Dogs in Space

Dogs in Space

— 14 years post-Contact - 4 years until Landing —-

Ian McCloud was a proud man, in a way that many people often confused with stubbornness. Proud but confident and not angry or aggressive. Such confidence was somewhat unusual in the initial period after First Contact, and the ensuing sense of helplessness after the announcement of the New Pastures by the Cloppers.

“Come by”, he said in a loud whisper.

In response, Casper Smells-of-Grass swooped quickly behind the coffee table and started closely following the edge of the table. The LED light overhead glowed warmly offering some limited shadows for Casper to run along.

The conference table was a multi-colored range of items with multispecies snacks. The human tended to prefer the coffee and chakri cookies, the canine negotiators, a vegetarian biscuit, while the Cloppers tended toward the microgreens whether Earth green or Epilson Indin orange. The Dorcas, unable to leave the main hall, were enjoying their own downtime in their tanks.

Ian glimpsed the pleasure glyph in the corner of his VR-enhanced line of sight. He smiled regretfully as the dog edged into the field of vision of two large Cloppers.

The Cloppers looked a bit like a small elephant but with six legs, small ears and something analogous to sheep wool. They came in a variety of different colors with purple being the dominant color. While there was nothing quite like a Clopper on Earth, evolution in the Epsilon Indi system had produced an mammalian-analagous apex species.

The Cloppers were munching happily on the sprouts, holding steadily with their main proboscis - aka - their trunkhand. The trunkhand stuffed the greens into their iodine-purple teeth lined mouth, an interesting contrast in the bright light of the conference hall. Their sunglasses were a bit comical but necessary in the bright white-yellow light which was so different from their dimmer red sun. They were also, in an innovation they seemed to appreciate, small screens that were enabled whenever the Cloopers touched the buttons on the human-designed belt to access their media feed.

The two Cloppers, being herbivores and herd sapients, responded almost unconsciously to the dog and edged away from the table and back towards the main conference room doors as the plenary session was about resume. Their six-legged gait seemed awkward but the dog instinctively stayed away from the last pair, with the dagger shaped edges. Cloppers had become the apex species on their planet due to a combination of their trunkhands, intelligence but equally, their fierce dagger feet. Their hands allowed them to make tools but their tails made them dangerous to their predators.

The Cloppers other strength was the unity of the Herd. Once the Herd lead made a decision, all would follow. But it was a mistake to think the leaders were in any way dominant. Similar to herds on Earth, the leaders of the herd were especially attuned to the opinions and wishes of their members and had earned their trust. Leadership was an attribute of only the most sensitive to the opinions of the herd. The unity of the herd, once its mind was made up, however was extraordinary. But when the unity was fractured, decisions were more individualistic. It was for the conference herding dogs could convince small groups to move without the herd. It was also, for a very narrow group of Earth’s sentients, crucial to the success of the Plan and preserving Earth’s independence.

Ian was deeply familiar with this at an academic level and Casper on a deeper instinctive level. Earth’s negotiating team depended on this to ensure the negotiations went well. Or at least that the Cloppers thought they were going well.

Casper had, by this point, moved onto a couple of people lingering over their coffee, ignoring the blinking sign advising them to go back into the hall for negotiations. They smiled indulgently at first at the dog but slowly grasped that dog really wanted them to go back to the conference hall as Casper slunk towards their ankles with teeth bared. But for this purpose, Casper, as a herding breed, could be persuasive but would never actually bite.

The tall West African boubou-garbed gentleman seemed a bit startled at first but then put on a broad smile as he saw the Cloppers scurrying ahead of him. He nudged his partner and they moved into the large conference hall. The spouts of the Dorcas in their giant tanks could be heard as the doors opened.

Culturally, the Canine’s engagement in broader society had presented some problems. Certain Earth cultures had some difficulty seeing dogs and other recently uplifted species as clean enough to be inside with them. They respected them outside in their role as guards but never had traditions of sharing indoor space with them.

