Golarion does seem to have masochism, which isn't exactly heritage-modification-for-Hell-being-all-right but is - quite a step in that direction, a thing that could conceivably be a product of people who are genuinely more all right with bad circumstances and less likely to opt out of them being more likely to have children for many many generations of raids and rapes and slavery.

But Carissa's best guess, from here, is that people will indeed be more appalled about Hell and the Boneyard (though the Boneyard is fixable without any divine intervention! With diamond manufacture and contraception you can just make sure babies almost never die and get called right back when they do!). She's ....deeply uncertain about whether that'd make them favor erasing the world. It doesn't seem overdetermined by being appalled about Hell, it depends on your estimate of whether it's possible to destroy just Hell (she's still confused about what presumptive-future-Keltham-capabilities let him make a trumpet heard all over the universe before painlessly destroying it, but don't let him do that same thing in just Hell - perhaps by compacting with some gods elsewhere so they know how to counteract it in their own domains?), and it depends on your estimate of what Greater Reality is like and on your estimate of how good lives in Heaven and Axis are and on a lot of other things they haven't yet gotten to.

She'd be very surprised if, presented with that, smart humans with lots of time to think all arrived at the same answer (unless there is a clever way to destroy just Hell with success near-guaranteed; then, she supposes, they'll all agree on that.)

Keltham keeps saying that it's overdetermined, that Golarion is so wildly far beyond the line any dath ilani would permit to exist, and Carissa's main prediction is that among Golarionites on reflection, wiser and with time to think, it's not overdetermined; they'll be all over the place. Which may not be worth testing at great expense, if it wouldn't be decisive to Keltham even if true.

He acknowledges the point about masochism but suspects that Hell would need some renovation before even Pilar Pineda could have a good time there.

It would not ultimately surprise him if the same storylike forces that dropped Keltham near Carissa at the Worldwound would also arrange for Golarion to be clearly over his line, clearly under Carissa's line, and of mixed reception to everybody else in Golarion under intelligence enhancement sufficient to allow them to answer coherently.  It could even be that most people in Golarion would end up thinking a different thing, given Wishes and an artifact headband, depending on whether he talked them through the growing-up process or Carissa did.

It may, in fact, not be decisive to him; because of his sense that there are people in Hell who wouldn't want to be there, and they get a kind of veto power over the whole arrangement.  A trade arrangement that leaves nine people better off and one person worse off is not, in the end, a voluntary trade; from his perspective Pharasma is just a kind of thing that makes unfair trades, because She doesn't think the little things can threaten Her, and She has no right to object if he makes Her stop existing about that.  He is not just destroying what he'd rather not exist, he is refusing a trade that didn't get buy-in from the participants.  Maybe, maybe it would be the case that if there was only one person in Hell they shouldn't get veto power over all of Creation - though there is an old parable in dath ilan about a city of a million happy people and a thousand forsaken miserable children and a democratic-supermajority vote, whose point is that democratic-supermajority does not make right.  But it goes back to the question of ratios, again: he is ready to call off a trade if it screws one person out of a hundred, and his threshold definitely isn't one in ten.

- he does still think that they're supposed to make a list of everything they can test, and figure out how to test it all least expensively, and then spend some amount of bounded resource on running the tests with the greatest value-of-information including how they potentially lead to spending more resources and running other tests.  That's just common sense.

Yes, definitely, she's noting the experiment-ideas as they run across them, just in case.

She does observe that the decision isn't between destroying everything to destroy the people in Hell or doing nothing about Hell. It's about the difference between the odds-of-success of this plan at destroying Hell, and the odds-of-success of the next best plan for destroying or fixing Hell; so the question is not whether destroying the universe is better than nothing by Keltham's values, but whether it's better than a less certain, narrower intervention that leaves the other afterlives intact.

She doesn't expect to convince Keltham that not destroying the universe is better than destroying the universe.  She does hope to convince him that destroying the universe is much much much more bad than she thinks he currently conceives of it, so that he is more willing to trade off some chance-of-success for a plan with a narrower scope.

