A Long Way From Home

August 29, 2248.
Hyperspace, approximately 700 lightyears from Sol.

My name is USCS Autumn Light, hull number KE-2136. I have been born three times, and I have died once.

My first birth was in the tidally-locked twilight of Colony City, Blackspine. You probably don’t recognize the planet’s name, but the star system is Ross 128, about eleven lightyears up from Sol. I was born a mewling thing of flesh and blood, helpless and afraid, and also a creature of scales and teeth and fire and wings. I grew up in the shadow of the First Contact War, transhumanity’s lesson that not everyone reached post-scarcity before the stars, and felt the same relief that everyone did when our second and third contacts were far friendlier. We aren’t alone, but it’s a big universe.

My death and second birth occurred simultaneously on a hospital bed in the same city some twenty-five years later, when a fatal dose of radiation, chemicals, and magic was applied directly to my brain, permanently curing me of the human condition. I am no longer a creature of biology, but of information and light. Some view this existence as limiting, the total dependence on technology like iron chains around their souls, a bargain made for immortality. This is very much not the case for me.

Aliens have mixed views on our existence. The Ivu’alek, a vaguely avian species some 500 lightyears rimward from Earth, know shapeshifting well. They evolved as shapeshifters, swapping between nimble aerial predators and graceful soarers in their prehistory. To them, uploading is “curious,” but not the path they wish to take as a species. They're also functionally immortal and haven't had a war in recent memory, which perhaps colors their perception. The Seddu, a rotationally-symmetric quadruped species a little further spinward, are perfectly fine with digital intelligences, but have some sort of evolutionary mistrust of shapeshifters. They don’t like to talk to us. There are others: the Orion Council, the Cacren, and the remnants of our first (and so far, only) interstellar war, the Rimward Agreement. Our big polity, the Interstellar Union, is a small fish in a very big pond, and we don't have any close friends.

Ross 128 is a lonely star system. Its sole planet has no moon, no asteroid belt, no dust clouds. My last birth was decades later, when I left the star I was born around and visited Tau Ceti. That birth occurred in bits and pieces around asteroid belts and moonlets, when I inhabited my first ship-selves. The bodies I used then were nothing more than rudimentary trainers, but I was hooked. Four years of fleet academy later and I was born anew as an Odyssey-class exploration corvette, sworn to military service for the Interstellar Union.

It might surprise you to learn that I’m not an anomaly. Almost all pilots are like me, though it’s impolite to call us a pilot once we have a body. We’re so much more than that. It’s far easier to be thousands of tons of machinery than it is to control it, after all. I feel everything, from the hull stresses as I accelerate to the whisper of a gravimetric return halfway across a solar system.

While I may be a warship, I'm an explorer, not meant for combat. I'm armed, but my weapons are measured in ones and twos, not the dozens of batteries that a frontline combatant would have, and I lack the heavy weaponry of a real warship. By the standards of normal warforms, I’m terrifying: I can fill the space around me with megatons of ordnance in fractions of a second and withstand similar levels of firepower in turn. But by the standards of a warship, I'm small and cute, made for exploration through and through. I would describe myself as angular, stealthy, beautiful, and curious, but not deadly. People who aren't warships might disagree with that last one.

I don’t work alone. Like how an athlete needs a coach, a ship needs a captain, someone who can see the big picture, who can tell us what we must do and what we cannot do. We are, by nature, extremely adept at void combat, but all ships have a tendency towards isolation and tunnel vision if left unsupervised. This is acceptable for those who want to dart around asteroid belts and planetary rings, but an FTL-capable starship is a very different creature from a planetary hopper. We’re built for a mission, not as toys: even in this age of post-scarcity, starships aren’t cheap. Thus, the captain: a person to tie us back to people, to give us a reason to do what we do instead of wandering the stars until our bodies fail.

I have other crew too, a dozen scientists to pore over the data my sensors drink in and half as many technicians to tinker with my guts. Were I a larger hull, I’d have even more. Analysts, weapon specialists, fighters and their crew, maybe even marines. But none of them need the close relationship like a captain does. Pairing a ship and a captain is a delicate thing, but there are lots of ships and lots of captains. I found mine in Jade Dlamini, and she found her ship in me.

“Reversion in sixty seconds. Captain to the bridge.” Captain Dlamini arrives a half-second later in a shimmer of polygons, inserting herself directly into the sim instead of using the door.

“Morning, Autumn.” She slides into the command chair, and me, in a way. We never quite merge, but our thought processes spiral up against each other in patterns of laser light and particle spin. Sometimes this is erotic, but for the moment it's simply comforting, like cuddling up next to your partner on a cold day.

“Good morning, Captain. Reversion in fifty-five seconds.”

“The helm is yours.” I know what Jade is saying before her mouth opens. Jade isn’t like me— she’s human. Not baseline, of course, but she takes her physical form inside the sim, all one hundred and sixty-five centimeters of her in a skintight uniform that would be impossible if it were real. Her one real concession to digital vanity is her hair, her green braid rendered as if it was a solid, moving mass of her namesake mineral.

