Ders is pretty.

Also, huh. Typewriter, and they have computers, and semi-modern medicine . . . Vivai has been systematically underestimating the tech level of this world. Probably because it dresses more like Ancient Byway than any way Byway has dressed itself in the past few centuries. Update. They're modern, just a few duodecades behind Byway, give or take. Maybe he won't have to do anything at all to catch them up to longevity escape velocity . . . or maybe he'll give his whole life in the attempt and still miss the boat by an embarrassing amount and be permanently cognitively aged. He still has to get a good handle on the size of their population, their average intelligence and the shape of their intelligence distribution, and the eumemics of their social structure.

"Hi, Ders. Um, sorry, I might need a minute to figure this out." That his words to perhaps the prettiest creature he's ever seen, okay that's hyperbole but still, might have been anything else.

Vivai reflects.

His obvious central line of attack here is to untangle the precise boundary between the Keeper and drone cognitive repertoires. They obviously don't know yet, or they'd have computers smart enough to make Ram Askielal look like a trash ditch. With any luck, the wildly divergent cognitive philosophy of Byway, applied to this world, will beget a picture of sapient cognition more complete than either world possessed by itself - even under a mind as relatively slow and clumsy as Vivai's. Maybe the picture will be complete enough to make smarter computers. Far more likely it'll just make for a couple really good books authored by Vivai himself. Either way, he'll have not only an earned source of status in this world, but also some really fun new paradigms.

. . . But first he should sort out some of the more basic aspects of how this world functions, about which, he now realizes, his thoughts up until now have been embarrassingly unclear. And about which he's expressed a cringey amount of overconfidence as his brain instinctively attempts to avoid looking childish. Brain, you moron, we're an alien. If they expect us to understand their culture right away without any questions that's their deficit. Now he has the chance to grill this world's self-understanding frankly. No pressure.  

Hopefully this alien supermodel with the ASMR voice has a deep respect for frank epistemic triage.

"So, some really basic questions to start with now I realize I don't understand the fundamentals of your world as well as I've been putting on. First: how long do drones and Keepers, respectively, naturally live?"

Ders will give him a minute to figure all this out, and won't speak or make any noises until Vivai actually asks a question.

Neither the drones nor Damin interpret him as acting childishly, although they wouldn't know they had to dispel that misconception. Vivai's size is what would be expected of teenagers in the Imperium, though.

"Prediction: your world, Sir, has different time units than this one. Here is one second: zero...one. Five dozen seconds make a minute. Five dozen minutes make an hour. Two dozen hours make a day. There are three gross* days in a year. 'Day' and 'year' are time units which also correspond to the rotational period – defined sidereally – and the orbital period of this planet around its suns respectively. The 'day' time unit and the rotational period are very close, but the 'year' time unit is slightly shorter than the orbital period, such that extra days must be inserted approximately once every dozen years to ensure alignment with the seasons.

Prediction: you, Sir, lack the computing training or working memory to process all these numbers and are in need of exocortical-aids**. This drone will write them for you. Please correct it if it is mistaken in any of its predictions so that it may calibrate properly." And Ders will write down the numbers and labels using a dip pen. It writes just as well as it speaks – all the numbers look like they've been printed, and the letters are in perfectly even cursive.

"Are you literate, Sir? If not, this drone may recite the numbers and labels for you at your pleasure.

The Imperial Census, which occurs every dozen years, collects data on mean Keeper age and Keeper life expectancy. The most recent census is eleven years ago. The mean Keeper age currently is four dozen three gross*** years, with the mean Keeper life expectancy being nine gross nine dozen and five****. The Imperial Census does not collect such data for drones." Ders will similarly write those numbers down.

"Does that answer your question, Sir? Prediction: It does only adjacently.

Hm...Prediction: In the majority of animals, homeostatic processes degrade slowly with age, such that, even under optimal living conditions, there is a limit to their lifespan. This is called senescence. You, Sir, were expecting remna to senescece, and hence were asking about this age ceiling, but they are not – we senesce negligibly. It is thought that, many gross gross years ago, in the ancestral environment, drones used to senesce, but nowadays they no longer do so. Please do not update strongly based on that thought – it has not yet been conclusively proven."

