Neksil and Jeffinar

"Sorry, I'm confused why Jherek would be upset over one of us coming over. We would love to have Kastakians visit us to look at things if they wanted to say, do tests on seawater, before signing a more comprehensive immigration agreement. We would appreciate elaboration on this.

Perhaps. Our usual system is for goods to be registered with the Imperial Standards Authority, and therefore be permitted to bear its seal. Then, people who purchase products with said seal can sue the people who made them if, on the packaging or advertisements, they made misleading claims, had inaccurate ingredients lists, et cetera. This puts the onus on the person suing to gather evidence – the ISA does not itself conduct inspections. With regard to Kastakian goods, we could reverse this, by having Kastakian manufacturers pay to be inspected according to some standard by the ISA or a private inspector. Then, the Kastakian manufacturer is freed from the responsibility of having to pay damages in case of defective goods or misleading claims, and any claims for damages will be paid for by the inspector. Probably the ISA will handle inspection at first, slowly transitioning to private inspectors later – we don't want the government to be responsible for both the inspection and the court cases suing the inspector, at least, not for too long.

You can lease drones from their Controllers, or buy them from sellers. We recommend merely leasing at first, though, and only buying them after we've taught at least some of you how to manage drones properly."

Jeffinar and the Imperium

"I should probably call kim over to explain in kis own words rather than risk misrepresenting kim, if that's acceptable?

You should probably have a standard set of expectations about how long Kastakians who come over to study things will stay, and make them read a copy of your laws, or you'll have an excited endeavour-group or twenty show up to investigate various things and outstay their welcome out of sheer curiosity, even if you only take specific-purpose groups rather than any adventurer who turns up.

That sounds like a workable plan - once people are more used to it, some of them will sign up to your legal system and some of your people will probably decide which risks are worth taking, and anyone who still wants to reduce uncertainty can use a private inspector who is beholden to your system.

I'm imagining a few initial scenarios for drone import - ideally we'd have the Keeper on site or nearby for the first few attempts just to avoid misunderstandings, so a big hospital ship like Langhame would provide one of their best suites to the Keeper, run of the ship and full access to entertainment, and then the Keeper's drones would work in the roles they're having trouble filling; or a mining concern might supply them with building materials and cultural liaison to create a land based home and keep curious adventurers at bay, in return for their drones' work in the mines?"

Neksil and Jeffinar

"That is acceptable.

We can offer visas to Kastakians who wish to visit, valid for twelve years. They will be subject to the same laws, but will not be able to own land, enlist in the military, or run for public office. It would be great if you could have an ambassador or ambassadors who could come to the Imperium and set up an embassy, so that the specifics can be discussed, especially if your culture would have different ways of doing things which would require special accommodation. For example, it seems that you raise children collectively, and do not have the concept of an allotment, so most likely laws regarding that would not be enforced for you.

Yes, that makes sense. We have Keepers who run hospitals or mining operations who would love to have them and their drones work for Kastakian organizations. We would be interested in making an initial trial agreement. Approximately how many extra workers would you need for Langhame? Ah, I forgot that the drones would need to be retrained, because your tools are different. We can handle that later, however.

Which types of organizations do you think would want drone labor the most, and what sort of training would they need the drones to have? Of course, having to retrain them is inevitable given the change in environment, but we would want to pick drones who already have relevant experience so that the training time is decreased."

Jeffinar and the Imperium

Jeffinar sends a nearby technician over to ask Jherek if ke's free to talk immigration agreements with the Imperium.

"Yes, parents are expected to want to provide for their children, but again, formal arrangements make it less likely people will actually do their best - and more likely that other people are complacent about the situation if they seem to be failing...

That sounds good to me, I expect Jherek will have some detail questions, like exactly what happens at the end of the twelve years.

I don't have a good estimate for Langhame's labour needs - what kind of numbers are you thinking of? Mostly the upper limit's going to be on how many new workers they can run induction for, yes.

