"...what? No, we just couldn't do much in the way of scenes, mighta hurt the baby."

...maybe it's not all just being generated to follow the pattern of an edgy thought experiment?  "Are there any downsides to being a masochist, or a submissive?  Anything about it that you regret, literally anything at all?"  Realism plz?

"Oh, sometimes people'll talk down to subs. When we bought a car the salesperson quoted me way over blue book and Master came by and got a steal. My teenage nephew mouths off to his mom now he's writing 'dom' on paperwork, won't listen to her and still minds his dad. And my health insurance's more expensive and sometimes I get a mark I don't like the look of and it takes a while to go away so I can ask Master for a prettier one."

Thellim's mind is blank.  It shouldn't be blank, there should be more questions she should ask, but her mind is tired and more than slightly wounded inside.  Yeah, she gets it.  Being a submissive masochist is awesome with just the right amount of realistic downside and of course the actual qualia of it are incommunicable to her.  She wants to go home.

...if a real person, if real people have been created like this, Thellim does not know what to do.  The point of the thought experiment, no doubt.  Which the people inside, if they are real, did not create, and are not to blame for.  And they are sapient beings so the least she can do is be polite.

"Thank you for answering my stupid questions."

She wants to go home.

"Oh, no problem, hon, it's not what people usually wanna call me about but it's all good. And it's work I can do with the kids home."

Thellim tries for a smile.  "I doubt we'll have occasion to ever meet again, so goodbye forever!"

...that would have sounded more cheerful in Baseline.

Linsee laughs, anyway, and waves and hangs up.

"Well, I am probably going to have fewer nightmare flashbacks to that video, which is good and was the most urgent problem.  It's leading me to unpleasant conclusions about what genre of reality I now live inside, which I'm sure you weren't hoping for and I do apologize for that, but that is the kind of problem I can sleep on so long as I am able to sleep."

"I'm glad you will be more able to sleep. Is there some - movie genre or something that this is mapping to -"

"It - probably takes some background, unless our culture has overlapped in ways that don't seem probable.  There's a practice among my people of inventing bizarre thought experiments, to probe the boundaries of our ethical systems.  And we're warned that teenagers and particularly teenage boys have a baseline tendency, before hearing the warning, of setting up thought experiments that maybe shouldn't be imagined.  Alternate societies where rape has been legalized.  Inhuman superbeings forcing you to pick between one person being tortured for fifty years or a... famous big number English has no words for... of people getting a dust speck in their eyes.  Or asking if you'd crush your mother's brain to save a thousand other people from having their brains crushed."

"And the warning says, whatever point you were trying to make, there's a way to do it without the thought experiment being that upsetting, because the huge upset wasn't really intrinsic.  You can have it be about, is it better to eliminate all chocolate forever from one planet, or have a famous-big-number of people get dust specks in their eyes.  It's a kind of mental laziness and the sort of thing that teenagers, especially boys, do the first time they notice that deontology and utilitarianism can conflict ever.  We're warned that, if somebody presents you with a thought experiment like that, there's a lot to be said for telling them to go away, because it's never going to happen in real life and so you don't need to do violence to your emotions or your logic, or to the integrity of yourself where all of your parts are singing the song of Light in unison without so much infighting."

"Because, in real life, you see, you're never going to run into any bizarre thought experiment where a woman is being tortured, but this is actually super fine for incommunicable reasons and she would oppose any attempt to make it stop.  So you don't need to do violence to your feelings by considering the possibility.  You tell the teenage boy to go away, and to raise the topic again when and if it comes up in real life."

"It would be - easier, much easier, to come to terms with this, if it was happening in dath ilan.  If it was happening someplace more realistic in the sense of it all being just simple math deep down.  If we encountered something equally shocking happening in dath ilan, it would just be, well, what do you know, human beings are strange and not all of them think the way you do, go study up on expected variation by naive subjects versus actual variation as found in experiments.  If something equally shocking happened in real life, I would know that it wasn't as unnatural as it looked and that it would just turn out to be more naturally consonant in people, because, in the real world, the things that actually happen are those that are consonant with human nature, even if they turn out to be surprising."

"But in this world with your magical eclipses - if a teenage boy had no care at all for the feelings of others, if they were halfway to being an alien superbeing, you can very much imagine them creating that situation in reality just to throw somebody like me into it.  So they could say, ha ha, well here it is in real life, I made some sapient beings who strongly prefer being tortured and maintain this preference under reflection, what do you do now."

"I... guess that makes sense if everybody in your world is too kinky - or whatever you even call it when it's everybody - to even think about torture for any reason besides being edgy. Uh, I... live here... so I can't just be like, oh, this planet isn't realistic enough for me, the things in it aren't normal things that can happen in real life and my model of reality doesn't have to account for them, but - I get that you are making a big adjustment in your scope of what's normal."

"I don't think I'm supposed to adjust to it.  I think I'm supposed to do what I can for this world and then move on.  Or, no, supposed to isn't the right term.  If you present me with this thought experiment, my choice is that I do what I can for the world, without taking a position on the aliens' bizarre ways, one way or another, because I do not understand the aliens' minds.  And in the absence of that understanding, Reality is prettier when aliens don't try to impose their ways on each other, all else being equal.  I wouldn't want you imposing submission and masochism on a human population.  And the sapients here are saying they want this, that everything's great, and having only themselves tortured - as individuals, not as a species, it would not be okay if you were torturing other Eclipsers who didn't like that.  But you say you like being the way you are, as individuals, not just as a species, and yes, that does matter.  Fine.  Lovely thought experiment, whoever set it up.  You've successfully induced moral dumbfounding in me and forced me into falling helplessly back on the null action even though inaction isn't actually privileged in any way.  But I do not want to live here, and I hope that my next world is better than this."

"Well, a mage can probably get you home. It'll take a few years."

She wasn't really thinking of that route for leaving.

"Please do not commit suicide just because last time you got catapulted into another universe."

"Why not?  It seems like a perfectly reasonable generalization over the one data point I have.  It's not like there are any contradictory data points."

"Well, it might not work again, and even if it did you could wind up somewhere worse, and it would leave me with something of a mess on this end, and we'd never find out if you can revolutionize math education."

"I don't want to be here.  I don't want it so much, right now.  You're right, to be clear, from a utilitarian standpoint," if the people here are as real as her, however real she is now, "but I don't want to - I should rest.  I should rest and not think about this for a while, or try not to.  Play more Civ - no, something with as close to zero violence and upsettingness as possible."

Even in bizarre thought experiments where suicide looks like a completely reasonable long-term solution for elaborate reasons, suicidal ideation is probably still a warning sign.  And should probably still induce an immediate short-term core fallback to the reasoning patterns that say not to kill yourself or think too much about killing yourself, even if it looks like there is a reason.

"I have... Tetris? I have a chessboard if you'd rather play a two-person game but it will be harder to learn, I'd recommend Tetris." She pulls up Tetris, demonstrates its functions.

Sounds like a completely reasonable core-fallback to her.  Thellim sits at the computer and starts playing.

Isabella tosses the takeout containers except for the one with a little leftover fried rice, which she finishes off and then chucks. She makes instant hot chocolate and offers it to Thellim.

Thellim takes it.  "Thank you," she says in almost a whisper.  "You've been very kind to the poor confused alien yelling at you."

"You're welcome. Let me know if you need anything else."

Isabella has a library book and settles down with that in the chair across the room from Thellim.

Alex arrives as promised on the weekend, hugs his sister, waves at Thellim. "I hear you're an alien!"

"I am!  I thought at first I was the same species as you but now I'm mostly assuming I'm not!"