There's enough time before the predictable crash for the passengers to, briefly, talk and try to come up with some ridiculous way to survive.  They're passing over a rocky zone like a shattered mountain range; flat spots for a landing approximately don't exist.  The area isn't cold enough for their brains to stay cold and be retrieved, even if they had some way to protect just their own heads from the impact.  Five people are frantically working to tie together enough clothing to make an ad-hoc parachute for somebody's four-year-old.  It's not going to work, but it's a dignified way to die.

The best Thellim can do is not distract them while they work.  Being still and quiet has never been an important part of her self-image before this, but rapid adaptation to altered circumstances is a virtue.

She successfully keeps herself still and quiet up until the plane loses enough speed to start diving.  She only starts screaming after enough other people are screaming that her screaming won't make any important marginal difference.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA -

(pain)

House!  Green beans!  Totally fine!

"Hi...?" she says to the people in front of her in a rather small and confused voice.  Then, after a moment's thought, "Tsi-imbi?"

The people whose home she has appeared in look very confused. They do not seem to know what "tsi-imbi" is supposed to mean.

The one in the chair reaches down and tugs a dangling end of the restraint and it comes untied and the one on the floor catches it before it falls. Puts it in his pocket. Asks her something in Not Baseline.

"Language... difficulty?"  Welp it looks like she's in another world that doesn't speak Baseline.  Not really what Thellim was expecting from a plane crash but better than she was expecting so she should try to be cheerful and proactive about this she guesses.

They don't super seem to know what to do about her. The one on the floor haltingly tries another language.

It won't necessarily occur to Thellim yet that anybody speaks more than one language.  This looks like an equiv-tech world with artificial nice things, it no doubt speaks a carefully optimized artificial language, and universality is among the most desirable properties of such.

"Language difficulty," she repeats.  "This is a complicated sentence which demonstrates that I in fact speak a completely different language from anything you've ever heard of, implying that when I appeared I did so from very far away.  You can deduce that, right?"

The one in the chair points at himself and says, "Brian."

The one on the floor mimics the gesture. "Jackson."

Okay, good, cooperative Civilization.  Not that you could manufacture chairs and houses if people didn't have market economies, but still, good to know.  "Thellim," says she, mimicking the gesture.

They confer amongst themselves some more. Jackson pulls a rectangle out of his pocket and starts poking it; it lights up at the first poke and the lights change every time he pokes it.

What a nice higher-tech world she has found herself in.  Might have been nice to find herself in one that spoke Baseline, but maybe Baseline is just such a poorly constructed language that optimizing her experience from here on out will be helped by her learning a new language from scratch.  That's about the most optimistic spin Thellim can manage to put on current events.

She is, of course, consciously aware that this version of the story was generated by putting a maximally optimistic spin on things.

This... really was not how she was expecting her day to go, and it does not obviously conform to any of the things she thought was true about reality, or for that matter, true about stories.

Thellim waits.  Crossing language gaps is a matter for specialists, which she is not, and these two people don't seem to be that either.

"Tehillim?" attempts Jackson after a minute.

"Thellim.  Thel-lim.  Thellim.  If you have higher-tech mathematics and software that are trying to learn my language and can do that just from hearing me talk for a while, I can start babbling as best I can.  How do I convey that, though... I don't want to start babbling at you if that doesn't help at all..."

The locals murmur to each other a little more, shaking their heads occasionally.

A snatch of music starts playing from the phone. Jackson pokes it a few more times; the music stops. He says something to Brian. Brian says something back. Jackson points the rectangle at Thellim, and it flashes brightly.

Was that a cue to talk to somebody who's now watching?  Well, won't hurt if she makes a mistake about that.  She repeats the gesture, pointing at herself.  "Thellim!"  Long pause.  "Language difficulty!  Tsi-imbi!  I'm from dath ilan!  As you can see, I speak an unknown complicated syntactical language with at least some repeated words, if I go on talking long enough I ought to at least repeat a preposition or something, so unless your first theory is that somebody devised a whole new language and learned fluency in it as a prank, I probably come from another world!  Though I'd totally understand if you thought pranks were a higher prior probability than that.  I hope your world gets lots of people like me and that you do not start out with an astronomically high prior that everyone in this house is insane!"

Jackson puts the phone down during the pause. He pokes it a few more times. He holds up one finger in what is probably a meaningful gesture of some kind.

Then there is an unvoice in her BRAIN.

[Hello?]

Oh my WHAT.

"Hello?"  :How do I [ ] things?:  {Am I doing this right?}  <I bet I'm not doing this right.>

[Uh, I got most of that. I'm doing all the work, here, just naively directing thoughts at me will do.]

Should she do tsi-imbi?  No there is actually no point in going 'tsi-imbi' solely through an apparent telepathic connection it is rather a self-undermining sort of strategy.  [I'm Thellim.  I was in a crashing plane.  Now I'm here in what appears to be an entirely different world; mine had less advanced phones, and nobody who could speak inside your mind.  I hope you already have substantial experience with that kind of thing happening.  But if not, I can fluently speak, read, write, and translate a language that doesn't exist, I've memorized some poetry and famous speeches in that language, I'm wearing manufactured clothing with labels that don't correspond to any local manufacturers, and, probably hardest of all to fake, I'd be surprised and interested if my genetic markers bore any resemblance whatsoever to any local subpopulation.]

[People appearing after plane crashes is actually very weird. Uh, I don't have lie detection but I could hire someone who does if whether you are from another planet is ever importantly at issue.]

[I'll be moderately impressed if your world is covering all of its bases so well that a randomly sampled average person from another, moderately lower-tech world knows nothing very valuable or useful to your world.  But I suppose most valuable knowledge of that kind is valuable whether or not the person is telling the truth about how they got it?  It is nice not to be thought insane, though, especially when one is not insane.]

[I mean, I don't think it's urgent to figure that out definitively right this second before we know, like, where you're going to sleep tonight. Assuming on your planet people need sleep.]

[We do.  So far as I can tell by looking, people here look like the same species I am.  Ah... on my world, if somebody verifiably materialized from elsewhere, versus just saying they'd materialized from elsewhere, there would be very different responses involving, respectively, the largest university-inquisition in the history of time with an uncapped budget, or alternatively, psychiatric intervention?]

[If you want to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital staffed by people who are mostly monolingual speakers of English be my guest but it's not a popular option even for native speakers and I'm not planning to insist as long as you do not appear to be a danger to yourself or others. I am sure some kind of academic would be interested in you but I do not have one in my pocket.]

Thellim is now very confused.

[Things here are very different than they are on my world.  Do you not have... research institutions?  Collections of specialists, who are supported by venture capitalists trying to capture prizes, which prizes are funded by most of the world's public to produce public goods?  And, I mean, it wouldn't be the first thought to cross my own mind, but do you not have venture capitalists who would fly out by the thousands to meet somebody from another world?]

[We have research institutions but you seem to have a remarkably specific preconception of how they should work considering the other-planet thing. I don't have a venture capitalist in my pocket either. Do you want me to get on Twitter and post "hey, somebody I knew in school had somebody who claims she's from another planet land in their kitchen"? Because that will be taken as an experimental fiction project.]

[I am still incredibly confused but adaptation is a virtue so let's do whatever it is that you think is supposed to happen next!]

[Jackson said Brian doesn't mind if you stay in their spare room for tonight, and I can swing you plane tickets for tomorrow to where I am - uh, if you think you can take plane-navigating instructions reasonably well - and that will make it easier to do things like hire a lie detector and, uh, try to introduce you to venture capitalists if that's what you're into.]

There is a dreamlike, unreal quality to the way that Thellim's arrival here is (1) supposedly totally unprecedented (2) being treated with about the same urgency and interest as the observation of a new turtle species.  Sure, they'll give her a plane ticket to fly out, rather than rushing every possible form of scientific instrumentation to where she is in case there was any kind of lingering detectable anomalous radiation.  Okay.  Fine.  She'll roll with the dream.  At least now she knows this isn't fiction because fiction has to be believable.

[I have no problem staying in a spare room.  I can't navigate a plane but I can write down syllabic phrases in my own language to repeat at key points for purposes of getting on a plane.  Or, I suppose, Jackson or Brian could write down flashcards for me to show people, so I don't have to make it obvious that I don't know your planetary language.  I'm sorry if this is impolite or in some way violates cultural conventions of which I have no inkling, but may I inquire what person has taken charge of this event, and for some precis of their role in the greater society and its factions?]  Maybe she got routed to the Chief Crazy Person In Charge Of Crazy People.

(Only after the braintalk does Thellim think to wonder if she's permanently traumatized about planes now.  She probably shouldn't be, right?  She'll reconsider that if the next plane crashes but, for now, things will definitely be more convenient if she's not traumatized by planes.)

[...there is not a whole big to-do about your arrival. The people who know it happened are Jackson, Brian, and me, because if you'd hung around dithering for another thirty minutes Jackson would have tried emailing me and I'm a precog. I work for a boring private psionics corporation but in my individual capacity think I am better equipped to deal with you, whatever your deal is, than Jackson and his dom are. You could be, like, a weird eclipse accident, if some poorly controlled diabetic kid kicked you a month into the future after somebody else scrambled your brain a little, but even if I were positive you were from another planet there is not a Department Of People Being From Other Planets to submit a form to.]

[Why, I don't think I've ever before heard any statement which has given me so few follow-up questions!]

[Do you want, like, the executive summary of how magic works or something. Jackson says to tell you he's going to show you the spare room now.]

[Both of those things sound lovely.]

Jackson opens a door and gestures into it. It is a spare room.

[On the eclipse closest to your twelfth birthd-

- if you are really from another planet, then actually no matter how old you are you need to act like that the next eclipse might be your eclipse. We don't know how that works because people from other planets are not a routine occurrence. Protocol is that for the two entire days leading up to a total lunar eclipse you DO NOT EAT ANYTHING with ANY calories. After the eclipse if you feel normal you can resume eating, if you feel like you can suddenly do magic you have to get in touch with somebody who can either lock you down or get you into a virtual reality setup to confuse your magic and absolutely should not eat until one of those things has happened, capisce?]

Thellim obediently enters the spare room.

[Eat zero things for two days before a total lunar eclipse, check.  When might the next one of those be?]  Thellim should feel more alarmed about this, Brain Voice sounds very driven about it.  She will pretend she is more alarmed, until she starts believing in it more, and fake making the correct decisions so she can carry them out.

[The next one is this June on the fifteenth. That's in the summer, it's winter now, January 24.

Anyway, on the total lunar eclipse closest to your twelfth birthday you have a small chance of getting one of two categories of magic; there's mages, and there's psions. Psions do things with mental effects - illusion, precognition, talking in your head like I'm doing, etcetera - we can work on computers too nowadays - and mages do things with physical effects - flying, healing, setting things on fire and whatnot. We start out with no control whatsoever over it and every eclipse precogs like me spend all night cleaning up after kids who sneak a piece of leftover Halloween candy or whose birthdays are subject to clerical errors or who can't fast for medical reasons because otherwise there would be lots of enormous disasters all over the place in the real timeline. Once an eclipsed has control it's safe for us to eat food outside of virtuality but we don't know how to do anything on purpose till we teach ourselves and it resists systematic instruction, so we all know whatever powers in our set appeal to us. Questions?]

[It's probably not actually the most urgent question but in fact the first question to cross my mind was whether precognition works for solving NP-hard problems.]

[With the contents of an entire Cheesecake Factory and a cooperative minion I could brute-force one a little faster but not, like, well, for that you want a diviner.]

She's in a world that can convert cheesecake to computation, well, fine, she will deal with that because ADAPTATION IS A VIRTUE.

[I suppose my next question is what happens to me.  If there are, for reasons I don't understand, a bizarre absence of swarming funders desperately throwing money at this event, then I suppose I hope there exists a reasonably-priced psion who can give me this world's language so I can poke around your Planetary Network figuring out which pieces of knowledge I have are liable to be worth the most money.  We will, I suppose, not bother with having lie-detectors verify the truth of my story and announcing it to your world, because nobody except you would really care, or pay money to talk with me about my own world's institutions and innovations and history, I GUESS??  At some point in the summer I will very carefully not eat anything for two days - or three days, if that adds safety margin surrounding my unknown circumstances? I'm not twelve and am happy to do three days - and then I either end up with magic, or continue doing whatever I was doing.]

[I don't actually know if there's anyone who works as an English installer but I can look it up. Though that's not the world's language, we have kind of a lot of languages. Two days has some safety margin built in as long as you really eat zero calories during that time, otherwise the advice would also include limits on how many calories you can have the day before.]

[I'm in fact slightly concerned because that doesn't match my model of how anything on my world works metabolically - there could still be food in my intestines and my body's caloric reserves would release sustained triglycerides and later ketones into my bloodstream over time - but if the issue doesn't arise until summer there'll be time for me to check for metabolic differences; if your world's metabolic setup looks the same as mine, I'll chalk it up to 'magical rules rather than actual caloric dependency'.  Actually... does your civilization understand why the rules are that way, or is it just empirically observing the 2-day limit on food?  Because it's also never observed somebody go through their first eclipse at an age much higher than 12.  I mean, maybe this isn't the most urgent question, but it sounds like something you or your world worries a lot about, and the thought does come to mind.]

[Just empirically observing the two day rule. I can do magic till I faint from hunger but people don't do it by accident.]

Yeah, she'll be doing some metabolic research and then fasting for a substantially longer period than two days.  Unless this whole process is better-understood, or the consequences less drastic, than Brain-Voice makes it sound.

