"On the other hand, if the information has ever touched a computer, Jane'll tell me regardless 'cause I'm her mom."

"Never have I been gladder to be a relic of the stone age," he says. "What is your fascination with invading my privacy for your, your personal entertainment?"

"I didn't say I was going to ask her! But the vast majority of people who've made it their business to keep shit secret from me were hiding facts like 'we have been reading your diary since you were four' and 'that computer game you've been playing is a psychological evaluation tool' and 'the asshole who knocked your head into the corner of your bunk and could've given you brain damage was actually a plant and we could've stopped him anytime but we didn't' and 'we're graduating you early to use you as leverage against your best friend' and 'that game you just played involved real soldiers, four of whom died after giving up their lives on Earth to relativistic space travel and didn't know they were putting their lives in the hands of fifteen- and sixteen-year olds, and we were never going to tell you but our psychologists convinced us it was strategically necessary'. And I don't like it."

"What would've been better, then?"

"I don't really know," he sighs.

"Compared to anybody who isn't minted and flush with coins, all of us might as well be omnipotent. If we want to bad enough, we can do anything. You'll have better luck trying to manage what we want. We've got good ethics but not perfect ones."

"Manage what you want?" he repeats. "How am I meant to do that? And why should I need to? If you are nearly omnipotent and your ethics cannot prevent you from needless violations of other people's privacy and autonomy, that is a problem that you, urgently, need to solve."

"There's this thing we do," says Aegis. "We ask ourselves: What do I want? What do I have? How can I use the latter to get the former? And having more power lets us be more precise and nicer and more ethical at getting only what we want and not any extras that we don't need that we might not really, truly want. And we don't want to hurt people, or go around needlessly violating other people's privacy and autonomy, and with wishcoins we can avoid it even if something very, very important that might ordinarily conflict with those things is on the line. But at the end of the day it always comes down to what we want. Angela's god is false and Amariah's don't care and mine's probably going to send me a Mother's Day card - we answer to ourselves. I don't think wanting to know things that have no obvious application would ever tend to trump others' personal privacy. But if something were going to... curiosity is high up on things that motivate Bells. I'm not trying to scare you. I do think Juliet must like you, I'm not planning to pry into your head, and you aren't from my jurisdiction anyway. But for keeping conversations a little friendlier than this one turned out, you could consider not being conspicuously, temptingly opaque."

"I fail to see at what point in this conversation I could have usefully been more inconspicuous, since you leapt down my throat the moment I failed to volunteer information about my personal history."

Juliet chooses this moment to wander by. "This looks distressingly hostile," she says. "What's happened?"

"Your Watcher got me curious and wasn't thrilled with the results," says Aegis.

"...Oof. Uh, I wasn't linked up and don't know you as well as the others do, are there special circumstances or are you garden-variety thereabouts?"

"Far as I know, no one has ever kept a significant secret from me specifically, that wasn't both relevant and being kept for reasons contrary to my interests, there's that," says Aegis.

"Okay. Maybe when your Whistle comes out you wanna ask him about getting a mindreading install like how Stella and Angela and Shell Bell have. And don't mind Giles. I think he gets it about relevant information. Giles, what's your half?"

"Also, reminding me of it could prompt me to ask if there's anyone you want pulled from the afterlife," Juliet says archly.

"...I don't know," he says helplessly. "I will have that conversation with you later when I've thought about some things."

"Okay. Aegis, am I right in thinking that if you were trying to keep a secret from somebody you'd think it was very nice of them to tell you where they could get it besides from you?"

"Yeah," says Aegis. "And what'd happen if I didn't cough up, too. Otherwise maybe I piss them off not telling and they just find it out some other way and later I need them to like me and they don't - or maybe I don't tell and they're not mad but I never even know that they could've just looked it up someplace else and are capable of yea much restraint and I need an evaluation of their character later - or maybe I do tell because it turns out the alternative is getting drugged and half-paralyzed and gosh sure would've been nice to know that they wanted to know I could do this thing back when telling them would've been relatively painless, huh? - or maybe she's the admin Downside and she knows literally everything already and now I know how restrained she's not and also know not to waste time predicating any behavior on her being ignorant of anything - or something. Why wouldn't I want to know exactly how much my secrets were under my control?"

"Okay, but," says Juliet, "if one hasn't already thought through all that sort of thing, then learning something about how much one's secrets are under one's control can just sound like bad news or like escalating, they don't necessarily like learning it even if it was already true. If you - geez, you haven't interacted with civilians since you were six apart from the last twelve hours, have you? All kinds of shit probably goes without saying when everybody in the conversation's ranked and uniformed."

"Well - Renée and Charlie wrote, but, yeah," says Aegis. "Lot of explicit power structures. I have bad instincts?"

"I'm not gonna say they're complete shit, I'd have to talk to you a bit more to know that, but they're probably not well-calibrated. Giles isn't your C.O. just because he's old enough to vote. If he doesn't tell you something you're not going to wind up killing people on his say-so in the absence of critical information or running into some organizational incompatibility and ending your career."

Juliet snickers. "Just don't do it to Renée. I can just imagine the look on her face."