That's not too bad.

"The numbers of the Vissers may be out of date," adds Ristrell. "If they've been promoted. I have been ignoring Imperial attempts to contact this ship but they may have presumed Visser Three deceased in spite of the lack of confirmation."

"Do you have names for those Vissers?"

"Not for Nine -" She has the others, though, name and number.

And they have eidetic memories. "Thank you very much for your time," he says. "I hope we made it interesting enough to make up for taking so much of it. Do let us know if you think of anything else."

"Of course," says Ristrell. Josefa's face is not made for sharklike smiles. Ristrell makes it work anyway. "Please feel entirely welcome to send messages with any further questions. I'll start sorting out people to help process and integrate surrendered Imperials."

"We appreciate it."

"A pleasure to meet you, Sovereign," says T'Mir.

"Likewise," Ristrell says.

"We'll be in touch."

And Beijing again.

"That was useful. So - are we sending in anyone first to establish goodwill, do we have results on the Kandrona, how good at record-keeping are these Yeerks - the latter is probably the most urgent, it will take a while for people to comb through all their works and find the records and then a while longer to verify there aren't people missing from them. I said to Butterfly during the meeting," he adds to T'Mir, "that I think we should ask Space Arda to do our legwork here, because there are more of them and they're less busy and they have native summoning and if there are non-informationally sensitive bits of this - maybe making places for ex-hosts to live - they can do it without drawing on our very overstretched demon."

"Checking - they're having to do indestructibility twice on the troporter and her 'cohabitor' both so there's a delay there, don't know yet."

"We can inquire if finding volunteer goodwill ambassadors with the necessary qualifications is likely or not, and ask Cam to produce the records so we can try to at least guess if they'll be accurate, although if someone is simply not written down we will miss them. I suppose we will have an opportunity to find our mistake by word of mouth during processing."

"Unless there's a whole - breeding camp or something - that never got numbered, I am not sure even that finding out about them'd help us at that point..."

He inquires with Space about the likelihood of finding volunteer goodwill ambassadors with the necessary qualifications.

"The obvious reason to number hosts is to distinguish them to allow continuity for their Yeerks. It's possible they don't number children who are too young. But the hosts might remember how many children they had and then we can check that against a database."

"Yes. Oh, and we need to check whether basement-dwellers are as good as animals-morphed-human - or morphed-Elf, I suppose - and if not we need to get billions of animals to morph Elf, ugh -"

"I think it's actually a bad idea to cause animals to morph Elf, since it comes with osanwë and that can do broadcast."

"Good catch. Human, then."

Butterfly adds this to Cam's request list.

Space says that if the suicide triggers are still possible to activate with a Yeerk in your head then volunteers won't be a problem, but if they aren't then finding volunteers will be a challenge.

Are they willing to assume that if other chip interfacing works the suicide triggers will too, or do they need to figure out a way to do a live fire test?

Well, it'd be an Aurum test, but it still might be hard to form the necessary intent for it. If other chip-activated features work they'll call it good.

Okay. Who wants to try it and with who playing Yeerk?

He'll come on over if it's his alt or Finleran playing Yeerk.

<I find it disconcerting that I would apparently care so much less about Yeerking if I had been born a different species> he says, but morphs it.

"Welcome to Cube," Butterfly says to the visiting Maitimo.

"Hello, Imperatrix! I enjoyed reading the account of your world, you did excellently. Other than a couple volunteers for this, are you going to need anything from us?"