Helorm's telescreen flashes a blue CORRECT when she finishes reciting the numbers, just the way it happens in movies, and then goes black.

Oh.  Apparently she's insane in a way that fakes her sensory experiences.

"Tsi-imbi," Helorm says, her voice unwavering in her dignity.  "I experienced the screen saying the answer was correct."  In real life, the person on the other side of the screen should still be watching her, if she managed to get into the car at all.  Civilization will know what to do to take care of her from now on.

(An exception has been thrown from Civilization's normal processes.

That happens now and then, in a system the size of Civilization.

This particular exception has never been thrown before.  If you were reasoning through the circumstances of that exception in advance, you would reason that perhaps some enterprising person with unusual motivations had somehow arranged to disable the metal-detector or otherwise smuggle a radio transceiver through the system.  That's probably it, since the alternative is crazy.

The alternative is also much more important.  Actually, even somebody with that much spare time and ingenuity, starting to wreak havoc on Civilization, would also be important.  But the alternative is much more important than that, and Civilization was not in fact expecting this exception to be thrown at all.  Most people with that much spare time and ingenuity can find more fun ways to spend their time, with less extreme personal repercussions.

One situation is impossible, the other situation is improbable, and the very smart people of dath ilan know better than to think that in that situation they know which of the two must be the case.  This pathway was not predicted to execute at all, in Civilization's code, and that's why an exception is being thrown.)

The screen lights again, showing a grandfather-aged man with a much more serious expression.

"Exception handling.  I am Derrin.  Your answer was correct.  I realize you may now suspect you're immersively insane.  I observe that in such case you've already done everything that Civilization asked of you to handle that contigency.  In the name of Civilization, of sapience, and of the Light, I beg you to assume this situation is real and act accordingly.  Under the Algorithm, Civilization now asks you for your cheerful price: to report to me with total honesty and sustainably-best exactness everything said by the voice inside your head; and to transmit back my own words with total honesty and sustainably-best exactness; neither deliberately omitting nor deliberately adding nor changing, in either direction of transmission; your services as transceiver to last for the duration of this entire situation as reasonably defined; with payment understood to be conditional upon this situation proving to be a true First Contact situation."

Helorm shuts her eyes.  She hates this.  She does not want this.  She wishes this was over.  The hard part was supposed to be over thirty seconds ago, when she would get the verification question wrong.

She thinks, briefly, and then names an amount of money equal to 2^24 times the worth of an hour of unskilled labor.

(This is the dath ilani equivalent of saying "one billion dollars".  16,777,216 hours is a proverbial amount of wealth such that you can buy yourself, and all of your relatives and friends, everything that would make a sane person actually happy, for the rest of your lives.

Helorm isn't being greedy, just doing what she can to take things at face value for a little while longer.  If she named a small price, the Keeper might be worried she'd feel tempted to pursue things that weren't the good of Civilization; and nobody wants to spend any extra time thinking about that during an emergency situation.  2^24 is the amount that people name in movies, which happens because that decision seems obviously normal and correct to a dath ilani audience.

Obviously, before naming that amount under the Algorithm, Helorm mentally checked to make sure she'd actually go through with the cliche number as her cheerful price, regardless of any worries about whether her situation was real.  Mere worries about whether anything is real occupy a much lower level of priority than true-commitment.)

"Accepted.  Please transmit these words of mine, on behalf of Civilization:  Are there any time-sensitive emergencies in progress?"

[I'm now having the experience of talking to somebody from Exception Handling,] Helorm sends.  [He's bought my services as transceiver.  He says:  Are there any time-sensitive emergencies going on?]

The mysterious voice replies [No, apart from it being generally desirable that contact be handled efficiently.]

Helorm repeats this as best she can.  "The voice says no, apart from a nonspecific preference that contact situations including-this-situation be handled expeditiously."  Even if it's an imaginary situation, she did promise diligence under an algorithm more sacred than that.  "It's speaking not-Baseline into my head, and I feel like precise recodings would use a lot of extra code to capture nuances that aren't monosyllabically encodable in Baseline.  Would you rather I speak faster and get the translation not-quite-right?"

Derrin makes a hand-gesture that signifies Temporary Assent.  "Let's-do-that-for-now, if the nuance seems relatively-unimportant-in-your-own-best-judgment.  Transmit:  Who are you, what are your intentions?"

"I speak for a tiny subfaction within a parallel version of humanity," Helorm says, and pauses, listening to the voice in her head again.  "Our own intentions are positive-sum cooperation with dath ilan, under negotiated treaty conditions protecting this world, but we cannot speak for our world."

"How are you communicating with Helorm?"

"We don't have good theories of the underlying mechanism, and we'd expect even the very smart people of dath ilan to find the backstory bizarre.  We'd like to delay discussing that."

"Why Helorm in particular?" says the Keeper.  There are imaginable scenarios where that part matters a lot.

"We'd like to delay discussing that as well," Helorm repeats.  Uh huh, sure, Helorm thinks.

