"I was already open to the possibility of sending David⁂ back before the split, if they want to go back and the other Davids can't talk them out of it. Even if their preferences have been changed in ways the pre-forking instance wouldn't have considered legitimate, those are still their preferences. I'm not sure what the other me meant by cooperating with the Affini just from the yes or no questions. Possibly they meant that they think the Affini can be convinced to stop uploading people, or to ask their permission first. Or possibly they mean that we're going to need to do the same thing we did with David for everyone else, asking who wants to leave and getting them out, but that the Affini also have desires that don't involve harming other people and we can work with them on those. I'd need to have a proper conversation, or better yet merge back together, to have all the nuance."

"Are you—" he's really trying not to shout; it isn't productive. "Would you send him back even if that means the Affini can make more forks of us too? That doesn't seem right. That David doesn't own our past—we all do."

"I guess you could always make the same offer to any new Davids?" Alioth muses. "I don't know how long you plan to stick around for, if you want to be indefinitely rescuing Davids and all that. And I guess I don't know how I feel about..." (wordless gesticulating) "...consigning Davids to the Affini? No, that's not fair. I guess I mean...I don't know how I feel about making it a race between how fast the Affini can indoctrinate someone and how fast you can offer them an exit?"

"That makes sense; Davids are cool but there's an optimal number of them and it's not eight billion. The thing is, there are already several Davids with the Affini; they're the ones who initially refused to leave. So I don't think David⁂ would give them any new capabilities."

"If the ones here want to get in telepathic one-to-one conversations with those ones and have another go at convincing them to leave I can set that up, though I can't guarantee it'll succeed. Ditto for giving them eidetic memories so they can never lose the knowledge of where they are. I can have the other me go back and tell the Affini that they can have David⁂ back conditional on promising not to make any more Davids. I can just make it impossible for the Affini to make any more Davids, though I'd need to do some thinking about how to implement that so that I can still fix it if one of you gets hit by a bus. I don't expect it to be hard though." 

"Or I can, you know, do any number of other things, there's so many Davids here that if someone has a brilliant idea it's statistically going to be one of you."