"Oh, do you not have it? I suppose that makes sense, it's only on a few planets and it's very difficult to synthesize. Kyber crystals can generate and focus energy, so people commonly use them in lightsabers - those are essentially long welding torches that are used as weapons." He demonstrates his own lightsaber.

"Oh, would you look at that. It's a short-range weapon?"

"Yes, in part, although those of us with reflexes enhanced by the Force are able to use them to deflect oncoming projectiles. Most people who use lightsabers do have Force abilities. There's a major movement called the Jedi Order who used it as their traditional weapon. They're... certainly an interesting organization. Some combination of a school for the Force, a religion, and a small military. I am not in the Order, but I actually keep one primarily for if I end up needing to fight them."

"Do you find that conflict likely? Would your research into the Force give you an advantage against other users of Force abilities in a fight?"

"The Jedi don't take kindly to those who try to use the Force outside of their teachings. In particular, users of the Force can access more powerful abilities when they're seriously angry. I don't yet know exactly how it works; there are clear ways in which midi-chlorians have chemical bonds with various anger hormones, but the parts that I've been able to model aren't sufficient to explain the full effect. The Jedi call these the "dark side" of the Force, and consider them too dangerous for anyone to use without descending into madness. If they found out I was studying that sort of thing... it wouldn't go well. I can hold my own against a Jedi if necessary, but it wouldn't just be one Jedi."

"I see. It sounds like you're taking quite a risk in order to expand the breadth of your knowledge. I hope you find what you're looking for."

Plagueis nods. And... well, should he mention the other things he's been doing to expand the breadth of his knowledge? He's been trying to be honest so far; this person won't start out with any prejudices against the Sith, and doesn't really have much of a capability or motive to spread his secrets, so he doesn't really need to hide who he is to the same extent that he does with everyone else.

But there are some things he doubts this person will like him for.

Nevertheless, his caution will be won over by the way that he would really actually like it if he could not be in a game of concealment for once in his life; there is literally nobody in the galaxy who he's honest with, not even Sidious. But he'll at least raise the subject gingerly. Or perhaps he'll see if this is someone who's even likely to be aligned with Sith ideas in the first place.

"A bit of a philosophical question for you, Asatyyl. There's an old story about some podracer pilots - those are an incredibly fast and dangerous groundspeeder used in races on the planet Tatooine. They're in a race, on this long stretch of land where they can get up to quite high speeds, and there are massive stands on either side of the track. Now one of the podracers starts veering to the side. It's not on purpose; the ship is breaking down and it can't stop itself. But it's heading directly for the stands on the right, where there's a whole mob of fans. If the podracer crashes, all of them would be killed in the explosion. Now another pilot sees that this is about to happen, and they don't have any way to stop the crash entirely. But they see that on the left side, there's only one fan, all by themselves. So the second pilot thinks that if they can slam into that podracer and knock it over to the left side, then they would kill that one fan, but then the ones on the right would be safe."

"Suppose you're that second podracer. You know that if you knock them to the left, you'll be killing that one person, who would have otherwise survived. But the people on the right will make it out. Would you do it?"

"Ah, philosophy! I seem to remember one of my teachers positing a similar situation when I went for additional education off-planet. Do you take no action, and keep your own hands clean? Or take the responsibility on yourself to choose the magnitude of the harm that will occur?

It all depends on how good you believe you are at predicting the future, doesn't it? And, of course, how good you are at convincing other people that the greater disaster would have occured had your actions not averted it. Plus, even if you yourself have accurately assessed the need to make a sacrifice for the good of many, others with worse judgement may take your example as license to do the same, but with little or no good actually coming of it. And of course, from a legal standpoint, cases even slightly more complicated than this philosophical thought experiment become increasingly difficult to fairly adjudicate if you have to take hypothetical averted consequences into account.

Still, the universe doesn't shy away from putting hard choices in front of us, especially those of us who are responsible for decisions affecting the wellbeing of many people. I have to admit, my natural inclination is to do what would preserve my reputation and status, which often means taking the path that appears most legibly 'good' even when the anticipated outcome does not have the highest benefit for the most people. One might say I am reserving for myself the option to do more good in the future than I might otherwise have the opportunity to, but one might also say I am abandoning the quest for moral perfection in favor of complacency and intellectual laziness.

