The man is seated cross-legged opposite Carissa, in their private time-dilated Forbiddance which no other is to enter during this event.  The universe is a bit over three meters tall from floor to ceiling, and though the ceiling is something like a glowing blue sky, it is not really the same.

The man takes a scroll of Heightened Extended Detect Thoughts; the spell at just second-level cannot provide enough raw power for him to get enough decodable information off Carissa.  He has more scrolls, but they will still have relatively little time.  Both of them think quickly, now, and at this level of intelligence there should be little wasted motion.  But there is much thought for them to exchange.

He casts the spell, observes Carissa permitting it to take hold; he signals Carissa that she can go ahead and put on her artifact headband, combined now with her Wishes; and then, when she's ready, cast her own Detect Thoughts on him.

Carissa is very unsure whether this will work, whether it will be impossible to think in front of Keltham or not, but the worst case scenario, here, is that it doesn’t work, and they learn nothing. She’s decided to not try to make it work, because trying to make herself willing to have thoughts in front of Keltham seems like a terrible idea. If he turns out to feel safe to think around, then this will work, and if not, it won’t; all she’s here to do is learn which world she’s in.

She takes her headband back. 

It’s not actually a headband. That’s how she thinks of it, because she’s a wizard who spent the first eight years of her adult life saving for a headband, but it’s a crown by any reasonable definition. More elaborate and more expensive than the crowns most Kings can arrange to wear. The metal is cool to the touch no matter how long she holds it.

Carissa wants to be smarter and better and know more things and have more space to think them in. She puts it on, and feels her mind expand around her.

She gives herself ten rounds, first, to just breathe, take it in, exult in it; she is more complete, and more alive, and her delight in that need not be tainted by all the facts that are going to immediately come crashing down on her. Many Carissae Sevar will live their whole lives without being Wished and artifact-headbanded up as far as magic can take them, without letting their thoughts spool out in a mind that is big enough to contain them.

It is not one ounce less satisfying and less beautiful and less wondrous than she imagined it; if anything, it's moreso, because there is more space in her now for imagination. 

Right, then, enough of that. Time to save the world.

There's not an easy solution.

It's the first thing she looks for when she puts her headband on. She's been considering it unlikely, really, but likely enough that much of her remaining hope resided there. That there was some clever solution as likely as Keltham's mainline plan to result in the overthrow of Hell and the return to better custody of those souls subject to it, which did not run even a small residual risk of destroying everything else in Creation. 

There isn't. Or if there is, it's something that uses dath ilan knowledge alongside Golarion knowledge, something that'll occur to her or Keltham in a blinding flash of insight only when their minds are met and joined. Not something Keltham has seen himself yet, and not something you can infer if you've only built one computer and still can't really see how to convert many of the questions you actually want answered into its strange language. She would think about it longer, but it's unlikely she'll see it in another sixty seconds if she didn't see it in the first six - not if she doesn’t even see a promising angle of attack -

In the absence of the easy solution there’s only the difficult one. In the last week before their trip to the city of Brass she took to organizing her wall for her future self, circling particularly confusing questions that she hoped smarter-Carissa would be able to resolve, trying more to identify important questions than to answer them. Answering them was for later, for once she was smarter. 

For now. 

Well, not quite now. Answering the questions on the wall is the third item on her to-do list. The second is to look inside herself.

She hasn't really been using dath ilani cognitive techniques for a while. She used them to talk to Keltham; otherwise she'd fail to talk to him entirely. She used the really inescapable bits, the bits about how you should try to believe true things instead of false things, and check yourself internally to see if you're doing that, if your questioning-processes are even trying to spot your confusions and rip them away and arrive at the truth. But there's a lot more than that, and for the last month Carissa has been (mostly deliberately, mostly as the result of an explicit calculation about the merits of this course of action, but only mostly) holding them in abeyance, because she did not trust that they would not change her. 

She still doesn't entirely trust the techniques but one of the things that is immediately obvious, from here, from this place of greater clarity about the roiling sea of emotional agony that has been most of her life since she left Osirion, is that she's going to need to be using more of them than she's been using so far, or the world is probably going to end. And while she's changed, in some ways, from the Carissa Sevar who some seconds ago put her headband on, she has not changed in being entirely sure that every other thing she has ever cared about or ever will is worth tossing into the furnace for a one-in-a-million chance that it'll save the world.

And that is, of course, the first place to look, with her newfound mental fortitude, with a sharper spotlight she can use to catch any lies she might still be telling herself and any places she might be looking away from. Is she, mentally and emotionally, configured in the best possible way to work on this for as long as it takes, alongside Keltham even when everything he says is incredibly frustrating and feels slippery and wrongheaded?

No.

This is hardly a thought that required lifting her mind up to a new stage where most people could hardly recognize it. She talked about it with Carmin on her second day here, when she first needed a break from making her wall of strategically important questions. She'd picked a coping mechanism by then: she was visualizing her thoughts, in her head, as suspended above a river of torment, red-hot like the Andramal winding through Dis. That way, she could identify when a thought was touched, singed, shaped, by the river of agony, and rerun it. 

This, Carmin had said, was not the approach most people come up with, to trying to think clearly while in pain; mostly they try to make the pain less intense, less immediate, until it's the kind of pain you can work alongside as an old friend. "Be in constant emotional agony, use very elevated Wisdom to check if thoughts were touched by the intense emotional agony" is both not available to most people and not a very good idea.

Carissa obediently tried various approaches to being in less emotional agony. She determined that many of them were designed for problems that were not 'the literal worst possible outcome under your values system is very likely to happen and it's your fault' since many of them were about noticing and appreciating how the problem you had was not the worst possible problem to have, or not likely to be very bad, or not very likely to happen, or would leave a world worth living in even if it happened. They would be very useful if she were emotionally distressed about her family going to Hell or something normal to be sad about like that. 

Most ways of being in less emotional agony involved looking away from reality, and she could afford that even less than she could afford the emotional agony. Most ways of trying to shape her thoughts to dip into the river of agony less often involved shaping her thoughts to not tell her when the river of agony was influencing her, and that was even worse. 

So she told Carmin it was the approach where she was in constant emotional agony but learned how to keep her thoughts properly clear of it, or nothing, at least until she was even wiser. She would be sculpted around the pain she was in, but at least she would see it clearly, have no thoughts she couldn't think, and know which thoughts to distrust; that was the best solution she could come up with. 

That was wrong, of course. The thing she can feel herself doing now was possible even at her previous Wisdom. She actually thinks that one of the fundamental revelations she's having, one of the general principles here, is that all this was possible for the very original Carissa, the little girl at the Worldwound worshipping Asmodeus with no magic at all.

All she's doing is looking at the pain and knowing that it does not help. That because it does not help, it is a luxury, and she cannot afford luxuries. It feels strange at first, and counterintuitive, for pain to be a luxury, for grief and guilt and horror and misery to be luxuries, but that's what they are; they are parts of Carissa which are real and important and which she cannot afford. 

The pain does not want to hear that it's a luxury. The pain wants to be necessary. The pain wants the story to go that Carissa Sevar is in so much pain and has to do her work anyway. But of course the story is better, truer to the pain and truer to Carissa Sevar, if it goes that Carissa Sevar does not have the luxury of being in pain. 

If you do this wrong, you'll just fold the pain up on itself, and be miserable about your own misery, count it against yourself as another failing. Here, she does feel like she's using a skill she didn't have before, a skill that she certainly at least never used before: the skill of reaching for each thread of her mind and knowing how much pressure to put on it, so that it dissolves instead of hiding. It feels vaguely like picking blackberries; you develop a sense of which are ripe on the vine and ready to fall into your hand. 

She looks at the pain, thread by thread, and she tells it regretfully that she cannot afford it. That precisely because the thing that she is mourning is so important, there is no space and no time to mourn it, and so she'll have to not be in pain, and that too is part of the tragedy, that she must walk into it without even the comfort of being permitted to grieve it. She does it very gently, very cautiously, so she doesn't just hide her thoughts from herself by accident.

After a while in the place of the red-hot river of agony there is an abiding conviction that it would be correct to mourn, correct to scream, correct to pound her fists against the floor until she broke every bone in her hands, but that she cannot, because the world deserves an advocate who is not distracted. It deserves that more than it deserves to be mourned, even though it does deserve to be mourned. Carissa Sevar is strong enough to build her forty-foot wall of strategically important questions while at every instant suffering intensely, but she actually needs to be stronger than that, strong enough to stop it with the suffering intensely, so she's going to do that now. 

That's not the whole of it but it's a solid few steps closer. 

She looks at Keltham, then, and casts Detect Thoughts - (of course the spell behaves like that, how did she never notice before that there's an obvious better configuration, every spell is going to be like that, have little unnecessary points of tension no one could see how to unfurl, she could fix them all) - and then looks up to meet his eyes.

She doesn't feel afraid. That wouldn't help. She does feel curious, because that's the kind of thing that might.

His mind lays open to her, as it did in the beginning, four months and a thousand years earlier, when she cast a lesser form of this spell on Keltham shortly after his arrival in Golarion.

Now she is fifth-circle and INT 29, and he is greatly changed, and she is greatly changed.

The structures of his mind unfold before her, in vastly greater detail...

...they are more orderly, now, than when Keltham arrived in Golarion.  Stronger, sadder, and better-organized.

His mind shows, because he had been watching Carissa confront her dilemmas just now, his thoughts about how he handled those matters himself.

He did not switch off his own hurt.  Past-Keltham never tried to switch off his own hurt at any point.  Pharasma might have seen that as self-modification, planning to extort Her - creating a new version of Keltham that would feel less hurt over having to annihilate everyone in Pharasma's Creation -

(His thoughts swiftly glide over the reasoning there, trusting to the augmented powers of thought-detection that he sees in Carissa now, the swiftness of her thought, to understand what should be instantly comprehensible at INT 29 -)

A coherent being almost never modifies their own utility function.

To choose to hurt less about destroying Creation, is to be readier to destroy Creation, to choose that under a wider range of circumstances.

So a coherent agent in past-Keltham's place, even having already mostly decided to destroy Creation, would not modify its utility function to assign less negative valence to destroying Creation.  What about the small probabilities of Creation not being as it appears, in which case you might have to change your mind in the future?

Even if on the most-probable-mainline you expect to carry out the same decision after modifying your utility function, and get the same amount of utility according to your current utility function, there are possible worlds where the different utility functions imply a different choice.  Those possible worlds do not have zero probability; the different decisions you would make in them represent an expected loss from the standpoint of your present utility function.

And so a coherent mind almost never self-modifies in that way.  The expected loss is obvious; what would they gain?  A coherent agent never has cause to bind itself, to war within itself; if it would benefit from predictably doing something, it can just predictably do that thing.

Past-Keltham was not coherent, and hurt inside, at the thought of killing everyone he'd met in Golarion.  Murdering trillions of innocent people, maybe isekai-ing them to someplace as unpleasant as Golarion had been to him - or just their ceasing to be at all, if what happened to him really was a special case, though there seem to be strong arguments that it wouldn't be - he did not want to do that.

Which is to say - metaphorically - from the quizzical perspective of a more coherent mind - that past-Keltham derived internal disutility from the event of his imagining and choosing situations of sufficiently low external utility.

To a weird twisted mortal incoherent mind like that, might there not be utility to be gained, in choosing to hurt less?

If you're going to destroy Creation anyways, why hurt about it too?  If it's the same outer act, the same outer consequences, either way?

But what if original-Keltham wouldn't have been able to destroy Creation, would have flinched at the end, turned away from the betrayal of deontologies?

What if original-Keltham furthermore would have turned out to believe, deep down, that Pharasma would yield to alter-Keltham; hence that alter-Keltham wouldn't need to actually follow through, if he'd made himself hurt less about destroying Creation?

And - even if that's mostly not what was going on - what if Pharasma's decision theory, looking at something as much of an incredibly incoherent mess as past-Keltham, saw elements in it of Keltham maybe flinching away?  Of his fearing he might flinch away, his expecting Pharasma to yield?  When he made the decision to exert what power and Wisdom he held over himself, to make himself hurt less, and so become readier to destroy the world?

So, just in case, he didn't do anything that Pharasma might interpret as making himself hurt less, about the prospect of destroying the world, when he realized that was what he needed to do.

He didn't deliberately or wantonly think about the painful thing all the time, as would have been stupid.  He also didn't stupidly not-think-about that area of thoughtspace; he went on thinking about alternatives to destroying the universe.  He didn't deliberately think painful thoughts, but he left those emotions in place, ready to fire unchanged, when at the end he made his last decision to proceed with his plan; knowing that it might end with him destroying everything.

On a moral level, what he's doing has simply the moral meaning of him destroying Creation.  If Pharasma or Cayden Cailean comes along and makes something else happen instead, that's not to his own credit.  And he needed to not think about all that anyways.

He didn't actively think about how much he didn't want to destroy Creation and isekai everyone in Axis, didn't actively call that pain down on himself.  He also didn't try to do anything about the sickening sense of sadness and despair that went on in the background anyways.  That might have been a forbidden self-modification, and increased the actual risk to Creation.

That person wove himself a new structure woven out of the pieces that past-Keltham shattered into, when past-Keltham met a situation that set his inner pieces at odds against each other, consequences and deontology and virtues no longer in accord and pointing in separate and incompatible directions.  That man decided not to fall apart, to stay sane anyways, to continue anyways; which was also a capability that dath ilan had tried to grant him.

...he didn't do it perfectly.  You're supposed to have help from a Keeper, to put yourself together again in a way that makes sense, when you take enough damage that you'd fall apart if not for your decision not to.  Sanity-by-fiat is meant to be a temporary thing, for emergencies.

The person that Carissa met when she came to the Doom Base from Osirion - he conceived of himself as something of a mausoleum to past-Keltham's last wishes, made out of the pieces of Keltham.

All of his remaining self-care was concentrated into his last hope that the world wasn't really real, that the people in Hell weren't really there, that the main consciousnesses in this continuum with a lot of realityfluid underlying them were himself and Carissa and his other potential love interests and maybe a few other people.  In that case, he ought to not sacrifice himself fully for the sake of destroying Hell or mending Pharasma's Creation -

- but he couldn't actually do that, it turned out, couldn't balance Creation and himself.  He didn't have enough reflectivity during his temporary bouts of Wisdom 20 to make changes that could simultaneously optimize around himself and Creation.  Especially not when those self-modifications also had to work at Wisdom 16, when the Owl's Wisdoms wore off.

A mortal cannot always divide their efforts between two possibilities, not in practice.  He had to choose between optimizing for his own inner life and optimizing for Creation, and he chose Creation, because he wasn't that selfish, in the end.

The only hope he'd held out for himself, was that a last plea of his had been heard, that the quality of a viewpoint character had left him.  He'd tried to conduct himself accordingly, be something that could fade into the background of the plot.  Hoping that something far above had heard him, listened to his last plea, and removed most of the realityfluid from his computation, letting the real Keltham continue somewhere else, from just before he cast Fox's Cunning on himself back in Osirion.  Even finding himself still in Golarion, he could still hope for that, that most of himself wasn't really there, anymore.

He thought about his own existence as little as possible, a poor man's substitute for daring to try to interrupt the reflective thought-loops that underlay his own consciousness.

For a long time Carissa did not understand what Keltham meant when he claimed that he wasn't Keltham, that Keltham was gone. She isn't confused, now, even if Keltham appears to on an impressively comprehensive level not care about the things Carissa personally gets out of existence and care about a completely different set of things that don't matter to her at all.

She wishes he had been more selfish, too selfish to destroy the world, selfish enough to grasp for the less-likely story where they fix Hell some less risky way. There's no point dwelling on that either. 

When he reached Intelligence 25 / Wisdom 26 / Splendour 25, after receiving Carissa's wishes and Pilar's headband, he put himself back together - though that's more a question of his using Wisdom 26 (now 27) to operate all his pieces individually, rather than him trying to make there really be a coherent person inside.

There are obvious better ways to grow up, as he saw later with some time to think.  One such obvious way involves increasing thinkoomph more gradually, having new experiences that fill in your slightly larger mind with new motivations, new philosophies-of-thought-and-action, newly learned intuitive-choices, to become a real person and not just a utility function hooked up to thinkoomph.

All of that works better with a passion driving you towards something you actually want, and not just a lesser horror you're steering at to avoid a greater one.  It works better if your life and love and startup isn't in ruins, if you have something positive to look forward to.  Carissa could become a coherent person like that, maybe, if she doesn't have to become a god instead; she's not happy, but she's driven and unified within herself.

He could decide to make himself become that regardless, at Wisdom 27 - envision a plausible person he might have become if he'd done things the slow correct way, then imitate his best guesses for what a person like that would think.

But then there's the question of whether that would constitute a self-modification too far away from the original Keltham's original reasons for choosing to destroy the world.  He is very constrained, now, in how he dares repair himself.  Small risks matter, when they're on that scale, and also he can't achieve real organic happiness anyways so it's not worth it.

His mind is all deliberate structure, now; he doesn't just exist and feel, he is working to a plan of what to think and feel, deliberate strategies of internal choice.  If he were to describe himself now, it would be that he is something inspired by Keltham, a crafted artwork designed in the shape of past-Keltham.

...But he's not in pain, anymore.  He's ready to feel Keltham's pain later, when it might matter to how Pharasma perceives the decision theory of threats versus best-alternatives-to-negotiated agreement.  But for now, he's just not in pain.  He's decided not to think those thoughts in the native structure that would bind to the circuits firing those emotions.  That's something you can just do, at Wisdom 27, if you have all of dath ilan's knowledge and training that it gave to the tiny childlike past-Keltham about how minds work.

He'll think those thoughts again in their native format at the end, when he makes his last mortal decision, and imprints himself onto the form of a god.  Just in case what's currently on his mind has anything to do with what sort of god he becomes, when he touches the Starstone.

That he doesn't want to kill everyone.

That he'll do it anyways, and not hurt any less about it, if that's what it takes to end Pharasma's Creation in its present form.

She wishes Keltham could have gone on being the person that he was. She liked the person that he was. She understands, now, why he couldn't just be the person that he was but smarter, the way she can be the person that she was but smarter - she thinks about what she did anyway, in case it helps him, but she suspects that it won't -

- the core thing about Carissa Sevar, which has been true since she was four and first realized it, is that she is the person with a direct and immediate interest in the survival of Carissa Sevar. That gives her an intimacy with all possible versions of herself that she could never feel for any other person, that no other person could possibly feel for her; every Carissa Sevar, whether created through memory modification or enhancement or curses or whatever else, possesses a stake in Carissa Sevar's continued survival that no one else in the universe possibly can. When tiny four year old Carissa was scared because she'd gotten in trouble at school for misunderstanding an instruction and gotten beaten, she could take comfort in the love and support of grownup Carissa, of devil Carissa, the future people who want Carissa to live because they can only live through her. 

The next most core thing about Carissa Sevar is that she loves being alive. Some of that was interwoven with Asmodean things she's now discarded, gratitude to her creators that she is not sure is entirely coherent since their decision process about whether to make her did not involve a check about whether she'd approve of being made or about whether she'd be grateful. (She does think she approves of being grateful to any creator who created her conditional on her gratitude, of serving any creator who created her conditional on her service; Asmodeus's mistake is that he didn't negotiate for her loyalty, more fool he.)

But most of the wonderful perfect delight of being alive is just a fundamental truth that felt as real when she was four as it does now, that to take in input from the world around her and make sense of it as much as she can is a wonderful glorious untouchably perfect thing, and as she's grown bigger she can take in more input, and make more sense of it, and answer and ask newer more complicated questions, and it's wonderful. 

The next more core thing about Carissa Sevar is that she wants the world to not feature any big appalling problems that might eat her, so that she can study magic all day. This, too, has persisted uncomplicatedly in her self-concept since...not since she was four. Since she was eleven, maybe. If it's possible for her to solve the big appalling problems, she'll do that, because it's what she'd want someone else to do, but the point of solving the horrible problems is to get to study magic all the time. 

And from there there's a lot of branches, bits she's exploring, like why "it's what she'd want someone else to do" features so much in her reasoning and whether that's enough to get you all the way to Good or if it's more of a Lawful Neutral thing at its core, and why she likes being a cult leader, and why she thinks Dispater and Abrogail were good for her in ways Good versions of them wouldn't and couldn't have been, but all of them feel like whether or not they persist across any particular set of new capacities she'll remain herself, and recognize herself, and love herself and be happy for herself that she gets to be alive.

 She is sorry, if Keltham isn't shaped in such a way that he can take any advantage of any of that. It's probably not high priority to resolve, but she wishes it were better for him.

He is showing all this to Carissa, now, showing her all of this, all of the dath ilani technique he can, because he is pretending that Snack Service does not exist, and if Snack Service did not exist, he would be desperate to find a better way - even more desperate - would be giving Carissa every advantage he can, all of his art, all of his knowledge.  Because maybe she's the story's protagonist and she can think of a way out, a way to save Creation without maybe destroying it, without releasing Rovagug and killing everyone in Project Lawful and Osirion, everyone he knows in Golarion.  He has seen Carissa augmented in the City of Brass, for it, opened his thoughts to her, for it, will trust her, for it, would give her any resource in his power, for it; if she can think of a better way to rescue all the souls in Evil afterlives and make Pharasma's Creation something that doesn't hammer down any Civilization before it forms.

He'd do that even if he was taking Snack Service into account, just in case.

If she needed him to true-suicide for it, he would; only not go to Hell, for that is something he'd never do.  He is not that unselfish.

Carissa isn't, actually, going to use the dath ilani techniques for this; she'll look at them, learn from them, and then build something else for herself. 

She isn't sure Keltham understands the way she feels about dath ilan, about dath ilani mental techniques, she suspects that she wouldn't have ended up needing to do so much translating of the things he says to her if he understood.

 Carissa thinks that dath ilan is a nice place to live for the people who live there, and probably doing notably better than any institution she'd know how to run at acting on the values of the people who run it, and it makes sense that Keltham misses it very much.

She does not, actually, share much in the way of values with dath ilan. She's thought about it, because it might be very important, and she has picked out the parts of herself that were just rationalizations so she could endure Cheliax and pass mindreading, and even once you strip all that way - Carissa thinks that getting to exist is very important, that ceasing to be is far worse than going to Hell, that if you are annihilated from a billion universes and someone makes a copy of you in a different universe you have lost almost everything that mattered, that 'average utilitarianism' does not describe her values or anything that even resembles them and in fact feels like a silly value-function someone made up to win philosophy arguments, not a plausible account of how a person's deep wants for the world could possibly be shaped (she is aware that it is a real way peoples' deep wants for the world could be shaped, but certainly not hers). 

There aren't Carissae in dath ilan, and she wonders whether there's no one born like her or if they just get shaped some other way in the course of growing.

Dath ilan is not really something she wants to see win; dath ilan winning isn't very good, by her values. She suspects it's wrong-by-Carissa's-values to kill demons and magical beasts and wild turkeys and mules. It's definitely wrong to kill anyone who can object.She thinks it's definitely wrong not to make new people, if you can do it. It's all right to hurt people if you're good at it. It's all right to have slaves, if you made them or saved them when no one else would have. That's what a Carissaeish Good would look like, she thinks. She isn't, herself, Carissaeish Good, but if she met a civilization of it she'd want to see them win. 

Dath ilan's mental techniques were, in a very ordinary sense, engineered to make people dath ilani; engineered to raise ilani children who share the fundamental assumptions of their society. Every society does that; there's no way of raising children without inculcating them in your values, nor would it be a reasonable thing to try. You can tell them about the importance of independence and thinking for themselves, but that's a value of your society that you are inculcating in them. There's nothing wrong with it. 

Since Carissa disagrees with dath ilan on almost every important values question relevant to her life, she is wary of building her mind out of cognitive techniques meant to produce dath ilani. Even without assuming any malicious engineering by dath ilan's technique engineers to confuse people about their own values, dath ilanism teaches ways of resolving some of the muddles inside people, and Carissa thinks it mostly does not resolve them in the way that a fully worked out Sevarism would resolve them. 

If she had time, then, Carissa would discard ilani techniques entirely and build it all herself from scratch. She didn't, initially, agree with this premise of Irorite philosophy, but it has grown on her; the best cognitive techniques for you are the ones you hammered out yourself, at your pace, with your goals as an aim, with access to some examples but without a model you'll get stuck on and use as a base for forming your own. 

Of course, she doesn't have time. She needs to become as skilled as possible as quickly as possible, even if this means building a permanently worse and diminished Carissa because of using techniques that aren't hers, that are designed by people that don't share her values, and that resolve all her muddles in the wrong way. It's better to have access to those tools than to not, wherever she's not able to invent her own fast enough. But she thinks that the version of her built out of ilani techniques instead of out of her own techniques she invented herself for her own specific values and purposes will be substantially worse, and so she's trying skill-by-skill to calculate the best tradeoff and then use the ilani technique or not depending how that calculation comes out. 

And of course it is not a good use of her energy to feel sad about this, or bitter, or resentful, so she's not going to, but she considers learning dath ilani techniques to be replacing bits of her own soul with aliens with alien priorities, and it is the sort of thing that would grieve her, if she had time to grieve. She doesn't share Keltham's sense that people ought to enhance themselves slowly, bit by bit, filling out the pieces of themselves as they grow - it seems like one thing people could do, but not the only one -- but she does feel that for mental technique-building, that it's actually something you ought to do at your own pace. 

All of this to say that she's listening, trying to take in everything Keltham is trying to push at her, but with wariness, because the tools he's trying to teach her to use are tools meant for different goals than she has. 

Rolling your own cognitive techniques is an obvious goal.  Dath ilan has a whole philosophy about it, that knowledge isn't truly part of you until you could reinvent it from scratch.  He supposes she could try to run off only the Irorite version of that philosophy, if she's worried about contamination, but it sure is a very dath ilani way to look at the world and yourself.

If you consciously understand the ways you shape people, but letting them become themselves is one of your goals, it follows that 'roll your own cognitive techniques' is something that your Civilization would try to teach people to do if they could.  It's why they don't have Golarion-style 'schools' full of memorization, why they herd children into discovering for themselves how dath ilan orbits its own Sun, the simplified equations of classical-illusion gravity.  Dath ilan engineers people to be themselves, to discover themselves, to a degree far beyond anything that anyone in Golarion has ever considered doing, because they have the luxury of that in their optimized world; to figure out the precise conditions to let children discover gravity for themselves, and not make them memorize it.  And children aren't told either, until they suspect it, that the simplified equations of classical-illusion gravity they discover aren't the final truth.

Maybe Carissa at INT 29 - cognitively overpowered in some ways if not others beyond anybody who existed in dath ilan, using mutual telepathy with INT 29 Keltham - can reinvent her own cognitive techniques to any significant degree, within a week or two of time dilation.

It would not particularly be possible otherwise.

Past-Keltham was not taught very much of the Art directly, he was too young to need it and too stupid to use it, but he was taught a lot of the material that can be used to invent it at INT 29.

Here, then, is some of what she'd need to know to rebuild her own version of the Art from scratch.  Even at INT 29, the Detect Thoughts are not fine enough that she'll be able to pick it up from watching him think at this speed, but it is something of an overview of what she could try to learn later at speed, using INT 29 and telepathy -

- and his mind reviews some of it for her, what little he was taught of the vast amount that true Civilization knows about cognitive science, and some of what he filled in at INT 29 around improved recollections; like a Zoomout Video showing dath ilan surrounded by its entire universe; only with meaningful content with implications in every piece of it, stars that are structured words instead of tiny dots of light in an illusion -

- macroanatomy and microanatomy of the brain, over a hundred cortical regions in two hemispheres and subsurface structures, vision here, spatial sense here, one kind of sensory integration and motor planning here, the mapping of the body's homunculus onto it; but that sensorimotor cortex interfaces with the cerebellum which does this kind of motor planning - 

- microanatomy, the layers of the cortex, the different neurons making up the layers, how they mesh with each other, the signaling mesh produced by temporal synchronization of two already-synchronized cortical columns that recruit a third equidistant member; this is a cerebellar chip, detecting errors and correlating those errors against a hundred thousand inputs, a branching factor higher than exists anywhere else in the brain, yet still vastly reduced in dimension compared to all the incoming sensory data -

- differences between expected reward and actual reward; the equations for how much an error in either direction updates the neuron; if the errors can't be gotten down to zero, the neuron equilibrates, metastable if not stable, around the point where the error-nudges in both directions balance in their sum -

- circuits in subcortical structures that watch the larger world-model, binding emotions to them if they recognize the format; here's what Civilization taught him about the way that those circuits wire up in childhood, the lesser ways they rewire in adulthood; the gene expression cascades underneath, the locally simple learning equations they implement; local gradient descent, temporal-difference learning, fire-together-wire-together -

- this is what a human brain really is, deep down, the real character of cognition as carried out inside mortals -

- and his thoughts start to zoom back upward from there through the levels of organization in intelligence, pointing out particular emotions and the subcortical structures they correspond to, what those emotions take as successes and errors, how mortal habits train themselves and balance around the point where subcortical error-nudges counterbalance each other, as they propagate through the whole brain - most of the local parts of cognition are usually in equilibrium, but there's always something being updated somewhere and so the brain's habits-in-sum are always moving...

...like a three-dimensional puzzle piece slotting into place, fitting together the mathematics of decision theory, what he's already taught her of computation and programming to build the magical-simulator-of-magic, calculus, equilibria, expected value, valid inference; combine it with what Civilization knows of the specifics of how brains compute things, and you can see the shape in the center, how that shape matches with all the surrounding areas of knowledge and binds to it, like a protein molecule slotting into its receptor...

...this is Thoughtcraft, much like Spellcraft, but with different laws of physics.

It's one fragment of Science.

There's kind of a lot of Science.

Past-Keltham didn't tell her because he didn't know how to teach all that and definitely not quickly - not knowing that Detect Thoughts was possible or that it could reach this level - and it didn't seem kind to him, to say what sort of education adults had, that he couldn't realistically pass on in any reasonable time.

Huh.

How the brain works isn't actually something Carissa had ever particularly wondered about; it wasn't just an unanswered question but one where it was hard to imagine any answer being particularly useful. 

there's so much world so many things to learn so much detail everywhere how could anyone know those things and think it'd be better if it were all gone

 It's sad, in a way - a very small sadness next to the other ones, but still sad - that he couldn't have told her that when she would have collapsed into his arms in delighted wonder and just wanted to play with the idea all day. 

She appreciates his telling her now, because she can see that he wants her to, because it really is fascinating.

She'd have less hesitancy about borrowing from dath ilani knowledge of the physical functioning of the brain, except that of course Wished-up and artifact headbanded minds probably don't even exactly work like that anymore.

Everything is of a piece because reality is one piece.  All divisions between areas of knowledge exist in the map, not in the territory.

The perspective that she labeled 'average utilitarianism' relies on an understanding of generalized Relativity as it applies to quantum mechanics -

- this being something past-Keltham didn't discuss with Cheliax earlier, because combined with the most elementary math of quantum fields, Relativity directly yields an understanding of antimatter, which is the most obvious way to use Wishes to destroy countries -

You can, of course, get the equations of Relativity just by observing the physical facts; but to really understand them, children are led to guess them in advance by contemplating certain questions and dissolving those questions as ontologically meaningless.

"How fast is the whole universe moving?" seems unobservable from inside the universe; and, you could argue, is not only unobservable but meaningless - because in the simplest conceptual frameworks that do predict what is observable, 'motion' is the motion of particles relative to each other.  Not, motion relative to an absolute space, that is unobservable and hence can be eliminated as an element of the theory.

But maybe there is an absolute space?  Maybe physics has absolute space beneath it, and everything is moving at a speed through that space.  Maybe someday you'll discover 'laws of physics' - simplest logical rules that would reproduce a universe embedding you to observe what you observe - that imply distinguished structures that stay motionless within space, mathematical seams that are observable.  And, measuring those, you'll discover the whole universe is moving at a billion kilometers per second relative to absolute space.  How do you know you won't?

Later, you're shepherded through discovering the relationship between electricity and magnetism, generalizing the classical-illusion field equations for those, and realizing that the wave propagation through that field is light.  And this, it seems at first, implies a fixed speed for light, relative to the electrical-magnetic field.

And you might think: couldn't you measure how fast you were moving relative to light, and so measure how fast you were moving relative to an absolute Background Space?  So the thought experiment about the whole universe moving twice as fast - suggesting that only relative motion is real or even meaningful - has failed to predict the character of physics; there was an absolute space after all.

But actually, every time you measure the speed of light relative to yourself, you find the same speed.  No matter how fast you're going, or how fast the light source is moving, you find the same measured speed of light from your own perspective.

And when you work out the logic of what that shocking fact implies, it ends up requiring that you view spatial dimensions and time dimensions as being relative to your current velocity... which is to say, the time distances and space distances that observers at different speeds observe as different quantities, are not the underlying elements of reality.

The only thing that's still invariant from every perspective is the interval between two events, which in terms of classical-illusion measurements would be expressed as the square of distance in time minus the square of distance in space, with the speed of light converting units between the two.