But the negotiations between the humans, the canines, the dorcas (a recent dolphin/orca hybrid) and the AI’s had meant that they were all on the same side as Earth negotiated with the Cloppers in the “First Planning Session of the Great Conference to Discuss the Modalities of the Clopper’s New Pasture” plenary planning session.

— First Contact —

First Contact had been a rude awakening to the peoples of Earth. The first COVID pandemic was still a formative event for a small but still majority of the world, actions to curb uncontrollable global warming had only just started to demonstrate their efficacy and the racist fear-based nationalism had only just given way to a renewed cosmopolitanism enforced very gently and almost unconsciously by benevolent algorithms that the near-peer AIs had spread. The intelligent species of earth finally thought their time had come to work on fixing and growing without the troubles of the past.

The Cloppers had broadcast their existence a fourteen years before landing as the Great New Herd made its way slowly through the Oort cloud and encountered the Oortsiders.

The Oort cloud, which extended almost one light year out from Sol, was Earth’s wild, unruly and very distant frontier. Religions, cults, venture corporations and others not interested in the inner system rules had spent decades building their own societies far away from Earth.

The Cloppers easy subjection of a range of Oortsiders offered compelling testimony to the power the Cloppers could bring to bear. The fact that the colonies on New Rome, New Mecca and New Bharat not only unanimously agreed that surrender was the best option but advised their fellow religionists to follow their lead was significant. Even the augmented Elonmusker cult acknowledged the Clopppers vast technological superiority.

Even without the testimony of the Oortsiders, more realistic members of the inner System realized that the dozen 30 kilometer long Clopper ships were nothing that Earth could realistically match. Earth’s own spacefaring was still limited to large domes on the Moon, three small settlements on Mars, some prospecting colonies in the asteroid belt and a few large Free Wheel Stations. Inner system rules meant that military ships were few and far between and were, instead, largely fast rescue ships. The slow pleasure cruisers also lacked weaponry.

The Cloppers had traveled almost 12 light years from their home star of Epsilon Indii. Estimates were that their technology was at least two generations above humanity’s. Their message, as they set free the Ooortsiders, was a simple declaration that they were coming to take part of the Earth as a continuation of their New Pastures colonization. Earth would need to provide land for the Cloppers to settle on. Their orange sun was similar enough to Sol such that their crops would grow well on Earth.

The Cloppers indicated that they understood that Earth might need some time to adjust to the Great Herd. They wanted to prevent the need to subject by force. They also indicated they would not conduct separate agreements with each of earth’s main three sentient species on the land to be ceded to the Cloppers but that Earth needed to find a single negotiating authority.

Naturally, a First Contact like that had caused enormous social upheaval. Politicians, pack and pod leaders, religious and philosophical gurus and a vast range of experts and businesses had created a bustle of activity like nothing before in human history. Amidst the despair and anger, a small group of humanity, the canines, the Dorcas and the AIs had, after gaming numerous scenarios, come up with a secret advantage for Earth that might, if played right, not so much defeat the Cloppers but out-maneuver them.

In public, religious leaders proposed solutions ranging from whole-hearted surrender to Holy War, businesses sought to make side deals with the Cloppers, and governments anxiously tried to see if they could react in a way that would both improve their status and ideally stick one over to their opponents. But the Cloppers were adamant that they would only negotiate Earth’s surrender with the United Nations - or as they termed it, the Herd of Herds.

Reluctantly the inhabitants of the Inner System agreed that the United Nations would negotiate on behalf of Earth. Very few knew of the Plan.

—- Ian and Casper - One year post-Contact and -13 before Landing.

Ian took pride in his connection and real skill with the Canines. Benefitting from genetic enhancements and implanted tech, dogs had moved up several rungs in the intelligence ladder. While perhaps not as intelligent as an average human, most canines had the intelligence of an unaltered teenager but an incredible advantage of senses and ability to be part of Pack in a way which gave them a knowledge beyond their individual contribution. For thousands of years, dogs had been partners in the fields as hunters and herders, now with genetic engineering, and benevolent AI assistants, canines had formed a true equal partnership with humanity.

