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  He was hesitant to give the obvious answer. “Maybe it is, when humans are allowed to be together without the intervention of companions or AI caretakers. Not all of us, maybe not even the majority of us. But some. Under the less than ideal conditions they find themselves in on that planet.”

  “And you want to take us back to this nightmare by having humans be together in person again?” the silvery-haired woman demanded, voice thick with disgust.

  “It's not all bad,” Tycho protested. “It's not even mostly bad. It's a lot of good, a lot of what we're missing, with only the potential of these sorts of . . . societal ills.”

  “Their society certainly made me ill,” Callista shot back. Tycho nodded, trying not to glance at the nearby puddle of sick. The queasy smell of it was making him have to swallow rapidly to avoid retching himself.

  With a last shuddering breath she forced herself to her feet and turned away from him. “I'll help you with this project. I think it's more important than ever that we present it in a way that doesn't drive hundreds of billions of humans into some sort of mass irrationality. But I-I can't do it right now. I need to talk to Bruce for a while, sort this out.”

  He felt bad that she wasn't turning to him for that, but he supposed he couldn't blame her. Bruce was better equipped to help her deal with her mental distress, and anyway Tycho had been the one to expose her to this unpleasantness in the first place. “Should I head home?”

  “I think that would be best. We can coordinate in the allnet for this. It'll probably be more efficient that way anyway.” Callista started to dart out of the room, then reluctantly paused and looked back at him. “I don't know if I should thank you for letting me be the first to see . . . that. But it means a lot to me that you turned to me for help with this.”

  Tycho nodded. “I'll see you in full immersion, Calli.”

  She'd already disappeared through the door by the time he finished.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sea of Humanity

  Tycho spent most of the next day in slowtime full immersion on the allnet, sorting through the data the drone had provided and collaborating with Callista to prepare his presentation to humanity.

  It was a daunting prospect, although one made easier by the presence of the woman he was courting. Thanks to her debating experience, much of it in front of audiences of millions or even tens of millions depending on the event, she was adept at playing the crowd, tailoring her discourse not only to the subject at hand but to the people she was presenting it to.

  She did most of the work preparing the actual presentation, while Tycho played to his own strengths parsing the vast amounts of information coming from the probe and selecting the most relevant examples to make his point.

  He wanted to introduce Earth, what the humans of the newly discovered colony called their world, in as fair and unbiased a way as possible. But since much of the way these new humans interacted with each other was strange and bewildering to people who'd grown up as the rest of the universe had, he wanted to present the positive sides of their culture in a way that wouldn't seem chaotic and ominous, as they had to Callista.

  Tycho had to admit that in spite of the many clear problems the humans of Earth faced while interacting with each other, the more he saw of the way they lived the more he fell in love with it. There was something so simple, so sincere, about how they acted around other humans.

  After never having seen anything like it before he soaked up every video that offered him a chance to see it, especially the family scenes and the community celebrations. Many of them invariably ended up in his presentation, only to be cut out again by Callista.

  “You only want enough material to get your point across and provide a sufficient explanation,” she said patiently. “Putting in too much of anything, even good things, will only bog down the presentation and cost you momentum. When you're dealing with an audience you have to cater to the people with the lowest attention span or you'll lose everyone as they start heckling and picking fights in the comments to amuse themselves. And that becomes more and more important the bigger your audience gets.”

  “I want people to see all the good before they have to address the bad,” Tycho argued.

  The silvery-haired woman just shrugged. They were currently sitting together on a couch in a simulation of Tycho's living area, which just happened to be drifting in the void of space with no walls, in front of Tycho's usual preferred view of the barred spiral galaxy where they'd found Earth. He'd discovered the humans there called it the Milky Way.

  “That's the advantage of the allnet,” she said. “Once you've made your announcement you can immediately release archives with all the footage you want to show. Viewers will have a chance to dip into slowtime and go watch the material, then can come back and catch up on your presentation.”

  Right. That was a fairly useful resource. “I just want people to see Earth the way it is. The social aspects that are in many ways superior to our own society.”

  “You mean you want them to respond to it the way you did, instead of the way I freaked out the first time I watched a New Year's celebration in Times Square?” Callista shook her head wryly and shifted around to put her head in his lap, looking up at him; he'd found that in the allnet she was even more casually affectionate than in real life, usually leaning against him or sitting in his lap or sprawled comfortably across him. “You keep telling me that, darling, and I'm not arguing. But you have to present it fairly if you want people to judge it fairly, which means you can't pull the wool over their eyes by painting a rosy picture for them to admire that blots out all the bad things.” She shuddered, good humor momentarily fading. “And there are plenty of those, whether or not you like to admit it.”

  Yes, there were, and in order for Tycho's presentation to be balanced he'd have to show that side of Earth's cultures, too. Which was what he and Callista spent the most time on, trying to present the grisly details accurately but not in a way that would have people panicking.

