“That’ll be pretty hit and miss. You'd have to do a lot of scanning for the small number of situations where that would be feasible. They're willing to take this on?”
I nodded. “They’re isolationists, but not like Starfleet. They don’t think contact with humans is a morally bad thing - just that it's holding us back. Presumably by forcing us to keep conforming to human culture and so forth, I guess. But they are neutral on the question of interference with any locals, so I figured it would be relatively safe. Of course, if Starfleet gets hold of it, they'll go ballistic. But really what can they do besides scream loudly? They aren’t here, they can’t get here in less than a couple of decades, and I have control of the local hardware, so they won't be building local ships or androids.”
“And honestly, Will added, “if they started using strong-arm tactics, I don't think it would go well for them. As a group, Bobs aren’t tolerant of that kind of thing. They’ll register their disapproval, we’ll acknowledge their right to their opinion, and that'll be that.”
“Well, we have enough scans for a first pass at a rough android design, but a lot of work ahead of us on the culture and language fronts, starting with how we get in.”
“Yeah I don’t wanna cut my way in. To be honest, I'm not sure if that would even be possible. There have to be some legitimate entrances for supplies or personnel or maintenance equipment or something. Internally, there will have to be a ring of some kind between the inner and outer shells, to allow matching the rotation for things going in, and removing the angular vector for things coming out. A spin transfer system. We should look for that kind of structure and the scans.”
“Maybe it's time to just have a detailed look at what we've got.”
Several dozen milliseconds later, the party atmosphere had evaporated. A bristling silence hung over the group and we all wore matching frowns.
“I presume everyone has noticed the level of technology of the inhabitants?”
“Or lack thereof,” Bill replied.
Garfield poked at a window in front of him. “Or the fact that the interior entrance we did a close up on appears to be sealed off, so the inhabitants can't leave? Something smells.”
We now had a couple hundred thousand miles worth of points scans, and a thorough rotational scan from three locations. The results were… perplexing. Instead of modern metropolises, we were seeing what appeared to be villages, constructed mostly of some kind of wood equivalent, mostly concentrated around the river. Smaller settlements were situated around tributaries and branches. There was very little in the way of metal, as well. In fact, most of the metal seemed to be in the form of small discs carried around by the locals. Money.
I tapped the image to call attention to a detail. “We’ll need to do some more scans to confirm, but it looks like the land is sculpted rather than the product of any kind of natural erosion. Either the water for the streams and tributaries is pumped up to the source, or they have actual weather to supply the headwaters.”
“Also,” Bill pointed out, “the inside seems to be divided into segments of about 560 miles in length, separated by mountain ranges that form a ring to divide each segment.” He tapped an image and it zoomed. “We don't have enough detail, but I think those mountains also anchor stays or guide wires to keep some kind of cylinder lined up down the center of the structure. I'm guessing that central cylinder provides illumination. There's no allowance in this design for letting the actual sun shine in.”
“Probably true but SUDDAR hasn't been able to pick up those kinds of detail, and if you’re right, it brings up the issue of heat dissipation. I wonder how they handle it?”
“I think we have at least a partial answer to that,” I said. There are radiator surfaces along the entire shaded side of the outer shell, which are radiating way more heat than can be accounted for by solar absorption, so there’s a lot of heat being generated internally. Probably that lighting you're talking about. There must be a system to bleed the heat from the living area to the outer shell.”
Everyone in the room nodded slowly in appreciation. Bobs loved to technical solutions.
“And notice,” Bill added, “the rivers meandering pattern repeats every dozen segments or so. I think the landscape does as well. I guess they just use the same design templates over and over. They might even have built the megastructure in segments of that size, then glued them together. A billion miles, that's a most 2 million segments.”
We all stared in silence of the data windows for several milliseconds.
“Maybe,” Bill mused, “we just happened to have scanned a section of the megastructure that’s set up as an agrarian community. There's no reason for the society to be identical along the entire length of the topopolis. Maybe they're technologically backward by choice.”
“Including blocking the exits? That seems incompatible with a voluntary return to the land, you know.”
“Well, it isn’t ideal for first contact, or for learning about their society.” I tapped my chin for a few moments. “Let's move along the strand and see if we can find something more up-to-date.”
One week later, we admitted failure. We had not only moved millions of miles along the original strand, but we had even jumped to one of the other strands and continued our survey.
“There’s all kinds of variation and detail,” I observed, “including different climate zones and completely uninhabited areas. But everything is pre-industrial. Why would a species build such an amazing feat of engineering, then sentence themselves to essentially live in a zoo?”
“Maybe that was the point of building it. These are aliens, Bob.” Bill shrugged. “Their motivations
