...Not more than here anymore. Do you want to see or should I try to explain in words?

Whichever you're comfortable with.

He remembers -

(or maybe he doesn’t, not accurately)

- switching back to his right hand when it’s barely rested because now his left is cramping too badly to write, blinking until the shimmering page he’s trying to copy resolves into letters, intensely proud to still be working -

- a girl whispering a story he could barely follow about a turtle princess and the unnoticed passage of centuries, thirsty enough she could barely speak even if she weren’t afraid to be heard, while the others traded off listening for footsteps and continuing to copy their assigned books -

- clapping in the face of someone who fell asleep at work because it would be worse for them to be caught than to just endure forever, trusting that he could count on the same kindness -

- watching someone start to nod off and startle himself back to wakefulness and being so proud and relieved that with all of them working together on it they’d managed to teach the newcomer themselves, they who still had the slightest touch of human gentleness and wouldn’t leave him screaming for days -

- the thrill of realizing they must have misunderstood the way his breath caught, must have taken joy for agony, and once they weren’t watching he could sleep through their attempt at punishment and relax -

- he remembers success. He remembers trust of a kind he doesn’t have with Ashkon. He remembers thinking he was helping someone. He was, probably, when he kept them from getting caught. He remembers having some reason to feel proud of himself.

Some parts of your existence there were better than others. You didn't compress your whole emotional experience into being-in-Hell-is-awful. Of course you didn't.

Yeah, I guess. I just... had things then that I don’t have now. And I don’t know if there’s a better way to get them.

Is having them compatible with the good things you have now?

I don’t know. I guess - doing useful things is. I don’t know if being good at things is, I don’t have that much time to practice anything right now. I’m not sure if you can end up trusting people in the way we did without danger and I don’t know if there are any dangers here. I guess it’s weird to say so but I actually think pain that doesn’t really feel bad would be easier to come by here, I wouldn’t be hoping to get lucky and trick people. I was never really that lucky.

Where would you look, to find out?

To find what out?

Any of those things you don't know, or speculate about.

Everywhere. I don’t know of a narrower place to look, but "everywhere" would do it.

Where would you start?

...Well, in practice I would start with whatever Ashkon happened to want to be near.

That makes sense. And what kinds of things would you try to observe about it?

Things that would be more likely in one case than another. I think maybe you think either I have the answers to all my own questions or at least that - if I go far enough down the list of "and how would you figure that out?" it won't end in "I don't know where I'd even start" - or are we trying to figure out where that point is?

I'm interested in how you think about approaching things. If there's a point where you can't any more, that seems like a good place to focus.

So I guess I think - you know in the Sims there's - here, have the entire concept of sim bars with pictures, if he didn't know before then he does now. I think I came out with all my sim bars red - or just most of them - actually, of the literal needs in The Sims, I guess I was only red on hunger and energy and fun and maybe orange on social - but he's using the concept more broadly than that because he isn't an oversimplified video game character, and he's thinking this next bit too fast and too visually for words but what happened next was that he hung out in a park working on the very most preliminary prerequisites for coming up with a plan to save everyone and occasionally meeting the needs he realized he had (if they can be called needs; he's had this argument before, see, though he sees the teleporter's point a little better now) and that was the best thing he could imagine ever experiencing. And it wasn't unendurably awful or anything, but there were still bars that were red and that had just been red all the time for so long he couldn't identify them as things that were wrong. That's half the thing that's so useful about Ashkon.

Only - well, two things, the first of which is that he's identified problems in ways other than fixing them, so now he has a list of them, but secondly he thinks he also has some unknown number of secret problems he hasn't identified yet and doesn't know anything about - no, that thought can't be right, because the fact that he hasn't identified them in the course of noticing his preferences when things start varying means there are things that have been stably the same amount of bad, which means some of his problems are with the constants in his life, and there aren't all that many things that haven't changed.

Or maybe that's all dumb. Who knows.

Colindo has never played The Sims but he follows the analogy well. Most things about your life have changed, but there could be things that you didn't have and still do not; that wouldn't look like a change until you began to have access to them.

Yeah. What do people want? Probably he won’t be well modeled by any generic list but there might be something useful in a list of things other people have wanted in the past.

People want friends and families. Art and music. Rest and stimulation. A sense of purpose. Safety, security, and prestige. Novelty.

Wow, he actually wants all of those things and has about half of them. There might be things he wants that aren’t on the list but... that seems like a really good start. He takes notes so he won’t forget any if he goes depth-first on the most confusing one right now.

I don’t really understand why I don’t have a family.

Most people begin with one. Did you?

I guess so. I don’t really remember what it was like and - I mean - we talked recently, but...

The family-ness wasn't there?

Yeah! I don’t get it.