So I can understand how someone might make the choice to actively sacrifice one person to save many lives that are equally in  peril. I might even call it admirable--assuming, of course, that the assessment of the two dangers is accurate."

Plagueis legitimately can't parse exactly what Asatyyl is trying to say there. Wait, does he literally just mean that he thinks the right thing to do is to save the people, but that he doesn't actually care about doing the right thing as much as he cares about the benefit to himself? Plagueis doesn't think he's ever met anyone who was that blatantly self-aware of their own evil, except for Sidious, and Asatyyl does not seem to be like Sidious!

(There is perhaps a complicated backstory on how the supposed altruist Plagueis ended up recruiting somebody as his apprentice for a selfless campaign to better the galaxy, when that person was not only evil but visibly proud of it. But that is a different story for another day.)

But at the moment, Plagueis is pretty sure that Asatyyl has not just said that he is evil. Is he just saying that it's sometimes necessary to do things that aren't themselves perfect, in order to appease the public? That makes sense; it's actually a very respectable yet ironic utilitarian argument, that it's necessary in this case to sacrifice a lesser chance to sacrifice a lesser good for a greater good, for a yet even greater good.

But it seems like there's something separate in what Asatyyl's saying, something beyond just the reasonable process of making locally suboptimal decisions in order to preserve long-term opportunities. He was saying something that sounded... he's not sure what it sounded like, but there's a sense that something in the way he's viewing the world is... broken.

Something about when he said that it depends on how good you are at determining what's right... in a way that implied... what is he implying, it's like he's saying something about himself but it doesn't fit into any framework that makes sense and... what is it that he's saying here.

Is he just making some argument about people's inherent flaws, and how that limits their ability to - but no, that doesn't make sense, because then he wouldn't have said that he -

That's what feels so wrong, isn't it. That Asatyyl said -

- oh no -

- he said it in a way that implied it wasn't even a big deal -

- he said -

- that maybe he's abandoning the quest for moral perfection -

- he knows he knows there's a quest he can see what the Sith try to see but he -

- but he -

- he -

After a long pause, Plagueis will speak again, and he will not be trembling with horror in any way that is visible.

"Asatyyl... so, if I've correctly parsed what you're saying... well, there's an essential part of the branch of philosophy that I'm a part of, and it seems like you've hit on parts of it, but... somehow not the other parts, which I would think would inherently follow from there."

"So... I belong to the few survivors of the school opposed to the Jedi, the Sith. We're commonly seen as evil, because we push podracers to the left in real life, and we haven't expended much energy on making sure our reputations come out of it. Which is in part because there were some of the ancient Sith who legitimately were evil, and after the Jedi won the war they generalized the label to anyone even vaguely affiliated with them. But the primary purpose of - well, at this point, it's not much more than my purpose - is to make the galaxy a better place. Even when that requires certain sacrifices. I asked that of you to gauge whether it was safe to mention to you that I've kidnapped and killed several dozen people in my experiments. The knowledge that I've gained from that has brought about several medicinal breakthroughs that have saved millions of lives, and I certainly don't intend to stop at millions."

"But the part of what you said that drew my attention wasn't exactly your answer, but... what it said about you, and your goals. Because what makes the Sith unique, even beyond their approach to doing what is right, is a desire for self-improvement, no matter how harsh that journey might be. There's a... as you said, quest for moral perfection... and we strive towards that, constantly. And I may be wildly off on this, but it sounded as if you... know that you're imperfect, but... you don't actually seem that dedicated to becoming as perfect as possible?"

"I... really am not sure what that would even be like. You're aware that you might have inherent flaws that make it difficult for you to make the world better, and... do you not try to surpass those flaws?"