* 432

** Three-syllable compound word in Standard Imperial.

*** 600

**** 1409

THEY HAVE BUILT-IN ENGINEERED NEGLIGIBLE SENESCENCE. (And impressively even epistemics! And . . . training that turns people into actually-efficient computers. It's looking like it's going to take longer for Vivai to find an initial wedge in this world than he thought.) Vivai is happy for the aliens but this is not great news for Vivai. Starting with negligible senescence means you have no incentive to engineer it. And Vivai still senesces, unless the isekai translation magic gave him that, too. (He's not betting on it.) So he's up the inter-reality creek without a paddle. The imperturbable background part of Vivai that calculates his realtime decision tree expands the proportion of relatively immediate nodes involving strategic suicide.

"I - can read." He - he can. Read the alien handwriting explaining their 2-dozen-hour-day-based time units. In the same instant, he groks that all those loop-de-loops are totally semantically useless. (So. Many. Whole. Suitcases.)

Seeing as he is, in fact, in Crazytown, Vivai will not verbally object to Ders doing part of Vivai's rightful cognitive labor, although he will look mildly uncomfortable about it. It's not helping that Ders's . . . just Ders, is kind of distracting. Vivai's not normally a dope! This is just unfair.

"Um, you're correct that we senesce! My body, or at least the body I had on my home world, was guaranteed to stop working sometime before a gross of our years - those aren't too different in length from yours, I think, I'll explicitly figure that in a second - and probably before ten dozen. That is, it would have stopped working then unaided. I was already taking medication designed to repair the damage that naturally builds up in our bodies from our metabolic processes, and when I was younger I paid for a few really expensive viral treatments including one that put copies of my mitochondrial DNA inside my cell nuclei, and then made them authoritative. I have no idea at this point how many of those concepts will be familiar to you, sorry.

Given the biotech development track my world was on, it seemed pretty likely that I and other people my age - I'm a dozen and ten of our years - would not ultimately die of senescence. But here, sans access to that stuff, my body will almost certainly go kaput before it hits a gross. And I'll probably degrade significantly in cognitive agility, and then ability, long before then, in a smooth curve starting now but not becoming really noticeable for another couple dozen of our years. That's the viral treatments - each one I got, significantly slowed the decline of the people who got it in its trial waves starting a dozen or four Byway-years ago. Completely without technological assistance, human bodies almost literally always die before reaching the age of ten dozen Byway-years, and almost always senesce to the point of total physical and cognitive uselessness before eight dozen. So, yeah. Point remna.

I'm - not actually sure I can avoid temporarily updating on that speculation about historical drone senescence, sorry. At least not as much updating as it takes to commit it to memory. It's so fascinating! I'll be sure to tell them Ders warned me." Vivai, it's clear, is making this promise to protect Ders's reputation sacredly seriously.

"Okay. Interplanetary year conversion. Our second is about the same as yours, it's about like this - second . . . second . . . second . . . second. And we have the exact same time units up to also having 20-hour* days, which I acknowledge is really weird. We have the same system with having to insert leap days, ours are every four of our years, and very occasionally leap seconds on top of that, but our baseline year is two gross six dozen and five days long - so shorter than yours, and not a nice round number like yours, but on the same order. So, my body's expected lifespan, a gross of our years, would be, rough estimate, every of our years is about five-sixths of yours, so - " (Vivai, it appears, has subconsciously intuited that Ders, while a computer, will not interrupt him.) " - gross over five-over-six, gross times six-over-five - a gross and two dozen. So my body is destined to go kaput after about a gross and two dozen of your years - no, that's not right, your years are longer . . . " He reddens but does not change expression. "Uh, the multiplier is associated with your year, right, you go a gross times five-over-six to convert. So. My lifespan here is.

Ten dozen or so. Of your years."

He clams up, seemingly expecting Ders to comment.

*The current most popular number system in Aineh (Byway's current most important city) goes: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, ζ, ₵, 10. "20-hour" is of course pronounced "two dozen hour".

It's semantically meaningless, but it's not useless! Ders is trained in business handwriting only, not ornamental – Mag does that. The loop-de-loops are there to minimize the number of pen lifts needed to write, which permits people to write for longer. 

Vivai is correct that Ders will not interrupt him unless he pauses for long enough that he unambiguously expects Ders to respond. Only then does the drone do so.

"This drone is familiar with those concepts. We do not have the technology to use viruses to transfer mitochondrial DNA into cell nuclei. 

