Khemeth smiles at her in a way that would look natural to anyone who does not know him very, very well. "It's not especially private. If you're cleared to bet on the markets - by the way, you have a really quite unfair advantage on me for predictions about Merrin - then you're welcome to be here and make suggestions for this." 

Basic concerns that he will lay out: as one may have gathered from the fact that he was in a tiny personal boat hundreds of miles out in the deep ocean during a storm, and didn't even immediately radio for help when said boat capsized, Kalorm does not so much like interacting with Civilization, pretty much in full generality. It's partly an aesthetics thing, but there are neighborhoods designed to feel like being in Nature, and that doesn't help much with Kalorm's thing. Kalorm's basic objection is to anyone having power over him - and being monitored, and anyone having information about him, since that is itself a form of power - and to anyone trying to optimize his life for him.

Kalorm is not in any sense a cruel person, to be clear. He is, like Merrin herself, actually rather high on affective empathy. He can be fiercely loyal and protective of anyone he decides he likes.

...He doesn't like most people he meets. He expects, rather reasonably on priors, that most people he encounters won't share his priorities, will struggle to even understand his priorities – and will generally try to accommodate them anyway, but this tends to also rub Kalorm the wrong way. He doesn't like the idea of a Civilization of highly optimized systems that includes some extra systems to catch Exceptions like "weird people", because that is still a world of highly optimized systems, and Civilization does not, in fact, really have room to fully opt out. Kalorm does not expect Civilization to be optimizing toward any of the things he wants, but even if it somehow was, Khemeth finds it useful to model him as having a deep objection to the entire framework. (It's more complicated than that but this explanation is complicated enough for Merrin.) 

He was in a boat out in the ocean because – well, actually Khemeth isn't sure of details, they haven't been closely in touch for the last few years, there may be a specific goal he was after – but in general, Khemeth is pretty sure that Kalorm correctly saw it as a way to minimize Civilization's ongoing monitoring. Not to zero. His ship had a transponder; he had a personal transponder; it was in fact the case that his location was on a map, and weather forecasting saw a storm headed that way, and the prediction markets called a 1 in 32 chance of a serious accident. The scale of response is mostly Khemeth's doing; he has automated systems set up to immediately drop a lot of funding on risk-mitigation if the markets foresee a risk to his brother, and also to notify him (and once notified he put in a larger bid on the "send Merrin in particular" plan, for various reasons, but probably not reasons that will help Merrin to hear right now. That conversation is for later.) 

Kalorm doesn't actively want to die or anything, but his attitude toward risking it is very alien to most dath ilanis. He is going to be annoyed that, yet again, Civilization meddled in his life, trying to soften the sharp edges of a dangerous world for him like a parent would for their child, except that in Kalorm's mind, not only did he not request that, he actively requested not that. 

Though it's also true that Khemeth and the rest of the family put in quite a lot of money and effort, on top of what Civilization is actually willing to invest in preventing the near-term True Death of someone who has made it really quite clear that in the long term they prefer True Death over seeing the Future. 

Huh. 

(It's honestly fascinating to hear someone talk about how other people work with a fluency and confidence that Merrin has only ever in her life felt internally about medical interventions, and even then can't usually talk about nearly so lucidly.) 

Khemeth seems to be waiting for her response.

"...I - used to sort of want that, I think," she says slowly. "Um, I mean, to - be able to just leave, and live by myself in the woods and be left alone. I -" Shrug. "I didn't expect it to work." 

(And that's interesting, because the Merrin in his head, which he's now coupling as closely as possible to the cues of the Merrin in front of him rather than running her through hypotheticals, is feeling a flash of - longing, jealousy, on some level noting wistfully that Kalorm was braver than her, on some level feeling like if she were more able to hold to what she wants, separate from what other people want of her, then - something - the Merrin in his head is running into a flinch of remembered pain and not actually following that line of thought to its conclusion.) 

"I can imagine," he says, gently. "I wouldn't be surprised if you've come a lot closer than most people to understanding what Kalorm wants."

Though in Merrin, Khemeth suspects, there are competing drives. She does, on some level, intrinsically want to seek out freedom and independence and not being beholden to anyone; it's the drive that responds to certain pressures by planting her feet and declaring that she wants to be allowed to make non-optimal decisions, to prove to herself and everyone that they're her decisions and not Civilization's. (Most dath ilanis would be very very confused about this motivation.)

But it's a very quiet voice in her now, one she's barely aware of anymore, because in addition to an intense agreeableness and reluctance to inconvenience people that is definitely in tension with desiring freedom, Merrin also wants to work within a system she can put her full trust and loyalty behind, and so for her it seems like a very worthwhile trade, letting Civilization set out the safety rails of her life in exchange for a place where she can throw her efforts behind something worth fighting for, knowing that Civilization is competent to determine where she can provide the most value. 

