The Things We Repair
Copyright© 2026 by Flubu
Chapter 35: What We Tell Them
The idea began with Daniel asking what Xianglume knew about Canada. ER answered for eleven minutes, and Daniel regretted asking almost immediately. They were at the kitchen table after breakfast.
The countdown read:
1 DAY, 16 HOURS
Claire had gone into town with Marcel to collect prescriptions, groceries and several things Daniel had apparently forgotten could be bought before running out.
Neris sat beside him with the Earthside receiver open in front of her, checking it again despite nothing being wrong. Daniel had decided not to comment; ER had made no such decision. “Receiver diagnostics remain unchanged from the previous four tests.”
Neris did not look up. “I know.”
“You are testing it again.”
“Yes.”
Daniel smiled into his coffee. Neris’s ears angled toward him. “You checked the cattle cameras six times.”
“Cattle move.”
“The receiver also has state changes.”
“Not when nobody has sent anything.”
Neris closed the casing. Daniel regarded that as victory. He made the mistake of asking: “What do your people actually know about where you landed?”
ER began with geography, population, federal and provincial government, historical treaties, languages, economic indicators, climate and transportation infrastructure. Daniel interrupted somewhere around agricultural exports.
“Okay.”
ER stopped. “You left the account incomplete.”
“I figured.”
Neris rested her elbows on the table.
Daniel looked toward the speaker. “How much of that did you know before October?”
“None.”
“You learned it here.”
“Yes.”
“From what?”
“Publicly available information.”
Daniel looked at Neris. “Just Canada?”
“No,” she said.
“How much Earth?”
Neris’s ears moved. “That depends on what you mean by know.”
Daniel glanced toward the speaker. “That sounded diplomatic.”
“It was precise.”
“Same thing.”
ER projected a small globe above the table and rotated it slowly. Most of Earth appeared normal, but bands of information covered some regions densely and barely touched others. North America and western Europe glowed brightest; much of Asia showed moderate coverage before the map faded rapidly elsewhere. The knowledge imbalance was obvious before ER explained it. Daniel looked at the globe. “That’s bad.”
“Yes,” Neris said.
ER said, “It is incomplete.”
“No. It’s biased.”
A pause. “Yes.”
Daniel leaned back. Neris looked at him. He pointed at the brightest areas. “You’ve been using English internet.”
“Primarily English and French sources, with machine-assisted translation for additional languages.”
“Mostly places that publish information where you can easily find it.”
“Yes.”
“And places with enough infrastructure to put everything online.”
“Yes.”
Daniel stared at the globe. “That’s not Earth.”
“No,” Neris said quietly.
ER dimmed the projection. Daniel looked toward the window. Snow covered the yard, a tractor sat beside the equipment shed, and one cow was pushing the mineral feeder with her nose as though personally offended. One farm, one household, two months: a tiny place from which to describe a planet. He looked back at the globe. “What does Xianglume get when you go home?”
Neris understood before ER did. “About Earth?”
“Yeah.”
“Our reports.”
“Which say what?”
Neris hesitated. “Crash circumstances, survival, protected contact, local interactions, emergency medical intervention, communication development and technical restrictions.”
Daniel waited. “And people?”
Neris looked at him. “Daniel.”
“That’s one person.”
“Claire.”
“Two.”
“Marcel.”
“Three.”
“Dr. Singh.”
“Four.”
Daniel pointed toward the globe. “There are eight billion of us.”
ER said, “Approximately.”
Daniel looked upward. “Do not make the number worse.”
Neris’s tail curled around one chair leg. Daniel continued. “Your people’s first working picture of humanity is four people, some cows and whatever you downloaded while hiding in the forest.”
“That is reductive,” ER said.
“Is it wrong?” A pause. “No.”
Daniel smiled. “Claire’s rubbing off on me.”
The back door opened. Claire entered carrying grocery bags. Marcel came behind her with two more.
“I heard my name,” Claire said. Daniel stood automatically. His monitor vibrated once. He sat. Claire noticed but remained quiet.
Marcel put the bags on the counter. “Should I be worried about what you’re talking about?”
“First contact.”
