"Ah, no, they don't let you do that either. It's a very comprehensive thought experiment; they copied notes from the people who set up the good trolley problems, you see." 

"Aw, man, but if every teenager got to be invincible for a week as long as their tasks were reasonably aimed at researching their essay that would be so neat."

"It would be! But tragically we had too many people try and throw the switch at exactly the right time and split the front and back wheels between the tracks, bringing the trolley to a stop for a perfect Hollywood ending, and now the thought experiment police are on guard for this kind of shit." She sighs. "It's so sad, but these are the cards we've been dealt." 

He snickers. "Well. English class was always my favorite but it would have been a pretty dramatic swing even still if I'd known to expect an essay. ...do you think the envelopes raining down in 1971 is more or less confusing than the slight uptick in ER visits followed by people manifesting superpowers, I think probably more? Less obviously complementary to the dungeons."

"More seems likely! Like if they don't come with any special knowledge besides you have an essay due on this topic probably most people consider them dungeon related and don't do them? Which means the first crop of espers is all people who have that experience and think yeah, I'll write that essay, why the fuck not?, which probably does fascinating things demographically..." 

(Her brain tries to mock her. She ignores it. She's having fun.)

"I might have done it if the topic were interesting or I was bored? Or like, according to the product of those two functions."

"Huh! Even if the only thing people knew was that they Probably Had To Do with dungeons? I think... I would have done it at fifteen but not at seventeen." She pauses, and there's a bit less cheer in her voice when she adds "...well, actually, in the seventies I definitely would have done it at any valid awakening age, for cultural reasons."

"Cultural reasons? - I guess not all topics would bend this way but I actually sometimes drop, like, a 'please stop eating people' letter into dungeons that are gonna get away alive, on the very remote chance that any of them have absorbed enough human memes to read. It will not work but printer paper's cheap and I wrote it as a thought experiment in the first place. So if I got a 'something to do with dungeons' essay prompt that wasn't, like, please rate all of the species of penguins from best to worst, or something, it'd have turned out kind of like that probably."

"It was difficult to be trans in the 70s," she says, brightening up as he keeps talking. "...can I read that letter?" (It's - such a good thing for someone to do, actually. Printer paper is very cheap!)

"Yeah, it's a little - would attract annoying comments, if I blogged it as an open letter, but you can see it, I have it on a hidden page, password to it is 'stopeatingus' all one word lower case." He sends her a link.

"Yeah, that makes sense!" He's still backla- she can just say that. "You're still backlashed, so I'll read it later. When did you start doing that?"

"It was... after the library dungeon, when was that... The books didn't make sense, but if I pull up photos of Bookworm Library -" His phone obliges and he looks at the timestamp. "Looks like that was six years back. The books didn't make sense but some of them did have individual correct words in them. I have it translated into French and Tagalog too, in case a Rosetta stone helps."

"Yeah, if any of them were the type of things that wanted to communicate but weren't sure how, it'd matter." 

if Arrakis could communicate, if it'd tried to surrender, would you have spared it? Would you have listened? Would you have just killed it, like a good soldier? Would you have had a choice?

"It never does anything. But they get - bigger, meaner, why not smarter, if I am merely doing this fifty years too early I endorse looking kinda silly for fifty years in order to nail the first moment when it matters."

I sure hope Nightmare isn't getting smarter she's not saying that.

"I think it's really cool thing to be trying," she says instead. (She agrees that it's not going to work, but - you miss every shot you don't take, and it'd be so sad, to miss this one.)

"Thank you!"

She squeezes him. (Will his backlash accept that as a response, for a moment?)

There was something she had stashed to mention later... 

Ah, right. "Real quick, before I forget... I'm below the backlash range where it would have mattered, but for the record, it can sometimes snag on indirect things, like the way you double checked after I froze." She sounds apologetic. 

"...ah. Is it like maximally perverse about that or is there some way to in fact double check things?"

"It's - if you're worried about tripping it, it'd be safest to follow up when I'm below a 4 on my own scale," she says, still apologetic. I know it's stupid. 

"I can't write notes to self when I'm backlashed and it's not fair to you if I text somebody about you..."

ah well in that case- shut up.

"Can you text my personal phone or will that not work?" 

"I can do that if I'm at reading-the-comments levels but not at the high end of texting levels, the possibility that someone might happen to be looking at their phone and see a text right away even if in practice that's not common does a lot of work for me. Once you have an agent I could text them?"

She tries not to think too hard about her likelihood of noticing that he's doing that and responding to that, because that might make it more likely to happen. Burn that bridge when we get to it. "Seems like a plan." 

"Okay. Man. Psych backlashes."