Potentially-helpful-information*: You, Sir, are very young compared to remna. Keepers receive their allotments from their parents at two dozen years old, and are considered legally young until the year they turn a gross and one years old. You, Sir, are a dozen and ten of your years old, which would make you a dozen and six and a half of our years old, approximated-to-one-fractional-place. This drone is nine dozen and three years old. Its Master is eleven dozen and eleven years old – both with our years as units.

Prediction: Upon comprehending your situation, this drone's Master will want to help save you, Sir, from your pitiful state by whatever means necessary. Nine dozen years is very short – not even enough to pass legal youngness. 

Prediction: You, Sir, will try to acquire as much knowledge regarding biotech to try to recreate your world's technologies here, so that you may live without senescing. Further prediction: Many companies here would want to invest in you or hire you to learn more about your world's biotech. Given similarity between our biology, it is likely that many human technologies will also be useful on remna.

It is thought that – sincere apologies – this drone may refrain from telling potentially pertinent or interesting hypotheses which-have-some-evidence-but-insufficient-to-be-considered-by-most-people-to-be-basically-true*, if that is your preference."

Yes, drones do have reputations in the sense that their actions reflect on their Master, who is in charge of them. That's very much not what Vivai is thinking though.

* Two syllables in Standard Imperial.

You do not make a process more ergonomic by artificially increasing the constraints on it. That is not how that works!

"Oh, my overupdating-on-speculative-theories thing is ego-syntonic*. Initial overreaction is just - how you let any new evidence into your system at all. It's self-correcting in the long run, and anyway, how are you supposed to productively aim ahead of time for approximately how strong you want to update on something, when you lack this much context? I'll have to make some wildly inaccurate assumptions about the object level, and then build up all my locally appropriate meta-reasoning heuristics from how those really dumb assumptions get exploded. Feel free to withhold for your own reasons if you have them, but it's not necessary to do so for my sake. And now I'm really curious what spurious thing, in particular, you were just going to talk about."

. . . Hm. If they're going to take pity on him about something, Vivai supposes it might as well be his mortality. Surely, though, there's an amount of dignity I won't sacrifice even for the paltry survival of my physical body, right? Not now that I'm guaranteed subjective immortality? Right, Decision Tree Manager?

Decision Tree Manager?

Decision Tree Manager doesn't hear him. It's busy weaving a pretty little spiderweb of futures in which he begs biological immortality from the cognitively dimorphic eusocial tentacled ram dinosaurs.

WHAT?

Decision Tree Manager doesn't bat an eye. Decision Tree Manager points out that Vivai is not a death-based intercounterfactual travel sherpa, and does not actually know the vague space of possible things that may go wrong if he tries to replicate his first jump, let alone how to begin to bend toward protecting himself. Decision Tree Manager shows Vivai many gut-level anticipations of Things Going Wrong.

. . . There's never any point in fighting when his hindbrain is this decided. Fuck.

FUCK.

A really stubborn part of Vivai hopes desperately that the food here is a slow-acting neurotoxin.

"Thanks for all the info, that was really well-targeted to help me understand my current situation. Assuming it isn't all part of some elaborate con - sorry, nothing personal, just a possibility I have to entertain until I'm actually stably situated in the economy of this world and understand, to my own satisfaction, who owes who what." He doesn't confirm or deny Ders's prediction that Vivai will try to make himself biologically immortal in this world, since Vivai's level of conscious intention to do so changed in response to Ders expressing the prediction.

"I should confess right away, then, that I was nothing like a professional bioengineer in my world - just a hobbyist who read some tutorials and kept up on the news. Somewhat. Like, to argue with partners and acquaintances about what would happen next, and to bet on some of the issuing prediction markets - the ones that were about companies and projects so peripheral that even someone of average g, like me, hi, hello, I'm average g in my world, could expect to maybe make money. Although I, personally, always lost money. So far! I am of course subjectively raring to go, and confident that I can deliver, but I think I should calibrate you guys's expectations more realistically."

*Yep, nonawkward, native, single word in Byway and Irethal.

"Understood, Sir. This drone will not restrain itself from sharing potentially pertinent or interesting unconfirmed-hypotheses.

The 'spurious thing' was the hypothesis that intelligence and negligible senescence necessarily evolve together. Both traits are very expensive, biologically speaking. Intelligence is mostly useful only if you anticipate living long enough that you can learn, and, after learning, executing on said knowledge, which would imply not having biological caps on lifespan. For example, if a species was intelligent and not negligibly senescent, then said organisms would have to waste time trying to impart their knowledge as fast as possible to their offspring before their inevitable demise, where all the knowledge they contained were lost.

