"Like, eating meat or - I mean, centrally, I mean...

"You have at some recent points seemed really upset, and - I don't want to - be a part of that...  Even p - peripherally, or passively..."

"Well, inconveniently I'm upset about a thing I did in the past and a thing that you in a radically different mental state might decide in the future and neither of us has retrocausality or precog powers."

"Do you want me to try and model what I would think about stuff if all this somehow all turned out to be real?"

"...sure."

"Okay, um....

"I'm not sure I can do it right with you, so maybe I'll imagine how I would feel if I had actually had sex with Maria Rose?"

"The cases seem to me pretty importantly different in several ways but maybe it'd still be informative."

"If I'd... had some reasonable-seeming kind of sex with her, like... I went down on her and was only a normal amount of bad at it, because it's - I blew a trans guy once and maybe it's somehow close enough, or something, and she doesn't notice that I couldn't get hard and just thinks I'm - being a gentleman, or something..."

"Among the differences, though probably not top three..."

"...What?"

"Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, it's just - disanalogous for the gender situation among others."

"It doesn't really seem like you would believe 'I liked the sex and think I would probably keep liking having done it except that it seems to be causing you severe emotional pain'."

"It's not nothing! It's better than many possible reactions! I just don't know it'll persist and, even if it does, I did not have a lucidly composed advance directive about having sex with you while you didn't think I existed, and knew you were not in your right mind, and went ahead anyway."

"Sure.  But if I'm trying to figure out whether - my voice is going to call a scandal against you, then I should be imagining sex I didn't want to have."

"...not necessarily? In practice maybe. But you could very reasonably take issue with the fact that you were in a vulnerable position even if it worked out luckily. Like... if a teenager intentionally hooks up with a musician they’re into they could want it at the time but later go, 'that actually should not have happened, they should have turned me down, they should’ve looked at my ID'."

"Maybe this whole idea is dumb."

"Modeling your awakened self? You can skip it."

"Okay."  Julien is just gonna sit here for a minute vividly imagining sex he doesn't want to have, then.  Apparently.  And occasionally sniffling.

Maybe he would have been able to get hard, either because he's a freak or because he's in a simulation meant to - if not torture him then clearly at least torment him.  And then the fact that he hadn't tried to arrange for there to be condoms, on account of how he was trying to draw as little attention to that possibility as he could, would become terrifyingly relevant, and -

He still doesn't think he would want to ruin Maria Rose's life over this.  Even though she would have smelled crushingly flowery the whole time.

(This is dumb, and not helping.)

But then, he'd approached her and tried to pass for normal, which is not really the same thing as begging someone to have mercy on you with their healing dick healing??  Your dick, with - this is also dumb.

It was so scary when she kicked him out.  If he imagines that all that danger was fake, not only in that this simulation does not really seem into dropping other shoes rather than holding them all over his head like some fucked-up centipedal sword of Damocles, but in his head entirely, no simulation at all...

The fear remains.  It's impossible to imagine wanting to trade the feeling of control and relative security that comes with going along with the narrative laid out for him for even - not having to do that - and impossible to resent someone who gave that to him.

This is probably a failure of modeling, and he shouldn't tell Haru.  He already knew that.  And he already knew trying was dumb, and he couldn't refrain in spite of this, and he's never going to be okay again whether or not this is a simulation which it is.

Hug is ongoing.

Julien has not been getting enough rest and unless prevented will cry himself to sleep in the hug.

That's fine. And lets Haru maneuver for more notebooking, once he's soundly enough asleep.

The sleep is rather fitful.  But if 'soundly enough' is relative, there can still be room for notebooking.

There's lots to write. He has to work out a principled response to blackmail, for example, in case Julien does another sudden juke in backlash presentation and tries it for more sex guiding on a "might as well be hanged for a sheep" basis, or, who knows, for hair scritches, backlash is weird and Julien's seems weirder than most, or else for after he's awakened if he decides to take it up then. Also some of the emails about Cricket have been answered, and Clark says that, actually, they'd want him in the Philippines, which isn't as badly off as Indonesia but still takes some DWB assistance and it'd be convenient that he speaks Tagalog.

Epidemiologists are probably never in situations where they believe that because of the unique epidemiological powers of their bodily fluids they had better go ahead and get into the mood for epidemiology-relevant sex acts and then ignore their remaining reservations as interfering with their performance in sexily resolving an epidemic.

Julien wakes with a gasp, sits half up, and sways in place for a moment.