It actually does seem to him to be a lot easier to destroy Creation than to destroy just Hell.  He doesn't actually have solid plans for getting a trumpet call (that was just a hypothetical example based on Golarion announcement protocols) into the eighth layer of Hell, that was something he expects he'll end up mostly leaving to his future divine self.  His primary hope is that releasing Rovagug is the sort of thing that will cause a consciously perceptible change of experience within Hell, including via side avenues like by Asmodeus leaving Hell to fight Rovagug.  His backup nonconcrete plan is for his divine self to negotiate with Lawful Good entities about that.

To destroy Creation he probably just needs to destroy Pharasma's infrastructure in the Boneyard continuum, Her Seal and Her Spire, though he will also try to simultaneously destroy as many Material planes as he can.  Asmodeus has worked hard to make it pragmatically unsolvable to destroy the center of His presence on the ninth layer of Hell without also destroying Creation.  Asmodeus has probably not put in the same effort to make it impossible to cause a loud noise or other perceptible disturbance in the first eight layers of Hell.

...he's got plans for getting Carissa's family out of Cheliax and into Elysium before he unleashes Rovagug, obviously, along with everyone else in Golarion he knows or cares about, basically boiling down to Wishnapping them there.  It is - a sort of thing where he was not sure whether Carissa would let herself think about that, or not. 

Carissa suspects it won't matter. She has thought about it - it's hard not to -and she thinks that, while the Chaotic planes are said to be infinite, the reachable bits of them will all go with Creation if it goes. The parts that survive will be, well, infinitely far away. It might help in the case where Rovagug is unleashed and Golarion destroyed but not all of Creation, and seems worth doing for that circumstance (though in that circumstance they're also probably resurrectable), but she thought about it for a while and considers it unlikely, that the parts of Elysium and the Maelstrom that any Golarionites go to would outlive the universe.

Her feelings about this, which she has a very strong habit of hiding from Keltham and which are crying out in misery at being observed here and now, are fairly mixed. Of course it's better to do slightly less expected harm than slightly more.  But....it's less than one trillionth of the harm averted, and wildly more than one trillionth of the emotionally significant to Keltham harm averted; and that makes her scared that he'll be more willing to do it, what with how he's primarily risking the people he's never met or cared for. When she was planning to destroy Cheliax to buy them another month of time, she considered and rejected getting anyone she loved out; if she wasn't willing to do it to them, she felt, she shouldn't be willing to do it at all. Instead of her family, maybe Keltham should just pick four random people to Wishnap to Elysium; it'd do exactly as much harm-reduction, and it wouldn't deceive the parts of their minds that can only conceive of bad things on human scales.  Maybe none of that actually coheres, but she thinks it does, or is a pointer to something that does: she thinks that part of the 'deontology' of a world of Carissae would be that anyone in one of those who decided it was worth bombing a city did not get themselves or their loved ones to safety first.

He doesn't know if she'll listen to him, but he wants to suggest to her, as a woman once said to past-Keltham, that she is allowed to be a little selfish.  He knows that she will have already thought of this obvious thought, and rejected it; but he nonetheless wants to say it to her, what she'll have already predicted he'll say.

The 'infinity' of the Chaotic planes does strongly suggest to him that they're more continuous with the territory outside Creation than the other planes; Carissa might want to learn the entirety of his physics knowledge (though it's clear that local physics are modified from that) and then reconsider whatever Golarion evidence she has.  (He'll want to review her relevant Golarion knowledge too, but it might lack the crisp clear formality of physics and so be less learnable by him at low expense.)

From a dath ilani perspective, it would be a generically obvious sort of tactic, at this point, to collect some Golarionites and a repository of their culture and put them into an ark in Elysium, with spellsilver on board and diamonds and some helpful magic items, and maybe an Efreeti noble bound by oaths.  Try to maximize their chance of surviving, if Elysium comes unanchored from Creation but isn't destroyed instantaneously.