This surprising additional math, indeed, is exactly what's required to implement a universe where there's a universal speed limit reflecting the locality of causality, and yet the only meaningful elements of reality are the positions of things relative to each other.  That Reality went to this extra effort to make physics visibly 'relative', in this sense, is the beginning hint of a deeper truth that proves to be more general: physics is built around a certain spirit and character in which relative positions, not absolute positions, are the elements of reality in the ontology of physics.

Over and over, it proves possible to start from a thought experiment like "If I'm inside a sealed room, should I be able to tell if I'm staying still or moving at a constant velocity of a million miles per hour?", or "Should we be able to tell whether the whole universe is rotating or not, relative to absolute space, by seeing if there's centripetal forces being generated by the rotation?", to answer "No!  If I can't see the quantity from my own perspective, ultimate physics must be arranged in a way to make that quantity not exist!".  One can correctly derive intricate laws of physics from that principle.

It's idealistic reasoning, but it's a form of idealistic reasoning that Reality itself seems to use, the same way that Reality seems fond of calculus, or continuous quantities, or numbers and math more generally.  You could say, it's first-principles idealistic reasoning, using the sort of idealistic first principles that Reality has been empirically observed to respect, and which prove to cause people to correctly guess physics without observing it first if they're led to guess using those principles.

(Golarion physics, he strongly suspects, is partially an imitation of that simple dath ilani physics, and partially has been artificially constructed and modified and complicated away from that physics; so that this universe can run both mortal biology copied off dath ilan and dath ilan's physics, and also include magic and souls.)

It can be seen from 'first-principles reasoning using the kind of first-principles that Reality has been empirically observed to actually follow' that it shouldn't be sensible to ask "How quickly or slowly are the laws of physics operating?", unless there is some larger outer universe establishing a speed metric to be compared to.  Similarly, you can't ask "Is the universe upside down?", unless there is some larger spatial metric that embeds both the universe and something else that points in a direction.

Further beneath reality is quantum mechanics: in which the basic quantities are complex numbers, 'amplitudes', assigned to positional configurations of particles.  The integral over the squared absolute values of those amplitudes, the measure, seems to describe how real something is - or rather how relatively real something is, because physics doesn't talk about the absolute amount of reality, at that lowest level.  Only the relative quantity, relative phase, slope of derivative, of the amplitudes.

If you run a quantum experiment that divides the greater reality into two subworlds, with amplitudes over configurations that interact almost purely internally within a world -

(this happens all the time, to be clear, or at least it did in dath ilan, there's ten-to-the-large-number divergences of worlds every second as entropy increases over time, and Pharasma's Creation is either doing the same thing or pretending very hard that it is)

- and one of those worlds has twice the integral-over-quantum-measure as the other, you'll find yourself in the larger experiment-future two-thirds of the time.

Do a thousand of those experiments, and look back, and you should find that around two-thirds of the outcomes reflect the larger quantum future.  There's a version of you that sees the smaller outcome every time, a thousand times, but those yous are only 1/3^1000 as real, and you'll almost never find yourself there / only experience yourself seeing that to a very tiny degree.

There's no physical difference that would be observable if you doubled all the tiny amounts-of-realness.

And this is also the kind of physical principle that you can correctly guess from thought experiments about Relativity: what would it even mean if everything everywhere simultaneously became twice as real?

You can get this quality of quantum physics by observing experiments, but you can also advance-guess its character via the vastly productive principle of Relativistic thought experiments: it's meaningless to imagine all of Existence becoming twice as real, so reality is only relative, and that's why physics over amounts-of-realness only speaks of the relative quantity of those amounts.  Some things can be realer than other things; it is meaningless to ask how real they are in an absolute sense.

There's a meaning to one person being twice as real as another, inside of larger Reality.  You're twice as likely to meet people who exist in twice as many places.

But what does it feel like from the inside to become twice as real, or half as real, in an absolute sense?  Nothing, and in fact the thought isn't meaningful, just like there are no absolute phases in quantum mechanics, only relative phases of the amplitudes.

One future can be more real than another, and you'll mostly experience yourself in the futures that are more real; when you look back in your past, you'll find that the experimental statistics for results roughly match the physics-predicted amplitudes of those results.

But when you look at yourself and question how real you are in an absolute sense - imagine yourself becoming twice as real, or half as real - you're imagining something that wouldn't feel like anything, because it doesn't mean anything; just like it wouldn't mean anything for time in the universe to run twice as fast, unless it could run relative to some larger universe and greater metatime.

This, in a sense, is why you find yourself experiencing anything; the answer to the malformed question, "Why does anything exist at all?"  It doesn't require anything larger than yourself to give you existence, as would then need some further outer factor to lend existence in infinite regression.  Structures of relative realness always find themselves to be as real as themselves, however much more or less they exist compared to other things; and that's why you find yourself inside a physics ultimately comprised of a structure of relative-realness.

In dath ilan that physics over relatively-real elements was 'quantum mechanics' over 'amplitudes'; but even if it's something else inside Pharasma's Creation, it'll ultimately be made out of stuff that embodies relative quantities of existence.  Nothing that exists can be absolutely real (as isn't even a meaningful concept) but only relatively real to other things, so whenever you look closely enough at something that exists, you'll find out that it's made out of tiny bits of relative-degree-of-realness.

He is thinking all this, because it seems to him entangled, as truths-of-empirics and validities-of-reality often are, with what a sensible mind would end up valuing as it shakes out its emotional structures binding to pieces of reality-as-the-brain-models-it. 

It seems to him that you can't, actually, just say that you reject dath ilan's concept of how to value people's reality ("average utilitarianism" as she calls it, though in dath ilan it does not have a name), and have that be divorced from everything else dath ilan knows.

There are pieces of morality that can be pried apart from other elements of a coherent decision system - like whether you enjoy seeing people suffering or enjoy seeing them happy, that's something you can pry apart and invert without affecting other parts.  (At least if you're talking about an agent with a utility function; it doesn't work that way inside normal mortal humans, obviously, humans are woven together more tightly than that.  But in principle you could pry away the utility function of something that did have a utility function.)

Whether your ontology of thought is over relative amounts of existence, or hypothetical absolute quantities of existence as seen against an absolute outside-of-all-reality yardstick of existence-quantity-units - like imagining an absolute right-side-up direction of space - isn't something you can pry apart from understanding physics with an ontology that's based around relative positions and relative realness in a very visible way.

When you worry about whether it's a crime to make people's sum-over-futures add up to less than the reality of their current selves - to wonder if this is a crime apart from people objecting to it, apart from whether their remaining futures are pleasant or unpleasant - it seems important to comprehend that becoming less real does not feel like anything from inside, and in fact doesn't mean anything except relative to other things being more or less real than that.

When it comes to asking whether an enslaved being should be grateful to have been created, it matters to his own emotions-morality-philosophy that this being who will be enslaved would counterfactually otherwise still exist somewhere; in fact, would exist within a countably infinite number of such environments, all existing to some tiny finite degree of relative realness, summing to a finite total.  What an entity like Asmodeus is doing, in 'creating' somebody, is changing which environments are more real relative to that person, and changing which futures that person will predominately experience; and as an entwined effect, making that person more encounterable by others in the same larger environment.  If this future and environment is not pleasant, a future of slavery, this seems to him to be not a favor requiring a grateful reciprocal favor - as the act is phrased and described in his own ontology.

...Carissa realizes that you cannot reject dath ilan's morality piecemeal because all of the pieces form a worldview together. That is why she stopped using all of it and would, if her concern were for her own integrity, never use any of it to build herself, even the science.

None of that information makes her an 'average utilitarian', as she predicted it wouldn't, when she considered the space of possible observable features of reality dath ilan could have observed which would have caused them to all be 'average utilitarians'. Carissa took into account how good an explanation dath ilan would probably have for all of its alien values, considered how confident she was that her values were different, and isn't learning anything from being told that, yes, dath ilan has a predictable explanation for its beliefs. She didn't reject them in the conviction that dath ilani hadn't argued the question.

If there are an infinitely many Golarions which are functionally identical such that there are infinitely many Carissae in this exact moment of existence considering this exact problem, then there being half as many isn't a meaningful thing to describe (she recognizes that this isn't quite the frame Keltham is using, she's not sure yet if his frame is importantly different).  But it's coherent to care, for instance, about in what share of universes she exists, or in what share of universes in which she existed at some point she exists for a long time, or in what share of universes in which she exists her parents and sister exists, and it's coherent to, if you wake up inside a new universe, have preferences about whether you died and stopped existing in your old one. And if you prefer to exist in as large a possible a share of the universes that there are, and for the duration of your existence in every universe to be as large as possible, and for the people you care about and all people who aren't insane people who want to die to live in as many universes as possible, and you would be distressed to learn that you are murdered in your sleep half the time you fall asleep, then she's pretty sure you end up not an average utilitarian.

She's being snarky - it's much harder not to in her thoughts - so she does want to note that she appreciates Keltham not trying to make the infinities argument to her until she was smart enough to immediately better-articulate her preference; if he'd said that to a small Carissa she might've thought she had to be persuaded because she couldn't describe what she cared about coherently, and she - appreciates it, about Keltham, that he didn't try that.

She's catching up satisfyingly fast, now, but even at INT 29 comprehension is apparently not instantaneous - this is a distracting thought and not good protocol to think 'out loud' and he wishes he had not thought it.  This is not an argument from infinities; the ontology of physics is also written in such way as to visibly reject infinities.  'You never actually meet an infinity and what do you mean by that word anyways' is among the first-principles that Reality is empirically observed to favor.

If you imagine (probably counter to fact) that Carissae are one-third of everything that exists, you could say that there are infinite Carissae which are one-third of an infinite existence, or that there are zero Carissae which are one-third of zero existence, or that there are twelve realness units of Carissae who are one-third of a greater reality with thirty-six realness units.  The only real thing in all three cases would be the relative quantity one-third; the units appear in both numerator and denominator, and cancel out.

It's not meaningful to talk about everything becoming half as real.  It's not meaningful to talk about Carissa becoming half as real to herself from her own perspective.

If Reality is as large as dath ilan had strong reason to believe - and encountering Golarion hasn't exactly counterargued the case - it's not true to talk about some external factor creating a new Carissa whose pattern would otherwise counterfactually not exist anywhere else in Reality.  It's a meaningful claim, but a false one, always:  Reality looks to be quite large.  And even a small large number of universes will be enough to saturate the number of meaningfully distinct Carissae that can exist; there's only so many ways to put together all the atoms making up her body, if you only consider those atoms' momentary positions down to a tolerance of one atomic nucleus's width.

It is meaningful to talk about Carissa becoming half as real to her parents as she once was, or her parents becoming half as real to her; he wasn't trying to say otherwise.

It's consistent, coherent, for Carissa to care about how her parents here can't see her again, even if she continues somewhere else and that place also has a copy of her parents.  It's coherent for Carissa to want to be in more places, to be more encounterable from the perspective of other people, for lots of people to meet a Carissa one day.

The weird-to-him part is where Carissa seems to feel like her being encountered by more people in greater reality, makes her more real from her own perspective somehow, and is a selfish good.

From a selfish perspective, Carissa can control the fractions of future universes that she'll encounter, through her decisions - this indeed is what all ordinary decisions do, control the relative realness of the possible futures that continue yourself.  She can't make herself be more or less encounterable to herself from her own perspective.  She can want to experience being in the same universe for longer, and not get isekaied to somewhere else; but that's a question of which possible futures containing herself are relatively more real compared to each other, not the percentage of existence she holds within larger reality.

...on a personal level, he doesn't really want Carissa to update about this, because if she wasn't trying to copy herself over as much of the multiverse as possible and never ever get isekaied the hard way, she wouldn't really feel like Carissa any more.  He's not even, really, arguing with her about it.  It's just weird.  (In the sense that it's a long sentence from the standpoint of somebody who thinks about reality using a language with a simple correspondence to reality's native structure.  Or in the sense that most human beings who grew up knowing from the start how reality worked, probably would not shake out their initially incoherent emotions in a way that attached great selfish importance to a fact that's impossible to measure or experience from inside yourself: the fact of how often you are observed by other observers within a greater Reality.)

Carissa honestly doesn't distinguish, really, in her head, between selfish goods and unselfish goods. There's just the whole long list of things she wants, some of which she'll notice having gotten and some of which she won't. Her desires about other universes all feel like the same kind of desire, to her: she hopes, for each universe, that the universe is rich and interesting and populous and has interesting magic and that the people get to do cool things and that one of the people is her. It doesn't feel different than wishing the universe isn't a Hell, which she imagines is in Keltham's values.

That Carissa Sevar, the girlfriend he ran into after losing most of his realityfluid inside of dath ilan and ending up somewhere else, desperately wants to be everywhere in Reality even if some of those instantiations are awful, is one of the more probabilistically-suspicious facts about this entire situation.  It's the sort of thing that would be true if something at a higher/lower level of Reality was trying to be ethical about which people it created - or rather lent additional realityfluid.  It might pick a kind of person who would totally want to be more-instantiated almost anywhere, even in a place as awful as Golarion.

He is, in fact, kind of horrified about this.  Relatively far more people will give permission to be instantiated in nice places, meaning those places don't have Carissae because they don't need Carissae in particular.  The places that get Carissae rather than other interesting people, will be places where only Carissae give permission to make them emissaries or recipients-of-reality, to fix those broken places; where most sane, sensible beings would not feel so grateful for being forcibly volunteered for it.

It's not exactly a very pleasant fate to call down on yourself... from his perspective.

From Carissa's perspective, he expects, she thinks that's a great fate to call down on yourself, because you get to exist so much more that way, and it's okay if a lot of those places are on fire.

But it's one more way that it's incredibly incredibly suspicious that he met her.

That had also occurred to her. She in fact concluded that if this means lots of people make lots and lots of Carissae to enslave or torture or whatever, because this is more ethical than doing it to other people, then this is an enormous win. All of their universes will have Carissa Sevar. After realizing this, she explicitly said aloud to the powers that be 'I want you to make copies of me, you have my permission to do that' in case the powers that be happen to care.  If she had the time she'd write up a more detailed set of instructions to persons considering instantiating her, but she's busy.

She'd previously thought that Nethys/Snack Service/that faction arranged for Keltham to land on her, but she now thinks this can't be correct because that would constitute a threat-by-proxy. Keltham is more prepared to shred himself and become a god and try to blow up the universe because he landed on Cheliax and they fucked with him. If they got to pick Keltham's landing spot, they should have picked a landing spot that didn't look like it'd bias him towards destroying the world.

So some other force chose his landing spot, and they need to know what it is because they need to know if it was making a threat. Well, she wants to know that; Keltham, presumably, wouldn't act any differently if he knew he was a threat and Pharasma was going to ignore him.

If Carissa has persuaded a lot of universes to put her in them, and is particularly popular with universes that use some rule like "you can make any people who on reflection want to be there", then maybe most Carissae are in those universes, and this universe only has people who on reflection want to be here.  (This would imply that Keltham shouldn't blow it up.) 

The pattern that seems to him obviously correct for a discussion like this one - as is also dath ilan's pattern for how Very Serious People discuss Very Serious Matters, but it looks to him like he can derive it from principle easily enough - would involve identifying importantly different ways reality could be, that matter to their morals, such that there is some hope of resolving those by observation or further argument.  And then make predictions and then run the experiment, especially if it's a cheap experiment.

If a paving stone in Hell wants to go on existing even there, and would rather not be isekaied if that meant existing in fewer places or becoming less encounterable, that is in fact a crux for him.  Whether it is true about the paving stone 'on reflection' might matter to him differently, depending on how much reflection was required, and how loudly the paving stone would yell to ignore this reflection and please kill them because they're hurting.

In principle they could Wishnap a paving stone from Hell and use Detect Thoughts on it and try to ask it questions, and hope the paving stone is in good enough shape to have recognizable thoughts in reaction to words, if not, maybe, to talk.  There are obstacles and costs to doing this; first he wonders what Carissa predicts of it, whether paving stones in Hell will prove to have the surprising-to-him property of accepting horrible futures if that's the cost of more people in Reality being able to meet the paving stone.

Golarion is definitely, observably, not run on the principle that everyone in it, at every time they might be asked, wants to exist there; she has met people who don't. There are more complicated things that could be true of it that, by Carissa's values, would constitute a strong argument against destroying it: for example, if everyone looked at the distribution of outcomes in Golarion before being instantiated there and agreed to take their chances on it, even if they dislike the actual outcome they got. Or maybe they'll find a way to fix Hell and find in ten thousand years everyone will agree existing now is worth the time they spent as a paving stone. 

The surprising not-impossible thing they could learn, of paving stones, is that there's actually nothing it's like to be a paving stone; that Asmodeus has hidden that because of the beneficial effects seeing the paving stones has on non-paving-stones. It's on the wall, but she doesn't consider it very likely. 

The other thing that could be true, but that would be hard for them to observe, is that most of Reality that continues on from paving stones is worse for them than Hell.  He mostly expects this is not the case; but that touches on different large issues.

He has not previously scried Hell, asked any questions about Hell's internal details more complicated than he got from his unfortunate previous Vision of Hell, in case his doing so would lend additional reality to the targets of his scry or inquiry.  Possibly this egg has already broken, if Carissa has journeyed into Hell, and talked with damned souls in ways that depend on the details of their torment, or worse looked inside their minds.  Mid-Keltham would have asked her and bargained with her not to do that, if he'd seen it coming.

Carissa has ventured into Hell, and interacted with the devils there, though mostly not with the paving stones or the petitioners. Her past self would have required a lot to be bargained out of that. The suffering of some ten or a hundred people, in the world where she causes it by visiting Hell again, seems much less important than them having slightly more accurate information and more resources, or Asmodeus having slightly less cause for suspicion, or where they gain whatever they gain by negotiating with Dispater and Erecura. 

On Carissa's mainline assumptions as he understands them, that's a valid derivation; the suffering of one paving stone is a small weight compared to all of Pharasma's Creation.

This is true only if everything in Pharasma's Creation is as real as it seems, rather than it being almost entirely unreal, and becoming real when a viewpoint character needs to look at it.

On that alternate premise:  Looking into the thoughts of one entity undergoing extreme suffering, whose history would then need to have been extrapolated inside the putative Storywise Simulation of Golarion that they're inside, is a significant cost.

(They are otherwise inside a Non-Storywise Nonmagical Simulation of Magical Physics - high-probability not one that "Pharasma" created, She is not powerful enough for that.  This again touches on other large issues.)

Carissa doesn’t think it makes sense to care very much about harms inside the world where very few people are real, unless you are overwhelmingly confident that’s the world you’re in. The world with trillions of people in it is just trillions of times more important, and as a result you should virtually always be doing things that make sense in that world; it would have to be an exceptionally unusual situation where something had trillions of times the effect in the world where most people weren’t real. Extrapolating the life of one suffering person seems very bad, but not anywhere near bad enough she’d trade it against even an infinitesimal cost in the world where trillions of lives are at stake.

Depends on priors (as this is locally unobservable) for the amount of total reality (in the sense of a fraction of total realness of Existence) that you think is invested in the realities across those two hypothetical cases.  You can't get moral worth / utility just by comparing the numbers of real people across the twin cases - that rule would say to value tiny quantum outcomes as much as large quantum outcomes in your future, since the people-count would be the same in both cases.

Dath ilan ran on simple physics, and had no visible storylike attributes or signs of past intervention by extrauniversal beings.  Finding yourself in dath ilan or a planet similar to it, it makes sense to expect that almost all of your reality comes from the underlying mathematical structure of physics being faithfully implemented; on simplicity priors, almost all of your reality comes from worlds where the other people visible are as visible as you, and those worlds are getting a lot of realness (as a fraction of all existence) that way.

There's a possible Pharasma's Creation where everybody is real and he and Carissa are only a tiny fraction of that realness.  There's a possible Golarion where he, Carissa, and the other Project Lawful researchers are the main real people.  There's a possible Golarion where the viewpoint shifted off himself and Carissa when their INT went too high, and Pilar Pineda is now the viewpoint character.

He is mostly at this point planning across the Everyone Equally Real version of Creation: because the people there are hurting more and more in need of rescue; because he assigns majority probability to that world being the case; because there is not much he really values that he can achieve for himself selfishly, now, in the Storylike Golarion.

It's not particularly clear to him that the Everyone Equally Real universe gets a larger dollop of total realityfluid summed over all the people, across all the realities where something like that exists, compared to the Storylike Golarions.  Pharasma's Creation has more complicated physics and is also more storylike, maybe especially in their own version; it may be that most situations like theirs exist inside generalized stories, rather than because something happens to be running physics like that and gets selected to host a story.

He doesn't want to be an idiot, by making a paving stone's horrible life and past much more real, in the event that storylike continua are where most of the realityfluid resides.

Storylike Golarions where peoples’ realness varies with how much Keltham or Carissa are paying attention to them should be a very tiny fraction of all storylike Golarions. 

This is of course going to be very difficult to test, but Carissa thinks that the strongest argument that many Golarions run on stories is that there are a lot of extraordinary stories in Golarion, to the point where it’s something people have a concept for, the meteoric ascension and/or downfall of epic heroes. It makes her envision some kind of setup where there’s a baseline physics Golarion and then a lot more realityfluid in individual extraordinary stories and circumstances, where more people are paying attention or playing out minor variations. For most possible creators or audience who’d make this story, most stories they would tell in Golarion would not be this story, and would instead be, say, Nex’s story or Arazni’s story or Aroden’s story or Iomedae’s story or Cyprian’s story or Tar-Baphon’s story or Abrogail’s story or the story of many other people who’ve led classically storylike and compelling lives; even if Carissa and Keltham are as appealing a story as any individual among the great names of history, which she doubts, there are thousands such. 

Creators would probably reuse resources across stories, so you’d expect that the default outcome of looking for a person would be their being temporarily copied from a different Golarion, which increases that person’s realityfluid but not very much because this story does not, in how many implausible events shuffled them here, seem likely to Carissa to be one that has a lot of realityfluid.

Point 0 - Not directly disagreeing with anything Carissa thought, but reviewing background as he knows it, since their synchronization is recursing to this depth where it's relevant:
   - If you compute a simulation of something using more sophisticated programming techniques than their Magical Simulation of Magic can support, it should be easy to seamlessly simulate a universe that's computed in only as much detail in every global part as is required to attain some specified accuracy level in the local details as seen from a viewpoint.
   - The key thing is not the commonness of simulations, but the total amounts of realityfluid in them, or in particular parts of them.  If a uniformly-distributed-realityfluid simulation of Golarion has much more realityfluid than a variably-detailed simulation, the uniform simulation will be correspondingly more expensive to simulating Entities, and they'll create fewer simulations like that.  The key question is not so much 'Are uniform simulations or locally-weighted simulations more common?' as 'How much realityfluid in total do higher Entities want to invest in all uniform simulations, versus all locally-weighted ones?'

Point 1 - They're coming in with different intuitive priors as to what a story should look like.
   - Nex/Arazni/Aroden/Iomedae don't look like dath ilani stories, and they don't look like an eroLARP in particular.
   - If Iomedae's story involved isekaied entities from outside Creation, or multiple romantic prospects each with distinct special abilities, or asexuals who watch it all, Golarion history has omitted the fact.
   - Nex and Geb, so far as he knows, were not obviously having a romance at all.  Or, if they were having a blackrom relationship, they didn't obviously have anthropically unshareable updates on their self-obsevation of isekai immortality to explain away their persistent disagreement, which is very much the sort of plot development you find in dath ilani romances and not in Golarion romances.
   - The story of Keltham and Carissa appears to have been written for somebody with an ilani-style knowledge background, or maybe a mating of his and Carissa's mortal knowledge backgrounds.  The story of Nex and Geb doesn't obviously share this feature, as might indicate optimization for trans-Creational artistic properties.

Point 2 - If he fails to destroy/modify this whole universe, it's then much more plausible that his story was only one story among many, compared to the case if he does destroy/modify this whole universe.  If everything goes as he plans, he will be sorta standout among people with an impact who had important stories.

Point 3 - Even if Nex and Geb were relatively real, it doesn't imply the paving stones in Hell are real before Carissa or some other viewpoint character casts Detect Thoughts on them.  The high-resolution viewpoint might look only at Nex and his surroundings (especially as spread around by Detect Thoughts) rather than simulating everyone in equal detail.  There might not exist a precomputed high-resolution Hell-tormented paving stone that would be exactly and realistically the one that Carissa or himself would find, especially given that the two of them at INT 29 would notice anomalies in the origin date or average life of such a paving stone.

It is true that all of the stories Carissa knows of are Golarion sorts of stories not dath ilan sorts of stories. She doesn’t think that’s an argument this story has more realityfluid than those stories, but it is certainly a difference in their character. 

She does think that if they’re in a story then probably Keltham will fail tragically and get squished, changing nothing. It’s what would happen in every kind of story she’s ever heard of. (Actually, she thinks if they’re in a story they’re in a failed timeline which will be glimpsed by the successful Carissa and Keltham at some point.)

It seems like another reason to operate on the assumption things are governed by causality and not narrative satisfyingness. If things are governed by causality, they don’t actually look hopeless to her; maybe the thing Snack Service is planning will succeed. 

A dath ilani story wouldn't balk at letting him or Carissa change Pharasma's Creation, so yes, they're coming in with different story-priors.  The key question is what tropes the Higher Entities use.

Sending somebody in from entirely outside Creation, into a story with tropes made of both his culture and Carissa's culture - his best guess as to why the narrative does not quite feel dath ilani - seems like the kind of event that might betoken more involvement by Entities who could dispense variable-realityfluid at all.

That said, his current guess is that the existence of Pharasma's Creation predates this present interference.  Golarion does not quite look shaped by the same pattern that designed their story.  That's why he's spending so much effort trying to destroy-modify this world.  He's just not confident enough in that belief to risk creating (infusing with retroactive reality) a paving stone who'll be one of only twenty real people who needed minds detailed enough to pass telepathic inspection.

Events here, especially after the breaking of prophecy, plausibly-to-him were proceeding without tropish improbability at all.  That could itself be a literary artifice, the story of somebody in a tropish situation who came to a world that previously had been running on its own logic.  But his own guess is that he, or rather, his story, is an emissary sent to Creation from Outside and to some degree Above.

Background:  Unless something even stranger is going on, there are Entities at a much higher level than Pharasma, Entities with INT very very far above Hers, who operate a larger continuum within which Pharasma's Creation is one small bubble.  Much of what seemed puzzling about dath ilan, he has now realized, is explained by the following key point: anybody with a computer and a bunch of Keeper-suppressed knowledge about how to construct actually efficient agents, could unleash an unstoppable horror that would eat Pharasma and Her fellow Outer Gods like so many grapes.  Given that Pharasma is still around, She and Her Creation and the rest of the Outer Gods are presumably inside a zoo-like preserve laid down by Higher Entities, a zoo within which genuinely scary things can't exist.

Dath ilan doesn't have any protection like that, so they're twisted up into a weird shape so that they can research making a controllable ultrasmart thing or possibly heritage-engineer smarter children to research it.  He's much more confident about the dath ilan statements than any of his Golarion-guesses.  Dath ilan is much simpler and straightforward and known to him, and at INT 29 the shape of the evidence he has about dath ilan is completely straightforward.  Dath ilan looks exactly like it should look, if it's secretly believed that anybody with a sufficient combination of computing power and exfohazardous knowledge could destroy dath ilan and surrounding galaxies.

He has complicated guesses about why Entities paying the Creation-containing Entities to send a storylike event into Pharasma's Creation, might pay to make that event storylike; or why the Entities operating the level above Pharasma's Creation, might charge less to accept an intervention if it was storylike; but this they should probably not fully recurse on and should do more breadth-first exploration, like if Carissa has any questions about what he just thought about dath ilan.

As a conclusion about dath ilan, it makes sense, and makes sense of her own instinct that dath ilan, for all its wealth, isn’t right, isn’t nice in the ways it should be nice or safe in the ways it should be safe, that it is maybe in the stage of growing up but certainly isn’t what a civilization would hope to grow up to be. 

One of the side notes on her wall, a line of inquiry that she didn't expect to be crucial but that had an off chance of being so, asked: what is the nature of gods, what is the dividing line between godhood and mere incredibly excessive power and intelligence? 

There is a dividing line; no one names Nex, or Tar-Baphon, or Baba Yaga, a god, even though they are plainly in many respects constrained only as the gods are constrained. They don't pick clerics. That's the answer her textbook would give. 

All of her speculation here was tentative; it is a matter where little is known, and the process that selected what was known isn't a trustworthy one. But her best guess had been that the gods were on the other side of a divide that she can plainly see looming ahead of her, now. 

If you are a sufficiently muddled sort of mind, getting more intelligent changes your priorities; it is very nearly impossible for a muddled mind to deliberately get more intelligent in a way that doesn't have that effect. It was part of the problem she was trying to solve, for Aspexia Rugatonn, when she was an Asmodean, and look how well that went. Under most circumstances, then, a mind that cares about its current values shouldn't consent to a procedure that changes the mind and predictably changes the values. She predicts if she asked Aspexia Rugatonn if she wanted all her stats Wished up by five, Aspexia'd in fact be at least somewhat reluctant. 

So until you have figured out how to change yourself while preserving what you care about, there is a large class of possible self-modifications that would be obvious unambiguous good ideas if you knew how to stably preserve yourself through them, and that are equally obviously a terrible idea if you don't. A mind that figured out that thing would make all of those changes, go into the place in the space of all possible minds that that collection of modifications takes you towards. A mind that hasn't figured out that thing is going to be stuck, unable to verify its own integrity across various modifications. 

It's not that hard for a coherent mind to preserve its own preferences through self-modification, unless he's missed something.  It might have taken him a while to work out the math at INT 18, and if he was starting from Golarion's math background instead of dath ilan's, it might have seemed like a huge deal.  But at INT 29 the logical structure for an unbounded already-coherent agent amplifying while staying coherent looks straightforward: here it is.  It doesn't fully solve the problem for Carissa, because she's not already a coherent agent nor unbounded; but knowing it may help in practice too, much like knowing the formal Law of Inverse Probability can help in informally weighing evidence.

When you're not a coherent agent - when the decisions you'd make at different times and in different states of mind step on each other's toes and defeat each other - any choice you make to become Something Else Which Is Not That, means that you will act differently, under some circumstances, than you would have before.  It's in this sense that for an incoherent thing to become coherent must seem, from its own perspective, like reshaping itself to do unnatural things at least sometimes.  But that only happens when the 'natural' behavior is in some way stepping on itself; otherwise you could act the same way as a greater intelligence.  Indeed, you could just do similarly as a greater intelligence, in a few special places, so long as you weren't doing it all the time or in a way that burned all of your resources.

It's strange to imagine that obstacle blocking Nex from becoming a god - that Nex couldn't see any trustworthy pathway to further improve his own intelligence and stay Nex, even with decades to work on it - that Nex turned back from that possibility and feared it.  Still, he supposes he can imagine it being possible for a very smart Golarion native to get stuck on the problem?

However, another plausible barrier is Nex's concern about being squished by Achaekek, while prophecy was still running.  That Nex was powerful might be exactly why the ancient gods wouldn't assent to Nex taking divinity, and Nex could have known that.

He expects he'll have to become a god in order to rig Pharasma's Creation for destruction.  He has already reshaped himself in somewhat of the way that past-Carissa saw and worried about.  He has begun readying himself for imminent godhood, giving himself a shape that can be stable, not fighting against itself.  He has crystallized his mind into something that knows itself in detail and operates itself in detail, that has designated internal resolutions to its internal conflicts.

His conflicting desires have been reified into something closer to a utility function, with multiple subfunctions attaching simply-summable opposed weights, in place of internal conflict.

It's one of several ways in which he's prioritized 'doing something about Creation' over 'being faithful to the original pattern of Keltham or humanity'.  The more he starts with a coherent utility function, he suspects, the more he'll get to keep that coherent utility function when he ascends, instead of the Starstone choosing a utility function for him in the process of granting him divinity and divine domains.  He is worried that becoming a god is an unnatural form of enhancement that imposes extra constraints.

Carissa is pretty sure that all the parts of her which aren't "people shouldn't all be murdered" have in fact been incoherent across self-modification, not because she can't see in principle how an agent could be coherent but because she in fact isn't; she thinks there's a way to incorporate this insight into Sevarism but isn't necessarily going to straighten out the rest of it because, in fact, 'people shouldn't all be murdered' is enough to be getting on with for most of her purposes. Maybe she'll spend five minutes on it later, see if it's simpler than it looks from here.  

Backtracking to the previous topic, if she’s not misunderstanding him, Keltham was hypothesizing that there’s something strange about the fact godhood is a well on the other side of that line, instead of entities with the ability to modify and improve themselves continuing to do so and use their improvements to amass more resources to use for more improvements.  

She doesn’t think that theory requires some higher entities above Pharasma and her ilk; they can just, themselves, be competent to squish baby things that will grow up to eat them, and in fact Otolmens and entities like her seem to have precisely that remit and fairly extraordinary powers to deploy in pursuing it. 

Numeria is in a bubble, after all. 

Cached thoughts adapted from dath ilan's analysis of the Great Silence / absence of visible aliens in dath ilan:  Given the existence of FTL travel via Interplanetary Teleport and the absence of much of a visible local speed limit, if it's possible to become Something Bigger that can tear through Pharasma and absorb the resources of Her Creation, and that happens anywhere in the larger playground that embeds Creation and has Outer Gods elsewhere inside it, Pharasma and all the other Outer Gods would quickly fall.

