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In an ordinary Midwestern suburb is an ordinary two-bedroom house containing an ordinary couple. One of them has a plate of chicken and green beans and the other is kneeling beside him with his hands tied behind his back, opening his mouth to receive a green bean.
Thellim in Eclipse
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out-of-equilibrium
...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.
out-of-equilibrium
...and successfully committing suicide could just mean that Thellim ends up in a worse horrorworld next time.
out-of-equilibrium
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.
out-of-equilibrium
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.
out-of-equilibrium
Well, she supposes she could... accomodate... with this world. Depending on what makes somebody get classified as a submissive. Maybe she can be one of the dominants.
out-of-equilibrium
Well, either this situation runs on sufficiently storyish logic that she will be able to actually take over this world and rescue the submissives, using the outside-context black-swan-to-the-natives dath ilani concept of optimizing anything ever, and/or whatever magic she gets during the next lunar eclipse; or, alternatively, Thellim is just one woman up against an entire world and she will fail without ever coming remotely close to succeeding.
out-of-equilibrium
And she needs to actually calm down and actually think and figure out whether Isabella is actually planning to - to do whatever doms do to claim subs. Maybe Thellim already did that to herself by declaring herself to be traveling under "section 114" at the airport. Maybe this entire situation is because Isabella saw an unclaimed person wandering around, without whatever privilege makes somebody a dom, and picked up the gold bar in the street.
Wait. That's testable. Google query: what is section 114?
Section 114 is a regulation allowing psions who work in aircraft mishap prevention and certain other areas to vouch for passengers flying without ID or otherwise irregularly, although it looks like this is mostly intended to allow lockdown psions to get fasting kids within range of them for lockdown with a minimum of waiting.
out-of-equilibrium
Okay. Okay, that could be a step in an ill-intentioned plan but it is not of itself an incriminating step. For that matter, if Isabella was planning something horrifying, it wouldn't make sense to leave Thellim inside this apartment with Network access. Unless somebody is monitoring the Network? Precogging the results? It still doesn't seem smart compared to - to putting guards on the apartment? Fine, nobody on Earth has ever heard of optimizing anything possibly including their plans, but there have to be limits to that or they couldn't manually drive cars.
out-of-equilibrium
...Isabella should not have had Thellim imbued with English overnight before her plane trip, if Isabella was planning to enslave her.
out-of-equilibrium
...It seems surprisingly tight. Giving Thellim English hugely increased her freedom of action, created the probability that Thellim would talk to somebody else and find out about any plots that Isabella had, created the probability that she would ask somebody on the plane what doms and subs were.
Even as a cunning plot to create trust through apparently offering trust first, it's way too much risk from Putatively Malevolent Isabella's perspective.
Isabella doesn't - didn't - expect Thellim to end up opposed to her. Giving Thellim English that quickly was an act of unambiguous initiation-of-cooperation or just plain friendship.
out-of-equilibrium
She supposes she can add "don't betray Isabella's help and friendship in the course of conquering her world" to the list of insane constraints here.
out-of-equilibrium
...getting one submissive out of a chamber like that before she died would justify - almost anything, surely? But you're not supposed to betray the logic of that algorithm period, there's just the one and you can't repair it each time it breaks a little more - across however many worlds there are - but there's an exception for understood broken promises, where obviously the promisee never had in mind a situation as extreme as the one you encountered - but Isabella would not agree with this and these circumstances are ones where "please don't conquer my world even if you don't like it" could be, no, presumably is, exactly the sort of thing where Isabella would see that as an intended retroactive condition of her help.
out-of-equilibrium
Thellim arrived in a house instead of three hundred distanceunits underwater in the middle of the sea. She arrived in the house of somebody who knew Isabella. Maybe both of those suspicious coincidences are meant to be helpful. Maybe Isabella is - kindly enough - that Thellim could actually - talk her into a different moral position?
Because if nobody like that exists anywhere in this world, Thellim's impossible quest is going to be very lonely and probably very short.
out-of-equilibrium
Time to go back to Googling things, this time with an eye to world conquest. Or, no, maybe first she should go eat a bite of food, and then resume Googling.
