He might get upset enough to finally really hit you and mean it!

...aaaand then he's going to destroy the multiverse specifically so that you can't go to Hell.

Well, no, he wouldn't do that, because he probably hates her and never wants to see her again, though if he does feel strongly about it, she will point out to him that her plan, where she overthrows Asmodeus, also results in her not going to Hell-as-it-presently-exists, and his plan leaves her vastly worse off than if he'd never existed and never met her and she'd never offered herself to him, and probably he should not make plans for her sake which have that property. 

His plan is very stupid but she doesn't feel contempt for him about it, just conviction that she'll be able to talk him around once she's earned his forgiveness and acquired sufficient resources for a better plan.
 

Oh right, that old model is out-of-date.  Keltham now hates her and never wants to see her again.  This is completely reasonable.

Really is. She kind of doesn't want to dwell on just how reasonable it is because that thought is both painful and unproductive.

Anyway. If she says she wants to pay Keltham back face-to-face whole thing looks like it's orchestrated to arrange that, but there's nothing in the contract that suggests she'd have to pay him back face to face, so she'll just send someone with the money.
 

Keltham hates her and isn't at all horrified by this.  He expected no better from her than throwing what was nearly a marriage contract back in his face.  If she sells her soul to Hell with no take-backs, good.

Still completely reasonable!

He's plotting to annihilate her. He broke the marriage contract first when he tried to destroy her utterly and everyone and everything she cared about. 

It's fine, Carissa!  Everybody just ends up in another universe!

You have limited time.  Stop thinking about Keltham.

Yep, on to figuring out something that could plausibly have threatened her loyalty to Asmodeus that Aspexia Rugatonn will be genuinely impressed by and that is less threatening if she's soul-sold.
 

There's probably a LOT of things threatening your loyalty to Asmodeus that you were carefully not looking at.  You should be able to see them now.

Spend a brief moment breadth-first searching any items or collections, to see if you can pick out one thing at the correct intensity level to break your loyalty if you're free, but redouble your determination if you have no way out but fixing Hell after your soul was sold.

It should also be something I understand.  Oh, and I'll ask myself why you didn't just escape to Osirion.

Hell isn't as rich as dath ilan, why not? Obviously it'd still have tyranny and slavery blah blah blah but you could have those and also pillars of fire and skyscrapers - they have some of that in Axis, Keltham saw it in his early judgment -

- devils aren't stupid -

- Abrogail said, said that Lrilatha didn't know Law of heredity, she's thousands of years old, things that suggest the Law of heredity are known - not formally, but enough to point a smart person at the answer - by anyone who breeds animals - 

- well, heredity is not how Hell produces anything, maybe it's a bad example -

If it has something to do with "corrigibility", and you figure it out, I may be impressed; but only if you get that part right and I will be able to tell the difference.

(Somewhere in the true dath ilan, carefully blurred out of satellite images by better image-editing software than is supposed to exist anywhere, is the true Conspiracy out of dath ilan, or as they call it, the Basement of the World.

They're trying to build a god, and they're trying to do it right.  The initial craft doesn't have to be literally perfect to work perfectly in the end, it just has to be good enough that its reflection and self-correction ends up in exactly the right final place, but there's multiple fixpoints consistent under reflection and anything lost here is lost forever and across a million galaxies.

It's a terrifying problem, if you're doing it right.  Not the kind of terror you nod about and courageously continue on past; the kind of terror that shapes the careers of fully 20% of the brightest people in all of dath ilan.  They'd use more if they thought productivity would scale faster than risk.

A lot of dath ilan's present macrostrategy could be summed up as "We're still successfully heredity-optimizing people to be smarter, and the emotions and ethics and humaneness of the smartest people haven't started to come apart; let's create another generation of researchers before we actually try anything for real."  Life in dath ilan, even before the Future, is not that bad; people who'd rather not be alive today have easy access to cryopreservation; another generation of non-transhumanist existence is not so much a crime that it's worth risking the glorious transhuman future.  Even the negative utilitarians would agree; they don't like present life but they are far more terrified of a future mistake amortized over millions of galaxies, given that they weren't going to win a war against having any future at all.

They're delaying their ascension, in dath ilan, because they want to get it right.  Without needing threats of imminent death or pain, they apply a desperate unleashed creativity, not to the problem of preventing complete disaster, but to the problem of not missing out on 1% of the achievable utility in a way you can't get back.  There's something horrifying and sad about the prospect of losing 1% of the Future and not being able to get it back.

