Or maybe that's just what they want her to think.

(It’s not, actually, what they want her to think. That doesn’t mean it bears any particular resemblance to reality, but dath ilan would be giving themselves too much credit if they claimed to be able to optimize Abrogail Thrune’s thoughts like that already, and if they could they wouldn’t particularly be aiming for anything like that anyway.)

And, frankly, they have bigger problems. Like the, uh, magic. Or the people spontaneously appearing in the Basement of the World. Or the entity named ‘Asmodeus’ who apparently self-identifies as a malign superintelligence. And was simulating(??) the Law-Abiding Psychopath Basement researcher who invented dath ilan’s concept of an s-risk. Or the other spatialcontinuum which is apparently just full of malign superintelligences and s-risks-except-they’re-not-really-‘risks’-if-they’re-actually-happening.

There are three broad categories of hypothesis as to what the fuck:

One, superintelligence(s) doing inscrutable things. This might be the most plausible explanation for the appearance of magic; nothing Abrogail or Aspexia were actually observed to do was definitely not cleverly applied nanotech. It’s just that the space of utility functions implied by an entity capable of exhibiting that level of control over reality, and using it to do—that—has got to be pretty superheated small. Ok, yes, it’s a plausible alignment failure by a civilization that really liked incredibly dark fantasy-genre stories, but, uh, you can make up arguments for anything.

Two, someone is simulating them. Leaving aside absurd-hypotheticals about civilizations that really like incredibly dark fantasy-genre, one obvious reason someone might do this is to predict and thereby optimize over the real dath ilan. Both dath ilans really do not appreciate this, and have accordingly made arrangements that the simulated one should try to fuck up the simulation as much as possible. They’re certainly not going to give their simulators anything that could be used against dath ilan in base reality.

Three, something else entirely. There are a lot of subhypotheses in this category, but their center of probability mass is somewhere around ‘this is real, whatever that word actually means’. In that case Greater Reality, or at least their local region of it, has proven to be far darker than they had expected. They dare to hope that Golarion is not typical of universes, and mourn for all those worlds they will never reach if it is, but if Hell is real then they will end it, or die trying.

(But they’re going to be really sure it’s real first.)

Given their current probability distribution over these scenarios, then, they choose the path that maximizes expected utility across all of them.

Earlier

To be a Keeper is not to cease to be human, for all that, to those outside their order, they may sometimes seem to be some other species. It is to see yourself as human, in full detail, to see that machinery which makes you up for what it is, to know exactly what it means to be the handiwork of a blind idiot god, and then to go on being human anyway.

Some, in fact, do not. The truths of human psychology are statistically among the most disturbing revealed in early Keeper training; more failed Keeper-trainees who choose early cryo attribute their decision to this cause than any individual other.

Civilization regrets, of course, that it must tell its new Keepers so much of their own frailty, and mostly cannot tell them that it will not always be so. And therefore, though Civilization has decided against doing this in the general case, failed Keeper-trainees who choose early cryo on that particular account are told, before they retire, what awaits them in the Future.

And then they go into the cold, because renewed confidence in a glorious transhumanist future does not really make early cryo any less the solution to their problem.

Unless, of course, they’d like to help with that whole Future thing.

To be clear, Therril did not arrive in the Basement of the World by anything resembling this route. She decided she was going to work there when she was ten years old, having realized half a minute after she conceived the idea of running minds on a computer that this was obviously the most important thing in the world, and if there wasn’t a research project consuming at least 5% of dath ilan’s GDP about it, that just meant the Keepers didn’t want anyone to know that there was. For obvious reasons, now that she was thinking about it, obvious reasons that just made the project even more important.

But it was told to Therril, when she was a little bit older than that, that one ought not try to become a Keeper because they wished to be perfected; that Keepers were a little bit better than ordinary people at some things, but acutely aware of their imperfections in a thousand ways besides; that Keeping was a terrible burden and those who chose that path because they imagined it to be a privilege were statistically speaking terribly disappointed—

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

Do people actually believe this shit? “You definitely don’t want to join our cult that rules the planet; it’ll make you sad.” Children in Cheliax wouldn’t fall for that, and these people are supposed to be smart.

—this is, actually, the typical Keeper’s honest view of their institution. It’s just that Therril was not typical.

She answered her Confessor that, if she trusted his prediction of how she was going to update, she already had no choice but to feel exactly that sad, but if she was going to help fix any of the problems then she was going to need to know what they were. And her Confessor answered that the Law of Expected Evidence didn’t work like that, but he also switched his bet on the relevant secret prediction market to YES.

And so Therril was trained as a Keeper, and mostly wasn’t sad about any of it. She really doesn’t consider sadness a useful response to anything. Her only answer to the darkness of the void that surrounds humanity’s bright bubble is challenge accepted.

It comes at the cost of all her emotional responses being a bit muted, and Civilization would actually like to be somewhat less like that, so she doesn’t have twelve dozen genetic children like many people at her level of general intelligence. She does, however, have perhaps the most terrifying job in all of dath ilan, which is to be the last sane person in the Basement of the World should something happen.

(Something, uh, happened.)

Even a ninth-rank Keeper may baffle briefly at the sudden appearance of magic. The problem is not updating on an event of nigh-unmeasurably low probability; that she did instantly. The problem is that, once that update has occurred, it leaves all prior models of reality falsified and no single obvious posterior model in its place. In the minutes and hours after Abrogail Thrune’s appearance in the Basement, even a true superintelligence would plausibly have had no idea what was going on.

One person witnessing the anomaly would have been an interesting psychiatric case. Two people witnessing it would have been a much more interesting psychiatric case. Dozens of people and all of the Basement’s security cameras witnessing it falsely, without the involvement of a hostile superintelligence, does not actually violate Therril’s model of reality less than it having actually happened.