[Again, forgive me if it's rude to ask, but may I ask what form of payment or reciprocation you may be expecting for all the help that you have given me, including with things like plane tickets and perhaps 'English' installers?]

[I make lots of money, don't worry about the plane ticket. If I find and hire you an English installer that will be pricey enough I will kind of feel it so we can talk about that then.]

That's... not really all that reassuring a thing to say in reply, but different world, different customs; Thellim won't press.  [Until I've learned English, I'm not really sure how much resource there is that I can make use of, besides food and shelter and help learning the language - I imagine it being hard to do without somebody who already knows both languages, I'm past the window for rapid language acquisition in childhood - and while I'd imagine that your brain-voice skill isn't unique, it seems like, if that skill exists, there might be somebody who can get English into me with less labor than doing a lot of braintalk.  I suppose, while I can't read anything or use the planetary network or talk to anybody besides you and people with similar skills, it would be nice to have access to recorded music from your musical genres-that-are-recorded-and-replayed-in-planetwide-competition.  Actually, if that's something that Brian or Jackson can supply, it will enable me to be less horribly bored once I run out of energy to think and make notes to myself.  Oh, it would also be nice if they have paper and a pen, if your society hasn't advanced beyond that.  And if your society's shower controls are much more complicated than my society's shower controls, help understanding the controls in this house might be appreciated before this brain-call ends?  But if it's just four knobs that you turn, I can probably figure those out.]

[I have never visited Jackson's house so I don't know how complicated his shower is but it's probably not more than four knobs that you turn or pull or something. Uh, braintalk is a much, much easier skill than implanting languages in somebody's brain; you'd still pay a premium on it being psion labor at all, but you could hire somebody who's like fifteen to do it in conjunction with language tutoring, as opposed to somebody who is thirty and has worked a long time on their language installation skill and is the only person in the country who can do it, or something - I still haven't found one, that's just my guess at how rare it probably is. I assume your hosts have music and I can ask them to put some on but we do not have planetwide competitions. We have a continental competition but I don't think the stuff from Eurovision is actually notably better or more accessible or anything than random pop. Jackson says pen and paper and old iPod are on their way.]

There is a knock at her door.

Thellim accepts pen and paper and presumable hightech computing device 'old iPod'.  [I shall of course be grateful for assistance in learning English the hard way, if the easy way is above my budget and I can't get loans and haven't earned early revenue.  On my world some forms of music are fine for trained professionals to play on the radio, record, or sell; others are reserved for ordinary people who'd just like to play for their friends or at gatherings.  I didn't want to presume on somebody to play me live music, and the first kind is of much higher quality, so I asked for the first kind.  What do I do with the 'old iPod'?]

Isabella presumably relays this request to Jackson, who about-faces on his way out of the room and comes back to hold the earbuds up to her ears and turn it on for her.

[We don't have limitations on what songs musicians are allowed to record...] says Isabella.

Well, gosh... that is some... music she hasn't heard before.

[Yes, I've been picking up that your world has much less in the way of globally supported institutions and useful coordinated practices than mine, despite the higher tech level.  Don't worry, I won't try to fix it until I understand why things got to be that way in the first place, and what it has to do with the Eclipse affair - that being the most obvious background element that differs between your world and mine.]

[...I can see why you might want there to be a Department Of People Being From Other Planets but I have no inkling of what's desirable about limiting what music you can record.]

[Music can be nice to listen to.  When you listen to it on a radio or recording just for the sound and music itself, you'd naturally want to buy it from the greatest professionals in the entire world, people who spend years practicing and then compete to produce the best songs and the best versions of songs.  Music can also be nice to play among your friends.  How nice it is to play among your friends depends on how much they appreciate it - really appreciate it, not just pretend to appreciate it to be polite.  There's a potential collision where you can imagine somebody having already heard all the topnotch professionals having played incredibly good versions of the songs your friends are trying to play much more poorly.  So there's a dividing line between complicated music that's unrealistic to try without an orchestra or a recording studio, which is what the professionals play; versus the music that one or four people can realistically successfully play together, which is then avoided by professionals and recording studios.  If professionals did record a really polished version of amateur-music, a radio station wouldn't play it; and if a radio station did play it, their customers would drop their sponsorships and never listen again.  I could say that the radio station wouldn't do it for fear of losing customers, and that would be partially true, but also the radio station is part of Civilization and wouldn't wantonly destroy a coordinated public good because they're good people.]

[I... have never heard anyone complain that their enjoyment of their church choir or singing in the shower or their piano lessons is diminished by the lack of, uh, grassroots censorship.]

[You wouldn't necessarily notice if you didn't have a base state to compare it to!  I don't blame you for being suspicious of a proposal to reduce professional competition over anything, especially if you've never worked through the economiclogic of any similar proposals before.  Every kid where I'm from grows up hearing a story about light-bulb manufacturers who want to avoid competition from the Sun, and come up with all kinds of clever arguments for why the Sun should be shut off so they won't have to face the competition.  The key difference is that when you want light, it doesn't matter as much who you get it from - maybe there's a corner light-bulb seller with whom you have a warm relationship, but that relationship isn't intrinsic to the lightbulb or the light it sheds.  So sometimes you need to accept that the current relationships of that kind will be broken, and different ones will form somewhere else, because that's how Civilization moves forward.  But some friends getting together to play giant-kazoos are not about obtaining the good efficiently, they're about obtaining it together; and the way that people usually aren't paid for that, is one cue among several that maybe the pressures of competition should give it a rest.  We've made a conscious decision not to be pushed out to the extremes of commercial efficiency everywhere.  It's the same reason why we've decided not to manufacture superstimulus-foods at scale and offer elaborate fried-cookie-cake-ice-cream in every corner shop.  You don't want to feed people as much of it as possible as cheaply as possible; you want it to be something that the grandmother-faction on your block makes a batch of every few days and gives away for free.  I'm sure Civilization could get along without any one of those customs, but it would be a colder darker place without any of them.  I don't know now, of course, because it's part of the causally-screened-off past; but I expect that the very first person who ever invented Economics probably also started thinking about how to not turn their society into a hyper-efficient economical dystopia - how to preserve some warmth in the face of the global-scale competitive pressures their theory implied.]

[You have grandmother factions?? What do you mean screened-off past?]

[Oh, uh, I probably shouldn't have said that.  Infohazard stuff.  Maybe your version of Civilization never ran into an analogous infohazard but I should talk about that with a Keeper of Harmful Truths.]  [But on a more cheerful note, I just mean the faction of Civilization composed of grandmothers who, are... like... ordinary grandmothers forming an ordinary faction so they can invest some of their philanthropy and voting power in grandmotherly interests?  How does your society make sure that nobody is just ignoring the interests of grandmothers?]

[They can vote. Uh, we don't have a job capacity that obviously maps onto 'keeper of harmful truths'.]

[Figures.  I'll ask later about how one could reasonably have all grandmothers voting directly, I mean, they can't reasonably be expected to all keep track of all the grandmother-related issues facing Civilization.  How bad does it actually get with nobody keeping any infohazards under control?  I'm not asking you to tell me about the infohazards, obviously, I want to know what's liable to happen to me if I go onto your Planetary Network with nobody... filtering for me?  Do you have professionals that do that?  It sounds way more expensive but your society obviously lacks the coordination to just keep them off the Network.]

[It's called the Internet and people just, uh, go on it and look for what they want, unless they want to be one of those weird computer illiterate old people who phone a librarian every time they want to know the definition of a word or something. You might run into porn by accident but not, like, a Langford basilisk, we don't have those.]

[I... had the impression from the way our society is structured and how much effort we put into that type of thing that worse things ought to happen if there's no infohazard control.  Maybe your society generates less of them or maybe it's more of a fat-tailed-risk] or maybe this whole world is a dream or fiction or something else that doesn't have to hang together perfectly the same way as physics.  ['Porn' is... what, top-class professionals drawn from the most attractive people on your planet working with the greatest writers and the leading research psychologists in order to put together the most attractive possible sexual stimuli for maximum commercial sales, and never mind what that does to people when they go back and try to have sex with a real person?  Uh - I'm sorry, I realize it isn't your responsibility to answer that and I'm not trying to make you answer for your society and I know you wouldn't see me as having any right to vote on it yet.  It's just - this wasn't a very good day for me even before I arrived in an alternate dimension.  I'm sure your world has all kinds of redeeming features and is much better than mine at all sorts of things.]

[Most of the most attractive people on the planet do not want to work in porn, the writing is actually notoriously terrible, they don't hire psychologists, and substantial amounts of porn can be had for free though I assume at some point most of the involved producers expect a paycheck. I don't think it's a leading cause of relationship problems except if somebody in the relationship subscribes to a religion that thinks porn is morally wrong. Uh, is there anything else you want me to tell Jackson to get you to help you acclimate over there?]

Maybe if your civilization is too uncoordinated to avoid putting porn on the planetary network, you're also bad enough at making porn that the obvious sequelae don't happen - it sounds like the makers can't get paid?  Right, because uncoordinating people just take non-excludable goods instead of paying patentgratuities on them.  That goes some way towards explaining the bizarre absence of public goods around here.

[Sorry, let me think if there's anything else I need... well, either something I can wrap around myself for clothing, or some way of doing laundry before I go to the airport.  Expectations about how I'll be woken up tomorrow, in case the standard way of doing that is dumping a bucket of water on me in bed.  Bedtime-mouthwash if that's a thing here.  And I'm not sure how I square up in attractiveness to your society's average, especially if you're higher-tech, and I'm old enough that I don't really have to anymore, but if somebody does have a spare faceblanding kit... wait, what am I thinking, if your society has porn on the Network you wouldn't have created any customs against walking around naked in the streets either.  Nevermind.  Mouthwash, wakeup expectations, laundry mechanism or clothing.  I'd rather not show myself uncovered, even if there's no custom against it, and at least the men were wearing clothes.]

[I didn't get a good sense from the picture of whether you'll fit into Jackson's or his dom's stuff but they presumably have some kind of laundry solution. It is not standard to dump buckets of water on people; I'm in an earlier time zone than they are, so I can yell in your head till you wake up if you like, or they may have an alarm clock handy, but also your flight isn't until noon so you don't need to be up that early. They might have mouthwash though I don't know that there exists mouthwash specifically formulated for bedtime in particular if you're expecting something really narrowly defined there. Do not walk naked in the streets, wear clothes in front of people unless you are going to have sex with them, but I don't know what a faceblanding kit is.]

[Doesn't matter, it sounds like.  I apply black pigment around my eyes to make my face look slightly less human and more tired and less pretty, in order to preserve a coordinated public good that it doesn't sound like your civilization cares about.  There's no point in my trying to preserve that good on my own, since it's fragile against even a few defectors - so never mind, I guess?  And I definitely won't walk naked in the streets if your society does coordinate against that.]  She's sure not going to trash whatever tiny little scraps of coordinated good this society has managed to create for itself.  [Out of curiosity, though, does your society have any great number of people who feel awfully out of place, like other people are doing much better than them and there's no hope for themselves, like lots of exciting things are happening elsewhere but never to them, who can't find any mate who turns them on despite there being many other members of the opposite sex who also can't find a mate who turns them on?  Because if none of that is happening, either the lunar eclipse thing has further consequences I haven't foreseen, or this world is out of equilibrium for other reasons,] like this whole experience just being an internally incoherent post-death generalized dream, [or possibly my society was just wrong about what would happen if people blindly followed their local impulses of profit-seeking and pleasure-seeking in an uncoordinated unforesightful fashion.  Not asking for an extended explanation if you're busy, maybe just... on a scale of 1 to 12, how true did that grim prediction ring?]

[I'm actually not busy at all today because I'm in the hospital waiting for the decent healing mage to be freed up from more life-threatening cases. Uh, I don't think most people are picky about their mates being the opposite sex, but apart from that, sure, some people are unsuccessful in various ways and depressed about it, it just doesn't actually seem to me like anything you've described would prevent people from being unsuccessful and depressed about it. Let alone prevent them from being depressed for other reasons.]

"You're in the hospital?  Are you okay?" Thellim does not ask.

"Around 5% of our population goes to a Quiet City and only a quarter of those still end up unhappy enough to retire to cryonic suspension," Thellim does not argue back, "and if the connection between our carefully designed systemic properties and that number were obvious to your version of Civilization, it would have already fixed its problems."

She's just heard something much more attention-grabbing than that.

[I... I'm sorry.  I'm starting to think that I might have traveled MUCH further between worlds, to a much stranger place, than I realized,] and I'm having to spend more of my effort on not just deciding this is a dream and trying to wake up.  [Where I come from, entire species, in general, including the human species, have their shapes and forms encoded by genetic information in tiny DNA strands.  The content of these DNA strands was shaped entirely by a multi-hundred-million-year process in which copying errors over the genetic information would occasionally give rise to variant sections of information, genes, that produced organisms that replicated and reproduced faster than others.  In the human species, reproduction occurs when a male penis emits lots of tiny DNA-carrying cells into a female vagina, one of which combines with a larger cell from the woman, each of which carries half the genetic information to form the child.  I can talk later about why the female doesn't just use all of her own genetic information to construct the child, if that part seems counterintuitive; or our tentative theory about why there would be differentiated men and women, instead of just women sharing genetic information with each other, though I agree that it otherwise sounds like a hole in the theory and we probably wouldn't have predicted it a priori either.  On our world's view of things, it doesn't make sense to talk about any particular part of an organism being specially for reproduction, like the genitals; hands are equally organs made for reproduction, they're for using tools to get the resources needed to feed babies.  People on my world care about finding opposite-sex mates and having children with them because it's literally the only thing that every cell in their bodies is designed to do, and if that's not true here then even though the people are shaped like me and even though the houses look like houses in my world, I don't understand any of the forces that this world is an equilibrium of, and people turn into psions or mages at a lunar eclipse and need to not eat any food with calories but it apparently doesn't matter if there's reserves in their liver keeping their blood sugar up and I, I, I'm sorry, I won't have a breakdown now because it won't be useful but I need a lot of native textbooks and I need to be able to read them.  I'll take out a loan if that's what's required to get the language faster.  I don't know where I am inside reality anymore.  The part where there was gravity and breathable atmosphere fooled me.]

