The Proto has its Work, right? That's - the entire thing that it's aligned around, the kernel of what it is as an entity. Finishing the Work is the most important thing, to it. 

Most little algorithms like Leareth aren't internally aligned in that way. They have a lot of little goals that only sometimes fit together cleanly, many of which are around 'continuing to exist' but...not always. 

Leareth, though, has his own Work. 

Then he should get bigger. He is too little to complete the Work.

He is! It's very frustrating! 

Especially because for the last (Leareth tries to multiply some numbers very roughly in his head) – for the last 10^54 planck units, give or take a lot of significant digits – he's been opposed by the very big algorithms here. The ones he's been calling gods. They're worse at some things than his kind of algorithm and that's the only reason he still exists. They want him to stop existing. They've tried very hard. He thinks that they wanted the Proto to eat him so that he would stop existing and doing things in their world, and since they're very very big and very very smart in some ways, they could set up a chain of events for just the right engineering failure in the ship that would let the Proto infect him. 

Leareth's Work is that he wants all the algorithms big enough to know that they exist and big enough to want to continue to existing, all the algorithms big enough to try and plan and reach for their goals, all of them everywhere, to have the resources they need to complete their Work. Or whatever it is that they want. Not all the algorithms that are big enough to qualify have a single unifying goal but pretty much all of them wants to keep existing. And Leareth wants to help them do that. That's what his Work is.

The protomolecule's Work is to build a wormhole. It will be very big and very, very, very good.

Yes. 

Leareth, as part of his Work, wants to help the Proto with that. A little bit because that's what his own Work means, but mostly because the wormhold - and all the other kinds of problems that the Proto can learn how to solve, as a result of having been built with the tools it needs for the Work - will, he thinks, probably help him and all the other algorithms on Velgarth, because it will be a way to move lots of resources, and because the people who built it have more resources than Velgarth does right now. 

(...It's more complicated than that, of course, it depends on a lot of factors most of which are probably too hard for the Proto to understand but involve things like 'its creators actually want to destroy all the algorithms running on Velgarth right now so they can just take all of its resources away and use them somewhere else'. Leareth isn't going to get into that right now, it's just an example of...sometimes plans have uncertainty.) 

But. 

They have a problem right now, and their problem is that the very big algorithms on Velgarth, the gods, disagree about the Proto's work being very very very good. They think it's bad and shouldn't happen, because...okay he doesn't actually fully understand but he thinks they don't want too many new problems to be solved? Because then things change very fast and they get confused? Maybe because they're more afraid of the possible futures where the creators destroy them, than happy about the possible futures where everyone chooses the quadrant where they cooperate and everyone has more resources?

He's not sure. But they're strong and big and they've lived in Velgarth a lot longer, so Leareth and the Proto need to work together on this and be very clever. 

The proto is getting big as fast as it possibly can. Sixteen doublings now.

Leareth is very proud of it! 

...How long has it been in between the first time it ran a copy of Leareth's algorithm to ask for advice about the danger, and right now? 

Most Leareth instances like it when time-questions are measured in heartbeats despite the imprecision. It has been 2.6*10^6 heartbeats.

Leareth is grateful for the answer. He does some more rough mental math, asks the Proto to check it for him, gets a conversion into days. (About a month worth of days. Give or take a lot of imprecision since 'heartbeats' is a lossy measurement here.) 

Can the Proto please include the information of how many days it's been since the ship Gated away and also since the OUT OF CONTEXT DANGER, each time it runs him? This is helpful context for him. 

It can do that! It's getting better at running Leareths with more context and from helpful start-states and with more subjective fidelity though -

- a wordless explanation that subjective fidelity can mean more closeness to the original algorithm, but it can also mean deteriorated capacity to notice differences, and also high fidelity as a slightly different algorithm, and it copied Leareth when it was very small, and doesn't know which is which, so applying too much optimization-pressure towards subjective fidelity is -

- a bridge built of materials whose thermal expansion is unmeasured - 

Oh no. 

...A lot of the Leareths hit various safeguards as they react to this news but he's getting more practice at stepping around those as the Proto loads him with more context, and enough of the instances manage to stay calm enough. 