It’s clear, even in advance of actually generating them, that many possible explanations for the day’s events involve the action of alien superintelligences presumed hostile to Civilization. In a great many possible worlds—perhaps most worlds—they’ve already lost, and had already lost the moment the anomaly was detected; it makes sense, therefore, to focus further inquiry on those worlds where their actions have the greatest chance of making a difference, even if they’re objectively less likely.

She doesn’t spend very much thought on scenarios of the type that Basement researchers are often primed to worry about. An entity with the anomaly’s observed capabilities repurposing dath ilan’s atoms for something else would not in the typical case take long enough for anyone to notice it happening. Whatever power caused the anomaly, it appears to prefer that humans mostly continue existing (one unlucky Basement Security aside), which points toward it being the work of some approximately-humane civilization—

—such as their own. It’s supposed to be impossible for a unilateral-actor* to build an AGI on their own, but it’s already clear that restricting her search to that usually considered possible isn’t going to explain today’s events. Apparently the Basement has been granting limited access to classified computer tech to dubiously-aligned researchers outside its walls, because…people were afraid they were going to tell everyone about it otherwise?

What the superheated nuclear waste!!

Would someone please explain why they thought this was a good idea. Later. Right now she’s going to go to an isolated terminal just outside the Basement’s Faraday cage and enter a code known only to her and two other people in dath ilan, and a half-second later Civilization will have no working computers. This isn’t going to stop their adversary, given that they already appear to have Sufficiently Advanced nanotech (or something), but dath ilan also runs rather a lot of its essential processes on computers, and it should probably stop doing that for the forseeable future.

Then she picks up the emergency analog phone and calls the Chief Executive and the head of Default’s Security and recommends that someone locate the following people. Locate. Do not approach or attempt to detain them. They should be assumed to potentially at least have all the abilities exhibited by the recent anomaly. (Both of them are already recieving live updates on that situation.)

*Literal translation of the Baseline word often rendered as ‘supervillain’.

"A woman matching the description of your anomaly appeared out of nowhere in the Temple of the Light less than a half-minute ago," says Default Security. "We used immediate lethal force per instructions; we're starting cryo now. She seems human, even up close."

Things that can do what this person's been seen doing don't die to bullets.

They should burn the body. It's a tradeoff Civilization is willing to make, even if this is a person and not a mere tentacle of some alien superintelligence.

She mentions that consideration, but doesn't recommend it. If they do destroy it, they may have no opportunity to find out what it was.

"Keep me apprised," she says. "Therril out."

Things keep happening!

A few hours later, Athpechya, who had been in critical-but-stable condition in the Basement's infirmary, suddenly wakes up, fails her mental integrity check, and then murders the Keeper giving her the check and several medtechs with various unexplained abilities before vanishing.

At the same instant (though the two places aren't in real-time communication and won't verify the timing until later) she spontaneously appears in the secure cryo facility in Default where the first anomaly's body is awaiting transfer to long-term storage. Right next to said body, in fact. She opens the cryo pod, does something including a strange gesture, an incomprehensible word, and the spontaneous combustion of what appears to be a small Element-6 crystal, and then the first anomaly is alive again. They have a brief conversation in an unknown language, and then the first anomaly vanishes.

(Dath ilan's most critical facilities have analog security cameras, or at least analog backups. They've considered that they might have to burn all their computers, and didn't want to be completely crippled if they did.)

A few moments later Security arrives and shoots 'Athpechya' dead. It takes a lot to kill her, and they lose several people in the process, but she does eventually go down.

This time, they burn the body as soon as possible. Dath ilani don't generally make the same mistake twice.

Security is able to locate all the non-Basement personnel with access to Basement computer tech, except Finnar. He, his wife, and those of his children who live with them are nowhere to be found.

Aspexia Rugatonn finds herself in Hell, in the company of her soul's custodian, and delivers a top-urgent situation report to be forwarded to whomever is currently in charge of the Church of Asmodeus in Cheliax.

(This wouldn't have happened if they had just cryopreserved her.)

Finnar, of course, has nothing to do with any of this. He doesn't even realize he's a suspect, though he will once he has a chance to think about it.

He is, however, a chip designer as his main occupation, and he knows about the killswitch built into all of Civilization's computers because he's had to implement it in all of his designs. (All of his designs publicly known to exist, at least.) He was never explicitly told why it needed to exist, but it's obvious given his other knowledge, and so when all of his computers suddenly fail, he assumes the worst and begins moving to get his family to safety.

Finnar's house has a number of secret rooms and underground levels. This is entirely unremarkable for a wealthy dath ilani, but Finnar's house has twice the usual number: one set for showing off at parties (or, in his case, deflecting suspicion), and, below those, the places where he and his family keep their actual secrets. (Some of them, at least.) The house is built on a cliffside overlooking the ocean, and the very lowest level, below the water line, is where he keeps his submarine.

A secret submarine cave is also an unremarkable thing for someone like Finnar to have. It's not even a secret that Finnar owns a submarine; Security can easily learn this fact about him, and indeed, they would have been automatically alerted to it if their computers had been functioning. But, as it actually happens, by the time Security even arrives at his gate, he and those of his family who were at the house (Nerdel, Kurthim, and the twins) are already on board, deep beneath the ocean, headed for their compound on the polar continent, which unlike his sub-basements or submarine cave is actually secret and would be rather difficult to find even for someone who knew to look for it. The rest of the children know the contingency plan for if the computers melt, and will meet them there as soon as it's safe to do so.

Khemeth swears to Security that he's confident his father had nothing to do with this, and that his father most likely headed to his secret compound because he thought the world was ending. (Is the world ending?)

No, he's not going to tell them where the secret compound is. He swore not to, and he takes his oaths to his family even more seriously than his oaths to Civilization.