I'm not totally familiar with the capabilities of drones yet, but endeavours that run out of labour most often, or have to resort to hire for reward are... the hospital and retirement vessels, mining, bulk material preparation and processing, food processing, high-demand repetitive-manufacturing? Once it's a more established practice, I expect a lot of people will want a small number of drones per vessel for ship maintenance, too. After that there are a lot of things we just don't successfully do that might benefit - I imagine you'll be approached by at least one mass-breeding-experiment group, for instance..."

Neksil and Jeffinar

Ah. Well, the Imperium wouldn't care about the children, because they wouldn't be residents. How to say that more diplomatically...

"The visa holding scheme doesn't apply to the children of the people. You'd need residency for that, which allows you to own land. Although in this case you wouldn't need that because you don't want to live on land. What I meant to say was that...the Imperial government would not enforce anything with regard to how parents treat their children save for what would count as criminal law violations, and only if someone actually reports this. You are free to set up whatever systems you have for your children – we do not have any desire to intrude upon your child-rearing cultural norms.

It would be preferable to have a single Keeper, or a single company, per ship. The average number of drones per Keeper is four dozen and two. Companies pool their drones. Usually these involve only two or three people, but may go higher. We could probably get you a medical company with a gross drones available.

Drones can do unskilled and skilled labor. They work very precisely, and will do exactly as you tell them to do – on the other hand this means that you need to have robust and detailed operating protocols, and shouldn't rely on them to use their judgment. There's separate training available for them to learn that – proactivity training and discrimination training – but this is difficult and takes a long time to do. The upside is that they don't really get bored: they can be content doing the same set of tasks over and over for a gross years without losing concentration or slipping standards. We don't use drones to do research or creative work.

Ah, yes, we have drones do childcare too. Do you need those?"

Ikkeh to Jeeee

Ikkeh scans the message from Lisal in the middle of his and Jeeee's conversation. His face scrunches up, fleetingly. Then Jeeee receives Ikkeh's full attention.

". . . Wait, does carborundum occur naturally on Kastakia? The graphite should be able to endure - hm, Byway's temperature units are anchored on our species' tolerance range - it's about half the absolute temperature that iron melts at." How can the Kastakians' practice lag their theory so far? And why are they worried about disposal solutions? Ikkeh will ask later, if he gets the chance.

"I'm sorry, Jeeee", he holds up the paper the drone dropped off "is it alright if I go try to convince the Imperials Byway is work-with-able?"

Kriv, Ect, and Hansil to Talaskai

Kriv turns to Ect. "Six-times-twelve-to-the-fourth milligrams if you go flag down Hansil."

Ect's eyes narrow, but he nods. Kriv pulls out a notebook, writes something on it in big letters, holds out the notebook out to Ect, and pulls out a digital camera. Ect gets in close, takes the notebook, writes something on it, and finally holds it up for the camera making an elaborate finger sign toward it. With his non-camera-holding hand, Kriv makes the same finger sign toward the paper and freezes for a moment while he presses the button with both he and Ect in frame. He lets Ect lean in to examine the photo on the little camera display screen, and then Ect nods again and has swept off in Hansil's direction.

Then Ect is back. "I didn't promise to pay my loss on the bet." He mirrors the process Kriv just went through, with a notebook and camera of his own; it's apparently Kriv's turn to write something on the paper. Same hand signals, same selfieing, and Kriv okays it.

Then Ect is off again!

Kriv looks at Talaskai awkwardly. "Hansil is the known psychologist out of us eight. The issue of how Kastakia functions at all is starting to seem to me like more of a psychology thing."

Within a shortish time, Ect is back with Hansil.

This might not be apparent to Talaskai, since Talaskai is not only kimself young, but also literally a different species, but Hansil is a grown man trying very hard not to let his excitement make him look like a child, and not noticing that, to Bywayean eyes, he is not succeeding.

"Hi!" says Hansil. He holds up Thessalia's survey. "I've just grabbed this and scanned it early - the results of a survey on Kastakian psychology that I offered to Thessalia - do you know kim? - since it's looking like this meeting might be" - he gestures at the previously shaking cave, and the ?hostile? remna - "non-conducive to the pristinity of ideal-asymptotic natural philosophy, anyway." Hansil looks down at the paper.

"What is God?"

