"What I wanted to do was orchestrate something that'd make you think. I don't think you'd actually be okay with that."

"Won't stick."

"If I can find a way to make it stick, do I have permission to do it?"

"It won't, though."

"I know you said it hurts to stop again, but even if we just had you thinking a little while we could ask you about your preferences on things like killing you to start over."

"You can start me over if you want. Well. Ask Aydanci."

"We don't want to. We don't even know if it'd work. We just don't know what will."

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.