how Merrin came to the attention of Exception Handling
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She's definitely going to ask Irris to swear a secrecy oath, though. And maybe invite herself over to her childhood home tonight so she can get hugs while she unloads everything. She considers texting her mother to ask about that and decides this is still too much multitasking when she cannot get herself to take her eyes off the screens. 

 

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Prediction markets do not shift in response to what happens; prediction markets shift in response to what becomes known, possibilities as they are eliminated by observation.  The initial drop from 20% to 18% wasn't in response to any unexpected medical event occurring; it was in response to everything going as initially expected.

On one side, people were working hard on this, pursuing profit, Exception Handling was playing some unusual cards not all of which might be visible; it could have been the case that the protocol would be mysteriously polished and smooth and everything would go great right from the start, and Exception Handling would say 'wow what a coincidence'.  Some of the bettors in the market have noticed the improbable emergency medic guised as a Sparashki, which could be a distraction from any number of realities, and her 12-hour shift; Exception Handling claims that this was a total coincidence, but they're saying it under social circumstances where it's known and understood that they might lie.

And on the other side, the patient was fairly stabilized going in, and might've just continued being that stable as rewarming started.  It wasn't the most likely event to observe, but it was a going possibility.

Nothing really amazing happened when the human-untested protocol went into play, as the market traders did still mostly expect; and the patient responded as modally expected and not in any way showing that they were healthier or more robust than that; and so the market dropped from 20% to 18%.

It's not just the impact of the momentary event being observed, it's traders following the trend of all the future observations that you could guess would go the same way, the moment you got the first hints.  Maybe they'll have to walk back some of those guesses later.  That's not embarrassing, that's how things should be; if you never had to walk back a leap, you wouldn't be leaping far enough.

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(It has absolutely not occurred to Merrin that market participants might have been betting based on her improbable existence and stamina being one Weird Thing that might correlate with or suggest other potential helpful surprises in the future. Merrin is still mostly not processing the fact that her presence here was weird or surprising period.) 

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A little while later, the predicted odds fluctuate a bit and settle back at 20%. 

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!!!!!!!! 

Tragically Merrin is no longer in the room, which makes it much weirder to do a happy dance and say 'good job!' at the patient, who is after all not really involved in this as an individual making decisions. She does a small happy wiggle in her chair instead and then pokes at the screens. 

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This update is actually also a matter of things going as expected - but in a case where there was some probability mass on things going noticeably worse than expected even at this early stage, which would indicate they were in a world where the invisible accumulated damage to the patient's body and tissues was in one of the worst-probable-case scenarios.  

But the patient's core temperature is slowly and unproblematically starting a controlled climb, his blood chemistry is holding steady (with a lot of effort going toward maintaining that, of course, but that might not have been enough), and the sensor metrics for peripheral and gut perfusion are rising as they slowly, cautiously, bring his blood pressure and oxygen saturation up toward the parameters for the next stage of the protocol. Which are still deliberately lower than the normal range for a healthy person at 37 C, of course; his cellular metabolism is going to be lower, which is actually how they want to keep it. The default plan, if they make it that far without running into a complications (unlikely), is to re-stabilize him at 28 C and do a more thorough assessment. 

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There's a simple game you can play to simulate a correctly functioning prediction market:  Start with a number like 20%, and then, pick any possible balanced shift you like.  There could be a 1/3 chance of it going down by 4% and a 2/3 chance of it going up by 2%.  (Absolute shifts, additive shifts, not multipliers.)  Don't introduce any potential shifts that would go below 0% or above 100%.  If the number reaches 0% or 100% the game is over.

In dath ilan, playing a game like that, they'd use a quantum randomness generator, just to be sure to emphasize how it did go different ways in different worlds.

Let's try to pick up that 2/3 chance of a 2% upward shift, shall we?  It's probably going to happen.  Odds are probably going to look a bit better.  Or they could drop by 4% instead, but that probably won't happen.

Isn't it exciting?  You could almost imagine that, by picking the right balances, the right die-rolls to make, you could possibly shift the probability of the outcome in any way.  Little dath ilani children play the game until they realize that they can't.  It's their first introduction to predictive asset markets as random walks, which is how markets are experienced by anyone who doesn't know something that few or no others in the market know.

Let the dice roll.

22%.

