Griffith actively suppresses an instinct to say that he's broadly fine and everyone he knows of has off days, and just nods at the apology. Apparently aliens like leaf-vegetable chips? Hopefully they're better than the kale chips he remembers trying, at least with this mouth.

"The Fractious States is typical on Earth for prosecuting criminal law proactively, though historically your method was more common than it is on modern Earth. And I appreciate your understanding of my difficulties."

The leaf-vegetable chips will be crunchy, mildly salty and oily, and not bitter. 

Damin scoffs. 

"Oh come on. You're just going to let it go like that? This is why your drones don't obey you, Gifit – or rather, Griffith. Oh well. Do what you want – they're your drones.

Of course. I doubt I would have done much better, myself."

"My actions here are more in the direction you want than my reflexes! My reflexes can be modeled as thinking that I'm at a restaurant, and a person the restaurant employs is worried I'm going to make a complaint and try to get them fired due to an honest mistake that may not even have been on their part, so I should actively reassure them that I'm not upset and I'm not going to make a big fuss. I am not actually fully up-to-date on how Gifit handled this estate."

"What's 'firing'? I don't recognize that as a word in Standard Imperial. Oh, like...dismissing a contractor? Why would you want to hold back on complaining? I wouldn't. Of course you would want to dismiss contractors who weren't performing up to par.

I was friends with Gifit but I didn't really know the specifics. Nowadays, most people have a drone that acts as their secretary and helps them manage things. I believe Nam was the name of the drone Gifit had that did that. Have you talked to it? It can probably tell you what to do." 

"So! On Earth, the range of labor non-people can do is much more limited. So if you run an organization like a restaurant, you don't just need a skilled specialist for a temporary project like reworking your recipes or installing electrical systems or such, you need people who are willing to do tedious tasks that only take a few weeks to fully learn how to do, to ongoingly staff the restaurant. You probably don't want to pay them a lot of money, so you hire basically anyone who shows up and passes your screening questions. You probably don't even ask them if they use intoxicants while working because you can't afford to be picky. If you stop paying someone to staff your restaurant, I think it's probably because he's doing something egregious like theft, you've run low on funds, it makes you feel powerful, or it'll satisfy an angry customer. However, you can't actually afford to only have workers who never make mistakes! If you're running a high-end expensive restaurant, you can be pickier about workers, but when I go to a restaurant it's usually a cheap one. So if I demanded that a restaurant dismiss a worker who annoyed me by making a minor and reasonable mistake, this wouldn't actually improve the restaurant's performance because his replacement likely wouldn't do better, and it'd cause serious life disruptions to him. He'd likely have to find another source of income promptly to be able to afford to rent his current residence, which most people find unpleasant. So I and many other people consider it negative on the axis of stuff like general well-being and preference-satisfaction which Earth people talk about more than people here do to cause a worker to be dismissed over a mistake like that."

Damin eats the chips and makes satisfied expressions.

"Wow. Not having drones sucks. I hope Earth fixes itself. Not that that's relevant to us at this moment."

Dinner is ready!

There's steak, some sort of creamy pasta dish, and mango sorbet.

Damin smiles.

"Your drones clearly haven't been replaced by otherworldly visitors, because they remembered I like mango desserts. Alright. I forgive them for the late dinner now."

"Great! I remember liking some dessert of mango over sweetened sticky rice which was sometimes naturally purple, maybe that exists here or I can figure it out."

"When I was on Earth I was more concerned about the near-inevitable death of senescence problem than the unavailability of non-person labor in many fields, but I also was doing significantly better than the global and better than the local median in terms of personal income and wealth. I hope Earth fixes itself too. I was trying to help while I was there but there's not much to do here. I expect that if the Imperium develops a way to easily reach Earth, even though on Earth we thought there weren't any planets near us with atmospheric conditions and life like ours, they could trivially conquer Earth. I guess if you somehow end up giving advice on that please encourage people to not make a mess of it."

The mango sorbet will have very little acidity or tartness to it. It tastes like mango that has been magically stripped of sourness.

"Oh yeah. We have that here too – we put coconut milk on it.

I would be too, I bet. I couldn't imagine having a time limit on my lifespan.

I think we kind of grew out of the conquering phase, honestly. We would be more inclined to initiate trade with and immigration with Earth. That would probably put pressures on their governments and businesses to be better. We love having exit rights and choices. War is...wasteful, which is displeasing to us. Why fight when you can trade?

You're not really obligated to do anything. You can just farm. I suppose you could go into the medical industry if you really cared about making sure people don't die."

Damin seems to be enjoying the food.

"I can't rule out that the dish I remember involved coconut milk." And the current food is good.

"Regarding Earth: It would become extremely obvious to the Imperium that they wouldn't need to fight a war to conquer Earth, if it came to their attention. It has better weaponry, but you could say something like 'there was an election and it turns out we're the legitimate leaders of Earth, and if you oppose us we'll definitely make you regret it even if you think you're hard to deter' and people would believe you. Also, making trade and immigration agreements would likely be very frustrating to the Imperium. As it stands the Fractious States, which is among the largest and richest countries, tries to charge taxes on citizens who move to other countries and tightly restricts immigration, and most countries have a lot of convoluted individual restrictions on trade that vary based on product category, so you might conclude 'we can't reasonably trade with this government because it is insane' or such. Furthermore, drone-keeping potentially looks similar from an Earth-typical legal standpoint to forcing people to do labor, which is banned at least for non-criminals in most countries."

"Oh. Right." Damin looks abashed. "I forgot that like...your people don't understand lying. I'm like – I still haven't quite processed that fully, because of how unbelievably unstable that equilibrium is. I was thinking about like...military strategy and weapons technology."

