He vividly imagines gouging out their eyes or cutting out their tongue or carving insults into their flesh, or maybe they could be branded or disemboweled or boiled alive. He kind of misses being boiled alive at this point, at least in the sense that he'd probably be happier if that were happening instead of this. He vaguely hopes that someday in countless centuries he'll have another opportunity to escape and maybe it'll go better.

Atsinni gets a text before lunch and meets up with a friend in the food court. They get Panda Express and find a place not in earshot of anyone where they can talk a little more freely.

"Does yours think about offing herself all the time?"

"No, not anymore, but it took about a month. Sometimes she thinks about strangling her baby before it's big enough."

"Oh, I haven't had mine a month yet, maybe he'll be fine by then. At least he doesn't have a baby."

He wonders if someone that never has the chance to make any choices would definitely go to Heaven but, of course, he doesn't know.

Having another victim there but not in any shape to talk, both of them forced to only interact with their torturers, is not new to him even if the specifics are. He doesn't even bother wishing they could talk to each other. Obviously that's not the kind of thing that happens.

Someday after however many centuries it takes to escape this and the next thing and the next and the next, and to destroy Hell, it would be nice to burn all the Yeerks to death. After making sure they have a nice afterlife, maybe, if that's feasible. Because they don't seem to care at all that enslaving the baby might be a good thing to do, and the information he thinks they have mostly suggests it isn't.

"I'm trying to teach him to meditate but it's not really sticking."

"Well, what've you tried?"

"Read a book about it. Twice."

"Let me know if anything works, seems like letting go of attachments and whatnot would be good for 'em."

<If I didn't need to add things to my to-do list, maybe.> Yes, yes, the real reason is that he's stupid, he knows that, but he's not going to say it.

Yeerks are terrible. Better than Hell, but terrible, and in his way when he has no reason to believe anyone else is going to try to do anything about Hell at all. He's delayed trying to figure out how to make good choices at least once already because of Atsinni and he's - inclined to reevaluate that choice.

"Yeah, I'll let you know." Sigh.

"Welp, I've got to go meet up with the hubby," says Atsinni's friend. "Get my tray for me?"

"Sure thing."

And she's off.

And he's imagining over and over how she'll feel, if her own hands are used to pick up her child and carry them down to the pool past all the screams and - it might well be better for the child but that doesn't matter to how much it'll eat at her. Will she scream, he wonders, or will she be too far gone by then? Will she get to apologize, down there against a backdrop of concentrated misery, or will she never say a single word to her own child in this life and maybe not in the next either?

If he has an opening it will probably only happen once it's obvious he doesn't age. That will take much, much longer than it takes a child to start to be capable of productive work. And he might not be able to figure out how not to be someone easily manipulated into torturing others for no benefit in that amount of time, anyway, who knows how long that will take.

Maybe a perfect person would say the right thing to Atsinni to fix everything. He doesn't know what that would be.

Atsinni sighs and busses the trays and goes and knits in the atrium.

So. How do you make good decisions. Well, why did he previously make terrible decisions? Believing people who were lying to him. Okay, and how could he have done something other than that? He could have just not believed anything anyone said, that much is easy, but then how do you learn anything? It's easy to learn things along the lines of "the object that I'm looking at right now is brown in this light" but that doesn't teach you anything worth learning. He's passingly familiar with formal logic but it doesn't really help if you have nothing to start with...

And add to it the untrustworthiness of memory and it's hard to even build up a trustworthy set of bare sense data. Maybe impossible, though it - doesn't really seem like you need certainty, merely being able to be right most of the time and having some way of correcting your mistakes eventually would work. Right? Wait, would that be enough...?

To all appearances Atsinni is at this point completely ignoring him. He gets faster at knitting, over the course of the afternoon. Finishes his scarf and puts it on.

It's easy to derive an interesting mathematical toy that sort of relates to the question - if you have two courses of action, to pick a random example whose specifics aren't important you could destroy the planet or not do that, and if you happen to know how many people each action will damn... in this case suppose it's however many people are alive now, or however many people are alive now plus that many again when the population has fully turned over plus that many again as many times as God wants there to be future generations... or maybe arguably that means you'd succeed or fail if and only if God wants you to, and there is actually no difference in any outcome no matter what you do? Well, if that's true then it doesn't matter, now, does it, nothing matters then. Anyway one of those courses of action is several times better, because it damns several times fewer people.

But if you don't know - maybe there's a thing you could do that you think will destroy the planet, but maybe instead it will create twenty extra planets and fill them with people all of whom will be damned - you can just say it could do either and if you take gambles like that thousands of times then you're an idiot and should realize your planet destruction schemes never work but eliding some important details it'd tend to lead to on average damning ten times the population of Earth - no, more than that, unless each of the others gets destroyed after one generation - anyway that neat mathematical toy exists and is loosely related to the question but does not, in fact, answer it, because how do you come to a conclusion other than "this course of action might cause any result" and... and do you actually want to do what damns the fewest people on average, what if there's a way to maybe damn zero people and get everyone out of Hell but it could go wrong and so on average similar gambles damn a person and a half, and instead of that you can do something guaranteed to damn only one person ever - it's not like you can ever actually damn half a person, right? Or, no, you can, if you send them to Hell for a while but then destroy it - is that half, or is it some other fraction - how do you even come up with a neat mathematical toy that works with how it's possible Hell won't be destroyed, ever -

and is it even wrong, if it's never destroyed, if it goes on forever?

