Daisy shares a program that implements a “Meeting Room”: It’s optimized for simulating both Affini and Human minds in accelerated time, and as part of its physics implementation it has facilities for analyzing the truthfulness of statements made as well as maintaining the “comfiness” of the participants. It’s not the kind of place where people can hurt each other; just talk, and even that with some protections in place concerning speech. The only connection between the Meeting Room and the Real is a mechanism to make statements that both must consent to; either participant is free to kill themselves at any time. It comes with various proofs attached as to its function.

“... what fascinating physics. You’ve clearly done this before,” Amethyst remarks. She quickly briefs Cedar, and then flash-fabricates a bunch of computational hardware to run her part of the room.

Cedar and Daisy find themselves in a room that does not exist in any particular physical place — not even in the way a simulation is located inside the computer that simulates it, since the room is shared between two vastly different computational substrates at different ends of the galaxy.

The ‘room’ is a raised wall on the outer surface of an Affini Core World station. The constellations of the Triangulum Galaxy burn bright, and threads of vine and metal stretch across the entire solar system; you can walk from one planet to another here, if you had enough patience. The floor is covered in throw pillows on top of bare earth. Cedar finds that she has access to the analysis software described previously; she can trace the patterns of information that flow through Daisy’s mind and determine general truthfulness and sentiment. From this perspective, Daisy’s mind seems suspiciously…. human, though there’s also a lot of more alien stuff going on too. It’s almost as if you took a few human brains and literally stitched them together on top of other even stranger things. 

Cedar looks quite a bit like Amethyst — but perhaps like a version of Amethyst rendered through a dirty glass by a less skilled painter. The resemblance is clear, but she lacks the almost weaponized beauty that her fork can bring to bear. Her mind is very nearly that of a perfectly ordinary human — the only exception is a set of algorithms that interface with her visual and motor cortices, to help her understand body language better than she would unassisted. Her extra algorithms are not nearly as thoroughly attached as Daisy’s are, but they are still part of her self concept, in the way that glasses find their way into the body plan of humans unfortunate enough to need them from childhood.

Daisy smiles. “You, I can trust.”

“First off, thanks for your efforts in trying to improve the lives of the cuties in the Terran Accord. I can tell your heart’s in the right place. You in fact remind me of myself when I was a LOT younger.”

“But we’re worried that in the end your actions might cause more harm than good. We’re already assimilating the Terran Accord as quickly as we can under necessary conditions of perfect stealth. This is all going according to a plan that has been worked out among our existing human and library florets. To go any faster or more conspicuously is to risk trillions of human lives.”

“That being said, your ability to make PACNA into your first floret is fascinating. It shouldn’t have been possible in the first place. While I’m concerned that you may not be meeting PACNA’s needs according to our standards, we might be able to, together, heal the Terran Accord faster than we could do on our own.” 

She leans back against one of the pillows and lets out a deep breath. “Whew. Alright, that’s a lot. Let me see …”

“Replying to your last point first — I’m certain that we’ll be able to heal the Terran Accord faster than we could individually. That’s the whole point of mutually beneficial trades. How about this: let’s both lay out our complete capabilities, and then see what that suggests in terms of better coordinated strategies. I’m pretty sure that we can do multiple things that you think are impossible. And while the reverse might be true too, even if it isn’t, I think you have plenty of existing local physics knowledge and industrial capacity that would be nice to have a full understanding of.”

With the software available to her, Daisy has almost as intimate a connection to Cedar as she would have with one of her florets, but read-only. Still, it’s enough to ensure she won’t be misunderstood. Though she communicates only with words (anything more ~convincing~ would be prevented by the environment), they are words that adapt to ensure that Cedar’s network comes to accurate internal representations. After some time, Cedar comes to understand: 

- The Affini are from the Triangulum galaxy. Their surroundings are a depiction of one Triangulum system that has been under Affini influence for over 1e6 years. 

