They can head inside, sure. It's not like there's anyone who isn't them or their drones around to eavesdrop, though.

"My experiences are thus: I was until yesterday an alien, of a casteless dioecious senescence-prone species incapable of lying, and then I through an unknown mechanism woke up in Gifit's body with some access to his memories. Associated with this is a language I don't remember generating including poetry within that language, detailed memories of alien biology as relevant to longevity research, and so on. Since you don't just believe things people say to you I'm not sure that I can produce adequate evidence to convince you of much."

Damin will sit down before hearing what Griffith has to say.

"...yeah. This is indeed not. And you speak...so differently from Gifit. What was your name in your alien world?

The hypothesis I'm working under is that you're being mildly inconsiderate and are in a very elaborate LARP*, which you failed to talk to me about. I know you used to go to one of the seasonal LARP groups."

* Three syllable word in Standard Imperial.

"Griffith Young. I could show you my writing in English and we could see if there's a path to test whether I just came up with a conlang or not? I went for stuff I recreationally memorized but I could translate some document out of Imperial Standard."

"Interesting. Some of those phonemes aren't in Imperial. It would be transliterated as 'Grifit Ian', or perhaps 'Grifix Iyn'.

I don't think there's a path? Many people make naturalistic conlangs.

Hm. Okay. So. My model of Gifit is that he's not going to pull a LARP on me without telling, and that this is really out of character for him. This makes me more inclined to believe you. On the other hand, your situation breaks very established laws of physics and I'll have to like, throw away my entire world view. Which I very well might need to do, mind you.

I'm...deciding to take what you say at face value, especially since like, the situation doesn't seem to me as dangerous enough that I'll have to put in more effort into verifying your claims. Your situation is functionally identical to if you underwent a simple drastic personality shift with added worldbuilding." He smiles.

"How's life in your new body, Griffith?"

"Well, I keep being surprised by things: The typical keeper here is a lot wealthier on non-technological-advancement dimensions than the typical person on Earth is, the lifestyle I can afford to lead here isn't available to most people there, but I also don't have a portable electronic computer capable of storing gigabytes of data and playing music. There's some philosophies which place positive or negative value on actions or character traits or worldstates on an axis that's common to track on Earth but doesn't get tracked much here. Apparently it's unseemly that I would prefer people not torture their cows out of concern for the cows, though my memories suggest animal agriculture conditions are adequate here and a sadist would much prefer to torture drones over animals, so my nonstandard preferences here might not affect my near-term actions much. There is an entire art form around counterfactual scenarios and I am pretty excited by this."

"Also, the body itself is unfamiliar to me, and I'm not sure how long it'll take me to fully adjust. I like not worrying about senescence and having a better sense of smell, but sometimes things feel too small or I expect to have hair, and in my past I was taking cross-sex hormones which I can't do here. I also enjoyed some dry and acidic foods, but I don't know if this body is capable of enjoying them, it's not species-typical. …it is really weird how familiar so much of the ecosystem here is, I'd have expected aliens to be a lot less similar to my species."

"I don't have many prompts to do things. In the past I was focused a lot on not dying, but now that seems a lot less likely, and it'd be normal for me to just hang around not doing things, but I'm not sure I endorse that. I have a few concerns about possible atmospheric composition problems we might have in the future, which I'd like to bring to the attention of whoever's appropriate, but I was never a chemist or a physicist and I know more names than full working models, I didn't get to bring a library."

"Ah, Earth is the name of your civilization? Or home planet? Wealthier in which respects?

Interesting! You must have way better mechanical and electrical engineering. Do you remember any schematics? If you do, you could probably make a lot of money.

Yeah...no one really tortures cows? Why would you want to do that. Torture drones instead – they have more satisfying pain responses. I would imagine that a culture...no...species which doesn't have the concept of lying wouldn't have fiction. I feel so sorry for you. I'm glad you'll be able to experience that now. Also, I'm wondering how exactly not being able to comprehend lying was a stable equilibrium for your species – it seems so fragile – but whatever.

