"Butterfly is fine, 'Imperatrix' actually started as a joke. We will likely want a lot of personnel helping sort out the Imperial Yeerks. Sovereign Ristrell will figure out how best to finagle it but doesn't have the directly-Tide-employed population for as many as there may be."

"Sure, how many is that going to be? Is this -" he picks up Matirin, carefully, with fascination - "I just hold him to my ear -"

"Yes, that's all. Ristrell thinks three billion Yeerks to within an order of magnitude and five to twenty percent that many hosts, assorted."

He - cannot answer, because he no longer has motor control.

"He says they can do that," he reports. "Testing voluntary control over various chip effects now -

uh, there are mental controls we both have access to and can end up fighting over the switch for, but I can't consistently win those, so suicide trigger would work fine." And out.

"You okay?"

"One sec - yeah, fine -"

<It is awful.>

"It's pretty intense, I'll grant you that. Okay. So that works and you have your volunteers if you want them - what do you want them briefed about, or do you want to do the briefing yourself, if needed we can fork them from before they are told all of the things they need for real informed consent -"

"I don't have a briefing written up yet but loosely how Yeerks work and our intentions toward the Empire. - are there people who know enough to be thoroughly credible about our intentions toward the Empire without dropping a lot of sensitive intel?"

"Your big problem is that they're all going to know summoning. Which means don't put any Yeerks within a hop of the daeva worlds."

"All of them? It doesn't even serve an afterlife-securing purpose for Elves, does it?"

"They would ever have seen a valid safe summoning circle, but without eidetic memory I am not sure how much you could reconstruct."

"How good is baseline Space Elf memory?"

"Mine was very near perfect already, there were blessings for that, but not everyone took them. Without any blessings loaded we do not have any advantage on humans."

"That's something, but unbound circles are not hard to reconstruct from the general idea..."

"We could grab someone from four years after the war ended, who'd been working on reconstruction and repairing relationships with orcs during that time - that was before Cam was done repopulating Afterlife and summoning was not really on our radar, but then all they can testify to is that we were really generous to orcs after our war ended and they weren't a threat, can't speak to anything we've done since and the absence would be glaring."

"Yeah, that's the sort of omission we'd sooner - omit. Maybe Boots could edit it out?"

"Will that be obvious to a Yeerk? ...and if they know Boots exists, maybe we just implanted all the memories our scouts have -"

"It'd be - I'm hoping it'd be obviously impractical to have her implant that much in that much detail? My suspicion is that she could do it subtly enough that it'd be missed but when I've Yeerked people it's been for shallower inspections than we should be prepared for... maybe this doesn't work at all."

"Might not. Can Boots do tampering that the person does not notice?"

"Yep. When she was demonstratively messing with Kib he didn't notice some of what she did until Island pointed it out or he tried to do specific tasks."

"And Yeerks don't recover memories the hosts forgot or heal brain damage or anything.... we get someone who doesn't know that Boots exists, which is most of them, get their consent for Boots to edit summoning out of the fork's memories, the Yeerks are very unlikely to notice, if the Yeerks do notice anything they are likelier to assume that we use amnestics occasionally than anything more sinister, and even if they go for a paranoid interpretation that's no worse an introduction than turning off all their suns."

"Oh, I didn't realize they didn't know Boots existed. That should be fine."