[Visit 24: Survey Mission 1]
We popped out of hyperspace; The fast-survey had sent us this system's co-ordinates while we were finishing up the study of the feudal world, so this was added to our list and would be our next world. The survey crew had left reconsats in the system but didn't have the resources to study a living world.
Considering how cursory the survey of the robot world had been, this was much more complete and came as a surprise.
A technological civilization. Alive. Would they be like us? How far along were they? Were they going to live, or die? Could we keep them from dying?
Could we intervene? Should we intervene? This wasn't Star Trek's "Star-Fleet" so there's no "Prime Directive" to hold us back. We had the option of a first contact- and we were well equipped by experts in social "sciences".
The uploads from the reconsats provided the babble of their transmissions; The survey crew had been able to program them to properly decode and then save the signal information for digestion. We recognized the problem of monitoring their entertainment traffic.
Like our own world, we were able to discover more about their biology than expected since it seems "adult" material is another common thread (we've seen it before on other worlds, though only once in active broadcasts). We found their equivalents to educational TV as well, so the linguistics teams were having a lot of fun watching their forms of "Sesame Street" and (shudder) "Barney and Friends". Some things are too universal.
Unfortunately, biology again varies more than economic and social systems; We knew, pretty quickly, we'd not be able to walk amongst them without major reconstruction of our limbs. The difference in proportions in body shape (knees, elbows, etc) were too great to deal with cosmetically and our symbionts precluded any other solution. A First Contact situation would be an obvious thing for these people, and something we couldn't back off from. Unfortunately we'd not brought any autonomous robots with us from our 18th visit.
We rotated scout-ships and added reconsats to low orbit over the planet while the Feynman stayed in their rich asteroid belt; We re-loaded water from icy bodies and built up maintenance and manufacturing facilities as well; This was likely to be a long-stay mission.
We were soon manufacturing reconsats in large quantities and even built some "innocuous" landers which could be delivered to the surface without drawing much attention. One metallic asteroid was found suitable for a Niven conversion (this was not a common find, even in our own solar system; finding one so quickly was almost miraculous) and work started on it. We were trying to maintain a low profile and we felt successful in this.
Out of the 30 interstellar drones that we left Earth with, we had less than 10 on hand. This situation would require more communication drones. Despite the transit time for a drone between here and earth making a round-trip time of over a month each way, communications for such an exceptional situation was likely to be critical. We added a production line for message drones along with almost every other part we'd like to have. We also worked on building another two ships to allow better support of our scout-ships. For the expected incoming message drones we would need a permanent hyperspace beacon set up; This was built and placed orbiting one of the outer planets so that any drones or ships jumping in wouldn't attract too much attention. The burst of radiation (RF through Gammas) presaging a jump into real-space would be too obvious closer in.
Our surface probes collected and analyzed the biosphere of the planet and beamed the information back to us; We did our best to minimize any technology beyond the technological level found here.
We did build small robots that could "infest" their libraries and communications centers so that we could learn more of their languages and see more of them. This tactic worked well enough despite the need for larger 'bots to coordinate the small "insects" and provide up-link capacity to us.
How they didn't notice any signs of surveillance I don't know; We weren't using non-radio transmission techniques for the landers since we didn't want to tip our hands.
Of course some of the robotic animals we sent down acted like strays but they had to be more autonomous since radio transmissions were far more likely to be intercepted when occurring within a city. We listened to as many of their communications channels as possible.
We got enough information to learn how to tie into their world-wide network; Their own protocols were analyzed and we were able to access their network content. I'm one of the few that remembered the earlier days of the Internet on earth. These people weren't doing much all that differently as earth had. Their version of the Web was just as lame as ours had been.
We needed a "safe" way to make a first contact; So, on a world like this there must be, somewhere, isolated individuals (or small groups) who would not be missed. We found several, isolated on small islands. Our 'bots looked them over carefully before we considered our first visit; We didn't want to meet up with a science team that was wired into the planetary communications grid.
One group on an island were apparently shipwreck victims; these would make good candidates for first contact since this would almost qualify as a rescue. That they were all ill from nutritional issues and poor readiness for cold weather meant that we should move quickly.
