The building continues to look empty for the first little while. It's dark inside, and really dusty.

When he sneezes, there's a flurry of movement in the shadows, and a flare of blinding light, and then he's out.

Yep. Not for as long as expected but much longer than they actually need.

When he wakes up, his eyes move, but he isn't doing it. He sits up, but he isn't doing that either.

There's a hissing screeching nightmare noise and then his own lips say, "Who said that? I can't see in the dark from in here." More screeching. "No sir, no one likely to look for him." Screeching. "Understood, sir. I believe I'm able to make it on foot if it's not convenient to give me a ride at this time." Screeching. "Of course, sir, thank you."

He stands up. He walks, eyes flicking around as though to get hints from the bits of light here and there, out to the exit and back into the open fields that surrounded the apparently not very abandoned building.

He wonders why he's reflexively doing that and then he gets suspicious of the fact that that's not something he would do reflexively and even if he would he would still have stopped immediately on wondering about it and - no he can't shut up, no he can't just scream instead, no he can't raise a hand - it takes a while after that for him to think anything other than oh fuck oh no over and over.

He's been speaking modern English for a while, but his most comfortable language is Latin, and it's not even his first. He's got Old English, Old French, Classical Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese, Classic Maya - more than that, actually, so many languages he's lost count, most of them too rusty to jump back into without spending a while listening to someone else - and he hates it, hates that he can interface with the world in so many ways and all of them were taught to him by demons.

That's the most notable thing about him, is that either he's delusional or he died centuries ago during a plague epidemic, and since then he's been in Hell most of the time. They told him it was Purgatory, that he'd learn better and then go to Heaven, that while he was there maybe he could help them help others, too, for values of "help" that included "break their wills because they need to stop being so sinful" - he doesn't want to think about it and also he doesn't think he can ever forget, not the time he took the hand of someone he'd up till then called a friend and started breaking their fingers, not the times he ordered someone else to drag someone off out of his sight while he knew what was happening and relaxed -

- It's a lot but it's not definitely centuries. If it is centuries, then there are stretches of years eaten by sleep deprivation or blurred by sheer monotony. It's more than there really ought to be at his apparent age, anyway. And some of it's testable; he thinks he's not really alive, will never age, doesn't need food (he had that driven home to him particularly humiliatingly), heals from literally everything and often in under a day although there's some kind of extremely painful workaround for that (he didn't start out male, that was a reward or maybe a reminder of what he's done, one or the other).

It's a very good healing factor but it doesn't keep him healthy, he's weak and miserable and exhausted and fuzzy-headed and being stunned was the closest he's gotten to sleep in months. They dolled him up a bit when they sent him to Earth (to save people, they said, but he's pretty sure he's been damning them, actually) to make him look more vaguely angelic than obviously damned, but that's only the magic of personal grooming. He has long since forgotten that living people who feel this way have a tendency to fall asleep as soon as they're horizontal.

Someone will, actually, look for him, but not today, and not someone who'd call the police, and anyway maybe he's delusional and they won't. It's only been about a day since he decided to go to ground on Earth and hope Hell couldn't track him down. They weren't even going to check in for days yet.

Though when he manages to unstick his thoughts from sheer horror he supposes that actually they can just possess him, so that's fucking delightful, and it's also baffling but he's in no shape to think about why it's baffling. The most salient thing about it, at the moment, is that he can give up.

Yup. He can totally give up. He doesn't have to exercise any volition at all in order to continue walking till reaching the road and then keep going from there for a couple miles, his mouth trying out some of the languages while his feet take step after step.

It's - miserable, really, that there's nothing he can do, but at least maybe their incentives line up so they want his body really healthy and maybe that means not torturing him.

He thinks, for the first time and surprising himself even though after everything else it shouldn't be a surprise, You know what, I think I hate you. He doesn't even strongly expect to be heard.

<Yeah, I think that's pretty common with human hosts,> replies a nonvoice.

Why can they read minds on top of everything else! He thought they couldn't do that! But as established he is a complete idiot!

He keeps trying to move, even though he's pretty clear on that not working, because it's such a weird experience and he keeps expecting that whatever he's doing is something he's doing, and it seems like a good idea to get used to the way things are as fast as possible.

<I'm not a demon or anything, I'm a Yeerk. We're space aliens.>

He kind of effortfully tries to consider the likelihood of that. He's never seen one in Hell but they seem to be invisible and maybe they're best tortured with systematically different infrastructure and have their own area, or maybe he saw them and forgot, and at any rate maybe they don't even sin, who knows, he sure doesn't. It would be so confusing if demons could do this and not confusing at all if they couldn't, but he's very stupid so why should it matter if he's confused?

Most importantly they clearly aren't trying to trick him, because whoever this is doesn't need to, so - that's good. If they're not demons and they might never have committed any sins then actually that's great, he's sorry to have said he hates them, probably they're fine.

<I actually have no idea if this thing happens to us when we die. Or if it even happened to you. But the healing thing seems real so you're probably not totally delusional.>

He deliberately suppresses all the things he might otherwise think of to say to that since, in fact, they are not optimized for keeping people out of Hell after all. Maybe listening to his thoughts is a dangerous idea considering how much he as a person has been optimized for malevolent ends, but he doesn't quite manage to actually suggest ignoring him because that would be crushingly lonely.

<I know, right, being alone in your head is awful. I'd heard humans weren't like that but it's neat that you are!>

<External people are also good company, maybe that's the thing you heard? Probably better in some ways because I'm not sure Satan himself deserves to hear all my thoughts.>

<Oh, it's not so bad. It does look like you had a very rough time but I'm not planning to get you into anything too awful going forward if I can avoid it.>

Aww, that's nice. And there's not really any point in doubting it since there's not really anything he could do if he knew it wasn't true, though he seems to be kind of quietly doubting it anyway just because at this point he doubts the existence of gravity.

<Thank you. ...What are you going to do?>

<Well, we're kind of at war, but if I don't tell anybody you've got a magic healing factor I bet they'll let me keep you and won't be especially likely to put me in a combat position. Humans aren't best for that anyway.>

He's pretty sure wars are bad because they kill people and killing people is bad because then some of them go to Hell. Or maybe that's fine, as established he can't tell right from wrong. Probably it would be silly at best to try to second-guess their choices here when he knows absolutely nothing.

<...I hope you figure out whether you go to Hell when you die and how to avoid it.>

<I have no idea how I'd find that out, honestly.> How did his host even get here?

Seems like demons can just appear on Earth? Probably not casually all the time, nothing looks like it would look if they could do it all the time, but they can do it at all and they can take passengers if, for example, they want to make someone else run their errands for them.

He got here as in this city by walking and also taking a bus.

He thinks maybe it's important not to give up on figuring out something that important? Or maybe he's completely wrong. No one should take his advice, it'll only make everything worse.

Well, how is the demon he's running errands for supposed to find him?

He was supposed to be in a specific area but maybe that was actually completely unnecessary, he was figuring he'd be able to tell if it was actually necessary based on whether he successfully hid or not. He was thinking of changing clothes and doing something different to his hair and maybe some horrific facial scarring would make him harder to recognize...? But maybe none of that would matter. In hindsight they probably wanted him not to be able to derive anything useful about their capabilities.

Does he have any money on him in his own right literally at all?

He has a blade and twine and some wire and a couple of tools from a craft store tucked away in pockets and $1.73 that wasn't given to him by demons and he does not have or need a house or food or water. He has shoes so he feels pretty rich although they should trade them for different shoes that don't come from demons, unless maybe whoever has them next will have problems, he has no idea whether there is actually any problem with them.

$1.73 will get them a bus ticket next time a bus passes by.

Once they are in a more populated area and can find an ATM they can get a few hundred and go to the nearest thrift store for a replacement outfit and shoes.

<Do you think if I have taste in clothing it's probably somehow evil enough that you shouldn't care?>

<I can't see how, really. You want to pick stuff? I've never worn clothes before.>

<I haven't picked clothes for this society before but I have worn clothes before. I hate wearing white, let's try green or blue or orange. I've seen people roll up their cuffs so it's fine if we get pants that are too long and if they won't stay rolled up we can hem them. Or maybe I'm wrong, did anyone with better information maybe at any point tell you anything.>

<I have some briefing but they were expecting human hosts to be better oriented to the situation than you are. We'll figure it out.> He finds blue jeans and a green shirt and some flip-flops that have some orange on them though they are mostly black, and they fit tolerably, and they can be worn out once they are purchased, with the things they came in with left in the dressing room unceremoniously.

This is the best thing that's happened to him in centuries and probably in the top ten things that have ever happened to him.

<We should get a haircut, I think this style is used in iconography of Jesus but otherwise it's kind of unusual locally, or maybe I'm totally wrong about that but I think we should still change more things just in case - not sure if we should also stop shaving, it gets prickly - on the other hand maybe they expect that I'll think that so maybe we specifically shouldn't, or maybe you should pick something at random.>

<Yeah, looking around I don't see a lot of other male humans with long hair.> Walk walk walk. There's a barbershop. In they go. "Just hack it all off, I'm sick of it being like this," he tells the barber, when they get a chair. There are lollipops and he takes one of those. Mmmmmmm.

<Um! We don't need food, we can save it for other people - I'm sorry - I'm sorry - > He's trying very hard not to remember something and not otherwise thinking very well.

<They're free and even if they weren't I got plenty of money out of the ATM. This way the guy won't expect us to talk to him. Besides, what's the point of having a host with tastebuds if I don't taste anything?>

That's probably right since the person who had the idea wasn't thoroughly and comprehensively corrupted and made as bad as possible. He apologizes and then apologizes again for good measure, and it's not entirely clear even to him whether he means anything by it or if it's just a reflex.

The Yeerk ignores him and enjoys the lollipop and gives the barber a nod and a hefty tip after his hair has been cut down to a nice shaggy-layers situation that doesn't come close to brushing his shirt collar. Onward!

Onward, apparently. This really sucks and his judgment is terrible so he probably only feels bad because he's a terrible person and deeply mistaken about right and wrong, only that's not reassuring at all because it means either they're going to do bad things and hurt people or he's going to be miserable all the time. Or conceivably both.

Sub-Visser, this is Atsinni 3094 reporting supplementary to the presumable report you will have had from Ishkan 8015. A vagrant human entered the work site and was presently stunned and I have been given him as a host. The human does not presently have his own means of support and I would like to requisition an apartment and sinecure until a permanent assignment is found for me. CCing Nansta 1223 to this end. I will write again from a new phone once I have acquired one.

He tries to pay attention to that to distract himself from the horror of the lollipop but then that results in him knowing Atsinni 3094's name, which is terrible, what if he doesn't like that name, for that matter what if at some point he wants to use a name for his prisoner?

