"Yes, absolutely!"

Sandalwood adds her to the mailing list.

"We also don't have to look for your world particularly. There's a saying: zero, one, infinity. If there are two worlds, it would be surprising if there were only two. We only care about your world as opposed to other worlds insofar as you care about it. So if you aren't sure you want to go back, we can focus on general inter-world travel instead of trying to go there specifically."

"...I'm still... even if the world you find isn't my own world and there's no one there who cares about me specifically, I'm still... harder to protect, than you are. But... I guess it's still... simpler... to look for other worlds that aren't mine, first."

"There's also the problem of -- even if we don't look for them, they might look for us," she mentions. "So it wouldn't even help to avoid looking for other worlds. The choice is just which worlds to focus on. We have taken snapshots of what your soul looks like, in case we figure out how to manipulate soul-stuff later. So we might be able to put you back if you were destroyed, the way I can be."

"And I promise we will keep working on figuring out how to teleport you, and keep you updated on our progress. You are already probably much safer than you were, because we can protect you from physical harm very efficiently. But we're not infinitely powerful, and we can't make a guarantee. I'm sorry."

"I don't think I was guaranteed to be safe before I came here. Something happened that put me in a strange world with no memories, and I don't know what it was but I don't think I did it on purpose. It would be a pretty strange thing to do on purpose. So I guess nothing's changed, really. Maybe I'm just... surprised... that you feel so safe, that you... expect everyone to be so safe?"

She taps her lip in thought.

"I guess that's fair?" she responds. "I do feel less safe today than I did yesterday. My insurance premiums spiked about it, actually. But at a certain point, you've done all you reasonably can to ensure your own safety, and it's not worth worrying more about. The only way to protect myself better is to learn more and become stronger."

"And, even though I don't know what brought you here, it's got to be pretty rare, right? I mean, it's happened once, to one person, in a period of years at least, probably decades. There are ten billion people in the solar system -- what are the chances it would happen to me? And if it does happen to me, what's the worst case? I get restored from backup here, and the copy of me that went elsewhere gets to have an adventure meeting aliens."

"Does that make sense?"

"I think," she says, consideringly, "that you and I worry about... different things."

"That's probably true!" she agrees brightly. And then she points at herself and says "Alien!".

Then she adopts a more serious expression. "But lots of people care about different things. One of the tasks of a society is balancing people's different wants and needs. Can you articulate what it is that you worry about?"

"I worry that... if bad things happening to me matters, then... things that matter might happen to me. And you... seem to think... that things that matter... can't really happen to you? That... it would matter if bad things happened to you, but they won't?"

Sandalwood adopts a confused expression.

"I'm not sure I understood that," she replies. "Let me try to say it back to you in my own words to see whether I got it right or not."

"You think I would worry about bad things happening to me, but I don't worry much because I don't think there is much chance that they actually will. On the other hand, you would worry about bad things happening to you, but you don't worry much because ... you didn't think bad things happening to you mattered, for some reason? And now you're adopting a framework where it might matter whether bad things happened to you, so you're getting more worried. Is that right?"

"...maybe?"

She spends a moment struggling with words.

"...you said that... a copy of you that went elsewhere would get to have an adventure meeting aliens. But... it might not be a fun adventure. It might be a bad and upsetting adventure. But you don't seem worried about that."

"Oh! Yes, I see what you mean."

She hums for a moment, trying to think of how to put this into words.

"There are a few reasons for that. For one thing, I think it's genuinely unlikely, for the reasons I explained earlier. For another, if it looked like it were going to be more unpleasant for me than worth it, I could pause my brain and erase my encryption key, and expect to wake up back here at some point in the future when the other members of my self-tree find me. Antepenultimately, it doesn't help to worry. I've done everything I can to prepare, and I pay a stipend to our professional worriers to come up with new mitigations on my behalf."