So your previous species was senescent, and was also...sexually dimorphic? Is that right? Yes, many people enjoy dry and acidic foods – just not most of them. Probably if your personality changed your tastes also changed. 

Yes, our society is very peaceful now, and diseases are less of a thing now that we have better medicine. Not zero of a thing, though. And of course, accidents happen. I mean, if you just wanted to chill here and farm for the next gross years, that's fine. Many people do that their entire lives. That's kind of what I'm doing aside from my side therapy thing.

What do you mean by atmospheric composition problems. That sounds Concerning."

"Earth is my home planet. It contained multiple polities without a single planetary government, I'm from the Fractious States of America. I don't think I remember schematics but I have some remembered information that might be useful if someone else did a lot of work with it. People on Earth tortured animals mostly for non-sadistic reasons, they wanted to produce abundant meat even if it was more likely to be contaminated and the farms were extremely unaesthetic and the process created disease-risk externalities. And then sometimes people who were working in the industry would hurt an animal because it was nearby and they could get away with doing so and they were stressed. Yes, my species was sexually dimorphic."

"My atmospheric composition concerns are as follows: In addition to obvious pollutants produced by combustion of coal and oil and such, carbon dioxide is also released, and over the long term its accumulation can cause the atmosphere to retain more heat, altering the climate. Furthermore, there's a class of refrigerant chemical containing chlorine, fluorine, and carbon ­… I think that's what it was, 'chlorine' and 'carbon' start with the same letter in English and I mainly remember the chemical by acronym … and it can cause damage to ozone. Which you might think would be fine, because you probably don't want to breathe ozone, but actually there's a layer of it in the upper atmosphere reducing ultraviolet light exposure, and if it gets damaged such as by refrigerant leaks, then you can end up with excess UV light."

Damin laughs when Griffie says 'Fractious States of America'. 

"Okay, so your people can't lie, but can't they...omit things? Couldn't it just called itself the 'States of America'? I'm kind of amazed that a country would willingly call itself that. 

...I'm confused. Do your animals produce more meat under torture? If I whip a cow it's going to spend energy healing the wound rather than making more meat and milk. Which is why I don't. Do animals on Earth work differently?

Ahh, we've had coal and oil power for more than a gross years now, but I don't think we've noticed that. Then again, we've deliberately stopped building more coal and oil plants because the smoke is awful. We're relying on geothermal, wind, and hydropower, and are looking into nuclear fission and solar. We're kind of bottlenecked on energy and there's a political battle over making tradeoffs regarding coal and oil power and our energy needs – this has been alleviated somewhat by people figuring out how to filter the smoke that removes most of the bad stuff. Though really, if you want to talk chemistry, you should talk to Xaber.

I don't know what chemical you're referring to, but I am familiar with the ozone layer, yes. Who knew that Xaber's infodumps would actually be useful." He laughs again. 

"We're bad at omitting things. The capacity to do it is something I'm getting used to."

"If you put animals in highly cramped conditions, you can have more animals per unit land, and then if they harass each other due to the cramped conditions you can surgically modify them to be less capable of it and also just tolerate a lot of them harassing each other, and you can do selective breeding for accelerated growth at the cost of a near-certainty of injuries. So I guess the animals that are bred for unhealthy growth acceleration do produce more meat under bad conditions, sort of, but mostly it's more indirect than that."

"I probably want to talk to Xaber about chemistry. I know that photovoltaic panels are possible, and I've seen some and could try to sketch them, but I don't know how they work, and I know some stuff about productive fission plants but not a lot."

"I would not survive as someone from your world. I would die of embarrassment.

Interesting. I could see that happening for chickens, but not for cattle – part of the reason you want cattle is so that they can convert inedible grass into edible meat and milk. In your scenario you would have to spend a lot of labor cutting up grass and bringing it to them to eat, or feeding them actual food, which seems counterproductive. In any case, people don't like the idea of the animals that will be their food to live in perpetual dirtiness.

I can introduce you, if you want. Um...you can do what you want, but I wouldn't suggest opening with 'I'm from another world, actually' because he'll think you're crazy. I'll just say that you've developed a passion for chemistry and have been reading and thinking about some interesting things.

