There is a possibility becoming increasingly, terribly clear in his mind.

<...wouldn't every universe think of its own physics as regular?> he says slowly.

<Do you mean...are you saying that...that brains here are just very-complicated-biological-machinery all the way up? That there's never a point, as a species gets smarter, where its members become something more than the sums of their parts, where a merely carbon-based-computer mind becomes a thing-that-is and which cannot be destroyed or fundamentally damaged? --or, at the very least, certainly not by the mere clubs and knives and poisons that could do it to a lesser animal.>

"I thought you thought my universe had physics that would actually be foreign in the same way to both of us, because they'd show up in the same kinds of fantasy books where it's literarily interesting to have souls be recognized by some gods as special cases - exceptions to the usual laws of physics ohno." He clams up.

Literarily interesting to have souls be recognised as special cases...

...yeah, that all sure does sound like a "yes", doesn't it.

<...I-- I'd thought that's the thing you were using "soul" to mean,> he says. <But you...don't actually have a hayi, do you.

...oh, oh, of course, we-- we would have no way of knowing, if-- if-- if y'all just cease like lesser animals do, then we'd never hear from y'all, you shouldn't judge the flaws in your protective gear based on the ones that make it back-->

He says something that, in context, is probably swearing.

<--for all I know most worlds are like yours and there's just one cluster that's different, maybe the flow of walk-ins goes "outward" in some hyperdimensional sense and nobody who makes it out this far is ever going to hit Rekka afterward and report what they learned...>

There's a pit yawning in his stomach. The multiverse is larger and scarier and more unpredictable than he thought it was, and it had been plenty large and scary and unpredictable enough already.

<...there's...there's clearly something more to you than the usual lesser animals, even if you managed somehow to build all of that something-more out of ""regular physics"". I never would have predicted that hayi-less creatures could form a civilisation like this. And...if, in the end, you consider me a real person, it would only be right to extend you the same courtesy.

Uh, I didn't...actually answer, did I-- ravens and chimps aren't conscious. A-- in the...paradigm that I am accustomed to, hayi are necessary but not sufficient for sapience. Ravens and chimps and some other species have them, but they never...well, no, of course you wouldn't have a word. There's a moment, usually a little after a child's second birthday, where something clicks and they-- become self-aware, go from being a smart animal to being a person. Other animals never have that moment, not that anyone's seen.>

". . . huh," he says. "We call that part 'sentience', and the part we call 'sapience' something else that happens when you're around five or six . . . " because that's the easy part.

The harder part comes slower. "Just to be perfectly clear on this from the start - assuming you are real, sorry but I've had some really convincing hallucinations, none as convincing as this but many subjectively more convincing than any before them - from my perspective, the situation is now that we figure out who was making exceptions for hayi on Rekka, and how, and trade with them or imitate their methods until stuff doesn't suck anymore."

<What happens at six?> He supposes this and the "soul" thing are just the sort of issues you should expect when attempting to use the language of someone who apparently has a fundamentally different mechanism of consciousness. assuming he's not a p-zombie

<If there's a "who", they're keeping very quiet about their existence. Or the spirits we have met are much more powerful than they claim to be, but that seems like a weird thing to lie about.

...I'll do what I can, but I don't know how much help I can be. We've known about the existence of hayi for ages, but our knowledge of how they work is very much in its infancy. And it's not like you can use local ravens as test subjects, even ignoring the controversy involved in doing potentially-fatal tests on greater animals. There's...just me, by the sound of it, and if an experiment ended up killing me it would cut off your whole line of inquiry.

...also it would mean I have to go find out what outside-context bullshit the next world has in store for me--and for that matter the inside-context bullshit--and I would really rather not with that. At least y'all have germ theory.>

"I'm sure we can do this without deliberately risking your life! That was not even on my radar. Please tell me that killing people to give their kidneys to those more in need is not a thing where you're from.

Um, at six - do five- and six-year-olds from Rekka - it's not obvious if you're not looking for it - but is there a known transition point where they start ever - asking why and not being satisfied with the answer, until they actually understand?"

Oh good, so Xakda wanting him to go away is conditional on him not being sentient.

or Xakda just doesn't have the implications, starting to unfold in the back of his mind, of the fact that mice can bounce back from being continuously dosed with deliriants for a week straight and ravens can't no, the organ-harvesting comparison implies an unwillingness to kill Minaiyu even if Xakda would benefit

<We definitely don't murder people to harvest their organs. The exact threshold of how confident you have to be that a comatose body is empty before you can harvest its organs is a matter of some debate, but it's generally set pretty high.

Hmm. There might be a transition point like that? I hadn't really thought about it that way.

