When Sandalwood signed up to be part of the rotation for the Emergency First-Contact Response Team, she did not particularly expect to be called upon. But she kept up with the trainings, and pulled the occasional shift even though nothing ever came of them.

So she is surprised, when she hears a warning tone and gets teleported to a sun-lit open space. Doubly so because most anticipated first-contact scenarios would be happening in space, not (her HUD tells her) in southern Antichthon. But she has prepared for this.

She assesses the scene. There is one object of unknown origin, but it's changing shape in a physics-defying way, so there's no telling what it is. The whole scene is being streamed to other observers who can work out the physics. Her job is to handle making friendly contact. Better to err on the side of caution.

"Hello!" she calls. "Welcome to Sol."

She copies her words as pulses across the electromagnetic spectrum, bursts of neutrinos, and gentle gravitational waves, because they don't know the object's sensory modalities (if any). If there is no response, procedure calls for her to proceed to a more basic first-contact package that works up from math. If there is a response, she is to use her judgement about figuring out the most effective means of communication.

Her words arrive just as the doll finishes hitting the ground, and, as a final touch, a mote of alien radiance sparks in the center of her forehead and a black unicorn horn weaves itself into existence around it. Unlike the rest of her body, which is made of normal materials undergoing unexplained transformations, the unicorn horn is Really Definitely Magic or at least Really Definitely Not From Around Here; its unknown energies are scaffolded on a physical substrate that's not totally unlike nacre, but without the constant interference of that energy, the physical structure of the horn would be disintegrating on the spot.

The doll, whether in response to Sandalwood's words or because she just landed from a fall of six times her own height, stirs groggily and emits a soft groan. There's no tiny vocal equipment in there; her mouth just moves inexplicably, and the sound issues forth inexplicably from it. Her eyes blink open and then quickly close again with a slight, suppressed flinch as though pained by the light, even though the eyes are just inert spheres of coloured glass without nerves to transmit information, and there's no sign of a brain they might be transmitting information to.

... huh. Those sure do look like human mannerisms! Maybe this first contact will be much easier than they had expected.

Sandalwood dims the sunlight in the park. She's not sure whether she should shrink to match scale with their visitor, or whether appearing so much smaller is deliberate. Ultimately, she settles on shrinking down to 1/4th scale, so that she's a little under 3 times taller. She sits crosslegged on the grass about half a meter away, such that she couldn't quite touch the visitor if she stretched.

"Take your time," she says in a gentle tone of voice. Even if the alien hasn't picked up language, they have clearly picked up on body language, so maybe tone of voice will convey information too. Or she's reading too much into what looked like a wince and she'll have to fall back to math. "If you're hurt and there's something I can do to help you feel better, let me know."

The doll startles slightly when the light goes darker, and squints her eyes open again (the wood morphing subtly to provide the squint) to peer up at the misbehaving sky.

"Where..." Her voice comes out as a hoarse croak; she stops, makes throat-clearing noises and motions despite the lack of a functional throat to clear, and tries again. "Where am I?"

"I'm not sure what scale of answer is most useful to you, because we don't know where your previous location is relative to here," she apologizes. "You're in a play park in the residential community of Asvrirniji, near the south-easternmost tip of the largest continent on Antichthon, in orbit around the star Sol."

She thinks for a moment and then holds out a hand and shows the cosmic microwave background above it. "This is what the cosmic microwave background looks like from here, if that helps."

"Sol... I think I've heard of Sol," she ventures cautiously. "I can't remember..." She rubs her tiny wooden head with one tiny wooden hand. "I can't remember much of anything."

Sandalwood keeps being surprised by their visitor. Which is probably not a good sign for how well she's staying on top of the situation. But they did pretty much expect that first contact would go off the rails more or less immediately.

"That's alright," Sandalwood replies. "I can't see your brain, so I can't speculate on whether there's anything we could do to help directly. A human who had acute amnesia would often benefit from food, rest, sleep, and time. Does it seem likely that those things would help you?"

...blink blink. "Can you... normally... see brains?" she says dubiously.

She makes her forb stop hovering vaguely behind her head and come hover over her hand in place of the previous image.

"Baseline humans can't normally see brains unassisted. I can use a tool called a forb to perceive things in my surroundings better. Normally, I don't look inside people's brains because they want privacy. But we've never seen someone like you before, so I took a quick peek at what you are made of when I was trying to figure out how to communicate with you," she explains. "And I didn't see anything that appeared to contain enough data or ability to perform computation to be your brain."

The doll gives the forb a look of perplexed uncertainty.

"...well, I'm a doll," she says. "I don't have a brain. Or a... computer." She says the word 'computer' with some hesitation, like it's slightly foreign to her, though her English has been otherwise fluent so far.

"Well, yes," she agrees. "So I don't know how to directly help you with amnesia, the way that I would if you were a human. But I still want to help you be well. Is there anything that you would like to have to recover from whatever it is that brought you here?"

"...I don't know," she says, lost. "Why... why help me be well? Do I belong to you?"

She is now confused in a different direction, but this feels like progress. She double checks the local laws.

"Under the laws of Asvrirniji, no sentient being may belong to anyone. You seem sentient, so this applies to you. This means that nobody owns you. If you had a previous owner, Asvrirniji does not recognize their ownership of you," she explains.

"I am helping you for two reasons. Firstly, because it is my job. I am paid to try and make a good first impression and open friendly relations with any aliens who show up. Secondly, I would want to help you even if I weren't being paid, because I value other people's well-being. I like knowing that everyone else is okay."

"...you can't just... not recognize that I belong to someone," she says, little wooden eyebrows drawing together in a puzzled frown. "Isn't that stealing?"

Oh! Property rights and the rule of law! She is so prepared for this to be one of the cultural disagreements with aliens.

"So whether a person owns something isn't a concrete fact about the thing, like whether it's made of wood. The fact of whether someone owns something is a fact in the minds of the people involved, which only 'exists' insofar as it will prompt people to take different actions. So different communities can have different rules for what can be owned, and how it can be owned," she begins.

"Wherever you came from, the consensus might have been that someone owned you. And so the people there would have acted as though that person had some right to control you, profit from you, etc. When I say that in Asvrirniji nobody can own you, what I mean is that nobody here will act as though anyone has the right to tell you what to do, control where you go, or other rights that owners have over their property."

"Does that make sense? I can talk about how stealing works in this framework, or walk you through examples of what would happen under different circumstances, if that would help."

"...no, me belonging to someone is a fact in me. I can tell who I belong to because I have to do what she says." She frowns, looking lost again, her authoritative air subsiding. "But I don't remember who it is. So I won't know for sure until she finds me and tells me to do something."

Sandalwood nods. "That makes sense. But I think it's important to be clear that nobody else here is going to think of 'someone can order this person to do something and they will do it' as meaning 'this person belongs to this other person'. They might adopt language like that colloquially to refer to your relationship, but they wouldn't bring you to the person who can give you orders against your will, or anything like that."

Sandalwood leans back and rests her weight on her hands.

"Would you like it if I did a thing so that you can't hear anything someone says that might be an order?"

"—no?!" she says, somewhere between offended and alarmed. "Don't do that! Then I'll never find her!"

"I promise I won't do anything like that to you without permission!" she quickly exclaims. "I wasn't sure whether you wanted to find her or not. If you want to find her, there are probably ways I could help with that, though. Do you remember anything else about her to narrow it down?"

She considers asking whether their visitor thinks her administrator is in whatever place the visitor was beforehand, but her HUD says that the physicists think the visitor might have been flash-fabricated or reconfigured for human interaction somehow, based on how the visitor's body was changing as it landed, so she decides not to poke too hard at where the visitor came from.

...slowly, sadly, she shakes her head. "I don't remember anything."

"That's okay. Do you know if the giving orders works through recordings? Because if so, I could put up a request for every person who uses she/her pronouns to send you one," she offers. "I don't know how many of them would, but it might still help eliminate a lot of candidates."

"...every... person who uses... what?" she says, puzzled. "I don't understand what you mean. And I don't know if - recordings - would work right."

"Earlier, you said 'So I won't know for sure until she finds me and tells me to do something'. In the language we're speaking right now, that only grammatically refers to a little under half of people. Since you have otherwise been speaking fluently, I assumed that was information about the person who can give you orders," she replies.

"Do you understand the difference in meaning between the sentences 'I gave her my raincoat', 'I gave him my raincoat', and 'I gave them my raincoat'?" she asks. "Or do those sound like the same thing, or refer to a concept you don't have, or anything like that?"

A tiny thoughtful frown as she puzzles over this input.

"'I gave her my raincoat' sounds like you gave someone your raincoat and 'I gave him my raincoat' sounds like you gave someone—weird and foreign and unusual—your raincoat, and 'I gave them my raincoat' sounds like you gave your raincoat to a stranger, or more than one person."

"Huh!"

She thinks about that for a moment. Luckily, her job is to talk to the alien, not to figure out why an alien would share so many concepts but think of men as foreign and unusual.

"People here tend to sort themselves into categories called genders," she explains. "There are two popular categories, and a bunch of less popular ones. When you refer to someone in the third person, it's considered polite to use the set of third person pronouns associated with their category."