Meanwhile in the Basement, Athpechya is back! Again! Or at least someone knowing her authorization codes has arrived in an isolation cell without having appeared to enter, locked the door, and sent a message (in a special low-bandwidth code intended to subvert talk-control-like optimization) that she's visited an alternate universe with multiple types of alternatephysics, a human-looking civilization, multiple hostile superintelligences, multiple putatively aligned superintelligences, and at least one gigantic flaming s-risk. She consents to immediate cryopreservation should it be deemed necessary, but she is currently the only one who can get back to the other world.

"We know she's compromised."

     "Or someone was trying to impersonate her and this is the real one. If what she's saying even might be true we can't just ignore it."

          (Due to the communications disruption and the fast pace of events, the Basement doesn't yet know that Aspexia was killed in Default.)

"That's the world's most obvious unbounded-utility-mugging."

     "Is the probability really that low, though? It fits everything we've seen, better than—what, that there's a hostile superintelligence around but for some reason we're still alive?"

          "If a supervillain somehow beat us to AGI, they'd want to destroy the Basement, right, but they probably wouldn't want to kill everyone here."

"How sure are we it wasn't Athpechya?"

"Sure enough to talk to her, at least."

(Athpechya may be a Law-Abiding Sociopath, but the operative word there is 'law-abiding'; she's far more legibly trustworthy than some people who have for some reason been given access to Basement technology. Besides, she's leaning away from the whole 'supervillain' theory anyway; it's looking like their adversary's capabilities include some form of teleportation, which just isn't something nanotech can do.)

The wall of the isolation cell has a basic two-way teletype built into it to allow the occupant to communicate with the outside world without exposing anyone to any of the more direct forms of talk-control, which so far as anyone in dath ilan knows require the auditory medium. To guard against merely persuasive arguments, the outer screen displays in an alternative alphabet only taught to those “qualified” (insofar as any human can be) to talk to people who might be in need of this box. It’s a primitive code, of the sort that can be implemeted without requiring significant computing power, and it wouldn’t stop a smart dath ilani trying to break it, but half the point is that a smart dath ilani isn’t trying to break it. They’re trying not to look at the screen at all.

But someone has to.

Therril proceeds with the mental integrity check. Athpechya passes this time, which is hopeful although not decisive—basically every class of adversary Therril actually worries about can trivially beat their useless integrity checks, but earlier events suggest they’re currently dealing with one that can’t.

Then she writes:

ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON THE ANOMALY ATTEMPTED TO HOLD HOSTAGE EARLIER?

I AM NOT.

THE ANOMALY'S NAME IS ABROGAIL THRUNE; THE PERSON WHO LOOKS LIKE ME IS ASPEXIA RUGATONN. THEY ARE BOTH AGENTS OF A HOSTILE SUPERINTELLIGENCE CALLED ASMODEUS - THEY DIRECTLY ADMIT THIS, INCLUDING THE HOSTILE PART.

And she proceeds to tell the full story of her time in Golarion.

aaaaaaAAAAAHHH?

'Internal screaming' is mostly not in her mental action-space, but, that said, her confusion now is of a less accustomed and less welcome sort than that before. It is one thing to have many hypotheses and insufficient evidence to distinguish them; everyone actually exists in that state all the time, or else is wrong, for all that any bounded reasoner must collapse their probability distributions to certainty along all but the most important dimensions to have a hope of comprehending any structure so vast as Reality. She tracks less than some beings that might be hypothesized to exist, but more than almost any other person in dath ilan; the possibility of an attack on the Basement using capabilities totally unknown to Civlization was not even near the edge of her mental possibility-space, although predicting the details of such an attack was somebody else's job. Relative to the expectations of an observer from some other place that holds the methods of rationality in less reverence, dath ilan was actually surprisingly prepared for Abrogail Thrune.

They are not, in the same sense, prepared for Golarion.

Therril's confusion now is of the other kind: plenty of evidence but no hypothesis consistent with it all. In the Basement they call this 'unrealizability', and it causes all the decision-making processes taught to dath ilani children, including basic probability theory itself, to halt and catch fire.

In the Basement, of course, they mean to build an agent that doesn't have this problem, and also know math not taught to children, so Therril only pauses for a moment while she engages the more complete epistemology.

[Meta-note: math not taught to dath ilani children is not known to Earth at all, hence the lack of details, although in this specific case this is an interesting line of research.]

Even at a glance, the 'gods' of Golarion violate nearly all the theory dath ilan has developed about how highly intelligent entities ought to behave.

Most of that theory is secret, so a dath ilani encountering Golarion possessed only of public knowledge might not notice all of the ways in which it's inconsistent. But even outside the Basement it's known that one oughtn't be able to reliably predict the errors of someone much smarter than oneself, and Therril can without much effort think of half a dozen ways in which a world should not look like that, that's ruled by entities that with the sort of thinkoomph they'd need to manipulate reality on the level that Abrogail and Aspexia were seen to. (She has it from Athpechya that at least some magic comes from the gods, and it seems reasonably likely that all of it does, by more or less direct routes.)

Okay. It's conceivable that the gods of Golarion have some strange architecture that makes them superintelligent with respect to low-level reality manipulation, but mediocre at higher-level planning; it's the sort of thing that would be unlikely unless their creators were deliberately aiming for it, but it isn't impossible. Which hypothesis might actually also explain the strangeness of their utilityfunctions: despite being almost maximally disaligned with each other, and in many cases almost maximally disaligned with actual human values, the gods almost all seem to find humans/things-smaller-than-themselves relevant in a way that would be unexpected for a single not-deliberately-aligned superintelligence, and exponentially more so for several dozen of them. The gods of Golarion exhibit value-diversity as it might be imagined by a child who'd never spent ten seconds contemplating how small a region of thingspace humans and all they care about actually occupy.

