The level of effort evident in this apparently highly chemically proficient nonsense, which is what it almost certainly is, is alarming. Whatever kind of person does this, it's not the kind of person he'd thought Xakda was at all.

"Thanks, Minaiyu, for whatever it's worth. Which, if you exist to the extent this naïvely seems to suggest you do, is a lot.

When does your shift end, Xakda?"

"Twenty-two."*†

*Counting equinox sunset as zero.

†The specific rail line this time is given with reference to, is omitted, because there's a clear Schelling point for timekeeping in Xakda's workplace, namely the rail line Xakda's workplace refers to.

"I go an hour past that, tonight, if you want to come see me again and go over this, seventy percent this rate."

seems like a good idea to me if you're OK with it?

Questioning look!

"I'm, um." Shows notebook. "Writing a note Minaiyu can see so he can OK it.

He can currently speak directly into my internal monologue-stream but can't read off of it."

holy wizards have mercy just kill him, kill him now

"Ah." It's weird but not that weird, for this apparent severity of mental disintegration? It doesn't sway Andor's credence one way or the other, about Minaiyu's reality.

i don't think he knows I can't actually sing

anyway

you good with more of this after my shift?

(By the way, the reason it's fine for Andor to take personal, nonstandard clients "on the clock" is that, while some workplaces require employees to be available certain hours out of the day, the bulk of employee pay is, of course, always by commission, and bosses would never encourage their employees to be idle at work to the extent that they can still remain available. Andor is planning on skipping some company tasks, tonight, to see Xakda, but will also be skipping out on corresponding company pay, which is not a decision he always likes to make. If there's a company patient who needs to see him at exactly that time, which he's not on the whole expecting, he'll need to interrupt his session with Xakda.

Also, the obligate hours are a minimum, and Xakda under ordinary conditions would have worked long past his nominal shift end.)

Well, currently currently he can't speak into Xakda's internal monologue-stream, but that should be easy enough to fix if Xakda wants this conversation not to be out loud.

He leaves the front.

<Absolutely.>

That went...well? Probably? Hopefully?

- oh, right. There was a reason that fronting!Minaiyu took over Xakda's voice directly, wasn't there.

Well, he'll go back to work, then.

"Sorry," he says, at an opportune moment in a hallway. "I had forgotten about the singing thing . . . Love of all that is good, may we resolve this quickly."

Not much else happens for the rest of his workday, except he gets to co-diagnose with Nakoru a few times. Nakoru is better at suggesting unintuitive ideas, and Xakda is better at moderating between possibilities. They work well together.

On his second break, he asks for Minaiyu's opinions about the cabinets he's looking at online (he and Sinber have tasked him with this decision). Would Minaiyu go with the natively lockable latched doors, or the ones that are less securable but also quicker to open and cheaper?

"Resolve this" could mean a few different things and some of them are better than others, but he will try to be optimistic in his interpretation. And if Xakda is still thinking of Minaiyu being here as a temporary state of affairs, well, Minaiyu will do his best to ease the adjustment.

(He remembers hearing about what happened in Peace River's End when he was a kid. Tiv hadn't gotten access to the language, and had woken up that morning significantly earlier than Reteni. The adults of Reteni's household found what appeared to be their child huddled in a corner, confused and scared, screaming in a guttural language at anyone who tried to touch her.

He ran into them at a science museum a couple years later. They were laughing, fluidly switching off tasks, chatting with the other kids. (Tiv spoke pretty good Tashayan by that point, albeit with some accent.) All three of them agreed that the coolest part of the museum was the bit where you stood on it and it enveloped you in a giant bubble, but had different opinions on which part was second-coolest.

They were happy together, in time. He hopes he and Xakda can be happy together too.)

<What usecase are you thinking of?

Also, I don't have a good sense of how meaningful that price difference is. What's that in terms of your household's average living expenses? And how long would you work to make that much money?>

"To me, kitchen cabinets should be for oatmeal but also possibly secrets, but that's not a universal opinion. Um - cheaper cabinet is around 3gg, lockable one is 4.2ish, so the difference is 1.20gg or so - on a default-effort workday, I make maybe five times that?" It's sort of a strange method of value-anchoring - he himself would have just anchored off the ratio of the difference to the full price of the cabinets, and his own seeming moderate level of care about the whole expenditure - but he doesn't have the cognitive-energetic latitude to question that right now.

(Anchoring off price ratios doesn't tell you how many goods and/or services and/or leisure time you're giving up by buying the expensive one!)

<Well, if it is for secrets then by all means get a lock.

I know there are some households who lock up sweets and stuff like that when their children are too young to have the impulse control to handle unrestricted access responsibly, but I think it's more common to just arrange your food shelves in order of access-restriction with the most tempting things on top. That way the progressive unlocking over time mostly takes care of itself: the older you are, the more things you're tall enough to reach and the more things you can be trusted with.

