"He likes watching Plates."

"Should I do something else while I wait for him to be done watching Plates, do you think?"

"You can talk to him now if you want, they're just doing the recap now."

"Thank you."

He'll go say hello to the warden.

"Yo," says the warden. "The red guy said you were here for... cultural exposure?"

"Yes, I'm trying to figure something out about Vanda Nossëo's cultures and justice system but it's slow going because all I have to go on is the certainty that I'm missing something."

"Huh. Well, I hope it's been helpful visiting here."

"It has! John was really helpful. I don't suppose while I'm here you'd be willing to tell me how you came to be a prison warden?"

"So I sort of fell into a job at a mental hospital because my friend worked there, and I liked some things about it - arranging the environment to be helpful and calming, coordinating everything between the doctors and the pharmacists and the visiting family and stuff - but one day my boss said to me, Phil, the one thing stopping you from really understanding the patients on their level is that you're always thinking about them like they must have made decisions to get here, and this is a hospital, not a jail - well actually he said it's not a substance abuse clinic, and I considered that too, but then this place opened up a shift and I was like, yeah, that sounds like the parts I'm good at and not the parts I'm bad at, I'll go cover some hours there, and I get along with the inmates better because, like, yeah, they did make choices, they aren't just having an attack of the brain chemicals, and they can make different choices, and if potted plants and marathoning cooking shows'll help them get there, I'm on it. - also it's a really easy job, if anybody gets super agitated I can do some magic stuff till it settles down but mostly I just hang out and make sure everybody's social worker's showing up on time and stuff."

"That's - that's extremely interesting. So you're mostly serving the people here, is that right?"

"- well, yeah, they don't really need help to not escape, there's fuckall on this planet. Uh, except for the gigantic sucking pits of nothingness. But those are on other continents. They'd get dragged back long before they started trying to climb there. - I guess they're not technically other continents when there isn't like an ocean. But if there was they would be other continents."

"Thank you, that's... very different from how things are where I come from, and very useful to know."

"Happy to help. - ooh they're doing layer cakes -" He is absorbed again in the TV.

He could probably afford to watch the mysterious baking thing for a while but he's learned what he wanted to know and has more to do. Envoys ready to head back yet?

Yup, they're just waiting for him. "Where to?" Nelen asks.

"Anywhere we can talk reasonably privately will do, or just back to Sesat if there isn't time for that."

Pop, pop, pop, and they're back on the ship in orbit above Sesat's planet.

"All right, that was productive, I have a better sense of how your values work in practice and I've got a short list of questions that aren't just stabs in the dark. I want to know what people in Vanda Nossëo think defines a specific person as themself rather than as some other person, and I want to know - hm, it's hard to precisely articulate the other thing but I might have a useful hypothetical that would get me my answer - and I might have to follow either or both of those through several more questions and answers but I think I'll at least know what to ask now."

"I'm not totally sure what you mean about a person being themself rather than some other person," says Nelen. "It seems like whatever you mean it might be complicated by the existence of alts, have you gotten an explanation of alts yet?"

"Not in great detail."

"Some worlds are commonplace - the same historical events playing out on the same landforms, in separate universes," says Nelen. "The two we've seen a lot of are Ardas and Earths - Earths are a planet that can have different other planets as neighbors, my home planet is in the same world as an Earth, for example. Cassiel and Natsuko are both from different Earths. Tarwë is from an Arda, and Zanro is from a different one. This is a particular city on a particular date on the earth in Eclipse -" Times Square! - "and this is the same city on the same calendar date - though taken a few years later, because similar worlds aren't all at the same time in their history - in Cube." Another Times Square. "They're not totally identical, they have different advertisements up and the námor in the crowd aren't the exact same set and it's cloudier in this one. But you can see that they have the same tech level, mostly the same buildings except this one has a broken window... you see?"

"I see."

"But some of the námor are the same." He points out a woman in a red coat; she is in both photos. "Which if you think about it has to be the case - the architects who built these buildings had to be in both places. The inventors who made the products that the matching advertisements are showing had to be in both places. We call those námor, who have copies like that in different worlds, 'alts'. And if you tracked down this woman, and that one, and they met, they'd find they had almost everything in common. With me so far?"

"Yes, though I thought alts appeared in more different worlds than those."

"They do, I'm just trying to ground the concept. So this kind is the kind that's easy to find, you just go to the same address - adjusted for the time period - and there they are. But once you have the idea that this can happen at all, you can notice it in námor who don't have perfectly matching backgrounds in perfectly matching worlds. Alts can be different species, genders, ethnicities, show up in a matched world but in different places and times... and those, to find them, you need forensic demons, or specialized teleportation, or someone who knows the template very well to get to know a new member of it." He pulls up a group photo of all the Bells to date. "These are all the Bells we've found, we work particularly hard to make sure we don't miss any because they're so well-aligned and useful. If, say, I have any alts, I don't know about it. Natsuko knows about some but only the easy-to-find sort.

"And alts differ in how many - constraints seem to be operative. These are all the Maitimor we've found," pictures of those, almost all Elf men, one Elf woman, two human men, one Andalite. "Much less visible variation. We check for these too, we're not missing any. But it turns out they aren't reliably well-aligned. So, a Bell might say something like, being her instead of someone else is a function of her basic personality and her life history, say, whereas a Maitimo might want to define it more tightly, require some shared values that don't come standard with the basic personality.

"Did that help at all?"