—wakes up in his own bed in dath ilan.

Wait, what?

His first, pre-rational, highly motivated line of thought is that all of that was somehow a dream, that possibly he never even got on that ill-fated plane to begin with. But Keltham, as much as he would like to believe that Golarion was a figment of his imagination, knows that's not actually how dreams work. Also, if his brain is in fact generating things like Hell in his sleep, he should probably talk to somebody about that anyway.

also even if that was a dream he still discovered that he has a sexual fetish that Civilization is in no way going to be able to fulfill and also he was never going to succeed at any of his life goals in dath ilan not important lines of thought, right now.

His first properly considered thought is that under Owl's Wisdom he must have managed to commit a sufficient level of personality-suicide that he is, in fact, finding himself somewhere else. Except that, somehow, he's back in dath ilan, in his own bed, which was previously empty, which suggests that this is somehow the same world he left behind in the plane crash. That points toward this almost certainly being a story, possibly a secondary story instantiated by a reader of the original story who saw his plea, rather than a spontaneous appearance, such as might happen with non-negligible probability in Golarion, but not in dath ilan.

—it occurs to him that this is two-way travel between the two worlds, such as was so ruled out by his theory of what was going on that he never even checked, and now he's mentally hitting himself for not immediately at least offering a lot of money to Nefreti Clepati to attempt a Gate to dath ilan, so that Golarion could get some actual adults in the room—

—well. There are adults in the room now, not that he places appreciable probability on anyone being able to get back to Golarion. He could commit true-suicide, land back at the Worldwound, and then that is almost certainly not how anything works.

He gets out of bed, goes to his computer (his phone seems to be missing, which would make sense because he had it on the plane with him), and calls Exception Handling.

"Exception Handling, what is your Exception?"

"Uh, tsi-imbi, and if I haven't gone completely superheated insane then I need to report the existence of a situation possibly requiring urgent action by Civilization, the details of which are a grade, uh, higher-than-I'm-aware-of-the-existence-of* infohazard."

(*Two-syllable word in Baseline.)

That sure does sound like a schizophrenic person!

The operator pulls up the caller's file to see where she should send the psychiatrically-trained Security team.

She checks his voice fingerprint, to make sure it's actually him calling.

"Tsi-imbi," she also says.

(This would normally be a concerning thing to hear from the person you just tsi-imbied to, but it just confirms Keltham's hypothesis that he did land back in the world where he died, as opposed to, like, overwriting the brain of a different Keltham.)

There's a half-minute of shuffling on the other end of the line, and then it cuts out and someone somewhere else picks up.

"Hi, Keltham," says a new voice. "I'm Keeper Silan, sixth rank with the psychiatric division of Exception Handling. Are you in immediate danger or do you assess that you may unendorsedly harm yourself or others?"

"No," he says, also escalating straight to a sixth-rank Keeper sure does imply that someone knows about the Isekai Theory of Immortality and wants to keep it tightly under wraps, granted he did also mention the grade-infinity infohazard, "but the last hundred days of my subjective experience were of being in a fantasy world in which millions of people were being continually tortured, so if I'm having a psychotic break, that's the kind of psychotic break I'm having, and if that was real, then—"

(shit he's crying again)

"Do you need a moment?" asks the Keeper.

Meanwhile, she's texting somebody to check on Keltham-44619 in Golarion and see if he found out classified details about Hell and is now having a breakdown about it, or if this is in fact somehow a different Keltham who crossed paths with a different Golarion and is now spontaneously appearing somehow, as seems to be the sort of thing that just happens now.

(As far as most of dath ilan knows, most people who joined the rescue operation on Cheliax died in a single anomalous meteor-caused plane crash that they did go through the trouble of faking quite comprehensively, though there was no one actually on board. Keltham's immediate family knows that he isn't true-dead, under a grade-three secrecy oath, but they don't know where he is instead, other than "engaged in important work for the good of Civilization", which took his parents aback, but dath ilani don't actually disbelieve Keepers.)

"No," he says, not quite convincingly. Crying in front of Keepers isn't really like crying in front of one's girlfriend, but they are in fact expected to be capable of just not making the wordless update that most people would after seeing someone in a state of emotional distress.

"I know it must be upsetting to have found out like this," she says, "but I've been authorized to tell you that fully half of Civilization's best and brightest are working in some way or another on the problem, and secret prediction markets give us more than a 90% chance of winning" conditional on the world not being destroyed, as most prediction markets implicitly are, but this isn't the kind of thing you tell someone you're trying to comfort about the existence of Hell.

"Wait, what?!" He almost says tsi-imbi again, but it would be fairly pointless and kind of undignified at this point.

"You—know about Golarion? And Hell?"

This is a sufficient update in favor of "this is a different Keltham" that she's going to run with that, even in advance of being able to get in touch with someone in the Golarion Containment Zone who can attempt a Greater Scry on "their" Keltham.

"I notice I am confused," she says, a single syllable in Baseline. "It seems our states-of-information are badly out of sync. Your debrief probably shouldn't be going to me and shouldn't be going over a civilian phone connection, however. Can you stand by for a car to pick you up and transport you to a secure location?"

Sure, he can.

Also everything that he's about to see is going to require a grade-four secrecy oath, which is not actually any stricter than a grade-three oath since the conditions of that are pretty much maximally strict, they just incremented the number to let people know that this is really superheated important. Normally non-Keepers don't even get the opportunity to swear one of these but they do, uh, kind of need him and will pay literally whatever his cheerful price is if he objects to this for some reason.