<I mean I'll probably have to call you something at some point to get you fake papers and whatever with a human name on them but I don't care what it is. My name's fine.>

<...Okay. If you want.>

And now he's back to feeling bad about the lollipop. Surely there's something else to think about but nothing seems as salient. He's trying not to think about why that is, it's humiliating and horrible and he'd just as soon not share it. Surely there's something else to think about but nothing's coming easily to mind.

When the email is sent they are going to go buy a phone. Without any guidance from his host the Yeerk is going to put his name into the phone as Stan Peters and then text his superior again so he'll have the number. Then while waiting for a reply he's going to play Bejeweled.

Stan Peters is fine. Bejeweled is nice. It seems like it'd be fun to play but it's also nice to just watch, and anyway it's very distracting. He'd ask for a turn but why would Atsinni 3094 let him do anything ever.

<Do you do this a lot?>

<What, Bejeweled? No, I've never tried it! All this human stuff is new to me.>

<What did you do before?>

<Swam around. Read. Not like with eyeballs, we don't have those.>

<Swimming sounds interesting. I can't remember if I've done it. Not recently.> What is even the point of not having eyeballs if people make you read things anyway. He doesn't especially intend that thought as part of the conversation but it's not like he can hide it. He had his eyes sewn shut for a while and honestly it was fine but that's because it gave him a break from things that were even worse.

<Seeing things is great, if you ask me. They have colors!!>

<Colors are nice!> All senses are nice when you can control what you perceive with them and not otherwise. Or maybe not, he wouldn't really know. <I like natural landscapes a lot, I missed them while I was... you know.> Or maybe he didn't, why would he remember anything correctly.

<Aww.> He will switch the default phone wallpaper to a landscape one, they have some nice generic landscapes on the thing. Eventually he gets a text back and summons a taxi to take them to their new apartment in a building where they've got the landlord.

That's so unfathomably kind!

He has actually seen the insides of some modern residences, but his standards were mostly set by a medieval village and then Hell. He'll probably think the apartment is amazing but he does know enough to expect to find it amazing. Sort of. With all of the caveats that apply every single time he thinks anything.

The place has a beige sofa and a queensize bed and a square dining table with four cheap chairs and some remarkably bent blinds. Once Atsinni has assessed this he plops down on the sofa, feet up, and creates an Amazon account and siphons a few grand out of the mysterious money fountain of the Yeerks and orders sheets and soap and a set of basic pots and pans and stuff like that, and then plays some more Bejeweled until their feet don't hurt any more, and then goes grocery shopping.

The apartment is amazing. Bejeweled is great.

If he thought it was worth making decisions at all he would beg Atsinni not to get them food that could otherwise go to starving people who might die and go to Hell and that will taste like guilt and worthlessness anyway. Well, it's... not like the vast majority of his existence hasn't involved being regularly subjected to unpleasant experiences... but couldn't Atsinni have been really unreasonably enamored of something less miserable, like being boiled alive.

<If you want to get me ordered out of you so they can dissect you to figure out how you don't need to eat... well, tough luck, because I don't, but I don't think you do either. Besides, it won't taste like guilt and worthlessness to ME.>

<I don't care if they dissect me. I didn't mean to say anything, I'm sorry, I haven't really worried about my thoughts bothering people very much before but I think what you're bothered by is all the misery and I've already been very motivated for a very long time to figure out some way to stop being miserable and I don't really expect to suddenly figure it out this decade.>

<I mean the misery is whatever, I don't rank high enough to get a consensual host, but the specifically pitching a fit about eating food is weird.>

<I'm sure it would be weird for someone who needed it.>

They went to such lengths to drive home to him that he absolutely didn't, and that not instantly realizing he could just fast indefinitely made him a disgusting sinner. Maybe there's some secret reason why actually that was an example of them making him a worse person, but even if that's true, there's a difference between agreeing that yep he's so thoroughly corrupted no one should care what he wants, and actually ceasing to have feelings.

Maybe he can try to stop having thoughts or noticing things entirely? That's an underexplored option since it would just get him punished at home before he came here.

<If you wanna just dissociate suit yourself, I guess. I should ask Enstat for advice except I'll have to make it sound like you're traumatized about something besides food since that doesn't make sense. Sex or something, are you traumatized about that?>

<Um. I.> Now he's trying to stop having opinions or preferences about sex and also trying to figure out what other preferences he needs to stop having. Maybe all preferences in full generality? He literally can't do anything, and he is still somehow managing to do something wrong. <I'm sorry.>

<Wow, chill. I'm just trying to figure out how we can eat like a normal person without this being somehow the worst thing about having a Yeerk for you.> He is continuing to grocery shop while they have this conversation. He wants four kinds of breakfast cereal, and a box of chocolate fudge, and a bag of potato chips, and a microwaveable vegan pesto tortellini thing, and both strawberry and mint chocolate chip ice creams, and a pile of deli turkey and another pile of sliced cheese, and everything listed on this package of gnocchi's recipe for One Pan Creamy Gnocchi With Artichokes, which takes them through the spice aisle.

<...I appreciate that you care about that.>

Maybe he should be coming at it from the direction of suggesting less unappealing foods but as established all his decisions are bad and he has been pessimized. Also he doesn't even know what some of these things are.

Also, it occurs to him that tonight he might not really need to sleep, it'll take longer than that for they-never-told-him-what-drug-it-is to finish wearing off, but in a few nights they're going to have a somewhat similar problem. He can go without sleep indefinitely and cannot function indefinitely without sleep or drugs, and he hasn't been allowed - he's caught little naps sometimes when they overestimated how painful something was and left him somewhere but in so doing he's basically trained himself not to even try at any other time - or maybe since sleep happens in private and isn't entertaining and he doesn't ever need to be functional again it's fine.

<Well, I sure hope you're not so insomniac that I can't walk us in a straight line this time next week but we'll give it a whirl, I guess. Should help that I don't have to let you run the autonomics. I was going to sleep on the couch tonight since the bed doesn't have sheets yet.>

<Run the autonomics?>

<Like your heart rate and whether your... hands... sweat... or whatever. If you were in charge of that your pulse would be spiking constantly, it'd be miserable. Maybe it'll even help you calm down if you don't get the feedback response any more.>

<...Oh, that explains it, I guess. Can you make me sleep that way - you shouldn't, though, I'd have nightmares, you probably don't want to watch - >

<You know, I'm not actually sure if I'll see your dreams or not, that's a good question. I will certainly be trying to make you sleep that way but anyone's guess if it'll work.> Quart of milk and a loaf of bread and a quartet of bananas and they can check out. With... all these things from the checkout aisle. A Snickers and a pack of gum and a thing of tictacs and a weird strawberry fruit leather thing.

The strawberry fruit leather thing almost seems appealing. If he were sure it was a good idea, and sure his own certainty meant anything, and in control of the experience, and only having a strawberry fruit leather thing. So, not really.

<Tell you what, this is good for like two years, I won't eat it till you wanna in case that helps. I can let you chew without letting you try to call the cops, pretty sure.>

<I don't see why I would call the cops.> Also why would that even help, when there's this entire cartful of stuff and he isn't confident it's a good idea. But what would the cops even do, for an exorcism you need a priest, and also why would you exorcise a nice non-demon from someone terrible. Maybe it's actually a perfectly reasonable idea and he just can't understand why.

<Oh, yeah, the cops wouldn't help at all but it'd get me in trouble for making a scene.> He pays and out they go.

Ugh, how did he manage to go straight from "it's right to endure all this suffering because the angels say so" to "since they were demons all along it's right to endure all this suffering", he had sort of hoped that not having every aspect of his life optimized for making him and everyone else miserable would be more different. As established he doesn't know anything, but it feels so terribly pointless. Which is definitely because he just doesn't understand anything. Whatever, what does it even matter to him what Atsinni does with Atsinni's body, who is he to have opinions about that.

And home they go with all these groceries, and Atsinni puts them away and takes a rinse-only air-dry shower in the absence of relevant accessories and then changes into a fresh thrift store outfit to sleep on the couch in.

He tries very hard not to have opinions about any of it and eventually his internal experience is of being three feet away thinking about which shapes tesselate.

Then probably they will be able to get to sleep eventually.

He dreams he's been caught and a demon is dissecting him to remove all his muscles to feed to a lion. (He has very little idea what lions look like. This one has scales.)

Normally, insofar as there's a normal for something that happens so rarely, he would wake up disoriented and try to get back to work before even parsing where he was.

This time he is not controlling the autonomics so he's going to just stay asleep.

He has a wide variety of additional nightmares and one non-nightmare about Atsinni's friends possessing all the demons and taking them clothes shopping.

When they wake up in the morning Atsinni gets up and stretches all the sofa-sleeping kinks out. <Turns out I don't get your dreams except insofar as you remember 'em, which isn't much.>

<Arguably neither do I, I guess. I don't think I can remember ever sleeping that restfully before.> It'd be a good time to try to mull things over, given how many things he needs to rethink and how much sharper his mind feels, but he doesn't really feel like doing that for... at least not for this audience, and he could also unpack that but it'd probably be rude.

Atsinni doesn't comment on that, just sets about fixing breakfast, humming tunelessly in the process.

<You know, you could give things away to different beggars on different days in different places, maybe you wouldn't get caught.>

<No way, pal. You can be three feet to the left the whole time if you want but I am having One Pan Creamy Gnocchi With Artichokes.>

<You're not - > He thinks better of saying anything but that has basically no impact since it's obvious what he was going to say. It was going to be you're not thinking about them at all.

Because it makes sense, of course, that no one should think about what he wants, his desires were optimized malevolently. And it makes sense, too, that he wouldn't be right about whether and when and what to give to the poor, and so there's no specific decision Atsinni could make that he could possibly know enough to judge. But Atsinni explains himself enough that never having mentioned anyone but the two of them or someone threatening them stands out.

<D'you want me to like, find a nice charity, drop a few grand on them? Couple times a week? Diddling human banks is easy, they've got everything on computers but don't know how to make that work right yet, nobody scary'll care.>

What, he's supposed to make decisions now? But he's terrible at -

- fine, Atsinni has strictly more information on literally everything including whether he should make decisions, Atsinni doesn't seem to think that's an obviously stupid idea, so, considerations - is stealing from banks wrong, well, literally everything he knows about morality is suspect and should be thrown out, he really doesn't know what the answer is, just that the right question involves the impact on other people - mostly the thing to do is keep them from going to Hell, and he... should disregard everything he thinks he knows about how people end up there, maybe excepting things he thinks he remembers very vaguely from a very long time ago, which he should instead disregard for being vague memories from a very long time ago.

<I guess if the bankers and their families will starve, then no, unless more people will starve otherwise; and if it's more of a thing where they show off that they have twice as much gold jewelry as some other banker then yes. I think. I'm not sure, I mean, you know more than I do but if it's - if it'd be a good thing to do and you're asking me if I want you to do a good thing then yes and if it's a trick question and it'd be a terrible thing to do then no? I think?>

<I don't know what lifestyle bankers live and I don't wanna do a ton of research about it.> Gnocchi goes in the pan they got from Amazon, and sizzles. Stir stir.