She waves a hand.

"But a full explanation of what's going on with genders can wait, unless you're particularly interested. Do you have any other questions I can answer for you, or immediate needs?"

"...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."

"I'm being paid to help you!" Sandalwood responds, because this seems more likely to go over well than trying to put their visitor in a box she clearly doesn't want to occupy.

"My self-tree thinks that having someone designated to make a good first impression with aliens is a good use of resources. Even if helping you doesn't turn out to be important, it's the policy that we will try to be friendly and helpful to aliens. And we think enforcing that policy uniformly is going to be better for us long-term."

"...am I an alien? I guess I'm an alien. I don't really feel like an alien."

"Well, nobody feels like an alien to themselves," she agrees. "To you, we're the aliens."

"It's still weird to be in a normal park talking to a normal person in normal language but also being an alien there."

"Would you like to go somewhere stranger?" she asks. "We could go to the Moon."

"Hmm. The moon doesn't sound very strange, actually..."

She laughs. "Fair enough. How about ... oh! Do you want to go see some of our spaceships?"

This seems like it might result in moving, so she climbs to her feet and then shrinks to match scales with their visitor, walking over to stand nearer.

The doll looks startled at the sudden size change, but recovers her equilibrium quickly.

"I could go see a spaceship. I think spaceships might sound strange. I'm not sure."

"Well, there are plenty of strange places. Maybe you'd like the dragon peaks on Venus," she replies. "But first stop, the Saturn Solar Shipyards!"

There is a gentle flash of light, and then they're standing on the polished black marble floor of a viewing platform. Saturn's rings arch above them, their reflection swimming beneath their feet. The entire sky is a transparent dome, with nothing save a fixity field holding the air back so that there's no obstruction between them and the shipyards.

Above them floats a replica of the USS Enterprise. Around it swarm a variety of smaller support craft, currently busy patching the burns which a Borg cube (visible in the distant background undergoing similar repairs) put in it during the last reenactment.

A moment after they arrive, a man in a Starfleet uniform appears on the other side of the room with a completely different lightshow, and walks around the curve of the horizon.

Teak, perhaps among others, may notice that the doll's soul did not initially come along for the ride—but it heads in the right direction immediately, elongating along the way into a ribbon of undifferentiated soul-substance. It appears to be obeying the speed of light, at least for now.

Meanwhile on Saturn, the doll's body is totally inert, its face frozen into precisely the same expression of cautious interest she was wearing when they left, all points of articulation suddenly loose and unsupported. One eyelid falls shut as it crumples quietly to the floor.

"Oh gods I killed the alien!" she exclaims, turning to regard the slumped body with horror. "Please somebody tell me we got her in the backup system."

Teak -- who has been assigned alien monitoring duties because nobody else who has tried can see her soul -- puts an avatar on the floor a little ways away from Sandalwood.

"So A, yes I did get her in the backup system I think. But I wouldn't rely on it too much, because she's an alien and we still don't understand how she works. B, her soul is on its way here the slow way, and will get here in an hour and a fifth. C, I'm putting a teleport lockout on her so this doesn't happen again, but please try not to do anything else unusual to her," she replies.

Luckily, space is big, and her soul isn't going to pass too near anything important. Teak marks out the predicted flight path and diverts a space station that would otherwise come within a few million miles.

One nice thing about being an upload is that she's long ago become used to running multiple points of view and switching between them. She sits with Sandalwood in the shipyard observatory, talks to the other physicists in their virtualized lab environment, and follows along behind the soul as it makes its journey.

Half way through her flight, she gets an urgent ping and another avatar appears beside her.

"What is that?" Pear asks her. "And more importantly, why can some of my monitoring not see it? I can't manage orbital clearances if I can't automatically monitor all the objects that need orbital clearances."

"Did you hear about the alien? That's her soul," Teak replies, nodding towards the elongated ribbon of soul-stuff. "I'm more surprised that you can see it at all. So far I'm the only one who can. And yes, I know that makes no sense. We're still arguing about it in <virt:fcrt-lab-environment-1>."

She inserts an avatar there, sees that they've gotten into specialized arguments about high-order field harmonics, and drops the perspective.

"So why do you think we can see it if other folks can't?"

Teak shrugs. "No clue. We're all using the same sensors, and nearly the same cognitive architecture. The anomaly stops somewhere in the early parts of the visual cortex."

Pear pulls up a list of cognitive trials, and overrides the blinding. She cross-references everyone who has looked at the alien's soul, and isn't one of them.

"... it looks like you're part of a trial for integrated dynamic spatial senses, yeah?" she asks, after a moment of prodding.

"Yeah, why?" Teak asks. "You know you aren't supposed to look at that without good reason."

"So am I. And nobody who can't see it is so far. It's either that, the improved kidney function trial, or random chance. Let me drop that on the rest of the physicists, see what they make of it."

She re-opens a connection to the lab environment and whistles.

"Hey! I have an experimental result you'll want to see. Look at this."

They conduct a series of experiments, the final results of which are:

• Nobody with a physical brain can see it
• Nobody not in the trial group for the improved spatial senses can see it
• People who receive the same intervention as the improved spatial senses group, but haven't yet adapted to that can't see it either

"... so we'll know more once a few people have had a chance to adapt to the changes," Teak tells Sandalwood. "But yeah, it's pretty wild. I have no idea what's going on. Pear, Elm, Yew, and I are all going to swap off monitoring her in case something else happens."

"I just hope she's okay," Sandalwood replies, wringing her hands. "If she doesn't make it, it will be the first murder in three years and it will be all my fault."

"I'm sure it's fine. Her soul will be here any minute now."

Teak paints a marker in Sandalwood's vision, letting her see a glowing point a few degrees above the local horizon.

"Alright, I can do this," Sandalwood says to herself, nervously smoothing down her dress. The marker grows larger in her vision and Teak starts counting down.

"... 3, 2, 1, action!" she says, snapping her fingers.

The soul arrives, splashing into place within the body almost like a fluid being poured into a container, if there were such a thing as an insubstantial fluid that poured at just shy of lightspeed.

The doll blinks and sits up, apparently undistressed—

—and is immediately joyously captivated by the view. She ignores everyone present in favour of staring up at Saturn's rings in wordless wonder.

(Slight ripples are still reverberating through her soul as it finishes settling into place, but if this causes her any discomfort, she isn't letting on.)

Oh thank goodness. That is so much better than the alternative.

Sandalwood is going to pretend that she has not just spent the last six fifths of an hour anxiously catastrophising. She relaxes her shoulders and just watches their guest for a moment, to ensure she's okay.

"It's so beautiful," she says, very quietly.

"I'm glad you like it," she replies.

There's no rush, so she's content to let their guest examine the rings and the stars as much as she would like to.

She startles a little at the sound of another person's voice, and spends another moment staring up at the rings before tearing her gaze away so she can look at Sandalwood.

"I think you have successfully brought me somewhere very strange," she says with a tiny smile. "What do you want to do next?"

"Well, my overarching goal is to give you the tools to have a good, fulfilling life here until we can figure out how to send you back," she replies. "But if you want to have a look at more beautiful things, that's definitely an acceptable next step. What do you like most about the sky here?"

"...it's round," she says, and then her painted cheeks darken briefly in a soft pink blush. "I mean—" She traces the arc of the rings with a sweep of her little wooden arm. "The way the bands of light have such a clean curve against the black sky. It looks like a poem."

"Yeah, Saturn is a natural wonder," she agrees. "The biggest project around here is definitely the shipyards, but there are a lot of little satellites and homes built in the rings for the view. I bet you'd also like to see some of the O'Neil cylinders -- they also cut a pretty striking figure against the stars."

She looks back up at the sky.

"There's no rush, though. We can certainly stay here and stargaze for a while."

"What cylinders?" she wonders.

"Oh! O'Neil cylinders are a particular design of space station," she explains.

"Some people say they look like floating bricks, but I think they have some of the same stark, geometrical beauty that the rings do. The ones I'm thinking of aren't cylinders, technically. They are, for obscure reasons known only to the fork that set up the template for this particular cluster of stations, Reuleaux heptagonal-prisms. But the point is, picture a large rod floating in space, one side brightly lit by the sun and the other in darkness, speckled with windows that look into an interior filled with greenery. The outsides are covered with solar panels, but at this scale they look like individual black sequins, making the station shimmer and sparkle as it rotates," she describes.

"That does sound pretty," she says consideringly. "Where are they?"

Sandalwood checks the date and thinks about angles for a moment, before pointing back in the direction of the sun, about five degrees above it.

"They're back in Earth orbit, because they were one of the earliest station designs," she replies.

"Do you want to show them to me?"

"I do," she replies. "There, uh, is a small problem with teleporting again, though. Your body came along with me just fine when I teleported, but your soul took about an hour to catch up."

"I didn't see any reason to suspect this was bad for you," Teak chimes in, from where she was quietly observing. "But just in case, I think probably you shouldn't teleport again."

"So we can either use telepresence, or go the slow way!" Sandalwood continues, undeterred.

"...that's very odd," says the doll. "Why would my soul be slower than most people's?"

She shrugs. "I think I mentioned, but the rest of us here don't have souls."

Blink blink.