If he's doing that anyways, he'd obviously put Carissa's family on board by default.  Telling him not to do that, in hopes he'll be influenced by her and her family's greater jeopardy, seems threatish in the decision-theoretic sense.  He might acquiesce to leave Carissa's family behind if Carissa demanded it be so, for the sake of peace between them; but he'd then ignore the influence on his decisions from that.  Making the outcome be worse for him, than he could otherwise make it be for himself, in hopes that it'll influence him, is something he should respond to by not being so influenced.  Maybe Carissa wants to bind herself that way, by not getting her family out of jeopardy - though this seems to him like questionable altruism, her family does not belong to her like her clothes do - but she definitely shouldn't hope to bind him that way, by putting in more jeopardy what he could put into less jeopardy.

(A side-thought, thinking to himself:  Possibly delegate the ark project to Fe-Anar, maybe Wish up Fe-Anar and give him some now-unused headbands to be a better leader...  Iomedae's transcension via Starstone generated artifacts from the magic items she was carrying with her at the time; maybe they can do something similar with their headbands and/or the giant diamonds entrusted to Fe-Anar... Obtain a large existing airship or larger regular boat, and commission emergency-speed crafting on it, add magic items to it, to try to make it more planar-survival worthy...  He may want to put Fe-Anar on that project soon, there could be lead time on Fe-Anar obtaining a ship.)

Carissa isn't sure, actually, that if you're doing something like this you're allowed to be a little bit selfish.

She isn't sure that you aren't, either. She is aware of her own bias to solve moral problems in a way that involves suffering whenever that is humanly possible and sometimes when it isn't.

But it feels to her like all the trillions of people you are going to kill have the right to demand of you that you do the best possible version of your plan; that if you are unwilling to do whatever it takes to try not to have to kill them, then you aren't grown up enough, yet, to do it at all. 

Probably it's fine to do things like saving her family that don't affect the odds of success of the overall plan. But everything's entangled, and she's not sure there are things that don't affect the odds of success of the overall plan. It won't affect whether Keltham is willing to go ahead, maybe; but say that Pharasma is willing to grant him an end to Hell and nothing else he demanded, and he has to decide whether to annihilate the universe over that or not. She can't, actually, bring herself to wish that the universe whose annihilation he contemplates holds nothing of particular importance to him anymore.

Even leaving aside that he's unlikely to end up relatively-certain that an Elysium ark survives the destruction of Creation, her family is not going to swing this.  Even the other Project Lawful members are not going to swing this, if he can Wishnap them to the putative ark.  Carissa won't be on that ark, and she is and always has been the thing about Golarion that felt the most real to him.

In that case, she is grateful that he thought about her family, and if it'd be helpful she'll plan Fe-Anar's ark with him at some point. Fe-Anar does seem like a good person to do it. 

(This is only sort of an accurate explanation of how she feels; she is trying to produce cooperativeness and gratitude and positive-reinforcement-for-Keltham out of a well of recently-deafened agony and isn't totally sure it's working. But she hopes it's working.)

...there's a protocol out of dath ilan which might help here, which is that she's allowed to say for example 'I acknowledge the thought and am glad we're still coordinating, but can't feel gratitude right now', and this serves a lot of the same purpose of not appearing to Keltham as a blank non-reinforcement of behavior she wants him to repeat, without requiring her to feel particular things.

He's not looking for a feeling of gratitude from her, for people can't (or at WIS 25+, should not too often) choose what to feel.  More like - the acknowledgment that he made or was trying to make a Cooperative move in their multiplayer dilemma, including one that was on the level of people and feelings.  So long as that acknowledgement is there in any form, it doesn't need to take the form of an emotion she has to struggle to produce within herself. 

She's still trying to be extremely selective about which bits of alien technology she adopts into herself. But that is the language Keltham so wishes he could hear, here, so - yes. She acknowledges that he is cooperating, that he is trying very hard, even when it is costly to him, and that she noticed him doing that just now in addition to having a background presumption he's doing it even when she doesn't notice.

