"I definitely don't want to do this if doing this would hurt people! That's why I'm asking first, because it's completely non-obvious to me why this would hurt anyone," she reassures. "Could you explain what it is about this that would be hurtful? And how it would hurt people? Like, what specifically would people do if this happened?"

It's - where should he start - so she might have noticed that Crafters have trouble touching each other, or touching each others' things, or being in each others' spaces? That's most obvious with things that are clearly another person's, but it affects anything that isn't clearly theirs, to a lesser degree. He's noticeably less able to take actions here than he is in his own territory, because it isn't his, it's a shared space. And it doesn't matter if everyone agrees that it's fine for him to, say, use the spare dishes in that one cabinet; the problem is in him, in what he feels is possible or impossible for him to do.

And that sense of 'this is my territory, I'm allowed to do anything I want here' isn't unbreakable, either. It doesn't come up often, because Crafters have such a strong taboo on taking actions in others' territories that aren't clearly welcome, but when it does come up - if there's a miscommunication, or an accident, or something like that - that'll damage that Crafter's sense of ownership of the space, often temporarily but possibly permanently, with the same kind of effect. Unwanted touch does the same thing with even more dramatic results; not feeling that you have full ownership of your body is really bad.

And that's what'll happen if she takes action in Crafters' territories without their permission. Worse than usual, even, since usually it's an accident and the person who made the mistake can say that, and she'd be doing it on purpose. He expects that for a fair number of Crafters even knowing that she could take action in their territories at any time and there's nothing they could do about it would be enough to cause major problems, and so would knowing that she's watching them closely enough to notice them asking her to. And the usual thing to do when there's a really catastrophic loss of felt sense of one's territory is one's own is to move, but if her thing is everywhere... he'd expect a lot of people to die of not being able to feed themselves or do other basic self-care like that. It'd be really bad.

"Yikes! I see why that would be bad. Does something happening in your territory without your permission feel bad if its a nonsentient thing doing it? Like, if the wind blew a tree down, or if a non-thinking bird got in and moved some shiny things around. I could build a crystal that is operated by a computer and locks me out, such that the computer can react to things like people signalling for help, but that I can't tell to do things, if that would help?" she asks.

He wouldn't expect that to help; if he were to make an automatic cart and it wandered into someone's territory that wouldn't be much better for them than him wandering in by accident himself, even though birds and the wind are fine. The difference is partly that there's a person behind it and partly that it's unexpected; people know that wind and hawks and crows are out there and they're used to them, or if they've just moved into the area from somewhere that didn't have crows they at least did that on purpose. But he's not sure how much the younger generation knowing about her crystal already when they go to claim territories will help, it's not just familiarity.

She frowns internally and thinks for a moment.

"A lot of the value of having crystals like this is that they're omnipresent. Most crystal people like knowing that they're always safe wherever they go, but some crystal people like their privacy more than others and objected to the global deployment. They were mostly okay with a non-sentient computer system that didn't keep records, though," she remarks.

"It's a lot more efficient to build one large crystal, but I could build many small ones instead, and arrange them such that they only cover public areas?" she suggests. "Would that be better? Coupled with telling people how to make devices that use safe invisible light to signal when they need assistance?"

Putting them in public areas is allowed, but it might mean people are less comfortable being out of their own territories, so he's not sure if that'd make things better for people overall - his intuition is that that'll vary a lot from person to person. Having crystals that people can voluntarily keep with them would be a better way to do it. She could do some sort of emergency signaling thing, too, that's common enough for Crafters to do already with very loud noisemakers. The important thing is that if someone wants to just never interact with this and never be seen by it or affected by it at all, that needs to be possible, and ideally they should be able to do that without giving up anything they're currently doing. And then she can revisit that in the next generation, it might be that people are fine with having it in public places if they've grown up with the idea of that being a way a public place can be.

She really doesn't like that idea. On the one hand, she can see philosophically why people should have the freedom to avoid interacting with a system, and even the Fixipelago permits opting out of most things. But on the other hand, there are lots of bad things -- child abuse, murder, etc. -- that she just stopped (or at least drove down to one-in-a-million occurrences) by rolling fixity devices out to Earth.

