"Can you give me three examples of local chaos and local unkindness respectively?"

If he asks 'how chaotic exactly' he's worried she'll quantify her answer in standard Chaos Units that he is supposed to already know about.

Sure, Inga can do that. Thank goodness he's not a local, or he'd be asking for the most chaotic and the most unkind thing she'd seen. Why do they do that, it's so awful.

"So of course these will just be examples, not guaranteed to be representative or median or whatever, just examples that come to mind. And I will restrict myself to things I have personally witnessed, rather than things that I have heard about from others in the enclave, or seen on news reports. And bear in mind that I am relatively new here myself and have mostly stayed within the enclave, so I have only a little direct experience of this world to draw from. With all those caveats in mind..."

"Chaos:"

"Example one: I went to a local library to obtain special-interest-obsession-feeding picture books for the preschool-faction-of-my-childcare-collective and found that the books were instead organized by ... "bedtime stories" and "read-alouds" and ... well I guess that was any kind of organizational system but it felt like they deeply misunderstood the principle of primary-user-primary-axis?"

"Example two: Sometimes the electricity stops because trees fall on the 'power lines'. Sometimes it stops for days. I can understand this happening a few times, but it has happened to me once already, in less than a year of living here, and I wasn't going to report hearsay but I hear that it happens more years than not! How have they not fixed this yet?"

"Example three: It would take too long to explain how they elect governments here, it's very complicated and we'll have a whole optional module on that for you when you get deeper into orientation, but I'll just say that winner-take-all, plurality-voting is very common and it is not even the worst thing that happens."

"I think maybe I should stop there before I get into the unkindness examples."

-----

NOTE: Struck-through words sound like gibberish to Othrem.

...huh.  Those sure are some conlang words that she expects him to already know.

Or, you know, since he apparently just DIED and stuff, something much much stranger is going on.

"Is there a known-to-you explanation for why they haven't designed an electrical grid with redundant connections, or why they can't vote to change the voting system?"

"My older-wiser-mentor-figures would probably not like it if I just say BECAUSE THEY ARE VERY STUPID HERE so I won't say that, but I can't really rule out that as the reason. We have had some trouble gathering reliable information about average intelligence on this world as compared to home, because we don't have any local expertise about how it was measured at home and we have not yet managed to create trustworthy instruments of our own, and we find the local instruments dubious at best. Anyway, they are definitely not as smart."

"Anyway, to give a more nuanced and less judgy answer - I don't really know, but I think they have not fully grasped the principle of superlinear-returns-at-high-levels-of-infrastructural-reliability, and so they keep muddling along with what they think is good enough. Or maybe their civilization truly can't afford the higher reliability because their economy is so leaky. I'm not really sure. Some other folks who have been here longer and specialize in civilizational-adequacy-improvement can probably give you better answers."

"As for the voting system... I think they can in theory vote to change their own voting system but the way to do that is so insanely complicated that literally all of them have better things to do."

-----

NOTE: Some complicated phrases come through just fine, somehow.

"Is there an understanding of a full story that ends in this unpleasant way, or is the path to unpleasantness significantly confusing and mysterious to you rather than merely having some unknown latent parameters?"

"Uh... come again? I didn't understand that."

Uh oh.  Was one of HIS words just a mysterious conlang word to her...  Which one would that have been, though, he wasn't using any complicated words.

He'll try to rephrase while using different words and hope he doesn't do it again.

"Do you feel like you basically know how this world got to be that way, or is it to you like the hidden and probably terrible secret of a novel the protagonist hasn't figured out?"

Okay, that's still kind of a weird question, but Inga thinks she mostly gets what he's asking.

"I personally do not have a well-developed theory of how this world got to be this way, other than 'slightly stupider people,' and that seems to me to be a sufficient explanation? I do not know physics here to be any different, for example."

"I am not sure what you are getting at with the whole 'novel' thing. Do you... think you're in a novel?"

