Bicameral is kind of having a hard time with the cave. It's not literally universally the case that anything in some sense underground is Chaos, but historically there is not much else that one does in caves. They are not going to touch the paintings but this is not as trivial as it would usually be. 

(Bicameral was, nonetheless, very much involved in the otherwordly-flu-quarantine protocol design and cable installation, and the physics experiments, and especially the followup to the physics experiments of 'putting up clear signage'. People who cannot handle physics theorizing and designing signage while flipping randomly from Law to Chaos were not selected for this critical first contact.) 

A team has been assembled. For Surface diplomacy representation, after ten thousand comments of public debate were rapidly spawned on one of the policy-discussion forums and rather more words of private threads were exchanged, they went with the Marisha template – which does throw off the gender balance, but the debate concluded that female-coded personalities are likely to come across as more personable and non-threatening even to other worlds, and with some effort they were able to include two bio-males out of the six. (Who are wearing significantly more female-coded clothing than they usually would even at work, actually, it seemed like overkill was better than underkill in terms of sticking to Lawful.) They're not sure whether to expect this to be weird?? Probably fashion just varies a lot between worlds and the gender signaling will get lost in the general alienness noise. 

Only one of the three experienced Chaos "diplomats" (this is a completely different word and concept, but it seems like most languages don't distinguish them) has ever done an assassination! She's not planning to advertise this fact! She is mostly very disappointed that their initial team decided against letting anyone bring spray-paint or glitter.) 

In case of unexpected emergencies or something, Bicameral is also sending a medical responder (Surface occupation), an electrical engineer (obligate Chaos but not very Chaos, it'll be fine), and a computer-translation-specialist-babysitter* who's been awake for thirty hours straight trying to handhold her personalized ML language model through translation protocols and thinks she's mostly got it to the point of outputting basically-comprehensible if not entirely idiomatic translations of arbitrary written text in Bicameral's main international trade language. Plus, of course a project manager with accompanying recordkeeping assistant.

They've brought several neatly packaged go-boxes of random supplies that might come in handy, some art in case "art show and tell" turns out to be a thing in interworld diplomacy even though they are not technically in Chaos right now, and plenty of snacks. 

Everyone except for the electrical engineer (who does not so much with the people interactions) and the sleep-deprived translator is paying so so so much attention to the other diplomatic parties' body language and mannerisms and expressions and general style of interaction. They've got some notes and there was a very hasty virtual training to get everyone on the same page and obviously no one is going to be getting this perfect, but it's really awkward not knowing yet how to interact and have it go smoothly. And paying attention to that sort of thing tends to help one stay in Law. 

The diplomats from Green are somewhat fewer; they have support staff hanging back outside the cave, but the ones who enter are:

- a white-haired old lady dressed in voluminous purple robes with white detailing and accessories; her nametag says "Shrey of Alund, Representative of Green", and her braid goes nearly to the floor
- a middle-aged man with a blond buzzcut wearing fabric that all looks like those paintings where you put in a selection of colors and then drag something pointy through them; he's accompanied by a black-tailed marmoset; his nametag says "Cason of Yaris, Representative of Green"
- a woman about the same age as the man, in a much less flashy outfit (white blouse, black slacks); she has a crow; her nametag says "Tsahiri of La, assistant to Green representatives"

Five of the most significant signatories to the Global Accords have sent diplomats, for a total of four women and one man on the Carolingian diplomatic team, all dressed in the various colorful traditional costumes of their countries.

(There was some debate about who was going to send the man, given that his job was obviously going to involve a whole lot of sitting down and shutting up. Eventually the various heads of state drew straws for it.)

The rest of the Carolingian contingent includes two priests of Truth (one male one female), a math hermit (male), a programmer (genderfail), a linguist (female), an ethicist (male), and two first responders (male). Also a ten-year-old, because there was a diplomatic kerfuffle and a few riots about the lack of child representation in the delegation, and finally the GA agreed to grant an observer seat.

The men are all wearing swords, in order to properly convey that this is a peaceful diplomatic summit. Most of the women have their faces partly obscured, by light veils or half-masks or sunglasses or wide-brimmed hats or, in one case, elaborate face-paint. The male priest of Truth is wearing very tight pants, and one of the first responders has his uniform halfway unzipped to reveal a lot of cleavage. (There may be a certain amount of competition to be the first one to fuck an alien.)

All of the male Carolingians emote quite broadly! Most of them are VERY EXCITED. The math hermit is blinking around like he hasn't seen this many people in one place in ten years, because he hasn't. The first responder with cleavage is EXCITED and HORNY and also READY FOR A FIGHT even though there will probably not be any fights. The women are inscrutable. The genderfail is avoiding eye contact. The ten-year-old is bored. (The final briefing took a long time.)

Planet-That-We-Live-Upon has not, per se, sent any representatives; To send one for every state would crowd the cave and excessive and leak too much information if the alternates prove unfriendly, so the three representatives that are sent for initial talks are careful to specify that both individually and collectively they only speak directly for a subset of the world's population. Emmet Kel represents Sallash, Naiya Thur Adissa represents EMRAC, and Sho represents Greater Rinoc; None of them are planning to be forthcoming about what these places are or how much of the population lives in them.