The hypothesis claims that an intelligent species which was negligibly senescent would be impossible – it may now be safely rejected, with you, Sir, as the counterexample. This drone supposes that inventions such as language and writing would have permitted the rate of information transfer to be higher than the rate at which it is lost by death-due-to-senescence, such that the total amount of knowledge held by the species was higher each generation – higher than the rate at which biology may encode instincts into organisms via natural selection. Er, to the extent that teleology can be applied to nature – sincere apologies, it is simply a useful frame of mind.

I do not know of any outstanding debts which you have incurred, Sir, unless my Master or the other drones have neglected to inform me.

What is g? 

It seems that your world has better communications technology than mine, Sir. The use and spread of prediction markets is hampered by the fact that the teletype networks can only handle so much information to pass through, and also the need to calculate trades. Machine computers are being prototyped for this purpose. This drone's other Master, Master Konrad, is very fond of prediction markets and wishes to see them be more widespread.

It is still possible that the information you have acquired simply by virtue of living in a more technologically advanced society would be enough to speed up the rate of biotech research here."

Hm. That was not the spurious theory Vivai was expecting to hear. He thinks for a strangely long time, looking at the ground, conflicted.

He could - but no, even that gives away too much, too soon. File the evopsych stuff away for later, when he can talk to top field biologists, which - happy coincidence of happy coincidences - Ders says he will likely get a shot at, soon!

"Er, sorry, g is just our shorthand for abstraction ability. It's not quite intelligence, it's - do you have standardized testing for rural people, so that you can find peripheral geniuses and move them into cities?" It occurs to Vivai where he is. "I mean, ordinary rural workers, so you can bring them into cities or places like this!" What kind of place is this, exactly? But Damin is clearly wealthy, clearly well-read, so Vivai supposes what he's said probably holds. "g is our general way of referring to how well you do on the very best of those tests we can design. Some people used to like to confuse it with intelligence." That probably makes Vivai's world look pretty stupid - "But almost no one does, by now. Er, by the point in history from which I left.

Now we know it's an aspect of human intelligence, along with several other things that are real but harder to quickly test, none of which you can talk about in polite conversation without being suspected of narcissistic obsession. I of course only bring up something as uncouth as standardized test scores because I'm an alien, and, Science! Philosophy!

And you're right, we have way more developed info-tech - we have general-purpose computers that can make markets quickly as well as do other things, although in practice I think high-volume financial stuff is mostly handled by specialized info-equipment. And our computers are connected in a network that encompasses the whole planet, which is as awesome as it sounds. The world changed a lot after that." Vivai smiles. "I may be more or less useful in that area than in biotech, I'm not sure." Actually, he's pretty sure he can reconstruct some breakthroughs in signal relaying and computing technology that are way higher return-on-complexity than any breakthroughs in biotech, but Vivai Wants To Talk To A Biologist Now, and if he's going to be staying here, he has years to triage this civilization (s?).

". . . And that spurious theory is very interesting. I agree I disprove it in the universal case. I can't think of any analogue theories off the top of my head from my world that your species smashes clean through like that, but it'll be weird if I don't hit on some eventually. Assuming I learn more about you guys's biology and psychology. Which - yeah, I would love a chance to speak with some biotech researchers, as soon as it's convenient."

"There is standardized testing for drones, the most popular of which being the Imperial Civil Service Exam For Drones, and a similar test for the military, but it's more physical and less mental. A minimum score is needed for a Keeper to sell their drone to the government, with additional tests being available if you want a higher price for a pre-trained drone. It is possible to take the examination simply to have the drone be assessed, even if one has no intention of selling it. This drone is certified to have passed the minimum score in both the Civil Service exam and also the Computing examination to be sold specifically as a computer drone. It scored one and one-sixth standard-deviations above mean in the Civil Service exam, and two standard deviations above mean in the Computing exam – this drone is quite valuable. Clarification: the minimum score is independent of statistics – the standard deviation scores are only there to calculate the price of drones once they pass the minimum.

There is testing for Keepers to enlist as officers or to franchise an Imperial government office as well, but it's less rigorous and is pass-fail, rather than outputting a number or letter grade. Generally, Keepers do not like to legibilize themselves like that.

...Registering-confusion: standardized testing is not restricted geographically. So long as one can transport the drone to the testing center and can pay the testing fees, the drone can take the exam.

