"Does it read your mind, does it transmit information about you, can it control your thoughts..."

"It doesn't read your mind but it can read stuff like how tense you are and what hormones you're producing. It doesn't transmit information you don't want it to unless something really weird is going on, I can't be sure it never happens. It can't control your thoughts."

"That seems like it involves trusting Sing a lot but not really more than you'd have to to get your brain fixed and not more than people have to trust the magic, anyway. And Sing has a good track record, if not as long as the magic's. Are there in fact people who don't get these things or is it being safe to skip it kind of a theoretical thing?"

"There's people who skip it. Sing won't let them die without being preserved, but there's plenty of folks - mostly back on Earth, not on Mars - who don't get anything done at all."

"Technically everyone is still accessible here but I think if it were possible not to be no one would stop people - what's even the point, if they don't want to be retrievable then why waste space keeping their bodies around?"

"Well, there's lots of space."

"I'm sure you have lots but still. I think - insisting on retaining the option looks bad and if there's a reason that's less bad."

"Sing isn't a person and it's not really going to make sense if you try to interpret it like one. It cares about people not dying irretrievably and so it avoids letting that happen unless someone is incredibly determined and it does also care about people's consent and stuff but it doesn't care at all about things looking bad to people - at least not directly, it might care if that would change something else I guess."

"I mean, if it wants to have the bodies on hand because it likes its body collection, or something that can be glossed as liking its body collection, that's still better than secretly hoping to bring them back just to watch them complain about it. Not that I guess I could tell. But, you know, if it doesn't look good to us we probably won't vote for it."

"It probably hopes that the conditions under which it would be appropriate to bring them back will come about someday. Insofar as it hopes things."

"I guess that's as sensible as anything. I don't know anyone it'd be relevant to but I think Donna and Sky do - they're on the scout team, you've met Donna - or actually I guess I mean I think they did know someone. They might have questions I wouldn't think of, I don't know, it seems like a fine reason to me. I - guess at some point we're going to have to break it to people coming back that their grandkids they were hoping to see all grown up are probably not coming back, aren't we. Is that something you have prior art on?"

"Can you explain more?"

"It's the case for most dead people that they're grandparents or great-grandparents or even sometimes great-great-grandparents. The - stereotypical dead person is a hundred and three and their youngest family member was, like, ten, and they have an actual relationship and they're looking forward to catching up. Of those, because we've been here for centuries, a lot of the formerly ten year old grandkids are not currently alive either. And - I don't know the numbers - it's gonna turn out that, like, a dozen of the grandkids actually died at age twenty and left a note about how they don't want to exist in the same world as some other happy person who hasn't done anything worth killing them over, or - the ones who felt claustrophobic will probably not feel claustrophobic on Mars, they'll be fine - or whatever. So we'll almost always be telling people 'yeah, the people you wanted to see are excited to see you again and all grown up with kids of their own now!' but there'll be a couple where we instead say, uh, well, something more tactful than 'surprise! They're staying dead because their lives ended in unremitting misery!'"

"Huh. Sing lets people freeze with some pretty elaborate conditions but I'm not sure what it does about people who don't want to share a universe with somebody else. Maybe it'll make pocket universes like this one for people like that? Or figure putting them on separate planets is a reasonable interpretation. Cory - my girlfriend - wanted to never have to think about her ex again, so I set that up, the ex lives on Earth."

"It might be that some of the people would be okay sharing a universe if sharing a universe didn't mean being a day's walk away but it also might be that knowing a couple of theoretically doable dimensional jumps and a month's train journey could bring them together would be bad enough. I don't even know how I'd find out. Maybe Sing is just smart enough to guess."

"I'd bet on it, personally."

"Well. You'd know. If you think Sing's smart enough for something, I'll trust that."

"I'm not an expert. I just usually assume that if it looks like there might, almost, be enough information for a lot of people working together for a long time, to figure something out, then Sing'll have it right away."

How simultaneously reassuring and creepy.

She has more questions.

Also, as Tarinda can eventually see for herself, she has a house, with a little fenced-in garden which her husband is weeding. Lia lets him know she's brought Tarinda back; he waves.

Wave wave!

Lia relays this information, as, icons aside, he does not currently have eyes.

" - Oh, you wouldn't pick up on - you're not really supposed to wave back, it's sort of a vocable that means 'I know or at least suspect you're there and I'm interested in a conversation but I'm specifically not saying "come over here right now"' - at least when you do it exactly like that - I suppose Mars has a completely different social context, though, you'll have to - I mean, you won't have to tell me about that if you don't want to, but I want to imply an interest in hearing about that, which with non-aliens I would do by saying you have to tell me. Let me know if I end up assuming too little background and insulting your ability to learn alien manners in two days."

"I wouldn't take it to be rude if you said I had to," she assures him. "I've actually never met anyone blind on Mars, I think there are probably a few on Earth but Mars is more high-intervention."

Lia translates this too. Val tries not to seem annoyed about Tarinda not talking to him, perhaps not successfully enough to fool any entities capable of taking in more data than any human and trained on a larger corpus of body language than any individual human has ever seen. Half the reason he's talking to her is because Lia is so much worse at reading people, and if he's stuck with only the information Lia can pass on then his mistakes are going to be correlated with hers.

"When you say that Mars is more high-intervention as a reason that Earth would have more blind people, is the mechanism there that it's cheaper or easier to get, say, cataracts treated on Mars, or is it that something about Mars being high-intervention means only people with the right complement of senses can or should go, or something else?"

"It means that people who want to live with fewer technological things going on in their lives, like curing blindness by whatever means one might acquire it, tend to live on Earth, because people who wanted to live on Mars back when that first became an option largely weren't of a being-blind-on-purpose personality type."

"Makes sense. Anyway, I notice I dragged us down this tangent before I even managed to invite you in, my manners have clearly disappeared on a scouting trip. Make yourself comfortable, you can hang out in the garden or head inside, whatever makes you comfortable. Have a seat somewhere or something."