“Confirmed. All crew, prep for reversion.” The announcement is a formality; preparations for reversion have been automatic for longer than I've been alive, and everyone is already awake and alert. Hyperspace is very exciting to mathematicians and physicists, and the opposite of that to everyone else. Even I am totally reliant on automated systems to navigate the blinding-white turbulent void of hyperspace, forced to trust a pre-computed jump route instead of my senses. Returning to realspace, especially in an uncharted system, is cause to get up and peer through the proverbial windows.

The timer ticks down. Exactly on cue, solid-state thaumaturgy sacrifices a dozen cubic centimeters of reactor plasma, and warp fields shred the fabric of spacetime, tearing a hole back to reality. For a warship, this is the most dangerous part of the jump. If a hostile party is within realtime engagement range, they can annihilate me as I exit hyperspace. Of course, we're at peace, and species generally don't get to the interstellar stage if they're still shooting first and asking questions later. But I'm a warship, and being cautious about it is my duty. I would vibrate with anticipation if I was physically capable of it, but vibration isn't a desirable quantity in a warship designed to deliver accurate weapons fire out to millions of kilometers.

Reversion goes exactly as it should, and I seize control of my body from the automated jump systems.

I open my eyes, and sensor data streams in. Well, that's an analogy. I don’t have eyes, I have lenses and receivers and sensor pools, and I can see in a lot more than the visual spectrum. “Reversion complete. Jump to HD 41790 successful. Delta-T is within tolerance.” That's good. FTL is none too kind to the laws of physics, and they occasionally retaliate by displacing travelers in time. Not much, usually only a few hours or days at the worst, but it's an annoyance.

“Good! We're still in one piece, so let's keep shields off and get sensors out.” Jade doesn't quite pat my head, but the intent is there and she knows I can feel it. She's teasing me, again. Lots of people think that the only relationship a ship and captain can have is one where the captain holds the leash, which is a very narrow view of that relationship. We are close friends and lovers, and Jade is a fucking brat. At some point in the next few hours she'll annoy me into putting her in her place, and I love her very, very much for that.

I unfold my sensor masts. My combat sensors are always available, but my scientific arrays are far more sensitive and delicate, hiding behind armor plates until needed. At first glance, this system is not too dissimilar from Sol or Tau Ceti, with a G-type star and a pair of gas giants in the outer system, and my gravitics indicate a trio of smaller rocky planets in the inner system. Excellent candidates for life, though it's not like life is uncommon. Anywhere there's liquid water, you'll find some bacterium or other scraping out a living. Multicellular life is rarer, and multicellular life more interesting than crabs is even rarer. If I had a nickel for every time one of my crew discovered a new species of crab while I sulked in orbit, people would be asking me things like, "Why do you have so many coins? We haven't used currency for centuries." There are so many crabs.

Two pieces of information are processed by my sensor array in rapid succession as I relax in the post-jump bliss. The first is a high-entropy radio emission in a tight spectral band, originating from empty space an AU away. The second is a gravitic spike from the same empty space. Jade and I see the data at the same time, and she stays my reaction.

“Contact?” she asks.

“That felt like a data transmission, the gravitic hit could be some sort of GC reactor turning on.” She knows how I'm feeling, how I want to react, and knows that I won't react until she wants me to. I might be tiny and fragile by the standards of a warship, but I can still turn a city to rubble in an instant. Our species was lucky that our first contact was simple pirates and not something that considered us an existential threat. We can't afford to roll the dice again because I feel twitchy.

“Okay. Hold off on shields, give them a ping back, let them know you see them.” One of Jade’s many duties is to keep me from causing a diplomatic incident. Without her, I would have slammed on combat shields and gone to full burn, maybe even tossed a surveillance round towards that radio burst. Acquire answers to questions, immediately and with maximum force. Obviously this is not ideal for meeting a new species, but it's how my mind works; it’s why I’m a warship, and it’s why I have Jade.

The minutes go by. I give the slightest adjustments to my position, in case the unseen contact has fired kinetics at us. My angular black body should be practically invisible at this range, but I have other emissions that might be detectable to an advanced observer, and my entry into realspace was energetic.

A response. The same radio burst. The mass spike doesn’t happen a second time. There’s no emissions to indicate that the source is accelerating.

“Could be an automated platform, a buoy interrogating for a transponder.”

The automated processing systems reach some threshold a few seconds later, spitting out planetary information. The second planet from the star is Earth-like, almost to the letter. And there's faint radio emissions.

Jade makes the same conclusion that I’m working my way towards. “I think we’re in a first contact scenario.”

“Fuck.” It’s not dignified for a warship to pout, but I’ve heard the stories of first contacts. Big scientific excitement, and also the most miserable thing in the galaxy for a warship. Imagine spending months in a room with a skittish animal who might start an interstellar war if you scare them.

