"Huh, that's kind of weird - do they have, what, a separate chess part of the brain that only does chess and nothing else -" She starts setting up.

"It's not even just chess, there's—they're weirdly slower in a ton of ways and faster in others. I once watched someone take over half an hour to eat a bowl of cereal, and his cereal refused to get soggy at an appropriate rate, and they all just take forever to switch tasks or finish things—but conversely they age a ton faster, and they learn skills a lot faster, and they even get promotions at work a lot faster, and they get married and have kids and it's like the overall story of their lives is on fast-forward."

"You're saying that cereal - a physical object that is not part of a human at all - behaves differently when one of them eats it?"

"Yyyyup."

"Are there other things like that? What would happen if you shared a bowl of cereal?"

"I honestly have no idea. I have an intuitive guess that for the duration of the bowl of cereal they would eat at the same rate I do and it would behave normally? But yeah, food in general was the most obvious, it gets cold more slowly for them but they also take longer to actually cook, like, they put something in a microwave for over twenty minutes and it gets as warm as when I do it for a couple, and as far as I can tell baking and other forms of cooking are similar. Not sure how other things work, so it could be isolated to just food, but I wouldn't be surprised if their clothes got less worn because of the same effect or if they got more worn because their overall life goes faster and stuff."

"...I'm going to need to befriend a neighbor or a coworker and do experiments."

"I support you in this endeavour, let me know if I can help. I've kinda been mellowing down on the experimentation because it has, uh, not been the psychologically healthiest thing to spend so much of my time thinking about how literally no one else around me is a person."

And he doesn't want to impose his presence on Elspeth, even if they are the only people in the world it would be... bad... to make this mean that she had to suffer him despite any potential social incompatibilities... but also he is starving for human connection.

"I imagine it would get wearing! I was planning to try to work my way up to staff writer at the newspaper and imagine that people somewhere would be reading the articles but having run into you is better." She's white; she moves a pawn.

He moves one of his own.

"I do occasionally browse Simmit and I would definitely have eventually run across your poll but it was lucky to run into each other like that. You said you've been around for a couple of days?"

"Yup. One day at the hospital, two days of work, that brings us to now."

"Yeah that explains why I hadn't seen it before."

"I wonder if you could program a webcrawler to notice - something different about our web browsing behavior, I don't know exactly what it would be but I bet it's different even if not everyone who starts existing is going to make a poll like mine."

"Yeah. Entirely empty Simbook profiles could be an easy initial thing to look for, maybe, I don't know if we'd all get one but it does seem kind of coincidental that two people who think they wouldn't have ordinarily been so absent from the internet happened to have one of those."

"Yeah, that's a good idea. And maybe new house purchases, had you ostensibly bought your house the morning you began?"

"Iiiiii don't know actually," here's his phone and bank app and, "Yes, apparently. And I didn't... have an initial deposit. My account apparently just existed and happened to have enough money for the purchase."

Nod nod. "I called the real estate company and they - you know. Probably everyone else buys houses sometimes too but it'd be something we can check, maybe we should make friends with the real estate people."

"Yeah. Although that'd probably still catch NPCs that get spontaneously created and don't acquire, uh, self-awareness in the process."

"Yeah. But it's probably a manageable number to go through - did you and I have the same realtor -"

"What was yours? Mine was Alto."

"Landgraab, drat."

"Oh, I've heard of them. Alto is almost as big, I think."

"If there's only two that's not so bad but if there's twenty it'll be harder to go through them to find people."

"There are a few smaller ones but those are the two I see ads for all the time."

"Okay. You make friends with someone who works for Alto and I'll make friends with someone who works for Landgraab?"