He's not at all confident about whether they should give to charity, whether it actually depends on bankers' lifestyles, or whether it'd be a good use of time to try to become confident about any of that. He not-very-confidently expects Atsinni is a much better person than him.

But he's pretty sure Atsinni decided not to do that research because he doesn't care, not because there's a better thing to do with that time or because Atsinni is actually confident that what they should do doesn't really depend on the answer. He's not judging, exactly. For all he knows Atsinni might be doing the best possible things for everyone in the world. It's not even something that bothers him very much on the scale of things that bother him.

<I don't think I am doing the best possible things for everyone in the world by accident and I'm certainly not doing it on purpose.>

See, he was right, he's not a maximally bad judge of character, you can tell because he was right -

- but why did he have to be right about that.

<Well, I don't think anyone is actually doing that. Sounds fake.>

He wouldn't know. If there were ever any people like that he doesn't recall meeting them, but then, you wouldn't meet them in Hell, would you, and he doesn't have a very good memory either. He doesn't really understand why anyone wouldn't want to try, but as established he is a total idiot and doesn't understand anything.

<I dunno, why would I want to try? It turns out actually I want to eat food and be safe and have eyes.>

It sort of feels like the thing to say to that is so do they but in fact he's against food and indifferent to eyes and can't bring himself to feel like safety is real or could matter, so maybe empathy just doesn't work, who knows. It's just -

- this isn't trustworthy, it's been too long, but he thinks maybe he remembers being okay, some summer a long time ago, and that'll probably never happen again, for him, and he doesn't think he can stop having experiences, and it feels better to have something to get up for, something he can tell himself he's succeeding at - 

- only that intuition might be one he formed when the only mercy was that which was absolutely necessary to let him keep functioning at all, and so having some motivation to keep going seemed very important, because -

- the next thing doesn't come in the vague jumble of concepts and scattered words and images he normally thinks in, and isn't voluntary, and isn't meant as communication. It's just a memory of the worst they ever did, vivid and embodied enough it feels more like rolling back time than like remembering.

He was going somewhere with that but not anymore.

Well, reportedly some hosts just sort of scream epithets at you in their heads all day, and it's kind of a tossup which is preferable - not having tried the epithets thing, admittedly - and the healing factor pushes in favor of keeping this one.

Garlic goes in pan. And artichokes. Wow, garlic smells amazing.

It does smell amazing. Not exactly appetizing but it feels homey and inviting and that's sort of helpful for being in the present moment, which also sucks but notably less.

When the gnocchi is done they are going to eat solidly half of it for breakfast, YUM, and put the rest of it in the fridge for later. Then send more emails about the job expectation situation. Atsinni reports that his host is "23" and in good physical health and probably about 90th percentile cooperative as a stab at a guess and speaks a few languages but has no other special skills. Then he pirates half a gigabyte of random music onto the phone - the Yeerk apartment building has secretly good wifi - and starts dancing around the apartment to random tunes while unpacking delivered packages and putting sheets on the bed and towels in the bathroom and so on.

Atsinni kind of... isn't that great, as a person, and is doing things that make other people miserable out of a total lack of concern for their welfare.

Once he settles that in his mind he actually mentally files the gnocchi as torture instead of kind of ironically doing that, and - it's not the least horrible torture he has ever experienced, but it's definitely much less bad than average. He would really rather zero torture, and to be used by someone who does good things instead of bad things, but he'll settle for markedly-less-bad-than-usual torture and being used by someone who isn't literally omnimalevolent. He keeps repeating to himself that this is an improvement and he's glad to be here, as though maybe it'll feel true the thirtieth time.

...He manages to notice very distantly that maybe if he had food preferences gnocchi would be better than lollipops.

<Dude, I'm not trying to torture you! Normal humans are not tortured by eating gnocchi. It's just impossible for me to eat gnocchi without help. Yeerks can't eat, we absorb radiation.>

And that is a much more sympathetic motive than omnimalevolence and that is why he is repeating to himself that he's glad to be here instead of repeating The Song That Never Ends. Whoops, now it's stuck in his head and he's doing that after all.

Atsinni doesn't dignify this with a response.

The reply comes back that they're going to be assigned an undercover security position at a Pool; it'll consist of loitering around a mall, on-call to come by if anything dodgy is up, keeping an eye on things in general in case they are the first to see something dodgy and need to tell everyone. Lots of walking, OK to shop and eat at the food court and whatever during the day as long as they don't make themselves excessively obvious regulars to anybody there. Standard issue fanny-pack-looking-thing that is actually a dracon beam holster will arrive at their address that evening. He'll report to Odshen "Sal Jenkins" 709, who manages the Nordstrom that conceals the entrance to the Pool, but she has a lot on her plate and he shouldn't bother her directly for anything that isn't an obvious crisis unless he gets a second opinion from a co-worker. Shift schedule is thus.

Atsinni gives an acknowledgement and then plays Bejeweled.

At least Bejeweled doesn't suck.

They are having all four kinds of cereal for lunch.

Cereal is terrible. Even by the standards of foods.

It feels like some kind of additional problem that Atsinni doesn't like him being miserable about that, and can't get away from it, and... constantly hurting Atsinni does not make him happy. But he doesn't have to care. His ambitions have already, without him quite ever explicitly noticing it, shrunk from destroying Hell to being tolerable company, and they can shrink further, they can wither and die entirely.

<Aww, you're not so bad. Way better than nothing. It's just nice having company even if you're weird about food.>

There was a time (actually almost the entire time he's existed) when he would have been ecstatic to be called "not so bad". Between regretting everything else he can remember being praised for and not being sure he wants to want things anymore, it's sort of bittersweet now. But it's still nice.

<Thank you, I'm glad. Let me know if there's anything you want. Maybe. I don't know if I'll do it or just start panicking about how to figure out whether I should do anything.>

<Yeah, I think you've got some things to process, but no big deal, it's not going to interfere with anything except trying to be nice to you.>

He's not really sure what to make of that; the idea of someone having being nice to him as a goal is hard to engage with.

<I'm glad it's no big deal.>

<Lots of hosts are actively trying to be inconvenient and this basically doesn't work at all!>

Why bother. Well, maybe if you really resent all of the... stuff...

Yeah, that's maybe also something he shouldn't think about. It's annoyingly hard not to think about all sorts of interesting and important things when he's recently slept and eaten. Well, there's always... math? He kind of wants to understand why the quadratic formula is what it is, that seems like a reasonable default thing to try to fill his thoughts with. If he'd been any good at algebra he might've caught on to being in Hell centuries ago - well, there are a lot of things that could have helped if he'd been any good at them but this one is interesting and not fraught to think about right now.

Oh good. Maybe Atsinni will give him math problems when he's having issues in the future.

They have an afternoon to kill, which Atsinni fills with some more shopping to make their place a little less boring - including a TV, on which they are now going to watch, let's see, probably kids' movies don't require too much cultural context, Lion King it is.

Weird. Is that what lions look like? Do they really have societies like that? None of the characters are especially likable except Nala whom he's trying not to have opinions about. But mostly it's - it's colorful, it's nice, there's music. It's vastly better than most experiences he can recall having.

<I hope you end up wanting to watch more of these.>

<I like it! And it's pretty low energy, you still get tired even if you heal and we're going to be walking around a lot at work.>

<What exactly is your work?> He totally theoretically observed an email about it but it was not written to make sense to him and also he wasn't really up for being curious about his surroundings.

<Wandering around the mall to keep an eye out and be on hand in case anything threatens the Pool.>

<That sounds fun. What's the Pool?>

<Yeerks can't stay in hosts forever. Three days. That's how often I need to take a little break, go soak up some rays in a pool - we're aquatic - and then get back in for another three days. They're a little expensive to build, especially if you need to do it in secret, which we currently need to do, so they have a lot of security on 'em.>

Thaaaaaaat means he might have an opportunity to escape and that means Atsinni doesn't actually have literally no motive to ever lie to him and THAT MEANS HE CAN'T TRUST OR BELIEVE ANYTHING AT ALL.

<No, look, they don't let hosts escape, they lock them up for us while we're in the Pool. You'll see for yourself, on the way in before I get out of you, okay. The only thing I need from you is to not tell anyone who'll listen, while I'm out, that you have magical powers, 'cause those are weird and they'll want to figure that out and that isn't going to look like you hanging out all day in the mall being undercover security.>

That isn't trustworthy, though, that's obviously something Atsinni could be saying to keep him. Not that he should be thinking about this now, he shouldn't think about it until he's at the Pool, right now he should think about math instead.

Right. They can just postpone this till they get to the Pool.

They are having deli turkey and sliced cheese for dinner and then they are putting on the first episode of Steven Universe and then they are going to sleep, in the bed, which has sheets now.

By which time he's gotten to the point of sort of groping toward the idea of calculus.

He hates Steven Universe.

Wow, okay, next time they can try that one about the kids with classical element themed powers, that looked cool.

Sleep!

Sleep! Definitely the most convenient thing about this whole situation, that. He has more nightmares.

Atsinni doesn't comment on that in the morning. He has potato chips for breakfast and hops in the shower. <Are you going to be cranky about it if I jerk off?>

The potato chips... don't suck??? False, the potato chips suck, but he keeps unexpectedly not actually being nauseated whenever Atsinni eats anything and it's sort of serving to wear away some associations and the potato chips are very predictable after the first one and don't taste like memories and after multiple days of being sort of adequately taken care of he's emotionally stable enough to just dismiss the idea of feeling guilty about it. If his sense of what counts as okay had not just been dramatically recalibrated by watching The Lion King, he would maybe consider classifying this as an experience that doesn't suck. Very much. Mostly.

Will he be cranky? In the sense that it'll bring back horrible memories, yes, there aren't really any cheap pleasures that don't. In the sense of being on net worse than anything else they might do, not really. He probably should not attempt to have any kind of take on the morality of it because all his moral opinions are thoroughly pessimized. (If he did then obviously his take would be that it's wrong.) <I'm not complaining.>

Well in that case it's happening. He doesn't make a huge production out of it; it barely prolongs the shower beyond what it would likely have been anyway (not that this is a short shower, since this time there is shampoo and stuff and that's exciting). And then they get dressed and hop on the bus to the mall.

Atsinni swings through the Nordstrom to nod at the fitting room attendant and duck into a back room to confirm with her that he's Atsinni, this is what his host looks like, yeah he can show up earlier tomorrow he'll set an alarm. "Do you need the Pool today?"

"I could wait till tomorrow morning but as long as I work here seems wise not to push it."

"Yeah, all right. Come right before lunch or he'll puke in the cells, if he's a puker, and the Taxxons don't get it all reliably."

"Gotcha."

And they are off to patrol the mall.

Shampoo is exciting. It's not as new to him but it's still nice.

The mall is also nice.