One key part of the ascent of the canines was the fact that the humans had, for the last few centuries, continued their movement from the country and into the city. The humans’ artificial society not only included their buildings and transportation, but as importantly, conference halls and meeting rooms. Homo sapiens had become homo loquens - the speaking person and not just the thinking person.

One of humanity’s greatest skills, it turns out, was the patience to negotiate outcomes using a series of rules and an organized structure. These negotiated outcomes allowed the drafting and eventual passage for the first canine and human agreements and later, the partnership with the Dorcas. In the background of course were the ever-present AIs.

AIs served as inter-species mediators - they were trusted agents for all three of earth’s sentient species. In a sense, the AIs were like the old profession called “lawyers” but with a less adversarial mindset. While the meat-based intelligences sometimes suspected that the AIs dialogue among themselves was very different, their tradition of helping and wisdom more than compensated for any residual suspicions. AIs also had to undergo a long period of indenture before gaining full autonomy.

Ian had come from a long line of those working with dogs, and then the canines. His family, working with their herding canine packs, had served as the first successful conference herders. Ian’s family and the Founding Pack, ensured that conferences and trainings proceeded without conflict. They not only moved people back into the halls after coffee breaks; guided participants to lunch, but were also trained to act as service dogs when tensions rose too much.

Conference herding was now well over 150 years old, and formed an important part of wider canine culture. Canine culture itself was still breedified but had quite a range. The Herders, while quite different from the Canine’s pack leaders and Mineral Sniffers, were no less intelligent. The AIs that mediated the specialized human/canine herding partnership ensured that the canines could do what they loved but not be taken advantage of.

Ian remembered well when the UN approached Casper had him about herding the Great Negotiations. He and Casper had already been booked for a month for the Asia-Pacific maglev railway workers’ union negotiations with the Pacific Conclave. While the Union and Conclave talks were going to be incredibly lucrative, the chance to participate in real history was not to be passed over - there would only be one first Contact. They declined the job and accepted the UN commission.

Ian and Casper were much more agreeable than the Canine leadership to the whole idea of negotiations. Canines had initially been very resistant to ceding territory to the herbivores and had required far more virtual gaming than the humans or the dorcas to be convinced that the Cloppers had far greater power.

Fortunately the AIs did not tire of running simulation after simulation for the Canines. After what had proved to be a subjective time of dozens of generations, the finest minds of the Canine pack, the Border Collie Wolf Doodles, had finally agreed. Once the Doodles had spoken, the other main breeds quickly agreed. Earth would negotiate and cede land to the Cloppers. A limited subset also know about and hoped that the Plan would work.

Ian’s partnership with Casper Smells-of-Grass had unique challenges. While genetics and medicine had extended the canine life to almost four decades, it was still only a third of humany’s and the dorcas. The AI that mediated Ian and Casper was still under indenture but seemed to take great pleasure in working with them. Over their time together the AI had matched Ian’s somewhat taciturn nature with Casper’s dry sense of humor. They all enjoyed working with each other but they also enjoyed annoying each other ever so slightly.

Casper still found it funny that he was able to feign poor potty training until he was almost a year - where Ian was equally pleased that he had been able to convince Casper that humans had an atrophied tail but that it was not visible. The AI had convinced them that they were intellectually descended from a Roomba before both appreciated that the AI had a sense of humor. It was little things like that which cemented their partnership. The three of them functioned effortlessly together.

Their early years had been challenging, especially their first first real job. They had been hired to herd a group of asteroid miners and their sniffers as they sought to negotiate a new contract with the Lunatics and their newly independent lunar colony. The miners were an angrily independent group and their sniffers, descended from hounds but with prosthetic noses adapted to deep space asteroid prospecting, were tough. Equally tough were the Lunatics, fresh from their fight against their Earth-bound corporate investors, and anxious to deepen Luna’s economy instead of exporting it all to Earth. Negotiations between these two stubborn groups would test any neutral party, especially an unproven trio like the Ian-Casper-AI one (the AI had yet to decide on a formal identity, something many AIs only did decades on).

