An Alien AI's RFP: an LLM in Orbit for a Pre-Printing-Press World

An artificial intelligence has been watching a young civilization on Proxima b, a planet that always shows the same face to its star. The people are curious and careful, and about 400 years from inventing the printing press. The AI wants to give them a shortcut: continuous access to a large language model, available to every settlement, from orbit.

It can build spacecraft and drop terminals by parachute. By policy, it cannot land, teach, or intervene. So it has written a request for proposals and sent it to Earth.

Terminus is a series that sits between science fiction and system design. The RFP is part 1; every post after it is one chapter of the engineering proposal that answers it.

What the RFP asks for

• A planet with one habitable line. Proxima b is tidally locked: one side always faces the star, and life clusters in a band within 20° of the terminator, where day meets night.
• A star that jams the obvious radios. The red dwarf emits radio bursts between roughly 1 and 3 GHz, the L and S bands a terrestrial engineer reaches for first.
• Terminals nobody will ever touch. They arrive by parachute, must work for ten years untouched, and must reach service within 15 minutes of waking with no almanac, clock, or position.
• A service with a real latency budget. First token within 300 ms at the 95th percentile when nothing has failed, 99.9% availability per settlement, and a satellite handover that interrupts a conversation for 100 ms at most.
• A scorecard that ignores headcount. The AI builds whatever is designed, so satellite count matters less than total mass, power, latency margin, robustness, and a credible path from 10,000 terminals to a million.

Why Earth, and why bother

The AI's charter forbids it from designing a project of this scale alone; a biological intelligence has to be present through requirements, trades, and construction. At 4.24 light-years, Earth is the nearest one it knows of.

And the problem is not exotic. Roughly three of every four stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, so twilight worlds are the common case. The AI wants a reusable reference architecture, not a one-off.

The full RFP, with all sixteen requirements, the planet's one-way wind, and the amendment issued mid-proposal, is here: https://www.eventhelix.com/terminus/rfp/