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HAPPY WIGGLE yeah okay this is still objectively a really unacceptably low number and in theory Merrin is still mad at the world about that but that direction is a better direction! 

(Whatever caused the shift, it's something subtle, not immediately obvious to her from the screens she's already flipping through and can actually parse.) 

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Just a bad thing that could have happened but didn't.  A lot of this protocol is going to be like that.

Key juncture coming up.  1/5 chance of going down by 4%, 4/5 chance of going up by 1%.  Reality rolls its dice...

18%.  Well, it happens.

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OH NO RUDE! 

(Merrin has, to be clear, herself played this game before as a child. In fact, it's one of the areas where she wasn't noticeably slower-than-average at picking up the expected lesson. This was, however, perhaps mostly because Merrin is less driven to win than the median dath ilani. Which is...less true...right now. She does know intellectually how this works, just, she's really really exhausted and her emotions are much less under her control than usual.) 

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Among the likely reasons for this update, they've now hit 22 C, which is a point at which there might have started to be noticeable EEG activity, and...there isn't, yet. 

(They don't actually want the patient's brain cells to be very active for the next while, and are prepared to put him under deep anesthesia to suppress that as soon as they notice activity, but the presence or lack of said activity, and whether it's normal-for-relevant-temperature or additionally abnormal, is information, and the plan is to wait to get that information before they go ahead and mask it.) 

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How well will the patient respond to this series of relatively ordinary events happening next?  Most news is good news, an absence of bad things; the downward movements are sharper than the upward movements.

18%, 19%, 20%, 21%, 22%, 20%, 18%, 19%, 17%, 18%, 19%, 20%, 21%, 22%, 23%, 24%.

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By a few minutes in, Merrin has managed to properly internalize that she isn't taking actions about this situation anymore, and so it perhaps makes less sense to be so exhaustingly hyper-vigilant about any shifted in the predicted-outcome likelihoods.

It's sort of unsurprising, now that she thinks about it. After the past twelve hours, when the main numbers in front of her were vital signs rather than overall predicted likelihood-of-ok-outcome, her emotions and motivation system had gotten really used to responding to minor good or bad shifts in the patient's condition as though they were happening because of actions she took, since that had at the time been true: the primary numbers she was tracking were very directly responding to her settings manipulations, if not always the way she expected or preferred. 

Which means it keeps being tempting to hook up her emotions to updates in the predicted outcomes the same way, but it's also stupid, she's not even properly plugged into that feedback loop, and she can't do things, so it's just leaving her a constant pointless itchy desire to do something unspecified.

She will instead focus most of her attention on the screens of raw sensor data. 

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In a market this liquid, you can see probabilities on individual events coming in, conditional values for what will then be true about the Patient given that.  This won't be the first time or the 20th time that Merrin has tracked a prediction market to see how it plays out; but it might be the first time she's ever, outside of sims, maybe even in sims, had this much market information.  Enough to see the balanced shape of possible market movements before they happen.

There's now substantial biological activity in the brain's neurons, as they rewarm, and they're about to get the first readouts on post-rewarming-that-much signs of metabolic damage, neural cell death, as it becomes visible in blood leaving the brain.  They're using pretty sensitive readouts but even so they cannot afford to steal the patient's blood for tests that often.

Signs of neural cell death are what ought to be observed if the protocol is not really working all that great.  The market mostly expected the protocol to not really work all that great.  They're sticking a hundred fingers into a dam they believe to have a hundred holes, and while one or two holes untheorized or unplugged won't break that dam, 10% of the fingers failing will do it.

In terms of the market game, to simplify a complicated spread of possibilities... roughly, the dath ilani child is about to gamble on a 3/4 chance of dropping the odds from 24% to 11%, balanced by a 1/4 chance of raising them from 24% to 63%.  Or at least, that's what the market thinks the market will do.  Sometimes the market is wrong about that.

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...Yeah, the prediction markets in the sort of weird obscure emergency sims that Merrin likes to play are basically never this liquid. 

She cannot affect the events happening now. It might just be better for her odds of crying in front of the entire room if she didn't care about the outcome– no, wrongthought, but if she wasn't trying and wanting so hard for a particular future-world-state that might happen (with around 1 in 5 odds) and probably won't happen and either way it is no longer under her control.