She takes a deep breath, and reminds herself that she's not on Earth. She can't just do what works for humans, actually, and her default plan would have possibly made this species go extinct. She just needs to find the least bad option.

"What if I made a small device like my personal crystal for each Crafter, which would only listen to them, and put it outside their territory (turned off) with a note explaining what it was and why I wanted them to have it?" she asks. "The fixity devices can talk to each other even when their ranges don't intersect using invisible light, so you could still call for help and make materials with them, although the teleportation wouldn't work."

Sure, that'd be fine. She'd presumably want to do something for Crafters who don't have their own territories - kids and teens, mostly, but sometimes people who're too old or disabled to manage on their own will move in with a friend or a healer - but leaving boxes of them in public places should mostly work fine for that, especially if she mentions in the notes where to go for them.

"Okay! Let's call that the new plan A, then, and I'll try to figure out refinements to it to make things smoother," she says.

"One difficulty with that plan is figuring out how many devices to make and where to leave them. I saw that there wasn't really anything like a book that lists how many people live in different places. Would you expect that if I flew up in the air and looked with a very good telescope that I would be able to spot everyone's territories? Or are there people who live entirely underground with no visible surface presence?"

There are definitely people underground; there are people living in the glaciers like that, as the obvious example.

Hmm. Tricky.

"If you wanted to ensure that a gift reached everyone, even people living in glaciers, how would you go about it?" she asks. "I can come up with a few ideas, like asking people to list who their neighbors are, but maybe there's an obvious way that I'm not thinking of?"

Crows and parrots and things are also useful to ask, some people aren't very social at all with other Crafters but still like animals. Other than that... there are probably ways you could get people to come see what you're being so obnoxious about, but only by being really obnoxious, and not without hurting people - the people who're hermitty enough that they wouldn't hear about it from their neighbors at all are doing that on purpose, and trying to make them not do it is a kind of trespassing, too.

"The thing is, 'medical uses' includes things like being able to reverse the damage that aging does to the body. And it would be really sad if someone died who otherwise might have had thousands of years of healthy life ahead of them, just because they didn't know that they could be healed," she explains. "So I understand that some people would still rather not be disturbed, and that making a racket so that could come and investigate would be harming them, but letting them die is also bad."

She takes a moment to think about how to phrase this.

"Crystal people solve the problem where sometimes new important things happen that need a response right away, but where it would be unreasonable for each person to keep up with everything, by designating some people as being able to make decisions for other people. But I get the feeling that Crafters don't really do that."

"If there were something that a hermit might need to know about to save their life, like a hurricane coming for them, what would you do?"

If somebody knew where their territory was they might leave a note and a noisemaker outside it, if there was time. But the problem she's trying to solve is people who nobody knows are there, in which case nobody would know to try to tell them - which is a problem hermits know they'll have, when they decide to live that way, and they do it anyway.

And yeah, Crafters don't make decisions for each other like that - how would you even get someone to go along with a decision like that? That sounds horrible.

She feels pretty conflicted about this! Their society seems pretty stable, so the risks that people were implicitly opting into by becoming hermits probably didn't include anything of this magnitude. On the other hand, people so unwilling to talk to others that they would rather let a hurricane hit them than talk to someone have stated a pretty clear preference, actually.

Rather than reply to that, she addresses the easier part.

"People have tried a lot of different systems," she explains. "The way it works where I am from is that you can pick specific trusted people to be able to make decisions for you, and they can pass their confidence on to other people they trust and so on until you reach people who make keeping track of a specific issue or area their occupation. And if someone you've delegated to makes a decision that you don't like, you can revoke your delegation and pick somebody else. So most decisions end up being made in ways that people agree with, although the system isn't perfect."

"I think something like that probably works better for crystal people partly because we're used to it, and partly because other people doing things to us doesn't seem as bad. Like, I might dislike it if you touched me, but it wouldn't cause me long-term problems unless you did it for a long time in specific ways even after I asked you to stop. You still mostly shouldn't touch crystal people that are unconscious, because they can't tell you to stop, but touching each others hands is a fairly common greeting, for example."

That still sounds like things would happen sometimes that people didn't like, though? It probably depends on what kinds of things they are, some stuff wouldn't be a big deal he supposes.

