There's a pause, and then the mysterious voice-in-the-head speaks again, now in Baseline:

[Hi, Mom.  I'm not dead.]

"Thellim?"

[You have absolutely no idea how good it is to hear from you again!  And I'm sorry, I literally couldn't contact you earlier.]

"The plane crash.  They took you instead!"

[Much weirder than that.  I think I actually did die and then materialize here.  It is really very odd, though moderately less of an impossibility by local standards than ours.]

"She says she actually did die and then materialized there, which is really very odd but moderately less of an impossibility by their standards than ours.  Thellim, if that's really you, what happened to you after you pressed Start three times?"

[NO!  Mom, this conversation is going to be in all of the historical records!  We are NOT putting in that part for everybody on two planets to read about!  In the name of sapience would you please think before you talk for once!]

"It actually is Thellim," Helorm says, a strange lifting bubbling sense going through her.  She notes absently that she seems to be crying; she doesn't refocus attention to stop the tears, there's other stuff going on.  "Anybody pretending to be Thellim would have given the correct answer, it shouldn't be that hard to find.  Only my real daughter would tell me to shut up."

[Ha ha yes very clever Mom now change the subject.  I can't believe we're talking for the first time in two years after you thought my soul was annihilated and that is the first topic you bring up.]

"On further and deeper reflection, this is not unmixed good news," Helorm says out loud.  The actual implications, if this is reality, have begun to dawn on her.  "Thellim is not who I'd have chosen to make first contact with another civilization."

[MOTHER!]

"And returning to track," says Keeper Derrin.  "Thellim, what's your present situation vis-a-vis mental integrity, alignment with Civilization, and Algorithmic standing?"  The taken dath ilani might lie, of course, or this communication could be manipulated; but that doesn't mean this question's answer is uninformative across all possibility lines.

[This planet is crazy-making in several ways, but I assess my core integrity is intact and I haven't been pushed more than a couple of standard deviations below average sanity.  I know of no important regard in which I disagree with Civilization, as I knew it two years ago, on the key final utilities at stake.  I have not defaced the Algorithm; no near misses, nothing I regarded as a significant temptation on that score.  I have acted as I thought Civilization would wish, as the only finger of dath ilan that could touch this world or help it; I was aware of the financial rewards for doing so, if Civilization could ever be reached again, but that was not the primary reason I did it according to my conscious narrative.]

"Speaking for Civilization, I offer preliminary acknowledgment of your efforts.  Situational report; where are you, what's going on there?"

[Earth is - analysis-resistant.  Extremely hard to compress, for a human mind at my intelligence level with dath-ilan-shaped priors.  I do not have a proper report prepared, Keeper, I did not expect this contact project to ever be successful.  The last time I tried to compose a report was half a year after I arrived.  I was still mostly in a state of shock then. I had not gotten over it and started trying properly to adapt.  My prepared report from then is - too lacking in basic understanding of Earth -]

Helorm exercises a mother's discretion and interrupts after repeating.  [Dear, stop trying to advance-excuse your future failings in front of the Keeper, and just embarrass yourself with your best spontaneous report.  He's probably already looking at your test scores and doesn't expect you to be any smarter than you are.]

[Yes.  Sorry.]

[Earth is weird.  It would be impossible to write fiction for dath ilani using Earth as a setting, because you'd have to interrupt every other paragraph with three pages of backstory about how any specific feature of Earth could possibly end up the way it did.  You get here and you see the people and they look human, and you think you know how a high-tech human civilization is supposed to work, and you're wrong.  It's hitting inside the lower-than-maximum-entropy parts of your probability distribution, doing things you specifically thought couldn't happen.]

[The least expected, most impossible fact about Earth - which has fewer consequences and seems to be overtly responsible for less of the overall weirdness than I first thought on arriving, because this isn't a literary story with a single added impossible premise - is that every person, during the total lunar eclipse falling nearest to their twelfth birthday on either side, has a roughly 1 in 1,000 chance of gaining apparent extraordinary powers.  Some are 'psions' with powers over minds and computers; 'mages' have more material powers.  My native cofounder Isabella is a psion, and practiced up her skills at mental communication until she could sustain this connection to my mother, who I identified to her as best I could.]

[The powers of 'psions' and 'mages' on first manifestation are extremely uncontrolled to start with, lethal to others and often to themselves.  Unless they have consumed nothing containing calories for 48 hours prior, in which case their powers have nothing to fuel them, and can be safely contained.  Their metabolisms otherwise seem to work the same way ours do, including triglyceride stores and glycogen reserves and some people having longer-lasting intestinal digestive processes.  So it's not a matter of energy availability in the bloodstream; the phenomenon literally tracks what they've eaten.]

[Earth's civilization has the eclipses barely under control, using precognitive psions to foresee twelve-year-olds accidentally eating, and so preventing them from smashing cities.  They then use recently-developed virtuality technology to give psions and mages a safe way to get their powers under control.  Mages and psions are now growing more common; but that part is extremely recent, and powers take time and practice to develop and specialize.]

Keeper Derrin is not even trying not to make a horrified face.  He is never going to be imperturbable enough not to react to statements like that.  He doesn't want to be that unperturbed.  Ending up disturbed and indeed antiturbed seems right and proper in this situation.  Even if you blame it all on superintelligences, that doesn't make it sound any more likely even in retrospect.