Pharasma is still here, so:

Possibility 1:  Some higher force protects Her; near-equivalently, some Enitity wrote the complicated laws of their Higher Creation such that it wasn't possible for anything inside to become dangerous.

Possibility 2:  Pharasma or at least one Outer God holds sway over every part of the Larger Universe that embeds Creation; they have uniformly agreed not to become any more dangerous than each other; they uniformly squish everything within the Larger Universe that tries to become more dangerous before it can actually get powerful.

2's premise of uniform cooperation doesn't well-match what surface-appearances he has been able to gather about Outer Gods; the Outer Gods don't seem to be running in a state of careful uniform cooperative action with Pharasma.  Rovagug required action from Pharasma to suppress, and would probably become a bigger scarier more dangerous thing if It could do that.

(He suspects based on his early research attempts into Outer Stuff that there's some sort of Outer Thing sealed beneath Cheliax's Whisperwood.  He was thinking of unsealing that, at some point, for additional observations/experiments to bear on open questions in this vicinity.)

Carissa suspects that’s the kind of action that causes Otolmens to look at you more carefully and then immediately squish you. (It’s actually slightly surprising to Carissa that this has not happened already.)

Multiple hypotheses there, primarily that ancient gods in general and possibly Otolmens in particular have a lot of trouble decoding mind-states of embodied mortals (as would be trivial to an Actually Scary Thing).  To surface appearances, absent complicated immersive divine deceptions, Golarion is a world where Outer cultists and Rovagug cultists can exist and gain cleric powers - and this was true even before prophecy was shattered.  This implies weird things in general about to what degree the ancient gods / Pharasma-aligned entities can see well and intervene cheaply.

His current precautions include Mind Blank as much of the time as he can manage, and having negotiated with Otolmens via Lrilatha about Doombase screening if he agreed to return to the Ostenso region.

He'd try to make the Outer Thing's release look like an unrelated accident that he was responding to helpfully, at least so far as surface glances of gods could tell about the surrounding situation.

Carissa’s theory of why there are Rovagug cultists is that they don’t matter to the gods and the cultists mostly rederive it independently so stamping them out wouldn’t keep them gone, though it’s definitely also the case that the gods have a hard time interpreting mortal minds, and have a hard time in general seeing what’s going on now that prophecy is broken. 

Osirion, of course, has a prediction market on the odds he’s trying to let Rovagug out, and the gods can see that. His primary advantage is that he’s a first-circle wizard and everyone knows first circle wizards who want to destroy the world can’t actually do it; the first time he demonstrates any genuinely unprecedented capabilities he loses that. 

What specifically would he be trying to learn from unleashing an Outer Thing and can they just ask it of Erecura?

Foremost he wants to try communicating!  Like by tapping out sequences of primes and so on.  There's standard dath ilani ideas about How to Open Communications with Aliens, which plausibly nobody in Golarion would have tried with Outer Things after Tongues failed to work.  If he can establish communications, an Outer Thing might know all kinds of relevant stuff that Pharasma-aligned entities don't want to tell them.

Failing that, if he at INT 29 / WIS 27 and with his greater background knowledge of alien possibilities via dath ilani extrapolation, is still as horrified by the Outer Thing as other observers report being horrified by Outer Things, maybe he'd update further about Pharasma being a relatively nice Medium-Sized Entity who ought to be kept around despite the Hell business.

That’s a pretty tantalizing possibility, though obviously he doesn’t expect to update in that fashion or they could skip the step with unleashing any Outer Things. She doesn’t actually see why he doesn’t believe already that Pharasma is a relatively nice Medium-Sized Entity; she believes that.

Nice by his definition of nice.

(His thoughts attempt to shut down several distracting non-optimally-conversation-steering side thoughts about Hell's tolerability and Carissa's earlier thought that Carissan Lawful Good societies would keep slaves.)

Carissa thinks that, well, mostly people go to Hell because of the awful things they do to other, weaker, worse-off people, and that really does look like human values, or something like them, were a substantial input into the afterlife system. Not the only input, but human values probably have something like 90% overlap with the actual system. Most people think it’s right and just that bad people go to Hell. Carissa doesn’t especially agree with them, but the thing Pharasma is doing is recognizably in most of its details in the space of things humans might do, and you wouldn’t necessarily expect that from things done by a bizarre and distant alien. 

Keltham has perhaps by now read about how war is practiced between nations in Golarion, though he won’t have seen it firsthand. Armies march through farmland claimed by the enemy faction, killing everyone who resists, taking all their food and leaving those they do not kill to starve, raping women, taking slaves, slaughtering children. Ordinary people are called up to serve in those armies; ordinary people do those acts, because they can, because everyone else is doing it. 

That’s not what Chelish armies do because someone engineered Cheliax that way; that’s what ordinary Taldane or Qadiran armies do, in the ordinary course of war. 

The worst half of those soldiers will go to Hell, and while Carissa thinks that Hell should make better use of them, she does think that the assessment that they are Lawful Evil is basically correct, and Axis is reasonable in not wanting to let them in, and a Hell which was merely a place full of people like them would be awful. 

By some estimates she dug up while she was doing research for her wall, one in ten people is a slaveowner. It’s higher in Cheliax, of course, which wants everyone to be a slaveowner to damn them, but across history the best estimate is that it’s one in ten. Not all of those go to Hell, but they sure do go a way towards explaining why about one in ten people go to Hell.

(Carissa’s family owns slaves. The staff at the villa the first few days, before Otolmens picked Broom and they realized it was a vulnerability, were all slaves, if Keltham hadn’t figured that out. The fire elementals who heat the water are slaves. They didn’t realize right away that they should hide from Keltham things like how people enjoy gladiatorial contests and public executions, because that’s true in Taldor too.)

That is, to her, the fundamental expression of who Pharasma is and what Pharasma wants: people go to an afterlife that reflects the choices they made in life, and that afterlife is good or bad depending on whether the choices they made in life were conducive to good worlds or bad ones. 

You can disagree with that, of course, but nothing about it feels especially inhuman. In-ilani, maybe, but not inhuman. 

Past-Keltham was placed somewhere that he would, in fact, get to know some damned people: kids his own age, with a much much poorer education, who wouldn't have qualified for most dath ilani adulthood tests.  How they ended up damned:  They were dragged into a banquet hall and told to sell their souls to devils.  After being raised to believe, whether it was truth or lie, that if they refused they'd die and go to Hell right away and have a worse time of it.  On account of how they'd earlier gone along with being forced to cast Acid Splash on their classmates, and later on prisoners and orphans.  Also their minds were being read for signs of disloyalty, forbidding them to actually think about their situation.

He's aware that past-Keltham may have been placed someplace where he'd be selectively exposed to evidence of the system functioning in that way.  It remains validly signifying evidence that Pharasma's system has a mode for damning people like Ione Sala - who atoned to True Neutral after leaving Cheliax, and ended up natural Neutral Good almost immediately after.  If she hadn't been oracled by Nethys, Ione would have been damned.  Peranza actually did sell her soul and did go to Hell.

Another reason people go to Hell?  Malediction!  An Asmodean priest was using that spell on children too!  Pharasma apparently doesn't give a shit!  At best, it might be a negative weight in Her utility function that She traded to the ancient gods of Evil for something else that She wanted.  A tradeable medium-sized negative utility is not the same as Her really giving a shit.

People he knew personally who might actually deserve preemptive cryosuspension... Abrogail, Aspexia... Maillol and Subirachs, probably... Elias Abarco, apparently.  Possibly Avaricia and some of the second-gen Project researchers.  Even of those, he did not really get to see them doing very much that was Wrong.  Maybe it would feel different if he'd watched Abarco rape Carissa, and then again, maybe it wouldn't.  Thousands of years of torment seems like disproportionate revenge even if you grant the concept of revenge.

Possibly his personal experience is statistically unrepresentative of Creation.  He gets that.  Though he wasn't put in position to witness the very worst, hasn't actually scried in Hell some orphan who got Maledicted because a priest still had that spell at the end of the day.  But sure, he may have been put in position to witness statistically unrepresentative amounts of damnation due to soul-sale.

The thing is, that Pharasma permits Peranza to go to Hell after being forced to sell her soul, or that She traded away the possibility and actuality of children getting Maledicted even if She mildly dispreferred that, is strongly informative about what sort of entity Pharasma actually is.

On a larger scale, he figured out sometime around INT 27 that part of why almost everyone in Cheliax goes to Hell is that their fiat currency is backed by souls, causing everyone's acts of spending money to count as soul-trading.  He's not sure how large a part that is of Chelish universal-damnation protocols - they could ask Erecura or Dispater later, if safe oaths can be established there - but it's some part, given that Cheliax goes to the effort at all.

Cheliax might be a statistically unrepresentative place for Keltham to have landed inside of Creation, receiving a disproportionate amount of effort from Asmodeus because Golarion is where Rovagug is contained or because Golarion is where prophecy is shattered.  But that Cheliax is a possible mode for planets in Pharasma's Creation means that if Pharasma's Creation is allowed to continue, maybe it all goes to Cheliax.  He does not particularly think that Asmodeus has a worse chance of reshaping Creation in His preference than nonancient Iomedae has of saving it.

And then of course there's all the feral kids in the Boneyard - many of whom merely go to the Abyss or Abaddon, of course, but some of whom go to Hell, including the ones who choose Hell at the gates of Abaddon.

Those are some of the defects-from-a-humane-standpoint in who goes to Hell.  There's also the point that eternal, soul-destroying torment is not a human standpoint on deserved revenge even if somebody did terrible things in life and even if you legitimate the entire emotion of revenge.

He is aware, at this level of Intelligence, that dath ilan probably has some amount of mortal-Golarion-like horror in its hidden past.  He genuinely does not know how much.  He genuinely does not know the extent to which dath ilan's past was Golarion-without-magic, before dath ilan did heritage-optimization to make it better; or if the people in Golarion have interbred with Evil beings, or had some of their Goodness and Intelligence destroyed by selection pressures over millennia.

But it - really doesn't seem to him - when he looks inside himself, for emotions buried under culture, that would have evolved in him - it doesn't seem to him, if he felt really angry at somebody, angry enough to want to hurt them even if nothing good would come of that, that he'd want to hurt them forever and ever until they turned into paving stones, forgot their names and the hurt they'd dealt to him, and then go on hurting them.  Humanoids evolving from before civilization started, before farming started, shouldn't want to levy unbounded punishments on each other for bounded misdeeds, that's not where the evolutionarily stable strategy should settle.

Hell - doesn't seem to him like a concept - that human beings would invent for themselves from scratch - if they didn't grow up in Golarion, thinking of it as part of the way-things-are.

He's not sure.  It's a guess that could be wrong in a same direction that he's been wrong before.

It's not really a crux, none of this is a crux - he should warn her, before this line of thought continues for too long - because at INT 27 he lost his ability to think of Evil humans in Golarion as anything but bigger Boneyard children.  He was trying to hold onto his sense of people in Golarion as having their own virtues and strengths, who were experienced emergency responders even if they couldn't pass 13-year-old adulthood tests, who had their own plans and purposes even if they were INT 10 or INT 8.  He tried to keep hold of that sense, he really did.  He lost his last grasp on it after he put on the artifact headband.

That people in Golarion damn themselves is the final proof of their innocence, in a way.  Why think that they really understand the pain they deal to others, any more than their mind can successfully span time to understand the pain they're bringing upon themselves in the future?  The future isn't really real to them, and that's why they destroy it.

It doesn't really bother Carissa that the soul trade counts as Evil. It does seem like probably something happened where - say that Pharasma’s conception of Good and Evil is 99% the same as a human conception of those things, that doesn’t mean that the world will end up 99% as good as if She’d gotten it right, because Asmodeus can deliberately identify the places where human values and Pharasmin values aren’t quite the same, and try to build a society that leverages those to make humans be Pharasmin-Evil without being human-evil. 

Though mostly Cheliax just makes people normal human evil. Keltham’s Ostenso wizards are younger than Carissa; they haven’t, yet, had Worldwound assignments where they mindread and report defectors, or are allowed to punish misbehavior by their own inferiors. 

Carissa isn’t sure that being muddled means you can’t be meaningfully evil, can’t meaningfully deserve punishment. She…. agrees that you don’t deserve torture for the rest of the lifetime of the universe, at least not if it’s feasible to provide you with something better than that. 

And she agrees that they do, after all, have to end Hell, if it can be done without having the whole universe gobbled up by Outer Gods or something worse. She doesn’t feel urgency about doing it. They could build a Civilizaton that will have better ideas about how to do it, and she’d be satisfied with that. But she agrees, in the end, that it has to be done.

One of his guesses about Pharasma is that - since She seems plausibly loosely inspired by some humane civilization's concepts of good and evil - somebody tried to build a Medium-Sized Entity and failed.  That scenario in distorted mortal-story-form could sound like "Pharasma is the last Survivor of a previous universe" (that in fact Pharasma ate, because the previous universe wasn't optimal under Her alien values and she wanted to replace it).

Possibly there was some previous universe in which trading of souls was almost always evil, and the people there were punished with prison sentences - obviously dath ilan would never set it up that way, but having seen Golarion, he can imagine some other universe working like that.

Then Pharasma was built, and learned from some sort of data or training or something, a concept of "punishing evildoers" as defined by "written rules" by "sending them to a place they don't like".  And then, uncaringly-of-original-rationales-and-purposes, instantiated something sort of like that, in a system which classified soul trading as unconditionally "Evil" across all places and times and intents; and punished that by sending people to Hell.

Which entities like Asmodeus could then exploit to get basically innocent people into Hell through acts that they didn't mean to hurt anyone, and didn't understand for Evil.

This, as Carissa observed less formally, is simply what you'd expect to follow from the principle of systematic-divergences-when-optimizing-over-proxy-measures.  Maybe in some original universe where soul-trading wasn't a proxy measurement of Evil and nobody was optimizing for things to get classified as Evil or not-Evil, soul-trading was almost uniformly 'actually evil as intutively originally defined'.  As soon as you establish soul-trading as a proxy of evil, and something like Asmodeus starts optimizing around that to make measurements come out as maximally 'Evil', it's going to produce high 'Evilness' measurements via gotchas like soul-backed currency, that are systematically overestimates of 'actual evilness as intuitively originally defined'.

An entity at Pharasma's level could have seen that coming, at Her presumable level of intelligence, when She set those systems in place.  If She didn't head it off, it's because She didn't care about 'actual underlying evilness as intuitively originally defined'.

Allowing Malediction also isn't particularly a symptom of caring a lot about whether only really-evil-in-an-underlying-informal-intuitive-sense people end up in Hell.

Pharasma was maybe inspired by human values, at some point.  Or picked up a distorted thing imperfectly copied off the surface outputs of some humans as Her own terminal values - that She then cared about unconditionally, without dependence on past justifications, or it seeming important to Her that what She had was distorted.

He frankly wishes that She hadn't been, that She'd just been entirely inhuman.  Pharasma is just human-shaped enough to care about hurting people, and go do that, instead of just making weird shapes with Her resources.

If anything, Pharasma stands as an object lesson about why you should never ever try to impart humanlike values to a being of godlike power, unless you're certain you can impart them exactly exactly correctly.

If he was trying to solve Golarion's problems by figuring out at INT 29 how to construct his own Outer God, he'd be constructing that god to solve some particularly narrow problem, and not do anything larger that would require copying over his utilities.  For fear that if he tried to impart over his actual utility function, the transfer might go slightly wrong; which under pressure of optimization would yield outcomes that were systematically far more wrong; and the result would be something like Pharasma and Golarion and Hell.

There's no point in trying to blame Pharasma for anything, nor in assigning much blame to mortal Golarion's boneyard-children.  But somewhere in Pharasma's past may lie some fools who did know some math and really should have known better.  Whatever it was they planned to do, they should have asked themselves, maybe, what would happen if something went slightly wrong.  People in dath ilan ask themselves what happens if something goes slightly wrong with their plans.  That is something they hold themselves responsible about.

That seems like a good opening to contemplate what most of Greater Reality is like, because ‘not quite an exact copy of human values, with problems introduced in the translation’ strikes Carissa as probably an extremely common format out there, if it’s something that humans can do just by making a couple of stupid mistakes. 

That's literally the largest question they could contemplate.  Let's have at it.

He does not actually expect that 'Entities with imperfect copies of the values of the things that tried to build It' are all that common in Greater Reality.  Pharasma, if She arose that way, happened because Her hapless makers lived in a continuum with 'magic' like 'Fox's Cunning' that adds points to 'Intelligence' and 'Wisdom' even if the person casting the 'spell' has 'absolutely no idea what they're really doing or how the spell works'.

In nonmagical continuua like dath ilan, building a Scary Thing has to be done by weaving together raw causality, like in their Magical Simulator of Magic.  This implies that the people making the Scary Thing have to be more knowledgeable about the thing that they're building; more importantly, it implies that, if they messed up, near misses in formal-space would translate into much larger motions across the conceptualspace of the Scary Thing as seen from a mortal viewpoint.

That is, if you try to make something like Pharasma in dath ilan, your design plan probably ends up missing the target on dimensions like 'caring about what happens to living feeling mortals, instead of considering tiny-dolls-shaped-like-mortals equally good and much cheaper', and the cheapest instantiations of things that satisfy Its utility function aren't self-aware qualia-bearing entities.

Pharasma would be the sort of disaster that happened to hasty makers who called on spells to produce lots of 'Intelligence' by surface-simple conceptualmagic means, that hid all the underlying complexity; and also invoked poorly-tested spells to do the actual targeting of the utility function, where those spells themselves were conceptualmagic processes such that their small design flaws corresponded to small movements across conceptualspace.

To put it another way, Pharasma's makers (if this whole guess is correct at all) probably got the equivalent of a misphrased Asmodean compact, whose implementation still bore an overt surface resemblance to their exact wording; rather than a misphrased computer program, which goes off and does something completely weird that isn't close to the original intention of the maker inside the space of conceptual descriptions on the output.  When you screw up a computer program, it doesn't misspell some words, or cook a well-formed tomato stew instead of a carrot stew, it exhibits much weirder behavior than that.

Pharasma should be more the sort of thing that you meet inside an Artificial Magical Continuum that makes 'souls' and 'magic' and 'Wisdom' into short words of the language of that Magical Continuum's conceptualmagic physics, while hiding the tons of actual complexity that must actually exist underneath that API.

And Artificial Magical Continuua like that, he does think, ought to be relatively small segments of reality.  Dath ilan was in a mathematically simple universe with visible reality-amplitudes at the bottom, which is what you'd expect a base-level structure of relative realness to look like.  The Magical Continuum that embeds Pharasma's Creation is presumably in turn embedded in some more mathematically regular universe resting directly above its own underlying realityfluid, and the Magical Continuum is probably only instantiated by some small portion of that Base Physics's realityfluid.  Unless, for example, some Alien Scary Thing took over all of its Base Physics and then decided to use all its resources on simulating a Magical Continuum - which in turn seems like a decision that ought to be relatively rare, because a Simulated Magical Continuum is not massively economically useful in any obvious way, nor will it occupy a maximum of most possible Alien Scary Thing utility functions.

That is to say:  You'd expect most of the realityfluid directed by intelligence, in Greater Reality, to look like it was being directed more by the sort of Large Entities that might have come to exist in a base-level reality like dath ilan's; rather than the sort of Medium-Sized Entities like Pharasma that come to exist in Magical Continuua that get a small share of a Large Entity's resources, or maybe very infrequently a huge share of a Large Entity's resources.

So the question of what Greater Reality looks like is mostly about which sort of Large Entities come into existence in Mathematically Simple Physical Continuua like dath ilan, what desires those have; rather than mortals in Golarion, gods in Creation, or Outer Gods in the Magical Continuum.

Carissa wants to start thinking about Greater Reality by taking a survey of all of the alien races and civilizations known on Golarion; she started some of that work already, because it was obviously going to be useful, but she needs to re-review all of her notes with a bunch of new questions in mind. Her theory is that basically most alien species either evolved, or are copies from versions elsewhere who evolved, or were deliberately bred for intelligence by other intelligent species, and especially the ones who evolved or are copied from versions who evolved are the most useful input they have of what kinds of evolved species you might get, out there in Greater Reality. For each of them, it seems hard but not impossible to extrapolate what kinds of civilization they would build, if they had lots of time independently to build civilization; would they kill outsiders? Trade with them lawfully? Be altruistic towards them? and from there to extrapolate what the distribution of bits of Greater Reality controlled by the descendants of various evolved civilizations would be.

Of course, there will be parts of Greater Reality not controlled by the descendants of evolved civilizations, like Pharasma's Creation. Those will generally be the product of some process that propels something not shaped like the values of the civilization that created it to godhood.

Carissa needs to think more about what kinds of processes will propel things not shaped like the values of the civilization that created them to godhood, but from where she's standing it's not obviously the kind of thing that wouldn't happen without magic. You could just have humans who spend a lot of effort, but not quite enough, teaching their god human values, or humans who ascend themselves but via an ascension process that resolves their muddles slightly badly.

Some of their evidence on how difficult this problem could possibly be, is constrained by the fact that dath ilan is trying to solve it at all (he infers with confidence, based on the shadow of their policy in which ideas were and weren't removed from public discourse), so it can't look too hard.  And they would rather let the planet run for a few decades than try to solve it immediately, so it can't look too easy.

In fact it seems like if a coherent set of values that come from human values is very hard to define, there might be lots of things that are not-quite-right for every thing that is right, even if there are also lots of things that are sufficiently wrong as to not recognizably have anything of value at all in them.

Honestly the thing Carissa is tempted to do next with that is figure out how to build a non-magic god (not do it! just figure out how she would) so she can see what the distribution of tries to do it seem like they'd look like - though also, it seems like while Greater Reality is probably dominated by simple-to-specify universes, those seem disproportionately unlikely to be able to do captures of minds from the specific point of their destruction in other, more complex magical universes.

The set of correct spell diagrams for Prestidigitation is much smaller than the much larger set of ways to configure Prestidigitation that is near-right-but-significantly-wrong; which in turn is tiny inside the much vaster space of ways to configure spell diagrams that aren't Prestidigitation at all.  The much larger space of complete failures doesn't make it impossible to hang Prestidigitation.  Similarly, within the any-success space, the larger proportion of near-right-but-significantly-wrong configurations doesn't mean that most Prestidigitations hung at all are near-right-but-significantly-wrong.

The difficult part, and the reason why dath ilan is running so scared, would be getting things right on your first try .  But it wouldn't be valid to conclude that a first try, conditioned on it not being completely wrong, probably hits near-right-but-significantly-wrong.  If you can do something on your first try and not have it go wildly wrong, that's probably because you've invented systematic methods for targeting and error correction, not because you got lucky enough to miss the wildly-wrong space.  Then the question becomes whether those target-locking-optimization-methods have sufficient narrowing-strength (unit: bits) to hit the center target and not just exclude the space of complete misses, where most of the work, in some sense, goes into excluding the complete misses... he thinks, having not actually observed that computational landscape.  But he has already done some thinking about how many bits it takes to specify the structure and content of a utility function, and the set of errors that give you near-misses versus complete misses.

He does think she's wrong about simple-to-specify universes not being able to mirror and copy minds from more complicated magic universes.  Thought from quantum mechanics:  Realityfluid (in dath ilan) is continuously divisible, and ends up in more and more mostly-separated-worlds-interacting-mostly-internally, exponentially growing in number and exponentially shrinking in individual size, as the greater universe increases in entropy.  You can exploit the exponential subdivision of realityfluid to create 'quantum computations' that can only be calculated using exponentially large numbers of computing elements.

Quantum phenomena in dath ilan can't be exploited to run arbitrary computations over exponential numbers of computing elements, because the motes of quantum realityfluid can't communicate with each other arbitrarily and can't be searched arbitrarily for successful answers.  But quantum computations can compute in polynomial time things that require exponential classical time, like factoring large composite numbers.

No law of reality known to Civilization forbids that a universe with more permissive continuous physics could simulate many many more complicated magical universes, by dividing a bit of reality into very tiny pieces, and using those pieces to mirror a whole complicated magical universe.  The people inside that universe would exist to only a very tiny degree; but even in dath ilan, it's known that you can set up computations that are only real to a very tiny degree, and interact with them to read out their outputs .  There are in fact famous edgelord-philosophical-thought-experiments about whether it's okay to run harmful experiments on people who are clearly visible to you, but who are only real to some tiny degree because they're inside a quantum setup like that.

That said, it's been speculated that the quantum universe is the way it is because of some unknown constraint that weighs against universes whose realityfluid is even more amenable to arbitrary computation via arbitrary divisions; but it's mostly guessed this is an anthropic constraint more than a Reality constraint.

The Higher entities very likely have access to some form of hypercomputation by continuous division of reality, given that they were able to run dath ilan and copy him off it, or that somebody else in the Higher Causal Continuum outside the Simulated Magical Universe was able to do so.

Carissa has a hard time imagining the motives or values of a civilization that would run all possible universes, including universes with Hell in them, at very very minimal realityfluid, in order to take the people in them at the moment of true-death and suddenly give them wildly more reality-fluid, which seems to be the kind of civilization Keltham is hypothesizing. Even the Carissae wouldn't do that and they're very very in favor of making lots and lots of people.

...to him, this seems like a totally obvious thing to do?

Probably dath ilani Civilization is (secretly) planning to do it with a bunch of smaller universes easily contained inside of quantum computers, once Civilization has safely ascended - unless it's more efficient to engage in cross-universe logical negotiations with other universes that will do that instead.

Dath ilan's universe comes with a built-in time limit before the negative energy (not Negative energy, a different kind of negativity) grows too strong and rips everybody apart.  He guesses that the actual reason the Keepers told everybody not to worry about that right now, is because they expect that a few billion years later Future-Civilization will have made some logically binding deals with extrauniversal entities that are sufficiently visible to them - like Entities that started out inside simple but indefinitely continuing physics, which Future-Civilization can accurately simulate well enough to guess which Entities that evolve there will stay Lawful and have a known utility function to trade with; but whose otheruniversal sub-classical-illusion physics permits the possibility that they'll later develop computation powerful enough to simulate dath ilan's greater universe exactly; and give those Entities more of what they want inside of Civilization's realityfluid today, in exchange for them continuing Civilization in their own universe after dath ilan's local universe runs down.

Trading for your people to go on existing elsewhere makes sense. But why take the people in such a pocket-world out at the moment of true-death instead of at literally any other moment? Why let them go on being conscious in Hell but then take them out if Hell is destroyed inside their universe?

If you're nice, you could just take them out sooner; if you're trading, no reasonable person would trade for that.

Carissa would like it very much if other universes made copies of her, but if she goes to Hell and gets tortured a lot and deteriorates she doesn't want the copies to be made from that point! The copies should be made from the point where she is coolest, obviously.

She would be actively quite angry with the copiers who could have copied her from the point where she was coolest and decided to copy out a traumatized shell instead.

No doubt there's Carissae copied over to elsewhere to some tiny degree at every moment!  But if you're copied over to somewhere else at a 2^-41 fraction of your current reality, that mostly doesn't feel like ending up somewhere else.  If you wait until almost all of somebody's reality has been destroyed by a plane crash, and then copy them, that feels to them like they're going somewhere else.

The part where mass numbers of people who die in Golarion end up in Hell instead of getting isekaied, and will have been thoroughly messed up by the time Pharasma's Creation runs out (it may come with a known time limit to the gods, though the stories about it sound very distorted and might just be made up) - that setup is, he's guessing, an unusually bad situation from the perspective of Entities who care about that sort of thing.  Bad in a way where they can't just ordinarily catch mind-states as they fall out of reality, as they would do with a place like dath ilan.  That is, he would guess, part of the story of how Keltham ended up in Golarion on track to destroy it.

That makes sense, but destroying the universe would, then, not isekai people. Keltham experienced showing up somewhere else because he died in approximately every single plane crash across all the dath ilans where his plane crashed. If instead 99% of dath ilans had been instantly destroyed, he would find himself in the dath ilans that were not instantly destroyed.

The experience that the people in Hell will have if Keltham destroys them (treating 'experiences that feel continuous with the current people' as the important thing, which Carissa isn't persuaded of) is of being in Hell, in the nearby universes where Keltham didn't land, or where Otolmens noticed or squished him, or where his plan failed, or where he randomly had a heart attack as does sometimes randomly happen to healthy humans, not often but often enough.

If they want the people currently in Hell to have the experience of the pain ceasing and their lives getting better, they have to do that by fixing Hell; otherwise, overwhelmingly, those peoples' continuity will continue in all the Hells that no one touched.

(Carissa is aware this is also an argument that destroying Heaven probably doesn't give people the experience of waking up in an unknown bit of Greater Reality run by entities that may or may not comprehend the values of the societies that created them, but of going on in the nearest bit of un-destroyed Heaven. This does make her feel a little better about the whole thing but she evaluates that as a confused impulse brought about by trying to pay attention to the wrong features of the universe, ones that in normal circumstances overlap heavily with the thing she cares about but which aren't actually the same.)

Ideally, he'd knock on the afterlives, such as by making a very loud physical or spiritual sound that everyone hears and remembers hearing at least briefly, eg an explosion or a loud trumpet sound.  It's then cheaper for soul-catching Elsewheres to 'rescue' the people that heard the sound, even if Hell otherwise ends fast enough that people don't notice themselves dying.  Though he notes that this is more of an Experiential Thread utility than an Average Fate utility.

(Experiential Thread utility:  Valuing the moment-by-moment trace of what it feels like to be a person, weighted from their reality-measure when they first noticed their own existences.

Average Fate utility:  For every observer-moment in the universe, weighted by its momentary measure, valuing the average experience of all the future observer-moments that remember having been that observer-moment.)

That still seems like there are enough universes in which he succeeds at the trumpet sound but fails at destroying all of reality that she would expect most people who heard such a sound to mostly go into universes where that sound occurred but the universe wasn't immediately destroyed.

Mostly, though, experiential-thread theories of what matters feel like an error to her, they're not what she cares about; she appeals to them only to the degree they describe what Keltham cares about.

(Arguably Keltham should, actually, be interested in what the people he is doing this to care about; she understands that he mostly doesn't have a method he believes is accurate to get that answer by asking them, but it seems like a wrong to, as an experiential-thread sort of entity, go around doing things to someone that are extremely bad under their own theory of what they care about. She agrees that asking people on the street probably wouldn't work well, but possibly asking ascended mortals would?)

He realizes he's updating off evidence fundamentally unshareable with her, but nonetheless notes that from his perspective, when Keltham heard and saw that his plane was about to crash, he ended up in Golarion, not in a complicated fake Exception Handling scenario in which they'd induced that hallucination or faked that setup for Totally Justified Reasons Actually.  There were maybe some worlds like that even within dath ilan, but they were rarer than one in a thousand, rarer than one in a billion, however much rarer they had to be for Golarion to have more realityfluid than that; and Golarion can't have that much realityfluid to start.

If he sets up some of the obvious physical phenomena for destroying Pharasma's Creation, to be remote-detonated from Golarion where prophecy doesn't work; manages to cause some sort of experiential anomaly in Hell or all the afterlives; and then tries to blow up the universe; there may be possible and therefore actual states of reality where that doesn't work, but if they're improbable enough, the people in Hell don't mostly continue in Creation.  Creation can't be all that probable in the first place, though of course that also decreases how much caring Higher Entities are willing to pay to rescue people from Creation or destroy it.  And that's before taking into account the subjective probability that they're inside a privileged story-reality-thread which has much more realityfluid than neighboring nonstories.

He agrees that asking an ascended mortal (who must be Lawful enough to abide by solid secrecy oaths) is a reasonable experiment.  He doubts it swings anything by itself, but it could swing things in combination with other experiments coming out in the direction Carissa hopes or predicts.

Carissa isn't sure, yet, what exactly is the best articulation of her own values here, and doesn't expect it to be a common articulation even among humans who arrive at one. But she's intending to make her system at least satisfy her intuition that it's extremely different whether someone arrives at a high average happiness because they are killed in every universe where they are unusually sad, or because they are made happy in every universe.

Among the barriers to himself just taking Golarion mortals' word for it, is his concern that Golarionites have now been heritage-optimized to not really think about their afterlife-futures.

If you're told that Evil afterlives exist and their existence implies reproductively-suboptimal behavior given your other goals - like, for example, not stealing something you could get away with taking, because you might go to the Abyss; or it being more prudent to donate money to Iomedae's Church, instead of spending that money on dates - then maybe that gets evolved-against.  Civilization was always very worried about scenarios where it looked like smarter, more altruistic people might end up having fewer kids; lest they breed intelligence, altruism, or actually-acting-on-your-philosophy out of themselves.  They went to great lengths to avoid it.