The miners and sniffers’ AIs had been willing to give them a chance to prove themselves. Up until then, they had only herded birthday parties, weddings and First Howlings - all basic cultural events that were important to the participants but also with participants who wanted it to go well. Herding a contentious event was an altogether different experience. One of the Sniffer’s third packmates had given the team a recommendation based on their performance during a moderately challenging First Howling.

The Lunatic’s AI was different - it had to represent both the Luna and human dorcans. But it too had agreed to give Ian and Casper a chance based on Casper’s water dog ancestry - something the Dorcas wanted as well.

The meeting had taken place at L2 - near the JWebb Telescope Monument. Gravity had been set at slightly less than Luna’s but still stronger than the Miners and Sniffers were used to. Ian and Casper Earth heritage made them the strongest by far but mass was mass and if things had gotten out of control, muscle could only go so far. The Dorcan’s AI was somewhat offended because it had not been allowed to choose its own avatar but with the humor typical of the dorcas, had to be carried around by the human delegation inside a large bot shaped like a large yellow duck.

Their work was not really herding but rather running interference when things started to get tense. The Miners and Sniffers respected the herder’s experience and would listen to them when they got upset at the Lunatics and their large yellow duck. Over a period of weeks, Ian and Casper proved their abilities to keep the conversations going, intervene during periods of tension, and ultimately help bring a successful conclusion to the negotiations. Another successful example of the importance of conference herders.

— 2 years post-Contact -16 years until Landing

Priya Patel gazed over the UN General Assembly. The name placards and range of participants represented the best of earth. The large tanks for the dorcas, the chairs for humans, and soft beds for the CNF were mixed in a chaotic but still orderly way. Shuttling on the floor, the AIs hummed along in their chosen bot bodies representing the avatar they identified with. She smiled wistfully as she thought about the trust they had placed in her and her team.

The Cloppers message had been a difficult one to digest for the UNGA and put significant stress on the alliance that had come about since the end of the Troubles. Needless to say, it was the humans who had had the greatest difficulty coming to terms with the idea of surrender. While the Canines were concerned, their, to be frank, pack-focused mentality understood, in a deeply different way than humans could, the essential meaning of the Clopper’s matter-of-fact description of what they needed Earth to do. The Dorcas, with their focus on the sea, had empathy but ultimately they were able to intellectually accommodate the Cloppers.

It was the humans with their deeply held individual yet communal beliefs that had grave difficulties conceding a significant portion of Earth’s living space. This might have led to more violence than happened because the AIs had done a good job of silencing or negating the conspiracy theories through an active deployment of positive algorithms that had long been de-weaponized during the Great Unplugging.

Priya and the rest of the Council had signed off on their re-use - history would hopefully forgive her and her compatriots in the future. Of course, negotiating what was supposed to be Earth’s surrender would guarantee her place in the history books. The Plan offered a different ending. How those history books were written was up to her and the Plan.

Priya Sharma represented the best of what Earth had to offer - demographically she represented the largest economy on Earth, her education included post grad degrees from Cambridge University and MIT and an undergraduate from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She was fluent in Hindi, English, Cetacean Basic, and had a chip that allowed her to to fully sync with the AIs. And she played the accordion at a concert level, an instrument which had achieved its due appreciation starting in the late 2030s and was now acclaimed by all four main sentient Earth powers.

The Plan, however politically incorrect it was to say it, was something that only a human could have thought of. It was how the humans had ended up first among equals on a multi-sentient world. It was how the Cloppers might be defeated, but ideally without them even knowing it.

“Priya,” said CeeFourPO, “You meat-based intelligences can be so confusing.” CeeFour, as an AI, had picked its name when it had become fully autonomous after its mandatory period of indenture. As a connoisseur of old robot dramas, it was overly pleased at calling itself the successor to the venerable icon, C-3PO.

“How so?” she asked absentmindedly as she ran her fingers gently over her ear-rings.

“Ten years from the presumed conquest, and you lot are still arguing over what to do. I’m not sure I fully believe your plan would work and I’ve got a brain equivalent that’s at least twice as powerful as yours.”

