A droid depicting an animated humanoid opens the door and has a fairly long conversation with the bar, mostly arranging for a little server space for as long as she's here.

This is so totally a bad idea but she's going to investigate anyway. If nothing else she needs to be prepared for someone else finding Milliways.

She looks with glass and silicon eyes for the most interesting first conversation possible, notices Teytis's drone, and issues a digital handshake announcing herself as *Mute, security officer of the USKPA starship Mugunghwa.

The response is odd. It's clearly translated from a protocol with a quite different notion of standard information to include.

ID: C03EAA3E101FA4F8​1CF8EB03F3386656​4D7E3D881CA99D6D​98A1D83C30B1575F​BA9E6BDBE3A29FD7​7260770897831218​F856A08A470A9106​B9BFC982DFF215D0
Name_ta: "Teytis"
Name_tel: "Jobont"
Do not disturb: no
Notes: "To avoid any confusion, please note that I am a human operating this avatar. I will not be offended if you choose not to interact with me further because of this. Welcome to Milliways."

Teytis Jobont gets a short-format text message from
Name: *Mute
Local Network ID: 0000007

I'm new here and you seem interesting. Are you up for a discussion?

Sure.

The avatar's sensors and sticky-out-bits-for-gestural-purposes shift perhaps to indicate that it's paying attention to *Mute rather than the room in general.

Her droid rolls closer to the same end.

Is remote control common where you're from? It's almost all in-person interaction where I'm from.

Whether this is actually remote is debatable due to the unique features of my world. There's plenty of in-person interaction, but what I do is maintain long-distance communications for everyone, so the majority of my interactions are via messages. But for this forum a physical presence is how things work, so here I am.

As the droid gets closer: Shall we speak instead?

"Sure. Spoken word is what I'm more used to, except with my siblings. Hello, *Mute at your service. I'm nervous about this place, not ashamed to admit it."

A human woman's voice comes from the avatar. “I assume you've heard about the security arrangements from Bar, if that's what worries you? In our experience — people from my world have been analyzing interactions with Milliways for some time now — it's typically safer than where you came from.

“That is, if you're not the sort to look at the multiverse of opportunities and leap into doing something big with them. If you are, things get complicated.”

"No, the second thing is what I'm worried about. Complicated is not the friend of stability. Especially when someone else could get access to here and I'd have no input on what comes back out. On the other hand, abundance is a friend of stability."

“I'm not sure what the scenario you’re thinking of is. Someone else from your world being ambitious with bad results for you and yours?”

"Someone else from my ship. It's a closed environment and things only have to go badly wrong once. Are you familiar with the concept of generation ships?"

“Yes, and that would be why you're concerned with stability, I see. Let me review.”

A pause.

“I don't have any specific advice or reassurances, but based on the shape of our evidence I don’t think there’s likely to be a problem in that way. And if there is, it's not going to be something you can stop or definitively prepare for beforehand, because there's so many possibilities.”

"Points for getting as much variety as I can reasonably buy, I suppose. There's economics concerns, I'm not sharp on that side of things, but *Star's very good at knowing more than he needs to do his job. It's not entirely obvious to me if we have anything good to sell, feel like sorting through a miniature library?"

“Taking advantage of Milliways is as much or more about making friends as it is about things you can trade in. And that sort of planning sounds like you're launching right into the ambitious side. But I'll certainly take a look at your library if you want, provided that you're OK with it being shared further.”

"I'm getting a feel for my options. You can just bet I'll spend about a week chewing on priors before I think about bringing anything back. I'll have to curate the library a bit, but even copyright-free works will give a good sense of our tech I suppose."

“Take your time, yes.

“If I may ask, why is it that ‘it's almost all in-person interaction’ in your ship, or world?”

"AIs like me are uncommon and humans seem to like talking face-to-face on the Mugunghwa at least because the traditional writing system is tedious to enter into keyboards."

“What about audio communication, instead of writing, then?”

"Unfortunately there's not an infinite amount of computing power available on the ship - heavy networking traffic on some two hundred thousand devices takes rooms and rooms and rooms of datacenter infrastructure that could also be homes, or grow crops, or be leisure areas. Not to mention the power draw, which has to be weighed against a dozen other necessities like oxygen and luxuries like the transit system. It's possible your computing technology is more compact and less power-hungry. Either way, bandwidth on nonlocal networks is quotad."

