"What did you like to eat in your old world? Are you curious about trying something similar from here, maybe?"

"I liked...oatmeal with cardamom, and wraps with chicken and roasted peppers, and mashed potatoes mixed with cheese and stuffed back into the potato skins and baked, and smoked salmon, and dried apple chips, and sweetened yogurt with blueberries and pop-amaranth in it, and pistachios coated in carob..."

He stretches, trying to shake off a little of the false-tiredness.

"I, uhh. Am extremely unfamiliar with almost all of those foods! My plan is to just get a pizza, really. I guess we could sort-of eat together, separated by the glass? If that'd make you less lonely."

He smiles. "I'd like that.

A pizza is a...cheesy flatbread? That sounds promising."

"As for Tashayan cuisine...well, I'm not much into cooking, myself-- that job was mostly done by my...professional parent? I don't think that word is quite right...'adoptive uncle', maybe...anyway, most of those things are simple enough that I wouldn't have trouble making them if I had ingredients and a kitchen. Oatmeal I could probably even do in the microwave.

I bought pre-smoked salmon and pre-carob-covered pistachios from the grocery store, though.

I've definitely noticed that local restaurants use wheat in a lot of the places where we would use amaranth. Is popped wheat a thing?"

"That sounds impossible to me! You can do it with corn, and... it's very good at taking on the flavors of other stuff. I wasn't aware that amaranth could take the place of wheat; they really seem like such radically different ingredients, to me."

"Hmm, I wonder if popped corn would work well with yogurt and berries. Might need to chop it up or something, since corn kernels are so much bigger...

You might be thinking of amaranth leaves? You can also grind up the seeds and make flour out of them.

I ate a lot of pancakes my first few days here, when I was more nervous about whether our digestive systems were compatible; they didn't say what kind of flour the pancakes were made out of, and it turned out to be wheat, while back home if you don't specify what kind of flour you used for something it's generally amaranth."

"Can you make puffy, rising dough with it? I feel like making flour from seeds would be so complicated and slow and expensive... I'm probably going to learn about all these new kinds of food. I'm looking forward to it, huh."

"It's not really puffy the way that wheat bread is, no.

I wouldn't expect mass-producing wheat flour to be much easier than mass-producing amaranth flour? I guess that, all else equal, it would probably be easier to sift bits of sand out of a batch of grain if the grains are larger, but I think it's mostly a matter of what you've designed your equipment around.

Come to think of it, I do have a spare copy of my family's recipe collection on my, uh, phone, so that should be a good start for making alien food." He grins.

Eventually, the food arrives for both of them, carried by a robot under a layer of plastic foil, together with some additional supplies for Iris. She sets up a folding chair and awkwardly eats some of her pizza, looking at Minaiyu through the large window as she eats.

"It's a *bit* oilier than I'd like, but not bad, and I think it's got a lot of promise: there are probably other pizzas out there that I'll love," he signs.

...not that he actually needs to sign, come to think of it: sound carries pretty well through this wall. But he's accustomed to signing through transparent separators when eating alongside people he isn't breath-bonded to, and it seems that habit has kicked in.

Well, there's no reason not to sign, he supposes. (Except maybe that it requires putting the pizza down, but speech would require not talking while his mouth is full, so it's kind of a wash.)

She signs back. I'm glad you like it! Are you thinking you'll be staying inside all day transcribing stuff, or are you thinking of getting outside to get some sun and relax with the bird?

"I'm not planning to stay inside the *whole* day, but I'm also not planning to come back outside right away: I'll do some indoor work next, and go out in the afternoon.

...I think the next thing I should do is figure out how to get the news out about where people's minds go when they die. I haven't been focusing on that, I figured researchers would find out when they studied my books and word would spread from there once they'd done the tests to show it was true--or, well, the tests that *can* be done from here, without any dead people's spirits around--but...people are dying, right now, at any given time, and they'd be making different decisions around how to spend their final circuits on this world if they knew what would happen next."

Tests? Like what? Did people from your world find out by people dying and managing to be reborn back in your world after dying again? I can be very sure that we'd know if that had ever happened here.

Wait, did he tell her already-- right, he mentioned Amethyst's "homeworld" and then indicated that this had something to do with afterlives, that's enough for her to get as far as "people end up in other worlds when they die".

"It's not unheard of for people to be reborn back on Rekka† after dying again, though it's very rare in humans: that mostly happens with fae††. And it usually takes millennia for people to turn up again when it does happen; though there's one known case of someone landing back on Rekka without any other lives in-between, and that one had 'only' been...about three hundred years, I think it was.

I think the *main* reason we know is that..."

...she's probably thinking of walk-ins as...being like him, that's her example of how people arrive from other worlds, and she has no information to say otherwise...

"...so, uh, I should clarify: when people die, they wake up in...well, *almost* always a different world...*inside the body* of a local. The local person is still there: they share the body.

So sometimes people get possessed, and the possessing spirits can tell you all about their previous lives, can speak alien languages as complex as your own, and sometimes they know things that their host couldn't possibly have known, even if the host were creative enough to make a whole language from scratch. Sometimes they know that you can kill waterborne plagues by boiling the water before you drink it. Sometimes--rarely, but sometimes, and it happened to us about 210 years ago--they know how to build functional steam engines.

We learned a lot from her, about automated looms and railroads and tricycles and a bunch of other things. And we realised: any of our children might grow up to be like her someday. You won't *always* be in a position to do what she did: you might end up in a hunter-gatherer band with a technology gap too large to cross in one lifetime, you--" he laughs, and gestures around him "--might potentially end up somewhere that already knows, but every person who could have learned how to build a steam engine and didn't is a tragedy on a potentially global scale. If not in their second life, then perhaps their third, or their fourth.