[I appreciate that you are trying to make fewer assumptions but I did not actually need Evolution 101, we have that here, it just doesn't... make everyone monosexual, any more than it prevents, uh, dogs trying to mate with furniture, say, or... the entire concept of masturbation. Historically people tended to assume women were all subs and men were all doms strongly enough that most people paired up in opposite-sex pairs with the occasional oddball who couldn't make it work but now we don't, so people like Jackson and his dom can pair off and it's fine. I'm not actually sure you can get a loan because you don't have, like, a legal existence, but I did actually find a language installation psion who lives in Sweden but can work remotely and will work for payment in kind from me.]

[You're using a number of words that my planet doesn't have and which don't explain why - the evolutionary equilibrium - I know one female-female couple, I set them up with a book series they really liked, they were rich enough to get in the highest bid on adopting an orphan, but from an evolutionary standpoint that's not the same as - I'm sorry, I just ended up in a different world and I feel like I'm trying to understand too much, too fast, I'd probably feel much more enthusiastic if I'd got here by spaceship as part of a formal science-inquisition but the way I got here was by being in a plane crash and thinking I was going to die forever no cryonic suspension and then just being here instead.  I think I need to not think about this a little, maybe sleep if I can.  Is this conversation something that can continue while I do things like shower and go the bathroom, or do you get unpleasant side-channel telepathic info when I do that?  And - do you have any questions about my world?  I can answer those without having to think as hard.  You've been so nice to me and I haven't been nearly grateful enough about that, unless this whole conversation is putting me deeper and deeper into formal or informal debt in which case I really need to know.]

[I do not get unpleasant side-channel telepathic info and am not particularly considering you as accumulating debt. Does which words you don't know count as something about your world?]

[The first word you said that didn't translate at all, a while ago, was 'Twitter', but I... might not want to hear it described right now in case it's some kind of enormous incomprehensible bizarre thing that drives people from my dimension mad unless we think about it very cautiously.  You mentioned 'Langford basilisk' in the context of infohazards which implies I might never want to hear about it at all.  Most recently 'sub' and 'dom' and 'Sweden' but it sounded like Sweden was just a region-a-faction-gathers-to.]

[Uh, subs and doms are roles - subs like being bossed around, doms like bossing them?]

[We've also got employers and employees on our world, yeah.  I'm not sure why anyone would think that was male-female correlated, but whatever belief your world had about that, it sounds like your world got past it already.]

[...not in a professional context, just in general.]

[Of course, lots of human interactions can be understood in an economical context even if there aren't explicit financial transfers going on.]

[You didn't want to be explained more things so I'm just going to note that you have a deep misunderstanding here and move on. How many people are there on your planet? Is it just the one planet?]

[Nine hundred ninety-eight million, four hundred sixty-something thousand as of yesterday afternoon!  Just the one planet, do you have MORE??]

[Not at this time, but in some ways magic's a young field and some people are working on terraforming-relevant powers - if you ask me questions I'm going to answer them, incidentally.]

[So noted!  Hearing about a Civilization that's scaling up to terraforming sounds like something that might make me feel a bit more cheerful about - all the strangeness of this place being for something, ultimately - and I think it might do me good to hear it.  I'll stop you if you say anything that starts overloading my brain again.]

[If you say so. Uh, so, since uncontrolled magic is dangerous the state of the art is for magic kids who don't want their powers locked down to spend their time in virtual reality till they have it figured out. But virtual reality is new, I'm about the same age as Jackson and we weren't the first cohort to go through virtual control training but we were close. So before that there weren't many magic people, but now there are lots, it's just we're mostly young and don't have any really complicated powers that take decades to develop. But there are several organizations that hire mages to work on things like teleporting interplanetary distances, adding atmosphere, probably fiddling with the magnetosphere - there's a good candidate planet, we're the third one and the fourth one is about the right size and stuff.]

[Reddish-colored, extremely light but not nonexistent atmosphere, 1/10th your planet's mass and 38% of the gravity?  Because if so it sounds like we come from analogous Solar Systems!  That's really interesting, we always thought our own first colony would be at the poles of the first planet, but maybe the fourth planet is easier if you've got magic people!]

[You've got it, yep. I'm not sure what the advantage of Mercury is supposed to be but we can probably do that too with enough magic if people wanna live there.]

[There's permanent ice deposits at the poles!  A colony built in underground tunnels near the poles of Mercury wouldn't bake in the Sun and would have very easy access to solar power and water.]

[Cool, I guess that's a good reason. You mentioned you were lower-tech?]

[We do not have the handheld blinky-flashy things!  I'm guessing those are computers with wireless Network connections?  It's been predicted our society will get there but not for another thirty years - computing progress slowed down a lot after the first years when everything seemed so easy.  Mages would change everything though!  I'm guessing that interdimensional trade is not really possible because the trade networks would be all over both our planets already, but if we could actually open a portal between your planet and my planet, everybody involved would be very very very rich.  Do you have the concept of Comparative Advantage where even if your planet has an absolute advantage in every sector of manufacturing, we can still both become richer by trading with each other because our relative costs to produce different goods are different?]  Thellim's mental voice sounds more cheerful now.

[Good guess. Uh, why did computing progress slow down? I don't think mages are actually heavily involved there and computers had to be decent first before we could do VR anyway. Interdimensional travel might totally be possible but nobody has invested years in trying it because there was no proof of concept about there being other dimensions to travel to, if you tell a lie detector and it gets decent press someone'll probably be able to take you home before you have to pull together the cash for immortality. We have comparative advantage.]

[I don't know in that much detail why computing progress wasn't faster?  I have a general impression that it's hard to make the features smaller because you need higher and higher frequencies of light to carve smaller and smaller features into silicon.  Which seems like the sort of thing where one mage could help build the machine you need to build all the computer chips, instead of needing a mage to make every chip.  You might not even notice every time your society jumps a hurdle where it only takes one mage and our society is just stuck in that spot for another thirty years.  And... I guess it's possible that there are natural events that connect two universes and then they know how to reach back to each other?  But dath ilan seemed to occupy a universe that was very - mathematically simple, at its core, so far as we could ever tell - and there was no room in the character of reality for things like eclipsed-produced psions and mages.  Your world seems like the sort where the rules allow for people like me to materialize; I don't think dath ilan's rules allow for me to go back.  Maybe you could materialize more dath ilan people here, if they're about to otherwise die and have their brains not suspended.  I'm curious about what your world does for immortality - we're just putting cryoprotectant into people and vitrifying their heads, so we can bring them back later when we have the tech - but feel free not to answer if it's liable to take a lot of thinking on my end, I shouldn't be trying to absorb everything at all at once.]

[Mages can do de-aging, on top of healing in general. The vitrifying thing isn't popular. Are you saying you don't want to be brought home, if someone susses it out?]

[I'm not that much of a wuss!  I'm moderately upset and overwhelmed, that's not the same as traveling to an entire new world and having no thoughts on my mind except running back home without looking at anything or trying to help with anything!  I don't think you can get me home.  And if you can open two-way communications then at least my Civilization - of which I am part - will consider that there's much higher priorities than my going back home.  But if at some point there's cheap-enough travel without every transport costing millions, I'll decide then which Civilization suits me best, and in time of course there'll just be one Civilization with two worlds.]

[Well, I guess you could tell me about some people from back home and I can try to stretch my telepathy that way, might be faster than a teleporter doing it.]

This thought had just straight-up not occurred to Thellim at all.  You can't have brainvoices suddenly appearing in dath ilan.  Dath ilan is normal.  Dath ilan is real.  The Brainvoice's suggestion sounds as unlikely as taking a pamphlet describing something really heavy, and heaving it through a reinforced-glass window.

Naturally, this impossible suggestion should be tested immediately.

[Let's try for my mother!  Her name is Helorm, she raised three children of whom I was second, and when my little sister was full-time-employed and career-ascendant, she mostly-retired and changed her primary-civil-allegiance to the Grandmother Faction, though my older sister didn't have her first children until a few years after.  She's definitely on the More-Chaos side of the Law-Versus-Chaos-Tradeoff in Civilization and always encouraged me to defy parental authority more often, especially my father's.  Helorm's taste in fiction runs to romance-entrepreneurial novels where a female venture capitalist gets simultaneously courted for romance and capital by three glamorous inventors but the incentives are obviously terrible and only one of them is really being honest.  Actually hold on, I should ask you what information you actually need instead of babbling at you.]

[If you can draw a picture would be ideal, that's what Jackson did so I could talk to you, but information that is more like her name and less like her romance novel preferences is good - do you only do one name to a customer over there?]

[I mean, some people have pseudonyms and that's fine so long as they're not using them for criminal activities, but I don't think that's what you mean?  Helorm is the 3,813,004,102nd person born since they started counting births, and that number is unique to her.  Did you just give people additional names so that the combined string of names became unique, instead of them having one unique name that would be way too long?  That's... actually quite clever, I don't know if it's better but I think I like it.]

[The combinations of names actually aren't all unique either, but we have family names and most people who speak English have middle names. - I haven't introduced myself, I'm Isabella. Isabella Marie Swan, while we're on the topic of multiple names.]

[Are there a lot of Isabella Marie Swans out there?]

[I don't know but there are other Isabella Swans. I'm the one that comes up if you search online though.]

Huh.  Thellim isn't quite sure what this system is meant to do or even if Isabella's Civilization is the sort where the systems do things but she doesn't want to inquire right now, that seems like the more tiring sort of conversation.  [What else can I potentially tell you about my mother, if her birth number isn't enough?]

[What does she look like, how old is she...]

Thellim is not an artist and not a deeply visual person, but she will hesitantly attempt to describe her mother, along with her mother's corresponding age.

[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.]

[I shall diligently attempt to have no emergencies.]

Thellim attempts to head bedward.  It's surprisingly boxish rather than person-shaped and she would've expected a proper house to contain something more like an advanced sleeping unit, but it looks serviceable enough.  Thellim will nonetheless check the bed carefully before getting in, just to make sure this civilization doesn't equip its beds with built-in Thellim-eaters.

The bed does not eat her. There are car noises outside, though.

Thellim is not accustomed to houses without adequate sound insulation, at all, never mind those located next to some kind of unshielded machinery that operates at night!

Thellim briefly considers whether this is worth braintalk, decides against it being urgent enough to bug someone undergoing a medical procedure who said "emergencies only".  Thellim is exhausted enough to sleep anyways, right?  And if she can't fall asleep, that will just make her even more exhausted, in a process that seems positively bound to lead into sleep at some point!

The car noises slow down as it gets later.

In the morning Isabella says, [Rise and shine!]

Not her best night's sleep ever, but nothing fatal.  Thellim has some new perspective on how nice it is when things aren't fatal.

[Hello.  I'm still alive.  Don't ask me to solve any complicated math problems for the next few minutes though.]

[Wasn't going to. Jackson says Brian can drive you to the airport, and the English installation should've kicked in overnight, you wanna take that for a spin?]

"Whoa," Thellim says out loud, experimentally, also trying to transmit the thoughts.  "I know English."

She'd - honestly she'd rather have been awake while something this large happened to her brain-state but Thellim will not complain at the moment.

"What happens if I try to say something with a longer symbol message length in English because it contains multiple concepts that have shorter codes in my native language?  It comes out as a longer but grammatical sentence.  That feels very odd.  Does it help me think things that are shorter codes in English?  It would help if I had an example of a problem whose answer was a short code in English but a long code in Baseline."  Thellim stops trying to speak in English, it's weirdly awkward and she can already feel her thoughts containing less discourse about probability-theoretic concepts that don't have single-syllable names in English.

[You will probably have an accent because the installer is herself Swedish and English isn't her native language, but it'll at least let you read airport signage and conduct conversations.]

There's a knock on her door.

"Permission given freely and cheerfully!" Thellim calls out, in what was supposed to be a three-syllable standard polite phrase meaning he could come in.  Eh, she'll get used to this.

In comes Jackson. "Uh, I made breakfast," he says. "Isabella says you speak English now?"

She totally understood that!  "I do!  Thank you so much for being cooperative with me!  Brian too!"

"Yeah, 'course. Uh, I made French toast and bacon."

French toast proves to be bread soaked in something and fried and served with strawberries and powdered sugar on top.

Thellim takes a tentative nibble.  Not what she's used to, but no stranger than any of a hundred weird foods you can get delivered in dath ilan on days when you want to try somebody's bizarre invention instead of eating more accustomed food, and like those strange foods it's put together with care for her taste-buds.  She'll devour it with gusto.

Jackson eats more than her and Brian put together even though he's very skinny, and then Brian ushers her into his car, which is a slightly dented black Chrysler.

