THE PARKED WORLDSHIP

1. THE CLIENT

The Client is the Parked Worldship: an itinerant civilisation of approximately nine billion, housed in a vessel that is also a fleet that is also a homeworld, currently station-keeping in the gravitational shadow directly behind the Sun. The Client is, by every account, kind — it ends every message with "travel safely" — but it is troubled. After several million years of growth by word of mouth, its discoverability has plateaued. It would like, before it moves on to the next system, to be properly found.

2. AUDIT FINDINGS

• Crawlability: The Client cannot be indexed because it is behind the Sun, which the Client correctly identifies as "the largest robots.txt in the solar system." We have advised that the Sun is not, technically, blocking crawlers. The Client has invited us to try crawling it. We have declined.
• Core Web Vitals: The Client's Largest Contentful Paint is "the moment a visiting species comprehends the full scale of the fleet," which we have measured at several weeks. This is outside Google's recommended threshold of 2.5 seconds. The Client was gracious about this.
• Bounce rate: "Civilisations arrive, perceive our full nature, and leave." We have recommended a gentler above-the-fold experience and a clearer value proposition that does not, in the first viewport, reveal the full nature.
• Backlinks: The Client has nine billion inbound references, all from within itself. We have flagged this as "not technically a link scheme but adjacent to one," and recommended a disavow we are all afraid to file.

3. CONSIDERATION

The Client offered, in lieu of currency, "a moon — any moon, your choice, we have several and they travel well." Finance attempted to enter a moon into the accounting system. The system rejected it as an invalid value. On the second attempt it accepted the moon and silently increased the company's total assets by a figure displayed as a number, the word "approximately," and then a second, larger number. The auditors have been told it is goodwill. It is, technically, a moon. It is in escrow. It has phases.

Whether a private English company may lawfully take, hold, and one day visit a moon by way of fee is not a question Finance is equipped to answer, and it has been referred out. The Office of General Counsel has since issued a full opinion on the point — taking advice from both terrestrial and off-world lawyers, reconciling the engagement with terrestrial law, and falling back to galactic law where the two collide — together with the instrument that, in the event, sealed the matter, and the coordinates of the moon itself: see The Lunar Consideration (SW8-L-001).

4. ON-SITE AUDIT (FIELD NOTE)

Part of the technical audit was conducted in person. The Client's name for itself, transliterated, is the Solivagant — "the lone wanderer" — and it extended, with its usual courtesy, an invitation to visit. The strategist assigned to the account is a keen traveller and took the trip on personal leave, treating the engagement as the world's most unusual working holiday. Their notes came back not as a survey but as a travel diary, cheerful and entirely unbothered by scale; the entry on the night market two decks down is, against all odds, the clearest account of the Client's information architecture we possess. Their wider write-up is filed off-system, as is everything to do with this Client, but it is where the on-site findings actually live.

5. WHY THIS CONTRACT IS UNREPORTABLE

We cannot publish a case study reading "we helped a nine-billion-strong nomad empire behind the Sun rank for 'benevolent stellar empire near me,'" partly because the achievement is unverifiable to terrestrial readers and partly because the phrase "near me," when the Client is involved, returns results that are upsettingly accurate. The engagement is real, retained, and ongoing. It is filed here. The Client checks its rankings on the 17th of each month. It is climbing. It is, slowly, being found.