  Or in the irrational extreme calling for the eradication of the insane savages that were on the cusp of space travel and still went to war against each other.

  Their own universe-spanning civilization with a history that stretched back a hundred thousand years had had plenty of opportunities to show what interstellar warfare looked like. And as humanity's population had waxed and waned, at some points reaching into the tens of trillions, the unimaginably vast scope of death from such conflicts was a horror beyond the capability of the human mind to comprehend. Especially since much of it had been caused by weapons of such cataclysmically destructive power that they could bring that death to entire worlds.

  Neither Tycho or Callista wanted that particular part of human history to repeat itself. That included protecting Earth from any panicked overreaction to their primitive cultures by the other humans of the explored universe.

  As they were putting the finishing touches to the presentation, making more and more mistakes and growing more and more snappish as fatigue from hundreds of slowtime hours of constant work set in, Callista abruptly shifted in his lap with a languid yawn, resting her forehead against his.

  “My mind's fried,” she said woozily. “I've blown through two doses of neurostims and my body in the real world is exhausted. Let's take a break.”

  Tycho almost groaned with relief at the suggestion. He hadn't had any stims since that first dose when this all started, and honestly didn't miss it. But at this point thinking felt like trying to lift his ground car with muscles made of pudding.

  Or something like that; he was too tired for similes.

  He was about to suggest they call it a night when the silvery-haired woman began nuzzling his cheek with her own. “I know,” she purred, “let's just cuddle on this couch for a bit before we finish up your presentation.”

  That sounded like pure heaven to him, and he obligingly shifted around to lie flat on the comfortable seat with Callista sprawled half on top of him, head on his chest.
He absently rubbed her back through her silky curtain of hair, and she murmured appreciatively and nuzzled his neck.

  But to his embarrassment it took only a few minutes before exhaustion caught up with him and he drifted off to pleasant sleep. His full immersion rig automatically disconnected him from the allnet and detached, probably making him disappear and jolting Callista unpleasantly as she fell through where he'd been.

  Oops.

  His sensory deprivation vat was almost as comfortable as the couch, absent the warm presence of the woman he was courting, of course. But as he was drifting off again he had a faint impression of Eva lifting him out and carrying him to bed.

  “Sleep well, my love,” she whispered as she tucked him in then cuddled up against him. “Miss Ensom scheduled the presentation for twelve hours from now, and the AIs are already giving it the maximum prioritization.”

  If Tycho was any less tired that announcement would've kept him awake all night. Maximum prioritization would draw the attention of just about everyone, and while many probably wouldn't be bothered to attend it was likely that every human in the explored universe would at least know about it.

  To say that would be a lot of people was a vast understatement.

  But thankfully he was tired, probably the most tired he'd ever been, and he slipped down into blessed unconsciousness.

  * * * * *

  The Forum was designed to show a visual representation of a seat with the silhouette of a person for each attendee, even though from the perspective of everyone in the crowd they would be in the front row, the seats nearest them populated by friends and family.

  Tycho had been to events hosted in Forum hubs similar to this dozens of times, usually as a spectator but occasionally as a speaker. At some points while spectating he'd seen the seats stretch back for miles in a sea of humanity, millions of people all told.

  Now the seats stretched back to infinity.

  The Forum's metrics showed that over 130 billion people were in attendance for his announcement. That was a number the human mind wasn't designed to comprehend. Even for Tycho, who spent his time calculating the vast distances of space as he led drones to plumb its secrets, the full grasp of it was beyond him.

  On a surface level he could understand its meaning, that it was greater than 129,999,999,999 and less than 130,000,000,001. But no analogy or simile, no visual aid, nothing could prepare him for the sheer weight of intelligent minds focused on him and him alone, waiting for news that would affect humanity as it hadn't been affected in centuries, possibly millennia.

  A glimpse of its own past, not forgotten but put so far out of mind it may as well have been.

  Tycho may have attended Forums with millions of people, but he'd never spoken to more than a few hundred at most. He thought he would be crushed under the weight of such a vast crowd, even though he'd done well enough in his previous speeches. The sea of humanity stretching to infinity in all directions seemed impossible to ignore.

  But instead, to his surprise, individuals became lost in the number. His mother and dad, Callista, friends he knew from his work or scholarly pursuits or full immersion on the allnet, all blended into the blur of shadowy faces.

  He might as well have been alone, recording this speech. If his entire audience was here in person that would be, well, physically impossible, but perhaps then he'd feel the horror of stage fright, the suffocation of public speaking.

  But as with everything else, human existence conspired to put him in a sensory deprivation bubble. Safe from any discomfort, the good as well as the bad.

  A hurricane of comments from the vast throng fought for dominance on his display. Some were already surfacing to the fore, given extra weight by upvotes from other attendees. He'd lose the crowd quickly if he ignored those for long; statistically speaking he had to address any that had more than a million supporters, or maybe ten million given the sheer size of the crowd.

