"But at the cost of taking away someone's humanity?" Asthirin blinks. "Translation glitch. That concept is more inclusive in Thought-Speak."

"You don't... necessarily have to enslave them," Chantal says tentatively. "If you could instead just... very aggressively explain things."

"Some people take very aggressive explanations."

"Excellent point," Sahar says. "This is one thing that I want you all to take away from this class: mind control should not be a first resort. Almost always, you will have other options. If you don't, you are probably missing something. It might be due to a blind spot. It might be that you are too proud to consider something to be an option. It may be that those options are less likely to work. I befriended Ehan, and probed him on his society in great detail. This is how I know so much about it. I became his friend, in a very real sense his only friend, and I asked him what his plan was for his society. What would he do about the reds? What would he do about the reproductive instinct? What would he do about aliens who didn't want to follow pollution protocols?"

"He would bring home robots, and reds would be obsolete, and no one would have to think about them anymore. He would have lightspeed travel, so the reproductive instinct wouldn't be a problem. If there were aliens polluting the universe, then he'd make them change their wicked ways; wasn't that why he was here? Maybe he'd give them a pollution instinct, like they should've had in the first place."

"And I looked into his mind. He was not going to be convinced. It wasn't like I was asking him to go vegetarian, or quit smoking, or something. These were things he couldn't lose without losing himself."

"So I took them from him. I made him love me, first - that's almost always the first step to a successful reinvention - and as the semester went on I molded him into someone who would do what I thought was the right thing, even when I sent him back to his home planet. I experimented on him, ratcheting his pollution instinct back and forth by stages, directly manipulating his empathy to apply to reds both specific and in general, playing with his reproductive urges like Silly Putty. Dean Mesmerra took me into her office and told me personally that I was skirting the edges of the rule that stated that the person who graduates has to be the person who received the invitation. I cared exactly enough to make sure I didn't break that rule. The man who went home was, technically, the man who received his invitation. But the one would have killed the other in a second, given the chance."

Her vividly scarlet eyes are hollow. "In a very real sense, I killed Ehan. And I would do it again."

"But—going faster doesn't make more space," says Bird. "There's an amount. You run out. Couldn't you have told him?"

"I tried. It was one of the first things I said to him - and he said, 'this place proves the world is wider than any of us knew. If they don't teach us to move between universes, I can learn how myself.'"

"...hmm," she says. "It still seems like... like he wasn't creative enough. Like he wanted things to be easy instead of interesting."

Sahar blinks.

"Yes, though I haven't met many people who would put it that way. But you're right; he wanted things to be easy, and he wanted to make there be more of what he knew, rather than wanting to learn more ways for things to be."

"But that's wrong!" she says. "There are so many ways things can be and you miss so much if you don't look for them!"

"Yes. There are more ways to be than we can imagine. If we choose too soon to make the world the way we want it to be, we miss valuable perspective. But every moment we don't we're letting people suffer and die. This is another dilemma: do we delay change so we can understand what we're doing, not hurt people through our own inexperience, but let them suffer? Or do we charge heedlessly forward, making whole everything that once was broken, trampling those in our path?"

"...neither??"

Sahar raises an eyebrow. "Interesting. What would you do instead?"

"If you want to change something, understand it first. If you don't understand it, how do you know what you want to change it to? But you can understand one thing, and change it, and then learn another one. You don't have to wait until you know everything to start doing things."

"...yes. Yes, ultimately, that's the best we can do. But there's only so much you can understand some things - often the biggest things, that are hurting the most people, are the most complicated. My country had fully legal and unabashed racial slavery until only about a hundred and fifty years ago. I've thought often about what I would have done, in those times. With my powers, without my powers. With modern technology, without. Born then, or sent back. And the answer, I think, is that even if I did not fully understand the systems in play, I would have put forth the best effort I had to dismantle those structures. With my bare hands, if I had to. And I would hurt people to do it. That's the cost of being a person who wants to do things: sooner or later, someone gets hurt."

"But if you don't understand something how do you know how to change it so it's the way you want?"

"The way I'd put it is that some things, you only need to know enough about them to be confident that whatever happens when you change it, it'll probably be better than the status quo. Sometimes you'll be wrong."

"Like - my go-to example is that in my world, wizards don't interfere with muggles - non-magical people - even though we could fix a lot of their problems. And I don't know how it would go in practice, maybe some people would get hurt in the transition. But a few years ago, fifty million muggles died of a flu, and my little sister could make a flu-cure potion when she was eight years old. That's the kind of situation where you don't have to understand what would happen to know that something has to change."

"...maybe we mean different things by 'understand'?"

"Maybe so. In an ideal world I'd understand not just what the problem was but what was propping it up, what its secondary effects were, what the downstream effects of removing it would be - I'd understand the whole problem. But in practice you kind of scale it off of how bad a problem it is."

"Things are... harder to understand than they look," she says. "You can look at something and think 'oh, I see what that is' and be wrong. Blowing on a candle puts it out but blowing on a campfire makes it bigger. And that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to put out fires but it means you should—remember what the differences are between what you're trying to do and what you've done before and watch out for how they might matter?"

"Yes, exactly. But if you ask around, say 'I've put out candles but this fire looks bigger, what should I know about it?', do some reading on how fire works, then you can learn how it's different from what you know. If you study what's happened in similar cases, like - if you knew there was a little country that had slavery and you wanted to stop it, so you looked at what happened in other countries when they stopped having slavery? That can give you an idea of what'll happen if you interfere. And you can make a change without it blowing up in your face. Hopefully."

"Yes. I think... you said 'you don't have to understand what would happen to know something has to change' and I thought of blowing on campfires because sometimes that's what happens, when you really don't understand what would happen and you do something anyway. That's why I wondered if we meant 'understand' differently."

"Sometimes that can happen. Or - if oil catches fire, and you try to put it out with water like a campfire, it'll explode. That's what I'd think of - a situation where it doesn't just not work, it gets worse. But that's what I mean about not fully understanding the situation if it's bad enough. For all I know, if I make wizardry public, the muggles will declare war and bomb us and we'll all die and it'll be worse than it ever was. But I've done enough research that I don't think that'll happen, and I'll do more, but - every year we don't intervene, five hundred thousand of them die of smallpox. Just smallpox. I think I'd risk getting bombed to fix that. I wouldn't do it if they would probably bomb us, but as the risk gets smaller it gets more worth it, right?"

She nods thoughtfully. "I think I see what you mean. I think... more things are like campfires to me than to you."

"That makes some sense. You have seemed a bit lost - how old are you? If you even measure that in years."