<What are Taxxons?>

<Another kinda host. There were some around when we nabbed you but it was too dark to see them, there'll be some around in the Pool. They're the centipedey guys.>

<Huh, okay.> That will probably be interesting but he's trying not to anticipate anything about the Pool too much.

In between noticing things about the mall he tries to figure out how to square a circle.

Atsinni drifts around the mall, window-shopping, trying on clothes, actually buying some clothes but asking them to be held for him till later, taking selfies wearing half the merch at a sunglasses kiosk and buying a pointy-cornered red pair with rhinestones which the proprietor pronounces "interestingly genderfuck", and when he finds the whiff of Cinnabon too tempting, back to Nordstrom to go through the secret passage in the employee bathroom. There's stairs, and after they've gone down the first flight, they can hear the screaming!

Oh, it's not going to be lonely. Hell is often lonely. They presumably have much less space here.

Atsinni introduces himself to people, some of whom he apparently knew at least distantly before, and gets in line. The process appears to be that each host - they're only doing humans right now, maybe the centipedey guys and the scary spiky ones take off-peak-hours - gets locked up and then tipped forward over the sludgy-looking pool of fluid in the center of the room, their Yeerk goes out, and they get tossed in a cell for some amount of time, after which they get hauled back to get their Yeerk back. In the cells, they appear to be doing things like:

- sobbing and screaming
- puking
- jerking off, while having a shouted argument with the host in the next cell about whether this is a reasonable thing to do in this situation
- pleading with their captors
- sitting quietly doing the crossword (this one isn't restrained at all - is in a cell, but not shackled there)
- looking for ways to commit suicide (this one has been a bit more thoroughly restrained than most of them)

On the way to the Pool he just repeats don't think don't think don't think don't think don't think don't think over and over until Atsinni isn't going to overhear anything. Math would also be fine except he can't focus on it at all. It's not that any individual person is suffering that much, they actually mostly seem to be suffering relatively little, and it's not that there actually are more total people suffering, but it's more visible suffering all in one place than he can remember ever seeing before and they're being loud.

<As you can see you are not going to escape, and if anyone listened to you talking about your healing factor, which they probably won't anyway unless you hurt yourself, all that would get you is studied. We good?>

He is not thinking about that yet. It's entirely possible that he's going to do absolutely nothing but he's not going to commit to that before he's thought about it and he's not going to think about it till he's alone.

<Dude. If you rat me out they probably kill me for not reporting you as an interesting find as soon as I hit gray matter. And then for all I know I go to Hell! Is that what you want?>

That is not the way to get him to commit to anything but it is a way to reduce him to incoherent internal screaming. Maybe soon it will be incoherent external screaming.

FINE. Atsinni gets out of the line and grabs a gag out of a basket and makes to tie it on. "It's his first time, he's usually a sweetie but this is throwing him and I don't want him to panic too bad and bite his tongue," he sighs at the curious-looking guy ahead of him in line as he slips back into place. "That's what these are for, right?" Then he stuffs it in his mouth and knots it.

"Ah, yeah, legit," says the guy in front of him, who looks like he's probably not more than sixteen. "Mine's a pussy about that kind of thing but he just fucking loves pissing himself to make a nuisance for me. Hosts, right?"

"Mm-hm," sighs Atsinni around the gag.

He doesn't react much, even internally. He's too busy freaking out about what kind of afterlife Yeerks go to.

Then they can make it to the head of the line and into the manacles and tip forward, held securely by a couple strong staffpersons.

Out goes Atsinni with a little plop.

Once Atsinni's not suppressing it he feels intensely sick.

Takes him a while to manage to think anything at all, and even then... well, there's no actual point in thinking about whether he can possibly make decisions, then, is there. Fair enough, really.

It's just... he obviously can't be trusted and it's obviously silly to care about his preferences, but it would be kind of unexpected for that to be true of all of these other people, and no one else seems to both disapprove and be in a position to do anything about it. That's true of Hell, too, but there aren't countless damned souls screaming at him right now, and he's not so exhausted that he wants an excuse to give up this time. So it hurts more.

He does not, in the end, make any progress on anything he meant to think about.

He's escorted back to the pool after about an hour and leaned down for Atsinni's convenience. Atsinni breaches the liquid into his ear.

The nausea settles down. The staff unlock the shackles; Atsinni unties the gag himself. Doesn't say anything right away. Heads for the stairwell.

He doesn't say anything either. He's not thinking much.

They go up the stairs. The screaming sounds die away. They pop out in the fluorescence of Nordstrom. Atsinni heads for the food court.

This is fine. He deserves to suffer anyway. It's so unfair that he can't just gut himself, too. He keeps having to suppress he urge to be angry at Atsinni when this is so reasonable, and the urge to try to talk Atsinni into doing something good when he has no idea what that would entail, and the urge to try to run away when that wouldn't even have any effect.

<Can you maybe skip sleeping in the future, I think it's easier not to care about anything when I'm tired.>

<I can try it tonight and see how it goes but I don't know how hard it'll be for me to do stuff with your body if it's tired.> They are having a Cinnabon and, ooh, what's that, a slice of pepperoni pizza, for lunch.

Cinnabons are horrible. Pizza doesn't taste like food, not really, it tastes -

- if his emotions connected to anything anymore he would maybe throw up.

<The chips were better.> Why is he bothering to say so, it's not like anyone should ever listen to him about anything.

<Yeah, I know. Kind of weird that I can like sweets when I have to eat them with your mouth and you don't seem to like 'em.>

<I used to like things. I think. If I don't remember wrong. I think maybe a very long time ago I would've liked the Cinnabon. Maybe you have the taste I would've had if not for everything?>

<Plausible.> Atsinni busses the tray like everyone else and explores more of the mall. There's a fountain. There's a little indoor playgroundy thing with toddlers. There are escalators. There's a shoe store, he pops in there to shop because they currently only have flip-flops.

Extra shoes, wow. They could - nope he's not going to have opinions about things. Atsinni will get whatever Atsinni wants and he doesn't need to think about it.

Well if he's going to be that cagey about his opinions Atsinni can't throw him a bone even in this situation where he totally would because it doesn't involve compromising his ability to enjoy this desirable host body! He tells the employee he's been wearing nothing but flip-flops for a while and doesn't know how you're supposed to fit regular shoes, can he help, and gets fitted, and of his original shortlist of five styles of sneaker finds one that the store guy says fits him. They're white with gray piping. He is also going to buy these neon green alternative shoelaces, why not, and get the guy to put them in for him.

He has no opinions about that. Ideally he would not even have any thoughts. He wishes he couldn't even perceive the shoes.

<I think there's a fancy trick where you don't let your host access their own senses but I super do not know how to do it.>

<You don't have to. I'm sorry.> That would be so nice. Counterpoint: all of his preferences are wrong. Whatever, it apparently doesn't matter anyway.

<Well, if I run into someone who knows how I might as well ask.>

<Thank you.>

<You're welcome.>

Atsinni is simultaneously dramatically more solicitous than anyone else he can recall ever meeting and also the most openly horrible person he can recall ever meeting and it feels weird and dissonant even though there's no real puzzle there, just the fact that everyone else was secretly horrible. That thought seems like it might bother Atsinni and he regrets having it.

<I don't think it's that complicated. I'm a Yeerk. We're in the middle of a war for the survival of our entire species. Earth and the hosts on it are an indispensable resource because without taking them we are helpless and tiny. So we can't exactly cut it out with the whole slavery thing. The Andalites will find us here eventually, or corner us on another front and backup from here will be what wins or loses the war, or some other key thing will only work if we have the hosts and the industrial base to keep going. I don't want to die, or hang out useless and blind in the Pool while all my friends contribute to making sure we still exist next year. So they gave me you and I took you. But I don't have to be any more awful about it than that. I guess I could report you as having magical powers but I don't actually think they'd figure out how they work.>

<I don't think you treat me in a way that makes you horrible. I think the fact that when we talked about it you told me you weren't trying to do what's best for everyone and you didn't seem bothered about it, the fact that you didn't want to bother doing research on how bankers live even though you could either ask a friend who's possessing one or, if you couldn't, the information would also be useful to your people, and the fact that - I don't know - maybe it's the slavery thing but I never previously had the impression that non-demons who kept slaves had to invest that much specifically in measures to prevent suicide but I don't really know anything so maybe I just didn't know that - I don't know anything about the Andalites, and maybe they'd do horrible things to everyone if you don't stop them, but you just told me about your motivation for fighting them and it's "I don't want to die" and "I don't want to be useless and blind" and - I wouldn't want to die either, in your place, but you only just found out about Hell, so I'm a lot less sympathetic - or maybe that's not it, it's not how I'd put it if I had any filter here but I don't - I don't even know that you do horrible things, I just think you want to have fun and preserve the ability of your friends in particular to keep having fun and don't really weigh anything else - I don't know, though, you're an alien and I'm not very smart. I could be completely wrong about all of this.>

<I mean, if I weighed other stuff it seems like that would really prevent me from having fun and preserving the ability of my friends in particular to keep having fun, so, I can see what you're going for but have no particular incentive to go from here to there myself. I think you're doing some weird mix of like, ethics the way I was led to expect humans sometimes do it, and also being incredibly traumatized but not in the way I was led to expect humans to do it because nobody knew about having-been-to-Hell trauma.> They are going to sit in this Barnes and Noble and look through a photography book.

He would rather not have opinions about the photography book but in fact he thinks it's great.

<You also... seem to only be worried about Hell for yourself when it's - hm - when you were telling me you didn't want to die of me talking to someone, you don't seem like you care about it enough to do research on that instead of look at photographs. I think when I try to imagine being really selfish I still imagine caring about things besides having fun.>

<I didn't want to research how it affects bankers if I make the numbers in my account go up. I kind of doubt that's even the sort of thing humans actually know.>

<Why is that in particular confusing?>

<Well, banks get more complicated with computers and stuff, they're not just, like, a place with armed guards with a pile of silver coins in it these days. There's insurance, probably. Complicated financial... instruments. Of some kind. I think if any bankers were going to notice we'd have a stricter policy about hacking, or at least we'd have prioritized taking over some banks. You can pick the next book if you want, this seems like a good store to spend the afternoon in anyway, I just don't have enough practice at reading and talking to you at the same time.>

<See if there's anything useful about - I don't know what keywords they'll want to use but I remember not being surprised to have an afterlife and I remember priests existing, so it might be possible to find information about Hell, only I guess I'm not sure how to confirm that a book wasn't actually secretly written by demons - I don't know, it would be useful if you think you'd be able to tell if it was actually wrong or something. Maybe. If you don't think you could tell then I don't really care, photography is nice.>

<Yeah, I have no idea how I'd tell if a book was written by demons. I think some humans are aware demons exist but I also think some humans are aware Skrit Na exist and neither of these groups of people is a majority.>

<Maybe the humans who are aware Skrit Na exist would know more than the humans who aren't aware of that? Or maybe not, I wouldn't know. I don't think I've heard of Skrit Na before.>

<I don't know if they go by that name among humans they abduct. Sometimes they grab people and study them and take their stuff.>

That sounds bad but then again perhaps it is good, it's not like he knows what things are bad.

