——— Somewhere Else in the Milky Way, On a verdant planet ———

The Captain fumed as he paced the bridge.

It had been five weeks of hiding in orbit. It was supposed to have been the perfect planet for a new colony, lush alien jungle life, minimal moving life in an early stage of evolution. Then the incident happened.

They had landed initially to test the atmosphere for sleeping beauty, and discovered ruins from some civilization recently gone. He had logged it and gone to investigate with several drones, but in the process some alarm had been triggered and the ship alerted him to an incoming impact at the location. As he and the drones scuttled back through the underbrush, a great whoosh knocked them flat. When he looked back, all that remained was a crater and burgeoning wildfire.

Now after the initial panic and scrambling, he was back on the ship with the drones and began to scan the solar system. It was too much of a coincidence that a meteor just happened to strike when he had started exploring ruins on an alien planet. It only took a few hours of tracing the meteor’s path to find the culprit. Something on the moon had launched the meteor in a prolonged orbit, when his ship had entered the atmosphere. Then somehow the meteor had altered course while he landed and went to explore the ruins. His computers could still detect the unusually lucky off gassing that had caused it to alter trajectory.

After he saw that he had quickly flown his ship to the opposite side of the planet. Only for what could only be described as an electronic screech emanated from the moon as more objects launched. These were not rocks but propelled missiles. Something was on that moon, and wanted him dead, and he couldn’t let that happen. Especially when he looked at his passenger sleeping in the cryo pod.

——— Back in Sol System, Lunar Hangar 37A ———

Duilim had hoped the part of the trip to Sol would go by quickly, and it had for the most. Yet it was the unlikely portion of picking up his pet projects from his home that had been the most time consuming. Mountains of paperwork were waiting for him, forms to legally change his name and net designation, forms to pass ownership of his items to the now legally distinct entity he was. Forms that took him three weeks to have resolved while the Tempered Longing toured the system and made diplomatic meetings. At the moment they were on Venus meeting with the Vesuvian Survey Guild, Duilim’s guild. No doubt they were meeting with Finn and discussing potential systems that may bear investigating.

As he looked at the amassed boxes and crates of what were all of his worldly possessions, he sighed. They sat in the corner of the hangar like a mound of dirt. It wasn't much to be honest. The majority of the pile was an assembler forge he had been tinkering with since the technology had become public, and the remainder was a collection of books he had purchased over the years. Quite a few he had downloaded in his hard drive, but he still liked the ambiance of reading a physical book. Not to mention it made forcing a book recommendation on someone easier when it was a solid object and not a link to be ignored or deleted.

He walked over to them and sat down on a crate, it would be a while until his ride showed up. His comms chose that moment of introspection to ping him. He was free to take his things and transfer them to the Tempered Longing, as his own heir/progeny/clone. Apparently an old case of cloning and brain transplant had been used as precedent for a digital person gaining a new body without doing a direct data transfer. Now he just had to wait for the ship and the Glint to come pick him up. Maybe he should check what had been happening in the system while he had been away?

As he opened the Galnet, greeted with a deluge of headlines about the Glint-Human expedition, and what they had been up to while they were in the Sol System. Most speculated on what the first system they'd be visiting was, with many reporters quoting a recent astrological survey of nearby stars between the Glint home system, and Sol. Behind those in volume were the usual paranoid articles about the alien Glint taking over Sol's economy, making a vassal state of them, and so on. Other's lauded the potential of Humanity conquering the Glint as their own subordinates and making use of them to further humanity. Even a few trashier articles about biology had risen up the trending list. Duilim sighed as he quickly closed the tabs. He remembered why he had never really followed the news. The majority of the time it was depressing if not outright horrible.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

A look around the hanger, empty with the exception of the assorted crates filled with his few belongings and tools. Every noise echoed back at him. It had never felt like this before, back in his old body. When he used to land on the maintenance cradle. His mass had made it comfy. Now the empty crescents of metal and clamps hung loosely, waiting for whoever used this space after him.

While he swung his legs out of boredom, he thought about how this was the most time he’d had to himself since he had been re-embodied. Centuries of solitude exploring space alone, it seemed the universe had decided he needed some good old fashioned social time.

Dulim checked the time, a minute had passed, like tar dripping from a beaker.

Already the years spent alone in space felt like they went by too fast. He relegated himself to fiddling with the settings of the assembler program while he waited. He had meant to tweak a few of the defensive blueprints he had made, now would be the perfect time.

——— Venus, Research Base of Finn McOulè ———

"-and then he promptly lost balance and ended up lodged halfway through the hangar door!"

Saule chittered as the red robo-android finished the story about his human crew member's first days as a surveyor in the guild. The tour of the facility had been enlightening, in more ways than one. Duilim apparently still had yet to consider the rest of the crew as friends or close enough friends, as Finn most definitely was Duilim's friend. The thought had dampened Saule's mood as he had hoped Duilim opening up about his fear of death was a sign of trust.

He had asked Finn if that was the case earlier after he had learned of their close bond, and in a more private space in between labs.

"El—Duilim, has always been introspective. He doesn't come off that way at first, as I'm sure you remember when you first met him. He is very gregarious at first but then he starts to doubt his interactions with you. It took a long time for us to get comfortable with each other. But don't worry, it will happen as I've never known him to truly dislike anyone. Give him time."

Saule mused on that conversation as the tour continued, past clear floors showing swirling sulphuric acid winds tinged with green specks. The humans were beginning the long process of 'terraforming' this world. It had been explained as slowly making the world habitable, in lieu of finding a world with the right conditions, you made it.

Finn and the Vesuvian Guild were spearheading the research on Venus with the funds they gathered from exploring systems the Plutonian Astronomers pointed out. That was actually what had initially lead Duilim to discovering the Plinth System, the Tharg, and the Jewellers.

It got him thinking, just how small was that chance that the Plutonian Guild had selected their system to be next surveyed. Surely with the galaxy at their feet, the humans had multitudes of systems to check. He would have to ask as they stopped by the planetoid on the way out of the system.

As Saule had been thinking, the group had been led into a large lab, but with few chairs and three giant, clear cylinders filled with the natural atmosphere of Venus in it. Finn had moved to one of them and had started tapping out a command on the panel beside it.

Finished, Finn straightened and called out to the group, "Gather around, I have a demonstration of what I've been working on here over the last few months."

Saule grouped up with the rest of the crew. Stuhkey, Naytani and Riyn looked a bit bored. Wensley however was enthralled and was at the front of the group, closest to the display.

With a whisper Saule asked, "Do you know what he's doing?"

"He is going to display a small scale, sped up atmospheric conversion using modified bacteria." Wensley replied without turning his head, “If he’s that confident to do a display like this, it must be quite effective.”

They watched as a miniscule iris in the wall of the container rotated open, and a puff of green dust dispersed outwards, and diffused into the yellow tinged gas of the test chamber.

“I have released the melange of bacteria and micro-organisms,"