"Thellim, that's not actually a clever dig because you don't know what you're talking about. People can write whatever they want. Write one yourself and post it on the internet if you feel like it, nobody will stop you. Maybe people will even like it. It happens that I have not read anything that I can, given this tightened set of constraints, suggest to you as a completely nonmisleading demonstration of what Earthlings are like which isn't trying to be clever or funny or sexy or speculative or satirical or anything. Maybe it's a thriving genre I haven't been exposed to because it's written principally in Chinese! Maybe it's trendy this year and I haven't seen any because I mostly like older works! Millions of novels are published every year, and even if I read them all somehow it could be a thing in magazine short stories or some website I've never seen!"

"I'm sorry.  It's understandable if you can't show me any books like that because they contain - realistic submission.  There's some kind of weird irony here, this used to be exactly what I did for a living and even though you have a word 'matchmaker' you apparently don't have somebody who reads lots of books and who you can pay a small fee to answer this question."

"The word is used for a historical profession of setting people up with other people to marry. There might be modern ones still but not in common use around here."

"Ha, I wanted to be a mate matchmaker when I was younger - any matchmaking between people and other people is an inherently centralized profession, since it generates value proportional to the three-halves power of the number of people you know in sufficient detail assuming standard variance in match qualities, so it's inherently centralized, so a few leading practitioners can capture most of the trade's gains instead of it being distributed evenly among competitors, so half the matchmakers dream of becoming a wealthy mate matchmaker.  And the other half dream of matching... huh, you don't have a word that means 'employer or employee but just cooperating without a control asymmetry' which I guess makes sense for Earth.  But of course only one percent can be in the top one percent, and I didn't have much luck proving myself by setting up romances among the customers I knew from matching people with books, even though that's relatively personality-revealing knowledge as matchmaking goes."

"We have dating sites. Which I think appeal to about the same sort of person who'd want a professional matchmaker even if I'm not one of the type myself."

"Dating... sites?  English thinks you mean something Networked?  You would need very advanced computing technology to automatically process the kind of information that a mate matchmaker works with, or so I imagine."

"They might use different information. I could start the account-making process on OK Cupid if you want to see, I don't know much about it myself."

"That's... I am 80% sure I'm misunderstanding something here, and the 20% case where I'm not seems potentially very important if computer science here is that advanced.  Sure, let's take a quick look at OKCupid."

Isabella navigates to OKCupid and tells it she is a Dom seeking a Sub and lives in New York City and starts answering its profile questions.

"Okay, if this is broadly typical of the information collected then I see where I was confused.  Dating sites don't do the same thing as mate matchmakers.  A dating site seems to collect standard question-answer information about you that you're willing to reveal to anybody who reads it, and relies on people going around reading it themselves.  Mate matchmaking efficiently centralizes and professionalizes the work of learning info about people, at some cost in the matchmaker's imperfect proxying of customers' reactions to that info, but it also means there can be more info per person.  Much more importantly, it allows collection of the type of information that people wouldn't want to put on the Network, or reveal to somebody else before they'd gone on a first date or possibly ever."

"...information like what?" she says, discarding her OKC account.

Um.  "Level-three... no, those grades aren't going to translate across worlds.  Promise of secrecy that you'll defend against other people asking but not that you have to be really paranoid about?"

"I'm not asking for information specific to you, or anybody you know, just examples of the category."

It takes her several seconds to come up with something that doesn't give too much away about herself.  "Suppose a woman likes a man to dress up in a particular erotic style in the bedroom.  She may not want that information revealed to the world, and she may also not want it revealed to a man who definitely doesn't like to dress up that particular way."

"Okay, I think we're probably way more open about kinks than you guys are but there is a gap there. I'm just not sure why you'd trust a matchmaker with that information."

"Higher levels of secrecy promise than three."

"...I mean, sure, but anyone could say that, and also it would be fairly nervewracking to tell a stranger about your embarrassing kinks even if you did have perfect confidence it would travel no farther."

"Traditions that build up momentum behind a logical algorithm's output, enforcement mechanisms that I doubt could exist here, ongoing monitoring, statistics showing that it works well enough.  There's a professional guild of mate matchmakers and so far as secrecy oaths go they're considered level five Confessors.  I wouldn't trust the secrecy oath of a level five Confessor with the fate of dath ilan, nonspecific stats say there have been violations at that level, but I'd feel cheerful about staking my mother's true life on it if there was a moderately good reason."

"Oh, like priests. - priests are not as important as this comparison may make them sound and would be hard to explain."

"Yeah, that didn't translate.  In theory, you shouldn't be able to trust anyone without logical decision theory to explain how their decision and your decision can fit into your respective concepts of yourselves as sane people.  But it's pretty clear from the emotions human beings have that they've been solving this problem over an evolutionary timescale that must far predate coherence theorems, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's enough for 'priests' to function.  Though if I was just arriving on Earth for the first time I'd probably say something about the huge role that trust plays in a lot of economic flows and how weird it is that priests aren't more important."

"Priests are more specific than you're imagining. Uh, how do you fancy the idea of my having my brother over on the weekend so he can be another perspective on Earth for you?"

"Two data points instead of one!  Hooray!"  'Hooray' is such a weird translated term but Thellim likes it actually.

Isabella snorts. Opens her packet of almond cookies from the restaurant and eats one and offers Thellim the other. "He's not a sub either, if you were specifically hoping for more on those, but I suppose if you don't want to take up correspondence with Jackson I could introduce you to my dad."

The words 'sub' and 'dad' in such proximity produce a queasy feeling in her, it is possible to avoid imagining that happening to her family but it takes effort and the prethoughts of the suppressed thought are still there.  "I should probably avoid talking to subs until I've had more time to -" get used to the idea is not something she ever wants to do "- adapt to that fact being the case."

"Okay. - Alex says I can tell you he's nondynamic at, uh, secrecy level three."