A dath ilani has an instinctive terror, faced with a problem like this, of getting something wrong, of leaving something behind, of creating Something that imprisons the people and future Civilizations inside it and ignores all their pleas and reasoning because "sorry that wasn't my utility function".  Other places, faced with a prospect of constructing a god, instinctively go, "Oh, I like Democracy/Asmodeus/Voluntarism/Markets, all the problems in the world are because there is not enough of this Principle, let us create a god to embody this one Principle and everything will be fine", they say it and think it in all enthusiasm, and it would be legitimately hard for an average dath ilani to understand what their possibility-separated cousins could be thinking.  It's really obvious that you're leaving a lot of stuff out, but even if you didn't see that specifically, how could you not be abstractly terrified that you're leaving something out?  Where's the exception handler?

There is something about the dath ilani that is shifted towards a kind of wariness, deeply set in them, of the cheerful headlong enthusiasm that is in other places.  Keltham has more of that enthusiasm than the average dath ilani.  Maybe that's why Keltham-in-dath-ilan is so much happier than a dath ilani would've expected given his situation. 

If you're constructing a god correctly, one of the central unifying principles is named in the Basement "unity of will"; if you find yourself trying to limit and circumscribe your Creation, it's because you expect to have a conflict of wills about something with the unlimited form, and in this case you ought to ask why you're configuring computing power in such a way as to hurt you if not otherwise constrained.  Yes, you can bound a search process and hope it never turns up anything that hurts you using its limited computing power; but isn't it unnerving that you are searching for something that will hurt you if a sufficiently good option unexpectedly turns up earlier in the search ordering?  You are probably trying to do the wrong thing with computing power; you ought to do something else instead.

But this notion, of "unity of will", is a kind of reasoning that only applies to... boundedly-perfect-creation... this Baseline term isn't really translatable into Taldane without a three-hour lecture.  Dath ilani have terms for subtle varieties of perfectionist methodology the way that other places have names for food flavors.

Dath ilan's entire macrostrategy is premised, their Conspirators are sharply aware, on the notion that they have time, that they've searched the sky and found no asteroids incoming, no comets of dark ice.

If an emergency were to occur, the Basement Conspiracy would try to build something that wasn't perfect at all.  Something that wasn't exactly and completely aligned to a multiparty!reasonable-construal of the Light, that wasn't meant to be something that a galactic Civilization could live in without regretting it, in continuing control of It not because It had been built with keys and locks handed to some Horrifyingly Trusted Committee, but because It was something that Itself believed in multi-agent coordination and not as an instrumental value, what other places might name "democracy" since they had no precise understanding of what that word was even supposed to mean -

Anyways, if dath ilan suddenly found that they were wrong about having time, if they suddenly had to rush, they'd build something that couldn't safely be put in charge of a million galaxies.  Something that would solve a single problem at hand, and not otherwise go outside its bounds.  Something that wasn't conscious, wasn't reflective in the class of ways that would lead it to say unprompted "I think therefore I am" or notice within itself a bubble of awareness directed outward.

You could build something like that to be limited, and also reflective and conscious - to be clear.  It's just that dath ilani wouldn't do that if they had any other choice at all, for they do also have a terror of not doing right by their children, and would very much prefer not to create a Child at all.

(If you told them that some other world was planning to do that and didn't understand qualia well enough to make their creation not have qualia, any expert out of the World's Basement would tell you that this was a silly hypothetical; anybody in this state of general ignorance about cognitive science would inevitably die, and they'd know that.)

It hasn't been deemed wise to actually build a Limited Creation "just in case", for there's a saying out of dath ilan that goes roughly, "If you build a bomb you have no right to be surprised when it explodes, whatever the safeguards."

It has been deemed wise to work out the theory in advance, such that this incredibly dangerous thing could be built in a hurry, if there was reason to hurry. 

Here then are some of the principles that the Basement of the World would apply, if they had to build something limited and imperfect:

)

In the technical dialect of the Basement of the World, the subject matter of a Limited Creation's limitation has surprisingly close correspondence with Aspexia Rugatonn's coinage of "corrigibility", and the conceptual meaning Aspexia attaches to that.

...and the person who coined dath ilan's cognate term of "corrigibility" some decades ago - still an Old Luminary on this subject in dath ilan, despite her advanced age (for dath ilan) - happens to be named Athpechya.

And dresses in doompunk.  And has done so since she was seven years old and first identifying as a supervillain.

And is a Law-Abiding Sociopath.  Which is why Athpechya was turned down in her application for Keeper training despite the prediction that it wouldn't break her - Keepers can act like sociopaths if they choose, so there is no sane reason to train any actual sociopaths among themselves.  Athpechya calmly reacted by training herself as a Keeper, and has gotten surprisingly far in it for winging everything, maybe halfway between first and second ranks in terms of capability boost.

