"We have corpuses of their literature, and they didn't specify that they were only to be used for translation. We can go through them for references to the murders. It could have all been faked while we were setting up the biosafety protocols but it would have taken thousands* of people, or for them to know about contact in advance."

*Literally '4096s of people'.

"Technology that understands text well enough to translate it has an obvious higher rung that understands text well enough to modify or generate it."  Everyone on this mission knows about machine learning.

"If it's a strategy a lot of worlds converge on I would also expect it to have happened at least a few times among cultures in our history," says Shrey, "if not with the text generation part, since ours isn't good enough to write novels even now, but still. You might be particularly impaired at reasoning from that sort of thing because one person in a hamster ball can't really be an expert on all history, but my consultants aren't turning anything up."

"Our machine text generation isn't anywhere near that good, but theirs could be. And it's not a thing that's happened in our history either. Also, they didn't make excuses about not wanting an ambassador. We could try to accelerate that; if it's all a facade they'll have to start pushing back on that at some point."

“If we end up getting absolutely nothing out of this then I suppose we’ll be mildly put out,” says the Bobbiversian in vantablack, to the keeper, several minutes ago. “Oh well. We-are-no-longer-talking-to-you-in-particular-go-away.”

A separate Bobbiversian notes to the Anomaland delegation that they do have lots of sterilization surgeries and drugs and also that lots of them are variably legal and also that all of them have weird side effects, do they have any without weird side effects - it transpires that they never invented rubber condoms, if those come up - and the Bobbiversian in vantablack is more than willing to answer that elf’s questions! Children are raised in creches because they’re a convenient institutional format for keeping them somewhat separated from society; in the past they used to just wander around entire villages or households being raised collectively but that’s a big disease risk, right, and it’s not great for anyone getting anything done, only some cities allow creches in at all.

Men produce the most children per, and tall-purple-flower-women produce the least, but on a statistical level the children of men are much more likely to end up being murdered; they’re somewhat above replacement in total and would be much more above replacement if not for all of the murder. Lots of countries have some kind of incentive structure in place for having children; it’s usually just ‘here, have this amount of currency’. The murder of babies and small children is in fact somewhat controversial but it’s very hard to scale it back without making people concerned that they’re going to lose access to their UBIs, or that they’re going to overrun the planet, or that the crime rate is going to explode from all the men not being murdered in childhood, and it’s hard to scale back the birth rate without people getting concerned that they’re going to shrink down into nothing, and it’s very hard to coordinate on scaling back infanticide quotas and the birth rate at the same time.

The bobbiverse corpus they sent over seems to contain fiction and apparent-nonfiction describing thousands upon thousands of different societies, most of them extremely weird or magical or horrifying or sexual or all four, and mostly declines to mention children when they aren’t being worked into fantasy worldbuilding. Even their textbooks seem to come from countless different worlds, although usually only as a medium for discussing real chemistry or physics or similar.

"I think I credit their true existence more than the prediction markets do, but I'm also not as smart as modern kids," says the elder.  "But in our history there have been instances of creating false villages to deceive foreign ambassadors about the state of a country."

The other dath ilani nods, and translates.  "Yes.  It may not seem like an obvious strategy to you, but it does to us.  Maybe it didn't happen in your own history, but it did in ours.  So it's a thing which humans may do - maybe not your exact kind of human, usually, but some kinds of human - and now we've learned that they do it even when they are resourced at far lower levels than an equiv-tech civilization.  This is also not necessarily their own true first contact; they may have had time to prepare their strategies."

The Keeper neither nods nor gives any form of other acknowledgement to the Bobbiversian, simply turns to go.  This outcome was foreseen, in a certain branch of possible reality, and considered necessary within it.  Dath ilan isn't going to send an infiltration mission into the Bobbiverse while the not-gaslighting!Bobbiverse could possibly be under the impression that dath ilan is their cooperative friend.