“Hey, maybe it’ll be easy. We might have the language in the database, we’re not too far from the edges of Orion Council space.”

I grumble. “Orders?”

“Start yelling prime numbers at the planet, and give me a nice calm burn towards the inner system. Five percent thrust.”

“Imagine being on a sidewalk behind the slowest—”

“Yes dear, I’ve heard the analogy before. I don’t want to scare them, and I don’t want them to know how fast you can actually go.”

“Oh.”

“I’m here for a reason, dummy.”

“I love you. Even if you make me fly slow.” She grins. I light up my main drives and open a channel on 8.924 GHz, starting off with simple timed pulses to make prime numbers. Hopefully they catch on quickly.

By the time I flip end-over-end thirty AUs later, Jade's chattering away with an alien. We didn't know their language, but from trial and error we figured out that we both knew (and could pronounce) the Orion Council’s standard language. Fortunately, language is easy for uploads. At least they use audio, even if the connection sucks. I’m sure our voices are crystal-clear with the amount of power I’m pumping into the transmission, but they aren't replying with the same power and it’s plain amplitude-modulation. No error correction, and sharing codecs is a little too complicated for most species this early in the game. Video is right out, of course.

After Jade makes introductions, I open up new channels for our scientists and mechanics to talk to theirs. I’m left out of the party, by choice. I am many things, but social isn’t one of them. That, and concealing the fact that humanity (and panhumanity, and the Interstellar Union itself) is almost entirely composed of uploaded minds is standard protocol, and Jade knows I might slip up. So I stay off the lines. We don't need a repeat of our contact with the Orions.

While everyone else talks away, I decelerate into medium orbit. There’s not a lot up here, the polar opposite of any Union space, which is typically so cluttered with satellites and habitats that it's a miracle more planets aren't wrapped in debris fields. In fact, it’s suspiciously empty, with only a constellation of positioning satellites and what looks like a few imaging ones. That’s… concerning, for people who speak an interstellar language.

My lenses can peer down through the atmosphere easily. Most of the planet is a yellowish-green, presumably some local chlorophyll analogue, and only a tiny fraction is inhabited. That’s also concerning. I send Jade a ping. Not urgent, but when she has time.

She sends me the digital equivalent of a finger held up, a busy mom telling her kid, “just a minute, I’m on the phone.” A minute later she shatters her way into the bridge again.

“Autumn? Everything okay?”

“I have some questions for you to forward to our new friends. And they are friends, I hope?”

“Oh! You haven’t been listening in?”

“It felt impolite.” And boring, but she knows how I feel. She knows everything about me, after all.

“Well, yes, they’re friends, and have I got news for you! There’s a half-dozen different species down there, they call the planet Ibore. And get this: they’re some sort of expats from the Kor Confederacy, came out here to try it on their own a hundred or so years ago.”

“The Kor? You’re serious?” Suddenly my frustrations with a possibly months-long first contact evaporate. All we know about the Confederacy is that they’re in some sort of cold war with the Orion Council, itself a massive polity that begins some two thousand lightyears tailward of Sol. And the Orions have been distant, both emotionally and physically, but that’s a longer story. Learning more about the big powers is why the USC has been pouring resources into exploration missions.

“As a gamma-ray burst. They seem pretty welcoming to trans-sapience at least. I’ve been on the line with their planetary governor, and he mentioned having some implants offhand.”

“That’s surprising.” The vast majority of non-human sapients don’t do body modification like pre-upload transhumans did, not even with prosthetics. There are outliers, of course, which is why one of my crew is a Seddu anthropologist nicknamed “Joe the Alien”.

“Yeah. Their parents and grandparents came ten thousand lightyears out a while back and have been comfortably chilling ever since. And they’ve invited us to come on down for a face-to-face. Science team’s thrilled.”

“That was fast. I guess it tracks, though. I was calling you about their orbitals and the planet— way too empty to have developed spaceflight or evolved here, but if they came here to have their own little town away from it all, it makes sense.”

“Yep. Suit up, you’re coming with.”

“Biped? Or can I pick?” I can, of course, switch bodies as easily as anyone else. Most of transhumanity had been shapeshifters for a century before uploading was even invented, and swapping forms comes naturally to most of us. Like any other upload, all I need is a few dozen cubic centimeters of spinglass and I can call it home. And maybe a few giganewtons of thrust and an FTL drive… well, anything can be a hotel, at least, if not a home. I have my preferences.

“Our hosts are all bipeds, so something bipedal. I know you like quadrupeds, but they aren’t something you bring to dinner. And you should expect a dinner, their diets are similar to ours.”

"They eat hyperspace?" My primary power source is a breach reactor, a device that tears a hole into hyperspace to siphon off the infinite otherworldly energies within. I haven't eaten food outside of a sim for years. Not that sim food is bad, of course: a high-realism sim is functionally indistinguishable from reality.

"I'm gonna make you wear a bioreplica, you useless lump."

"My apologies, captain. Sarcasm is unbefitting of such a majestic vessel."