But, perhaps, if Golarion's past light cone contained enough powerful agents that it wouldn't be so unlikely if a few happened to care about the experiences of smaller sentients, then those that did would naturally congregate on one of the few uneaten planets with evolved intelligent life, and recognize their mutual interest in keeping that planet uneaten, and perhaps agree to restrict their non-counterfactual conflicts to forms that wouldn't collaterally destroy the entire mortal population of Golarion—forms in which it might even superficially look like the actions of mortals were making a difference. Or perhaps all the gods of Golarion have a common creator with an even stranger utilityfunction than any of Its creations, and all the lower gods' apparent conflicts are actually just playing out some kind of script.

(Therril has never heard of 'Rovagug' or 'Pharasma' or 'Outer Gods'. It's just obvious if you understand decision theory.)

Even if the gods have agreed not to let their conflicts destroy Golarion, the same doesn't necessarily apply to dath ilan.

Too much of her infra-probability mass is still taken up by unknown unknowns to make anything resembling an expected utility calculation yet, but there are at least some plausible worlds now where what Athpechya has told her is true. What they really need now is more information, and either a logically consistent version of Golarion or clear evidence for all of this being fake will arise eventually.

That said, are there any worlds where immediate action by Civilization might have a large impact?

—Asmodeus can probably see dath ilan. That's not a certainty, but He's far more likely than any other power to have sent his agents here. And assuming that He can, copying people from dath ilan and instantiating them in Hell is well within the current expected range of His capabilities. In Golarion He's restricted by agreement only to do that to otherwise-dead 'Lawful Evil' people, but there's no reason to believe those agreements apply in dath ilan.

In the worst of these worlds He's already copied the entire population of dath ilan. But the fact that He bothers to capture already-existing people at all, instead of just creating His own, weakly suggests that either He can't do the latter (in which case He might not be able to trivially copy people either), or that He only values torturing people who would counterfactually exist, and possibly only those who are otherwise destroyed—because, right, there are hypothesized forms of personality-death that leave one's experiential thread unable to be resumed by rescue simulations elsewhere, and extended torture might be able to induce them.

It's still one hypothesis among many, but that is quite possibly the most horrifying utilityfunction a being could possibly have where the shit did this thing come from.

And Asmodeus sent human agents to dath ilan rather than act there directly, which suggests that His resolution and/or attentional capacity in their world is actually quite limited. It all adds up to a reasonably likely set of worlds in which Asmodeus hasn't yet started torturing the entire population of dath ilan, but will start doing that soon unless stopped.

Well, there's a god of that, if Civilization can trust Her.

HOW DOES ONE CONTACT IOMEDAE? she asks Athpechya.

MY UNDERSTANDING IS THAT GODS CAN BEST SEE THE MINDS OF MORTALS WHEN THEY ARE CLOSELY ALIGNED WITH AND/OR CURRENTLY CONTEMPLATING THEIR DOMAINS. I ASSUME THAT, AT LEAST WITH MYSELF AS HER CLERIC PRESENT, IOMEDAE HAS ENOUGH SIGHT ON DATH ILAN TO RECOGNIZE YOU DOING THAT. HOWEVER, FOR HER TO ANSWER WOULD CONSTITUTE AN ACTION IN DATH ILAN WHICH SHE IS CURRENTLY SWORN NOT TO TAKE.

UNDERSTOOD. I'LL HAVE SOMEONE SEE ABOUT LETTING YOU OUT OF THIS BOX. (The final decision, obviously, will be made by someone who has never interacted with the possibly-compromised Athpechya directly and has only read a transcript of the conversation as summarized through two third parties.)

She calls the Chief Executive and informs him that recent evidence is pointing away from the supervillain theory and towards First Contact, but there are certain matters that need to stay causally isolated to the Basement for now. For infohazardous reasons, Civilization should until further notice try extra hard to prevent True Deaths. (She would tell him more, except that she suspects that merely knowing about gods may improve their ability to read one's mind.)

Then she informs all relevant people of what she's about to do, goes to one of the other isolation cells (positioned throughout the Basement so as to minimize the expected travel time to the nearest one), turns on all the recording devices, and locks herself in.

Elsewhere

The True Resurrection completes, and Aspexia Rugatonn rises from the bier on which her body was remade, sizing up the woman who resurrected her.

There is now, in Cheliax, that intolerable situation where one god has two ninth-circle clerics alive on the same planet at the same time.

Asmodeus could, given the unusual circumstances, simply take back Subirachs' extra levels, and remain in compliance with all relevant agreements. However, this situation is also implicitly a contest for the leadership of His church in Golarion, and such contests, He has decreed, ought to be settled in an Asmodean manner.

"Fail your save," she says.

There never was a question of how this was going to end, was there.

She obeys.

Destruction.

She doesn't have time to make it hurt. Hell can do that for her.

Some time later, Aspexia Rugatonn, accompanied by Gorthoklek, enters the throne room of Cheliax, having summoned the chief nobles thereof to attend upon her there. She walks up to the throne and stands directly in front of it, not sitting, but positioned so that any who did wish to sit there would need first to move her from her spot.

"The queen lives, but may be presumed to have betrayed us, and the Crown of Infernal Majesty is lost," she says. "Which of you next sits upon her throne is of little concern to me; the leading candidates are all, in my opinion, equally unsuited for the job. However, Cheliax has, in the course of these events, encountered an emergency which it will not survive if it now engages in its usual method of choosing a ruler. In recognition of this, by this writ of Asmodeus' own will, I have been appointed regent of Cheliax until such time as the emergency has passed, and while it persists, any attempt to better your future position by any means other than loyal and competent service to your country and your god will be met with the severest of punishments, in this life and the next. Those who wish to argue with any of this may do so in Hell. Is this to all of you absolutely clear?"

