Sigh. "I don't know."

"If you were thinking even for a little bit you might think of something we could do that the Enemy couldn't fake."

"Didn't come up with anything before."

"My father did. After the war he's going to figure out a way to restore all my memories and if that happens I'm going to believe it at least likelier than not that this is real. I can verify that several decades have passed. I can do things like 'likelier than not'. You can't."

"I'll get all my memories anyway."

"Yup. And then we'll hope that after a century you're so unbearably bored of not thinking you decide to chance it long to enough to verify it's in fact been a century, and that the Enemy couldn't have pulled off a convincing hallucination for that long without erasing any memories."

"Okay." Almost wry.

"I just wish I had something better than that to offer Aydanci."

"Sorry." Softly.

"Not your fault. It might even have been the right strategy, now that we've got other people who can program."

"Mmhm."

"Love you. I'll think of something."

"Love you."

He thinks of a lot of things. The most tempting is to go find a human population on the south continent - probably one at risk of a famine or something - and dump Kib on them. He might decide just to smile vaguely and let everyone starve to death, of course, but it seems likely that he would not do that.

It's definitely something the Enemy'd do, but he's not really trying to convince Kib he's not hallucinating, he's trying to convince Kib to be a person long enough to tell them what he would want done if he weren't.

Also, in order to do that he'd have to pry Kib away from Aydanci, possibly literally out of his cold dead hands, because it is entirely possible that Kib would smile vaguely and then starve to death with everyone else.

I was not in fact planning to let anyone starve, if he's not willing to snap out of it.

Then if the Enemy ever did try anything like that before and it actually got him to think he'll have reasoned that out and he can remember it at any time.

Yeah. I just don't see any reason he would ever under any circumstances have another thought, and I find that upsetting.

Do you think I don't?

You probably have it worse since you think it's real. Have you thought of anything? We have his permission to kill him, incidentally, if we can get the Valar to open the portals again...

He's mentioned.

- The Aly memories were never tampered with that he can recall. Could get a Vala to roll him back all the way to when she died and tell - her - what's going on, it'd be sort of like starting over.

You think missing memories will stick if it's the non-evil Valar doing it?

No, unless Lórien in particular can keep them from coming back by virtue of his specialty. He'd be lucid a little while, but - no, he'd notice how long ago everything was, I don't know how he'd react to that without any other information -

Well, explaining the whole truth would not be the thing the Enemy'd employ - the Enemy'd leave out that he might be able to read minds, and possibly that Kib was ever his prisoner -

I doubt very much that Kib is willing to put as much confidence in - stylistic assessments.