2^24 labor-hours?

A masochistic full-time sex worker, such as there is probably at least one of in the whole population of dath ilan??

Carissa, bound in chains as his property???

Keltham is still the same boy who went to Golarion, but he no longer lives in the same world.

"My cheerful price is that you annihilate Hell."

"We're doing our best."

The car takes Keltham to the large car-arrival-platform beneath the Temple of the Light, where Silan is waiting to meet him. It's a pretty busy platform, and thus easy enough to duck unnoticed into an unassuming maintenance closet with a false rear wall—

—which leads to the offices of the meticulously maintained Fake Evil Keepers Conspiracy. In fact, if you show up as someone who's supposed to be here to the very cleverly hidden retinal scanner, the entire closet is an elevator. (An exact duplicate of the closet slides down to hide its absence.)

They go a few dozen yards* down and then transfer to a different elevator, because it's difficult to make a maintenance closet into a fast elevator, and they have a long way to go. (Also here is a good place to put the actual human Security who check Silan's credentials and biometrics, and also inject Keltham with a subcutaneous tracker/remote sedation device.)

(*Dath ilani length unit of about meter-size; translated as the Imperial unit because their system is base-12 and so their "mile" (1728 "yards") works out better that way.)

Nearly a mile below the surface of Default is the central station of a vactrain system capable of reaching the far side of the planet in under three hours. There's mostly no reason for it to be so fast, but as long as they had to build a deep-underground transit system for moving people around the planet in complete secrecy, the marginal cost of making it ridiculously fast was fairly small. Mostly, it's how you get into the Basement, and also connects the main Basement installation with the one-per-continent satellite installations where researchers who don't deal directly with secret computing tech can work if they'd rather not be so totally isolated from the outside world, but dath ilan also has other secret installations, like the Golarion Containment Zone that was rapidly built near where the pre-existing tunnel passes under the mosly unpopulated west coast of Oceania.

(After the yet-unsolved probably-murder of a rather important researcher at the Harkanam satellite Basement, most of the satellite installations were scaled down, with their more important personnel being moved to the main campus. Except the one that even the main Basement doesn't know about and the vactrain system also doesn't reach, because it's on the Moon.)

They're moving fast enough, at peak speed, that their centripetal acceleration toward the planet is noticeable to a human as a slight reduction in the apparent force of gravity. The trip doesn't take long.

And so Keltham can be introduced to Derrin, eighth-rank Keeper assigned to the First Contact bureau, widely acknowledged as the person in dath ilan whose comparative advantage is in dealing with Weird Shit That's Weirder Than The Weird Shit You Were Expecting Because It's Literally Aliens. The situation with Golarion has progressed far beyond First Contact by now, but Derrin is, like everyone to have visited that superheated nuclear accident of a planet, still under causal isolation, so at least until dath ilan contacts some other alien civilization, which to be fair seems a lot more likely at this point, he's serving as the informal chief of Meta-Exception Handling within the broader ongoing Golarion Exception.

"Thank you, Silan, you may proceed to Intake," he tells her. (Travel to the Golarion Containment Zone is one-way for almost all purposes; Silan will not be going back to Default for some time. Her speciality of psychiatry is sorely needed in the Refugee City that sits somewhere above this secret underground base anyway.)

"Keltham," he says. "My condolences for what sounds like it must have been a very unpleasant experience. We do however have some very important questions. How do you assess your current mental integrity, alignment with Civilization, and Algorithmic standing?"

"I have a lot of negative emotions I'm mostly not processing because I haven't had the slack, which should be unsurprising to you if you if you know about Hell and even less surprising after I explain exactly what happened to me, but I think my core identity is intact—it's possible that under cognitive enhancement I did something that broke my sanity and that's what caused me to experience waking up here instead, but if so this version of me is copied from before that happened. I have taken great care not to deface the Algorithm, even while—well, regarding my alignment with Civilization, I should probably mention that I was planning to probably destroy the world. I don't frankly think Civilization would disagree with me about that, though."

"Destroying Golarion's local universe is currently Civilization's option of last resort, but it is one we recognize as positive-net-utility. Given your presumed resources, I wouldn't predict that you had greater than a 10% chance of attaining any better outcome.

"My information here is quite limited, however, so I'm going to need as complete a summary of your time in Golarion as you can give."

He can do that, only stopping to cry a few times.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

That sure is a whole lot of illegible intervention by some not-particularly-aligned superintelligences! It sounds like Otolmens, one of the few gods Civilization approximately trusts, tried to stop it, and didn't particularly succeed! Derrin is having thoughts about isolating this Keltham, who was quite probably aimed by any or several of the other Golarion's gods, even from the rest of the Containment Zone. On the other hand, it's probable that Whoever predicted that he would think that, and They might be trying to harm Civilization's goals by causing him to be overly cautious with someone Civilization actually needs. It's not generally a good idea to try to think ahead of entities who are almost definitionally one step ahead of you.

With that line of reasoning screened off, he's mostly interested in just what the ass Cayden Cailean was doing. He's pretty sure that, if Cayden is in fact the sort of entity He's said to be, this intervention was aimed at creating a really bizarre and unlikely world-state that both Keltham and Asmodeus would prefer to oblivion. He has, however, no hypotheses as to what that world-state might even be, never mind how to get there.

Maybe he'll feed Keltham's story to the Thing Much Smarter Than Him that Civilization is currently building, and have It take a guess.