"How..."

But she can't figure out how to finish that sentence.

Sandalwood can't really figure out how to answer that question, either.

"All of our thinking is being done in our brains?" she replies. "Since you're the only ensouled person I've met, I'm not sure what you're expecting them to do."

"...I think... I think I expect souls to go along with being alive, and you are alive. But I don't understand souls, really, I just expect them. Sorry. Should I stop being confused by things I can't explain? It's probably inconvenient."

"Can you just stop being confused by things?" she asks. "That sounds somewhat impossible. But anyways, I don't mind when you're confused. I'm pretty confused about souls too. Being confused is a reasonable reaction to meeting aliens, I think."

"I guess I can't stop being confused on the inside but I can stop being confused on the outside. It's important not to do the wrong things and inconvenience people."

"Well, I do agree with that," she responds. "But in the current circumstance, my job is mostly helping you get oriented, which is actually harder if you don't show me when you're confused or ask questions that you're wondering about."

She gives this statement due consideration. "Okay... what shouldn't I do, then?"

Sandalwood thinks for a moment.

"So I want to clarify that you are allowed to do the things I'm about to mention," she starts. "And I won't be mad if you do them. But it would be convenient for me if you would refrain from lying or deliberately insulting people. And you're actually not allowed to break the law, but it would also make my job easier if you didn't. I'll tell you about any relevant laws before we go somewhere that has them, so you don't need to worry about breaking laws I haven't warned you about."

"...what do you mean when you say that I'm allowed to do things, but I shouldn't?"

She takes a step back.

"If you were, to example, to tell me a lie," she explains. "Nothing bad would happen to you. I wouldn't get mad, you wouldn't be banished, you would still get to go places, etc. The only thing that lying would do is make it harder for me to understand you and help you. So I would prefer if you didn't do it, but you only need to care about that insofar as you care about making my job easier, which I don't need you to."

"For contrast, if we went somewhere with laws, and then I told you about a law and you broke it, there would be a negative consequence. You might need to pay a fine, or you might be asked to do something to make up for the transgression, or you might be banned from that area for a certain amount of time."

"Does that explicate the difference?"

"Pay a... fine?" she echoes uncertainly. "What kind of fine?"

"Are you familiar with the concept of money?" she asks, genuinely uncertain. "We have a currency called 'stars' which can be used to pay for things, including fines. Everyone receives a periodic payment in exchange for buying into the whole system. You have ... 1.033 stars," she says, peeking at how long it has been since she arrived.

"But I haven't bought into the system!" she says, alarmed. "I'm a doll, I can't own things!"

"By 'buying in' I just mean agreeing that private property is possible. But you can opt-out if you want to! Plenty of beings do," she replies. "The system is opt-out instead of opt-in because that's easier for most of the population. You could also just hold onto the money until you find your owner, so that you can give it to her and she can start with a little extra."

"...what would opting out... mean, and what would not opting out mean?"

"So right now, there is an account which you are permitted to spend money out of, which is accumulating money at the same rate that every other being's account is," she replies. "Not opting out means that continues to be the case. If you did opt out, your account would stop receiving money. You could choose to send the money already in your account back, or to some other person or cause, or you could just leave it there."

"Having money lets you pay for things. Right now, I'm paying all of your travel expenses out of the 'make a good impression on aliens' fund. If you wanted me to go away and stop trying to help, you would need to pay to go places. The teleport here cost 2.4 millistars. There are charities that pay to make sure nobody ends up stranded, but you wouldn't be able to go to as many places without any money. There are other things you might want to pay for, though, like paying a fine to avoid banishment, or paying people for their time to check if they're your owner."

She pauses, trying to judge if this is too much information at once.

"My recommendation would be to either leave it alone until you've had longer to adjust, at which point you can make a more informed decision, or to buy into a spending collective. Those are organizations that take the basic income from people who don't want to have to interact with money, and then cover reasonable expenses like travel and food without requiring payment. So you wouldn't own anything, but you could still go places."

"...that all sounds... complicated and confusing and alien and like I can't just decide not to deal with complicated confusing alien things because they will be happening to me whether I understand them or not," she concludes.

"That is ... pretty much accurate?" Sandalwood agrees. "As I said, ignoring this issue completely for a while is probably a good idea. Nothing is happening which can't be un-done, you're not hurting anyone, and nothing about this is time-sensitive or will change if you just ignore it."

She coughs. "I feel like we got off topic. This whole conversation started because I was trying to explain what I mean by things like 'allowed' and 'permitted'. Maybe I should just avoid using those words? I'm happy to explain our economic system, but the defaults are the defaults because they are easier to change later. It's easy for someone to give up something that they don't want to have, but you can't go back in time and give someone something that they were missing. So we don't need to talk about it until you feel ready."

"...hmm," she says. "I think I see what you mean... but... it feels to me like if I don't opt out, I'm... agreeing that I'm the sort of thing that should own money? And I don't know how I feel about that, or if it's even true, or even really what it would mean for it to be true or not."

"That makes sense!" she reassures her. "How about instead of putting the money in your account, we put it in a trust account. And once you have thought about it and know what you want, you can either claim the trust account or disavow it? And it the mean time, I'll keep showing you around on the be-nice-to-aliens budget and answer any questions as they come up."

This is, in fact, pretty much isomorphic to the current situation. But she hopes that this framing will be a bit less upsetting.

"Hmm..."

She spends a few seconds thinking about that.

"...that makes sense," she eventually concludes. "Okay."

Sandalwood pulls up an admin interface and makes a note on their visitor's account, and then sets up a second account into which her basic income is routed.

"Done!" she reports. "Alright -- where were we? Did you still want to see the O'Neil cylinders I mentioned? Or do you want to ask more clarifying questions about things like our economy and laws and so on?"

"Maybe I should ask more clarifying questions. I'm just not sure where to start."

"That's understandable! It's hard to adapt to a totally alien culture. How about I start with a general overview, and you stop me if something doesn't make sense?" she suggests.

"That sounds very sensible!"

"Alright."

She thinks about how to phrase this to land well with their visitor.

"So the fundamental idea behind our economy is that there are certain things that ought to be shared fairly, because nobody has more right to use them than somebody else. For example, space. Nobody has an inherent right to control what happens in a particular volume of space. But people need a certain amount of space, just to exist. And many people enjoy having private areas. So how do you let those ideas all sit in harmony with one another?"

"Our solution is money -- fungible tokens that people can exchange. When someone wants exclusive rights over something shared -- like having a house where they can evict people, or wanting time on the fabricators to make something with -- they pay everyone else for the privilege. Then everyone else can use that money to get exclusive rights over something they want."

"If two people want the same thing, it goes to whoever pays more. Which leaves the person who didn't get what they wanted richer for next time, so that on average, the whole system allocates things to the people who want them most, without being biased towards anyone in particular."

"There are a lot more details to make things work in the real world, but does that make sense as a basic outline?"

"...that sounds... very strange," she says slowly. "I'm not sure how things worked wherever I came from, but I think it was very differently than that. I think I understand, though."

"There have been other systems in the past that might be more similar to what you're used to?" Sandalwood guesses. "This is a fairly historically-unusual system. But it is also the best system we've been able to devise so far, by a few different metrics."

"But now maybe you can see what I mean when I talk about the universal basic income as being a payment for buying into the system -- it is the money that is being given to someone to compensate them for all the things that they don't get, because they are being privately used by someone else. For example, right now you couldn't just walk into my apartment. It's private and locked. So I am paying you a tiny tiny fraction of a star for the privilege of being able to say you can't go there."

"It's not very much, because most people don't particularly want to go there, so I don't have to pay very much to keep it. If I wanted an apartment in a very popular area where lots of people want to be, I'd need to pay more. But those very small payments add up when most people have private houses, and buy new manufactured objects, and teleport, and rent server time, etc. Right now, everyone is getting slightly under one star/hour."

"Which brings us to the question of who can receive a universal basic income. That's a more thorny issue. The actual answer we've settled on is 'anyone who can use language to communicate, or is a member of a species who can normally use language.' But there is a lot of arguing about whether that's the right definition. Some people think that various animals should get UBI, there are debates about when babies should qualify, not everyone agrees with the specific standard we use to measure 'language use', etc. It's the definition we use because it seems like a good proxy that reliably separates things that definitely should be compensated -- like people -- from things that shouldn't -- like rocks. But it's definitely not a perfect metric."

"I think that's a good summary of the reasons for the system. Do you have questions about that, or should I talk about how this works in practice?"

"Hmm... I want to think about that for a minute first," she says.

"Of course! Take your time."

Sandalwood looks back up at the rings. The ground beneath them is slowly rotating, bringing more of the space around Saturn into view.

She looks up at the rings and spends about half a minute contemplating the structure of society before she says,

"Okay, I think I understand. What were you going to say about how it works in practice?"

"I was going to say a bit about how we set the right prices for people to pay for things, and then talk about auction insurance," she replies. "Those aren't details you necessarily need to care about most of the time, but they might give you a more complete picture of what people actually pay under this system and why."

"That makes sense. I'd like to hear about that, then."