  And of course he had to respond to those that came from names given their own weight by prestige or influence, whatever the number of upvotes attached. Although naturally that very influence tended to draw a flood of support and put those comments to the fore anyway.

  But here at the beginning he had some leeway to introduce his topic and work the crowd. He could get away with letting the comments drift for ten or so minutes before their weight forced him to either respond or be buried beneath them.

  Ten minutes, to give the news of a lifetime.

  Once he'd judged attendance had peaked and the crowd was primed, all according to advice Callista had given him during yesterday's preparations, he began in a firm, confident voice. “Welcome, all, and thank you for attending. We're faced with a unique opportunity, one I'm sure you'll be just as excited about as I am.”

  He began the information feed he'd prepared with Eva's and Callista's help, dominated by a view of the newly discovered world. “This is planet 3 of the newly designated Sol system, in the arm of a barred spiral galaxy approximately 5,000 kiloparsecs outside the boundary of the explored universe.”

  He paused and took a deep breath to open the gravity well that was his news. “It is populated by just over 3.6 billion humans we never knew existed, who have recently achieved space flight and traveled to their moon.”

  As expected, the announcement created a storm of reactions. Most of that the Forum muted to the quiet susurration of billions of voices speaking at once, but on his display Tycho saw millions of side conversations pop up. Some were populated by orders of magnitude more people than he'd ever seen in one hub before, usually congregating around an accepted expert on space exploration or anthropology.

  A brief AI summation of the various conversations informed him that most involved speculation on whether his information was accurate, while some were already getting into the ramifications of newly discovered humans.

  He hadn't even given all the news, and people were already arguing about it.

  The reactions weren't as intense as he'd expected, probably since he hadn't gotten to the most shocking part of his news, so Tycho kept ignoring the comments for now and continued over the hubbub. “As far as we've been able to determine these humans have no knowledge of coming to this planet, which they call Earth. Their history dates back thousands of years, with archaeological evidence dating back tens of thousands, and as far as they're aware they are native to that planet and evolved naturally on it.”

  As he continued he noticed a comment had topped 10 billion, which made it effectively impossible to ignore. It had been made by a prominent philosopher, backed not only by his own considerable following but those whose thoughts were running along the same lines. “Are you saying you've discovered a literal “lost world”, one which might give us a glimpse into our own distant past?”

  Tycho nodded and highlighted the comment for response. “That's exactly what I'm saying. The evidence points to these humans evolving from primitive tribes, possibly without even any proper language, and progressing along an undisturbed natural progression to spacefaring societies.” He looked out at the crowd. “And I firmly believe that it not only gives us a glimpse into our past, but offers us insights into our future.”

  He continued his presentation, pausing to respond to comments as needed. He tried to do so at points that wouldn't break the flow of his speech, and most of the comments were questions Callista had predicted would be asked and had helped him devise concise answers for.

  Some comments, however, were completely unexpected, things they hadn't even considered or prepared for. A few of those Tycho could answer, at least enough to be satisfactory. But for the rest he was grateful Callista had a private conversation open with him where she was offering advice as needed.

  The silvery-haired woman had answers to a few comments, mostly those requiring different fields of expertise from his that she was more familiar with. But more valuable still was her debating skill.

  Where neither of them had a good answer she was able to use debating tactics to eithe
r shunt the comment aside or turn it back on the commenter. This was especially useful for the hostile or no-win comments Tycho was occasionally bombarded with. Thanks to her advice he was able to neatly sidestep potential pitfalls, intentional and unintentional, and smoothly continue the presentation as the comments and their commenters lost popular support.

  Just another of the countless things he loved about her.

  After an exhausting hour, fielding more and more comments as his presentation wound down to its conclusion, he finally thanked the crowd for their attention and ceded the platform. Since he'd shared his information the Forum was then taken from his control, although he was still allowed a prominent voice as the sole expert on this new planet and what they currently knew of it.

  The debate immediately shifted to whether or not these creatures were humans at all. A substantial minority in the Forum held the opinion that they were an alien species that had evolved independently with humanoid characteristics. Tycho weighed in with his skepticism of this idea, and his confidence that once they were able to test the genetics of the newly discovered people they'd confirm they were in fact humans and shared common, if ancient, ancestry.

  After another hour or so of debate the consensus was reached that Sol 3 was a forgotten human colony, or perhaps one that was never recorded. A few romanticized the notion that it was a group of outlaws or revolutionaries that had crash landed on the world, and the millennia had destroyed the evidence of the crash and left them to recreate civilization from scratch.

  That would be a poor explanation for why most of the plant and animal species on the planet were commonly seeded on human worlds throughout the explored universe. Tycho threw his weight behind the suggestion that the world was an undocumented penal colony, terraformed and seeded with life, or at least the existing life and atmosphere altered to accommodate humans, before dropping a load of convicts there to survive.