General consensus: yes. A few don't want to be tampered with, a few don't want to jeopardize their work, a few want to try it temporarily, but most agree outright.

"Uh, me too actually." says Alioth, raising her hand and waggling it. "What? Just in case."

"That's totally fair! I'm actually going to do it for myself too, because why not." Everyone who is interested in the power now has it, temporarily or permanently as specified. "Second order of business: does anyone want to merge with anyone else and keep both sets of memories? I've done that a few times and it's pretty easy to get used to, but if you think being nine hundred guys is awesome then that's awesome."

"Nine hundred birthday gifts a year??" mouths Alioth in dawning horror. "Visiting our parents' house?" And then another thought occurs to her.

"Oh, but David — David, David, David, seriously, you shouldn't all merge. Look what happened when you went off to Fovos: if there was only one of you, and anything happened and Anda hadn't come along—I mean not that I'd feel any better if a copy of you got—wait hold on is this kind of a busted thing to be saying? Sorry, I'm just gonna...chill for a minute..."

"It's cool conceptually but I don't think I need a thousand of me to exist?"
"Ick, so I'd have hundreds and hundreds of weeks worth of memories like that on Fovos? Not great."
"I was actually in an Affini sim. Oh god."
"But maybe if there were two or three of me, that would actually be kind of based."
"Does my voice always sound like that?"
"Aw, Allie, no, it's not busted! Frankly I think chucking copies of me into a black hole whenever you get grumpy could be therapeutic for you. A valuable if pricey service I would be happy to provide."
"Is there even a Fovos there to go back to? What about the people I interviewed?"
"You too? Man, I hated that guy! He could've just said to try the restaurants a block away!"
"Okay, so how many of me do we want there to be?"
"Can we rescue my interview recordings? Wait, what's journalistic ethics on interviews that turned out to be wholly simulations. Probably bad right?"
"Check out the blue sparkles in charge. That's so cool."
"Were other people on Fovos taken?"
"But like, how did she find a psychic sparkle voice to rescue us, you know? Why is she like this."
"Yeah I hate the idea of like, drawing straws to see who gets to exist. Merging is a way better idea."

"I'm afraid there is not, currently, a Fovos to go back to. Everyone in the system had the same thing happen to them as happened to you. I intend to rescue all of them too. But I'm going to need to find a star system in a safe part of space where I can put the orbital back so they all have somewhere to live."

(While they say this, the other thirty-one mind-threads are making eights, or in a few cases teaming up to collect enough attention to make nines. Mass resurrections are awesome but also kind of suck. Getting to build a megastructure is awesome with a side of awesomesauce.)

(To Anda) "Huh, it's gotta be someplace far enough away that the Affini don't just capture it, but close enough to Accord transit that we aren't stranded in uncharted space."
"—get it? This is bigger than Fovos. This is like, revolutionary. Depending on how much they want to help us."
"Ow! I was kidding! Kidding!"
"We can swap roles afterwards if you're mad about it! Just ignore the smartphone and explain your recent experiences to me as if I'm hearing about them for the first time."

"What does Accord transit look like, functionally? I can potentially provide ferries or portals or something depending on the details of how your FTL works. But really what I should do is fix the thing where sometimes aliens eat your stuff, and then figure out the replacement orbital under fewer constraints, if you're alright living in this interdimensional bar while I deal with that. Have the Affini sent humanity a manifesto or do they have an identifiable government or anything like that?"

"In theory, you can jump faster than light wherever we've found a wormhole between places. In practice," a fleeting dark expression, "the logistics get more complicated than that."

"Do they have a government? Unclear. I get the idea they're sort of a hive mind? Sometimes their captives send videos, but chat doesn't think it's official. They're sort of hard to understand. Probably if you wanted to talk to them, showing up around Fovos would do it."

"What can we can do to help? You know, while we're here?"

"I could really do with a native guide! Your world has a lot of technology mine doesn't. Does the FTL ever result in closed timelike loops? I mean, people meeting their past selves and stuff. Also, who or what is chat?"

"Oh, chat's just the scuttlebutt on the local internet. You know, news of the day, hot takes, that kind of thing. Most people think the Affini are a hive mind, but it's really hard to tell when they don't really communicate directly."

"I don't think that's ever happened, but it'd be cool if it did. Maybe if you took the long way back, if you managed to find your way and survive that long?"

"Huh, maybe I'll try that at some point. Or maybe I'll avoid it forever; time travel gives me the creeps. Uh, is there any kind of interstellar government that might complain about me putting an orbital somewhere without asking?"

"Well technically...," David temporizes. Awkward glance at Alioth.

"...technically, you'd need a development permit from whichever of the corporate AIs owns that region of space. Sometimes it's obvious who that is, sometimes less so—at least to me. No one I know really pays attention to real estate unless they have a special interest in corporate law, but basically the corporate AIs have divvied it up among themselves, even the uncharted stuff they haven't gotten to yet. And I doubt you'd get permission unless you were like, PAC-tier."

"You guys have AIs running stuff? What are they, uh, like?" If they're superintelligent Anda is going to operate entirely from Milliways and just not go out. 

Oh! Oh.

"I hear you, but no, these aren't like futuristic scifi minds— they're ascended corporations. Way, way, more cycles and reach than any individual human, way, way more data, but still not especially enlightened. They just regulate the economy: what things cost, who owns things, who's allowed to buy things, what everyone's civic privileges are, what deals to make, what planets to take over next, that kind of thing. They're based on language models, so for all I know someone like you could talk to them, but I have no idea if they'd have anything to say."

"Oh huh, you guys got supercomputer central planning to work and it's not just a huge pain in the neck? That's pretty neat. As long as they're not going to predict all my decisions before I consider them, decide I'm a threat to their ten-million-year plan, reverse-engineer my magic from the underlying physics of the multiverse and eat me with nanobots or whatever then I'm not bothered. Anyway, if being rich will make it easier to do stuff without breaking a bunch of laws, I could get a legal identity and sell stuff, but I don't want to let the Affini screw up a bunch more people's lives while I yakshave. How bad are the consequences likely to be, for both me and people who aren't me, if I build first and ask permission later? Or make new stars out past the edge of the galaxy where nobody could reasonably have claimed anything yet?"

"No, no, we are definitely living in a badly-run dystopian nightmare. Cordant is a privately-owned system with an endowment, so we're kind of sheltered from the worst of it, but it's still pretty yikes. "

"If the corporations catch you trying to exist and/or do things outside their economic panopticon, they're liable to freak and send in the military. But if you build stuff off the edge of their maps, eh, what they don't know can't hurt them. Did you say you can make your own wormholes? Can you make it so that like, the Affini can't use them? Oh! Can you make it so the corporations can't see them? Are you actually magic? How does that work?"

"Ah, alright then, next time I go home for a visit I'll tell the economists they were right and we shouldn't try it. And in the meantime I'll build my own galaxy and not let anyone in who looks like they plan to cause trouble. And yes, I am extremely magic! The way it works is--I want to say 'the way it works is I can do whatever I want', but I can't make myself smarter, or learn information except by copying objects I know exist or looking at places, or get between universes except by being in Milliways. But mostly I can do whatever I want."

"Coooooool."

"Alright, last order of business before I start making stars, and I'm afraid it's an unpleasant one."

"One of the Davids was in too much pain to talk to me about what they wanted, with no sign of not being in pain any time soon, and had been like that for a while. I left them alone for the moment because closing the door pauses time. You guys are the authority on how best to help them. Should I pull them out or leave them be or just kill them or other?"

"Is...is there any way to find out what's going wrong and fix it? Could you fix him if you pulled him out?"