They all wear simple black robes and veils; A very perceptive observer might notice that they are also wearing masks underneath the veils. Sho wheels in an antique nuclear explosive with the words "URANIUM-235 FISSION EXPLOSIVE" painted on the side, just so that there are no misunderstandings.

...once Green has gotten a translation back on that from the support staff, Shrey will venture: "Did you bring a real explosive to this meeting?"

Sho does his very best to not show offense at the question; His best is pretty good (Representatives were selected for that, among other things), and he's not very offended. (Representatives were also selected for being hard to offend)

"Yes, I did. Our world thought it prudent to give us the means to quickly cut off contact between our worlds in the event of a dire emergency, and we expected openness about our intentions to be reassuring and promote peaceful contact."

Shrey has been selected by a process which, among other things, means she's the sort of person who doesn't say "what the fuck" at people.

"I hope our translation is working well," she says instead. "On Green it is not customary to bring explosives to diplomatic talks, nor is it a paradigmatic example of reassurance."

The Marlatias are taking the lead. There are six of them, dressed identically in floor-length drapey silk robes with a sort of velvet overrobe, showing almost no bare skin and not offering much hint at the body shape underneath. Their hair is identically braided in an elaborate pattern with what appear to be colored hair extensions wound through it. When it comes to height, apparent gender, and skin and hair coloring, they're all over the place, but their body language is also almost creepily identical. (They don't normally go in this hard on running a pure Marlatia, but this is a high stakes situation and they are going to be professional about it.) 

Since the other worlds' representatives cannot be expected to recognize Marlatias, they are helpfully wearing nametags, phonetically transcribed into all three other alphabets, with a unique numerical designation after 'Marlatia' and their polity of origin (not that this is very important, at this point in Bicameral's history, borders stopped being very significant decades ago.) 

It's very fortunate that they're going hard on that, actually, because this is so many mixed signals??? Half of the Carolingian delegation is parsing as obviously, blatantly Chaos, in fascinating ways. The members of the delegation entering after the Marlatias will have thirty seconds' reprieve to pull themselves together. 

Their obligate-Chaos engineer is honestly having kind of a hard time with it. You can't just...have a diplomatic show up in tight pants with a sword at a diplomatic meeting of worlds and expect this to stay Lawful for more than five minutes. He's so ready for a swordfight full of sexual overtones followed by fucking which may or may not also be wrestling. He is not going to act on this but it's kind of asking a lot not show anything on his face. There are absolutely no Underworld situations in which he has ever needed to control his facial expressions or eye contact. 

- well now this is happening???? This is even more off-any-sane-kind-of-script than the Marlatias were expecting, and they did a lot of brainstorming trying to make sure their expectations were appropriately open. Honestly, bringing a nuclear bomb to a diplomatic meeting reads as incredibly Chaos; the exact analogue probably hasn't ever happened in Bicameran history, but it's pretty on-theme for Underworld diplomacy during the last period of any real ongoing geopolitical conflict. 

(The engineer is DISTRACTED and now he so so badly wants to learn how this other world designs bombs and whether their tech tree was significantly different. He should not do this and he is not doing this but it's clearly by far the most interesting thing in the room now.) 

An extremely sleep-deprived translator is now frantically shorthand-typing at her baby AI translation, which for some reason still has a hard time on many specific cases of talking about a Law/Chaos distinction. Marlatias receive a text message to their wrist-screens, read it in five seconds (reading incredibly fast is an important qualification to run a Marlatia), spend another three seconds exchanging Meaningful Looks, and converge on the most senior Marlatia stepping forward. 

"It is not - customary according to my-our usual diplomatic process," she says, and does not make a face at the confusion translation of template-group pronouns, "but we follow your reasoning and it - would not be unexpected in different -" not-processes but that's a terrible translation, "- contexts. We did not bring any of our similar precautions," which it sounds like are also substantially more hypothetical, though they do exist at all, "into the cave, it seemed less efficient." 

Neither of the first responders step in front of the ten-year-old when the bomb comes in, because that would be disrespectful and also completely pointless, but they clearly want to.

Aside from that, the bomb situation doesn't get much of a reaction. It makes perfect sense, if you're Carolingian. How are you supposed to tell that it's a peaceful diplomatic meeting, unless there are weapons present for you to refrain from using?

"Ah, well, in that case, apologies-without-intent-to-change on behalf of the people I represent," - even though technically it's EMRAC's bomb - "On our planet we do not generally bring explosives to diplomatic talks, either, but these talks are located in what my military attache assures me is a vital strategic chokepoint, and we do sometimes bring explosives to those. This bomb is obviously not intended to harm any of you, only the cave. We thought it would be - discourteous - to attempt to conceal its presence, but if having it visible in this chamber is causing discomfort we can move it around a corner."

Outside the cave and at some distance a slightly worried team of engineers is going through all their hypothetical reality-separator and well-tested cave-collapser designs looking for ones that might be more efficient if located outside the cave. They're hoping that was a mistranslation or imprecise speech, if the althuman merely meant "We cannot fit a massive particle accelerator inside the cave" that is much less alarming.

