Pince-nez

Vester was the first visitor to old earth in nearly five centuries, and the body its brain wore for the journey to, and exploration of, was the culmination of a vast body of research including, but not limited to, 'cybernanophysical diplomancy', ie., the science of physical protocols and fuzzy communication (hence the jocularity of _mancy), for the material substrate of earth had been, over the course of the intervening semi-epoch, nearly completely rewritten into nano-pseudocrystalline programmable networks, and while, at first glance, it often looked like old earth, it was in fact, something quite different. Vester was to behave as if it was fully protected, but it knew it was not, hence, the six fresh copies of its brain aboard the HEM, or habitat extension module, with which it had landed, and the ten or so more, or the ones of which it knew about, remaining in stasis somewhere on the surface of the moon, though deep under its constructed ocean and quasi-impermeable nanomechanical shell.

Vester had landed somewhere about twenty kilometers from the banks of an inland sea in an area that had once been called Nebraska, and had taken off running toward the coast upon landing. It wasn't even fifteen minutes of running until he discovered his first contact with the convoluted presence(s) which inhabited its former mother world which was known on the moon in general parlance as Auth, or 'Arthur'. The dark purple lithop-like extrusion rising nearly a meter tall out of the wavering grassland seemed to be singing in a low voice or humming a tune, which through audio analysis performed through interlink with the HEM's livesatlink turned out to be Aristide Bruant's Ah, les Salauds! (Oh, the bastards!)

The song came, Vester finally surmised, from the side of the lithop which was facing toward the distant shore, and so it walked around the creature to see what it might be using for a mouth, and so, found its face, with soft round eyes hooded by bright yellow, bushy, anemone-like eyerbrows, and an enormous nose upon which perched an unlikely pince-nez baroquely ornamented with tiny nictitating flowers, and a creamily articulated pink mouth which jauntily worked out the words of the ancient song while staring up at Vester with a mischievious gaze.. "So here it is, " thought Vester, "the first sentient signpost for the modern megaconsciousness which had first destroyed, and then remade as a parody, the body of the ancient earth. Here is Arthur!" Protocols and defenses began whirring into place in the brain-mind and bodysuit of Vester who slowly stepped back from the dangerous if humorous godmachine avatar in order to quietly take it all in.