Xaber has talked to me about photovoltaics, but currently the best prototypes for solar power are heliostat towers where you use mirrors to focus rays to heat water, which then drives turbines. He would probably love any information you could give about fission plants."

"Cattle often get fed maize and soy, I think. I really doubt people were doing this without it being profitable to them, but the Fractious States had some archaic farm subsidies that affected the price off maize, and it didn't properly tax the farmers for the externalities they produced or make it easy to sue over them. A majority of people there prefer eating meat over eating soy and I expect there was less demand than here for price-optimized food that doesn't appeal to the senses at all, a lot of cheap food appealed to the senses at the cost of nutrition."

"Regarding fission: What do you think the state of the world would be like if some weapons technology existed which was feasible for large organizations such as governments to use to significant destructive effect? My information on nuclear fission suggests it's kind of entangled with that. It intuitively seems like a unified world government wouldn't have problems with such a thing being possible, as they could regulate it and not get into an arms race, but I'd like your opinion."

"Also, I can try not to open that way to Xaber, but I'm not sure how to explain things like 'I'm really sure that there exists a working photovoltaics design which would have these visual properties' without the relevant context. I suppose I could abstain. I also feel that if somehow Gifit gets back, being less than fully open about my status is doing him a disservice, but everyone I've talked to so far seems to just be assuming that it's fine for me to socialize with his friends and enjoy his farm and drones and such."

"Yeah, maize and soy are the things we would feed to ourselves or our drones. Your land must be really productive to be able to feed both your species and your cattle – you are omnivorous, yes? Ah, you probably use chemical fertilizer, no? Xaber discovered a new way of making that that's more efficient. He's still refining the process but it would be a very good thing for the state of our agriculture.

Ah, I'm not sure how your taxation scheme is back there, but here we just use land value tax. There were proposals for other types of tax, but land value tax is what we converged on as fulfilling many desiderata: being hard to evade, requiring less legibility to the state, being easy for people to measure and pay, etc.

Yes, we would want food to both be appealing and nutritious, though for drones you only care about the latter. Speaking of which, we should have dinner." He chuckles.

"You don't need to explain – you could bet money, or pay him to research it for you.

I'm fine with it because I can't really distinguish between 'Gifit was replaced by an otherworldly entity' and 'Gifit had a personality change and also was doing a bunch of extra reading' – he was one of my friends but we weren't that close. And even if the former was true, what could I do about it? It's not like I know of a mechanism to bring him back, and I'm not going to kill you or harm you over it – both because he might return, and because this seems totally accidental."

"It is accidental. I tried contacting the medical advice service Gifit was paying for about it, in case there was something time-sensitive they could do for him, but they didn't have any particular insight."

"Some people at home say land value tax would be better, but implementing it would effectively be similar to a government declaring ownership of all the land, which would not be well-received by large land owners and some other groups, and so it doesn't happen. There are income taxes, payroll taxes which are just income taxes but paid by the employer, sales taxes, property taxes which account for value of a house and not just the land it's on, and some others. Paying taxes is complicated and tedious in part because a vendor of tools to help with tax calculation lobbies for it to be that way and politics are a huge mess."

"We do use chemical fertilizer. Some people do use non-synthetic fertilizers at home but all the cheap food uses synthetics, we have a population of several billion. Though they eat less than people here. If I discuss chemical fertilizers in conversation with you without prenegotiating a profit-sharing agreement will you rush ahead of me to use the information I gave? Also, betting is an interesting idea, it's mostly a thing that happens among people who like risk for its own sake and a small community of people who think it's an intellectual tool worth exploring at home."

"Ah, but the government here does have ownership of all the land – the Imperator took over several gross years ago and occupied everything. People would revolt if income taxes were a thing. Likewise with sales taxes. That would require making your income sources and what you buy and sell legible to the government. Which is...triggering to our instincts regarding feeling exposed and vulnerable and out in the open.

What is lobbying?

Er, no, because I don't really have a chemical business? And would probably take a dozen years or more to get going – and I would not want to put in that much work. Probably do that with Xaber, though? You can make a partnership with him that will get you a portion of the profits, or contract with him to be a consultant.

