[I don't know in that much detail why computing progress wasn't faster?  I have a general impression that it's hard to make the features smaller because you need higher and higher frequencies of light to carve smaller and smaller features into silicon.  Which seems like the sort of thing where one mage could help build the machine you need to build all the computer chips, instead of needing a mage to make every chip.  You might not even notice every time your society jumps a hurdle where it only takes one mage and our society is just stuck in that spot for another thirty years.  And... I guess it's possible that there are natural events that connect two universes and then they know how to reach back to each other?  But dath ilan seemed to occupy a universe that was very - mathematically simple, at its core, so far as we could ever tell - and there was no room in the character of reality for things like eclipsed-produced psions and mages.  Your world seems like the sort where the rules allow for people like me to materialize; I don't think dath ilan's rules allow for me to go back.  Maybe you could materialize more dath ilan people here, if they're about to otherwise die and have their brains not suspended.  I'm curious about what your world does for immortality - we're just putting cryoprotectant into people and vitrifying their heads, so we can bring them back later when we have the tech - but feel free not to answer if it's liable to take a lot of thinking on my end, I shouldn't be trying to absorb everything at all at once.]

[Mages can do de-aging, on top of healing in general. The vitrifying thing isn't popular. Are you saying you don't want to be brought home, if someone susses it out?]

[I'm not that much of a wuss!  I'm moderately upset and overwhelmed, that's not the same as traveling to an entire new world and having no thoughts on my mind except running back home without looking at anything or trying to help with anything!  I don't think you can get me home.  And if you can open two-way communications then at least my Civilization - of which I am part - will consider that there's much higher priorities than my going back home.  But if at some point there's cheap-enough travel without every transport costing millions, I'll decide then which Civilization suits me best, and in time of course there'll just be one Civilization with two worlds.]

[Well, I guess you could tell me about some people from back home and I can try to stretch my telepathy that way, might be faster than a teleporter doing it.]

This thought had just straight-up not occurred to Thellim at all.  You can't have brainvoices suddenly appearing in dath ilan.  Dath ilan is normal.  Dath ilan is real.  The Brainvoice's suggestion sounds as unlikely as taking a pamphlet describing something really heavy, and heaving it through a reinforced-glass window.

Naturally, this impossible suggestion should be tested immediately.

[Let's try for my mother!  Her name is Helorm, she raised three children of whom I was second, and when my little sister was full-time-employed and career-ascendant, she mostly-retired and changed her primary-civil-allegiance to the Grandmother Faction, though my older sister didn't have her first children until a few years after.  She's definitely on the More-Chaos side of the Law-Versus-Chaos-Tradeoff in Civilization and always encouraged me to defy parental authority more often, especially my father's.  Helorm's taste in fiction runs to romance-entrepreneurial novels where a female venture capitalist gets simultaneously courted for romance and capital by three glamorous inventors but the incentives are obviously terrible and only one of them is really being honest.  Actually hold on, I should ask you what information you actually need instead of babbling at you.]

[If you can draw a picture would be ideal, that's what Jackson did so I could talk to you, but information that is more like her name and less like her romance novel preferences is good - do you only do one name to a customer over there?]

[I mean, some people have pseudonyms and that's fine so long as they're not using them for criminal activities, but I don't think that's what you mean?  Helorm is the 3,813,004,102nd person born since they started counting births, and that number is unique to her.  Did you just give people additional names so that the combined string of names became unique, instead of them having one unique name that would be way too long?  That's... actually quite clever, I don't know if it's better but I think I like it.]

[The combinations of names actually aren't all unique either, but we have family names and most people who speak English have middle names. - I haven't introduced myself, I'm Isabella. Isabella Marie Swan, while we're on the topic of multiple names.]

[Are there a lot of Isabella Marie Swans out there?]

[I don't know but there are other Isabella Swans. I'm the one that comes up if you search online though.]

Huh.  Thellim isn't quite sure what this system is meant to do or even if Isabella's Civilization is the sort where the systems do things but she doesn't want to inquire right now, that seems like the more tiring sort of conversation.  [What else can I potentially tell you about my mother, if her birth number isn't enough?]

[What does she look like, how old is she...]

Thellim is not an artist and not a deeply visual person, but she will hesitantly attempt to describe her mother, along with her mother's corresponding age.

[And if you're from an alternate Earth I guess we don't need to worry about whether the years are the same length.]

[Agreed up to the limits of my total ignorance of everything.]

[All right, I can work on it. Passively, my active work is all on precognitive range right now. Is your planet all - culturally unified?]

[Unified?  You mean a monoculture?  We all try very hard not to have a monoculture.  You can't run experiments if you have a monoculture!  Everybody in Civilization understands that.]

[Oh, okay, cool, it's just some of what you say makes it sound like you're all kind of doing one... thing.]

[I'm not sure what you mean, unless the 'one thing' is something like 'professional specialization, finding unoccupied niches that fit our never-before-realized individual combinations of genetic traits, and deliberately creating new variations across regions of the world in order to try doing things different ways in case the baseline of Civilization is doing it wrong'?  We do all breathe oxygen, but we don't have much choice about that.]

[I don't mean breathing oxygen, I mean like you don't have porn on the internet. Do you have like, a bunch of internets, and the one you're supposed to use is doing a no-porn experiment?]

[It would be very much in keeping with Civilization if there's an experimental region that's making porn just to see what happens!  It wouldn't go on the main Net but I could see them having a subnet.]

[Okay, then to rephrase, the part I'm confused about is the part where having porn is the experiment and not the default. As an example, not specifically about porn.]

[I expect that at some point in our past, maybe even after the screening-off point in which case I could look it up if I was on the Network, somebody ran a regionalized experiment to see what happened when people matured and lived with access to the more obvious kinds of porn to manufacture, and Civilization is on the no-porn baseline because the results looked worse.  It's obviously easier to run the experiment if the Network has no porn on it to start with, but we wouldn't persistently keep all of Civilization in that state just because it made some experiments easier.  We're not science maniacs.]

[You misunderstand. Before anyone started censoring anything why wasn't there any porn? We don't have a screening-off point, and I read a lot of random encyclopedia pages because I have an eidetic memory, so I happen to know that we have artifacts from before the invention of writing that are porn. Pottery and graffiti and stuff. It's not on the list of human universals, but it's old, and appeared all over the world before anyone was inventing fancy collectivist reasons to prohibit it. How was it removed?]

Thellim is feeling uneasy about where this conversation is heading.  [So it sounds like your civilization either - never had the same problem ours had, or never noticed the problem - and I'm a little worried about whether I should be saying anything about this to you - but when we buried all records of our past in a safe archive where maybe someday the future could find them again, created a new planetary language, rewrote all the books, and then, two generations later, did it all again - I expect that any lingering porn wouldn't have made it through the filter?  It would have been very surprising if it did.]