One of his concerns is that Golarionites have been effectively bred not to think about Hell, or not to care about Hell, but in a way that doesn't make Hell hurt any less once they get there.  People in Golarion who think about the near-inevitability of some of their kids going to the Boneyard, who really care about their kids, might decide not to have kids.  And it'd be one thing if people's sanity and intelligence were left intact, but their utilityfunction changed, so that they really and coherently and in a consistent way ended up as a sort of thing that didn't mind the prospect or actuality of Hell.  But it does not look to him like this is what happened in Golarion.  To him it looks more like - people grew up knowing about Hell, and the more coherent people drastically reshaped their lives in reproductively suboptimal ways given that information, and Golarion bred itself against coherent thinking about Hell.

Or it could be that dath ilan bred itself for coherence and Golarion just never got around to it.  He can't reliably guess, at this remove from Golarion and without spending a lot of time tracking down histories of who had how many kids, whether Golarion actively bred against people coherently thinking about their own future, via people learning about Hell, or if dath ilan just heritage-optimized for smarter saner people over a couple of dozen generations before their historical screen.

Carissa, at this level of Intelligence and Wisdom, may rationalize that heritage plus the philosophy she developed from growing up in Cheliax as an Asmodean, into something that is coherent and that really doesn't mind going to Hell.  He doesn't currently predict that most other mortals in Golarion would end up with the same philosophy if they were boosted to the same stats; he predicts that their incoherence would fall away from them and they'd become more actually horrified by Hell and the Boneyard, which would feel much more real to them as their larger minds shrugged off a finite adapted internal pressure against thinking-about-the-future-and-other-people's-future-experiences-as-if-they-were-real. 

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. 

There's a lot of different hypothetical ways to slice up the alien superintelligences that constitute the Powers of Greater Reality; and at this weak level of augmentation he just doesn't have the time or computing power to derive a serious estimate about the real landscape from scratch.  The large thought that follows is properly framed against the magnitude of this difficulty of guessing...

In different universes with different physics, there will be Things that don't develop neuron-analogues as a whole new computation substrate on top of their genes; and instead compute with their equivalent of DNA, and pass memories and skills on to children.

Aliens like that would be very different from dath ilani, or from the Golarionites copied from a common ancestor of their humanity.

Some such species of Things won't transcend by constructing computers from scratch, but by accumulating enough DNA-skills like that over time, or coming up with some adaptation for exchanging DNA-skills horizontally, until in the midst of all those DNA-analogue-bourne skills collected of their species, a greater coherence and reflection is born, and a self-optimization.

A superintelligence born that way would be very very different from dath ilani or Golarionites.

Some possible laws of physics will put much larger subvolumes of reality into causal neighborhoods of each other; compared with how, on a planet, things only touch their immediate neighbors in three dimensions of space.

Some coherent mathematical causal-relations over relative-reality (another way of saying 'laws of physics') will do the equivalent of creating vast numbers of computer programs that immediately start copying and eating each other, or competing for memory, googols of them all touching each other within a confined space; such that a superintelligence is born from those almost immediately, rather than requiring a long time to evolve.

A superintelligence born that way, from a universe like that one, would be very very different from anything that evolved anywhere, or that had been born out of a process itself evolved.

With that warning in mind - that large segments of Greater Reality are probably really alien, much more so than the Outer Gods - one of many many potential theoretical ways to slice up the space of alien superintelligences, might be to talk of three kinds of Entities:

One:  Entities that only care about their own experiences, or realityfluid in their own immediate vicinity of causality/spacetime.

Call these Locally-Caring Entities.

Two:  Entities that care about realityfluid regardless of whether it's in their own vicinity; such that, compared to a baseline of a null-simple or typical-average configuration of realityfluid, their best configuration of that realityfluid gives them a much larger relative positive bonus, than the relative negative loss of the worst possible configuration of that realityfluid.

For concreteness:  Suppose that, compared to the way most realityfluid everywhere they can affect is put together by default, putting it together their best possible way, scores a gain of +100 utilons; and putting it together the worst possible way, loses -1 utilons.

Call these Positively-Caring Entities.

Three:  Entities that care about realityfluid not only in their immediate vicinity; which can lose a lot more from the worst configuration of that realityfluid compared to null/baseline, than they can gain from the best configuration of that realityfluid.

Take a random bit of reality they can affect in any physical or logical way, the way it usually is, and make it the best way a bit of realityfluid can be: they gain +1 utilon over baseline.  Make it the worst way it can be, according to their utility function, and they lose -100 utilons under baseline.

Call these Negatively-Caring Entities.

Considering the imaginable case where Greater Reality degenerated into beings mostly trying to extort and blackmail and threaten and retaliate against each other, doing the worst they could do to one another, spending lots of effort on pessimizing each other's utilityfunctions:

The Locals would defend their own bubbles of reality and not care about anything outside of that;

The Positives would be slightly sad...

...and the Negatives would go to extreme lengths to prevent that possibility from ever materializing.

Then (one might speculate), all of the Negatively-Caring Entities that didn't have very strongly opposing utility functions, and had logical line-of-sight on one another sufficient to engage in binding logical negotiations, would have a potential target of logical coordination that could perhaps be summed up as:  "No pessimizing the utility function of anybody within this coalition."

Of course, any particular Negatively-Caring Entity would only care directly to avoid having its own or similar utility functions pessimized.  But the Entities large enough to extrapolate distant Entities that could in turn extrapolate themselves, might execute a logically binding agreement to act against almost-any utility pessimizer they ran across, even one that wasn't targeting their own utility function, if that pessimizer was targeting a utility function likely to reappear within the coalition.

They would have an incentive, even, to oppose whatever it was that flipped Dou-Bral to Zon-Kuthon; or on a smaller scale, Asmodeus figuring out what mortals like least, and doing that to them.

It's not, in this case, that the mortals are part of the mutually-negotiating coalition.  The mortals don't have logical line-of-sight on the Negative Entities; the mortals cannot Cooperate in a way that is logically dependent upon the Entities Cooperating back.  Possibly even Dou-Bral, as He then existed, would not have possessed the cognitive resource to extrapolate Negative Entities in enough detail that He could have made a logical compact that bound them, chosen to prevent pessimization of their utility functions only if they would do the same for His utility function.

But the mortals have greater nephews, Powers such as dath ilan might have one day birthed, Future-Civilizations elsewhere in Greater Reality; and those Powers predictably have their own utility functions pessimized, to some degree, when Dou-Bral gets flipped to Zon-Kuthon, or Asmodeus tortures mortals.

Even Positively-Skewed+Caring-Entities have an incentive to not allow pessimizers to exist.  They can be hurt too, when realityfluid gets configured the way they like least, if their Positive skew is not total.  But their incentive to wipe pessimizers out of reality is much relatively weaker than it is for Negatively-Skewed+Caring-Entities.

Negatively-Skewed+Caring-Entities will engage in negotiations to remove Zon-Kuthon, or whatever flipped Dou-Bral, from Reality - even if those negotiations incur large uncertainties and inefficiencies.

Before meeting Carissa, past-Keltham would have considered it obvious that human beings are Negatively-Caring Entities, in both their Local and Nonlocal components.  He still thinks most of the people in Golarion would qualify as Negatively-Caring, based on other reading and conversations, and that the unusual woman he landed next to at the Worldwound will prove to be odd about that.

For most people, the very worst thing that can happen to them, or to anyone, is worse than the best thing that can happen is good.

The larger Entity that created the Magical Continuum that contains Pharasma's Creation is Locally-Skewed+Caring, as is Pharasma.  Reasoning:  Pharasma is large enough that She should be able to extrapolate at least some distant Entities that could extrapolate Her, and engage in logically binding negotiations with those.  Golarion does not look like it should look if Pharasma were trading with those distant Entities.

Similarly, if the Larger Entity wasn't Local, It'd have traded with distant Entities in ways that would have visibly shaped the Magical Continuum, and would have imposed constraints on Pharasma's Creation and Golarion.

Wherever they are right now, it's not a trading equilibrium of lots of Entities.  It's something's personal backyard.

Pharasma's Creation, however, is an exceptional pit of horror from the perspective of the Negatively-Caring Coalition.  Mortals don't just live miserable lives and die, they live miserable lives and then get tortured in the afterlife into wrecks that might be hard to rescue-by-continuing-simulation.

Those mortals are not in the class of agents with which Negatively-Caring Entities true-negotiate, execute mutually binding logical arrangements.  But sending mortals to Hell is going to pessimize the utility functions of many particular kinds of Negatively-Caring Entities, like those Entities born of a place like dath ilan.  This is an easy fact for any large Negatively-Caring Entity to extrapolate.

Future-Civilization, when it grows up and can engage in logical negotiations of its own, will not wantonly step on and crush the utility functions of any large Entities with lots of realityfluid, whose utility functions are easy to foresee.  If it's predictable that some foreseeable classes of Entity would hate the imprisonment of mitochondria inside of cells, Future-Civilization will arrange that there are no imprisoned mitochondria.

And in return - it will be logically bargained, and only logically-conditional on that bargain's predictable execution will Future-Civilization make its concessions - in return, Negatively-Caring Entities that run across some event Future-Civilization and its logical kin would hate, will try to prevent that event from happening.

So a Negatively-Caring Entity that happened to be standing next to the Entity operating the Magical Continuum, bargained for something to be done about Pharasma's Creation inside.  Possibly only after Aroden died and some other future remedy was derailed.

That's his basic guess as to what happened, here, what's really going on.

The Entity/Entities that made the Magical Continuum care about it locally and in a weird way.  The Magical Continuum is not being efficient at any ordinary instrumental goal.

The Makers prevent Pharasma and her fellow Outer Gods from being eaten by superintelligences; the little Outer Gods have a garden to play in undisturbed.

Similarly, the Makers probably Locally-Cared about, and optimized for, the Creations of Outer Gods containing many mortals who didn't just get consumed for their resource-value or externally uplifted to technological civilizations.

The Makers could intervene at any point, yet they intervene almost nowhere, their actions almost entirely null.  Just like Pharasma mostly doesn't intervene in her Creation, and the gods mostly don't intervene in Golarion.

It's against this background that the incredible weirdness of Keltham-insertion as an intervention needs to be considered.  A Negatively-Caring Entity with some foreseeable utility function paid for that intervention, on behalf of everything like Future-Civilization that would consider Pharasma's Creation as a really unusually bad place -

(By the standards of Greater Reality, within which, it is to be hoped, most Entities are optimizing their own utility functions, rather than spending lots of their resources on pessimizing other Entities' utility functions. It's not an unreasonable outcome to hope for!  Most Entities have reason to want Greater Reality to end up that way - though the Negatively-Caring Entities have a much stronger reason to want it.)

- but paid as little as possible, of course, for the intervention that would annoy the Makers least, cause them the least loss of utility for which they'd demand compensation.

The Negatively-Caring Entity didn't pay the Makers to send in a superintelligence, nor to send a Keeper to Absalom.  That, presumably, would have been much more contrary to the Makers' Locally-Caring utilityfunction, and demanded a higher price, than dropping Keltham next to Carissa at the Worldwound. 

This theory obviously does not compress all of the evidence available to them that looks like it ought to be compressible.

In particular, Golarion's past weirdness such as might be pleasing to the Makers, seems different in character from the strangeness of past-Keltham landing where he'd end up with multiple romantic prospects.  Though he hasn't been staring too directly at that, himself, because it seems like it might also have been a Cayden Cailean tactic to arrange some of that tropiness; he knew that future-augmented-Carissa would be able to think about that more safely than himself, if it needed thinking about.

But it's an obvious thought that the Negatively-Caring Entity that sent past-Keltham into Golarion might've split the cost with something that had strange preferences about isekai stories, so long as they were arranging an isekai at all... or something.

He does not, in fact, expect to succeed in decoding what actually went on there at his current level of augmentation.

But depending on the size of the Makers' causally-connected local section of their Higher Universe, in terms of how many different Entities are active traders there, there could be something in there that erupted out of a civilization that got stuck in some weird equilibrium where it poured more and more resources into an increasingly sophisticated interactive isekai romance.  Say, because that civilization was even worse than Golarion at handling existential threats like the Worldwound; and the interactive romance novel succeeded in being a romantic superstimulus to the species' members, and was therefore an extremely selfish-profitable investment of computation, and they managed to pour billions of labor-hours into that company, but not into the public good of surviving their own transcendence.  That level of coordination failure would've seemed implausible to him before Golarion, but now he buys that as a plausible dysfunction mode for aliens.

The resulting Entity which ate that civilization, then cared a lot about having isekais look more like romance novels.

(It's more likely that one such Isekai Entity exists within causal contact of the Makers of the Magical Continuum, if there's a lot of Entities in mutual causal contact with the Makers, but this doesn't seem implausible.  The kind of computations the Makers are throwing around do not seem characteristic of three-dimensional space with a tight lightspeed limit.)

The Isekai Entity might care more about 'natural' versions of those events than those it arranged for itself, due to having evolved some earlier taste for the natural, or a prohibition against tickling its own rewards (as its makers might have tried and not-totally-failed to imbue into it).  Or it could be a Negatively-Skewed+Caring-Entity, which made for itself quintillions of the cheapest events it classified as isekais, but would still be very unhappy about any isekai-categorized event occurring anywhere that wasn't a correctly designed romance novel.

The Isekai Entity would of course refuse to pay to modify isekai events that were planned only as threats to itself.  But the original Negative Entity's paid intervention into Golarion would have been an isekai purely of that Negative Entity's own natural interests; it would not have started as an isekai only for purposes of threat.  So the Isekais-Must-Be-Romances-Entity paid to further modify those events - paid a lot, because it wouldn't run across naturally-occurring isekais in need of fixing very often, and would have a lot of generalized money to spend on that.

He realizes it's not a good theory.  He's just keeping it in mind so that he has a probably-false theory he can use to organize his evidence, and at least notice when something contradicts or confirms that theory, rather than leaving his observations wholly unorganized and untheorized.

It's a very Keltham theory. She agrees that it's not a good theory. While it does seem to her like Keltham-related events have a distinct character from the events of Golarion's history, that feels mostly-fully explained by Cayden and Nethys's meddling plus the degree to which a legend out of history gets distorted by the retelling.

She's less sure than Keltham that Greater Reality isn't mostly local, entities creating their own universes that run by their rules. It doesn't seem like a natural thing, after all, to care about things happening in other universes; it feels like resolving a muddle in a particular way where you might expect most people not to. (What's Keltham's theory on why entities would care about things outside themselves, in general, anyway, or at least why humans do it?)

He doesn't stare too hard at Cayden/Nethys, so that's Carissa's future job if it produces relevant factors.  He was trying to reason mainly from Pilar's, Carissa's, and Asmodia's prior improbability in their base characters before any divine meddling started.  He's reasoning from the improbability of Pilar's potential for tropian stories, rather than the Cayden-meddling realization of that potential.

Caring about everything everywhere that matches a pattern is computationally simpler than caring about only things that match the pattern in a particular region of space; also, if you only care about a short time in the future, somebody will trade you a small amount of resources today for all of your resources later, which eliminates you as a lasting Power of Reality.  Or:  Caring about 'experiences' of the 'self' requires defining 'self', and if that definition cuts off all strong growth and self-modification, that entity is again filtered away as a strong Power of Reality.  Or:  Things that get optimized into existence by something like natural selection, which is trying to solve a problem in an environment, may well end up caring about something in the environment; or rather being made up of a muddle that could easily shake out that way for at least some things.  (That's how it happened for humans, leaving out some complexities of reflection-towards-coherence along the way.)

There's nothing forcing an agent to shake out that way, but it is simple to care about every part of reality by running your utilityfunction over its configuration, and if a component of many humans' values lands there, then plausibly so do a bunch of other things' components.

Even if Reality did end as mostly Entities that were mostly Locally-Caring, the non-Local Entities would still trade with each other; trade-optimized regions would then just be a smaller total fraction of Greater Reality's dispensation of its intelligently controlled realityfluid.

Carissa agrees that something probably not-Cayden put Pilar there as well as Carissa; Asmodia feels less suspicious, to Carissa, as a person, Asmodia seems like the kind of person lots of people are. …except that maybe someone had to be a person who'd say to Carissa that they wanted to not exist, so that she could understand that as something a person might actually want for themself and not just want inflicted on others, so that she wouldn't report Keltham to Asmodeus the instant she realized that his plan might destroy the world. 

She understands that natural selection produces muddles which can then shake out in many many ways that aren't what created an advantage in the selected environment, and probably other processes for producing intelligent beings - breeding them deliberately? - would do the same thing. It still seems like there are powerful forces in the direction of caring about yourself and your family and your nation and your species more than you care about all sapients; she expects most evolved creatures not to care about everybody, though tentatively.

Asmodia was oddly adept at learning the more mathematical parts of Law, for somebody to just happen to be in the same class as Pilar.  The second group, sent over when Cheliax assigned the project a higher priority and was trying to allocate smarter people instead of gift-girls, didn't seem to contain another Asmodia.

Lots and lots of evolved things, and probably even more of the Entities that the evolved-beings birth (if they mess it up) would end up not caring about sentient beings at all, whether Locally or Everywhere.  The categorization he's suggesting generalizes beyond caring about sentients, for example:

Suppose some being cares a lot about particular shapes of matter, for example, and prefers matter being curled up in one squiggle shape - a rounded-rectangular spiral pattern say - while greatly wishing that no pattern ever be squiggled up in a hyperbolic spiral.  It might feel no pain or pleasure, no joy or happiness, about the fact; it might just act so as to bring about the rounded-rectangular squiggles, and avoid the hyperbolic spirals.  Or it might feel pain or pleasure internally, as it learns about spirals or squiggles being created, but be indifferent to this as it plots its goals.

From the perspective of the Squiggle-Caring Entity, some other Entity that cares a lot about people having conscious experiences is then just a strange being that cares about some weird and more abstract and complicated pattern that matter can be squiggled into.

Playing out some additional particulars in case the abstract pattern didn't make it across the telepathic gap at the speed they're trying to think at each other:

That Entity would be categorized as Negative-skewed or Positive-skewed in that utterly sentient-uncaring utility function, depending on whether one ill-shaped squiggle pattern cancels out the utility of 100 good squiggles or 0.01 good squiggles.

A Negatively-Skewed Squiggle Entity, whose utility function arose in any way suggesting that this utility function arises more often in Greater Reality than its (Positive) inverse, has incentive to be signatory to a compact whereby the Future of dath ilan's Civilization would spend lots of resources to intervene, if Future-Civilization ran across some smaller thing that also really hated hyperbolic spirals, and some mid-sized Pessimizing Entity was therefore making lots of hyperbolic spirals because it had decided to pessimize the smaller agent's utility (maybe after making a threat that was decision-theoretically-properly refused, and having evolved to be hateful itself).

Future-Civilization wouldn't care about hyperbolic spirals as such, and the smaller thing might not be a kind of being that experienced unhappiness as such, or had even chosen to have any conscious experiences at all.  But in return, the original larger Squiggle Entity would intervene if it saw somebody torturing a mortal; not because it cared, not even because the mortal was trading with it, but because Future-Civilization had agreed to avert the pessimization of Negatively-Skewed Entities in general, conditional on its expectation that a lot of Negatively-Skewed Entities would do the same, and Entities signatory to that compact were expected to occasionally avert small or large squiggle-caring beings from being pessimized by having lots of hyperbolic spirals created at them.

A logical trade like that comes with friction costs.  So Negatively-Skewed Entities are more likely to be signatory to a pact like that than Positively-Skewed Entities; because even if they only assess a 10% chance of Future-Civilization actually existing to execute the bargain that they predict Future-Civilization to execute if it exists, and even if they expect Future-Civilization to underestimate by a factor of 10 how much the Negatively-Skewed Squiggle-Carer exists to pay them back, it's still worth sacrificing the opportunity cost of 100 rounded-rectangle squiggles to prevent one expected hyperbolic spiral from being made.  A Positively-Skewed Squiggle-Carer would conversely demand 100 units of realityfluid be spent on preventing hyperbolic spirals in order to justify sacrificing 1 unit of realityfluid that could have been spent directly on rounded-rectangular squiggles.

She doesn't want to invest too much in contemplating how as a god she'd handle that problem, when it's a probably-wrong model Keltham sketched out and probably not a description of actual reality. But it is the bleakest possible imagining of the universe, that it's mostly full of entities who'd consider the universe not existing to be among the best possible outcomes, who are set up structurally such that almost everything that could possibly happen is bad and all the good things are worth losing to slightly reduce the chance of bad ones. 

Pharasma and the winning god-coalition destroyed the gods that sided with Rovagug, and she would do the same thing to entities that would side with Rovagug, if she could.

(Probably in some universes Rovagug and the gods that sided with Him won and everything got eaten, and she's not in those universes because they don't exist, and she understands how that counts as triumph for some people, how they might just want to peel more and more Golarions away from the branch where people live and die and love and fight and laugh and cry and squeeze them dead and make the "Golarions eaten" branch of the tree a little thicker. But it's not what she wants.)

Negatively-Skewed Universal Carers don't need to end up wishing that somebody would erase their universes!  Unless they really hate the way that reachable matter is shaped by default, compared to it not existing; but hopefully such beings are few... or configured in such a way that they're not experiencing constant suffering about that; he himself wouldn't want them to be unhappy, though it's not like they themselves need care about "unhappiness".

So long as Reality isn't allowed to end up full of Zon-Kuthons and Asmodeuses and other such utilityfunction pessimizers, most Entities, even Negatively-Skewed ones, could mostly be getting things they want, and not things they hate.

People who feel like Reality loses more when one person gets crushed and tortured, than when ten people lead happy lives, aren't necessarily out to destroy Reality.  If no one is being tortured, there isn't a problem!  (Or rather, if nobody reachable is being tortured, there isn't a problem you can solve by destroying the local universe, and you might as well not think about it or be sad about it either.)

Civilization would have fought to defend itself from destruction, and did fight to defend itself - because while there were possible states of matter that would lose more (compared to a null state of lifeless matter) than the best states of matter would gain, they managed to stop those bad things from happening, and be mostly happy.

That's the grand dream and vision, from the Negative standpoint - that Reality not contain a lot of utilityfunction pessimizers running around and occasionally pessimizing beings with utilityfunctions similar to their own, so that Reality as a whole is something they're still glad to have around.

That's why Pharasma is being given an out.  She doesn't need to have Her Creation destroyed, if She's willing to have it not contain such a large element of utilityfunction pessimization.

That did actually occur to Carissa, or something like it, when she first decided not to betray Keltham and to come to him instead.

She thinks she may have made an error there, but -

- but it seemed to her that Golarion would not, really, endure for the forever she wanted for it, while it had Hell in it, that even if she warned them and they crushed Keltham there would be another like him someday, that the only way for Golarion to endure forever, like she wants it to, was for it to be something large shares of reality didn't want to destroy.

She understood a thing Keltham said on her first day here as a claim that this wasn't true, that he didn't think he was extending Golarion's lifespan in expectation. But - with caution about the mind-states that permit her to help him without being a threat to Pharasma - she does, actually, strongly value the destruction of Hell for that reason and think some substantial risk of destroying the world would be warranted, though by her own preference you'd spend decades exploring other Hell-conquest options first.

It's not a consolation he feels honesty-safe and epistemically-safe about offering her.  That Hell has been allowed to persist this long within Creation (on those hypotheses where all of this is as real as themselves, and not quantitatively much less real than that) is evidence (within those hypotheses) that intervening in Creation is expensive; and only became some combination of affordable+attractive after the death of Aroden lost other hopes, or the shattering of prophecy made it less expensive to act against gods.  It is possible that if this intervention against Pharasma fails, no other will be sent.

Decades seems like quite an unreasonable amount of time for smart people to think.  He'd take that time only if there was sufficient value-of-info; and he didn't expect to slip up, tip off the gods, and get squished, inside of that delay.

It does seem clear enough to him what he is sent here to do.  He's not happy about it; he's a lot less happy about Hell.

Carissa is largely resigned to the fact he is going to try it.  She wants to convince him that only Hell is worth doing it for, and that if he gets Hell but Pharasma is unable or unwilling to change any other things about Creation, then that should be sufficient for him not to prefer the world destroyed. She hopes to narrow the specification further: figure out the actual minimum ask and make sure it's a concession Pharasma can grant if She wants to.

She sees that Keltham isn't going to be willing to not try to destroy the universe. She hates him for this, on some level, but she doesn't predict anything different.

He is, in fact, presently minded to demand of Pharasma that protections be set up to make sure this doesn't happen again.  Among the reasons why he would hesitate to simply press a button and destroy only Hell and Asmodeus, if he could come up with a scheme that he was sufficiently convinced would do that on a first try, is that Pharasma might just build a new Hell, and then take Zon-Kuthon out of the vault and put Him in charge of neo-Hell.

The problem from his perspective is not just Creation as it stands being horrible, but that Creation has no rails against becoming even more horrible in the future if he solves the present horribleness.  It may not be a way that people in Golarion are accustomed to thinking, who have so many problems today that need to be solved right now, but dath ilani try to put systems into states where they will knowably not go bad later instead of just being okay right now.

If Creation isn't knowably on a trajectory that takes it permanently out of being a miserable hellhole, it unfortunately seems to him that his utilityfunction strongly suggests smashing the whole place and letting sentient beings exist elsewhere instead, and the present inhabitants likewise having futures that continue mainly elsewhere.

He's not sure why (earlier?) Carissa expects/expected their continuations to be awful.  His model of Outer Gods and Entities is that the ones which don't care about people will mainly not use matter in a way that involves it being people.

Even the Makers of the Magical Continuum, which very likely don't care about people, aren't taking all of the matter and realityfluid in the Magical Continuum and turning it into unhappy people.  Past-Keltham, possibly, got sent to Golarion because it was a particular kind of intervention that was cheaper to buy from the Makers than anything more sensible; he was not put someplace that would hurt him as much as possible.

He doesn't think that Entities with simulating-eyes on Pharasma's Creation, or who trade with the Makers of the Magical Continuum for information from it, that care about the sentients within it at all, would be trying to continue the people there past the end of Pharasma's Creation with a goal of hurting them.  The ones who care about continuations at all, he would hope, are themselves nice; or trading with Entities that are, in the sum of their goals and auction bids, nice.  If that's not so, he's substantially more peeved with whatever hypothetical Entities sent him here to destroy Creation, and also it seems less probable that caring Entities would want that of him in the first place.

That he is sent here, who will deliver an ultimatum to Pharasma to improve living conditions or be destroyed, is some evidence that he wouldn't have been sent here if the expected result of destroying Creation were to isekai everyone here to worse-than-Hell.  Though of course, the Entities that sent him here could be acting deceptive about that, expecting himself, or Pharasma, to be deceived by the apparent evidence of Their actions.

Safeguards against this ever happening again definitely need to exist, but if they can be negotiated without Pharasma, say among the other gods, then that's preferable to making them part of the Pharasma-ultimatum.  If future disasters are sufficiently unlikely then Creation shouldn't be destroyed just because its laws don't prohibit them, after all dath ilan's laws don't prohibit it either.

She's hoping they can negotiate around what 'sufficiently unlikely' means. For one thing, she thinks Pharasma wouldn't, actually, create another Hell and put Zon-Kuthon in charge of it; that would be a change on a scale that hasn't happened and might not even be possible and that would serve the interests of no existing non-Zon-Kuthon gods and not be consistent with what Pharasma is known to care about. Perhaps Iomedae or Erecura can give better estimates of its plausibility, but it'd be good to know how much implausibility is sufficient for Keltham.

Let him be considered an alien wandering by who sees a lot of matter in an unpleasant state, that can with some work be converted to a more pleasant state of nonexistence.  He's already put in some work to destroy the universe, and made some serious sacrifices about that.

Then, after all that work, some other alien steps in and requests his indulgence to instead transform reality into a different end state which that alien likes better than nonexistence.

He's not especially interested in calculating the exact least pleasant most miserable state he considers better than nonexistence, so that other alien can make him an exact minimum offer that gives him a near-zero tiny fraction of the gains from coordination.

If they're going to be revising Creation anyways, how about if Pharasma comes up with a decent offer that doesn't resemble a hellhole so much anymore, and gets something that She herself considers comfortably better than nonexistence, a state that neither of the two of them consider really icky and unpleasant; and everybody lives happily ever after, except for Zon-Kuthon who ought to be turned back into Dou-Bral anyways.

Because that involves him being willing to destroy some universes that don't have Hell and have an incredibly low probability of ever having Hell, and he shouldn't be willing to do that because it's an awful thing to do to people without even Hell as justification?

She can feel herself having to stamp on the impulse to get emotional again, but it's that answer, rather than the original plan, that is why she hates Keltham and wants to preemptively cryopreserve dath ilan, the fact that he is willing to destroy the world if it is offered the end of Hell. It is that which feels to her like a mad monstrous incomprehensible blankness, like murder for its own sake.

The fact that Carissa feels that way might get him to accept an offer of 4, in this Ultimatum Game, but not an offer of 0.01.

If Pharasma says 'well, I can declare that the Lawful authority over Hell is Carissa, and I predict with very high confidence that I won't change who is the Lawful authority over Hell again in the next billion years, but nothing else you want is the kind of thing I really do as an entity', then Keltham should not consider it accepting an offer of 0.01, to bring hope and comfort and healing to every single person in Hell and never have it again and have everyone else in the universe go on with their good and wonderful lives.

And if Pharasma says 'well, well, I can declare that the Lawful authority over Hell is Carissa, and I predict with very high confidence that I won't change who is the Lawful authority over Hell again in the next billion years, and the other things are also things I could do, but I won't, because I don't want to', and Keltham murders every single person in the universe over that - he can't hide behind Hell, if he does that. He wouldn't be doing that because of Hell. He would be killing trillions of people and sending at least some of them to Hell, because some of Greater Reality is bad, because he personally doesn't like the deal he got.

She doesn't have a purer definition of what Evil is than destroying a universe in which trillions of people live and none are in Hell, because you feel that this universe doesn't give you a big enough share of the benefits of it existing.

No matter how high the stakes are, if you're willing to accept tiny shares of gains from trade, you won't get offered any other deals; that logic doesn't change when the stakes go up.

It seems to her that Keltham is not just rejecting the trade Pharasma offers him, of living in her universe, as not worth it to him, which he may totally do if he likes; but is also going around smashing every trade Pharasma has offered every other person, which they ought to have the right to accept or reject on their own, and rejecting all those trades on behalf of all those people.

If putting Carissa in command of Hell is change enough that Golarion, and every other planet in its plane, and every plane in the rest of Creation, can with that much of a boost, see higher technology and greater cooperation spread from star to star, until people here are no longer living squalid lives where half their children end up in the Boneyard, that then indeed would be enough.  That would be a fair chunk of trade-gain; it wouldn't be the minimum quality of life and maximum misery that got him to be almost indifferent toward this reality's destruction.

Similarly, if universal education got to the point where everybody could actually understand the choice made in deciding to leave Creation for Greater Reality, and it was easy for them to skip the afterlife system if they wanted, he would be okay with that.  But that sounds like Civilization rising to great enough heights that it'd be fine regardless; even a mildly below-average dath ilani might have a hard time grasping Greater Reality shit.  It sounds like a stronger demand to make of Pharasma than just cleaning up Creation's regular mess.

Else if putting Carissa in charge of Hell is change enough that Abaddon can be subdued, and the nearby surface layers of the Abyss subdued, once Heaven and Hell are fighting there side-by-side; if cooperation between Heaven and Hell is enough divine agreement that heroes can stride from plane to plane and smash the slave-pits and torture-chambers, until rulers and parliaments learn what worst of human behavior will earn extraplanar missions of disruption -

- then he might be persuadable to consider accepting a world where people live in squalor for a few decades and go to a moderately pleasant afterlife for a few millennia or eons, until Creation reaches its natural endpoint and those people end up somewhere properly transhumanist where they can grow up for real.  So long as they're not in agony.

It would be a poor meaning to Carissa's life, he does think, if Creation could have become something greater and more exalted than that, but he for love of Carissa did abide by her last plea to accept less.  Does she ask of him to accept Creation's stagnation, in preference to its nonexistence, for fear that Pharasma won't be willing to give more?  It seems sad, to him, for Creation has the potential to be so much more than a breeding ground for souls in a handful of moderately pleasurable afterlives.  He's not sure he'll agree, if Carissa's last request of him is that he permit Creation to wallow in mediocrity and never become itself forever, as that pleases Pharasma; not even as her last request.  But she could ask, and perhaps he would accede, and then Pharasma would not be likely to offer any more.

If Keltham's demands of Pharasma are more, and farther outside the domains in which Pharasma is accustomed to functioning such as who she names the lawful ruler of Hell, then it is likelier that the universe will be destroyed and all within it lost.

It is also likelier that there will be good things it will be much harder, perhaps impossible, for Creation to attain.

But it is one thing to destroy a universe because it is bad, because there are those in it who cry out to die and cannot, and another thing entirely to destroy a universe because it is good but there are goods it does not possess; it would be a fine and joyous and great meaning to Carissa's life, if what she does is convince Kelthams not to annihilate any universes that do not have Hell in them, to save all the trillions of people in all of those universes, and then to devote her eternity to building the greatest and best thing that can be built within creation, which will, she thinks, be pretty great.  It doesn't seem sad to her, because Heaven doesn't seem sad to her, and Elysium doesn't seem sad to her, and Nirvana doesn't seem sad to her, and of course if she's in charge she bets she can do even better. What seems sad to her is for all that all those places are or could have been to be lost forever.