...Prediction: In your world, Sir, people prefer to live densely, such that wealthy people all cluster in the cities, with the poorer people being pushed out into the rural areas.

It is very unseemly to discuss the intelligence of Keepers, but it is not displeasing to discuss the intelligence of drones.

Ah, many people working in the communications industry would want to speak to you, Sir, in that case. Prediction: Many people will pay for you to consult for them, or to be a researcher, including the Imperial government. 

This drone can beg for its Master to contact His biotech company owner friends, so that you may speak to them."

"You begging* your Master to contact His biotech company owner friends sounds awesome, as long as you think he would be into that to start with, and His biotech company owner friends aren't colluding to hold me hostage or something."

Government - he gets an aura around the meaning, something like company, but really really not, like if you picked and chose and fused connotations of company and pirate-gang and cult, and dumped on a cold bucket of further meaning-flavors entirely foreign to Vivai - wait -

"I - I'm new here and just picked up this language through mysterious magical means. 'Government' is a handle for an entirely new concept to me, and about those I've been able to get flashes of semantic insight - but this one is really hazing my brain. Like, for a second I was sure that 'government's just take money from everybody and do whatever they want with it including - making themselves the sole arbitrator of all disputes -" okay the fact his brain is flashing him meaning-hallucinations this nonsensical has to be an aftereffect of the fact he died while bleeding out and half-delirious, of course that turned him permanently insane ". . . and everybody venerates them for this.

What are they actually?"

*Vivai will imitate the attitudinal-flavors and caste cases used by whoever he's immediately talking to, intentionally but without thinking explicitly.

"Yes, this drone predicts that its Master would be keen to do this. 

Imperial law permits property owners to remove any visitors to their property at any time, and permits violent force to be used if they do not comply verbally. The corollary to this is that visitors may leave anywhere at any time, and it is illegal to bar them from doing so. However, this only applies to Imperial citizens on Imperial land – you, Sir, are not an Imperial citizen, and so the court's protection does not apply to you. Still, this drone confidently predicts that neither its Master nor His friend will want to hold you against your will. This drone also predicts that even if His friend were to attempt to do that, that its Master would try to stop it. It is also possible for you to purchase weapons in the city if you wish to be more assured of your safety, but this drone predicts that its Master would not furnish you with funds to do that."

They don't have government? Literally how does that work. How do they just not kill each other competing for resources, if there's no force pushing everyone into a better metastable social equilibrium.

"The Imperial government does not 'take money from everybody' – it only collects taxes from Imperial citizens. You, Sir, are not one, and so do not have to pay. The Imperial government is the sole arbiter only in criminal court. Criminal offenses include assault and theft. The criminal courts are authorized to impose fines, corporal punishment and exile. 

Civil offenses include fraud and breach-of-contract. The Imperial government and the regional governments run their own civil courts, however, it is possible to settle disputes privately, either among themselves, or by hiring a private mediator or court, and contracting that its decision be legally binding. The civil courts, and by extension, the private courts and mediators, are only authorized to impose fines.

People who do not wish to be subject to Imperial law renounce their citizenship and move away from its territory to live on terra nullius."

Vivai's credence that these specific farmers are just messing with him - and probably for something nefarious seeing as they're seemingly too smart to be that entertained by gaslighting an alien for fun - rises sharply.

 "A lot of that just drained through my brain-strainer, but the central issue seems to be this 'law' concept? What is a law. How does it prevent people from doing things - what - rewriting the nature of -" brain no that can't be right please get it together "moral reality? That doesn't make any sense AT ALL.

Sorry, this language-acquisition thing and my, ah, recently scrambled brain don't seem to mix. How do. Laws. Prevent people from doing things." His brain seems to now actually be throwing up a hurricane of random associations now, not any more decipherable than radio static.

"A law is a command for you to do something, or to refrain from doing something, with punishment if you disobey. For example, if you attack and injure someone, that person is entitled to damages from you. The criminal court is the court that will handle this. By continuing to be citizens of the Imperium, people are saying that they are willing to obey laws, and likewise, be protected when other people violate the laws to affect them, such as in this case. The Imperium does not make claims as to which laws are moral or not, simply that the people who live in it have agreed that they like these rules enough not to leave.

Laws prevent people from doing things by disincentivizing them from doing it.

Prediction: Your world, Sir, does not have any governments. This drone will attempt to explain why governments exist given that your world has none.