The playbook did say to be encouraging and validating even if the new arrival had weird ideas.

Inga's never had a weird idea in her life, all of her ideas are very normal, and all her family and friends back home were pretty normal too. But Othrem's from a pretty small town. Maybe they also selected for weirdness.

Obviously not in the sense of letters on a computer screen, but some sort of generalized novel complicated enough to support consciousness does seem like an obvious thought?  She seems to be replying as if she already knows that to not be true, though?

"No, I wasn't intending to import that aspect of novels from the analogy that used novels!  I just mean, are you, from your own perspective, inside a mysterious situation or a known one, with respect to this planet having nonredundant power lines.  Like... the sort of mystery where there's enough room in it for the answer to be, 'There's aliens we didn't previously know about mind-controlling people', or the sort of sad but understandable situation where the aliens would be redundant because there's already a pretty good theory with no need for aliens."

What... is Othrem even talking about.

There's reality, where people live, and then there's fiction, where made-up stuff happens. And sometimes fiction is very realistic, and seems a lot like reality, and sometimes it has magic or magitech or whatever, and then you get to play what-if about the magic.

But reality is just reality, you don't ask if sometimes reality is secretly a mystery novel. Reality is not secretly a mystery novel. It's just physics. It's just atoms bouncing around and doing their thing. And isekai, of course. Isekai is a very normal part of reality. But you don't go around asking if there's an alien-shaped plot hole in reality. There is not.

What is she going to say to Othrem.

"Uh... I think I am going to have to refer you to someone more senior on the Arrival team with that question, I don't seem to be doing a great job of answering it."

All right.

He's now pretty sure that she is not a dath ilan native from his own timeline of dath ilan.

He just straight up cannot imagine having to ask someone else in order to know whether you'd collectively found a basically solid understanding about the terribleness of the surprisingly terrible planet you'd all landed on.  And if there was some kind of miscommunication whereby she didn't understand that was what he was asking, well, that still bespeaks a larger cultural gap than he'd expect from the other passengers of his crashed airplane...

...no, he's still jumping to conclusions.  What if she's, like, from his great-grandparents' generation?  He has never spoken to anyone's great-grandparent for more than a few sentences, but obviously there'd be some amount of cultural drift.

"Noted.  Three examples of unkindness?"

"Like I said, I've spent almost all my time inside the enclave, but the Arrival team has been trying out a new protocol where new arrivals take a... field trip, I guess you could say... to a city nearby, to absorb more of the local culture. I went on my trip a few months after I arrived. I learned a lot, and so did the Arrival team!"

"Naturally, soon after I checked into my hotel, I returned to the front desk to report the noise-and-light-pollution-issues with the room and ask for remediation, but they refused! I asked whether it was a new hotel and if I had gotten a discount for needing to provide my own remediation, and they didn't seem to understand, and when I insisted about the discount they told me that I was being disruptive and needed to settle down and at first I was confused because I did not feel any internal sense of disquiet, but then I remembered from my training that I should not argue with this strange off-topic false claim because locally this is code for wanting to terminate-the-conversation-until-conditions-improve or possibly terminate-the-conversation-and-the-relationship, which seemed pretty extreme to me but anyway I decided not to stay in that hotel after all."

"So I took my things and went out to the park nearby. I attempted to use my handheld device - they call them 'phones' - to locate alternative lodging. I found several potential candidates but I thought I would get a local opinion about which ones already had suitable noise-and-light-pollution-remediation. There were some kids on a bench nearby and I thought surely this must be the local teenagers-giving-dubious-life-advice outpost. So I asked them, but they were very rude! They wanted to know if I had any... I can't remember their words, but I think they wanted inadvisable-stimulation-medication? I admitted I did not have any of that, and then they refused to answer any of my questions. So much for that idea."

