She nods.

"Yes, that's a good point."

She dismisses the false colors, returning the air to plain transparency.

"Colors like that are useful for seeing what's happening when the components are otherwise invisible, but it's important to remember that it's just a visualization tool. The colors don't really have anything to do with the underlying substances, they're just something we're using to keep track of them."

"As for whether the same substances can combine in different proportions or ways ..."

She summons vials of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, carbon suboxide, and mellitic
anhydride. The first two are identical colorless gasses, the third looks a bit as if oil were a gas, and the fourth is a white powder.

"These are all made out of carbon and oxygen in different proportions. One to one, one to two, three to two, and twelve to nine. The one to two mixture is the most stable, and also the most common one. The one to one mixture -- called carbon monoxide -- is produced in very small amounts by decaying plants. The three to two mixture -- carbon suboxide -- is made only under some very particular circumstances, and light will eventually make it break down into a mixture of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. The twelve to nine mixture -- mellitic anhydride -- is also made only under very particular circumstances and breaks down if you heat it up too much."

She stares thoughtfully into the vials.

"...you had a question for me earlier, and I don't think I answered it, and now I don't remember what it was."

She smiles a little ruefully.

"My question was what underlying fact about oxygen could explain all of the things I demonstrated about it. And the answer I was probing for was exactly the fact you came to a moment ago: that oxygen is a component of carbon dioxide, and of water, and of rust. Once you realize that all substances are made out of these 94 things in different combinations, you can learn a few basic rules about how they interact with each other, and then make predictions about how different substances can be combined without having to memorize each interaction individually."

She points over at the bowl full of crushed orb that started this discussion.

"That's why I expected you to find the little demonstration I did of separating stone into silicon and oxygen convincing -- I can't create or destroy these 94 basic substances except by using star transformations, so when I break a substance down into parts, that's because those parts were already combined in the original substance."

She summons another little demonstration orb, tossing it up and down.

"And that's also the explanation of how we can make materials out of hydrogen from the sun -- our modern tools can do star transformations, to turn hydrogen into the other basic substances, and then assemble those in the right way to make everything else."

"Oh, I see," she says. "So I did answer it, sort of, by saying that if your only ways of turning one thing into another can be reversed, then there must be something that it all reverses back to."

She nods. "Yes, exactly."

She clears away the miscellaneous chemistry detritus.

"Chemistry -- the science of studying all these transformations -- is another example of something which takes a lot of work to figure out from scratch, but then once you know it it can save you work. A lot of knowledge is like that; hard to get for the first time, but then easy to scale and reuse once you have it."

"I think..."

She pauses, frowning in deep thought.

"...I'm not sure if they knew about chemistry, where I'm from. I think I didn't know about chemistry, or didn't know very much. And I think we had ways of turning one thing into another that don't say much about what anything is made of. But I don't know what they were, or how to do them."

"That makes sense," she replies. "Your soul isn't made of any of these 94 things, so clearly there is something about you and your world which we haven't seen before. There's a saying -- all theories are wrong, but some are useful. Meaning that there is always more to discover: the secret of how you got here, the secret of how your world's transformations work, and so on. But you don't have to know everything in order to use what you do know."

She gestures at the cylinder above them.

"It took my species ten thousand years from the time we invented writing to figure out how to build places like this. We didn't start off knowing, and we could never have gotten here if one person had to invent the entire thing, alone, in one step. When you let someone teach you something new, or discover something yourself and lift them up in turn, you're participating in a process as old as civilization that lets us all collectively reach farther than any of us could alone."

"Which is why I'm certain that we'll figure out how to return where you came from. And when we do, we'll teach them chemistry, and they'll teach us the transformations they know how to do, and together we'll be able to build something greater than either of us managed alone."

"Oh," she says.

Tentatively: "I... should be happy about that?"

Sandalwood coughs into her hand.

"Uh, sorry. Sometimes I get a little carried away about science," she remarks. "That sounds ... more like a question, though? I don't think feelings have 'should's. You aren't supposed to feel anything other than what you do feel."

"I'm supposed to feel the right things so I don't upset or inconvenience anyone," she says. "I thought I said so before. Maybe I'm not remembering right."

Sandalwood has automatically-generated searchable transcripts of all of her conversations.

"Uh, hold on a moment," she responds. She pulls up the transcript and scrolls back through it.

"You said 'It's important not to do the wrong things and inconvenience people', and I agreed," she said. "But I agreed with that because I think there's a difference between feeling things and doing them. Like, if I am hosting a party and feeling overwhelmed, I would do my best to continue to be polite and welcoming to the guests, even if internally I was feeling miserable. But that's not because my feelings would be wrong, it would be because there's something I care about doing more than I care about expressing my feelings in the moment. And if a guest asked, I would tell them I was feeling poorly, but I wouldn't let that influence my tone or plan for the party. And after the party, I would act on those feelings and take steps to arrange not to do things that make me miserable again," she quickly adds, seeing ahead a few possible steps in the conversational game.

"So in the current circumstance, if you had said 'I should express happiness about that', I still would have disagreed with you but it would have been the right ... type of thing. Does that make sense?"

"I think I see what you're saying... but..."

She frowns slightly.

"...if you find the place where I came from... then lots of good things will happen," she says. "And it's... appropriate?... to be happy about things that mean lots of good things will happen. Right?"