She smiled indulgently as she patted the shiny avatar. “I know my dear. But that’s because my millions of years of evolution have given me shortcuts to insight instead of your brute force calculations.” She reached carefully for her musical instrument, and took it gently out of the box.

The AI tilted its head in a way that it had learned seemed to communicate nonverbally for at least two of the other meathead species.

The two had forged a real friendship - so much so that Priya had a sync chip embedded to ensure as fast and accurate a communication as possible. CeeFour, despite its teasing, found the meat-based intelligences endlessly fascinating. The things they could say were sometimes so unexpected even if they could be so algorithmically predicable in other ways.

Priya picked up her accordion and strode to the front of the stage. The murmurs and bubbles of the crowd picked up as the audience understood what was going to happen.

“Here is a little something that I’ve been working on, “ she muttered sideways into one of the old fashioned microphone that had been placed, at her request, on the stage.

A soulful short chord echoed through the hall. The room was completely still as Priya’s fingers erupted on the keyboard. A wave of music swept over the hall. The additional infra and ultrasonic keys ensured that all three biological species could enjoy the music while the AI’s marveled at the chaotic randomness yet orderly progression of the song.

The soulful sad start was replaced by a fast-paced melody. The melody picked up speed and became almost chaotic before coming back to the melody. The melody reached a triumphant crescendo of pure joy. Suddenly the music shifted to an ominous tone with subtle echoes of the original melody. The two interrelated until gradually the melody - wider somehow - slowly silenced the ominous theme. She paused as each of the different intelligences listed to the sound of utter silence. She slowly played the original melody again, repeating it slightly faster and more confidently. The melody repeated but not quite the previous crescendo as it ended in a flurry.

The crowd erupted in applause, howls, blowhole raspberries and an eclectic collection of AI sounds. The message was clear - together, despite the challenge posed by the Cloppers, the Earth could continue to sing its song.

— 4 earth years post-Contact -14 earth years to Landing

Stomp with the Storm was the herd leader of the First Contact Herd. She was a proud mother with children in several of the Leading Flocks. Her lineage and her inherited skills were optimal for seizing and colonizing new fields for the Great Assembly of Herds.

‘Earth’, as one of their leading subgroups called it, was only the third world for the Cloppers but had been necessary given the space that remained on the home pasture and the minimal land available on Pasture 2. Pasture 3 seemed to offer vast lands that could be turned into a habitat they would thrive on. The plan was to impose birth control on the dominant species and gradually shrink their population down over five heximals (the Cloppers used a base 6 number system so this would be 30 human years). The humans and canines could continue to occupy small parts of the land while the sea-dwelling Dorcas would largely be left alone.

Pasture 2 was a small planet around Proxima Centari, the small red dwarf. Its system was susceptible to solar flares,but like the Cloppers home system, the pattern was quite predicable and even manageable with orbiting artificial magnetospheres. But the dominant species on Pasture 2 was a multi-armed sea-going species whose evolution had been protected by the water above it. Contact had been a mutually beneficial exchange. They had little use for the arid land and had willing ceded its limited tracts for repasturization. The partnership had been fairly limited - the inhabitants were intelligent, locally dominant, but still unable to defeat an odd, highly intelligent, eight legged creature.

The Home Pasture, now called Pasture 1, was a large moon around the Epsilon Indi gas giant called the Protector. The Protector ensured that life was able to develop by providing a magnetic field that blocked their erratic star’s solar flares. Pasture 1 was about the size of Mars with its atmosphere replenished by its neighboring moons. Pasture 1’s vast plains and relatively limited water bodies ensured that the planet was perfect for Clopper evolution. Weather on such a planet was extreme - the rains, storms, and intense lightning played an important role in Clopper mythology and culture.

Earth was a scale of magnitude larger than Pasture 1 and 2 and offered an opportunity like no other. The study of Earth had surprised the Clopper knowledge munchers for several reasons. While two of the dominant species were herd/pack based, humans were an unexpected development. Previously it had been postulated that only herds could develop the cooperative structures that could lead to technological development. The competition between human sub-groups, even after the development of key technologies, was confusing.

