"Oh, cool. Is it the fun kind of reinventing the wheel or do you maybe want some books about it?"

He's definitely against it anyway.

"It's kind of tedious. He won't necessarily believe the books but I think they're not worse than useless? Though occasionally I have to read things a bunch of times for him to absorb them."

Yeah, that reliably happens when he's tired enough. Now that he's thinking about it he's sort of nostalgic about the time he spent copying books before they invented the printing press; he barely remembers anything about any of the books and it was exhausting not being allowed to sleep or take stimulants or stop and stretch for who-even-knows-how-long but he trusted the other scribes not to hurt him, and to help him avoid punishment whether he deserved it or not, and he doesn't recall having had that kind of trust with anyone since.

"So there's a pamphlet specifically for people from Demon U, I don't have a paper copy but you can read it on my phone now if you want. For a way more academic and longer and less practical rec, there's Ethics for Dummies."

"I'd be interested in the pamphlet."

She has it bookmarked. She mutters about the idiosyncrasies of the touchscreen lest they get confused about how to scroll.

The pamphlet explains that New Jerusalem (like named-but-not-described polities Rose City and the Bastion) is a very big polity with people from very different backgrounds who have very different ideas and getting along means letting people do what's right in their own eyes sometimes, but there are some extremely broad generalizations that can be made about popular points of view. Relative to a lot of people's backgrounds respect for one's betters isn't emphasized very much; it's more popular to worry about people coming to harm. Not everyone believes in desert at all; people who do still often think most of the things that happen in most of the hells aren't fair (included are some examples of wrongdoing and consequences a bunch of random people thought were fair; opinions vary a lot but less than half the people they polled endorsed anything that could reasonably be described as torture ever); there are very brief descriptions of a couple of locally popular ethical philosophies (or maybe more accurately broad categories of philosophies) and both of these general categories of philosophies approximately endorse it being good when people are happy or comfortable, modulo not necessarily using exactly that ontology, in itself and because it makes people better at things; most people think it's good to give people gifts or adopt orphans or rescue people from hells, and most people think it's bad to attack people for no reason or steal things (though there's disagreement about that) or break other people's things. The pamphlet is about six pages long. There are pictures.

Is his host paying attention?

Yes but kind of resentfully because look what happened the last time he let anyone try to teach him ethics. He's mostly paying attention so he can consciously flag every claim as something he read in this pamphlet represented to him by Jess as reflective of some kind of heavenly consensus or something. He's not sure if they're right, if they were represented correctly to Jess, if Jess is legit, or if he even cares. He'll have to think it through in detail later.

At least it's not a mystery?

Well, that's something, he can give the phone back after getting through the pamphlet only once.

"I hope that helps. That's really a topic that varies a lot, with humans, but... I think not usually in a way where I'd expect a randomly selected pair of humans living together and in telepathic contact all the time to end up disagreeing with each other."

"Are there a lot of telepathic humans?"

"No, sorry, I'm just guessing. Because people tend to agree with each other when they really get each other, and people tend to prioritize people they empathize with, and people tend to come up with similar ideas in similar conditions. I guess I could ask some multiples? I'm not sure that's even a real thing but I could ask them anyway."

"I guess maybe Yeerks don't work that way. Otherwise we'd presumably converge on host-like priorities and every new infestation would be a defection risk."

"Yeah, you're weird. I wish I had a better idea what questions to ask to figure out what's up with you. Actually I wish I could turn into a Yeerk and turn you into a human and find out that way."

"Well, talk to the Andalites, I guess, they're the ones who know how to do that."

"Okay but the Andalites are the ones who made nice with you and then started doing genocide, right?"

"Yep!"

"I don't think I want to talk to them unless it's all a big misunderstanding. Maybe someone else will."

"Your call."

"Yeah. Someone else will, I'm sure. Anyway, if you're staying, you ought to meet some of the people left on my list, even if you like your current guy fine and he likes you back you might want to, uh, visit? if that's what you call it? while someone checks in with Mr. No Names Only Self-Destructiveness."

"- does this involve putting me in a bowl of water, because I still don't want to go in a bowl of water."

"Do you need to be in a bowl of water in between hosts? I don't know how you work."

"No, in principle I could go ear to ear."

"Well, how about I start introducing you to people and you see if you want to do that?"