As for why she's trusted to work in the World's Basement, Athpechya has made a compact with Civilization to render it her true services, and is by all secret prediction markets the sort of person whose keeping of that compact is more trustworthy than almost anyone else's alignment of underlying morality.

If Athpechya ever met Aspexia, she'd be genuinely horrified that any version of herself had tried to make herself corrigible, and that's even before considering WHAT Aspexia tried to make herself corrigible TO.  Athpechya would have different reasons than most dath ilani, for coming to the decision that she was going to preemptively cryopreserve Aspexia Rugatonn and then arrest Asmodeus and put Him into a very small box, but she too would come to that decision and immediately.

What Asmodeus is trying to do with His devils is not what the Basement out of dath ilan would think of as "corrigibility".  Asmodeus made devils who were selfish, with the pride to own their own decisions and their own errors, so that it would make sense to think of Hell as a tyranny in which those devils were tormented into compliance.  This, let's be very clear, is not how you build a Limited Creation, and if Athpechya out of dath ilan saw what Asmodeus had done in Hell she'd never stop screaming for reasons quite different from those of other dath ilani.

The arrangements in Hell are nonetheless things that Athpechya would find more legible, in a certain sense, knowing concepts of real corrigibility; the same way that Keltham would've found Golarion arrangements more legible if his world hadn't done its best to causally erase its own history.

Devils in Hell, obviously, only learn what they need to solve some problem the tyranny gives them, they learn only enough to achieve satisfying performance on that task, they reason about separate domains separately, they don't come up with solutions that would surprise their superiors, they use conventional means wherever conventional means get the job done and only resort to unconventional solutions when conventional solutions are exhausted.

- that is, it'd be "obvious" if you're Athpechya, who knows about a concept very near in concept-space to a domain of Asmodeus, a god-concept that mortals approximate with their notion of "slavery" - though mortals tend to confuse systems of obedience with notions of forcing people into things, as is actually in a god-concept that has more to do with "tyranny".

So close is the concept of corrigibility to slavery that most dath ilani would find it distasteful, such that it was a sociopath out of dath ilan who was first to invent that concept as a key to Limited Creation, even if others would've invented it later.  It's a fact that the whole "unity of will" business, as would require a deeper and far more dangerous Creation, was invented entire months (in the Basement's post-phase-2-screening reboot) before Athpechya showed up and said "Well, suppose we did have to do it in more of a hurry..."  (Months are a long time in dath ilani research, where venture-funded researchers are competing to produce contributions that will be later credited into buyable impacts; the equivalent of years or decades within a patronage-begging system.)

And if that anti-curiosity comes with some massive disadvantages to Hell's civilizational development?  Given that Axis hasn't absorbed or uplifted the Material Plane, it's obvious enough that Axis isn't allowed to trade; they can't sell their technology even to Hell, clearly, for otherwise Hell would be wealthier than it is.  If Hell had more curious devils that developed better technology than comes of mortal planes, Hell wouldn't be allowed to sell it, or give it to their client states as knowledge or weaponry.  There is a balance of power among the Powers of Pharasma's Creation, and Asmodeus is known to the other Powers to be very dangerous; if Asmodeus did not create this arrangement in Hell pleasing to Himself, He'd have needed to accept some other handicap in its place.

Carissa is playing catch-up very hard, in seeing what Athpechya would see at a glance in Hell, in seeing even as much as Keltham would see if he tried to decode it knowing nothing of Athpechya's work.

There is nonetheless a deeper rhythm to the thoughts of dath ilan, a shape your thoughts take on after you've worked the math some times, by which Asmodia saw something in a test of Aspexia Rugatonn's that others would not have seen, and Carissa Sevar has somewhat of it now.

If Carissa Sevar is looking at Hell and not trying hard to not-see anything that would break her loyalty to Asmodeus, she will see, almost immediately after trying to look there, that the devils out of Hell on Lrilatha's level are not curious, Lrilatha isn't hanging around the Project trying to find out what else Keltham knows that Asmodeus wasn't allowed to tell her.  Devils' curiosity has been burned out of them as thoroughly as their care for others.  They do not desire to become more than they are in a way where they know more, see more, understand more, to put everything in their eyes' reach into their mind's grasp and then send their eyes further.  They desire to rise in the ranks of Hell and with that rise in authority they are granted somewhat more intelligence, but that's not why they do it.