[Author's note: After discussion with some readers where they kindly pointed out several flaws in this system, I no longer think this is how it works in the Fixipelago. The overall goals of the system from above remain unchanged, but the specific price-discovery and payment mechanisms are no longer a solution I endorse.]

"Cool! So almost all prices for things that go towards UBI are set using Vickrey auctions. The idea is that you want an auction structure that incentivizes people to say what their real price is -- if people put in bids lower than what they're really willing to pay for something, then if somebody else wins the auction they'll regret it, because they would have been willing to pay more. If someone puts in a bid higher than they're willing to pay, that's no good either, because then they might lose more value than they gain, and why would anyone participate in a system like that?"

"So the trick is to find an auction structure where everyone's best chance to win is to put in a bid for whatever the item is really worth to them, without distortions. One way to do that is to have everyone who is competing for something put in a sealed bid. Whoever put in the highest bid wins, but they only have to pay the amount of the second highest bid. This has a few nice properties!"

"For one thing, it means if you're the only one bidding, you don't have to pay. Or in other words, if you want something that nobody else wants, you can just have it without needing to compensate anyone. It also means that there's no reason to systematically underbid your real price -- lowering your bid doesn't save you money, it just means there's more of a chance of losing out to someone else."

Her tone of voice has gotten increasingly excited as she explains. Economics is really fun.

"And that works pretty well for one-time purchases. But for something like renting a house, there are other things people care about beyond just getting a particular house -- like being able to predict when they'll need to move, or being able to just live for a while without worrying about auctions. We could hold all the auctions periodically -- like once a year -- and some towns actually do that. But that means that new people can't get a house without waiting for the auction to come around, among other problems."

"Fortunately, this is a problem that can be solved with insurance! What you can do is run the auctions very frequently, so it's easy for people to enter and exit the market on their own schedules, but provide auction insurance. Instead of paying a variable price in every single auction, and having to worry about losing them or not being able to budget, you pay a (slightly higher) flat rate across the whole duration to buy auction insurance from an insurance company. In exchange, they promise to pay however much it takes (up to a given limit) to win the auction for you."

"So the actual experience is -- you find a house you want, and say how much you would be willing to pay for it. If that's enough, you get it. If it isn't enough, you at least increase costs for the person who is using the house instead, get paid slightly more, and have a chance at winning the bid when the current occupant's term of insurance runs out. Nobody pays more than a space is worth to them, there's no need for a centralized schedule, landlords can't collude to raise prices, everyone can set how long they want to rent for, and prices are mostly stabilized by insurance."

She realizes that she's been monologuing and coughs into her fist again.

"It's not a perfect system -- sometimes it can be hard to get into a neighborhood that becomes popular very suddenly, for any price -- but it works fairly well for most things. There are places where it works differently; the community as a whole pays for the entire area, and then subdivides it according to their own rules. But that's the usual system."

"It... sounds like... this is a system where... no one can own things?" she says tentatively.

"I mean ... yes? Sort of? It depends on what you mean by 'own'," she replies. "You can pay everyone else for an exclusive right to a place for some term, and during that term you can control what is done with that place. Whether that is the same thing as 'owning' a place is something of a philosophical point. People often refer to places they've won bids on as being their property, but you could argue this is a linguistic quirk instead of a literally correct assertion."

"I think... what I am used to the word 'own' meaning... is something about other people not being allowed to take something away from you? And in this system other people can always take your house away from you, they just have to pay you for it."

"Yes, that's true," she agrees. "There are still sometimes problems with mobs of people trying to run someone out of their house. Once the insurance markets got established those sorts of problems mostly died down, though, because most people don't get targeted like that, so insurance against it is pretty cheap, and you can get a good payout if you're forced to move. If it still ends up being a problem you can move to a community that uses some other method to allocate houses, or move to a space-station that can easily shift orbits if someone buys up the orbit you're using."

"...but what if someone buys your community's land? Or—I'm not sure I understand the part about space stations."

"So yes, a mob of people could pool resources to buy a community's land. But this is, in some ways, less of a problem for a whole community at once. You can just pick up everything and move together, with no need to miss your neighbors or anything like that," she explains. "Teleports are cheap, so you can often just move your entire community in a single go somewhere else. There are some towns that do that as a matter of course -- popping around to different destinations as a unit."

"As for the space station -- if you're in an apartment, or something like that, you can move all your things out of the apartment, but you can't really move the apartment itself, because it's part of the building. Even if you have a normal house, it needs a certain kind of spot to move to. But a space station can move as a single self-contained unit, and it can go anywhere. Space is so big that even if every other person in the world was trying to bother you, they still wouldn't be able to outbid you on every reasonable orbit simultaneously. And if that did happen, you'd be rich anyways. So if you choose to live in a space station, you can pretty much just ignore this problem."

"...hmm. Okay, I think I understand. So the thing people can take away from you is... the land your house is on, but not the physical structure of your house itself? And if you aren't in a place where other people own things that your home is attached to, like the land under it or the other homes above and below it, then you can really own your own home, because other people can't buy it from you without your agreement?"

"That's a reasonable restatement, yeah! The auctions are for the space itself, not the things you put in the space. And while both are important to people, and the system isn't perfect, it seems to work pretty well in practice."

"What other kinds of things are there that people pay for but other people can buy it without the agreement of the person who has it?"

"Hmm. Let me think. There's broadcast rights to slices of the radio spectrum. Computer time on public servers, although you can also buy and run private servers outright. Some places, although not everywhere, auction off rights to make certain amounts of noise in public places. Technically digital storage is auctioned as well, but digital storage prices are so low as to make that not really relevant. Visual occlusion of stellar bodies, I think? Although that's another one where prices go very low because space is large."

She looks up other categories of stuff listed on the market.

"There are other things that you can buy in the same way, but they don't already belong to anyone. Like teleports, or time on the fabricators -- all of it is auctioned, and there isn't really any stable ownership because most people only need a few microseconds from one fabricator at a time."

"Does that answer your question?"

"...I think so. I don't understand what all those things are but I think I understand enough."

"I'm happy to explain if you're interested, but I think none of those are as ... fundamental ... as space is. Although computer time and digital storage are kind of like space for uploaded folks?" she muses.

"Eh, not really," Teak disagrees. "As you mentioned, digital storage is really cheap. I'm stored in a distributed storage cluster spread throughout the Oort cloud, and I pay something like 1.4 millistars per year, because mostly nobody else cares about cold Oort objects. But I do still pay for an apartment on Pluto because sometimes I need to host non-uploads. So uploaded people definitely still participate in the land market in a way that is pretty different from the experience of buying server storage or time."

"...you're stored in a... um, what?" says the doll, blinking in confusion.

"Oh! Sorry, I'm an upload. I don't have a physical body. My brain is simulated by a distributed physics simulation running on a network of computers, and then I project an avatar here by manipulating light."

Teak turns of her tactility and waves a hand through Sandalwood's shoulder.

"I can touch things in the same way I can manipulate light, but it's all 'faked'," she explains, making fingerquotes. "Some people are a bit disconcerted by it, which is why I don't go around wearing a t-shirt flaunting it, or anything like that."

"...so... you're a person, but you're not really here, this is just an illusion of you and your... not your soul, your, um, not-soul... is elsewhere, or maybe nowhere?"

Teak wiggles a hand in a so-so gesture.

"Yes, I'm a person. Whether I'm 'here' is something of a philosophical question. I'm paying attention to a shared sensory experience with you, so I'm 'here' in that sense. But it's true that this form is an illusion. I don't have a physical body, unless you count the computers simulating me, but that's kind of a stretch because they're also simulating a bunch of other people, and running unrelated programs. The computers I'm using right now are located here," she says, pulling up an illustrative diagram of the solar system. She highlights a cloud of a few hundred different objects orbiting well outside the outermost marked planet, and also puts a label showing where Saturn is in relation to them.

The doll looks up at the diagram, and studies it quietly, tracing its lines with her eyes. She looks out at the sky, and back to the diagram, trying to find landmarks she could use to find her orientation on the map, but space is big and has few things in it.

Teak dismisses her little hologram and makes her computers twinkle directly in their vision, drawing labels on the sky. They'll all be teleported to new random orbits when she's done showing them (security mindset), but helping the alien get her mind around uploads seems important.

"...it's pretty," she says, smiling slightly.

That's a perfect opening to flirt with the alien. She should probably not flirt with the alien.

"Thanks!" she says instead. "It's not for everyone, but it suits me. I like the idea of floating between the cradle of civilization and the unexplored darkness between the stars."

"...your life is very strange to me but I'm glad you have the things you want."

"People getting the things they want is great!" she agrees. "I suspect that everything here will seem less strange with time."

"There aren't too many uploaded people," Sandalwood comments. "But there is definitely a lot of variety in what people are like and what they do with their days."

The doll nods thoughtfully, smiling a little.

She claps her hands. "Okay! I would chide myself for getting sidetracked, but it's not like we're in a rush. Let's head over to the O'Neil cylinders and then figure out where to go from there."

With the teleport locked out, they'll have to go the slow way. She lifts them up onto a platform and then accelerates. The stars turn to dark red embers in one direction and brilliant blue pinpricks in the other for just a moment, before they get close enough to Earth that the speed limit drops and they fade back to their normal colors.