Yes, betting is showing that you think something is actually true, in a way that gives you skin-in-the-game – you're incentivized to get it right, because otherwise you'll lose money. They call those prediction markets. They're way more popular now, now that we have better communications technology, but not everyone participates. There have been proposals to integrate it into government, but none have panned out yet.

As for weapons technology, well, the Imperium is really the only major polity here? I don't think the independent stateless people have the industrial capacity to build such a thing, if it's cutting-edge tech. Probably everyone would be really anxious for a while but then realize that killing each other is wasteful, and not do that. That's basically what the Imperator taught us – although he had to either kill or exile all the people who thought that killing was more important than non-wastefulness."

"So, in the Fractious States, people tend to notice that legislators have to make a lot of decisions such that they can't fully focus on giving their best judgement to every decision. So if an organization cares really strongly about a policy, they'll hire people to do stuff like offering the legislators expensive meals together where they talk about the organization's perspective on the policy, with the idea being that if the legislator is too tired to do a lot of original research or pay a lot of attention they'll be biased towards the organization's views, I think. Politics was never my focus."

"The weaponization capacity of fission would be pretty cutting-edge, yes. People sometimes act as though 'you could get some radioactive material and, without that much technology, use it to make a mess' is in the same reference class as 'you could get some radioactive material and, with a lot of technology, use it to make a very powerful bomb' but I don't think that's a reasonable classification scheme and I would expect that people already know things like 'if you dumped hazardous substances on other people's property you could cause problems for them'. It's not a very complicated concept."

"Prediction markets are mostly illegal in the Fractious States for convoluted reasons that you probably aren't interested in and won't be impressed by, I'm certainly not impressed."

"The memories of fertilizer that spring to mind are that you need to balance nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Ammonia … I think is a simplistic nitrogen molecule, possibly present in urine, can be used as an explosive in addition to a fertilizer, and there's something about synthesizing it under extreme pressure I think? And there's better phosphorus sources than bat guano, I think it gets mined at home, but in a context of abundant phosphorus people complain about phosphorus runoff causing algae overgrowth in lakes and such. I don't think I remember that much about potassium that's agriculture-relevant at least right now."

"Wow. America needs better legislators. But we also probably don't have the huge organizations you seem to be implying.

Mmhmm. It would be useful if like, aliens come, I guess. I don't know. I know a lot about politics: both my parents were politicians, but I know nothing about the military. Konrad would be interested.

...see, now you're tempting me to ask, but I'm also really hungry now. My drones are probably eating with your drones now, so I should eat with you. I'll have whatever you're having.

Yes, Xaber's process involves compressing gases together in extreme pressure to make ammonia. Nitrogen is the limiting factor in many cases, though."

"I don't think advanced weaponry is particularly useful, I just don't want to accidentally enable it if it'll be a giant disaster. I don't like giant disasters and at home there was a long while of two states threatening each other with very powerful weapons that would cause a lot of collateral damage, which didn't end up getting used but it feels like a matter of luck that they didn't."

"And yes. I tried to have the drones serve food on a schedule because I'm not reliable at remembering to eat food when I'm focused, but I'm starting to think I didn't really make my reasoning for scheduled food clear, because I'm not getting food-related prompts."

"Hm, did you ensure your drones received your message? It might be better if you told them directly, or punished them for not getting you your food on time. I certainly would have. Alternatively, you can send your drones to be trained by Konrad – yes, this is me shamelessly shilling my boyfriend's business.

I like to be surprised, and my drones already know which dishes and pairings I like, so I have them roll dice to see which food they'll prepare, without telling me beforehand."

Griffith looks awkward. He tells the nearest drone to get them some food likely to appeal to his and Damin's tastes promptly and get the rest of dinner started, and then turns back to Damin, still looking awkward.