"...is the bomb unable to harm any of us, or are you saying that would be an unintended side effect should you elect to destroy the cave but would certainly happen anyway, or are you saying we'd have enough warning to evacuate, or do I misunderstand entirely?" says Shrey.

This summit is not getting off to a great start.

"It would be an unintended side effect. The circumstances in which we would set it off would not allow enough time for an evacuation."

This all seems very reasonable to the Carolingian delegates; the male diplomat is nodding along pleasantly. Of course it would be inappropriate to threaten an attack on a peaceful summit, but it's hardly an attack if your emergency measures simply might kill everyone including your own diplomats.

"...I think I now understand the thing you're trying to do. Thank you for bearing with me, it's a very unfamiliar approach."

This...implies some things about how the other representatives are thinking about tradeoffs, or else implies that they have alarmingly different predictions about what kinds of dire emergency they are planning for here, how little time said dire emergencies would give them to plan, and how little response time said dire emergencies would allow. 

(The engineer is actually kind of confused about their tech level. That is not the current state of the art in Bicameran explosives, whether specced for controlled underground excavation or for leveling cities – or continents, which has fortunately stayed very hypothetical.)

(The erstwhile-assassin is musing that they're doing this to avoid being intimidating, except that this is in stark conflict with 'brings a nuclear bomb to a meeting of worlds'.) 

"Would you like to see our contingency-planning flowcharts?" the senior Marlatia asks pleasantly. "Not mainly because it would be reassuring, although if it would be that would be a bonus. I'm worried that we might be either expecting different kinds of dire emergency or assigning them different probabilities. Our first-level plan for if - something very unexpectedly dangerous happened - had been to cut off contact at the opening of the cave in a minimally destructive way and hold onto more option value for excavating it later. We had not been assigning a very high likelihood that this will come up, and we're concerned that we're missing a consideration that's obvious to you. Most of the emergencies we did contingency-planning for are not ones where the best response would be cutting off the connection to our world." 

"I would love to see your flowcharts," says Cason.

"Are they fully public information?" asks the Carolingian diplomat with the face-paint. "We can ask the Priests of Truth to step out."

"I would see them," says Emmet Kel, smiling pleasantly. She has not bothered to retrain her instinct to smile at other diplomats in light of the fact that she's wearing a mask.

That is a very confusing question! They wouldn't have mentioned and offered to share a version that they weren't comfortable sharing with everyone here??? That would be such a baffling thing to do!

(The full version, which includes more detail on tech implementation of various things, and more specification of plans that assume hostility between different actors here and would be compromised if public, isn't even stored on any devices inside the cave. It's not in theory impossible that an envoy from one of the other worlds, if their computer tech is much better, could somehow access the project intranet from the link inside the cave, but if they're assuming that level of capability and also hostility, it is sort of unclear what could be done? So it's a risk they signed up for when deciding to attend the summit. Not that anyone had seriously considered at any point declining.) 

"Thank you for checking that," the Marlatia says. "The version we're sharing is public information. We should have the connection in place to send the file over, but the format might be incompatible?" 

Tablets are offered to look at flowcharts. 

Contingency plans for emergencies include: 

- Unexpected seismic instability, though they did a thorough survey of the cave and surroundings for safety first and probably even a horribly ill-timed earthquake won't collapse it. 

- Unexpected earthquake, subtype: leaving either everyone or some subset trapped in the cave. The rescue plans there mainly count on people outside the cave, obviously, but they've got supplies to cover a week. 

- Unexpected medical emergencies in the cave. They're so prepared for this.

- A highly contagious disease from one of the other worlds. They think they already covered all their bases here but the solution is in any case "quarantine the cave" and other planners outside will apply larger-scale quarantines if warranted.

- Fire, various different subtypes including "someone has a Chaos moment" but they promise they've screened for that really hard. 

- A disagreement in the cave turning to violent altercation, various subtypes of. They're not saying who in the delegation would be on point to handle this. They're not really worried about it, short of "someone pulls out a machine gun and kills everyone in five seconds", which would call for a response from the teams outside the cave. 

- One of the other worlds declaring war on them (or a third party) and intent to invade. A lot of the details and sub-branches here are redacted, but Bicameral is in general really reluctant to address hostile intent by cutting off interworld contact, at least in the absence of having solved the physics mystery and having a plan to get it back. 

- Various unfortunate tech problems that might happen if you try to make computing devices and Internets developed entirely independently talk to each other. 

- It turning out that one of the other worlds has built an ill-advised AGI that could leak into Bicameral. The plans here are very heavily redacted, including by totally failing to mention anything about Bicameral's space program. They would totally escalate and cut off interworld contact about this but they would be so sad. 

This is not a complete list. All the plans include current estimated likelihood of them being relevant, and [partially redacted] notes on what red flags they would be tracking to get some advance warning. Quite a lot of people outside the cave are getting continuous updates. There are spreadsheets. No one inside the cave is assigned to working on that part because it's really better done with a good workstation setup.  

The Marlatia feels like she should specify that the "planning for dire emergencies" is, like, at most five percent of the total Bicameran effort going into this venture, they would not be doing this if they expected it to result in dire emergencies rather than fruitful collaboration. 