Sandalwood screens out any non-visible light from interacting with them during the trip, in case their guest doesn't handle gamma rays very well.

"It'll be another minute, since we're not supposed to go more than a tenth the speed of light near Earth," she apologies.

"What..."

She can't quite figure out what question to ask.

Sandalwood does not have enough context to guess either.

"... did I do something surprising again? I'm sorry," she apologizes. "I didn't want to teleport us because we're not 100% sure its safe for you, so we have to go the slow way, which involves accelerating to near the speed of light and then decelerating at the other end? And normally that would only take a few seconds subjectively, but a group of concerned citizens and governments all go in together on partial bids for the space near Earth to restrict the maximum speed of objects, so that if there were a sudden failure of the traffic control systems (which there isn't going to be) there would be time to respond. So it will be another ... 47 seconds before we arrive."

"I think I'm... not used to... suddenly going places very fast," she says slowly. "It looked—new and strange."

"That makes sense! Would you like me to stop being able to move you around?" she offers. "It's useful for showing people around, and the systems won't let me move anyone in a way that will hurt them, but it could definitely still be unsettling if you're not expecting it."

"I don't know?" she says uncertainly. "It seems like probably being able to move me around is convenient for you?"

She adopts a thoughtful expression. She suspects that trying to explain that she cares about whether their guest likes the things that happen to her will get them into another rabbit hole.

"So it is convenient. But that convenience needs to weigh against other things, like whether you feel comfortable enough to ask questions or make requests. If I did something that was convenient in the moment, but that made my job harder overall, that would be a false economy. And since I don't know you very well, I can't really predict which things will turn out to be important to working well together and which ones are trivial, so I need to ask what you prefer in order to gauge the correct action."

"Hmm."

She falls silent, thinking that over.

She doesn't interrupt.

Over the course of their remaining travel, Earth grows from a tiny dot to an orb hanging in space to their left. Directly overhead, a group of seven long shapes turn, slowly circling each other in a complex dance.

There are large patches of green visible through the geometrically spaced windows, but the entire rest of the gently curved exteriors are covered with black sequins, casting shifting rainbow arcs as each one rotates to catch the sun.

In the distance, a few other large orbital structures are visible as dots which occasionally flash when the sun reflects off of them at just the right angle.

She gradually shifts from pensive to marveling.

"We can also go in and peek at the interiors," she promises. "The different stations all have different internal environments, because they were part of a series of experiments on how to design low-management habitable zero-gravity ecosystems. My favorite is probably the jungle, but they're all worth seeing."

"...jungle? What other kinds of environments are there?"

"Oh, let's see ... There's a saltwater beachfront and forest, a freshwater lake and deciduous forest, a tropical rainforest, a temperate rainforest, an urban space with room for greenery built in to the architecture, a hilly grassy area, and the control cylinder which is just flat grassland and scrubby bushes without experimental terrain features," she lists.

"They are all habitable. They were each meant to test a different potential complication around having large ecosystems in spin gravity, so each one has a few unique features that distinguish it. They're not very densely populated, because environments with artificial gravity ended up being more popular, but I think they're a historically interesting stepping stone on the way to space. And they develop really cool weather."

"What kind of weather?"

"Oh! A bunch of wild stuff!" she exclaims. "So they're all large enough to form clouds, but not so large that clouds could never reach the center of the cylinder. Which would ordinarily be 'so what?', but they're spinning. So the clouds get pulled into twisty spiral shapes that sit overhead and look like they should be rotating, but they just float over your head."

"And the sunlight comes in through the windows, right? But that means that it often falls on the clouds from 'below'. So they burn off from below, flaking into these fine golden mists. And the hotter air will try to rise, so every one in a while there's a big climactic inversion, and the cloud puffs out towards the window, swallowing the wisps of cloud that were being hammered away."

"The way the cylinder heats is neat too, because the windows are offset, so you don't have the land warm uniformly in the morning. Instead, you get lots of little fragmented breezes. And the terrain can have a really big impact on whether those just kind of stir the atmosphere, bringing the scent of the plants to you, or whether the little breezes all build together into a sweeping circular wind that spins around and around endlessly, dragging little blobs of cloud out into long streamers that wind over the hills until they're pulled apart to leave a clear sky."

The doll tries to picture this.

"...I think I would need to see it in order to understand what you mean," she concludes.

"That's fair! It's kinda hard to describe with words. If you're done admiring the exterior we could go peek inside?" she offers.

"I think I would like that, if that's all right."

"Yes, it's no trouble. I like seeing how they change over time," she agrees. She moves their platform over to a docking hatch near one of the windows. It irises open to greet them, a shimmering barrier keeping the air contained.

There are signs of docking clamps and a second iris already retracted, to suggest that this would be a working entry even in the absence of fixity fields.

They emerge from the hatch and float over to the ground, where the grass comes up to a neat brick walkway around the iris. The curve of the land is strange -- perfectly flat in one direction, but curving up in the other direction, giving the impression that they are standing in the wide, flat bottom of a giant mountain valley. Forests cling to the nearby slope, the trees in the full fledge of autumn, painting the sides of the cylinder in bright flame colors.

The lighting is also strange. They entered on the sunward side, and so the light is shining up through the window near them, falling on the distant landscape above. The far side of the cylinder is just far enough away that the farthest point is lost in an indistinct haze of atmosphere.

As they watch, the angle of the sunlight slants, casting a beam of light down the walls of the valley and brightening their surroundings. The gravity is not quite Earth-standard, but rather a little lighter, lending them a bounce to their step.

Most of the landscape is quickly adapted to, but the lake sitting part way up the side of the cylinder, placidly rippling, gets more and more surreal the longer it is in view. It is, unfortunately, clear today, with only small wisps of cloud handing suspended in the center of the cylinder. They are aligned along the curve of the ground, gently floating counter to the sun's rotation.

She tilts her head back to look up, and then leans back, and then ends up just lying flat on the platform so she can gaze straight up into the distance. Everything is so beautiful, and so strange. It looks like... a dream, or a painting, not that she remembers seeing dreams or paintings before, but that's what it feels like it looks like.

Sandalwood sits crosslegged beside her.

"Isn't it neat?" she says after a moment. "This is why I love megastructures. A lot of members of my self-tree live on the Moon for practical reasons, or on Antichthon because it's got lots of beautiful wilderness, but I have an apartment in a giant tree in the asteroid belt because I love seeing views that are strikingly different from how you implicitly imagine them."

"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."

"Hmm. Maybe a necklace is the wrong choice, then," she agrees. "A better choice would be one that had literally no effect on anyone except yourself."

She thinks for a moment.

"Oh! I know," she exclaims. "I wanted to show you how to use our transport system to go places anyways. Our transport system uses windows which only you can see to let you choose your destination. And the color of those windows is different for everyone, to make it harder for someone to fake a window. What color do you want your windows to be? It doesn't affect the functionality of the interface at all, and nobody can see it except for you, so the only thing the choice of color affects is you."

"...how does it do that?" she wonders.

"How does it only show up for you?" she clarifies. "The system creates appropriate photons to make it look like the interface is there for you, aimed directly into your eyes. Any photons that are scattered instead of absorbed get deleted as they leave your eyes, for privacy."

"That's very strange," she says. "It's so... specific."

Sandalwood cocks her head. "I'm not sure what you mean? People need ways to interact with the transport system, and most people prefer visual interfaces because they are inherently non-linear in a way that is hard for audio interfaces, but permit more acuity than direct brain interfaces, or tactile interfaces, or anything like that."

"If you prefer an audio interface you can choose that instead," she offers. "I don't know how well our direct brain interfaces or tactile interfaces would work for you. But if you have some sense like magnetoception or graviception that humans lack, we can probably rig up an interface module that uses that instead. Although it didn't look like you noticed the gravity wave I tried to greet you with when you first arrived."

"...it's... making and erasing light just so, for everyone," she says. "Specifically. Isn't that... a lot of trouble?"

Someday Sandalwood will meet aliens who have graviception. She was so prepared.

"I think people sometimes have difficulty thinking about what is hard and what is easy for a computer," she begins to say, before interrupting herself. "Wait! I didn't even think to ask. Are you familiar with the concept of a computer?"

"I don't think so."

Sandalwood summons a simple half-adder made with marbles. "The basic idea is to make a physical object that can react to different things happening according to a predetermined set of rules," she explains. "Our actual computers use hybrid optronic field-tensor processors which are probably too complicated to actually get into. But it's the same basic idea as this marble contraption. If you send the same marbles through the input here, the same pattern of marbles will come through the output here. And if you think of the patterns of marbles as representing numbers in a particular way, what this machine does is produce the sum of its inputs."

She points to a label on the side of the machine showing how numbers are encoded.

"It doesn't 'understand' addition, because it's not conscious, but if you needed to sum up a big list of numbers you could create a bunch of these chained together, and they could add your numbers without needing a thinking being to do it. The hard part is coming up with a structured physical system that computes the outcome you want. Once you've done that, it takes no additional effort to use it for more problems," she continues.

