[Is there by any chance an early guessing program where some prettier teenagers who'd be more valuable to dominants get told they're probably submissives and then exposed to particular forms of carefully crafted pornography.  Does anybody ever decide to stop being a submissive and what kind of explicit or implicit obstacles do they face in that.]

[...I guess particularly creative child abuse grooming might take that form but otherwise no. And yeah, people sometimes say they're a sub for a while and then decide that actually they need to change their paperwork when they're like seventeen or even early twenties, sometimes even later if they're older people and got wedged into being subs because they're women and grew up when those were more conflated, and they do have to do some annoying bureaucracy and might get weird looks but it's not intentionally difficult or anything.]

[How does 'child abuse grooming' work in your society?]

[...it's not something we are collectively intentionally tolerating, it's just a thing people sometimes do if they want to abuse children, they set them up to be more compliant or less likely to tell people about it or something.]

[Isabella, listen to me.  Your world is not - coherent.  Human beings or general intelligent agents can successfully band together and create 'police forces' that stop horrible things from happening.  Moons don't grant people mage and psion powers.  There is not naturally an enormous class of people who want to be hurt, that is not how evolutionary biology works, organisms do not evolve to want to be damaged.  Airplanes that serve better meals attract more customers, and people who run airplane flights know that, and they put good meals on board in order to attract gainful-trades away from their competitors.  Nothing in your world makes any sense, nothing is at the balancing point of the fitness gradients, and something is preventing the people inside from noticing, and I can see it because I'm not a native.  Have you never read any stories like that?  No, probably you haven't, people here probably aren't allowed to write them.  And I don't know what it feels like from the inside to end up being transformed by lunar forces or whatever into a 'masochist', but from what I saw on the video the pain is still there she was screaming and bleeding and this world is not interestingly different it is broken it is a horror and something has to be done.]

[We have freedom of the press in this country, people can write whatever they want. Do I need to take the rest of the day off to prevent World War III?]

[The moon is not letting you think about it.  Or whatever strange feature of this world allows lunar eclipses to grant powers.  It's just a wild guess but I can see it and I can see you not seeing it.  And I'm going to write up as much of this as I can before the next lunar eclipse hits me in case I can't think about it any more after that.]

[You do not need to take the day off to prevent me from damaging this world.  I don't know how to do that, and would do a great deal more research before considering anything that violated deontology.]

[You can write whatever you want, though I don't think your English install will have given you much of a typing speed. I do not think I'm being prohibited from thinking thoughts, I think I just grew up in a very different situation from you and have different assumptions and expectations, and I would for that reason kind of like more information about what you mean by 'violating deontology' before I decide that I'm definitely not taking the rest of the day off.]

[You've been kind to me.  For today, I won't do anything with the intent of affecting your larger world without checking in with you first, and more likely not at all.  Deontology is complicated, and I'm too worn to explain the details, but I think that much of a promise should let you finish your work without fear.  We do have logical-decision-theory where I come from and I'm not going to break the Algorithm.]

[I... don't know what that last sentence means but okay.]

[I'm almost afraid to ask what you have instead, but that is a surprisingly good candidate for being a large part of the problem around here.  If your reality-layer has anyone who is good at math or economics I'd expect them to be able to recognize the importance very quickly.]

[Maybe it's just discussed in different terms. I've only taken a couple econ classes.]

[You can't do econ without logical-decision-theory as the base.  Or at least not from first principles; I suppose you could arbitrarily assume an infinite set of assumptions that agents are making about other agents' assumptions.  If it'd been invented, you'd know.]

[I suppose you can at some point describe it and we can see if I recognize it by some other name. We do have economics as a field.]

[You've got a field that corresponds to whatever you hear when I think the word 'economics', yes.  It remains to be seen how well isomorphisms of subject matters commute with translations of braintalk concepts.]

[Fair enough, I guess. You could read the Wikipedia page on econ if you like.]