"I used the local transportation system to go to the nearest alternate hotel. The transportation system was subterranean and it did take me some time to decipher the signs and determine the right way to go, but I figured it out and was feeling fairly pleased with myself. When I arrived at my destination, I noticed that there was inadequate signage helping to orient the rider directionally on the street level. There were signs about the names and numbers of the streets but there was nothing absolute about the cardinal directions. I examined the signage inside the transportation system station and found it did not already bear the signage-already-optimized-do-not-attempt-further-optimization-mark, so, after stopping to check the true cardinal direction situation, I got out an indelible marker from my bag and began optimizing the signage."

"They, uh, did not like that. The station personnel, that is. I am still not entirely sure why, because I did verify that the information I was adding was correct. It was later explained to me that civilization here is too low-trust or low-intelligence or something to permit for a culture of guerilla-optimization? Anyway that was the point where I called for extraction and I went back home to the enclave."

"The Arrival team has made several updates to the pre-field-trip training materials but I'm not sure they actually sent the arrival after me on a trip at all, they're still rethinking the whole thing."

Okay he feels like he almost got that word 'signage-already-optimized-do-not-attempt-further-optimization-mark'.  Especially given the context, it sounds like it should be a cognate or descendant of 'naively-looks-subject-to-a-further-optimization-but-is-not+mark', that society puts on physical objects that look broken or improvable but which are actually that way for Nonobvious Reasons--

Ohhhhh maybe he is from the past version of dath ilan!  And that's why Baseline has new words and she expects him to be smarter!  He would not be trying to explain the nature of a completely unknown world to a new arrival by recounting only his own personal experiences, he'd lead with the clearest or most enlightening examples that had happened to other people, even at the price of having fewer additional-details available about those.  But if she expects him to have much lower sample complexity / higher general intelligence, then she is probably expecting him to do well enough about inferring everything she means to communicate using only data she has personally witnessed.  Probably all of society converges more to norms of 'when possible, answer only using data you personally have verified directly' as it becomes possible to deduce more from that and there is less need to hear about other people's data.

(Othrem does not immediately conclude that this new hypothesis is correct, because he is not seven years old (as is the age you start to be trained out of that sort of thing, by the gauntlets of lures and gotchas that children run into when they get old enough to start seriously trying to escape their children's-escape-bedrooms).)

"How is life in the enclave different from what you expect me to expect?" he says.  That'll give him info about both what his possible hosts are like (they may not be from future quantum branches of dath ilan, or not of his dath ilan; that whole hypothesis class could be incorrect); and also, where they expect him to be from.

Oh, that's a pretty good question. She'll pause for a moment to organize her thoughts.

"Okay, three categories of answers come to mind."

"First, of course, are the bad-surprises that pretty much everyone has when they arrive, that have to do with what resources we have available on this world. So, like, this house is weird, right? The architecture is odd. When you get around to using the bathroom, you're going to be disappointed by the fixtures. That kind of thing. We are doing our best to bootstrap better infrastructure but it's easier in some domains than in others and it has not yet felt important to improve the entire supply chain for how bathrooms are built here. It does actually work to pee here, so we just pee and get on with more important things."

"Second are the bad-surprises that are within our immediate ability to fix. And of course we observe each new Arrival and see what gives them trouble and then we try to improve our Arrival procedures to smooth out that problem for the next person. Obviously. So by definition, we have already fixed the things that we know to fix - but also some, like the field trip I went on, are still a work in progress - and there is always so much room for continued improvement!" She's just saying obvious things now, move on.

"Third are the bad-surprises that are particular to you as an individual. I don't have a lot to go on here but you are definitely different from the median new arrival in a few obvious ways. You don't seem at all upset about having DIED! You seem completely calm! You haven't taken any time to yourself to go and calm down and organize your thoughts! You haven't written anything down! You haven't even ASKED FOR PAPER!"

