Helorm roughly repeats this, though her memory isn't perfect, and adds [Tell me what?] at the end of it.

[Are you treating this as reality yet?]

Helorm would laugh painfully, if she wasn't too busy.  [Well, I haven't been sedated.  So either this is real, or I never managed to call the First-Contact-psychiatric-hotline or leave my apartment at all, while still noticing myself being fully alert and my senses being fully detailed.  Which is not supposed to be how insanity feels; and the truism is that, if you find yourself still clinging to the insanity hypothesis at that point, it's probably because you're trying to flee from a reality that's actually real.  I suppose that, exactly like characters reason-out in books, I've now reached a branch of my decision tree that I simply didn't expect to reach; where the straightforward story about my being immersively insane has become sufficiently improbable that I should flatly disbelieve it, even if all of my alternative hypotheses seem even more improbable; which means the actual truth is outside my hypothesis space; which means I should open myself to experience and start figuring it out.  Not really helping with my stress levels, but there it is.]

[I've already met someone from dath ilan and learned about what tsi-imbi means that way.]

"The voice says it's already met someone from dath ilan and learned what tsi-imbi means that way," Helorm dutifully echoes... if this is reality, she's getting paid rather a lot of money to do this, isn't she.

"I guessed.  You don't need to repeat this next part to me, if it seems more private-interest than public-interest."  It's not that a little kindness is more important than all of Civilization, per se; but if there is not actually a tradeoff between a little kindness and all Civilization, then it is still good to be kind.

[He says it's okay to keep this next part private,] Helorm says.  [Can you please just tell me what's going on?  I've had a stressful day.]

[I'm going to relay to you from someone who doesn't have my transmission ability. I've been using non-word telepathy to communicate with you across the language barrier; I do not speak Baseline and will not understand what I relay in Baseline, it's going to be directly from her without my interpretation.]

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.]