The Carolingians would like to know who would be on point in case of violent altercation, so they know which people are acceptable targets and which are civilians! The Carolingian first responders are those two, but anyone wearing a sword is theoretically combat-eligible.

Obviously Carolingia is also committed to peaceful negotiations. They just don't want to do any war crimes by accident, in the unlikely event that someone else strikes first.

"- if this is very much on everyone's minds, possibly we should have a slightly more comprehensive exchange of information on what constitutes war crimes?" says Shrey, slightly pained.

"Yes, that is an excellent first order of business now that the unpleasantries are out of the way. We expect that any uncontroversial war crimes treaty could be ratified within the week by all relevant parties on our end. Perhaps we can begin by reviewing each others' laws of war?"

Emmet Kel produces a paper document from a cart. Listeners consider it a war crime to:

- Attack or bombard a city or nonfortified part thereof without first requesting surrender, and waiting at least one day for a response
- Attack a force waiting for your surrender without first communicating that you are not going to surrender
- Prevent an unsurrendered military force from retreating from a surrendered city, or prevent a surrendered civilian population from retreating from a surrendered or unsurrendered city
- Prevent or neglect the supply of any occupied surrendered city with food and other essentials
- Attack or execute, in whole or in part, any surrendered body, except for executions lawfully carried out at the end of a conflict of convicted war criminals
- Make false claims about the past, present, or anticipated-future conditions of your prisoner of war camps
- Attack various humanitarian aid workers
- Impersonate, in war or at peace, humanitarian aid workers
- Violate any lawfully offered guarantee of safe passage, or falsely provide a guarantee of safe passage, or use any lawfully guaranteed safe passage for any purpose besides those specified in the grant
- Enlist children below the age of 0x10 in active military service
- Order any subordinate to violate any war crimes treaty they are subject to
- Fail to communicate to any subordinate their obligations under any war crimes treaty they are subject to

Of course, there are a number of other treaties governing arms control or the rules of war between particular states. This is just the one that everyone is a signatory to.

(This is NOT HELPING with the MIXED SIGNALS of whether they are in Law or Chaos right now!) 

Bicameral is really excited to review the Listeners' standards 'laws' of war and will happily offer their own version. It's roughly similar though using different categories and clearly developed out of different previous war-fighting practices, and the guidelines for children are a lot more specific and broken down into multiple age groups.

There has not actually been a Surface inter-polity war since this version was signed. In Bicameral the treaty does not apply in the Underworld – this doesn't mean that it's violated there as a matter of course? Just that the reason people don't do the things isn't 'because it's illegal.' You really cannot get into the Underworld by accident and there are about twenty other reasons they're not opening the Surface-Underworld border to visitors from other worlds until all the cultural differences have been communicated. 

They would like to clarify that 'someone in the cave picks a (non-lethal) physical fight with someone else in the cave' is a totally different category from anything they would call 'war crimes'. They aren't – or at least previously weren't – especially worried about anyone doing a war crime by accident? If someone decided to literally murder some other people in the cave for no obvious reason, but wasn't expressing intent to invade, that would still not really be categorized as a war crime, though it would definitely be information they would take into account. 

"In our world's Lawful Surface diplomacy it would definitely be - rude and unexpected?" Marlatia tries to explain. "In Underworld diplomacy it would be par for the course, but we are treating this cave as Law until we have a chance to discuss and get on the same page, since based on the linguistics it's not clear that the other worlds here have that distinction at all? Anyway, in either place it wouldn't be a war crime. It would probably simplify things for us if a section could be marked off as Chaos." 

All three of the Chaos diplomats are down for random fights once that's clarified! So's the engineer, although he isn't dutied to intervene in ill-advised fights, for reasons of deep social obliviousness. 

"Regret-the-imposition, I am going to need you to explain that again, it sounded to me like you have wildly different laws and social mores depending on whether one is inside or outside of caves?"

The Greens present their own conventions of war, which are not exceptional enough to warrant laborious itemization, though there are a few items in there about under what circumstances war animal handlers count as civilians that are suggestive of their typical war conditions.

They too are confused by the inside or outside of caves thing.

"Apologies, this is surprisingly hard to talk about in another language." The Marlatia hastily consults some newly-added translation suggestions on her own tablet (the AI-translation-babysitter has at this point just decided to park herself in earshot at one of the conference tables and set up a fold-out workstation so she can do this faster).

"In Bicameral we make a distinction between Lawful areas, which is where laws apply, and Chaotic areas, where they don't. For the last fifty years Chaos has mostly moved underground because we ran out of space on the planet where it would be non-disruptive to logistics – Chaos used to be the default and now it is only in explicitly marked areas. Having it underground in cities makes it easier for most people to switch and means we can monitor the border and make sure nobody is ending up in Chaos by accident. This cave is especially confusing to explain or talk about because it's - unspecified territory? We are treating our own actions more - cautiously, conservatively, than we would even in Law usually, while having less constrained expectations of what other people will - think is reasonable. Normally caves would be Chaos but this cave is not Chaos; active mining installations are also not Chaos even if they are underground, we aren't going to get confused and forget." 