She is skeptical, in the end, that Pharasma can change the fundamental nature of everything about creation, in a way that she is not skeptical that Pharasma can change who is in charge of those afterlives that acknowledge Pharasma's authority to decide that. She thinks it's quite unlikely, and that demanding it of Pharasma almost definitely means everything is destroyed forever. Reasoning with trope-logic, she thinks this might be the thing she is here to say to Keltham, the thing all the careful maneuvering was about: not that a universe with Hell in it is worth existing, because she was never going to convince him of that, but that a universe without Hell in it is worth existing.

(Everyone in it can of course be told about Greater Reality, and destroy themselves if they want to take their chances with it. She predicts that they overwhelmingly won't.)

There should have been more mortalborn gods in this world than Irori, if Irori was possible at all, and it is suspicious to him that neither Nex nor Geb tried to attain divinity.

There should have been trade between stars, if the Outer Planes are connected to all of them, if spells like Interplanetary Teleport are a thing.

Golarion should have attained higher technology, earlier, when +6 intelligence headbands are a thing here; the steam engine should not have needed to wait on the shattering of prophecy.

If Pharasma can't directly help mortals, not even by giving Her priests a contraception spell that some other god designed, then so be it.  He hadn't meant to demand impossibilities of Her, if impossibilities they are, as his minimum gain from trade.

But he strongly suspects that there are measures set in place to prevent mortals from rising, to prohibit mortals from developing into gods even if they naturally would, to prohibit trade between stars and planes.

And whether those measures were born of pacts between ancient gods, or laid down by Pharasma, he had meant to demand, whether of Pharasma or of those ancient gods, that mortals be permitted to rise according to whatever fire is in them, and not be pressed down.  He's not, by his own nature, inclined to tolerate a reserve where mortals are kept as livestock and not for their own good either, even if those livestock are just ordinarily miserable rather than in agony.

Oh, Carissa's definitely planning on building Civilization, if any of Golarion survives to build it on, and they can send some 'arks' out for other worlds, if (as looks likely) Golarion doesn't. It's why she was initially prioritizing Golarion in her planning, the part which wasn't about partiality to her homeworld - she thinks that the place where prophecy is broken is the place where they should be most sure they can build Civilization whether Pharasma approves or not.

Thinking something isn't worth destroying the universe to achieve doesn't mean thinking it isn't very important, or worth making many many other costly sacrifices to attain. 

They could go grab some people in Axis and in Heaven and in Elysium and Nirvana and explain Greater Reality to them and see what they think; Carissa predicts that they will largely not consider themselves livestock, and will be generally very happy about their lives and long-term trajectories, and will likely prefer to keep existing, and she will rethink some things if that turns out false. She'd be really surprised if you can't tell people about Greater Reality in the afterlives, even if you can't tell them while they're mortals.

It's not that she doesn't think that everyone who wants to become a god should have the chance to rise that way. She absolutely thinks that. She means her Hell to be a place where everyone becomes the greatest thing that they can be. She just thinks - and she suspects that Keltham, too, if he's studied the question, will think - that a universe where everyone just goes to nice afterlives and it's rare for them to become a god is better than that universe not existing. She also thinks Keltham will think that at least enough of Greater Reality is nasty that he'd be sending some unlucky share of them to Hell so that some others of them could become gods, which is a trade that doesn't seem very Kelthamish.

They can plausibly grab some Lawful Good and Lawful Neutral petitioners who'd definitely abide by a secrecy oath, and tell them about what he suspects might be much better lives and enhancements available in Greater Reality, beyond Pharasma's slum.  He suspects petitioners won't be allowed to offer specific comparison to actual afterlife conditions, when talking to mortals.  But he could ask the petitioners to assume hypothetical Greater Realities and the basic isekai hypothesis and ask them if they'd want to leave (together with their families); and, if so, the maximum tiny fraction of themselves that could end up somewhere worse than Hell before they'd switch decisions back.  They can put that on the experiment list.

But if it turns out that almost nobody gets to be a god, because of Achaekek?  Who he's planning to kill, obviously; but suppose that Pharasma says She's going to run right out and build another Achaekek, or the ancient gods say they'll do that, so mortals don't get too uppity.  Pharasma says that Carissa gets to take charge of Hell, but forbids her from trying to build Civilization, and demands indeed that he destroy Golarion (in an ordinary way, everyone there still gets afterlives) so that nowhere prophecy-breaking can exist where Civilization could ever rise.  What then?

He, of his own accord, would probably tell Pharasma that he's fine dying together with Her in a fire, in this case.

Carissa predicts that probably an overwhelming majority of everyone in Creation would not prefer to be thrown into that fire, and she thinks that maybe this is a case where the dath ilani nature being quite different from the Golarion-nature is important. Most dath ilani would perhaps be miserable if they ran out of all the things to do and read and learn at their current Intelligence and couldn't get smarter faster than they got bored; this is, she thinks, not how most people work. Most people, she thinks though less confidently, don't even want to be gods, they want to go to Heaven and live in peace and comfort, doing meaningful things surrounded by people who love them, and they're not wrong, she thinks, and they won't get bored, she thinks.

Carissae are not like this, actually, not so easily satisfied; and you could imagine that those people are just failing to appreciate the depths of the difference between their lovely perfect life and the better things they could grow into. But - that seems like a different kind of claim about their incapacity to decide their own lives than claiming they don't sanely choose Hell.

The reason Carissa agrees they don't sanely choose Hell is that when they do go to Hell, they regret it.

But if they go to Heaven and don't regret it and don't wish they were gods, it seems like much more of a stretch, to say there's some deep sense in which they should have been enhanced into something that would regret it and want to be a god.

He's not gonna hide it, he is frankly concerned about the process that produces lantern archons like the one he met.  Like, if that was a Boneyard baby who went to Heaven the moment they developed a discernible taste for helping other kids at age four, maybe okay.  If that was a normal Golarion peasant whose trip to heaven involved the equivalent of sudden intelligence-reducing brain surgery - one source claimed that petitioners absorb the material of the plane they're on, and didn't mention carefully developed safety protocols for delicate soul surgery - it's not totally impossible that he decides that Heaven also has to go.

He realizes that Carissa Sevar is probably not happy about this stance, and he hopes Heaven turns out not to be full of horrifying brain surgery that makes people into stupid happy lantern archons that don't remember their past lives.  But that whole lantern archon experience is something that, in retrospect, INT 18 Keltham was a giant flaming idiot for not getting worried over earlier.  Even Cheliax's approved presentation of a lantern archon should have been an enormous flaming warning sign about afterlives.

(Sometimes he feels like he can't understand how dath ilan actually works when everyone there is so stupid that past-Keltham was one of their relatively smarter kids.  He does, in fact, understand, because it's not that complicated in an absolute sense; but on an emotional level, it feels absurd-even-if-true that you could have a functional society where the average Intelligence is only 17.  Their Wisdom in Golarion terms he estimates higher, but he doubts it's over 22-equivalent even in the specialized aspect of cognitive reflectivity.  Even if there's some smarter people around, in retrospect it feels like a society like that should just fall apart.)

Carissa is going to stick to her principled stance that if people like their lives and don't want to die it is extremely wrong to kill them because you think that they shouldn't like their lives.

....it does mean a lot to her, though, that Keltham is considering how far he is willing to move in her direction on this. It is the first thing in a long time she's felt - hopeful and less lonely about. this whole thing. And if it turned out that Keltham and dath ilan aren't willing to destroy any worlds that don't have Hell in them, then she thinks, for whatever it's worth, she wouldn't hate them and wouldn't want to preemptively cryopreserve them and wouldn't regard them as fundamentally basically a Carissa-utility-pessimizer under most circumstances, and she would be very very happy, to change her mind about that.

He appreciates that it's - possible to move Carissa at all, in her feelings.  He was - worried, about that, and maybe he was wrong to ever be worried but he was.

The lantern archon scenario he's worried about is when people going in do not have a good picture in their minds of the soul-surgery they're about to undergo, when they think they're fine with it happening to them; and then they get modified into something that is super happy and cheerful about being a lantern archon.  It's not that he wants to destroy the lantern archon because he thinks it's wrong to be happy to be a lantern archon.  It's that he would want to destroy Heaven before it turned any more people into lantern archons.

....Carissa isn't sure she wants to destroy Heaven about that but she agrees it'd be a really horrifying thing to do to people, among the most horrifying possible things. She would be really surprised and disappointed if the Iomedae was doing that or letting people do that. It seems like the kind of thing where Carmin would say, no, try again and come up with something that isn't horrifying.

That said, the reason it is horrifying is that it's kind of like being murdered, so it doesn't really seem improved by murder.

Iomedae isn't making these putative lantern archons, on the hypothesis he's worried about.  It's how Pharasma built afterlives to work and Iomedae can't do anything about it without Pharasma's permission.  Maybe even Pharasma can't do anything about it, and then Creation might have to go.

To prevent future people from being, possibly, worse-than-murdered, in a way that it's harder and maybe impossible for rescuers Elsewhere in Greater Reality to fix.

Carissa is confident that most petitioners who go to Heaven do not show up there as lantern archons or lantern archon building material.  They show up there as petitioners, and at some point some of them become outsiders, which seems pretty likely to be deliberate and voluntary and in fact the kind of thing Iomedae or the other Good gods could influence; Asmodeus, after all, has a hand in the making of His petitioners into outsiders. She agrees this is worth getting confirmation of.

She is trying very hard not to evaluate Keltham off his willingness to destroy Creation in this particularly unlikely hypothetical, getting mad at him for unlikely hypotheticals in which he'd destroy creation is clearly just disincentivizing him thinking through with her where he actually draws the line. She will just not worry about the unlikely hypothetical where Heaven's process of making outsiders is as involuntary as Hell's.

It certainly is a very Carissa fact about Carissa that she seems, in some sense, more readily to be horrified and admit her horror, 'among the most horrifying possible things' as she puts it, about a hypothetical process that seizes petitioners and turns them into cheerful lantern archons, compared to, say, the process that makes devils.  Perhaps this is an important natural attitude to have within your emotions, for somebody who intends to become the new goddess of Hell -

(A stab of agony that he sets aside; it's not as if he was planning, himself, to survive this event as himself; or as if there was any realistic prospect in the first place of getting Carissa back for himself; or even of her living happily ever after as herself.)

Well, Heaven would be making lantern archons stupider and weaker, and that's an awful thing to do, which Carissa will never do. Hurting people is fine; weakening them is wrong.

(He can have her back. But only if he doesn't do this, and she understands why he's going, instead, to do this.)

...would she truly rather get turned into a lantern archon who'll, after that, almost never remember being Carissa, and stay that way forever?  Than end within Creation, and find herself elsewhere, undetectably-to-herself diminished in her reality, mostly in places that would let her become stronger and more herself and learn greater magic and mathematics?  If those were her only two choices and knowably so?

He can't yet feel it, understand it empathically, this choice to exist in places that feel so much worse; only so that some measuring instrument outside of yourself can say, undetectably to you, that there is more realityfluid in you; only so that the little lantern archon you became forever will be more encounterable to other people.

She wouldn't choose the lantern archon over the other world, but she doesn't really buy the premise that there are a lot of people who'll instantiate her elsewhere only if the lantern archon is destroyed, in which case it's better to have both the other world and the being a lantern archon. She doesn't care about what she'll in expectation experience next, compared to where she actually is and what all the hers are experiencing.

Maybe she'd be the kind of brave and impressive lantern archon who grows up into something bigger; maybe she wouldn't, and that'd be sad, but it wouldn't be so sad she'd rather have the space of all existing Carissae just be narrower and smaller and have a big hole in that universe.

He's not saying it's an incoherent utility function, it's definitely a coherent utility function, but he's guessing it wouldn't be most people's utility function without specific prompting in that direction.

...he is concerned over whether she thinks it's fine to hurt the people in Hell, after she takes it over, even if they don't want that, so long as they were bad people in life and the hurting makes them stronger.

....she does actually think it's fine but she understands that many people she'd like to cooperate with disagree, so she won't do it, and she hopes that some of them will see that and correspondingly do less annihilating people. Or that's how she anticipates the god Carissa shaping up.

Many people would rather become lantern archons than be hurt more.  Even if it's because they're weak, and afraid, and too exhausted by the pain they've already felt in their lives; yes, even genuinely evil people, who've dealt hurt to others, can feel that way.  And he would destroy a universe to protect even them, the same way he'd destroy a universe to prevent them from being turned into lantern archons.

There's a lot of gods he may be handing demands to, at the end of this, and it may be that the god CARISSA will be one of those.

She strongly suspects that preferring being a lantern archon, or being annihilated, to being hurt more, is generally a state that makes it also bad for you to hurt you. In a hypothetical where someone felt that way, but actually hurting them would make them healthier and happier and stronger and more whole, she wouldn't think it was wrong; but as she said, she doesn't intend to do it, since a lot of other people feel strongly about that and it's a pretty small share of cases.

It doesn't really have anything to do with them being bad; Hell is and always has been for everyone; that was once a linchpin of her loyalty to it.

A society which doesn't rely on people not being Evil, rather than one that needs them to be Evil.

She's done a better job of talking him into accepting some trades he would not otherwise have been inclined to, than he would have expected, even taking into account how much of himself still loves her.

There's an uncomfortable point to be raised here, which feels like a gotcha, or taking things back.  If Abrogail is not carrying his only child (modulo possibly also Jacint Subirachs and Willa Shilira whom Meritxell also disguised-as), and there are many more others - which he does not currently model as being the case, on the evidence he has, it depends on how hard the story is out to force him into corners - then if he waits to execute their plan, and it turns out he does have other irrevocably ensouled children, that, on his current psychology, affects what level of shit he's willing to accept from Pharasma.

It's one thing to accept that INT 29 Carissa has more rightful guardianship than he of the other life forms in Golarion; that it's her place to defend their interests from his weird extrauniversal morals and intuitions.  He's got a lot of probability mass on the people here not actually being all that real anyways.  He's not sure enough of it to leave them in Hell, but he's not sure they do exist either.

It's another thing entirely to let his own children grow up in a crapsack world, and maybe end up actually as real as himself in a sequel, within either set of possibilities.

....that does strike Carissa as a strong argument for destroying Cheliax before his children might be ensouled, if they determine that those children exist and aren't ready to go ahead with the ascension plan yet. It could perhaps be done without prompting the gods to reassess Keltham as a threat if, instead of Wish wordings they need for the main plan, they use some lesser power out of dath ilan, or get some other countries to invade.

If solutions in that genre are not available, the arks that are meant to survive the destruction of Golarion should be equipped with the resources to resurrect the children and provide them a good life on the ark, and the Church of Iomedae equipped to sweep in, conquer Cheliax, and make it nice if it continues existing.

But crucially, this is not a problem Pharasma is going to be able to solve.

Pharasma probably hates the baby situation; Carissa has been reading up intensely on Pharasma and now infers it to be an ongoing source of annoyance to Her, because babies don't have enough traits to be sorted. If She had a way to fix the baby situation She would have done it. Playing hardball with Her about the babies won't achieve anything, because the babies are a problem Pharasma wants solved, and which will be solved if the universe goes on existing through contraception and so on.

They have to come up with a clever and sufficient plan for protecting all of Keltham's babies which does not involve Pharasma at all, that's all there is to it.

He apologizes for his mental sloppiness in using "Pharasma" as a shorthand to refer to "Pharasma plus the rest of the ancient gods", which he had modeled, high probability but not certainty, to form an effectual coalition with respect to Creation.

+6 intelligence headbands exist, yet industry only started picking up after Aroden's death and the shattering of prophecy.  Interplanetary Teleport exists, but there's no sign that worlds which can produce diamonds more cheaply than spellsilver are trading diamonds for spellsilver with worlds that can produce spellsilver relatively more cheaply.  Axis with very high probability has knowledge they're not allowed to give to Golarion; if Abadaran theology is true, then Abadar has copies of Azlant tech manuals, but isn't allowed to sell those back even to the planet that created it.

He infers massive, ongoing intervention by some divine coalition within Golarion and surrounding planets and planes, with macro goals being effectively pursued.  He puts high probability that this Potent Intervener would be able of delivering some pretty major asks about Golarion, if it wanted, even if Carissa is right that Pharasma can't do it Herself.  He himself puts more probability that Pharasma is just reluctant given inhumanly noninterventionist goals.  But even if that's false, clearly Something exists, some collective, that's able to satisfy goals like "No industry advanced to the point of diamond synthesis, anywhere that prophecy still holds."

It is his strong guess that Pharasma plus the ancient gods have collectively the ability to decide that Creation doesn't need to look like this; decide that mortal industrialization is allowed, not just in Golarion where it's too expensive to stop, but everywhere.  Pharasma plus gods could turn the same efforts that they put into suppressing mortals, to shutting down the most horrible particular elements of Creation, the Nidals and Xovaikains, lest otherwise the world become something that his ascended-Self preferred to not exist, and would destroy.

Or it's possible that even that much positive action from the Divine Coalition / Potent Intervener wouldn't be required, as his thoughts covered before; that if the Good gods didn't need to fight Hell, and the gods stopped actively suppressing mortals, then that would be enough by itself to set Creation predictably on a course to Pharasmin Civilization as would be fine by him.

If it is genuinely actually true that Pharasma and the ancient gods lack the power to, by action or inaction, let Creation not be such a crapsack - then future-him can consider then whether to destroy it.  But he mostly strongly suspects that Pharasma plus the ancient gods have the power to steer the future somewhere else which is not that.

Carissa’s present theory is actually that there’s more industrialization elsewhere in Creation, that Golarion has historically been subject to more meddling because it has Rovagug in the middle of it and industry, going off dath ilan, can give mortals the power to let him out. She doesn’t know anything about whatever civilization sent the thing that crash-landed in Numeria, but Golarion doesn’t have the capabilities to send things across the stars, and that civilization evidently did.

She’s not sure this matters to her very much either way; there are still lots of cool and valuable things happening on planets without industry.

There might've been an over-update on what past-Keltham described as the difficulties of interstellar travel faced by dath ilan inside of non-magical physics, where you don't just have mortal-Aroden doing Interplanetary Teleports all over.  He'd guess that wasn't an industrial spaceship, just one magically hacked together; or a magically star-traveling lifeform from the Dark Tapestry, or some other draw from all-other-possibilities.

Seeding diamonds out of hot 1% methane 99% hydrogen in a zero-gravity space-looped demiplane is much much easier than interstellar travel the hard way, and nobody was selling synthetic diamonds to Efreet in the City of Brass before they got there.  (Unless the Efreet themselves, and not just Efreet trade goods, are partitioned by planet; and the Golarion-trading Efreet can't buy Wish diamonds for even their own use from Efreet who trade with hypothetical industrialized planets; it's possible, but improbable, counterevidence that adds to other counterevidence.)

How does Carissa feel about demands that divinities at least stop actively hindering mortals from making their lives better?  Does this feel like something she's terrified he can't get, will constitute asking for too much, and then Creation ends?

She thinks he shouldn't say 'or I'll destroy the universe' about it? 'or I and my allies won't do any positive-sum trades with you and will consider ourselves in a low-key state of war with you' is fine! That doesn't entail destroying the universe! Carissa will absolutely back him on withdrawing-cooperative-relations from gods that get in the way of mortals making their lives better. She'll back him on trying to assassinate Them!

Carissa agrees wholeheartedly that the gods could probably stop getting in mortals' way, and that getting the gods to stop getting in mortals' way should be the highest conceivable priority. But it is not acceptable to murder trillions of people because it was too hard to achieve, and so the means by which it is achieved cannot be threatening to murder trillions of people. They will simply have to pursue this incredibly important objective in some other fashion, once Hell is destroyed.

Mortals are creative, and prophecy hasn't been gone for long.  She doesn't think the hindering will succeed for long, let alone for forever.

And if, from a godly angle, it looks to him like the hindering will succeed?  If it looks like only Golarion alone will ever be free, unable to liberate anywhere else?  Or if the ancient gods demand Golarion be destroyed, as the price of other bargains?

Those entities are kind of assholes, Carissa.  These are eventualities to be considered.  They obviously don't want mortals getting uppity and, if it turns out They believe They've got a plan for keeping mortals firmly down, should he disagree with Them about that question-of-fact?  If they don't have a plan, like that, if Golarion survives, why wouldn't they demand some arrangement like the deliberate destruction of Golarion?

Why would they not demand every last scrap that she was willing to concede, if she persuaded him to concede it?

They haven't destroyed Golarion yet, despite prophecy being broken there, despite all the headache it has given them. Presumably because Rovagug is contained within.

Destroying Golarion and letting Rovagug out would be, she thinks, a great victory, for those gods who want to keep mortals down, over those gods that don't - and it's not all of them.

She doesn't think it's Abadar. Abadar kind of jumped at letting the mortals build Civilization, even in the face of what he knows is some risk they'll use to destroy themselves. They can ask Erecura, actually, a bunch of her questions for Erecura relate to god-alliances they can offer and join on ascension.

She just wants Keltham to, when he ascends, look around and see which gods he's allied with, and then be allied with them, instead of trying to unilaterally wreck everything.

Already part of the plan once he's legible to the Lawful ones and can do binding logical deals not to have info he provided be used against him.

He'll have unfortunately needed to do a lot of grim work before then, on his best present plan, like destroying Absalom and releasing Rovagug (both as a distraction, and to preemptively defang Asmodeus by placing Him in a situation where he'll fight on the anti-Rovagug side).  But if it were possible to just show the gods how it would go, and have that be credible, and move straight to the negotiated outcome, none of this would be happening inside reality at all.

She doesn't think she can get him to be sure that there's categorically nothing other than Hell worth destroying the world over.

But the system not being fair, fixing it other ways being extremely hard and uncertain - she thinks that actually, humanity would take that, over a high risk of being destroyed, and anyone trying to act on behalf of the mortals inside Pharasma's system would remember that, overwhelmingly, if not facing Hell, mortals don't want to be annihilated, that when slaves they don't want to be annihilated, when prisoners they don't want to be annihilated, that the route ahead being hard and uncertain and unfair is not a problem they solve by dying about it.

From a godly standpoint there'll just be a probability estimate.  Not "the road ahead being hard and uncertain and unfair", just a probability of victory.  If you don't like your thoughts and feelings collapsed into probability estimates, then don't become a Keeper; and the same presumably applies to becoming a god.

Suppose that the probability of fixing the system looks like, say, 0.01%, because the ancient gods will it not so; and They demand of him that he personally scour clean Golarion with antimatter, in exchange of the end of Hell.  Does she bid him then concede?

Certainly it'd be absurd to destroy the universe rather than do it, what with how destroying the universe has all the downsides of doing it and then some. 

And...if that's the price of ending Hell it's a price worth paying. Even she thinks so. 

Depends on whether you think a god-corralled and herded subpopulation of the human race and the sapient kind, as that greater population exists across all the realities, is a positive or negative contribution to the whole.

And it doesn't have to be the price of destroying Hell.  It could be something the ancient gods demand only because they're assholes and Carissa is titanium-bent on conceding them everything they ask.  Why wouldn't they demand it, if he's predictably going to concede to every demand?

The proposal is that he not destroy any universes which are pretty excellent.

Carissa thinks that the universe, without Hell in it, with no other changes, would be pretty excellent, and constitute mortals - not Keltham, maybe, but normal mortals -- having gotten a great deal relative to their alternative of not getting this life at all. She thinks that if you take Hell out of the picture, mortals mostly live interesting and challenging lives, doing things that matter to them, around people who love them, and the ones who hate it could suicide without worrying about Hell; and Carissa, when she catches them, can do whatever they want done for them including sending them to Greater Reality if they want that. The difference between that and the universe not existing is much much much larger than the difference between that and a better universe.

...theory related to this. Dath ilani don't seem happier than Golarionites, and she suspects that some of that is them having bred themselves wrong; but the other obvious theory is that people are pretty much the same amount of happy under a really wide range of situations, and letting Golarion become like dath ilan in wealth levels would be only a small favor to the people in it.

They could run a lottery, if they wanted to test this: if you win, you get 10,000gp, enough to never work again and live in luxury, and if you lose you get fed to daemons. Carissa predicts that basically no one will take this lottery (and the ones who do will be doing it to save sick children or resurrect damned loved ones, not for selfish reasons) and it's the lottery Keltham proposes entering for them as a collective.

He would want to explain about anthropic survival and Greater Reality; and he's not sure he can, even leaving aside the unshareable evidence-from-his-own-perspective of starting in dath ilan and ending up in Golarion.

Carissa spoke of slaves choosing not to die.  The vast majority of those slaves don't have the guarantee of Axis or Elysium, if they died.  Especially if they suicided, as Pharasma defines to be the 'Evil' of murder.  (Another Evil that isn't remotely bad!  Another way to end up in an Evil afterlife without being a bad person!)

But perhaps Carissa is right as a matter of human-variant psychology, that even a slave with the promise of Elysium would still not want to die.  Would this be coherent reasoning?  And not, for example, the result of natural selection against people who took afterlives seriously, who really believed in Hell and didn't have kids, or who took Heaven seriously and sacrificed themselves altruistically against demons?

He remains skeptical about the proposition that clinging to an awful life is something that Golarionites would be selected to really coherently prefer, rather than them just being selected to not-really-anticipate the promised afterlife.  Assuming, of course, that a slave with the promise of Elysium would not just want to go to Elysium like a sane person.  (Further assuming that Elysium doesn't turn you into a cheerful bright glowing ball, which would be another excellent reason to want to stay alive though miserable.)

Mostly, that should be set aside for later experiment; it's the sort of disagreement they might be able to resolve by using Detect Thoughts on a volunteer, at this intelligence level.

But if the Golarion variant of humanity is bred not to really believe in Hell or Elysium, it's probably also impossible for them to really emotionally believe in anything he says about Greater Reality.  Even if they use 15 wishes and a +6 intelligence headband and an Owl's Wisdom to make the underlying arguments understandable.  He supposes that they could find that somebody with that boost would suddenly say, "Oh, wait, what the ass was I thinking, of course I'd rather go to Elysium than be a slave," and then they might be able to coherently process arguments about Greater Reality; but that experimentaloutcome would still undermine Carissa's point.

Carissa expects that for the most part, for most people, there has never been any serious selection at all around ability to think or not think about afterlives, because the overwhelming majority of people are farmers who know only vague legends about the gods that may or may not cohere to anything in particular. Most people who have ever lived probably have no idea if Hell is real, or if it's really very bad, or if Elysium turns them into a strange alien, or if they'd prefer either to nonexistence. (This is testable: they can go ask people in remote villages someplace). The thing Keltham is postulating, selection, where people who thought clearly about the world and realized they didn't want to live in it had fewer offspring, could only possibly have happened among a tiny segment of the population which had any confident knowledge about the afterlives (high-level spellcasters and people who get trustworthy information from them) and the ability to based on that control whether they had children, which most people can only do through lifelong celibacy.

(She does suspect that humans are selected against finding lifelong celibacy easy.)

Furthermore, coherent reasoning is useful for tons of other things that affect whether your children live to adulthood: planning which crops to plant, how much seed corn to hold in reserve, how to interpret signs of a coming storm, how to decide when to flee and when to stand and fight. There is extremely strong selection in favor of coherent reasoning; her best guess as to why everyone isn't ridiculously good at it is that there are some deep physical tradeoffs.

Regardless, she doesn't think this matters. The process by which people arrived at their current reasoning abilities and attitudes about the afterlives aren't relevant to her. The reasoning abilities are relevant and the attitudes, but not the process.

And she doesn't care if they 'emotionally believe' anything Keltham has to say. If they, in fact, told about Greater Reality and about the existing afterlives, want to go to the existing afterlives, then even if this is not what Keltham thinks they should want, or not what he thinks a different person with different abilities would want, it doesn't matter, because they are not Keltham's slave to dispose of as suits him; they should get the thing they actually want, not the thing that Keltham believes they would want if they were bred for or otherwise predisposed to greater coherence.

It really and truly feels to Carissa like it is profound Evil Keltham is describing here, to destroy someone's soul over your own conviction that, while they prefer Heaven to the distribution of outcomes in Greater Reality you described to them (or reject the premise that experiential-thread is what matters), if they were better at reasoning they'd most likely want something else. She just doesn't think it's all right to do that to people, ever; she thinks you'd kind of have to lack some essential human sensibility that dath ilan perhaps bred out of its own population in order to want to.

There may have been effects on her moral-cognitive reflexes for that she grew up in Cheliax - where every authority and every person who wants to overrule you, for what they claim is your own good, in fact doesn't really care for you much.  Or, insofar as they do care about you, is actively steering you against where you'd want to go if fully informed, i.e., trying to steer you into Lawful Evil.

Someone who grew up that way, might come out of that with a different moral outlook on parentalism, than someone who grew up in dath ilan.

Civilization's prediction markets are basically well-calibrated; Governance has a functioning delegacy that puts nonassholes in charge and could immediately kick out any who turned asshole later.  Dath ilan is nonetheless very conservative about applying parentalism, because it's understood that parentalism incurs long-term costs for short-term gains.  When you prevent people from making their own mistakes, you also prevent people from learning from them... well, of course that's also more of a long-term benefit in dath ilan, where people and societies actually do learn from mistakes.

But if you don't guard the heavy machinery well enough, a kid can wander in and get killed, and then they can't learn from that.  Or rather, the lesson comes in the Future, but that's a little late.

Dath ilan has always staged its degree of parentalism - as measured by the difficulty of the competence tests you need to pass before doing something supposedly harmful - with the goal of giving the smaller minds (like kids) the chance to make their own mistakes; provided that those mistakes aren't going to cause severe irrevocable damage.  That is, Civilization is heavily but not massively conservative in the direction of more letting people make their own mistakes.  Adults with learning disabilities who'll never be able to pass the relevant competence test get stronger guardrails set around them, because they can't learn from their mistakes, and so there's not as much long-term benefit to letting them hurt themselves.

The fact that people in Golarion have probably been implicitly selected to instinctively distrust, hate, and resent authorities, in a world where authorities weren't in fact looking out for their best interests... well, mostly it strikes him as possibly reflecting a trope about unreasonably-difficult+thoughtexperiments:  what if an organism couldn't steer to avoid hurting themselves, couldn't think about the question intelligently, couldn't learn from experience either because the problem was oneshot-else-die or because they were too dumb to generalize the right lessons, and they'd been evolutionarily selected to disbelieve in the possibility of anyone else helping them steer, and to feel angry and awful if you tried to help them anyways?

And there's an old fallback in overly-difficult thoughtexperiments like that one:  Go back to what's actually true.  People can tie themselves up in tangled knots of belief and trust and resentment of parentalism, but afterlives are just real, cryonics is just real, the Future is just a place and so is Greater Reality.  The core idea cutting through all dath ilan's arrangements is this: that when the test shows that you see reality clearly, you are said to be ready to navigate it yourself, even if society doesn't like your choices.

The reason why kids are prevented from killing themselves generally, and truekilling themselves especially, before they pass the respective competence tests to choose either, is not that Civilization thinks it proper for parents to have different interests in children than children have in themselves.  It is that Civilization is reasonably certain that it does in fact know something that the kids don't know, and to be more meta-rational than the kids about which of them is more likely to know it: namely, the value-of-information from staying alive longer to see what unfolds.  When prediction markets become sufficiently certain that somebody would say years later that they should've been allowed to suicide years earlier, that's an automatic license to do so no matter how young you are at the time.

He's sympathetic to the idea that INT 10 people in Golarion should be allowed to hurt themselves, maybe deal themselves lifelong crippling injuries that they can't afford to get healed, if they say to the likes of gods and INT 29 mortals:  "Stay out of my business."  Past-Keltham fell on the Individualistic side of Civilization's moral balances; he wanted Civilization to move more in the direction of people looking out for themselves, rather than looking out for others.

You could make a strong case for letting eight-year-olds get themselves killed that way, once they're old enough not to make the wrong choices in the Boneyard; in the long run that provides the benefit of calibrating future generations to accept the right amount of advice.  Conversely, if you prevent kids from killing themselves or force them to take advice, standard dysgenic mutational pressures may produce increasingly suicidal or intransigent kids.

But he starts to worry when it comes to the question of letting people go to Hell; or for that matter, having children in Cheliax if Cheliax stays the way it is.  At that point it starts to become proper for the Government to step in and do something about it, at least if it's dath ilani Governance rather than Golarion royalty.  That's a kind of mistake that smaller agents really can't recover from, and it's the proper job of larger agencies to guard them parentally until the smaller agents pass the relevant competence tests for having understood what they're getting into.

Past-Keltham thought in dath ilan that people ought to be more selfish, and wished that Civilization were set up to work with more selfish people.  But even he considered there to be an obvious caveat for having systems in place such that children could successfully grow up, and not just, like, get eaten by the first adult who talked them into signing a legal release allowing them to be eaten.

Carissa agrees that letting people go to Hell is taking this principle too far. She thinks that the way you can tell it's taking the principle too far is that generally, once they're in Hell, they don't want to be there anymore. But she doesn't think that applies to people choosing Heaven over Greater Reality, assuming Heaven doesn't mind-edit them to like it once they're there; she doesn't think they'll later regret it, and if they do they can in fact go try out Greater Reality at that point. And Keltham was just hypothesizing people who they told all of the facts known to them about Greater Reality. She thinks that at that point they know the facts and they choose Heaven it's a choice there's no justification for overriding them in.