...she hopes she gets sedated sometime soon.  What's taking them so long?

(If you tsi-imbi in a way that verbally reports you're having full-scale immersive experiences that witnesses recognize as false, they're supposed to rush in and sedate you.  This is specifically so that anybody who lands in a seemingly unbelievable situation, who tries to tsi-imbi that, will know that the situation is real if they notice themselves still being awake and undrugged after a short delay.

It's not that dath ilan expects anybody to actually land in an impossible situation, of course.  But dath ilan collectively expects its residents to sometimes be mistaken about what's impossible.  Dath ilan has crafted its procedures to reduce concerns about ongoing private hallucinations in those cases.  "When you're dreaming you don't know you dream, but when you're awake you know you're awake," as the pseudo-paradoxical-truism goes.  Maybe when you're crazy, you can not-notice you're sedated; but when you're awake and noticing you're not at all drugged, that's a distinguishable mental state from being too asleep to know you're dreaming.)

The Keeper is reading stored information on Helorm and has already spotted the most obvious thing that makes Helorm unusual and a potential First Contact point, assuming this is not a prank.  The Keeper has already figured out why intelligent contactors might reasonably decide to withhold this information from Helorm, since it is of potentially great emotional valence and that would introduce conversational delays.

"Then I believe I have deduced it," says the Keeper using his auditory track.  "The situation in dath ilan is largely on-trend since then.  Before I ask the next verification question, are there any priority points I ought to be immediately aware of?"

(Though a dath ilani author would recognize it as a disreputable easy out with respect to faking the presentation of high intelligence, it remains true that some unusually smart dath ilani are able to pursue more than one track of thought at once, and read using visual thinking while talking using auditory thinking.

For most purposes that smart people ought to be spending their time on, it's a party trick.  For purposes of handling complicated novel time-sensitive emergencies, it makes practical sense to employ somebody who can do the party trick.)

"Possible priority point one," Helorm repeats.  She can tell the Keeper is talking over her head, in a way that Helorm wouldn't expect even a person-much-smarter-than-her to be able to do with an arbitrary alien civilization that just showed up.  But she's insane, and in that case so what; or if not, if it's all real, good for ridiculously high-ranked Keepers.  "Our world has not causally screened off its past.  We don't know how important this is because we don't know why dath ilan did so."

Derrin is among roughly a million persons in dath ilan who know why the past was screened, though they do not know the past itself.  He lives in the same city where almost all the rest of those people live.  "That's unfortunate, but it was an expensive precaution and it's understandable if your own infohazard-aware delegates chose not to take it.  Continue."

"Possible priority point two.  Seemingly basic features of this world, including the method we are using to communicate, show signs of bizarre strong optimization according to no fitness function we are able to deduce.  Now that we've contacted you, it seems possible though unlikely that a very strange thing will happen during dath ilan's next total lunar eclipse.  Very roughly, everyone nearing or anywhere after their twelfth birthday should completely fast for two days before dath ilan's next total lunar eclipse, just in case.  We think astronomical timelines should be synchronized between our worlds, but if we're wrong and that's immediately about to happen on your side, it constitutes a massive planetary emergency for you and you must request more precise instructions at once."

On the one hand, oh dear oh dear.  On the other hand, this does raise much further the already-dominant probability of the whole thing being a prank, pending final testing.  Derrin is now personally well past 99-1 betting odds that this is fake.

(Criminally faked by Helorm, that is, not faked by authorized personnel testing the system.  That should not happen at Derrin's level, at all; this was sworn to him.  A lesson has been preserved from hidden history:  Weird-emergency-handlers need to immediately know that weird emergencies are for real.)

"I'll check that as soon as we've finally-verified," he says.  "Is there a priority point three?"

(Of course Derrin is still treating the situation as real, until and unless final verification fails.  It's not just the lopsided bet payoffs, it's that Civilization made a promise to everyone who honestly does hear a voice in their heads.)

"A retrospectively obvious-seeming thought in this world, about future technological developments, is very conspicuous in its absence from dath ilan; and we expect it was declared infohazardous by you," Helorm repeats carefully.  It's obvious why this part is being spoken over her head.  "We're not sure whether the object-level phenomenon is predicted to be dangerous, or if it's that thinking about the subject is considered cognitively hazardous to unprepared individuals.  We suspect the former case but haven't yet deduced truly-strong-arguments on our own.  This world is currently going full ahead on pursuing the corresponding technological developments.  We estimate it's more-likely-than-not at least five years out, possibly much more, but we don't know how to narrow it down any more than that."

The Keeper sighs internally.  Isn't that a fun thought, if this whole thing isn't a prank.  But a putative prankster could easily have deduced Artificial General Intelligence as an obvious thought and then noticed that thought's absence; hundreds of thousands of smart dath ilani have done so, and have checked in with Keepers about it, not uncommonly being recruited as a result.  "Priority point four?"

"Nil," Helorm says, electing not to mention that the language being spoken into her head does not seem to actually have syntax corresponding to the Maybe algebraic datatype constructor.