“That answers that.”
Claire removed her coat. “What now?”
Daniel pointed at the globe. “Xianglume doesn’t know enough about Earth.” Claire looked at Neris. Neris nodded. “And you’re fixing that today.”
Daniel shrugged. “We have nothing else to do.”
Neris said, “That is not true.”
Daniel looked at her. “What?”
“There are still personal departure preparations.” He stopped. Claire immediately became interested in unloading bread. Daniel looked away. “Fine. We have nothing urgent to do.”
Marcel opened a cupboard. “What happened in here?”
“Neris.”
“It’s organized.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Daniel looked at him. “Don’t.”
Marcel slowly closed the cupboard.
Claire put milk in the refrigerator. “What are you proposing?”
Daniel looked at the globe again. “I don’t know.”
Claire sat. Neris moved the receiver aside. ER restored the display.
Daniel said, “Something that tells your people what they’re actually dealing with.”
Marcel pulled out a chair. “A starting profile,” Claire said. Neris looked at her. Claire continued. “Not conclusions. Questions.”
ER said, “A structured pre-contact reference framework would be useful.”
Daniel nodded. “Sure.”
Claire looked at him. “You have no idea what that means.”
“Not a clue.”
“It means a list.” Daniel groaned. Claire was already reaching for paper. Neris’s tail moved. ER said, “A digital structure would be more efficient.”
Claire pointed at the speaker. “We’re brainstorming.”
“Paper does not improve brainstorming.”
“It does for me.”
“Your individual cognitive preference does not establish general superiority.”
Daniel smiled. “Fight.”
Neris looked between them. Claire ignored everyone and wrote at the top of the sheet:
EARTH
She wrote beneath it:
WHO SPEAKS FOR IT?
She looked at Neris. “Well?”
Neris thought. “No one.”
Claire circled the answer. Daniel leaned over. “That should be page one.”
ER created a new file.
The first line appeared on the kitchen tablet.
EARTH HAS NO SINGLE REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORITY.
Marcel nodded. “Good start.”
Claire continued and moved quickly through countries, international organizations, the United Nations, regional blocs, treaties and disputed territories, with ER confirming each category and qualifying the number of recognized states. When she reached “Indigenous nations,” ER paused. Claire looked toward the speaker. “That pause means something.”
“My current dataset is insufficiently nuanced.”
“Then put that in.”
ER added:
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, NATIONS, TREATY RELATIONSHIPS AND SOVEREIGNTY REQUIRE REGION-SPECIFIC REVIEW. DO NOT ASSUME STATE GOVERNMENT FULLY REPRESENTS ALL PEOPLES WITHIN A TERRITORY.
Neris read it slowly. “That applies elsewhere too.”
Claire nodded. “Quite a lot.”
Daniel looked at Neris. “You asked before who represents Earth.”
“Yes.”
“Answer’s going to be annoying.”
“I expected that.”
“No. I mean there isn’t an answer.”
Neris’s ears tilted. “That is useful to know.”
Marcel opened the bread. Claire slapped his hand. “Lunch isn’t for two hours.”
“I’m supporting first contact.”
“With toast?”
“Cultural context.”
ER added: “Food practices”
Daniel laughed. “Don’t encourage him.”
Within twenty minutes, Claire’s sheet had become three sheets. Within forty minutes, ER’s file had become a hierarchy spanning governance and laws, military capability, science and medicine, economics and inequality, languages and religion, media and public opinion, artificial intelligence, spaceflight and ordinary social life. Daniel watched the list grow. Something bothered him. He could not name it yet. “It looks like a report.”
“It is a report.”
“No.”
Claire looked up. “What’s wrong with reports?”
“Nothing.”
“That tone says otherwise.”
Daniel stared at the projection. “Governments. Money. Wars. Science. Laws.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not people.” Claire sat back. “It’s part of people.”
“Yeah.”
He pointed at the list. “But if somebody gave me that about Xianglume, would I know anything about you?” Neris looked at him.