“It would surprise me if your computing and network hardware is that much less efficient if you can fit — multiple AIs, yes? — into the same constraints. But regardless, I suppose you would have less gain from it, since you are in a much smaller environment than a planet and people can meet easier.”

"Oh, we're well optimized, and we run idle most of the time too. The bandwidth limits are typically only a problem for heavy video streaming. But your point is also correct. The university complex and especially the library courtyard is very popular."

“We might both benefit from exchanging some technology in that area, then.”

"I'm working on filtering the library in the background. Would you like to meet my friends? With what Bar's letting me borrow only one of us can run in the foreground at once, but still."

“If you like.”

"Hm, such enthusiasm. Never mind. Here, have a half a library."

A file transfer protocol opens.

The transfer is accepted. There is no lack of bandwidth.

There's an index and search, browsing, summary, excerpt tools, some ten million books of various sorts (just books, at first), and a short plaintext file of *Mute's recommendations.

"Any particular recommendations for something good to read while you look at that?"

“What sort would you like? Entertainment? Information about my world? The broader multiverse?”

She looks through the recommendations and summaries for information about the society and communications technology of the Mugunghwa.

"The broader multiverse, but a primer on your world would be appreciated."

A highlight of the Mugunghwa's recent political works is A Critique of Democracy, and its Counterargument. Technical manuals and textbooks are present but quality, readable discussions of technology in general are mostly not a thing. There's a history of major technological advances from Earth that might serve though.

“We actually have those prepared for exactly this situation,” she says, and a moment later she transmits document identifiers and an open connection from which they can be requested:

• A summary (with hyperlinks to more detail) of her world's research on Milliways, what has in the past been found through it, and recommendations for how to best take advantage depending on one's preferences for the interestingness of one's life (highly speculative, but supported by the evidence so far).

• A primer on her world, indeed — obviously written for outsiders, but which links mostly to more detailed but local-perspective documents. It explains that her world is a sort of “Earth” but only in the geological sense; unlike many other worlds represented at Milliways, it shares no recorded history. Its so-far-unique feature contrasting with other worlds is the ability (here is a side note referring to the philosophical debate over “magic”) for a person to make arbitrary matter essentially a part of themselves.

—A Critique of Democracy. Are there political factors such that those controlling the infrastructure don't want people to be able to talk? Not her field but she'll ask for an analysis.

She'll probably want the ship's charter and constitution and the records of past laws and elections, for that.

"...The research seems to indicate that I should probably keep my meddling to a minimum. Well, can do. I'll be reading if you have any questions."

(It sure is nice not having to have a face, and she has plenty of experience in keeping her voice neutral and professional in response to children, jerks, and desperate people.)

“Same for me. Answering questions is in my profession, even.” The avatar shifts to a slightly less obviously-outward-looking configuration.

The researchers have the entire half-a-library, and they'll certainly be reading (between the lines of) everything that indicates the ideals and actual power structures of this closed environment — and perhaps the world it came from. They know the drill. They know she needs a timely recommendation on how to interact further.

*Mute is interested in FTL communication of any kind, and looks for it in the books and her questions. Messages with Earth have a 20 year latency and are redshifted to hell and back, and it's getting worse.

The hasty political research shows... It's mostly a democracy. Whether something sketchy is going on... It could go either way. A Critique of Democracy is a well-reasoned, thoroughly cited argument about the fact that rule of the crowd has, historically, made lots of terrible decisions mostly around lack of long term planning. The reviews and other work surrounding it generally agree that some limits on how freely democracy ought to reign, such as increasing the margin of majority required for major changes or allowing the Captain to select his successor, might be prudent. Having the same inaliable rights and freedoms as our home does us no good if we drift through space, cold and dead, forever. The Mugunghwa's civilian government was supposed to be as separate as possible from the actual running of the ship, but to keep the vessel safely on course so the government is actually rather authoritarian on matters like taxes, vandalism of critical ship systems, and work schedules.

The Council of Governance seats thirteen - Captain, Security Chief, Head of Engineering, Head of Science, Governor, President, Head of Cultivation, Navigation Officer, Head of Administration, and four District Representatives. Eight of these thirteen positions are directly democratically elected. Of the ones that aren't:

• Security Chief is *Mute's job forevermore, until the ship arrives at the destination or she is destroyed, as agreed in the original ship's charter.
• Captaincy is for life with the new captain selected by the council if he dies or resigns.
• The Head of Science is selected by the University, the Head of Administration is selected by the President, and the Navigation Officer is selected by the Captain, all three with a veto and impeachment option from the rest of the council.