Jeeee and Ikkeh, then maybe Tetratopia

"Nah, but it's basically what you get when you go up the silicon dioxide and carbon scale enough, and we have all of that we might want. You can make graphite too if you push it further, but it's not really efficient at our demand levels for graphite, you find enough of it while mining for useful things.

No worries - I think the things we're really after are transistors and satellites, nuclear power sound super cool but it's not going to change the world quite as much as those."

Jeeee goes looking for a Tetratopian that ke can bother about the tech path to satellites.

Talaskai and Byway re God

Talaskai looks really confused about the weird photo op that they're doing

"What are you...

Ooh, is that tiny box a camera?

I think what you're doing is significant somehow but I have no idea about what?"

Ke is in no way at all socially perceptive enough to have picked up on any of the subtle nuances of Hansil's behaviour, although ke probably instinctively likes Hansil a bit more because of it.

"Oh, so, um, we're not meant to try to convert you to any religions yet because everyone was going have a huge... argument about it. But God is a pretty common concept, I'm surprised you don't have one? Like, I'll try to keep it really general, the concept that there's Someone who actually made the world, or at least made us into people, or at least is really big and cares about us? Most people have some kind of concept of it, like, people who don't tend to get really sad and frantic about everything?

I don't really know Thessalia, ke seems pretty okay though? Like, ke's probably thought about this stuff in way more detail than I've done."

Lak to Thessalia

". . . That all sounds reasonable up to the point where you can't agree on money at all because there's a hitch where you never feel saturated on an abstraction. I see Kriv has nabbed Hansil already, or I would - it seems like some psychological thing that Bywayean humans don't have. Also, why not use specifically hours-of-childcare, if your attempts at explicating accounting often hang on that specifically? It wouldn't be ideal for Bywayeans, because you can't save it up, only a representation of it, but it seems to my naive understanding like it might solve some problems at Kastakia's current stage of development.

I know I'm asking for a" not bird's-eye view, ke's a freaking bird "very abstracted view of things, and you won't know the true answer for certain, I'm just feeling out my unknown unknowns with respect to your society."

Selno to Yompam

Selno looks nervous at the interruptions, but quickly forgets and flips through a little hastily-prepared Byway-to-Kastakian dictionary while he starts to talk.

"I was using 'siloed' more to refer to how immunotech is a specialty of certain companies now, but - yes, people generally guard their intellectual property as much as they can, even after they're sure it works - no longer for fear of being embarrassed, but for fear of losing their exclusive rights to the monetary profits issuing from the idea. If they don't expect sitting on it like that to make them look evil, that is. It's rare that someone smart enough to invent something is totally incapable of capitalizing on the invention maximally themselves, and can't find anyone who is so capable with whom they can advantage themselves by selling to, and knows themselves to potentially be so incapable, but it does happen, and in those cases they publish and are recorded as heroes.

From the sound of it, Kastakians aren't generally greedy with their inventions, even when they don't expect the greedy path to reflect badly on them?"

Selno looks up from the little dictionary.

"Also, sorry, what's 'religion'? The linguists we hired don't seem to have found the exact match for that word in Byway if there is one."

Ikkeh

Not going to change the world much, eh? That's fine.

Ikkeh smiles at the thin air that Jeeee has just left.

Ikkeh will show Jeeee a change to the world, then.

Ikkeh goes hunting for Lisal. He's terrible with remna faces and has to ask around a little. Can he flag him down?

Yes, Lisal left a drone which will ask whether Ikkeh wants to be brought to Lisal.

Eyyeh to Tavinter

Just as Hansil opens his mouth, Ect runs up and stops on a dime next to him. "Hansil. Kriv sent me to ask you for help delineating the Kastakians' divergent psychology causeway-to* economics."

Hansil eyes Tavinter and Eyyeh "apologetically" (not convincing in the slightest to Eyyeh). "Sorry, I have to take this." He jogs back toward Kriv with Ect, darting to grab Thessalia's survey from his table on the way.

Eyyeh turns back to Tavinter. "Sorry. I'd be amenable, if you'd accept me as sole representative?"

*Ect speaks this as the Byway word - Kastakian presumably doesn't have an equivalent. It's a common logical connector that lets you form noun phrases by representing the directed edge from a cause noun to an effect noun.