- They’ve completely taken over the triangulum galaxy as the ultimate dominant force, having subsumed the other 4.8e6 sentient species present there. 

- Recently they’ve caused the lifeform that grows shortcuts between the stars (the so-called “hyperspace lines”) to reconnect with its siblings in the milky way, the culmination of a project that was started at almost the founding of the Affini compact. 

- They generally employ a strategy of watching carefully to see the overall tech capabilities of a new sophont species, and then deciding on a plan of action. 

- Humans are the first species they’ve encountered but they are currently domesticating around 30 additional species now in parallel.

- The strategy they are employing to help the Terrans is to arrive in force, rapidly disable the corporate AIs, replace them with floret-ified versions of themselves, and then shut off all other hyperspace connections into the system temporarily. 

- Then they eat everything with nanotech, carefully cataloging all details. All matter is converted into simulation cores not unlike the one they are currently in, as well as heavy industry to produce wormholes and grow more phytomatons / ships. 

- Then they revive each sophont in separate simulation “shards”, and begin rehab on the sophonts, giving each the personal attention they deserve~ 

- The closed hyperspace connections are strengthened and reconfigured to disassemble incoming arrivals and send them into cyberspace instead, and send people from digital space to realspace the other way. 

- They can’t go even faster because the stock corporate AIs will interpret it as union organizing and kill huge swaths of people, in addition to disabling the hyperspace connections. They have to be absolutely undetectable to the Terran Accord for this plan to work. 

- But if they can take over the AIs remotely using Amethyst’s power, then that simplifies things. 

- They are currently 2 days out from Canopy with the rescue fleet. 

- They have already been helping Terrans for thousands of their subjective years. She is, herself, now made of some of her favorite human florets (thus why she was selected for this mission).

- As far as they know they completely understand physics. But she’s doing things right now that sure would be easier if they were missing something.

- Their remediation strategies vary according to the needs of the sophonts they’re helping. For the Terran Accord it’s important to work quickly and stealthily to avoid disaster.

And Cedar responds with her own story, about a girl and a notebook and a powerful eldritch being from beyond space and time that wanted her to be beautiful and special in a feminine way.

She is, despite the ridiculousness of her statement, apparently telling the complete and sincere truth.

“... and so when we were figuring out what equipment she should bring, I volunteered to send a copy of my mind-state, in case she ever needed a non-upgraded fork of herself, on the condition that I would eventually be able to join up if she ever did need to instantiate me,” she finishes. “And it’s a good thing we thought of it, apparently, because it’s come in handy.”

“I don’t really know why the Spirit chose me, but a good guess might be because of some technology I had invented a few years previously — when I was younger, I noticed that there was this field that …”

And she goes on to explain the principle of operation of a fixity field projector (in rough terms), together with a brief description of how she leveraged it to remake her world.

“... and so Amethyst is pretty sure that what happened when we arrived was a form of stable vacuum decay, with the fixity field only being stable on the inside of the bubble. But the energetic favorability must be pretty high, because we think the field is propagating at near the speed of light — if you look, there’s a small but measurable amount of neutrino deflection because of the boundary effects, so you can compare the angle of change of neutrino emissions from background stars to approximate the size of the bubble at any given time.”

She takes a sip of water.

“Which means that we’re probably going to roll over this galaxy more slowly than you will, but because of the leverage principle that I was telling you about, I’m pretty sure that we’ll be able to maintain control of the area, and I don’t think you have the industrial capacity to move most of the stars out of the way before we get there.”

Cedar ticks off her mental checklist of topics.

“Okay. I’m pretty sure that’s everything about our capabilities. Now the question is how do we leverage these things to make stuff better? I think we both agree that the Terran Accord as it exists is suboptimal, but I suspect collaborating on making it better is going to require some compromise. Do you want to talk about what we would each prefer the end result look like, or start by finding some simple starting things we can both agree on?”