My quad was amongst the 5 selected for this mission; We had a good mix of skills. So we dropped down in three shuttles and landed on the beach. We didn't have to worry too much about detection via their RADAR since there was little coverage where we were going.
Our shuttles are ugly boxy things with no thought of aerodynamics; These folks, as soon as they saw us land (we weren't loud but we had a lot of lights on to ensure safety) knew something different was in the air. The lettering on our shuttles didn't match any of their own alphabets.
We all wore bio-containment suits as we climbed out of the shuttles; The suits are as transparent as possible allowing these people to see how we looked. We carried blankets and medical gear modified to look like what they were more used to seeing.
There were 9 of these people here; The faces resembled cats though their teeth weren't as well equipped for purely carnivorous pursuits; Like us they should be omnivorous.
We got to their shelters, already feeling the bite of the cold in our own suits (and having to crank up the temperatures within) and worked on the structures to cut down on drafts, wrap them in self-heating blankets and set up a space heater.
We quickly cataloged them as seven females and two males; Four were in mated pairs, leaving five of the females out.
A lot had been learned about their planet's biosphere by our robots but we needed to get more information before we'd trust it further.
The medical team (of which my 2ndWife was a member) made sure to gather food identification information from the more lucid patients and the rest of us were tasked with foraging for various foodstuffs; Our patients were soon doing better between the warmth and the food.
The cargo shuttle was quickly disassembled to build a set of shelters and added greenhouses for our own needs. This was done in such a way that any of this world's spy satellites would not have an easy time (visually at least) locating our base here. It'd be difficult to hide the existence of a population here given IR emissions.
It took two more days for the bio-compatibility tests to be completed enough that we were able to skip the isolation suits; By this time our patients had almost fully recovered and were able to wear clothing from our fabricator and shoes were being developed.
With our "hosts" (it's their world, after all, not ours; We knew to be good guests) warm, fed, healthy and comfortable it was quickly turning into time to learn about this world's history.
It wasn't easy to get their trust, though. There was some worry that we were invaders, come to take over their world. Getting the message across that we had little interest in planetary surfaces was done by showing them other worlds (and our own) and giving them unfettered access to reading from our library (which now included libraries from 14 different worlds). Two of the females were apparently SciFi enthusiasts and found our ships and manufacturing and maintenance yards in what should be their asteroid belt gratifying and wanted to go there.
Being told that we chose to contact them because they were isolated so that we wouldn't hurt the rest of the civilization here was certainly not reassuring to them; I think they were tired of being isolated like this. Moving them into more modern quarters and providing access to our libraries reduced their anxieties enormously. They were quickly able to assist us in our understanding of various recordings. We were compatible enough that foodstuffs were (to a surprising degree) sharable; Apparently nutrients were common and only tastes provided a barrier. They grew to like some of our foods as we did with theirs. They'd be comfortable with us.
They also studied our mating structures; they'd been monogamous for many generations but the male/female drives were, as expected, not greatly different between our races. I was not alone in thinking this relaxed them the most since the two mated couples opened themselves up to our kind of polygynous system ("When with Earthers, do as the Earthers do") which reduced some of the sexual stresses the males had; Having "access" to advanced medicine made the worries of child-bearing more ... bearable.
Our understanding of this world was getting better. Our "hosts" had science (speculative) fiction, just like on old earth. (We'd seen some of their entertainment media which covered this, though they still had way too much emphasis on xenophobic reactions.) Some of the work was more tolerant and there were sci-fi conventions recognizable to many of us, filling in the ramifications. We were considering this as a means of recruiting more of these people; The crew we had here was quite competent and well educated before they even met us.
This world had problems too considering it's economic system was, like Earth's 350 years before, geared for volatility (Capitalism, Stock Markets, etc) so they were busy squeezing out as much profit as possible and they fell into a folly that looked like it'd be their undoing: they were down-sizing people into "contract" employees. The first companies to have done this here were reaping huge profits (their tax laws sounded familiar somehow) so others jumped onto the bandwagon of "Scalable Labor".