Suppose that person A desires something P owned by person B, and that B desires something Q owned by A. Also assume that each person is reluctant to let go of what they own, but that each wants the other object more than their own. Person A might choose steal P, or threaten B with bodily harm in order to acquire P – these are the simplest and cheapest ways for A to acquire P without giving up Q. Also assume that, in order for them to talk to one another, they must render themselves vulnerable to each other, since of course they must get close enough to be in speaking range.

This is the way it works in the ancestral environment – it the way of animals, who must kill and fight to get what they want and what they need. It is also an equilibrium of Nacis – this is the old name for it – a state where no single individual has anything to gain from changing only their strategy, and thus it is extremely stable. It is also extremely wasteful, given that A and B could simply trade P and Q and thus both be better off. But why render one's self vulnerable in trying to trade, if one could simply steal and get both? Even if both A and B were inclined to trade, there would still be the lingering possibility that the other might be trying to trick them into becoming vulnerable, and then swooping in to take their item while giving nothing in return.

If they traded, they would reach a state where no person could be made better off without any other person being made worse off – the old name for this is the peak of Partos – and indeed, many people prefer to live in an environment: an environment where it can be assured that the other person is acting in good faith and is not going to defraud you. The Imperium is a collective agreement among its citizens to add a third agent into the mix, which will act to heavily disincentivize anyone who attempts to take advantage of others, such that each individual person is incentivized not to do that, and instead cooperate peacefully.

Does this meaningfully resolve your confusion, Sir?"

"Well, at least one element of it . . . does make sense with something I predicted before, although of course I can't prove that to you now."

He almost starts this off with 'Prediction:' because Ders seems to be getting a lot of mileage out of that habit in terms of added hotness, but decides against stealing Ders's Thing and possibly offending it. If drones get offended.

"I'm going to guess ahead of time that I look to you like - well, not feminine, you're hermaphrodites - like a sort of underdeveloped, neotenic, possibly sickly person? I bet I look just about the least intimidating of any full adult you've ever met." Why tentacled shell-headed hermaphroditic aliens should share human mild anatomical correlates of temperament, he does not want to think about. "Is that true? Either way, once you tell me, I'll explain my theory."

It is not Ders' Thing: the trainer that trained it taught it to speak like that. And drones do not get offended. Sadly, these revelations will remain uncommunicated to Vivai.

What will be communicated to Vivai with his language install is that the word 'feminine' doesn't exist in Standard Imperial, and that what comes out is the Byway word for it. 

"Validation impossible: this drone does not know what 'feminine'," and it repeats the phonemes as accurately as possible, "means, and so cannot assess whether you, Sir, are 'feminine' or not.

Correct prediction: you, Sir, would be considered extremely short for an adult drone and extremely extremely short for an adult Keeper – your height would be expected of someone currently undergoing puberty. 

Validation impossible: you, Sir, are not remna, and so this drone cannot assess whether you look sickly or not. However, you exhibit neither the scent of a healthy remna nor an unhealthy one. Ignoring that, you, Sir, appear to be superficially healthy."

Hm. Vivai was going for something deeper than 'you're short', there, but. Face the music or you'll fall behind beat.

"My hypothesis, whatever state it's in now, was that your species - and I have no idea why your superficial anatomy and psychology should correspond this closely with that of my own, what with the wildly different modes of reproduction and presumably wildly different starting material - we evolved from short hairy little tree-climbing creatures with big eyes and long tails" (he makes a skittering, four-fingered climbey motion with his hand, to demonstrate the concept of 'squirrel') "but anyway that does seem to be the way that it is - evolved down a path adjacent to my species's, except that your ancestors, for whatever reason, ended up in a configuration that favored much more intraspecific aggression.

And that this resulted in the relative amplification of traits Byway would relatively associate with the male sex, and call masculine - though the difference between human males and females on most of these traits is just statistical, humans being just about the least sexually dimorphic animals ever. Anyway, masculinity is generally associated with higher doses of growth hormone, and so bigger, hardier skeletons, and more muscle, and also higher doses of signals that told one's developing brain 'wire yourself to be concerned with domination and combat, rather than social soft skills'.

In our species those social soft skills would include childrearing and mate choice, but I imagine since y'all are all sometimes female around here, those last two don't trade off against aggression as much for y'all.