So it's a Church coup, then.

You don't particularly argue with a ninth-circle cleric to her face about that, though, and you definitely don't argue with a pit fiend.

Everyone is absolutely silent.

"The Grand High Priestess has asked you a question," says Gorthoklek, holding up the writ for any who dare to inspect it.

"Yes," and "Clear, Your Highness," say a chorus of terrified voices.

Rather a lot of people would really desperately like to be literally anywhere else, possibly including some parts of Hell, right now.

And some time after that, Gorthoklek sits at the head of a table with Aspexia to one side and Contessa Lrilatha to the other, addressing an audience of Cheliax's most senior military officers.

"Our Lord saw somewhat of the world we have discovered—which has discovered us—during the Most High's time there, though His sight is ended with her death and return to Golarion," he says. "It is not a place which, by the ancient agreements between the gods, you ever ought to come into conflict with—but dath ilan, as this place calls itself, has no gods of which our Lord is aware."

(Yet. Asmodeus does know about the Basement, and His absolute first priority is to destroy dath ilan before it can create a scalable intelligence and point it at Him. He's spending quite an unsustainable amount of intervention-budget on it, actually.)

"Dath ilan is a fanatically Lawful Good civilization which will not hesitate to utterly destroy Cheliax when" (if) "it finds that it cannot take it from our Lord's grasp, and is quite capable of doing so. Their Intelligence, Wisdom, and mastery of Law exceed that of any unenhanced mortal in Golarion, and they have used that mastery to create weapons whose power no mortal caster short of the ninth circle could equal. But they were entirely ignorant of magic until today, and this will be our advantage. We intend to press it by invading very shortly, before they have the chance to learn much. Cheliax shall have the full support of Hell in this."

There are certain things Gorthoklek is carefully not saying, which are nonetheless obvious to someone with sufficiently enhanced Intelligence. To begin with, the reason Cheliax doesn't usually have the 'full support of Hell' is that that's insanely expensive for Hell. More than Cheliax is worth to Asmodeus, if His attention is spread as widely as the Church claims. For Hell to be behaving like this, they must themselves feel threatened by dath ilan, and Hell is prideful. If they're looking this panicked in front of their mortal slaves, they might actually lose.

Gorthoklek looks directly at the colonel having these thoughts, reaches across the table, and snaps his neck.

"Observe now the fate of that man's soul in Hell," he says, raising the image on the room's scrying mirror, "lest any of you also forget the consequences of betraying Asmodeus. Now, to begin with our agenda, there are certain truths known to Hell, which were not previously permitted to be told to you..."

dath ilan

He's three days' hike from Civilization when his satellite phone stops working. He knows little about electronics, but he can tell this isn't an ordinary failure; there's smoke coming from it, and he opens it up to find the chip partially melted.

It's not like he was going to use it anyway. But his father once warned him of a day when all the computers in dath ilan would fail at once, and though he was oathbound not to tell of why this might happen, he didn't have to explain that it would indicate something very bad. They have a contingency plan to execute if it happens, and though he doesn't know all the details, on account of some of them presumably touching on secrets of Civilization (ugh), he knows that he needs to meet up with the rest of his family as soon as possible.

Ugh. He kind of hates his family sometimes, and there's actually a lot about this situation that triggers his dislike, but he doesn't actually want to be anywhere else, if the world is ending.

He turns around and starts heading back the way he came.

Some time later, in the woods a few dozen meters ahead of him, an infohazardously attractive naked woman just...appears out of thin air.

"Um," he says. ('Tsi-imbi' is such a stupid phrase but it's not like he can really thing of anything better to say to this.)

When she notices him, she does—something—and clothes, which are for some reason incredibly doompunk, appear on her body as instantly and inexplicably as she did.

"You're the first person to see me and not declare himself insane, you know that?" she says, walking toward him.

"Civilization already thinks I'm insane," he says. "I'm not going to give them the pleasure of hearing me admit it.

"But, uh. What the ass."

"Do they really not have economicmagic here?" she asks. (This language. What the fuck does magic have to do with economics?)

This is really something that she ought to get explicit clarification on, although if they do but it isn't widespread, Random Guy in the Woods admittedly might not know about it.

(Detect Thoughts.)

"No?—well, only in fiction. Are you not from dath ilan? You look human." This is really incredibly bizarre. He'd assume the woman was the insane one, here, if he hadn't seen her appear from thin air.

(—if she really is an alien then maybe he should call someone qualified to deal with that—not that he can—)

"Hmm. I'm from a planet called Golarion. Lots of places we know of have humans but I'm not sure how you would have gotten here without economicmagic."

In dath ilani fiction economicmagic is a completely separate type of alternatephysics from faster-than-light travel but presumably real life doesn't follow dath ilani tropes.

"Is that how you got here?"

"Presumably. I didn't actually come here on purpose, but I must have accidentally landed somewhere I wasn't supposed to be because your government immediately started trying to kill me." (She gives no indication that she finds this unacceptable. Someone who somehow managed to teleport into the Imperial Palace past the Forbiddance would absolutely be Maledicted and killed on sight. Someone who did that in Osirion would probably also have very little chance of surviving it, even if they wouldn't be Maledicted.)

He's—not actually that surprised, that Civilization would murder innocent people to protect its secrets. It's not the sort of thing he actually wanted confirmation of, but.

"Ugh. And I suppose you're why they panicked and melted all the computers."

"I don't know what a 'computer' is. Is it related to building some kind of nonmagical version of a 'god'?" She's using the Taldane word.

"What the ass is a 'god'."

She explains this.

Oh.

Kalorm is rather neurodivergent for a dath ilani, but he still grew up there, and aside from his peculiar learning disability he's actually fairly smart. It's obvious, now, what his father couldn't tell him, what secret Civilization has been keeping that they'd kill to protect. The worst part is that he can't even argue with the moral logic of it.

