Griffie winces at 'selflessness' topping the list of what 'good' is in Jim's world.

"I consider this an interesting problem and possibly tangentially related to things I've studied before, I'd like the better definition."

"So it's a metaphorical crystalline lattice existing in a torsor of the set of all possible - "

"If it's only possible to explain it in language that's this technical, I'd really prefer it on paper so I can go through it with a dictionary or three."

"Sure."

He takes a notebook out of a pocket too small to contain it, and a pencil, and writes it down and adds several illustrative diagrams.

And Griffie photographs the note, transcribes the text while maintaining the relation to the diagrams, and gets to work with the aforementioned dictionaries. If the path to victory involves dealing with the complicated mathematics of the forces of ethics anyway, ey might as well get some practice.

Goodness, in Jim's world, appears to be a precise structure of relationships between agents-at-times and environments. Just as a spell diagram is a precise structure of markings, but is still a working diagram no matter where in an ordinary room you put it, so is it with Goodness. If everyone in society shifted their actions at once towards a different equilibrium, that might be Good, but unilaterally breaking with a Good status quo is not.

For any entity, the Good way to treat that entity supports that entity's role in the structure. Entities' proper roles include (but are not limited to) supporting other entities in their proper roles. These proper roles can be inferred from other information about the entities in question and the world they interact with.

Griffie summarizes eir understanding back to Jim, ending with "…and whatever this is ended up stabilizing on an equilibrium where mind control is acceptable, possibly due to being recursion with an insufficiently well-defined base case?"

"...No, it's - if some good people moved to Milliways, they could still do nice things for each other, and for strangers from other worlds, and for everything they did or thought in Milliways, there'd be a fact of the matter about whether, if the whole situation had existed in my world instead, it'd pull them closer to good or evil. So it's not inherent to goodness that there's mind control about it. That's just what my universe does when someone convinces it that it's possible to relate to morality in a given way. After we convinced it that evil is also conceivable it started doing the same thing for us - there's a specific inflection point, even, where you go from net mind controlled to be more good to net mind controlled to be more evil."

"…do the good people have opinions about mind control and what are they. What is your concept of evil. Have you considered developing a third concept that's about … individual freedom, particularly from mind control? Do you want to evacuate your entire universe through Milliways or work on mental protection spells with me, I have a spell that's specifically 'protection from evil forces, especially mind control' and it's in a spell-family that also does protection from good forces and such."

"That... is a lot of questions. I have considered developing a third concept - that is the main project I was working on before I got my door, and when we tried to convince reality to support individual freedom it seems to have parsed it as something closer to 'it's really funny when people make choices, we should brainwash the people who run ice cream parlors into selling more different flavors and require that everyone find a new house every night' and we didn't get critical mass on a vision of the future that was both comprehensible and, uh, that. I am considering evacuating the universe but I don't know if I'll decide to do that. I do have a model of good people's opinions on the mind control but maybe we should go get a book from Bar that is actually written by a good person about it. And evil is fundamentally about fucking with people, and about - particular things, and physical things, and pain, and making people less good, and about selfishness. Again, that's the summary for mortals, but in a technical sense it's a pretty simple negation of good, I don't think there's anything weird about the math. And if your spells can block my entire universe's inherent physics, that would be shocking but awesome."

"Thanks for answering my questions. Blocking an entire major shard of universal physics is not unprecedented for my world's spells, though it tends to take a lot of input energy and there may be more effective methods. It is in fact possible to, say, dramatically reduce the fundamental possibility for objects to have temperatures at all much less be on fire using my world's magic, and fire is one of the four elements. It does suggest that me literally figuring out Protection from Good and tagging you with that and Protection from Evil won't solve your problems, but I already figured that was the case. I hear that really skilled wizards can make a significant effort at convincing the universe that someone's mind just doesn't exist, and there are also spells designed to target alignment-y background radiation like when you go to the Plane of Law and the plane itself tries to push you into walking at the correct rhythm in the correct lane. And I think it might be nice to get a book from Bar written by a Good philosopher about mind control, but I feel pessimistic about that route and would like to look at the technological route first."

"Are you trying to solve moral realism? That's charming."

"I'm interested in solving the horrible mind control thing? You can have ethics be meaningfully reflected by fundamental physics without … your world's problems."

"I think the best option for that, given Milliways, is just to leave, but I don't think everyone would want to."

"Well, you're the one with local knowledge so it's up to you, but if you want to work on anti-mind-control spell development for the people who don't want to evacuate, I'd be happy to work with you on it."

"I don't mind magical research or casting spells on people to fuck with their minds in ways they'd experience as startling and disorienting and possibly violating, but you seem like you might."

"Sorry, I'm not sure whether to parse that as 'I wish to reserve my right to personally mind-control people for fun later and thus don't want to build too-good wards' or 'I am fine with Protection from Weird Moral Physics being startling, disorienting, and possibly violating for victims of Weird Moral Physics, and I anticipate this as a risk, but you might not be fine with that, so do you really want to help me build something I might use that way' or what."

"Second thing. A lot of people like the thing where they just have to put in an upfront effort and then maintaining their alignment gets easier and easier. And none of them have ever known anything else."

Griffie sighs. "…I still really want you and your friends to have the option to be genuinely free and not just choosing between 'goodness' and 'anti-goodness' and to have that ongoingly be an option for people who wouldn't evacuate the universe. Do you value having spells like this enough that you're willing to make promises about how you'll use my contribution to spell development? If you want a model of my moral opinions that's usable when I'm not around you can probably approximate me with Suaal's archons' moral philosophies. Because, well, if I ran into a dilemma like this at home I'd … go ask the archons for advice, probably."

"I don't actually know what I value. Most of what I've wanted for a long time is to make more options and weaken morality, and here I am in a place with infinite options and no morality, and I'm going to have to take a rain check on long-term commitments."

"Huh. I'd object to how you're using 'morality', I'm here and I still have mine, but your universe is horrible in a way which means I maybe shouldn't nitpick your language too much. Regarding infinite options: are you also immortal, because if not I could sell you a backup body, or if you have soul senescence I might be able to fix it since I have a shiny repaired unaging soul on hand to use as a reference."

"I am in the market for another body."

"Bar sells spell components for producing those, they're pretty pricey but they're not intrinsically magical. Can you handle physics-maintenance for something made of the Elements I'm made of yourself or does your universe otherwise have support for my elements, do you have opinions about gender or species, all of these factor into price."

"I have never run into your kind of matter before and I'm not entirely sure what my world would do to it but I wouldn't put it past it for the answer to be 'turn it into something superficially similar made of entirely different types of material' or 'blow it up'. I like the succulent thing you have going on, I haven't really gotten motile plants to work how I want before. I have a slight preference for male bodies because, for reasons I predict you will find unconvincing, gender is evil, so sometimes I indulge in having one."

"Oh, you could convince me that gender is fundamentally opposed to your universe's malformed conception of 'goodness', and then I'd just say things like 'well, sure, but if gender is evil then why do so many of the best people in my world have one, it sounds like your universe is just terrible'. Anyway, I can get you a biological sample from me for you to try putting through your door for a few seconds if that's safe, and then if that works out I can just build you an empty male one of these no problem. Well, 'with humanoid male genitalia and a broadly masculine appearance', it's probably easiest for me to work from cuttings of myself here and that'll technically get you production of flowers of both sexes, does that matter for you?"