"If your civilization doesn't consider itself cognitively competent to distinguish whether my plausible-sounding arguments are valid or invalid, it should consider taking the advice of my Civilization, which does consider itself able to make a principled discrimination over arguments at that level and to have converged on correct answers over them," says the Keeper.  "Our advice is that you are scattering children into unpredictable worlds, and that there are large chunks of plausibility mass on this being a disastrous and irrecoverable outcome; assuming that you care about the experiences of children, which you would seem to represent yourself as doing, based on the implicit appeals of your previous course of action.  May I inquire what it would take to get your Civilization to shift course on this issue, in a manner agreeable to you?  I believe that many of the worlds meeting here would consider it of sufficient gravity to potentially impede otherwise mutually beneficial trading with you."

"We now request all of your data on Bobbiverse language, which you used to construct your translator," a dath ilani quietly says to an Anomalan, outside of hearing range of any others, even the Greens.  "We further meta-request that you do not make known that we made this request."

Visual data on the Bobbiverse delegates seems adequate that a dath ilani costumer could design full-coverage suits drawn from the same distribution.  Design of such costumes is now in progress.

Most Keepers who volunteered for locks-off Exception Handling training were male, but there's still some women among them.  These pretrained Keepers are now in VTOL planes carrying them to rendezvous with a hypersonic plane that will rush them to the cave entrance; a hypersonic plane which, since the start of this emergency, has already had on-board a supply of Emergency Rapid Language Learning Drug and the Emergency Immersive Learning Sensory Feeds that go with it.  (You see the word and its translation once, and you remember it; and your childhood language-learning wiring-algorithms reactivate and go into similar overdrive about sentences, syntax, and patterns.  Use sparingly, or preferably not at all; some of your less frequently used memories of Baseline will not survive the experience.)

Elsewhere, some +5sd mad engineers are assembling a silent tunnel-melting machine that will run off a small, very slightly critical reactor core.  Once the mission gets in, they're not going to bust a Bobbiverse security checkpoint, they're going to go out through the cave walls.

Governance hasn't decided to do it, to be clear.  It still seems more likely than not that the 'Bobbiverse' is a gaslight designed to elicit exactly this reaction and present the true government of that world with a Keeper infiltration mission to capture, examine, and trade as a valuable.

The backchanneling in Llassan sign language continues, wholly unabated. 

Nobody else is doing overt signaling so that's not how diplomacy is done in these other worlds, with clear marks of you are escalating and I want you to know that I have noticed, are you absolutely sure you want to continue that; possibly that is why dath ilan is doing things that parse to malachitian diplomatic eyes as dangerously escalatory. Or possibly it's just that dath ilan is that confident in its ability to win a conflict that's fought through an interdimensional portal, which given the apparent tech level differential would, honestly, be fair. 

None of the diplomats, obviously, has the power to take unilateral action on behalf of their nation; that would be an insane thing to give a diplomat. Each of the nations with a delegation here is getting a live feed with translation, and they in turn can do what they want with the information. But the diplomats sure are thinking about what that might be. 

The Greens are going to go ahead and extend the offer to all the other worlds here, even several offers per if there are distinct-enough polities with interests represented, that they can provide Greens selected to specialize in them. The other worlds can provide a best guess on what sort of person from the distribution of Greens would get along with them best and then they can borrow a Green volunteer answering to that description who thinks this sounds neat to go learn their language properly and learn more about them.

Sure, they'll take that. Malachitians' best guess for a Green they'll get along with is someone who's willing to clearly and unambiguously signal things like 'you are escalating very quickly', that being how malachitinous diplomacy is done, but anyone an interdimensional volunteer would be directly interfacing with is selected for being to get along with wide ranges of people.

There are four polities represented here, the countries of Callassa and Eluin and Niqal and Tisa, although there are many more polities than that on the planet; if volunteers are interfacing with governments all four of those would absolutely take one, but if they're interfacing with the diplomats this delegation was selected to work as a group on behalf of all of their nations.

Sounds like maybe one Green ambassador to Malachitin to start with, then, and they can recruit others with more information as necessary. They will put up a posting about it and see who's willing to haul out to this cave for this job. (Anyone who answers these postings is probably going to be a young relatively inexperienced person; the delegation here isn't, because this seemed important enough for some people to leave home about it, but the specialists are going to be twentysomething singles who wanted out of their current housing situations anyway more likely than not.)

“I’m sorry, are you threatening us?” inquires the Bobbiversian wearing vantablack who’d previously opined about suicide being a fundamental right. “How very strange! I don’t think we ought to make that an effective method of changing around our society on alien whims and I don’t think it’s very nice to threaten people when you’ve barely started to know anything about them. You haven’t even given us flowers yet.”

The Bobbis would like a Green who isn’t going to be weird about the infanticide thing, can they get a Green who isn’t going to be weird about the infanticide thing.

Can they be a little more detailed about what "being weird" means. They don't usually give high profile positions to people who are pro-infanticide but they can try for someone... low empathy who has a lot of exposure to edgy eugenics arguments on the internet?

... sure.

Okay, the ad is up now.