...No yeah definitely, or at least, if it isn't wrong he doesn't care, except in the sense that God might interfere with trying to destroy Hell if that is wrong.

Anyway, how can you get anywhere besides absolute doubt? Well, why does he think he was in Hell? Because they lied to him about math, actually, and he could check that - or maybe they didn't, maybe they were confused, and not good at teaching humans, or maybe he misremembers, and in neither case can he trust what he remembers them teaching him, clearly, and in two of the cases that's not because the problem is with him.

He's not sure where to go with that other than "trust people who say true things about math" and he's not sure how to find someone like that, and it can't be Atsinni or selected by Atsinni because Atsinni would know what kind of test it was, which is a pervasive problem and he needs to be able to get useful information from people controlling everything he perceives while not being misled by any of it and... man, this sucks.

That's the point at which he gives up and just admires Atsinni's scarf and lets himself get lost in the movement of the needles.

Click click, go the needles. When the scarf is finished off he goes back to the bookshop. Looks at some books about math but doesn't buy any of them. Does buy the sequel to the dragon book.

Dragon book sequel! That is a thing that doesn't completely suck! Maybe he should just give up and let that happen.

- Except. The thing is. He keeps going back and forth on whether he wants an opening, and that's silly. He doesn't control whether he gets an opening, or maybe more to the point when. He'll outlast the mountains. It doesn't matter if he wants to give up, doesn't matter if he would be comfortable, doesn't matter whether he feels guilty about not being able to save that other slave, doesn't matter how he feels about Atsinni or about himself. If he gets an opening, and doesn't take it, and that's not because he's decided not to, if it's just because he's too confused and afraid, then that would be a choice, too. It would be the choice to be lazy, to be so afraid of having more blood on his own hands that he stands by watching all the horrors in the world and doesn't even bother to try.

So. What kind of information can you get from people who control all the information you can get?

If he wants to ignore the dragon book in favor of thinking about information theory Atsinni will not stop him but it means he will be really confused if he pays attention again after the big plot twist, which they reach while they're on the bus home.

He's kind of halfway paying attention. Whatever. If he can't have nice things then so be it. Atsinni likes having nice things and Atsinni's an asshole, maybe it's just the case that if you try to have fun you will end up torturing people or causing people to be tortured.

(He would kind of like to ask for Atsinni to go back and reread when he's not preoccupied but he would also kind of like to pretend not to care. Neither of these things being an option the compromise he comes to is to stew miserably.)

When they get home Atsinni finishes the book and then has ice cream for dinner while watching the third season of Avatar.

He's too distracted by misery to get much out of the first episode. The second is - really pushing the idea that virtue and fun go hand in hand, even more so than the rest of the series, or maybe he's totally wrong about that. Pushing it from the angle that fun causes virtue, or is virtue, or something, not the other way around. It's - why did someone think that was a good message? Or did they not really think about it? Why is this what Atsinni ended up watching, did Atsinni realize in advance it agreed with him or was that a coincidence or was it engineered by someone else?

<Hey. You've been quiet. What do you think, do you basically agree with Aang?>

<Oh, I guess so? Like, blah blah the ultimate point of the war and the Empire is to get everybody hosts. Hands and eyes for all. And I'm down with that but they're so humorless and dickish about it which is I guess why they don't know you're magic.>

<Why are they humorless and dickish about it?>

<I guess they think it's more efficient that way or something. Or it's easier for whoever's commanding to manage.>

<I don't understand that.> The things he saw at the Pool seemed like a headache to administer, compared to, say, paying people, but he wouldn't really know. It just seems like it'd be less work for a lot of people, if they didn't have to drag the hosts away in chains, if instead they could just dispense with all that and call them by name. And if Atsinni is right that they could steal vast amounts of money, it seems like they could pay people. Maybe some people wouldn't ask too many questions about where the money came from. That might be limited to amounts that wouldn't be noticed on a large enough scale but there might be people who just want Yeerks, and would pay, for real, no theft required. And just how much of the space could be repurposed - more Yeerks, storage, whatever - if the hosts didn't wait down there at all, if they could just loiter in the mall and come back when the clock said it was almost time.

But there are probably considerations that haven't occurred to him. He doesn't think his confusion is because the way they do things is actually stupid. He thinks if anything it's because he's stupid, and doubts it'll actually help to get an answer, but still.

<Oh, they go for voluntary hosts when possible! It's just that we're still operating in secret - operating openly would be a huge vulnerability for opposed human factions, let alone the Andalites - and that makes it impossible to advertise. But you saw some of them weren't chained up, right?>

Well, yes, although he didn't make any inferences from that because maybe they had just given up and made deals or they were too squeamish to hurt themselves or something.

<Why can't you ask people hypothetical questions that aren't really hypothetical?>

<Oh, people try that, they try all kinds of things, but it doesn't tend to hold up as well as you'd expect when the hypothetical can't have any classified information in it.>

He doesn't really understand but he supposes that's only to be expected since he doesn't really understand anything at all.

<Thank you for trying to explain.>