Yes, this was familiar. We humans had been there, done that, damn near starved in a world-wide economic meltdown before the symbiont changed things around and made the drive for maximizing profit at all costs a criminal act. We had no idea of how these people could recover from such a crash without something like our symbionts as a cushion. Our fear for their future wasn't confined to just us, of course.
Their meltdown was, from the best estimates of the financial gurus still on-board the Feynman, less than a year away. Their move to "scalability" of labor was expanding throughout their economy at a breakneck speed but it was obvious that their government(s) had no idea of the vast sea change that was coming.
That's when it dawned on us: they were doomed and they didn't know it yet. Our hosts from this world, though, ended up figuring it out, since they researched our own history, and studied our own crash of 2011. Debating this with our friends here over meals was educational and they were worth preserving.
It was a mutual decision that we'd start recruiting more of these people to join our ships; One quad had gone up to the Feynman and took to crew training like ducks to water. We'd also back colonization efforts to the two available planets (both a wee bit bigger than Mars), moons and help them stock the Nivenized worldlet with a biosphere based on both their own and ours.
These "colonies" could potentially provide both demand and transportation to motivate their homeworld into staying in one piece.
Maybe. We didn't have any better ideas that had any chance of working. At least we'd get people off their homeworld and they could learn from others' mistakes.
So we were working out how to recruit more of these people so we could train them and use some as a core of stability for their own kind. It certainly wouldn't hurt if we could get them actively into space like we were.
Our hosts had contacts in their SF "fan" world; We would have to take some chances to save their world. Nobody could have predicted how well this worked.
We assisted the remaining quad (of five, actually) in the building of a boat capable of getting them to their home continent-- in effect, self rescue-- where they'd stay in touch with us and work to spread the word of their danger. As if any were likely to listen.
One of our histories of the market crash, with whos, hows, whys and wherefores was gently fictionalized and turned into a SciFi story and our contact sold the story to a publisher. Unlikely as it seems, this book ended up quite popular to the SciFi readers and was actually studied by the various "news outlets" which widened exposure. Despite this exposure, few "qualified" economists read it, citing it as an "utter fabrication". Those who might have actually read it stayed mum. It also engendered a bit of anxiety by those with wit, who then went onto our recruiter's list when they were identified.
It's funny, but I think it would've worked amazingly well back on earth, but our key recruiter was collecting contacts at their Science Fiction conventions. The people we could get through this path were already emotionally prepared for a first contact situation. We got our first batch of recruits lined up fairly quickly and arranged to pick them up in a rural area. Instead of the sixteen we expected, there were thirty-six people waiting to be picked up by our thoroughly stealthed shuttle.
It was amazing how these people reacted to their first sight of an actual "alien", it was like they'd met their long-lost siblings. We picked them up, brought them to the small base we'd established on their moon, and got them oriented with our technology and history. These people soaked it up like a sponge. They were also teaching us some new tricks we'd not noticed as possible.
It was obvious over time that there'd be a seeding of "ringers" in the groups we brought up; We were hoping to accumulate quite a few of these kinds of investigators. These people would be important to establish our bona fides when the time came to make official contact. Whenever such an agent was identified we placed them in a position where they'd have as much access to information. Considering the kinds of people needed for that kind of work, we were fortunate that none we collected suffered from xenophobia. Obviously someone suspected our existence and ensured that agents would be "ready" for contact.
Some crews went to work building up more homes on the larger of their two moons (with our help) saying they needed to get more people to settle there. We'd scooped doctors, engineers, pilots, police and even some scientists-- including a linguist! (I personally hoped this one was an agent.) We were rushing forward with amalgamation as our pickups got bigger and more frequent.
We soon had locals driving the shuttles. They were much better at avoiding detection than I would have expected. I also learned that agent date drops were happening as well which were encouraged.
Our "native recruiters" were soon on the lookout for micro and molecular biologists that could work on modifying our symbiote for their world; It took another two months before we accumulated a team of five researchers in the right areas. They were soon working on the symbiote and trying to make a less fatal version of our own for their own kind. We kept warning them of how it had killed many of our kind before our population had stabilized; We were still afraid of it; We wanted them to be afraid of it too. We made sure at least two of their agents were providing oversight to help keep them anxious about this work. We didn't think that killing off half of their population was a good way to make friends.