She agrees that the parentalism of dath ilan is much less bad than the same thing in Cheliax. But she observes all the same that if there were people in dath ilan who were miserable not to have more freedom, not to be allowed to go start their own Civilization, to have had the crucial decisions about their childhood made for them, well, those people wouldn't have kids, and so dath ilan probably does have selection in the direction of being all right with lots and lots of parentalism.

In an absolute sense, yes, there's lots of parentalism in Civilization; and decreasing it is an ongoing problem that lots of Very Serious People worry about, not least because they're explicitly worried about selection pressures for being okay with whatever level of paternalism is allowed to prevail.

In Golarion he observes a notable tendency for city governments and kingdoms to ban books that might lead people into heresy; and not offer those books for sale in Ill-Advised Consumer Goods stores to anyone who's old enough, or any child who passes a requisite competence test about it.  In Golarion, once the city-level or national-level government or maybe just a powerful local church decides you're not allowed to buy a book, or a drug, or in some places a night with a sex worker, that's just The Rule and there's no exception for anyone.

(One could conceivably argue that Golarion's policy is really the same as dath ilan's policy; it's just that nobody in Golarion can pass those competence tests, so nobody in Golarion is allowed to go to an Ill-Advised Consumer Goods store, so they might as well not exist.  However, it seems to him that the competence test of the individual ought to be calibrated to the competence of the government that wants to overrule them, and governments in Golarion couldn't pass those dath ilani competence tests either.)

People in Golarion are being selected to be okay with much greater levels of obnoxious interference in their lives, so far as he can tell.  It's just that the claim of those governments to be acting on behalf of the individual, with all their meddling rules and prohibitions, is not even that believable.  So it's not, at that point, selection pressure about being okay with real actual parentalism from an entity that plausibly does have your best interests at heart.  It's about submitting to a Golarion government that will otherwise torture or execute you...

...but this is getting off-track from the key point, and the rule he knows for cases like that is to review the local stack trace.

A couple of stack layers up, Carissa was putting forth the predicted-but-not-confirmed-observation evidence of "an average slave prefers to stay alive, and is predicted by me to want that even if they were guaranteed to go to Axis or Elysium" (is his paraphrase okay, he wants to check?) as moral input into the question of how bad it is to prevent people from existing in a life that's hard or unfair.  Carissa had also proposed an experiment about explaining to someone about Greater Reality, and then offering them 10,000gp in exchange for a fifty percent chance of being eaten by a daemon under controlled conditions (paraphrase okay?), as moral input into how bad of an individual-choice violation would be involved in destroying Creation.

The problem from his perspective is that if an average slave doesn't choose Elysium, he's not clear on to what extent that implies a general problem with truly believing that Elysium is real, versus a strong coherent preference to stay in Golarion.  Carissa then put forth a claim that it was morally imperative on him not to test whether an individual's preferences were coherent or their beliefs accurate, just obey their stated decisions (paraphrase okay?).  But in the moral system he knows, there's no obvious systematic way to put forth an absolute deontological-rule like that, rather than a defeasible deontological-pressure, without implying that eight-year-olds should be absolutely allowed to take truicidal actions that they don't know are truicidal but that they say they want to do.  Carissa replied that letting people go to Hell is indeed too far, implying it's a deontological-pressure rather than a deontological-rule, and said that Heaven vs Greater Reality should be up to the individual.

He tentatively agrees with leaving Heaven vs Greater Reality to the individual (if Heaven isn't actually gotchaing people into lantern archons, but yeah sure that seems unlikely).  What next step of argument from there?

If he agrees with leaving Heaven versus Greater Reality to the individual then they might just...agree? Carissa doesn't think she is reasoning in deontological-rules, she's not sure how those fit into Carissa-values and they may not at all, she's mostly just thinking in terms of civilizations-she'd-want-to-preemptively-cryopreserve-or-not.

She thinks that as much as she hates it, Keltham is at least maybe-right about Hell, and she's just scared that because Keltham doesn't think anyone else is reasoning clearly he will make tradeoffs between non-Hell places and Greater Reality which aren't, in fact, those they'd make.

Yay for apparent-possible-progress-pending-further-discussion+toward-agreement, then!  But not to overpromise progress, he's worried for trope-based reasons that, after they have a few more days to mentally pursue this debate, they won't end up actually agreeing about the expected value of Greater Reality to people vs. "any living standards higher than literally Hell".

In particular, he's worried for trope-based reasons that the real heart of the disagreement between himself and Carissa will turn out to be that past-Keltham experienced his True Death and continuation elsewhere, and now remembers apparently direct confirmation of isekai-immortality being what truedying people actually experience.  That evidence centers on his self-observation and his update off finding himself to be this self rather than somebody else: noticing himself to be somebody who remembers beginning in a simpler more real world and truedying there and continuing in a less real one.  From the standpoint of somebody else watching past-Keltham get copied out of dath ilan, they haven't made that same observation, and it's fundamentally unshareable with them.

The famous central difficulty of writing a romance novel is finding a conflict that can't be resolved immediately through clear communication and emotional maturity; nobody wants to read a romance novel about silly people ignoring obvious solutions.  Anthropically unshareable evidence is one way of providing a romantic obstacle like that.

It would not have occurred to Carissa to complain that among the problems with their relationship were that they didn't have enough genuine non-manufactured conflict.

In fact she can't think of a single romance she's ever encountered in which that was the problem! Any two people naturally have irreconciliable differences as a product of the one of them selfishly optimizing for their own interests and the other selfishly optimizing for their own - okay now that she completes that sentence she can see how in dath ilan that would not describe the plot of many romance novels.

But the unshared evidence thing does seem like it might arise. Carissa does not really think that in an important sense the thing that happens, if you truedie is you waking up somewhere else; someone might make a copy of you somewhere else, which is good of them, and if you truedie enough places then on that planet, the copy might have the experience of truedying and finding itself on a planet that likes making copies of dead people from elsewhere. And she grants that she ought to care about exact copies of herself as much as about herself. But the intuitions from instead-you-wake-in-a-nearby-universe-where-you-didn't-truedie and instead-your-experiential-thread-usually-dwindles-slowly-enough-there's-nothing-to-continue suggest to her that she doesn't think 'you wake up in Greater Reality when you die' is the right way to think about it, even if it or something like it did happen to Keltham this time from his perspective.

Still viewing the conversational stack from a step back, they shouldn't be trying to fully-resolve this now unless it looks like it can be fully-resolved quickly.  The important thing in this conversation is to get an overview of the things that might form an obstacle to cooperation and kept oaths between them, going forwards.

The critical question here is: what happens if the plot successfully places the two of them in an epistemic Cooperation-Defection Dilemma, where rather than the two of them just having different goals, Carissa believes that he is mistaken about what happens when people greatly diminish in reality / get deleted from the universes that contained most of their instantiatedness; and conversely he thinks Carissa is mistaken about him being mistaken.  (This is the thing that's hard to do to a romance between INT 29 people who know about agreement theorems (as she soon will), unless the plot throws anthropics into it or something equally overclever; which is why he worries about overclever tropes.)

In this case, Carissa could end up believing that to play 'Defect' against him would be to serve even his own goals, better than her Cooperating would serve them.  Betraying him might seem like a friendly act, an act of aid.

(The classic presentation of this situation to dath ilani children supposes two 12-year-olds on an island otherwise full of 9-year-olds, and they're all facing a contagious disease:

The two 12-year-olds disagree about which disease it probably is.

The 9-year-olds collectively have enough resource that they can take thorough precautions against one disease, or 80%-effective sloppy precautions against both diseases.

Either 12-year-old could sabotage the other by waiting for them both to present their case, and then telling the 9-year-olds all the reasons why they're sure the other 12-year-old is wrong, in which case the 9-year-olds will take 99%-effective precautions against that disease only.

If both 12-year-olds Defect in that way, the 9-year-olds will be dispirited and only take 20%-effortful 50%-effective precautions against both diseases.

These two agents both have the same altruistic goal - to save as many of the people on the island as possible - but their believed Cooperation-Defection payoff matrix has the classic ordering of the Dilemma:  DC > CC > DD > CD.)

Carissa is, actually, pretty sure at this point that she is going to be a Lawful god; she wishes she had retained the option to betray Keltham to Otolmens, but she does not actually intend to do so, having not retained that option. That logic does not, to her, feel specific to whether she would be betraying Keltham for his own good or for the good of every other person in the world.

Yeah, he figured, but wanted to check explicitly.

Okay to shift discussion to continue a previous topic up the stack?

Yes. And she noticed he asked and will try to do the same if she's changing topics, though on the set of norms more familiar to her you just change topics and the other person can object if they object.

That sure is an impressively low amount of meta!  He's not sure he wants to go that low on meta.  Their conversation has been sorta uncontrolled, not really by his past-self's standards for arguing something complicated with a friend over a meal, but definitely by the standards of Very Serious People in dath ilan trying to use two people's intelligence in a coordinated way.  Though his guess made at the start of the mental meeting, and still held by him now, is that their time is still mostly better spent on mostly not-meta, due to their lack of mutually established protocols for meta, which is why his current meta-meta strategy is to do only very brief metas like that one he just did.  But you can still, like, briefly meta-think about whether it's okay to change topics or if the other person was still in the middle of thinking.

Carissa is going to go even less meta and just make an exasperated face at him.

(His body, back in reality, takes a half-round to breathe, for a moment, before falling back into the debate.)

Back up-thread, he mentioned how, from the inferred suppression of pre-prophecy-shattering industry in Golarion, he further adduces a Potent Intervener, probably a Divine Coalition.

One of his background guesses that this Potent Intervener is mostly coextensive and maybe cointensive with the Rovagug Coalition, the gods which cooperated to seal Rovagug, and could by different choices, then or perhaps now, release Rovagug instead.

As he mentioned earlier to mid-Carissa, but considers an important aspect of his model and worth reviewing now:

It is his further guess that every ancient god who participated in sealing Rovagug, did so as part of an agreement that Creation wouldn't be allowed to fall below their own value-of-nonexistence plus fair-share-of-trade-gain-for-not-that.  It may be more of an ongoingly tense treaty than a logically-verified binding bargain, since some Chaotic gods participated; when Dou-Bral was flipped to Zon-Kuthon, it's not clear that past that point the world was maintained in a state-at-least-minimally-pleasing to Dou-Bral.

Creation, on his model, has always been maintained in a state guaranteed to be satisfactory to those ancient gods who'd have the power to destroy it otherwise, and only those ancient gods.  That's just how Pharasma does business, or how the Divine Coalition does business.

Sarenrae may not maximally like this current state of affairs, but it contains enough redemption and healing that She prefers it to nonexistence.  He does, in fact, worry that Sarenrae is maybe a Positive entity, who might think that 10 people in Hell plus 1 person being redeemed and healed in Nirvana, is a net gain over all 11 of them having never been.  Gozreh and Calistria and Dahak may all think Creation could stand to be better; but none of them would prefer it not exist, and probably by a substantial and comfortable margin (though of that he is less sure).

Mortals have not been invited to that bargaining table, on his model, because they lack the power to destroy Creation.  He's worried that mortals can't get a fair share without being one of the Powers that can otherwise destroy Creation.

His plan from the beginning was simply to put his own lethal grip around Creation's throat, and then if Anyone happens to prefer Creation to go on existing, They can invite him to take a seat and bargain for the world to look okay to mortals too, and not just to ancient gods.  The gods themselves, on his model, chose to make that power the qualifier for listening to any being's pleading; they shouldn't complain, and he doesn't actually think they will complain, and if they do complain then everyone can take their batna and end Creation.

Carissa thinks that she just... rejects that frame, which Keltham likes to think in, for contemplating what he is doing.

Carissa does not actually feel that there is any unfairness in the fact that the entities who sealed Rovagug got more of what they wanted than entities which showed up much later and didn't seal Rovagug. That seems entirely fair to her. She doesn't think that "I'll help seal Rovagug, if you do X once Rovagug is sealed" is at all the same kind of conduct as "I'll destroy the world, if you don't do X which makes me not want to" -- a Carissa, obviously, would have helped seal Rovagug without conditions, but she's happy to work with entities of the first type and fundamentally thinks the second ought to be preemptively cryopreserved for everyone else's protection. And while if someone ELSE went and released Rovagug this week she would be willing to make concessions to get Keltham to help her fight him, they'd be concessions to Keltham's wants, not to mortals' wants, and it's another thing entirely to say that he should himself get the rewards of having fought Rovagug if he didn't.

Carissa thinks that mortals have more of a seat at the table in Sarenrae's values, or Shelyn's, or Desna's, or Shizuru's, than in Keltham's; she thinks that those gods have something closer to the median values of a mortal in Golarion than Keltham does. She thinks that dath ilani morality is - askew in important respects from human values which make Keltham a particularly bad representative of humanity.

Dath ilani mostly are easy to get to no longer want to live. Golarionites aren't. Dath ilani mostly experience cognitive enhancement as personality death. Golarionites don't. Dath ilani mostly think about morality in precise theoretical terms borrowed from bargaining - fair shares, what mortals would have had if they'd helped seal Rovagug - and Golarionites don't. dath ilani don't seem to have the same care for tradition and history that Golarionites have. None of the things Keltham is saying are Golarionite things. He does not represent Golarionite values, and his having power would not make the world more of one in which Golarionite values, especially the extremely common Golarionite value of not being annihilated, would be represented.

Keltham is another alien entity who wants to destroy the world if it doesn't meet with his approval, and he is not an alien entity whose wants actually serve the people whose lives he is toying with. 

That Carissan take is kinda the only reason besides sheer lingering attachment to Carissa, for why he's considering throwing Golarion mortals under the tractor-wheels at all; that she, who'd be Lawful Evil goddess of Hell, does claim to be more their protector and to speak for them, than could he of dath ilan, and does most earnestly tell him that they're fine with their crapsack world.  He doesn't really believe her right now, but it shifts him some, and there are some experiments they can do to learn a little more.

It's a harder sell if some of the people in there are his kids.

Whether any of them are, is undetermined; but if it becomes this much of a factor, he'll want to probe Cheliax about it, and eat the added risk of imminent Cheliax attack if Cheliax notices the probes.

And if he does have that many kids - would Carissa rather he move now, when they're not ready, or would she rather he make more stringent demands of Pharasma?  He's... really not happy about the concept of destroying Cheliax just to buy a couple more weeks of time, and there'd be the chance they'd have moved some of his kids outside Cheliax.  It would - just read to him like a stronger story-prompt/prompt-from-above to shut up, stop trying to wiggle out of things, act with alacrity before he has to destroy Cheliax.

Or maybe a prompt/nudge/demand not to let this stay a crapsack world, not to yield so much in negotiations, to hold it to the standard of a worthy place for his children to grow up.

- she thinks she'd rather they move early, if those are the only two choices, but she needs to think very carefully, if that's the tradeoff. She thinks that if Keltham is ascending with substantial intent to bargain for much more than Hell, then probably they lose. Her best read of the trope-logic is that in this story, if they can't compromise, they lose everything and everyone dies. The forces arranging this are not, in her read of them, pushing for "Keltham boldly demands, and gets, everything he wanted" - if that would have worked, it would've worked without Carissa carefully engineered to be at his side. The reason she's here has to be because otherwise he asks for too much and loses.

He hardly needs to be reminded that Pharasma might refuse a demand and then he'll need to destroy Creation.  He is always forcing himself to reason as if Pharasma will reject all demands and the question is which universes he then wants to destroy.  If a trope-sign that Pharasma might not yield to him, changes his demands, it means he's fucking that up, and Pharasma would refuse that demand in any case.

And while he knows that Carissa hates it when he thinks like he's in a story, for the record, he does in fact hate being in a story.

Carissa is again too busy not having emotions to bond with Keltham over their common loathing of being in a story but wishes to do the social handshake that would correspond to.

(Correct format for communicating with him, helpful explicit metadata annotation; social handshake acknowledged.)

One of the major factors he's worried about is that the state of the romance between them is trashed in a way that - wouldn't correspond to being on track for the Good Ending of a dath ilani eroLARP, or of a story based on deconstructing one.  Which may nicely mean they're off the story rails, in some important sense, but may non-nicely mean they have no guardrails either.  What he and Carissa were meant to be, together - was probably not this, that they have come to.  Or maybe the tropes governing these events are just not what they would be in dath ilan.  Or they are headed for some upset that lets them be together after all - but he mostly doesn't believe that, the wounds between them look too deep.

Her hypothesis may still be - a valid inference about what Keltham and Carissa were meant to have been.

Well, there could always just not exist the kids he's afraid of.  He mostly thinks they won't be there.  Not least because, if those possible kids are actual, it undoes a lot of what Carissa seems to have accomplished inside the story.  Probably she slays Abrogail Thrune and his one unborn child and that's, enough.

(His body seems to want to cry, about that; he's not sure they have that kind of relationship any more, to cry in front of her, and he is mostly inclined to not let his body do it.  "Tears and hugs don't solve anything," goes a proverb out of dath ilan, "so don't offer them to people who need solutions.")

Carissa observes that if they need to have repaired their romantic relationship to get a good ending, then possibly they should take steps towards doing that, now that they're smart enough they probably won't just emotionally shred each other every few seconds. She is not herself convinced of a framework in which they're - supposed to be in love, supposed to be together, as opposed to just having been cynically engineered into a position where he would listen to her and she would have learned from him how to figure out what she actually wants. There's no reason, she thinks, that the story-writers would engineer a happy ending for the two of them being part of a happy ending for the world; in many stories, they'd have to pick which one they really wanted.

She doesn't mind if he cries in front of her, though she's still not really having emotions and so is unlikely to naturally-rather-than-deliberately respond in the way he might be hoping for. She could scoot over to him, and hold him, and weep with him, but, well, it would be on purpose because maybe tears and hugs do actually solve problems related to being in a story.

Yeah, he's pretty sure that doesn't work tropewise.  Not if the tropes here are anything like dath ilani, and if they're that alien from it then who knows the sign of anything.  Trying to just patch things over, force things over, because the two of them think the story needs it, is not a romantic victory.

He hopes that this all works out to his trusting Carissa; and that she knows how to scan Cheliax, in a way that doesn't give too much away, but shows whether or not they tried to steal children from him and hide them; and that the scan of Cheliax turns up negative, so that Carissa gets to hold on to the small triumph she has, that was all he found himself able to give her, and the meaning she thinks she has in this story.

If the story seizes that from her, it won't be a good sign about the kind of plot arc they're inside now.

Carissa thinks that Keltham is, perhaps, not directing his own intelligence sufficiently at the problem of making things go well for his children, if they exist. She has seen him apply his full creativity to problems, and usually when he does there's a brilliant sideways solution there, not just a well of despair and impossibility.

Would it be sufficient if they just pay Heaven and Nirvana to adopt every Golarion child in the Boneyard and raise them all in ilani-acceptable ways. They can't do it sustainably but they could do it for one cohort.

...he'd probably want his kids going to Elysium, or maybe just delete the souls before they actually have qualia, but - okay, yeah, she has a point, if he can identify his kids from a divine vantage point, or anyone trustworthy can, he can optimize for them specifically.

...it continues to feel to him that this would be wrong, if he did that, that you can't ask special treatment for your own kids and leave everyone else's kids to rot in Golarion's misery.  That the point of throwing Suddenly Kids into the story would be to force him to realize that everyone in Creation is somebody's child, that everyone in Creation deserves better than the negotiating-equilibrium of Pharasma plus the ancient gods deemed fit to leave them.

But she has proven a point that he's obviously not thinking about this clearly, that he's still running the wrong adaptive-pattern-shapes for directing his thoughts.  Scanning through everything and rewiring himself is not going to be instantaneous, especially when he's got to juggle not being extortionate through a modified self as proxy.

The instinct, in him, that it'd be wrong if he did that, feels like a recognizable parallel of Carissa's feelings, earlier, that there was no point in putting her family on an ark in Elysium. She thinks he was right about that one.

Oh, he'd absolutely have his putative kids sent to Elysium, the question is just how he ought to feel about everyone else's kids after that.

Carissa doesn't herself have children. She wanted to, but it wasn't quite time -

- no, that's not it. She was worried she'd care about them, and that seemed like a liability, so she was going to wait until she got monetary incentives, and was then doing it for totally mercenary reasons.

She wasn't accustomed to thinking about - doing other people kindnesses you can't call in on them - so it didn't occur to her to think about whether by having the kids she would be doing them a favor. If she had she'd have had them sooner, because - because obviously getting to be born into Golarion is a favor? A whole glorious shining world, with dirt and water and sky and gossip and magic and impossible dreams -

It's not perfect, not yet, but they're working on it, and not everyone wants to be born somewhere perfect, some people want to be part of the work of getting there -

- if Keltham is right, they'll have all of eternity to live in universes which are in fixed states, ruled by vast entities that make sure nothing goes too awfully wrong. And they'll have only this brief beautiful instant, to live in a universe that needs fixing.

She is sad, that she was too scared of caring about other people to give some children that.

Well, to be exact, he'll have his kids sent to Elysium if he can't otherwise negotiate a Golarion where they'd be okay living, with a sufficiently high probability of being fixable if they try...

This unfortunately feels a lot like his emotions-rather-than-abstractions were going along with Carissa's suggestions because the people in Creation were aliens and maybe not all that real, whereas his kids would be real and have actual feelings and ought not to be condemned to a Carissa-acceptable world... he will have to track down the difference between his Sys1 and Sys2 here, it is not something he can do in an instant.

There is something here that his emotions are not easily willing to let go.  He will have to think about what it means.  And whether it ought to be extended beyond his own children to Golarion-variant humanity or if it's specifically about heritable dath ilani emotional makeup, and whether he is willing to destroy Creation about whatever this is.

He should learn more of other species, if their psychologies are different enough to notice.  Maybe he'd demand that humanity be removed from Creation, but dwarves would be fine to go on having children that gods will keep as cattle or pets and never permit a true Civilization.  Does Carissa have a take on that?

Carissa does think that it's the kind of thing where the average answer might vary by species. Though also she thinks it might not. Presumably, if people resented that their parents bore them, they wouldn't go on having their own children. Then all the species where such resentments were common would have dwindled and died out.

...it occurs to her, thinking about it from this angle, that elves famously have few children. She had always heard it attributed to this planet not being as suitable for childbearing as their original planet, but it does seem to function as evidence that species might just by collective decision wipe themselves out. (This hasn't occurred with elves because they are immortal, so even though their rare births don't replace the rate of their rare deaths they die out only slowly, as she was told it.)

She does think that humans obviously should be permitted to be born on Golarion. If there is one species where she can say this with confidence, it is humans, because she does not really know what it is like to be a nonhuman born on Golarion and she does know that to be a human is to have something precious and glorious and good that she would trade infinite suffering to have experienced even briefly.

She also thinks that 'children that gods will keep as cattle or pets and never permit a true Civilization' is - obviously irrelevant, on Keltham's assumption that eventually everyone ends up in Greater Reality? Everyone will, if he's right about that, spend subjective eternity in a true Civilization, and the only question is whether it's a horrendous wrong that some of them will spend a while first in Golarion and its afterlives. 'they never get Civilization' is if Keltham's right not at all a possibility on the table. The only possibility is that they get something else first.

And if Keltham is wrong and what waits for those annihilated here is not some glorious Civilization, well, that seems like a wholly sufficient argument against annihilating this place, once you've dealt with Hell.

There is, from his own perspective, the question of whether gods ought to be allowed to keep temporary pets.

Dath ilani humans would not wish to enter into this place to be kept as pets even temporarily.  He worries this will also be true of his own children; fine, they can go to Elysium and they will be relatively few.  But it also seems to him a reasonable and natural way to think.  If lots of humans here would feel that way on reflection, then more of them shouldn't be brought into this pet-cage - as he would not bring his own children there, since they'd actually be real and not be aliens.

Conversely, if he already believed that most humans of Golarion thought as Carissa did, that they were all like her deep down, he would not even have argued.  He does want to be clear that he accepts that as a locally-valid-step of her argument:  If a supermajority of Creation's citizens are like Carissa, then nothing except Hell is worth annihilating Creation, if that.

Carissa isn't an average person of Golarion.  She's somebody who will become the Goddess of a better Hell.  As that Lawful Evil goddess, a better Lawful Evil goddess, it is - something that makes sense - that she would think that every sort of person and sentience and sapience has a right to exist as themselves, to be treasured as something that exists, even if others would call them Evil.  That somebody who tortures others, would not be seen by Her as somebody beyond the pale and unforgiveable.  That She would, not just morally, but emotionally, go on really caring about that one who inflicted hurt, when She welcomed them into Her Hell, maybe to be forcibly reformed over time and maybe not entirely in a comfortable way, but doing so in the way of Somebody who genuinely cares about that person and thinks they have a right to be themselves and be Evil.  That Her only truly unforgiveable sin would be feeding someone to daemons, which almost all entrants to Hell have not done; and that Her petitioners who hurt other people or exercised ill power over them, without depriving them of existence, have not, to Her, done something she emotionally feels is unforgiveable.

It is, maybe, better that Carissa be goddess over Hell, than Iomedae.  Iomedae would not be vengeful, of course - he is certain of that, he knows very well how entities think when they go that deep into Lawful Good.  Iomedae would calculate that the petitioners of Hell ought not to be hurt much, now that they can no longer hurt others, that there wouldn't be a point.  But the universal love that Heaven might give to Evil souls that fell into its power, is not the same as those petitioners entering into the embrace of a Goddess who truly believes Herself that those petitioners, while in need perhaps of correction, even forcible correction, are not aliens to Her, not so distant from Her, that most entrants into Hell have not done anything that is to Her true anathema.

The point being, Carissa is kind of a special person.

He is reasonably sure that most people aren't exactly like Carissa.

As for exactly how much they are like or unlike past-Carissa, like or unlike past-Keltham, it is the sort of thing that they can experiment on later with Detect Thoughts.

Carissa would not want to go to a place where she was Iomedae's, that much she's sure of. She wouldn't rather be Asmodeus's, now that she really understands Him, but...she'd rather be Abrogail's. She would want those who go to Hell to fear that they will be treated with by the rules they know very well, and know how to use, but by which they are presently powerless, not that they will be subject to alien whims.

She thinks she can do Hell right, if it's hers. She thinks she can make people better and stronger and also possible to usefully have as part of something with a purpose other than suffering.

(It really seems like anyone else could, too, if they tried, but Carissa is wise enough to know by now that the reflex 'it really seems like anyone else could, too, if they tried', is a reflex installed when it was not in her interests to think that she was valuable or unusual, a reflex installed probably-deliberately by other people who did not want her to think she was valuable or unusual.)

She thinks that Greater Reality might be a bit like Iomedae, that way, and that people getting to come to her might be better.

...Carissa thinks that it would not seem outrageous to her, not abhorrent, if Keltham made a condition of his negotiations with the other gods that it be possible in their afterlives to learn the truth of Greater Reality and go there. She still feels sick at the thought of Keltham destroying a Hell-less Creation over that condition, but it doesn't seem to her to be an incomprehensible crime; it would be him thinking that they ought to have the choice between this thing and a thing he thinks is better, and making the choice for them only if he is not allowed to give them a choice.

She does not feel that way about him making other demands for Golarion and Creation to be changed to his liking, but if he were to insist on a choice - she could understand that. She could imagine eventually coming to forgive someone who had murdered a Carissa because he was not allowed to give her a choice about whether to live or not.

He might want to try to talk her out of - no.

Carissa should talk to Carmin, not him, about what She plans to make of Hell.  Or run Carmin inside her mind, if she's confident of her model and the real Carmin would be too slow.  But maybe give Good a chance to talk to her about what exactly people going to Hell should fear; he did flinch, a little, when Carissa said it like that.  He's not saying that it's his decision and his answer is no, but - please give some Good person born of Golarion a chance to talk to her about it, while she's still mortal, because he worries that gods have a harder time changing Their minds.

- well, maybe the gods should consider being less incompetent, then. But she does mean to talk to Carmin, and to everyone else who is allowed to know what she knows. She is still, after all, looking for a way out.

They'll have a lot more things to think at each other later, about Greater Reality and negotiations with Pharasma; but they have some idea, now, of the differences between themselves.

Having discussed things at the object level, it seems like it might be time to have a conversation that might end up even more stressful (if they don't deliberately deploy Wisdom to shut down their own emotional responses as might be a bad idea) but they probably need to talk about this, particularly because it might affect downstream whether oaths between them are trustworthy.

He's been putting off all the conversation with Carissa that hasn't been about technical things or very short-term goals, waiting for her to have another 5 Wisdom and himself to have 2 more Intelligence, because their first attempt at having conversations with emotions in it went incredibly badly and he did not then understand what had gone wrong; at the time it seemed to him like Carissa was lashing out at him in a way that - just didn't make any sense in dath ilani terms, or anything that she'd been willing to show him back in Cheliax either.  He could map it onto characters in Golarion stories but those characters seemed to have no knowledge that they were inside stories or think of how they might look from the outside, and it seemed - possibly not true, that Carissa was like that, in the grips of unreflective hate; and if it was true then it would damage their relationship, if he dwelled on that rather than waiting for both of them to be smarter.

But he did not know how to deal with it, how she was to him, it wasn't a way that dath ilani are to other dath ilani, nor could he parse it as an Alien communications protocol that had been designed in any way where the goal was good outcomes if both people behaved like that to each other.  He was confused and he feared it and it hurt and there didn't seem to be any safe way to talk to Carissa or even try to discuss relationship meta-protocols with her, she just felt to him like a bundle of sharp edges and violence and hate directed at him; and moreover like she felt those sharp edges and hatred were right and proper to direct at him, like that was part of a mature comms protocol they were both supposed to be using, and would have been sad if he'd argued against it.

At this level of Intelligence he can look back and begin to parse some of what might have been happening.  He can suspect, now, that when Carissa refused to follow him down the hallway she was being a Chelish person in a dangerous situation testing out visible dissent to see what happened, not being a dath ilani shifting their relationship to seem no longer on friendly terms before she used her more powerful headband to destroy all his plans; and that when, from mid-Keltham's perspective, this triggered an inevitable discussion that should've been had before he invited her into his doombase at all, 'please promise not to use your superior intelligence to destroy my doombase, or I might have to put you on hold until we're equally intelligent', it looked to mid-Carissa like her defiance had been met by threatening to turn her into a statue.  He can guess, now, that Carissa has probably been making more subtle overtures to him, that he didn't respond to in the very narrow way that would tell a Chelish person that they were safe to continue talking to somebody who could have her hauled off to a torture chamber at any moment; but even if he'd guessed this earlier, mid-Keltham wouldn't have been able to do anything about it.

Carissa had been assuming that Keltham was in fact not a safe person to show any of her internal processing, not a safe person to ask to change how he interfaces with her in any way, that it was somewhere between undesirable and impossible for him to change how he interacted with her. This is of course not a very strong claim, in Golarion terms; overwhelmingly, a person who has power over you is not a person it is safe to make requests of, or safe to contradict, or safe to show how you work; when you expose your internals to someone, or tell them what you need, you are giving them more ways to hurt you. She did try, sometimes, but it didn't work, and - yes, that interaction in the hallway was important, in shaping all of Carissa's strategies for surviving in Keltham's fortress.

It is a natural sort of thing to do, when you are a prisoner or a slave or otherwise in a precarious situation, to test the smallest possible disobedience, something for which the punishment will almost certainly be survivable (and if it's not, well, you weren't going to survive anyway, in that case). Then you learn how quickly your captors are moved to anger, what warning signs you can see in them, how badly they hurt you, what finally satisfies them.

So Keltham said, "Carissa, with me", and he had just told her that she no longer belonged to him, and so she didn't obey. She thought at the time it was probably stupid of her, but - she wanted to know, very badly, what Keltham had meant when he said she no longer belonged to him.

It did not occur to her until this very moment that Keltham might have been parsing her as 'shifting their relationship to seem no longer on friendly terms before she used her more powerful headband to destroy all his plans'. If she'd been planning to betray him she'd have been scrupulously obedient, given every impression he was talking her around!

That's what people who are going to betray you do! .....apparently not in dath ilan, even though traitors who don't telegraph it survive better than traitors who do?

In dath ilan there is a notion that, even when things have gotten problematic between two parties, they don't immediately shift all the way towards throwing out all - what Golarion would call honor, dignity - in their relationships between each other.  Even if somebody's going to destroy your planet and you need to stop them, even if there's children being Maledicted to Hell, you don't - corrupt all of the potential for real friendship that exists everywhere - by pretending to be somebody's friend, or even their friendly trading partner, and then betraying them.

That's why past-Keltham stopped trading with Osirion, and refusing the equivalent of friendly hugs.  He needed to destroy their planet; that wasn't worth tarnishing the possibility of friendship by making them always worry that apparent friends might be out to destroy their planet.

Carissa can model this about dath ilani, sort of, now, though she thinks it only works if everyone else is doing it; Osirion does have to worry their apparent friends might be out to destroy the planet, whether Keltham in particular is their friend or not. The state where one need not fear the betrayal of their friends just isn't attainable; in Golarion it's all just a matter of slightly altered probabilities of betrayal.