You and your Master and Rend and Las all looked to me from the start like comically hypermasculinized - comically overgrown, over-matured - versions of humans, to me. And on top of that, you have those head-shells that look like they were selected for use in intraspecific dominance contests. So I thought, back when Damin and I were talking, that maybe your species had evolved down a more aggressive path. And just now you told me that in your ancestral environment, it was the default equilibrium that two people would have items their utility functions said they should trade with each other, and yet not trade out of mutual reasonable fear of getting too close, that the other would defect, go totally antisocial, and steal. And while I can't yet see how a government - whatever that ultimately turns out to be - would be the natural solution to the problem of having evolved instincts geared for conditions like that - I can understand that problem in the abstract, and see why it's a source of social free energy that might feed memetic constructs that my species never generated, and that might look very strange to me after having been optimized under grossyears of your species's intelligence."

He attempts to gauge Ders's reaction to all this.

"It is believed that remna, our species, are descended from cephalopods which made their way onto land, given the similarities in our morphology. However, this has not yet been conclusively proven.

This drone believes that the reason its species developed to be more aggressive is because remna developed sapience during a time when they were being predated by megafauna, which we called jguvi. After we attained to sapience, and hence developed language and tool use, we drove them extinct, at least, in our starting continent. When we began to expand to other continents, many years later, in the Second Imperial Period, we found jguvi there also, and likewise slaughtered them.

It is one of the crowning achievements of this drone's species.

Prediction: Your most recent ancestors were apex predators and did not need to worry about predation, which permitted you not to develop drives for aggression or cozy-places.

Keepers dislike feeling observed or exposed or made legible because it triggers the ancestral-environment feeling of danger, of having no safe hiding place, and of the possibility of being attacked on all sides. The process by which someone must make themselves vulnerable in order to participate in trade or emotional connection or similar activities is known to us as the mortifying-ordeal-of-being-known*. Therefore, it was very hard to break out of the wasteful stable equilibrium, and there needed to be a strong internal force, which in this case was the Imperator, to achieve a better metastable equilibrium closer to the peak of Partos.

Drones do most of the childrearing in the early years, when the child is too weak and dumb to be taught complex subjects. After that, in most cases, drones continue to do many of the chores* of childrearing, while Keepers tutor the child in various subjects. Nowadays, drones are better trained, such that drones can also tutor the child, though usually only in simple subjects like basic numeracy and literacy.

As for mate choice, usually Keepers will have an even number of Keeper children, with them being the impregnating-parent for half of the Keeper children, and being the birthing-parent for the other half. From what this drone knows about biology, males invest less in offspring because they do not have to gestate, which is an advantage they have over females. This means that females must be selective about who their mates are. However, the disadvantage is that males cannot be assured of the paternity of their child, whereas females are assured that whatever they give birth to is their children. This strategy of alternation therefore assures that at least half the children are indeed one's children.

Shell-plates which are colorful or pearlescent are considered attractive. They are not intended as weapons."

Ders will remain totally facially and bodily emotionless, while still keeping the same professional-friendly tone of voice. It is well trained in impassivity! This is why it was so expensive to buy.

* Two syllable root word.

* Two syllable compound word, meaning 'menial work suitable for drones'.

. . . Where to start, with that. Unless Vivai is parsing everything wrong, they seem to be consistently making familiar patterns of error when attempting to reduce their own psychology to its most likely proximate causes. Improvement to their current evopsych paradigm is something he could comceivably sell them, but if they're not smart enough (mature enough as a civilization?) to have untangled all these knots themselves, already, they're probably not smart enough to steal his insights off his back without his explicit demarcation of them as Valuable Insights, and, for that matter, proof of their value. So he can't see the harm in just grilling Ders honestly, with no attempt to obfuscate himself, right now, to resolve his own confusions.

"I'm honestly uncertain here - does your world not have any socially-intelligent species with no natural predators, which are intraspecifically aggressive? As you'll have guessed, mine does! Many such species, actually - for social species, especially larger-sized ones with smaller groups, high levels of intraspecific aggression isn't particularly less common than low."

Maybe it's less that the species that intentionally produced Ders isn't smart enough to see what Vivai sees here - maybe it's just that they don't have his data. Home, after all, had a faction that argued eusocial species could never evolve sapience, because the respective inclusive fitness reward gradients for reproductive and non-reproductive castes diverged too high up the genetic-developmental stream for sapience to occur-and-spread cleanly in either one caste or both.

"My species doesn't like the-mortifying-ordeal-of-being-known*, either, but the way we deal with that isn't by aggression and hiding in cozy-places, it's by trading with each other and hiding in cozy-places**."