Asatyyl's body language may not be legible to someone not of his species, but if Plagueis has any sense of Asatyyl's emotions he might come off as somewhat self-conscious. He definitely reacts to "kidnapped and killed several dozen people", but in the manner of a diplomat who is used to minimizing his overt emotional reactions so as to maximize his negotiation options. He is recontextualizing what he knows of Plagueis, but not dismissing him as irredeemably evil.

"I think...I think most people only have so much mental and emotional energy to dedicate to surpassing their flaws, and even that they only sometimes spend on improving themselves. There is certainly a part of me that wants to become a better person, along various axes. I have plenty of examples in my life, of people whose characteristics I admire and would like to emulate.

But I admit that my self-awareness often exceeds my strength of character, when it comes to ways in which I might make the world better. And it all depends on what your  definition of 'better' is as well; there are about as many of those as there are sapient beings in the universe.

I do try to...well let me think. There are several different factors that go into my decision making process, when I'm faced with a difficult moral problem. My duty to my Queen and my planet, the promises I made when I took on my current position. My personal ambitions, such as they are, and the impact my decision will have on my coworkers, friends and family. And how much any of my options align with my own sense of morality, which I have to admit has been cobbled together rather piecemeal from my experiences with different cultures, rather than constituting a coherent philosophical theory.

So I would say, I am slowly trying to bring all of this into alignment, but not with the intensity that the Sith do. It sounds like your philosophy is...one that would attract very exceptional individuals, and give rise to great accomplishments, as it sounds like you have achieved. But it's not something I feel that I could live up to, at least not at this point in my life."

"But... why, exactly, don't you try to fix yourself? If you're not currently capable of making the best decision... how would that not eat away at you? If you want to do the right thing, but there are parts of you that conflict with that, then how can you just... let those parts keep existing?"

"I suppose I don't value my own perfection the same way you do. Or at least it doesn't seem as urgent. It will be a while, at least, before I can make of myself all I want to, and in the meantime I have to learn to like myself the way I am, and enjoy my life for what it is."

Then is he just saying that he doesn't care about doing the right thing? That's probably not exactly it?

Plagueis knew that there was something wrong with pretty much everyone around him, but this is not at all fitting with what he thought was wrong with them. He assumed that people failed to do the right thing because a complicated tangle of emotions that they couldn't control made them too stupid to realize what the right thing even was. Asatyyl appears to be smart, and probably capable of figuring out what's right, but... doesn't do what's right anyway? How would that work?

"Hmm. I'm not sure if I'm misinterpreting - no, I'm fairly sure I am misinterpreting at least a few things, because I'm quite confused. Do you in fact want to help people?"

"Ideally, yes, I'd like my life to be a net benefit to the universe. I'm well aware that my ability to help is not limitless, even at my level of influence; choices must always be made as to which people are soonest helped. Hearing what you've accomplished, it's clear that one person can do a great deal of good, if they put their all into it. Perhaps if I rebuilt my life from the foundation upward, I could optimize the amount of good I could bring to the universe. I guess I've just never thought of it that way."

"Well... do you want to... I'm not even sure what it would be, most of the things the Sith focus on are unfortunately just about the Force, so I'm not sure where I would even start - hmm. Are you interested in learning various aspects of the Sith teachings?"

"Absolutely, it sounds like a philosophy that has a lot to offer. I'm starting to think I could be doing more for the well-being of my fellow denizens of the universe. What do the Sith say is the best way of going about that?"

"Well, the object-level ideas are probably not very applicable; your universe is probably quite different from anything I've ever seen. It's more about how you judge what ideas are correct, an epistemology that actually gets the correct answers. It's about looking at the world around you with rigor; not necessarily doing what seems natural but instead asking at every step if there's a better way."

"The basic machinery on which people's minds are built - assuming that even generalizes to your universe's biology, which I think it does - is one governed primarily by associations. When you see, say, a piece of bread - " he gestures to what's left of the Christmas loaves " - it activates different neurons at different amounts - well, neural clusters, not the individual neurons - but it's based on how closely linked to the sensation they are. So on the most basic level, there are quite a few neural clusters acting up based on the visual appearance of the bread, and then you'll probably also have some connections that involve the taste and smell and feel and other sensory experiences connected to bread. Different kinds of bread, things that are close but not exact to the object your brain is generating, will activate too. You'll hear the word bread in your mind, you might recall memories of bread you've had in the past, assuming that you even have encountered bread in the past... all sorts of things."