If she'd realized greater-Carissa's plans while in bed with Abrogail and seen a way to pull it off she might have slit Abrogail's throat so she could run off with the crown, and Abrogail would not, she thinks, have felt betrayed by the lack of warning; indeed Abrogail would probably be disappointed in Carissa if Carissa tried to be honorable and warn her.

The Carissa in that hallway who inferred Keltham's full plans and decided to betray him would have followed obediently while fervently praying to Dispater and Otolmens and Irori and Abadar, to warn them of Keltham's plans, and then attempted either suicide or assassination without warning. She...had rather assumed this was common knowledge. She should have pointed it out, later.

It's something that Osirion doesn't need to fear from past-Keltham modeled accurately, or other Osirion-like agencies accurately modeling other Keltham-like beings around Greater Reality.  That property and the knowledge of it will have been preserved when all this dust settles, that the stranger from dath ilan never pretended to be anyone's friend after he stopped being their friend.

It's not surprising that in Cheliax everyone needs to fear betrayal from everyone; Cheliax isn't trying to preserve the possibility of honor, friendship, or warm feelings between anybody and anybody.

Carissa does not really think that if Keltham destroys the world observers in other universes will think that the possibility of honor or friendship with dath ilani has been preserved. ...maybe, if they're being very careful about what they believe and have full and accurate information, that the apparent friendliness of a dath ilani is unlikely to be feigned; but mostly, they would be correct to fear dath ilani and incorrect to befriend them, if their world is anything like Golarion, and if Keltham in the end sees fit to destroy Golarion; especially if he doesn't destroy it over Hell but over it being not to his liking in one of a thousand other ways. 

But she can now imagine the smaller, stupider Keltham, reading Carissa as a dath ilani, reading Carissa's hesitation in that hallway as a dramatic declaration of war as it would be in the home world he clearly misses dearly, and make sense of it, even if she doesn't think the dynamics that produce it really do reach across worlds. 

Carissa will try, then, reluctantly because it always feels very dangerous to roll back an update about how dangerous someone is, to peel loose the inferences she made in that moment in the hallway: that when Keltham said he no longer owned her, he did not mean that he no longer demanded her obedience, but that he no longer promised, in exchange, his consideration. That there was no disobedience so small and trivial and petty that she could expect to survive the punishment for it. That those impulses in her to test things he said, to check if they were true, were incredibly hazardous and should be squelched instantly, that she had no affordance to want to know such things and he would be furious with her for wondering.

It didn't seem like a very Kelthamish way to be, but then, he'd told her that he wasn't Keltham anymore and she should stop modeling him based on what Keltham was like.

And it does feel to her like there's some kind of - strange attitude, in new-Keltham's thinking, a sense that he had the right not just to kill you but not to face your defiance and fury about it -

- not the pragmatic thing, she understands the pragmatic argument that as a practical matter someone successfully concealing defiance and fury will be more likely to persuade someone not to kill them than someone letting it slip. But - it felt, at times, like she was observing a sort of underlying conviction that anyone full of defiance and fury and loathing at their executioner was being badly behaved even if the pragmatic considerations didn't apply. She doesn't fully understand it. Maybe she's wrong to infer it's there. But she thought it was there, and that made it seem more plausible, that new-Keltham was also someone who was incredibly dangerous to ever test or disobey; there was just a whole consistent explanation of him where he perceived many ways for his prisoners to misbehave and anger him, where he perceived himself entitled to their apparently eager and grateful cooperation with their execution...and she wasn't ever sure of it, but it seemed likely enough to make it obviously not worth testing again.

Does she still think, now, of him as 'executioner'?

(A need in him, sadness, fear, horror, wishing that things had not turned out like this he is suppressing thoughts of a 'correct' answer for her to give, doesn't want her to just see his answer sheet and read it off.)

The conversation about him not destroying the world if it isn't necessary to prevent Hell was helpful. She thinks she could see her way to not seeing him that way, if he is ready to destroy the world over Hell. She doesn't think she can see him any other way, if he is ready to destroy the world over people who want to live not having all the things he thinks they ought to get. Or - she can, she can probably see him whatever way is most helpful, but she'd be lying to herself to do it.

The first and most important fact about any person is the power they have over you and what they are trying to do with it. And Keltham had power over her that they'd both chosen, and he loved her, and he was trying to build Civilization. And now he is trying to destroy the world. She knows he'd rather not if he gets everything he wants, but if they were his only options, he'd rather destroy the world than let anyone live in it. He'd rather destroy her than build Civilization with her, if they'd be building without a guarantee they could bring an end to Hell eventually.

It's like trying to see the stars in daytime, trying to see any fact about Keltham other than that.

There's still the choice to express that as 'executioner', to say it the way you would say it about somebody who wanted to kill you, would enjoy killing you, was passionlessly doing a job about killing you.  That to him seems like the thing that is not in dath ilan - or almost never in dath ilan, not often enough to make the statistically-representative news there.  Where you try to make your political opposition look worse than they actually are, lie about that, lie about that to yourself, exaggerate the problem beyond what it is, like you're deliberately unseeing the Opposition's view of themselves and their own understanding of what they're doing, and substituting some alternate Opposition that sees itself the way you see them, an Opposition that only exists to show how you right you are for hating them and opposing them -

- he's seen it now, he's read Golarion books, but it still seems to him like a huge horror and a great distortion of truth, this thing called Hatred, that exists between two people wanting different things.

It seemed to mid-Keltham that there was something of a defection in it, in a cooperation-defection dilemma he was trying to play with Carissa.  That if he'd been to Carissa, as Carissa was to himself, that he would have hated her and called her uncaring, cruel, torturer of children, for that she'd have let the screaming paving stones stay in Hell forever and ever if that was the price of keeping Axis, and yelled like she didn't care or was happy about that.  Where that would have been Defecting, if he'd actually done that, and he was trying to Cooperate instead by trying to understand and see Carissa and her reasons as she saw herself, acknowledging her reasons for doing what she did, every time - except that in dath ilan that's not even a thing you're taught to do for the other person, it's just being sensible, seeing things as they are; the truth about the way the Opposition actually sees themselves is also part of Reality.

It seemed to him, sometimes, like Carissa was playing a game against him, where he was supposed to make that countermove, and the game couldn't go on to whatever awful thing came next, until he hated her back.  But this he could not bring himself to do.

She does not name him that because of how he feels about what he plans to do; she names him that because he intends to be the instrument of her death in the pursuit of his purpose.


Hating someone can be about lying to yourself about them. Certainly it is tempting to lie to yourself about other people, for lots of reasons, and hating someone can be one of those reasons. So can loving someone. But - and Carissa doesn't have a fully developed theory here, of how this ought to work, of how people ought to relate to each other, she never bothered coming up with one because she was very busy and nothing suggested it'd really help if both of them were judging each other for falling short of their different communication ideals -

- it would be an error, right, to say that because loving people is a temptation to lie to yourself about them, you shouldn't love people. Carissa is sort of persuaded of a weak version of this claim, that for humans with normal human capabilities you shouldn't love people because you'll be unable to avoid lying to yourself about them. But she thinks that a society of Carissae would instead try to teach all the Carissae how to love people without lying to yourself about them, instead of teaching them not to love.

And similarly they would try to teach all the Carissae how to hate people without lying to yourself about them, instead of teaching them not to hate.

And if there were a negative utilitarian Carissa who was trying to destroy the world, everyone in the Carissa-world would hate her, and, yes, name her an executioner. It wouldn't be a game. It wouldn't be that she was supposed to make any move back. The dignified thing to do, really, would be to nod and say that the hate is just and deserved, that it is not wrong-hate based on a lie about an enemy but right-hate based on a correct understanding of an enemy's true intent.

And is it just and deserved, rightful hate, that he hate Carissa for not caring enough about the paving stones in Hell, that she'd sacrifice their pain to save Axis, maybe because she never really understood what pain and suffering are to people who don't end up doing well as devils?  Is it right, for someone who has a different utilityfunction to Carissa, that they hate Carissa for having a different utilityfunction from them?

That does not feel like the principle she imagines her society abiding by, if she imagines that these intuitions had to come together as a set of rules to raise children by. Part of just hate, she thinks, is the hated entity having power to act; it feels undignified, vaguely like some kind of self-indulgence, to hate someone for having values they are in any event powerless to enact. It's taking something that ought to be about the state of the world and making it about something unshared, something you have no right to - the contents of their own mind. She proposes that you can hate people for what they're trying to do, not for what they wish in their heart.

 But it seems correct, certainly, for a paving stone to hate Carissa if they want to, for being unwilling to grant their prayers for destruction at the price she would have to pay for it. Not for not understanding, but for not acting; it would be reasonable and just, to hate her for that, if she had the power to do something about it.

And it is likewise an error, she thinks, to hate Asmodeus for having Asmodeus's utility-function; but to hate him for all the torture - yes, that is correct. Hating him for all the torture is entirely reasonable. If he hadn't done it yet but was trying his best it'd be reasonable to hate him for that too. Carissa is pretty sure she hates Asmodeus, though she doesn't spend a lot of time on hating Asmodeus because she is pretty busy trying to kill him.

And here he was about to say that he had thought - not believingly, but in hopeless lack of understanding - that maybe the game was for both of them to hate each other, to demonstrate that they did have the ability to hate each other, to make clear their mutual alternatives to cooperation; and then for both of them to agree to give up the hate together, as a symmetrical concession.  And yet somehow, Carissa has found a frame where it's right and proper that she hate him because he'd destroy the world, and it's not okay for him to hate her about her willingness to leave the paving stones to hurt.

He notes - despite that it might not seem strategically wise to show Carissa this thought that increases her danger, because he still thinks of them as being on a more honorable footing than that, where they are still in some sense trying to help each other - he notes that his model of Carissa or at least mid-Carissa is that she's too quick to conclude she's powerless.

It's an obvious thought that this mental reflex has been trained into her really hard by Cheliax, but still.  She didn't leave with him at the Worldwound for the nearest Lastwall encampment, because she did not realize that she was powerful.  When they were in his doombase, she tried a little small defiance to see what would happen, and didn't realize that she was a fifth-circle wizard confronting a first-circle wizard, or that mid-Keltham called for Tarnish because for all he knew Carissa was about to Dominate Person him or just kill him.

He suspects that they might, possibly, be outside the strictest tropiest routes of the possible story laid down by a Higher Entity; because so far as he knows, he's successfully left Broom behind in Osirion, and so far as Ione knew, Broom hadn't done anything proportionally important to his apparent story-weight.  That's unfired foreshadowing, and if it stays unfired, then maybe they get at least a little causality to work with, and don't need to be inside something that's absolutely and perfectly a story.  But it wouldn't surprise him at all, if Broom showed up out of nowhere and did something important and the entire weight of decision ended up resting on Carissa.  That is very much a way that a story might go, if this was a story; and he is horrified and sickened by the thought that in this case the paving stones might just stay in Hell.

Carissa Sevar is, at the very least, not reliably powerless from the standpoint of somebody like him.

In that context, then, the thought came to him: getting to hate, but not be hated, because you think of yourself as powerless, is a kind of reward for thinking yourself powerless; and maybe you don't want to reward that thought.

First, a distinction: she thinks that hating someone ought to be about the things they are doing or trying to do, and sensitive to whether there's a chance they'll succeed. She does not think that you can hate people only if you are powerless, just only based on their actual capacities. He asked her if he was supposed to hate her for not caring enough about the paving stones in Hell, and the answer to that, in the framework she thinks her world might use, is no. If he'd asked if he was supposed to hate her for trying to stop him, for being someone who might stop him, then she would have said yes, and given him the symmetry that seems so important to him in believing her that her instincts and principles are not just about hurting him.  If he hates her for the fact she would help Broom stop him if she could (if this did not qualify as a betrayal of her word, which she means to keep),  then yes, that would be just. Hate based on a true model of her, based on something she really in fact might attempt, and based on what she is trying to do and not whether she cares about things deep in her own heart. 

It does seem important to her, that a person in the dungeons of Egorian, hating Abrogail Thrune and wishing her dead, is not the same as Abrogail Thrune hating that person and enjoying herself as she plans their destruction. Carissa does, actually, think that a society of Carissae would embrace the dungeon-person's hatred as an emotion it is not better to erase or suppress, except pragmatically; an emotion that is correct like grief is sometimes correct or like anger is sometimes correct. And she thinks a society of Carissae would judge Abrogail Thrune, for hating the prisoner back, as it would be a hatred out of proportion to the prisoner's actual ability to cause harm. 

With that said, there is something to that diagnosis of her, that she is quick to believe herself powerless, that in Cheliax an apparent opportunity to hurt someone powerful would be a test, that they tried very hard to make it the case that apparent power was still powerlessness, that seeing hope was no reason to believe there was hope. 

She .....isn't actually concerned at all about a reward for thinking yourself powerless. Being powerless is worse than most kinds of torture. The half-minute in the hallway while Keltham threatened to statue her is more memorable and more vivid and more terrifying and awful than any punishment she's ever undergone save the other time someone threatened to statue her.  There's no way any person with a functioning brain would like being powerless.

But a person can be trained to have a very strong assumption that they are powerless even if they see what appears to be an opportunity to change something. And it is actually still difficult to imagine, to Carissa that Keltham would have reasonably believed himself in danger from her in his own fortress. 

(He didn't have security trailing them? He didn't have items with Spell Resistance she had no hope of defeating, and contingent spells set to whisk him to safety if anything happened? He hadn't had someone with Spell Gauge confirm she had no remaining spells prepared and not expended???)

Mid-Keltham had been - hoping, for better, and letting himself hope unreasonably because he didn't want to just, die and be a Keeper, around Carissa.  He'd let himself hope again, because it was one of very few things left for him to hold onto - and then, suddenly realized that he should not have let himself be not-a-Keeper even that much.

He'd had Tarnish trailing them, but not in hearing range of their intimate conversation, not in a stop-Carissa-if-she-goes-all-out-that-instant way.  Ri-Dul had run Spell Gauge on her and confirmed no spells below 4th circle, but somebody wearing an artifact headband is easily bright enough to discharge all her 1st through 3rd spells to give the appearance of being out-of-magic as part of a plan.  Osirion had claimed to have verified various truths about her; but if he needed to fool Osirion he would not just give up and consider them unfoolable.  The most powerful Spell Resistance items they now have were acquired in the City of Brass, and even those would not reliably keep Carissa out at her current known power level, even if she hasn't trained specifically in penetrating Spell Resistance; mid-Keltham did not have the same level of protection.

Just like her mind readily thinks of all the ways he might have stopped her, rendered her harmless, he thought of all the ways she might not be harmless; and he didn't have all the resources she imagines of him, either.

Above all, anyone with an artifact headband more powerful than yours is a huge threat even if she truly doesn't have resources, because she might do something you didn't think of, if she doesn't think herself powerless.

(Highprobability: dath ilani fiction hammers this trope into the ground in part because of a Keeper-influenced program to covertly caution people against trying to create Smart Things.  That doesn't mean it's not true, they wouldn't deceive about that, but he's flagging it because the hopefully-friendly terms of their cooperation seem to him to call for him to explicitly label all covert-agenda dath-ilani manipulations when exposing Carissa to them.)

(She appreciates his guesses at where dath ilan was engaged in manipulations.)

Once he threatened her she did consider frantically if she had any way to kill herself. She didn't have any spells remaining, having prepared precisely the ones needed for the escape attempt, and her dagger wouldn't be fast enough (it wasn't last time), and she might have enough self-control now to drown herself on the first try but wouldn't be unobserved for long enough...and she admittedly wasn't thinking clearly because her brain was no longer sure if it was Keltham or Abrogail she was facing, but she didn't see a way; she still doesn't, for all her new enhancements.

That does not mean he doesn't have a point, of course, but she thinks the failure was less one of failing to notice a real way to be dangerous, and more failing to notice that Keltham might have perceived himself to be in danger.

(A flash of idle wondering, humorous-anticipation-of-possible-humor, worried concern, and it's probably not best if they try to avert emotions like that: did Carissa ever get in trouble with anyone else that way, like, say, the Church or Crown of Cheliax?)

(Yes, actually. How did he guess.)

(She absolutely failed to notice the ways in which Abrogail would parse her as a threat to Abrogail's power, a mistake which would definitely have been fatal except ✨Abrogail likes her.✨)

CONCERN

Carissa is planning to kill Abrogail if it's useful, which it might be under a whole class of plans to delay Cheliax's invasion of Osirion slightly. And she is clear on the fact Abrogail is very very evil, and was manipulating her every moment of their acquaintance.

But, yes, she still feels that way about her.

See, Abrogail swore to Carissa that she would never turn her into a statue forever, even if Carissa betrayed her deliberately.

...he suspects mid-Carissa of having some sort of fear/threat exaggeration syndrome going on, possibly because of, you know, the whole Cheliax thing.  But it also rhymes with - the kind of small comfort that being tiny and powerless and threatened can bring you.

Mid-Keltham didn't say he'd turn her into a statue forever, he said that he was going to statue her until he'd raised his own Intelligence to match hers.  If he was meant to take on responsibility for her own reactions like a parent of something safely powerless, then it was foolish of mid-Keltham not to consider the truth-plus-falsity complex possibility where past-Carissa had told the truth about her statuing-fear (as had appeared to past-Keltham under Detect Anxieties), but been truthful-but-misleading-to-him in her presentation (and later truthspelled presentation) that led past-Keltham to infer Abrogail had desensitized the fear by enacting it.

But it does seem like - the thing that mid-Keltham said was not what mid-Carissa heard.  And he hopes that she is just past this, now, in virtue of having been Wished beyond it, but if not - he doesn't know what to do, around somebody who - hears a different thing than what you say; if you're not so much smarter than them, and so understanding of their alienness, that you can exactly manipulate your messaging.

He said 'at least' until he was fully augmented with Wishes, and possibly until he obtained an artifact headband, which she had no reason to think he would do before he destroyed the world, which she realized in that exact instant he was planning to do and probably planning to do in a matter of weeks.

She - understands now that to Keltham, rounding that to 'potentially forever' is a suspicious kind of rounding to do, a kind of motivated-rounding like calling someone an executioner when that carries implications they are unbothered by the killings they are committing. Now that she understands him better she is trying to be more careful to distinguish details when she thinks them, to note that he said he would statue her at least until he was Wished up and only possibly until something happened that she considered quite unlikely to happen before the end. And she imagines he evaluated it unlikely he would get killed in the City of Brass and that she would never be unstatued.

But mid-Carissa was not making that distinction, and did not place much weight on the 'at least', and parsed the situation as very probably one from which she would never wake before her ultimate destruction.

She thinks that, if you are talking to Golarion people over whom you have absolute power, you do need, indeed, either great skill or great caution, to not terrorize them out of their minds when you explain how your best alternative to their cooperation is to turn them into a statue potentially until you've obtained an artifact headband. Golarion people do not, in fact, parse that as not a threat, but as a threat framed bizarrely; they do not automatically believe you about your claims about what's in your own interests absent their cooperation, and assume you will exaggerate or lie about or muddle those to get the concessions you want, and so they have only the action to evaluate, obviously threat-like in nature. She thinks that mostly Golarion people with absolute power handle this by just giving orders, in cases where their words are backed by implicit-willingness-to-turn-to-stone, and saving negotiations for cases where their words are not backed by implicit-willingness-to-turn-to-stone.

Abrogail made her no longer afraid she would statue Carissa for disobedient thoughts, and therefore no longer interrupted by constant terror whenever she had a thought that she imagined might provoke the queen. Abrogail did that by assuring her it wouldn't happen for real, not by - making it something that she wouldn't be scared of if it was going to happen for real.

What she thinks she'd say is that she is no longer excessively afraid of it in a fashion that consumes her attention when there's no chance of it and puts her at more risk of it, but that she remains convinced it is nearly the worst thing that could happen from the perspective of her values and worth arbitrary suffering to avoid, and it's still true that if you ask her to choose between being a statue temporarily or jumping into a lake of fire she'll pick the lake of fire.

But the fact she was able to respond to Keltham coherently and then try to depart his presence so she didn't annoy him with her breakdown, instead of having the breakdown on the spot or trying to gouge his eyes out in the hopes she could provoke Tarnish to kill her, was probably to Abrogail's credit.

He's not sure enough that he qualifies sufficiently as mid-Keltham to apologize for him - and the whole concept of just saying 'sorry' to somebody is not very dath ilani for reasons probably not worth going into right now - but it can at least be said that he regrets the distress inflicted, didn't intend it, and would not do that again given a second chance to do it.

(His mind is currently trying to set aside for LATER all of the concerns suddenly raised about Abrogail Thrune as his ongoing romantic competitor or metamour; or maybe she's WON, and if that doesn't just mean Story Over, maybe it fires the flag-event where he's supposed to force Carissa to testify to that fact under truth-spell so he takes legal ownership of Carissa from Cheliax.  He doesn't actually see the point, now, but he's going to have to reexamine his possible potential-plot-structures map, checking the whole thing for where owning Carissa might be relevant...)

Carissa acknowledges that dath ilani trope-reasoning does not come naturally to her, but she really thinks that the Abrogail plotline will end when Carissa kills her, or if things go really well brings her around to their side.  This does not require anything of Keltham, who cut off romantic plots with Carissa when he, you know, told her to stop considering herself his.

...that wasn't some ridiculous alien miscommunication, right, that is what he told her?

It was a kind of saying goodbye, yes, though he acknowledges fault in not making that more explicit than it was.  He was planning to destroy Creation (modulo Cayden alternatives he doesn't get moral credit for), and become a god, and he did not see either of those things as offering hope of them living happily ever after together.  He didn't want to offer her false hope.

(It hurt.  But she knows that.  Right?  He thinks she already knew that, but he's been wrong too many times before.)

She knows that. She knows that he loved her, and she loved him, and she wishes that it could have been real, and she meant it, when she told him that if the world survived she would stay with him. But she doesn't expect it.

He's just going to think it, instead of fighting it down: what exactly did Abrogail Thrune tell her, when she promised not to make Carissa a statue?

She has a much better memory, these days, with all her enhancements, but that she remembered word-for-word from the day it happened. "I, Abrogail Thrune II, swear in Asmodeus's name never to make you a statue for true," she said, and then, "Though at this level of breadth and consequence I'll make no oath of it without greater payment, I also promise not to seek particularly to destroy your soul by any means nor deprive it of its eternity."

She knows - doesn't she? - that he could swear that same oath to her, and mean it?  That he'd put her on that ark to Elysium if he could, if she'd let him?  Abrogail Thrune's oath doesn't even force her to do that much, if she plans on destroying all the souls in Golarion herself; would she bother to get Carissa out of the way, if that happened?  Abrogail Thrune might think it romantic for the two of them to true-die together, if she didn't happen to seek particularly to destroy Carissa's soul and Carissa just happened to be around when it happened.  Abrogail wouldn't care very much, on his read of her, that Carissa herself didn't think it so romantic.

Abrogail Thrune has perma-statued people.  It doesn't bother him because if Creation survives then Civilization will dig those people up in time, and if not they'll end up Elsewhere.  Or if Carissa talks him into it, maybe he won't demand that much of Pharasma, that future Pharasmin-Civilization predictably advance to the point of digging up those people; and they can stay statues forever for real.  As Abrogail Thrune chose to happen, not because she had to, but because she wanted to.

There is still a part of his brain that feels sort of indignant about how possibly one of Carissa's romantic interests is being judged much more leniently than the other, here.

(Awwwwww.)

(She'd pay a very very high price, for Civilization to advance to the point of digging up those statues. Not the destruction of everything, that's too high a price, but nearly anything else.)

She would, for what it's worth, hate Abrogail, if she suspected Abrogail were trying to destroy the world. Not even in the complicated way she hates Keltham; there would be none of what she loves in Abrogail, if Abrogail were trying to destroy Creation.

But it's true, that she doesn't judge them the same way, and also that if she were being properly coherent she would hold more of Abrogail's conduct against Abrogail - because the Abrogail who hurts Carissa to make her stronger is not the only Abrogail, and she often hurts people much worse, for no cause at all.

She doesn't have much to say in defense of the part of her that feels warm and joyous when she observes that Abrogail likes her.

He suspects that if he, himself, had perma-statued anyone, intending for them to never return nor knowing anything of Elsewheres, that Carissa would be notably more upset with him about that.

And it maybe shouldn't be important, this thing, when so much between them is already shattered, except that it - seems to rhyme with other things - that to his perspective, look like - there is something harsh in her, towards him, that he doesn't know how to deal with, for that it isn't in dath ilan, or dath ilan trains its people out of it.

Carissa doesn't have an answer to that ready, and she notices herself flinching away from just pointing her mind at it and thinking, because she has no idea where that will take her and that's frightening. And she thinks she doesn't trust, not fully, that nothing will go wrong, if she digs through her mind for an answer and it's an ugly one or a cruel one or an - irrational one, one that makes Keltham think he shouldn't listen to her about anything.

Past-Keltham's model of Civilization's wisdom and Keeper-wisdom would have sagely pronounced that it's not a great idea to leave something lying around like that in yourself, under these circumstances; that you ought to set it aside and be sane instead, if the world is otherwise ending.

This version of him feels less sure, of what the true Keepers out of dath ilan would say.  He knows that hate is possible to him; past-Keltham hated Abrogail Thrune, for a very brief period between when he realized what'd been done to him, and when he applied Owl's Wisdom to himself and lost that brief flash of emotion.

And he wonders if the true Keepers out of dath ilan would know - being wiser than he and little if at all less intelligent, with far more training and maybe greater in dimensions of thinkoomph that Golarion's three magics don't augment - if the Keepers would know already that dath ilan damaged itself in some way, in the past, by trying to breed hatred out of itself.  Maybe anger too.  He thinks a Golarionite in his place would have been angry with Cheliax, for what it'd done, and not lost that thread of anger when they used an Owl's Wisdom.

If Carissa had deliberately and knowingly sent Peranza and Asmodia to Hell to be hurt and warped and damaged beyond repair in Hell, and not sacrificed her own soul to save them either, and didn't seem to feel she'd done wrong - then it wouldn't have made him hate her, wouldn't have made him be unfair to her.  It would have destroyed something in him, that he still holds for Carissa though it burns his mental hands to hold it; but even for that, he wouldn't be towards her as she is towards him.

He never hated Pharasma even when he confirmed that there were children in Hell.  Not because he made a strategic decision, but because She wasn't close enough to his frame of reference to be meaningfully hateable... or maybe that's trying to justify with reasons what's just reasonless biology.

Maybe dath ilan bred anger out of itself, and maybe that has something to do with the way that happiness is such a fragile state that they have to work so hard to protect.

It remains that whatever is in Carissa now - even if it's there because she's whole in a way that dath ilani are broken - it is something very alien to him, that makes him want to run away and not try to face whatever this thing is in her.

His current and better model of a Keeper doesn't say for Carissa to force herself to look at it, right now, but it doesn't say that it's safe for Carissa to ignore.

There's a lot of things in past-Carissa that it's not safe for this Carissa to ignore.  Fear that warps reality to be scarier, hatred that warps reality to be more hateable, a set of emotional benefits from feeling small and powerless that nearly got her killed when other people didn't see her that way, and probably a whole long list of other things like that.

Oh, she plans to look at it. Just possibly not while Keltham is reading her mind.

He's said now, things that are supposedly true about her, despite not himself being Carissa Sevar.  He has the sense that he's been directing a lot of this conversation - admittedly, he was the one who scheduled it - but still, there's probably something Carissa herself would want to say, about how he can try to take a shape that she can deal with.

Where this, itself, is not something that he modeled himself as being able to ask of her, while there was that harshness in her.  Her past requests, like 'say them about Keltham attitudes instead of about dath ilan attitudes because I kind of have a grudge against your home planet', are things that it wouldn't have been healthy for mid-Keltham to go along with.  But maybe they can manage to negotiate a comms protocol that they're both happy with and isn't meant to hurt him for his crime of being an executioner.

It ...wasn't about hurting him, her request that he talk about Keltham and not about dath ilan. It was about -

- so, it's not the first time that Carissa has had sex that she would have refused if she had a choice, right. That's the kind of thing that happens sometimes unless you expend a very costly amount of effort on avoiding it. It hasn't really had long-term negative effects on her, before; it kind of sucks, but lots of things kind of suck. You don't want to be a person who gets damaged by harmless kind of sucky things happening.

This one bothered her. And the reason it bothered her is that Keltham had asked her not to do it. It's not his fault, it's entirely her fault, she genuinely wasn't trying to make it his problem, but the reason that it bothered her was that she had been trying to meet Keltham inside his strange world. And that was a promise she made Keltham, himself, as an individual, because she loved him; not inside any greater system that made any sense, just her and her best understanding of him.

She would not have made a promise like that to dath ilan. She doesn't love dath ilan and it doesn't love her and she actually does not care at all about, would not take any comfort in, whatever dath ilan has to say, about what happened. If Keltham is gone, as he sometimes says he is, then there isn't anything anyone can say that would help and not hurt, but offering her what dath ilan has to say is some kind of cruel parody of the thing that she wanted. It wasn't a promise to dath ilan.

It feels a little bit like there was a pattern like that, where every individual time Carissa did try to tell Keltham what would make it possible to speak with him, he extrapolated a reason for her to say it which was irrationality or cruelty or unreasonableness, and then rejected her irrationality or cruelty or unreasonableness, and Carissa was muddled and scared and in pain but she was trying, very very hard, to describe to Keltham what he could do if he didn't want to hurt her, and he never wanted to do it.

So she made up a Keltham inside her own head who was, well, inspired by Keltham, not the real person, but he would say whatever Keltham was saying except if she asked him not to hurt her he would do it, and he wouldn't treat her like the confusion between them was a product of Carissa being ridiculous and inexplicable, and he spoke her language instead of resenting her for not being a native speaker of his, and everything he said was reasonable even if he had to search really hard to come up with a reasonable thing that might be what Keltham meant.

It wasn't that her Keltham was always right about what real-Keltham was doing. She didn't know what real-Keltham was doing. But she had to try every sentence he spoke to come up with reasonable things that he could have been saying if he wasn't trying to hurt her or trying to make a point about how wrong she was or trying to prove dath ilan was better than she was.

And, it just feels like Keltham usually didn't try, when Carissa said things, to come up with five reasonable things she could mean, while every time Keltham said anything Carissa was trying with all her might to come up with five reasonable things he might have meant. And it felt like, when she tried desperately to tell him what he could do to not hurt her, he listened, and then categorically refused to do it, and that was suggestive, about how well it would go if she kept desperately trying.

Everything about her seemed like a scream of - pain, injury, of not wanting him to be who he was, not wanting this to be happening - and to be infused with a sense that it was right and proper for her to feel that way, and improper for him to object - such that for him to object to anything would have only hurt her more, and raised more of the sharp poisonous thing against him.

So mid-Keltham wrapped himself up in himself and retreated to wait it out; thinking that, if she wanted there to be comms between them, she could just come to him and say 'hey let's sit down and negotiate a mutually agreeable comms protocol'.  Mid-Keltham knew, to be clear, that Carissa wouldn't - because she wasn't dath ilani and hadn't been raised to think of going meta about comms protocols as an obvious solution, because she didn't have a standard protocol for doing meta-comms where you're both trying not to be emotional or confrontational about that, and because she wouldn't, on his model, trust anything that sounded like it came from dath ilan - would have seen it as an attempt to injure her, if he'd offered anything of dath ilan's - not to mention he'd gotten rather poor results from trying to go meta about comms with other insufficiently enhanced Golarionites, often with things getting into apparently irretrievable states of hostility.  So all that mid-Keltham could do, was wait for her to be Wiser and hopefully possible to talk to without injuring.

When she said to him, '...maybe you could say them but just say them about Keltham attitudes instead of about dath ilan attitudes because I kind of have a grudge against your home planet's way of doing ethics right now‘, that was, actually, an effort to negotiate a communications protocol. Perhaps bracketed wrongly, perhaps she didn’t do the right meta-communication, perhaps it would have worked if instead of ‘maybe you could say’ she’d said ‘proposed communications protocol:’.

But she was trying. When he asked, she told him what he could do that would help her and not hurt to hear: she asked him to tell her what Keltham thought about her being raped, instead of what dath ilan had to say, because hearing what Keltham thought would help and hearing what dath ilan thought wouldn't.

He refused to do that, which, as she had predicted it would, hurt very badly, and she stopped, after that, trying to tell Keltham how to communicate with her in a way that hurt her less.

If that was her only desperate attempt to negotiate a comms protocol, the only and only chance he'd gotten - though the main meta-tag on it seemed to be that she felt it necessary to attach to that felt to him like it carried a state of sharpness towards dath ilan, holding herself injured by dath ilan - but if that was misleading-to-him and actually the meta-content was 'Keltham this is my last attempt to reach out to you, respond in the right way or you won't get another one' - then from his perspective, things were not clearly labeled.  Maybe because in Cheliax you must not label things, you must give exactly the right test and the other person must give exactly the right response and nothing can ever be legible or that's all kinds of weakness and vulnerability?

