[And if you're from an alternate Earth I guess we don't need to worry about whether the years are the same length.]

[Agreed up to the limits of my total ignorance of everything.]

[All right, I can work on it. Passively, my active work is all on precognitive range right now. Is your planet all - culturally unified?]

[Unified?  You mean a monoculture?  We all try very hard not to have a monoculture.  You can't run experiments if you have a monoculture!  Everybody in Civilization understands that.]

[Oh, okay, cool, it's just some of what you say makes it sound like you're all kind of doing one... thing.]

[I'm not sure what you mean, unless the 'one thing' is something like 'professional specialization, finding unoccupied niches that fit our never-before-realized individual combinations of genetic traits, and deliberately creating new variations across regions of the world in order to try doing things different ways in case the baseline of Civilization is doing it wrong'?  We do all breathe oxygen, but we don't have much choice about that.]

[I don't mean breathing oxygen, I mean like you don't have porn on the internet. Do you have like, a bunch of internets, and the one you're supposed to use is doing a no-porn experiment?]

[It would be very much in keeping with Civilization if there's an experimental region that's making porn just to see what happens!  It wouldn't go on the main Net but I could see them having a subnet.]

[Okay, then to rephrase, the part I'm confused about is the part where having porn is the experiment and not the default. As an example, not specifically about porn.]

[I expect that at some point in our past, maybe even after the screening-off point in which case I could look it up if I was on the Network, somebody ran a regionalized experiment to see what happened when people matured and lived with access to the more obvious kinds of porn to manufacture, and Civilization is on the no-porn baseline because the results looked worse.  It's obviously easier to run the experiment if the Network has no porn on it to start with, but we wouldn't persistently keep all of Civilization in that state just because it made some experiments easier.  We're not science maniacs.]

[You misunderstand. Before anyone started censoring anything why wasn't there any porn? We don't have a screening-off point, and I read a lot of random encyclopedia pages because I have an eidetic memory, so I happen to know that we have artifacts from before the invention of writing that are porn. Pottery and graffiti and stuff. It's not on the list of human universals, but it's old, and appeared all over the world before anyone was inventing fancy collectivist reasons to prohibit it. How was it removed?]

Thellim is feeling uneasy about where this conversation is heading.  [So it sounds like your civilization either - never had the same problem ours had, or never noticed the problem - and I'm a little worried about whether I should be saying anything about this to you - but when we buried all records of our past in a safe archive where maybe someday the future could find them again, created a new planetary language, rewrote all the books, and then, two generations later, did it all again - I expect that any lingering porn wouldn't have made it through the filter?  It would have been very surprising if it did.]

[That... answers my question.

Usually I'd be running this conversation through a lot more precognitive tries but unfortunately I'm on painkillers that affect my appetite so I can't today, or I'd... counterfactually have more questions about that...

...Jackson's going to bring you a bathrobe, you can change into that and he'll run your outfit through the wash unless you tell me it needs to be cleaned in some specific way.]

[My clothing doesn't have a Complex Laundry Code and hopefully your baseline laundry machines aren't so mismatched to our clothing assumptions as to destroy them?  If I say 'let's do it using cold water, light agitation, and the simplest soap you have' does that go through?  My clothes aren't especially valuable but they are artifacts of a distant civilization.]

[I can tell him that, yeah. I can also tell him to get you a T-shirt and sweatpants and those might fit you, if as would be reasonable you'd like to be more cautious with your civilizational relics.]

[If your Civilization is happy with me wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants, I'm happy to wear them!  Yes, let's be careful with the relics just in case they have an incredibly valuable sewing pattern that nobody here has invented.  It's not likely but we can't actually replace them if they're destroyed.]

[There are postcogs, but easier to just hang on to them, yeah. You can swipe a plastic bag to bring them on the plane.]

Jackson knocks and presents Thellim with clothes.

Thellim accepts.  [Can you ask him to point me at the shower, now that I've got clothes to change into?]

[Yep.] Jackson executes this procedure.

Thellim enters the shower.  It doesn't look as complicated as she feared, and some careful experimentation gets the water to the right force and temperature without dousing her in cold wetness along the way.

[By the way - stop me if this is something I shouldn't say - you've mentioned being in the hospital a couple of times, and on medication.  I don't see much I can do to help from this end, and I don't know you well enough to claim friendship as yet; but as one generic sapient being to another, I wish you the best of whatever it is, and would jump to help if I actually could.]

[Uh, thanks. I'll be completely fine, if I were in serious danger I would be higher up in the triage ordering, usually I get seen a lot faster than this but today there were a bunch of trauma injuries that the staff mage is taking care of. By tomorrow I'll be all patched up and full of bagels.]

[We'll pay an awful lot for that kind of work if you can actually establish two-way transport.  We're pretty good about preventing people from dying permanently, myself excepted, but my grandmother would have liked to stay around longer and -]

Thellim thinks of something for the first time.  In her defense, it's been a busy day.  [Let me know when and if you can actually reach my mother...?  I mean - there's much more important things going on - and my prior understanding of the universe is that you just shouldn't be able to do it at all - but - my family probably isn't very happy right now.  They think I died in a plane crash, no brain preservation, they think I'm gone for good... I'm sorry.  I shouldn't even have said that to you.  It is not legitimately something I could or should ask you to consider as important.]

[Yeah, of course I'll tell you as soon as I reach her, just, that might take years even if it's straightforwardly doable.]

On her way out of the shower later on Thellim can catch out of the corner of her eye a glimpse of Brian laughing and swatting Jackson on the rear while Jackson is scrubbing the kitchen counter and giggling.

Thellim will smile because she is putting her generic happiness for sapient entities being happy in FRONT, and is putting in BACK any sense of the bottom falling out of the universe because this is not just one couple in twenty but an entire civilization in which evolutionary logic has apparently jumped out the window.

[The mage is going to see me now and then I'm going to crash for the night. I'm leaving your channel open so you can try to wake me up if you have a horrible emergency but try not to have any horrible emergencies, okay? I'll wake you when it's time to get up and go for your flight.]