Daniel continued. “I’d know what your government does. How many people live there. What your technology can do.” He looked at her tail. “At some point somebody would probably explain that.” Neris’s ears lifted. “But would I know about Returning Light?” She became still. “Would I know your sister plays music badly on purpose when she’s trying to annoy you, or that your mother’s solution to every problem is to feed everyone?” Neris’s muzzle shifted.
Daniel looked at Claire. “That’s what’s missing.”
Claire tapped the paper with her pencil. “Culture.”
“No.”
“Values?”
“Closer.”
ER said, “Publicly observable cultural values.”
Daniel looked toward the speaker. “Maybe.”
He thought. “What do people keep?”
Neris watched him. “What do they throw away?”
Claire’s pencil stopped. “What do they build memorials for?”
Daniel continued. “What do they write songs about? What do they make jokes about when everything’s terrible? What stories do they tell kids? What do people photograph?”
Marcel said, “Food.”
Daniel pointed at him. “Yes.”
Daniel looked back at Neris. “What do people call home?” Neris’s ears softened.
ER said, “Those concepts are difficult to quantify.”
Daniel smiled.
“That is not generally a desirable property of data.”
“Not everything worth knowing fits nicely in a field.”
Claire looked at him. “You realize who you sound like?”
“No.”
“Emily.”
Daniel stopped. Claire lowered her voice. “She used to say you tried to turn everything into a problem with inputs and outputs.”
Daniel looked down at the table. “Yeah.” Neris placed her paw over his.
Claire smiled faintly. “Apparently you learned something.”
Daniel started supplying the missing sources: books, music, films, public memorials, festivals and obituaries. Neris stopped him at the last. “Obituaries?” “People say strange, honest things about what mattered after somebody dies.” ER added it.
“Wedding traditions,” Claire said.
“Funeral traditions,” Neris added.
“Sports,” Marcel said.
Daniel looked at him. “Seriously?”
Marcel stared. “Try first contact during the Stanley Cup playoffs and tell me sports aren’t cultural risk.”
Claire nodded. “He has a point.”
ER added it.
Daniel frowned. “Don’t tell him.”
Marcel smiled. Neris leaned toward the projection.
“Humour.” ER added it.
“Physical contact norms.” Daniel looked at her. She lifted one paw. “Your species is inconsistent.”
Claire laughed. “That’s generous.”
Neris continued.
She worked through examples of contradictory human contact norms: strangers might be expected to shake hands, embrace or kiss cheeks, while elsewhere the polite choice was not to touch at all; sustained eye contact could signal respect in one place and confrontation in another; touching someone during conversation could convey warmth or be considered intrusive. Claire confirmed each contradiction. Neris looked genuinely concerned.
ER added:
INTERPERSONAL CONTACT NORMS — REGIONALLY AND CULTURALLY VARIABLE.
Daniel looked at the line.
“You really wrote that.”
“Would you prefer an international incident?”
“No.”
Neris’s tail brushed Daniel’s ankle.
He looked down. “Also tell them tails are not universally available.”
Claire covered her mouth.
ER said, “That distinction was already evident.”
The work grew. So did the problem. By lunch, they had stopped talking about what information to collect and started arguing about how to collect it. ER proposed sources ranging from public demographic and government data to scientific and legal literature, international organizations, opinion surveys, news archives and translation corpora. Claire interrupted. “In what languages?”
ER paused.
Daniel looked at her. “That’s an important question.”
Neris’s ears lifted.
ER said, “Current collection capacity supports multilingual analysis.”
“That’s not what she asked,” Daniel said.
Claire nodded. “What languages are most represented in what you already have?”
“English dominates.”
“By how much?”
ER displayed the percentages. English towered over everything else, with French at a fraction and Spanish, Mandarin, German, Japanese and several others trailing into a long tail of poorly represented languages.
Marcel looked at the chart. “You’ve learned Earth by reading the people who publish the most stuff you can reach.”
“Yes.”
Claire shook her head. “That’s dangerous.” ER did not object.
Neris looked at the globe and put forward that the first principle should be source diversity. Claire added language and regional diversity; Daniel added economic diversity, pointing out that an Ontario farmer could not stand in for one in Kenya. Neris extended the point to internet access, and Claire added urban and rural populations, majority and minority groups, and people living under both open government and censorship. ER created another section.
