Aleph was a bit perplexed to watch the alien assemblage of boxes, limbs and various other things do gardening.

They explained each step of the way, they made documentation in neatly printed out booklets and laminated sheets. They required and reassembled the pipeworks, occasionally went out and brought in tanks of ‘something’ that Aleph was certain she had seen hooked up to some of the Clerk’s various life support systems.

Those were disassembled, strained, run through various filtering systems and pipes, baked and when it was done much of the resulting dusts were mixed into various blends that eventually ended up introduced into the hydroponics system.

“So you can farm too?”

Elsie turned to fix Aleph with a look. It was honestly a bit of a relief, Quarti could manage if instructed but their work had to be checked over again afterwards.

Omega was spending a lot of time cocooned in a ‘bath’ of something vicious and clingy that smelled like bread dough and was faintly warm to the touch.

Quarti had promised it would help the shaman recover and heal better and stronger in her various spirit injuries and symbiote exhaustion. Aleph had not been sure but Omega could only shrug and go along with it as she had been unable to hold even one skill share for longer than an hour even months after they skimmed the star.

Elsie finally answered.

“I would not say I am an expert on the nuances of cultivating your particular lineage of food crops. But the life support system you have setup for them is more or less the same principles as what I am doing for the adult Refugees. The only difference is the specific balance of metals and how I am supposed to manage the symbiotic biofilms instead of sterilizing them”

Aleph nodded, to be honest she had tried the prototype that Elsie built for a new hydroponic rack for a few months and after seeing how the seeds took to it and the greater number of accessible tuning options in the interface she had agreed it would save on total labor by maybe a third?

Again she was not sure how she felt about alien tech being something being simpler and less ‘technological’. It seemed like cheating honestly.

There was nothing in the new rig that she could not build herself. In fact that was the whole point. The agricultural system Elsie put together was in many ways easier to put together and maintain then the terran one.

She had even built one of the modules herself.

The hardest part had been constructing the ‘precision prototypes’ that apparently the Alien used.

Elsie was very insistent on explaining how, showing and providing documentation on those. It was a bit frustrating, Terra had its own set of units and measures but Elsie had pointed out that their machines were actually all drifting out of measure with those tools.

Even the tools built to recalibrate the tools were going to wear out and drift eventually.

And Aleph had dealt with enough piping and screws to realize what even a slight drift in the precision of her tools and components could mean.

She had never appreciated standardization on Terra until she was looking at the slow slipping away of being able to depend on it.

Still the units were entirely different and that was a bit frustrating.

Elsie had offered to make a converter device but Aleph had waved them off, the prototypes already had the basics of how to create arbitrary secondary measurement units out of them.

The things were amazing really.

They always broke along a set series of division lines. Depending on which prototype you were making there would be a different sized uniform macrostructure.

There were dozens of ways to identify which crystalline matrix was in each prototype and they were incredibly, stupidly consistent under what structures they broke apart in.

And how you produced them?

It was a series of steps you could take with incredibly simple tools. The majority of which was testing or building measurement devices, confirming certain purities of metal and how to iteratively improve the quality of manufacture until you got a very particular crystalline lattice that broke along extremely consistent fracture lines.

There was even a little rhyme kind of sing-song variation of a few of the production methods that Aleph found really catchy!

Elsie’s little guide on it had hundreds of little tricks of how to get to that original crystal lattice material. And once you had that you just needed to vary your ingredient process along very easy to remember lines in order to make a different prototype scale.

Aleph already was considering redoing all their screws and pipe diameters along the basis of the prototype’s natural dimensions. But that would be a rather involved process.

“So, where did you learn how to make these? Or any of the other things you taught us? Was it from your parents, or family or uh manufactory? I don’t actually recall you ever explaining how you work... that way.”

Elsie continued to assemble pipeworks, confirm flow rates and then add various meshes to seedlings.

"Libraries that I bought, mostly. Although the prototype recipes are... it is not strictly speaking common knowledge but at the same time it is very abundantly available and aggressively distributed knowledge.”

Aleph nodded and gently slid the little cubes around watching how they would stick together along their surfaces.

“I would not recommend that you bring it up with Ship Mistress Pylo, have those out in the open or think too heavily upon them while she is nearby though."

She blinked, that was a new one. Elsie had never actually said anything should be kept from Pylo before.

“What? Why not? These seem really useful and pretty easy to make.”

Elsie turned their screen back at Aleph for a while, letting her watch the various shifting balances of evaluation on the topic and the feelings there of. They were wrapping up the installation simultaneously.

Aleph did not mind, the collection of machinery and containers of brains and who knows what else was incredibly capable of multi-tasking when pressed too. For the most part they avoided doing it while teaching as some kind of politeness.

“Ship Mistress Pylo has certain... biases against those that use the methodology that these prototypes are the foundation of. Correlated memetics and ideologies tend to tie closely to them and across the reef I suspect she has met such practitioners of the craft that were less than kind to her.”

Aleph boggled and looked down at the collection of precise cubes floating between her hands, then looked back at Elsie with a raised brow.

“Are you saying that making a bunch of metal cubes that are really good for keeping consistent measurement are like... uh... some kind of weirdo alien cult?”

Elsie fluttered with several different exchanges on their screen and then for some reason the price of continuing the conversation with Aleph started skyrocketing abruptly.

“Not exactly, but there is a certain cultural mindset that tends to use them. This installation should suffice to increase yield efficiency. Have a good shift Aleph”

Before she could even say another word the whole thing was sailing over to the airlock and folding into it.

Huh.

Weird.

Aleph stacked the cubes together. Noted how there were nice even collections of each specific scale that could fit into another one.

She considered them, it was really so incredibly easy now that she knew how to approach it.

She could make the prototypes in scales that fit together in any base system she wanted.

In fact, she suspected she could probably make one that actually outputted terran units in the crystal lattices if she wanted.

Hum, that would require some experimentation to see but the process seemed very tunable and intuitive.