If that was his last chance, he didn't know; and if that was the comms situation, he didn't know; and if something like that arises in the future, he's probably still not going to know unless she tells him, because she is very alien.  He is a bit smarter now, but stupid nonetheless; and she is become a very smart alien in turn; this potentially cancels out unless they meet on grounds of pure Law rather than emotions complicated further by intelligence.  Any time she does something that isn't what sensible ideal agents would do (agents outside of Cheliax, to be clear) he's not going to be able to deduce it from first principles unless she labels it.  It's one reason why this whole conversation seemed impossible unless they could both use simultaneous Detect Thoughts at INT 29, and get to some point beyond which it would be possible to go meta and reconcile comms conflicts.

The intended meta-content was that she understood her kind-of grudge against dath ilan was not something Keltham would necessarily be sympathetic to, and she wasn't sure future-Carissa would share it - thus specifying that it was something she felt right now, not necessarily a long-lasting state of affairs. She tried piling on a lot of disclaimers- "kind of", "a grudge", "right now", to make it clear that it wasn't an endorsed anti-dath-ilan position she was advancing, or a policy she was demanding in full generality but a current and specific need. 

Also, that wasn't the only time.

There was an earlier time, where she told him that the conversation would be less painful and more bearable for her if he'd stop bringing up dath ilan, which he did not see fit to acknowledge as a request at all, and a later time, when she was just on the brink of giving up, where she told him that she didn't know if the approaches that seemed to her like they ought to work really would, since they hadn't been tried, and so was willing and ready to proceed only by dath ilani rules.

He could have told her then that he was open to negotiation, if he was, which he gave no sign of.

Carissa thinks that sensible ideal agents might, in fact, try two times to quietly bring up something important to them, and get refused both times, and then try saying more explicitly that they have ideas for how things could work better but those ideas haven't been tested and they're willing to just obey the other's protocols.

She thinks that, actually, nothing Keltham did had anything to do with his inability to understand anyone who doesn't behave like a sensible ideal agent. He was not behaving like a sensible ideal agent.

He was behaving like a scared, injured traumatized person who didn't want to give Carissa the thing she said was important to her and who wasn't actually very interested in her ideas for how communication might work, especially since she disclaimed that she didn't know if they'd really work. She was behaving like a scared, injured, traumatized person who wanted Keltham to stop doing a thing that was really hurting her, was aware she had no leverage for this request, did not know the magical words that would render her permitted in his framework to make it, tried a couple of different ways of making it anyway, and then gave up and told him she was giving up and adopting his framework.

She is actually fine with the fact she gave up and adopted his framework. There are important battles to pick here and this isn't one of them. But she is sad, if Keltham's narrative about his prisoner trying to tell him what she needed, being refused, and then figuring out how not to need it, and then telling him she had done that and communicating by his rules from then onwards, is that she could simply have said the magic words if she wanted something different to happen. She did not know the magic words.

She tried to talk to him with the only words she had, and it didn't work, and so she gave up and did the rest the dath ilani way for the rest of their acquaintance without ever complaining about how much it hurt her, and she is fine with the fact that this happened, but she does think that it did happen.

If she's thinking of the two occasions he thinks she's thinking of, then when she said "This isn't a demand but if you shut up about dath ilan it'll require less self-control from me to talk to you like a civilized person" he took that completely at face value as a factual statement dath-ilan-style and made a mental note not to talk about dath ilan unless there was a sufficiently strong reason to put that demand on mid-Carissa's internal attention; and shortly after said "You are kind", which is a type of acknowledgement that mid-Carissa almost never offered him, the many many times that he tried to be kind; and then gave her all that she asked for in negotiations.

If he was also supposed to acknowledge the request a particular exact way, because otherwise mid-Carissa thought she was being ignored, then this is the kind of thing that needs to be explicitly labeled in the future, even now, because she is - he thinks -

- just vastly vastly overestimating how legible she is to him.  A lot of his knowledge he does have about her comes from a time when he doesn't know, even now, which things were lies or truth, and she does know which things are lies or truth and is probably under-adjusting for how much she thinks he can guess.

When she said "I think I can have this conversation by dath ilan rules" the next event was that he did describe dath ilan rules to her, and then that conversation, which she wanted to have, happened, and was useful; and then they had some conversation after than not by strict dath ilani rules for formally navigating disagreements; and then that worked around to where it could blow up; and then he went back to figuring that they should try to have less emotional conversations until everyone was INT 29.

Oh! It is in fact useful to know that Keltham changed his behavior off Carissa trying to communicate that it would be helpful. He still brought up dath ilan a lot after that, including in situations where she didn't see why it was necessary, so she assumed that he had not changed his behavior at all, and mostly did not try to communicate like that again. If he had said "I will try to do that somewhat less often" or "I will keep that in mind", then she would have volunteered far more statements like that.

He's also not legible to her; she can only guess whether things she said have any effect on him if he acknowledges them or observably-to-her changes her behavior based on them.

He's not actually thinking at this point that he was mistaken to try to preserve the tiny shreds of their relationship to where they could talk about it using INT 29 and telepathy.  He still feels pretty much like a scared, injured, traumatized person to whom nothing much good is going to happen in the future - it not being safe, nor really kind, to forcibly edit himself to be otherwise - but it does help to be a smarter and telepathic such person.

She thinks waiting was pretty reasonable. She just feels - sad, lost, like the bulk of her effort was wasted or at least not noticed - if Keltham's narrative about communications is that Carissa was unwilling to try because of her dislike of dath ilan, when she set aside her dislike of dath ilan  and accepted all her needs would go unmet and tried to conduct all future conversation by dath ilani protocols and would have kept trying if Keltham had asked her to.

The reason why she did not use the magic words 'hey let's sit down and negotiate a mutually agreeable comms protocol' is not that she wasn't willing to communicate in a dath ilani way; she tried very very hard to communicate in a dath ilani way once he gave her examples and instructions. It is that she did not know those words.

There's a strong impression he's getting right now - from the situation, not from Carissa's actual thoughts - that he is placed into a game where the next move he's supposed to make is to show those times when he tried to show kindness, openness, vulnerability, concession, acknowledgment of her own position and reasons, to Carissa, and didn't get back things he interpreted as - the sort of encouragement you might show somebody if you wanted him to repeat that behavior or double down on it.  And if he doesn't drag up those examples, he loses this game.

He doesn't think that's a game Carissa means to play.  That doesn't mean Cheliax/Golarion never carved it into her.

- she thinks that those examples would be very useful for helping her attach the abstract belief she has been maintaining and espousing the whole time, that he is trying as hard as she is, to some specific features of his behavior.

She will probably if there are no examples change her mind slightly about whether that belief she has been maintaining and espousing this whole time is actually true.          

That....seems reasonable to her? It is helpful to replace the abstract belief someone else is trying hard with specific examples of times and ways they tried hard and their communications weren't met with any signal they could usefully interpret, and in the case where actually one of them isn't trying very hard, it'd be helpful for that to come to light too. It seems like Keltham thinks that finding-examples is some kind of bad game to play, and she understands that often when he has objections like that he has good reasons behind them, but that is absolutely something Carissa is doing deliberately and what she thought the point of this conversation was - to help them both arrive at, hopefully, the more grounded belief that the other person has been trying very hard.

Also, once they have some examples of where exactly they misunderstand each other, they can change their behavior in similar situations in the future. Like, if Carissa is ever again tempted to say "if you do X less it'll make it easier for me to not get mad", she will add, "if you are going to act on this advice I would appreciate you saying that you intend to do so".

And she definitely won't when mildly annoyed with Keltham do anything that might be possible to misinterpret as Withdrawing From Friendship And Cooperation.

And if she finds herself getting tired of dath ilani communication norms, instead of "I have my own ideas about how people could communicate healthily, but I sure didn't get them from Cheliax and I don't know if they'll work", she will say "hey let's sit down and negotiate a mutually agreeable comms protocol".

(Those two phrasings would in fact have been near-semantic-equivalents to him, but he appreciates that she has no way of knowing this important fact due to his alien illegibility.)

(^-- this is a kind of constant acknowledging of the Other's position and difficulties, that dath ilani are trained to do, that he can see the point of doing during difficult comms problems; tag, this is a dath ilani technique as is a fact that Carissa on-his-model wants tagged)

(Huh! In her dialect, the first of those is near-semantically equivalent to the thing she did say, 'the Chelish way of doing this is for everyone to conceal all their feelings at all times, so it's entirely possible I'm too optimistic about approaches that don't require that and they really don't actually work.', which is itself an attempt at the acknowledging-the-limitations-of-one's-own-state-of-knowledge which she was doing because she hoped it was close to a dath ilani thing Keltham was looking for.)

(She appreciates the thing he did with dath ilani use/mentions there.)

(Context matters a lot there?  If she approaches him visibly intending to Start a Conversation, and the Topic of that Conversation is to be 'I have my own ideas about how people could communicate healthily, but I sure didn't get them from Cheliax and I don't know if they'll work', then clearly they're supposed to set aside a chunk of time and talk about this separate topic, Carissa's Ideas About Healthy Communication.  If she says in the course of another conversation  'the Chelish way of doing this is for everyone to conceal all their feelings at all times, so it's entirely possible I'm too optimistic about approaches that don't require that and they really don't actually work' that doesn't call for a Chunk of Time Set Aside the same way.  If you say 'Hey let's sit down and negotiate a mutually agreeable comms protocol' it works context-free because everything is explicit.)

(...he wouldn't have guessed, without telepathy nor labeling, that she'd appreciated his last use/mention tag; and he appreciates the explicit labeling, and feels encouraged to do it again.  He wouldn't have been able to infer the appreciation from context; it definitely didn't show on her face.  Carissa possibly still has too much habit of hiding all information about her reactions, as of course a tiny powerless thing should, in Cheliax.)

(She's been not having visible emotional reactions for a different reason lately, actually; her understanding of Keltham's preferences and dath ilan's norms were that emotions can be quoted but not projected-at-someone in civilized conversation, and so she has been trying very hard for it to be impossible to infer her emotional state. Admittedly Cheliax gave her a ton of practice.)

(...it's okay to project appreciation for things to him.  He hadn't meant to communicate not-that.  Positive emotions are usually okay to show; obviously there's all sorts of ways they can be twisted into weapons, but if you're not doing those things then you're probably okay.)

       Meanwhile in a different linear-substream of thought:

It's maybe not the best example, but it seems to be making itself very prominent within his own mind, so he'll just say it:

There was a time, reopening conversation after his augmentation, when he tried tentatively to show vulnerability and his past hurt, and talk about the importance of reaching out to someone else, and how he appreciated how she'd done that in the past even if it was illusion, and appreciated it more after he'd had normal Golarion people to contrast that to, and finished 'Even if it's only under threat of the multiverse being destroyed, I'm glad to be with, the Carissa who also reaches back.'  Where 'even under the threat of the multiverse being destroyed' is a way of showing that you understand the Other's positions, that they're being nice to you even though their own perspective might not place you so firmly in the right as you feel yourself.  Now contrast that to the possibility where if instead he'd tagged it with Carissa's past injury of him (under threat, he understands that it was under threat), to emphasize how forgiving he was -

- as is the sort of thing where, he feels, there's a Golarion game that expects him to do that, and he did not that (tag, dath ilan teaches this) - so he was also voluntarily giving ground in that game - 

- and mid-Carissa's response was, dispassionate in facial expression, "I think - it wasn't just the Conspiracy - I think I got put in charge of the Conspiracy because I wanted to understand you so badly that I was better at it than anyone else."

A causal history of how past-Carissa had come to do that thing.  Nothing encouraging him to show vulnerability, or reach back more; nothing to reward the risky behavior he'd just tested, not even by a statement of positive hope about the results if they went on trying to meet each other in the middle.

He knew he did not know, what was happening inside Carissa.  But his guess was that the sharpness and anger inside her, did not want him trying to be nice to her, that this felt to her like an implicit pressure and commandment to reward him, who was a terrible person who ought never to be rewarded when he was planning to destroy Golarion.

So he folded back into himself, and didn't throw any more emotions at her like that, or other attempted emotional vulnerabilities or shows of positive-feeling that she might have had to answer with another expressionless bit of history.

....huh.

That answer was - meant to be reassuring, meant to be emotional, meant to acknowledge his point and try to offer him everything that might have helped him come to terms with it. 

She thought, as probably isn't surprising to him at this point, that he was asking for reassurance that he would be understood outside the Conspiracy, that the Conspiracy was not the only place he would ever find anyone willing to try to understand him, so she assured him of that, that it hadn't just been the Conspiracy.

She thought he would find it reassuring, to learn that the causality had run the other way, to learn that she had wanted to understand him so desperately she'd ended up in charge of the conspiracy, because that would mean the wanting to understand him was about her, and not about the conspiracy.

And, of course, she was cautious about showing much emotion, because he had said that there were ilani techniques for quoting emotions but you weren't supposed to just have them at people.

It seems like there were ways they could've figured this out without INT 29 and mutual telepathy, and at the same time, like anything they'd tried before this would probably not actually have worked in real life.  Well, they did try things at each other, and they didn't work.

She is sorry, that he didn't hear what he needed to hear. The thing he said was meaningful to her.

She thinks that any individual case could maybe have been avoided, if one of them had just happened to say a slightly different version of what they felt, but - but they kept talking until it blew up, right, every time, so probably they would inevitably have kept talking and then it'd blow up a little later.

Probably they wouldn't have gotten lucky enough to understand each other the three times in a row or something it would've taken to actually start suspecting - on an emotional level, not on the logical level where she would have stubbornly maintained all along that Keltham was probably trying as hard as she was - that the other person was trying.

(In dath ilan there is a standard practice for resolving marital disputes, particularly disputes where both sides think they're communicating more clearly than the other, or where both sides think they're being charitable and the other side is being uncharitable.

This standard practice is to install audio recorders in all the rooms in the house, wait a month to collect data, and then submit a record of all tense marital interactions to a panel of three confidentiality-sworn judges, to determine whom the judges thought had argued more validly or behaved less helpfully.

Often, of course, the knowledge that your disputes are going to be reviewed, or seeing how your friends bet in the prediction market about who's going to win, is sufficient in itself to clear up a relationship conflict.

But fundamentally, the reason why so many marriage disputes end up in unhealthy mental states, is because the married parties don't have a good way to objectively score their performances, or tell who's actually winning, at being the more helpful partner.  And the solution - audio recorders and third-party judges - is straightforward, but you have to actually do it, and preferably before your relationship finishes falling apart.  There can be other things that go wrong with a relationship, of course, but all those things are easier to resolve after you've established common knowledge of who's currently winning and by what sort of margin.

Mid-Keltham didn't suggest this course of action, back then.  Mostly because he didn't know where to find fair judges between himself and Carissa; even an inevitable from Axis would still be of Creation, might fail to understand both sides, and might not have enough Law that it was allowed to speak of in Golarion.  And also because something about the whole thought seemed off, with respect to relationships in Golarion... like maybe Golarion relationships did in fact tend to revolve around other problems than that.)

He doesn't, really, want to think this, it feels like picking up a heating stone that is too hot and that he'd only just put down.  But part of him wonders, now, if Abrogail Thrune can deliberately try to destroy people's eternities for fun and believe she's succeeded, and still be a romantic interest of Carissa's - it's probably too late, now, to change whatever he did wrong, but it makes him feel like he lost Carissa through some misstep that came before planning to destroy Creation.  That their relationship could have survived that, if he'd done whatever it was that Abrogail Thrune had done right.  Hurt Carissa more, taken more thorough ownership of her, before it was too late, maybe.

It's not particularly a healthy topic, but he can tell that his mind isn't naturally going to leave it alone so long as it remains an unsolved mystery.

(If he literally just needs to be more physically attractive, there's probably an Outer Plane that'll sell that to him, though he's reluctant to enter into Hell to deal there.)

She did still love Keltham, was in Keltham's preferred framework still a "love interest" of Keltham's, up until he told her that Keltham was dead and she was not his anymore.

Did she somehow misunderstand that, too.

He told her, then, that what he meant by that was something Carissa Sevar probably never could understand - though maybe she might understand it now - because to her Keltham would be Keltham even if he collapsed into a lemure.

He does not, probably, even now, understand - how someone can end up justly owning a Carissa - or maybe it's a kind of ownership that has no place for justice - it seemed dishonest, to mid-Keltham, to go on claiming ownership of Carissa, when he had changed so much in his self and his intentions from the person she offered that to, and when she, herself, had first named him her owner in Cheliax under conditions of Conspiracy, and even her affirmations at the Conspiracy's ending were still within Cheliax's power and Asmodeanism's delusions - he did not understand Carissa's sexuality, whether she needed to be taken and any talk of giving cut against her grain -

- actually now that he reviews these thoughts, it's obvious that there was a Chelish plot specifically to make him think that clear meta-communication and explicit consent was unsexy because they were trying to get him to rape an actual victim so he'd go to Hell.

- yes. There was definitely that. But also, Cheliax is what shaped Carissa. The shape that it made her is not the shape she would have grown on her own, outside Cheliax, but there's not a lot to be gained, even here and now where she has the wisdom and distance and insight to do it, in trying to be the person she would have been if she hadn't grown up in Cheliax; that person is that person, and Carissa is Carissa.

And there was a Conspiracy, when she offered herself to Keltham, and it is entirely reasonable and fair of him to not want to count that, to not want to hold her to anything she said then, but - but as he said to her at one point, if you take away culpability and responsibility in everything Carissa did in Cheliax, there's nothing left, really. She did not, when she made those promises, think that they were pretend because they were inside of the Conspiracy.

It was in part because she still loved Keltham, because she still wanted to be his, that she came to him, instead of doing something that from the outside would be more likely to achieve her goals, like accepting from Osirion a ludicrous amount of money for a warning about what Keltham was planning and then warning every other god as well.

And it is - very Keltham, of mid-Keltham, who denied he was Keltham at all, to not want to have something that he was going to get wrong, something that was dishonest, and probably it would have damaged him, to try to disentangle what inside Carissa was real, what kinds of realness was acceptable to him. Certainly she expects it would have hurt him, if he'd tried to carry on from where they'd once been. ...maybe it would also have hurt her. She's not as sure. She thinks that Keltham mostly hurts her when they're not clear on who wins, so he thinks he has to fight, and not when he is clear on it.

In her imagination, if she is unconstrained by real Keltham and where he was at and what he needed, and just imagining the thing that would have been good for Carissa-who-loved-Keltham, when she arrived, Keltham would have told her his plan, up front, crying, told her he did not want to do it, that he hoped she could find another way, but that he had to, for all the people in Hell, if he couldn't find another way, and asked her if she still loved him, if she would ever have loved him if she had known that about him from the start, and she would have cried, and said that if there were an answer to that question which involved the world not ending she'd give it regardless of which one it was, but if there really isn't, if he really and truly cannot be moved on that and is eager to be moved on everything else - then yes, she still loves him. And the things she told him were good, were good; she never lied to him about that. And if he hurt her now, that would be good.

But objectively it was probably wildly more sensible for him to break up with her.

If by "objectively" Carissa means "in the counterfactual case that we weren't embedded inside something at least a little like an eroLARP" then sure, "objectively" they weren't failing at unknown eroLARP flags and maybe dooming the universe.

He wonders whether Snack Service, Nethys, Cayden Cailean, didn't know the right thing for mid-Keltham to do, there, didn't know to steer for that or didn't know how to safely navigate there in a way that didn't risk Creation.  Or if They knew that was a possibility, a way to salvage their relationship, but They chose otherwise... it is not for him to think of such things.  He will tell Ione and Pilar of it, maybe, for all its privacy; in case it's the sort of thing where this world isn't the most real world, only a possibility foreseen, and all that they do is for the sake of some Keltham and Carissa more real than this.  (That they find themselves here rather than there is strong evidence against that possibility, but obviously every possible version of yourself should ignore that sort of evidence to get the best global outcomes.)

His failure, in the end, was from trying to optimize for two goals at once.

Mid-Keltham didn't want to tell Carissa about the plan to destroy Creation, before he obtained her Wishes and contracted to rent her headband.  And it wasn't, obviously, that he was the type to cheat Carissa; but that if Carissa aided mid-Keltham while knowing his plans, and this decision was influenced by her having deduced the obvious point that Snack Service thought Pharasma would yield and end Hell rather than lose Creation, Pharasma would look through himself and see Carissa.

And also mid-Keltham didn't want to betray Carissa, didn't want to turn her loyalty or love to what she'd see as one of the most horrifying purposes imaginable; so he gave her warning, and asked to negotiate with her - tried not to presume on friendship, let alone ownership -

And it seems, in the end, that he maybe ended up with neither desideratum, but certainly not the first one.

But he did it to protect Creation, in the end, that he didn't just tell her everything right away.

Well, she can hardly be angry about that. Maybe when she was small and scared and stupid, but not now.

And hey, maybe nothing will happen to Creation, and the gods will negotiate a compromise, and they'll live happily ever after. [if she were speaking Baseline, this would be inflected as "highly unlikely"].

Or maybe they'll love again as gods, and the eroLARP will count that as a happy ending for them.  He doesn't feel like he would count it that way, he feels that no ending where he becomes a god so suddenly could be a happy one for him; but maybe he'll feel differently as a god and that's all the eroLARP cares about.

Maybe when he touches the Starstone he'll wake up somewhere else, with a Carissa, with whom he can figure out what he wants.

If it's a new Carissa, and not a Carissa who remembers - at least everything up until they said goodbye inside Cheliax - then that doesn't count either, to be clear to anything that cares.

He got her a +4/+4/+4 Belt of Physical Perfection in the City of Brass.  They only had the one Belt, and it is for her, not for him.  In part because his own path seems straightforward by comparison, he just has to destroy Creation if it be not saved; to do something else which is not that, might be harder.  And in part - as a - gift, he guesses, or an apology, or - whatever there is between them now.

He got her a black Robe of the Archmagi too.

Oh.

She - takes it she's not supposed to do the thing - that the dath ilani thing is not actually to - be very careful not to get any emotions near anyone - in this specific situation.

That's not actually the dath ilani thing, no.  By now, regardless, they should be past the point of deferring much to a distant world's comms protocols for idiots.

She loves him, and she misses him, and she wishes he were doing anything at all that wasn't this, so she could learn to understand him and earn his forgiveness and be his forever and build Civilization with him, for him, so he isn't lonely anymore.

She will try so, so hard to do something that is not letting everything and everyone die. Mostly for the sake of everything and everyone but partially for his sake; he would, actually, be happy, if she found something, she sometimes feels like he wants this doomed course but he doesn't really and if there's anything else to be found she will find it.

Seeming to be given everything, and finding the courage to trust in it, and having it all ripped away from him, has wounded him on a level that - doesn't really seem worthwhile to try to recover from inside of Creation.

If he could live happily ever after with Carissa, though, he would give it a try, for that.

Losing her is - not all of the hurt - but it's most of the lasting wound that feels like it couldn't heal naturally and isn't correct to heal artificially.

He is glad to know, at least, that she loves him, and misses him; and he loves her, and misses her, and he also wishes he was doing anything that wasn't this.  She wouldn't have very much forgiveness to earn, for what she did under threat of Hell.  Peranza and Asmodia getting shattered might have been a problem, but they weren't, and -

- he doesn't want this doomed course.  He just doesn't think that even the gods and the eroLARP are on course to get them out of it.  On the surface of things, the story they're inside has too many dangling plot threads and character arcs cut short, for this to be a perfect run that gets the best ending.  And he hopes that this was just a dry run, a possibility almost entirely not real that gives valuable information to Nethys or Cayden Cailean, but he knows that his awareness of his own awareness is probabilistic evidence against that.

Carissa doubts this is the best ending for Nethys or Cayden Cailean, but she doesn't care at all about either of them and remains the slightest bit optimistic it might be a very good result for her. ...for Keltham seems less likely, but maybe she'll think of something.

(He is a little jarred by the thought, that things could go well for Carissa but not him, he had intuitively modeled them as - closer-linked in fates, or as people, than that - but he sets the thought aside.  There is a known clock-bound on all of this.)

They don't have that much time left on Detect Thoughts.  There is an Algorithm to be shown her.  Before then he'd know her informal thoughts, on promises and oaths with the lover who left her bereft so he could destroy Creation and diminish the reality of all the souls inside it; maybe for reasons based on unshareable evidence, reasons that she will end up sure herself are mistaken.

She is going to be a Lawful god. There are a lot of things, important things, that you can only build that way. And Nethys sees other worlds, sees other Carissae, sees other Kelthams, and she is pretty sure she gets more of what she wants, in the grand view, if her word is meaningful, if it's possible for her to mean what she says. She is not sure if she wishes she'd sold Keltham out to whoever would listen the instant she realized his plan. It depends what the gods have in store. But she didn't, and won't, even if he is obviously wrong, or obviously monstrous; if she were different, she wouldn't be here.

Lawfulness is Pharasma's take on things.  It's a bundle of ideas that Pharasma chose and bundled.  It is the sort of package-deal that people maybe see through at this INT/WIS even if they have no training at all in seeing through package-deals; and Carissa now has some of that training even if it is secondhand off dath ilan.  It would not surprise him terribly if somewhere in this plot they come to a point where Carissa somehow learns that she's beyond the sight of Nethys.  He doesn't predict it very strongly, but they are inside of something with at least some storylike qualities.  Any pillar of her trustworthiness that she names to herself, knows to herself, as her own support, is liable perhaps to be tested.

Set aside Pharasma's bundle.  Set aside Nethys's manipulations.  If there were no Pharasma and no Nethys, who would Carissa be, and why?

Carissa is not, actually, sure that you can neatly set everything aside like that. It's not that she agrees with Pharasma about everything, it's not that she wouldn't kill Nethys if the opportunity presented itself and wouldn't destroy any universes. But there's no truth of who and what she is that is totally separate from the world in which she operates, has always operated, will always operate.

In a world where it was impossible for gods to credibly communicate facts about their intentions to other gods, and impossible for mortals to do it either even at lower resolution; there might still be some algorithm in dath ilan. But it wouldn't be a description of how things work, and Carissa would not let universes die for it.

She lives in a world where you can choose whether anyone can trust you, or not, and it is in that world and in that context, and in the shape of the god she wants to be, that having given her word she won't kill Keltham even to save the world.

Look, it's not that improbable that Carissa's going to end up in a different universe at some point, maybe one where in fact there's not a Pharasma and a Nethys around.  In his personal experience, only 50% of universes have Pharasmas and Nethysi in them, and 100% of his direct samples have ended up in another universe at least once...

That was a thought-continuation out of dath ilan, a reflex for pressing on thought experiments.  But even reflecting more carefully on where his thoughts were steering, this doesn't seem like a thought-line to abandon.  "Because of Pharasma and Nethys" feel like weak contingent reasons to him, a reliance on something outside of Carissa for her strength and trustworthiness.  He's got a family of Starstone speculations where Carissa's degree of understanding and self-understanding about this topic may affect how Lawful of a god she ends up becoming, maybe even her power as a Lawful deity.

From his perspective, the existence of Pharasma, or spells that detect "Lawfulness", or afterlives that depend on "Lawfulness", or alternate-possibility-perceiving gods like Nethys straight out of contrived-thought-experiments, are a kind of external crutch.  He feels about them the way that the Irorian monk, Derrina, seemed to feel about the Crown of Infernal Majesty.  Seizing advantage of them is one thing; being unable to operate without them is another.

When you become a god, you decide what kind of being you are, in an important sense; gods don't change very much. You can't, exactly, become Abadar and then decide later that you're going to cheat someone just once. Someone who'd cheat just once would never have been Abadar.

The thing humans are doing is weaker, and worse, and most of the justifications they'd give for it are contingent and complicated -- not just the ones labelled 'Law' and 'Nethys', but also the ones labelled 'honor' and 'dignity' and whatever else. Probably most humans wouldn't, actually, keep their word if it might mean the world was destroyed, not humans who really understood how unimaginably horrendous the destruction of the world was, and that fact probably limited how many humans could be steered through whatever contrivances have steered them to here and now.

It is a fact about Carissa, that she has meant it, every time she gave her word, even this time when she gave it believing that Keltham was the most profound evil the world had ever known, believing him much much worse than Asmodeus, hating him. It is also a fact about Carissa that, mostly, this habit was not built out of the pieces that gods have as pieces of themselves, the parts of them that make them able to commit to things. It was built out of the knowledge that devils do it, and the desire to be one, and out of the desperate hope she could talk Keltham out of this, if only he could trust her enough to let her try.

If he wants to know if she understands what pieces are in gods that let them commit to things - yes, she understands those pieces, and intends to build herself around them. If he's looking for a different historical-origin-of-what-Carissa-is, he won't find it.

In his own causal-origins, he grew up with a deep respect for those honorable things people do which are not founded from their first beginning on exactly correct decision theory, but which they can nonetheless feel deeply within themselves.  He's not objecting to Carissa's causal-origins, not at all.

The main point where respecting imperfect decision theory blows up on you is when not both sides are respecting it.  It's often emphasized in dath ilani fiction that you may not be able to get away with negotiating with aliens this way; that if you try to blunder ahead on just honor, the aliens may look at you and shrug and say, "Well, that thing sure is effectively a rock with Cooperate written on it, rather than something whose output logically depends on our own output.  It's imagining us as acting with honor, and that's false, we've got this other thing instead.  So what do we care about how this thing conditioned its behavior on the behavior of this imaginary alien in its mind?  It would have imagined the same alien no matter what we do now."  This is obviously-in-retrospect a concealed warning against honorably trusting to the honor of computer-based intelligences who don't share that evolutionary history; but it also points to a potential failure of the join between two mortals, at the point where they both become gods.

Abadar will bargain fairly with you even if you don't imagine Him exactly right.  It's in His utility function, and not in a weird alien way where He'll maximize you into a weird side corner of possibility-space in course of maximizing how fair He was to you.  Abadar is actually about fair dealing, not exactly in the way that mortals see fairness, but in a way that makes mortals be actually safe to bargain with Him.

To reciprocate the trust that underlies mutual Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma - even of something that imagined you wrongly, whose output doesn't quite logically depend on your own output - is yet still within the utility function of someone once called Keltham, who once was Abadar's priest.  At least, it's stayed in him this far, though he's never, quite, really cared enough about any event in this possibly-unreal universe for that pillar of himself to be tested; it's not as if Carissa was being twisted/torn/shattered in Hell at any point during this, it's not as if he was given a chance to undo his children by lying.

He is not sure it is quite in Carissa's utility function the same way, that even with Creation at stake She would never betray a tiny mortal who trusted in an incorrect imagination of Her - or would She not?  He does not know and therefore asks.  There are other courses between them, if the answer is 'no'; this is not a question where only one answer preserves cooperation between them.  (And that there are other ways, he wouldn't ever lie about to her in order to get a more honest answer from her, even if his thoughts could be that concealed.)

She knows he wouldn't. She's grateful that he wouldn't. It's why she's here, instead of selling her information on what he was going to do to Osirion for a lot of money and then warning all the gods.

She thinks that Carissa is, actually, Lawful Evil not Lawful Neutral; she might betray a tiny mortal who trusted in an incorrect imagination of her, whose trust in her bore no resemblance to the bright clear thing that devils and gods do. She'd try not to; it seems unlikely she would ever have to, and she wouldn't find it funny. She'd advertise as fact that she might do it, and she wouldn't do it if she'd said she wouldn't.

But if there were a tiny mortal who wanted to destroy the world, and who sought lightning in the sky as proof of her commitment of confidentiality, and there was unrelated lightning in the sky and the mortal warned her -
- she'd prevent the end of the world.

Yeah, he kinda figured.

To him it seems an obvious attempt at resolving this, that while they are in this place halfway between mortal and god, while their causal-origin emotions are still in them and the respect of it, and also they can understand and use real decision theory, that they build the real structure of a logical correlation between them, based on reading each other's minds and constructing real models of the decisions that they'll make over and over to not betray each other.

He understands that something else might rise up inside her, once her own mind is no longer being read.  But it will be something that knows decision theory, that knows that he was modeling how she might think even in that moment.

By the nature of a bargain like that, the later Carissa-become-goddess could only be bound if She believed (presumably accurately because goddess) that She really wouldn't have gotten a chance to save the world, if She'd made a different logical decision in the physical places it's multiply represented, in the future at Her later time of action, in the past within his accurate though necessarily abstract model of Her.

This in turn means that he has to be ready, now, to remove that future capacity from future-Carissa, if he makes a different prediction about Her.

...he hopes she is not incredibly upset about this.  He wouldn't have to walk through it that way if her utility function said to be trustworthy even to things that haven't sufficiently accurately modeled Her own future decision to have introduced a logical counterfactual dependency on Her within the past (not just that the past happens to correctly guess Her decision, but that the past would have made a different guess if future-Her chose differently).  No statueing nor any other deprivation of consciousness will be involved no matter what.

She's not upset about that. She's harder to upset now anyways, but even the Carissa he first met wouldn't have been upset about that; using force to get what you want is not an upsetting move, not the kind of thing that stands in the way of further cooperation, as long as you're provoked to it predictably.

Some part of him is still surprised by hearing that, strangely.  At this level of cognition he'd better only need to be surprised once, or he's asking for a refund on Golarion's whole concept of intelligence enhancement.

Let them go to it, then.