"It's certainly striking," she says. "This world is full of so many beautiful places."

"It is!" she agrees. "When people have enough -- enough time, and enough resources, and enough help -- they make beautiful things."

The sun sweeps over them, a beam reaching through one of the windows of the opposite side. It momentarily lights up the grass around them a bright gold, and then sweeps on, up the wall of the station.

Now that she has time to focus on the terrain, the doll might be able to pick out little clusters of houses dotted throughout the landscape. Despite the probable inhabitedness of the cylinder, there is nobody within sight of them, leaving them alone among the grass and the trees.

She holds up her hand in the warm sunlight as it passes, closing her eyes against the brightness. But it's not the wince she made when she first got here; it's pleasant and peaceful. The sun glows through the woodgrain of her tiny fingers.

Sandalwood is content to let them sit in silence for a while and enjoy the sun. She summons a plate of little finger sandwiches and munches on them. Their guest didn't evince any food-related needs, and it's plausible that she doesn't actually eat, but she places the plate where she could take a finger sandwich if she chose to.

"Hmm?" she asks, looking over at the plate. "Oh! You were hungry? I'm sorry," she says anxiously.

"I don't see why you would be sorry about that?" Sandalwood says in confusion. "I can't get more than a little hungry -- there's a thing that monitors my blood sugar and teleports nutritionally-complete food into my stomach -- but I thought that it was nice weather for a little sandwich-picnic. So as soon as I thought that, I summoned some food. There was nothing I was expecting you to do, and it's not your job to track my hunger."

"...hmm." She relaxes somewhat, a note of confusion entering her voice. "I... think I expected that to be my job, but I don't know why. I guess maybe it was my job before?"

"That makes sense," Sandalwood agrees. "Do you think it was a job that you enjoyed? I value not getting hungry too much to give it up, but there are plenty of other people who still eat in the normal way. You could be a chef, or a nutritionist, or a personal caretaker, if any of those appeal to you."

"Or if you didn't enjoy it, we can find a job where you would be happier and therefore more efficient," she hastens to add, because she's starting to get a feel for how to frame things for their guest. "There's no rush to decide -- I think you need a lot more context before it would be reasonable to expect you to work independently. And if you don't want to do any of the jobs we have here, and focus on finding your owner, that's fine too."

"...I... I think..."

She spends a little while considering. Five seconds, or so, which doesn't sound like much on paper but is a significant interval as conversational pauses go.

"...I think," she starts again eventually, "that it wasn't... relevant, whether I enjoyed it. It was what I was made for."

Sandalwood chooses her words carefully.

"That is ... fairly horrible," she replies. "It matters, whether people enjoy the things they do. People who do something they enjoy do it better, and find ways to improve it that someone who was just grudgingly working wouldn't think of. And separate from that, the world is ... more beautiful, I suppose, when everyone does something that brings them joy. And sometimes you have to sacrifice beauty for necessity, but it's still worth striving for that ideal of making the world a joyous place."

"...but I'm not... someone whose happiness matters," she says, confused.

"Why not?" Sandalwood asks. She wants to say more, but she restrains herself in order to give the alien enough space to talk.

"Because I'm a doll."

Sandalwood suppresses a sigh.

"I'm an alien," she reminds her. "I've literally never met a doll before I met you, and I don't understand why they're different from every other kind of being."

She searches for an illustrative metaphor.

"Did you ever have anything that was entirely your business, that nobody else would interact with?" she asks. "Like, if you were taking care of food, perhaps there was a dishrag that you would have used. If your dishrag wore out, and you went to get a replacement, and there were two replacements that were the same price but one had a pattern you liked and the other one was ugly, would you pick the pretty one? Or would you not care?"

"I don't know," she says, staring up at the far side of the cylinder. "I have... expectations, not memories."

Sandalwood drums her fingers on her knee.

"Fair," she replies. Then she summons a necklace in each hand, both sized appropriately for their visitor. One is a stone which matches her shirt set into a delicate silver setting, and the other is a lump of coal wrapped in rusted wire.

"I intend to give you one of these necklaces, but it doesn't matter to me which one you pick. It also doesn't matter to me if you discard the necklace as soon as I hand it to you, or keep it forever. I'm getting what I want just from the act of seeing you choose, because what I want here is to better understand how you think. Which one would you like me to hand to you?"

She considers this scenario.

Still considering.

"...why?"

"Because I'm trying to figure out whether you don't value your own happiness, or you don't think other people should value your happiness. Those two imply very different things about how your mind works, and about how you can slot into society here," she replies. "Knowing how you will pick lets me predict what you would think of some of my other suggestions, which makes my job easier."

"...I think... I don't know what I think," she says. "I don't know what the right thing to think is. I don't know what the right thing to choose is."

"Hmm."

Sandalwood sets the necklaces on the ground between them.

"It's perfectly understandable to be unsure," she reassures their visitor. "We can come back to the question later, if that would help. I don't want to rush you. It would be okay if you never answered this particular question. Would it help to do a practice run? Try each one and see how it makes you feel before you have to decide for real?"

"...but what if I make the wrong choice? What if I choose for the wrong reasons?"

"The point of the question isn't to figure out how you're 'supposed' to choose," Sandalwood explains. "The reason I asked the question is to figure out how you do choose. We're not setting in stone the one way you have to behave, we're observing how you already do behave so that we can reflect on it and consider what that tells us about you."

"It's like ... It's the difference between a classroom test and a wildlife study. People don't grade squirrels on how they bury nuts, they just look at how squirrels actually bury nuts in practice, and learn from that. There is no right or wrong answer. I'm already learning a lot from watching you think about it."

"But—you said that which one I choose is about whether I value my happiness, to you. And I don't know if I value my happiness and I don't know if I would be choosing a necklace because of my happiness or for other reasons. So it seems like I would probably be choosing wrong, if I chose a necklace and you thought it meant something about whether I value my happiness but it didn't."

"Oh! Yes, I see," Sandalwood replies. "I'm sorry, I should have been clearer. When I say that I want this question to tell me something about whether you value your happiness, I mean that this question is intended to provide some evidence one way or the other. But there are a lot of reasons why this might not be a good question! I thought of it in only a few seconds, and there are probably a lot of confounding factors."

She gestures at the necklaces. "If you picked the one that looks uglier to me, that could be because you were indifferent to the choice, or it could be that you happen to really like things made of carbon, or that you prefer to take things which are further left, or closer to hand. And if you picked the one that looks prettier to me, that could be because you value having something pretty, or it could be that you like alloys, or that you think other people will enjoy looking at it if you wear it, or that you prefer to take things which are closer to galactic north."

"There are lots of reasons you might take each necklace, which means that which one you take can't tell me anything about your thought process for sure. But some of those possibilities are more likely than others, and some of those possibilities match other clues I have about you and some don't. So by combining this question with other things -- other questions, discussions with you, watching how you react to other details of our environment -- it can help me get a better picture over time."

She sits back.

"So it's simultaneously true that this question isn't individually important, and also that it is still useful to me in trying to learn more about you. Honestly, what I've mostly learned so far is that I need to think through my questions and explain them better, which is still valuable information."

"...it's important to look my best, but I think that's not the same thing as valuing my happiness," she says. "It's about other people's happiness too, and about—expressing the right things."