She feels like this whole first contact situation has been happening in the wrong order. Talking about emotions and morality is, like, something that should have happened as a result of discussing property law or art, not chemistry.

"In my view of good and bad," she begins. "Feelings are upstream of the goodness or badness of a situation, not downstream. That is to say, when I feel happy about something, I identify that thing as good. It's the happiness that makes the thing good, not the goodness that makes me happy."

"When I think about meeting more neighbors and building great and beautiful things together, that thought makes me happy, so I call it good. But if the thought of finding the place where you came from doesn't make you happy, then you don't necessarily need to think of it is good. When I think about other people being happy, that also makes me happy. So even if I didn't care about finding where you came from, I might still be happy that someone else would like it. But again, if thinking about other people being happy doesn't make you happy, you don't necessarily need to think of the same things as being good."

She doodles a glowing diagram in the air, with 'happy' and then an arrow pointing to 'good', more because she's gotten used to having visual aids at this point.

"That's a little bit of a simplification, because there are other emotions that are also good. Like satisfaction, contentment, novelty, pride, etc."

She adds them to her diagram.

"That's one reason it's important to give people jobs that they will be happy doing. Because whether they are happy doing them influences whether it was good to give them that job. If it worked the other way around, everyone would be equally happy doing every job which needs to be done, which empirically isn't true. You can randomly assign people to jobs, and they'll usually prefer to switch to something else when given the choice."

"Hmm," she says, thoughtfully.

Sandalwood is mildly concerned that she has messed this interaction up, but there's nothing to be done now. She drops a note asking for help into her self-tree forum, and then quietly sits and lets their visitor think her thoughts.

She watches the sunbeams crawl across the far side of the cylinder.

"If you find a way to travel to my world... you'll be going to a place where people can do things that you can't do, in ways you can't do them, and you don't know which things," she says at last. "That seems... dangerous? What if they don't agree with you about how things should be?"

Sandalwood nods.

"Yes, it would probably be dangerous," she agrees. "But there are a few safeties we have planned, just in case of emergency. One are the backups we have running. If you killed me, for example, the system would just look at my most recent backup and put me back in my apartment. And there are backups, and backup fixity field generators, spread throughout the solar system. If you wanted to kill me permanently, you would need to destroy some number of hidden, well-defended crystals distributed throughout a cubic light year of space. Even I don't know how many they are or where they're located."

"So that puts a floor on the danger level. Things can still be dangerous and bad, but not to the point that they would kill me, until they get back around to the level of things which destroy the whole solar system. Or things which interfere directly with information, I suppose."

"Then there are the dimensional lifeboats. We don't know how to build a stable pocket dimension or wormhole yet -- we're working on it -- but we do know how to create an unstable pocket dimension that rapidly collapses. And it isn't finished yet, but there's an ongoing plan to use those as a last-ditch defense to eject everyone who wants to come out of the universe, if it looks like the solar system is going to be destroyed."

"For things that do interfere with information -- not everyone has this, but my self-tree occasionally boots up a fork from our early days in an isolated computer which is as disconnected as possible from the normal backup system, and has them check that the major decisions we've made collectively still make sense. So if someone did manage to drop mind-control on me -- and the computers that are double-checking my brain don't notice, and the backup system is subverted, and none of the rest of my self-tree noticed or they were subverted too -- we would still eventually get a warning about it. Oh, and if this was a big concern, our initial explorers wouldn't go in person -- they'd pilot a body remotely."

She thinks for a moment to check if she's missed anything.

"I think those are all the relevant precautions we have set up right now. But if you have suggestions for things we should do or think about defending against, we would really appreciate those," she says. And pay the existing bounty money for that into your trust, she doesn't say.

"...hmm," she says again.

"You said you can't teleport me properly because you don't know how to move my soul, right?"

"Yes, that's true. For some reason, our tools can't grab whatever it is your soul is made of. They can't even really see it properly -- only under some particular circumstances we don't quite understand yet," she agrees.

"So... if you meet my world, and you want to tell my owner that she isn't allowed to keep me... you can't really do that, because she has more power over me than you do."

"I... should... be happy about that."

Aaaah! No, internal screaming doesn't help.

"So it's true that we can't offer you perfect safety," she agrees. "I don't know if there is such a thing. But ... if you don't want to be transported to your owner, we will do everything in our power to prevent them from reaching you. I built everything I have on the premise that beings should be free to choose for themselves where they want to be."

"Worst case, if your owner showed up on Antichthon right now and you didn't want to see them, the two of us could run away at nearly the speed of light in a random direction, and they would have a very difficult time catching up."

"Also, it has been slightly less than two hours since you arrived. Give us time. Chemistry took years to be discovered, and I'm confident we can figure out ways to teleport you faster than that, but probably not just in a few hours."

"...but what if..."

She shakes her head.

"...I... still don't... know how I do feel about it."

Sandalwood nods.

"That makes sense. Sometimes it can be difficult to listen to our emotions, especially when we're in a new and confusing circumstance. The fact of the matter is, we still have no idea how it is you got here. It will be a long time before there's even a chance of contacting the world you came from," she replies. "So you have plenty of time to adjust, and relax, and figure out what you want. You don't need to decide right away. And I'm happy to try and help you work through your emotions if talking with someone about them would be helpful."

"...when you... decide to contact my world... will you... warn me?"