"So there are a lot of different variations, but the basic idea is that self aware, but not more intelligent than like a bug, computer programs can be spun up by the millions. And we can give them a little simulated world and code them to take always make lawful good choices within their little simulated world.

Alternatively we can use mind magic to tie existing people into virtual worlds then put them into memory base pseudo-timeloops that just contain the exact instant they actually made the morally relevant decision thus allowing us to rerun them choosing to risk their life to push a toddler out of the way of a truck or whatever a few hundred times a second.

And those are just the ideas I thought up right off the bat. I think there is a lot of room to workshop this.

Immortality basically works out to just keeping the computer on, or normal life extension for the second version. Also, I'm still trying to get a feel for the exact numbers but I suspect we could get a gods worth of quintessence fast relative to a normal lifespan."

Griffie looks concerned. "So. Issue one, I'm not sure this gets you a good deity as opposed to, say, a deity can't actually make sensible decisions about anything that isn't rescuing toddlers and is in fact easily manipulated. Issue two, I'm not actually sure we can do much with quintessence production given that we're away from the fountain of thought, but that's a pragmatic issue, doesn't make testing not worth it. I've been treating quintessence production as more of a risk than a goal, sorry about the oversight."

"I would appreciate clarification on the fountain of thought.

I am pretty confident in our ability to create agents whose behaviour counts as lawful good, in the limit I think we could copy your mind in large quantities, or if your non-materialness interferes, self modify our species to pretty exacting specifications. But there is a real trade off in terms of other points of failure. 
If my most optimistic idea of how this works is right then I can; write the program, beam it to my ship, have multiple other programers check that the code is correct, run it long enough that it would create a god if ensoulded, verify that everything went well, then do the real run today before I need stimulants."

Ey takes a breath.

"It would also leave us enough time to check that merging works the way I expect for this kind of ensouled agent and stuff like that.
Whereas harder plans have more risk of loosing my door or a soul dying in my world or..."

"the bar with categorically adequate security."

"The bar has categorically adequate security between people in the main bar area. It doesn't even reliably apply outside the door, and I certainly wouldn't trust it to protect us if we opened the door to my world."

"I was specifically thinking of if someone died in the main bar area with the door closed, but it sounds like it's probably not something to rely on."

"Anyway, fountain of thought?"

"Sometime around the beginning of my worldsheaf – it was just one world that eventually got named Aiquzall, back then – various structures ended up existing, such as the Elemental Ring, where the Four Elements come from, and a Fountain of Thought, from which intelligent life … formed? was a self-reinforcing process? I'm not sure, but, basically, the marginally more intelligent lifeforms emitted more quintessence which formed proto-gods which tended to be invested in intelligent life existing and it formed a feedback loop. The feedback loop was strongest at Aiquzall-the-landmass and is today strongest on the planet, it's weaker within the Outer Planes, and it's likely really weak here. Which may make it hard to form a god."

"Do you think bar would know about the possibility of forming gods here."

"In terms of Suaal magic specifically? No. If it's not published, she doesn't have it, and who in my worldsheaf would publish such a thing? There isn't a wide range of Suaals to sample from for publications either, and even if there were, those Suaals would vary in physics and she wouldn't be able to tell me which one matched my world. Sorry."

"Ok. My last trip left me unclear on how well she understands the how the physics of her interior works. 

Is there a downside to creating quintessence if it doesn't form a god or only forms one on return to Suual?"

"The options here are having me do it, which I'm already doing, or permanently introducing complications to the functioning of morally relevant entities, or creating new morally relevant entities, and those last two both seem like a big deal. But just leaking quintessence that dissipates seems in and of itself probably fine."

At some point it's worth noting that Inovemekio's main language includes verbal quotation marks that are frequently used as part of normal conversation. Ey also speaks English colloquially and is barely resisting the urge to use sarcastic air quotes in conjunction with the phrase "morally relevant entities".

"I think there are potential discussions around what entities are morally relevant and utilitarian trade offs of these plans. But also one version of this would involves just speeding up your consciousness and possibly that of a handful of additional people by a factor of a 100,000 or so."

"I'm fine with trying a consciousness speedup if I can stop it from the inside should it turn out to be a bad idea."

"That is a bit tricky but not impossible. So, we can speed up your subjective time perception and the number of times you can register a 'conscious decision', which will hopefully be conceptually the same across systems, much more than we can speed up your actual cognition. Also, I'm worried that the shard of you in the simulation knowing it's a simulation will make the quintessence wonky. Probably not since you'd still be cooperating with a not naturally aligned group for a 'Good' reason. But still.

Anyway we can still do a relatively slow speed test run and/or* setup the loop so that you can still have a semi-seperate meta-cognition shard monitoring things."

*This is an actual word in both Angry, Sleepy and Galactic 5 which Inovemekio has been freely mixing since they are almost merged at this point.

After some more discussion during which Griffie seems annoyingly nitpicky, ey agrees to be accelerated by Inovemekio's team.

After some communication with eir mothership, Inovemekio has a team brought in, and gets some sleep in while they hold the door.

The team contains of two of Inovemekio's siblings, who are not actually indistinguishable from em, but come close. It also contains several far more bizarre looking creatures who don't directly talk to Griffie beyond basic technical questions and instructions.