I'd been wondering if maybe it was going to be the developmental stage where kids start voluntarily enduring discomfort in pursuit of abstract future goals, which for us is usually around nine or ten. Like, so far I've only done vaccinations on people older than that, because they wanted me better trained before I try to stick a needle into somebody who's screaming and flailing about it; whereas an eleven-year-old is usually happy to be there and will actively cooperate. Sometimes they even sign up for the rhinovirus vaccination cycle.>

". . . huh. It's probably not related to the 'hayi' thing, but our kids don't really have an uncooperative stage. I generally don't diagnose them because they're systematically different from and more fragile than adults, so it does make sense to - our economy - to have pediatric specialists even if not 'cardiologists'.

I think for us five or six probably is the age when voluntarily enduring discomfort in pursuit of self-conceived goals becomes possible, if we have a discrete point like that? Even though, before that age, kids just calm down and take the needle if the trusted-by-familiar-adults adult says to. I don't know nearly enough psychology to say for reasonably sure, though.

It's almost time for me to go back, sorry - I can ask Andor for some psychology reading recommendations after he declares you a not only medical but physical miracle, which is what I now on some level expect to happen?"

<Well, immediate goals are sooner, I think. It's somewhat harder to grasp the concept of "putting up with a needle-stick in order to lower the risk of experiencing a couple weeks of suffering months later".

Sounds good. Especially the ways that things can go wrong in y'all's brains: seems like that'll be a fruitful area of study.>

The implications-unfolding-in-the-back-of-his-mind are now pointing out that, in hindsight, he absolutely should not have allowed Xakda to dose him with a psychoactive without vetting it first, even if Xakda wasn't and isn't trying to kill him on purpose. Minaiyu could not reasonably have known, and in this particular case he's pretty confident that it was indeed an overlay and not a disruptor, and he will forgive himself, but also he's not doing that with the next mystery drug.

. . . He has more points of clarification about child psychology, but he really does have to get back to work now. So he does.

In the middle of his last work period, between tasks, he writes a note:

I told you to 'please tell me' your culture didn't have kidney thieves, but now I'm not sure I should have wanted that to be true. On the one hand, it's lots of seemingly low-hanging fruit for improving things if failure modes in the human-having planet multiverse - hey, by the way, uh, did Rekka have continents like this? [doodles of Gahai] - tend to be that obvious to people from other multiverses, and tend to not affect the people who live there that much, as you seem to have turned out fine. On the other, it'd be nice if human-having universes didn't have that failure mode? So I guess whether I'm happy or sad about Rekka's lack of kidney thieves depends on whether I previously thought that good human-having universes were the default, or bad human-having universes. And now I realize the thing about the continents is the actually important thing here, whoops. Anyway, your thoughts?

<Oh, your planet's in a multi-continent phase, that's so cool! Yeah, no, we basically have the one, though some islands get pretty big.

Honestly, at this point I cannot begin to guess the default goodness level of a human-inhabited universe, let alone chimerae. We knew the available data pretty much had to be skewed in some way and extent, but I don't think anyone was predicting the existence of potentially vast swaths of invisible..."lesser humans" sounds insulting. Of invisible hayi-less humans.

...I think it seems overall better if people aren't blatantly leaving money on the table? It makes for easier improvements, sure, but only because things were needlessly bad to start with. It'd be nice to think that people are largely doing their best with what they have, and it's just that they often don't have enough.

--we still might come across things that seem like obvious failure modes to each other, which we may or may not be right about. I guess we'll find out.>

It doesn't seem

But the mostly-black display he's constantly checking flashes a notification about the next patient, which cuts him off.

His shift ends. His motions clearing his workspace are as practiced as a very clumsy figure skating routine, although occasionally the angle of the light coming through the window, far higher than it usually is when he leaves, screws him up.

"Are you ready? Sorry about ghosting you earlier, but 'better a job you can't complete than a tragically unbeginnable feat'. I guess you wouldn't have that saying. Anyway, that's a saying. There's an opposite saying, of course, it's all about knowing when to apply which . . . My point is, I figure we can tackle the anthropics stuff after the appointment. Provided I didn't literally imagine you."

Nakoru, passing by his open office door, stalls and squints aggressively.

(Acoustics in Gaha'e architecture generally keeps sound vaguely in its place even when doors are open, but Nakoru was right there and he and Xakda have the kind of closeness where he's not entirely obligated to pretend he didn't overhear any of Xakda's business through his open door.)

"You know how it is."

(This is one of the local ways of conveying 'Please do not inquire further.')

"Oh, totally." He moves along.

He wonders, a little, if Nakoru is ever going to meet him.

<I know we both have a lot of conversational topics piled up, but yeah, one step at a time. Let's go.>

He does not shake as, things finally packed up, he makes his way back to Andor's door. He's quietly proud of that. Five years ago he would have been noticeably twitchy. It's still kind of dicey whether he's able to swing this level of apparent calm on any given fraught occasion. Not that he gets much chance to practice. He really doesn't.

