"Unfortunately I care a lot about freedom of the press so your venture capitalists would have a very hard time convincing me I'd like it there."

"We'd - no.  I was going to say, we'd obviously build an experimental region that was based on your whole world as much as possible, to observe what went on when all your preferred changes were tried simultaneously, in case there was a great synergy that local experiments would never hill-climb for us.  But if you can run non-magical experiments on genetics that cause mass civilian casualties that made your civilization completely give up on awareness of or influence over its own population genetics... maybe we really wouldn't try it your way, even in a small region.  What happened, exactly?  I'm starting to feel genuinely concerned about whether anything I might do is liable to blow up something I didn't understand and kill a hundred thousand people."

"Somebody thought some particular groups of other people were genetically inferior and decided to round up and murder as many of them as possible and some other people objected and there was a war. Is the extreme oversimplification of World War II. You are - I'd say you aren't going to do it by accident but I actually think it's really likely that what your history screening is covering up is lots of genocide much like that one of whoever wouldn't go along with your metaculture so maybe you are at some risk of doing it yourself."

"That contradicts theorems about how dignified people do things and therefore we would not do that and your world is VERY VERY DISTURBING and you should be more interested in fixing it and something is probably messing with your mind to make you less interested in fixing it."

"You don't think your secret censored history contains a genocide because it wouldn't be dignified?"

"Three-year-olds don't end up that far off from a multiagent-optimal frontier!  I know this because I was three years old and I never genocided anybody at all!"

"Congratulations, Earth three year old don't genocide people either!"

"Good!  We're making progress.  What is the earliest point at which your people start committing genocides?  One of the educational processes between age three and that is going wrong."

"Thellim, we aren't a monoculture, there is not a specific set of educational processes to intervene on."

"Perhaps, from my perspective, all of your educational processes are broken in very similar ways, but we can start by asking which educational process produces the greatest number of genociders per capita."

"That would be the Nazis and the Soviet Union at three apiece on Wikipedia's list followed by the Ottoman Empire at two but the takeaway lessons there are mostly that fascism and communism are bad... I'm not actually sure what was up with the Ottomans, I haven't read much about them."

"Isabella, you keep saying 'monoculture' but so far as I can tell your alternative is that some of your subcultures raise kids to commit genocides and some don't.  I'm not sure this is a good place to maintain persistent variance inside a civilization."

"I keep saying 'monoculture' because you keep talking like it is possible on your planet for someone to go 'oh, this doesn't look like a good place to maintain persistent variance inside a civilization' and then they alter the entire civilization to patch that and here there is no one who can do that."

"Nobody can produce public goods and there are no coordinative global institutions, yes, I noticed.  The reason why this worries me is not that I think this is a thing normal humans do without magic, it's a thing I can prove that general agents with intelligence do without magic."

Isabella snorts.

They board the subway. Isabella gestures at her cane and gets someone to yield their seat for her.

"All of these people are going to roughly the same place we are, to the point we need a long train of containers just for everybody making this trip...?  This isn't an anomaly the same way as eclipses, but I suspect something in the back of my mind is guessing some number wrong by four orders of magnitude, or has some other mistaken assumption."

"Uh, New York City has about eight million people in it, many people do not have cars for reasons aforementioned so the subway's popular."

"The Great City is larger than that, but I don't think it literally ends up with two points such that you fill six containers densely full of people and move them all between those same two points..."

"Oh! No, there are lots of subway lines and stops." She can get a map on her phone and show her. "We're here and we're going here."

"Ohhh, that makes more sense.  ...I wonder if there's a bunch of equally small details I could learn and then everything else would make equally much sense.  It seems like that is a kind of experience somebody should expect to have when transported to another world, even though fiction novels couldn't pull it off convincingly."

"Maybe? I guess we'll see. I live half a block from this station and then I can either check you into a hotel or you can crash on my couch, your pick."

"I defer to you on the topic due to your greater information; for myself, I prefer WHICHEVER OPTION IS LESS NOISY WHILE TRYING TO SLEEP.  SPEAKING OF WHICH, YOUR CIVILIZATION SEEMS TO HAVE NOT DEVELOPED NOISE-SHIELDING ON SUBWAYS."

[That's true, we haven't, do you know how to manufacture it or anything?]

[Not personally, but I don't think it was a big tech bottleneck so if you offer a big prize for effective sound-shielding you should get the tech quickly enough?  But Jackson and Brian know how to cook better food than airlines serve and the airplane food was still terrible, so I suspect that there's that deeper problem again.  Oh, I personally know how to design better chairs than you have in airports.  Or at least I know what they're supposed to look like and feel like externally.]