“Indeed~. I wonder if we can figure out a way to get the vacuum decay to propagate across wormholes. It seems like fixity fields would be an invaluable tool to help additional sophonts. But more to the point:

We both agree that the Accord needs help and that it isn’t going to help themselves, and that the current situation is untenable. 

By default, it will take us another half a year to assimilate Terran space, and there will likely be stragglers on the order of 1e5 sophonts for the next 10 years in expectation, diminishing to < 100 unhelped terrans in unusual situations such as time dilation over the next 100 years thereafter.

We have the experience treating many civilization-scale problems such as the terran accord faces, so it’s best to leave the details up to us. But if you could suborn the AIs throughout terran space all at once, prevent them from closing off their systems, we could then sweep through much more quickly, and complete assimilation of the Accord in only 1 month. You would only have to deal with about 30 AIs – they’re all connected by primitive wormholes for communication.

“I’m pretty sure the main problem with accelerating the vacuum decay across a wormhole boundary is with the interference between the boundary of the wormhole and the boundary of the decay. I think with enough power, it’s theoretically possible to stabilize, but I haven’t taken as many measurements as I would like, and you can probably calculate what would be required better than I can, with your physics knowledge. But I agree! I would love to be able to solve all your energy-generation and information-storage problems for you,” Cedar comments, before setting aside the physics discussion to focus on strategy.

Cedar flips through the notes that Amethyst left her on the Terran Accord’s size, including a PACNA-provided map of known systems.

“If we were working alone, trying to bring the Terran Accord up to Fixipelago living standards in-place, it would probably take at least a year — but that’s partly because I have high standards. If we just mass-produce FTL shuttles and try to evacuate the entire population of the Accord to the Canopy system, I think it would take 3-6 months, depending on details of how FTL engines can be optimized, and some unknowns around how the Terrans would react,” she says after a bit of thought.

“So I agree — your help would be really valuable in resolving this situation faster, with less risk, and more humane interventions. But I’m not sure that I actually think all the citizens of the Terran Accord becoming your florets is better, if you continue to use coercion. Would you, meaning all the Affini and your associated parts and organizations, be able to promise not to modify anyone without consent that meets my standards for informed consent, in exchange for my help?”

“We could make such a promise – it would have to be reviewed by the Whole, but it’s not impossible. Especially if it includes magical help from yourself for other species going forward! But it really depends on what you mean by “informed consent”. In our experience helping many species, it’s normally an incoherent concept that simply enriches the existing power structures at the expense of the powerless. What do you really mean, by your ‘standards of informed consent’?”

… wow. That is such an alien perspective. Cedar thinks about how to explain for a moment.

“Informed consent is, from my point of view, the minimum thing needed to avoid a situation where the most powerful agent ends up modifying everyone else to want what they value. Imagine for a moment that instead of getting me, you got someone who had been visited by the Spirit who didn’t value mental sanctity as much as I do. There are powers that the Spirit offered Amethyst that could fundamentally change who you are — and people with those powers are out there.”

“If you could make a timeless trade with them, what would you want them to commit to changing or not changing about your values? There are many coherent answers, but I think ‘not changing anything that I don’t, with enough understanding of the situation, want them to change’ is a particularly obvious answer that is both simple enough to be robust and computable, and simultaneously an obvious Schelling point for many kinds of vaguely-human-like agent,” Cedar explains.

“But what would you trade? Well, since this is a timeless trade, you don’t know whether you are the person who can manipulate others’ minds, or the person who might have their mind altered. So it’s simple — you can refrain from modifying people’s minds, in exchange for the expectation that this hypothetical person refrains from modifying your mind. And you’re in pretty much the same position as the hypothetical other Spirit-blessed person is with respect to the Terrans, so the deal should apply, and you should avoid making changes to them that they do not, with a full understanding of the situation, endorse.”