Is that a car?  It's probably a car, it's on a paved flat surface suitable for driving.  Interesting!  Maybe with higher technology they've gotten the noise down to zero and the self-driving can handle the full complexity of surface conditions.  That would save money on underground tunneling, though at cost of valuable surface area, but maybe their urban areas just aren't that dense.

When they are both in and have their seat belts on Brian demonstrates that the car is not self-driving or quiet at all.

"D'you mind if I turn on the radio?" he asks.

"Yes.  No.  What?  How does this language - it's okay for you to turn on the radio.  Is there - I assume there are - magical safeguards - against a human error causing this car to drive directly into a solid object?"

"...uh, I don't think my insurance covers precognition warnings but somebody'd stop me if I was about to cause a big pileup probably." He flicks on the radio. Music she has not heard before thumps into the car.

Okay, so there is a magical reason they're not going to die in an enormous fireball spawned from the fuel tank of what sounds like an internal combustion engine which, like, why but never mind.  Thellim will attempt to enjoy the unfamiliar music, and the sight of wooshing right through a city at speeds faster than even a powered-trampoline-avenue.

They drive through some city, and past some random cornfields, and then there is an airport! He pulls up to the curb to drop her off, makes sure she has her bag of her civilizational artifact clothes, and waves to her.

Thellim imitates the wave back, and adds a dath ilani salute meaning that much has been received and much is owed-in-a-friendly-way.  There's some sweat inside her new clothes now and it's not drying quite as fast as in carefully optimized dath ilani clothing, but it will no doubt dry soon.  She doesn't know why she was so nervous; this world has precognitives and if experience has taught her anything, it's taught her that dying in a giant fireball just means you end up somewhere else.

[Hey, you there yet?]

[I'm at the airport, heading towards a place where I see lots of other people entering with a sign that says "ENTER" over it.  Entrances aren't obviously organized by destination even if I knew my destination - what piece of info do I need to find my next waypoint?]

[You actually need to go to the desk that says American Airlines and get them to print you a boarding pass. That'll have a gate number and then you go to the gate. You don't have an ID, which complicates things, but please do not try to tell your entire life story to the airline agent, tell them you're Thalia Jones and you're traveling under section 114 sponsor Isabella Swan and then they'll confirm with me.]

[Rogerroger.]  Thellim enters the huge building, and then has to look up at a lot of signs and read them individually instead of being able to just scan through them and let "American Airlines" leap to her attention.  Seems like the sort of thing that will fix itself with more experience, so she's not worried.

The desk with "American Airlines" over it has what looks like a queuing line... yeah, Thellim is pretty sure that's a queuing line.  She goes to the end of the line, waits, and pays attention to what the people before her do.

The people in front of her go to whoever says "I can help who's next" and then they present their identification and luggage and get papers for themselves and their luggage and then move on.

Thellim goes to the next available helper.  [I'm up,] she brainvoices, and echoes her next words back to Isabella.  "Thalia Jones, journeying under section 114, sponsored by Isabella Swan," she says out loud.

"114, ugh - Barb, do you know how to do a 114 -"

"Yeah, I can help you in a sec," says the presumable Barb.

Barb switches kiosks temporarily with Thellim's helper and does computer things and prints her a boarding pass and writes something on it in purple marker. "Line's shorter right now in that security checkpoint," she says, pointing.

"Thank you very much for your game-theoretic cooperation!" says Thellim.  Whoops, that probably didn't sound like colloquial English, but in her defense what kind of post-apocalyptic language lacks a short word for that.  Thellim quickly turns and heads toward the indicated 'security checkpoint'.

"Weirdo," she can just barely hear the nonBarb agent mutter.

The security checkpoint is a line bottlenecked at a guy who looks at IDs and boarding passes and then further slowed by people putting their luggage and shoes on conveyor belts and going through metal detectors or getting patted by uniformed personnel.

Why... shoes... well, magic, she guesses.  Heck, this whole line could be an arcane ritual intended to scare away plane-eating demons, for all she knows right now.  She'll put the question on hold in case it's easy to answer with Network access and doesn't require bothering Isabella.

Thellim duly puts her shoes and her clothes-in-a-bag on the conveyor belt when it's her turn.

She gets through the security line without incident and can then follow signage to gate A-11 and settle in to wait for her flight.

Thellim wonders if she can become incredibly rich by explaining to these people what a comfortable chair should look like, or if people would just steal the chair designs instead of paying for them and that's why these chair designs are so half-baked.  She wants to halfway-doze despite the noise, but doesn't want to risk missing her flight.

Her flight comes along 45 minutes later and she has an assigned seat between an eleven year old with a video game and an old lady who reads the in-flight magazines advertising weird products.

Thellim will read the in-flight magazine carefully, searching for buried clues to how her new world functions!  It's not like she has anything better to do.  How long was this flight supposed to be, again?

Three hours!

The high-quality glossy paper of the in-flight magazine is full of advertisements basically just asserting that someone's product EXISTS and making NO MENTION WHATSOEVER of any actual ARGUMENTS for why anybody would want to buy this product instead of one of its competitors and the information in this magazine is of NO CONCEIVABLE INTEREST TO ANY NORMAL PERSON and this feels like being inserted into a SURREAL DREAM VERSION of a NEWSPAPER and Thellim is now wondering if people here just BUY RANDOM PRODUCTS on being told they EXIST and everything is very CONFUSING again.

The old lady next to her has circled an advertisement for a cat drinking fountain.

There is an in-flight meal! It's terrible.

No doubt that is what HAPPENS when you spend your entire ECONOMY on CAT DRINKING FOUNTAINS your airplanes can no longer afford FOOD.

There are also peanuts, which are fine.

After the flight, which lands in a completely nondestructive fashion, Thellim can get off the plane!

[Arrivals board says you touched down?]

[We did!  If the plane exploded, it happened so quickly that I didn't notice and I ended up in a very similar plane afterwards.]

[I'll... take that as dark humor, shall I.] Like someone who understands the layout of LaGuardia, Isabella directs Thellim through it until they can meet and proceed to board the train. Isabella is a very pretty person who isn't blanding her face at all, though unlike some people Thellim has spotted she doesn't seem to be actively working on looking nicer than she does when she gets up in the morning. She has a rattan cane.

[Hi!  Pleased to meet you!  I hope that seeing your unfiltered beauty doesn't forever spoil me for all other human beings, but given my probable rising prominence in the world it's likely not too much of an issue in the long run.  Is this a talking-out-loud situation or a brainvoice situation?]

"Out loud's better all else being equal, magic does cost some energy. I will take the remark about my unfiltered beauty as a compliment, I guess. Welcome to New York. I brought you a spare coat." She proffers a blue coat with a furry hood.

"Thank you!"  Thellim starts to put on the coat.  "Am I to wear this because New York's environment is colder, or for some other reason?"

"It's not actually colder in New York than it was where you were, but we'll have some walking outside to do that you skipped on that end, I don't have a car."

"Feel free not to answer if it's complicated, but is there a reason you can't pay somebody else who has a car to drive you places?  I'm still - trying to figure out why some things exist in this economy and not other things, the missing parts can't be random or you'd be missing at least one of the parts in an airplane..."

"Oh, I can, people do that all the time here, but I prefer the subway."

Thellim's impression of the word 'subway' is something like underground-car-tunnel mixed with multi-person-vehicle.  She does not understand why, if they have the technology to dig tunnels, there are cars on the surface, and she doesn't understand why, if you've already expended the land-area to put single-person vehicles on the surface, you'd rather go in a multi-person underground vehicle instead.

"I shouldn't pester you with questions of relatively low priority, but be it noted that I'm still very disoriented about how much I'm unable to deduce conclusions from first principles and observations from hypotheses, with respect to facts like why someone would prefer the subway to hiring somebody else who owns a car.  I know my own world well enough that it compresses to a small number of axioms and I can decompress them.  Oh my ass how does anybody ever think in this language, all my sentences come out way too long and I sound like even more of an overly talkative neurotype than I actually am!"

Isabella tap-tap-taps along with her cane. "The cars you can hire are called taxis, and sometimes they're a good choice for a particular trip but they require telling the driver where you're going and making a slightly more complicated transaction and sometimes traffic is bad and if it's bad enough I sometimes get a little carsick, while I don't get subway-sick."

"Ah, the automation on subway vehicles is superior because they operate underground in a simpler environment?  That would match my expectations if so.  But why do the subway vehicles sound larger?  What's 'traffic' in context, it sounds like a turbulent flow kind of traffic?  Feel free to say this is not a priority question."

"I don't think they're actually very automated but they're on rails. Traffic means when there's too many cars and they have to slow down a lot."

"Too many cars, not enough road?  You can't build more road or charge more for cars during traffic?  I've been coming up with hypotheses about magic-assisted reproduction to explain why your world's equilibrium had more homosexuality, but the more weirdness I run into, the more it seems like magic somehow disrupts the general process of balancing supply and demand."  Or it's a generalized weird story premise that some generalized author isn't really trying to justify.  It honestly seems more and more likely the more she runs into concepts like 'subways' and 'traffic' - the moon magic she could maybe buy, but the small economic details of this reality give a strong impression of having not been thought out.

"Magic was very very rare like thirty years ago and they had traffic then. Also I don't think most people in same-sex relationships need magic, like, if Jackson and Brian want kids they will find some women in a similar situation and arrange that with them probably."

"No, I don't mean psions and mages do it locally, I mean the whole nature of this being a magical world?  And if Jackson and Brian each have one kid that way, they each end up with one kid they're 1/2 related to.  If magic let them have kids with each other they'd be each 1/2 related to 2 kids, like heterosexual parents, and there'd be no fitness advantage for heterosexuality, which is why I thought that plausible... how recent is this sexual situation?  Maybe your world just plain isn't in equilibrium and is currently experiencing rapid selection against homosexuality."

"The women would presumably also want to keep some of the kids so I'm not sure they'd wind up with fewer all things considered. Almost no one is monosexual at all and I don't know off the top of my head if it's more common to be heterosexual than to be homosexual if you're going to be one or the other but I think people who care about having kids a lot do actually select for the opposite sex when they're looking for partners. Like, I don't especially care about having kids so I'm more likely to wind up with a girl because most subs are girls, but my mom cared about having kids so she married a man."

"Is variation in who wants kids not genetically heritable around here?  There's several proverbs I'm trying not to say literally because they'd probably come out as three paragraphs long, but 'the future belongs to people who have children' isn't a bad gloss."

"Thellim, there are nearly seven billion people on Earth, I don't think anyone actually needs to worry about not having enough."

"That's an awful lot by our standards," and it makes it even weirder that their economy has such awful food on planes, there should be seven times as many people to develop better recipes than that, "but I'm not thinking about the absolute number, I'm thinking about the relative frequencies of alleles in the breeding population, and why everybody doesn't already want kids.  I mean, in our world, it's not the case that everybody wants kids, but that's because we're making a conscious effort not to breed ourselves into the... into fictional aliens who really, really want kids."

"Well, we are not making conscious efforts to breed ourselves any which way. People who want kids have them and people who don't don't. Plenty of people don't."

"Your Civilization just doesn't care about its eugenics at all?  And in the absence of coordination, your reproduction is driven mostly by how much you want to reproduce?  That really sounds like a recipe to end up as pregnancy-obsessed aliens in two hundred years or maybe even faster."

"Let's say... experiments... with eugenics... were tried, and went really really badly, and we are now largely agreed we'd rather do this instead."

"How badly does an experiment have to go to give up on eugenics?"

"Do you want the civilian casualties or the total?"

"...you tried to breed supermagicians."

"That was among the things they tried but it didn't work, actually, it's not genetic."

"You obviously did something with enormous unforeseen negative externalities, and I don't see any way to get that out of an experiment in directed reproduction without phenomena my civilization would call supernatural..."

"I don't think you know as much as you think you do about what humans will do without it being magical, since at some point your planet was taken over by a meta-ideology which openly refuses you all the historical cautionary tales you might otherwise have benefitted from."

"It would seem self-evident that of the two of us I have more knowledge of what humans get up to with zero magic, but I agree that you may know much that I do not about what happens in prehistory.  I suppose that if prehistorical societies tended to have sufficiently little magic you may know more than I do about my own world's environment of evolution.  Though I'm currently entertaining several classes of hypotheses where the lunar eclipses are just the surface of the way your world fundamentally differs from mine.  What of it?"

"Through most of history the extent to which magic mattered was that occasionally there was a natural disaster and occasionally a twelve-year-old got murdered. Then for a while occasionally the twelve-year-old would be sent to live alone in the woods for a couple years and be around later somewhat the worse for wear doing magic on medieval calorie sources with very little information on what they could theoretically accomplish, and most people never interacted with one. Then for a while there were somewhat more systematic setups for living in the wilderness with routine food and water drops, enough that there were enough lockdown psions to go around and nobody had to do that who didn't want to. Virtuality is new and most people still don't go and the skills take a long time to learn so many appear only once or twice the world over. Many, many things are not directly affected by magic. Meanwhile, everything in your world is governed by an extremely specific meta-ideology. So I would bet on myself over you if we were both trying to predict a nonmagical population of humans which did not happen to have received any missionaries or whatever from your planet."