SOURCE BIAS AND REPRESENTATION
Daniel watched it fill.
ER said, “Public information provides broad access while minimizing privacy intrusion.”
Neris looked toward the speaker. “Public does not mean ethically unlimited.”
ER paused. Daniel looked at her.
She continued. “A person posting publicly does not necessarily consent to becoming part of an extraterrestrial behavioural dataset.”
Claire slowly put down her pencil. “That needs to be in there.”
ER added:
PUBLIC AVAILABILITY DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY CONSTITUTE ETHICAL PERMISSION FOR INDIVIDUAL PROFILING.
Neris continued.
They set the next boundary quickly: no private communications, hacked systems, medical records, individual location tracking or personal dossiers assembled from public sources. ER agreed to each condition, pausing only before the last. Daniel looked at Neris. “You thought about this.”
“It is basic contact ethics.”
Marcel opened the bread again. Claire let him.
Neris continued. “The objective is understanding societies. Not cataloguing humans.”
Daniel looked toward the globe. “Good.”
ER added:
UNIT OF ANALYSIS: INSTITUTIONS, COMMUNITIES, CULTURAL PATTERNS, PUBLICLY DECLARED POSITIONS AND AGGREGATE BEHAVIOUR.
AVOID INDIVIDUAL SURVEILLANCE.
Daniel read it.
“That may be the first alien policy document I actually like.”
“It is not alien.”
“Technically.”
“It is being created in your kitchen.”
“That is not making it less strange.”
Lunch became part of the research without anyone intending it. Marcel asked whether Canadian food belonged in the profile; Daniel said Canada did not have one food, Claire suggested poutine. Daniel objected on geographic grounds. Marcel nominated butter tarts, and Neris asked why neither contained vegetables. No one answered. ER wisely added nothing to the official framework.
After Marcel left, the work became harder. Claire opened the military section, and Daniel immediately wished it could be omitted. Neris would not allow that. An arriving Xianglume vessel could appear to Earth systems as an unidentified aerospace vehicle, triggering radar tracking and, depending on the country and circumstances, possible military interception.
Nuclear-armed governments belonged in the same profile even if everyone hated the introduction they created. Claire insisted on including the fact. Daniel’s objection was not that the risk was false; it was that the risk was not all of Earth.
Neris touched the display. “That is the point of the profile.”
Daniel had learned to distinguish what Takuhai could do from what Neris intended to do with it. Xianglume would have to make the same distinction about humanity. Daniel nodded slowly.
ER added nuclear arsenals, missile-warning and air-defence systems, military alliances, public doctrine, space surveillance and cyber capabilities, while excluding classified sources, intrusion and any attempt to discover hidden weaknesses.
Claire asked: “What exactly is the purpose?”
Neris answered. “To avoid triggering defensive behaviour.”
ER said, “The objective is not determining how to defeat Earth.”
Daniel looked upward. “Glad we clarified.”
“The objective is determining how not to accidentally appear to be attacking Earth.”
“That’s better.”
Claire looked at the map.
“One giant ship dropping through the atmosphere without warning is out.”
“Strongly,” Neris said.
“Fleet?”
“Extremely strongly.”
Daniel smiled. “Good diplomatic terminology.”
ER said, “An initial formal contact mission would likely remain outside controlled national airspace until communication and authorization existed.”
“Orbit?” Claire asked.
“Possibly.”
Daniel looked at her. “That’ll calm everyone down.”
Claire grimaced. “Point.”
Neris looked toward the window. “Distance may be safer physically and more frightening symbolically.”
Daniel nodded. “Welcome to humans.”
Claire pointed at the speaker. “That should be a category.”
ER added:
PERCEPTION OF INTENT MAY DIFFER FROM ACTUAL INTENT.
Daniel smiled. “That one applies everywhere.”
The environmental section came more easily: climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, energy transition and resource scarcity. Neris asked why humans continued activities they knew caused long-term harm.
Daniel said: “Because knowing a problem and agreeing who pays to fix it are different things.”
Claire looked at him. “That may also belong on page one.”
ER added it.
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