"What is her interpretation?"

"I don't know.  It's hard to know specifically.  The geas doesn't give me information directly, it constrains my actions and the intentions I am able to form.  But I can infer things based on how it affects me."

"How much have you inferred so far?"

"I was geased opportunistically in order to break free a great number of dead prisoners from a prison-mausoleum that would otherwise have bound them to geases that forced them to serve Vespol as slave-soldiers.  Theoretically she could've been using everyone to mean everyone in the camp, but that geas would not have bound me at all once I was in this universe with no way back.  It obliged me to save you.  When you told me that there were trillions of people in this universe it obliged me to orient myself toward eventually saving them.  She intended me to save everyone in the world that I could possibly place within my reach, using all of my skills and all of the resources I could gather and bring to bear on the problem."

"...did she think you could make a lot of meaningful progress toward saving everyone in the world?"

"I was a pirate commodore, on my planet.  I commanded a fleet.  I was known for doing so effectively and terrifyingly.  I think she suspected, if I survived ransacking the prison-mausoleum, I would be able to go on to - lead a revolution, or a spy network for freeing the imprisoned dead from Vespol before they were geased."

"Is there any way at all to break a geas?"

"Once a rune is sealed, there is no way in the universe to alter it except by obviating it completely.  A rune to spin a wheel can be broken by destroying the wheel.  A geas can be broken only by permanently negating its victim's ability to fulfill it."

"I'm sorry.  That is horrifying."

Slowly, deliberately, with as much foreboding as the geas will allow him to threaten her with, he says:

"You would not like the results if you succeeded in freeing me from my geas."

She almost, just barely, begins to reply -

 - and stops -

 - and turns over his words, and her response, carefully, slowly, inside her mind.

"I understand," she says seriously.  "I still find it horrifying."

He studies her, but he cannot read anything on her frozen metal face.

"Can you resist a geas."

"No, a geas cannot be overcome by force of will.  A geas repurposes and strengthens its victim's will as a mechanism of enforcement."

She shakes her head darkly.  "All right.  Is forming a network of droid freedom fighters something your geas might - compel you to do?"

"With you and your allies and this sandcrawler at my disposal, freeing droids is what I am best positioned to do right now, but the geas will also oblige me to gather more resources and give myself more room to prioritize.  ...The geas was defined in a context where anyone who dies can be physically relocated outside of Vespol and allowed to make the Westward Pilgrimage to whatever awaits humans after death.  Given that in this universe death seems to imply the kind of obliteration that comes of spending all one's soul on a rune, I doubt the geas will ever allow me to kill anyone if I can possibly avoid it, as it will render them permanently beyond my ability to save them.  ...If something can be done to prevent death-of-old-age the geas will also oblige me to work on that but I cannot imagine what could be done about aging, especially without runes."

"...People could maybe be turned into cyborgs but that'd take some doing to institute at scale and not everyone would go for it.  But that's a ways off."

She hesitates.

"The goals of the geas appeal to me.  And your help could be valuable.  But.  If you tell me you'd rather your body be incinerated - and if that wouldn't put more people in danger - I'll do it."

He's not actually sure whether being permanently rendered a disembodied immaterial spirit that can only observe the world without acting on it would be better or worse than this.  ...In principle he could still act on the world by defining and investing into runes if he drew any in advance of his incineration, though, until he ran out of soul.

...And the geas isn't even going to let him answer this question honestly, is it, it's going to oblige him to answer in whatever way will allow him to continue living and continue to fulfill the terms of the geas.  Which will at least allow him to perpetrate a flawless interpersonal deception against an innocent bystander.  He's missed that, since he was geased.  He was so good at it.

If he was sure the awfulness of being disembodied would be worse than this, he'd just say

"No."

And not elaborate, at least until asked.

"Getting everybody out was one thing, but - I don't want to enslave you."

"I am not much less constrained without a body.  I would rather be something I hate than be almost nothing."

He has no idea whether this is true.

"All right."

Then, the bridge of the sandcrawler.  The astromech droid R2-C3 is projecting a live hologram of the protocol droid TN-17, who's been appointed acting commander of the guard in the residential areas.

"Updates?"

"Someone named Lep crawled out of his hole and defected about thirty seconds after the human made his pitch," Enseven says.  "No other takers so far.  One of the holdouts wants to talk to his girlfriend, she's being held in a different house."

Everyone looks at her.

"It's probably not practical to keep them all under house arrest indefinitely."

"They could be trying to collude," Epsilon puts in, with the help of the brass-colored 3PO unit translating for it.