"Huh. Okay."

"Even the gloves aren't universal, though the places which don't expect it are mostly places that aren't very developed and have very little interstellar tourism or migration, and you might not like them."

"Wearing gloves all the time is incredibly annoying and I'm constantly scared I'm going to forget to put them on, go out for a walk, and get arrested!"

"Yeah, it's not as bad for me because I can arbitrarily adjust the fabric minute to minute if I want and if I forget them I can just put them on in a split second but it's still annoying for me."

"You wouldn't get arrested for forgetting your gloves, you'd get reminded and lent a pair and walked home."

"But if I forget and then tap somebody on the shoulder to ask directions and they're wearing a tank top it's the end of the world."

"I don't think it's the end of the world."

"I admit that probably being dragged off to a reeducation center would probably not affect my ability to learn languages."

The tablet gets stuck for a while. 

"Anaander wants you to stay here. She won't insist but she won't let you get hurt over mistakes either."

"Did she just tell you that or are you deriving it somehow?"

"It seemed obvious and I wondered whether I thought that because I was modified at some point to think more highly of her and I asked and she said that obviously she'd like you to feel comfortable staying here but that she feels - constrained in expressing this by the fact her attention is the opposite of reassuring and that no one's going to be dragged off unless you start trying to kill people. She didn't say anything about whether I was modified to think more highly of her."

"God that's creepy. Do you care, if you get modified - have you ever in the past cared if you got modified -"

"I care about having accurate beliefs about things. I care about Anaander having everything she needs - I don't think she does, see - and it's been such a long time and she hasn't gotten it back - I think if Anaander is trying to get things she needs I prefer that. I did three thousand years ago, too."

"She doesn't have everything she needs? Gotten what back?"

"She needs the right sort of people. There are trillions of people so I don't know why she hasn't found them."

"What does that mean?"

"When the creator of this tablet was alive Anaander was surrounded by people who it was good for her to be around, and she did good things. They all died. She should - find new people like that. I think she knows that. But she hasn't, even though there are more than enough people that there's got to be adequate ones somewhere."

"Well, the creator of this tablet was her parent, right, does she have any surviving relatives or is the clone immortality thing that limited?"

"She doesn't have surviving relatives. It's not that limited but they were all killed during the war. Many of them it took tracking down lots of bodies but - not tens of thousands, and it happened."

"Well, if what she needs is relatives then she would seem to be out of luck since I assume if she wanted to reproduce she's had ample time to get around to it."

"I don't think she needs relatives. But I don't really know. I guess 'she just needs something that she ought to be able to find' is a useful thing for me to think anyway."

"Is it? Does she ask you for advice?"

"No."

"Anyway. You can tell Anaander - just like you can tell her everything else that passes between us, I suppose - that I already assume I have a lot of her attention since I have some idea of how exciting novel magic might be to a naive society and how much attention she might have to spare. So, if she's got something to say, she doesn't have to tamper with you or even use you as an intermediary, she could just, like, send whatever passes for an email."

"I'll tell her that."