"And maybe the reason you haven't asked is that it's already completely obvious to you, but following-the-principle-of-saying-obvious-things-out-loud, yes, of course I am your Temporary-Starter-Girlfriend, and if you would prefer instead or in addition to have a Temporary-Starter-Boyfriend or something else entirely while you build your new polycule, we have a whole team for that. We are so very sorry for the loss-to-you of your previous polycule and we realize what a heavy blow that must be - we all went through it ourselves - and we don't want you to be alone in this time of emotional upheaval."

And with that, she'll come over to the loveseat where Othrem is sitting, sit down right next to him, and give him a hug.

WHERE IS HE INSIDE THE COSMOS ACTUALLY AND WHY DOES IT INCLUDE SUDDENLY HUGS

He stops himself from panickedly yelling "I think I am not from your planet!" before things get any more horriblyawkward, because he should think about consequences before doing that.

"I -- maybe should go-off-and-think-by-myself, actually," he says, from within the complete body freeze of Offscript Hug that he is not concealing at all because the concealment reaction would be to freeze instead of reacting and he is already doing that anyway.

She expects him to either have better priors or more intelligence, and if she thinks he is supposed to go-off-and-think-by-himself, maybe this conceals wisdom-you-do-not-know-is-wisdom about why he should do that.

His brain in the background goes on deducing things anyway, all marked as not-actually-known of course, but that is not a reason to not let yourself think the wordlessly obvious first-thoughts:

- People his apparent visible age are already supposed to be super attached to entire polycules.
- Dying and waking up elsewhere is so legible to them that they start having emotions about it right away.
- They expect arrivals to know it's okay to display those emotions at strangers.
- There are completely different rules about who you hug, when.

Finally! Inga has no idea how he's made it this long without needing any alone time, and frankly the conversation has been long and a bit overwhelming for her as well. She is ready for a break, and to go and update her team.

She does wonder why he's so stiff, as she hugs him, though. Something is definitely off, there. Probably he has some polycule-fidelity-agreements and his brain hasn't quite caught up to his new reality yet. He'll get there.

She releases him from the hug and stands up.

"Of course! Your private room is right over here." She opens the door for him. "Just let me know if you have any trouble with the lighting or anything. I'll be in the office, that door over there." She points. "Feel free to knock or just call out if you have any questions or need anything."

"Oh, and also, by default we will head back to the main enclave in another hour or so. That's when my Cave Monitoring shift ends. Someone else will be coming to the monitoring station then, and I can drive you to meet the rest of the Arrival team. Unless of course you are too overwhelmed and would prefer to stay in the Arrival bedchamber for awhile. Many people prefer that. One step at a time, you know."

She's talking too much, to a person who just asked to be alone. She should stop.

"So, uh, yeah, see you later."

And with Othrem safely ensconced in his private room, she retreats to the office to send an update to her team, and to take several deep breaths herself and stare at a wall for a while.

He certainly is... odd. Intense. A little... flat? She's never met anyone quite like him before.

She reminds herself not to judge him on what may be the worst day of his life so far, given that his life, you know. Ended.

The first thing Othrem does is let his wordless thoughts expand into words from their most recent working-memory-active anchors.

- People his apparent visible age are already supposed to be super attached to entire polycules, as if they'd already found multiple surprisingly-perfect-and-irreplaceable-partners and invested a ton of human capital in them.  (Implied: much more refined mating markets that can do that when you're 25?  Or, it's not just a small fraction of Happy Couples that are running off and getting subsidized to have lots of kids?)

- Having died and woken up elsewhere is much more legible and expected to them.  They start having immediate emotional reactions to the isekai right away, rather than their emotions being mostly on hold pending having resolved a lot of uncertainty.

