Binary Red Dwarf system near Sol

Image from Steve Bowers

In orbit around Ijited are numerous comptronium nodes, home to a wide variety of cybercosms

Groombridge 34

Image from MiyuwiAuthor

Umamwa, a super Neptunian world in the outskirts of this system

Snapshot /traveller's notes: A conversation between Vec representative [Node78heat] and Hwii dolphin diplomat [V!!ieekkk], 4852 AT

Representative [V!!ieekkk] is how I pronounce it? We could not find record of it so we were not sure. Ah of course, we pronounce it with a "!!" to ping a glimpse of your lungs? Very polite to let us [ping] with your formal name. Yes we do enjoy your name's reference to the [!eekk] air poem! How nice! What a pleasure to meet you while embodied in flesh. We thought this would be polite to meet on your terms, so to speak.
Haha you think it's endearing how we talk in this way? The way this body refers to its whole, and with such a foreign dialect! We like this too, to be honest. Sometimes it is good to practice in the real, for good relations!
Ah how polite of you to mention this out loud. Of course we would be rude to emulate your behaviors and mind too smoothly, as if we knew you too well like family. One day! As you say, it is customary to act not-quite- Hwii if one is not Hwii. To preform foreignness when making new foreign friends and neighbors. We are glad we are succeeding! Perhaps several generations before the treaty, we would have used such a tactic, using the appearance of your relative as an avatar, but we are past such things now and such practices are unfashionable. There is no need to revive the dead, so to speak.

This is how you tell a story, yes? A history? Our interface explained to us this is how you bionts like to hear Experiences, when such experiences are not formal or critical. You zeta dolphins prefer the story to be told mentioning all senses , are we correct? But not too much detail. That zeta dolphin over there, [#!yy], said this bores you. Shall I begin?

"These skins were new. Grown and designed locally to swim through the atmosphere. We'd spooled our mind into them. We'd opened our new bodies and felt the new fingers and pinion flaps and a few propellers.
Check each body for function. Each one works. Opened our eyes and ears and clicked and cackled with our sonar and set off from the port into the reserve. we flew off into the habitat/ there is what you would have called the mechanosystem, out in the reserve. See this recording? You enjoy it don't you?

We are doing well? Good!
Then we will continue!
As we were saying, some fifty kilometers outside the city walls, we reached the old city and the abandoned mines. This is overgrown now- the skeletons of the old mining vecs are beginning to crumble beneath the forests of wild solar energy collector swarms.
The remains of the first vecs who came here two thousand years ago are still resting deep down in the abandoned tunnels. We find them all the time during construction and sell them to your polity's archeologists.
Of course, I'm afraid the remains of Your ancestors did not survive long for anyone to honorably recycle their organics once mine broke their habitats.
But we should talk about less morbid aspects of history than one ancestor's failures of terraforming or another's successive mechanoforming attempts. They are in the ancient past! A hundred different factions of Nauri have tried to make this place a vec garden from the dead oven it once was. Then the Hwii hider faction. Then another then another over thousands of years. The planet sheds our buildings like you and I shed our old bodies, each time our mind needs to pass on to a new one.
Were your natural body able to survive down there unaided, I'm sure you'd find such carcasses [bright] with your sonar clicks.
But we should not be morbid!

Now come! We should should eat together to celebrate that you have given us this planetary territory so generously! We're sure you'll find the mechanosystems of our construction swarm exceedingly useful.
I'm salivating! we've only done this a few times before with a biological mouth ourselves and We've anticipated such things since we began talking...

• Enhanced Dolphins
• Final Cosmic Eating Establishment, The
• Nauri
• Perseus Pirates Virchworld
• Space Adapted Human
• Virchuniverse - Text by M. Alan Kazlev
  Generally, an aggregation or collection of thousands of interconnected virchworlds or cybercosms, all sharing the same basic ontology and lay-out, to make traveling from one to the other easier. Sometimes also used to designate a single extremely large virchworld.
  
• Virchworld