"We know what does and does not block human eyesight.  If our walls weren't sufficient, we'd either have built walls that could block them or not have developed a concept of privacy that expected to block them.  I'm not saying that the taboo is reasonable.  Cultural things generally aren't, and need to be updated to reflect new technology or situations.  And it probably will, given time. 

"The best way to proceed probably depends on what goal you're going towards, and how much you think making people angry and scared will interfere with it.  And how much you care about people not being angry or scared as a valuable thing to try for, in itself.

"What would your society consider proper behavior if I'd fallen into a bedroom where people were being intimate, instead of on a public bridge?  Or if I'd had some kind of uncontrollable telepathic ability that made me read everyone's mind on the planet?"

"I don't expect you to just ignore your taboo. I'm just concerned that you're still... imagining wrong the ways in which it is, in fact, threatened. Like how you're so focused on the sensory apparatus specifically. To use your example, it wouldn't be like building thicker walls at all. It would be like disguising that what you were building was even a house, because one can infer by seeing an inhabited house that its occupants spend time inside it doing various things, without directly observing any of those things."

"Mm. Our goal is simply to give your fleet more options than they currently have. We're a tiny drop of hope in an ocean of chaos, is what I think, which means we can only help where we happen to be. But if basic facts about us are going to scare your people and make them angry, they might choose the harder path, and deny themselves this chance for a better future!"

Madoka takes a breath.

"And um, if you fell into a private bedroom while something intimate was happening, that would be the same if you fell into any private room where you weren't supposed to be? There isn't, um, a specific custom. As for uncontrollable telepathy... that sounds like a really unique situation and I couldn't predict for you how it would be handled, because that would depend on the exact details."

"I'd meant more emotionally than legally, with the hypotheticals.  

"If you can't explain it well enough for me to understand the difference, you won't get most people in the fleet to understand it either.  I can infer that something is a house, and that house things go on inside of it, but only after my eyes detect things that my brain can go on to interpret as doors and windows and other things that I know houses have.  That, or being told that it's a house by someone, which I sense with my ears.  Then I'd still need more information to know which house-contained task was being done at a given time inside of it.  Even ralts or hatenna, with their unwilling empathy, are still sensing emotion, or dopamine levels, or something, because information exists out in the world and it must be getting to their minds somehow so that their brain can interpret it as emotion.  We just don't know how.

"Though, that would probably be a good comparison to make.  Hatenna, I mean.  They're stuck feeling the emotions of people nearby against their will, and no one can figure out a shield yet, but we aren't going to lock up thirteen year olds for settling so the culture has an exception carved out for them.  Admittedly, I still have no idea why your system was set up like this by a person on purpose, or why someone would make anything without an off switch, but it's... well, it exists that way now."

"It makes perfect sense to me but I am out of explanatory metaphors. Or wait, no I have one more. You're thinking of the system as, like, a tool, being used against you. It is more like an artificial law of physics, or as close as we can get to one."

"Could you tell me about Hatenna? About the shape of this exception?"

"Hatenna is a daemon that automatically picks up the emotions of anyone within about 7 meters then feels those emotions themself.  This isn't a pleasant situation for either the daemon or the people being read, but we've tried methods of blocking it and haven't found a solution.  

"Daemons with uncontrollable abilities being ignored and allowed to walk freely was a major political issue around the time the fleet was being put together.  On the dead world, they were expected to live somewhere with space, like a farm, and avoid going into public areas.  For the fleet, which doesn't have that kind of room, they were originally planned to be forced into a seperate hall.  It took years of civil rights protests and forced desegregation to make our ancestors change their minds.  Now, it's just an accepted fact that people can't be restricted from public areas or denied services."

"It sounds like that was a difficult situation for everyone involved, especially if having the ability was truly such a burden on the individuals with the ability even without the social effects. Unfortunately, I think it is probably unwise to draw parallels between our systems and persecuted minorities. I've learned the hard way that most peoples are unsympathetic to the hardship of being cut off from the technological parts of ourselves that their own society is not accustomed to..."