"So it took a lot of time to design our current computers, and figure out how to describe the rules for when light should be created and destroyed and so on, but now that they have been designed, they can handle doing the interfaces for everyone in the solar system simultaneously with no additional effort. There is an administrator who watches over the computers in case something goes wrong -- her name is Pear -- but she normally doesn't need to step in because they're very reliable."

"...can I put marbles in it?" she asks tentatively.

"Yes, go right ahead," Sandalwood agrees, pointing at the marble storage baskets on top. "I summoned it so that you could use it to build an intuition."

She is fully prepared to summon more marble-based mechanical computers as necessary to turn this into 'alien's first computer engineering lesson' if necessary.

She picks up a marble, studies it, studies the contraption. Is it obvious where and how to put the marble in?

Yes! There two input funnels labeled "A" and "B" with little plates and colored blue. There are two output pipes colored orange and labeled "A+B 1s digit" and "A+B 2s digit". The marbles in the storage basket on top of the machine come in two varieties: a heavier kind colored white with a "1" printed on them, and a lighter black kind with "0" printed on them. The internals of the machine are made with glass and wire, so that she can follow the paths the marbles will take as they fall through.

There's also an internal reservoir of zero marbles and an extra uncolored output labeled "extra marbles" which comes out the side into a little basket.

...hmm.

She puts her 0-marble into A.

The 0-marble falls into a little basket, which tips over onto a little rail, which it almost has enough weight to tip, but a counterweight keeps it from moving, so the 0-marble rolls the other way and hits a little flipper. The flipper is connected over to a paddle in the B part of the machine that turns the other way. The 0-marble then rolls down a tube and comes out of the "A+B 2's digit" output.

...she tries putting it into B, instead.

It falls down, past a little platform that was retracted when the first basket tipped over. It hits the paddle, pushing it back to a neutral position, but not before being diverted to a different tube that makes it fall out of the "A+B 1's digit" output. Putting two marbles through the outputs also tugs on a string that tips the A input basket back upright.

Sandalwood silently watches this, and then chimes in to say. "That corresponds to the fact that 0 + 0 is 0," she comments.

Next she tries putting the 0-marble into B and then...

The 0-marble falls into the B input and then doesn't come out.

Sandalwood winces internally and attaches a note to the teaching instructions that came with the adder.

"This particular adder is designed so that it deals with the A input first, and the B input waits," she explains. She points at where the 0-marble has landed on a little platform. "If you put another marble into the A input, it will fall into that little basket and pull this platform out of the way and this marble will fall into the rest of the machine."

She takes another 0-marble and puts it into A.

It falls into the basket, tips over, and then follows the path of the first marble she put into A. It nudges the paddle before the B marble has fallen down to that point, so the B marble follows the same path too. They roll simultaneously out of the output slots, the motion resetting the basket at the top.

Sandalwood doesn't interrupt; she's pretty sure their guest is going to try a few more experiments unprompted.

This time she puts a 0-marble into A, and waits for it to come out, and then puts it back into A.

It falls down and lands on the top of the tipped-over basket and stays there, waiting for one of the outputs to pull the basket back upright.

So she puts her other 0-marble into B.

It passes the pulled-back platform, hits the redirection paddle, and falls out of the "A+B 1's place" output. This pulls the basket back upright, and the first 0-marble plops into it and then immediately tips it over again, hitting the ramp, moving the paddle back into its interception position, and then rolling out of the "A+B 2's place" output.

Sandalwood internally takes notes about how some kind of input device that only takes marbles synchronously instead of the clever little basket-based locking mechanism would probably be more robust to experimentation.

She puts a 0-marble through B to reset the state of the machine, and then, at last, picks up a single 1-marble, and puts it into A.

It falls down and tips over the basket as previous marbles have, retracting the B-input platform. This time, though, it is heavy enough to tip the counterweighted rail, and so it rolls the other way, into a different holding basket.

She puts a 0-marble into B and watches what happens.

It falls down, past the retracted platform and un-moved paddle, and hits a counterweighted rail of its own. It is too light to budge the rail, so it rolls one way and makes its way out of the "A+B 2's digit" output. On the way, it hits a lever which tips the 1-marble out of its basket and out of the "A+B 1's digit" output. 

Then, if she puts them in the other way around, a 0-marble into A and a 1-marble into B?

The 0-marble flips the B-paddle into its intercept position, and falls out of the "A+B 2's digit" output. The 1-marble gets shunted over by the paddle and comes out of the "A+B 1's digit" output.

Hmm.

She gets another 1-marble, and tries putting a 1-marble into A and a 1-marble into B.

This time, the A marble rolls down the counterweighted rail and into its waiting basket. The B marble falls past the paddle and onto its own weighted rail, where it rolls the other direction. It hits a lever that tips the A marble the other way out of its basket, into a tube where it releases a 0-marble from the internal reservoir and out the "A+B 1's digit" output. The A marble then drops out of the "extra marbles" output and the B marble makes its way to the "A+B 2's digit" output.

Hmm!

...she looks for a way to replace the 0-marble in the internal reservoir.

There's an opening on the back that feeds into the reservoir. It holds about ten 0-marbles at a time.

She puts one back in to make up for the one that was spent.

She stands there, a marble in her hands, gazing contemplatively into the machine.

She methodically repeats all the basic addition operations: 0+0, 0+1, 1+0, 1+1. (And replaces the spent 0-marble again.)

Then she... stands there, gazing thoughtfully at the machine.

Sandalwood is content to leave her to her thoughts, although she does also summon a whiteboard on which she writes down the results for easy reference.

"...can I see... what it looks like... when you put them together to add more numbers?" she asks hesitantly.

"Sure," Sandalwood agrees. She creates a freestanding wall of half-adders, with their inputs and outputs hooked together to make a full 5-bit adder.

"Give me two numbers between 0 and 32," she requests.

"...um, um... two? And three?"

"Alright," Sandalwood agrees. This version has a little rack that you can set up the marbles in, and then a lever to pull to release them all at once, because you can sneak in quick changes when you have a self-tree that's very excited about first contact to help. The half-adders still have the basket mechanism and you can reach past the rack to put marbles into the inputs directly, though, because that makes it more explorable.

She fills both racks with 0-marbles, except for the first two places. In the A input, she puts a 1-marble in the 2's position. In the B input, she puts a 1-marble in the 2's position and the 1's position.

"3 is one 2 and one 1 in the encoding the machine uses," she remarks. "Go ahead and pull the lever and see what happens."

...she pulls the lever.

The marbles cascade through the machine, spitting "000101" out of the output tubes and an extra '1' out of the 'extra marbles' output.

"That's one four and one one, which is a total of five," Sandalwood supplies. "Go ahead and try whatever you'd like now -- I just wanted to show you an example of how the input and output are encoded, because that's one thing about this kind of machine that people sometimes have trouble with."

Hmm, so...

First she tries to find just the last part, the part that should be the same as the other machine, and verifies that it still does 0+0, 0+1, 1+0, and 1+1 just the same. (And that it still needs her to put a 0-marble back in after adding 1+1.)

This remains true. The individual half-adders are clearly separated from each other to make it easy to tell them apart, and they are all identical both to each other and to the existing model which she examined before.

Okay!

She moves over to the next half-adder and tries to verify it the same way.

It is an identical device, and behaves in the same way, except that one of the outputs (the 1's digit) feeds into the A input of the first half-adder she examined. The 2's digit output is labeled 'carry' and goes through a little basket-lock system that is also connected to the 2's digit output of the first adder. With the state of the first adder as it is right now, the basket dumps 0-marbles out the back and onto the 'extra marbles' ramp.

Sandalwood vaguely wonders whether she's going to try and validate all 10 of the half-adders. She decides that it's note of her buisness, and blinks open her messages to catch up a little, while keeping an eye on their visitor.

No, the next thing she does is try to operate the two adjacent adders together. By putting in... it looks like three zeroes is what this arrangement expects?

If she plays around with the three inputs of the two half-adders (since one input of one is connected to an output of the other), she can get them to produce 00, 01, 10, or 11 as outputs, with the extra marble dumped out the back.

Before trying anything involving a 1, she goes back and forth a few times between putting in two zeroes to the last half-adder and three zeroes to the assembly of both of them, trying to get a sense for how the two machines interrelate.

The 1's digit of the second-to-last half-adder routes into the A input of the last half-adder. So when she is using only 0-marbles, the effect is the same as putting a 0-marble into the A input of the last half-adder directly.

Since the half-adders wait for the A input before processing the B input, this means that the second-to-last half-adder always finishes its work before the last half-adder does.

Next she tries each of the three arrangements of two zeroes and a one, watching to see the differences between how the marbles make their journey in each case.

In every case, the 1-marble ends up coming out of the 1's digit of the last half-adder. One of the 0-marbles ends up at the 2's digit output output, and the other 0-marble gets dumped out the back into the 'extra marbles' line.

When the 1-marble is input directly to the last half-adder, it follows the same path that it did when put into the B input of the standalone half-adder. When the 1-marble is put into the second-to-last half-adder, it invariably makes its way to the 1's digit output of the second-to-last half-adder, and then into the A input of the last half-adder, where it proceeds as normal.

Hmm. Two ones and a zero, all three ways?