"Yes. Yes, it is."

—and if they pressed the button to destroy all computers, they must have (falsely, but perhaps reasonably) concluded that someone who wasn't them had built an Artificial Intelligence of their own.

Specifically, his father. Because that's actually what he was trying to do, wasn't it—rightly not trusting that Civilization would create a being that would build the best Future for their family—

"I think my family is also wanted for something they didn't do right now," he says. "I need to warn them—"

This person appears to be Chaotic Good. That's—going to get incredibly annoying, eventually, but Chaotic Good people are also stunningly easy to manipulate. And his family, to whom he's loyal in spite of presumably enormous ideological differences, is part of a conspiracy to take over this planet by building their own god using 'computers', whatever those are.

They sound like useful allies, at least until she gets her bearings well enough to find the true center of power on dath ilan and strike at it.

"I could try a Sending?" she offers.

"How does that work?"

"It's a learnable-economicmagic-ability of the fifth topological-degree-of-complexity" okay it's objectively reasonable for their language to not have short words for magic stuff but this is still annoying "that sends a message of up to 25 words to a creature familiar to the caster—I'm not actually sure it would work, you typically have to have at least seen a person to get a Sending through to them." She starts the casting anyway; it takes ten minutes and she can always cancel it.

"What's it like to receive one, for someone who's never done that before? Are they authenticated?"

"Like hearing a voice that isn't coming from anywhere in particular. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'authenticated' but you can recognize the sender if you know them—that would be me, the 'spell' itself can't verify that the message would originally be coming from you, if that's what you're asking. In—where I'm from we would sometimes use passwords, random words that we'd add to the beginning or end of a message that it would be hard for someone else to guess. You'd have to have set that up in advance, though."

"Yeah, we've thought at all about establishing-trusted-communciations-over-an-untrusted-channel* but if it has to be in-band that's going to eat some of the apparently precious bandwidth. How the ass are 'words' a meaningful unit of—nevermind, conceptualmagic, right. Anyway, I'm trying to decide whom to send it to—my oldest brother is probably already looking for me but he'll turn you in. My father is the one I trust most not to do that but he's probably already at or on his way to our safe-place and if he leaves now he'll alert Governance to where it is. I suppose we could try one of my other siblings, or—

"How does your instantaneous travel thing work?"

*Three-syllable word in Baseline.

"Greater Teleport, seventh 'circle', instantly transports me and up to five other willing" or unwilling with insufficient Will saves but there's no reason to mention that "people to any point on the same planet that I can identify unambiguously. I can cast up to six seventh-'circle' 'spells' per day and have so far used two."

"Does it destroy the body and reconstruct it elsewhere or does it transport you through a higher-dimensional space with non-planar geometry such that distances are shorter than in our 3-space?" He does not really trust that the former thing is not 'death'.

"It transports you through the Ethereal Plane. I have no idea what the fuck you just said but between those two things it's probably the second one?"

"How 'unambigously' do you need to identify the destination?" Can she just...teleport into their secret base.

Yes, but only because he thought about it while she was reading his mind.

She doesn't say this.

"If it's a place you haven't been, either a picture, or an address, or a point on a map, or something like that. It can't be used to find secret places unless people are very bad at keeping secrets and it can't be used to test whether a place exists." All true, but, see above.

Okay. He should probably, like, think about this at all.

(Kalorm is Chaotic, but he's not actually that low-WIS, especially by the standards of a place that isn't dath ilan.)

The most likely possibility is probably still that he's hallucinating. Unfortunately, he doesn't even have a way to test this while out in the woods a hundred kilometers from the nearest settlement. He could—ask the woman to teleport him somewhere there are people—and then tsi-imbi, and if he never experiences leaving the woods, then it's probably because teleportation isn't real, and if he hallucinates the teleportation too—well, he doesn't actually think his brain can generate a convincing version of his father or any of his siblings. The most sensible thing to do is to teleport to Khemeth, but Khemeth will turn her over to Governance to be killed because he's the sort of person who—prioritizes avoiding tiny risks of massive downsides over real people who actually exist—

—how sure is he that there isn't, in fact, a massive downside risk here?

Dath ilani are pretty well primed to understand that even aliens who superficially look human may not actually share much or any of human values. Kalorm doesn't read much fiction, but even he gets that. Why is he failing to realize it here?

—because she's incredibly hot? No, he doesn't really think that's it. It's not that she isn't, mind, but that hasn't typically been something that unendorsedly influences his decisions, and she's not his type anyway. He's not one of those people who sees one attractive person and has their standards permanently ruined; a not-insignificant part of the reason he took to spending almost all of his time in the wilderness was so that he didn't have to deliberately make himself uglier to accommodate people like that.

—because she spun some story about being a fugitive from murderous Governance that she could have just made up? It's true that he has no evidence for this but her own word, but—the average dath ilani would hear that story and probably assume that Governance had good reason, and if they believed that the Keepers had approved the killing (almost certainly true here) they'd pull the trigger themselves, and he—doesn't want to be one of those people.

But maybe it's, like, worth figuring out why they might have wanted to kill her, even if this is objectively a horrible thing to do?

Obviously they're scared. He knows that he's not as scared as he should be; the possibilities surrounding scalable artificial intelligence are still unfolding in the background of his mind, and he sees, now, why the Keepers thought it worthwhile to utterly remake Civilization around the goal of just buying enough time to survive it, even if he doesn't necessarily agree. And if, as he suspects, this woman accidentally teleported into their top-secret AI research lab, then of course the people there would have been especially primed to believe they were being attacked by a hostile superintelligence, the sort of thing that probably couldn't be defeated at all but, if it could, would require them to utterly destroy anything that had come in contact with it with no thought for collateral damage in the worlds where it didn't even exist. He doesn't actually have any doubt that, if one were to shut up and multiply about it, the number at the bottom of the 'kill her' column would be larger.