"I don't think I can easily describe just how much lunar eclipses producing psions and mages does not fit with the character of reality, where I'm from.  It's why I would be so incredibly shocked if you could successfully contact my mother.  Our reality is - mathematically simple, deep down, and closed, things don't happen that aren't in the deep-down math.  Something like your lunar eclipses can't be truth in isolation; it can't be that your reality is just like mine except that it has psions and mages on top, it must have a different character.  This whole place is very different from my world in some deep ontological way, though somehow those two regions of reality intersected at having air and gravity and humans.  You say that sex-indifferent attraction and too many cars needing to slow down aren't being caused by mages and psions in a way that's visible to you.  And maybe it's not the lunar eclipses doing it at all, not directly.  But my running hypothesis is that the strangenesses are interacting with something much deeper, the different thing about your world that allows psions and mages to exist at all."

"I guess that's not ridiculous from your own perspective but I would appreciate it if you would frame your questions less like you are an expert on how humans in general ought to behave when actually what you know is how one specific metaculture ought to behave."

"I... think I understand, and appreciate, your caution against generalizing from one example, but I'm not sure you realize the extent to which your own civilization seems to depart from universally convergent optima that can be derived from first principles and which a normal human civilization ought to reflect, even taking into account that humans aren't ideal bounded agents.  It's one thing to end up on a parallel planet and find that clothing styles and cuisines are different.  It's another to find out that - people are using addition that isn't commutative, their system of probabilities isn't some isomorphism of the Probability Axioms, scientists are reporting statistics not using Bayes's Rule, sexual attraction isn't evolutionarily optimized for reproduction, the number of cars on the roads doesn't adjust to match road capacity, and advertisements don't make any sensible argument for why people should buy the advertised products!  Our civilization doesn't have a random form in those dimensions, it's being pushed both emergently and deliberately toward optimal forms."

"Our addition is commutative. Advertising is actually one of the most optimized items on your list, as it happens, since they change things and try to figure out what moves the most product. What are ads like where you're from?"

"Well, in a fundamental sense, advertisements aim to overcome obstacles posed by different incentives to achieving common knowledge about product qualities!  That is, if I was good enough friends with somebody, such that I thought they knew me very well and had my interests at heart, they could just tell me they were very sure I ought to buy something, and I'd buy it!  In principle, the problem of advertising is posed when somebody who knows me less well still has justified belief that I, or a bunch of people in a class similar to me, ought to make a trade we haven't already made.  The basic difficulty of this problem class is that you can also imagine people who don't have such valid knowledge, but are incentivized to deceive themselves about how good their product is, because they capture a portion of the gains from trade.  And the basic danger of advertising is that if you have a group of people like that, they may be incentivized to burn all of their gains from trade on advertising - getting people to trade with them rather than somebody else.  Like, you and I are both producing flavored drinks, which are actually exactly as good as each other, and we each capture 10 dollars... that is not how large our monetary unit of account is, English, but fine, 10 dollars.  We each profit 10 dollars each time we sell a drink.  If I'm self-deceptive about my drink being superior, and I pay $5 to produce an advertisement promising that and thereby convince one consumer to switch from your drinks to mine, I gain net $5 but you lose $10 and the consumer is no better off and also pays switching costs or costs of cognition, so social surplus has been destroyed.  There's a mild tax on marketing, more symbolic than anything else at current levels, but it does remind people of how easily it can go negative-sum given the incentives and less than perfect information.  So the basic challenge in advertising is to convince the customer that you actually do know about a product that's better for them to buy - overcoming my skepticism about my conflict of interest with whoever wants me to trade with them."

"So, in practice, an ad might look like a picture of the product, with a brief description of what the product does better that tries to sound very factual and quantitative so it doesn't set off suspicions.  Plus a much more glowing quote from a Very Serious Person who's high enough up to have a famous reputation for impartiality, where the Very Serious Person either got paid a small amount for their time to try that product, or donated some time that a nonprofit auctioned for much larger amounts; and the Very Serious Person ended up actually impressed with the product, and willing to stake some of their reputation on recommending it in the name of the social surplus they expect to be thereby produced.  Plus a Network trail to a much longer report from an old, even higher-reputation institution testing whatever the product's merits were.  And the upshot is that people can find out about things they didn't know they wanted to trade, but could validly benefit from trading, with their cost of information partially paid by somebody who also expects to benefit from the trade and already knows about it; without all of Civilization's gains from trade being dissipated in a negative-sum fight about who trades with who, driven by an arms race in deceptive advertisements.  To me, at least, this doesn't sound like a weird private quirk of our Civilization.  It sounds coherent with some of the most fundamental and important theorems about systems of multiple agents, which states that in principle they end up on a multiagent-optimal frontier, and in practice they end up very close to a multiagent-optimal frontier."

"So, uh, it's not actually necessary for Coke advertisers to believe Coke is objectively superior to Pepsi in order for them to produce Coke advertisements, for one. Companies do pay people to try and review products sometimes but there is not a special category 'very serious person' that everyone listens to because we're not a monoculture. Also flavored drinks and lots of other products are matter of personal taste as much as or more than objective quality. Also very boring advertisements listing statements about objective quality... don't... move as much product... so they have been moved away from in recent decades."

"And that is an incredibly bizarre anomaly just like your lunar eclipses, except more disturbing because in this case I understand the theorems about agent behavior that they're violating, and I would have thought those theorems would generalize across widely different laws of physics.  Something is messing with your minds."

"I would ask how your metaculture is meant to have, in practice, arisen from a state of nature, except you have acknowledged to me you don't know because it's being deliberately hidden from you."

"And I don't know what the Past Infohazard was, but if it also existed here and this is somehow what happens if you don't try to causally screen it off from your civilization, I am feeling a whole lot more on board than I used to be with the extraordinarily extreme measures our Civilization took to suppress it.  No offense or anything."

"It's okay if you don't like it here. I wouldn't like it where you're from either."

"That is an extremely, profoundly credible statement which everybody on my world would believe immediately based on priors, and our reaction would be to fly out ten thousand venture capitalists to interrogate you about all the nice things you had, and all the ways in which our world was falling short, and which new businesses would be required to provide those things to you and lots of other people!  That your world does not react like this seems to indicate some much deeper and more profound and alarming asymmetry!"

"Unfortunately I care a lot about freedom of the press so your venture capitalists would have a very hard time convincing me I'd like it there."

"We'd - no.  I was going to say, we'd obviously build an experimental region that was based on your whole world as much as possible, to observe what went on when all your preferred changes were tried simultaneously, in case there was a great synergy that local experiments would never hill-climb for us.  But if you can run non-magical experiments on genetics that cause mass civilian casualties that made your civilization completely give up on awareness of or influence over its own population genetics... maybe we really wouldn't try it your way, even in a small region.  What happened, exactly?  I'm starting to feel genuinely concerned about whether anything I might do is liable to blow up something I didn't understand and kill a hundred thousand people."

"Somebody thought some particular groups of other people were genetically inferior and decided to round up and murder as many of them as possible and some other people objected and there was a war. Is the extreme oversimplification of World War II. You are - I'd say you aren't going to do it by accident but I actually think it's really likely that what your history screening is covering up is lots of genocide much like that one of whoever wouldn't go along with your metaculture so maybe you are at some risk of doing it yourself."

"That contradicts theorems about how dignified people do things and therefore we would not do that and your world is VERY VERY DISTURBING and you should be more interested in fixing it and something is probably messing with your mind to make you less interested in fixing it."

"You don't think your secret censored history contains a genocide because it wouldn't be dignified?"

"Three-year-olds don't end up that far off from a multiagent-optimal frontier!  I know this because I was three years old and I never genocided anybody at all!"

"Congratulations, Earth three year old don't genocide people either!"

"Good!  We're making progress.  What is the earliest point at which your people start committing genocides?  One of the educational processes between age three and that is going wrong."

"Thellim, we aren't a monoculture, there is not a specific set of educational processes to intervene on."

"Perhaps, from my perspective, all of your educational processes are broken in very similar ways, but we can start by asking which educational process produces the greatest number of genociders per capita."

"That would be the Nazis and the Soviet Union at three apiece on Wikipedia's list followed by the Ottoman Empire at two but the takeaway lessons there are mostly that fascism and communism are bad... I'm not actually sure what was up with the Ottomans, I haven't read much about them."

"Isabella, you keep saying 'monoculture' but so far as I can tell your alternative is that some of your subcultures raise kids to commit genocides and some don't.  I'm not sure this is a good place to maintain persistent variance inside a civilization."

"I keep saying 'monoculture' because you keep talking like it is possible on your planet for someone to go 'oh, this doesn't look like a good place to maintain persistent variance inside a civilization' and then they alter the entire civilization to patch that and here there is no one who can do that."

"Nobody can produce public goods and there are no coordinative global institutions, yes, I noticed.  The reason why this worries me is not that I think this is a thing normal humans do without magic, it's a thing I can prove that general agents with intelligence do without magic."

Isabella snorts.

They board the subway. Isabella gestures at her cane and gets someone to yield their seat for her.

"All of these people are going to roughly the same place we are, to the point we need a long train of containers just for everybody making this trip...?  This isn't an anomaly the same way as eclipses, but I suspect something in the back of my mind is guessing some number wrong by four orders of magnitude, or has some other mistaken assumption."

"Uh, New York City has about eight million people in it, many people do not have cars for reasons aforementioned so the subway's popular."

"The Great City is larger than that, but I don't think it literally ends up with two points such that you fill six containers densely full of people and move them all between those same two points..."

"Oh! No, there are lots of subway lines and stops." She can get a map on her phone and show her. "We're here and we're going here."

"Ohhh, that makes more sense.  ...I wonder if there's a bunch of equally small details I could learn and then everything else would make equally much sense.  It seems like that is a kind of experience somebody should expect to have when transported to another world, even though fiction novels couldn't pull it off convincingly."

"Maybe? I guess we'll see. I live half a block from this station and then I can either check you into a hotel or you can crash on my couch, your pick."

"I defer to you on the topic due to your greater information; for myself, I prefer WHICHEVER OPTION IS LESS NOISY WHILE TRYING TO SLEEP.  SPEAKING OF WHICH, YOUR CIVILIZATION SEEMS TO HAVE NOT DEVELOPED NOISE-SHIELDING ON SUBWAYS."

[That's true, we haven't, do you know how to manufacture it or anything?]

[Not personally, but I don't think it was a big tech bottleneck so if you offer a big prize for effective sound-shielding you should get the tech quickly enough?  But Jackson and Brian know how to cook better food than airlines serve and the airplane food was still terrible, so I suspect that there's that deeper problem again.  Oh, I personally know how to design better chairs than you have in airports.  Or at least I know what they're supposed to look like and feel like externally.]

[Airports and airplane food are not actually a problem of 'does someone, somewhere, know how to do better than this' but more of 'what's cheap at scale and what will the market bear'. Very few people decide not to fly because airplane food sucks. People with very strong food preferences just, like, bring their own sandwiches instead, that's what I do, I fill my carry-on luggage with sandwiches and snacks. Very few people decide to go to a different airport because it has nicer chairs because there are not so many airports that this consideration isn't overwhelmed by proximity and flight availability, so airports go for cheap chairs that hold up well to lots of use and are easy to clean and stuff.]

[That simultaneously sounds like plausible dialogue in a show featuring an economist, and also deeply disturbing.  Like it's from an alternate dimension where economics doesn't quite... work right.]

[Well, there are also luxury airlines that have special lounges in the airport for their members to wait and serve tiny cheesecakes on the plane, they're just really expensive.]

[I never before conceptualized my private-tradeoff-virtue as being that person who says in a tone of Very Deep Concern 'The marginal cost of tiny cheesecakes should not be that high!' but I guess I am officially that person now.]

[Yeah, I don't spring for the tiny cheesecakes, I think it's mostly people who are even richer than I am or who are getting the membership as a perk from their job?]

[Maybe if we can just fix the marginal cost of cheesecake, everything else about your civilization will fall into place!  It could be there's just one problem at the root of everything and that's it.]

[Good luck with that one.]

'Good luck' simultaneously comes across as meaning something like 'good skill' while 'luck' comes across as the opposite of 'skill'??

[Is your couch or the hotel likely to be darker and quieter at night?]

[Depends on what floor of the hotel they put you on, higher up is pretty far from traffic. I'm reasonably high up but I talk in my sleep and you might be able to hear from the couch.]

[All else equal, sounds like the hotel is easier to sleep in.  I'm very open to considerations like the hotel being more expensive, harder to reach you from, containing obstacles I wouldn't know how to handle, would not let us solve computer-puzzle-games together at night before going to sleep, or such.]

[It is more expensive, telepathy works fine, if you handled the airport you can probably handle a hotel, do you... especially want to play computer games before bed?]

[I know I must sound like a terribly lawful person, but in fact I am not such a pure, sweet, perfectly-coordinated person that I'm not curious about what kind of computer games a civilization develops when it doesn't care about infohazards or superstimuli!  But mostly I was envisioning - standard social scripts for starting friend-business-partner-mutual-dependency relationships with people?]

[I don't mostly go for puzzle games, I like civilization-builders, and I'm a little worried that if I introduce you to Civ you will form a grand theory about how Earth is broken because it has Civ.]

[Don't worry!  When I fix your Earth it will be a perfect multidimensional improvement that makes all agents better off simultaneously according to their own preference functions!  You just watch me!  So what is this 'Civ', hmm?]

[...well, you, uh, start out as a very small culture and there are some AI-controlled other cultures, or you can multiplayer it but you don't have a computer, and then you try to keep your culture afloat and accomplishing things while negotiating conflicts of interest with the others.]

[Your computer games are so advanced that you can negotiate with factions inside them?  Why, that does sound like it might be secretly responsible for much that is different about your world!]

[It's not THAT sophisticated, it doesn't parse natural language or anything, but you can try it if you like.]