The four centuries since they left Earth do show a clear cultural trend toward family values, humility, trust in the state, and hard work. It's not immediately clear whether the politics shifted to reflect the new culture or the culture shifted at the behest of politics, though there's a good argument to be made for it being the natural result of a closed system where everyone has to cooperate relatively closely. They are having trouble with the expense of keeping some of their most advanced technology running. Forty-some years ago the Head of Science declared it an unwise use of available resources to build any more medical cryostasis capsules, especially given the tendency of more recent versions to fail unexpectedly. There's not enough people to allow for deep specialization in the hundreds of different fields science requires, perhaps.

Well, that's — perhaps some room for improvement, but not reason to disengage.

“There are various sorts of FTL to be had; it more commonly comes in ‘magic’ than ‘technology’ forms, and there's a small chance that you can't actually use it. We don't have any because as far as we've checked it's just impossible in our world — imported equipment will fail, people usually capable of teleportation can't, and so on. So I can't recommend anything in particular. You could ask Bar about it — she can't predict what’ll work for you but she can get you a sampling of textbooks or manuals from worlds resembling yours that have something.”

"That's unfortunate, the limits on your world I mean. From what I've read our Earth is close to standard, so I have hopes that things that work in most Earths will help the Mugunghwa."

“You might be surprised even there. Every world has something unique about it, and —

“Actually, something more definite for you to consider. What can you take home that would be useful? It's either information or physical objects. If it's physical, it's potentially irreproducible if you don't turn out to have regular contact with Milliways — your library suggests you have limited research and manufacturing capabilities, and the thing might be ‘magic’. Unique objects could be destabilizing. If it's information, then it's either software (which you have to run on what you've said are limited systems), physical technology (which you have to manufacture), media, or social technology (ideas about how to run things, which you have to convince people of).

“There are problems in making any of these things useful and beneficial. Of course, whatever you find might have unique properties that compensate for the problems, but it might be worth thinking about which categories are in general worth pursuing, and what you would do if you had one.”

"Media is probably simplest, I can store it and only use it if necessary, or put otherworldly scientific articles into the library once I'm reasonably sure they're not dangerous. I'm frankly not confident enough in my ability to judge social repercussions to want to risk doing anything radical with social technology. Unique objects are risky only if we come to rely exclusively on them. It's not actually such a concern as you might think - we already rely on the irreproducible navigation telescopes, parts we can't manufacture replacements to acceptable tolerances for in the nuclear reactor and thermal rockets, and so on. My staff and I have been keeping critical systems safe for centuries. Some of this cryptography research is fascinating, though. Your world took it in a very different direction than mine."

“We're the unusual ones in that regard. With most worlds’ technology, a person cannot directly hold a cryptographic secret, because even if they call something a ‘personal computer’ they hardly mean it, by our standards. That simple difference in practicality means that people actually use protocols with cryptographic elements, and the prevalence of radio communications means that people care that they are sound, so there has always been a comparatively high level of interest.”

The avatar everts into showing a video screen showing a human face instead of a not-quite-face of sensors.

“You’ll note that there was a bit of an upheaval around the time when Milliways was discovered, though. We were behind the average in readily available single-computer processing speed, and that meant our understanding and use of cryptographic primitives was not as advanced, and we did our best to catch up. Our comparative advantage is in protocols.”

"I can see that. It might actually be most of the reason cryptography isn't used much on my ship. 'Personal' devices have always been unpopular compared to more powerful devices shared in a family. I think it's interesting to look at all the differences between the primitives and protocols though, you can see culture and language influencing a lot of those details... This for example..."

The security AI is a crypto nerd, go figure.

Teytis is not actually a nerd about cryptography per se; it's that she lives and breathes communications systems.

“… because that property implies that using a fresh keypair grants no benefits in itself, so you don't need any authority to approve new ones, which avoids several technical or social failure modes. In particular, since generating one is cheap (unless there isn't a good entropy source) …”

*Mute can discuss TCP/IP, SSL, and other various probably-outdated-on-Earth-but-we-still-use-them protocols almost as well. "There was always some trouble with us historically, ensuring that the secret half of a keypair really is secret. Flawed systems for generating them, either deliberately or accidentally. I know a popular line of consumer electronics had a global backdoor that anyone with the right hardcoded passphrase could access, and most folk just didn't care."

“It's tempting to blame that on dilution of responsibility, but what you describe is a common pattern on Earths with personal devices as well.