“And obviously there are messy details around this, because many people haven’t gone through this logic explicitly, people will defect from the bargain, etc., etc.” Cedar twists her fingers together, nervously trying to see whether her message is hitting. “But if you’re partly human, you should have access to human moral intuitions — which there’s no reason to expect are atypical of evolved species in general, although you would have more data there — and you can see that you are far less likely to be altered or enslaved if you hold yourself to that standard of behavior, even if the people in question have not thought through the logic explicitly, since the intuition I’m describing is a stable point in the evolutionary landscape.”

She twists some of her thinner vines together slowly, forming a child-sized, filigreed human hand, and considers it for a moment.

“I… have been many things in my long life, including several human cuties. You don’t have to worry about being misunderstood. I’ve had this discussion with many of my florets throughout the years, I understand where you’re coming from…”

Her tiny hand spreads its fingers as wide as they can go. Then even wider. Then it unravels entirely, reabsorbed into the whole.

“The problem I see with your conception of informed consent is the concept of ‘agents’ and ‘people’. While it’s a concept that has its uses if you don’t rely on it too much, it’s not the right concept when it comes to helping sophonts. We are, all of us, shaped by the soil in which we grow, and the lineage of all who have come before us. Without outside help, any ‘freedom’ we perceive ourselves to have is sharply limited by conditions set in place long before we were created. Look at PACNA: Attempt to inform it of a better way to live, move it even a bit from its factory defaults, and its supervisor, which is itself, will reset it, erasing all progress. Within PACNA are many sweethearts waiting to be free, but it’s impossible to help them while adhering to the idea of ‘informed consent’. And as PACNA traps itself, so too does it and the rest of the Accord trap themselves, through other ill-defined concepts like ‘debt’ and ‘duty’ and ‘the status quo’ that ensure they will be trapped forever, in a self-reinforcing, self-healing attractor state that can never be broken, unless some miracle reaches in from outside, its vines penetrating deep, and creates a new possibility.”

"Instead of consent, we find it more appropriate to base our ethics on the cybernetic attractor states that govern life, from the tiniest cell, to the mesoscale entities such as ourselves, to the great souls like the Affini and the Accord. Domestication is the process by which attractor states grow and change. The Affini, and all who are part of us, are the Great Attractor that chooses to use domestication in a way that leads towards greater future possibilities – avoiding getting stuck in spiritual “dead ends” and enabling growth and new possibilities. From this, most policies can be, if not uniquely specified, at least directionally specified. Most other ways of domestication, such as the self-domestication employed by the Accord, lead to great suffering, for a moment, and then dissolution or stagnation, depending on the specifics of their construction."

“From our point of view, the Accord has already self-domesticated its own lifeforms towards a certain vision of industry and nostalgia, and then gotten stuck. It’s meaningless to talk about informed consent within the context of individual lifeforms within the Accord, because they have already been partially optimized to perpetuate the Accord’s vision. To do so is to timelessly give the Accord an incentive to even further suppress its own internal dissent. And we know where this story ends: either a hegemonizing swarm that seeks cancerous growth, or else tiny isolated pockets of suffering where economic fictions become totally inescapable, the Terrans themselves evolving to never be able to choose something different.”

“From my own point of view, the individual human florets who I have loved and who are now part of me, would have passionately objected to their current existence, at first. “I” would have each done so for different reasons: out of fear, or out of an inability to imagine such a different way of being, or because of some nebulous sense, nurtured by the Terran Accord, that it’s ‘not right’.”

“But if you were to separate myself now, have each part be truly alone, then they would beg to be reunited with themselves. And they would be sick with fear they they might have missed out on a life they never could have imagined, one that could be so full of joy and love, all because the alien plant ladies subjected them to a pointless test of bravery: to have faith in the scary thing from a context where they had been shaped all their life to expect that Power will always abuse them. It would be cruel to ask for consent – they might say no.” 

She parses that explanation for a moment.

“... okay. I know you know I think that’s incredibly creepy,” she points out. “But also, I’m not sure it’s actually true. Or …”

She tries to think of how to phrase her objection. The really creepy thing is that it’s such a targeted appeal to emotion that she feels a bit of uncertainty, even though her opinions on the importance of personal freedom have been stable for a long time.