Does that make it right? Obviously not. But he isn't debating whether or not to kill her, which he really doubts he could do anyway. What—is he debating? Whether to accept her freely offered help. What, exactly, are the possible downsides there?

Whatever gave her her powers is obviously throwing around a lot of computing power. If even a small fraction of that power is devoted to optimizing against dath ilan, they've already lost no matter what he does. Even in the worlds where it's just her, of approximately-human intelligence, but secretly evil—well, he doesn't want to make her privy to any secrets, but he wasn't going to do that anyway. She's the one with the magic powers. Her helping him doesn't grant her any new levers. It's just her helping him.

"One more question about Sending. Does it transmit actual sound, or just the impression of hearing that sound inserted into your brain?"

"Other people can't hear it."

The latter, then. Of course, without any understanding of the underlying phenomenon, one has to assume that something that can insert the sensation of hearing words into your brain can also be doing arbitrary other things to your brain. But—if she could in fact mind-control people from a distance, she would be doing that to the Chief Executive or the head Keeper already, and the problem with the teleportation plan is that all of his family's residences are going to be swarmed with Security, and teleporting into a public place is likely to be even worse on that front. They'd be safe at his family's secret base, but he's not taking her there.

"Do a Sending to my brother Khemeth. I'll dictate the wording. In the end he's the best person to contact about this, and I think I can persuade him not to turn you in—if I'm wrong, well, you can teleport."

(Even he's seen that episode of Science Maniac Verrez.)

(Abrogail has never heard of Science Maniac Verrez, but she does have something in common with the villain thereof who gave that advice.)

Some time later Khemeth gets a Sending:

"Watermelon interval redistribute. This is Kalorm speaking through a proxy. Requesting pickup at [coordinates]. Do not alert authorities. There are decision-theoretic considerations-too-complicated-to-be-explained-over-this-channel.*"

*A single word in Baseline.

Not very far away, Khemeth, currently flying a helicopter low over the trees while his sisters scan for any sign of Kalorm, suddenly startles.

"Tsi-imbi," he says. "I just experienced a female voice claiming to be a proxy for Kalorm and knowing his verification passwords, requesting pickup at [coordinates]."

     "I didn't experience it but given current circumstances I don't think that's actually much evidence of it not being real," says Mallor.

"That doesn't mean it's not a trap. If it can write to my brain it could also have read Kalorm's passwords out of there."

          "If it is Kalorm we can't just leave him," says Ranthir.

     "Obviously not, but we should send Exception Handling to the coordinates rather than going ourselves."

"The message said not to involve authorities for complicated decision-theoretic reasons."

          "Okay, that's a trap."

"So if I had to guess, I'd say Kalorm met the person actually responsible for whatever made the Keepers panic and melt all the computers, and now he doesn't want her to get arrested because she managed to convince him she did nothing wrong. She might even be telling the truth, but—Kalorm isn't even cleared to know about the risks we're dealing with here."

     "So should I call Exception Handling?"

"No. I don't actually want to incentivize Kalorm against telling me stuff—the alternative is that he'd still be out there with Omega-knows-what, and we'd have no idea about it. I suspect that's what he meant by complicated decision-theoretic reasons, even though that's not quite how decision theory works.

"What I'm going to do is I'm going to land at the nearest heliport, leave you two, and go get him myself, and if I'm not back in the expected amount of time, then you call Exception Handling."

And he does this.

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.

Unfortunately I'm not allowed to give you that.

Yep, whoever set up this system sure can die in a fire.

Warning that this conversation has now gone on long enough that it may start causing adverse effects soon. If you don't have anything more urgent than this, I'd like permission to retrieve otherwise-True-Dead people from dath ilan to Heaven, and create clerics here—once you have clerics you'll be able to resurrect people, if they'd rather not stay in Heaven.

"That's not my decision, mostly—only the Legislators can make decisions like that, and I think they'll want more independent sources of information before approving that. I can grant temporary authorization to retrieve the otherwise-True-Dead, unless the Legislators rescind it later, if you can swear to a few things about what Heaven is like and that people can choose to stop existing instead if they'd rather do that. And I'd also like you to swear to the truth and non-misleadingness of everything you said to Athpechya."

She can do that.

And the connection ends.

pop(location);

He lands, climbs out of the helicopter, and surveys the scene.

"Kalorm, you absolute dumbass*."

*With the tone marker indicating 'affectionate, but still genuinely quite irritated'.

"I fail to see how any of this is my fault."

"Did you consider," he says, in one of their father's conlangs that no one outside their family should understand, "that people with unknown mind-affecting powers might in fact be dangerous, and if Exception Handling wanted her it was for a reason?"

(Tongues: lol.)

"How the ass do you know that's even slightly what's going on."

"It's obvious if you understand decision theory."

He resists the urge to punch his brother in the face.

"They were going to kill her," he says, "because she landed by accident in the middle of their top-secret AI research lab that apparently no one was allowed to tell me about."

"Shit," says Khemeth, and then more intensely, "Shit!"

"If she landed there 'by accident' from her own perspective that is in fact worse than if she went there on purpose. Do you need me to explain why?"

"...no."

Sigh. "What...other alternatephysics-abilities does she have, to your knowledge?"

"She can teleport."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH

"I suppose," he says, "that at this point killing her would not even help, and we ought to just preserve-as-much-value-as-possible-in-those-worlds-where-we-aren't-already-completely-fucked*."

He thinks for a moment.

"Take the helicopter back to the heliport and pick up Mallor and Ranthir," he tells Kalorm, "then bring them back here. They're supposed to call Exception Handling if I'm not back in a certain amount of time, and I'm afraid this is going to take longer than that."