He acknowledges that, in turn.

...They're clear at this point that dath ilan's alien technology is just alien and not secretly meant to corrupt Lawful Evil targets, check?  He's reasonablycertain at this point that he understands everything about dath ilan that looked sinister to the likes of Cheliax and Osirion.  The sneakiest thing dath ilan did was covertly shape him to never notice he was a sadist; and they didn't do that in a way that hindered his adaptation in a world with masochists.  (Now that he thinks about that at this intelligence level, that's weak evidence that dath ilan has masochists but very few, and they didn't want to hinder the sexuality of sadists who could end up affording them.)

Obviously past-Keltham was shaped in all sorts of ways as a kid, but those shaping-targets are matters of public documentation on the Network.  They're not covert intended effects of the alien technology.  Even the height of dath ilan's cleverness shouldn't be able to steganograph mind-control tactics that could influence augmented-Carissa, without his own augmented self being able to notice, through the sole medium of techniques simple enough to be taught to past-Keltham - to speak only of capabilities, saying nothing of intention as would require knowledge; past-Keltham was clearly not prepped for the Cheliax scenario he landed in. 

Carissa agrees with all that, and would be making different tradeoffs if she disagreed with any of it; and still, if the situation were any less dire, she would not be trying to replace her own instincts and responses with those of an alien civilization whose values are in fact very different from hers, and she checks internally, every time she does that, if it's actually necessary to do and if the implementation is tugging at any related bits of her head. 

She imagines if Keltham were in a civilization with vastly more advanced mental technology where everyone preferred Hell to death and cared mostly about how many universes they existed in and was a masochist, he too would develop some kind of mental checklist when adopting their alien thought patterns, and might feel sad, that it was necessary to do at all.

It would depend greatly on whether the purpose of everything in that civilization was clearly labeled.  Past-Keltham didn't hesitate to learn any of Carissa's alien technology - which did have more risk than he realized, but he was mistakenly treating a low-trust society like a high-trust society, and Cheliax's lessons to him were not overt in their true purposes.

There is, in general in dath ilan, an ethos that the protagonist is supposed to immediately learn any and all amazing mental tricks the aliens possess, and analyze them and judge them and repurpose them if necessary.

(He's reasonablycertain that's not a subtle trap aimed at causing aliens who pick up dath ilani to think it's a good idea to rapidly learn from the dath ilani.) 

She wonders if they're perhaps quibbling over this because it touches on a deeper thing, where Carissa on an emotional level views dath ilan as ...not really the kind of civilization you cooperate with if you have any choices other than cooperation and death. She has tried quite hard to not make this Keltham's problem, she has not asked again that he talk less about dath ilan, but when they're mindreading it's hard to hide; Carissa views dath ilan as something that should be forcibly cryopreserved, ideally.

He wishes to see those thoughts; guessing them would take more time than looking.

The people of dath ilan are obviously not alien the way Asmodeus is alien; they have many human impulses, they have lots in common with many people of Golarion. But -  a gesture at the concept that things that are similar until you optimize them aggressively enough can then end up extremely distant from each other - dath ilan has resolved a lot of their muddles, and in almost every case resolved them in the opposite of the way Carissa, herself, resolves them; and so in this world, and she suspects in most worlds, the things that Carissa wants and the things dath ilan wants are very very different. She thinks she'd probably be reasonably happy in a dath ilani utopia, and that they'd probably be reasonably happy in a Carissaeish utopia, but in any world short of that, their aims will be diametrically different and there being dath ilani around makes it less likely that anything at all of value to Carissa will be preserved. 

Keltham is very very much not a Carissa-utility-inverter, he's just for unrelated reasons reasonably likely to do the precise thing a Carissa-utility-inverter would do, and dath ilani, as she understands it, would nearly all do that, and so to Carissa, as a pragmatic matter, they aren't very different from Rovagug or from a Carissa-utility-inverter. The best thing to do about them is to render them unable to hurt anyone while you try to make the world a place so good it has space even for them in it. 