Pretty much all she can do right now is...hope that she actually did a better job of minimizing tissue damage than what the markets are giving her credit for? (Which is, you know, obviously ridiculous? Since if anything it sure looked like the markets had too much faith in her.)

Anyway, it's not worth making emotional updates on anything else other than the final outcome. Given how much Merrin has eaten into her reserves of coping ability and emotional resilience, she is maybe going to have trouble executing on that, but she is at least going to try to be calm about this. 

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Reeeaaaady?  The information is allllmossst in.

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Merrin does not really think there's anything else she can do to be ready! Short of getting a hug from her mom but that's complicated. 

She is sort of squinting at the markets screen out of the corner of her eye, like someone with a spider phobia opening a file that might or might not contain horrifying spider images. 

(In the back of her mind she is thinking that she clearly needs more practice at...well, something related to this.) 

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You know, she was expecting it to be spiders, and then it was indeed spiders, and really if human brains were better designed then probably this entirely unsurprising outcome would not suck nearly so much???? 

Of course, Merrin is already fully aware that nothing about biology - which is, after all, what her feelings are made of - is well designed, see: what she spent the last twelve hours of her life doing. 

It's not definitely over yet, 12% means 12% not 0%, presumably the protocol includes some fallback tweaking that might still help, but are still much less likely to work than the already-low odds of the original plan working. Merrin did not at any point have a chance to read through the contingencies in detail, it wasn't something she prioritized since she wasn't expecting to have to run it herself, and she's actually feeling very tired at this point. She would consider just leaving except for how getting to her room involves standing up, and also maybe looking like a coward in front of the Chief of Medical Oversight and also whoever else happens to be watching and she might make the Sparashki look bad 

She stays where she is. 

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12%, 13%, 14%, 15%, 16%, 17%.  A steady upward trend as more bad things fail to happen.

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Okay, the part Merrin perhaps did not entirely think through, when she decided to stick around for this, was how the rewarming protocol would take a while. It's now been, like, another hour and some, and she's still wired on caffeine and adrenaline but sitting here is not appreciably emotionally and socially less exhausting than what she was doing before. It might be worse; she's way more aware in-the-moment of how many important people are around her, and keeps randomly remembering fumbles from six hours ago and cringing in embarrassment at the thought that she was up on that screen where Avarris is now. 

Her brain keeps informing her that she wants her mom but she definitely can't ask Irris to come here. 

She...can get out her cellular texter and text her, though. 

[Still stuck at work. Want to come over after but might be really late] 

Pause. 

[can you think about whether you would swear a grade 3 secrecy oath, in case I'm sad and want to tell you why] 

 

(Merrin's mom is not glued to her cellular texter, even when her daughter has been in a known weird situation all day. The reply isn't immediate.) 

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Soon after the number is at 21%.

Here's the thing: even after that big Spiders disappointment, if the number is at 21%, that's a payment every bit as good as the 20% they had at the start!  1.05 times better multiplicatively speaking!  Around a 1 in 5 chance the patient makes it out!

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Irris eventually replies. 

[ETA home 20%/50%/80%?] 

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Oh noooo none of the prediction markets are about that. Can she ask for a prediction market on 'when Merrin goes home' so she doesn't have to use her actual brain to answer her mom that's stupid and Merrin is not going to ask for that right now. 

Uhhhhhhhhhhh. Well. At the very least, if this goes badly it'll be over faster. If not, then....probably the limiting factor is on how long it takes before Merrin is actually literally falling asleep in her chair. Which isn't going to be for a while. She's pulled all-nighters before - not doing shifts, that would be really irresponsible and unfair to her patients, but she miiiiiight have gone to her tutoring sessions before after a night shift, and she's definitely finished an especially stressful shift and then "decompressed" by spending the entire night watching Exception Handling TV. This is probably more similar to the second thing? 

[90 min/3h/8h] she sends after not actually very much thought. [low certainty. i'm tired] 

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A pause. 

[is there not a market on that] 

Another pause. 

[i'm going to call personnel and tell them i'll swear the oath if they let me come in now. i made cookies for you] 

 

(Shortly later, Irris is on the phone to Hospital Administration with this exact question. She is absolutely willing to swear whatever oaths they want if they let her come hug her daughter who sounds like she's having a really something day.) 

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