(One of the other Marlatias is making eye contact with the more Chaotic members of the delegation and sending some quick text messages to ensure that they are not going to be confused about what's expected here, even though things keep being very confusing.) 

One of the Carolingian diplomats in sunglasses has a list of their own laws of war! Carolingian war crimes include:

- Attacking without a formal declaration of war, made according to one of the protocols listed in appendix A
- Violating a truce, including but not limited to any of those listed in appendix B
- Killing civilians, except as properly forewarned retaliation against war crimes
- Refusing unconditional surrender
- Depriving prisoners of war of the option of a quick and humane death
- Providing enemy civilians with living conditions substantially worse than those provided to allied noncombatants
- Using civilians as human shields
- Torture, except as properly forewarned retaliation against war crimes
- Wanton destruction of crops, civilian manufacturing infrastructure, or objects of cultural, artistic, or historical significance, except as properly forewarned retaliation against war crimes

"Civilians" are defined as: people who haven't passed a male gender tests, misericords, humanitarian aid workers, and anyone who surrendering. A civilian who is armed (aside from a misericord), who attacks first, or who refuses to comply with reasonable orders ("go here" is reasonable, "tell me how to breach the defenses" isn't), forfeits their civilian status. Soldiers are expected to exercise reasonable judgement in identifying civilians; civilians who are concerned about mistaken identity can wear any of the symbols listed in Appendix C.

Several of the Carolingian men are visibly enthusiastic about the prospect of random fights! The diplomats clarify that this is not usually acceptable at a diplomatic summit, but it seems fine as long as it's clearly demarcated and people taking part aren't actively diplomatizing, they guess.

(What the heck is a misericord? They do not seem to have gotten this vocabulary word! The project manager flags in a message to the lead Marlatia that they should politely clarify in case it's important.) 

She can do that. "Also, I think we only want to designate a Chaos area if all the delegations think that's a good idea and we've definitely agreed on what that means? From our perspective it looks like it might make this simpler rather than more complicated, but if other delegations think it would be more complicated then we are comfortable with this area being unspecified but with the assumption that all of our people will be following Lawful norms." 

One of the junior Marlatias has an idea! "We have some fictional and memoir writing that's set in our present-day and would have examples of people living on the Surface and Underworld and transitioning between them, and might be a higher-bandwidth way to communicate that, rather than talking about it in the abstract? I think our machine translation should be able to automatically translate them into any of your languages by now although it won't be perfect yet." 

"We don't seem to have 'misericord' either... putting a pin in 'male gender test' for later, it doesn't seem immediately germane but is confusing... I don't think there is an obvious benefit to having a portion of the cave in which laws don't apply, but perhaps you could explain how you feel it would simplify things? Do you just mean that it might under some circumstances be unclear who has jurisdiction about a particular conflict?"

Misericords are the people who go out on a battlefield during a ceasefire to kill severely injured soldiers! They're a separate category from other aid workers because they have to be armed, for obvious reasons.

Huh. Not a thing Green has -

"Yes it is, the ancient Savunka did it with dogs."

"Oh. Well, not a thing modern Green has but it makes a refreshing amount of sense anyway."

Ah, question answered, seems unlikely to come up but good to know. 

The Marlatia mostly means that it sure looks like her team's engineer and the Carolingian first responder with the cleavage sure look like they want to fight and have sex in some combination and might be less distracted once they have an opportunity to get it out of their system, and in Bicameral this would almost always have net-helpful effects in terms of getting people comfortable with each other and trust-building.

She's going to cut herself off after two minutes of trying to come up with an appropriate and tasteful wording of this that won't be offputting to anyone, rather than 'until she feels good about it', you can't really expect to succeed at that sort of thing in a language you just learned and across three different sets of massive culture gaps. 

"...Have you heard of morphine? We can export morphine to you if you need it."

"Regarding Chaos, I think it would be...unobjectionable for there to be a clearly designated Chaos area so long as we keep everything Catastrophic out of it, if that's important for your people." This is a confusing and bizarre request, since obviously this entire cave is already outside any uncontested jurisdiction and no laws can reasonably be said to apply. Naiya is stepping cautiously because she has no idea what the bicamerans would do if anyone mentioned this obvious fact in their earshot.

"It's important in the medium to long term but it doesn't need to happen today and we could also handle it by swapping people out," the Marlatia says. "I think it makes sense to talk about - etiquette norms? I don't think that's exactly the thing I mean - but we think of that as separate from ratified laws. Both the Surface and the Underworld have norms because this just happens when you have a group of people who interact, but the Underworld has different norms. There are things on the Surface that aren't illegal according to any branch of law but are frowned-on. Right now we're - running a set of social expectations that's appropriate to being nonthreatening and conveying that we want to cooperate and trade, and we don't know what would be interpreted as threatening in other cultures so we're being conservative, but there are predictably going to be some mismatches there and we're trying very hard not to hold - things that seem like a social norm misstep in our Surface norms - against anyone, since that would be very unreasonable and wouldn't help." 

"Anyway, in the Underworld, having physical fights between well-matched participants isn't hostile and is a way that people build trust and friendship." 