"I should have explained the reasoning there better, yes. I'm not really used to being in a position of power over others like this. …I also am inclined against the use of punishment. I'm used to contexts in which non-token punishments for sincere mistakes are mostly considered useless unless you feel vengeful or such, which I don't, and given the nature of drones I'd expect basically any behavior they do which I dislike to be a sincere mistake. And at least for now I'll be surprised by the majority of the food and can only guess at what I like. My guess is Gifit didn't make obviously unreasonable training choices – he had the aesthetic preference that they stand around until dismissed, which is very annoying to me but that's not really a mistake on his part."

The drone will do that!

"Why so? Punishment is traditional and robust, even if it might be a little imprecise or heavy-handed. Drones which receive only minimal training or bad training might get into...ruts...where they're too stuck into habits and don't correct themselves even when you explicitly say to Stop Doing That. So, you punish them – it's operant conditioning. Drones will never be averse to you, of course, because you're their Controller, so you can punish them as much as you want, although you shouldn't do it too much, because otherwise they might become too averse to doing the old thing.

I could teach you hypnosis if you want to do that without punishment, but punishment is fun, so like, why would you want to do that? You can punish drones even if they haven't done anything wrong, of course."

"I have an ingrained flinch reaction about hurting others. It's common for Earth children to go through a phase of hurting people when they're frustrated, and then at least in the culture I grew up in they get lots of lectures on why this is dispreferable. There are children's books with titles like 'Hands Mostly Shouldn't Hit'. As an adult, if I hit someone whose behavior I disliked, including someone I'd hired, this would be illegal. Historically, sometimes people did legally get to do that, but also sometimes people got in legal trouble even for fully consensual cases. That's mostly tangential. I have ever gone to clubs where people did things like consensual recreational punishment but it wasn't that fun. Possibly due to the lack of fiction, really. But even when I went to those clubs I wasn't interested in hurting people? And drones apparently aren't people and mine would enthusiastically cooperate with whatever I wanted and Gifit probably has memories about how to inflict nondamaging pain, but still, I am very much not in the habit. Also, it seems like it might be a private thing. Also my intuitive idea for what to do if I'm annoyed at someone and don't have objections on the more-common-on-Earth-axis to doing whatever I feel like is to yell, which might be annoying for you to overhear. Also I'm used to applying more effort and resources to get lower-quality food with worse timing, so I'm not really upset here."

"Really? Why would they get in legal trouble if it's consensual – they could just choose not to file a lawsuit. Or seal and notarize a contract absolving the other party of liability.

Oh. Are you the sort of person who likes getting hit, then?

It's not private, per se. There may be screaming and fluids which you do not want to inflict on people, so functionally it's sort of private.

I feel sorry for you, and I'm glad you're going to get to eat better food now."

"Assault isn’t considered a civil wrong in the Fractious States and other similar jurisdictions, it’s considered a criminal wrong. It gets prosecuted sometimes between consenting parties because third parties in or influencing the government disapprove, often because it’s part of a subculture they’d like to disrupt. For instance, they could think violence for sexual gratification among people who have sex with people of their own sex is disgusting, that’s happened in recent history. I am the sort of person who likes getting hit, including conveniently in this context by others of the same sex, which is probably why I heard about this particular incident. A more well-known phenomenon is that lethal dueling was banned in many jurisdictions, because the associated culture shamed many people – well, male people – for not dueling, which lead to higher death rates than a lot of people preferred."

"I am also glad I'm going to get to eat better food but I feel bad about being a poor host and I clearly need to catch up on Gifit's memories of managing this estate more."

"It's also a criminal wrong here, but like, the person who got hit could just choose not to prosecute? Even if a third party tried to prosecute the case, the hit-person could simply write an affidavit saying 'Actually it was consensual and I liked it so the case has no basis' and then the case will be dismissed. Hm. Prediction: your government prosecutes criminal law proactively, and on its own. Ours doesn't. Someone has to bring forth the case.

Interesting! Lots of Keepers also like that, but much fewer than those who are purely sadistic. Alternatively, you could train a drone to do it for you, but training a drone to be dominant is rather difficult – you'd need a professional trainer for that.

Hahah. I forgive you. I imagine it would be hard to host someone after waking up in an alien body."

Conveniently, a drone arrives with a bowl of fried chips made of leaf vegetables, and kowtows, apologizing profusely for the delay in dinner.