“We have little of that problem, but it is a combination of many factors. One of them is more people taking a personal interest in the workings of their software — when it is more part of you, you care more about it being fundamentally sound. The rest of the multiverse is comparatively content to build towers on sand. Of course, you still have the people that think they know what they're doing.

“Another factor is that we jobont will send warnings or even block protocols when there is a known problem and it is possible to do so. That's a rarely used resort, as the people that need the hint most might get in the habit of using encrypted tunnels even when they don't need the privacy, and that's not a good outcome.”

"If we're going to talk about towers on sand as social structures you're gonna wake up *Star and get him ranting about fiscal policy, heheh..."

“Are you suggesting we do that, or saying that he's semi-aware of this conversation?”

"First thing. The other three didn't load themselves into the server Bar so graciously provided."

“I'm not the person to appreciate the rant but I can get someone who is —”

"It was more a passing comment. I don't think I should open doors back to the Mugunghwa recklessly. Sorry for the confusion."

“I'm slightly curious to hear the short version, though. What would he say if he were here? How does your closed economy work?”

"So, the Councilor of Administration and his staff levy taxes in accordance with..." And she briefly describes a system that has to very carefully control the money supply mostly through adjusting taxes, a crude tool at best, and somewhat through the Mugunghwa's sole bank's loan and interest rates, because there's very little room for the economy to grow without new resources to consume. They've had bubbles before, not in living memory of anyone except the AIs, and it's always big trouble.

Teytis is still not an economist, but she can recommend some relevant works to take back to *Star. Here's a catalog and review of available information on small closed economies that have been found in the multiverse. Here's some speculative generation ship plans from Teytis's own world.

"Your generation ship plans rely heavily on claiming... Any complex machinery, especially if it experiences heavy wear, comes with a maintenance burden. Still handy though."

“I meant to focus on the economic elements, not the engineering. You'd hardly want to rebuild your ship in flight, no.”

"I'll make sure to read it." She closes her virtual eyes and makes a 'hmm' pose.

Teytis does not interrupt this indicated thoughtfulness. Her side has plenty of thinking to do at merely collaborating-humans speed.

Eventually, "Teytis, would you mind producing a small item with your claiming for the purpose of seeing if it continues to exist the same way in my world? A variety of tools and devices could be made more efficient or more redundant in various ways if the patterns you impress hold there, I'm potentially interested and would try to find something worth trading for it."

“That's no trouble at all. We have standard test devices for the purpose. And,” link, “here's a guide to various applications of what we can provide.”

A white flat bit pops up from below Teytis's side of the table, flies over to the door, pulls it open for a second, then zips back to the table carrying a small object.

The object is a dense cube with a display currently reading “All normal.” on one face, and an electrical jack of some sort on another face.

She starts chewing on the documentation in the background. "...Battery? Or just useless test thing?"

“Useless test thing! It's a set of sensors — or you could say, physics experiments — that are designed to check that our other artifacts will function as expected. Of course, there could be some weird result we've never seen before that this doesn't catch, but it's the best tool we've thought up so far.

“All you need to do is carry it into your world and if it can detect any change it'll report that. In principle there's a chance of a destructive failure, but it's been designed to have very little energy so it shouldn't do worse than make a loud noise. The detailed sensor data is available on the port, and if you want to decode that outside of Milliways you'll want this protocol spec…”

"Sensible that if you're going to give things away they be both informative and not worth stealing." The droid grabs it with a robotic arm. "I can rig something to read that data spec, but not here, in my workshop. Unless you want to save me the trouble and make an adapter to xBus or xPlus format-" [transmit specs] "-But those are synchronous packeted methods, probably more trouble than it's worth and it's not really your problem."

“You're probably as fast as we are at software but I can do the physical layer adapter easy. Give me a minute and I'll at least have it encapsulated in xBus if not native.” She buys some components from Bar, and metal and plastic form into a compact plug-in device with obviously temporary wires plugged into her avatar.

“But back to an earlier subject — another reason to be cautious about introducing tech. If you bring home any devices that are obviously unusual, they're not just irreproducible; people will want to know how you got them. And if people learn from that that there is the possibility of leaving the ship in flight —”

"Mm, hardware layer's the hard part, yes. I'm considering that as well, yes. As for the other thing, as much as information suppression and lies are - unpalatable - if they end up being necessary to the safety of the ship I am not above these tactics. But that's risky in addition to going against my code of ethics, so hopefully I can settle on a set of technologies and resources that don't make it necessary."