"I am somewhat concerned that it would be easy for an etiquette conversation to derail into perceived or real passive-aggression about whatever ways we may already have violated one another's expectations there," says Shrey. She doesn't look at the bomb but Tsahiri does.

("We have morphine! Some misericords carry it. A significant number of soldiers turn it down, if it's the only option.")

"It sounds like Chaos norms are in some ways similar to the norms in our male homosocial environments," offers the diplomat with the half-mask. "I'm sure the differences are more subtle than that, but that's the direction our models seem likely to err in."

The representatives from Planet-That-We-Live-Upon are perfectly capable of detecting one-meta-level passive-aggression, thank you very much. They are also perfectly capable of shutting up and not saying anything about it, or about how incredibly rude it is to imply that someone might have fake Catastrophic Weapons.

"If this is an... important part of forming diplomatic relations in your culture... we can look for someone who is willing to fight you..." Most high-ranking diplomats do not have a testosterone-dominant system but they can probably find a staffer for this.

Ooh, the Carolingian diplomat's inference is fascinating and also should maybe be a side conversation, with notes taken and provided to the rest of the group later? The lead Marlatia has already noticed that the project manager is starting to give some Looks that mean 'why are we all standing around in a single giant group conversations while one person talks at a time, this is so inefficient.' 

She does have a response to the Listeners! "I think Chaos interactions are important for most of us in terms of strengthening interpersonal relationships, but it's certainly not a mandatory requirement for having trade relations, and Chaos also includes a lot more than fighting. Collaborative art and fiction, or theatre performance, are probably the most common others? ...And it's not important for me personally, I'm running a Marlatia." 

"--sorry, can you elaborate on that last?"

"I noticed!" Naiya gestures at the Marlatia's name tag "What does that mean."

"I had imagined it was a title."

"This is another thing I'm inferring from the linguistic analysis doesn't exist in other worlds! In Bicameral, most people have different aspects to their personality, with more or less clear separation - these often align with Law versus Chaos but not always - and many people will absorb traits from other people and from characters in fiction, either that they're reading or writing themselves, and then build out new personality aspects from that. Some character templates are very - sticky, in a way that makes them an attractor, and makes them sort of self-correcting so that someone who has half of one will tend to converge on having a whole one? And then some of those sticky characters also have very useful skills and ways of thinking about the world, so people will try to grow one on purpose in order to be better at their job."

There's a single word for this in most Bicameran languages, obviously.

"Marlatia is a diplomat who was a real historical figure and was famous enough to have quite a lot of fiction written about her, and also had a personality with the attractor nature for many people and especially to sort of person who ends up deciding to work as a Surface diplomat. So there are about fifty of us, and it's unusually easy for Marlatias to talk to each other and stay on the same page, which is why we sent six of us rather than a mix. ....Marlatias are Law, the rest of - me - does have a Chaos aspect but Marlatia doesn't." 

"Huh."

     "Seems useful, if it works."

"Does it substitute for suicide?"

Does it what? This is both baffling as a first question to ask at all, and separately the phrasing of it is very odd. 

"I - am not personally an expert on this and would want to consult someone who would have data," she admits. "Anecdotally I've heard of people who were suicidal ceasing to be because they grew a personality that either fixed the problems they were suicidal about, or just had a very strong drive to exist and was a source of motivation? I've heard secondhand of people whose original native personality was persistently unhappy and got mostly or entirely replaced by a new one, but that's rare." 

"Huh. Interesting." says Sho in the nonchalant monotone of someone concealing that they would like to take their interlocuter apart under a microscope.

"- well, that seems like an interesting place to start learning about etiquette norms. How does one address various people emulating Marlatia, do you have disambiguating names or anything?" says Shrey.

"We have unique identification numbers! They're also on our nametags. Amongst ourselves we often go by nicknames, but they're usually very high context inside references so we weren't assuming that would better than ID numbers as an introduction. - In our own world, it would also be the case that you could assume we definitely know a certain set of historical references and analogies, for example, and if you had met a Marlatia before, you would know our opinions on a range of social issues and what we like or dislike. This also simplifies negotiations inside Bicameral and it's a big advantage of doing things this way, but since you obviously wouldn't have that context, and I assume are not interested in reading the several million words of fiction highlights which are the most concise package to convey that context, right now we're mostly just benefiting from better ability to predict each other." 

"Usually I'd suggest kicking the fiction highlights to a fast reader back on our end, but it sounds like that might be - risky? If they don't want to emulate a Marlatia?"

"- I mean, I suppose I wouldn't recommend assigning that to someone who has a history of ending up with unwanted talkative character models and not being able to turn them off, and who would be very distressed to suddenly grow a Marlatia? This package is also meant to make it less risky, though, our experience is that most people tend to pick up the emulation more from first-person-POV content, and this one is just the parts that are from the point of view of other characters interacting with Marlatias." 

"I don't think I've ever heard of a person having a history of that before today, but I didn't know whether to expect the Marlatia stickiness to be about her or about your world's psychiatric conditions."