Do you think a lock would be helpful with your kids? My default assumption would be that oatmeal does not require a very large quantity of impulse control to handle, but people vary.>

"How many sweets did people on Rekka have? That's a clever solution, I've just - it's not a - problem I've ever heard of! I mean, unless your kid's feeding-regulation circuitry is broken in a way that can't be fixed yet.

Thanks for the motivation-boost, anyway. I think I will keep open the option to put some secrets in that cabinet." He buys the lockable one.

<Generally not very much per day, but when you multiply that out by three or six months of pantry it works out to quite a bit on hand. You really don't want a toddler trying to eat it in one sitting.>

"Ah. Makes sense." He's never known anyone to do quite that much food-stockpiling or like sweets nearly that much, but if you combine the two, he can see the hazard.

He does his best to fill the rest of this break with further home-improvement-shopping and related chatter, then returns to the same uneventful workday. On his third and final scheduled break before the end of his obligate shift, though, he's out of shopping and a little out of trying-not-to-think-about-Minaiyu-as-permanent steam.

"I'm - sorry I've been trying not to think about you as permanent, if you are real. It's just - I know this doesn't excuse it, but from my perspective, you're either - a vivid but false construct of my mind, which is something I've experienced many times though not at this hypothetical level, but which I've read is a thing that can get much weirder than this - or some kind of absurd intervention by inter-universal forces that happened to happen to me specifically. You know?"

He thinks things over for a few moments

<...thank you. It'll-- take time to get used to, for both of us.

...I wouldn't say that I know, but I...know that I don't know? The probability-space must look very different to someone who'd never heard of walk-ins but had heard of schizophrenia.

--it's super weird that people here can get stuck in delirium like that, by the way. I have never heard of that happening anywhere. That kind of detachment from reality puts a lot of strain on a soul: normally it's not survivable for longer than a few days straight. Eventually the connection snaps and you're left with a soulless, comatose shell.

...I...understand, if you want to withhold judgment until after tonight? It remains to be seen whether I can convince Andor, given that he doesn't know for sure what your pre-existing knowledge base is and, like, for all he knows you might have memorised the periodic table and constructed a language to describe it in, but you know you didn't do that. At least, I assume you didn't. Even if you did, I'm sure there's more where that comes from: maybe you can get me some wood and hand tools and I'll show you how to build a spinning wheel.>

"Ha!

. . . What my idea would usually be, with going to Andor, is - either he'd be able to make you vanish, by talking me out of my own childishness like impressive diagnosticians tend to be able to do, or he'd be able to figure out what you really are? If he, like, gives up on the problem, then I'll go to someone else.

Schizophrenia - you're not trapped in a delusion, really? It's not, a box that separates you from the outside world. The usual metaphor is that it's a disruption in the ability of the 'projection apparatus' that generates the more abstract parts of yourself, to focus. You lose your coherent representation of reality, to this sort of hyperbolic subjectivity where you can't quite perceive, on a high level, faster than you can will, so your beliefs end up malformed and smeared with your desires and intentions. Depending on the case, that high-level part of you that's disrupted, can include your soul, but it usually doesn't.

Did you learn something different about it?"

<...yeah, I have no idea what you're talking about, and that description still sounds like the sort of thing that should kill you.>

"Less confusing than hemispherectomies or bilateral parietal lobe damage not killing you, though!"

<...are-- are you being serious right now? About the brain damage? That actually happens? You're-- you're saying people survive, but changed?>

"It's - debatable to what extent the person is changed? In the same way you don't change an autopilot routine by crashing the carplane that it runs on. But they can lose abilities, yeah? Like when people - stop being able to gestalt-perceive the left side of their visual field, or they'll acquire this incredible hour-to-hour or stimulus-to-stimulus variability in their ability to handle even mildly mentally strenuous tasks - it's actually kind of a fascinating area of concern? Did you never look into neurology at all? No judgment, at all." It took Xakda himself a while to get over the associated heebie-jeebies but it was so fascinating once he did.

<...okay, so--

--did y'all ever do the experiments where...like, you do surgery on a mouse's brain, and that changes the way it behaves? Like, it stops freezing or hiding when it sees a cat, or it forgets where to go in a maze it was very familiar with before? But if you do the exact same surgery on a raven, or a chimpanzee, they just go permanently comatose?

And the same with natural injuries, like, sometimes somebody drops a dog on its head and from then on it suddenly becomes forgetful or aggressive or something, but this never happens with people. People with brain injuries might end up paralysed, or lose senses, or get chronic headaches, or in a lot of cases they'll go comatose like the experimental ravens--the soul's already dead and the body just hasn't noticed yet--but never changes to anything fundamentally them, never cognition or temperament or memory or anything like that.>

"- No? Are you - this is a universe with regular physics, if you were worried about that.   . . . Are your ravens and chimps conscious, or have you discovered something else that your culture's stories track as fantasy-logic-relevant, that ravens do have but mice don't? Our ravens and chimps pretty uniformly don't pass the mirror test."