[The next most critical fact about Earth is that... I register that my native cofounder will probably wish to put this differently, once it's her turn to talk, but still: from a dath ilani perspective their civilization is made entirely out of coordination failure.  Coordination that fails on every scale recursively, where uncoordinated individuals assemble into groups that don't express their preferences, and then those groups also fail to coordinate with each other, forming governments that offend all of their component factions, which governments then close off their borders from other governments.  The entirety of Earth is one gigantic failure fractal.  It's so far below the multi-agent-optimal-boundary, only their professional economists have a five-syllable phrase for describing what a 'Pareto frontier' is, since they've never seen one in real life.  Individuals sort of act in locally optimal equilibrium with their local incentives, but all of the local incentives are weird and insane, meaning that the local best strategy is also insane from any larger perspective.  I cannot overemphasize how much you cannot predict Earth by reasoning that most features will have already been optimized into a not-much-further-improvable equilibrium.  The closest thing you can do to optimality-based analysis is to think in terms of individually incentive-following responses to incredibly weird local situations.  And the weird local situations cannot themselves be derived from first principles, because they are the bizarrely harmful equilibria of other weird incentives in other parts of the system.  Or at least I can't derive the weird situations from first principles, after two years of exposure and getting over the shock and trying to adapt.  I would've been much better off if I'd tried to understand it as an alien society instead of a human one, in retrospect; and I expect the same would hold for an Earthling trying to understand dath ilan.]

"I'd find a concrete example helpful."

[In the 'country' I'm in, and most but not all other 'countries', it's considered forbidden to speak of optimization-over-heritable-variation; people practice it only on an individual basis rather than a socially planned one, while denying to themselves and others that they are doing even that much.]

"To be fair to the Other, among students of reconstructed-probable-history, heritage-optimization is considered a prime example of something a young civilization could easily screw up on an existentially horrific scale," Keeper Derrin says.  Perhaps he shouldn't be pushing back against this exposition of the Other's foolishness, but he'll try it once and see where the conversation goes from there.  "There are no save points nor rollbacks for the population gene pool.  We may have been incredibly lucky, in our own early history, that we didn't accidentally breed ourselves into small yappy pets.  Re-extrapolating from the amount of genetic selection undergone by domesticated bear species relative to their natural-bear ancestors, we can infer that the concept of deliberate breeding must have been around for thousands of years.  Extrapolating historical progress thousands of years backward as a regress, the idea of natural selection must have been discovered at a time when early groups of humans knew very little else.  It is very easy to imagine a civilization having accidents with their early attempts at heritage-optimization that would lead the Others to, for very arguable reasons, close off that entire field until their prediction markets indicated near-certainty about the results of any future attempts."

[Keeper, if dath ilan's real prehistory was anything remotely like Earth's - never mind.  Let me try again with a different example.]

[Elections in the 'country' I'm inside run on a system where the person with the most votes gets elected, which produces strong incentives for strategic voting and an immense obsession with backing only 'electable' candidates and not 'wasting' votes; one of Earth's own writers described it as a system of only voting for lizards, because otherwise the wrong lizard might get in.  Now, you're wondering why this is public policy, when surely the prediction markets predict that other electoral systems would result in much better observables over voter-aggregation outcomes.  And the answer is again complicated but, basically, their whole society just isn't organized that way, in fact, prediction markets are illegal.  Which isn't just about the politicians being awful, it's about the voters having been traumatized into a fear of numbers, by an 'educational system' that would make me physically sick to recount to you.  They'd be scared of a political system that had even more numbers in it.  And if you're wondering why their experimenters can't explore the space of possibilities and discover a better educational system - well, again their whole society just isn't organized that way; again, it's basically illegal.  Most things are, here.  Illegal I mean.  Not just against custom, actually outlawed, with no exceptions because there's no exception routes built into almost all their laws.  But also their society doesn't generally rely on its experimenter-analogues to figure out questions like that; which is in part because the experimenter-analogues generally can't figure out problems much more difficult than the deterministic-visible-mechanism level; which is in part because their experimental reports aren't allowed to mention likelihood functions.]

"Wait, what?" says Helorm after she repeats this.  She mostly isn't quite attuned to the reports as reality rather than fiction, but that part is just absurd.  "How do you analyze experiments at all without likelihood functions?"

[EXTREMELY POORLY.  There's an enormous subjective incoherent inconsistent branch of pseudo-mathematics whose entire purpose is just to avoid ever mentioning likelihood functions, which doesn't allow the results of separate experiments to be combined into a single piece of evidence except through fantastically complex manipulations that often turn out to be computer errors.  Very little of the resulting 'science' is reproducible even in surface findings, a fact which they call their 'replication crisis'.  And it's not because the lunar eclipses are suppressing the concept of likelihood functions from their minds; Earthlings can understand it, they had the concept before I got here, although it wasn't in their central Network's repository page on statistics.  It's not the lunar eclipses, there actually is an enormous conspiracy of 'journal editors' who all act simultaneously to prevent anyone from using real math to describe their experimental results, on pain of their work being suppressed from elite channels.  Only it's not actually an explicit conspiracy, because if it was an explicit conspiracy, it would be coordination, and if Earthlings were trying to coordinate on that scale, they would fail, and lots of papers would be using likelihood functions.  The main conditions under which Earthlings actually manage uniformity of action, at that scale, is when they're acting out of an unspoken will to all make the same mistake at the same time so none of them look any sillier than each other.]