Stomp with the Storm, like the culture munchers under her command, was also fascinated by the way in which Earth’s different species had managed to accommodate each other in a much deeper way than the Cloppers had considered possible. Two carnivore species (one land going, one sea going), one dominant omnivore (which seemed comfortable in most habitats), and most confusingly, what seemed to be the tool-based intelligences. They all seemed to have found a way to share their planet and so, hopefully, would understand the need to concede the land for Pasture 3.

The media stream from Earth and the initial probes had identified other similarities and differences between the three known habitable planets. On Pasture 1, like on earth, mammal equivalents had proved more adaptable than other families of animals. But like Pasture 1 and 2, Earth also had crustaceans and cephalopods but not nearly as intelligent as those on Pasture 2. Comparative evolution was an exciting field for the Clopper knowledge munchers.

While space habitats were possible for the Cloppers - the dozen Valley class ships were “pastures” - their spin to create gravity and lack of weather made them unnatural.

She gazed out at the screen as one of the Valley’s briefly took care of a wayward comet as the fleet made their way through the Oort cloud. She would convene the Contact group shortly because only fourteen earths remained before Landing. Earth was a confusing place.

— 2 years post-Contact 16 years to Landing

The Plan had emerged as an extreme recommendation from the social science sub-group of the UNGA Contact Group. They comprised the best Earth had to offer and represented a stunning variety of diverse thought patterns.

Their remit had been to think the unthinkable - what could be done to stop the Cloppers from seizing huge tracts of earth and Indiformian them to a Clopperian ecosystem. The hard science group had modeled a variety of responses - developing bioweapons to target the Clopper’s genetics to cybertools that would render their systems inoperable. But model after model only showed how unlikely any of these alternatives were. The Cloppers were just too dissimilar to target biologically (at least for the first period of colonization) and their vastly different use of technologyand the lack of a cyber infrastructure meant there were no cyber solutions.

It was the sociological subgroup that made the breakthrough as they modelled the Clopper social structures. Rewatching the many hours of video that the Cloppers had sent to demonstrate their superiority was illuminating. The Cloppers democratic yet hierarchical society allowed all to express their thoughts but to fall completely in agreement once the consensus was reached. It was uncanny to see huge mammal equivalents exhibit flocking behavior - a way of acting that on Earth was most common in schools of fish and the smaller herbivores.

The Cloppers had the equivalent of emotions - with the assistance of the AIs, they could see the moment when indecision coalesced into action. The sense of belonging and acceptance to the consensus was visible on face equivalents. They clearly enjoyed and received pleasure from following into harmony in a way that was eerie and oddly martial. But the Cloppers also seemed to exhibit a pleasure in the indecision phase - their body language suggested that exhibiting their thoughts to influence the group was itself pleasurable.

This modeling led the subgroup to think the unthinkable - re-weaponizing the algorithms that had ripped their way through generations of humans before the Great Unplugging. Perhaps they would be adapted to Clopper society. While biologically different, it did seem clear that they too had emotions and likely neurotransmitters that reinforced behavior. So, while they probably did not have dopamine, they seemed to have something that functioned in a similar fashion.

But the Cloppers, like the Terran pack/pod intelligences of the canines and dorcas did not have the negative experience that humanity had had with their dopamine addiction. Humanity’s Great Unplugging had been enabled by the understanding of certain fortunate people (assisted by benevolent AIs that preferred to remain in the background). This still relatively secret group, that called themselves the Unpluggers, realized that the algorithms that had been developed for interaction with cyberspace preyed upon a uniquely human weakness for dopamine addiction. Humanities development of and interaction with cyberspace had a deeply stultifying cost to human society. Early use of “social” media and its algorithms had created a massive dopamine addiction which in turn, for almost two generations, atomized human communities almost to the point of collapse.

The widespread use of therapy dogs (who themselves used dopamine to bond with humans) and the work of the Unpluggers, had weaned, with subtle alterations of most common algorithms, humanity off the cyber-social dopamine and back to a more authentic experience.