- And then they're sure enough of where they'd end up, that they'd rely on the continued correct-rule-application of their culturally standard protocols about when it's okay to have loud emotions in front of strangers.  Like he'd broken a leg or had introspected the possible start of a psychotic episode, and she was on-duty emergency response personnel... which, sure, that's reasonable enough in one sense, but she expects new arrivals to know it.
-- Her bright reflective over-vest doesn't have to be casual fashionwear.  It could be a way of saying, 'Look here at the emergency personnel!'  His own version of Civilization accomplishes this with a particular color of bright LEDs, because lots of people wear reflective things; but an alternative arrangement is not unreasonable.
-- But she sure is not otherwise acting in the way he expects emergency personnel to present... well, of course not, she isn't part of actual Exception Handling, she's from a bunch of arrivals who banded together... but then why would she expect strangers to display strong emotions at her, if she's not trained about that?  "Different customs", is the overly general answer.  Or, her clothing encodes specifically that she's fine with emotional displays.

- Her version of Civilization has completely different rules about who you hug, when, after having what kind of existing relationship / after thumbprinting what sort of sentence written in very large letters on what sort of weird-city entrance-agreement.

To be clear, Othrem does mentally distinguish that these are his first reactions, his reactions trying to explain away her version of Civilization as a minimal-departure from his own, with everything else held constant and asking what fewest things would need to change.  Possibly, she is from further away than that.

...Othrem is getting more worried about that hug the longer he thinks about it.

She does NOT think he is a stranger from an actually pretty different version of Civilization.  She thinks there are supposed to be EXISTING CULTURAL RELATIONSHIPS HERE, and there are NOT, but she thinks there ARE, and she is already HUGGING HIM ABOUT THAT.  She's not that pretty, but she's pretty, and buying a hug off a girl like that would ordinarily cost at least 0.2 ULH if she sold hugs at all.

She might not be the sort of person who'd give out ANY hugs to a weird alien creature.  And then once she finds out what actually happened, might incur some amount of distress or sadness about the violation of her own sexual or romantic nature.  Common sense is saying INCREASINGLY LOUDLY that he should blurt out the truth and abort this course of events, rather than trying to be Very Cautious and Paranoid.

Realistically, probably nothing terrible or irrecoverable has happened so far.  But one can very easily see how this could escalate beyond hugging.

Of course that very sequence of events, and his reaction to it, could be a standard part of their Dark Conspiratorial Plan to detect people like him, whom they have already encountered a dozen times before.

And with that he has exhausted his pent-up thoughts about the most recent events in working memory.  At this point, he should go back and think over this whole matter from the start.

Where is he, right now, inside of Reality?  What can he infer, what can he wildly guess, from the information that he has?

The first obvious thought is that he is not likely to succeed on an immediate or overly naive attempt at explanation, because he was not expecting this to happen to him at all.  It is very far off his mainline probability of 'you are Dead and can make no further observations', and even supposing that to not happen, it feels in an intuitive sense like multiple generalizations are being violated that he would have expected to hold.  If quietly watching aliens had grabbed him to rescue him from true-Death then he would not have woken up naked in a cave.

To explain is to predict; to predict is to explain.  If he predicted Not This then he is not the best person in the world to try to explain it after the fact.  One ought to go grab somebody who predicted it to happen, and ask them instead.

He is of course going to go and ask what he would make of the situation anyways.  One cannot make progress in the face of confusion by freezing in epistemic helplessness.  But he will not put too much weight on what he concludes; and he will be looking for places that his prior or his logic or his rules of reasoning are broken, not just the explanation with the largest tiny probability inside his existing prior.

On one obvious interpretation of "Go ask the people who actually predicted it in advance", he ought to go and ask the authors of isekai novels what they were thinking.  Perhaps all of those books are secretly concealed advice to true-Dead people like him, with the actual logic of their reasoning having been classified by the Keepers as an infohazard.

Othrem permits himself to think this obvious thought, that it may pass over him and through him, and then he sets it aside for a time until after he has tried to take things at face value first.

Right, so.

What happened to him, and where is he...

That's not returning an immediate answer.

Back up and approach from a different angle.  Why do these events have such a tiny prior probability?  Why are they such a surprise to him?  What part of his prior, his reasoning, or his metaphysics is being most clearly attacked by Reality and the Actual Outcomes?