Inovemena, Inovemelu, or possibly Inovemekio in a new outfit explains that this is because they are from the motherships support crew and have relatively minimal training dealing with alien cultures. Also because most of them are barely sentient labor species except the actual magical specialist who has a mental architecture specialised for magic and can't think logically about anything else.

Griffie will be provided with a portal computing crystal, a tensorbook, and briefcase full of 4096 ebi bills as backup/thank you gifts before being shoved into the simulation.

Griffie actually is friends with animals and would like to talk with the members of the allegedly barely sentient labor species, but can wait. What's an iteration of the simulation like? Can Griffie exclude specific events from it, there's a few incidents of em making some bad decisions that it seems dubious to amplify.

Oh yes, they aren't planning on simulating anything close to Griffie's entire life. Even the first run will be just the most promising parts and they hope to assemble a 10 minute loop of just the actual decision points behind Griffie's greatest hits.

In terms of subjective experience:

There are two layers to the simulation. The outer layer is a vauge, literally dreamlike, control area that gives the impression of a pleasant forrest without actually having any trees or really any unambiguous physical features except for their bodies and the control board for the inner simulation. 

The floating display has hundreds of switches, dials, and menus as well as a view port to the inner simulation. Despite this apparent complexity, Griffie simply needs to decide on a memory or set of memories and tell Inovemena to press go. Everything else is a mix of manual backups, performance tuning, and tools for assembling the eventual loop.

If there is a easy way for them to measure quintessence from completely outside the sim that would be helpful, but Griffie should be able to overlap eir real and outer sim bodies for the purpose of casting by wanting to.

The inner simulation is indistinguishable from reality to the inner Griffie as long as outer Griffie wills that.

The actual decision points, huh.

Some of the points the sim-operator Griffie picks include retrieving a cleric who betrayed her demon-god from the Abyss as an implicit promise repaid, returning the Staff of Polyphoe to its agricultural use, offering a wand of Stabilize Nature Spirit to Friends of Trees just in case, and choosing to join eir friend in the fight against Charon long before knowing his name or that it was eir fight as well.

Griffie attempts to steer away from scenes of combat. It's necessary, but it's probably not the best manifestation of eir ideals. Ey doesn't, actually, aim that hard for Lawful.

Aaaand run!

As a first run they will do all of those with enough context for the test run to take a few hours from inner Griffie's point of view. 

When that goes smoothly they will look at dialling into just the decision points. And possibly ask about including a little bit more law and/or focus on opposing the lower planes depending on the exact result. They won't push too hard on this since it's not their area, and a goodie two shoes pantheon still sounds way better than the lower planes, but they do want something accabtably aligned with themselves. And are lawful... not good. Not outer planes style evil but not good good and arguably not exactly neutral.

The request for more Lawful quintessence is fair, they are paying for it. Griffie can propose some scenarios with more Law: Expressions of the value of coordination with one's enemies, such as insisting on honoring the conditions of a foe's conditional surrender even when it seemed possible to secretly break the conditions, and in one notable case negotiating the terms of an (ultimately counterfactual) surrender pre-combat. Expressions of the general sentiment that delicate situations ought to be understood prior to intervention, such as asking an alchemist whether it would be safe to extinguish her burning hair with water, or asking whether it'd be safe to use healing magic during an unusual medical emergency. Coping with the whims of fae and other strange beings by attempting to work within their norms despite their norms seeming rather unreasonable and offensive to less tolerant people. Choosing to carry playing cards and a tea set to provide a bubble of 'civilization' for its calming effects, and using it. Being scrupulously honest with creatures in eir care about what ey can and cannot protect them from, and wishing ey could better defend them from uncaring chaos. Does this cover the law-concepts Inovemekio's team wants? Griffie has noticed that they don't have quite the same law-concepts ey does.

"As for opposing the lower planes… I could be wrong, but my impression is that opposing the fundamental roots of the lower planes is a better quintessence source than mere violence towards fiends, and in particular that destructive violence is the wrong sort of imposing-one's-ideals-upon-the-world for fighting a death god. My…" Griffie trails off, looking distant, then refocuses. "My girlfriend has a publication on the subject, 'Foes Beyond Fiends'. If you don't want to take my word on it. She's more theoretical than I am."

"That all makes sense. We can rerun the loop with the new memories and that should be sufficient."

Griffie is certainly okay with these memories if Inovemekio's team is! (Also, what is Inovemekio's team called? It's nice to have names for things.)

"Oh right the translation is so good we forgot you don't actually speak our language, which has strict enough naming conventions you could at least make a reasnable guess. My and my siblings are collectively the Inoveme* or the flowers of Inoveme, the wider team is 'the primary simulation team of The Graceful Seeker of the Lost', but you can just the Graceful Sim team."

Looking closely at the non-Inoveme*'s clothing will reveal that have patches saying they are part of the crew of 'The Graceful Seeker of the Lost' but it is small print on highly decorated clothing. So the badges are very easy to miss if you don't already know to look right below the center of their v-neck collars.

Alright. Do the Inoveme* want to explain what sort of values they like to see expressed in the world in more detail, Griffie thinks that a trait of good allies is looking out for cheap opportunities to serve each other's interests and is necessary for Griffie to be able to spot those. Also ey's curious. Also, ey doesn't really have 'detect good' in eir native spellcasting capability and is going to need to do an obnoxiously tedious ritual to inspect the quintessence production thus far, so it's a good time for em to listen.