This time one of the other Marlatias who hasn't spoken yet jumps in; it's unclear how they coordinated on this but they did it without missing a beat. "...I suppose it's possible that our stickiest characters are somehow much further in that direction than anything your world has come up with? If so I think that would be apparent sooner than it would cause problems. It seems likely our population is much more prone to this happening, and this package still doesn't merit a warning like that." 

     "Marlatia is - polite?" the most junior Marlatia offers. "Not pushy? I'm sorry, our language has a specific word for the concept. What I'm saying is that even though Marlatias have the - stickiness - they're still pretty willing to go back to sleep if they wake up somewhere they don't seem to be wanted. There are some templates that are less polite that way and we didn't bring any of them with our delegation." 

The senior Marlatia nods. "It's probably fine but we would recommend not reading several million words of content about Leareths until we know how people from other worlds vary on the risk assessment."

     The onetime-Underworld-assassin snorts. "My friend ended up with one by accident – it's not that she was upset, but it would be awkward in this setting." 

"I expect we'll be interested in importing the content, so we can determine whether it works at all for us."

     "If it substitutes well for suicide--"

"--I imagine it would be especially popular among suicidal parents of young children."

"I think I want to put you in touch with someone who works with suicidal parents," the senior Marlatia says. "It - sounds like this may be a higher priority in your world than in ours. I don't think it's common for us but it does happen, so there will be people who specialize in it and would have advice." 

(Project manager is already formulating a message to send back through their project intranet.) 

It seems unlikely that the specialists will have useful advice, given that they evidently have significantly less experience with the topic, but the diplomats have relevant job skills and are not going to say so!

"At some point we should obviously compare the full suite of baseline physiological and psychological health interventions. I am sure there are some that your societies have developed and we have missed and vice versa." Suicidality is not really an issue for Listeners who aren't going through a puberty, probably the Carolingians are just putting different (worse) chemicals in their drinking water.

"Agreed, we'll have a report compiled with an overview."

"As will we."

The Church of Truth is going to insist on handing over a full scientific archive as soon as possible, but the diplomats don't have to immediately volunteer this fact, in case it's needed as a bargaining chip.

The Listeners will bring in some more staff to handle breakout groups for negotiating treaties for rules of war and intellectual property, and one "staffer" with a testosterone-dominant system to do espionage or backchanneling or just get into fights if they wind up designating a Chaos zone. Also an "anthropologist" to keep an eye on that.

...explain this "intellectual property" thing, it's translating as "trademark infringement" or maybe "plagiarism".

On Green it's like wanting to keep a secret except you have no privacy feelings and your motives are more about proprietary control and financial gain?

Oh! Trade secrets! Like when a company makes their top people sign nondisclosure agreements about the secret spice blend! Sure, Carolingia has that.

...secret spice blend? That sounds like a very weird case for allowing intellectual property. What if someone is allergic to a secret spice?

People with spice allergies probably don't buy things where one of the ingredients is listed as "secret spice blend". Or the company might list known allergies their spice blend can trigger, especially if they're mostly just keeping the exact proportions secret. It doesn't come up much, spice allergies aren't very common.

...after conferring briefly amongst themselves the Green delegation concludes that each of them is allergic to at least one spice.

Not exactly like trade secrets, the whole point is that it should not be secret - It's usually more efficient if you just tell everyone the secret and then they agree to pay you some percentage of their gains from using the knowledge. Listeners have various legal regimes to incentivize this sort of behavior, and rules for how these legal regimes interface with each other. We've been assuming your worlds also had similar regimes in place and we just need to work out the interface, but it sounds like the whole idea is new to Carolingia?

The overhead of figuring out how much of a thing uses a particular bit of knowledge has generally seemed unenforceably insurmountable to Green regimes that do intellectual property at all, which isn't most of them.

...If people don't know how much they expect to gain from using a particular bit of knowledge how do they decide whether to use it or not?

Bicameral sends a couple of the Marlatias over for this conversation, while sending other breakout groups to discuss similarities and differences between Chaos and Carolingia's "male homosocial environments", to more thoroughly convey the expectations that would hold if they did choose to designate some of the cave as Chaos, and to explain the multiple personalities thing in further depth to anyone who wants to know. 

"So the goal here is that the person who invested in building or designing something is financially compensated for the labor, out of the surplus value that their work produced? We also have systems for that, though we mainly do it by paying out bounties – or funding someone in advance to work on a project, if they have a proven track record. Most people have diminishing returns on wealth and if inventors and architects and such were collecting a percentage of the gains forever, it would end up - kind of disproportionate? Though sometimes the bounties are very big, or paid out multiple years in a row if an invention is gradually catching on and seeing more use. Anyway, ordinary people - and organizations, too - pay into various funds that are used to pay out as bounties, which ones in what proportion depends some on their own work and what tools they use there, and then there are contests or judging panels that allocate those funds. Attribution for work done is separate." 

Also, importantly, none of this really applies in the Underworld, which is transpires seems to run mostly on a...gift economy? Despite easily soaking up 25% of Bicameral's total GDP, in a completely decentralized way. Most industrial production is done on the Surface, but most art and fiction happen in the Underworld, meaning that authors' compensation is also done in a completely decentralized way. Though it sounds like there's enough surplus sloshing around, brought in by people whose main career is on the Surface but who value their Chaos time, that the Underworld can support something like 0.5% of the population living full-time in the Underworld as musicians or visual artists or writers or actors, etc. 

