Oh.  Apparently 'dom' and 'sub' are actually short for "dominant" and "submissive".

Is this actually as bad as it sounds from the words?  Maybe she should just read the science paper she found before panicking.

This is very rapidly heading in a direction that is very not good.

The science paper seems to be talking about ways that 'dom' and 'sub' key into evolutionarily older adaptations and it's confirming in passing that the shift in sexuality is recent, though it frames it as an insight into something that was always true, but there's - there's hints of - things worse than dominants giving orders and submissives taking them - of course this world would somehow manage to invent something worse than masculinity and feminity to replace it -

Stop.  Deep breaths.  She's not quite distressed enough to fall back on solid-core reasoning, but she is in literally another dimension and needs to be careful about jumping to conclusions.  All her predictions have been horrible and that's not a good sign for her models being real.  She is not necessarily the protagonist who got transported into a broken world in need of fixing through the power of clear thinking and good coordination; she may be in a cautionary tale about protagonists who think they know what needs doing when they really, really don't.  Jackson didn't look unhappy or scared of Brian.

Of course that could be because Jackson wound up with an unusually nice dominant, or because that was a good day in that household when Jackson didn't get any horrible orders - for that matter, there's some of the less fun to think about behavioral-econ experiments, the ones where the experimenters didn't push nearly as far as it looked like they could have, for ethical reasons, but which were awfully suggestive about what people might end up being happy to get by contrast with much worse deals they could have received -

Maybe Jackson seemed happy because he was getting fed that day.

Maybe she's making things up that completely fail to be true.

She needs to figure out - a Google query, a Wikipedia keyword - and screw making predictions in advance - but her System 1 seems to be frantically scrambling even as her System 2 yells at it to calm down and she can't figure out what to query to figure out which kind of protagonist she is, whether this is a horror-world or if she's just failing to understand a coherent set of customs that make moral sense once they're explained, Isabella thought that "submissives" liked taking orders, but of course Isabella is a dom and nobody in this world is going to have the tiniest training against self-serving beliefs because you have to think about children's education to do that -

What happens when a submissive decides he doesn't want to submit - when a submissive refuses a dominant's order?  Maybe there's some more incisive question that would separate the ethical possibilities, but right now Thellim's System 1 is scrambling and she just types in the first Network query she can think of:

What happens to subs who are disobedient?

There's - there's a wall of text excerpted from links and awful words jump out like punishment and more awful phrases like fun punishments for your sub but maybe it's just extra homework she has to not panic until she's sure, and unknown terms like "safeword" that don't translate but sound vaguely reassuring to whatever probable-dom put this language in her head, Thellim's eyes scan over fragmented sentences she doesn't understand but that definitely aren't reassuring her, and then stops at a link that promises to show a video of what happens to disobedient subs and video sounds easier to understand than the excerpts of sentences Google is showing her so Thellim clicks through.

no no no NO NO NO she doesn't want to be here she doesn't want to be in this horrorworld she doesn't want that to happen to her no no what if Isabella thinks Thellim is a sub is the person in this video rescuable no they have to be dead by now nobody could withstand that kind of punishment for long without dying

Core reasoning patterns fallback.

The video is hurting her.  It needs to be turned off.

It is now permanently seared into her memory.

She needs to think about other things anyways.

One of the primary core reasoning patterns says not to kill yourself.  This potentially needs to be adapted to circumstances.  What she saw in that video looked a lot worse than death and probably ended in death anyways.  Killing herself is a potentially reasonable strategy if her chances of ending up like that otherwise look high enough.

Alternatively, she could try to stay here and fix this broken world, and risk ending up like that herself.

That should have been a very fast decision, shouldn't it?  The correct course of action is that she's supposed to fix this world, right?  Thellim is one person.  The number of disobedient submissives being punished right now is much larger than that.  Why is this decision hard?

It's sad.  Shameful.  Thellim thought she was more of a, protagonist, than this.

Could she be, misinterpreting, somehow?  Or missing background information?  Is there an argument she's missing for why that was, in fact, a perfectly reasonable and ethical thing to do to somebody?

It's that last thought, in the end, that manages to light a tiny spark of deep, bone-searing anger inside her.

Deep.  Fucking.  Breaths.

No.  No, there CANNOT be some unknown fact or unseen line of inference which justifies this.  This is a not a novel whose elaborate lesson will turn out to be about the importance of perspective-taking and appreciating that other people may have unseen knowledge and arguments that you failed to imagine and which paints them in a much better light than you first thought.  If this were a novel, which nobody would ever buy, it would be a novel whose lesson was that there are SOME THINGS WHERE YOU DON'T HAVE TO WONDER IF THERE'S A JUSTIFICATION FOR THEM AND YOU CAN AND SHOULD BECOME UPSET WITHOUT FURTHER HESITATION.

She has just seen a woman restrained so that she can't get away, can't even move, as one man - who had a - that he was using on her unprotected - while another man was violating her - you do not get to reveal hidden arguments why that is acceptable to do to anyone under any circumstances ever.  Nobody, not even somebody who'd wantonly murdered a city, not even somebody who'd done that to someone else.  It would be a case of something where the author shouldn't even put it into the story's worldbuilding, because even as an example of evil it would traumatize the readers and numb their moral sensibilities to saner sins, and if there was the slightest hint that the author thought it could even possibly maybe be okay, if it looked like the sequel was being set up to reveal a clever argument for why this was a perfectly okay thing to have happen in society, the correct coordinated response would be to ban the book.  You do not get to put that into your fun thought experiment for what a different possible society could maybe think was okay.

But she doesn't - doesn't want that - to happen to her.  She really doesn't want that.  To die.  Like that.  Flinging herself off an apartment balcony before it can happen seems like a perfectly reasonable strategic response.

It has not been shown that this outcome is a high probability.

By the time it looks like a high probability it may be too late to commit suicide.

...and planning to do that could mean that Isabella's precog layer notices Thellim missing her next braincall check which causes Isabella to show up now.

...and successfully committing suicide could just mean that Thellim ends up in a worse horrorworld next time.

It's weird how that final thought, the sheer unfairness of it, causes something in Thellim to snap and just like that she's thinking again because the sheer insanely over-the-top unfairness of the situation has amplified her emotion of meta-level annoyance to the point where it is capable of fueling meta-level cognition.

She'll have to think this through in more detail later, but it does not actually appear like she is being given a choice about whether to confront the horror of this world, what with suicide being difficult because of psionics and not necessarily helpful even it worked.