Internal sigh.  "Dath ilan is not trying to modify your behavior pattern by presenting you with a claim that we will punish you unless you do what we want.  We realize that ideal agents ignore attempted incentivizations like that, since, if they choose to respond, that choice becomes the only reason why the threat was offered them.  It is possible that we will refrain from benefiting you with trade if it looks like you'd use more wealth to kill more children, but that's our own natural incentive, not a threat, which appears regardless of how you'd respond to us having that incentive."  And also in that case dath ilan then has an incentive to do certain other things, even if Bobbis wouldn't respond to the prospect of those actions as threats per se; but Bobbiverse is presenting as people possibly too crazy to figure that out, and in the unlikely event that's true, dath ilan isn't actually going to warn them, since it's not a threat.  "Which is why we're asking if, say, you have a problem with tiny bitey insects spreading diseases, and you'd be willing to stop killing children in exchange for us wiping out the tiny bitey insects.  Some mutually beneficial solution like that."

Dath ilan would cheerfully take a Green, as soon as dath ilan's prediction markets become sure that... it is actually safe to have anybody from any world here come back to Civilization, at all, which, sorry, they are still too confused to be sure about.

The specialist Green can stay in the cave and learn from the dath ilani there if they don't want to bring one home, although this will make it slightly harder to get interested candidates, some of whom would mostly be interested in seeing exotic destinations. What do dath ilani look for in a liaison?

Sanity.

Dath ilan can provide definitions of sanity if needed, but hopefully Green already has the concepts of validity, probability, expected utility, and fairness as spotlighted mathematical structures.

There's probably other things too, but it's hard to guess what they are at this point?  Stuff like 'can take a lot in stride' seems already obvious, but the Greens have probably guessed that too.

So they want a... philosopher-economist sort of person? There's probably a philosopher-economist sort of person to be had.

The world's greatest detective sagely nods to this, ignoring the AR popup of sudden worried prediction markets about what exactly it means that only some Greens are philosopher-economists.

The linguist, Elxen, is absolutely-minus-epsilon sure that the thing being discussed really is child murder. The rest of the delegation has been consumed for several minutes in intense forum conversations trying to figure out how many excess Bobbiversian children Anomaland can afford to take and what consequences this will have for the Bobbiversians and their incentives. Right now, however, they want to know why there are so many excess children in the first place. Do they lack the drugs and surgeries that render people temporarily infertile? That information is absolutely free of charge, of course. 

On the subject of what happens to the children when they are locally destroyed, they agree that an infinite reality is nonzero consolation but agree that few of the possible future threads for each person are going to also include synced instances of their loved ones, and that anyway it's still very much murder to destroy even part of someone's future. 

Anomaland seconds the offer of specialized ambassadors to each other world, including one to dath Ilan who can quarantine in the cave, and would welcome one or more Greens (they have twelve top-level polities divided into several layers of sub-polity, but the top-level ones can group up further to meet with ambassadors). Their real-time polling is still well above 95% confident that peaceful solutions to all of these problems are possible, and there are already volunteers developing competence metrics specialized to each other world and other volunteers ready to be evaluated on them. What do the Greens prefer in an ambassador?

The linguist would like a Malachitian to consult on translation subtleties of the backchannel signalling.

Telpere, the Anomalan requested for full data on the Bobbiverse language, would like to know why they need the request to be secret. They're in principle happy to distribute knowledge that was given to them freely but don't want to do anything the Bobbiverse would justifiably consider a betrayal, or anything likely to increase the probability of violent conflict, without a correspondingly strong reason.

Orlan, the Anomalan tasked with writing up a document for dath ilan on why other worlds seem unlikely to welcome help, has the document. It has two sections.

Section 1, Why We Believe This, explains that Bobbiverse and Malachite have described the things about them that dath ilan calls problems neutrally, as things that bother them at most slightly, rather than as dire emergencies for which they would welcome help. (To be very clear: Anomaland definitely considers the thing where they die of old age to be a dire emergency for which they would welcome help.) They have objected to dath ilan's offers of help and consider them escalatory. Ozytopia seems more willing to accept help but this is tentative because their model of Ozytopia is not yet stable.

Section 2, What We Think Their Reasons Are, is divided into sections by world. 

Ozytopia appears to believe that their social technology is a high local optimum relative to their (apparently unusual) psychology, and that solutions optimized for other humanity-instances will be less well adapted to them.

Malachite expects everything to fracture into a lot of subgroups such that nothing as complicated as dath ilani cities is going to be widely popular. Also they share the Anomalan trait of being suspicious of anyone claiming too much authority, and fear the consequences of one group ending up with the ability to heavily determine another group's conditions.

They will not have a good model of why the Bobbiverse objects to intervention until they know what is causing their ridiculous problem, but it's probably at least some part fear of a power grab.

(Speaking for the aggregated polling on their own planet, Anomaland would be interested in negotiating immigration both ways, but is not going full steam ahead on that until they're sure it won't be massively disruptive to the current equilibrium due to high birth rates or differing pollution control standards or something.)

