Over the next two weeks, I poured through thousands of pages of alien learning, pausing for only brief walks in the chilly Antarctic sun to keep my helicopter clear of snow. I needed little fuel or equipment, as the facility operated under its own power and generated enough warmth to be moderately comfortable. I was not an expert in every field — no living human is — but I hadn’t fed the facility enough technical vocabulary for it to use much jargon anyway (outside of semiotics, a topic I quickly came to regret teaching it and eventually instructed the main console to avoid). The “library”, as I came to call it, was divided into four rooms:

The first detailed the history of the alien race and their facility, which I skimmed but paid little immediate attention to. The aliens resembled something akin to a turtle with tentacles instead of the limbs of an Earth vertebrate. They were large by Earth standards: their central mantle or shell was ten or so feet across, and their tentacles extended some four or five feet beyond that. Each tentacle narrowed to a thin point at its end, which could dexterously bend much like a human finger. There was no mention of distinguished sexes, but children had two parents: my best guess was a sort of hermaphroditism.

They were dull-colored to human eyes, a near-uniform grey-brown, as the atmosphere of their home world had been transparent to wavelengths not visible to humans. But in their own colors, their bodies were brightly patterned, and these patterns could shimmer and shift across their surface — their species’ first form of language. Their senses were reasonably familiar to a human: binocular vision in all directions from six eyes, spaced evenly in a hexagon around their central shell; a chemical sense that the machine translated as smell; a very delicate sense of touch driven by electrical potentials running through their skin. They could not, however, hear, which explained the facility’s tendency to communicate through text.

Their pattern based “word” for themselves had no way to translate neatly into English, and so the console actually asked me for a name for the purposes of presenting its data. I decided to call them Chukwans, after their turtle-like appearance and the Hindu turtle that holds up the world.

The second room contained art and literature. Apparently, they were a peaceful species: nearly all Chukwan imagery focused on a struggle for meaning and purpose in a distant past that I took to be mythological, but no recent works seemed to contain much struggle at all except against external forces. I asked the console for more on this, but such philosophical questions seemed to be beyond its ability to respond. In any event, they seemed to be incredibly cooperative, even eusocial, although they didn’t display any of the hive structure typical of eusocial creatures on Earth. Despite this, one individual credited with bringing peace appeared frequently in the records, having led some sort of an exodus — I came to call “him” Moses after this role.

The third room held all their cosmological knowledge, displayed on a wonderful hologram that filled the room in a way a planetarium could only dream of. Their home planet was not terribly far from Earth, but their initial expansion as a species had gone in the other direction from their homeworld: in towards the center of the galaxy, not out towards its rims. But this information was old: the Chukwans who had sent the probe to Earth were a splinter group, one long out of contact with their original home. That explained ‘Moses’: he was the leader of this group, and they revered him for his teachings (although nothing here mentioned what those teachings actually were).

The fourth and last room held their more practical scientific knowledge: chemistry, biology, mathematics, and physics, although the Chukwans seemed to make little distinction between the four fields and frequently blurred them together. This was of the most interest to me: no doubt that their art and literature would inspire scholarship for decades to come, but it was this knowledge I had come to find. Distributed widely, it could empower the people of Earth to build a new technological paradise; distributed poorly, it could enable an unstoppable empire the likes of which history had never seen.

My education, vast though it was, was not enough to understand everything in front of me. But there was no way to ask for help without tipping my hand — I would have to study it carefully and make my best guess as to how to distribute it to mankind. A risk, but a necessary one.

I started with power generation. I didn’t know exactly how much energy the human race generated, but my memory provided me with a vague enough guess — a few kilowatts or so per person times eight billion people would yield something like thirty or forty terawatts. I asked the console to give a rough estimate of the possible power sustainably generated by the technology it could explain and Earth’s resources. Its answer: ninety-four petawatts, three thousand times my estimate for human civilization. I did my best to understand the technology it offered — some sort of catalyzed fusion, from what I could gather — more directly, but it went well beyond my educated-layperson’s knowledge of physics.

Next came medicine. Some of the literature I’d managed to feed the central console contained descriptions of diseases. The dome’s computer could not tell me if it held the knowledge to cure those diseases, since it did not know enough about Earth’s biochemistry, but it did assure me that similar conditions had afflicted the Chukwans in their past and been eradicated. Disease was unheard of among the Chukwans, even genetic disease, as they apparently had rather advanced gene-editing. Part of the reason for their species’ expansion was a need for new territory in a species with a near-zero death rate.

Mathematics, unfortunately, proved to be well beyond me. I had never been much of an abstract mathematician even when working with structures developed for humans; the Chukwans’ formalism was impossible even after a few days of trying to learn it.

Despite the desperate importance of my visit, I found myself engrossed in everything that the library could teach me. I had work to do, but I also had a scientist’s heart, a heart that found no greater satisfaction than to peer into unrevealed secrets. Between the timeless Antarctic sun outside and the lack of any external time pressure, I found myself keeping days of twenty-six or twenty-seven hours, in which I lost myself in learning until hunger or thirst pushed themselves into my awareness.