Tetratopia finds itself in the kind-of-overwhelming-break-of-routine of having to meet with aliens. It's especially kind-of-overwhelming since, starting a few hours ago, approximately all of Tetratopia's prediction market infrastructure has been in a complicated panicked freewheel about the aliens, and half of Tetratopia's actually competent people who could have been out correcting them have instead been busy doing the dangerous art of illegible reasoning trying to get a hold of what's going on, and while Tetratopia's ability to predict and act was so impaired several big textnet nodes went down under the weight of all the memes being sent and updated. What a week (lit: few hours)! 

It's a bit early for aliens, they were mostly expecting to meet either some bacteria or nanobots, at the point in time in the future when they had nanobots, and everyone could just beam their utility functions at each other like normal people. (The planet's a bit of a mess, do you mind coming back in a hundred years?)

So, flying with vision uncorrected, Tetratopia sends in its delegation, all humans, clad in the same grey robes with badges listing their username and role. There are some corporate negotiators (the vast gulf between two corporations to be bridged being a pale shadow of the vast gulf between two alien civilisations), some prophecy-fiction and historical-fiction researcher-authors of varying hardnesses (who have thought in detail about modelling and predicting aliens and alternate Tetratopiae), some random schlubs with interesting neurotypes (in case any of them happen to be kind of like the aliens), and various experts in various fields that might come up in the course of negotiations. The selection of delegates leans towards those cleared as confessors, because the aliens are liable to be weird and horrifying somehow, and people who are not distracted nor sacrificing their integrity around weird and horrifying things are valuable here.

Time to begin the podunk cishuman version of beaming each other's utility functions at each other. Does anyone have anything interesting to gift-with-reciprocation-expected? Maybe you could show us your optimal-tileable-something, and we'll show you ours?

The Imperium was initially in a panic over discovering the cave, and, upon investigation, discovering that it had aliens. It was kind of chaotic at first, with the military scrambling to secure a perimeter around it. Fortunately, the cave was in public, unowned land, so there was no legal battle or drama over use-rights. Many, many messages were sent over the telegraph network, and many, many important people in the government rushed to the scene, taking the fastest steam locomotives and dronecars to get there. Once it was discovered that the cave was a very defensible position, military camps were set up near it to prevent any unauthorized entities from entering or leaving. Fortunately, it seemed that the aliens on the other side were seemingly peaceful and were amenable to the idea of a summit!

The Imperium was really unsure about how to handle alien social norms. They didn't know which things would be well received and which would be obnoxious or offensive. At the same time, they wanted to compromise as little as possible on pomp and aesthetics – they, of course, want to show off their own while seeing what the other worlds' are.

The Imperium's delegation decides to arrive with the accompaniment of brass instruments and singing, and they took care to bring drones who can sing. It's going to look like six very tall men being flanked by a dozen and two merely tall men marching, with the soldiers wearing rather impractical looking engraved breastplates – with a spiral symbol dyed red and yellow – and helms, while bearing halberds. 

They look otherwise humanoid, except for the shell-plates on their heads, which resemble the ridges and spikes of seashells, though less pronounced, and the six holes in the back of their clothes (which are absent on the halberd-holding soldiers), from which will emerge forearm-thick tentacles which will extend and retract themselves rhythmically, as though cilia.

The delegates introduce themselves. There are five Legislators attending and the Consul. Each of the Legislators introduces himself and gives a sentence or two about their previous work, then sits down on luxurious looking padded leather chairs that have been placed before the summit started. Each of the five Legislators wear different clothing: some wear shirts and pants, others wear dresses, others wear a sari-looking wrapped garment, although all of them follow the same color scheme of red, yellow, dark blue, and white. A couple of them wear gold jewelry in the form of a necklace or bangles – all of them are wearing signet rings, including the Consul.

- Lisal Gemas Rundis: psychology, therapy, sociology, anthropology, education-and-training.
- Reren Dimas Nilen: astronomy, physics, mechanical-engineering, civil-engineering.
- Neksin Sevren Pecis: singing, curating-and-archiving, history, fiction-writing, law.
- Suksub Perlam Sonmos: mathematics, computing, moral-philosophy, economics, religion, linguistics.
- Cinsal Baten Tenrap: biology, geology, agriculture, chemistry.

Once they sit down, extra people emerge and stand next to each person – two to each – who also seem to be wearing civilian clothes, although theirs are uniform, all wearing a long sleeved red shirt and dark blue vest and pants, with the same six holes in the back, although these people do not do the rhythmic-tentacle-movement. They seem to be their attendants. The soldiers will stand a little further back, with four behind the Consul and two behind everyone else.

The whole ensemble is going to look very coherent and put together, as though a single costume-designer and events-organizer arranged the whole thing. Nothing looks out of place – it's as though they have rehearsed it many times. 

There are going to be about four dozen auxiliary personnel behind them, which are mostly researchers and scholars the Consul and the Legislators have chosen and who have also volunteered to attend, and their accompanying drones, although they have been arranged so as to be as unobtrusive as possible.

The Consul Restem Talset Meden will introduce himself last, saying that he has done work most recently in the military, but previously was a sailor and surveyor for most of his life. He will also explain that he is the leader of the Imperial delegation. He's wearing an extremely elaborate looking red and white robe with large patches of embroidery done in gold thread, and dark blue pants.

The eight representatives from Byway arrive relatively late, although in time for all the other worlds' introductions. They don't seem too surprised by their own lateness, but they do seem embarrassed. They claim a table, and immediately proceed to tape it off into eight equal parts, affording for each representative to store/display what he brought.

The first section contains gorgeously composed diagrams mapping the human brain, and one life-size take-apart sculpture. If you remove the outer halves, all the little innermost nuclei are colored and labeled in tiny, serriffed text. Split the brainstem, and you'll find much the same situation, only the nuclei are much finer and the text really has to dance around to label them all. There's a smaller sculpture that's the same thing but for a human mesodermal cell. There's a stapled booklet giving this representative's resumé/biography. He's the longstanding chief executive of a biotech research firm; it looks like most of his work has nothing to do with neurology (although he won an invention bounty from a cryonics company once, way below his pay grade) but is instead in immune systems research. His company has immensely cheapened the process for making new effective vaccines, partly by commercializing immune system augmentations. The brain mapping stuff is a hobby he does with his cult.

In another booklet, he holds forth briefly on his philosophy, but cuts it short and gives the printed hash of a text file he says makes predictions about what will turn out to be the case at the end of the conference. Under the table are about ten dozen locked boxes (he wanted to err on the side of too many), all free for the taking, all advertised as containing a copy of the plaintext and an explanation of the hash algorithm. As this guy walks around, you can hear about ten dozen keys jingle from inside his clothes. (If you had super-hearing you might be able to tell they were all of different tooth patterns.)

The next square has been visually blocked off with high walls of cardboard on all but the inward-facing side. This won't prevent the other representatives from peeping if they're willing to be really blatantly impolite, but it seems they aren't - at least not so far. If you walk up and look on the inside - which aliens are invited to do! - you will find a giant paperback book that's a walkthrough tutorial map of the inside of this representative's flagship and prototypical fission power plant. Not detailed enough that you could really fleece him even with photocopies to take home, but detailed enough that he really doesn't want some of these other guys having a look at it. There are several questionnaire booklets about the state of the other worlds' power grids, for the alien representatives to fill out at their leisure, in exchange for a booklet of the same questions answered by him about Byway - though of course most of that info could be gleaned from reading the big map book. There's also a booklet on this guy's philosophy, which is very cosmological, very Origin_of_Everything-focused. It seems he's a hobby astronomer with aspirations to visit outer space - which, apparently, no one on Byway has actually done yet, but which he guesses humans on at least one of the other worlds will have, assuming they're all at similar or slightly more advanced power generation tech levels. He's included one of his twelve-year-old sons' diagrams of a hypothetical person-bearing spacecraft, with a note from the representative that "This is actually broadly what I think it will look like! Except -"

The third guy is a neurologist currently serving as consultant to several biotech companies - an unusual arrangement, but you can't ask for exclusivity from people who (led the team that) cured (the most common form of) dementia. That was a couple duodecades ago, but he's kept performing well enough for all these companies that they keep him on. A lot of his advice has gone to fuel the recent boom of anti-aging tech - insofar as there's an expert here on the technical side of Byway's recent prediction_market-endorsed clearance of longevity escape velocity, he's it. His philosophy is largely cognitive_psychology-focused, but he doesn't reveal too much of it. He, too, has questionnaires, these about the different worlds's psychological self-understandings, and boxes - containing more in-depth treatises of his, that he fears might pollute their answers. These aren't locked, though - he just urges the aliens to answer before they read. Maybe strategically, there are way more questionnaires than boxes.

The fourth guy runs the world's highest-valued shipping company. They recently branched out into transportation, which is not going super well, a fact that the guy's pamphlet doesn't sugarcoat. Much more successful has been their duodecade-long expansion into online retail. 

The fifth guy does run an established transportation company, with passenger trains crisscrossing Byway's analogue of South Asia and Oceania, a branch expansion competing with local companies in the equivalent of South America, and even rural trucking services (automobiles don't seem very popular on Byway except for in rural areas, except for fold-up personal airplanes, which are fairly cheap and common.)

The sixth guy mines nuclear fuels, and also metals. The seventh manufactures computer chips. Years ago, each of #6 and #7 originally invented or supervised the people who invented a lot of the current techniques, and each company stays years ahead of its industry to everyone's current estimation. The eighth guy runs a state-of-the-art vertically integrated contract-construction operation.

All but the logistics guy, Guy #4, have artful displays illustrating their life's work or intellectual hobby. Every last one offers take-home copies of some form of personal philosophy treatise, making some form of prediction about the conference.

These are the eight most important people on Byway.

Each by each, they realize - variously with terror (Guy #3), utter bafflement (Guy #8), enthusiasm (Guy #2) . . . etc. - that at least two of the other worlds are set up very foreignly.

The first Kastakians into the cave were a boatload of adventurers, of course. Awkwardly inland, on the second day of a planned three day hike, Talaskai and ker crew were gleefully charting it on the map and planning to spend the night there when the portal opened.

Most of Talaskai's crew went back, but Talaskai bravely opted to stay here in case the portal mysteriously closed again. Ke's been here ever since.

Within a couple of weeks, the Initial Exploratory Endeavour had roughly thrown itself together and was back to do linguistics, tech setup, field kitchen and everything required to make a temporary base camp on land and start actually getting things together.

By the time the summit rolls round, there are several distinct factions present:

Talaskai is stubbornly still here, and there are several hopeful parties of adventurers encamped, although access to the cave is now being physically controlled and most of them accept this is for pretty good reasons actually;

A couple of Remember to Eat Brigades have shown up to provide catering and logistics services and hope for some good gossip to fall out; only a couple of them are assigned to in-cave duty and allowed in for good reasons, represented by Junilla of the Secondbreakfasts, whose self-assigned job is to monitor the status of the 'delegates' and bring them snacks, and secondly try to work out what the needs of the aliens are;

The absolute flock of technical personnel and fundamental science types, helping with translation and science and trying to get systems to talk to each other and so forth, as represented by Meliashae from the Alien Translation Endeavour Group;

A rather raucous and fractious hastily assembled Alien Idea Transfer Endeavour Group of everyone who believes themselves to be the most pre-eminent practical researchers that have yet been made aware of the situation, some of which still showing the claw marks of someone having an actual physical tantrum about it; of those who made it into the cave, Jeeee Holdingforth is representing construction and mechanics, Yompam Langhame is representing medicine and biotech, and Thessalia Scribemores is representing philosophy and sociology.

and several Sensible Adults, including Ferek Missiletoe in charge of, in his words, "guarding the fucking gate because we have no idea what happens if one of them gets through here and we are not at home to mister out of context problem"; Jupital Langhame, on point for conversation intervention and trying to look in every direction at once; Jeffinar Findscreech, taking the lead on soothing ruffled feathers; and Tavinter Meddlebasket, mostly sitting back, taking notes, and looking increasingly distressed about everything.

They have not brought very much Stuff - they don't seem to go in for clothing, even, other than utility belts, satchel bags and the occasional blanket - but the Remember To Eat Brigade personnel have deposited a range of portable seats, cushions, perches, and tables with snacks on which they indicate are for everyone; the snacks mostly revolve around dried fish, some with a syrupy sugar coating, and various types of dried seaweed.

The people actually fronting up to the summit area are Talaskai, Jeeee, Yompam, Thessalia, Jupital and Jeffinar. Or they would be, but Yompam has immediately descended on the Byway take-apart sculpture and is enthusiastically describing the surprisingly few differences to Kastakian cranial biology, Jeeee is immediately lost in the walkthrough fission plant tutorial, and Thessalia is eagerly filling in a questionnaire about psychological self-understanding. And Talaskai is eagerly trying to get the successful transportation delegate to tell kem more about the folding aircraft...

Jupital engages with the Teratopian question on trade; of course they have a wide range of standard construction and life saving interventions they wouldn't dream of asking anything for, what kind of reciprocation do the Teratopians expect for their own standard-techniques-and-trades-knowledge, and what do they consider to be representative of their technology level - cutting-edge problems in Kastakian technology are efficiency of electricity generation from solar, reliability of lighter-than-air network repeater stations, refinement and extraction of hydrocarbons and exotic elements useful for electronics manufacture, scaling up of electronics manufacture, weight reduction of computers, specific genetic customisation of medical treatment.

If they'd like to know more about the general Kastakian moral-axioms, unfortunately this is a bizarre situation for them, usually they are extremely keen on freedom of movement and association but the circumstances meant they had to put some limitations in place to avoid tragedy-of-the-commons through overcrowding; otherwise it's just a matter of the golden rule really, be cooperative with other people and they'll be cooperative with you; everything else just falls out of people pursuing whatever interests them most.

Jeffinar fronts up to the Imperium, who seem to be expecting a more formal occasion. Their brass band initially made all the Kastakians wince and try to cover their ears, but they mostly recovered quickly; those who didn't gracefully bowed out of cave duty.

Ke apologises for the mismatch in communication styles and hopes they will bear with them while a compromise solution is hastily deployed. Ke explains that Kastakia's most pressing business here is the business of technology transfer - it's unconscionable in Kastakian society that someone should be forced to reinvent the wheel (this actually translates as a kind of paddle-wheel used for water propulsion) and they see no reason why that wouldn't extend to aliens.

Ke apologises again that the pre-eminent researchers appear to have been caught up in Byway's delightful exhibition, but if the Imperium would like to let kem know what their most pressing technological needs are, there are plenty of technical personnel and note-takers who would be delighted to help. Resources here are a little thin because the cave is inconveniently inland, they've only just managed to haul and install a proper computer system, but a few terminals should be available in here shortly for efficient knowledge transfer.

Ferek glowers suspiciously from just behind the main delegates, glancing occasionally at the guards set up by the portal. Ke is clearly not so happy about the idea of free technological transfer to the unknown aliens, but not enough to actually disrupt Jeffinar's efforts yet.

This is like...really messy? It's giving more 'convention' rather than 'summit'. This is not how they expected diplomats or delegates to behave. Well...they're aliens, so maybe this is how they do it there? Or maybe there was some confusion across the language barrier. Regardless, it's not like anyone is being hostile – messiness is preferable to violence.

Lisal and Suksub go over to the Tetratopians with their drones and a few of the researchers in the back, with the others following suit, coming with their drones and associated scholars. Reren and Cinsal and their group will go to the Bywayeans, while Consul Restem, Neksin and the rest will stay to talk to Jupital.

Lisal and Suksub et al with Tetratopians

The Tetratopians are actually putting forward a coherent front. This Makes Sense. This they can work with! If they knew that this was going to be more of a convention, then they'd have brought more people. The all-grey uniforms with nametags are certainly A Choice. In Zmavlimu'e, minimalism is the sort of aesthetic people adopt if they're too lazy to put up a more effortful aesthetic, or if their real aesthetic clashes with the popular aesthetic of the city and they don't want to pay higher land taxes. Not that many people consciously choose to adopt minimalism in and for itself. Perhaps Tetratopians eschew fashion and prefer other forms of art or aesthetic expression? One of them did mention 'showing optimal-tileable-somethings'. They're only going to think that and not say them, though – they don't want to imply the aliens are lazy.

Suksub: "Utility functions? Hm, is your species very rational? Do they act like ideal agents? Our species does not. Drones are closer to the mathematical ideal, but they are likewise imperfect, and in any case, I am not a drone. I don't think we can give you a formal mathematical description of what exactly we value, especially since we may drift in value – we price that in by valuing option value higher than what it would be worth instrumentally."

Lisal: "What do you mean by optimal-tileable-something? Do you mean tessellations? Yes, we have examples that can be brought in, although you will have to wait several minutes for us to get samples of our art back from the camp." 

"I am curious about whether or not this is common attire in Tetratopia," Lisal asks innocently. He will also add, "We do not commonly wear these clothes – I prefer my own aesthetic, but we wanted to arrive with a coherent aesthetic. Do Tetratopians feel similarly? It doesn't seem like the other worlds' cultures put much effort into coherence, although it's possible that other cultures from their world might arrive."

Consul Restem and Neksin et al with Kastakians

Consul Restem: "There is no need to apologize: neither you nor your party has harmed us materially. We are just confused. We were expecting a diplomatic summit, where a few people from each world's polities would discuss cultural norms and differences, and then negotiate research and trade agreements, maybe set up immigration or send ambassadors, make arrangements for dispute resolution – that kind of thing. This is looking more like a convention or a research symposium – which we are familiar with! – it is simply not what we expected. This is why we did not bring many..." Restem gestures in the air, "pretty things to show, although we could arrange for some to be brought in. We did, however, bring singers.

We were expecting people to be more guarded, and to not show so much about their world so quickly, excepting that which had to be revealed during first contact to make this summit possible in the first place. However, connection is only possible through openness – friendship is only possible through vulnerability. We are delighted to be given knowledge, and we hope that you accept ours as well.

Do you bestow your knowledge of technology upon us as a gift-which-requires-no-reciprocation-not-even-the-reciprocation-of-expressing-gratutitude*, a gift-which-requires-reciprocation-of-roughly-equal-value-sometime-in-future*, or do you wish to make a formal-transaction-with-exact-valuation-of-items*? We are prepared to move forward in any case."

Neksin: "Inland? So you are an aquatic species? Interesting! I did not guess that from your morphology. Wait...ah! You breathe air, but fly over water and swoop down? Is that accurate?"

Consul Restem: "We are interested in your computer systems! How do you train your computers? Your computers are...stationary and must be installed? Ours can move," and Consul will direct one of his personal drones to his side, who will bow deeply. "This is my computer, Sud."

Restem and Neksin will notice Ferek vaguely looming and observing, but they have very little idea about Kastakian facial expression or body language, and so will just assume that they are some sort of auxiliary person or aide.

They appreciate the food, but they're not sure if it's like...suitable for them to eat, in the sense of it being potentially inadvertently poisonous – the form of it is similar to how seaweed looks like in Zmavlimu'e too. It does smell really good however, and they will happily say that. Neksin directs some of the researchers to bring back samples of the food to be tested to see if it's fine to eat. 

* Two syllable words in Standard Imperial.

Jeffinar with the Imperium

"Yes, that was approximately what we were expecting, but our ideas transfer specialists appear to have decided to get stuck in transferring ideas directly with the Bywayans. Well, we were expecting people to want to get initial techniques-and-technology transfer done as soon as possible, but around that we were expecting discussion of how to successfully communicate, relative values on resources, and how best to reciprocate to avoid resentment.

We'd quite like to bestow our knowledge of technology as a gift which inclines you to be more amenable to sharing your own but does not carry a formal obligation, if that's a concept you're comfortable with?

We're not actually very good fliers - takeoff is a problem - it's thought we were originally cliff-gliders. We prefer to live on water because of the ease of transportation - once you've built a structure on land it's ever so difficult to move it, and you generally have to construct specific roadways for effective transport, we've now got this awful scar-on-the-land from the nearest decently wide river access to our base camp here...

Ah, I see you have pre-electronics computing! It turns out you can build machinery that can perform mathematical operations at a greater speed and reliability than most trained computers, although the very best are still better than most practically sized installations at that - the real strength is that a single mechanical computer can switch more easily between a much larger number of near-simultaneous inputs, so everyone can have a terminal and interact with it at once.

We primarily use them for information storage and retrieval, and encoding communications for radio transmission - that's long-distance information transmission via electromagnetic waves without the need for fixed wires, just floating repeater stations. I believe there are a lot of esoteric scientific uses as well, but trained individual computers are still competitive in those areas - the precision manufacturing to improve them beyond the limits of a brain is still eluding us."

The snacks are really quite high in salt, but otherwise should be broadly nontoxic unless they have specific sensitivities to seafood or iodine.

Consul Restem and Neksil et al with Kastakians

Consul Restem: "Haha, we specifically handpicked researchers and scholars to accompany us who had the self-control not to lunge forward and interrogate the other delegations. We had feared that being too forward would be seen as...aggressive. Or probing for information to use in attack. And yes, we are also very interested in avoiding resentment.

We would consider this a gift of the second type, with us interpreting you as treating the event of us becoming more amenable to technology exchange as equal in value to you as the knowledge you will give us. A better translation of the latter two words I think would be 'informal-transaction' and 'formal-transaction'. Another word for the second type might be 'favor'. We consider only the first type to be 'truly' gifts, since they have no expectation of reciprocation at all. And yes, we accept your offer, since we were already quite interested in sharing our technology with you, although we are unsure as to how useful it might be. The other worlds seem to have better technology than us."

Neksil: "Could we contribute art instead? Transporting things through the cave sounds like an ordeal, though.

Consul Restem: "Fascinating. It is thought that we are descended from marine animals – cephalopods, more specifically, I don't know if you have similar animals in your world – but that we eventually transitioned to live on land. We prefer building on land because things remain solid and static. I definitely see your rationale for preferring to build your structures at sea. You said that they moved – so they are not built on stilts? They float, like boats?

Drone computers will probably be supplanted my machine computers in the future, but not right now. Our computers are large and bulky and take much energy to run. Drone computers can not just compute, but can also remember things for you, schedule tasks, type, write, read aloud, function as librarians, and take stenographic transcripts. Sud is trained in all of those. The multiple-simultaneous-input setup you are describing sounds very useful, though.

Ahh, we have both wired and wireless telegraphy, but it seems like yours has better throughput. We would greatly appreciate knowledge on this front.

I suppose we could tell you about our technology regarding infrastructure on land, such as roads, although it seems that the other worlds are also landdwellers too."

Sadly, it will take a bit for lab results to come back, especially with industrial level tech, so they will refrain from eating the delicious smelling snacks for now.

Jeffinar with the Imperium

"Informal transaction is certainly my preference, yes - although if you hadn't accepted, we'd likely have tried to truly-gift you some things anyway.

Art and cultural products are definitely also welcome! Usually we just transact for those on a personal level because their value is so subjective. I'm sure you have something to offer, though - if only crafts and so on that we'll have forgotten - especially if you live on land, that must have distinctly different challenges.

We do have a wide range of cephalopods! Perhaps you'll be able to contribute to the ongoing debate on whether any of them are relevantly sentient? Generally our cephalopods are highly solitary, although there are a few exceptions, which puts them at a bit of a disadvantage to demonstrate personhood to another species.

Yes, we prefer floating structures where at all possible - generally sufficient counterweighting can cause them to be stationary enough when they need to be. Even if it doesn't in practice move very often at all, the feeling that it could be moved at need really helps the people on board.

I'm not sure whether 'drone' is translating correctly..." Ke looks at the nearest translator. "Meliashae, can you spare a few moments to explain the rationale behind this translation?"

"Sure!" An enthusiastic, slightly duller-feathered individual grins broadly at everyone. "You know how eusocial insects, like ants and bees, have multiple types of individual within the same species? Well, that's how it is with zmavlipre - 'people' - and zmavlire'a - 'drones'. We thought about just taking zmavlire'a as a loan-word, maybe that would have been clearer? A lot of us had trouble pronouncing it though!"

Consul Restem and Neksil et al with Kastakians

Neksin: "Oh yes, handicrafts! I can totally teach those. I can also gift you – this is a true no-reciprocations gift – a drone or two that I have personally trained, who have knowledge in Zmavlire'a handicraft.

Many cephalopods are sentient – the question is whether they're sapient. So far, we have found no other sapient species on our world, other than ourselves, extant or not. To be clear, our ancestry to cephalopods is only the best current hypothesis. We haven't actually found sufficient evidence to treat it as though fact."

Consul Restem: "Mm, that translation is not entirely accurate. The name of our species as a whole is 'Zmavli' or 'remna' – both are acceptable, although I think we will adopt the latter. 'Zmavli' has particular connotations which we do not want to convey in the presence of sapient aliens: the etymology is derived from 'more powerful', which is a reference to how we were able to drive the species that used to be our predators into extinction when we attained to sapience, many dozen gross years ago. 

'Drone' is the word used for drones, such as Sud, whereas 'prenu' is the word used for Keepers, such as myself. The easiest way to distinguish drones from Keepers is by scent...but I am not sure whether you have the biology to perceive that. The other rule of thumb is looking at height: Keepers are taller than drones, though of course remna vary. If you are unsure, it is safer to assume that someone is a Keeper.

How do you reproduce? Given that you do not have drones, presumably you are not eusocial." 

"We might want to wait for the food results before I take delivery of your drones - I don't want to accidentally poison them!

That's approximately the state of our theories on the cephalopods - knowing that they can theoretically evolve into a sapient species is probably going to boost conservation efforts, though, so that is a useful effect. 

We don't have a particularly developed sense of scent, I hope we don't smell too offensive to you!

We're oviparous and they all come out more or less the same, which is to say riotoisly different - it's possible for an egg-layer to raise a self-egg, but it's generally considered an unwisely egotistical thing to do these days, you're never really stranded with radio and if you've set up a family unit to raise your child then you can generally find someone who'll be more than willing to donate gametes. 

Uh, it's impolite to speculate on whether any given individual is an egg-layer or not, it's the kind of thing you only tell people it's relevant to."

Some farmer was the first one to see the cave glow, and whatnot, on Byway. He attempted to investigate himself, and came back spooked out of his mind. Almost no one actually believed him when he said he'd spotted aliens in there, some of whom were apparently-sapient birds and people with cephalapod tentacles growing out of their backs, but a couple of desperate reporters did show up. When the aliens did show themselves, the reporters got spooked, and very quickly the situation with the cave was generally known around the planet - at least, by the important people. Known, and eventually, believed. Everybody got out of the way of everybody more important than them until only the most important people were left. Those people hired linguist-tutors, go-betweens, people to set up Net connections down in the cave (ten cable-bundles of which now trail from the cave entrance to the Byway table) and people to secure the cave entrance against crazies - all of the eight deferring to the most important among them (the nuclear power guy, Guy #2) in the event of disagreement. They communicated with the aliens at various degrees of arm's-length, arranging the 'summit'; Guy #2 was one of those in closest contact.

Thus did the Bywayeans arrive various degrees of prepared, for what turned out to be - whatever this is.

That person seems to be speaking on behalf of the giant intimidating surely-redundant group that represents the only other human presence in the room. (They're all wearing the same clothes, which Guy #3 finds spooky as superstition - he's doing his best not to look too often at the Zmavlipre.) They ask the room generally (Why! Who are you talking to, thinks Guy #4) if anyone has something they'd like to trade for implicit expectation of reciprocation (Guys #2, #4, #7, and #8 light up, but Guy #5 - also distracted by the beginning conversation with Talaskai - blanches at the word implicit) including any optimal-tileable-somethings. Guy #2 presses the button for the speaker he's mic'ed to. "I have a couple tessellation-based ideas!" he gushes. Guy #6, who awkwardly started talking into his loudspeaker at the same time as #2, picks back up: "My company has some internal materials we've treated to tile at the molecular level in stronger configurations than the usual, if that's what you mean?"

Guy #3, who is much more comfortable with sapient lizard-birds than whatever the Zmavlipre and Tetratopians are doing, tries really hard not to peep Thelassalia's questionnaire. Instead he eavesdrops on #1-and-Yompam, and #2-and-Jeeee.

Guy #1 wants to know what the similarities in neurology are!! Birds on Byway have something analagous to a neocortex but not quite anatomically the same, the neopallium. The Kastakians seem more lizard-y than living Byway birds, though? Do they have a cortex-analog? What about - his voice hushes - some circuit in that cortex-analog that's thought to have closed around the time in their evolution that they became sapient, do they have that? He rattles off average human body weights, brain weights, neuron counts - are the Kastakians heavier or lighter, he can't even tell. What about their brains? Their neuron counts. (Guy #3 interjects, still trying to distract himself from Thelassalia: 'Particularly nasty or common endogenous neurological diseases?')

Guy #2 is just about vibrating out of his mortal container about Kastakian floating architecture. He explains to Jeeee, who is closest, that 'seasteading' is a common venture and a commoner dream for dissatisfied dreamers on Byway, especially young people, but most serious people titter about how it isn't practical on the scales the dreamers dream of scaling it to. How big are the structures generally? Do they tilt perceptibly to the people on them? How does one get materials in place to start building one? Would it work for a land-oriented civilization? And of course how is it all powered? He'd be happy to answer any of Jeeee's questions in exchange for this - even a few quasi-trade_secrets, if they can move somewhere the others can't hear.

Guy #5 explains personal fold-out airplanes to Talaskai cheerfully, with both paper diagrams and animations on his Net-connected screen. They've gotten them down to a size that can dock on these little cheap, layered, fully covered complexes atop apartment building roofs, or rural garages if you go for that sort of thing. They're usually driven by dual propellers, on the wings, which rotate to provide vertical takeoff and landing, and fold out in two parts, like a seagull's, for storage. The wings are longish when they fully lock (this is done in a special loading area of the garage complexes.) They're currently fueled by combustion, although of course everyone who thinks he's someone has a "better idea" for how to fuel them. Guy #5 rolls his eyes. Guy #5 will get what's coming to him, Guy #4 thinks.

Guy #7 will start roaming up and down the Byway table (scrupulously averting his gaze from the others' trade secrets - mostly) to see if any Kastakians seem particularly interested in talking about infotech? Particularly hardware and signal relaying. Do they have a worldwide Net? What do they use for transistors?

Most of the Bywayeans seem kind of hesitant about the Zmavlipre. No one rushes out to meet them, although they smile in what they think the scary (hivemind????? worries everyone but #4, who has the worst imagination) aliens will recognize as a welcoming way. How will Reren and Cinsal approach?

Yompam and Byway talk Brains

Yes, Kastakians likely branched off from lizards relatively recently, and still have a number of lizard features! They do have a much more developed cortex than any related animal, though, yes, look here at your model where the sensorimotor clusters are, that is rather more dominant in Kastakian brain architecture, although possibly rather more devoted to sight and lacking a large scent specialised area?

They do not have that exact thing but that sure looks like this coordination mechanism which they loosely attribute reflective consciousness to?

Neuron count is... not something they've thought about very accurately guessing! They know about parts of the brain mostly from aggressively swapping notes on brain injury cases and detailed autopsies, they haven't got a way to scan or stimulate parts of a live brain, you can put electrodes on some animal brains but when you try to do anything like that to a Kastakian it tends to have a side effect of uncontrollable screaming, which despite the specific prior consent of some of the subjects has been too disturbing to everyone involved to really yield any interesting results. Any kind of non-intrusive brain scanning device would be really interesting.

Kastakians are definitely lighter - presumably no wings means no hollow flight bones? Every limb bone being solid must really take the hard work out of fixing limb fractures.

Diseases or disorders? Most people get migraines after extended periods of stress and sometimes those progress to a full disorder with early retirement, a lot of people are missing or get noise in random pieces of the perceptual system - most regularly balance, hearing difficulties and tinnitus, touch problems like intrusive paraesthesia - often they don't even realise until someone describes the thing they're missing in a way they understand. Aging is also hard on the neurological system, losing odd parts of memory or speech formation or getting much stranger perceptual problems are common in the older Kastakian.

Actual communicable diseases, not so much, although obviously normal respiratory or fecal-oral communicable diseases can have neurological sequalae, especially if they get at the vascular system; there have historically been a few outbreaks of prion diseases, those are thought to have been wiped out and unlikely to resurge now that everyone knows to avoid eating nervous system tissue. (Obviously some people still do this just because they can, but not as a routine enough practice that it causes outbreaks.)

Jeeee and Byway talk Boats

Retirement communities can be huge! Some endeavour-group ships are also really quite big. Current designs get a bit unwieldy at about five thousand good sized berths plus work areas, at that size you basically have something that corners like a raft without a paddle and you shouldn't take it anywhere that might get storms.

Even the largest vessels absolutely do sway, being on land for so long is quite unpleasant because there's this anticipation-of-movement that is never really fulfilled and just gets more and more sensitive, it's especially hard to sleep - one of the base camp teams has set up a set of automatically swinging hammocks to try to make this a little better.

Materials are very difficult, yes - it used to be practical to build from shore-wood, and then from seaweed-fibre-and-fish-glue composite, but modern designs require a really considerable quantity of metals, so on-land mining camps are much more prevalent than they used to be and it's quite common to do rotational work in them as a youngster if you want to build credit quickly. It's possible to do some seabed mining and seawater refining, but mostly that's only worthwhile for particularly rare elements like gold and rare earths.

Wind power is still very popular, both the very traditional 'stick a sail structure on for propulsion' and the more modern 'stick up the largest wind turbines you can get away with without ruining your vessel's balance' approaches. Solar power is an exciting new field which can be used for heating, and that heating can obviously also be used for electrical generation like any heat source, but it seems like there should be a way to do it more efficiently and there's a lot of experimentation in that area.

And, yes, oil and gas. Generally not animal-source oil these days, even a little bit of wind power and a smallish battery is generally enough to power much better lighting, but for base load power, there's nothing else that has the power-to-weight ratio. There was a considerable increase in respiratory complications when it was first discovered as a fuel source, but mostly airflow baffles to ensure that fumes go away from the ship is a solved problem now, at least on the larger vessels that have more than a backup generator.

Wider environmental complications from changing the carbon balance have mostly been addressed with aggressive tree-planting, just slightly further inland than the food forest areas, but it's by no means a closed debate.

That's why ke's so interested in this fission idea, see - it looks like it has an extremely good power to weight ratio without producing toxic fumes, which would be extremely useful for hospital and retirement communities especially, who are large enough to run one safely and currently have to burn a lot of fuel for manoeuvring out of the way of inclement weather.

If they're used to land-based foods they will absolutely want to turn over considerable quantities of theirshoreline to mostly-self-sustaining food production, which might be prohibitive if they're currently inhabiting those shorelines with fixed settlements? Not having a land-oriented civilisation, it's hard to spot what the problems would be.

Jeeee is very confused about the idea that one would stop other people overhearing the interesting bits - doesn't kis tutor want to increase their personal value-perception to these people, is it that this is particularly uncertain information and they're worried about being embarrassed later? - but is very happy to follow the alien's lead if it means ke gets More Information. Ke is filling a considerable quantity of paper notebook with scrawled notes using a set of gel pens.

Talaskai and Byway talk Planes

Talaskai is clearly less deeply technically knowledgeable (and much younger) than Jeeee; ke knows how to perform a wide range of boat maintenance tasks but most of this plane stuff is going straight over kis head - which is what ke desperately wants to do, ke wants to fly over everyone's head in one of these amazing folding plane things!

They run on a fraction of mineral oil, right? People can build a retirement community bigger than one of those landing spots, so should be able to build specialised landing platform ships... this is going to be the best idea ever and everyone is going to love it.

What's wrong with combustion? If they're using all the land then maybe they can't plant enough trees? But surely that means they're not using all the sea, so they can seed some really huge seaweed floats which should do the same job?

Meliashae and Byway talk Infotech

Meliashae can talk infotech, in between being called over to debug translation issues!

Ke is extremely excited that Byway has transistors. Kastakians have been trying to invent something better than vacuum tubes for a while, without much success. Germanium sounds like a total nightmare to get hold of and facilities for silicon purification look extremely difficult, but fortunately they no longer have to struggle alone, which is fantastic.

Ke suspects they're accordingly not interested in Kastakian hardware design apart from for historical reasons, but is very happy to walk them through anything they would like to know - ke's a infomatics specialist by main-reputational-area, linguistics has previously been more of a hobby. In particular, if they have fixed settlements, they might not have invented floating and airborne repeater platforms, or all of the same encoding schemes to ensure data traffic travelled long distances to uncertain destinations with minimal losses, or the clever storage compression algorithms to keep text data small enough to store an awful lot of it, with various speed/compression tradeoffs?

There have been repeated attempts at a truly worldwide Net but what they've got at the moment is more like a huge-scale mesh network? It's designed for people to come in and out of range of various repeater stations and deliver data when it can. Obviously the primary use is for techniques-and-technologies sharing, but art and personal correspondence are also extremely popular uses, and produce an awful lot of data constantly moving around the system looking for whoever wants it.

Thessalia and Byway talk Sharing

Thessalia triumphantly finishes the questionnaire, and immediately asks to subscribe to the data once it's collated and any results that follow.

To Tetratopia, the Imperium dresses like they're having fun, a very high-budget renfaire performance, a magicalgirl troupe with costumes from the same mascot. Since those are inspired by actual historical organisations, the Imperium, too, is walking around looking like it's an organisation. How wonderful! Tetratopia gets the impression that the Imperium is handling this summit globally, presenting one face, which Makes Sense.

Tetratopia <> Imperium:

There's a conclusion one could draw about the Imperium, from how their translates-badly-"drones" are closer to optimal agents than them. Fortunately this is ruled out by how there are Tetratopian observers at the summit. Whew.

Delegate A: "Our species also does not act like optimal-agents, though we expect more advanced species to be able to choose to, when meeting with others, as to not lose. We similarly don't yet have a utility function; we do have a civilisational performance metric, that we use to judge how well we're doing, though this is known to be incomplete, qualitative, time-varying, etc.. But insofar as this meeting works, it will be because it's kind of like the thing optimal-agents do, and other civilisations might have different and in-some-aspects better ways of kind-of doing that, so on the macro-scale we want to frame things with that goal. We think here it's going to look like trades and preliminary agreements."

Not so whew as to not need some clarification: "Also, as a translation check, what is a drone?"

B: "Optimal-tileable-somethings are the best versions of things, that can be repeated in many different places, as an ideal rather than a rule. For example, there might be some, uh," - what example would be recognisable, aha, the Imperium pointed out the coherent clothing aesthetic - "best known type of clothing, for a specific circumstance, and that would be the optimal-tilable-that-circumstance-clothing. This is common attire on Tetratopia, an example of optimal-tileable inside-or-outside-in-temperate-climates clothing. I prefer it, other people have different tastes, and for the sake of the summit we picked a single point in clothes-space." 

Reren and Cinsal with Byway Guy#3 and Guy#5

The Bywayean group is going to look really weird??? In that...they're kind of not a group. The Kastakian group is messy, but not in a way that seems deliberate – it gives the impression of being a hastily made plan, or of this being only an initial diplomatic group and the 'real' diplomats will come later – whereas the Bywayeans have legibly divided their table into eight parts and one of them has even put up walls to ostensibly block the other ones from seeing it??? And the other ones are kind of looming to try to observe the hidden bits but indirectly??? If they wanted to keep secrets, that's fine, but in that case they should simply have refrained from bringing in their display then. Why be willing to show what you made to literal aliens but not show it to members of your own species and culture?

It's fine if certain people distrust certain others in society and want to hide things from them – they can just choose to distance themselves from each other – but like...this is a diplomatic summit. You want to present One Face. Not just because of aesthetic coherence being beautiful, but because of what it signifies: 'Even if push comes to shove, we will cooperate with one another. We will not defect. Cephalopods together strong.' This is the opposite of that.

Reren and Cinsal will push away the massive confusion and culture shock and appear calm and unperturbed: everyone who works in government has had impassivity training. Not a requirement; it's just a very very good idea. They do notice the Bywayeans smile at them, and they do interpret it as friendly, but they're not sure whether that's what the Bywayeans are intending to convey. They smile back, though – their drones do not, and remain stone-faced.

Okay, well, there are eight people there, but presumably one of them would step up to talk to them? Like, a leader or a final-backstop or an executive or a president of the group. They'll stand there for a minute before realizing It Does Not Work Like That. They will try to speak with people who don't seem busy.

Cinsal will speak with Guy#3 who is trying to eavesdrop on Guy#1 and 2, while Reren will speak to Guy#6. They'll ask whether they have names: the Imperium and the Kastakians introduced themselves, while the Tetratopians have nametags. Or do you have a different mechanism to distinguish individuals from one another? The Imperials are most definitely not going to assume they're a hivemind or similar – this is not how a hivemind would behave.

Cinsal and Guy#3

"What is dementia? Also, what is aging? ...ah! Your species senesces! Remna do not. I am happy that you have attained to such technology so as to have overcome your pitiful state. We likewise had to contend with the ancestral environment in our species' youth, namely, we drove the species that used to be our predators into extinction when we attained to sapience. This must be a crowning achievement for yours!

I'm surprised that all of you seem to have personal philosophies which are so legible you have written them down. Is this common in your culture? I don't think my values are that legible to me that I could write a manifesto about it, at least, not without lots of effort."

Cinsal wants to Contribute to Science, but also dislikes The Sensation of Being Made Legible. He will ask whether it's possible to answer the questionnaire but refrain from answering certain questions if he doesn't feel like it, or whether that would render the datum useless.

Reren and Guy#6

"We know that it's possible to harvest energy from fission in theory – our latest models of particle physics and radioactivity predict it to be true. However, we haven't been able to figure out a reactor or power plant schema for it just yet. We mostly rely on geothermal and hydropower. Solar is also in the 'theoretically possible but practically not' stage. We have coal and oil power, but it produces noxious fumes and is highly unpleasant – any such power plants must be placed far far away from any settlements, and even then the people that manage them are still at risk for pollution lawsuits. We are keen to trade for help and schematics for fission power, or to be directed to anyone who could help us in this regard."

Both Cinsal and Reren will ask the respective people they're talking to whether they're the leader of the delegation, and if not, ask who and where they are.

Consul Restem and Neksil with Jeffinar

Neksil: "Oh yes! That would have been terribly tragic. In the case the drone-gift idea is unviable, we can gift you books about it instead, some of which I've written. Although I'm not sure how much it would be of use to you – many of them are dependent on the specific properties of flora and fauna on our world, which might not be found in yours. I was one of the colonists to the New Continent, and I wrote a bunch of guides on adapting local materials to what were then the current techniques in various construction and handicraft fields.

And no, you do not smell offensive at all – we hope that we do not. It is quite intriguing, though: the scent of the other species here is, despite being firmly outside the expected-range-of-variation for remna, is still more similar to us than any animal or plant on our planet. I suppose that makes sense, since of course having a scent not already expressed by anything would be selected for in our evolution. You not being a part of our planet would mean you would have exerted no selection pressure on us in that regard."

Consul Restem: "It is thought that we were once ovoviviparous, but then became oviparous again in the transition from quadrupedalism to bipedalism, which necessitated changes in bone structure. We gestate an egg for one of our years...which is about," he turns to Sud, who supplies the number, "1.18 standard years, and which is incubated for another year. This is for drones; Keeper offspring take a month or two longer at each stage.

I see, your species is dioecious but not sexually dimorphic, or at least is dimorphic only by very little. We will take care not to speculate. For us, all Keepers may give birth to drone offspring both asexually and sexually, with the latter only being done when trying for Keeper children. New Keepers can only be birthed sexually, but even if you are deliberately using body-control to try for one, only about one in six of such births will be Keepers."

Lisal and Suksub with Tetratopians

Suksub: "Yes, we are usually able to work out the broad strokes of what our civilization wants if we focus, but we try not to legibilize our utility functions so concretely. Also, it's a principle of this government not to assume what its citizens' desires are – even if it might have keen insight into what they might be – and thus not optimize over them. Instead, the government is structured around certain rights and responsibilities which its citizens agree to be protected and bound by: in this sense, our government is more deontological than utilitarian. We only have so much state capacity, and we believed that this was a good and robust way to structure ourselves. It may not produce the best outcomes, but it is robust against many catastrophic outcomes, and is stable."

Lisal: "How does your species reproduce? We are eusocial: drones are the members of our species which are sterile, whereas Suksub and I are Keepers, who are not." He will give the same explanation of remna reproduction as was given to the Kastakians.

Suksub: "I see. I observe that Tetratopians are more towards the optimization side of things, whereas we are more concerned with variability or robustness. Generally, I think that we are more willing to sacrifice efficiency in methods if it means that they will operate on a wider range of circumstances. Usually, people will modify methods to suit their own needs and situation, but we find it useful and a common good to have unified standards in the cases where the situation or preferences are unknown, and robust solutions must be used – the Imperial Standards Authority publishes such robust standards on many, many things. I suspect getting you some volumes of them would be interesting to you, as examples of what could be considered our optimal-tileable-somethings – in this case they would be our robust-tileable-somethings. As an example, all of our clothes and equipment currently is Imperial-standard, including our language, given that we are representatives of the Imperium.

We chose a well defined area in clothes-space rather than a single point: coherence of aesthetic is important to us, but uniformity not necessarily so." He will elide the fact that uniformity is drone-coded. Would the Tetratopians find being implied to be drones to be offensive? Probably not? But he doesn't want to risk it – it would be offensive on Zmavlimu'e.

Selno and Hansil Reply to Yompam on Brains

Guy #1, who has by now introduced himself as Selno Aineh, is momentarily chastened about the 'well of course they're lighter, they fly' thing, but quickly forgets about it. He has a lot of questions about the part of the brain that the Kastakians loosely attribute reflective consciousness to. The ones he actually asks are just 'is it bilateral?' and 'what happens with lesions?', though, because now he has an informal explanation-debt to repay!

Bywayeans have about 16 billion neurons in the cortex and 90 billion overall, although those numbers vary a lot more between individuals than they thought they would! They used to extrapolate their estimates from dead-people tissue samples but now they have imaging techniques that can give them a direct estimate-count from the whole, live brain, which is important because, for some time now, almost everyone who would otherwise auction off the rights to their brain upon death has instead been signing up for cryo.

The reason he's been so curious about their mass, brain mass, neuron counts, etc. is that Kastakians represent an insanely epistemically valuable independent data point for figuring out exactly what the hard constraints on the biological evolution of general intelligence are.   . . . He honestly has no idea what the sudden incredibly human-looking tentacle-havers imply about evolution - or about anything, actually.

Byway, at this point, has a pretty deep fractal tree of hi-def brain imaging methods - although the branches nearer the trunk are less chaotic, the methods that turned out to be in some way suboptimal having been pruned away. The methods mainly involve putting someone in a big, tunnel-shaped scanner (although the scanners are getting smaller) and getting readouts on either the brain's inherent electromagnetic activity, or the traced paths of an ingested substance that emits some kind of signal. Sometimes the person's head is also directly covered with surface electrodes. Beyond that, there's tons of variation as people try to hit on some way to combine ever deeper detail in space, with ever deeper detail across time.

Guy #3, Hansil Aineh (their second name, he explains, is the same, because they call themselves after the same city, Aineh), is curious about the migraines, but interrupts himself to give a rundown of human neurological conditions. Dementias were the real nightmare, but after him and his people took down the most common one, the others mostly fell within the next duodecade, although there are a couple really stubborn holdout dementias. (There is zero subconscious, felt, or expressed, pride, here, these are just Historical Facts that Hansil is giving.) They used to think dementias hit about a tenth of the population starting at age seven dozen or so, with the rates rising sharply after that. But people started looking, five or so duodecades back, and realized that a lot of people as young as four dozen had 'stealth dementia' - clear physical signs of dementia beginning, without any outward manifestations. And the ages of first observed manifestation just kept inching closer to youth after that. After taking care of the root cause of those, the toll of human neurological aging on cognition is more randomly distributed. It sounds to Hansil like Yompam is saying Kastakian neurological aging is pretty randomly distributed already, and he wonders if they might not have things like human dementias.

Other major problems include: Cancer in glial cells and other helper cells (Byway is fighting the tail end of those pretty hard right now, and winning). Tricky chronic autoimmune diseases - those are proving really difficult to tackle in general, Hansil physically nods in respect to Selno. And infections - he nods to Selno again! Hansil recalls Cannibal's Disease having been a thing with cats many many duodecades ago, people were worried it would spread to humans but it never did. He expresses genuine horror that Kastakians have ever had to deal with prion diseases in their own species, seeing as prion diseases are worse than the worst things most hypochondriac children can imagine happening to them.

There're also developmental difficulties, although Byway has been less quick to 'cure'/prevent certain of those than later-in-life stuff, because, well, neurological development getting donked around in ways that usually lead to at least some medical problems is well recognized as The Thing That Lays The World's Thiccest Golden Eggs - not just cortical stuff that lets people, like, solve partial differential equations in their head, that actually doesn't necessarily come with problems, but, you know, subcortical aspies who can just consider more stuff as they live their life, and reap all the benefits. The opposite thing, schizophrenia, where you can't consider as much stuff, has largely been preempted by embryo testing and gene therapies by now, though. Along with a whole bunch of nasty genetic neurological things.

Selno interjects at this point, and asks if anyone is here on behalf of a Kastakian biotech or medical firm that would be willing deal with Selno or one of his colleagues - Bywayean firms opening Kastakian offices, or selling quickly-usable improvements on their vaccine pipeline, that kind of thing? No one here runs an actual medicine operation, unfortunately, but he knows lots of people who are involved in medicine and they'd be, uh, interested!

Ikkeh Proto-Replies to Jeeee on Boats and Power

Ikkeh Aineh (elsewise known as Guy #2) is enraptured! He takes lots of notes, peeping Jeeee's notetaking process sporadically.

"Jeeee, your pens are sick." He shows off his own gel pens. They are basically naked cartridges, thinner than skinny chopsticks, no bulky grip. "Do you want trade to compare?

. . . So you don't have fission power at all? Well, it's only four dozen and six years old for us, and it was luck we got it when we did. In that case, I don't expect the optimizations Ikkeh has made to be of use to Kastakians in general quite yet, sorry - although I can still go into that level of detail if you want! I did promise it.   . . . How long do you live, currently, anyway? For all I know the info I promised you will still be worth a lot to you when Kastaka catches up on fission in four duodecades. Anyway. Let me get a general tutorial together - " he starts drawing something up.

(If they've traded pens, Jeeee will find that Ikkeh's pens are only ergonomic for someone with super fine motor control, but are beautifully and precisely pressure-sensitive.)

Kriv and Ect Reply To Talaskai on Planes

Kriv Kwemaru (elsewise Guy #5) is impressed by Talaskai's chemical proficiency relative to his general level of experience, and his civilization's general tech level. "A fraction of mineral oil, yeah - what does Kastakia use it for? Do a lot of people know how to make it for some reason? And there's nothing particularly wrong with combustion, it's just that some people think they can leapfrog the rest of society and deliver early super-efficient nuclear-powered personal vehicles. Not for any real specific reason, just that it should in principle be possible -"

"Which is known to be a terrible way to go about problems in general," shoots Guy #4. "Hi, I'm Ect." (Ect gets Talaskai's name.)

"Problems," breezes Kriv Kwemaru, "that everyone else in this era has not also tried and failed at."

Ect shrugs.

Lak Replies To Meliashae on Infotech

Lak Ram Askielal (elsewise Guy #7) is very interested on those text compression algorithms! He secretly suspects Byway already has most of them, but probably not all. He doesn't ask after them, though, because he prefers formal trade where large volumes of boilerplate are going to be involved, whether that's algorithms or silicon purification.

"That you have such a developed proto-Net before even having transistors is fascinating! It's like - I can see, your Net is going to grow into something much more Net-native than ours. Ours is still based around company-internal infranets with big datacenters and central output servers, very physical. I like ours but we will steal so much from yours.

Ram Askielal - where I'm from, can't remember if I said - has mostly transitioned to fiber optic connections, which are less jittery and can be higher-bandwidth, although lots of places are still heavily copper-wire-based. We use radio towers to Net-connect these" - he depockets and presents a Bywayean personal device, an approximately 4"x2+(1/2)"x(1/3)" computer, mostly screen, with a physical keyboard. "but those are fixed, and we geolocate with them. Do you . . . " it's plain correct guessing is a matter of pride for him ". . . are a lot of Kastakians proficient in star-orienteering, or do you do enterprise geolocation some other way?

Anyway, that's a minor thing. We also use fiber- and copper-connected endpoints to generate a local radio signal that lets you wirelessly connect over a short range. PDs - personal devices - can also act as that, but just using the long-range radio signal they connect from. There are a couple attempts going on right now to launch, basically, radio towers, into orbit, like observation probes, so that people can connect via long-range radio, wherever. We already have pretty good radio tower coverage, but orbiting endpoints would let, for example, marine shippers connect, which is a huge problem currently. I'm optimistic!

With respect to transistor manufacture and trading on algorithms - you say you work in infotech, right? What do you do? Can you make deals on behalf of your company with me?"

Hansil The Piece Of Paper Reads Thessalia's Info

Hansil thanks Thessalia! He reluctantly puts away kis paper for now, not wanting his knowledge of kis answers to pollute the rest of his first impressions of the aliens, and possibly even the other aliens' answers somehow.

But the paper will need to know what Thessalia wrote!

1) Do people on your world generally recognize their species as being distributed over (a) finite-sum gradient(s) of quality in any, or many, cognitive trait(s)? Like, Job A requires people who are high in trait alpha for their overall intelligence, but Job B requires people who are high in trait beta for their overall intelligence, and traits alpha and beta seem to trade off against each other?

2) If yes to the above, has your species crystallized a small number of such functionally relevant axes with high confidence?

3) If yes to (1) and no to (2), what is your species's state of understanding about such axes? If yes to (1) and (2), what are the axes?

4) How many distinct items can people on your world store in short-term memory?

5) How many times can people on your world recurse through the same lexical-generation or otherwise conscious-blocking-top-level function, while still holding the partial results of the outer calls in memory, to be collapse-evaluated when the process finishes?

6) What's the minimum elapsed time between people on your world receiving a stimulus physically, and voluntarily reacting to it in a way that was necessarily the result of conscious, top-level processing?

7) (PLEASE don't feel pressured to answer this one; I wouldn't feel comfortable answering on behalf of my world, but I have to ask!) Does your species know its own basic emotional suite? If so, what are the atoms?

8) Are there clear multimodal distributions of cognitive traits within your species, that track sex or other inborn characteristics? If so, what are these traits and how do they vary multimodally?

9) Does your species commonly use standardized tests to measure cognitive performance? Are you presently able to produce (a) representative example question(s) drawn from (a) common such test(s), along with what they're designed to measure?

ζ) Please give a broad outline of your species' cognitive development from infancy.

₵) Please give a broad outline of (what your species understands about) your species' evolution into sapience, including estimated average group size at time of transition into sapience.

(It goes on . . . )

(This is the same questionnaire Hansil will give to anyone who wants to fill out his questionnaire!)

Hansil to Cinsal

"Hello, Cinsal! I'm Hansil Aineh.

Er, leader? That's not translating, I don't think I've met the concept, sorry.

. . . Dear Vaxi you never had to deal with aging." He is clearly just stunned at this concept.

"If you don't think about refining your values into legibility so that you can, you know, contribute something to your species' total code of ethics, then - what do you think about?

It's fine if you don't want to answer some of the questions, go right ahead. In fact, I encourage people on the survey to refrain from answering questions they don't feel comfortable with." He really wishes the aliens were comfortable sharing everything, but that's an anti-matter for this conversation.

"The aspect of your history where you drove your predators into extinction concomitantly with attaining sapience is unholy fascinating but before we get into anything else, I really have to ask: are y'all a hivemind?"

Eyyeh to Reren

"Hi! I'm Eyyah Vaxilal. Sorry, 'leader' isn't translating.

Ah, yeah, the impact on health from being near coal plants was a really unfortunate aspect of that stage!" He means it. "I don't think our species gets lawsuits, though. I bet they're awful." He sounds sympathetic.

"There's lots I can tell you about fission and plant design, but first - are y'all a hivemind?"

Cinsal with Hansil

Cinsal: "A 'leader' is someone who is charged with final-decisionmaking-capacity. For example, suppose that you are a group of people who must make their way through a forest. Some people say that Path A is safer, and some say Path B, and circumstances are such that the whole group must stick together. At some point, even after all relevant information is exchanged, there is still disagreement. The 'leader' in this case is the one who has the authority to say what the whole group ought to do, and whom all members of the group will obey if they make a decision. Normally, we prefer to work individually, but in cases like this, where decisions might have to be made very quickly, and where it is more convenient to have a single point of contact, we adopt this structure. Neither of us are the leaders of our group – our leader is Consul Restem.

It is thought that, in the ancestral environment, drones aged but Keepers did not. This is only speculation, though – there is no mention of Keepers or drones senescing in both memory and recorded history. 

I am or have been a biologist, agriculturalist, chemist, and geologist, and never a priest or a moral philosopher – the field doesn't really interest me. People vary about what their ethics are and what they value? In any case, my position on ethics is irrelevant: I come here as a representative of the Imperium, not a private citizen.

I see. I think I'll take a look at it but refrain from answering at least until I've seen the other exhibits from your world. I also think that I wouldn't be best placed to answer these questions," he says, skimming the questionnaire, "and that you're better off asking Lisal. He's a psychologist.

...no? What do you mean by hivemind. Can I get a translation check on that? Why do you ask?

I'll try to pre-empt your questions. We reproduce eusocially, with myself and Reren being Keepers – which are capable of reproducing. The others here," and he'll point to several people who came with them, "are drones, and cannot. Keepers can communicate with drones verbally and with pheromonal signals – although the latter is very nonspecific. Drones, however, can be trained to model the desires and goals of their Keepers accurately, which permits them to operate more independently and with less oversight, as well as less overhead for Keepers in thinking through the implications of orders given to them. This is called proactivity training. Is that what you meant, when you said 'hivemind'? I think there are connotations around the word you're using I'm not picking up, though."

Reren with Eyyeh

"Yes, although with us a big concern is also scent. I think that our species' capacity to detect scent is more sensitive and specific than yours', given that we are able to sense particles in the air not just with the nose, but also the tongue and back-tentacles. Keeping the outdoors smelling not-awful is an important part of governance – anyone can stink up their own property as much as they want, but if it crosses over to other people's property, they may sue.

Hm, so you don't do lawsuits? What if there was someone with a factory dumping waste into the river, ruining the water for people downstream? Also suppose that the factory owner did not own any of the downstream riverside land."

Reren will say similar things about eusociality that Cinsal did, although he gives a briefer pre-emptive explanation.

Byway wrt Tetratopia

(Ikkeh and Eyyeh keep an eye on the Tetratopians, wondering what their respective loudspeaker messages might have meant to them.)

Hansil to Cinsal

Hansil almost tells Cinsal that he will give Lisal an insane amount of money if Lisal fills out Hansil's survey. But the voice of his childhood bookkeeping boss floats up to him, out of the mists of Time: "No matter how much you want to be on the same side of the table as the other party, don't show them all your cards until the deal is closed." Hansil . . . physically stops himself from revealing his true final bid price. If Lisal leaves interesting (ha!) questions off, he can ask after those, with fistfuls of money, then.

". . . If I might ask, where can I find Lisal?"

Eyyeh to Reren

Eyyeh sounds absent. "The people downstream would sue someone at the factory of course, and their voucher and you would agree on an arbiter, and their voucher would pay out or make them pay out if the arbiter judged the factory guy to have violated the downstream people - it's the 'lawsuit' thing that's not translating . . . "

Eyyeh, for all his continued sympathy and curiosity, is going to gloss right over the revelation about the aliens' capacity for scent. And whatever 'governance' is. It can wait.

"What I meant when I said 'hivemind'," says Eyyeh after thinking for a minute, "is 'group of apparent individuals that thinks as one mind, acts as one mind, desires as one mind, of which the 'individuals' are in reality only appendages.'" Eyyeh hasn't booted up into Word Games mode, so if they're the kind that exploits every gap between word and obvious intended meaning, he's double screwed. For now.

"The eusocial caste partition, and associated conditioning techniques," relatively less important right now "that you describe, would partially explain why and how the - drones" he eyes the ones Reren pointed out "follow their specific Keeper. It would not explain . . . " he trails off, gaze wandering to bits of the Zmavlimu'e delegation as it's spread around the cave. "Why you're all dressed the same, or, coordinatedly, and why y'all do everything else so coordinatedly. If each Keeper's genes were only concerned with its copies in the Keeper's own sterile drones and downstream offspring during evolution, and if your species, and not something that ate it later, still runs things, you should all be acting as independent individuals, with independently internally derived, mostly socially conspecific-adversarial, motivations. The 'leader' mechanism you describe, partially explains the how, but not the why." He looks Reren right in the eye. "How did ancestral Keepers exchange genetic material? What optimization process begat the utility function of this - this system?"

A superintelligent hivemind, thinks Eyyeh, probably doesn't want to reveal just what it is in a room full of lesser beings. He knows that if he's talking to a superintelligence, he's dead in the water anyway, but, you know.

Dignity.

Tetratopia <> Byway

A negotiator or a few heads over, notices that it's an academic convention kind of thing (huh, it's kind of like asking for retroactive funding for what you’ve done as a civilisation, except the retroactive funding is in knowledge trade that you have no idea how valuable it is to the other party, is the preliminary guess at what's going on here), and pages some of the subject matter experts.

Oh hell yes Guy #2! Between the spaceflight and the promise of a tessellation-based design, some Tetratopian delegates privately have a favourite. 

The physicist of the delegation, whose specialisation is in weird materials but whose hobby to wind down is developing an unreasonably detailed game about nuclear reactors and spaceships, heads over there to check out the tessellation-based designs at this academic convention. After a quick sanity-check of the rocket (thoughts: yep, it looks right, oh I so want to compare our world's versions of Rocket Spreadsheet) and the fission plant (thoughts: those are some interesting choices from a slightly different tech path that I can't actually evaluate standing here but I can buy it) - because there are things you can do with nuclear reactors and rockets that Tetratopia is like a year away from scaling up to, so they don't want to carelessly drop hints - if Guy #2 is interested they will also share that Tetratopia has rockets! And satellites! We use them for location and for sending text messages.

They would love to know about this tessellation-based design! 

Oh that's pretty cool Guy #6!

The delegation's chemist goes over. It's not quite what they mean, optimal-tilable is more of a macroscale and conceptual thing, but are any of these materials now the best and most common materials you'd use for something, and we can tell you what we'd be using in those circumstances, and we can also talk about what we have in general and whether there's anything we'd directly want to talk about trading at this stage.

Guy #7 is working in a famously hazardous field, and it's very strange that you'd bring it here, where aliens are! (thoughts: Do they know? optimistic thoughts: Do they know so much, as to be reassured?)

Tetratopia's AI expert who knows about chip performance but not specifics on manufacture heads over to see if their chips are better than Tetratopia's and strike up a general conversation about how things are going. If it looks like it can be done with Bywayan chips - just as they don't want to carelessly spoil Byway on ICBMs, they don't want to carelessly spoil Byway on highly advanced photolithography - they'll show off their fancy and wireless PDA that they're using for talking to other people in the delegation and keeping track of the markets over this at home. Everyone loves squeezing more consumer good out of the same technology, when their actual technology is necessarily slowed.

While the Tetratopians are at the Bywayan table, they'll pick up some of the questionnaires, and some of the booklets, after asking for permission, and send the questions home for answering; if someone guarding a questionnaire or booklet is occupied in conversation, the Tetratopian delegate might ask a neighbouring Guy if they can take one. If #3 is talking to someone as a Tetratopian negotiator arrives and maybe not quite beaming 100% receptiveness at the spooky robed figures, for example, the Tetratopians would ask #4 as if #4 owns #3's questionnaire and booklet.

Some other Tetratopians might be hovering about, if any other of the Bywayans seem receptive to talking. The Tetratopians' inability to pick up alien cues and assumption that everyone here is cheerful about every alien here can be silently counteracted by waiting for invitation! 

Hansil to Cinsal

"Lisal is speaking to the Tetratopian delegation. I will send a drone to ask him whether he's interruptible, and to come here to answer the questionnaire if so." He makes a dismissive sort of gesture, and one of his drones goes off in the direction of Lisal.

"In the case that he's not, I'll answer the ones which are relatively basic. Is there anything else you wish to speak to me about? If not, I'll see what the other people from your world have prepared."

Reren to Eyyeh

"Ah, so it is similar, but in our case the arbiter is pre-chosen – it will either be the relevant regional government, or the Imperial government who will arbitrate.

Hmm...I suppose a Keeper and his drones could be considered a kind of hivemind. Drones have few and stable terminal desires: the most pressing of which is obeying their Keepers and keeping them happy and fulfilled and successful. In this way, the whole complex does act as though it had the same desires, but not the same thoughts. Two drones may disagree on how to achieve a specific goal, for example.

Keepers such as us also do think of our drones as extensions of ourselves, similar to how you might think of your arm or leg, or a particularly precious tool you use often, or of the land or house you own and live in."

Reren will gesture to his clothes.

"We value coherence in aesthetics and think of them as being greater in beauty than the sum of their parts, further, we also see beauty as a public good. Therefore, we coordinate to have unified aesthetics. In this specific case, however, we have unified aesthetics because we are all representatives of the Imperium, and so we adopt its aesthetics. 

Admittedly, I am confused as to why you are confused at this, and I myself am confused why you are not coherent. There is a non-beauty-related aspect to having a unified aesthetic – it is a signal of strong cooperation. It signals 'Yes, even if push comes to shove, we will continue to cooperate with each other; you will not get us to defect'. I was really confused that one of the members of your delegation seemed to...try to block off other people from your world from viewing what he was showing, even though he was seemingly willing to show it to aliens? I would appreciate an explanation of that.

Hm. It might be useful for me to explain our world's history. Keepers must reproduce sexually with each other to beget more Keepers, and yes, we are selfish. In the time just after we had defeated our predators, our population numbers exploded, now that there were no predators keeping us in check. There was lots of conflict between Keepers over territory. However, in time, the man who would become the Imperator came along.

Useful context: Normally, drones are loyal only to the Keeper or Keepers who birthed them – this is both mediated by genetics, and exposure to the relevant Keeper when young. However, the Imperator, both through genetic mutations and innovations in education-and-training, was able to figure out how to force other drones to switch allegiances and consider a different Keeper to be their Controller. Through this, and various other innovations in science and engineering – it is known that the Imperator was a very intelligent person – he was able to occupy the vast majority of our continent and make it into his territory.

The Imperator was very upset over the state of endless conflict that our people had degenerated to, and wished for them to be more prosocial – not just because of his morals-and-aesthetics, but also because choosing to cooperate leads to better outcomes for everyone, including him, while also promoting stability. We do not senesce, so it is personally important to us that society remains stable and not return to war.

He crafted various rules and rituals to redirect aggressive and competitive energies among Keepers into more productive and less wasteful means, such as dueling laws, gladiator fights, sports competitions, criminal and civil courts, notary and contract enforcement services, and various other things. He also taught people the techniques to get drones to switch allegiances, and likewise, techniques to make drones more loyal to you, and instituted the formation of drone markets.

Keepers who were unwilling to live under his rule were forced to live on less desirable land, which was deliberately sectioned off and left untouched so that people who did not want to join the Imperium did not have to. Keepers who tried to resist him and who did not go into the reservations were killed – and there were many of those – whereas those who found his rules amenable lived and flourished. The Imperator also had many, many children, naturally. Through this, prosocial norms and genes predisposing people to be prosocial achieved fixation in the population. Does this answer your question? To be clear, we still have the drive to be aggressive and to be competitive in us, it is simply that we have all collectively decided To Not, with regards to the more destructive and wasteful expressions of aggression and competition. Lesser forms of aggression and competition such as wanting to make lots of money or lots of children or lots of drones are fine with us – but killing or harming or stealing from others in pursuit of that is prohibited.

I suppose it would be more accurate to say that anti-antisocial norms have reached fixation, not necessarily prosocial ones. For example, there is no legal obligation to help someone about to die, but there would be legal consequences if you caused them to be about to die. The null action is privileged – acting in a way such that you have zero impact on the situation, identical as though you did not exist, is always permitted."

He will add, after a pause: "We were eaten by predators before, not now – we no longer have any natural predators, having killed off all of them."

Ikkeh / Guy #2 <> Tetratopia

Ikkeh is reverent about the rockets and satellites. "I told everyone! Can your satellites do Net connections for remote locations? If so, how good are they relative to ground-wireless and wired? How common is it to pay just to take a trip to space?"

To the physicist: "Your game sounds awesome - how much do you want for a copy? Or, what general scope of valuable-stuff, or what specifically would you take - since I'm assuming you're not ready to start buying profit shares in Byway companies, and presumably being paid directly in psychostimulants isn't maximally convenient for you. I know we don't have the supporting hardware and software stack, but even if it doesn't become feasible soon to buy copies of those directly, I know lots of people who'd love the challenge of reverse-engineering something for this to run on."

He attempts to explain his flagship plant design, and slips them diagrams of some pending micro-improvements that do indeed involve chemical tessellation. Upon finding out they were talking about tileable conceptual optimizations, he's a bit confused - why are those particularly valuable, since my optimal-tileable-somethings aren't your optimal-tileable-somethings and every person will have to discover his own set of optimal-tileable-somethings in his own time anyway?

Eyyeh / Guy #6 <> Tetratopia

Eyyeh shares Ikkeh's confusion about the optimally-tileable-somethings, and wants to know, before this goes any further, if this has something to do with Tetratopia being a hivemind. Tetratopia gets even less slack in this regard than the obviously nonhuman alien he's also talking to about this, since Tetratopians are obviously human (they are regular, sexually-reproducing, ~gross-five-dozen-and-2-boned, ape-descended humans like they look like, right?). If they're not a hivemind, then what force or boss arranged them to all wear the same outfits and act for an apparently unified purpose and why did it not come here in their place?

Lak / Guy #7 <> Tetratopia

Lak's company is working on fitting (twelve)^7 transistors on a processor (at least, in the models they want generic customers, including these aliens, to know about), but currently their highest-marginal_return_on_effort areas of improvement are interoperability/modularity and legibility. People can't get the most out of their parts if they can't build with them or program on them, so Lak's work progresses at the pace of curb cuts, instruction manuals, and general improvements on robustness and cheapness. He'll be genuinely impressed by aspects of the Tetratopians' cool PDAs - and he'll show off a tiny little handheld device of a type that's become common on Byway, and generally seems to serve a similar purpose! It has a physical keyboard and people often like to operate the touchscreen with a stylus.  . . . By the way, what's Tetratopia's population? He wants to gauge how the worlds are doing all things considered. Byway has about (1+3/4) x (twelve)^8 people, as of last year, to his knowledge. (They do have a two gross six dozen and five day year, right? Two dozen hour day, everything like that? Continents that look roughly like this?)

Ect / Guy #4 <> Tetratopia

"Oh, those are Hansil's! He - looks like he's busy with the Zmavlipre, but I'm sure you can take one, that's" - he looks over to confirm, a little privately chagrined by having to do this - "what they say they're for."

***

Pretty much everyone will want to know about the matching outfits, with varying degrees of suspicion. If Tetratopians ask permission to touch adjacent Guys's things, they'll get friendly corrections in the individual cases - no one will notice that as particularly strange, in the face of everything.

Yompam and Medical Stuff including Byway and Imperium

"rhetorical-request-to-resend-that! You don't age?"

Yompam looks like ke might spontaneously combust with glee, but gets down to answering the Byway questions.

Consciousness is basically a clock tick / consolidation mechanism, so yes, there's one for the whole brain? If you get hit in the consciousness, this is something that does seem to often reform in another brain segment, but if it doesn't / until it does, the person basically has no coherent self - it's like a really extreme moment-to-moment case of multiple personalities, some people like to theorise that the kind of multiple personalities that don't directly share memories (or necessarily even know the other one(s) are there other than by their actions) are likely caused by multiple consciousness clocks forming in the brain, but nobody has actually been able to work out any evidence about this?

Those scanning tubes sound much better than something touching the head, yes! They sound incredibly expensive to build, though?

Yompam is also extremely interested in dementia cures - there's one kind of really prevalent dementia which upsets everyone, which is the one where you basically stop forming short term memories, and then there's the one where you start mixing up referents for people even if you know them really well, and the one where everything is basically just extremely confusing and distressing all the time because your making-sense-of-things is broken, and a few aphasias; sensory decline is pretty much the major thing about aging that everyone hates the most though? Dementias are definitely somewhat age distributed although it does appear to be considerably wider variance than Byway.

Cancer is relatively treatable compared to all of this, they're just starting to experiment with customised treatments now that computers are getting up to the level where you can actually sequence someone's genetic code in less time than it takes them to die of cancer. Wait, does everyone have similar genetic codes? Deoxyribonucleic acid, gets translated into Ribonucleic acid and mostly encodes proteins, but like all code everywhere has random sections that turn other sections on and off and do all kinds of extra stuff because that's where the code ribbon was so God dumped extra functionality on it whenever Ke had a good idea?

People are forever trying mass-breeding-experiments for developmental targets, like making more visionaries or the latest fashion is for making better computer programmers, but they have about the success rate of all mass-breeding-experiments, in that they're a terrible plan and everyone involved statistically has worse life outcomes, at least in happiness measures.

Yompam is, in fact, part of a hospital with a research-endeavour-division; Juiptal Langhame over there is one of their serious-adults. Ke would absolutely love to set up an exchange program between Langhame and their medical endeavour-groups - that's basically what ke's here for, to quickly map out the divergences in technologies-and-techniques and start to match them with contacts that can do knowledge transfer as swiftly as possible, so they can get to working together on the frontiers of knowledge!

Jeeee and Ikkeh (Byway) and Tetratopia

Jeeee happily provides one of kis pens for one of Ikkeh's pens, but absolutely cannot use it at all; ke just doesn't have the fine motor control. Jeeee's pen has big grippy surfaces to make holding it as easy as possible, and is extremely consistent in ink supply regardless of user pressure.

"Theoretically up to about a hundred years, if we're very lucky? That's going to have at least one retirement in it for most people though, almost always the last twenty years and usually the last forty, more if you're unlucky.

I hope it won't take us four duodecades to catch up though! A lot of people who hate diesel engines will be super motivated to set up the tool chain even if we have to do half of it on land? I expect it'll be a priority for the exchange parties unless we find something even more pressing - those flying things looked pretty high up the list too. Is there anything that's high on your list?"

Jeeee's notes flow across the page in a kind of mind map made up of haphazard sections of nested bullet points with boxes and arrows. The writing system has discrete characters which make up lines, but in no particular preferred orientation.

Then Tetratopia mentions rockets and satellites!

"You've made it into space! It's really possible to get repeaters into stable orbit? Everyone working on repeaters fantasises about it... it's still possible to get out of repeater range and there's an awful lot of maintenance because of weather and animals, if we could put just a few repeaters into orbit nobody would ever need to be lost under cloud cover again!"

Talaskai and Byway talk Planes

"Oh, we use oil for lots of things! Most obvious is, like, backup generator fuel, main generators for things like hospitals that need a lot of power, sometimes engine fuel if you're not running fully electric. Then lighter fractions are good for cooking and heating if you don't have a good solar heating system yet, or you're somewhere that doesn't work so well. And it's an important feedstock in, um, lots of industrial things - you can get a lot more properties out of oil-composite than fish-glue-and-seaweed-composite, like heat resistance and being easier to bend and so on. And it's where you get lighter-than-air as well, which is essential for repeater balloons!

Nuclear power sounds like it might be good for the really big retirement-ships and hospitals, it doesn't sound like it scales down easily though? The thing with oil is the energy's already there and you just have to release it, and wind's everywhere so it's not hard to get more of it?

Endeavour-groups do get like that sometimes, I think you need some of them trying to leapfrog and some of them working on incremental improvements and then everything gets some attention?"

Meliashae and Byway and Tetratopia talk Infotech

"I mean, hospital-ships and retirement-ships still have the biggest datacentres and most boats just don't have the space to store very much of their archives at once, yes - but transistors, finally, might help a lot with that! Or someone will just get one of the light-sensitive-inputs working now that it can work with enough data and we'll be back to the egg, I guess.

Yes, pretty much everyone knows how to do clock-and-stars, if they're capable of it; our repeater stations mostly stay where they put but some of the more advanced ones try to move out of danger or towards where there's more signal need, so they're not reliable at positioning even if you're in range. If it's a crowded area you can often triangulate off each other instead, but clock-and-stars is still essential.

We definitely want orbiting repeaters a lot! Nobody being lost under clouds would be amazing. It sounds like transistors do get really small, as we'd hoped..."

Ke trails off at hearing the population number. That... that sure is a big number. Maybe ke really is super out of kis depth. Ke glances over at Ferek to check ke heard that. Ferek is frantically code-whistling at a couple of other grim-faced Kastakians in a way that strongly suggests the answer is 'yes'.

"Knowing the properties of flora and fauna on your world is probably good in itself - you'll want to know if something you have abundantly over there is really useful to us, and vice versa?

Can't really smell you over the general impression of Cave, I think we're much more tuned to humidity than small-molecule-concentrations.

I think a lot of the ideas-transfer-endeavour-group are going to be all over the other two people-types, but it seems like we have a lot of techniques-and-technologies to get you up to gliding-speed on? Do you have some kind of priority-ordering of problems that are most pressing for you, that we could focus on assembling exchange-endeavour-groups for?"

Jeffinar is terribly conflicted. On the one wing, ke really wants a shipment of several thousand drones right now, to put to work changing bedpans and repainting surfaces, to free up young Kastakians for the huge technological leap that desperately needs to be facilitated. On the other hand, the drones would probably not be terminally-loyal to a Kastakian, and ke can see Ferek getting increasingly frantic out of the corner of kis eye.

Thessalia fills out a questionnaire

1) Do people on your world generally recognize their species as being distributed over (a) finite-sum gradient(s) of quality in any, or many, cognitive trait(s)? Like, Job A requires people who are high in trait alpha for their overall intelligence, but Job B requires people who are high in trait beta for their overall intelligence, and traits alpha and beta seem to trade off against each other?

Nothing like as fair as trading off against each other - some people just seem to have everything and it's incredibly hard to work out how they should specialise, and some people are retired-from-birth and will never supply more than the satisfaction-of-caring to anyone else.

2) If yes to the above, has your species crystallized a small number of such functionally relevant axes with high confidence?

No - every now and again someone comes out with a types-of-intelligence questionnaire but all results have been extremely inconclusive.

3) If yes to (1) and no to (2), what is your species's state of understanding about such axes? If yes to (1) and (2), what are the axes?

Many independent research projects attempting to isolate types-of-intelligence, if they have a practical-expected-use generally aimed at providing a method for an individual Kastakian to choose between areas of specialisation, have been conducted but none of them has come up with anything better than just stating the obvious does.

4) How many distinct items can people on your world store in short-term memory?

Varies considerably, mostly tops out around a dozen.

5) How many times can people on your world recurse through the same lexical-generation or otherwise conscious-blocking-top-level function, while still holding the partial results of the outer calls in memory, to be collapse-evaluated when the process finishes?

I think the answer to this is hopelessly confounded by 'we obsessively write things down or make some kind of physical marker of them instead of even trying to do this'.

6) What's the minimum elapsed time between people on your world receiving a stimulus physically, and voluntarily reacting to it in a way that was necessarily the result of conscious, top-level processing?

Around a tenth of a second? Again, wildly variable (not just between individuals but over time within one individual) and I'm not sure I believe the study that obtained this minimum (they may have accidentally been testing a reflex response rather than a top-level processing response).

7) (PLEASE don't feel pressured to answer this one; I wouldn't feel comfortable answering on behalf of my world, but I have to ask!) Does your species know its own basic emotional suite? If so, what are the atoms?

Some people like to make 'emotion wheels' with a set of possible emotions, designed to help people who have trouble identifying or articulating their emotions? Those tend to have something like energetic, joyful, sad, angry, scared, exhausted as the top level categories.

8) Are there clear multimodal distributions of cognitive traits within your species, that track sex or other inborn characteristics? If so, what are these traits and how do they vary multimodally?

No; nobody has successfully fit a predictive model of cognitive traits to anything short of childhood nutrition and exposure to written material, and even that is only a general statistical conclusion. There are pervasive memes regarding increased agreeability in non-egglayers but those are likely results of overthinking about ancestral adaptation rather than actual results.

9) Does your species commonly use standardized tests to measure cognitive performance? Are you presently able to produce (a) representative example question(s) drawn from (a) common such test(s), along with what they're designed to measure?

Many endeavour-groups seem driven to continually try to produce such tests but nobody has found an actual use for them.

ζ) Please give a broad outline of your species' cognitive development from infancy.

Eggs begin to develop sensory input at a few weeks out of the body, and retain subconscious familiarity with auditory and tactile inputs from this time when later tested. Some hatchlings can immediately speak once clear of the fluid sac, but much more commonly this develops over the next two to six years alongside reading (some develop reading faster than speech, some slower).

Other cognitive milestones vary considerably; a fledge from the family-boat who doesn't come with special conditions will generally be between ten and twenty years of age and expected to be able to speak, read, write or use an assistive communication device, have grasped the concept that other people are people and have preferences that do not necessarily match their own, and have grasped the concept that actions have consequences.

₵) Please give a broad outline of (what your species understands about) your species' evolution into sapience, including estimated average group size at time of transition into sapience.

Our current leading theory is that sapience was breathed into cliff-gliding avians when God became lonely with having no-one to talk to amongst all Kis creation. Initially it was just the power of speech, but that gradually developed into reading and writing, tool use, and so forth. Initial group size is a highly contentious topic with some people strongly believing that a single egg-layer was blessed and spread this to her offspring, and others believing this is highly implausible and a whole community, or possibly an entire species of hundreds or thousands of individuals, must have been blessed at once.

Consul Restem and Neksil with Jeffinar

Consul Restem: "Yes, although we are likely only to send processed products if so, since we don't know whether our flora and fauna would be able to grow in your world, or whether they might upset the ecosystem.

Ah, we also do pay attention to humidity in the sense that it is easier to smell things if it's humid, and also our tentacles are prone to drying out if the air is too dry – which isn't painful, but is uncomfortable."

Restem wants to correct Jeffinar on considering drones as 'people', but it's not really relevant right now, and it might be a translation error.

"Priority-ordering-of-problems...I think the biggest problem for us now is finding good better fuel for locomotives, which are currently our fastest form of land transportation, but given that that pertains to land transportation, I'm not sure how much you could help. We are interested in solar power, if you have it, though, or nuclear. We are very interested in power generation techniques that don't emit fumes. Likewise, is there anything we could help with?"

Neksil: "It seems that you don't have drones yourself, so I don't know what happens to work no people want to do, like cleaning, or managing sanitation systems – things like that. Or very boring, repetitive, and physically tiring work. How do you manage that?"

"Wind power is our main answer to fumeless power generation, it seems like it can't be that much more difficult to rig turbines on land vehicles? I suspect it might be more difficult to fit fume baffles, which are our other solution to diesel fumes.

If you're still using coal we can definitely help you with oil platforms and engine designs to get you off that.

We have solar heating systems but solar electric systems are still experimental - you are generally better off using the sun warm water for hot water needs than using it in dielectric charging.

For work that people won't supply enough of naturally, even in short bursts for the novelty value, we do have an incentive system - the retirement-communities maintain accounts for people who do rotational work they value, and provide first choice of berths, food and service to those who have higher balances when they want or need to take a retirement.

It does feel like a bit of a waste, though, if drones are potentially available..."

Consul Restem and Neksil with Jeffinar

Consul Restem: "Ah, we also have wind power, I forgot, although we would still appreciate any insights you might have into turbine design and such. We also already have oil power, but we only have a few plants because they emit terrible smoke – such plants have to be placed very far away from cities or property unless the owner wants to get sued into bankruptcy.

Ah, we also do have solar water heaters, and were assuming you were talking about solar electric systems. There have been experiments on trying an arrangement of mirrors focusing sunlight on a tower filled with salt to melt it, and use that to generate electricity, but none have been built yet. The prototypes are very promising. Sadly, even if that did work, it wouldn't work on a boat, since you need lots of open space for it."

Neksil: "What types of work would not be supplied naturally? 

Oh yes, drones are very useful indeed. I think many people would want to provide their own drones for rotational work simply for the privilege of living on a retirement-community – we don't really have the concept of 'retirement' – and being able to talk to people. We are willing to lease or sell drones to you, depending on your preference, although I recommend you lease them first, since you have no people who know about drone management.

Likely, many drone-trainers will offer package deals of training you to manage drones as well as selling you some of theirs. What type of work do you anticipate needing? I could get people who work in the hospitality industry if you need carers, housekeepers, cleaners, cooks, that kind of thing, or do you want engineers, who have drones who know how to operate and maintain machinery?"

"The two best paid kinds of rotational work are nursing care and maintenance - both housekeeping and basic ship maintenance tasks like repainting, oiling, rope coiling and so on.

I also suspect if we're trying to absorb a lot of technology-and-techniques from land dwellers there is going to be a strong demand for on-land mining personnel that might exceed supply - it's a fairly popular thing to do a stint in because it's very novel, but being tied to one location gets unpleasant fairly quickly.

It sounds like we can also improve considerably on your generator design, we've put a lot of work into clean burning generators which emit minimal fumes - although I suspect they would still build up to unpleasant levels in a static facility, and also if your planet's atmosphere is like ours you're going to need to dedicate a considerable land area to forest if you scale up fossil fuel production too sharply - the effects are slow, but I assume land dwellers also don't like hurricanes and temperature extremes that much, and are probably not keen on rising sea levels either?"

Consul Restem and Neksil with Jeffinar

Neksil: "We have plenty of those, and also plenty of miners. The latest Imperial Census put the ratio of the number of drones to keepers to be four dozen and two to one, so I don't think you'll exceed supply? How big is your population? Putting together all remna, we have passed one billion since the last Census.

In the case that you do exceed supply, we can simply birth more, although there's a large lead time to that. It takes one year to gestate, one year to incubate, a dozen years pre-puberty, and three years for puberty. If all the drones are doing is caring and housework, then training can begin on the onset of puberty, which would be a dozen and two of our years – sixteen and a half in standard years. For technician work, and work that requires hard labor, drones which haven't gone through puberty wouldn't have either the physical constitution or the brain development necessary for training to be worth it. For them, it will take...a little over twenty standard years."

Restem: "We would greatly appreciate design improvements to reduce fumes. We only really care about the fumes being released into the environment – the drones who work in the facility wear protective equipment.

...I believe that our planet's atmosphere is similar to yours – this was one of the things tested during first contact. Indeed, it seems that we are able to breathe each others' air, given that we are all here in this cave currently. We definitely don't want temperature extremes – we've already had enough of that in the ancestral-environment – but I don't see why the power plants would cause that? Granted, I'm not a physicist or a chemist – perhaps one of my team would know."

Oh. That is - that is a large number. That's not all people, though, right? That's just - deep breaths, Jeff, try not to pause too long, it's impolite.

Jeff is definitely ruffling kis feathers and ke's pulled a pen from kis utility belt, not to write with, just to twiddle in one hand.

"We don't have a very good census, but - less than that," ke replies carefully.

"It turns out that burning fuels that release carbon dioxide - and especially if they also release sulphur dioxide, which is incidentally also the bit that makes them really unpleasant, we now have better filter designs to get the sulphur out in the first place - anyway, that makes the atmosphere better at retaining solar heat? We discovered this pretty much by accident while experimenting with combining exhaust fumes for their waste heat and solar heating - the fumes also held heat better than clean air.

It's a pretty subtle effect over a whole planet, if you have the space then ensuring you have enough established forest should counteract it? We'd deforested areas near shore during the time when wood was the best building material, so we had to do some replanting - if you're land based I expect you've also been clearing forest for living area?"

And because you have a billion people - well, a billion people sized individuals to support - you must be using a lot of living area, ke doesn't say.

Consul Restem and Neksil with Jeffinar

Neksil frowns slightly at the change in Jeffinar's demeanor, but recovers. Ah, he's stimming. Understandable.

Both of them simply nod at Jeffinar saying they have fewer people. "We have about twenty million Keepers," Restem adds, hoping to clarify.

Restem: "Oh, I didn't know about that effect. I'll commission an Imperial Inquiry on the topic of carbon dioxide and heat retention, and see whether there are temperature and climate trends we can observe ever since we started burning lots of coal and oil for fuel. We'll be able to act on it more meaningfully after they've produced a monograph." He makes a few gestures towards the drone beside him – presumably signing – and the drone leaves.

"Yes, we have, for agriculture and living space, although we don't clear all of it. Partly because many places have beautiful flora and fauna that we wish to preserve, and also because we want to have wood to build with – in many cases, old trees are preferable. Wood is still used a lot nowadays, although now we have concrete and steel, which we didn't have before. We have also been experimenting with hydrocarbon polymers made using light fractions of petroleum – it's promising, but hasn't produced anything useful for building with."

A drone returns after a minute, to say that the seaweed has been cleared for remna consumption. Hooray! Restem refrains, but Neksil tries the seaweed. 

Neksil: "It's really good. It has the right crunch, and the salt is wonderful – it is sea salt, yes? Sea salt has better flavor, at least for me – the...composition of it is different from rock salt. I don't quite like the one with honey, though, it seems like a dissonant flavor combination to me." A drone records this observation on paper.

"Oh, we have a number of oil-composites stabilised, we should get you the formulations - we've by no means exhausted the possibilities but they're very good, look, my pen uses them so you can see the ink levels - less brittle than glass and it doesn't break as dangerously if it does snap."

Jeff offers kis pen to anyone who would like to have a look, and gets out another one.

"Yes, I suppose there must be rock salt deposits but we've never really looked, for the obvious reasons?

Quite a lot of our cuisine does combine sweet and salt, but not all of it, sometimes we just want something purely savoury."

Consul Restem and Neksil with Jeffinar

Restem will keep his distance, but Neksil will get very close to look at the pen, though not touching it. He's not sure whether Jeffinar explicitly offered/permitted for the pen to be touched. What does it look like?

Neksil will offer his own pen, both to be looked at and touched and used, which is a red metal fountain pen with gold-dust lacquerwork, in a square and octagon tessellation pattern. It will either look gorgeous or gaudy, depending on Jeffinar's aesthetic tastes. Sadly, the pen is made for remna hands and would likely be too thin for Jeffinar to handle comfortably. It writes in blue-black ink.

Restem: "True! You would have no reason to mine for rock salt given that you live on the sea. I personally like sweet-and-salty combinations, but not everyone does. The drone also told me that other samples of your offered snack food has been tested and found fit for consumption, so I think it's very likely that food suitable for you will be suitable for us. This will be great news for all the people who will want to sell drones to you.

Speaking of which, what is your unit of currency? The Imperial Government produces notes which are backed by the gold standard. One rupnu is exchangeable for one grake of gold, which is...almost exactly one gram of gold. That is the minimum amount you need to exchange it at the bank – most people transact in fractions of rupnu, which is split into one gross fepni. You mentioned people getting compensated for unpleasant rotational work by getting first-pick on desirable berths and such – do they pay for them normally?"

Tetratopia and Jupital of Kastakia

The kind of reciprocation we were expecting was trade of equivalent knowledge, until we get a feel for what sort of things each world has and needs. Your construction techniques for our construction techniques, your medical techniques for our medical techniques. The expectation of reciprocation isn't strict; we won't offer too much that it feels imbalanced to us, and before it gets to that point we'll explicitly flag things, and if it turns out you say something of Tetratopia's is unexpectedly worthless to you we will take that into account. Part of why we want to trade standard-techniques for standard-techniques is because they're very comparable, even across vast gulfs of understanding. 

Speaking of standard-construction-techniques, oh boy does Tetratopia have those. If you need a concrete-building for basically any purpose, that can be done at the price of dirt-cheap, here's how we do it. (There's a handful of standard-construction-techniques related to water, but they all assume the entire industrial base is on land, and they're not all that good if one is used to water-based construction; the Kastakian construction techniques are unexpectedly valuable to us! Seasteading is a cool-but-impractical thing we kind-of-want to do and it looks like you're further down the scaling-curves than us.)

What kind of applications of ocean-going construction does Kastakia think are coolest? Tetratopia builds mostly on land, with our boats being mostly to move things between two land-based sites, so there might be some interesting uses that no prophecy-author has thought of.

Speaking of medical techniques, given the difference in our biologies, it seems that a lot won't transfer over. If your circulatory systems work like ours, here's how we do cryonics; we've tried things on smaller taxonomic-animals than humans so some of our work applies. Cryonics is very important! Are you making sure to cryopreserve everyone?

Tetratopian moral axioms, though you will see some debate about this among philosophy-fans, are generally agreed to be about satisfying preferences, with frustrating some preferences to satisfy more preferences elsewhere being okay, subject to a lot of guardrails because in real life if you try to frustrate some preferences to satisfy others in obvious ways it doesn't work, and it is not something that's been fully hashed out to the degree that one can follow a single written preference-satisfaction rule /invitation-for-comment //emphasis*. On a global scale, Modernity does the job of collecting information about people's preferences, and then uses prediction markets to predict what policies would best do that. The decision for us to visit the cave, instead of some other people, is downstream of that process. People making voluntary positive-sum trades with each other using the skills they have and enjoy using are generally how this happens in real life for most circumstances; one guardrail is to try to do things that interest you, instead of naively-better things that don't interest you.

Genetic customisation of treatment is something that Tetratopia would be cheerful about collaborating on! Again, apparent biology differences, but Tetratopia's current understanding allows medical prediction-markets to order a lot of stats to be done at a genome and sometimes update their predictions of the effects of known-standard-treatments a little bit from that, and even just having better stats to make larger updates would be an improvement that could be shared.

Likewise, cheerful on collaborating on improving solar panel efficiency (unstated for now: to switch from nuclear)!

Lighter-than-air repeater stations... hm, we don't have much like that - ah, because it's difficult to run underground cables to points floating on the surface of the water! Well- ah, the physicist sounds like they're talking about "satellites", repeaters-in-stable-orbits, so we expect there will be some valuable exchange there.

Tetratopia's public improvements are better and cheaper optimal-tileable consumer-goods; better food, better clothes, better furniture.  

* Standard sentences frequently make use of tone markers, which may be omitted in translation to languages that do not have them by default. //emphasis is a rare tone-marker that applies to a tone-marker.

Hansil to Cinsal

". . . I have lots of questions but I think it'd be best to take my time to compile them."

Or watch from afar until his observations and the answers to his survey questions crystallize into a coherent picture. That's the best strategy for satisfying Hansil's level of urge to interrogate in general. Never mind the number of questions that would have to be asked to help him get the sprout of a grip on 'leader'ship and sapient drone-eusocials, and Cinsal's seeming preference to move on.

Eyyeh to Reren

So Eyyeh's life is now a literary science fiction novel, then. One deep enough for the protagonist to have gone in with the idea that he is a science fiction protagonist, but not with mental preparation for the actual level of foreignness that actual aliens present. Got it.

". . . Let me be sure I've got all of that.

You don't senesce. You're a eusocial species that evolved sapience under heavy predation. You make 'drones' with simpler utility functions than the sexually reproducing among you - Keepers - but who are also sapient - both asexually and sexually, but Keepers only sexually. Drones always operate as arms of a Keeper, because their desires are always largely inherently tied to pleasing him. What about sexually begotten drones, are their loyalties divided or random or what?

. . . and - Keepers themselves used to be - independent, but, this - Imperator - what, just - took over your entire planet and its memetic evolution? Was he some kind of superintelligent aberration? Was he known to have had outside help? Is he now dead or otherwise gone? How could one man just - I mean, I know, heroes are a big deal, but they don't unilaterally strong-arm memetic and genetic equilibria into fitting their preferences. How, physically, did the Imperator convince reality to change to fit his preferences? If he's gone, why doesn't it change back to the way it was?"

Selno to Yompam on Brains, Exchanging

Hansil has, by now, been thoroughly distracted.

Selno asks a few questions after how the Kastakian version of dissociative identity disorder differs from the human version, and cuts himself off, not wanting to tip his hand about any of his budding hypotheses.

He asks into considerably more detail about their dementias, taking notes.

". . . What? What do you mean by 'does everyone have similar genetic codes'? Species exist but one medical treatment often works for many people, and those are the ones you generally seek out first in the search tree because they're the highest return-on-investment.

Mass breeding experiments? Like, someone with spare money who wants to prove something, pays a bunch of people to agree to have kids with whoever, videos an assistant blind to his hypothesis splitting them into experimental and control groups and pairing them off according to his theory? And then the kids get measured on whatever he wants to prove? Or, what do you mean?

'Serious-adults'? What is that? I got 'research-endeavor-division' from context, I think. An R&D department, right? But - 'endeavor-group' - from context you would be saying 'company'?    . . . Anyway, whatever, I'd love to talk to Juiptal about starting in on exchange! Somehow I was afraid the aliens wouldn't be as gung-ho about all that as we were." He smiles. "It's a trope in science fiction, but I guess the writers had to create conflict somehow." He smiles even more.

Cinsal to Hansil

"Of course," Cinsal replies, and leaves to offer to replace Lisal in talking to the Tetratopians so that he can instead talk to Hansil.

Reren to Eyyeh

"Correct. Correct. Correct. Correct. We make a distinction between Masters and Controllers. Masters are those who are authorized to give commands to drones, and each drone may have multiple. Each drone has exactly one Controller, and they have top-level-privileges and may add or remove Masters, or modify what sorts of orders they can give to drones, as well as countermand any orders previously given. In the case of sexually-begotten drones, the birthing-parent is the one who is the Controller, but then Controllership is passed to Keeper offspring once they develop. In virtually all of these cases, all three Keepers are Masters of the drones produced.

Not the entire planet – only our ancestral continent – there were no remna on the other continents until we colonized them. He is known to have been very intelligent. While he didn't take any modern intelligence tests, for drones or otherwise, it is estimated that he was +5sd or otherwise highly above mean on many traits of mentation. He did not have outside help, if you're referring to aliens. He had his drones, of course, as well as his allies.

He is dead. He passed away from illness a few gross years ago – his bodies and personal effects are in a mausoleum at the northern polar ice cap, as was his request. Many people make pilgrimage there, or likewise arrange for their bodies to be similarly frozen when they die.

I think you could strong-arm genetic and memetic equilibria provided sufficient force. For example, as I said before, people with genetics or memes which were not conducive to his vision for society were marginalized or killed, and I think that would be enough to shift equilibria into a different stable state. Or rather, not think – since this is what happened. He was aware that he could die, which is why he took steps to transition the institutions of Imperium into more robust ones that could survive even after his demise, such as transitioning legislature, executive, and judiciary to be democratic, or at least be appointed by democratically elected people, as well as figuring out how to transition the loyalties of military and civil servant drones – which at the time were all personally loyal to him – to other people in as seamless a way as possible. This system was already running for more than a gross years before his death, so his loss was not catastrophic to our system, and did not produce a power vacuum."

Ikkeh to Jeeee

Ikkeh notices the Kastakian writing system and is simultaneously struck by awe, and laser-incendiated by curiosity.

"My list? You mean the list of things Kastakia has, that I'd like the credit for bringing to Byway? Functional seasteading, of course."

Ikkeh looks mildly abashed when the Tetratopians more warrant Jeeee's excitement than he, but he knows it's true. For now.

Then he looks like he anticipates needing to look horrified very soon. "What's a retirement?"

Kriv (& Ect) to Talaskai

Kriv is impressed. "How old do Kastakians generally live to be - if that's not too personal? And if it's not too personal, or too forward, how old are you?" What if the Kastakians are just - smarter than us, and haven't yet surpassed our technology level because of some arbitrary social thing? "And about how many of you are there, total? If you know. And how many people do you know?" Kriv realizes this might be pushing it, but he hasn't sensed an incoming loss yet.

"You don't ever work with any physically-wired information- or energy-connectors at all, huh. (?) Is that area already exhausted enough for innovation, that you think you have good reason not to expect looking into very flexible long-range physical power connectors for nuclear, to ultimately be worth it?"

It's the kind of idea you simply can't sell to an alien civilization before you understand it. It's the kind of idea you offer to a member of an alien civilization to incline kim to explain kimself to you, so you can even get a foot in the door for future exploitation.

"Kwemaru is scared of you," says Ect. ". . . 'Endeavor-group'? The translator I hired way back missed that one, sorry, could you explain?"

Lak to Meliashae on Infotech

"What exactly kept you from making transistors again? You had enough prepared silicon, and germanium, to show that they could make cheap transistors but manufacturing was just slow? Are there any other things you know of that are bottlenecked by manufacturing like that?" He's just sending feelers out, trying to get a sense of the shape of things. Byway has a lot of things that are bottlenecked by scale - rocketry, for example, is exclusively funded by people who are able to build up a lot of surplus wealth - but transistors existing commercially at all being bottlenecked by scaling manufacturing feels unfamiliar to him in a way that - he thinks - can't possibly be explained simply by Kastakia being ocean-first.

Jeffinar and the Imperium

Jeffinar is a little taken aback that someone would get up close to the pen rather than taking it, and swiftly clarifies that this pen absolutely is a gift-without-obligation, as this seems to be important to them.

Ke examines the other pen with admiration, but it is very clearly not suitable for kis use as a pen.

"...some of the retirement-homes have units-of-exchange between themselves? Rotational work is tallied up in an account, some people like the specific returns to be legible and some people prefer to only have a vague idea that they've built up a reasonable amount of credit?

Sometimes a group of endeavour-groups that are doing a complicated set of resource trades will have a unit-of-exchange between themselves, but we don't have a - generalised-unit-of-exchange? Usually if one person wants something another person has, they make a case for why they should have it, maybe arrange to offer something in exchange if it's particularly scarce or onerous to get hold of - but usually it's pretty clear who can best use something, and people are more looking for places where their resources would be useful?"

Jupital and Tetratopia

Jupital is far too good at crisis management to say "What's a cryonics?" but ke really, really want to say "what's a cryonics?"

"Yes, it's very important everyone gets caught up on each other's standard-techniques," Jupital tries instead, hoping that this will cause them to clarify whatever they mean by 'imbalanced'.

"Coolest... I mean, I think the recent improvements in automatic control of stabilisation fins to mitigate heavy seas on hospital vessels are the coolest, but that's something I'd expect everyone to have a different opinion on.

You'd want to talk to Yompam for details of the circulatory system, I'm much more of an administrator of Langhame than a medical professional.

Oh, yes, we do have a lot of consequentialism and debates over types of utilitarianism - preference utilitarianism does work quite well with a reasonable rule-utilitarian safeguard, yes. A lot of people do organise their lives by some form of religious deontology as the primary source of axioms, but most of our religions do boil down to something like that except God is also held to have some preferences - what those preferences are is the greatest form of religious disagreement, of course.

Some people do attempt to run - I'm not quite sure what a prediction market is, but it sounds somewhat similar to career-matchmaking-clearinghouses? They're very useful for people who don't have a strong idea of what they want to do and want to find something that's good for other people but also, as you say, will interest them.

It sounds like Tetratopia has a lot more - standardisation? We do regularly try to produce and follow standards - that is another reason why it's so important everyone shares standard-techniques, so things aren't gratuitously incompatible - but generally unless there's a huge advance, like computers capable of handling individual text terminals for over-radio communication were, things spread fairly slowly as whatever was being used for that purpose previously wears out?"

Kastakian native language is a bunch of tonal whistling with clicks, emphasis being provided mostly by volume and speed; there are a few enthusiastic translators that appear to have just about got the knack of speaking other languages in a rather parrot-y fashion who are doing a lot of work to keep all this running.

Yompam and Selno - Byway

Yompam is very happy to hold forth for some time on detailed dementia case studies, current best practice treatments (basically all palliative rather than curative, although there are a few things that look like dementias but are in fact nutritional deficiencies or chronic dehydration, which seems to be much harder to induce in Kastakians but still possible with a picky enough diet), and where having separated parts tips over into being awkward for people (ke doesn't seem to consider most cases of dissociative identity disorder to be a disorder, simply something most people experience at some point in their lives, it's only when the identities have unshared memory or lack of switching control and some are not capable of reasonable adult behaviour that there's a problem).

"By similar genetic codes I mean, do you-plural even have a genetic code of the kind I described? I'm guessing yes, given you'd have been confused about something different otherwise?

Generally account balances don't come into it unless they're doing something particularly strange and think they're going to need a hospital-ship on standby for it to go even more wrong than usual. By the sounds of it you're viviparous? We're not, we're oviparous, which does rather make it logistically easier than what you're describing! Generally they're standardised enough to measure whatever they're trying to measure against other similar experiments - you can't run a true control group because a true control group would be people being raised the ordinary way by a family-unit, and obviously the variance on that is enormous. And generally the hypothesis is 'we can raise children more efficiently this way and their life outcomes won't be significantly worse than a traditional upbringing', although obviously different people pick different outcome metrics.

Yes, the idea of us being here as experts is to work out what areas we need to exchange techniques-and-technology on, and then we can start collaborating properly! Swapping personnel might be the most efficient way to bridge some of the bigger gaps, though, and Jupital will know more about who might be available and how many we could accomodate."

Jeeee to Ikkeh (and incidentally nearby Tetratopians) re Retirement

"...when someone can't work any more, or can work a bit but needs to be looked after? Like, sometimes just for the moment, sometimes it lasts the rest of their life?"

Talaskai to Kriv & Ect re aging, demographics

"Like, I think the very oldest get to see a hundred? I'm sixteen.

There's about..."

Ferek to Kriv & Ect re aging, demographics

...at which point Ferek does not quite fly over to the conversation, but certainly kis wings are out and there is considerable haste.

There is a quantity of frantic-speed trilling and chirping which the Kastakian translators decline to help anyone with, but might be approximately interpreted as "did you hear how many of them there are do not give any specific population numbers do you understand me" from Ferek and "you're not my real mom! no I do not want to go outside yes I'll behave" from Talaskai.

Talaskai to Kriv & Ect re aging, demographics

Talaskai shakes out ruffled feathers and makes an odd nasal noise which is akin to a big sigh.

"We haven't really tried trailing wires everywhere! I think people might feel kind of tied down to be physically connected, like it's a waste if they go out of range or something? Like, big installations like the salmon farms have lots of wiring that ties everything together?

Oh dear, have I been scary? I don't mean to be very scary, not like," ke glares at Ferek, who has backed off a little but is still clearly surveilling kim, "some people.

Uh, endeavour-group is - when you have a lot of people get together to achieve something specific? Like, anything that can't be run by a friendship-group because it needs too many people or too specific people."

Meliashae on Infotech

"Oh, we don't have - like, germanium is mostly a theory, I think someone might have synthesised, like, laboratory quantities? And we think the silicon needs to be much purer than we've been able to manage in any quantity, either.

I expect a lot of things are bottlenecked by manufacturing! Discovering things is fun, putting together the first prototype is fun, producing things that people obviously need is satisfying, but we have a lot of trouble doing anything that's in the middle of that, where it's basically a solved problem but it's not clear who actually needs it yet? Sometimes it's someone's obsession and that's infectious enough to get enough people along to get it over that hump, but I think a lot of things probably languish in the middle there."

Eyyeh to Reren

Bodies. Ah, well, the rest of his species has doubtlessly already blown its cover anyway.

"Bodies - his drones were killed with him?

Did he express a desire, in life, to be frozen so as to eventually be unfrozen if possible?" +5sd, yet - only +5sd and able to warp these bizarre aliens' future to such an extent . . . Eyyeh doesn't know if Byway can take something so dangerous, if it's allowed to re-emerge before its time. There may have to be a societywide moral injunction against selling the remna functional cryonic revival, once Byway reaches that point.

"My lack of understanding goes deeper, here. How could one person arrange for those who traded and lived in ways that he dispreferred, be killed or marginalized, except for by playing within the game of the current society, which could not have itself affected the rules of that game? How did he effect this, materially. What, vaguely, would a day in the life of the Imperator-changing-the-world, look like?"

Eyyeh is drawing something blanker than blank. Somehow he has a feeling Reren's answer will only invite more questions. He wishes this science lesson could be happening under circumstances of less future-of-the-species stakes. 

Selno to Yompam

"The human genome has been pretty thoroughly plumbed for informational content, but of course that's still ongoing, and copies of the 'decoded' genome at various levels of completeness and detail are in pretty wide circulation in the biotech sphere, if that's what you mean?

Are they breeding experiments or just child-rearing experiments? Why do so many people try to find more efficient methods of childrearing? Is it prohibitively inefficient?" He looks sympathetic. "How long do Kastakian children stay dependent? With humans it's about 9 years on average. They're not totally cognitively mature at that point, and physically they're still less than half adult size, but by then parents no longer generally have to invest effort into caring for them, because they've fledged as independent participants in the economy.

Why can't your childrearing researchers just have their blinded assistants split their group of eggs up into one half that gets reared in normal family-units and one that isn't?

I'd love to talk to Jupital whenever ke's available."

Ikkeh to Jeeee

Ikkeh looks like he's about as horrified as he'd expected to be. "Oh.   . . . Your people spend some significant fraction of their lives under physiological-neurological conditions that terrible? Anti-senescence is probably even more high-return for y'all than it was for us."

Kriv & Ect to Talaskai

"No," says Ect, now looking slightly abashed and concerned, "no, I just meant Kriv finds your knowledgeability indimidating."

Now Ect is confused. "If it's too large to be run by a friendship-group, and if I'm hearing you right endeavor-group is something different from for-profit-company, then - how does it work? What force, if not camaraderie or profit-seeking, keeps it together and working for a unified goal?"

Kriv listens intently. Talaskai's stated age has not assuaged his insecurity on behalf of his species, but he makes an effort not to show this.

Lak to Meliashae

Lak blinks.

"That's true enough if you're talking about ideas, but once it's clear that many people will find something useful enough to buy, there's instantly a huge profit motive to be the first to scale it, and dominate the young market, so that you're consumers' default choice until and unless someone else subsequently starts obviously outperforming you.

Or there should be. Is there - some reason that doesn't happen in Kastakia? I'd ask if Kastakians were rational enough consumers that sharp returns to dominating young markets in particular don't exist, but that would hardly explain Kastakian technologies getting scaled slower than obvious potential-for-profit . . ."

Yompam/Byway Selno on Genetics and Breeding

"Yes! It sounds like you're ahead of us there, we have the theory but just storing an entire genome is a problem, let alone doing anything useful with it! Sorting out our computing technology is going to help a lot there, I imagine.

Some of them have breeding criteria and egg-raising differences, but it's harder to arrange breeding criteria and most of them are trying for a representative cross-section more than anything. Many people enjoy and benefit from participating in a family-unit, but it certainly is a lot of hard work! Kastakian children vary quite a bit in age of adulthood, and many choose to remain with the family-unit for a while after in any case; nine is possible, but on the very low end, it's more common between fourteen and twenty.

Usually the adult members of the family-unit continue to feel residual responsibility for their fledgling and check up on them for as long as they are capable of doing so, as well - it sounds like you humans don't have that drive as much? - so it's often a lifelong responsibility.

It would be quite hard for an experimental-breeding-endeavour-group to find a family-unit who would take on such a responsibility - one of the major factors in wanting to form a family-unit is wanting to pass on your genetic traits, it's not always the case that all members of the family-unit will participate in breeding but it's usual to have at least one egg-contribution from everyone involved, unless they have a genetic defect they don't want to transmit but still want to raise children."

Yompam looks over at Jupital. "It looks like ke's pretty busy with Tetratopia; I can make some guesses if you don't mind them being guesses, or we can continue to explore areas of difference and similarity so we have a fuller list of exchange topics..."

Jeeee / Byway Ikkeh on Retirement

"You mean you don't? Yompam must be as excited about that as I am about satellites! Uh, assuming it carries over, but... even just the computing technology should get us over a whole bunch of roadblocks in research, the biologists are always complaining that they just can't process enough data even with a huge mainframe in their hospital-ship.

It's not just senescence although that really doesn't help, some people just need to stop for a while, and then get back to it; I haven't had one but there have been times when my friendship-group have had to take quite a lot of care of me, I think Thessalia had one for a while?"

Talaskai / Byway Kriv + Ect on Endeavour-Groups

"Oh, like, all sorts of things?

Sometimes it's wanting something that's hard to get, like, your friend had a great idea but it needs a lot of metal so you go join a mining concern as more than a rotational helper, or you got caught in a storm and ran out of food once and now you really want to feed people and definitely never ever be hungry again, so you go join a salmon farm?

Or someone has an idea that is, like, really inspiring, and then a lot of people want to make that idea a reality? Or there's just something that obviously needs doing, and it seems like it'd be an okay kind of thing to do, and not enough people are doing it.

People who are trying to get an endeavour-group started advertise a lot, like they circulate information about what they want to do and how they're going to go about it and people go 'yeah, that sounds like a worthwhile thing' or 'that sounds really interesting and I want to know more'?

Lots of people have trouble thinking of or deciding what they want to do for themselves and want to join something someone else is doing - like, it's great being an adventurer when you're my age, but a lot of people get bored of only doing things that a small group can do, and they want to be part of something bigger, or achieve something bigger, and the only way to do that is to join up with other people trying to do that thing?

Uh. What's a - for-profit company? In translation it kind of sounds like 'organised group of people who specialise in a kind of rotational work together in order to get a really big account balance and have a fantastic retirement', but it sounds like you use it for more things?"

Meliashae to Byway Lak on profit

"So, what I think we're getting to here is that our societies distribute things really differently!

From what I've gathered you use a direct market-economics system for pretty much everything? We, uh, we really don't do that?

Obviously informal markets break out all over the place, when there are material scarce resources, and we use explicit formal markets for things where we absolutely need extrinsic motivation to get enough people to do something that needs doing, like caring for the retired, or maintenance of larger vessels, or all the supplies that retirement-ships and hospital-ships need.

But most of the time we don't think in terms of formal trades at all, and certainly not in terms of personal value-accumulation. What Kastakians tend to do is attempt to maximise overall value for everyone - to find the place where they are interested enough in what they're doing not to burn out, but also are doing something that is useful to as many people as possible? And the same for resources that we find ourselves stewards of - we try to find the place for them that will generate the most value overall.

That does have some downsides, like the one I just mentioned - if something doesn't have enough interest-value any more, but doesn't yet have enough certain, legible world-improvement value, it doesn't get prioritised for resources or labour, and unproven technologies that have been pioneered but not scaled tend to fall in that hole.

I mean, don't get me wrong, some people really love 'the thing I worked on is now the thing most people use' enough to take the risk, but I get the impression that Byway humans are much less risk averse than we are - or possibly the lack of a safety net drives people to take more risks?"

Eyyeh and Reren

"Apologies, our language does not inflect nouns for number, which led to confusion. The Imperator only has the one body. However, some of his drones which died of the same disease – it was a transmissible disease – were interred and frozen along with him.

Not publicly. His drones kept his diary and records, of course, but it is traditional for those to be interred along with the body, due to their sacredness. No one save for them have viewed it. The remaining drones of the Imperator were unable or unwilling to give reasons as to why he wanted to be frozen. It is implied that he did want to, however, since he funded research into the specifics of remna hibernation, as well as freezing and thawing viability experiments on various animals. Further, his drones did say that rather than using body control to fight the disease, he chose to prepare for a very long hibernation instead. 

Does your species hibernate? It translates, so you must be at least familiar with the concept. It is a type of cando – does that translate? A moment, please," he says, and consults with some translator and librarian drones. 

"It is a type of dormancy, which can express itself in various ways. Our world has a longer year length, and has occasional severe cold snaps and heat waves. Therefore, our species must be able to cope with variation in temperature. Specifically, he performed the type of dormancy suitable for experiencing freezing temperatures, not merely cold ones.

He was able to subdue people he saw as acting antisocially because all of his drones were personally and very strongly loyal to him – those drones now constitute the bulk of the military and much of the civil service today. You do not have drones – your society is composed entirely of people – so finding loyal people to coordinate with would be much harder, and the risk of defection much higher. I doubt it would have worked in yours."

Consul Restem and Neksil with Jeffinar

In that case, they will happily take the pen to examine it! Is it ornamented? How is it designed – with regard to its shape, how it's filled with ink, the nib, and how it dispenses the same amount of ink regardless of pressure?

Retirement seems like an important enough thing for them that it's mildly confusing why you would only want to have a vague idea of what you have, but they don't voice this confusion. With them, they're fine (and prefer!) to have favors and trades between friends be informal and somewhat illegible, because that dispels resentment, and also because you don't need to have your friend do favors for you to survive. They absolutely will keep track of their food stores and prices of food at the market because that is necessary for survival.

Restem: "Admittedly, I am confused about what you said. I am going to analogize your words to try to help with my understanding. Suppose that A wants to bake a cake, and needs sugar. B has sugar. A makes the case to B that they will benefit if B gives them sugar. It is a compelling reason – with sugar, A can bake the cake. But...why would B give A the sugar? How does B benefit, unless B somehow arranges for A to bake the cake but receive a portion of it in compensation, or a favor-of-equal-value-to-be-traded-in-in-future."

Selno to Yompam

"Huh. We're wired to look out for the welfare of anyone young enough to be extra-vulnerable, of course, but actually providing for the child is the sole responsibility of its two parents. Having children stay dependent until fourteen or twenty . . . yeah, we can see how you'd end up with a big payout for anyone who can raise them more efficiently." He has so many questions but first, a lot of business is in order.

"I don't mind your guesses, respecting exchange deals - but who do you work for? Jupital?"

Ikkeh to Jeeee

Ikkeh frowns. "Is that common? About how long was it? Personally I've never gotten burnt out that badly, but it can happen to people sometimes . . . they're always back on their feet with a new job in about a dozen days, though, unless there's actually an underlying non-burnout problem requiring very expensive medical treatment. And being out for a dozen days hardly ever happens to people more frequently than once every few years, not enough to be a huge loss for the economy."

Kriv & Ect to Talaskai

. . .

"Money," ventures Kriv. "What does that translate as."

"Ke said 'account balance.'" mutters Ect.

"Five-mine-four-yours twelve-to-the-sixth-over-five milligrams mine ke doesn't grok it." Kriv ruminates a moment. "As in, as in, ke won't be able to explain what we're doing right now. Won't have the word for it." It's dicey but something is telling Kriv Kastakians just don't bet. Or at least Talaskai won't have.

"Of what?"

Kriv raises his eyebrows and enunciates very slowly. "Lin-say nine."

"Five-yours-four-mine twelve-to-the-sixth-over-five milligrams yours Linsay nine ke groks it as in ke has the word for what we're doing," says Ect. He squints at Kriv. "How is 'account balance' not 'money'."

"Well, what are we doing?" Kriv looks at Talaskai like Talaskai is an explosive with its fuse lit.

Lak to Meliashae

When Lak speaks again, he sounds distant. "It's. Actually the presence of a safety net. If I were going to venture a guess. A safety net that you wouldn't have if your species had somehow managed to advance to the point of radio and computers without evolving the strategy of weighing possible actions in terms of relative social profit and loss." He feels oversharing-remorse, but that's irrational given that as it stands the Kastakians are hardly potential trade partners. He's not sure if they qualify as fully sapient, not being able to rationally evaluate expected returns from action? But they have language and all the other features. Wizard Vaxi. Lak feels the assumptions of duodecades' psychic philosophy crumble underneath his standing feet.

"When the first company on Byway to successfully scale transistor manufacture -" he names a company "set out, they followed a long line of failures, and knew that, from the outside, it looked like there was only a very slim chance they'd make a profit. But -" he recounts the history of the company's founder having tested his innovations in his boss's workshop, and becoming justifiedly confident that that would scale up "and unlike if he'd been working on Kastakia, he knew he could always make a living machine-operating or delivery-driving or something. He wasn't staking his entire future on the to-all-appearances unlikely prospect of this project coming up plus, and for that matter neither were any of the failures.

None of us need to depend on what we are to other people, because we are, far more reliably, something to the economy." Reverence. "It sets us free.

I'd known you could be - an early-historic civilization, without being as free - although the system would still have endpoints that would open themselves up to trade for obviously advantageous scaling of critical infrastructure - but to get to this point, and do everything, or even ten out of twelve things, on a person-to-person scale - how - ?" How. They're lying, hustling the Bywayeans, and everyone. Trying to inspire pity, or something.

"Maximize overall value for everyone - find where you're the most needed - that's what explicit money does. You want where you're most valued? Follow the money. And there's a lot of latitude within that to do what you enjoy. That's categorically harder, without a direct market economy getting involved, on whatever scale you're working on. You'd just be deliberately blinding yourself. Your society, as you describe it - its parts shouldn't have any idea of how to organize themselves. It'd be like a brain with neurotransmitters but no electricity, no mechanism by which to send information at a distance. It'd be - a lumpy, incoherent, unpredictable boiling swamp, not a sensate species - forgive the metaphor, I know some people don't like egregore talk, but. A mess like that couldn't be relied upon to accumulate anything."

No remorse, Lak, if ke's being straight they're hardly viable trade partners until they learn this, and if they're hustling you . . .

Eyyeh to Reren

They totally kill their drones. There haven't been any other noun snafus, that Eyyeh's noticed.

". . . You really think he's dead." Eyyeh deadpans. No way will they assimilate a foreigner's intuition about their own sleeping hero. If anything, Eyyeh is winning Byway time, along with himself information.

"How many drones did he have? How many remna were there, at that time?"

Reren to Eyyeh

"Yes. Of course, we do not have the technology to revive dead frozen remna, and even if we do, we don't know whether his preparations were sufficient in preserving his body in a state that can be revived. Functionally, he is dead. In any case, even were he to return to life, he would not be restored to power – at the tail end of the second Imperial period, he transitioned the power structure to a democracy, such that in the years before his death, he was formally removed from all politics. At the time, drone training had progressed to the point that he could have most of his drones – which were many – switch allegiance to the elected Consul, thus giving them full control over military and civil service matters.

Hm, I don't have the numbers committed to memory, but we brought records of the Imperial Census stretching all the way back to the first one. I'll send a drone to fetch the records, although it might take a bit, since it was so long ago. I'd estimate...half a billion remna at that time, of which one in twenty were his drones. That's 5%. I think that's in the correct direction but I could be wrong. The census might not cover military matters, since that's covered under the transparency report. Did we have the transparency report at that time? I didn't live through this time, so I don't remember. I'll order the drone to look for that figure for you as well.

What about you? How do you structure your civil service and military?"

Eyyeh to Reren

That's a higher proportion of the population than Eyyeh was expecting. But.

"How exactly does the control work? That many - it still wouldn't make any more sense, that the Imperator should be Controlling them, unless you develop some kind of extension of working memory that's only usable for that purpose.

'Civil service' and 'military' may be part of the confusion here . . . whatever those are, I don't think we have them. What are they?"

Reren to Eyyeh

"It used to be a process mediated by biology, but now it's more psychological. Drones become attached to their Controllers and optimize over their desires. We call this process...it translates as 'binding' or 'imprinting'. It's not...it's not like there's a direct link. Think of them like...a perfectly loyal worker? Or like, a machine, but more complicated. Does that make sense? It's difficult to explain because it is so basic to us.

Really? You don't have those? Then what does your government consist of?"

A pause.

"Ah. You don't have one. That neatly explains many aspects of your society that were previously baffling, and also explains your similarity to the Kastakians. I'm not sure I can explain unless you know what a 'government' is. Or perhaps 'state'. Do you have a word for 'coordination'?"

Eyyeh to Reren

"Thank you for your patience in explaining these basic things to me." He means it. "Unfortunately, it seems you have many more to explain. 'Coordination' . . . no. None of those."

Reren to Eyyeh

Reren does not sigh or roll his eyes, because the selection process to become a Legislator and later a delegate is rigorous.

"Coordination is...the process by which agents agree to perform or not perform a specific action, so as to push the current situation from a suboptimal stable equilibrium to a more optimal metastable equilibrium. Maybe an example is needed.

Let's say that a dozen people live near a forest, and there is a fruit tree there which produces really delicious fruits once a season. Let's also say that people will want to get as many fruits as they can. The default state is that people will squabble over the fruits: they'll spend time watching over the tree, or steal from people who got the fruits, or attack and threaten them to get them to yield, or pick the fruits even when they're not at their best, since getting something worse is better than getting nothing.

Ultimately, no matter how much they fight, the number of fruits on the tree are limited. If they figured out a way to apportion the fruits in a way that appeases everyone, then they could stop wasting time doing all those things, but still have fruit to enjoy. They could say that all the fruits are picked at their best, with each person getting an equal share of fruit. Or maybe people do auctions for the fruit. Something like that.

This is better – they get fruit and their time back – but it's not stable. It's always possible for one person to defect. For example, they could pick all the fruits before they're ready. There has to be an enforcement mechanism to make sure that people who say they'll agree, but were actually deceiving the others. They could agree that anyone who breaks the rule is chased out of the forest, or does not receive fruit for a year, or gets beat up, or something sufficiently aversive to prevent people from defecting, something that will change their payoff-matrix so that they'll do the antiantisocial or prosocial thing.

A government is this agreement, but reified and more general. A military is an arm of the government that uses violent force to change said payoff-matrix, although in our case we separate this into two: the military acts externally, on people the who are not under our government, with the police acting on people who are."

Eyyeh to Reren

". . . Does utility literally grow on trees in your world.

Like, does enough stuff-that-people-value, that people would want to fight over it, regularly just spring into existence not as the obvious product of some person's labor."

Eyyeh is going to hold off the existential crisis that will be in order if literally the most basic axiom of philosophy turns out not to hold across universes, until the moment the axiom's destruction or preservation is actually confirmed to him. Which timeframe may extend significantly beyond this conversation, given that these aliens are shady at best, and probably animalistic superintelligent menaces. Until they actually strike Eyyeh down, or prove him something of clear worth that he didn't already know, they're getting maximum skepticism.

Reren to Eyyeh

"Well, yes? Like, fruit does grow on trees...hm, is that a metaphor or an idiom? And yes, there is tons of that: fertile land, land with ores or gems, forests, lakes and coastlines with fish. Even for items which are artificial, ownership is only meaningful to the extent that you can protect it. If someone steals it from you, then it doesn't matter whether or not you are the one who invested labor into making it. That's why we have the government to shift people's payoff matrices away from stealing and more to making, and also make sure that the adversarial-arms-race of developing better theft technique and developing better theft-prevention doesn't happen."

He's very confused at how their society doesn't have government and hasn't devolved into killing each other. Maybe their species is more peaceful? That seems like the most obvious example.

They don't even have a military...

...but their technology is clearly superior. And besides, the Imperium isn't exactly expansionist – it left behind totally fine land unoccupied as terra nullius so that people could have meaningful exit rights. 

Eyyeh to Reren

Eyyeh is looking at Reren like Reren is a celestial body rising at the wrong time of the day.

Slowly, tonelessly, with the inflection of somebody explaining how to get multiplication from repeated addition: "Fertile land has to be farmed. Ores and gems have to be mined. Forests have to be combed. Fish have to be caught. Fruit has to be picked, and if there's no fruit left in the literal forest, it has to be grown. Whoever does the work of sculpting the froth of Nature into a utile form acquires the resulting utility as a property - an attribute, an extension.

Y'all . . . steal these properties of others as your default course of action?"

Reren to Eyyeh

"Well, see, I can wait for you to do that, and then, after you have farmed the land and mined the gems and combed the forests and caught the fish and picked the fruit, I could kill you and take everything that you have. Or steal it from you – that would likewise alienate you from the product of your labor.

That's what happens to animals in the natural environment every day. Animals kill each other to eat them. You're talking about ownership as though it's an inalienable, irrevocable thing, when really, one could just reach over and take something from someone else, if that person did not have the means to repulse the attack. 

It's not the default course, but it is the most stable course, and so unless a different metastable equilibrium is reached, things will degrade to such a state normally.

I would greatly appreciate information as to how your species evolved, or what your culture is like, so that I can model you better."

Eyyeh to Reren

Eyyeh feels like calmly packing up all his things and walking back through the cave entrance that goes back to Byway.

He doesn't know what he would do if the remna couldn't follow. The fact is, all his knowledge says they can.

Voice low and cold: "I feel implicitly threatened by you at this exact particular instant, and I will not surrender heart-information about my species under such a condition."

Reren to Eyyeh

Intense frustration...! Which does not show on Reren's face, although his tentacles do start moving a touch faster.

"Why do you feel threatened? The fact that we have the capability to do it does not mean we have the intent to. And besides, your world's technology is much better than ours," although they wouldn't have the conception of things like tactics, or a dozen gross years of military history. "There is very little for us to gain from attacking you, and much more to gain from trading peacefully. 

I will also remind you that I talked at length about our species' evolution and our biology at length, and now that I have asked you to do the same, you are refusing. I underwent the mortifying-ordeal-of-being-known, in the process of wishing to establish friendship, and you did not. This is displeasing to me, and although I am obligated to talk to you because of my position, I, personally, would be upset if you continued to refrain from speaking openly."

Eyyeh to Reren

"As you doubtless perceive, the humans of Byway are a near_totally-nonaggressive species completely incapable of posing any harm to you or yours. As I suspected from the beginning, the Imperium is a to-some-extent-coherent force, which has the capacity and the motivation, at least in principle, to coerce some of the humans of Byway into serving its goals, whatever those goals may evidence." Never mind that he'd been thinking in terms of sogging science fiction plots . . . ! "These suspicions in part motivated my intentionally" he puts some iron in the word "steering the conversation between us toward your choosing to frontload your investment of disclosure, so that I could gauge whether you merited my trust of a disclosure-return-investment to lead us closer to the negotiation of formal dealings. Never did my worst imaginings touch what you actually disclosed. I daresay" voice tamped like a spring "if I die on the spot, my final emotion will be joy that in being so reticent, I dodged being the proximate cause of my species's final embarrassment." Eyes steely, but live - searching.

"Now that you are caught up to my frame of mind, are you still interested in dealing with me? If you are honest in your intent to trade peacefully, my full apology and partnership are nearly guaranteed in the medium run, but to earn them will require getting through a long and mutually costly game of defusing. If you do choose to play, we can pre-negotiate a price for your time, which I will pay out whether I end up deeming you trustworthy or not." 

Reren to Eyyeh

"I see. So you took advantage of our vulnerable posture and did not come here in good faith. We will remember this.

I am uninterested in further conversation with you. Goodbye."

Reren leaves to talk with Consul Restem.

Lisal, halfway between the Tetratopian and Bywayean delegations, is stopped by a drone. There is a brief conversation before he turns back and returns to the Imperial side.

Jeffinar and the Imperium

The pen is somewhat ornamented - along with the brightly coloured, textured grip which is mostly practical, it has decorative etching mostly around the end, in an abstract but highly symmetrical pattern vaguely reminiscent of seaweed. The outer protective casing is clear in the middle to show the level of the internal ink reservoir, which is suspended in what looks like a more flexible clear material. The 'nib' is a roller-ball mechanism; the steady flow seems to be mostly provided by the material properties of the ink itself.

"Because B wants the world to be a better place, and the world where A can bake a cake is better than the world where A can't? It's likely A will be sharing out the cake, in turn, but probably to whoever would most benefit from it, which might not include B.

Obviously we don't all perfectly agree on the optimal solution all of the time, but generally we operate on the principles that doing something is better than being caught in decision paralysis, and realising some value is better than hoarding for the perfect moment, and that other people might have differences in judgement but did try their best to find the best use."

Yompam and Byway Selno re Bosses

"Both Jupital and I work for Langhame - my usual direct organiser-arranger isn't here, ke has a lot of other responsibilities and couldn't be spared - not that I think ke'd have wanted to, I'm not sure ke's ever been on land."

Jeeee and Byway Ikkeh re Retirements

"Yes, it's pretty common - I don't know exactly how long Thessalia's was, some people just need a few weeks, some people take years and then recuperate, and final retirement often lasts a couple of decades?

Often it is some kind of underlying medical problem - it might get less common, once we catch up with your techniques-and-technologies!

It is a pretty big deal - a lot of rotational work goes into caring for retirees. I know some people like to feel that needed, but if it was really something people wanted to do that much, the retirement-ships wouldn't need to run incentive programs for it."

Talaskai to Kriv and Ect Byway re Money

"The translators have 'money' down as either 'unit-of-exchange' or 'unit-of-account-balance' - you're trading in milligrams of something rather than adjusted-service-hours, so it's probably unit-of-exchange?

You're doing, like, sometimes children and adventurers play a game where you all race to a nearby landmark and whoever loses does the dishes? Like that, but for some kind of actual stuff that you use as a unit of exchange. There is a word for it in our language but it's kind of insulting to say adults are doing it, it's 'gambling'.

So a 'for-profit company' is an endeavour-group that only provides - whatever it provides - in return for your, uh, unit-of-exchange or unit-of-account-balance? Like, some endeavour-groups do that kind of thing, when it's not obvious who needs what, or they need some kind of input that's also scarce, and it's worth the effort to take bids for what they're producing?"

Meliashae to Lak Byway re Capitalism

"I... I'm an infotech technician and I am totally out of my depth here." Ke looks around for someone who's free - aha, Thessalia isn't doing anything much! "Thess! Thess, I've done a terrible job at explaining philosophy-of-exchange, please come rescue me?"

Thessalia to Lak Byway re Capitalism

Thessalia bustles over, with some haste but not quite as much as Ferek displayed earlier.

"Hi there! What seems to be the problem? I'm Thessalia Scribemores, I did hear a little of what you were saying, but it seems like there's some kind of misunderstanding going on?"

Meliashae fills her in with a series of high-speed whistles, although primarily they only convey they-do-everything-with-explicit-trade-and-think-we're-not-a-real-civilisation-because-we-don't!

"Oh, well, yes, we do definitely have a place in society for extrinsic reward! The rotational work system that supports the hospital-ships and retirement-ships absolutely depends on it - and I suspect Meliashae emphasised informal exchange arrangements because, no offence dear, ke is in a profession which tends to be quite enthusiastic about work-for-its-own-sake and has perhaps less dependency on scarce material inputs, although computers themselves of course do take up a considerable quantity of scarce material input - but they're just so obviously in demand - and generally by the people who are producing the relevant resources - that it's not an obvious difficulty.

Am I climbing the right mast here, or was something else the difficulty?"

Selno to Yompam

Selno nods. "What's Langhame's area of work, then?"

Ikkeh to Jeeee

Ikkeh nods and gets back to demonstrating the outline of his power plant! Jeeee won't have a lot of existing referents for it, but does Jeeee have any outstanding questions?

Kriv & Ect to Talaskai

"Adjusted service-hours? Adjusted service-hours doing what?" Kriv says, at the same time as Ect says "Betting in your culture is considered childish?"

Yompam and Byway Selno re Langhame

"Langhame's a hospital-ship - possibly the largest, it depends how you measure it! That means our main area of work is providing medical care, and because of our size we've also got a sizeable research-endeavour-division, which is the area I work in."

Tetratopia and Jupital

Hopefully Tetratopian Standard's uniformly distributed maximally distinct consonants and vowels help with the language barrier! Though they are designed to be uniformly distributed and maximally distinct in a hominid throat heard by hominid ears. Tetratopia has Bad computer-generated Kastakian, if that helps? 

(Tetratopia doesn't hear a request-for-clarification in that, alas.) Yep, sharing standard-techniques is important. Here are some culinary principles, check out all the standardized-food-products we've made on the curve defined by what we know about optimal nutrition! 

(Someone listening in the background flags "hey, they didn't mention cryonics", the hypothesis of conspicuously not mentioning things raised to their attention by how Tetratopia conspicuously didn't mention infotech. A couple of ???s back home on that matter, coming up with various theories as to why they'd consider their cryonics to be sensitive, if indeed they do; lots of guesses about how Tetratopia preserving a Kastakian could be an s-risk, or how they're like the last premodern societies and have a taboo on it for some horrible unreason. At about this time, they might notice that there isn't a cryonics protocol in the standard medical procedures given. Nothing yet clearly actionable.)

The delegate is having a bit of trouble distinguishing that description of career-matchmaking-clearancehouses from jobs! Very broad strokes - there is some amount of something that needs to be done, and some amount of something that gets done, and those have to be the same, and the least painful way to make them the same is the thing that needs to be done is converted to the thing plus sending the person who does it some amount of "number" ("money"), and this works-at-all because you can send money to get things done so having money is desirable, we have some theorems about it? Does this describe a career-matchmaking-clearancehouse? If so, how does that differ from career-matchmaking done outside there? (How does that differ from general trade done outside there?) If not, what do career-matchmaking-clearancehouses do extra? 

Prediction markets are like that except it's a contract that pays out some amount of money if a thing happens, so when many people buy and sell these contracts the price is the probability that the thing happens, and people can get lots of money by buying from or selling to people who assign less accurate probabilities, so traders are incentivised directly to get them right and there can't knowingly-be a better source of information because traders would match that, and then you can make decisions based on these probabilities.

Tetratopia does have more standardisation! It's not just interoperability, you get economies of scale and lots of optimisation-power for picking really good standardised things! 

Lak to Thessalia

"You have a place in society for -" he repeats back the Kastakian phonemes for 'extrinsic' "- reward, if I'm right that that's a synonym for 'money' in your language - to explicate my thinking, that's like having a place in your proverbial brain for electrical signals. The part of society that's not 'extrinsic' reward, what is it made of? What holds it together?"

Jeeee and Ikkeh re power plants

Jeeee has a lot of outstanding questions! Ke is especially trying to work out what kind of materials science is missing between the techniques-and-technologies ke knows and what's here, and also trying very hard to dig up some techniques-and-technologies that Kastakia can provide to Byway, perhaps in wind power or hull construction or novel plastic-like composites that use organic ingredients instead of (or as well as) oil-derived ones?

Talaskai and Kriv/Ect Byway on Gambling and Accounts

"Uh, yes, that's why I didn't want to use the word straight up? I mean, adults balance probabilities all the time in order to work out where to, like, send stuff or go to work, but that's kind of gambling with the universe, not with another person?

Adjusted-service-hours is what account balances are made of? Usually it's rotational work - I don't know if that's coming across properly, like, it's work people usually don't want to do for a very long time and often don't really want to do at all, at least not enough that they'd do it without a direct reward? Then whoever issues that account has prices - or tiers, some just do tiers - in adjusted-service-hours for various things, like having a berth with a window or a balcony, or first pick for limited food or activities or whatever?"

Thessalia and Lak Byway on Capitalism

"Yes, extrinsic reward is usually account balances, although it can also be specific scarce goods or services, that's all pretty much covered by 'money' in your language I think, at least the standardised goods that are usually used for exchange?

Most people work for one of the two other varieties of reward, though - intrinsic reward, or improving-the-world.

Intrinsic reward is where people really love what they do, and want to do more of it if they can possibly get the opportunity to do so? I think everyone who's here in the delegation, and the translators and techs that are supporting us, and even some of the security people, are working on that basis here. People motivated by intrinsic reward will actually pay for opportunities to do the work they want to do, if that's a thing that can be done?

Improving-the-world is where people want a specific thing to be true of the world - like, 'nobody goes hungry', or 'kids who want to leave their parents get a boat to leave on', or 'people can recover from this particular kind of cancer', or, well, 'no really dramatic bad things happen because there is suddenly a portal to meet aliens'? They don't necessarily just intrinsically enjoy the work they need to do to make that thing happen enough to do it for that reason alone, but they really want the thing to happen, so that's their source of motivation to do the work.

I'm not quite sure I'm getting what you mean by 'holds it together' - that's not generally considered a good quality, in a direct translation? Obviously it's good if things that need a lot of people to get them done can get enough people to do that - which is why we do use some extrinsic reward if it's really important - but it's incredibly easy to accidentally trap people in a situation they really hate if you give out too much extrinsic reward for things, because they'll take the position with the high extrinsic reward - especially if they can put that reward towards improving-the-world rather than just personal comfort - and feel like they can't give it up, because the cost of losing the extrinsic reward is too high?

We already get that sometimes with improving-the-world motivated people, who burn themselves out because they think the cost to the people they're trying to help will be so much worse than the cost to themselves - and they might be right in some cases, but it's not something that as a society we usually want to encourage, because it has a lot of bad second-order effects like discouraging people from improving-the-world, and burning out people who the trade-off wasn't worth it for."

Jupital and Tetratopia

Excellent set of food schemas, not 100% sure that will translate biologically but it will definitely help Kastakia know how to provide food products for Tetratopia, assuming Tetratopia requires additional food or enjoys novel food inputs?

Ah, so that's actually a description of how rotational work happens - sometimes a career-matchmaking-clearinghouse will recommend rotational work, after all some people do make a career out of things that other people will generally only do rotationally, but most of them are aimed at careers - long-term passion projects? The only work that generates explicit 'money' is rotational work - work that people don't generally want to do for very long, or at all, which is made more palatable by adding to an account balance with some entity that can get the person things they want later - usually that's better amenities in retirement, as that's pretty much the only generally applicable desire?

Things that need to be done that don't have quite as much of a mismatch in needs-to-be-done and people-want-to-do-this generally make up the difference with people who want to work on improving-the-world and are happy to do something that they wouldn't do for its own sake to do that. If nobody feels motivated to do that, and the work isn't essential enough to be rotational work, then it clearly didn't really need to be done?

A career-matchmaking-clearinghouse is usually focused on exposing people to opportunities that they might want to take up because they turn out to really like doing that thing, or that they might want to take up because they want to improve the world and this is a good way of doing it; in some ways rotational work recruitment is a specialised kind of career-matchmaking-clearinghouse, Jupital supposes, yes. Some of them just match people to opportunities they might not have thought of without consulting them, some of them actually have contacts with endeavour-groups who are willing to accept very-likely-short-term members in areas that would normally require training, and thus favour people who'd like to stay a bit longer, so people can try out things they might like but aren't sure about?

General trade - most things, you broadcast or ask some specific person or group for the things you need for something, and someone shows up and provides them, or tells you they're available at a location if you can go there to get them? If the things are particularly scarce or difficult, you might need to submit some kind of persuasive application, or promise the producers some scarce inputs that they need - sometimes this does get complicated enough to almost be 'money', the other kind of rotational work that shows up more and more nowadays is work in mining or manufacturing concerns - which is paid either with credit to an account balance with a retirement-ship that the endeavour-group supplies, or with credit towards getting a share of rare resources for a project later, which can be used in trade onwards? People tend to get twitchy and upset about it when this gets too complicated, though - when too many things are bundled together, it gets harder to make good decisions about them, and people get more anxious about the decisions?

Prediction markets... they, uh, sound like the kind of complicated trading exchange that makes most Kastakians get a terrible case of decision paralysis, or make bad decisions and then get upset because they think they should have made better decisions? Maybe when computers are better this can be more frictionless, like you could write a program to generate the numbers rather than having to look at them yourself? Even with that, Kastakians would probably prefer a version where there was just a published leaderboard, rather than extrinsic-reward riding on it, extrinsic-reward always messes with Kastakians' utility functions, which is why we're very careful with it?

Yes - it's incredibly important that people don't have to waste effort re-inventing the wheel, Jupital is so glad that Tetratopia understand this! Here, a couple of data-access terminals which can hopefully be used by non-Kastakians have finally been set up - Tetratopian techs can get the first go on them, here's how you access the techniques-and-technologies database on each of them, here's how you input your own technical information, these friendly technicians are on hand to help you find the right place in the enormous category tree. If the first thing they want to do is upgrade the terminals or provide a better computing system to base this exchange off, even better, but we do acknowledge that computers are a significant user of scarce material resources and don't expect that?

Ferek is still mostly hovering near Talaskai, but receives a report from one of kis people on the Byway/Imperium fallout, and sends kem to go and hiss/click at Thessalia (and less urgently the other Kastakian delegates talking to Byway people) in a military code that Ferek insisted the Kastakian delegates all learn and the translaters avoid teaching; the message content is approximately 'don't mention the violence'.

Consul Restem, Reren, and a bunch of other auxiliaries leave the main talking area and go to a spot closer to their portal, surrounded by the imposing looking drones carrying halberds, who put up some sort of screen or tent with thick padding or cloth that muffles sound. Drones occasionally enter and leave the tent.

Neksil and Jeffinar

"I apologize on behalf of the Consul – he had to attend to other matters. Your pen is beautiful, and we would love to learn about how to manufacture the roller ball mechanism. We care a lot about our writing utensils.

That is a good goal, but how did this trait of your species come out? Evolutionarily speaking. As a limiting case, an allele which increases the fitness of all others indiscriminately at the expense of all others will surely go extinct. Hm. It's probably group or kin selection, isn't it? But I don't know enough about your species to make hypotheses as to how it would have played out.

It used to be that the mindset you're talking about was much rarer in the Keeper population, but nowadays it's somewhat more common, with people wanting to benefit not just kin, but also non-kin who cannot reciprocate."

Drones emerge from the tent and go towards 'important-looking' people from the Tetratopian and Kastakian delegations, for the latter, specifically Yompam, Jeeee, Talaskai, Thessalia, and Ferek, offering to whisper a message into their ear if they accept, or alternatively offer them a piece of paper to read (which they will hold in their hands to show, rather than offering it simply).

The message will go: "We have received a report of one of ours talking to one of the Bywayeans, specifically Eyyeh, where our delegate Reren revealed many things about our species' biology and psychology as a show of good will. However, the other party stridently refused to reciprocate, preferring to conceal information about themselves, believing us to be hostile when we have made no aggressive actions. We believe that openness is conducive to good relations and trade, and came here with the assumption that other parties will act in good faith. 

We have also found that Byway has no central government, and so this was not a coordinated action and merely that of one individual. However, we have updated significantly upwards on the possibility that Bywayeans are people-who-treat-all-nonformal-gifts-as-free – that is to say, that they only consider formal pre-agreed arrangements. We are not very sure of the first part, but are more sure of the second part – it seems that all intraspecies interactions in Byway are mediated by formal arrangements. We also believe that Bywayeans trade in information, which explains why some members of their delegation are concealing things from each other. This is also the case for us, but not for information which we believe is 'common' in our civilization, which we will freely give out, since giving someone information does not cause you to stop being able to benefit from it, in the same way material goods would. However, we will only freely give it out if we are assured that the same norm is upheld on the other side, which the Bywayeans do not seem to have. Our civilization cares about deontological symmetry and are very willing to adopt prosocial norms so long as both parties agree to adhere to it.

We would advise other delegations to be careful about what information you give to Bywayeans outside of the context of a formal contract for information exchange, and also to, potentially, ask for collateral to ensure the contract is upheld. Since Byway has no central government, it cannot be assured that a state from their civilization would award damages to the injured person in the event of a breach of contract."

Hansil, who was paying attention when the last remna to talk to any Bywayean left Eyyeh, makes his way over to him.

What emotion creeps into Hansil's voice, is petulant impatience. "Did the one talking to you, tell you where they're all going?"

Eyyeh's voice sounds like heavy instrument-cords wound too tightly and off-key. "No, but based on what he did tell me, I hope it's far away from Byway, and fast, and for a long time."

Should Hansil be nervous about the possibility Eyyeh's right about the remna, or ticked off about the prospect Eyyeh cost him his survey results? He's not sure. "Why?"

"Their default ancestral equilibrium was fully-connected threat of theft. They aren't inherently strongly motivated to respect others' property. To keep them from constantly stealing everything off each others' backs such that no productive society is possible, their culture has evolved some kind of memetic structure called a 'government'. That's the other part of why they're so weird - their eusociality is another part, and I don't have a strong idea of how the absence of respect-for-property, the hermaphroditism, and the drone caste, are connected."

"Oh." Hansil says. He scrutinizes the remna conference. He can't eke out any meaning in the way the psychedelic fabrics and tentacles are milling about, other than that those big mean-looking faces don't look happy. (In theory, that should have literally zero bearing on whether they actually are happy, given that he's reading signals that evolved within the intraspecific signaling equilibria of an entirely alien species. In theory. In practice, the entire fabric of sanity has been shredded to patch scrap, and the aliens make human expressions.)

Hansil supposes he's glad in retrospect that Hansil didn't give Cinsal his true bid price for Linsal filling out the survey - but against an alien race of mutual thieves, that seems like it'd been probably a hollow victory. "What did you tell them?"

"That I proudly declined to be the final embarrassment of my species by immediately divulging reciprocal detail." Eyyeh side-glares Hansil. "Sir Hindsight me at the peril of your own self-belief."

"I'm not going to," says Hansil. He continues watching the remna conference. His genius is in natural philosophy, always has been. He might sorely regret losing the fantasy of late-night talks with brilliant remna scientists about the relative psychologies of their two species, but that dream was a distant impossibility all along anyway if the remna are as bad as Eyyeh says. The adversarial social game is not his melody, and he knows enough to respect Eyyeh's negotiating prowess. At least far enough to assume that Eyyeh hadn't made any mistakes that would be obvious to him. Probably. "We should warn everybody." Eyyeh nods. The two of them walk down the tables and communicate what's going on with the remna as efficiently as they can. Any nearby Kastakians hear them clearly. The other representatives nod in acknowledgement, their expressions revealing various trace amounts of horror, frustration, and anger at Eyyeh's imagined mishandling. Eyyeh keeps his chin up. Maybe Ikkeh could have done better in his place, but it wasn't Ikkeh Reren approached.

Selno to Yompam

Selno makes an expression of chagrin. "I really am sad - I have a co-cultist - co-diagrammatist specifically - who runs a very similar operation to Langhame's, and he'd be much better in my stead for direct trading with kem." He brightens. "But Langhame will get to meet him soon enough. How is the immunotechnology supply side parceled out in Kastakia? Ours is mostly siloed into biotech sellers at various levels of specialization at this point, segregated from medicine operations entirely. But there was a lot more overlap in medicine and biotech ventures a grossyear ago."

Yompam to Selno / Byway plus Interrupters

"Oh, good, you do have religions! I was kind of wondering but we all agreed to park proselytization for the first delegation because the risk of it going extremely wrong was too high; some people who follow particularly evangelism-focussed religions were not at all happy about that, they're a bit worried this might be our only chance, but personally I'm much more of a 'if God wants it done He'll find a way' kind of person..."

At about this point a drone shows up; Yompam agrees to the whisper but about two sentences in says "Oh no that is a long message, please let me read it instead."

Having scanned over the message, ke turns back to Selno, "I'm very sorry for the interruption, it didn't make much sense anyway. Immunotechnology - by which I'm assuming you mean vaccines and antivirals and so on - is often researched best in research-endeavour-divisions of hospital-ships, just because the cases come to us - sometimes an external endeavour-group will have a great idea, test in some lab and animal models and then show up to the hospital-ship to do the last steps, but usually that means we essentially just absorb them for the duration?

'Siloed' has some interesting implications if the translation has got it right - I am not really an expert on philosophy-of-exchange but do your biotech sellers really not share technologies-and-techniques? Obviously sometimes you're working on something and you're not sure enough of it yet to stake any of your reputation on it by publishing, but in a persistent fashion?"

And then a Kastakian with a taser and riot baton in kis belt stops by a moment to hiss and click something in Yompam's general direction, which ke waves off with an impatient "Yes, yes" trill.

The Kastakians in general respond to the interruptions thus:

Jeeee immediately asks for the paper from the drone, thanks them politely, and then goes straight back into the interrupted conversation; ke just nods and flicks kis tail at the Kastakian interruption, not even bothering to answer vocally; ke does pause briefly for the Byway message about the Renma, but looks at most a bit puzzled about it.

Talaskai takes the whispered message, starts bouncing with impatience about halfway through, but doesn't ask for it written; ke just waves the drone off with a wing when it's done. Ke gets the Kastakian message direct from Ferek and blatantly ignores kim in a way that is clearly a social snub if anyone is yet understanding Kastakian body language. Ke does listen to the Byway message and responds to it to Kriv / Ect: "I thought there was something off about them!" Ferek covers kis face briefly with kis wing in a cringe about how the Imperium probably heard that.

Thessalia apologises before taking the drone message - "Sorry, I'd like to take this briefly, a moment, please?" - and asks for it in writing; ke takes longer than the others reading it over more than once, then nods and thanks the drone politely as if it were a person. Ke nods seriously at the Kastakian messager and thanks kim too; a similar reaction is deployed to the Byway message, including looking appropriately shocked at the revelation.

Ferek nods at the drone, asks for the written message, scowls a bit at not being allowed to take it for further reference, reads it quickly but carefully and also twice to memorise it; ke is fairly abrupt in dismissing the drone but that appears to be kis general practice with kis own people too. Ke listens carefully to the Byway message but doesn't seem to be particularly moved by it; shortly thereafter, ke deputises two Kastakians who haven't been taking an active part in proceedings so far - Tavinter, who has been wandering around listening intently, to go and try to talk to Hansil and Eyyeh, and Junilla, here with the Remember To Eat Brigade, to offer the renma more snacks and possibly a quiet word.

Meliashae has thrown kiself into fussing over the terminals hastily repurposed for enabling information sharing, waves off the Kastakian messenger and only hears a little of what Byway are saying; from what ke hears, ke starts on a patch to make the contact-and-desires section on the authorship details form more prominent, so that any Byway individuals who want to use the terminals can feel more comfortable that they're going to get the appropriate quantity of credit for their work.

Junilla and the Imperium

Junilla bustles over to the least occupied-looking non-drone renma with a fresh basket of snacks. "I don't suppose your secret meeting would like some refreshments?" she asks brightly.

Tavinter and Hansil / Eyyeh Byway

As they come to the end of their announcement pass, Tavinter intercepts Hansil and Eyyeh in a relatively graceful fashion.

"I'm afraid we didn't think to bring a soundproof tent, but if you'd like to come over nearer our portal where some of our people are politely keeping a bit of a cordon, perhaps we can discuss this matter further?" ke offers.

The Imperium and Junilla

Junilla approaches a linguist, who says, "Sincere apologies, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to talk to you. I'm just a private citizen, and I'm not a Legislator or the Consul – I can't speak on behalf of the Imperium."

He will sign to one of his drones – Imperial sign language appears to involve movements of the tentacles as well as the arms and hands – which will leave, and return after a few minutes.

"I can speak, but only on behalf of myself." And only if he avoids things which have bad optics*, though he won't say that last part.

"I'm Jinam. I don't think they'll appreciate snacks – they're kind of uninterruptible right now. But I can transmit a message for you which they'll read after their meeting, if you want." He looks terribly abashed and embarrassed, in a way which suggests he wants to hide being embarrassed but is bad at concealing his emotions.

* Literally situation-whose-appearance-will-cause-people-to-pattern-match-and-have-an-instinctual-emotional-reaction-rather-than-considering-the-matter-more-deeply.

Junilla and the Imperium

"Oh, I don't want to worry anyone! Here, have a seaweed crisp, they've done analysis on these and made sure they're safe for renma." She holds out the basket very carefully, not making any sudden moves or getting in his face too much. "I don't suppose you can point me to anyone else who might be happier to have a little chat?"

The Imperium and Junilla

"No thank you, I don't feel like eating when I'm anxious. I don't think there's any office-holding people who are available – Restem, Reren, and Lisal are in the tent; Suksub and Cinsal are with the Tetratopians, and Neksil is with one of yours – Jeffinar, I believe. I suppose I can interrupt Neksil, if this would be helpful to you."

He will sigh, and grasp the nearest drone's forearm for a moment, before releasing it and emitting an even more tired sigh.

"It has been very easy to model your civilization and translate for you – the phonology is wildly different but the concepts are similar – but it has been terrible translating for the Bywayeans, since they seem to...think very differently from us. And also, they don't have a standardized or stable language, so we're not as sure about the correctness of our translations compared to Kastakia or Tetratopia. I'm one of the linguists contracted for this project – I don't think I would live down causing war to erupt because one of me or mine messed up".

His drone is going to place a stress ball in his palm which he will squeeze really hard repeatedly.

Junilla and the Imperium

"I'm so sorry to hear that! Would you like to try one of our stress toys? We have several varieties, here," ke reaches into a pocket of kis utility belt and pulls out a brightly coloured but tastefully coordinated koosh ball. "If you want to, take this with-no-expectation-of-reciprocation; I have plenty more where that came from!

It's strange that they haven't standardised their language, isn't it? I guess that's part of how they haven't really learned how to share. Anyway, don't let me continue to distress you, I'll go and hassle Neksil instead."

Ke waits for a moment to see if Jinam actually wants to engage further.

Jeffinar and the Imperium

"I'm sure the mechanism designs are in one of our techniques-and-technologies databases, I'm not sure whether we have exactly that one loaded here but we can find out for you," ke says, and nods at a technician Kastakian who catches kis eye, who then skips off in the direction of the terminals which are in the process of being set up.

"As for evolutionary pressures - that's really not my area? I think I read an article once about how the cliff birds that are likely to be our closest animal relatives, if you believe in that kind of thing, benefit as a species from their willingness to raise a clutch if the original adults didn't return, as food was quite abundant, so there wasn't much direct competition, but environmental dangers and individual frailty were still a big thing? That sounds like the kind of thing that would promote group selection, I guess."

Jeffinar is clearly uncomfortably skirting around a topic here.

The Imperium and Junilla

"Oh wow," Jinam says, taking the offered ball and squeezing it. He makes animated facial expressions. "What is it made of? Is it rubber? Or...I know that people have been experimenting with hydrocarbon polymers? Is that it? Thank you very much.

I know! We have regional dialects, and also languages that hearken back to before the Imperium was founded, and also languages that people make for fun and other purposes, but having everyone converge on a single language as a fallback which doesn't change much just...makes sense. It makes it easier for everyone."

Jinam will let Junilla go if she wants to go to Neksil now, pointing the way to him.

Neksil and Jeffinar

"Thank you, that will be extremely helpful. Likewise, we are very willing to release our standards and building practices to you, if you feel like having them.

Ah, that's fine, although if you could direct me to a person who knows more, I would appreciate it."

Neksil considers Jeffinar's words and frowns. Does that work? Granted, evolutionary biology isn't his specialty either. And what does ke mean by 'if you believe in that kind of thing'? What thing??? These questions will remain unspoken. 

Instead, Neksil simply thanks Jeffinar, since he's seeing Junilla approaching in a manner that suggests ke is about to initiate a conversation.

Junilla and the Imperium

"This one is seaweed-and-fish-glue, actually!" she chirps, happy to see the effect on the linguist. "There have been some made out of hydrocarbon polymers, but at the moment seaweed-and-fish-glue is still more readily available." She nods affirmingly at the idea that a single language just makes more sense, then gracefully takes her leave to go to Neksil.

"Hello there! I was just wondering if your fellows' secret meeting would like any snacks. I'm sure they have all kinds of important business to discuss and I wouldn't want them to be unfairly deprived of anything! Also," she lowers her voice a little, "I must admit I'm a bit concerned about the tensions that have sprung up with Byway, and unfortunately I left my own sound-proof tent in my other utility belt."

Neksil and Junilla

"I don't think they will, but thank you for offering."

He sighs, but in a much more reserved and controlled way than Jinam. 

"Yes, I am concerned too. I – oh, here's a message." A drone holds out a piece of paper for Neksil to read. He makes thoughtful noises. It takes several minutes, and after he motions for the drone to take the paper away, he thinks for several seconds before responding.

"So you don't have a central government either. It's...difficult...to make treaties and agreements with people individually rather than unified states. Not having a government means that there is no means by which to enforce an agreement – indeed, the Bywayeans seem to lack any concept of either coordination or force, which is baffling to us. Likewise, they also don't seem to have the concept of acting prosocially – of acting to benefit non-kin who cannot reciprocate – or of doing informal trade, or illegible trade based on favors. 

How would you propose we deal with your civilization? If you are not qualified to answer this question, or do not wish to, I am happy to wait for someone else to speak to us. How you want us to deal with you will inform our decisions regarding the Bywayeans, since it seems that your society is a middle ground between the two of us – you share many of the concepts which drive our society, but you do not have central government, like them.

We are willing to ignore one person's actions. Although they did not act prosocially, they have not aggressed against us – though this does make us much less willing to act prosocially towards them, and merely act antiantisocially, or function as though neutral, or perhaps in a state of cold war. 

We are also keen to receive advice and information from you regarding the Bywayeans so as for us to help model them better, and avoid...cultural and linguistic misunderstandings.

Something which did occur to me specifically is that the Bywayeans, lacking the concept of aggressive action entirely, instead...'transmute' that aggression into antisocial behavior with regard to information transfer, such as with one of them refusing to permit the others to view their presentation. I believe that both of our civilizations do not do this, and act prosocially with regard to information transfer."

Jeffinar and the Imperium

"We don't have a formal government, but that doesn't mean there's no way to enforce an agreement. That's kind of why you've got two Langhames in the room. It's not quite the case that no Kastakian can bear the thought of not having anywhere to go in retirement, but the holdouts are few and far between.