Ozytopians also want to send ambassadors. They can send saintly monks who are philosopher-monks or who don't care much about infanticide or... honestly pretty much any diplomat seems fine for the malachitians, it seems like mostly what the malachitians want is for no one to tell them what to do.

Any ambassadors to Ozytopia should be fine with being around lots of normal people. That really seems like the most important criterion here. 

The elves would happily accept ambassadors! Elves would also like to send ambassadors to whoever would like to have them!

Obviously their delegates should be code-switching experts who are excellent at not overreacting to new information, are there any other traits that various worlds would like to request?

The elves also think that these other societies may be being a touch hasty in their rush to judgement? They haven't even asked a bunch of questions yet!

The Bobbiverse representative in vantablack seems quick on the uptake, one of the elves will attempt to engage her in conversation.

"This seems to be going in a bizarrely hostile direction for a situation where no one knows anything about you!  I'm really curious about the other conditions that led to whatever the current status of your world is!  Why are children raised in creches? How many children does the average person have?  What incentives are in place around that and why were they put into place?"

Another elf attempts to insinuate themselves into the dath ilan/Green/Anomalan conversation.  "This seems prematurely-judgemental-without-facts.  Has dath ilan not heard of not-closing-off-avenues-in-the-interpersonal-probability-space-on-first-interaction?"

Anomalans have heard of that, and also of the concept that if you can't get people to do things your way by making the case for it in detail in writing then you'll never be able to get them to do it by force or trickery. So despite the moral urgency of dying children there's really no need for anyone to do anything other than explain in detail why children should not be dying and what the Bobbiverse should be doing instead. And the first step of that is asking them a lot of questions so it becomes clear what better states they'll accept. Surely they don't terminally value death, right, so there almost has to be some such state.

Also, why are you back here, did one of the other delegations message the front room and ask for an elf?

Obviously there was information being exchanged, and elves want to know information! Elves in general really want to be in the room where it happens so that they know everything, and any delegation to a summit of aliens would be naturally selected from among people with a particularly intense desire to be in the room and know what is going on!  Was there ... some kind of expectation of privacy? Without any explicit statement to the room about desiring privacy?

In any case, this elf has managed to overhear the majority of the conversation and would like to reiterate her question for response by dath ilan.

Conversations currently happening in the Llassan Sign backchannel, which was not given to anyone for machine translation such that it retains its purpose as a language the diplomats can backchannel in, while mainchanneling continues in Spoken Llassan: 

1. How worried should we be about the thing where dath ilan keeps acting like every other world requires them personally to fix it and is escalating to 'well maybe you should abandon your own civilization and become part of ours instead' this fast (subconversation "Are we totally sure that's a bad thing in the specific case of the Bobbiverse?" which the Eluin delegation is trying to get back on track with "Regardless of whether it's a bad thing in the specific case of the Bobbiverse it's worrying?? It doesn't actually have to be a bad idea across the board to be worrying as an action taken at a diplomatic summit, guys, we don't have to debate how mad we should be about the seven year olds thing to assess the risk that dath ilan is going to try to invade.")

2. Should we in fact be accepting ambassadors, given that we're concerned about invasion risk and want the option to just leave the cave entirely and have nothing to do with any of this. (The consensus conclusion is yes, they're not going to be able to close everything down instantaneously regardless, and not accepting ambassadors would have all kinds of signalling implications.)

3. Conversely should we be sending ambassadors. (The consensus conclusion is a tentative no, since it's much harder to retrieve people from other worlds than to deposit them out of Malachitin, but they can come back to that.)

They're happy to consult on the particulars of Spoken Llassan! Sorry, is there a machine translation issue, they can also clarify whether things in the fiction they brought are real or worldbuilding details or similar.

Honestly most likely ambassadors from Ozytopia, Firstworld, and the elves seem like they'll probably be fine; again, they'll be primarily interfacing with people selected to get along with wide ranges of people. They should be good at picking up languages, especially if they're going to be talking to multiple governments.

Ozytopia's brassica song was universally agreed to be extremely charming and if they send someone who is very hyped about things like brassica they predict that other malachitians will also find that extremely charming.

Green would love to accept ambassadors from everywhere although if dath ilan isn't letting a Green in they don't really want to bring a dath ilani home with them. When Greens are considering being diplomats they try to pick people who are charitable, thoughtful, good at triage*, disinclined to lick cats, practiced at perspective-taking, and gung-ho about travel and being out of one's comfort zone, so that is what they'll be expecting, but they expect to be able to manage with basically anyone bright who thinks Greens sound neat and wants to be peer-friends.

*literally: stack-insertion

Elfland will accept any ambassadors people want to send, and expect that anyone they interact with will be sufficiently skilled at code switching to behave appropriately, or know that well enough about themselves to defer to others in communications.  They expect any ambassadors will respond calmly to polite requests about how their behaviors are affecting those around them, and if any ambassadors do not expect to be able to do that they should warn the elves explicitly in advance so that they can make sure to have individuals with exceptionally high frustration tolerances on hand for interactions.

Elves will not have any trouble selecting someone good at languages to send to Malachitin, though it will be considerably more difficult if they need to be able to read much instead of just having conversations.