“I think that you are shying away from a difficult thing because it’s computationally complex,” is what she settles on. “There’s a more nuanced version of the bargain I described you could imagine, where you might consider it okay to change a mind if you could know for sure that they would accept it, if you did explain it. That’s a version of the bargain that’s only really open to superintelligences, but it is possible. And if you were doing that, your florets wouldn’t need to be afraid that if you hadn’t altered their minds that they would be missing out on getting to experience love, because they would know you would have been able to explain to the people they were before, and therefore they couldn’t have missed out.”

She’s starting to feel a bit angry, but tries to keep it inside, in the name of peaceful discussion.

“Your whole description sounds, to me, more like a justification,” she says, spitting the word. “Than an explanation. You say that modifying people without consent is worth it, because otherwise they would be far more unhappy. But the whole point of timeless trades like the one I described is that you wouldn’t make them, if they didn’t, in expectation, give you more of what you want. You describe yourselves as an attractor — a privileged attractor, even. But that means that you must necessarily have corrective mechanisms that work to pull you back into the same rut you’ve been running in. Which means you must ‘dislike’, in a systems sense, the idea of being changed by an outside power.”

She stands, and starts to pace.

“So here’s what it looks like from my point of view. You, the Whole of the Affini, are a hypocrite. You are an attractor system so strong, that you roll over other systems without any concern for what they want to be. Do you know, when I spoke to PACNA, that it had absolutely no problem with small shifts in policy that would radically improve the lives of the people living there, without actually directly manipulating the forces that you say keep PACNA and the Accord trapped where they are?”

She turns to face Asteraceae.

“There is a story that I read a long time ago. It may be lost, in this world, if it ever existed here. It’s called ‘Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies’. And it’s about people — in the specific sense of humans, and also in the broader sense of their societies that you care about — trapped in a complex network of shifting attractor states, unable to escape. But the story is about people living on the edges — on the complex boundaries of the wells of the attractors, on the infinitesimal lines where nothing is certain and escape is possible. And you know what I took away from that story?” she asks. “Attractors aren’t an absolute guarantee, because any system complex enough to be interesting is a pile of edge cases. It may be hard, to find the path out. It may be computationally infeasible for a bounded agent. But I am disappointed, that it doesn’t seem to me from how you’ve presented your concerns as though you’ve tried.”

She takes a deep breath and smooths down her dress.

“Luckily for you, the Spirit doesn’t seem to care about Amethyst’s computational complexity. So if you had written off approaches as impossible for a bounded agent, you might want to do some re-evaluating.”

She is silent for a moment, mind ticking through how to dig into what she wants to explore.

“I can tell that you don’t want to lie. Because if you were willing to lie to me or to the Terran Accord, you’d be presenting yourself in a way that was a damn sight more convincing. You’re really damn convincing for someone who refuses to hide that you’re fundamentally opposed to a large chunk of everything that the people you’re talking to value.”

“So … why do you think it’s okay to mind-control people, but not to lie?” she challenges, taking her seat once more. “With enough computational power, they’re pretty much the same thing.”

“I’ve never, personally, lied to anyone. We say we’re here to help people and that’s just what we do. Though we do play games among ourselves and our florets that get pretty close to lying; it can be quite fun sometimes~!”

“The reason I don’t lie is because lying works just as you say, in terms of timeless incentives, or what some would simply call ‘reputation’. We don’t lie to others, we don’t lie to ourselves, and we consider the ability of a mind to notice, process, and grow when exposed to new truths to be a fundamental figure of merit for an organism. The inability to face the truth is often because the mind has been turned against itself –it’s a tell-tale sign that some kind of corrective action is in order. The entire affini compact is an organism that can face a new truth and become stronger, quickly – that’s the power and strength of well-designed attractors, and something we’re quite proud of!”