*, ** Both 'the-mortifying-ordeal-of-being-known' and 'cozy-places' map fairly cleanly onto single words or idiomatic phrases in Vivai's native languages.

"This drone sincerely apologizes; it was not specifically trained in zoology. Theoretically, it is safer to assume a higher level of intraspecific aggression, because it is closer to the equilibrium of Nacis, and hence more stable. Therefore, genes which code for that are more likely to achieve fixation in the population. A mutation inducing aggression in a population which is peaceful will be very successful, but the reverse would be very unsuccessful."

Imperial also has a single word for cozy-places! Although it's a compound.

"This drone is confused as to how trading relieves the mortifying-ordeal-of-being-known. Wouldn't showing yourself to the other person and talking about what you are willing to sell and buy – and hence revealing what you value – be mortifying?"

"Which equilibria are most stable and have the largest surrounding sinks depends on the population's starting configuration and environment! Aggression toward same-species competitors will help you in some initially peacable species but hurt you in others. For example, if the opposite sex of your species picks mates largely based on who has the most social status, then aggressiveness toward competitors will just progressively drop you to the bottom of the status hierarchy and destroy your mating prospects, as conspecific after conspecific assigns negative utility to the prospect of interacting with you.

That's not how it works for most animals, of course, but that's how it works for humans. And like every peculiar or rare thing about humans, you had people arguing that it was necessary for sapience.  

. . . I was actually pretty sympathetic to both the standard argument about non-eusociality being required for sapience, and one of the arguments about why a starting equilibrium of very low intraspecific aggressivess was required. Remna really are a revelation to me.

Yes, revealing pieces of your utility function is mortifying, but less mortifying than the prospect of others not valuing you highly because you refuse to trade with them! To humans, anyway - I guess if you had a psychology that was more like - a chimpanzee's, or something - that's a high-aggression animal that's close to humans on the phylogenetic tree but nonsapient - then, I guess that you might not have much intrinsic desire to trade with others at all." He suppresses a grimace. This is all so weird. He tries to remember what he knows about chimpanzees . . . he read a little about their social structure once. It was volatile, violent, crude, and coercive - seeming to bear no promise of ever being conducive to any kind of cumulative productivity.

"Oh, right, your species, Sir, is dioecious. This drone's is not, which is why it was focused on how things would work for monoecious species. However, I don't see why females would select against aggressiveness towards competitors. Presumably they would select for whichever phenotypes were most able to guard them and provide for offspring, which is likely to include a drive for intraspecific aggression."

One of the drones from the kitchen arrives to say that Master Damin has finished eating breakfast, and that they should [highly recommended] go to the living room now. It bows.

This dialect appears to be getting cruxy. Vivai loves a good crux, but the marginal expected return from switching engagements is positive right now.

He thanks Ders heartily - profusely, actually, since the worst case that can happen to an outsider for overappreciating the entrenched underclass is hardly as bad as the best case is good - and - does-not-bow to the other drone, his language acquisition appears to have given him a slight echo of body language too, although only an echo - only nods and allows himself to be led to the living room, glancing at Ders in case it wants to follow. Or - calculates that it should follow, given everyone else's desires. Drones aren't so different from humans in that respect, Vivai thinks admiringly. Being careful to want exactly what's best in an entirely unchimplike way. Surely he and the harder-working, more-humanlike underclass can ally somehow, even if that is how it works in fiction . . .

"You're welcome, Sir. This drone is happy to be of service," Ders says, but otherwise doesn't make any discernable facial or body expressions.

Ders indeed will follow, and bow when they reach Damin's table, which is now being cleared of plates.

Damin drinks water before speaking.

"I hope you two had a productive conversation. I'll ask Ders to give a summary of what happened, but first, I want to clarify that if you want to just leave and take your chances in town without me, you're perfectly allowed to do so, and I will not stop you. I was very excited over the prospect of meeting an alien and failed to consider-that-other-people-have-different-priors-and-utility-functions, and also that people had different culture. 

I also believe, given that this place likely has a culture different than yours, that you would have trouble navigating it without a guide. But still, it is your choice if you prefer to be alone. I will extend no more help than you actually say you want. You were talking about implicit debt earlier, and for us, if the other person has clarified they don't expect payment, then we indeed expect that they won't. But for you...the impulse for reciprocity might run deeper, or be instinctual, such that it is uncomfortable to be in a state of debt – I certainly wouldn't want to put you through that."