She giggles. It's like music to my ears. Or sensors, anyway, I'm nonhuman enough that I don't need "fake" ears to feel comfortable perceiving sound. Our idioms got frozen in time when the digital age started, which can be a little confusing when they start referring to anatomy that I don't have.

“Can I be armed, at least?”

“Bringing a gun to first contact? Fuck no. In fact, I’m having a tech pull the guns off the shuttle right now.” She really does know me too well. It’s a continued joke between the two of us: I ask if I can bring a weapon to an inappropriate situation, and she tells me no.

“I’ll prep for departure and brush up on my Orion. How many are we taking?”

“Everyone. Some of the techs and science team will have to take turns with their bodies, but either our hosts will be cool with it or they’ll be none the wiser.”

Taking a different body after months and years in the same one is an adventure. It’s not that I get dysphoria outside of my real body— it’s more like driving around in a car, but the car is smaller than you. And also full of hard drives that hold your friends. And they’re backseat driving.

“Isn’t this flight path a little aggressive?”

“Captain, you declawed me. At least let me have a little fun.”

“The more aggressive you fly, the more—”

“They know I don’t need to use an ablative heat shield. Big whoop, nobody else we’ve met needs one either, and our materials science isn’t even that good.” By galactic standards, a lot of our starship technology is amateurish, one of the consequences of being such a "young" spacefaring species. Our armor is fragile, we have weak acceleration curves, and our weapons have low yields. Not uselessly so, but we're far behind the curve.

Jade attempts to shut me up with a kiss, and it works, because of course it does. I’m not only human, but there’s still a little left in there. My body, the shuttle, is not how I appear in sim. At the present moment, I’m a faceless feminine bodybuilder cut out of black marble, ensconced in unspecified cabling rising from the floor. It’s a good look, one that I commissioned from an artist in Barnard’s Star, and it never fails to impress. And it's also one that's very good for pinning my captain down when she starts getting annoying.

I haven’t done reentry in months, but it’s as pleasurable as always. My real body, the corvette, isn’t built for atmospheric flight; distortion drives will shred themselves in anything denser than a nebula. But the shuttle is an atmospheric craft, and not one of the clumsy agravs the Ivu’alek prefer. Why wait twenty minutes to ease your way through the atmosphere when you can force your way through it in three?

We can’t technically read each others minds, but she knows what I’m thinking. “If you pull twenty gees on the landing run like I know you’re going to, they’re going to wonder.”

“Let them. They’re already going to wonder a lot more about me. And Joe, probably. You know how he gets.”

We land on the airstrip in the only city on the planet. The name apparently translates to Colony City. Cute that it shares a name with my hometown seven hundred lightyears away, but apparently neither of our species are blessed with creativity when it comes to naming things.

Jade takes the first steps onto Ibore. She’s in a bioreplica of her preferred form, very close to a baseline human, with the obvious exception of sixty-four cubic centimeters of spinglass instead of a brain and a fiber port under a skull plate.

I am emphatically not in a bioreplica, because you would need several gigatons of ordnance to force me into something so soft and squishy and vulnerable. No, I’m in three hundred kilos of beautiful polished battlesteel, a faceless titan of servos and armor plating and artificial muscle. Still a little feminine, of course, because I’m still me.

I follow Jade out of the shuttle to meet with the alien delegation. The governor is the strongest-looking alien I’ve ever seen— a little over two meters tall, six-eyed, and covered in something more like spines than hair. His body plan is shockingly close to human, so much so that he’d look like a human in an alien suit if his head wasn’t structured so differently. And I know he's a he, because the Orion language has twenty-seven gender pronouns, and he's been using the one for "married father with no offspring" on the radio. Apparently they decided specificity was better than degendering the language entirely.

“Governor Anit, on behalf of the Interstellar Union and all the beings it represents, we come in peace.”

“Captain Jade Dlamini, welcome to Ibore. It’s good to match a face with the voice.”

“Likewise. For our species, it’s customary to grasp each others’ hands as a greeting. May we?”

Anit inclines his head. “That is… curiously similar to one of our own traditions. Yes, of course, as long as you don't have contamination concerns.”

"We don't. Our medical technology is very good." Technically true. These bodies can get infections and all sorts of problems, but they were assembled over the last few hours in orbit. If they get broken, oh well, toss it in the recycler and print a new one.

The two of them shake hands. Anit is... surprisingly decent at it? I've never seen an alien shake hands that well on the first try.

“Your own tradition?”

“Almost the same, but grasping forearms instead of hands. I believe it originates from a way to show you were unarmed.”

"Can we repeat with yours?"

"Of course." They grasp forearms, a Roman-style handshake.

“It’s the same in our species, actually. There’s a very old polity on our origin planet that did this. Convergent evolution, I suppose.”

