"Trust me, we'd have been delighted to have been ignored. 

And - what does a good resolution of that look like, on your end, are they going to give me the resources to be more like my alts or not, towards what end are you not ignoring us -"

"If we knew we'd be handling this a lot more gracefully than we are. You are uncontainable as a - social hazard - in any non-tortuous conditions; trying to wedge you into some really sweeping oath that basically turned you into a Regular Maitimo would just be a creative form of execution with a useful byproduct; we do not want to upset Forever and uncreatively executing you would do that, even if it didn't seem unsatisfying as an answer on other levels; and if you just - stay here - doing your thing - then your alts and people close to them spin our wheels constantly fretting."

"Over what? I don't want their kingdoms, even if they sound like less of a headache to run. These are my people and they risked a lot more than their lives, for me, in the war, and I want to stay here and if there's something magically making my world worse than yours, fix it, and if it's not magic just some diffference in intrinsic temperament then do as well by them as I can - we don't have some necessary crime rate, with low unemployment and good options and good policing it'll be effectively negligible - I'm not going to steal their boyfriends, if you don't execute me mine will eventually come back -"

"...no, none of that is even close. The problem is more, we don't know why you are this way and, to people with functioning consciences, near-misses on being evil are disturbing, and in spite of the fact that your father's been in a room with a bunch of his alts ostensibly contemplating this problem for a while now we can't yet go 'aha, that's it, that's all, the rest of us are safe, there is no reason to expect me/my Maitimo/whoever to turn up evil one day, that could never have happened here, that is not something I need to have an identity crisis about'."

"It doesn't seem like there's anything you could do to me that'd help reassure you on that front."

"Yep. It's a problem. And yet here you are, salient whether any of us like it or not, mysteriously atypical."

"I have to ask... are you sure? Because I'm pretty sure that ruling a society of adorable innocents I would manage not to do anything objectionable."

"This is part of what worries us. But - mm - Cam wound up in a situation where he had to do some objectionable things but we can follow his reasoning and he was ecstatic when Loki showed up and fixed the fallout for him and he thinks like the rest of us and we all get what happened. This is not how you and your alts react to each other."

"Would you find it distressing if they had reacted that way, and do they value your good regard."

"I get what you're saying but I really don't think that's it. I wouldn't find it distressing if Island were better at reverse-engineering what you were thinking, it'd only start getting creepy if he explained why being a rapist made perfect sense and is exactly what he'd do if presented with some comparable situation."

"From the way you describe my alts, what they'd do in the comparable situation is 'break'. I suppose there's a sense in which that's better."

"Every now and then it is useful to be able to do that."

"These don't seem like applicable circumstances."

"Maybe. But you can't reverse-engineer your alts very well, either, can you?"

"Because I'm uncertain if they're 'me, with incentives to lie about this' or 'my skillset stapled to Forever's sensibilities.' I could model either of those, I'm just not sure which I'm dealing with."

"What do you get if you run those models?"

"Me, with incentives to lie about this, wants me dead so there's less material to promote this hypothesis to everyone's attention, or maybe sworn to be like them because this won't do anything and gives me an opening to start having nice normal relations with all of you on the assumption I'm cured and overwritten. Probably would state a preference for the former and count on me to figure it out and ask for the latter, since incentives to lie about this extend to incentives not to seem the type satisfied by creative forms of execution. 

My skillset stapled to Forever's sensibilities breaks, as I said. None of them have had their war drag out three hundred fifty years but they'd all be wishing they were dead - past some point they wouldn't be people, wouldn't want things, would just continue numbly executing on what their ethics demanded be done while wishing they could stop existing -"

"Doesn't take three hundred fifty years when a stint in Angband does it. They're recovering."

"Is it conducive to their goals for people to believe they're recovering."

"Wow, being you sounds like tremendous fun. I'm kind of operating under the assumption that one of the goals in question is having sincere relationships with certain people. If we ignore that as my wishful thinking then, yeah, I guess, but they could also just encourage the non-traumatized Space ones to fork some more and pick up the domain knowledge to substitute for them as needed, or something."

"I would be curious why they're not doing that. Anyway, I don't think I'd be better even by Forever's sensibilities if I had them myself; it's not a very stable setup. I think this country would for example be worse off by my alts' own lights if they'd been born to it."

"The country is honestly a subsidiary concern as far as the constant drain on our attention goes. So your country's not adorably innocuous the way Elf countries usually are, fine, Mitros is governing humans and nobody's giving him crap about how human they are, your personal life is the real stumper."

"They're not very separable. I asked myself if I could handle an indefinite-but-at-a-minimum centuries-long war with an Enemy good at psychological games and a people so divided it would take most of my energy just to hold them together well enough to hold off the Enemy. The answer was no, couldn't handle that. I asked myself what I'd need."

"And you came up with this answer and stopped looking."

"I'll concede the point if you think of a better one, or if we find one of me who pulled it off without him."