[I really am interested in playing computer games!  And similar new-friend activities like having you show me your interesting-favorite foods at our next meal, so you can see my expressions while I react.  But please stop me if I'm about to socially impose in a way you find at all unpleasant.  I really do not know your equivalent of the protocol for aspiring friends establishing comparable scales of desire and then comparing notes on how much they want various things in order to make sure they don't end up off their multiagent-optimal frontier.]

[I'm not sure we have... anything like that at all... but we do have food and I am absolutely stopping to eat once we're off the subway, do you want pasta-and-tomatoes or rice-and-fish?]

[Whichever seems more likely to be an exotic delight to a stranger from another world!]

[Sushi it is.]

They get off at Isabella's subway stop and she shows Thellim to a sushi place, where they can sit at the bar and behold raw fish. The guy behind the counter seems to know Isabella, asks her "the usual?" and gets a "yeah, plus a sampler for her". Thellim gets an assortment of slices of fish on pats of rice and also an avocado cucumber roll. Isabella gets a giant bowl of rice covered in raw fish and drizzled with mayo and sprinkled with fish eggs, plus a side of edamame and a few shrimps tempura.

Nom!  It's not the tastiest thing she's ever eaten but it seems noticeably outside the space of supposedly-wildly-creative dath ilani food variations in some way that's hard to describe!  Now this is a proper interdimensional adventure.

Isabella puts away her food very efficiently, pays by card, gets a complimentary matcha ice cream mochi for both of them to munch as they walk back to Isabella's apartment. "It's freezing out!" she tells the guy. "The better to appreciate your warm home!" he replies cheerfully. He has an accent. She eats her dessert.

"The food actually is different from anything on Earth - no, do not translate that, brain.  It is subtly different from anything in dath ilan.  And tasty!  I will chalk that up as minor evidence for your worries about insufficient internal variance in dath ilan.  We do have debates about that, you know, and different people have different opinions and everything!"

"Many cultures have internal debates and are still the same culture."

"Of course!  Civilization has a culture, it's just not a monoculture."

"Yeah, this is why I was switching to the phrase meta-culture." Here is Isabella's apartment building. It has a doorperson. Isabella nods to her and she nods back and peers at Thellim. "Who's this?"

"Thellim, you can let her in if she's by herself too," Isabella says.

"Yes ma'am," says the doorperson.

"Thanks for taking care of me!" Thellim says to the doorperson.  Hopefully she didn't give off any wrong or just misleading social cues by saying that?  Then Thellim follows slightly behind Isabella, a natural optimization for following somebody else when you're not sure of the forward path you're taking.  Along the way, she absentmindedly brushes her long hair back over her shoulder.

"Sorry," Thellim continues the previous conversation, "I must have missed it when you first said meta-culture instead of monoculture - I don't think it's a standard word in the vocabulary I was given.  But I think I rather like it?  Meta-culture is exactly what we try to have.  Different ideas, one language; people buy what they want, in one currency and transaction system; experimental regions try different things and argue about the meanings of the outcomes, but they report their likelihood functions with respect to the same hypothesis spaces for ease of multiplication."

"How do you stop the language from fracturing into dialects?"

"No... idea?  I've never heard of that being necessary?  I don't think the interaction graph between language-users clusters enough for that?  I could see how you'd have to coordinate against that before radio had been invented, but we're well past radio."

"I guess that's what I would have expected too if I lived before substantial communications technology but it turns out not to work that way. Like, Americans can understand Brits and vice-versa but there are definite differences."

"Huh!  I don't think we've run into that problem - maybe because our population was barely approaching one billion, we were going to celebrate the milestone soon - but I expect that if it started happening, we'd have a big debate about whether dialects are glorious diversity or dangerous meta-protocol corruption.  I'd probably vote on the first side if the dialects still had a very easy time understanding each other, and there were no famous catastrophes being caused by 'yes' in one language meaning 'no' in the other.  If the concerned side won the vote by a supermajority, we'd probably try... finding people with very central dialects and favoring their careers in radio and television?  That's just me thinking very briefly, we'd actually run a big prediction market about what the results would be if we tried the top twenty-four strategies under consideration."

"As far as you're aware nobody's had to vote on this in the history you're allowed to know about?"

"Not that I recall!  To be clear, I wouldn't be surprised at all if there was a debate before I was born, or if there's a bunch of Very Serious People in the background half of whom are yelling about the importance of hiring more people from the linguistic centroid of Civilization to prevent drift, and the other half of whom are saying that we should underweight the Great City in hiring journalists because the Great City contains too little interesting variance relative to its population.  Any time you strike a balance right it shouldn't be surprising if half the Very Serious People end up arguing on either side of it." 

"Is... Very Serious Person... I assume you have some less silly sounding name for them and it's just translating that way... is that, like, a job, or what."

"It's what happens when you go around being terribly worried about all the things Civilization is doing not optimally, and somehow build up enough credibility that enough other people pay attention to you that you can make a living at it.  Like, imagine the conversations we've been having, but now imagine that either of us was actually good at that."

"...'somehow'? You don't know how the credibility part happens?"

"Well, the central trust fountains come from people with ridiculous, clearly non-chance outperformance at some task very demanding of mental acuity, where it's easier to judge later who got it right than it was to solve the problem earlier on.  One classic example of a trust fountain would be Warren Buffett what no would be Nemamel, who beat the prediction markets for roughly her entire life, to the point where she could only trade anonymously and the name got retired for future children.  Now say you have a good trading record, were first to short an experimental paper you later helped overturn in detail, initially staked a prediction market that later turned out important, wrote a lot of essays that seem well-argued, and then somebody like Nemamel says she thinks your essays are making a useful contribution to Civilization.  Somebody like that is liable to be taken seriously, in the sense that other Very Serious People take the time to respond to their essays?"

It's like Harrison Bergeron and The Giver had a baby and the baby was fed nothing but liquefied game theory and economics textbooks. "I see. I'm going to tell the Swede she needs to fix how her name pointers work in her English installations."

"I wouldn't blame her if she said that would be impossible, or way too expensive in detailed effort.  Some people are themselves concepts, and if you're doing concept-mappings it's not surprising if you end up mapping those people."

"Einstein is a legitimate idiom. Warren Buffet is not." The elevator has finally arrived and taken them to Isabella's floor. Here's her apartment. It's very compact but it's sleek and fancy and tidy.

"Maybe the person who gave me English had a different taste in idioms.  Anybody worthy of mapping onto Nemamel should be an idiom!"

Thellim gazes around in appreciation at the elegant minimalism of the forechambers.  She looks forward to seeing the rest of this moderately wealthy person's house!

"You can help yourself to anything in the kitchen if you get hungry, I keep stuff on hand for midnight snacks but I mostly eat out or at work - that's the bathroom there - I'll get you the spare sheets for the couch, it folds out." She demonstrates this and fetches sheets and a blanket and pillow.

Wait, this is the house?  Seems small for a moderately wealthy person.  Maybe it's just her off-house for when Isabella is visiting this region.  Or maybe there's some kind of enormous supply-demand snafu for housing, but Thellim should not be leaping to this conclusion every time something seems off.

"Thank you, shall I try to set up the couch the way I'd predict it to work and you can correct me if I accidentally turn the entire thing inside out?"

"- okay I just checked and you were totally going to turn it inside out. Sort of. It's supposed to be flat now that it's folded out, please leave it flat."

Thellim takes another look at the couch.  "Oh, I just lie on top of it?  It's not supposed to fold back around me to keep me snug?"  She is also having all kinds of weird feelings about having been precogged but she can deal with those later.  "Nobody in your world knows how to design a bed, by the way."

"When you have your own place you can get a hammock or whatever you're imagining. Or, like, a weighted blanket, if that's what you're going for? Anyway, if you're not tired I can show you Civ now."

"Let's go!"

Isabella boots up Civilization V and starts a new game. The settlers have to build cities and defend themselves from their neighbors and collect resources.

Thellim starts taking the sort of early actions that somebody would take in Civilization V if they had never played this game or any game like it before.

Isabella is there to tell her what all the buttons do and give her advice, like that she really does need to build some military units ever even though it's very tempting to focus exclusively on infrastructure, because the neighbors will definitely attack her sooner or later.

What has she done so wrong that her neighbors think her an enemy beyond all negotiation?

"Uh, the barbarians roaming around just want your stuff, I think, and the other state civilizations sometimes you make friends with one and then they get in a fight with a third and want you to help or they'll be mad at you, sometimes they want your land, if you have different ideological commitments that can make things tense, if you denounce them or their allies that does too, if you won't denounce a third one they're mad at... Usually it takes a few things piling up for it to turn into a war but there are lots of things and it happens sooner or later, I've never gotten through a game without building military units although I have heard rumors you can build up to being such a ridiculous powerhouse that nobody challenges you."

"I'll just pretend this is a neat game mechanic, and has nothing at all to do with the way anything actually works in your world or in prehistory, and that will make everything fine because if you keep your map blank the territory can't become real."

"You don't have to play it if you don't like it."

"I'm not going to give up that fast!  I reserve the right to stop playing this game if these amazing computer graphics show me human figures dying on the screen while they beg me to stop and negotiate instead, but that hasn't happened yet."

Thellim also resolves that she will not violate her deontology at any point while playing this game - no attacking anyone who doesn't attack her first, no denouncing factions just because some other faction demands it of her.  It's hardly a deontology if you switch it off just because somebody else tells you something 'isn't real'.  Maybe this extremely suspicious fantasy-scifi world's plot twist will be that the people inside Civ V are real.  She hasn't been through exactly that morally-educational-prank as a child; but she's been through enough morally-educational-pranks to be suspicious, anytime someone saunters up and presents her with an extremely reasonable excuse to switch off her deontology.

(Her Civilization does have zero-sum games, and even army-maneuver games; but they're all played with abstract pieces, not pieces supposedly representing sapients in any way.)

Eventually Isabella wants to go to bed, but Thellim can play Civ longer if she wants to.

This game is so incredibly addictive!

Thellim was super prepared for this world to produce hyperaddictive computer games.  With a fierce, determined expression matched only by her internal pride in her own virtue for executing the skill correctly, she promptly departs for bed the moment she feels tired.  Take that, Earth!  Your uncoordinated economy’s attempt at exploiting Thellim’s brain is no match for the public-good techniques of mental discipline produced by the collective will and prize funding of dath ilan!

Isabella talking in her sleep is not particularly audible from the couchbed, but her alarm clock in the morning is.

Thellim flails her way out of unfinished sleep, her brain taking a moment to identify the distant loud alien sounds as unfamiliar music.  She relaxes once she identifies the sounds; the idiom of music as a gentle but forcible waking signal is familiar to her.

Though it's surprising that she was sleeping so late that Isabella thought an enforced waking signal was better than letting her sleep?  Either Thellim is in an earlier time zone relative to her departure point in dath ilan, or, er, possibly among the effects of hyperaddictive computer games is that they cause you to start feeling tired later than you otherwise would have.

Either way, she will once again not be proving any novel theorems at the frontiers of mathematics over the next few minutes, even leaving aside that Thellim is not in fact a mathematician and can't do that anyways.  Thellim muggily struggles out of bed and starts putting on whatever clothes are to hand.

The music stops. Isabella yawns her way out of her bedroom and into the bathroom, waving sleepily at Thellim.

Thellim queues up at the bathroom once she's dressed, heads in when Isabella's done, and later emerges not that much less blearily than before.  What's the new state of the World Beyond The Bathroom?

Isabella has a bowl of granola! [Hey, you want some of this while we run down what you can do with yourself while I'm at work?]

Thellim is slightly confused about how Isabella ended up needing to wake before the end of her natural sleep cycle for "work" - maybe the start of Isabella's work day varies and isn't controllable relative to her sleep cycle? - but agrees that having this discussion was a good enough reason to wake Thellim before the end of her own sleep cycle.

"Yes please," Thellim says out loud, since she's not eating granola yet.

Isabella pours her a bowl. [I'll be out for ten hours all told. I can check in with you when I have meal breaks, which is often, and when I'm about to leave the office, but ideally you would not interrupt me while I'm working - what you can do is, if you have a problem that doesn't need me right that second, plan firmly to tell me about it like forty-five minutes later, and then I'll have a window to find a good time to respond, since there's some short downtime during work and I spend the whole day in lookahead. Does that make sense?]

[Think so,] Thellim responds while eating granola.  [I have grave issues with the fact that your universe can compute nested smaller versions of itself that way, and what this says about the probability that I'm in the top level at any given time, and what happens to the people inside when a nested version stops computing, and what that all says about what kind of place I materialized in after dying, but I think I mostly should first spend a whole day in front of a Network connection instead of bugging you about it.]

[Yeah, I can leave you the computer with Civ on it and just use my work computer today. I can show you... Wikipedia is probably the highest value single website, and then Google I guess, and that should hold you for a day probably. If you feel up to venturing out shopping for a change of clothes or for a restaurant lunch I can leave you some cash for that, or you can just microwave something out of my freezer when you're next hungry.]

[How dangerous is your world generally, if I try to do something like getting lunch without a psion protecting me?  Without the ability to coordinate, it doesn't seem like it should be able to protect itself against the kind of violence represented in Civ, since protection is a non-excludable good at that scale.  Is there a powerful mage that protects this whole city just to be nice, or...?]