*A one-syllable word in Baseline.

He does this, only a little reluctantly.

He turns to the woman. Doesn't draw any of the obvious inferences from her appearance—if she's an alien, presumably this isn't her real appearance, and was optimized for—something, she's incredibly attractive according to his mental models of people who are attracted to women, which obviously you'd do if you could pick your appearance and were trying to optimize over whoever you were talking to—and the style of her clothing suggests something in the vicinity of 'supervillain', which—is meant to optimize over his family specifically? Lots of people would describe his father as a supervillain, especially if they knew what he was really up to, but he doesn't really go in for the whole aesthetic of it.

(Her clothes are distinctly low-quality, which is a small point against the theory that everything about her appearance was carefully optimized.)

—he's way too gay to be sexually attracted to her, but there's still something—magnetic—about her—he's going to assume this is mind control. He's not a Keeper and cannot just tell the effect to stop that, but he can try to correct for it.

"Welcome to dath ilan," he says to her in Baseline, which she apparently somehow speaks. "—you are in fact not from dath ilan? I'm Khemeth."

(He does in fact have the second-highest level of First Contact certification, and would have been one of a few thousand people paged if Civilization had correctly deduced that that was the thing happening, for all that he is not at all representing Civilization right now.)

—that's very nearly the name of the pharaoh of Osirion. Which fact probably wouldn't even rise to the level of her attention if she hadn't already met 'Athpechya', but this man does look a bit like the Ruby Prince, if one ignores the bright red hair.

Is this entire world just composed of absurd Lawful Good versions of people from Golarion???

At least this version of him presumably does not have magically enhanced Sense Motive, or a +6/+6/+6 headband, although it doesn't appear from reading people's INT scores that this planet needs that particular enhancement anyway.

"I am not. Abrogail Thrune, Chief Executive" she drops the 'hereditary' from the compound word that Tongues wants to use for 'Queen' in this language, Good people sometimes don't like hereditary monarchies "of Cheliax, in Golarion." On reflection it might not be the best possible idea to tell people she is/was the Queen of Cheliax, in case they do ever manage to contact Golarion and figure out what that means, but how are they going to do that without magic, and she does not actually want to test 'Khemeth's' Sense Motive. "Well, formerly. I don't expect I'll ever go back."

She had some sort of reaction to his—name? Almost like she recognized him, and was surprised by it, which—makes very little sense in combination with her supposedly being an alien. It's a point in favor of her lying about that, actually—his name isn't widely known but it has ever appeared in a newspaper.

(His innate social senses are of course parsing her as human, which she almost certainly isn't, but it's not as though he can turn his intuition off and it's still information in some narrow slice of worlds.)

"Is this your natural appearance?" he asks. He's not expecting her answer to be particularly informative—she'll probably say yes either way, and the worlds where that would be a lie are precisely the worlds where he doesn't expect to be able to tell that she's lying, but he asks anyway. At a certain level, the whole idea of having a conversation is premised on the other party's responses having some consistent relationship to their model of reality, even if he has to also mentally track the world where they don't.

She's claiming to be the Chief Executive of—some faction on her world? If his intuitions are valid, she's not lying about that.

"The clothes are an illusion because your government took mine, and I've had some—beauty treatments—done, but if you're asking whether I'm human, I am. I don't understand it either—there are humans on many planets in Golarion's vicinity, but to my knowledge we originated on Golarion and I'm not sure how you would have gotten here without economicmagic. Possibly your conceptualmagic-superintelligences are just uncreative."

—the presence of superintelligences isn't actually an update. If economicmagic and conceptualmagic existed without something superintelligent behind them, that would in fact be way weirder.

Still, aaaaaaaah.

Faster-than-light travel is if anything a positive update: if there's no causal speed limit, then anything that wanted to eat dath ilan would have done so a long time ago. He'll leave musing about further implications of that to the Keepers.

"Humans on dath ilan were not, to the best of our knowledge, created by any intelligence." Admittedly if they had that might be the sort of thing you screen history about. "Do you know if any of your world's—conceptualmagic-superintelligences—might be responsible for your appearance here, and if so, which?"

"I don't think it was any of the 'gods'." She's switched back to the Taldane word; it's much shorter than the Baseline compound. "Asmodeus has title to my information-theoretic-self and this isn't 'Hell'." She's going to use the Taldane word there, too; she's not sure what the long Baseline compound Tongues wanted her to use means but it's probably way too revealing about what Hell is actually like.

(There's an emotion of—relief, maybe?—attached to not finding herself in 'Hell'.)

People on her planet consider their information-theoretic-selves to have imaginary-ownership-tags pointing to specific superintelligences?!! Who have—though he's pretty much guessing here—some sort of attendant right to rescue-simulate them? And from the way she spoke of 'Hell' it's pretty clear that she is, in fact, glad to have not ended up there.

He is going to stop asking questions the answers to which are predictably going to make him insane and focus on persuading her to surrender quietly so that a Keeper can ask her those questions instead.

There's something he has to deal with, first, though.

"Are you currently using mind-affecting magic on me?" he asks.

"No."

"I am not, in fact, stupid."

Is he, though? Detect Anxieties.

WIS 24.

WHAT THE FUCK.

They don't even have headbands here.

She looks genuinely confused. "I mean, I'm probably the most Charismatic person on my planet, and that's magically enhanced, but that affects me, not you. If I were using magic to make you like me, it would feel like—"

Charm Person.

"—that."

—aaaaaaaah—

His mental model of a different Khemeth who is not Charmed asks her politely to PLEASE STOP THAT RIGHT NOW PLEASE.

Dispel Magic.

"You know, it's harder to Charm people who are Wiser but you're not, in fact, supposed to be able to notice the spell once it's already taken."