"But it's not like your brain is querying all of its memories and all of its thoughts that it's ever had, checking each one to see if it contains bread, and then returning them if they fit that. There's no simple answer as to whether something is bread or not; there are thousands of different qualities bread might have, and in any case, it's not even carrying out that manner of search in the first place. It's just expanding out from the specific areas that were activated by this vision of bread, and finding anything that happens to be related to it, and then bringing them to its attention to the degree that they were close to the perceptions."

"Now, this isn't an awful way to run a system! It's very good at what it does, at finding associations; and it's also quite good at learning new information, at least to the extent that it can be related to previous memories. Considering that it was hacked together by evolutions that aren't really intelligent processes themselves, the neural network is actually a tremendously impressive structure."

"But it has its downsides. Particularly when it comes to logical reasoning, and when it comes to creating plans that optimize a given target. Because when you're trying to achieve a goal... what you're doing, on the most fundamental level, isn't searching for the best way to accomplish what you're trying to do, it's the same thing that your brain always does. It's pattern-matching. Things that have been associated with what you're trying to do, will be weighted higher, and come to mind more. And then you'll find something that sounds very connected to the goal, which in practice is usually a result blindly pulled from the cache of how other people have tried to do the same thing before, and then you'll carry it out. Now of course, on the level of cognition that we have, this can result in slightly more advanced procedures than just checking past correlations, but there are a lot of difficulties when we're running on hardware that just isn't made for coming up with new, optimized ideas."

"Of course, a Sith Lord doesn't just see that they're fundamentally flawed, and just shrug and keep going. Even if we can't actually escape all of the problems with our brains any time soon, we can still get a hell of a lot better than the way we started."

"When most people ask themselves the question of how they can improve the world - well, not that most people do ask themselves that question, but most of the few who do - are they going to reason carefully from the problems in the world, and the capabilities that they have, and calculate the best way to fix things? No, they'll reason through the only way that they can. In the cache of memories that are associated with someone trying to do good, to help others, they do something like going outside, and finding a few poor and hungry people, and then helping give them food, or shelter, or something like that. Or politically campaigning for a good cause - not that this will be in any way successful, because the cached methods of campaigning don't actually work, because they're more about signaling affiliation than actually finding ways to change their opponents' minds. Or, perhaps, actually fighting for their cause with weapons and an army, which will usually make things worse. At best, they'll support some charity that is efficient enough to actually help more than two people in the limited domain that it focuses on. But they won't have anywhere near the level of effect they could have."

"I said before that I've saved millions of lives with my cures, which I have. But while I say that when I need to reassure someone that I'm making the galaxy better, I'm not actually that proud of it, because it's not anywhere near what I could be doing, what I can hopefully achieve some day if I can hammer through whatever madness is going on with these midi-chlorians. Curing a rare disease, and saving what seems like a lot of people but is really only a tiny fragment of all life... that's the best outcome, I suppose, when you find something that fits the pattern of altruism, and have a unique talent to contribute to it. But it's not anywhere near making the most difference, it's not the best use of my skills from a perspective that isn't blinded by imperfect associations society has trained in everyone."

"I'm not sure yet what the best way is for you to spend your life; I don't know much about you, and in any case it's far easier to find why an idea isn't the best, than to find the one that is. But I suspect that whatever you should be doing, it won't look like curing a minor disease, or putting food in the stomachs of the hungry people right outside your door, or anything else that would be standard for a would-be altruist. It'll look more like seeing the horror of the shackles of death, and finding a clever new way to tear them off of everyone."

"I'm sure I went off on quite a few tangents there. There isn't actually a standard order to discuss these things in; I'm not sure what you most need to hear about."

He nods along as he listens intently; this is a way of looking at the world holistically that he's never exactly been exposed to before. "You mentioned that current methods of campaigning for a good cause--in your universe, at least--are more effective at affiliation signaling than changing minds toward the cause. Can you tell me more about that?