<It's so frustrating that you can't just trust someone enough to ask for help. Unless maybe they wouldn't be any good at helping anyway. That would also be frustrating but not in the same way.>

<Yeah, I have friends but not ones who'd be good at this thing you're interested in or who would definitely not turn me in for keeping you secret.>

<I don't really see why you're not also interested, at least while we don't know enough to rule out options like "you totally do go to Hell but only if you die on Earth" or - I don't even know what else - there could be something simple but - > Unfortunately they have to figure everything out from first principles since his information is untrustworthy.

<Wouldn't anyone who wrote a book be someone who escaped from Hell, like you? And you don't know anything useable.>

<I don't think so? It's... hm. First of all, I think I remember there being people who had information about Heaven and Hell that came from God - but maybe I remember wrong - I just think I remember hearing something like that before dying, but maybe not - and maybe I heard it but it wasn't true - anyway. It's not just that, though...>

It's hard to put the rest into words. He has a sense that he doesn't currently have usable information but if he weren't so stupid maybe he would; he's pretty inclined to blame himself for not figuring things out sooner, and he can't do that and think a smarter person wouldn't be able to use his observations somehow, if not his inferences. But he's not wedded to the idea that there was ever any way to do better; maybe it really is impossible. Maybe it's impossible for everyone, from all vantage points, only - this thought is labeled "only I should have been better at math" (he was once taught about functions, specifically to fuck with him, taught them as pairs of values that constituted solutions for functions like 7483x^3 + 0.093y^2 without the idea of graphs ever being suggested, as an illustration of how a question could have an infinitely complex answer impossible to fit in a human mind; he doesn't think of this whole incident in detail but it could have tipped him off, if he'd just managed to think of the right things on his own) - he's reluctant to conclude that it isn't possible to know things, because he really could have been better at math, and he mostly squares that circle by thinking other people are smarter. And maybe they're smarter in ways he could learn to emulate, or maybe they're not; and maybe his memory is too distorted and spotty to be of any use to a smarter person, or maybe it isn't; but he has no reason to be certain either way.

It seems like, also, there should be other ways of getting information, since they do send people to Earth and those people do things on Earth and it might be possible to piece together, not what those people say, but what effects they have on the world. And then, Heaven might or might not also be real, might or might not also be interventionist, which might or might not mean the effects that visitors have are a wash.

If they tell different lies to different people and multiple agents get captured, what then? Do lies have to relate to truth in some kind of way - like being able to produce enough supporting evidence - that if you know ten of the lies someone's told you know something true about them? How many of their agents are even deceived in the first place?

<...I don't know. I guess I think - concluding that all the information would come from a specific source and there's no way to use that source is more certainty than I can understand having? Maybe you have a reason for it.>

<I mean, we have pretty good intel about humans and things humans know? I think if the Yeerk Empire knew Hell existed because any of the reports on it were credible that would change the strategic picture enough that I'd have heard about it. There might be something that would be credible only with the information you add to the picture but I have absolutely no idea how to find it. You were alive a long time ago, maybe everything God said has been degraded to the point of being indistinguishable from insanity among people alive today.>

<...Does the Yeerk Empire not know because all several thousand of the people possessing people with firsthand knowledge of the hereafter haven't told anyone.> Maybe not, maybe he's the only one they've ever caught, but if he's a secret then why would he expect to know about anyone else.

<That is one way the Empire could fail to know, we haven't got enough humans to be sure we'd have grabbed one. Uh, besides you. I guess maybe we have twelve and all their Yeerks are doing the same thing as me.>

<Is there a way we could signal to them that we know, without making anything clear to people who don't know?>

<May...be? I can't think of anything obvious though.>

<Me neither.> Since after all his judgment is absolutely worthless and all his ideas are bad.

<Well, you know, it seems worth doing if it's feasible so think about it if you feel like it and maybe we can come up with something that would work at all between the two of us.>

<Do you really think it's really worth me thinking about it?> He figures it isn't, since he'll just come up with whatever answer the demons would want him to come up with, but then again he doesn't trust his own judgment in thinking that, either, so if Atsinni is sure then he'll try.

<I mean, I don't know but I don't think it can hurt anything, if you come up with something stupid I just won't do it.>

Ah, to imagine that if someone proposes a stupid plan you just won't.

Maybe Atsinni just has judgment that good. Maybe almost everyone does.

<Okay. I'll try.>

Cool.

As far as Atsinni is concerned they might as well spend the whole rest of the afternoon in this Barnes and Noble, they probably shouldn't do that every day because they'll get to be recognized but they can do it today. After they have seen all the photos he grabs a randomly selected Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Ugh, he doesn't feel the need to pay attention to that.

So, ideas. Ideas. The problem with trying to come up with ideas is that he can't trust his own judgment at all - okay, not not at all, he thinks the Hell thing is more likely than not. He thinks one plus one is two; he thinks two plus three is five; he thinks a lot of really easy things like that, things that he can be sure of. There's just - no obvious way to turn that into anything useful. Not literally always, if someone said they wanted to have two scribes copy four books of equal length and wanted to divide the work evenly then there'd be mathematically grounded answer, though maybe they should do something else instead like give all the books to the faster scribe and tell the other one to figure out how to make a printing press...

When he tries to just make up things that intuitively seem like good ideas he doesn't even get relevant ideas, just ideas for ways he could maim himself and speculation on how to keep it from healing.

So how would someone smarter reason something definitely correct out from first principles? He doesn't know, he's not someone smarter. How would a version of himself who had caught on to being in Hell a lot sooner do it? They... wouldn't, there weren't any opportunities to escape, there were only opportunities to resist and -

- instead of going anywhere useful this train of thought dead-ends in a flashback. 

Atsinni puts the book back on the shelf and takes them to the nearest mall restroom. <How would you write a story about it? Or, what would you expect to come next, if someone said 'let me tell you the story of how I...'>

It takes him a minute to get from noticing that that's a very sensible question to realizing it's aimed at him and he should consider it at all. He's - not, actually, shivering or hugging himself or breathing hard, and it makes him a little calmer but also less able to parse the here and now as more relevant than his memories.

<...Good question. Um.> He's instinctively stalling for time while he drags his thoughts back onto the topic, as though if he puts up a good enough front Atsinni will somehow not notice. <So someone says 'this is the story of how I identified the secretly dead hosts' - injure them, only that's rude and cruel, don't do that. Someone who wasn't damned could pray. I don't think the saints or God or the Blessed Virgin listen to me anymore but it wouldn't be me, anyway. Those don't feel like the ends to satisfying stories but I don't think being true is what makes stories satisfying. Hmm, really in a story if it's been told a few times over I think it goes, I don't know, something like 'I went into the woods and I met a mysterious stranger who told me to solve my problems by, uh, never telling anyone I met her and bathing my new spouse in rosewater while wearing this magic scarf.' And that would cause all the Yeerks to hatch into humans. By magic. I think maybe it depends on the type of story, though. Oh, maybe the most satisfying vaguely plausible way for a story to go is that someone jokes about it, and it's obviously a joke except it's so specific that people who know it's a real phenomenon wonder but people who don't have any reason to think "my host is damned and regenerates" is more likely than "my host is a selkie and can breathe water" don't think anything of it.>

<Well, I guess I could try creating a social atmosphere where people are making jokes of the form 'my host is a selkie and can breathe water' and then come in with the damned regenerating thing. I could try praying if that might work, I guess, but I'm not clear on how you could tell they were listening in the first place let alone how you could tell they stopped.>

<They don't answer my prayers but I guess maybe they never did in the first place, and maybe they listen and laugh at me.> Oh no, he was too certain of something in the face of no evidence, even after trying so hard to realize he doesn't know anything, that's awful. Maybe he's even wrong about them not answering his prayers! Only he's pretty sure the last time he believed in anything to do with saints he was humiliatingly wrong about it! Or maybe he wasn't! Maybe he is a space alien from the planet Jupiter who appeared out of nowhere with false memories two seconds ago!

Atsinni doesn't really know what to do with that. <Well, being ignored isn't a big deal, I can try it when we're home.>

<That makes sense.> His ability to notice things that don't make sense is obviously broken, how could he be from Jupiter and have just started existing. No, wait, he's just assuming he's on Earth. And that Earth isn't part of Jupiter. The gulf between his inward reaction and what Atsinni's body is doing is making everything feel unreal and disjointed and like there are absolutely no constraints on how ideas might relate to experiences or other ideas.

<I think it'd be worse all things considered if you were piloting the autonomics, you were so nauseous in the Pool.> They are done in the bathroom and head back out into the mall. Back to the bookstore, why not, this time he grabs a YA novel with a dragon on the cover.

Those things... happen. He exists and doesn't really react to things for long enough for a reasonably quick reader to get through several pages.

Atsinni isn't that quick at it, he's in no hurry to find out what happens at the end of this honestly not very well written dragon book, but he will sit in the B&N and page through it.

After a while he gets sort of interested in it. Dragon stories are different these days. Stories are different these days, but stories about dragons are additionally different in their own specific ways.

When the store is starting to empty out toward the end of the day Atsinni buys the partially-finished dragon book and heads out to get dinner at the Rainforest Café.

The Rainforest Café is really cool.

Even though they're going to eat a bacon cheeseburger there?

nOPE

But it is really cool before they're served, so, there is that.

You win some you lose some. Atsinni really enjoys the cheeseburger and fries though!

They have a little more time to kill before their mall shift is over and Atsinni is going to spend it in a massage chair at the Brookstone.

Well, that's nice.

<You should maybe time food for when I'm being like I was earlier, I probably wouldn't care as much. - Or don't, I don't know, I don't have good judgment, do whatever.> He doesn't have a better articulation than "earlier" because he is unfamiliar with the word "dissociation" in this context.

<Worth a try.>

When their shift is over Atsinni heads out through the Nordstrom and nods to his supe. You can't hear the screaming at all from inside the store.

Bus home and back in the apartment. They can finish the dragon book.

Cool. Books are cool.

They were going to try not sleeping, so when the dragon book is finished and propped up in an empty cardboard box - Atsinni did not anticipate the need for a bookshelf - the TV can go on. No Steven Universe, how about Avatar.

Avatar is nice! Parts of it are upsetting in ways that have nothing to do with horrible memories and are nice and distracting, and parts of it are just funny. It should have more music, though.

Atsinni cannot accommodate this but they can binge Avatar all night. He sips water but does not insist on snacking in the middle of the night.

That makes the night the best stretch of continuous hours of consciousness he can remember ever having.

Oh good. He'll get the hang of having a human eventually.

Once the sun is up it is hygiene and breakfast time and back to work.