Meanwhile a ship from Earth, the Churchill, arrived with a team of negotiators and "First Contact" specialists (which seems odd since we were the only people with any actual experience). They worked with our group of locals and recognized the problems caused by these people being "out of the mainstream".
Defying prediction, their economic crash took longer to start than expected, but it started almost six months after the Churchill's arrival. A minor bobble in their stock market would have been meaningless just 8 months or more before this point, but the first layoffs happened-- and, like the pebbles preceding an avalanche, no concern was raised. Their market issues spread, and so, as demand dropped the "fiduciary requirement" to "minimize losses and maximize profits" had them shedding more and more of the "contract" labor. Their concept of "scalable labor", like our own "demand-based economy" faltered all because those out of work had no money to spend. Workers were being released in widening spirals until only the core cadre of the "scalable" companies were still employed along with government workers. The core cadre of a company usually consisted of managers and executives, people who couldn't do the WORK of business.
While there were smaller outfits that had retained workers they were not the mainstream; Between these workers and the others with "stable" jobs, there was insufficient liquidity to maintain an economy dependant upon consumers.
The reason this was a problem was that too few people had any money to spend. Without a core population of consumers with some assurance of stability, spending dried up and, without liquidity, their financial systems failed. It was a brittle failure, too. As the system started crashing no one recognized it as a problem so the infrastructure needed to deliver food (since mechanical maintenance work is always needed over time) became thinner.
Their political mechanisms hadn't taken this possibility into account (despite the oblique warnings from our own history) and their equivalent to "unemployment insurance" collapsed quickly; There were no financial resources available to cover all of these now unemployed producers who had no resources with which to continue consuming, so, because there was insufficient inertia in their labor pool, they had no way out. Demand had recovered for some things but there was no longer any faith in money to motivate scaling up the labor force. It was too late for "normal" market forces to re-assemble their economy. Core cadre and executives found themselves penniless.
This level of idiocy took talent-- but then enough of us had lived through our own example of idiocy. This was bad. We didn't have any assurance that even external influences like a first contact with us could help. It was worse than that since some of us (including myself) worried that there'd be those to blame us for their financial systems crash. One item backing this idea was that what was left of the government was searching for the "author" who'd "written" a "fictionalized" story of a crash like this. She'd departed months ago and was happy living on board the daVinci. It looked like some of the people down there desired to shoot the messenger.
We were able to be picky over recruits; The daVinci was being staffed mostly by the locals who were shaking out quite well. We helped in moving them into their solar system quickly and assisted the creation of settlements on various asteroids as well as the planets. The effort to settle the converted asteroid which we'd started spinning was quick and a biosphere compatible with their home world was established quickly. Quite a bit of the interplanetary traffic was under their control using ships we'd initially taught them how to build (and even provided many of the tools needed) so an economy of sorts was forming off of their home world. It was easy to get people to emigrate-- the pickup crews and ships were mostly theirs.
We were quickly becoming irrelevant in terms of this system's space-borne population. This reassured us in some ways and was somewhat threatening in others.
Money is an article of faith. It is only by faith that it has enough value to be exchanged for tangible goods or services. It's a liquid medium that only works if it's in motion. If there's no way for you to buy things you want (or need) and the various supply chains have collapsed, then food can't get to you in a city.
Too many links in the chain had failed and so their cities started to come apart.
We knew we'd need to intervene soon to pull them together. None of us-- human or local-- could bear the thought of seeing a slide into barbarism. There was only so far the emigration rate off world could go, and it was slowing because more and more training was needed for each successive iteration.
A new economic system needed to be built but we didn't have a clue as to how to achieve this. We'd been distracted by the big die-off and scrambled to cope with that disaster, so we'd been brought back from the brink by a direct threat that we all faced and brought us together regardless of who we were. So we had no idea how to pull them back from the abyss. Our own crash and recovery could not be used as a model and all of the others we'd seen in our travels weren't much better.