More puzzlement that he can probably resolve faster by looking than by guessing himself.  (Seeing evidence first and hypothesizing later is not as deadly to him, now, as when he was smaller.)

What would Carissa do differently (rather than teach differently or think about differently) if she had great political power in modern dath ilan as it is?  Would she tell all the sadists what they are, and... let them be sad sadists?  Enslave people to be used as victims who wouldn't enjoy that?

Probably let them be sad, yes; she thinks it’s actually much better to be sad than to be muddled. And probably she'd let people set to be forcibly cryopreserved choose to be enslaved instead, with an ongoing choice about that, though she understands it to be the case that probably few dath ilani would go for it.

But it also feels to her like…something has gone very wrong to put those things into such tension? One of the ways in which dath ilani are very alien to Carissae is that they would, in fact, be worse off from having a bit more wisdom and noticing an obvious fact about their own minds and desires. It makes it hard to say you'd do anything in particular to make them predict reality better or understand themselves better; after all, it can be stipulated that then they'll be sad. 

She thinks mostly she'd change all the heritage optimization to be pointed very aggressively at that, at the way dath ilani are so, uh, the words that immediately come to mind are 'so fragile and so miserable' but she understands Keltham is homesick and she would not have said those aloud -- 'so configured such that realizing they want things they can't have makes them lastingly worse-off' and 'so frequently sad', maybe, is what she'd have said. She would have said to them that they'd accidentally optimized-out a ton of really valuable stuff, further info available on request, and that the highest priority for the next generation would be getting it back.

He suspects that dath ilan's ancestors damaged themselves in the process of trying heritage-optimization, while knowing far less than they know now.  Subsystems of the brain compete for volume, for attention.  To make one subsystem louder can diminish the relative voice of another by comparison; there are known syndromes like that.  Dath ilan's ancestors (he now suspects, infers at this distant remove) blundered into a tradeoff like that in the course of optimizing for reflectivity, which is entangled with the relative loudness of prefrontal cortex compared to subcortical emotion-binding structures.  Past-Keltham knew he had more emotional intensity than the dath ilani around him; this probably correlated with past-Keltham having Golarion-measurable Wisdom well below dath ilani average (he is guessing).

The smart people of dath ilan may already know as much.  Even if they don't calculate that it would be helpful to emphasize a lot in public, that people ought to have louder emotions, as would give people one more thing to be sad about.

Fixing dath ilan, he currently guesses, would be mainly a matter of heritage-optimizing or biochemically intervening for more subcortical loudness.  (A component of local measured Splendour, probably, given how Wishes that boosted measured Splendour also boosted that.)  He'd advocate that policy himself, now that he's had a chance to look at Golarion.  He suspects it's already in progress there at least a little.  Dath ilan may not prioritize that characteristic as much as he would, having seen Golarion; but dath ilan has some idea that they've got a problem.

This does not yet seem like the part that you'd cryopreserve Civilization over.  His model of Carissa would never say they're too sad to be allowed to exist.

That makes her feel a spark of fondness, which she squelches out half-automatically. Indeed, no one is too sad to be allowed to exist. They can go along as miserably as they want. No, the only acceptable reason to cryopreserve Civilization is in self-defense; if it learns of worlds like hers, worlds where most people have good lives and amazing afterlives but some people have good lives and go to Hell, it will annihilate them.

 If there was nothing else in the entire Greater Reality then it'd be better to have dath ilan than nothing.

That gets into a rather larger issue, as he'd frame it.  Dath ilan is only one instance of a much larger class of agents, here, and that larger class is probably what's impinging on Golarion.

This is a large thought; he requests that they pause on active interchange for long enough that he can think it through.

Carissa can, actually, at this Wisdom level, just stop all her contentious world-destroying related thoughts and think about the sensation of having fingers and joints, being able to shift her weight, being able to breathe. It’s delightful. It is nice how some things are exactly the same as when she was a very small Carissa.

Keltham can take his time.