"Yeah, there's other patients in my same boat, I play cards with Gina when we're both up to it. We had a bridge group but Don got better, went with his Anstol up to do a space job since he was legally dead."

"Was there anyone who had mixed feelings about getting a Yeerk back?"

"I mean, it's how you get out of the hospital, because security," she says, rolling her eyes. "Don said 'there goes my peace and quiet' once? Uh, I think that they might not, you know, bother with the hospital for anyone who'd rather be dead."

"Yeah, that is what I figured. Did you personally feel like your continued access to cancer care depended on you keeping Enstat happy with you and on wanting to have her back in your head?"

"I guess? I don't know, it's sort of like 'are you aware that not having your children taken away by child protective services is dependent on keeping them fed and clothed', which is technically true but not how I thought about having kids."

"That makes sense. If you couldn't have Enstat back for some reason - you can, just, we're also trying to think about policies for lots of other situations - would you want a different Yeerk, or would you want to go back to your normal life?"

"Getting used to a new one would be hard. Also explaining a new one would be harder? With her I can be like 'Joey, I want you to meet Enstat, she got me talking to you again', with some other Yeerk it'd be 'Joey, this is Osset, the bodysnatching alien I have invited to bodysnatch me, why you ask, uh, I don't know'."

He nods. "If instead of Enstat coming back into your head we got her her own human body, and you two could be friends who had separate bodies, would that be an improvement?"

"It'd be better than just writing letters but Emril over there was her voice on the phone for me and it wasn't, you know, what I'm used to. I guess I might get used to it."

Nod. "It seems like both of you - made the best of a really bad situation." And a good thing since the Yeerks would obviously have summarily executed her once she became a worse bet if she wasn't compliant enough, and she knows that, but she doesn't think much about it, which is hard to fathom. "If we had somehow gotten here ten years ago before the Yeerks started kidnapping everybody, how would you have wanted us to set things up, would you have wanted us to set them up so you met her somehow?"

"I'm not sure I would have known a Yeerk would be good for me? But they have speculative ad campaigns, which might work for some people."

"What do you think made you the kind of person that a Yeerk would be good for?" (It's the spending years unable to speak to anyone but your captor, that's his guess.)

"Yeerks are good at - do you know how sometimes there's a thing and it will take five minutes but you have been putting it off for weeks and you regret everything about your life that has led to this five minute task and you'd rather jump off a cliff into the sea than do it and also the whole time you're telling yourself it will literally take five mintues if you just do it and then you can go on with your life -"

"- not exactly? It might be a human thing." 

"Oh. Well, it's a human thing and Yeerks do those in five minutes."

"I see. 

When you stopped having a Yeerk in you, was it a difficult transition back? We have run into people who couldn't remember how to walk, or make decisions about their own lives, because they'd spent so long just watching..."

"Uh, mostly I kept accidentally trying to talk to her and then she didn't say anything because she wasn't there. I could walk and talk and make medical decisions, I wasn't making a lot of other ones."

"Huh, I wonder what predicts the difference there. Did any of your friends at the hospital mention having trouble?"

"Gina said she used to space out when Tashham ate because she has some thing where she doesn't like to think about eating, and she found it pretty unpleasant to suddenly have to do that by herself? It can't really have helped that it was hospital food and she was sick though."

He nods. 

"Okay. There's a lot of negotiating going on right now, with the end of the war, so I don't know how fast we'll sort everything out. We want to make sure that having a Yeerk for decades doesn't degrade a person's capabilities too much, and ideally figure out how to predict that so we know who is at risk of it. And we want to make sure that anyone who made friends with their Yeerk because it was a little better than fighting all the time, but much worse than living their own free life, doesn't end up stuck with a Yeerk now that a free life is an option again. And we want to make sure we have a good plan for if, uh, Yeerk friendships end and someone decides they want their head to themselves. But we - want you to get to decide your own life, from here on out, so if you want Enstat in your life we'll figure out a safe way for it to work, within the next couple of months. ...also the U.S. government may want laws of its own about this and I don't know what they will be but I will try to make the case for laws that achieve those same things. If you think of anything else we should know, there are some people here who can pass messages to me, and some people who can message Enstat, too, if you want to talk to her about all this."

"They have to go swim in the Pool every three days anyway, that's a lot of chances to make sure the host wants them back. ...you're not much like Enstat thought Andalites were like."

"We don't want to let Yeerks enslave everybody in the galaxy but - we were their friends and allies, once, before that started. We taught them to fly."

"...yeah, the history book for baby Yeerks has that part, but, uh..."

"History book for baby Yeerks?"

"Yeah - they have writing kind of but it's this weird electrical thing, Enstat had to translate it from memory, but there's a history book for baby Yeerks about how Andalites showed up and taught them stuff but none of them wanted to be hosts and when the Yeerks said they'd go look for people who did want that the Andalites started shooting."