In every case, a 1-marble ends up coming out of the 2's digit of the last half adder and 0-marble comes out of the 1's digit output. Sometimes it's the 0-marble she put in, and sometimes it comes from one of the internal reservoirs of 0-marbles. The spare 1-marble and sometimes a 0-marble roll out the back as extras.

She is, as ever, conscientious about refilling internal reservoirs wherever she depletes one.

Now how about three ones?

That causes both the 1's digit and the 2's digit to disgorge one of the 1-marbles, with the third returned via the 'extra marbles' rail.

"I think I'm starting to see how it works," she says. "Though I'm not sure... how did this system of numbers with only two numbers come about? I think usually there's more numbers than that."

Sandalwood closes her messages.

"Yes! Normally, we use ten different digits," she agrees. "But machines which use ten types of marbles are much more complicated. And even though our current computers work on different principles, it's still true that building them to only handle two different digits makes them a lot simpler, and therefore easier to design, than using ten digits would. So our modern computers also use the two-digit system, which is usually called binary."

"It's a little hard to wrap my head around but I can mostly manage it if I think it through one piece at a time."

Sandalwood nods.

"Yes. Computers can behave in very complex ways. Usually, we work out a small, simple, repeatable piece -- like the half-adder -- and then use it to build larger components without needing to remember the specific internal details of each one. But building systems like this is a difficult skill that many people work hard to get better at," she agrees.

"I think I'm still not sure how adding two numbers together turns into... so much else."

"Entirely reasonable. First of all, computers don't just do addition. You can make similar mechanical systems for subtraction, multiplication, etc. But more than that, letting computers do something involves figuring out how to represent the problem in terms of math," she explains. "For example, to display a private window to someone like I mentioned, you have a system that enters details of the situation into a computer -- where their eyes are, where the window should be, what the window should contain, which photons currently in their eyes took which paths -- and then the computer solves the geometry problem of what angle each photon should be created at over and over again."

She waves a hand.

"A full explanation of how computers work is something that would take many years of education," she claims. "For now, it's sufficient to understand that we can build machines out of simple repeated components to do more complicated tasks. Figuring out how to turn a new task into math is hard, and setting up the system to feed the math problem in the right way is hard, but once you've done those, now the computer can do the calculations repeatedly without additional effort."

"And you have... so many little devices... that you don't have to be careful at all about saving their time and effort?"

"Yes," she agrees. She pulls up a visualization of the current system load. "Right now, about 3% of our computing power is being spent on physical system tracking and manipulation. That includes interface interactions, simulated physics, alternate gravity, traffic routing, atmosphere regularization for teleportation, and a bunch of other stuff. 4% is being spent on purely informational workloads -- financial transactions, sending messages, automatic scheduling, vote tracking, etc. The remaining 93% is being auctioned off, mostly to uploads."

"If the system ever uses more than 10% capacity at once, that's a sign that we need to grow it, and we invest in building more computers," she continues. "So we always have enough."

"A tenth?!" she exclaims. "But—but what—where do you get it all???"

Sandalwood conjures an illustrative ball of stone with swirling gold inlays.

"The same way we make most things. We have technology for moving things around, as you've seen. Fixity crystals, we call them. But 'moving things around' is way more powerful than it initially sounds. 'Moving things around' can mean 'rearranging the smallest components of matter from the middle of the sun to make any material object'. In this case, a computer compares the positions of all the particles in the pattern for the target item to the positions of compatible particles in the sun, and then executes a series of teleports to put all the particles in the right location," she replies.

"There are also tricks for generating matter from nothing, but that's more expensive. Anyway, once we have the pattern for something, we can make many copies of it cheaply. So producing more computers to keep up with demand is not a very large expense."

"...that's made of the sun??? Isn't the sun not made of the right things for that???"

"So it's true that the sun is mostly Hydrogen, which is not the right element to make stone out of," she agrees, tossing the ball up and down a little. "But for one thing, the sun is very big, so even trace elements are present there in large quantities. And for another, elements are actually made up of even smaller parts called protons and neutrons, which are again made up of even smaller parts called quarks. So if you can rearrange individual quarks, you can turn one element into another element."

"I think," she says, consideringly, "that that explanation would make more sense if I knew what hydrogen is."

"Oh! I'm sorry," Sandalwood replies. "When you said that the sun was not made of the right things, I assumed that meant you knew what it was made of."

This first contact managed to skip all the math and science they were expecting to be a necessary prerequisite to communication, but now it sure is circling back around to math and science.

Their visitor has responded well to having a tactile thing to experience, so she summons a sample-platter periodic table. The gasses are in little clear canisters, as is the mercury, and anything that reacts explosively with air. Radioactive elements have been not had samples included at all, but the periodic table is otherwise complete.

"So obviously there are a great many materials. And I already told you that they're all fundamentally made up of quarks," she begins, ignoring leptons for the moment. "But we usually think of there being a difference between the parts they can be broken down into mechanically, chemically, and nuclearly."

She summons a bowl, and crushes the stone orb in her hand, letting the pieces rain down into the bowl. "Mechanically, you can grind this orb up and see that it is made of bits of stone and of gold. You can see them here."

She takes a scoop of the stone and drops it into a beaker of acid, swirls that while waiting for it to dissolve, and then pours another beaker into it to precipitate the silicon.

"Chemically, you can dissolve the stone and eventually figure out that the stone is made of silicon, which is this part falling out of the liquid like snow, and oxygen. Silicon and oxygen are what we call 'elements'. Elements are these things," she says, gesturing at the periodic table. "They are the pieces things are made of which you can't break down just by using chemistry. Hydrogen is also an element."

She points out Hydrogen on the periodic table.

"The sun is mostly Hydrogen, with trace amounts of other elements."

She is prepared to keep lecturing if that seems warranted, but she pauses to see if this has spurred any new questions, or if their guest wants to play around with the element samples for a bit.

"Hmm," she says. "I think I... don't expect changing something into something else to tell you very much about what the first thing was made of, necessarily? But I guess you're saying that the way you're doing it, it does do that?"

Sandalwood thinks about this for a moment.

"It's not so much that changing one thing into another tells you about what the thing was originally made of," she replies. "So much as that our method requires you to already know, very precisely, what it is made of. But our technology can tell where particles are, and what kind of particles they are, in the same way that it moves them, so this isn't a problem in practice. Technically, the fixity field simply moves a particle to where it already is, and determines the kind of particle thus moved by looking at how much mass it just moved, even though the movement itself is infinitely short."

She lets that explanation hang for a moment and then says "I can explain how the sensing works in more detail if it's important, but it requires a decent amount of calculus knowledge. Does the first part of that explanation make sense?"

—she shakes her head. "I mean—" She gestures at the beakers. "Changing one thing into another, like you're doing there."

"Oh! Chemistry," she exclaims. "Uh ..."

She stares for a moment at the accumulated chemistry detritus, and then clears it away, replacing it with a taper in a jar on an old-fashioned balance scale.

"So we used to think that when things changed in certain ways, like being burned, that there wasn't much -- or any -- relationship between the things they were made of before and the things they were made of afterwards. But a few hundred years ago, a scientist studying what things were made of noticed something strange."

She snaps her fingers, lighting the taper on fire.

"If you burn something in an enclosed container, how heavy it is doesn't change. That is, even once the taper burns down, the whole enclosed jar will weigh the same amount. Which is a bit curious -- the burnt taper is clearly smaller. And if you weigh it alone, without the rest of the jar, it is lighter. So burning the taper made the air inside the jar heavier."

She waves a hand.

"Now, that's not conclusive proof that what something is afterwards is based on what it was beforehand," she continues. "But it is evidence that there is something which is conserved when you burn things. Same thing for other operations, like mixing flasks of chemicals, or melting things. If you do it in a sealed container, none of these operations change how much the whole system together weighs. Which suggests that one rule of Chemistry -- the art of changing substances into other substances by mixing and burning and so on -- is that you can't end up with something which weighs a different amount than what you started with. Does that make sense so far, or no? I promise I'm going somewhere with this."

"I think so," she says cautiously.

"Okay. The next insight came from a scientist doing experiments with metals and acids, but it's easier to show this using electricity," she continues.

She summons a tank of water with two electrified wires stuck into it at opposite ends, and protruding tubes to catch the Hydrogen and Oxygen this produces.

"When you run electricity through water, it breaks up into two different colorless gasses," she narrates, indicating the slowly-filling tubes. "These gasses behave in very different ways, though."

She lights a tea-light in a beaker, and then picks up the jar from the scale.

"When you take some heavy air from something that was burned in a closed container, and you pour it over another flame, it goes out," she explains, unscrewing the lid of the jar and pouring a bit of carbon dioxide over the tea-light, smothering it. "If you then introduce more of this one of the colorless gasses, though, the flame comes back," she continues. She attaches a tube to the place where the oxygen is collecting, and pours some into the beaker, making the tea-light flare back to life.

"Why do you think that might be?" she asks. "I'm not expecting you to know, I just want to hear some theories you think fit this evidence, so I know what else I need to rule out using a different demonstration to prove what's really happening to you."