He succeeds, this time, at dissociating so hard it doesn't really feel like it matters. Also at spending most of the morning not having thoughts at all. Somehow it is still not an experience of transcendent bliss.

Well in the bookstore they are going to read a book about MEDITATION, how's THAT.

That is probably useful. He tries to pay attention. He's notably worse at that.

Atsinni buys the book about meditation and after lunch reads it again in the atrium with the fountain where there are comfy benches.

Somehow this experience is the exact flavor of nice that feels like the only proper response is sobbing. He isn't sobbing. That feels very wrong and he has no idea how to react to it. He would really like to stop existing.

<I'm not going to start sobbing in the middle of the mall, everyone will notice.>

It feels like Atsinni keeps being mad at him for things that aren't volitional and that bothers him because he doesn't really want to feel like being a good person requires putting a lot of effort into not thinking anything that might lead to having feelings Atsinni doesn't like. Obviously he isn't suggesting that Atsinni should do stupid things just because all his preferences are warped by demons and he's vaguely offended.

Also he would like to stop existing even more now and possibly do things to their body that would kill a normal person just because he ought to suffer horribly. Or possibly because it's familiar and he'd like to feel in control of it and he's not totally not a masochist. (Actually he's pretty significantly masochistic, it just hasn't historically helped much because demons are pretty good at noticing when things are pleasant and not doing those things again. He hasn't noticed this is an axis people vary on.)

<You're my first host, I don't actually know what a normal amount of reacting to your thoughts would be let alone whether it'd apply to you.>

<I don't either. Are you aiming for normal or are you aiming for something else?>

<I dunno. I want to do my job and experience cool human stuff but within that constraint it'd be nice if you were - calmer, happier, something like that.>

<That would be nice.>

<I think I imagined it'd be really easy to figure out how to take care of a human! I'm not sure why I thought that, presumably most people's humans have less going on than you and they're still usually upset about everything.>

He's of two minds about that. On the one hand: it feels like maybe it could be as easy as not repeatedly intentionally doing things you already know are upsetting. Sure, there are compelling reasons to ignore him and act without regard for how he feels, but that's not "it's hard", that's "I have chosen to do something else instead".

On the other hand, he's ended up hurting enough people with good enough intentions that it seems plausible that someone could have the best of intentions and still do worse than nothing. Since if he recalls correctly, well, he's done it himself. And noticing that something is hard is compatible with not trying to do it.

But then on the third hand maybe none of that applies to whatever is up with other people, there aren't compelling reasons to ignore what other people want, unless maybe there are, he doesn't really have any idea. Maybe it does apply. It's - probably specific to Yeerks if pretending to be normal involves not crying and everyone in the Pool is obviously miserable? Maybe? Maybe that's not right, he's wrong about basically everything, the idea occurred to him but he can't evaluate it at all.

In lieu of words he just sends the idea of a shrug.

<Oh, I think most humans just really don't like Yeerks in general, is what's up with them. Some of them are chiller about it and those ones are the ones who weren't as restrained since they aren't going to try to do any murders. I'd really rather it didn't upset you when we eat things but I can't suppress hunger the way I can suppress being sick to your stomach with emotions you're having and I'm not. Also I like food and there is not other equally fine stuff that is not food that I can do instead to accomplish experiencing tastes and not being hungry. I'm trying the not sleeping thing! We didn't watch any more Steven Universe because you hated it!>

<I appreciate that when it doesn't have any bad effects you try to be nice to me.> Which is a completely different thing from actually prioritizing it, it doesn't seem like most things can be achieved without making any tradeoffs ever, although maybe he's wrong about that? But it doesn't seem like this thing can be. And obviously it's perfectly reasonable to make all the tradeoffs in one direction because if you have two people and have to hurt one of them why not pick the one who deserves eternal torment. This train of thought does not crash into a flashback and die but it does come with some relevant sense-memories. He isn't being sarcastic, he's entirely genuine, although he's refusing to consider head-on whether he cares that that's what he deserves or whether he's even correct that he deserves it, and he's very bitter at no one in particular.

It seems like if people in general just really don't like Yeerks and are being forced to tolerate them then it's not really a mystery why they're very upset. Maybe. Or maybe human emotions work some different counterintuitive way. Who knows. He's not saying it's wrong to hurt people, of course, he has no idea how he'd tell if it was wrong to do that, it just seems plausible that there might be an easy way to achieve it, or at least to avoid this one particular category.

<Okay but to be clear I'm not prioritizing me because you deserve it, I have no idea what you deserve and I'm not thinking about that, I'm prioritizing me because I'm me.>

It's so intensely frustrating that Atsinni keeps - doing that - he doesn't really have any idea what exactly it is, just, that.

<It seems like if the situation were totally different and I were someone else who didn't deserve this that would be unfair. I think. Maybe. If you think I'm wrong you're probably right.>

<I didn't say it was fair?>

That. Thing. The total lack of interest in whether he's doing the right thing, whether he hurts people, whether he's being fair, or basically anything other than whether he's having fun. He has so many advantages, like not being fundamentally corrupt and evil, and having friends, and trusting his friends, and having the ability to make choices both in the sense that he can take actions at all and in the sense that he can predict how his actions will affect the world and take actions to affect it in ways he likes. And he keeps rubbing it in, that he's wasting all that, making sure his worthless wretch of a slave can't even look on the bright side without being constantly reminded that the approval of some damned fucking sinner is unnecessary and irrelevant, that the only virtue left to be cultivated in this situation is the humility of submitting himself to Atsinni even though - Saint Aurelius said, "we should in truth think it possible for another person to have something that is hidden to us and whereby he is better than we are" (or maybe he didn't, maybe that was a forgery!) and Atsinni insists on making it as hard as possible to do that and it feels unfair.

Probably Saint Aurelius actually never said that. Maybe humility isn't even a virtue. He has no idea and he's so tired and so frustrated and just wants to stop having a conversation that is obviously just bothering them both and see if he can stop having thoughts now.

<I'm sorry. I keep thinking stupid things and I'm sorry. I hope you forgive me.>

<I could just stop talking to you if you'd rather but I'd expect you to get lonely. Maybe you wouldn't, I think humans don't get as lonely as we do.>

The thing is that he desperately wants to be spoken to and desperately wants to stop answering back and can't achieve both of these things. <I would get lonely, yeah.> Now he is dwelling on just how lonely it gets, to not be allowed to talk to anyone for long stretches of time and then afterward only allowed to talk to the demons for even longer... <I'm not really sure how fast in terms of hours, I didn't get to measure time while I was there. I think maybe not within an hour?>

<Okay.>

And he reads the book about meditation through for the second time and then goes to a craft store to inspect all the yarn and fake flowers.

He's vaguely in favor of fake flowers. He mostly zones out. He daydreams but he tries not to daydream about anything with a plot.

Atsinni walks out of the craft store with a book on knitting and a ball of variegated yarn and pair of knitting needles. He sits in the atrium and starts attempting to teach himself to knit, book propped open on one knee with the opposite foot.

He has a little relevant muscle memory. Sort of. Actually modern beginner projects are different enough that his memory, such as it is, gets in the way, and he isn't skilled enough for it to be net positive that he's ever picked up a set of needles before.

Knitting is nice. It's probably inefficient now, they have machines for it, although in that case why do they have books for it - whatever. Better not to think about it. It's fine.

Then they will knit all evening, except when Atsinni's pager-thing buzzes against their leg and he bags all his knitting and strides off for the Nordstrom like he is in a mild, normal hurry, only to discover when he makes it to the Pool stairwell that it was a false alarm.

Back to the atrium to knit more.

He's starting to be good at just letting things happen without him, except when he suddenly remembers not being allowed to rest and panics briefly as though that has any relevance to the present. Occasionally he chips away at some math thing, or makes mistakes and doesn't successfully chip away at some math thing, or contemplates how much he would like not to exist.

When their shift is over Atsinni packs up and catches a bus. They didn't have dinner at the mall so he has leftover gnocchi for dinner and then puts on the next episode of Avatar, knitting while it plays.

This seems like it has nothing to do with him and therefore he should be very happy!

He's mostly just exhausted. Sleep seems so, so appealing. But if he sleeps he'll have inconvenient preferences and think more and his goal is to think as little as possible and have as few preferences as possible ideally none of which should be inconvenient.

The characters have so much fun, except the villains who aren't having fun at all. Maybe it's supposed to be a moral about how being a bad person makes you miserable, though he's not sure if he should expect it to be that didactic and also that hinges on being sure the Fire Nation characters are bad people. Unless maybe it doesn't. It could just be true that being bent on killing people and conquering countries isn't any fun whether it's right or not, or it could be true that someone wants people to believe it isn't any fun so they don't do it.

Not that there's any point in thinking about that. Whatever, it's a fun show.

<I think we're going to have to sleep sometimes. If we were driving to work I'd worry about crashing, like this, and if we had a more complicated job I'd be worried about that. I can try to time it so you're tiredest when we have to go to the Pool?> Atsinni says when they are in the shower that morning.

He startles at being addressed. <I don't care. Do whatever.> Probably when he's less tired he will care but that is a problem for future him.

They have a lazy day at the mall. Atsinni decides to get a pedicure, that kills an hour and they have pretty toenails afterward.

He was introduced to this concept last night but not really clearly. It's weird! It's like torture, but sort of... opposite? Like there are things that aren't torture the same way that birds aren't trees, but this is a thing that isn't torture the way black isn't white.

They can get a manicure too!

Also weird! He tries not to have opinions about it since that's a gateway to having opinions about less pleasant things.

And then when their nails dry (it's a subtle French manicure situation which the lady recommended) they will have a salad for lunch and knit in the atrium.

It doesn't matter, it doesn't have anything to do with him, nothing has anything to do with him, he doesn't even exist, he must have imagined he existed.

That's... good???

Atsinni gets a calzone for dinner and heads home and - yeah, goes to sleep, he can't drag himself through more of this without it.

His last dream before waking is of a manicurist who also slips splinters under people's fingernails, who's too exhausted to go to work and has to anyway and knows there'll be no mercy.

He wakes up desperately wishing he didn't exist.

Yeah that seems to be how this human works.

Shower, breakfast, bus, mall. Atsinni has gotten sufficiently used to knitting that he takes his project to the bookstore and reads about whales while he works on it. It's going to be a scarf.

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.>

<Anytime.>

...So what can you learn from thoroughly filtered information? Maybe you can learn what the people filtering your information want you to believe - if they can read your mind, then that's probably just whatever you do believe, if you believe anything - right? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they're incompetent and don't get the results they want.