If other worlds want 'intellectual property' to apply to creative works, Bicameral is...genuinely not sure how they would implement that, short of making it illegal to consume other worlds' art or media in the Underworld at all but that would make people sad? They could maybe open some new bounty funds, and allocate payouts based on - some sort of survey data about the popularity of various media, to estimate the value provided? Though it'd be biased a little by the fact that a solid fraction of the population either has strong principled objections to recounting any of their Underworld activities on government surveys, or else has a sufficiently sharp delineation between personalities that they literally won't remember while operating in Lawful areas. 

Carolingia mostly just relies on the fact that whoever invents something first has a head start on making it, and on buying up supplies of the materials or stocks in relevant companies! Often companies will invent something and then keep it secret for a little while, but they have a pretty strong incentive to sell the idea to other people before it gets leaked and no one will pay them for it anymore. Occasionally there's something that no one has quite the right incentives to work on, but hey, that's what government grants are for.

Trying to apply all this to creative works sounds ridiculous. We're not seriously going to do that, right? Can we just buy subscriptions and tip artists like normal people?

For...ever? No, no, that would be insane, patent proportions decay over time, and stop being paid out entirely after a while to simplify bookkeeping. For most inventions, once a hexadecade has passed, it's not like the inventor provided some unique irreplaceable service, someone else would probably have invented the same process by then if it's truly useful.

Listeners do not particularly enforce intellectual property on creative works. That's just a matter of stopping blatant plagiarization and making sure derivative works credit the original.

Thank goodness.

The patent thing sounds nifty if you can swing it, Carolingians don't think they can but probably there's some mutually acceptable way of letting companies pay for Listener ideas in the same way that they'd buy a Carolingian trade secret.

Bicameral is pretty sure they can work with it! As long as it's understood that whatever laws they agree to can't and won't be enforced in the demarcated regions where laws aren't a thing! 

It probably won't even require designing any new systems or adding data collection for the administrative staff of most polities to know how much the population is using Listener inventions or products, and everyone will be delighted to pay into a bounty fund for that. Or they could try to interface in some more direct way, it sounds like the Listeners don't, on a logistical level, do this based on analysis of a worldwide database? And it might be interesting to run some randomized experiments on trying to switch one of their local polities to a Listener-like system to see how well it works and whether people prefer it? They'll put that up in one of the public policy debate forums and probably have an implementation plan in a couple of days. 

Green could... run kickstarters for importing specific ideas? If they can be described enough that people might want to buy them without knowing the full detail, that is, which sounds tricky.

Back on their side of the caves they have some experts working out some schema for determining and distributing patent fees for ideas whose patents have or would have expired internal to their world of origin and are the collective property of that world. To pick an example that is not self-serving, they've inferred that Green has very relatively advanced genetic engineering, and would like to be able to pay fairly for access to those genelines and any underlying methodological advances. For a one-time knowledge transfer it's probably...acceptable... for this to come in the form of a lump-sum interworld payment (Pending normalization of other trade relations and settling of currency exchange rates, but that's a whole other vat of bacteria) accompanying sharing of all public-domain information, but people on all of their worlds are going to keep inventing new things and so some longer-term elegant arrangement does need to be put in place eventually.

As a cludgey stopgap, pseudocharitable corporate entities could be created that could, with the negotiated consent of the patentholder, release new Listener patents into the Green and Carolingian public domains, and subsist on donations. And by "could be created", Listeners mean that if nothing better is figured out there'll be tons of people creating them if there's no better solution negotiated. The main problem they're foreseeing now is patent theft, since Green's suggestion of describing patents without disclosing all the details suggests that Greens are unwilling to simply not use ideas that they haven't paid for, nor to impose an enforcement regime to disincentivize that? In theory Bicameral's Chaos regions are a similarly thorny problem, though in practice it sounds like very little actual manufacturing is done there.

Also, the other worlds should really consider having a patent system of their own, since it encourages innovation and will in theory lead to greater long-run prosperity. They're... actually just going to give away the concept of patents for free and not just because the bot's out of the box, it sounds like more trouble than it's worth to negotiate patent fees for the concept of patent fees.

Greens look over the concept of patents. It doesn't seem obviously that useful and the regulatory overhead would be awful but maybe there is a specialist use case in obscure grommet manufacture or something that will decide it's a brilliant idea?

This seems very hard to enforce! How do you prove that someone copied your idea and didn't just think of it on their own!

And who's supposed to analyze all the grommets/weird fanfiction/recipes to see if they might contain a derivative concept?

Also doesn't it disincentivize other people taking the idea and improving on it?

Bicameral is definitely planning to test out the concept but they’re not sure that “incentivizing innovation” is solving a problem they…actually have…? Maybe in a few really specific areas of research that are relatively less intrinsically fascinating, but actually it’s hard to think of any field that’s both important and value-providing to society, and that no one will pick as their life’s obsession. 

Yeah, maybe they should compare invention timelines or hours of music recorded per year or something under these regimes?