"Actually, do you have any way of writing this down, or otherwise recording it? I'm sure I won't remember it all as faithfully as I want to once I leave."

"Oh, the hologram projector I gave you can record, and it has a microphone and speaker as well." He briefly recaps what he had said before, once Asatyyl turns it on.

"Actually, as for leaving - Bar, is there a way to get back here, once we leave?"

You will likely find your way back to Milliways at some point in the future, but doors appear mostly at random, and time passes differently in different universes. You may not meet each other again or for a long time.

Plagueis nods, and turns back to Asatyyl. "So what I was saying about politics kind of falls into the category of people doing things that would fit the pattern of supporting a given cause rather than searching for a strategy that would achieve their real goal. Most people, when they argue, are describing things in a way that feels natural to their own side, and often either fails to make sense or even more strongly antagonizes their opponent. If you actually want to convince someone... well, you have to give them a clear route into which they can change their mind."

"It's tricky, because, again, people are tied to specific frameworks and don't usually take actions that aren't associated with that framework. It's not natural, for them, to just say, 'oh, I guess I was wrong and those people were right.' You have to give them some story that'll make sense to them, feel validating for them. Some way that you can change their mind, but still let them think they were in some sense right. The classic method is if you convince them that actually, the side they're on has been lying to them, and so it's not their fault; actually, the only reasonable thing for them to do is to join this side. Of course, you have to be a little more subtle than that, most of the time."

"I certainly wish that people would just step back and logically evaluate what the truth was! But the average person's logical reasoning is far too miniscule to be appealed to. Most people you can simply press certain buttons, and they'll obey the processes that naturally follow from those. And the button 'here's a proof of why your side is wrong' is associated with the process 'argue that no, we're right because of this and this and this.' You have to be a little more clever, to find that right series of pushes to turn them around."

"Of course, the best ways to persuade people aren't really the sort of thing that we want falling into the wrong hands. The Sith of ancient times that were... less ethically inclined... managed to wreak havoc by knowing how to manipulate the masses."

"It's just as important, and perhaps more so, to know not to be vulnerable to such manipulations yourself. To not make decisions based on what naturally flows from the story you've created for yourself, but based on how it would affect the future."

Yes, I...I can see what you're describing in my own thought patterns. We just don't have the mental power to do more than take shortcuts almost all the time. But I suppose the first step is to be aware that you're doing so. Sometimes, though, it seems like fully understanding what 'the truth' is, even as much of it as is relevant, would take so long that what ever decision you were trying to make has already passed you by.

"Should I be worried that you are using your superior powers of thought to manipulate me into doing your bidding right now?" He's joking, mostly; he is not really very fearful that this is the case. "It doesn't feel like it, but then how would I know?"

"Well, yes, that's something for you to look out for. I don't think there's really anything I could say to prove that I wasn't. If we assumed that I in fact was capable of convincing you to believe anything, none of my arguments would really be valid. But... what bidding would I even be trying to manipulate you into doing? If you were some leader of a planet in my galaxy, you might have wanted to be wary that I was really just trying to trick you into helping me, for some selfish goal of mine. But I don't have anything to gain from influencing your actions, in your faraway universe. Except, of course, to the extent that I care about your universe for its own sake, and not for me. So I suppose it's possible that I'm trying to manipulate you into making your universe better, into helping its people, or something like that. But that would be fairly pointless, if you already want to do so."

"Of course, if you're secretly selfish yourself, and don't want to help other people, then yes, you should be worried."

He laughs. "True. There's only so much influence you can be expected to have on me when we're from different universes and you didn't even know I existed a few hours ago! And I don't really mind if you're maneuvering me into doing something I might want to do anyway, like making things better for people in my universe.

"I can see what you mean, though, about giving people a route to changing their mind that feels natural to them, that fits into their existing framework. I think I've picked up a little bit of how to do that intuitively, just in the course of my work. People do respond better when you meet them on their level. It puts a limit on how far you can move them, though, doesn't it?

"How were you first introduced to the Sith philosophy?"