Maybe something you can still say is that things that have happened before are likely to happen again, at least if you're careful not to make any other inferences - something really simple like "my subjective sense of how my body felt yesterday was that I had ten fingers, and that's been true a lot of the time, and when it's stopped being true for a while it's started being true again, so I think tomorrow I will feel like I have ten fingers" seems basically reasonable. It does seem like the experience of how many fingers he feels like he has isn't random, at least if his memory is at all trustworthy. If he had somehow done a better job of timekeeping he would know something useful about it like "on thirty thousand days I have perceived myself having ten fingers and on seven thousand I haven't" and then he could say tomorrow's odds are 30:7. That logic seems applicable even in cases where someone wants to convince you you can trust something so you'll be taken by surprise when it turns out you can't: if someone tells a thousand truths so you'll believe them when they lie, they still tell a thousand truths and one lie.

He mostly doesn't pay attention to the episode with the factory but the one after it is... interesting. Everyone on this show has such a comfortable time being taught things and this one goes into more depth about that than most episodes and has such a notably pleasant relationship between teacher and student - they're all notably pleasant, but he's encountered a couple of teachers who are about as gentle as Pakku, and of course Toph isn't in a position to exercise authority as a teacher at all, and so Piandao still stands out.

He doesn't, actually, think it'd be surprising or unlikely if it were easy to teach people more effectively and more gently than he's experienced.  He shouldn't be sure but - that's one of the things that eventually led to him catching on, that the demons were demons. (Probably.) He wonders if good teaching is like good math, and once you see it you can tell it's good just by thinking about it. Probably not. It feels like it should work that way, though, and it feels like it's clear that Piandao is a good teacher.

(He wishes he'd independently come up with the idea of not hurting your students.)

The next day Atsinni signs up for an embroidery class at the craft store.

Huh, they still do embroidery by hand these days? Weird.

Apparently!

They have to go to the Pool today, too, before lunch.

Ugh. At least he's tired enough to sleep through it.

(Insofar as anything can possibly count as relaxing, being very obviously not expected to do anything and very obviously satisfactorily miserable is relaxing, or at least not a situation where he's used to being punished for trying to sleep. Other people nearby screaming makes it harder, a lot harder, but not impossible.)

Atsinni doesn't gag him this time; he can catch some microsleep in one of the cells while he's catching rays and then get escorted back to receive him again.

That... is an opening and he's absolutely not ready for it and he has no idea what to do with it and he hates himself for that.

Is it at least reasonable to think if Atsinni left him an opening that soon it's likely to happen again soon? Maybe. Hard to say. He contemplates that afterward.

<Well I'm not going to do it if I think you'll get me killed!>

<That's very understandable. I don't want you to go to Hell. It seems like the fact that neither of us wants that should let us work together in a less adversarial way than this but I admit I'm not really sure how.> It would be obvious if he weren't a total failure as a person, he thinks, but he is and it isn't.

<All you have to do is plan not to tell people anything or show them anything that'd be a problem.>

okay but the last people who wanted him to do or not do things were trying to maximize torture

<Is this symmetrical with "all you have to do is - "> He can't actually bring himself to put words to it but there sure is exactly one thing he's selfishly upset about in their relationship and it's not like Atsinni doesn't already know what it is.

<I am in fact nonzero worried that skipping meals will get me killed. Not sleeping affects how you are to handle and not eating wouldn't help, on top of how conspicuous it could be - nobody is watching me now as far as I know to make sure I'm at the food court every day but if I start acting weird or your stomach growls at the wrong moment or something they might start paying attention.>

And he's nonzero worried that Atsinni isn't behaving in the way that best minimizes the number of people in Hell, so maybe it is symmetrical, and maybe that doesn't get them anywhere, or maybe at best it gets them as far as having empathy for each other.

(He... accepts Atsinni's reasoning, in the sense that he can't really argue that he knows better, but it doesn't feel like the sort of reasoning that was very careful or weighed his well-being very highly or took more than two minutes.)

<I'm weighing your well-being, I'm not, like, a sadist, but I'm not going to just suddenly hard juke left and do whatever looks like it might minimize damned souls! I don't even know what that would be but it's probably not me being dead!>

<I'm also not sure, or I would have explained it to you in detail already and be badgering you about it constantly, but I think... so, it matters if you go to Hell, and besides that it matters if I get to the point where I can actually come up with a good plan, and if I can it matters whether you get in my way.> He expects Atsinni to get in his way, at that point, because Atsinni seems to care about having fun, not about avoiding pain - he's not articulating this part in words, or even thinking it over, or he'd conclude he shouldn't be confident about it, but he implicitly thinks Atsinni is indifferent between going to Hell, ceasing to exist, and going back to the Pool forever. <Because - I guess - I've been thinking that if you want something, like having fun, you'll use all the power you have to hurt other people very badly, because it would be a really weird coincidence if, for example, making other people happy were the best way to have more fun. Even if you personally don't find cruelty fun.> He's concerned that this means he can never ever have any fun because all fun tortures people. <Also I think you keep conflating the obviously completely justified fact that you aren't prioritizing my well-being and the different> (unjustified and egregiously evil) (or maybe it's fine, how would he know) <fact that you aren't trying to do anything about Hell. It's not like prioritizing my well-being is very likely to be a good strategy for that. If you wanted me to be okay that would be really simple, or maybe it would get you killed, whatever, either way you wouldn't need to do anything about everyone else, and if you did somehow destroy Hell it wouldn't make me happy.> (He's not entirely right about that but he's not doing deep introspection about it right now.)

<I don't know how to destroy Hell! I don't know how to find out how to destroy Hell! I don't know how to make progress on figuring out what would be a good strategy for learning how to destroy Hell! If the opportunity presents itself, sure, let's destroy Hell, but I don't see any reason to expect that to happen.>

<It'll take some doing but my memories wouldn't make more sense if demons could read minds, if they could control minds, if they could control other people's bodies directly, or if they could achieve all their goals on their own without help. If that happened my memories would make less sense.> He could contemplate specific examples but that doesn't really seem to be the point. <I don't know how to get there without their help, I don't know if they can be injured, I don't know if there's a fixed number of them. I bet all of these problems are solvable if we just do some research and think about it for a decade, only I don't know how to do research so I need to think about that for a decade first. You seem really confident that you understand the world around you and how to make plans, so it'd probably go faster for you.>

<I understand the parts of the world I'm familiar with! None of which include any way to make inroads on traveling to or influencing Hell, let alone without making it a worse-than-suicide mission.>

<So I don't really know enough that you should listen to me, my ideas are probably terrible, but the terrible ideas that have occurred to me so far are trying to get recaptured, trying to impersonate someone else that they'd trust more, kidnapping other people they send here and making demands, checking that they're not just underground somewhere we could tunnel to, getting people who don't kind of suck as people to pray in case that helps - I assume there's no help coming but I guess I don't really know - or maybe other people would have ideas, or maybe the way they send people back and forth is actually learnable, or maybe it isn't but we could trick one into helping, or maybe we could talk one into defecting, or, uh, anyway I don't actually know and those ideas are probably terrible, you're right.>

<Getting people to pray sounds at least not very dangerous? I don't know how to do it but it doesn't sound like it involves attracting demon or Imperial attention which is a great start.>

Mental shrug. <I think most of what I know about it I learned before dying, which I guess doesn't prove that it really works that way. It - doesn't seem like my prayers since then have gotten me anything but maybe that was because of being in Hell rather than because of anything about me. Or because it doesn't work at all. Or something.> He finds the topic intensely painful, though of course that puts it in company with a lot of other topics.

<It seems like the kind of thing you should be able to do while I'm going about my business, if you want?>

<It's possible that'd work but there's a reason to think I specifically might not be able to do it successfully, there's some reason it's never worked for me before.> Also he hates the idea and doesn't want to think about why.

<I can probably find some sort of church but there are at least three different kinds just on the bus route we take.>

See, that's the thing: if he thought he had good enough judgment he'd look into all the churches, figure out how they work and whether any of them are likely to be secretly run by demons, and make use of any that aren't. He's not going to because he can't, because he doesn't have good judgment and because he can't take any actions at all. And Atsinni probably isn't going to because it's not fun. It's not clear that Atsinni could, or should, it's just that whether he could or not doesn't actually factor into what happens. Or maybe it does, who knows; the mind reading only goes one way, after all. Anyway, it doesn't matter.

<I wish I understood - so I haven't been to one recently, and I got the idea that it's not very common to do that anymore, but, you know, I think demons discouraged me from it and I remember churches being important before and if there are lots of them around then maybe they are still important - I guess what I'm getting at is, is going a good way to seem like an unremarkable human?>

<I don't have to spend literally all my time doing things that are fun and going to churches seems safe. I haven't gotten orders about it one way or the other so it's probably fine.>

Somehow that answer isn't within the range of answers he expected, not that he thought through explicitly what he did expect. He'd kind of like to ask for a better model of Atsinni's goals than he currently has but maybe there's no point in that, since he wouldn't trust anything Atsinni said, and maybe it'd be unfair to ask and then not believe the answer. But it still seems silly if he's going around stupidly expecting something really uncharitable and not even checking. Maybe the solution is to just do a better job of realizing he doesn't know anything and not imagine he has any idea how Atsinni feels about anything.

<Maybe you'll get used to me after it's been a few weeks or something.>

On the way home they can stop at an Episcopalian church and have a look around.

It's... a nice place.

He has complicated feelings about church that he's not interested in untangling right now, some tangle of homesickness and anger and grief and self-loathing.

They can... sit in a pew and look through the books that are lying around?

Apparently they can.

He'd have an easier time figuring out what was up with this church if he could watch the people who come here interact with each other. No, false, he can't trust any impressions he might have of them, never mind. They can read books. He hates nonfiction, it's untrustworthy but text worms its way into his thoughts and even if he doesn't trust it he ends up thinking about explicitly rejecting it in particular... but this is important and he's not complaining. Sort of. Insofar as it's volitional at all. 

Well if it'll keep him from complaining Atsinni is happy to sit there and read for a while. <I do want to sleep tonight, right after a Pool visit is the right time for it if you want to be groggy for those.>

<It's fine.>

He shouldn't have asked Atsinni not to sleep in the first place, it makes it easier to zone out and not have inconvenient preferences but caring about that is selfish of him and he should instead want to be as functional as possible.

Presumably he means selfish with respect to the denizens of Hell; it's not too inconvenient for Atsinni.

They go home and Atsinni skips dinner and goes to sleep.

Awwwww. He's not sure he should be happy about that, Atsinni has made all those arguments that he shouldn't be, but in fact he's overcome with affection and very touched.

He has the usual complement of nightmares but the last one tonight involves rescuing Aang from the Fire Nation.

Aww.

They do have to eat breakfast but then it's off to the mall to mill around - oh, and attend their embroidery class! It lasts three hours and they are doing a sampler.

He's more upset about breakfast, having gotten his hopes up.

But there's something - steadying, or something, he can't identify the feeling - about the idea that Atsinni would do something for his sake that wasn't trivial. It doesn't mean existence isn't miserable. It doesn't mean either of them wouldn't damn the other if it seemed like a good idea. It doesn't mean either of them has a plan, or that they're working together, or that it will ever happen again. It just means that one day someone chose to sacrifice something for him, and for no particular reason that means he finds it easy to focus on the thinking he needs to get done.

