"Eugh. Yeah, that's hard especially on the 'can't ruin literally all his fun or he won't want the results anymore, probably, unless killing the Valar is his absolute priority' front."

"Yes. It seems possible that the hope of indirect future mischief won't be sufficient to stop direct mischief, but certainly anything where he might as well be dead is probably not going to work despite being what we'd really want.

Does anything go wrong if you don't put things to that effect in and then later we kill him as soon as we've figured out how?"

"Might take a while to figure out how?"

"Build a planet out of servers and it'll take me a week, tops."

"This assumes it can be done without taking him by surprise."

"Yes. I'm bound to try forever anyway, I expect I'll eventually stumble on something."

"Well, barring chip-editing shenanigans you're bound to try forever."

"I also want him dead, it's not really an imposition."

"This is reasonable."

"I don't have to try constantly or anything, just not be deterrable. There can be long soothing stretches of engineering work in between if needed, and if it turns out impossible to brute-force killing him within a few weeks I'm going to have a go at mortality before I worry about it again."

"Ah, mortality, my old foe," mutters Cam. List of demands. "Needs to not hurt anybody - completely unrestricted by substrate and species, I don't care if in twenty billion years coral are sapient, no harm may come to the coral people. No summoning, no dimension hopping. I am to count as having held up my end even if the Valar notice the black hole in time to avoid it and I need to word that generously enough that he can't defect should he stumble across me on a reconstructed Valinor..."

"How are we defining people for the purposes of harm, and are we okay with it if he finds the thing that has brains just below the described threshold and tortures uncounted trillions of those forever?"

"I may have to make a 'can't ruin all his fun' exception if he wants to torture puppies," Cam says. "Defining people is difficult, though, I can't think of a definition I'm happy putting all this weight on..."

"No torturing anything that'd have preferences about the matter" is clean but might indeed ruin his fun.

I could ask people if they'd volunteer copies of them to be tortured forever for the greater good, many of them probably would..."

"Dear lord no."

"We are going to murder him pretty soon."

"And he can run copies pretty fast and what if we can't murder him."

"Alright. Airtight definition of people."

"Yeah." Tail-lash, frown. "Can't just appeal to language use, not sure I want to rely on his ability to assess or capacity to refrain from harmfully assessing capacity for self-reflection..."

"I'm not even entirely sure it's a natural category. Self-reflection seems like something that might be much more of a spectrum."

"I am reasonably confident in my assessment of all the species I've met but I could be wrong about some of the ones I consider nonpersons," Cam agrees, "and it'd be awkward trying to explain that to the coral people if their grandparents were not up to some threshold."

"Here the distinction is generally explained as 'Valar can't make people, only Eru can do that' which makes me very nervous as a criterion and vaguely worried about the category. And leaves them an opening to take the stance that non-Eru-made things, no matter how people-like, clearly don't have the relevant internal experiences."

"Speaking as a non-Eru-made-person let's not include this in the definition."

"Absolutely nothing to do with daeva' is already in there, right? But yes."

"I wasn't a daeva to begin with."