"I'm not sure!" she says. "I don't know if I know anything about how fires work. I think... they go out if you put water on them, or sand... or cover them... wait, you made that heavy air by burning something, that feels important. That means... that fires make something that hurts them? But wait, if they make something that hurts them, how do they manage not to put themselves out immediately? What's different? ...if you pour the heavy air on the candle without the glass around it, does it still go out?"

"That's a great question!" Sandalwood replies. She summons a new lit tea-light sitting on its own on the table, and then pours a little more carbon dioxide over it, putting it out. She has to pour a bit more of it to smother the candle for long enough that it doesn't re-light.

"So yes, pouring heavy air over a fire can put it out even if it's not surrounded by glass," she states. "I put the tea-light in a cup to begin with because it's a little easier to do the demonstration that way. The cup catches the heavy air and you don't need to pour it as precisely. But the cup isn't necessary."

"As for what's different about it, let me show you a demonstration that old scientists couldn't have done. I'm going to make the critical component of the heavy air that I'm trying to work around to glow purple, so that you can see it, even though it's normally colorless," she says, suiting action to words.

She re-lights the tea-light, and a streamer of purple gas immediately rises off of it and up into the atmosphere.

"When a fire burns normally, the heavy air it creates is hot -- heated by the fire. This makes it rise into the air and disperse."

She summons another cup and sets it over the tea-light.

"If you trap the heavy air, though, it builds up and can smother the flame."

The tea-light winks out.

"And then with the fire gone, the heavy air cools down, and you can collect it and pour it and so on," she finishes, waving her jar of heavy air (now purple) demonstratively.

"So with that in mind, we're pretty close to figuring out what's going on here. You have a fire. It burns, producing heavy air. If a fire is surrounded by heavy air instead of normal air, it goes out. If you take a hot thing that would catch fire, but can't because it's surrounded by heavy air, and you pour this water-gas on it, it catches alight. What might explain that?"

She considers.

"...can you make the water-gas glow a colour?"

She smiles. "It might undermine my point a little to just show you, but sure!"

She snaps her fingers, and all of the (oxygen in the) visible air around them starts to glow blue, making the terrain beyond a few meters grow hazy.

She moves closer, so she can see more clearly. It's in the air all around them, but there's more of it in the jar of specifically water-gas. And... "Show me the fire, and the pouring heavy air on it?"

She ensures the tea-light is lit, and then takes the jar of heavy air and pours a streamer of it over the flame. With the color overlay, it looks like a purple liquid pours over the wick, shoving the light blue air out of the way. The flame sputters and dies, even as the purple air starts to slowly mix with the blue and blur out into an indistinct haze.

"And when you put the water-gas on it..."

She pours a measure of water-gas over it, dispersing the heavy air and bringing the (still hot) wick back to life. It struggles for a moment, but then catches and starts converting the water-gas to heavy air, sending a growing streamer of hot heavy air upwards.

She nods, satisfied.

"So the fire needs the water-gas, which it normally gets from regular air, but the heavy air pushes the water-gas out of the way."

"Yes," Sandalwood agrees. "Exactly so. Well done! That's also why putting out fires with sand works -- it blocks their access to the air, and they can't get water-gas."

She dismisses the spent candles to make space, and takes the other gas she's been extracting from the water and colors it yellow.

"So what do we know about water-gas? It's present in the air all around us, you can get it from water, and fires need it. But there's another two facts that I want to show you about it."

She connects the tubes of yellow glass and blue glass to a spherical glass reaction chamber, and lets them both rush in. They combine in a rush of pale flame. She keeps the glass of the reaction chamber cool, and the steam inside starts to condense and run down to the bottom.

"Firstly, if you combine it with the other water-gas, they turn back into water."

Next she summons a sealed bell jar with a tomato plant in it, filled with heavy air.

"I'm going to speed up time in this jar for the demonstration because otherwise it would take a while," she warns. She snaps her fingers, and the tomato plant grows, converting the heavy air back into water-gas.

"Secondly, plants can turn heavy air back into water-gas," she continues.

"So we know there are multiple ways to produce water-gas -- from water or from plants. And there are multiple ways to turn it into something else, either back into water or by letting a plant grow. You could just memorize all these facts as just a bunch of rules, but these are just the basic rules of water-gas, and there are thousands of possible chemicals. Can you think of a single idea which explains all of these facts about water-gas so that you don't need to memorize them individually?" she challenges. "Go ahead and ask for more demonstrations if you think they will help you figure it out."

"—there was something like fire, but it didn't make the purple air," she says. "When the yellow and the blue made water. Um, that's not the answer to your question, sorry."

"No, that's a good observation!" she replies. "That's another hint to the deeper idea, actually."

She sets up a bunsen burner with a constant stream of yellow water-gas, and then sparks it. The result is a pale, nearly invisible flame that pulls in nearby blue water-gas, but produces a faint ribbon of steam instead of heavy air. She puts a piece of glass over the flame, which fogs up slightly from the steam to make it more visible. The entire setup is difficult to see, but produces a noticeable heat.

"Here it is happening continuously, instead of just once," she says. "What do you notice?"

"Hmm..."

She studies the process.

"The yellow air comes in, and the blue air comes in too, and they make... steam, not just water... because fire is hot and so the water comes out hot?"

"Yup!" she agrees. "That's completely correct. So really, we need to amend our facts about blue water-gas: when burned with a candle, it makes heavy air. When burned with yellow water-gas, it makes water."

She produces a sealed flask filled with very fine iron powder and pure blue water-gas.

"We can burn it with other things, too. This is powdered iron," she explains. She shakes the flask to distribute the dust and then holds it in the hydrogen flame to heat it. After a moment, there's a whump noise, and the powdered iron converts to red iron oxide with a pulse of orange-brown flame.

She opens the flask and pours some of the iron oxide out into her hand. "And this is rust. Normally, rusting happens more slowly, but the small size of the powder, the heat of the flame, and the pure blue water-gas make it happen more quickly. I can do a demonstration that turns the rust back into iron using yellow water-gas if you want to see that, but that is another one that takes an elaborate setup and a long time."

"So what do these transformations have in common?"

"...hmm. They're all making one thing into another... do they all make the same weight afterward that they had before, like you were saying that fire does?"

She nods. "They do. I can repeat the demonstrations on a scale if you want proof, but every transformation I have shown here maintains an equal weight."

Technically some of them release a tiny bit of mass as radiant energy. But her statement is true in a 'lies to children' sense -- adding the caveat now would make their visitor more confused, not less.

"...hmm. You said you can turn the rust back into iron," she muses. "And you got the blue and yellow air by making them out of water, and then they go back together to make water again. And the heavy air... hmm, it came from a candle, but then you put it into a plant, which isn't really the same thing... no, wait, did it come from wood originally? I don't remember for sure."

"You're on the right track," she responds. "And the answer is that you can get heavy air from burning either wood or a candle. Candles are actually very similar to wood in a way that will make sense once you've figured this out."

"I am much less sure than you are that I will figure this out so it makes sense to me," she says with faint amusement. "But okay. You can turn one thing into another in a way that doesn't change how much of it there is, and you can turn things back from what you turned them into... so... hmm, what if you turned things back all the way? What's the first thing that a thing ever was? Do you know?"

"Oh! That's actually a really interesting question!" she remarks enthusiastically. "Hmm. How best to explain ..."

"So there is a different type of transformation that uses different rules -- among other things, it can change the weight of something -- which only happens naturally inside of stars. And the actual answer to your question is that everything used to be yellow water-gas, and stars turned it into other things. But that doesn't help with trying to build an intuition for this concept. If you ignore star transformations, the first substances were these 94 things," she continues, stepping over to the periodic table and indicating everything before Americium.

She takes the opportunity to point out yellow water-gas (1st on the table, labeled Hydrogen), and blue water-gas (8th on the table, labeled Oxygen). Heavy air doesn't appear on the table.

She looks over the table very carefully. The yellow air is properly marked yellow, and the blue air is properly marked blue, but, "There isn't any purple air here. So... purple air was made out of some of these things? Which ones?"

Sandalwood is momentarily conflicted, because she was trying to justify the assertion that things are made of other things, and that elements don't change or get destroyed, not just list facts. Answering questions is still probably more helpful than trying to continue using the Socratic method, though.

She points to Carbon (#6) and Oxygen.

"Purple air -- usually called carbon dioxide -- is made from one part carbon and two parts oxygen," she replies. "The thing that wood and candles both have in common that I alluded to is that they both have lots of carbon in them. They're not completely made of carbon, which is actually where ash and soot come from. When you burn wood, the carbon and the oxygen in the air make carbon dioxide, and the non-carbon parts of the wood are left behind to make ash, or bond with oxygen in their own way and make soot. Wood also has Nitrogen (#7) in it, which turns into a different colorless gas when its carbon is taken away. I didn't bother giving it a color because it wasn't relevant to the point I was trying to make with the demonstrations."

"...I see," she says. "So... the purple air shouldn't really be purple. It should be blue and, I guess, red, for carbon? But if every thing that's one of the first 94 things has its own colour that's 94 colours. I think it would get confusing and hard to make out. Especially if—you said purple air is one part carbon and two parts oxygen, but can they combine in other proportions, and do they act differently when they do? Because if so, then each thing would need its own pattern of the colours of what it's made of, and that would get really confusing..."

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?"

"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."