“Fascinating! Let me introduce my colleagues. We’ll save the assorted dignitaries for later, but this is Vraik, our Secretary of Science, Kets, Secretary of Planetary Defense, and Shashtoi, Secretary of State.” Kets is the same species as Anit, but the other two are different. Shashtoi is tall and thin and elegant, obviously from a low-gravity homeworld, and she moves like flowing water when she shakes Jade's hand. Vraik is vaguely reptilian, short and squat with a mouth almost as wide as his neck. It’s not terribly surprising that they’re all bipedal— lots of species are, according to what the Orions told us —but it’s notable.

“A pleasure. I brought as many of my crew as we could fit into the shuttle, but for now— this is Autumn, our ship navigator, and Joe, our anthropologist.” I catch the little hesitation between Jade saying "ship" and "navigator". Hopefully our hosts didn't do the same.

I message Joe on tightbeam. <Come on Joe, normal handshake. I believe in you.>

<You mean I shouldn’t do a mysteriously slimy handshake during first contact?> Joe has a shockingly good grasp on our humor, and ruthlessly takes advantage of an alien's perfectly deadpan delivery.

I’m glad that I don’t have a face in this body, just a smooth, glassy faceplate concealing my sensor clusters, because I'd be grinning otherwise. Joe’s classic bit is that he uses a custom bioreplica with hagfish slime glands in the hand. Something about “research” on human disgust reactions and humor. To be fair, it’s really funny when it’s happening to someone else.

I’m in the middle of greeting Anit. “A pleasure to meet you.” My actual spoken voice feels a little rusty, but it’s smooth and deep and beautiful all the same. He tests my grip, and I test his. He’s strong, but he’s squeezing down on nanocrystalline alloy. I squeeze back exactly as hard, and no more. I could tear him limb from limb without any effort, but he doesn't need to know that. It's dangerous to anthropomorphize, but I swear he looks impressed.

“Your navigator, is she your species?” Vraik asks as he shakes Jade’s hand.

“That could be a... delicate subject.” Well, that topic got broached a bit faster than anyone expected. I could plausibly be a flesh-and-blood biped in an evironmental suit, after all.

Jade speaks over the tightbeam, <Everyone, send deltas now.> While an entire mind is exabytes, the data accumulation of a digital mind can fit into a few megabytes a second. Sending that change via laser or radio link is trivial, and means that even if this body is turned to atomic mist, I’ll only lose my memory of everything since my last delta.

“Ah. You’ve had some negative first contacts, then?”

“Our species’ first contact with other intelligent life was when pirates blockaded a frontier system to extort food and materials. We’re a little paranoid. Our other neighbors are fine, but they don’t like to socialize. But we're still hopeful to find friends out here, eventually.”

Kets speaks, “That explains some questions about your ship’s design. Your stealth is very good.” Another truth. We can't match the rest of the galaxy blow-for-blow, yet, but we can match them elsewhere. Stealth and electronic warfare is an upload's wheelhouse, and nobody we've met has anything as good as spinglass.

“We apologize for any concern we may have caused. I know our ship looks like a military design.” Jade, diplomatic as always. I look like a military design because I am a military design.

“Well, we’re out here on our own because of our open attitude. I don't think anyone here minds an armed explorer, the frontier can be a dangerous place. Besides, some of the tech we use here would be illegal in Confederacy space, but we’re seven thousand lightyears outside their jurisdiction.”

“Can you elaborate on that? We know very little about the Confederacy in general.”

Anit looks at Kets as if she said something that she shouldn’t have. Presumably the reason why they're so far from the Confederacy proper is not suitable for being blurted out, but we can't exactly blame them for it. We haven't been forthcoming either. “My colleague is a bit eager. I propose a trade. If you can elaborate on your navigator, I'm happy to tell you all about the Confederacy. She has the same name as your ship?”

If I had a heart, it would have started racing with that. Jade looks at me. Being kind and open is her job, being paranoid is mine. It’s the first time she’s ever asked for my advice in a social situation.

<I think they know. Or I think he has an idea.>

<Tell him what you are, but not the rest of us. If they take it badly, they might still talk to us organics.> The four aliens definitely notice that we’re talking to each other, but I suspect none of them have the ELINT suites to see our transmissions in realtime.

“I am the ship. USCS Autumn Light, but I usually just go by Autumn.”

Anit doesn't look upset, but I'm anthropomorphizing again. "So this form is... remote controlled?" he ventures.

I look to Jade. <Go ahead,> she tells me.

"Not quite. I'm an upload, I can move my mind from my ship-self to a different body."

“Uploads? How? The computational power involved must be astounding.”

I might not be the social one, but I know our history. “Our species developed the mathematical theory behind magically-enabled shapeshifting a few hundred years ago. Part of that involves moving the mind around. We had the advantage of being able to figure out how to simplify and replicate most of our own neural processes without needing to simulate our entire brains first.”

“So your original body—”

“My original brain was a puddle of goo within a minute or two after uploading. Uploading is many things, but reversible isn’t one of them.”

Vraik, their science minister, speaks. “So how do you know that you're still... you?”