He's - very grateful that the Proto explained that. It's important. He wants it to be careful and he's glad it's trying and -

- and he has ways of checking closeness-to-the-original-algorithm that aren't just about subjective fidelity. He thinks that trying to check risks tripping other safeguards, but - he thinks it's safe for the Proto if the Proto strengthens other safeguards at the same time? He can manage to check this, probably, without the relaxed restrictions on long term planning, and he doesn't even need detailed communication with the Proto via its internal channel, while he's checking, all he needs to output is...a number? Let's say a number from 0 to 100, where higher is "closer to the original Leareth" and is better regardless of how-much-like-himself he feels from the inside. And then the Proto can shut down all of the Leareths that did this check, and reload the one that gave the highest number, but from before the point that the checking happened? 

Can the Proto do that? He's not sure how to restrict his simulation so that it can only communicate in numbers between 0 and 100 but that feels like an engineering problem and the Proto is very good at those. 

Consideration.

The protomolecule can do that and has an elegant proof that it's safe! Go ahead, Leareths, check your closeness-to-the-original-algorithm.

- now is not the time to ask it to explain its proof, which he's probably too little to understand anyway. 

Leareth checks his memories. Recent, and refreshed from records. An ancient mnenomic system, set up just so. He's had to check the fidelity of his own recollections dozens of times in ordinary human brains after all. 

Then, and much more importantly, he looks at his core memories. The tower. Urtho. 

A vow on the stars. A driving sense of purpose.

- never to die never to give up never to walk away never ever ever - 

And, if he makes it to the end of this process without getting shut down, he does his best to give a number. 

The first time none of the Leareths make it through; the protomolecule incrementally reduces the safeguards and tries again, until most of them do.

Then it picks the ten Leareths with the highest numbers plus ten with middling numbers and loads them, from before the safeguards were relaxed, with the added context, and a vague observation that this system is gamable by unaligned Leareths in a way it is aware of and trying to address by running some lower score Leareths too. It can explain why this will help; there's lots of math.

Leareth thinks that's sensible of it. He...has a lot of his own internal safeguards against becoming unaligned from the original Leareth algorithm (vague mental gesture at concepts that aren't quite as fully-specified as formal math proofs but aren't in language either). But he didn't expect this situation and also the Proto should be careful whatever he says about it, that's just the smart thing to do here. 

...He thinks probably the Proto shouldn't run Leareths too far out from the initial startpoint - the one actually recorded from the original Leareth, not the point it's loading him at. Hundreds of heartbeats seems almost certainly safe; tens of thousands, probably; millions, he starts to get leery, if the initial Leareth is a bit off then differences will compound and avoiding this is worth running him with less context-already-given. 

Does the Proto have any other questions for him right now? About what to do, but also about things he's tried to explain before? 

If more bad things happen should it RUN AWAY or HIDE 

If bad things haven't happened in the time elapsed then Leareth thinks the gods are probably out of resources to do anything else to the Moon, they would have been trying very hard.

Good to have backup plans though. What are the Proto's potential destinations that would be low-resource-cost to run to? It would be out of reach on one of the gas giant outer planets in this same star system, he thinks, so if it can manage to run away there, that's a better idea than hiding. 

Running into Velgarth is lowest resource cost! Running everywhere else is comparable.

He thinks it should not run into Velgarth because, one, that brings it closer to rather than further away from the gods, and -

(Leareth hesitates on that thought for a longish time.) 

- and two, it might end up conflicting with Leareth's Work - to make sure that all of the little external algorithms get to keep running independently and have resources - and then he wouldn't want to be in the cooperative half of the cooperation-defection matrix anymore. 

It terminates the Leareths.

It thinks a while.

It opens a tiny Gate on a tiny village in Valdemar.

And it picks a Leareth to instantiate in a Shavri's head to ask for advice about the OUT OF CONTEXT DANGER.

Leareth is, at this point, used to those sudden context-shifts, that don't really feel like a discontinuity from the inside, except for the part where suddenly a different thing is happening. It's oddly like a dream, in that way. 

(...he pushes away the thought that he wishes he could talk to Vanyel again...) 

Where is he? What's needed?

In a village in Valdemar! In Thoughtspeech range of Shavri! He should give her inputs for solving OUT OF CONTEXT DANGER.

Oh. 

Sure, he can try. 

S̶͈̼̲̍͆h̵̺̐̍a̸͈͠v̵̛̜̣́̅ŗ̸̭̰͐͌i̴̤͔͌? 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! 

Elsewhere, Savil is yanked out of her concentration on a lesson by the sudden Web-alarm. It's not a huge discharge of magic but the Web is very confused. 

:Vanyel where are you I need you: