Elsewhere (but still in dath ilan)

Therril has already been contemplating the domains of Iomedae from the moment she first heard about Hell, but now she needs to give Iomedae a chance to answer.

"I, Therril of dath ilan, the authorized representative of Civilization in such matters as this," she says aloud, mostly for the benefit of whoever might end up reviewing the black-box recording of this after she's been cryopreserved or worse, "hereby grant Iomedae of Golarion, whose domain is defeating Evil, permission to act in dath ilan in the following ways only—" followed by several paragraphs of carefully worded language which, in terms comprehensible by someone who hasn't trained most of her life to negotiate with things much smarter than her, allow Iomedae to answer her truthfully and non-misleadingly, and do nothing else.

There are many worlds in which this is completely useless—Athpechya's impression of having witnessed an Algorithmic oath does not actually mean that any such oath exists—but in most of those worlds, Iomedae (or whatever power is responsible for Her apparent existence) can already do whatever She wants in dath ilan anyway.

Wow. It's actually illegal to teach mortals of Golarion to do that.

This is Iomedae, says a female voice that doesn't seem to be coming from anywhere in particular. (The sound recording system in the room will not be picking anything up.) I must warn you, as you specified that our communication should have no unexpected or adverse effects, that, while I'm better at not doing this than those gods that were never human, extended conversation with gods can cause severe headaches. I'll warn you if this conversation goes on long enough that that seems likely to happen.

She repeats what she experienced hearing to the microphones.

"That risk is endorsed," she says.

"—were you, in fact, once human? How does that work?"

Yes. In Golarion there's an artifact called the Starstone, created by Aroden, who was god of humanity. If you touch it—well, mostly it kills you, but if you're someone the existing gods wouldn't—predictably destroy—it makes you a god.

"I think I'm more confused than I was before you gave that explanation. Backing up. What is a god, technically speaking? What—computing substrate—are you running on?"

I'm not allowed to explain that to anyone in Golarion or who might ever go there.

An unsurprising answer indicative of a broader situation, beyond just Hell, that they're going to have to do something about. "I won't commit to never visiting," she says, "but I can commit to not using the knowledge in any way that causally impacts Golarion, if I must."

The other gods are already mad at me for accepting oaths like that from mortals.

She does not retort that she is a Keeper out of dath ilan, and no mere mortal. She did not actually expect to meet a standard of legibility established by literal superintelligences.

(Therril is much less naïve than non-infohazard-cleared dath ilani about the expected intelligence and Lawfulness of evolved aliens who haven't reached the requisite tech level for transformative AI.)

"Pushing that to the conversational stack to possibly return to later.* Tell me more about the formerly-human gods."

*A two-syllable word in Baseline.

Aroden, who was an immortal economicmagic-user from the lost Golarian civilization of Azlant, raised the Starstone some 4700 years ago and then used it to ascend, becoming god of humanity. Since then three others have done the same: myself, Norgorber, who is god of crime, and Cayden Cailean, god of—parties and mind-altering substances.

Okay WHAT.

It's pretty clear that each answer she gets is just going to generate a large number of additional questions, and she needs to start prioritizing this depth-first search. The bizarre utilityfunctions of the existing ascended gods probably aren't important. The general mechanics of the Starstone are.

"Are those—approximately the values they had in their mortal lives?" she asks. "Coherent extrapolated volition is an unsolved problem in dath ilan, and Golarion is, if I'm not mistaken, a preindustrial society."

Ascension—exaggerates—those aspects of one's utilityfunction that are most distinct from the human median—because there are agreements governing how similar two gods' utilityfunctions can be, to prevent us from bypassing budget agreements by forking and such—but I'd say that I'm definitely the same person I was as a mortal, even if I'm also a lot more.

Aroden did put centuries of work into designing the Starstone. I don't know the technical details—I could learn them if I wanted but I couldn't tell you—but I am aware that it's a hard problem.

She is going to take just the briefest of moments to wonder at how this civilization that solved important parts of the alignment problem five thousand years before it ever heard of a computer still manages to be so batshit insane.

"Where is Aroden now?" she asks. She really wants to talk to him even if this is arguably not the most important thing to be doing right now.

Dead. A hundred years ago.

Of course he is.

(—when fades the last lit sun—)

She has only the faintest idea of what it must have been to be Aroden, but—to have been the only sane person in his world, for so long (or else one of very few, else that world would look very different), to live under the rule of hostile superintelligences and successfully take the fight to them—to strike a blow that mattered, and yet—

—not enough. She lets herself feel, for just a moment, the white-hot anger deserved by a world that could have a person like that in it, and kill him—it was the inhuman gods, of course, Iomedae doesn't even need to say that to make it the most likely hypothesis—

She wishes he could know that he's not going to be alone anymore.

(...yeah.)

—and then she puts all that away, because there are in fact time-sensitive problems at hand. They'll send a team to track down whatever remains of Aroden's notes, if the overall risk-benefit analysis favors visiting Golarion.

"Priority item," she says to Iomedae. "Is there any mechanism known to you by which Asmodeus might cause people from dath ilan to experience finding themselves in Hell?"

In brief: only people who are Truly Dead, as your world would say, and sort Lawful Evil. But I expect that He can get those. Do you want more explanation?

"Yes."

Gods are broadly enjoined from creating or copying people—this is by agreement, but it's an agreement that applies universally and not just to any particular place such as Golarion. Accordingly, people in reversible suspended animation or who are expected to be recoverable by mundane means or arcane magic do not go to an afterlife—it is, separately, possible to resurrect people from afterlives, but this is a divine spell, castable only with the implicit sanction of a god, and it destroys the petitioner—the copy of that person created in the relevant afterlife. So I expect that people in cryonic suspension will not experience going to an afterlife.

The agreement covering sorting applies by default only to Golarion and its environs. Beyond that, any god may claim a soul regardless of its alignment—but if that claim is disputed, the dispute will be resolved by the same rules which govern sorting in Golarion, and I intend to dispute any soul of your world which Asmodeus tries to claim. I do not expect to have much trouble winning. The people of your world are in general quite Good.

(...a faint note of pride...)

"What exactly are the rules that govern sorting?"

She explains the alignment system.

As I said before, your world's population leans quite strongly Lawful Good—more strongly Lawful than Good, but few people are in serious danger of going to Hell. It would not be impossible to preemptively cryopreserve all of them.

—abortion of a fetus that's been ensouled, which in Golarion happens at about twelve weeks of gestation, is Evil. I am entirely aware that this is ridiculous and that human children do not acquire qualia until somewhat after birth, but in Golarion, abortion nonetheless creates an infant petitioner who grows up in the Boneyard—which is not in fact a good place for children to grow up. I am hoping that, as this is not by default the case for abortions in dath ilan, the Evil of the act should not apply, but Hell will obviously argue the opposite, and they are very good at exploiting the exact words of agreements to benefit their purposes.

—I am additionally worried, though much less so, that some clever devil will successfully argue that cryopreservation is Evil. In Golarion, most methods of avoiding the death of the body are—typically because they have high costs in other human lives, but the relevant agreements do not necessarily specify this, and again, Hell is very good at arguing things to their benefit.

Okay. They can tell everyone to stop having abortions. Someone will have to think carefully about what reason they should give; if they just say it's infohazardous, people will probably assume, even if only unconsciously, it's because they discovered fetuses have qualia—people who aren't Keepers generally aren't very good at not doing that sort of thing—and that would be horrible for everyone who's already had an abortion, though the true explanation would be even more traumatizing.

Cryopreserving the entire population of the Last Resort, or everyone who reads Evil by Golarion's standards, if that's a thing they can determine before death, is something they could do, though it would be the hardest thing they've done since the history screen, and it's not even obviously the right move—preserved heads are probably easier for Asmodeus or one of his agents to destroy than living people, especially if they're concentrated in relatively few places.

She'll gladly die in a fire with anyone who thinks the work they've done to save people from True Death is evil, and she's pretty sure most of the population of dath ilan would agree.

"Can we just—have—the entire exact text of the sorting agreement?" she asks.