Ikkeh

"Yes, please, I would like to talk with him if he's available." Ikkeh vaguely holds up Lisal's message, still in his hand, though ready to be stored in a Bywayean's ever-present backpack if it becomes inconvenient. Most of the Bywayean representatives have by now at some point felt sympathy for the remna, that they should have aftendrils and thus not be able to wear backpacks all the time.

Lisal and Ikkeh

"Hello. Have you read my message?"

Ikkeh to Lisal

"Yes. Incidentally, I'm sorry about how Eyyeh reacted to Reren's very reasonable explanations. People on Byway aren't used to thinking about even the counterfactual possibility of physical theft, it's been so sublimated in just about every conceivable way.

With regards to why I blocked off my table-section . . . " Ikkeh resists the urge to glance back to make sure no one's peeping while he's distracted. This is grave business and probably no one would be that impudent anyway. " . . . I blocked it off to protect my company's ideas from extracontractual imitation. I didn't haul in soundproofing equipment, et cetera, because it would have been heavy and taken a long time to set up, would have made my presentation more difficult for aliens to engage with, and would have blocked my co-representatives from entering the cave while I hauled it in. And isolating myself that far would have looked unseemly presumptuous. I am relying on my co-representatives' fear for their reputation as - " Standard Imperial doesn't have the words, what a peculiar language - "as people who contribute, rather than merely seeing and imitating, to keep them from standing in front of the table and reading what's there, or lingering while I talk in a way that would be obvious to anyone else from home as eavesdropping."

(Do remna hold each others' eyes while they engage in polite but charged conversation? If so, Ikkeh will be maximally polite and also shrewdly gauge Lisal's reactions. Otherwise, he will simply be maximally polite. The remna may be aliens, but Ikkeh is Ikkeh, and he has been watching.)

"It's not a sure thing, but Bywayeans generally guard their reputations as true contributors closely enough that I do not really think I have to worry."

Lisal and Ikkeh

Lisal would question whether Ikkeh is even capable of saying sorry on behalf of Eyyeh, given that they don't really have the concept of government, and neither of them are in the same company. That seems really petty, though, so he won't say that. He also will not suggest that Eyyeh be replaced by someone more suited for diplomacy, again because of the lack of government and not wanting to seem petty.

"We understand. It is good that major cultural differences be resolved now in a controlled environment, rather than misunderstandings continue, especially if we want to form agreements with each other.

The concept of concealing new-discovery economically-valuable information or military/strategic secrets from others isn't strange to us. We do it too, for example, if a research company has discovered some new insight which they want to use to make a new valuable service or product. What is strange is why you permit aliens – who have no prior agreements with you, unspoken or otherwise – but not non-aliens. For example, I could look at your presentation right now, and offer to sell what I saw to the others at your table. I'm not going to do that, but it would be trivial for me to do so."

Lisal's impassivity training is better than Neksil's. Ikkeh might pick up changes in the aftendril oscillation, but Lisal's face will be very blank.

Tetratopia and Jupital

The problems with money sound like the cognitive distortions in some "high-conscientiousness" people, and the distinction between shift-work and the rest of work sounds kind of like the sort of adaptation that causes good outcomes from high-conscientiousness-attracting fields like pretty-picture-generation and music-generation, though also doesn't sound like the kind of society that high-conscientiousness people would spontaneously invent by themselves. How long would a shift-worker be cheerful to work for, if they kept getting paid the longer they worked? Are Kastakians unusually functional when they're ill such as from poor sleep? Of course, this kind of psychological variance might be totally orthogonal to Tetratopia's, or that story might be totally wrong.

Oh, wow, that's... your whole tech tree. That leaves it hard to under-retroactively-reward Tetratopia, because they've already been proactively retroactively-rewarded! We will in turn retroactively reward you for this. Tetratopia conveniently already has done some work on writing out their tech tree, and the ontologies are not quite the same but they're close enough that we can get to work filling in the blanks on it quite quickly. (Unsaid: The terminals are a little slower than the usual upload speeds of dumping the textnet encylopedia, but this is something that Tetratopia quietly solves on their end.