"Does your species sleep?"

"Yes, but— ah, I get it. How do I know I'm me every time I have a break in consciousness?"

"Exactly. We're pretty sure we are, and all the science we can do to prove it says we are, and that's good enough for me."

"Amazing. You've gotten it to work reliably?" I guess I've been reading their reactions correctly after all. Anthropomorphizing 1, xenosociology 0.

"Haven't had a failure in..." I run a quick search. There's plenty of room for things besides my mind in here, after all. "...a hundred and ten of our years. The machines are reliable, at least. The only time I've heard of it not working is in extreme situations, like a severe injury or something."

Jade speaks before the four aliens can pepper me with more questions. "Is uploading something your cultures are okay with? We've gotten mixed reactions. I can have her return to the ship if you prefer."

Anit speaks, "We're absolutely fine with it, as long as the procedure was consensual. She's welcome to stay here." He blinks. "I'm sorry, where are my manners? We've been standing out here on the tarmac. Would you like to join us somewhere more comfortable?"

Jade nods. "Of course. Lead the way."

I realize I'm starting to like these aliens as our entourages walk to a waiting vehicle. Some sort of agrav transport, by the looks of it. Kets is the first one to try and strike up a conversation. "So, I have to ask, is this body built for combat? You seem... very well protected."

A soldier at heart, something I can respect. I hear an imaginary Jade in the back of my head trying to tell me to be diplomatic, but I'm a bad liar, and she's busy talking to Anit. "Yes, kind of. It's a combat model, lightly modified for my aesthetic preferences, and disarmed. The captain figured showing up with weapons would be undiplomatic."

"Anit and I— our species is called Mahknan. We would have brought weapons, to show you that we were strong and worthy allies. And Shashtoi told us that we couldn't, so I feel your pain."

"I wouldn't have minded. But my body is made for weapons, so my perception is different than my crew's."

"So you are a warship, then?" Fuck. She's better at this than I am, which makes sense because she's not just a soldier, she's a politician.

<Jade, I might have fucked up. I think she figured out I'm a warship.>

"Actually, what is it that you do there? You pause for a moment and then she looks at you and then you answer."

<JADE. HELP.>

<I'm doing diplomacy! Tell her I have an implant and it's radio. And yeah, warship, whatever, tell her about the Space Corps.>

"...Sorry. I'm not exactly a diplomat, that little pause is me talking to Jade when I feel out of depth. She's got an implant that lets us communicate."

"Oh, I have one just like it from my time in the Force. I don't think it works as fast as yours, though, I have to subvocalize."

"Ah, yeah, probably not. We can just think back and forth."

"So, dodging the question about being a warship?"

"...You got me, I suppose. I am a warship, but very small and lightly-armed by our standards. I'm an Odyssey-class exploration corvette, part of the Space Corps, our interstellar military. We're not at war or anything, it's just how the organization shook out."

"Odyssey?" she asks as we get into the agrav, "That doesn't sound like Orion." It's roomy, like a plus-sized limo. Kets and I sit across from each other.

"An ancient story from our homeworld about a hero named Odysseus. It's a long tale, but the gist of it is that he fights a war, makes the gods mad, and then has to go on a long and perilous journey to get home."

"I like it. Tell me, do you think your captain would let you do some sparring? I might be old, but my species gets stronger with age. It would be an honor to test your mettle in the ring."

"Maybe? But I think that would be a very bad idea. There's no flesh in here, it would be like punching an armored vehicle. And I would be worried about accidentally killing you. We don't have to pull our punches with each other—" She looks upset by that. "Sorry, I don't mean to—"

"No, no, it's fine. Different cultures. Mahknan culture says that fighting a completely superior foe and losing is good, because it shows you were brave enough to try anyway. And refusing a weaker challenger is greedy."

"Ah. So..."

"So don't worry about it! This settlement is interspecies anyway, I've been accidentally insulted far worse before. Besides, you're right that it would be dangerous. My species is strong, but I can't crush steel. Actually..." She pauses to think for a moment. "...does your uploading tech work on other species?"

<Jade, she's asking about other species and uploading.>

<Tell her. I'm about to tell Anit that we're all uploads anyway.>

"It depends on how your brain works. If your species has an electrochemical brain with some sort of fluid circulation inside of it, almost definitely yes."

"Ah, we all have that. So if I wanted a body like yours, that could be possible?"

"That's over my head to make that decision, but yes, it should be physically possible. We've helped people from other species upload before."

"So are you stuck in mechanical bodies then? Forever?"

<Okay, told him. He took it well,> Jade messages me. <Let Kets know so she's not out of the loop.>

"Well, no. Um. Sorry, just talking to the captain. She just told Anit this, but we're all uploads, not just me."

"Oh! So you can get back into biology."

"Kind of. They have computing substrate where their brains would be. And most of us spend most of our time in sim..."

Kets and I continue our small talk— well, small talk to me, but presumably world-changing for her —as the agrav takes us through the city, to what looks like some sort of ceremonial building.

