"Are you, how so?"

"I tend to find arguments in favor of institutions even when those institutions clearly have a lot of flaws that hurt people? Uh, Tattletale and my parents think I do this particularly when it comes to flaws that impact me."

"Oh no, but that's the time you'd be most qualified to make criticisms!"

(A drone approaches, hovers at the window, and moves on. Lucien gets a text.)

"I'm not sure that's true? I'm probably the most biased when it's about me... though possibly in my case the bias goes in the opposite of the expected direction."

(What does the text say?)

She doesn't physically resemble Lorica.

"Qualified to make criticisms, not necessarily tradeoffs! If a system is failing you, you know things about how and where it fails, which might, but also might not be, taken into account."

"Uh, I should maybe reply to Rete real fast but also uh, I am not sure how to distinguish when I am failing a system from when a system is failing me though now that I say that aloud the entire framing seems wrong?"

Oh, I am not sure what that means? She really seems like a Lorica.

I agree. But she doesn't look alike the way I would normally expect someone's counterpart in a nearby world to look.

"You seem unusually high on system-cooperativeness so a system that is not working well with you is probably also not working well with lots of other people."

Yeah - her world also seems to have very different powers from either us or Aleph so it's possible there's something else going on but I'm not sure how that explains this.

"Yeah I think that's true."

"Whatcha texting about?"

"Um. Rete says you don't look like Lorica which is confusing and doesn't match how people being alternates is normally known to work."

"It's... known to normally work? Do a bunch of people have pen pals who are them?"

"I don't know of any pen pals but anyone who was born before 1982 has a duplicate in Earth Aleph since our histories were identical up until then."

"Well, that's not definitely how I work since I was born in 2011."

"Yeah that bit was already confusing but it's even more confusing that you'd end up with the same personality and voice without having the same appearance."

"I guess that means her dad won't recognize me? ...and also that it's probably not a problem if I slip and tell you his name, I refer to my parents by their names when they aren't around."

"We technically don't know that the names don't match though it seems like a reasonable possibility - I can check with Rete to see if yours does?"

"Sure."

Lucien messages Rete.

Inexact but not unrelated.

Lucien can relay this!

"I think you are probably just an alternate version in a slightly weirder way than I expected."

"I guess! I wish I'd had the chance to meet her, I think that would have been cool..."

"Yeah she was really cool. I think she would have liked to meet herself too."