Input encrypted under an easily decipherable key are cryonics instructions, in case Jupital had a good reasons for not mentioning it and they want to burn it instead of reading it. They're marked as important if you don't already think it's a good idea to delete them.

Well ahead of us inputting some technology that doesn't have near-equivalents in Kastakia, do you plan on sharing information given to you by Tetratopia with other members of the delegation? We would prefer to arrange our own deals for that. (This includes some of the prerequisites for satellite technology.)

Ikkeh to Lisal

"My competitors would incur the same reputational cost, buying my ideas from you, that they would peeping them from me. Higher, since it's a less honest form of unearned imitation."

The remna are cold customers, etiquette-wise. Ikkeh can't help but be excited at the challenge.

"One guards one's ideas in a certain way toward those known to be one's competitors. One guards one's ideas in a rather different way with respect to unknown-element important strangers, whose favor one knows he will likely be competing amongst his colleagues to earn."

Lisal to Ikkeh

"I see, but why is that reputation important? Why is that valuable? Suppose your competitors viewed your information and set up the same product, but now cheaper, because they did not have to hire scientists and pay research costs. Rational consumers would then buy that product rather than yours. What makes this reputational cost strong enough that it would tilt the payoff matrix enough such that they wouldn't peek? At the very least, not peek in an obvious way – it's possible that they could have constructed some stratagem to hide their observation, hence enjoying the informational benefits but not suffering the reputational ones.

Why do you not treat us as competitors?"

Ikkeh thinks for a while, asks Lisal to repeat himself.

"To your first question: I infer from how you expect Bywayeans to be swayed by money, that remna can be so swayed? To Bywayeans, money is merely something that can be used to produce reputation. Tanking your reputation in the course of acquiring money would be like burning down a forest so you have space to set up a logging operation. It's not a behavior that you need to worry about people doing, just like you don't have to worry about people biting off their own fingers.

There may be some unimaginative souls at home who expect that they can get away with rounding alien sapients off to competitors in our familiar economic equilibria. Those unimaginative souls are not here today, not least because they didn't have it in their limited imaginations to become what we eight became in life - somebody out of whose way people step, to let them meet with the aliens. Honestly, what you turned out to be is tame by comparison with what I was expecting, but surprising in a gross little ways. A competitor is a known, or at the very most a known unknown. To a competitor, you bring your game. To an alien, you bring your arsenal and a representative sample of your assets."

Thessalia and Byway re Money

"Oh, yes, that was tried too, but it turns out the whole fixation thing means that, well, they managed to over-produce children - I mean, it's not clear what would have happened if there hadn't been other polities around, but a lot of the - I'm assuming you have the concept of negative externalities? Overfishing, water pollution, soil degradation and so on? Anyway, it didn't go very well - when people stop looking at the big picture and start maximising some kind of specific metric or quantity, they tend to start ignoring everything else. And I'm not sure how you do money without tying it to something like that; even the current system only works because, well, it caps out quickly - there's only so much luxury available to buy, or that even the most cautious person wants to save up..."

Thessalia is definitely Avoiding A Banned Topic a bit here, although she's reasonably adept at covering this up.

Yompam and Byway re Intellectual Property

"...all of those were definitely words, but I think I'm not getting something?

Techniques-and-technologies - you don't - share them?

Surely that - hurts efficiency? People have to reinvent-the-wheel - they waste time when someone else has already come up with something?

I really didn't get the thing about 'profits' - that's coming through as, uh, endeavour surplus, what you have over after your operating costs and can allocate elsewhere? Surely you get more endeavour surplus in total if you pool ideas rather than hoarding them?"

Yompam looks a little chagrined about the religion question.

"Other ways of explaining religion, um, axiomatic-worldview? It's not just that, it generally comes with - principles of life organisation - but that's not really central, a religion is mostly about - the fundamental things you believe about the world, that you base everything else on?"

Tavinter and Eyyeh

"Sure," replies Tavinter, and starts heading towards the Kastakian portal area.

When they've got a decent way away from everyone else, ke says, "It might be you've got it straightened out already, but you seemed to be perceiving the renma as a threat to your social equilibrium?"