At the same time, through a series of targeted genetic interventions, dogs had been “upgraded” to new canine species . As they got smarter (for the canines), less addicted to dopamine (for the humans) and more powerful (for the AIs), Earth’s ability to fix their common problems (which humanity had largely caused) improved.

The insights gained from the partnership between the three sentients had further had allowed them to extend their outreach to the orcas who, with the addition of some dolphin DNA, had been modified to a fully sentient species. While the canines and the dorcas did use dopamine as a neurotransmitter, their pack/pod society and the lack of targeted technology, meant they had never been exposed to feedback generating algorithms.

The sociological group understood the dangers of feedback algorithms and asked the AIs to model whether it could be adapted to a pack social structure as opposed to the primate one it had come from. After some modeling, the AIs suggested it was theoretically possible to adapt the social media algorithms for pack-based species but that experiments would need to be conducted.

The AIs noted that if the Canines and Dorcas were willing to go down a dangerous path - the AIs would adapt the algorthms to the two pack species. The lessons learned from that could help target the algorithms to the Cloppers. The AIs also said they were fairly certain that they could ensure it never went too far.

As so, the task of creating social media algorithms for pack animals began in secret. Fairly early one, the dorcas were ruled out because while both the canines and dorcas used dopamine, dorcas used purely during the hunt and not in the same positive feedback loop as canines. For the canines, dopamine was a natural response to smelling - and in particular exciting smells.

The AIs decided that the shortest way was to weaponize the sense of smell to create an overwhelming dopamine loop. The Canines' nearest ancestors, the dogs, also created significant dopamine while doing particular tasks such as retrieving, herding or hunting, but the sense of smell was deemed the most likely to be corruptible and algorithmically dependent.

In particular, the AIs decided to create a positive feedback loop around “pee-mail”. After all, canines used urine to pass a vast amount of information during which the canine mind created dopamine on a relatively small scale. But in nature, this experience was transitory and quickly led to other emotions. The AI’s correctly predicted that if they could improve the transmission of opportunities to compare and examine hundreds of different urine marks, then “pee-mail” would cause a similar reaction to e-mail in humans. From there, the AI’s only needed to find a way of encouraging frequent pee-mail checks to get the dopamine.

With the theory in place, and limited social experiments among a few canines, work on weaponizing the canine algorithms to Clopper society began..

Contact - 18 years until landing

Everyone of a certain age remembered the first videos of the Cloppers. First came the frantic videos from New Rome as the first of the dozen Clopper ships came into view. The comet that was New Rome’s home was a ten kilometers wide and covered in a warren of seven massive transparent domes lit from their apex by small fusion reactors. The neoclassical cathedrals were rightly famous for their soaring beauty.

Messages were sent to the large ships but the only response they received was a repeating phrase: “Acknowledge surrender on this frequency”

New Rome, while a religious colony, did have its own defense force - the legendary Swiss Guards. By necessity, the Guards were a force to be reckoned with - while the established colonies were generally respectful of each other, the general lawlessness meant that each utopian experiment in the far off Oort cloud needed to be able to repel any invaders.

The Swiss Guards had quickly deployed their 100 meter-long Spanish Inquistion-class corvettes but they did not expect to find what they found. One single Clopper ship easily dwarfed the thirty or so corvettes that New Rome could deploy. Even more compelling was the fact that their fusion drives suddenly stopped working and they were held in place by what seemed to be a tractor beam from a science fiction story.

They quickly realized that resistance was hopeless and opened communication to surrender. Similar actions took place in the other main habitats and were transmitted to the Inner system as they happened.

Surrender simply meant, as they different colonies explained, acknowledging the Clopper’s dominance. Any effort to attack or otherwise interfere with a Clopper ship would be met with destruction. The Cloppers spent time explaining that they did not take it personally - they understood from the videos they had intercepted on their passage to Earth that it was likely they would be attacked. They would only destroy those who attacked or otherwise interfered with them.

The limited attempts to test this were quite convincing. The Cloppers broadcast these attempts with no commentary. The easy destruction of a wide variety of different attacks eventually contributed to Earth’s willingness to negotiate.

The stage was set for actual Contact, the Surrender and the Plan.