"Penultimately, humans don't evaluate emotion rationally. It's hard to emotionally feel scared when I have had a comfortable and peaceful life for the past few years. I have gone around knowing that nothing here can hurt me, and my emotions haven't updated about it. If I do actually get sent to another world, I can feel a moment of panic about it then."

"And ultimately, even bad and scary adventures can be worth it if there's enough on the line that you stand to gain afterwards. Getting to save another planet of people from starving and dying is ... worth a lot of potential pain and anguish, to me," she concludes.

"I think... you keep expecting... that your ways of making yourself safe will just work. Like you expected teleporting me to just work. But sometimes, even though you expect something to just work, it doesn't. So I'm worried for you."

She pauses, then musters the courage to go on.

"...and I think... when you were first talking about meeting my world... you were expecting... cooperating with different people to just work, too. Even though it might not."

She stares past their visitor towards the distant cap of the cylinder.

"So there's two parts there. You're right that sometimes plans or fail-safes don't work the way their supposed to. That's why you need layered backup plans. But ultimately ... the world has to work in a way. And I don't know what that way is, but I have the tools and knowledge to figure it out. So the stuff going on with your soul is potentially scary now, after less than two hours of looking. But it would be far too pessimistic to think that we will never be able to figure out the deeper underlying rules," she explains.

"Secondly, about cooperation ..."

She trails off for a moment.

"It's true that cooperation takes hard work. And it can fail. And I haven't had all that much practice talking to aliens, and I feel like I've messed up several things about my first attempt. But there's an idea which I think is really important to thinking about interactions with aliens, which is: every selfish person plays on their own team, but every person who cares about others plays on the same team. I want the people of your world to be happy, and well, and able to do the things they want. I want every person everywhere to be free and satisfied and safe."

"And there are people who won't agree with those goals. There will be people who only partially agree with them, or who care about other things more. There will be people who agree with me about every particular but are still impossible to work with. But when you consider all aliens who we could potentially meet -- the difference is that the people who would work against me will also work against each other. And the people who would work with me, are already working with me, even though we haven't met yet."

...she seems to find something dissatisfying about the first part of that, but then gets distracted thinking about the last part.

Has she been monologueing too much? Probably.

She writes "No monologueing" in her notes, and then closes her notes and focuses on the sound of the spinwise wind through the grass.

"I guess maybe you're right, about... cooperating with people being easier when you want them to have nice things. But... it doesn't feel like you're right. It feels like... seeking out people who can do things you don't understand, and trying to cooperate with them, is very scary, and if they figure out how you work before you figure out how they work, then you might just lose, and the world might look how they want, instead of how you want."

She nods.

"That makes sense," she agrees. "Hiding, refusing to try and reach out, would definitely be safer. But ... I don't know if we can hide. Something brought you here, and we have no idea if it left a trail, or anything like that. Now that we know there is more out there than we thought, the question isn't whether we make contact with other worlds, but when, and on whose terms."

...the doll considers this, and then nods, slowly.

"You're still definitely the expert on what the world you come from will be like, and how they're likely to react to us if we figure out how to visit," she remarks. "One job which you could do if you wanted to would be to help the disaster and contingency planning people to work out more robust plans for what we should do when we find more worlds, or when they find us."

"...I think I could do that, maybe... but you'd want to pay me for it, and I still don't know how I feel about that..."

"I agree you should probably figure that out first," she says. "Either way, this isn't urgent. We ... don't have too much to go on for how you arrived here, so it's likely going to take a while to replicate. Probably we have years to get you settled in and work on plans before they become necessary."

"And you don't have to work on this, either. There are already a lot of people hired to work on contingency planning who will have more to work with now that we know anything at all about other worlds."

"I want... people to be safe. That's important."

"I agree."

"So I should talk to people about how the world works, as much as I can. And I should do it soon, because all I have are my expectations, and my expectations are going to change as I get more used to this world, aren't they?"

Sandalwood considers this for a moment.

"Yes, that's probably true. If your expectations are getting ... cloudier ... it makes sense to get them recorded before doing anything else," she agrees. "Would you like to go do that now?"