Orlan says to Shrey and the historian, "Assuming they're telling the truth, we can probably get somewhere by making contact with one of the factions that wants to scale back on the birth rate and the infanticide in tandem and offer them lots of nice things and help them with whatever bottlenecks are stopping them from winning, and then it will be somewhat less like we're trying to impose our own views instead of just being better friends with the faction that's more like us plus it being useful to be our friends."

Shrey agrees with this assessment.

Okay, so if a lot of the issue is that Bobbis mostly don't like children, and also haven't invented condoms or RISUG or IUDs (IUDs do have side effects but, like, WAY fewer than preganancy, especially long term!), that seems pretty solvable! They can have fewer children, and send some surplus to dath ilan which seems eager to address this problem own-expense, where the excess bobbis can hang out not having any children somewhere.

"What do your own past-aware prediction markets say about the likelihood of that course leading to a Bobbiverse civil war?" the old man says, this not for the ears of the elf.  "Do you think the other factions will not feel betrayed if one faction receives offworld assistance and adopts offworld ways?  Do you expect them to go along with that quietly?  An unequal conflict swiftly won may be better than a drawn-out battle between near-equals."

"We'd obviously take any number of kids but we're worried about portal logistics," says the other dath ilani in Anomalan.

"Portal logistics seem much more solvable than sociology," says Shrey. "And they don't seem nearly defensive enough about it to have a war, though that's just a first-pass assessment, I suppose that in addition to hating children they might like war." These seem about the same amount of weird.

"We've got geologists and physicists doing preliminary studies of the question of expanding the cave system until it's possible to run trains through. On the matter of civil war, it's going to be mostly dependent on how warlike they are and whether they have any entire polities in the less-death faction. If they don't, our intervention could cause the formation of one and that would be potentially very destabilising."

Trains would do it.  The physics of the cave system didn't look to dath ilan like that was going to be possible, but maybe the Anomalans probed harder and learned something dath ilan didn't figure out yet; they haven't tried anything that might break the cave.

Can somebody else ask the Bobbiverse how many kids per day they're currently murdering and not otherwise cryosuspending?

Sure, Shrey can get Tsahiri to ask. Tsahiri asks this of the nearest talkative Bobbi.

Anomaland hasn't tried anything outside of computer models yet, and won't until they're very sure they won't accidentally break the cave.

Separately, a dath ilani tries handing the Ozytopians a hastily improvised, non-rhyming, non-prosodic translation of the 27 Virtues of Rationality.  If 'Logos' is mostly a term for the common mathematical structure in various things and the Ozytopians were just talking about that poetically; and furthermore, the Ozytopians say that they think their problems could be helped with MORE LOGOS; well, dath ilan has very large amounts of Logos that can be provided.

The Bobbiverse delegation is delighted by the existence of condoms and RISUG and IUDs! 

The nearest talkative Bobbi pulls out a hexagonal handheld computer and estimates that they’re currently killing and not-cryrosuspending about four thousand children a day; they have about a billion people total, they produce maybe twenty million new children a year, they kill about a third of those children and fail to cryropreserve probably a fifth of the ones that die. Although a lot of the cryopreservation that happens is kind of bad and holding it to higher standards would probably raise the number to around ten thousand.

Shrey relays this information to the dath ilani. Tsahiri asks if they could put the infanticide on hold for a few days so excitable people don't have to treat it as a currently-in-progress-emergency*?

*This word, paradigmatically including examples like "your house is on fire", is a distinct word from a risk-emergency ("your smoke alarm is broken") or an aftermath-emergency ("you have evacuated your burning house but still need a place to sleep and stuff").

The vast majority of the Bobbiversians don’t even know that this summit is in progress and most of the ones that do know about it think that they’re hallucinating; the news is being very gradually and carefully spread to help keep everyone from thinking that they’ve gone insane. They are not capable of issuing sudden orders drastically restructuring their society at this time. Does the Bobbiverse delegation look like it was selected from a vast pool of potential candidates, it was not selected from a vast pool of potential candidates, did the rest of the delegations not have this problem.

