"Hi!!!"

"Hi.

I've been thinking about your alts, a lot."

He pats the couch next to him. "Yeah. They are very attention-drawing."

She sits down beside him. "At one point when I was talking to Matt the possibility came up that at some point we'd be able to do the--forking retrieval thing--for non-Space-Elves and he said he didn't want a copy of him from before Angband retrieved because he just wanted to stop existing altogether--so the Singularity Maitimo who'd been through Angband probably felt the same way--but the retrieved version was glad of it, so mine probably would if we did--

I specifically and explicitly revoke consent for future versions of myself to deny consent for this version of myself to exist. If anything happens such that I die and straight-up resurrecting me is infeasible, like if anything happened such that I wanted to be dead, you and any of the others have absolute consent to resurrect me from this point--or before, if that's necessary for some reason. I expect to update this periodically."

Hug. 

She leans into him, tears prickling her eyes. "I miss him. He's--right here--and I miss him--and he's going to die--and you're so much like him, you're more like him than he is, but you don't know me, you don't remember me, I'm not your little sister, and there are so many things I want to say to him but I can't because I can't bear for him to hear them from what he thinks is a puppet of Sauron and he thinks we're dead and I--I just want him to be okay again, I know I can't have that but I want it so much it hurts--even if I could bring my parents back tomorrow they'd never get to meet him whole, I'll never ever have my whole family unbroken--I want to rationalize my way into being able to resurrect an okay version of him from before Angband so much so I can't because any ethical reasoning I use will be biased but it hurts so much but I'm not suffering a fraction of what any of them suffered, it's so selfish to be worried about how I feel about this--"

Hug. "We might figure it out. Somehow. Somewhere in the multiverse there might be something -"

"Like what."

"Magic therapy, a problem you need to have been through Angband and then murdered hundreds of thousands of people to be equipped to solve, I don't know -"

"I don't--want him to have to be alive if he doesn't want to--I just don't want to lose him--"

Hug.

"Remember when he said not to let him at an 'annihilate all life in the multiverse' button? Don't let me at a 'destroy an entire universe's iteration of your species by rewinding time back to Formenos' button."

"I will ensure responsible custody of all buttons of unspeakable power."

"What would you do if you woke up and someone told you it was thirty thousand years later and you were a rescue fork of yourself from--a universe-adjusted version of Ozymandias's history? I--I just gave a very good reason for why I shouldn't be trying to deal with this ethical problem, but--"

"Depends on a lot of things. The people he killed, mostly - what they'd want -"

"I'm not sure trying to ask them is under any circumstances a good idea."

"Agreed."

"I'm not even sure to what extent it makes sense to hold them responsible for what happened, given fucking Fate and the Doom."

"I think I prefer believing my choices led me into horrible atrocities to believing it was all just fated and I was - puppetted the whole way."

"I would too if it weren't for the confounding factor of suddenly all this influence from extradimensional situations and free-willed people--if you don't have fate-confounding factors running around it's easier to change your decisions than fate, but if you do then it's easier to take advantage of them than to rearrange your decision-making algorithms. 'I was railroaded into this and it's still happening' is worse than 'it's all my fault but I can change' is worse than 'I was railroaded into this but now it's over.' That's just me, though."

"We've got literal chip data with what the Doom did to my alts, I guess I should probably find a way of coming to grips with that. Anyway. I kill hundreds of thousands of people, I could have - I don't know, I could have at least ordered mine not to follow me-"

"Could you have? Would the Oath not have prevented it?"

"...depends, I think - anyway, that's important, that's a big piece of - making the fork okay with existing under those circumstances -"

"Okay.

I need to tell your me to spend more time with you, I--there are so many levels on which I'm not going to try to replace Matt but--I love him a lot and she should--have more of an opportunity to have the good parts of what I've had."

"I don't know how close things brush to replacing Matt but I think it'd make him happy if you had - a source of the things he was at one point able to offer you."