[I will be reading about a lot of things, rest assured.]

Among Thellim's first thoughts, now that she's thinking again, is that maybe she can figure out how to present as some kind of superdominant - a third sex in the system, one that makes all the current dominants want to obey her.  This shouldn't be easy if this world is in a nearly-inexploitable-equilibrium, but that's just what so many visible features aren't in.  Maybe nobody here can imagine that possibility without the moon driving them mad, for the same reason they can't think about optimizing heritable traits without running amok with kitchen knives.

Having the dominants obey her wouldn't actually solve the problem where the moon is altering half the population to seek out painful experiences.  But it would be a start on whatever actually needs doing.

Are the children saner before they go through their eclipses?  It's funny to think of taking over this world with a faction of eleven-year-olds but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea.  Thellim might not have been on the competitive frontier of adulthood at age eleven, but she could still perform gainful labor, and might have been able to do all sorts of jobs if adults hadn't been doing them already.

[Okay. I'm sorry you found porn and had a crisis. You could turn on safe search in the Google settings but it's not perfect. I'm about to go back to work in a minute, anything else you want to cover first?]

[I think I may just need to - read more.  Get more data until a pattern emerges and things start making sense and my predictions start coming true.  I'm not looking forward to it, but I think it's what I have to do.  After a snack.]

[Sure. Maybe I should recommend you fiction or something so you can see more of the - moving parts of the world - but later. Bye!]

Snacks available in Isabella's apartment include:

- potato chips
- peanut butter pretzels
- trail mix
- oreos
- parmesan crisps
- apples
- bananas
- string cheese
- seedy crackers
- guacamole
- seven layer dip

Thellim tries samples of everything that looks unfamiliar - meaning everything except the trail mix and apples - and proceeds to eat way too much of everything except bananas, before she realizes that Earth's economy got her while she was distracted.

All right, back to work.  She doesn't really - want to - but she has to.  It's just occurred to Thellim that she herself may only have months remaining before her "nearest lunar eclipse to twelfth birthday" hits her and possibly turns her into a submissive.  She might have only that long to find a solution on at least an individual level, and if she can't find one, she would have to - pretty seriously reconsider suicide again.  Maybe she just drew an unusually bad world to end up in on her first draw from a permadeath roulette.

Assuming, once again, that all her wild theorizing is correct at all.

If their first lunar eclipse has substantial effects on kids not being turned into mages and psions, somebody ought to have studied that, right?  Somebody?  Please?

Not quite tracking the distinction between the way she's thinking about Earth herself, versus the way Isabella talks about Earth, the first thing that Thellim types into Google is "effect of moon on personality".

Isabella calls her back a bit later. [Having eleveneses, how are you doing?]

[So I know you don't do this here - I know you don't, because I searched it - but in dath ilan we get administered temporary-mind-affecting-drugs once our brains have stabilized enough to be safe to poke a bit, so we can learn what it's like if our brain starts to malfunction and operate safely inside it.  We're also trained to recognize common syndromes of insanity like psychosis, both in ourselves and in others.]

[I tried looking up what your world knows, if anything, about the effect of the moon on personality.  I found a... fascinating... Network repository that I've been reading through for the last while.  It turns out there's a whole suite of effects of planetary bodies on personality, besides just lunar eclipses - mostly having to do with the exact position of planets at people's time of birth, or possibly conception.  However, natives of this world can't think about that subject without the underlying magic of this world rendering them locally insane.  They can think about it at all, and notice the effects of the planets, but not think - validly.  I'm concerned that you won't and possibly can't believe me, and the syndrome does not look exactly like psychosis or any single drug I've experienced.  But I am very sure that any native of Earth who tries to think about the subject matter you call 'astrology' gets hit by the equivalent of a medium-strength mind-affecting-drug.]

[...okay, so, uh, astrology is... fake. I am not actually sure how to convince you that I can think about it and have concluded reasonably that it's fake, do you have an idea?]