Madoka pauses as she has an awful thought.

"Um. I hesitate to suggest this; it is almost certainly not commensurate or fair. But how might your people react if asked to imagine meeting a society that was horrified at the idea of... of hive minds. Because they've been horribly abused by a hive mind and overgeneralized. And consider human-daemon pairs to be hive minds, and consider your bond an... an on-going human rights violation..."

It only now occurs to Verity that Madoka might be much older than she looks.

"No one would be eager to emigrate there," she considers.  It sounds like a decent analogy to her.  "They'd be worried that the other group would show up and try to do something to force people to accept their 'help' or punish them for being born with two bodies.  Probably wind up polarized into pro-hive-mind in general, accepting immigrants from that society who want to develop artificial hive minds, even though we don't have any prior consensus on hive minds and I think if we ran into a hive mind first we might have wound up the other way.  Differences being magnified, and all.  We only spend about as much time on information safety as fire safety, yet I've had multiple conversations here about privacy and none about how much we agree that being on fire is bad.

"As for our actual difference... after thinking about it for a while, I've been thinking of my discomfort with being recorded as an issue with me rather than with the system.  Something that I'll have to adapt to, and haven't yet.  Though, other people aren't going to necessarily think that.  Many will consider their opinions to be objectively correct and mass surveillance to be a problem.  I'd expect most will want to live on their own planet outside of your range, like I said, and offer immigration to anyone fleeing from it.  Hopefully whatever polarization happens won't erode the exceptions protecting daemons with abusable abilities.  Though, if the system really is unhackable and not sapient and not a privacy issue as claimed, once our programmers get a good look at it, it probably won't be an issue for that long.

"Though, the talk of empathic daemons did remind me of someone.  If he were here, he'd probably mention that, since the problem is people's perceptions, making a huge deal out of avoiding putting the ships in range to be recorded would probably make people more leery of it.  It would imply that it is something to be concerned about.  Which," she tries to think.  "Which is just another complication I have no idea how to deal with.  There's a reason I wasn't happy with being expected to lead people."

"We could simply not tell them," Homura suggests blandly. "Until after we deliver them to their new planet."

Someone had to say it.

"That could work, if you can do it quickly.  An hour or two isn't going to be worse than five seconds, and that's unavoidable.

"So, a plan might be to find them, immediately go back for a tow ship if needed, then drag them into orbit of some out-of-the-way planet.  While doing that, we can ask for someone who can be a diplomat, a rotom, and a few skilled programmers.  The gathered team and the Mononoke can go back to your territories where people are already under the system regardless.  

"I could stay there for a while, if you think that's useful, and tell them about other things while the diplomats are with you.  I wouldn't mind a few more years of fleet tech as long as we eventually either determine that your system is safe or your side invents a shuttle that doesn't bring your system along, or limits it to a reasonably short range."

"If you think that's best," Madoka says earnestly. "Knowing the possibility, we did come equipped to transport your fleet."

Eelesia feels like she's falling down on the job, that Verity still doesn't understand. It is starting to shake her confidence.

"If you want a shuttle without sensors, we can make one, probably with this cruiser's own fabricators, even. But as I've been telling you, a lack of sensors wouldn't matter. What you're actually asking for is for whoever has contact with your fleet to create a permanent, artificial gap in their history. Even if they go in naked in a pressurized steel can, that segment of their history will be reconstructed afterwards. And it would be horrifying if there were a button we could press to prevent the... healing, of that gap."

"How far would that radius go, regarding things that didn't affect the person being... How does this not count as being able to view the past?  If someone visited us without bringing technology, walked down a street, then returned to your part of space, would the system be able to tell what the strangers in the houses they passed were eating for dinner that night?"