(Merrin is in fact having some of those feelings, but on a much more implicit level. On a conscious level, she's mostly worried about doing a bad job today, and worried that Khemeth is trusting her for the wrong reasons and she's going to disappoint him, and worried that she's going to say something that sounds stupid.) 

"Anyway. I don't actually think there's a way to avoid Kalorm being very irritated about waking up in a hospital. Even if there were, there is an amount of steering that Kalorm is not, actually, endorsedly okay with me doing, even as his brother rather than a representative of Civilization. I do think there are factors we can influence - both in terms of how upsetting it is, how stressed and frustrated he is in the short term - and also how much he ends up feeling like particular people, as distinct from the system as a whole, are on his team rather than exerting power over him because they can.

"I would not endorse convincing him of this if I didn't believe it were true, but if Kalorm met you in a less fraught situation than this one, and in particular if he first saw you in one of your wilderness rescue sims, I would give it at least 4:1 odds that he would end up liking you fine." 

"Uhhhhhhhhhhh. I mean, um, I - you're the one who knows him, but - why?" He is so much cooler than her, even if it's in ways that most of Civilization doesn't approve of.

(Irris is NOT SAYING ANYTHING but she is slightly making a face where Merrin can't see it.) 

Khemeth can see it, and he is in full agreement. Still not a conversation to have right now. 

"Well, you are two of the only people I know who would find it fun to jump off a 20m cliff into cold water without any kind of wetsuit or flotation safety device– yes, I did watch that sim. You're a good swimmer." 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah– actually, if Kalorm would like her because she's good at swimming, that feels...at least kind of vaguely reasonable? It's true that most people have not spent 1/100th of the time Merrin has spent on swimming really fast. Like, it's a pretty stupid skill outside of bizarre Exception Handling training sims, but - 

- but, well, it did end up being relevant here. 

Fractional approving nod. 

(Until two and a half years ago, Irris had not actually spent very much time trying to model Merrin's various social anxieties. She...still mostly doesn't have a detailed model of it. But she's now had a number of conversations with Very Serious People on how to be supportive to Merrin while she is being pushed very hard. She is very proud of her eldest child, and it's confusing yet endearing how much mental effort Merrin seems to spend on insisting that being able to dramatically rescue people in the middle of the ocean is not very impressive.) 

Yeah, that wasn't even a little bit a difficult social move. It's pretty obvious to Khemeth that Merrin has a range of areas that don't count in terms of social anxiety about being praised as unusually good at things, and a lot of them are true and relevant for the particular question of whether Kalorm would get along with her. 

"Anyway. You have that and some related things in common - things that Kalorm does not usually expect to have in common with anyone he meets, and certainly he has especially low priors on meeting a medtech with that trait. But aside from that, I think there's another pretty important piece here."

Now, how to phrase this - he has a prediction, but this is in fact operating outside the space of situations that he's directly observed Merrin in, and so he's reasonably but not totally confident...

"- Which is that I have the sense you're thinking of yourself as - on Kalorm's team, being there as a resource for him to accomplish his own goals. I get the sense that this is a major part of how you motivate yourself through very long shifts with a patient who is unstable and requiring you to do a lot of mentally costly work repeatedly. I think that approximately everyone involved here wants what's best for Kalorm, in a sense, but - I think you are one of the people who feels least like you know better than Kalorm does, right now, about what is best for Kalorm, just because you're an experienced medtech with over ten thousand hours of sim time and he is predictably going to be cognitively impaired at least in the short run." 

Trillion-degree* supernovas, is THIS what it feels like to have the full regard of someone who is a world-class expert in psychological modeling!!!!!????? Why is this happening to her right now. 

"....I guess that's maybe true." Because she's stupid and has never in her life been the person in a situation who knew best what the optimal decision was okay fine Merrin will acknowledge that sometimes she is the most qualified person for some really specific things, but like, Kalorm is probably not going to argue with her that he is a domain expert on boat-related fuel systems or whatever, and she is the local domain expert on medical equipment settings. Maybe. This entire family is really smart and it's socially stressful. 

*Note that actual supernovas only get to 100 billion degrees (at which point Kelvin vs centigrade does not make much difference really). Merrin is being hyperbolic. 

"Anyway. The last major piece here is that you spent over sixteen hours yesterday with Kalorm."

(And Merrin is neurodivergent in a way that, in some ways, makes her significantly more legible to multiple members of his family, in a world where most people don't run a large fraction of their motivation system off of direct personal loyalty.)

"I know he isn't aware of that, but you're quite attuned to him - you're already in the habit of paying close attention to what he needs on a minute-to-minute basis, even if yesterday was a rather different category of needs. I have the sense that at this point, you have a lot of personal motivation to help, separate from what Civilization will or won't incentivize or reward you for doing. I'm not entirely sure if Kalorm will be able to tell the difference, but I can tell the difference." 

Oh no confusing feelings. 

"Anyway. Those are the basic reasons why."

