"The problem isn't, 'she copies your gun'. The problem is, 'she sings that the gun is not real into everybody's heads, and they remember that, and not all of them are trustworthy'."

"...she can do that? Sing information into people's heads?"

"I don't know, but I don't think it's a risk you should take at least until you've killed both of the others."

"I mean, unless you've been under the influence before you've probably got uncontaminated judgment and my main advantage is conservatism. But neither Leviathan nor Behemoth could nope you as totally and permanently as she could, so you should save her for last."

"Well I've never been anywhere near the Simurgh so probably not, but you never know, maybe this is a long con and she actually can affect everyone everywhere and the song is just a decoy. If anyone would do something as ridiculously convoluted as that, it's the Simurgh."

"If that's how she works maybe I'm not immune to her after all and she's setting me up, but at a certain point we'll be totally paralyzed if we don't make certain baseline assumptions."

"Yeah, it was mostly wild speculation, I'm just staying as far away from her as I possibly can."

"And keep your guns out of her way until it's worth gambling your whole powerset on it."

"Right."

"Maybe? I mean, I think other people paying attention to my stuff doesn't make it not disappear—unless it does. I'm not sure how to test that without revealing my secret weakness, though."

"When you trusted the robot to bleep at you in response to the duck, you got the duck to appear. If a robot would reliably inform you of what was and was not sticking around, you'd have feedback on it even if there was lots of it and some of it was behind you, no?"

"Yeah, I guess, but I still have limited human attentional capacity, if there was so much stuff around that I couldn't keep track of the bleeps that'd probably be a problem."

"And people who aren't me don't usually get along really well with my tech anyway, I'm just wondering theoretically, but you have a point."

"And in any case there's a truly ludicrous number of buoys around right now, I think on a typical situation I won't be running into these limits. My power seems to leave me some leeway between my not paying attention to a thing and it making that thing go away, namely the half-an-hour thing, though that leeway seems to get shorter as I make more stuff."

Nod.

"You were gonna tell me when my duck disappeared, right?"

"I waited ninety seconds, remember? We were busy with the buoys."

"No, I mean, the new duck. You're gonna tell me when it goes poof."

"Oh. Well, the robot would probably bleep even if I forgot since that was the last thing it was suggested that it do, but yes."

"Can you tell it not to bleep? I have the impression that if you tell it to bleep then the duck won't disappear ever."

"You heard them," Lorica tells the bot.

"Okay, so, in the meantime, what other tests?"

"If you don't have what strictly amounts to a range limit it throws a lot of the original ideas into uselessness. ...But your duplicates have memory. And you could make a lot of those. I wonder if they increase your capacity, or at least don't deplete it?"