"If people(A) don't want to put up with you A can just leave. Except your parents(B), I guess, but you just need to run away to another city or your auncles' place or something for that."

"But then my auncles have to put up with me!"

"Not if you go live in a dormpartment somewhere but I guess then your dormmates would. What do you do that people don't like?"

"Be bad at math!"

"Then people(A) who don't like that just shouldn't ask you to do any! There are loads of people(B) who are good at math and like it, A should get B to do it!" Jana is annoyed. There is involuntary math in two universes and that is bogus.

"You're totally right," Logic says. "--What does preservation mean?"

"Uh, it's when you bodydie and the surgeons chop off your head and do stuff to it so you don't braindie and put you in a vault where nothing can mess with you until we* get uploading."

*Note: Convergentlanguage has four forms of 'we' that indicate whether or not the listener is included and whether or not any third parties are included. Jana used the one indicating the inclusion of both Logic and at least one third party.

"Oh! We don't have that I think. When we bodydie we braindie."

". . . FECES."

"WAIT this the thing where if something really bad happens and makes no sense it's probably a dream."

Jana(A) convulses A's entire body in the manner of someone trying to thrash around in bed and wake A's self up. No metaphorical dice.

"Double feces!"

"Have you tried pinching yourself? That sometimes helps."

Jana tries this, to no avail. "Nope. Hey, if you're a dream character why are you telling me how to wake up and if you're not a dream character why did you think I could?"

"Well, I don't know if dream people have souls," Logic says sensibly.

"I think I missed a step there, can you introsplain?"

"Well, if dream people have souls, I might be a dream person even though there's something it feels like to be me."

". . . I don't remember having any separately sapient personalityaspects. And I don't think they show up all of a sudden. So if you have qualia you're probably not running on my brain. Or I'm even more insane than it looks like."

"Dreams are pretty weird," Logic says. "I don't know how dreams work."

"I don't know either but probably you're all braindying and I don't know what to do!"

"Well, it's better that you know about it," Logic says, "because then you can stop it!"

"Yeah. I should call a bunch of preservation companies who can set up teams in your universe, in addition to the scientists and journalists. But nobody's dying right now, right, because time is stopped. So I can stay here and get more information until I'm sure I know everything everyone's going to need to know that I can find out and it can all get set up really fast. Also if there are two universes there are probably loads so I should learn more about that too."

"The Bar said that there are loads. She talks on napkins."

"Oh! Hi there!" Jana(A) says to the bar(B). A reads B's resulting napkin and requests a "some kind of almondshake with something tasty from another universe." Now A has an almondshake.

"So what else is your universe like? Are there any other problems we* should figure out solutions for?"

*This is the one that means 'just the people in this conversation'.

"Well, time is stopped, so we could just talk about things until we find more problems? I wouldn't have thought of preservation as being a problem on my own. --People back home are really worried about factory farming and the world outside the Teachingsphere and nuclear war and wild animals."

"I've heard of nuclear war but not factory farming or the Teachingsphere. Is the problem with wild animals that sometimes they attack people or that it's sad when they die?"

"The wild animals might be sad! If they're sick or hungry. --The Teachingsphere is people who worship the logos and in other places it's really bad and they have genocides and stuff."

"Oh, yikes. Genocide is--a war that goes on until everyone on one of the sides is dead? Firstplanet used to have those but then everyone who didn't figure out how to stop doing it died and now if cities don't like each other they just avoid each other and show off how rich they are at each other and try to get each other's citizens to move to them. Does worshipping the Logos help with that somehow?"