"Huh, don't they do that by moving the brains, though? That was the impression I had..."

"Classically, but they could probably fork someone if they felt like it. If brains are polluted too that's a harder concern, though."

"Reds are polluted all through including the matter of the brain, but I - again, this isn't my area, not a theologian, but I think if you just uploaded one the software wouldn't be polluted. Of course, we need to have some reds."

"Yeah. It's a tough situation, and not one I'm really equipped to address, especially as an outsider."

"It would have been nice if we'd figured out some way to sort it out before we had to explain to anyone, but this is what we've got," sighs Lestra.

"There was a human speech I listened to, some - twenty five Amentan years ago, when I was young and just investigating humans properly, and they had not yet abolished slavery. It's... Part of why I like humans."

"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice."

Pause, then: "It's a very human sentiment, all told."

"I do think we've made moral progress over time in lots of ways."

"Shoggoths have, too, I think."

"Oh?"

"We're a lot more willing to help others, than we used to be. Less dramatically isolationist."

"I can see how your history would've led to a long period of keeping to yourselves."

She nods. "I'm hoping that will end entirely, soon enough."

"The portals'll help!" Lestra grins.

"I think they will, especially if we can get security measures working on them."

"- So I did bring a list of questions, but I'm mostly here to answer yours, do you have more?"

She has a lot of questions about the impact of technology on culture, actually, especially the internet and easy access to information.

Lestra will happily chatter about that! She keeps going on tangents about Internet dialects, which are apparently a favorite subfield of hers, but usually notices she's doing that pretty quick and gets back on Combing Sorrow's preferred topics.

Then they'll probably pretty easily get Combing up to speed on the basics of the internet age. (It's quite different from the cultures she's used to, fascinatingly so.)

She's also willing to answer Lestra's questions, of course.

Lestra wants to know all about how the one human town she lived in received her, and what hiccups there were, and how she met her husband and what opinions the neighbors had about that, and how parenting Bright Sorrow with two parents was different from the usual budding-related arrangement, and about linguistic features of the shoggoth language.

Human town! They didn't know she was a shoggoth, for one - they thought she was odd, though, since she was presenting as a woman and the humans in that area have strong ideas about what's appropriate behavior for the different sexes. She was too blunt and independent for their tastes, and 'cultural anthropologist' is a male-dominated field. Most of the hiccups were around that; she'd been traveling across the world for about two Amentan decades before she met her husband, so she already knew how to blend in.

She met her husband at a university in the town they were raising Bright in. He was studying experimental physics, and had both very strong opinions about equality among the sexes and races and religions, and a tendency to confront people he felt were being discriminatory. They tended to get into arguments with the same people, and had friends and colleagues in common. People generally thought that the two trouble-makers were made for each other.

She hasn't had any siblings or another child, so how her relationship with Bright differed is a bit reliant on anecdotes. Still, the work load was a lot smaller, mostly - her husband absolutely loved child care - and there were more compromises involved.

Linguistic features! The shoggoth language has a few modes. There's a swift mode, more popular among children and young adults generally, and a classic mode, which is more poetic, and an archaic mode, which is more formal. Each one takes longer to say than the last. There's also a hailing mode, meant for long distance communication, which has more redundancies and is spoken at a lower frequency so the sound will travel farther.

Lestra wants to know more about the sexes-races-religions thing and the situations in which people use different modes.

Earth is a far more geologically fragmented world than Amenta, so human populations managed to develop for a while in relative isolation. Distinct ethnicities formed, and when those ethnicities met they sometimes didn't like each other. Race theory is more modern, she thinks - it's based on the idea that there are unifying, 'better' traits in certain groups of ethnicities, and that the race with those traits is better than and destined to rule over the other races. Phenotypes are the main way to tell races apart, in this, but many discriminatory laws also reference blood quantum, where some level of a single ancestor of an 'undesirable' race marks you as part of that race.

Religion ties heavily into race and ethnicity - a religion is a set of cultural practices, rituals, and beliefs that tie a people together. A few religions developed evangelical traits, where their adherents would try to spread them to others, often violently. A religion called 'Christianity' was closely tied to the national identity of this one island nation that tried to conquer the world, Britain, and that island nation was one of the main proponents and developers of race theory. Obviously including themselves as the destined inheritors of the world - the 'white' race, marked by pale skin as well as a few other traits.

The sex discrimination thing is harder to trace. It seems to be from early agrarian societies having division of labor along male-female lines, as sort of a proto-caste system. It got encoded into a few religions and cultures, even in places and situations where that sort of division of labor didn't make sense, and then developed a life of its own. By the modern day, the 'ideal' (in this particular culture) is for a woman to manage the home and children, and her husband to manage life outside the home. Of course, that's mostly a quirk of the middle class and newly rich, who can afford to have one spouse not working for pay...

Women also don't currently have the right to vote, though she expects white women will get it within the year, but that sort of systemic disenfranchisement means men have a very strong motive to keep women out of power, and white people similarly around other races, and Christians around other religions.

Gosh, that's all so interesting and must make things so complicated for anthropologists - all the sex role stuff with all its quirks, all the ethnic stuff - Amentans have ethnicities at all, you can kind of tell by looking which of three groups most people are if you are interested in that for some reason, but honestly it's easier to clock somebody who's got the wrong hair color for their caste, especially a yellow - how does the incentive to keep women out of power play out, surely the men have daughters?

Daughters are nowadays generally seen as belonging more to their mother, men aren't encouraged to involve themselves with childcare anyways, and apparently a lot of the type of men who oppose other people getting a share of their power don't trust their wives and daughters to vote alongside them. Historically, people who were concerned about having heirs would keep going until they had a male heir, appoint the eldest son as their inheritor, and marry off any daughters in political alliances. There have ever been ruling queens in this particular culture - they're usually treated as exceptions to the rule, though.

Anthropology is indeed very complicated, and you get people who'll specialize in one ethnic group or region, or even in comparing one aspect - like gender roles - across cultures.

Gosh! That's terribly unfortunate for roughly half of humanity but anthropologically fascinating! Men just... kind of don't like children very much or something?