Nom nom nom.

"Sigh.

Why would it forbid people from immigrating? Wouldn't immigrants pay tax? Our government officials are paid a percentage of both the revenue and profit of the government, so they're both incentivized to have as many taxpayers as possible and also to reduce government spending.

Well, see, the drone thing isn't as problematic as it might seem. You could totally give drones the same rights as people – it's just that they'll consent to everything their Controllers ask of them, and also give them all their property. It would work – we just don't do it because it's pointless."

"So! Some people want to reduce the rate of cultural drift, or have the polity they're in be composed of people more genetically or at least visually similar to them, or have less competition for jobs in their industry, and they care more about that than about the government getting tax income from immigrants. Furthermore, the Fractious States government offers various services to residents, which make immigration less obviously profitable. I think the Fractious States has good reasons for offering these services. For one, a lot of them are related to children. In a senescence-prone population, a functional society needs children to be produced regularly. Furthermore, without body-control, people can have children by accident. For reasons including these, the government runs programs for feeding children whose parents can't afford it, and running educational facilities for all children so that they have skills needed to participate in society, and such. So it's easy to get the impression that poorer immigrants would benefit from those programs more than they'd pay in taxes. When economists do studies, the studies suggest that immigration is good for the economy anyway, but there's various possible flaws in methodology that a study might have, and as mentioned, there are things people value which it's hard for economists to quantify."

"And I suppose giving drones legal rights could satisfy those legal requirements. People might be suspicious that you were privately threatening your drones, though. Which you apparently are. I suppose you could abstain or lie about it."

Damin sighs.

"Honestly, just hearing about your world makes me feel tired. I feel like asking more questions but I have the feeling that I will remain distinctly unsatisfied even after you explain.

Aside from introducing you to Xaber so you can talk chemistry with him, is there anything that I can do for you? So long as it's not costly, then it's a gift-with-no-expectation-of-repayment-not-even-with-the-expression-of-gratitude*. Otherwise, it will be a gift-with-expectation-of-repayment-with-future-favor-of-similar-value."

* Two syllable words in Standard Imperial.

"Accompany me through getting my bearings while you're here? I need to go over operations with Nam, look over the estate's finances so I can figure out what's available to spend on chemistry experiments, check if 'I've had a personality shift and prefer to be called Grifit for now' is a reasonable thing to say to people, check if there's anything Gifit particularly dispreferred that I should refrain from causing, and probably some other things I haven't realized yet. I have access to Gifit's memories but they're not as readily available to me as mine, they spring to mind when things related to them come up or when I go looking, but there's a lot of memories."

"I'll be happy to advise you on anything so long as I'm here – that's free. If you need me to stay longer than tomorrow noon, it will be a favor. You can contact me on the teletype network though. That's also free, but I might not respond immediately.

People do change personalities but usually not drastically. It's...rare but not unheard-of or highly weird for people to decide they want to suddenly refactor their lives or 'run away', so to speak. Socially speaking, you can just say you want to be called by a different name now, and they'll respect it. Usually. If you're sure about being called Grifit now, you should go to an Imperial notary in Kosfor and notarize and seal* an affidavit saying you want to change your name to something else. That's a formal document which businesses and institutions will accept. You'll have to pay one rupnu for the notary fee.

Xaber has a lot of money – he's an industrialist. If what you say seems promising, he might take you on as a consultant, make a partnership with you, or invest in you. Are you interested in starting a company to make money off of what you build? Or interested in just doing basic research?"

* [People use both signatures and personal seals/stamps to identify themselves, but the latter is considered to have higher weight. Gifit's seal is in his safe.]

"Your help is appreciated. I'll see whether I need to ask a favor of you, I guess."

"I like being called Grifith but the 'th' sound isn't standard here. I think I'll just say I prefer Grifith, or Grifit if one can't pronounce 'th', for now. I'll think about a legal name change later. Having more money seems nice but I don't know how much more work co-founding a company would be compared to just acting as a research consultant. And maybe if I'm lucky the stuff I remember about machine computers will be usable but not already-existing too, which isn't chemistry but would benefit from starting funds."

"You're welcome.

Yeah, some other languages have 'th', but not Standard Imperial. Co-founding a company is an order of magnitude more work, because you'll be expected to pool your drones together and train them and all that. That's why I haven't founded any and work by myself, hah.

Interesting. I'm not sure I have any friends specializing in machine computers. Currently, drone computers are better than machine computers, but machine computers seem like they'll scale better. If you successfully make a machine computer that surpasses a drone computer in some criterion – power consumption, speed, robustness against adverse conditions, versatility, or some other thing I can't think of – you'll be very rich."

"I'm used to being busier than the typical person here is used to being, I think? But I'm still inclined to try to get some kind of profit-sharing agreement that doesn't require that level of entanglement even if it means I get significantly less of the profit, if that's possible."

And he'll tell the nearest drone to send over Nam.

Damin laughs.

"Given that you don't have drones, I would think so. In that case, you'll probably prefer to ask Xaber to contract with you as an advisor, consultant, or researcher, and be paid in equity in his company rather than cash. That way, you won't be asked to pool drones. You'll receive an order of magnitude less money, but you said that was fine."

Nam will arrive. 

"Good evening, Controller. Good evening, Sir Damin," it says after bowing.

Good evening, Nam. "I am unfamiliar with operating this estate. Explain to me its workings." Please.

Acting like this is probably going to make Griffith's intuitive behaviors less appropriate for his home, isn't it.

"Yes, Controller. What aspects of the operation of this estate would you like this drone to describe? Or would you prefer a general overview?"

"I would prefer a general overview."