<All right. I guess we'll eagerly await other forms of resurrection getting more scalable.>

"It's on the to-do list. Except for Mirelótë's world which is perfect everybody has lots of dead people. Mirelótë's world apparently has, uh, a few dozen ever."

"They're not less dead just because there are fewer of them."

"If anything it's probably much less complicated to bring them back and we can more confidently expect it to go well without any additional supervision. But we can't reach our world now anyway. Are there dead people you know, Matirin -"

<Nearly all the people I knew before the war are dead. And Bella's mother lived in the part of Earth that we lost.>

"Which part of Earth was that -"

<The southeastern seaboard of the United States. And Cuba.>

"...ouch."

"What happened?"

<The Yeerks did it when it started to look like taking the planet by secrecy wasn't going to work. Blamed it on us, though not very credibly. There was a while where it was unclear if there was a compromise that both sides considered an improvement on 'destroy the world'.>

"Well. Sounds like you found something."

<We got very lucky, really, that Ristrell was positioned to do what she did. But we saved the planet. Eighty million people later.>

"Bella mentioned Ristrell but only as an example of a Yeerk with a consenting host when we were testing whether Cam can check for whether a person has a Yeerk in them or not. - he can. And said she runs the polity on the moon, but not a lot of detail."

<There was a last-ditch attempt to infiltrate the Yeerk ships in orbit because otherwise the planet was plainly going to get destroyed sooner or later. It failed. But it gave her the opening to stage a coup on behalf of a Yeerk faction that was willing to work with humans and with Andalites to arrange for Yeerks to get consenting hosts. I don't know if there are alternate universe versions of her but we're very much indebted to her and she figured out how to have a cooperative orientation towards people who were ...not really giving her a lot to cooperate with.>

"Alt is a conjurable parameter -" Cam holds out his hands. "- and I'm not getting anything, but that probably only quantifies over worlds we already know about."

<Too bad. Do you know any more than you said about how alts happen and who tends to have them?>

"Not much more, really."

"In addition to us, Maitimos, our families a ways out for those of us who are not spaceships but with some variance in number of siblings - for us, not you - there have been a couple we've noticed. Aitim identified Khemet's fourthborn brother Merenre's wife Ismat as an alt of her counterpart Isama from his world, Amenta, and also has an alt of Rabiah, one of secondborn Masaharta's - harem - who in Amenta is married to Makel. My Maitimo identified one of Khemet's wives Laila as his assistant Larya. This seems like a high concentration to find by casually rummaging around nearby but I don't know what general patterns to expect; it's possible that people with alts accrete around other people with alts somehow and if we visited a random village no one there would have any."

<Does my world have alts of any of those people?>

"Do you want me to count dead people?"

<Sure, I still might know them and could go off that.>

"You have... a dead Rabiah, looks like she died young and either at a renaissance faire or quite a while ago... and a live Andalite Ismat... no Larya."

<Huh. What's the name of the Andalite one ->

"Do Andalites have birth certificates or universal ID or anything?"

<Everyone's birth is registered, yes.>