"You really can’t use that standard with this population."

"Yeerks kind of have to, in fairly recent memory they were enslaving people left and right and the new standard is much better for everyone. Does this mean that the specific guy we got was in better shape than most similar folks, if he managed to communicate that he definitely wanted a Yeerk?"

"In that area if it had anything to do with wanting a Yeerk and not, say, wanting to make sure the Yeerks couldn't have any complaints about him. Are there non-Yeerk options that haven't enslaved people in recent memory?"

"Options for what exactly, I'm not sure what you're hoping for from the Yeerks here."

"Checking for sleeper agents. Making people more functional and less prone to do things that don't achieve their goals or anyone else's."

"We have truth magic, if that will do for the sleeper agents and they'll answer questions at all. I don't think Yeerks make people more functional, they just sort of act as - functionality prostheses - and at any rate have their own things they want to be doing with their lives."

"I think you might not grasp the average level of functioning we're talking about. Sometimes these people will do absolutely nothing, literally just lie wherever they're put. Sometimes they get antsy if they don't have a list of things that will get them tortured, and they try to provoke you and when it doesn't work they just keep escalating. When they don't refuse to eat they have a tendency to steal food no matter how well-fed they are. When they don't accommodate everything anyone in authority asks of them instantly they have a tendency to refuse to follow laws on principle. The ones that come here capable of doing work usually don't stay capable of it, they usually fall apart once they realize how gentle the consequences are for failing to do anything. And that's not even getting into the ones who believe in this horrible cult they're trained into and will try to evangelize. They're mostly not allowed into most decent polities that know they exist. Sometimes it reflects a lot of work and a lot of improvement for them to be capable of sitting in their own apartment watching cat videos all day. There's, often enough, nothing there to conflict with anything a Yeerk would want to do. And if there is, they won’t share it or sometimes act on it at all, and it seems to me they’d mostly be better off if someone who cares took a peek and learned what it would take to make them happy."

"So our baseline for horribly - albeit differently - tortured people is to put them in a magic forest that reshapes itself according to what will be most comfortable and soothing for the occupants. I'd be more inclined to strongly recommend it if the one example we have hadn't walked right out and reported disliking it, but that might be individual variation...?"

"That is unusually agentic... hang on..." She frowns, biting her lip, and checks something on her phone. "Our intelligence knows who that is, I think, but I don’t know why he'd be particularly likely to object to a magic forest. I guess in general we see a lot of... ambivalence about anything restful or pleasant, maybe that’s it."

"Well, apparently his Yeerk wanted a host so he could enroll in music school, so that's what he's doing now. You think the restful pleasant forest will often go over poorly?"

"I wouldn't have said so if I hadn't known it did but maybe it noticed that any time he's not being tortured he must be waiting for the other shoe to drop, or maybe it tried to encourage him to sleep and he panicked. If it was either of those things, it won't be unique to him."

"They don't like sleeping?"

"They're trained not to like anything... restorative, sometimes only if they don't have permission. So they're useless and unhappy all the time even when rescued. It varies how well it takes and of course some of the newer rescues won't have been there long."

"Okay. I do worry that they won't be able to - manage their end of making sure the Yeerk-host relationship is okay? Like, usually, there's an opportunity to check in when the Yeerk needs to go soak up some Kandrona radiation, but if they won't say anything then making sure they were okay with this approach would involve not only Yeerking somebody unresponsive in the first place but also having to take their Yeerk's description of the situation as accurate, which could be augmented with the truth magic but is still vulnerable to some - spin."

"I'm not saying you shouldn't put them in the forest, it might be good for them even if they don't like it. I suppose you could have two different Yeerks take a look and see if they agree?"

"That seems more invasive and also it might be hard on the Yeerks, a lot of them get attached to their hosts very quickly."

"I see."

"Maybe we can put together a pilot program and if it works well we could fund some resurrections to get more Yeerks available."

"All right. What do we need to make that work?"

"Well, Sovereign Ristrell's buy-in, for one, the Yeerks are mostly not citizens of Vanda Nossëo per se."

"Is there a way that people typically contact her?"

"I can probably set up a meeting." Compute compute.

"Thank you."

"It looks like there's a slot this evening at five."

The representative of St Edith’s can make it then, after ascertaining whose five o’clock it is.