And, uh, the tests that you could do *here*...you couldn't prove what *happens* to dead spirits, not without examples, but you could prove spirits *exist*, and that makes it easier to believe that the *rest* of my information about spirits is true, if that part was.

Species above a certain threshold of...intelligence, mental complexity, develop spirits. I'm not sure if the species here are *precisely* the same in the ways that matter for this, but back home...dogs don't have spirits but we suspect that's not by a large margin, ravens do have spirits, elephants, apes, parrots, dolphins...

Animals without spirits react differently to brain damage than people and smarter animals do. There's this...gradient of cognitive impairment, instead of the binary 'you're fine or you're comatose' that people have, because they don't have spirits that can compensate for small amounts of damage but can't stay in a brain that's damaged more heavily. It's more than just 'their audio processors were damaged and they can't hear you very well anymore and that's why they don't come when they're called', more than just 'they're in chronic pain now and that's why they're acting strangely': their *minds themselves* are damaged. And the same with less permanent disruptions to brain function: you can keep a mouse...at least a Rekkan mouse, for all I know your mice are different...on deliriants for *weeks* and it will often bounce back afterwards, you don't have that three-to-five-day window to get them off the drugs before the strain snaps their brain-spirit connection."

---

†he uses the Tashayan sign for the planet: the local sign of course doesn't have a word, and its meaning should be obvious from context

††also a Tashayan loanword

Well, I know a bit about brains and brain damage, just from casual reading. I'm quite convinced that people would find out and tell me if souls mean some animals get hit by brain damage differently! But it's abundantly clear that brains and minds are made of nothing but what we can see; it just doesn't happen that people magically switch from unharmed to comatose, the damage from the hits they take slowly builds up just like it does in every other animal.

"...they don't? It does?

Uh, I mean-- you're saying that brain-damaged" people? "humans can become...say..." what are some things that happened in the lesser-animal brain studies "...forgetful, or aggressive, or indecisive, even when they're not in pain and just being distracted by that, or maybe in ways stronger than what distraction-by-pain could cause? There are changes to their *minds*, and not just their senses or their motor abilities? You can feed humans deliriants for ten days and they wake up okay afterwards?"

Yes, that's exactly true. Minds get hurt just according to how brains get hurt, and people recover perfectly from extreme doses of deliriants, at least the kinds we're comfortable using on them today.

"I...

...it's not that I expect you to lie to me, and it seems like a weird thing to be wrong about, and I'm sorry, but for something this important I think I need to go read some other sources on this. *Before* trying to get the word out, on something that...might not...be true of people here."

(...he's not sure if he'd rather they be people or not. Being surrounded by non-conscious automatons for the rest of his life sounds pretty bad, but if there's a world full of sapient beings who (presumably?) cease to exist when they die--)

(--and if they don't have souls, they can't generate walk-ins, probably can't host them either, and that's why this world was cut off from the rest of the multiverse before he got here. There...oh fuck, there's no telling how many worlds like this one are out there, uncontacted, how many soulless people are living and dying and ceasing to be, and this world managed to industrialise unaided but it must be harder on your own and somewhere out there is a society of soulless people having a cholera epidemic and losing their very existences over something that would have been so easy to prevent if they'd known how--)

--okay, no, he should not follow this train of thought too far yet, he does not have a good enough grasp on the situation to know how horrifying it is, he is going to go do Internet research on neurology and also life-extension tech.

Researching neurology confirms Iris' claims; there's an intimate relationship between the mind and the brain, among all animals, no matter how intelligent or unintelligent. Looking up life-extension tech reveals a few different kinds of anti-aging medicines with relatively gentle effects; it's still enough that they're widely available, given out by life-longevity insurance companies. Cryonics, invented half a century ago, seems to be considered much more of a life-extension technology.

Huh.

They can preserve dead brains, with enough fidelity that they think they'll be able to read off the brainprint once that part of the tech catches up, and because their brainprints are them...

...there's still hope for them.

or, well, the ones who died on this particular planet within the past half-century that is maybe too big to even properly form emotions about, and anyway it's probably for the best if he doesn't have emotions about it

(He's not sure how he would tell whether they're people or not, but treating them like they're people when they're not fails a lot safer than treating them like they're not people when they are. And they sure do act like people: alien people, yes, but people.)

It doesn't seem like it will help anything to encourage them to train in technological bootstrapping, after all. He'll still show her how to build a spinning wheel, though. It's still really cool.

He uploads the book on the history of rubber, works on translating the encyclopedia article on respirators for a while, eats another slice of pizza (he finds that he actually likes the texture of the cheese more after it's been cooled and then microwaved), then suits up again and goes out into the yard.

"Hi!

I'm, uh, feeling significantly less existential horror about you not having souls after finding out about cryonics? Not, like, no existential horror, but-- I'm very glad to hear that you're in the process of building your own afterlife, given that you apparently didn't come with one natively. And it's fascinating how your afterlife-building method relies on soullessness to work, the way you've taken your vulnerability and twisted it around--

--I wonder if there are medical treatments that we can't use back home because they're too toxic to souls. If there were, like, a drug that vastly reduced arterial plaque buildup but also crossed the blood-brain barrier and made you delirious for the first two weeks until your brain adjusted to it, I guess we wouldn't know."

"Yes, that's true. But I think there's something that feels really right about souls not being a totally separate thing, right? Because then you can learn everything there is to know about brains only studying brains of animals, and you don't have souls that are a totally different thing that you also have to think about."