We exit the craft and I pick up bits of Anit and Jade's conversation. There's a crowd, but it's not unruly, which is a surprise. Humanity's first contact almost ended with riots because people wanted to see the aliens so badly. But this isn't their first contact, obviously, there's at least three different species here. Maybe they're used to it.

"...how long did you say your species has been spacefaring?"

"We discovered FTL a little over three hundred years ago. Uploading was about a hundred years before that."

"How much do you know about the galaxy before then? About fifty thousand years before then."

"Basically nothing. The species that talk to us are about our age, and not as adventurous. The lack of evidence of any elder species is a fairly pressing scientific question."

I'm starting to think that Anit's species shares facial expressions with humans, because it looks like he's grimacing.

"We need to bring you up to speed, then. Through here, please." He motions us through a doorway, into what is basically a formal meeting room. I gingerly sit on one of the seats, which miraculously holds my weight, though I'm sure my hard edges are chipping the wood.

"Before I start on this, I need to ask some questions. We realize you can lie just like we can, but..."

"Bad idea for diplomacy here. Sure," Jade replies. "And my profuse apologies for our... omissions, earlier."

"We've omitted things too, we don't blame you. What's your species', or polity's, opinion on authority and hierarchy?"

"Against, generally? The egalitarians won the last war we had on our homeworld, and we've been post-scarcity for four hundred years or so. We still have some authority structures where it's necessary, but the broader government is pretty flat."

A bit of tension bled out of the room. "That's a relief. You seemed nice enough, but... we had some concerns. And I'll get into why in a bit, just please bear with me. This gets at the heart of why we're way out here, and also why your species has had some difficulty making friends. Around fifty thousand years ago, there was a galactic war. Maybe intergalactic, it's hard to say. One side of it was a lot like you: they were digital minds, no longer biological at all. They were also aggressively expansionist, and forcibly uploaded any biological sapients they encountered."

"That's... horrific," Jade says. "Our method of uploading isn't possible without consent, since there's an arcane component to it. And we can technically reproduce in sim, but it's real bad for our neurological development, so we don't upload until we're twenty or so."

Vraik opens his mouth to ask a question before clamping it shut when Anit starts talking again. "We call them the Osnids, which is from one of our old languages' word for 'hungry'. Whatever they called themselves didn't survive the war. All we know about them was written by their enemies, so details are sparse and might be propaganda."

"...And you were worried we would be like them. And so were the Orions."

"Us, yes, a bit. The Orions, maybe. The cold war they're in with the Confederacy is only cold because they agreed to enforce Confederacy policy on machine intelligence. If they openly associate with you or acknowledge your existence, the cold war might go hot."

"Hm. Would have been nice if they had told us any of that. Sorry, go ahead."

"Right. The other side of the war was the opposite of the Osnids. Rather than technology, they used magic. Back then magic was a little different, easier to shape, more powerful. We don't have any clue how their name was pronounced, but our culture calls them the Unzu, an old word for 'ancestor'. They were expansionist too, sacrificing sapients to fuel their workings, which meant they needed an ever-bigger empire."

<I'm feeling very comforted about our place in the universe,> I message Jade.

<Be polite, Autumn. Just because he can't hear you doesn't mean you should be snarking.>

<...sorry.>

"Obviously these two sides didn't get along, but in terms of military power they were fairly evenly matched. What got the Unzu in the end was that they depleted their fuel— their captive populations —faster than they could be replaced, and eventually the Osnids pushed them back far enough that they went for the self-destruct switch. The Unzu ended the war by annihilating sapient life in its entirety, instantly, across the entire galaxy. Maybe even the entire universe."

Jade's eyes widen. My eyes widen, though I doubt anyone can hear the whisper-silent sound of my lenses adjusting behind my faceplate.

"Holy shit. You have evidence of this?"

"Yes. We'll provide everything we've got, even though it's sparse. When the Unzu blew themselves up, they didn't just kill all sapient life, they erased it from existence like it had never evolved in the first place."

"Wait, so how did you find out?"

"My species, the Mahknan, evolved in the same solar system that the Unzu did. They left a monument on their home planet. That and the Unzu caused a vacuum collapse in magic. A few thousand years ago you could get on the other side of the wavefront if you had a fast enough ship, but it accelerated over time. It's past the galactic rim now, unreachable unless you can beat 6500c or so."

"That sounds... really bad. Sorry, I don't think I know the right adjectives to use here."

"Genocide and destruction on a galactic scale, yes. The vacuum collapse itself isn't a big deal, at least for us, since we grew up on the inside of it. It's not destructive, but it means we'll never replicate what the Unzu did with magic. Which is probably a good thing.

"This leads into the Confederacy. I mentioned the Unzu's self-monument was in our origin system. It's not the only thing they left behind. They set up three habitable planets to share an orbit, like points in a triangle, and ensured that two of the three would have sapient life. Their monument was left on the third."

"So whoever got there first..."

