"Because it's got... plausible threats to her empire or something? I got here pretty recently, the stuff here doesn't obviously scale that way..."

"It's come up that people here can conjure matter and that this plausibly allows people to destroy planets pretty easily. Although so can the kind of thing Cam is, I don't know why he isn't worrying about that, Cam's not gonna but there's more of those."

"There's that - the locals don't actually know very much about how dangerous their magic is in combination with other information, but it's probably very, and we're postulating here that they can reach our world, if they can send us back. But the main consideration is the treaty with the Presger. The one that Rubelite might be able to help me renegotiate. The Presger feel very strongly about violence between different species. Humans killing humans, that's fine, they fundamentally don't understand what a human is so they don't care and I'm not sure I want them to understand what a human is because if they then extend their principles to object as strongly to humans killing humans then they might, just, hermetically seal all humans away from all other ones or something. Or exterminate us, for being so evil.

If the Presger find out about this planet then the treaty's broken and I don't know what happens after that but it's plausibly very bad. If I find out about this planet I will just try very hard to make sure the Presger don't."

"That implies that the dangerous conduit of information is not actually 'Rubelite lacks social competence, tells you stuff' but rather 'Rubelite reports to her alien parental unit that there's this place'."

"I don't really know what I'd do if Rubelite told me this place existed. I probably wouldn't just tell all the world's wizards what a black hole is."

"Would that even solve your problem."

" - telling all the world's nonhuman wizards what a black hole is and hoping one of them tries it might solve all my problems with respect to this planet and the treaty. Because it'd be some nonhumans that no longer exist killing themselves and some other nonhumans and some humans, not any humans killing nonhumans, therefore not a treaty violation, therefore nothing for them to be mad about.

I feel like I'm being very cooperative by pointing this out and you should help me come up with a superior solution instead of being mad."

"I feel like I don't actually know enough about Rubelite's relationship with the Presger."

"I don't either. I don't know if she can keep things from them. I'm confident she knows they make mistakes."

"I think the bit of her that's here would act differently if she usually couldn't keep things from them!"

"If she knew she couldn't."

"If she had less than a very solid reason to be firmly convinced that she usually can. I guess something really thorough could be operative? Like Annie's thing, say. Though Annie, like, mentioned that and explained it."

"I don't know what the usual state of the art of making spaceships give up information might be."

"But she did say she's human-built."

"I could extract information from, and tamper with the memories of, mine. I don't but I know how I'd do it."

"How would you do it?"

"I'd need to be physically aboard the ship, where there's a control hub. I could connect to it and override a lot of things and replace them with content I'd have had to prepare in advance. No human could do it."

"Why couldn't a human do it?"

"They don't think fast enough and they can't directly interpret AIs by having the hardware they run on - all they see is math and then they build some abstractions on top of the math, but not very good abstractions - and they don't have anywhere near the attentional capacity. I'd need hundreds of me to be paying all their attention if I wanted to do this."

"But the Presger aren't human and might easily have those abilities. Would you leave any tracks, theoretically?"

"I - think so."

"Stuff we could check for with her?"

"I haven't done this. I think - I would expect that there'd be inconsistencies because of how memories are stored. Degrees of ability that were inconsistent with memories of practicing those skills, periods of time where everything's accounted for but none of it was spent doing the things one would've expected to spend it on..."

"She's us, she might just notice that on her own."

Anaander looks fondly at the door that she vanished through.