While there was still a government to talk to, we dropped into orbit, loudly, jumping out of hyperspace above their world. The bursts of radio static from the forming jump points must've been pretty impressive given the flotilla of our ships that finally arrived. I wasn't alone in worrying that we'd be seen as a threat considering the government here had known enough of our existence; enough of the agents had managed to report back to their chains of command so we weren't all that surprising.
The Richard Feynman is an impressive Survey Analysis vessel, fully 20km in diameter. The daVinci and Michelangelo we'd built here were identical in size to the Feynman but were running a little light, mostly from the lack of training for a full-size crew.
The Churchill was half the diameter of the Feynman so it wasn't as impressive, but that's where the parleys contacts were broadcast from. We also advertised openly (finally!) for workers and crewpersons. We expected that the daVinci and Michelangelo (assuming their names weren't changed) would be getting survey analysis missions of their own.
We made sure that they were as well informed of our shape on our transmissions in their "TV" format. We also broadcast interviews with the "author" who'd translated our history book as a warning and arranged other interviews.
The remnants of their government was talking to us but suffered from too many voices; Our teams weren't going down there anytime soon. We did arrange for a pickup of government leaders so that the our negotiators could open discussions; They got to visit each ship and inspect them for weapons to reinforce that we weren't invaders.
It's likely they were more impressed by the daVinci, crewed by 5000 of their own kind with human advisors on board- but found that crews attitude towards their own kind discouraging. I personally think these government people were being blamed for the misery of this crews families who hadn't been able to emigrate yet.
But that ended up being the key-- The locals already settled on the moons and in the asteroids wanted things from their home world that couldn't easily be made off-world; Foodstuffs, seeds, medicines, education, so they were quite willing to pay for some products; All they needed was a medium of exchange.
It's amazing how quickly they were able to re-assemble an economy on their homeworld: it was a matter of trade. They could trade with both their off-world brethren and with us Earthers.
After all that time we spent agonizing over how to put an economy back together, it wasn't us that did it. Yes, we might have enabled it by having people "outside" the moribund financial system, but the key innovation didn't have a human fingerprint on it. We hadn't come up with establishing demand as they had. It was their own solution that worked.
We'd already benefitted greatly from their other innovations. Many were exceptionally competent engineers, grasping our human technology and finding new ways to apply it. Our new friends were still a dynamic race and we were already both profitting from our association.
For we discovered that despite our apparent progress all this time, we were barely more than stagnant. Perhaps even a safe symbiont for them would consign them to the same conservatism which reduced our vigor in pushing forward new technologies. We found a need for these people as partners to help us now.
Until such time as a safe symbiont for their species can be built, it was the An'Zha'Zhe who would be the movers and shakers. And we had plenty who wanted to join our crew. Their short lifespans (about 120 years) while longer than human baseline pre-symbiont was still a concern to us.
We ended up spending twenty years in their system before we finally packed up to continue on to the 23rd planned world in our itinerary. We were leaving with new crewmembers and a sister-ship. Already colonists were leaving here for the two other systems we'd found ready for immediate occupancy. Constant communications drone traffic between here and earth (and the two new colonial worlds) was helping to tie us all together.
And so we departed, jumping into hyperspace for the next world on our list. Our younger crew-members were looking forward to this world, and the daVinci jumped with us.
If you would like me to respond to your comments, you need to provide a return e-mail address.
Why provide feedback? Feedback is the lifeblood of authors here on asstr-mirror.org; we don't get paid in any currency beyond hits on the pages and feedback from our readership. Encouragement, questions, critiques, typos... as a reader you may be surprised how much your words mean to us.
It is a good feeling to know my words have been read ... and enjoyed.
If the above does not work for you, try: ASSTR Msg Form
Author: Jack C Lipton Title: Supply and Demand - First Contact (incomplete) Part: Universe: Feynman Survey Mission 1-24 Summary: watching as a world goes down in flames - or will it? Keywords: scifi Revision: $Revision: 1.8 $ Archive: Mailing List: FAQ: RCS: $Id: supply.x,v 1.8 2003/03/15 16:33:34 jcl Exp $