Andor, at his big standing desk, has seven different books open to specific pages. One of the books is entirely about psychosis, one is entirely about DID, and a third is open to a section about DID. There are several decently well-proportioned cross-sections of the human brain on his whiteboard, at least one of which wasn't there earlier.

"You can come in!" He doesn't tell Xakda to sit. People sit down when they feel settled in. Andor himself generally just doesn't. But the desks in this consultation room are height-adjustable, and Xakda does sit, when Andor hands him six short-answer questionnaires. The questionnaires, of course, don't proclaim what they're about - the patient may guess anyway, but it'd be needlessly surrendering information that might subconsciously bias their answers. Most of the questions seem entirely irrelevant to Xakda's experiences, which is just part of the deal you get when you're being thorough. He fills them out, letting Minaiyu write whenever it seems to Minaiyu like more of a question for him.

Andor takes forty-five minutes to go over their answers, during which time they are shunted to a little single-person waiting room. Xakda says he's sorry but he's not in the right frame of mind to talk. He goes over some retrospective case notes of his own, working 'late' after all. He's glad he texted Sinber to announce the appointment as he made it.

When Andor recalls them (after an hour and forty-five minutes, rather than forty-five, because a rather more cut-and-dry company patient did show up in the meantime, who Andor wasn't technically obligated to take, being 'off the clock', but whom it would have undermined his status as leader to pass on to a more junior colleague while present), his demeanor is noticeably - professional. That's all Xakda can notice about it. He takes them to an EEG hookup and sets Xakda up, asks Minaiyu to go 'passenger mode' for the first set of readings, then takes another set with Minaiyu and Xakda alternately answering questions. After that are the fMRI readings. As with the EEG, Andor has done what just about anyone off the street can do, and paid for time with the machine (he is scientifically motivated, but also, the rate he named for Xakda is a commission function tying Andor's payout to the accuracy of his diagnosis by an elaborate custom too large for this margin to contain.) He takes the same set of readings, this time also bothering to distinguish Xakda/Minaiyu's visually- and auditorily-attentive states. Then another shunt to the waiting room, which turns out to last an hour.

Finally, nearly four hours after the end of Xakda's nominal shift, Andor's marginal expected headway dips below his marginal expected costs, and he recalls Xakda again.

He shows off a closed diagnostic-probability-spreadsheet envelope.

"So. We are past time! I'd understand if you want to take this as my verdict for this session and go rest for now," his tone of voice indicating that this is not actually what he expects to happen, "but would you - specifically Minaiyu - be up for more of an interview?"

During the waiting times, Minaiyu runs over mnemonics in his mind and (with the microphone turned out of the way, so as not to distract Xakda) sings to himself both educational and purely-entertainment songs and tears up a little about how he's never going to hear Korri yet Toredi's next album and reads over Xakda's shoulder and daydreams.

The MRI scanner is kind of cozy, apart from the noise.

It's been a long day, but he doesn't want to leave things unfinished and he doesn't want to disappoint (especially not the person who is considering certifying him as not-a-dream-figment).

He nods.

"Okay."

He brightens just slightly, out of professionalism and being unsure of Minaiyu's preferences.

The first question is, "Is there anything you know of, that you know but you think there's a reasonable chance our society doesn't, but could verify?" 

He figured that a question along those lines was going to come up at some point.

"The main thing that's struck me so far is that Xakda seemed to have no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned electromagnetic pulses†. A solar flare destroyed our electrical grid seventy-one years ago; we've since recovered, but that experience taught us lessons that maybe y'all haven't been forced to learn. I didn't see any solar panels on the roofs during the flight over here, which makes me worry that y'all are relying completely on centralised power plants with big transformers and long wires that may well blow if a flare dumps extra current on them without blocking-capacitors. I know there's testing equipment that can generate localised electromagnetic pulses, but I don't know how they're made.

Mostly y'all seem to have a slightly higher tech level than we do. I expect there are other exceptions, other places where we've pulled ahead, but I haven't yet seen enough of your world to get a better sense of where they are."

If only he were a math enthusiast, he might have the latest advancements in prime numbers or something to give them. Pre-industrial clothing is fascinating, but extremely useless for convincing a high-tech-level civilisation that you're a real person with real otherworldly knowledge.

---

†he translates this term literally

He nods. He really doesn't know what he was expecting. It should be unambiguous that he was expecting excuses, and this was an excuse, but - somehow he doesn't entirely feel like he was expecting excuses, or even like Minaiyu's answer was entirely an excuse? It's probably just been a long day.

"Xakda, do you know anything about solar-flare electromagnetic pulses, this natural disaster Minaiyu's talking about?"

"- No, nothing except what he's told me. I'm not under the impression that that means nobody in Gahai knows anything, though."