Plus, you know, the fact that Merrin is in fact very competent at what she does, and very experienced with things going wrong in bizarre and unexpected ways – mostly in sims, in terms of clock time, but at this point she has more real-patient experience than a lot of medtechs who are ten years older.

Khemeth feels on some level like there has to be a way to point this out that won't throw Merrin into a weird anxiety spiral, because it's an assessment entirely based on capabilities that Merrin knows she has, but -

- but he sort of feels like somehow Merrin is mostly roughly calibrated if you query her in specific enough ways, and yet if you try to make her combine those inputs and extrapolate to the obvious conclusion, she - there's something in the way. Some emotionally-ontologically-basic category, some Metaphysically Correct Setpoint. One that doesn't correspond directly to anything he has in his own mind let alone what median dath ilanis have. Merrin is terrified of something that one might, from the outside, map to 'social judgement' - and then note as miscalibrated - but from the inside, for Merrin herself, it feels much larger and more fundamentally real than that. 

(Khemeth is not, at this point, analyzing Merrin's cognitive and emotional architecture mechanically, or in terms of causal factors for how she even ended up shaped in this way. He is using native theory-of-mind hardware to step into Merrin's shoes, and it's less of an opaque process to him than it was as a child, he has in fact invested very heavily in learning how to make his complex nuanced social observations explicit, but it's not totally transparent to him, and he does sometimes run into issues where his best understanding of Merrin has no introspective access to something, and so he doesn't either.) 

...This is a fascinating puzzle but not actually the current priority, because one he should check with some other people in Exception Handling that attempting to talk to Merrin about this is a good idea period, and two he should do it when he is less physically and mentally tired, and three it will take a while and both of them will be vastly more able to concentrate on it once the immediate medical crisis is over. 

Current actual priority: does Merrin seem to have calmed down about the concept of being someone who might be unusually well placed to get along with Kalorm on a personal level? 

Merrin is mostly annoyed with herself for causing them to get off-topic on the actual priority here, which is Kalorm. She is feeling kind of sad and - a confusing something that she has no word for?? - on Kalorm's behalf, right now.

It makes a lot of sense that Civilization is not delighted about people running off to do totally-unobserved things in the wilderness, but she also sort of gets why Kalorm (who it sounds like wouldn't even be tempted to do anything that hurt people) is frustrated about that.

It's not like Merrin has any solutions, not when people way smarter than her have almost certainly tried very hard to think of solutions and come up with this as the best option, but - it's still vaguely sad.

And she still definitely wants Kalorm to be okay and recover and have the chance to decide what he wants to do after this. 

Khemeth is not going to pick up on all of that, he still has less than 50 hours of realtime high-fidelity Merrin observation and this current conversation is literally their first face-to-face interaction, but - yes, her reaction seems within the bounds of what he expected, not overall problematic, and certainly good enough for his actual goals over the next day. 

(He will resist the urge to put too much cognitive effort into planning a later conversation– also, good, it does seem like overall way more of his cognitive abilities are working, now. This is roughly what he would have expected but it's reassuring to have confirmation.) 

"Let's talk specifics, then. While it's in some ways tempting to set the room up so that it's not immediately obvious to Kalorm that he's in a high-acuity hospital area, he would definitely not endorse us doing that, and also we do want to give him cues to help him orient to what's true about the situation and not just what he would prefer...." 

(Having this much direct attention from a world-class expert in anything, even separate from the thing where his particular area of expertise means that it keeps feeling like he's reading her mind, is kind of mortifying! But, like, less than Merrin would have expected, overall.) 

(Yes, obviously, because Khemeth is putting a significant chunk of effort into making sure she doesn't feel constantly self-conscious! Since a self-conscious Merrin is a slightly less focused and effective Merrin! It's kind of convenient how she apparently stops doing that once you make her work an unreasonable enough number of hours    it's less convenient how he cannot just push that lever on demand)

They discuss and arrive at a PLAN. It's even a plan that Merrin feels reasonably qualified to execute on! 

Since the plan requires Merrin to possibly work a full 12-hour overnight shift, and under circumstances where it could be unusually bad if she ended up being cranky (since her patient will, hopefully, not be unconscious), Merrin is going to make a solid attempt at napping. Or at least flopping in her bed and doing nothing that requires either cognitive effort or emotional fortitude until the decided-upon start time. 

Khemeth is actually feeling significantly more on top of the situation right now!

...That being said, he is also aware that he is not Merrin-level on stamina. (This is not overall surprising information. Merrin is almost as much of an outlier on stamina as Khemeth is on native social modeling, and Merrin has the additional benefit of having invested in physical fitness as a basic job requirement.) 

He, too, is going to delegate various instructions and then spend as much as possible of the next few hours napping on his boyfriend. 

The medical team will work on setting up Kalorm's room according to the instructions given. 

(Though there are still multiple hours to go, and Kalorm could suddenly deteriorate.) 

(He doesn't, though.)