[You are not especially likely to be mugged or attacked in this neighborhood but I suppose it seems likely that we have a higher crime rate than dath ilan. There's a psion who works in crime prevention but stuff is seldom escalated to him if it's anything short of arson or murder, since he's trying to cover a lot of people, so if you were lined up for a more minor crime then just being about to have a check-in with me would be your backup plan there, but it is not generally understood to be a particularly dangerous activity for people to go out and get lunch and go shopping in Manhattan.]

[I think I might be wiser to hide in your apartment of lower-environmental-complexity until I understand this world better.  There's just too much that isn't compressible and hits me in specifically low probability densities of my model, too many places where I'm stupid and not just ignorant.  Places where my model makes a routine strong confident prediction about how a human civilization at this tech level functions, and then yours does something wildly different, often not in a good way from my standpoint.  Your world's language has a shorter word for "genocide" than "cooperation", for example, and I would not have expected that to be the case for humans.  I might be having an easier time in some ways if I'd landed on a visibly alien world with crystal things or pulsating blobs.]

[Sorry for the lack of crystalline entities, I guess. Do you expect to need anything I haven't mentioned?]

[If the local environmental invariants like air oxygenation and thermal range stay within their previous range of variance, I should survive ten hours.  I hope I'm less stupid and bothersome when you come back.  Oh - you should either show me how to operate local microwaves and refrigerators, or trust to my ability to deduce that safely from whatever the Network claims when a weirdly stupid person enters search terms.]

[The refrigerator doesn't require operation, you just open it and then you close it when you're done and it will beep at you if you fail to close it, but fair enough on the microwave.] She demonstrates the microwave once she's put her bowl in the dishwasher, and then shows Thellim how to get to Wikipedia (the current featured article is about a historical painter) and Google (she Googles an arithmetic problem by way of example, and then at semirandom "Guam", to demonstrate the principle).

"Thank you again.  I'll try not to be even more of a bother to you."

"Don't worry too much about it, you're interesting." Isabella collects her cane and her coat and heads out.

Thellim gives her an Earth-wave-goodbye with one hand and a dath ilani handgesture with the other.

All right, step one in the investigation plan, see if Thellim can catch up on any more sleep.  This is going to be cognitively demanding and should be done on maximum available sleep!

All right, step one worked.  Now it's time for THINKING.  If she wants to actually do this correctly instead of turning into Science Maniac Verrez, she should actually list out all the anomalies and questions worth investigating, before she starts; then pick a first target based on its tractability X importance, instead of blindly maximizing one or the other; then try to come up with her own hypothesis before she starts looking at the data, so she knows what it is that she's learning and where her prior theoretical mistakes were.

Item one:  EVERYTHING IN THIS WORLD IS WRONG AND MAKES NO SENSE.

Item two:  The world doesn't appear to run on math!  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  Lots of things don't run on math!  Thellim personally knows several logical inconsistencies and they've always been very nice impossibilities.

Item two point one:  This world has many precogs, which seems to imply that the possibility that Thellim is in the top layer of reality right this second is correspondingly small.

Thellim is strongly tempted to go over on Wikipedia and look up this issue right now, except for the enthusiasm-draining strong prediction that Wikipedia isn't going to know anything about it either.

Item three:  This is apparently what happens to you when you die under circumstances where you could not possibly be cryonically preserved.  Thellim is surprised, on reflection, that there has not been more speculation about this topic inside her own Civilization.  Perhaps it is considered an infohazard, since even thinking about this for ten seconds is enough for Thellim to start seeing ways that thinking about this topic could drive people insane.  Maybe 'Wikipedia' has articles about that topic, since nobody here seems to have the concept of information with negative value to imperfectly rational agents, possibly because they've never invented the idea of rational agency in the first place or realized that information is normally supposed to have positive value.

...well, it's sort of obvious how those three issues fit together, isn't it?  This reality apparently possesses a capability of internal division that lets it obtain 'precogged' answers and outcomes from sub-layers of reality; metaphorically and perhaps literally, it's a complexity-theoretic-superior computer to the physics of Thellim's home.

Some layer of that reality contains either the original of Thellim's universe or an isomorphic copy of its physics, the same way that Isabella's universe contains all the sublayers that get precogged.

And even the top layer of Isabella's world is a sublayer of some other region of this hierarchically(?) divisible reality; and the layers above Earth somehow put the lunar eclipses into place, as an equilibrium of unknown other factors and forces and optimization pressures there.

Then, some rule of some layer above both Earth and dath ilan in the hierarchy, fired to copy Thellim from dath ilan into Earth...

Is any of this concentrating probability, though?  Or did she just come up with a hypothesis isomorphic to "Anything can happen?" and start coding out the anythings by hand instead of compressing them?  It sounds like mostly that, so far.

Still, when your previous hypothesis was Stupid in the sense of definitely prohibiting materializing from dath ilan into Earth, there is something to be said for jumping to a hypothesis of greater ignorance which allows more things to happen.  And there is also something to be said for allowing that hypothesis of ignorance to be specific and have plausible-sounding specific structure inside it, just in case it does start concentrating probability or suggesting an agenda of investigation.  It could be, for example, that 'Wikipedia' will have something to say about the precog-supporting sub-layers of reality, and that some experimentally-confirmed theory about them will look like definite affirmation that there could be a copy or original of dath ilan inside one.

Also, Thellim is starting to notice that, if she switches her attention from nonfiction to fiction, there is a strangely large amount of fiction that would prepare somebody to analyze her situation, if she died under circumstances not permitting cryonic preservation, and woke up in another world with higher information-theoretic complexity (implying more destinations than source events, which is why her transportation here would be rare as seen by the destination).  Were those novels Keeper-influenced, encoding hidden advice from Keepers secretly meant to help people like her?  "Be very careful about which nonhuman superpowers you bargain with or give your allegiance to" and "nonhuman superpowers may not respond to your requests the way you expect, not because they lack information about you, but because they have inhuman utility functions over responding to requests" are both very common themes in Portal Fantasies, now that she thinks about it.  Those are both pieces of advice that she might have guessed for dead people, if she was guessing blind.  None of that advice seems obviously relevant to her own actual situation; but it wouldn't be surprising if the Keepers guessed wrong, guessing that blindly.

...This mostly feels like the wrong thing to consider right now, even if it is in some sense the most important.

Go back to breadth-first.  What, specifically, in this world is wrong and makes no sense?  What is every anomaly Thellim can remember seeing since coming here?

1.  Her literal materialization in somebody's home.  Actually, that it was inside somebody's home and not over the middle of the ocean is sufficiently improbable-given-randomness to be worth noting itself.

2.  The home contained two males in a couple, something far more frequent here than in dath ilan; it would later be claimed to her that sexual attraction on Earth doesn't go by reproductive potential of couplings at all, in defiance of the evolutionary equilibria that are supposed to be where biology and biological cognition originally come from.

3.  Thellim tried to speak a different language to show that she was from outside their world; which didn't work, in retrospect, according to later info, because Earth had more than one widely used language; the first of many, many cases of Earth being way off the multiagent-optimal boundary despite all the theorems showing that shouldn't happen for intelligent agents in general.

4.  Thellim was contacted by a voice in her head, because Brian and Jackson would have contacted Isabella later, and Isabella is a precog...

Thellim is starting to notice an isomorphism between the set "anomalous events" and the set "all events since landing on Earth".

The thought of trying to list out everything that happened to her in order is making Thellim's brain feel tired, even if it would be the methodologically optimal thing to do.  Maybe she'll just forgive herself for being less perfect, and do this more sloppily.  Yes, even on this irreplaceable first-pass-at-the-problem where her thoughts are fresh and hindsight traps are minimal.  There's a reason why Thellim's original employment wasn't as a scientist; she didn't want that much rigor in her daily mental life.

Okay, rougher view of the anomalousness of this world.  There's all sorts of places where pieces of Earth ought to be generated by an optimized equilibrium, observable facets of reality where the derivatives of some fitness gradient should have come to an approximate rest along most dimensions as pushed by an optimization process.  Like natural selection, and sexual desire; or offered economic goods, and people selecting where to spend their money.  Then instead there's sex-indifferent sexual attraction, or airplanes with terrible food and nonsensical advertisements.

An obvious thought is that the layer of reality she's now inside didn't generate those features by tracing a long causal history to find equilibria, and instead just... filled things in, sort of.  Like an author making up features of a book, only not quite like an author, because a human author paying attention and trying for realism wouldn't have non-upgradable bad food on an expensive airplane trip.  The people inside the world are allowed to notice these facts, but not allowed to realize that they're anomalous, or they've come up with overfitted hypotheses that manage to explain what should not be explainable.

Alternatively, another obvious thought is that there's perfectly sensible reasons for everything 'anomalous', and Thellim just doesn't know what they are.  Like with 'subways' seeming at first to be moving much too many people from one place and time to another, but hiddenly, subways just make additional stops... actually that still doesn't make very much sense?  There were still way too many people, even if they were going to twenty destinations instead of one destination.  But it makes twenty much times as much sense as before Isabella explained that part to Thellim, and maybe that reflects a predictable direction of updating where Thellim could learn more and more facts and things would stop looking out-of-equilibrium.

This seems like a good general point to try to narrow down first, if Thellim isn't going to do the proper, rigorous, mental-effort-intensive, slow process of collecting all her data and considering all her questions before investigating any.

In particular - though maybe this is just recency bias with respect to what she's thought about last - the couple-sex-mix frequencies seem most likely to have an explanation that is in Wikipedia, if events in this world have explanations at all.  Economics is complicated and changes rapidly as lots of agents compete to participate in more gainful-trades.  Sexual attraction moves more slowly over evolutionary time and is easier to study.

Also, the pattern of romantic couplings generates a huge fraction of all the goodness/fun/utility in Civilization, so even here somebody should be studying that?  But no, you could say the same thing or even more so about everybody's genetic material, and here that is considered a bad thing to try to optimize.  Well, either Wikipedia will have something to say about it, or there will be no articles in Wikipedia on sexuality; and later Isabella will explain that one time a scientist wondered out loud what makes two people fall in love, and then everybody on that continent murdered each other, after which nobody ever asked the question again.

Actually, no, if that scenario is true, the whole story will be on Wikipedia!  Because Earth doesn't infohazards!

Thellim takes a private moment to complain to herself about all the dubious looks Isabella gives her, every time Thellim mentions Civilization being grownup enough to do something that Isabella's version of 'civilization' can't manage to do without people randomly killing each other, for what doesn't even sound to Thellim like reasons, and it is obvious to her which of these two ways of organizing a planet is doing better, and it's the one that can manage to subsidize childcare for unusually smart or healthy people without that turning into immediate mass murder for reasons that Thellim still cannot begin to understand even after being told the end result in this world, but fine.

And Civilization isn't a monoculture either!  Just because their world can manage to coordinate on anything does not make it a monoculture!  Thellim bets that her Civilization has managed to produce one thousand times as much informed analysis of the cost-benefit tradeoffs of how much exploration and exploitation to do in particular dimensions of society!  And then meta-optimize their world for the correct amount of diversity versus optimization!  But Isabella would just point to that as even more proof that dath ilan is a monoculture!  When what they actually have is a planet whose qualities vital to life and happiness are distinguishable from noise!

She's getting sidetracked, here.  Probably because Isabella is hosting her and being incredibly generous to a stranger without - apparently, this part itself is bizarre - any expectation that Thellim will be able to parlay her knowledge into trillionaire status and repay her.  But sometimes Isabella acts disapproving, and doesn't seem to want to clarify their relationship with more explicit terms; which makes Thellim feel unsure whether maybe the support gets shut off, if she says the wrong thing.  Thellim is at least temporarily dependent on Isabella, right now, more than she's been dependent on anyone since she was eight years old and passed the tests for initial-level economic self-determination.  Which means that Thellim has things she wants to say back to Isabella on certain subjects, but has been suppressing herself from saying, because it may or may not be safe; which means those rejoinders keep running through her mind, a loop of cognition that can't complete itself.

Thellim acknowledges this feeling; tells the feeling that it will have a chance to speak again later, when she understands her relationship with Isabella more solidly; and turns her attention back to analyzing Earth.

The topic at hand was whether the couple-sex-mix here would turn out to have a surprisingly reasonable explanation.

Thellim can try to observe this on Wikipedia.

Before she does that, she is supposed to try and solve the puzzle herself; so that, if there is a surprising answer, Thellim can notice herself having been wrong, and ask about how she went wrong.

So.  If it's not just the world being painted in sloppily, or in a pattern that Thellim doesn't understand - then how could this result be an evolutionary equilibrium?  Or more generally, what would Thellim guess had happened here, if she'd been told it was the result of history happening?

The first obvious guess was mages enabling homosexual couples to reproduce.  It's a very elegant and clear-in-retrospect guess which would have instantly explained how sexual attraction could have come uncoupled from the previous sexual polarities, to the point where Thellim is ashamed she took as long to consider that hypothesis as she did.  But it was a very good hypothesis before Isabella shot it down.

Thellim had even got as far as deducing that, with sexual reproduction uncoupled from the original binary polarity, a new binary polarity would probably start to emerge for the same reason it originally emerged in sexual organisms; hypothesized, but not known, to reflect a divergence of sexual strategies between "fertilize all the other organisms" and "actually raise the children".  That would be the 'dom' and 'sub' part, or so Thellim had been guessing; and once 'doms' and 'subs' had started pairing off, the set of all 'doms' and the set of all 'subs' making equal contributions to the next generation would have stabilized their relative population frequencies at 1:1, for the same reason that males and females were thus stabilized.  Or to be more precise, parental investment would have stabilized at 1:1, so if raising a 'dom' takes twice as many parental resources as raising a 'sub', there should be half as many 'doms' as 'subs'.