"It takes what I think you would consider a shockingly small amount of data to accurately extrapolate events on the level of human perception. That's vastly less fidelity than knowing the complete physical state of a past moment in time. And the system certainly wouldn't be able to tell what those strangers were having for dinner immediately. It's in theory possible that it might not ever derive that particular detail. There is just, by design, no way to promise or ensure that it won't, because the power to tamper with history is far too easy to abuse for it to be allowed to exist."

"I agree with that when it comes to large-scale history.  A great deal of our history would have been easier if knowledge couldn't be lost or rewritten by later groups, and I'm entirely for the preservation of that sort of information.  Information intentionally recorded and made public as news.  We make a distinction between historical fact worth putting into textbooks and which shoe someone puts on first that you still don't seem to understand, and we don't have the same distinction between something being accessible from the internet and being publically accessible to everyone.  Again, it's going to feel to everyone in the fleet like you're going to make recordings of every person inside of their own homes - while they're bathing, sleeping, dressing - and publish it to everyone. 

"You also can't promise or guarantee that the system is entirely unhackable, because you aren't at the end of all technology that can possibly exist.  There's an effectively-infinite amount of time and space to discover or invent things in.  Even if rotom can't do it, something else one day will.   The benefits probably outweigh the costs, but not everyone is going to be swayed by logic.

"At least deriving the gap requires physical information that leaves the houses, which means it's theoretically actionable against with soundproofing, air filters, and other security.  It would mean we could have some level of contact, enough that people from one side who want to move to the other can do so, instead of needing everyone to immediately pick whether to join or leave, and leave anyone who doesn't want to be watched on their own planet never to be seen again, or drag people against their will into somewhere they'd be miserable.  Even if they'd be happier overall, they are - most of them - adults, who should be allowed to make choices even if they're not logical."

"We'd never dream of refusing an individual's right to choose," Madoka affirms. "And we will do our best to provide the information and the means to make that choice meaningful, independent of any ongoing contact. Unfortunately, that is the best I can honestly promise."

"You could also say the same thing about the universe itself. If true post-cognition is possible even in theory---and even if it isn't I'm sure there're exogenous past-watchers out there somewhere---then the very fabric of reality is constantly recording every instant of existence and is vulnerable to hacking and no one in the history of life has ever had the faintest shred of privacy, technology or no technology."

"True.  Then I guess we'll just have to deal with the things we can deal with as they come up."

Araeneve expands on that, finally speaking after having stayed silent for a while.  "Hypothetical distant or far-future people feels less threatening.  It's not just them knowing, but the chance of the information being used to hurt us."

"I honestly predict that the chance of exogenous past-watchers hurting you with private information is higher than the chance of a malicious actor from your civilization 'hacking' the Administration. My point was that the universe itself is easier to hack than our systems are, and has none of the safeguards against misuse."

"And my point was that there's a difference between something actually being true and people believing in it being true or acting like it's true.  People not being reasonable should be taken into account.  It's one of the weaknesses of a democracy.  A good explanation can help, but... I think that might need to wait on the fleet engineers taking a look at it and making a report.  No offense, but you seem to believe too axiomatically that it's good to come up with explanations that anyone will find convincing."

Well, yes, when she puts it like that...

"None taken."

Madoka pats Eelesia's shoulder.

"Verity, the planet your fleet is already heading toward. How much do you know about it?"

"As much as anyone on the fleet does," she says, then starts to explain.  Much of it is what she'd already put on the star chart.  That she isn't going to spend her entire lifespan unable to reach it has gotten rid of her usual bitterness towards the subject.  

"There are four planets in the system.  Only one is habitable straight-off, and the other rocky planet has large quantities of ice.  No moons on either, though both gas giants have several.  Similar day cycles and year lengths to what they use on the fleet, only 15 minutes shorter per day and 7 day longer years, and gravity that is 94% of the fleet's.  Also the gravity here," she says, then rethinks.  "Assuming that there isn't some kind of personalized gravity thing that's automatically adjusting to what people are used to, or something."  She trails off, not sure what is relevant.

"The cabin gravity is passive; it's not an active system. Safer that way if the cruiser takes significant damage."