The Greens certainly didn't have this problem. Is there a possible transaction the dath ilani who, again, seem really motivated to deal with this own-expense, could undertake that would leave them with some Bobbiverse currency that they could then spend to bribe people to not kill kids for a few days, under whatever pretense Bobbiverse finds necessary?

To dath ilan: well, whether the logos is a Person depends on what exactly souls are, which is a subject that the philosophy-monks haven't figured out yet. Whether the logos has a soul isn't the most important subject for that research, anyway. They're mostly focusing on insects and computers. Their computers are all the size of an entire room and mostly do math, but they're really worried about a repeat of the factory farming thing, so they've banned reinforcement learning already just to be on the safe side and they pay down all technical debt as quickly as possible because it seems like computers would be sad about having bugs.

If you perform meditation rituals like thus-and-so, you will reliably have an experience of the logos as a person, but philosophy-monks debate how relevant this is to the subject of the logos's personhood. They know meditation rituals can create false emotions (see standard case studies here) but also the logos would definitely communicate its personhood to humans through the humans having evolved to be able to sense it somehow? Everything happens in neurology, the fact that it's neurology doesn't mean much.

The Ozytopians definitely agree that their problem can be solved with MORE LOGOS. They already know about these but they will set this to music anyway because it's very exciting that they met some people who independently discovered the logos and probably lots of people are going to want to sing about it!

To Malachitin: it sounds like the Ozytopians should send someone liturgy-track! Uh, do the Malachitins mind that liturgy-track people mostly work in the censorship board, because most of the time you don't need new liturgy and they need to be doing something. In most cultures, the Ozytopians understand, the censorship board is full of people who have bad taste and hate art. But there was a really embarrassing incident where a beautifully written book from the perspective of a child rapist was denied a nihil obstat* and then there were widespread protests and it turned out actually it was a classic of literature and needed an imprimatur** and ever since then the censorship board has been full of people who love literature and love spending all day reading and if anything the major problem is that they keep lobbying that some obviously unsuitable material should get a nihil obstat because the prose is very pretty.

*Lit.: "nothing stands in the way"; indicates that the book is suitable for consumption.
**Lit.: "let it be printed"; indicates that reading the book is believed to increase the reader's level of virtue. 

Pardon the interruption, but how easy is it to read things without a nihil obstat as a private citizen? What about as an alien ambassador? Telpere means no offense but is very curious about the concept of books unsuitable for consumption. They can assure the Ozytopians they won't be unduly bothered by terrible books; they were chosen for this delegation for being very difficult to perturb.

To Green:  Dath ilan can provide arbitrary amounts of whatever wealth they have available that won't increase the Bobbis' military potential or general tech level.  Fiction, for example (minus isekai fiction with lots of technical blueprints).  Ultra-high-value-density goods, most obviously pharmaceuticals, such as novel antibiotics, which the Bobbis probably need if they-as-presented can't coordinate to prevent antibiotic resistance.  The Bobbis also seem like the type who'd go in for certain Ill-Advised Consumer Goods that dath ilan hasn't previously produced at scale, but could.  Ten kilograms of LSD would go a long way if the Bobbis don't already have that drug; they're already insane, it's not as much of a marginal loss for them.

That said, dath ilan is increasingly convinced that the Bobbis in particular are messing with everyone here, and it's bad incentives to ship them a lot of wealth before getting more reassurance that there is actually a world like that.

Maybe the Bobbis could go get some actual children, like just three or four of them, and hand them over to the dath ilani. That would be a really credible signal, right?

It really wouldn't.  A civilization with the implied value function to fake the Bobbis could just as easily raise a batch of a few thousand children that all think they're living in the Bobbiverse, to say nothing of three or four.

Also, the Bobbis are not talking to the dath ilanis, so any such interaction would need to go through Green or Firstplanet.

The Greens thought they were specifically worried that the Bobbis were fucking with them about not valuing children, which being willing to hand some over would prove.