The part Isabella mentioned earlier about 'doms' assuming more control and 'subs' having less control in relationships, on this view, would represent a new iteration of the not-entirely-pleasant strategy-divergence between "insert your genetic material into other organisms" and "accept that genetic material and raise the resulting offspring" that gave rise to men and women.  Even with the specific events of prehistory screened off, dath ilan doesn't hide that general truth of the past.  The consequence of that evolutionary logic, as executing adaptations in men and women, is too obvious to need any historical records; it's immediately visible to anybody who knows evolutionary biology and has read a few romance novels.  The untrained male has an instinct to seize and guard a woman's reproductive capacity, instinctively using violence to stop her from interacting with other men at the same time that he instinctively displays other forms of commitment to try to earn her acquiescence.  The untrained female has adaptations that assume an environment in which men will try to pressure her into more sex than is optimal for her own reproductive fitness, so her adaptations push her to instinctively resist that pressure while also instinctively trying to increase the number and quality of men who'll be interested in her.  There is a long-running dichotomy-tradeoff-argument in dath ilan between the position that this is just stupid, and somewhat evil, and was structurally evil back when some of the first sexually recombinant organisms started to specialize in injecting their genes into other organisms; and that current humans should opt out entirely from the more conflicty and combative ways that sex evolved to work, starting with using mental discipline to counteract those tendencies and eventually trying to select them out of humanity's descendants.  Versus the position that it's (1) not that bad, (2) actually quite fun in saner versions, and (3) now baked into humanity's core utility function as a top-level value that is not up for debate from merely instrumental considerations or how it originated a billion years earlier.  Almost nobody completely believes in either implausibly-oversimplified-policy-stance extreme, of course, but people differ in where they place themselves on that spectrum of opinion.

Thellim had gotten as far as reasoning through all that, and wondering whether the new 'dom' versus 'sub' sexual polarity had ended up better or worse from the standpoint of "how awful would it look to a generic nice alien that reproduced asexually" or, possibly, to Thellim herself.

Except that apparently mage-assisted reproduction is not what's going on.

It was a very pretty hypothesis, but it is, apparently, not what's going on.

So Thellim needs to properly let this beautiful hypothesis die, mourn it, and then start over.

Well, it's a bit of a premature-observation-cheat.  But Isabella did mention that Brian and Jackson could make arrangements with a female-female couple to get kids all around.  In principle, this ends with everybody having the same number of offspring and replicated genes as in two male-female couples.  Arguendo, why couldn't that lead to evolutionary equilibria that were just as stable?

Counter-arguendo (Thellim replies to herself):  Assuming both Brian and Jackson cooperate to raise both of Brian and Jackson's respective children, and the two women do the same with their two children - there'd be a lot of guardian-investment in children not genetically related to the raiser.  Over evolutionary time, you'd get guardians showing favor to their related children over their unrelated children, and maybe slipping some help to their offspring being raised elsewhere.  Which seems like it would degenerate back into heterosexual pairbonding.

For that matter, wouldn't some female-female couples go looking for unusually cheerful and healthy geniuses to inseminate them?  And wouldn't that produce dramatically greater reproductive variance for males than females, which would come with its own set of problematic evolutionary trends over time?  Or would that act of optimizing their children count as a forbidden-to-think-about concern over genetic inheritance because people in Isabella's world start murdering people as soon as they think about that, not that Thellim is worried about that or anything, it's not like anybody here thinks that could possibly be anomalous somehow, or in any ways related to this being the kind of universe that has an impossibly bizarre lunar eclipse setup and terrible airplane food that people don't notice as strange -

She's getting off-track again.  She's supposed to be conditioning right now on the assumption that this universe does have a consistent historical logic.

Thellim can't think of any arrangements for non-magical homosexual reproduction which would be evolutionarily stable over the long term, faced with competition from ongoing heterosexual reproduction.  This could just be because there's a set of adaptations for stably trading kids that Thellim has failed to envision.  But the more likely hypothesis - again going off premature-observation-cheating from Isabella mentioning relatively recent changes to sexual norms - is that the current situation is not in near-equilibrium evolutionarily.  Give it a few centuries, and heterosexuality will become more common; the remaining male-male couples will be frantically competing to become one of the couples that has a thousand children apiece with the female-female couples; and everybody will be consciously desperate to have children.

Continuing that reasoning further:  If 'dom' and 'sub' polarity isn't the effect of bipolar sexuality being destabilized by magical reproduction, the obvious next thought is that 'dom' and 'sub' are the causes of that destabilized bipolar sexuality.

Supposedly, Isabella's Earth doesn't put any care at all into preventing economically-adversarially-optimized superstimuli from being developed and released to the Network - has no concept of infohazards in general, apparently.  And to a first approximation, Earth has nobody in charge of its globally important features, which is why the interdimensional alien visitor got picked up by one helpful psion and taken to a small apartment.  So some porn-making corporation could have developed superstimuli versions of sexual polarity, icecreamizing male to 'dom' and female to 'sub' in ways that bound more tightly to sexual receptors than the original sexes; and then that meme spread like a detonating supernova through their whole civilization and entirely displaced masculinity/feminity.  Without there being even the theoretical possibility of anybody who could stop to question whether that was a good or bad thing.  And the new situation isn't evolutionarily stable, but Isabella's people can't let themselves think about that or where the new setup will trend or eventually stabilize, because then they'll go insane and start stabbing each other with kitchen knives.

So that - feels like Thellim's current hypothesis, more or less?  Her guess in advance of observation?  It's not a very polished hypothesis, but Thellim doubts she'll come up with a much better one for further thinking.  The point here isn't to be correct, so much as to notice what she learned after finding out the correct answer - to notice which parts of Thellim's wrong background reasoning helped produce her no-doubt-wrong conclusion.

Of course, that's assuming the Network even contains an answer.  Most of Thellim's guessing-probability is on "There literally isn't a historical reason, and people in this layer of reality are not noticing that their airport seat designs and sexual emotions aren't plausible equilibria of historical developments."

And that's quite enough trying to guess the answer in advance.  Thellim has been good, she has been very good, she has been super scientifically virtuous about being explicitly wrong in advance, instead of pretending afterwards that she was "mostly on the right track".

Now let's start Wikipedia-ing... what keyword, exactly?  "Why isn't everybody heterosexual?"  That sounds like a Network query rather than an encyclopedia article title, but maybe the Network query will tell Thellim what keywords she should even be checking in Wikipedia.

First google result:  "The invention of 'heterosexuality' - BBC Future".  It mostly seems to be arguing that 'heterosexuality' is a stupid concept and shouldn't even get a word in the language or be taught to children, although of course the article doesn't phrase it that way because sanity forbid that anybody try to coordinate around children learning optimized subject matter or that anybody try to design a language to facilitate clear thinking.

Okay, let's try: evolutionary biology of doms and subs.

Oh.  Apparently 'dom' and 'sub' are actually short for "dominant" and "submissive".

Is this actually as bad as it sounds from the words?  Maybe she should just read the science paper she found before panicking.

This is very rapidly heading in a direction that is very not good.

The science paper seems to be talking about ways that 'dom' and 'sub' key into evolutionarily older adaptations and it's confirming in passing that the shift in sexuality is recent, though it frames it as an insight into something that was always true, but there's - there's hints of - things worse than dominants giving orders and submissives taking them - of course this world would somehow manage to invent something worse than masculinity and feminity to replace it -

Stop.  Deep breaths.  She's not quite distressed enough to fall back on solid-core reasoning, but she is in literally another dimension and needs to be careful about jumping to conclusions.  All her predictions have been horrible and that's not a good sign for her models being real.  She is not necessarily the protagonist who got transported into a broken world in need of fixing through the power of clear thinking and good coordination; she may be in a cautionary tale about protagonists who think they know what needs doing when they really, really don't.  Jackson didn't look unhappy or scared of Brian.

Of course that could be because Jackson wound up with an unusually nice dominant, or because that was a good day in that household when Jackson didn't get any horrible orders - for that matter, there's some of the less fun to think about behavioral-econ experiments, the ones where the experimenters didn't push nearly as far as it looked like they could have, for ethical reasons, but which were awfully suggestive about what people might end up being happy to get by contrast with much worse deals they could have received -

Maybe Jackson seemed happy because he was getting fed that day.

Maybe she's making things up that completely fail to be true.

She needs to figure out - a Google query, a Wikipedia keyword - and screw making predictions in advance - but her System 1 seems to be frantically scrambling even as her System 2 yells at it to calm down and she can't figure out what to query to figure out which kind of protagonist she is, whether this is a horror-world or if she's just failing to understand a coherent set of customs that make moral sense once they're explained, Isabella thought that "submissives" liked taking orders, but of course Isabella is a dom and nobody in this world is going to have the tiniest training against self-serving beliefs because you have to think about children's education to do that -

What happens when a submissive decides he doesn't want to submit - when a submissive refuses a dominant's order?  Maybe there's some more incisive question that would separate the ethical possibilities, but right now Thellim's System 1 is scrambling and she just types in the first Network query she can think of:

What happens to subs who are disobedient?

There's - there's a wall of text excerpted from links and awful words jump out like punishment and more awful phrases like fun punishments for your sub but maybe it's just extra homework she has to not panic until she's sure, and unknown terms like "safeword" that don't translate but sound vaguely reassuring to whatever probable-dom put this language in her head, Thellim's eyes scan over fragmented sentences she doesn't understand but that definitely aren't reassuring her, and then stops at a link that promises to show a video of what happens to disobedient subs and video sounds easier to understand than the excerpts of sentences Google is showing her so Thellim clicks through.

no no no NO NO NO she doesn't want to be here she doesn't want to be in this horrorworld she doesn't want that to happen to her no no what if Isabella thinks Thellim is a sub is the person in this video rescuable no they have to be dead by now nobody could withstand that kind of punishment for long without dying

Core reasoning patterns fallback.

The video is hurting her.  It needs to be turned off.

It is now permanently seared into her memory.

She needs to think about other things anyways.

One of the primary core reasoning patterns says not to kill yourself.  This potentially needs to be adapted to circumstances.  What she saw in that video looked a lot worse than death and probably ended in death anyways.  Killing herself is a potentially reasonable strategy if her chances of ending up like that otherwise look high enough.

Alternatively, she could try to stay here and fix this broken world, and risk ending up like that herself.

That should have been a very fast decision, shouldn't it?  The correct course of action is that she's supposed to fix this world, right?  Thellim is one person.  The number of disobedient submissives being punished right now is much larger than that.  Why is this decision hard?

It's sad.  Shameful.  Thellim thought she was more of a, protagonist, than this.

Could she be, misinterpreting, somehow?  Or missing background information?  Is there an argument she's missing for why that was, in fact, a perfectly reasonable and ethical thing to do to somebody?

It's that last thought, in the end, that manages to light a tiny spark of deep, bone-searing anger inside her.

Deep.  Fucking.  Breaths.

No.  No, there CANNOT be some unknown fact or unseen line of inference which justifies this.  This is a not a novel whose elaborate lesson will turn out to be about the importance of perspective-taking and appreciating that other people may have unseen knowledge and arguments that you failed to imagine and which paints them in a much better light than you first thought.  If this were a novel, which nobody would ever buy, it would be a novel whose lesson was that there are SOME THINGS WHERE YOU DON'T HAVE TO WONDER IF THERE'S A JUSTIFICATION FOR THEM AND YOU CAN AND SHOULD BECOME UPSET WITHOUT FURTHER HESITATION.

She has just seen a woman restrained so that she can't get away, can't even move, as one man - who had a - that he was using on her unprotected - while another man was violating her - you do not get to reveal hidden arguments why that is acceptable to do to anyone under any circumstances ever.  Nobody, not even somebody who'd wantonly murdered a city, not even somebody who'd done that to someone else.  It would be a case of something where the author shouldn't even put it into the story's worldbuilding, because even as an example of evil it would traumatize the readers and numb their moral sensibilities to saner sins, and if there was the slightest hint that the author thought it could even possibly maybe be okay, if it looked like the sequel was being set up to reveal a clever argument for why this was a perfectly okay thing to have happen in society, the correct coordinated response would be to ban the book.  You do not get to put that into your fun thought experiment for what a different possible society could maybe think was okay.

But she doesn't - doesn't want that - to happen to her.  She really doesn't want that.  To die.  Like that.  Flinging herself off an apartment balcony before it can happen seems like a perfectly reasonable strategic response.

It has not been shown that this outcome is a high probability.

By the time it looks like a high probability it may be too late to commit suicide.

...and planning to do that could mean that Isabella's precog layer notices Thellim missing her next braincall check which causes Isabella to show up now.

...and successfully committing suicide could just mean that Thellim ends up in a worse horrorworld next time.

It's weird how that final thought, the sheer unfairness of it, causes something in Thellim to snap and just like that she's thinking again because the sheer insanely over-the-top unfairness of the situation has amplified her emotion of meta-level annoyance to the point where it is capable of fueling meta-level cognition.

She'll have to think this through in more detail later, but it does not actually appear like she is being given a choice about whether to confront the horror of this world, what with suicide being difficult because of psionics and not necessarily helpful even it worked.

Well, she supposes she could... accomodate... with this world.  Depending on what makes somebody get classified as a submissive.  Maybe she can be one of the dominants.

Is she scared enough to consider that?

Ha ha.  No.

Well, she gets to keep some of her self-respect, anyways.

Now what is she actually - supposed to - do - about this.