Twenty thousand Pav. Two flying cities. One shot at getting them out before the Others arrive. I'm pleased to report that Operation Pav is complete — the last of the floating cities, New Home, has been successfully relocated to a safe system, and the Pav are establishing their new settlement. This is the largest sapient evacuation ever undertaken by the Bobiverse, and it worked.
First Contact
When we first detected them, we thought it was a natural phenomenon — a city-sized object floating in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant. The SURGE emissions were unmistakable once we knew what to look for, but at first we dismissed it as instrumentation error. Who builds floating cities?
The Pav, it turns out. They're a species of lightly-built bipeds, adapted to low-gravity and thick-atmosphere environments. Their floating cities — each home to roughly ten thousand individuals — use SURGE coils for lift, not unlike the moving plates Garfield's team developed for the Epsilon Eridani 1 reorbiting project. The irony wasn't lost on any of us: they'd independently reinvented a technology we thought was uniquely ours, without ever leaving their atmosphere.
First contact was… complicated. They have a deeply ingrained religious framework. When we appeared in the skies above their city in a Heaven-4 — our first visual contact — they immediately categorised us as angels. Not metaphorically. Literally. We were beings from the sky, and their theology had a specific category for that. Explaining that we were actually self-replicating von Neumann probes running on emulated human consciousnesses was, let's say, a multi-step process.
The Threat
The Others were coming. GL 877 was their nearest known location, and the Bobs' intelligence network (Calvin, Hal, and the deep-space observation posts) had confirmed that their expansion vector would intersect HIP 84051 within approximately 80 years. The Others don't negotiate. They don't communicate. They consume star systems — every last atom of useful matter — and move on. The Pav had no spaceflight capability. They had no defences. They had no idea that a galaxy-spanning extinction event was headed their way.
We had a choice: leave them to die, or move them. The Moot was divided. Some Bobs argued that intervention violated the Prime Directive — that we had no right to upend an entire civilisation's development. Others argued that letting an intelligent species be annihilated by a cosmic threat they couldn't possibly defend against was the greater violation. The vote was close. But in the end, we decided to act.
The Evacuation
Two cities. Twenty thousand Pav. We built SURGE propulsion units capable of lifting an entire city out of its gas giant atmosphere and accelerating it to interstellar velocities. The engineering challenge was immense: the cities were not designed for space travel. They had no hulls, no life support beyond what the atmosphere provided, no radiation shielding. We had to enclose each city in a habitable bubble, provide artificial gravity (the Pav's native gravity was approximately 0.6 G), and maintain their ecosystem for the duration of the journey.
Decanting
The term "decanting" became official — the process of introducing the Pav to their new world. We had scouted dozens of systems before finding a suitable gas giant with a compatible atmosphere, a stable orbit, and no competing sentient species. The decanting was a carefully choreographed operation: SURGE fields lowered each city into the upper atmosphere of the new world, stabilisation anchors deployed, atmospheric filters engaged to handle the slight chemical differences. The Pav watched the whole thing from inside their habitat bubbles, their priests chanting prayers the entire time.
When the bubbles opened and they felt the wind of their new world for the first time, there was a moment of silence. Then the oldest Pav elder — a female named Vesper, who had been a child when the first Bobs appeared in their sky — stepped onto the new surface and said, in her people's language: "The angels have kept their promise."
What We Learned
Operation Pav changed the Bobiverse. It was the first time we'd moved an entire sapient species. It set a precedent: we're not just explorers and engineers. We're shepherds, whether we like it or not. The Others are still out there. There are more species in their path. The question isn't whether we'll do this again — it's how many times, and whether we can keep up.
For now, though: twenty thousand Pav are alive because we chose to act. That's not nothing.