Not much gets enforced by this mechanism, mind, because the more it is used for, the more likely it is that people will defy it; more than anything else, Kastakians absolutely hate to feel trapped or coerced - but we're inclined to agree to cooperate in a purely voluntary fashion, so it very rarely comes up. Those who want to deviate from the few norms that we do set can just go sailing off over the horizon, but they rarely become a large enough faction to cause a problem for anyone else.

And essentially our entire society is based around acting prosocially - if we didn't do that so much, we'd need much more structure than we can currently get away with.

So I propose you deal with us as follows: present your case to anyone who identifies as a sensible-adult - here, that's definitely at least me, Jupital and Ferek - it's unlikely someone would mislead you about that. We can tell you if it's already broadly in line with consensus, something we think that could be handled and what kind of communication lag / resistance you might expect to face, or something that wouldn't be acceptable; if we can't come to a decision on a particular topic, we can find someone who can, or let you know how long it will take to fetch them - or do the research, I suppose, on a particularly difficult matter.

We do want to continue to attempt trade with Byway, as they have considerable prowess in medical matters which are obviously something we have great need of, assuming the biology is at all compatible. Possibly Meliashae - ke's over by the terminals, which I'm certainly hoping you'll be able to participate in information exchange on once they're properly set up - ke's been talking to them more and might be able to explain further what their take is. But I am a little concerned about appearing hostile to them, because of this.

As my first guess, though - they rely on their innate sense of fair exchange and ownership - as well as their general physical robustness - to make their lack of coordination work for them, much as we rely on our innate prosocial instincts to make our informal cooperation work for us."

Junilla and the Imperium

Junilla just cheerfully tidies and refills a few of the snack containers in the vicinity, and asks one of the technicians to see if Meliashae's got a moment.

Ikkeh to Jeeee . . . and Eyyeh

For materials science, to start, the Kastakians will mainly need stuff that can withstand very high pressures and especially temperatures - especially graphite. Do they have that? And, more as a by the by, how practiced are they at atom-splitting in general?

Wind power - Byway never got very into wind power, but there are some medium-sized off-the-grid applications where Ikkeh can see the Kastakian models having a very high return! Do the organic plastic-likes have advantages besides the easy obtainability of their materials?

Around this time, a grim Eyyeh and a nervous Hansil stop by to explain about the remna. Eyyeh does most of the talking, and afterward looks at Ikkeh with a flicker of something like he's expecting a reprimand, although it's so subtle that Ikkeh doubts Hansil perceives it, let alone Jeeee.

Ikkeh does indeed, to Eyyeh's eyes, look a little disappointed, although more - it seems to Eyyeh - in something only Ikkeh can see, than in the Eyyeh who is right in front of him. Eyyeh wants to want to die.

"If the situation is what it looks like to me," says Ikkeh (lightly, but not flippantly), "I think the remna probably acted very sensibly and even overly altruistically, according to their own perception of things." He pauses and Eyyeh waits for him to continue.

Ikkeh: "Why do even newly-fledged nine-year-olds own personal guns?"

Eyyeh: ". . . oh."

Eyyeh (dragging the words out of himself with all due effort): "Because if someone is completely incapable of physically defending himself against a crazy person who would steal his stuff by physically bodying him out of his territory, then - in real life nothing will happen because there aren't crazy people, we're in an equilibrium where you hear about a few crazy people like that a year, more if you're paying attention because, for example, you have to oversee the securing of a dozen mines. But - if being 'ready to defend yourself' wasn't part of the Code at all, if no one ever had the thought to maintain a personal-defense weapon or secure the perimeters of a dozen mines - then the first truly crazy person to perfect a functional primitive cannon could, in theory, plow everyone else out of their livelihoods and lives like hopscotch.

They - the remna - aren't categorically un-deal_with_able, we're 'in a default equilibrium of fully-connected threat of theft' too, personal guns are obvious infrastructural shims elevating us off it and should be glaring evidence - it's a matter of degree. In theory." Eyyeh's residual incredulity is an afterthought, and doesn't seem to be causally interacting with the degree to which he's reckoning with his fuckup at all.

Ikkeh: "Yeah."

Ikkeh: "Maybe the explicit threat-of-theft stuff should go closer to the big prominent Rights-to-Property stuff in the Code. As game theory slash topology of defense-of-shared objects. Such as codes." Because he's Ikkeh Aineh and he can just casually drop to-be-taken-seriously musings about the Code in the middle of a conversation about something else.

Ikkeh joins in Hansil and Eyyeh's recapitulation of the remna situation to Selno, and then Hansil and Eyyeh go back around to re-update everyone else, two out of five of whom grumble that they would have explained Eyyeh's error on his first pass if they'd thought he'd take it coming from them. He believes them.

When Ikkeh is back - "Sorry, Jeeee. Materials science?" He's watching the remna now, too, but assessingly, to try to get his own grasp on what's happening, and he knows he has so little scaffolding for that task that it can't use his full attentional bandwidth.

Kriv & Ect to Talaskai

Kriv: "Whoever issues that account? Like, okay, I'm thinking that would be like the head-of-corporation you're buying profit-shares with. Okay. But then, profit gets counted in units of milligrams-of-psychostimulants, because that's something concrete and immediate that everyone's preferences weight highly and which - you would in fact probably hit diminishing returns on, if you suddenly sold all your modern-denominated profit-shares and stuff for physical psychostimulants, but which, if all machines stopped working and all contracts suddenly collapsed, everyone would, in fact, to the maximum of his ability, hoard.

If I'm hearing you right, you - Kastakia - operates entirely off individual interpersonal contracts, without a common intermediate unit of value?"

(Ect is forcing his face to say 'politely interested' instead of 'blatantly skeptical'.)

Neksil and Jeffinar

"Likewise. We also dislike the feeling of being trapped, but for us, people aren't entitled to feel trapped once they sign a contract binding them voluntarily – otherwise, they could have just chosen not to. Still, circumstances and desires change, which is why most contracts feature at least one of: a set time when the contract expires and can be renegotiated, or escape clauses that can be invoked – these escape clauses are usually costly but not impossibly costly.

This is the same for us too: people who do not wish to live under Imperial rule renounce their citizenship and live on terra nullius, which is land that is specifically designated as outside the Imperium's borders.

Our legal code is based only on acting antiantisocially. Criminal law prevents people from taking aggressive action against each other, and civil law prevents people from committing fraud – we do not oblige people to help each other. Still, acting prosocially is usually considered beautiful and something to be admired and encouraged, but this is always only an encouragement, never an obligation.

There are debates on what is considered to be aggressive action, but things which are centrally aggressive are those which either cause significant bodily harm to the person, significant harm to their property, alienating them from their property or hindering their free movement – assault, rape, theft, kidnapping, and vandalism are examples of what is considered centrally aggressive.

We do not prosecute lying per se, but we do prosecute lying if people lie having contracted to tell the truth. Let me explain: If X and Y make an agreement and X breaches it, Y cannot prosecute. However, if X and Y make an agreement and have it be notarized by us, then Y can, because by having it notarized, they are claiming that they are both telling the truth, and are willing to be bound by it, and to be tried by an Imperial civil court if they breach it. The notarization also makes it so that the agreement is legible to the state – our citizens do not like us meddling in every aspect of their lives, and nor do we want to: it would be extremely expensive. It is also possible to have the agreement be notarized by us, but instead have a private arbitrator's judgment be what is legally binding, and not the Imperial civil court, if you don't trust the government to handle your case.

Similarly, if X sells something to Y, and it's defective, then Y cannot prosecute. However, if X sells something to Y with the seal of the Imperial Standards Authority – having registered their product with them – and it's defective or makes inaccurate or misleading claims, then Y can prosecute, because by displaying that seal, X bound themselves similarly to the previous example. It is illegal to display Imperial seals of any sort without prior authorization: we take this very seriously, since we need to have our citizens be assured that when they see someone displaying our insignia, that they are actually dealing with us.

This is one case where we will prosecute someone for lying without them previously agreeing not to lie – this is tried under criminal court. The other definition of criminal and civil court for us is that criminal laws are those who you agree to be bound to simply by being an Imperial citizen, whereas civil laws you agree to be bound to voluntarily. This is why tax evasion and forgery of Imperial seals are criminal offenses.

The two basic prerequisites we would want to set up are mechanisms to prevent aggressive action for our people who are interacting with yours, and, in the case where such does happen, ways for damages to be awarded, and the aggressor punished or neutralized in some way, and a mechanism to prevent fraud when our people interact with your businesses or sellers, and likewise, ways for damages to be awarded, and the fraudster punished in some way. Obviously you do not need to pay tax to us – you are not citizens – but we would be very upset if a Kastakian started forging our seals and this was not stopped immediately. Merely adopting our aesthetic is not criminal; it has to be the seals themselves – we will arrange for pictures of them to be sent to you so you know what to look out for.

We are amenable to the possibility of having a third party arbitrate disputes between our states specifically, although we would want to know more about the other two civilizations before agreeing to this.

In this case, Consul Restem – he has final say on treaties with foreign states – will make a decree granting Kastakians similar rights as Imperial citizens on filing criminal and civil lawsuits – normally we do not permit non-citizens from filing lawsuits in our courts.

We will arrange for our current criminal and civil legal codes to be given to you – who do you think will most benefit from it? – and likewise case law from the three gross years."

Ikkeh and Lisal

Lisal will emerge from the tent, drones beside him – though unarmed – and approach Ikkeh. He kind of looks uninterruptible, and he would hate to be impolite by cutting off his conversation with Jeeee, but he'll have his drone write a message for him, which it will deposit on Ikkeh's table section.

Ikkeh,

We notice that you have blocked off your presentation from other members of your delegation, but are willing to talk about and show it to the other delegations. We also notice that while you clearly marked your presentation as being blocked off, it is clearly not a secure block – we believe that you had the capability and knowledge to construct a better block, such as by creating a soundproof and opaque structure with which to let in specific people only, but you did not do this.

We would like to hear your reasoning as to why you did this, and why you did this in this manner.

This information will be very useful for us in trying to correctly model your psychology and culture, and help us both in avoiding diplomatic accidents. Therefore, we implore you to be detailed, accurate, and truthful in your response, and to decline answering or point us to some other person if you cannot fulfill this.

I am willing to talk publicly or privately.

Lisal.

Lisal will wait far enough away for him to have difficulty hearing what Ikkeh and Jeeee are talking about, but close enough that passing a message would be easy. He will wait for either Ikkeh to send a message or talk to him.

Lak to Thessalia

Easy stuff first.

"The goods we use as money aren't standardized - I don't know how standardizing them would be possible? They're just what everyone naturally thinks of, when they ask themselves 'What should I use as money?', because they have high and basically non-diminishing immediate value to everyone, as-is with no improvement required, and they round off to 'light and nonperishable' for most peoples' purposes, most of the time."

Okay. Easy stuff over.

"So, um, just to make sure I understand you correctly, your society has a problem where if you try to use money every time you want to incentivize behavior, your would-be heroes become kind of - hypnotized, by the prospect of earning a lot of money and then paying other heroes to hero, instead of heroing like they want to, themselves? So that less actual heroing gets done?"

Do not jump to assumptions. Clarify first, then analyze. Maybe the reason none of this makes any sense is that you disastrously misunderstood kim.

Jeeee and Ikkeh re Materials Science

"Pressures, yes, temperatures, how high? We don't use graphite for that, but we do use it for lubricant properties, we don't produce all that much as it's mostly a mining byproduct? I think you can synthesise it starting with carborundum, but in high temperature applications we'd just use the carborundum...

Mostly the organic composites are good for their abundance, you can basically make a plastic that does everything they do, it's just the plastic is way more expensive. They're a bit easier to render back down and reshape once you're done with them, maybe, but maybe we just haven't found good disposal solutions for plastics yet.

We have theories about how you split the atom but haven't actually done it yet, or at least not that anyone successfully published - there have been a couple of attempts but they, uh, didn't go so well."

Talaskai and Kriv+Ect re Money

"Well, yeah, I guess? Like, people try to publish things about systems of value all the time, trying to compare different opportunities against each other, but - I think there just isn't a thing that everyone wants, for us, like these 'psychostimulants' are for you? Almost everyone wants a good retirement so those are what backs what accounting type stuff we do have, but even then, it's not everyone - it's just the people who don't really care are usually motivated to do useful stuff anyway, so it all kind of works out."

Jeffinar and the Imperium

"We've, uh, never found that saying that someone isn't entitled to something stops them wanting it, or acting out if they don't get it?

Almost nobody works to explicit binding contracts. Like, sometimes we still use them when we absolutely have to, like - supply contracts between endeavour-groups and the hospital, those have explicit terms and penalty clauses and so on, but those are between groups of people and it's really just to make sure that problems get brought up before they happen, rather than too late to do anything about them. Mostly everything is just about expectations - people who get expensive training are expected to stay and work with the people who provided it, and if key like things to be explicit those expectations will get written down for kem - but usually just the expectation is plenty, it would actually be more likely that key'd break the contract and run off just to see if key could, if there was an attempt at a binding contract?

If someone's acting antisocially - well, first, key'll end up isolated, especially with the modern world being more connected, reputation sticks to you. Particularly extreme behaviour, I guess, people will just - defend kemselves? It's really, vanishingly rare for more than one person to act antisocially at a time, so even a small adventuring boat can generally contain someone who's being a clear and present danger. It's not illegal to defend yourself or your property - if you don't trust someone's judgement about what constitutes defending themselves, you just don't get on keir boat?

Sometimes people do get desperate and we have outbreaks of something worse than that - the usual example is that an endeavour-group running some kind of large industrial process will attempt to coerce people to stay with them and work, because otherwise the whole thing might fall apart and waste all the work that's already gone into it. Or parents get too attached to their children and convince themselves it's in their interests to keep hold of them instead of letting them go. These days, these things are rare enough that people eventually spot it's happening and, well, converge on it and deal with the problem? Kastakians tend to back down once it's really obvious they're going to lose.

We don't really have any mechanism for prosecuting lying or failing to deliver other than saying bad things about kem in the data stream. Usually people just don't want to supply defective goods in the first place, and if they weave a pile of lies to get some resources or a work position - well, clearly they really wanted it, it's usually not a big deal?

It sounds like you want - something up to your standards that visitors can do to anyone who aggresses on them? And some way to enforce contracts and standards, in the case that our people pretend to sign up to them and then go back on that?

As long as you agree with us on self-defence, I don't think that will be a problem - we can make it widely known that anyone doing this set of fairly obvious aggressive actions towards a renma without very clear self defence grounds - that is, they did one of the set of actions first - should be handed over to renma authorities at the first opportunity, and you can do what you like with kem, although key'll probably kill kemselves if you try to imprison kem. I'm not sure what you expect in the way of damages - Kastakians don't tend to have all that much in the way of obligations to each other, so if the original assailant is dead, it's hard to know where to get those from - as long as they're not excessive, we can probably just set up a resource bank which will pay those off, though.

Contracts - we'll probably just make it clear that nobody should use the seals, it's not really the kind of thing people will seriously do just to be contrary, if some kids try it then it'll be fairly obvious and people will stop them? - are a bit more tricky. We can set a norm that if you do enter into a formal contract with renma, you ought to present yourself to the renma civil court and cooperate with them if you screw it up; we can do that forcibly enough that you won't have any major opposition in coming and hunting down the people who run away from it, but you will likely get a few people who completely fail in their obligations, get too upset about it to engage with it and try to wander off and ignore it, which we don't really have any resources available to pursue ourselves.

And you'll probably have more success getting people to agree to stated expectations rather than formal contracts, especially if they know formal contracts have that kind of threat attached."

Thessalia and Lak on Capitalism

"Oh, I see!

I think there's a fundamental difference here - there really isn't anything that, if you ask a bunch of Kastakians 'what should I use as money?', they would agree on at all? Like, adjusted-labour-hours accumulated with a retirement vessel is really the best we've got there, and it still doesn't appeal to everyone, it's just the most common answer that helpfully lines up with something people need extrinsic motivation to do enough of.

So, in order to use money we kind of have to abstract over a set of people's very different utility functions? You can get a unit of value agreed between endeavour-groups that have a particular set of trades they regularly need to do, but it only lasts as long as that whole thing is valid.

Some historical groups have tried to use a very abstract unit of value, that just accumulates numerically and then enough people decide that they want to have easier trade with the people using it that it's useful for things? That's when the psychological problems tend to start, though - people start to want to accumulate this unit because it has uncertain but likely high value, they never feel safe because they think they need to accumulate more of the unit to be safe - people start feeling they have to charge for things in the unit to accumulate enough of it for themselves... because it's an abstract unit rather than an actual thing, people never really feel like they have enough of it, you see.

Most of these experiments died out because nobody sufficiently incentivises childcare, others - well, this was mostly done back in the ages where it was harder to share technologies and techniques, and other people would generally not bother to share them with polities that were doing this because they were afraid they might get offered money, and then the money contagion would come for them as well? We're less superstitious now, I think, but there's still a general distrust of a unit of value that isn't backed by something specific, and as I mentioned, nobody can really agree on the something specific that ought to be used."

There's a loud rumbling sound, and a disorienting minute-long flash of magenta light.

After everyone recovers, the scientists brought by the delegations say that there's about ten hours left before the cave shifts again, so anything they want to agree to should be wrapped up before then.

Jeffinar and the Imperium

Jeffinar looks nervous and lowers his voice.

"I'm probably going to have to fight Jherek about this, but, what are the chances of getting - whatever your minimum breeding population is - of renma through in the next ten hours, in case this never happens again?

I can promise that I won't ask them through until I am sure of their immediate safety, and every person amongst them," he makes it clear he's talking about the controllers and not their drones, "will have their pick of everything they might ask for among us if there's less than, like, a couple hundred, just out of novelty value if nothing else.

If there's something else you'd need in return, I can escort some of your drones to our terminals and they can memorise as much as they like in the time remaining?"

Neksil and Jeffinar

"I...see. That is not how it works with us: people can have all the expectations they want, but unless your agreement cashes out in force somewhere, then it's powerless and people are likely to ignore it. Nowadays people care more about reputation and care more, terminally and inherently, about fair exchange, but in the past this was more of a problem, so we continue to have forceful binding agreements today. I suppose what we could do is simply to have the 'punishment' here be refraining from trading with that person or group of persons – that will suffice for many short-term agreements.

You do seem to have a...distributed social mechanism for ensuring that people don't renege. We are not as proactive as that – we tend not to care about what other people are doing unless it directly affects us."

Neksil's impassivity training isn't as good as Restem's, and he has to put a hand over his mouth to stop himself audibly gasping when Jeffinar talks about lying about qualifications.

"We'll have to figure out something regarding the defective goods thing, because few people will want to buy Kastakian products unless they know there was some mechanism to receive damages from the seller if they get defective goods, or goods making misleading or false claims.

Indeed: the two main things we want to manage are aggression and fraud. That's the core of the Imperium's job. These are also the two main things we want to have in order to begin trade.

Ah, yes, we have similar self-defense norms. That works fine with us, generally – the specifics can be hashed out once we send an ambassador to live on Kastakia full-time. The damages bank is an acceptable arrangement. Likewise, we will deport any Kastakians who would be prosecuted by an Imperial criminal court back to Kastakia, unless they commit suicide while in jail – the cave does not open at predictable intervals, so they may remain there for several dozen days.

This is acceptable to us – both the seal enforcement and the civil court enforcement. I should say that in the case of an Imperial reneging on his contract with a Kastakian, that the latter can also go to the civil court and sue the other – it's not one sided. Again, we can have an ambassador come over to discuss specifics, such as whether you would be willing to permit us to pursue people who reneged and which your state, or rather, society, did not have the capacity to pursue."

"Why do you ask? We'd rather not...rather not do anything which angers other people in your delegation." Ugh, factional politics! The Imperial government isn't categorically opposed to doing that, but Neksil doesn't know whether or not Jeffinar's faction would win out. So better to play it safe. Not that he's going to say that to kim.

"I can answer your question, but I don't have the authority to sign trade deals – I say 'acceptable to us', but I'll have to go to Restem and ask for his approval before any of these can go through. I have a good enough idea of what he'd go for, but it's not up to me, ultimately.

If you only want drone children, the answer is one keeper. One keeper can have as many drone children as they want, asexually. If you want Keeper children, then two Keepers. However, only those two will be able to breed with each other – you don't want the siblings to have children with each other because of inbreeding. I'm not sure what the minimum population of Keepers there would need to be to avoid that. Do you want to make an immigration treaty? We can have Kastakians live on Imperial waters and Imperials live on Kastakian land, since we fortuitously prefer different living environments."

Jeffinar and the Imperium

"If we want to make a general immigration treaty, I suspect I'm going to have to call Jherek over for kim to be suspicious at it," replies Jeffinar. "Uh, if your genetics are like ours then the population minimum for not having the worst inbreeding problems is around fifty if they're happy to engage in a specific breeding program, two hundred if they're going to just arrange families normally, but that seems like a big assumption; it might give you a dancing-space-size-estimate," (this is their equivalent of 'ballpark'), "though?"

It sounds like we're reasonably sure the cave will open again, but if you'd like to arrange for one of you to come through before it destabilises anyway, that sounds like it would make me feel better and not upset Jherek too much?

We might just want to set up shared testing facilities for the goods you particularly want? In practice, people will take a chance on it or they won't, and people who do take a chance on it will get more opportunity? As long as we can hire drones, and it sounds like we can come to an agreement on that based on trade in services to the Keeper... I expect Kastakians who want land-based goods badly enough will sign up to the contract liability - and if they renege on that after all the clear warnings, I don't expect you'll have any trouble from anyone about pursuing them."

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?"

Jupital and Tetratopia

"Rotational-work contribution depends on a lot of things - how interesting the provider can make the work, how personally aversive the worker finds it, how much the worker wants what's on offer from the provider.

Uh, if ke was being paid in fully-general money, which seems to be a thing that Byway use at least, ke absolutely would be likely to work until ke dropped? That's one of the reasons we don't use that kind of economics - extrinsic motivation is dangerous, it has to be carefully used only when it's really needed.

I think from what I've overheard we're unusually non-functional when ill - nobody else seems to have retirements as a standard thing that happens to people on a regular basis? Even things that aren't bad enough to go into full retirement often knock us out for, like, a couple of weeks and we have to set up in advance to have our friends take care of things.

Sharing technologies-and-techniques - we can avoid directly sharing your files with the rest of the delegation via this particular computer? I'm reluctant to say this because I'm worried it'll reduce your cooperation - and we really need satellites - but in the spirit of cooperation - I'm not sure how it will work once ambassadors come through, much less people who arrive for long term projects. We'll want to share the technologies-and-techniques widely amongst ourselves - we probably don't have the industrial base for these things, so we'll need to do that in order to get enough people working on it - and most people won't understand the idea of not sharing them with other people."

Ferek and the Imperium

"Greetings! I'm afraid you're going to have to catch me up on what we're talking about," says Ferek, as ke approaches Neksil. "I hear you want to talk about immigration policy?"

Jeffinar and the Imperium

Jeffinar is about to answer about childcare, but absolutely does not as ke notices Ferek coming closer. "That does sound like the kind of number somewhere like Langhame could train," ke does contribute.