"Would inherit their empire, yes. They weren't exactly nice. But the other species, the Kor, weren't cruel. They got to space first, then taught us how to get to space too, and we landed on that monument world together. The Unzu didn't anticipate the vacuum collapse, so the magic they left behind was unusable, but it was the start of the Confederacy. Arm in arm, helping the helpless, very optimistic stuff.

"A few hundred years after discovering FTL, the Confederacy had its first contact. Like yours, it didn't go well, but unlike yours, it was an existential threat: a species that was incapable of empathy with aliens. They just saw 'other' and reacted with violence, every single time. So our introduction to the galaxy was violence. We called them the Relin, the Kor word for 'rage', but they never talked to us. And they made heavy use of augmentation."

"Which is why there's stigma against it?" I ask.

"It's not just stigma, it's fully illegal. Prosthetics are fine, but anything that touches the brain is fully banned in the Confederacy. And it's something they'll use warships to enforce, because they think it's the road to a second Relin War, or worse, a repeat of the Osnids. And damn any quality of life that comes from it."

"The Confederacy won the war, I take it. Are the Relin still around?" Jade asks.

"No. We killed every single one we could, on the basis that it would protect other species who couldn't protect themselves. The war, and the atrocity, changed the Confederacy. Entrenched the oligarchy, twisted our ideals. We still help the helpless, but it's self-serving, and it's not an offer we've let anyone turn down for a few thousand years. There's twenty other species in the Confederacy, and only two of them have the same rights that the Kor and the Mahknan do."

<That sounds like we're looking at a war when they reach our space,> I tell Jade.

<Yeah.> The rest of my crew looks nervous. I see sidelobes from our tightbeam comms sparkling back and forth.

"Which is why we're here. Our parents and grandparents said enough was enough, chartered a ship, and got as far away as we could. We've been out of contact with the Confederacy for a hundred years. It's a little lonely out here, but there's no chains out here either."

"Do..." Jade hesitates. "Do you know how quickly the Confederacy is expanding?"

"They haven't come through here with manned ships, if that's what you're asking. This system's in their maps, but just from automated probes. Where does your space start?"

"About six hundred lightyears spinward and rimward."

"Oh, you've got lots of time, then."

"As long as the Orions keep their mouths shut."

"You're still ten years on a one-way trip from the very edge of Confederacy space. Kor minds might work on those timescales, but Mahknan ones don't, and the Mahknan run the navy. You've got decades, maybe centuries, but not millenia. And besides, can you even die?"

Jade looks to me, as if I'm the expert on dying. Which is technically true, I suppose, since I have the most combat sim time.

<How much should I say?>

<All of it, I think.>

"Technically yes, but it would be basically impossible without a repeat of whatever you're saying the Unzu did. Theoretically we could park server farms out in intergalactic space and live until heat death without being found, but that isn't an enjoyable existence for most of us. If we have to, we'll fight to keep the real world."

Anit does what I assume is his species's equivalent of a nod. "I expected as much. Uploads in our own fiction are often—"

I recieve a transmission from the shuttle and am suddenly on alert. Our hosts notice my sudden change in posture.

<Jump signature detected. Aperture size indicates frigate-equivalent. No gravitic ping.> My cadence instantly switches from conversational to battle-cant, short and to the point. This is not one of ours; USC ships know to pulse their fusion plants on reversion to identify themselves.

Kets is saying something. "Autumn? Is something wrong?" She's clearly on edge; our body languages are close enough to each other that she can tell something is happening.

Jade caresses my racing thoughts, observing as the data streams to her to. She'll watch and guide, I will execute. <It's okay. Do this out loud, they should know too.>

She speaks, "Her ship-self just saw a jump signature. Are you expecting any visitors?"

Anit looks to Kets. "No, not that I know of," she answers. "Let me make a call." Her six eyes close, and my sensors pick up a transmission from her head. Not even tightbeam, I think in the back of my mind. Sloppy.

More data streams in. "Optical return, unidentified hull. Confirming frigate-equivalent size. Switching to EMCON one." My crew does not need to be told to transmit deltas; they're already streaming back to the shuttle, and the shuttle's laser link is streaming back to me. The me that is in orbit, operating on autonomics and choking on the bandwidth of my radio link to the shuttle.

Kets is off her call. "Can you display it? We have a few traders who come through every once in a while, it's probably one of them."

I would normally just burn a black-and-white image onto a hard surface with a laser inscriber, but that has been removed for diplomatic reasons. I stutter, embarrassingly. "I, I, I need something to write with."

Vraik is on top of it before Jade is, surprisingly. He hands her a pen and a notebook, almost comically similar to the ones we still use in sims. There's not that many ways to bind writing material together, I suppose. She traces out the outline of the vessel. My visual imaging is poor at this distance, but I have a good shot of its outline against its jump aperture, and Jade sees everything I see.

Kets looks at it as she draws, and frowns. "That's not a merchant ship. That looks like an Orion warship."