Also it means that if he were confident in his decisionmaking, and confident Atsinni hadn't planned it that way on purpose, and confident it wouldn't damn thousands of other people, and confident that for some reason exactly one of the two of them would have to go to Hell and suffer forever, and if it were his choice who - exactly none of which conditions obtain - he'd go himself, and it wouldn't be a hard choice.

So anyway. Three hours of embroidery class, which is sort of nice to watch and doesn't take much attention to enjoy in the background while thinking. And how do you get to be confident of things? How do you come up with a well-founded idea of some things as more likely than others, if you can't be certain? Of course Atsinni behaving that way could just be a plan to win his loyalty and not actual kindness - a thought that hurts very badly - but surely it means something, even if the thing it means is that Atsinni wants his loyalty, even if the thing it means is that Atsinni either wants his loyalty or cares about him - it seems like it's more likely to mean one of those things than to mean that Atsinni is really fascinated with spiders, right? Only why? Is that just an untrustworthy feeling or is there something to it?

The thing is that if it meant Atsinni were really fascinated with spiders, that would raise some questions, like "how do you get from being really fascinated with spiders to skipping dinner?" Whereas if it means that Atsinni likes him, it doesn't raise questions like that. Is there a way to be sure he's not missing questions? What exactly defines the category of question he's concerned with? It feels like in one case all the steps that would lead from the theory to the observation are clear, but in the other he doesn't see how the theory leads to the observation at all. But doesn't that say more about his imagination? Couldn't there be an explanation that he just isn't aware of? What if which sorts of connections between theories and observations he can easily think of has to do with what he was taught by demons trying to make him wrong about things? Is there something that doesn't rely on his poisoned intuition or judgment, something mathlike in its objectivity?

If Atsinni was nice to him because Atsinni is really fascinated with spiders - what, does Atsinni want to ask him later to ask another slave questions about spiders while they're at the Pool? Maybe there's a slave who studied them before being captured? Something else could happen to be true that, in addition to Atsinni really liking spiders, would explain Atsinni being kind. (He's going to feel so stupid if Atsinni actually just wasn't in the mood - another simple explanation - but that's not the point.) Atsinni liking him would explain it without needing any extra facts - is that true? What if Atsinni was going to Hell and didn't want him to grieve and decided to be an asshole to achieve that? Okay, additional facts do determine whether Atsinni liking him leads to Atsinni being kind to him. That feels somehow weirder and less default, as though there's something default about being nice to people you like that's not default about being nice to people you don't like when you're fascinated with spiders, but maybe that's just poisoned intuition. If there were a quantifiable amount of expectedness and he could be confident about that then he can see how he could get somewhere from there without relying on poisoned intuition about how to change his mind when things happen. But that's a big if, that he can basically only see how to apply to extremely simple and objective things like how many fingers he subjectively experiences himself as having.

Well, but aside from that - he's confused and mostly feels grim and afraid, but he'd say he's okay for the first time he can remember. (He'd say so because he doesn't have experience with a wide enough range of possible amounts of okayness to know what being okay even means, but still.)

There's a section in the sampler that the teacher leaves open to put whatever you want at the end of the class. Atsinni puts a spider in it.

He wonders if he's being made fun of.

<Partly that but partly because you were thinking about them so much I couldn't come up with anything else.>

<I guess.>

It's a delicate carefully-embroidered little spider and the teacher compliments it.

Maybe he should be proud of Atsinni. Or maybe the teacher is lying. Or something. Who knows.

Atsinni doesn't have an opinion on that. He buys a sewing kit and more thread and embroidery hoops and muslin and embroiders in the atrium for a change.

It seems nice that he has a hobby.

Which is odd, because arguably having any preferences or goals besides destroying Hell is not nice at all. But still.

This time he is doing flowers and birds.

Flowers and birds are nice. They're right up near the top of the list of things he missed while he wasn't on Earth.

And end-of-day they go home.

And when they're out of sight, there's an unexpected touch and they're elsewhere, in the middle of a cherry orchard.

<This doesn't look like Hell so I assume we haven't been shot or hit by a car or something...>

Being shot or hit by a car or something shouldn't matter but Hell lies but this place seems big, he can't think of anywhere in Hell that there's room for someplace like this, but that doesn't prove anything.

"Hi there," says a person behind them.

Atsinni spins them around.

"I didn't have much choice but to scare you. I'm sorry. You're in New Jerusalem. I can take you back where you were if there's a reason to do that, but I'm hoping we can help each other first."

"New Jerusalem?"

"One of three... places... sometimes known as 'Heaven'. Um, before I get into too much detail about that, I did get both of you, right, I don't want to leave anyone shriveling up by accident..."

"Uh, I'm not aware of having left anything on me behind."

"Good, it'd be a bad idea morally and strategically to leave anyone behind. So New Jerusalem is a monarchy ruled by a person sometimes known in English as Jesus Christ - I can give you the rundown on the laws you'll need to know about in a bit if you're staying - and we've dealt with people who've escaped one hell or another enough times already to have procedures for it, although, well, none of them take into account this situation. My plan is to take you to a place that's harder to teleport into, out of an abundance of caution, and discuss how the Yeerk Empire changes things. Is there any reason why, assuming this isn't a trick and I've been basically honest with you, you'd still want or need to return to Earth immediately?"

"Uh... not immediately but if I don't show up to work it'll complicate getting fed."

She starts walking and gestures for them to follow.

"I don't suppose you know exactly how to do that and just lack the runway or the materials to get it set up?"

"I do not know exactly how."

"That's annoying. We'll see what we can do. So - my current understanding is that the person I'm talking to, who is probably not named Stan Peters, is an alien slaveowner communicating through the body of someone also not named Stan Peters who was probably stolen from one of the hells, possibly one that lies about that. I would like to know if that's correct, and if you have any idea if they know about you, and I'm wondering about the prospects for an alliance between your people and New Jerusalem."

Well there goes the plausible deniability tactic not that it was a very good one. "I didn't think anyone knew that but apparently someone does."

"I honestly wasn't sure, it just seemed likely enough to be worth bringing you here."

"Well, I don't know how many people besides you know, but don't know there to be any - I mean, Yeerks know who I am and demons know who he is but not in combination."

"Speaking of which - I'm Sara, what should I call you?"

"Atsinni, I guess."

"Nice to meet you, Atsinni. So, do you have any useful input into the question of whether and how to reach out to your leadership or what it would take to make it easy for you to transition away from slavery?"

"I haven't really had much direct interaction with the higher-ups..."

"Hmmm. Would I be wrong if I said it doesn't seem like you'd be better off if you had?"

"I'm not really cut out for it."

"Huh. What does that mean?"

"I'm not ambitious or risk-tolerant enough?"

"I personally think that speaks poorly of them. If I were in charge of something I'd try to be - available - safe - if someone had something very important to tell me and wasn't very risk-tolerant or ambitious."

"Yeah?"

"I would basically not worry about my own safety if I wanted to talk to the king. If I bothered him he would tell his secretaries not to schedule any more meetings with me. The worst thing I've heard of him doing to anyone any time this past millennium is having them put in a prison covering about half a square mile and containing its own library. He did worse before that but for reasons that aren't true anymore. And so when people learn things he'd very much like to know, we tend not to be afraid to tell him, so he learns what he needs to know and things run more smoothly than they would if he didn't. I want to be like that, because I want what he has and because I would want anyone who answered to me to have what I have, which is - not being afraid all the time, and being able to make plans to make myself better off instead of just to avoid things getting worse, and having people I can ask for help."

"Maybe the Yeerk leadership needs more secretaries?" says Atsinni uncertainly.

"Maybe! Do you know anything about their staffing?"

"Not really, just who I'd have to take orders from."

"Oh? Who?"

"My direct supervisor and anybody with a Visser or Sub-visser before their name."

"I see! At some point I'll want to talk to one of them but I hope to do that without putting you in danger."

And out of the orchard there's a barn and a house, both of them sturdy and intricately ornamented and well-maintained, and between them an arbor and several benches where two people are waiting for them, one of whom has wings.

It seems like a perfectly nice place. "I'm not sure how you mean to do that."

"Yeah. My current bad plan is for you to move here - I'm pretty sure I can keep you alive, but not nearly as cheaply as I'd like - but if you don't want to then I'd need to do something else. Anyway, these are Theo and Jess," she says, gesturing at the other people; Jess seems to be the one with wings. She raises her voice a little. "Everyone, this is Atsinni and I didn't get the human's name."

"He sort of doesn't have one."

"The human incorrectly known as Stan Peters," she says.

Jess waves. "Hi, it's nice to meet you, I'm excited about aliens."

"Are you... not... an alien?"

"I guess if there are people from at least two planets then everyone's an alien from some point of view! I'm from Earth originally. I guess normally I'd say 'you can get wings too' but I have no idea if you can, and, um."

"He could get wings maybe, I don't think it'd work on me."

"They're certainly an option if he wants them. - Your situation really looks like slavery but if people started introducing me as a slaveowner I'm not sure I'd feel confident about contradicting them and I haven't even puppeted anyone."

"I mean, it isn't unlike slavery, but this one in particular really can't take care of himself, I think he'd probably just curl up somewhere and hide and starve and avoid sleeping."

He does not want wings and he's trying to catalogue notable observations about these people and this place because internally screaming about how this is crushingly important and he has no idea whether any of it is true doesn't seem useful and might be distracting and he really shouldn't distract Atsinni.

He would kind of like to be offended right now, though, if that were remotely reasonable which it probably isn't. Probably he should just acknowledge that Atsinni is right and be ashamed of himself. But then again perhaps Atsinni is totally wrong. How could he possibly be sure. It's not that he wouldn't do that but it seems important that it wouldn't do him any permanent damage even if it might in some sense temporarily hurt. He's not better off for being physically healthy, he doesn't think, but then again what does he know.

"Which to be fair would not permanently impair him. He doesn't want wings."

Awwwww, the theory that Atsinni cares has not yet been falsified!

"That's not unusual. I don't off the top of my head know the exact number of similar cases New Jerusalem deals with annually but it's a few."

"- what, people who just want to curl up and do nothing? What do you do with them?"

"There are resources available to them, which they can opt out of any time they want - I'm guessing he's from Demon U, there are residential programs for people from there and different ones for people from any of the hells people come out of not knowing how to talk, but if it's more a case of, just, flinching at everything and feeling like doing things is hard and pointless, that's what public housing and food deliveries are for. Also libraries."

(Sara looks like maybe she would have put it differently but she doesn't contradict Jess.)

"I don't know the name of the place. - also he could probably talk though admittedly I haven't asked him to try."

That sounds tremendously stressful. Which isn't a no.

"They don't use that name themselves. They call it Purgatory."

"Sounds right, yeah."