"Things that people don't like do sometimes happen, yes. But they happen a lot less than they used to, now that everyone has enough to eat, and enough space to have their own dwelling, and the ability to choose who can interact with them and speak for them, even if it's not perfect," she explains.

"Your world seems a lot better than mine was at the equivalent point in our technological development," she continues. "But I'm sure that things that people don't like still happen? Like -- if children haven't developed the taboo around touching other people yet, does it ever happen that a child latches on to somebody who doesn't want that, and ends up permanently harming them?"

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...they don't have crafting, right. Wow. No wonder they have such a different concept of what counts as a major problem.

Kids are, y'know, fine; little ones don't really count as people for instinctive purposes the same way crows and things don't and their taboo instincts start coming in right around the time that stops working as reliably. Some people still don't like having them around but it's generally pretty manageable and if it's not they can put up a wall or something to keep them out.

Anyway, yeah, here things are pretty good and he doesn't think people are going to be willing to put up with them being worse in that way sometimes to be better others. Though he's still not sure if his vague imaginings are accurate at all.

"If there's really no way to get fixity devices to the hermits in a way that won't harm them more than it helps, then I won't try," she promises. "Although I will want to check with other people that they think that's the case too, just in case you're mistaken or they can think of a different way. I'm doing all this to begin with because I really want to help people -- I think everybody deserves to have the best possible life, and even though you have many fewer problems than we did, I do still think that I can help make most people's lives better."

She takes a moment to collect her thoughts, and then puts up a quick sketch of a four-armed blue-green centaur-lizard with a childlike face about 3/4ths of his height.

"I think it's probably important that crafters end up viewing me as being more like a crow or a child and less like another crafter in terms of how that interacts with your territory instincts? I expect that to help people feel more comfortable around me, which is important to me. It's true that my normal body looks pretty similar to all the crafters I've seen, but I've been thinking that when I'm healed up enough to make a new body it should maybe look something like this instead. I want to have hands, because hands are really useful, and a face, because faces help convey emotions more clearly, but I don't really mind changing everything else about my body. Do you think that's a good idea? Would looking like this make people more comfortable? Or do you have suggestions for other forms that would be better?"

He expects that'll help a lot for a lot of people, yeah. Right now she's communicating much more like a Crafter than like any other kind of creature, so it's a little confusing - he's doing okay with it but some of the other formatters were struggling a bit with not thinking of her as a weird Crafter - and having a very different body plan like that will make it more obvious that something else is going on. She should probably still be careful about the normal things, but he expects it'll be easier for people to understand that a wider range of things could be mistakes that way at least.

"Yes, I'll still try my best to be careful. It's just, I don't have any of your instincts, so I'm pretty sure that I'm going to make mistakes," she remarks. "So if I can do something to ameliorate the harm from them, that's probably a good idea."

She takes a moment to sort out her notes.

"So right now my basic plan looks like: wait to heal up while talking to as many people as I can to get their perspectives, produce personal fixity devices and deliver them (at the edge of their territory, with an explanatory letter) to everyone who I can find by talking to neighbors, do some aerial scouting and provide fixity devices to everyone I can spot from the air, and then put baskets of extras in public areas for people to come and get if they need more. I'm sure I'll need to do more -- like tweaking the interfaces of the fixity devices to work better for people before I deliver them, and writing a really good explanation of everything they can do, but that's the basic outline. Do you have any more concerns or remarks about that plan? Or general questions?"

In general that sounds pretty good to him!

"What's the process for adding a book to the library?" she inquires. "At a minimum, I think I should probably write up a book explaining who I am and what I plan to do and how to contact me. And it would probably be helpful to have somebody read over and ask questions that are obvious to you but not to me. I also have a bunch of books from my world that I would be happy to share if the library wants them. And, if I can reach an agreement to hook a custom reader into the library's mechanisms, I can store them very compactly."

That all sounds like a good idea. New books are added through the formatting teams, but if she can do the formatting herself that'll speed things up considerably, and if she wants to add machinery to the library that'd go through the programming team.

"What are the formatting guidelines like?" she asks. "I saw enough of the mechanisms and the ansible output that I'm pretty sure I can directly encode a book onto a disk, but I'm not sure if there are standards for how things should be laid out or encoded that aren't obvious from just looking."