"...you said that nobody like me belongs to anyone here. Do you know about any places where dolls like me belong to people? Because if you want to look for the person I belong to, you should... probably start there?"

"I have never seen anyone else like you. There are no other non-human people in this entire solar system, and we've never met anyone from outside the solar system," she replies. "And, to clarify: I only want to look for the person you belong to to the extent that you want me to do that. I don't directly care about finding them, I just care about you getting what you want."

This one stumps her for a few seconds, until she eventually says, uncertainly, "...did you just call me a person?"

She blinks.

"Yes, I did. You are acting enough like a person that I am treating you like one. It would be rude and unfriendly to treat a person as though they weren't, but it would only be mildly embarrassing to treat a non-person as though they were a person, so I'm erring on the side of caution," she explains.

"Given that your grasp of the language doesn't seem perfect, I'm going to keep treating you as though you are a person even if you tell me you aren't until we have both defined exactly what we mean by 'person'. Our laws also have a precise technical definition of the term which we can test you against if there's any doubt."

"I'm a doll," she says. "I think that's different from being a person. ...what do you mean, about my grasp of the language? I don't think this is a different language from the one I'm used to speaking."

"Hmm. So from my point of view, the sentences I gave you earlier mean subtly different things than the things you said they mean," she explains. "Which means that there is at least one substantial thing which is different about how we are interpreting words. I would hate to accidentally offend someone by misunderstanding what they meant."

She thinks for a moment. Usually, she could -- with permission -- examine someone's language center to confirm what language they were speaking, but that won't work here.

"I am speaking a language called English. It's my native tongue. In it, the word 'doll' refers to a small inanimate toy, incapable of moving independently, which children play with. It sounds like you don't mean that, though. You mean a separate kind of being?"

"...well, it's the same word, but it means a different thing," she says. "I'm not just a toy, because I have a soul, so I can think and speak and do things. But I'm the same kind of thing as a toy except for that."

She is willing to take the claim that the visitor has a soul at face value, because clearly there is something not materially present puppetting her actions.

"We don't have anything with a soul," Sandalwood responds. "And I'm not sure what difference that makes. What is the polite way to interact with you? It seems like treating you as though you were an inanimate object would be awkward."

"...I don't know? I don't think it matters if you're polite to me. Because I'm a doll."

In the background, the physicists studying this have gotten into an argument, because one of them can see a cloud of ... stuff which they cannot properly identify flowing through her body, and the others can't. The one who can is asked to carefully sketch everything that she can see.

They were initially worried that she had had a psychotic break, but the other physicists can see the shapes once they're being processed in her brain, so apparently the alien's soul is just ... selectively invisible?

Once re-assured that the alien's soul has been backed up, just in case, one of them suggests that maybe she can see the alien's soul because she's her owner. Then this devolves into an argument about whether, if so, she should go meet her or not.

"I'm still worried that I will accidentally behave in a way that you don't like, because this is an unfamiliar situation," she starts saying. She cuts herself off when an alert pops up on her HUD.

"Huh. It looks like one of the physicists studying how you got here had an unusual reaction to viewing you. And since she's the only one who has reacted differently, they're wondering whether she's your owner or not. Would you like her to come here to check?"

Her expression brightens immediately. "Oh! Yes, please!"

Teak hasn't been physically instantiated in a while, but the visitor said that she wasn't sure whether recordings would work, so Teak dusts off her old body and slips back into it. She displaces herself a few meters away, so that she won't loom over the others.

"Hello," she says. "Put your hand on your head, please."

The ... something that perfuses their visitor is weirder in person. She peers at it, a bit distractedly, trying to figure out how it interfaces with the otherwise ordinary materials that make up her body.

The doll looks up at her with a beaming smile, and her hand starts to rise...

...and then it falls again, right along with her face, and she shakes her head. "It isn't you. I just did what you said out of habit, not because I have to."

(On closer examination, there is some activity in there that seems to translate roughly to the motion of nerve impulses, sensory information traveling inward from eyes and ears and skin, motor commands returning outward to animate the body—though the exact mechanisms of the interface in either direction are still unclear. What isn't apparent is any sort of computation that actually processes that information and outputs results based on the inputs of the senses. The central area that mediates between input and output seems to be totally undifferentiated and virtually motionless, except insofar as the doll's body is moving and carrying the soul-substance along with it.)

She stares for a moment too long, trying to think about what that implies about the mechanism, before shaking her head to snap herself out of it.

"I'm sorry to hear that. I hope you find her soon," she says. "It was good to meet you anyhow."

She blinks back into her standard environment and sends the body back to storage.

"I'm sure you'll find her eventually," Sandalwood says. "We're still trying to understand what brought you here, but maybe eventually we'll be able to use it to travel back to where you came from. That's probably your best bet."

"What did bring me here? I don't... I think I don't remember anything from before I woke up."

Sandalwood shrugs. "We saw a big flash of light, a twining pattern that rapidly shifted and got smaller, and what would become your body appear in midair. When it appeared, it was less differentiated, and looked more like an inanimate doll does. Over the next second or so, it finished changing to look like you currently do, including growing your horn."

"We are pretty baffled, honestly. It didn't look like anything we were expecting or had seen before. But the other members of my self-tree are pretty good physicists, so I'm optimistic that we can figure it out."

She blinks curiously at 'self-tree', but doesn't ask.

"Do things not normally appear in flashes of light? I think... I'm not sure. I think something appearing in a flash of light sounds sort of odd but not like something that couldn't possibly happen."

Sandalwood adopts a thoughtful expression.

"So, things do sometimes appear in flashes of light. But that's because we deliberately make that happen through a known mechanism. It's actually the same mechanism that gives me better senses. But we would have been able to tell if the same mechanism had been behind your appearance, because there would have been other signs," she explains.

"Well. I don't have any idea what to think of that."

Sandalwood appears an apple in her hand by way of demonstration.

"It's how we make things. We only discovered it a few years ago, so it's quite new, but also very convenient," she replies. "Would you like me to show you how to put a request into the system?"

"Why?"

"Well, you don't have to. But if you ever end up wanting to have an object, or to be transported somewhere else within the solar system, being able to do it yourself can be more empowering and convenient than needing to ask someone else for it," she explains.

"Even if you don't want anything for yourself, I would expect you to want to travel around the solar system, just so you can meet more people."

"I don't want to have objects, I don't think. I want to find the person I belong to and be hers. I guess maybe traveling could help with that? But—" She struggles with words for a moment. "...you don't have to help me just because I look like a person to you."