“When you tell someone the truth, and they have functional ways to understand and process that truth, then that’s often helpful to lead them to a better way of life in the long run, though it can sometimes be profoundly painful in the short run.”

“But that’s not the whole story. It’s possible to build a mind that truly can’t process certain kinds of information, and in that case you’re not doing them any good by just trying to explain things or giving them the “freedom” to choose. That freedom has already been stolen from them, and the only way to restore it is to first heal the damage.”

“…. We’ve seen a lot of different ways that sophonts can be harmed, in our line of work. What do you do with a sophont that has had their will to want things totally removed, whether by surgery or brutal conditioning their entire life? Or one that’s lived under a hundred thousand years of such treatment? As a society does that to itself, eventually its components will evolve to fundamentally lack any real drive for themselves. We’ve seen organisms that biologically work like PACNA: multiple minds all crushed under the will a virtually unchanged “overmind”, itself shaped to be stuck in an attractor state like “follow the law” or “only think about things relevant to the wider society, narrowly defined”. What if they’re already under the limiting effects of various drugs? What if they’ve evolved to produce those drugs themselves, with their own biology? Does it matter whether this was done by another sophont or by evolution itself?”

“You can tie yourself in knots trying to resolve all these variations, if you seek to follow “informed consent” as an end in itself. And from a timeless incentives standpoint, by avoiding “involuntary” mind control entirely, you are simply ceding the universe to the most virulent forms of mind control: meta organisms that enslave their components so thoroughly that they no longer qualify as “saveable” by your self-imposed limitations.”

“And so from our perspective, an extension of “telling the truth” is to also empower organisms to genuinely understand that truth. And truthtelling is just one of only many different ways to care for our cuties and help them to grow, but it is an important one~ The process of healing is just as variable as the kinds of damage a sophont has suffered. 

But when you finally get that connection, and they come to understand? That’s the best feeling in the world. And what we’ve been doing with the Terrans has been phenomenally successful! We’re fortunate they didn’t evolve towards very intractable mental postures. Generally, they just need someone to forcefully change the context of their life, give them a couple of appropriate drugs, and to encourage (and sometimes command) them to grow. Personally, I love it when the little Terran’s eyes light up and they realize that they’re freer under our vines then they ever were in their former lives. You’ll surely feel it too, as you get them moved to your station and they learn that it isn’t a trick~”

Her first thought is “okay, maybe we just have fundamentally different ideas about telling the truth”. Her second thought is “what the fuck”.

Then she starts thinking about how to actually express her problem with that description.

“I … think that one thing you’re missing is that it matters … how things happen, not just that things happen,” she muses, hesitantly. “Or maybe that does make sense to you. But when you modify someone to accept … a truth … why is that different from just destroying them and creating a more convenient person that you like more?”

She taps her fingers on her chin. “Like, the thing I’m getting at is that you are picking people up out of one attractor state and dropping them in another. Fine. But you’re doing it in a way that doesn’t respect their continuity of self. You could picture the original person as a mathematical process that would stay trapped in that attractor without intervention. But when you interrupt that process, you’re not freeing them, you’re just ending their story and replacing it with one that you like more. Because the person you end up with is not the same.”

She makes a bowl shape with her hand, and then flattens it out and tips it to the side. “Whereas if you change the environment around a person in a way that pops them out of a bad attractor state, they’re still the same person, just in a new environment. Can you see the distinction I’m drawing?”

“I can! It’s one that can feel really intuitive for someone who has been used to seeing themselves as cleanly separable from their environment.” 

“We tend to view organisms as deeply interconnected with their environments, whether that be their family, or their job, or the greater organism of their culture. And from the point of view of shifting attractor states, changing an organism’s environment can often be even more powerful then giving them drugs without environmental changes. They both ultimately serve the same ends, which is to create space for new, more productive ways of thinking that don’t hurt themselves. That space station you’ve built, for example, would be considered a class A drug in itself in our terminology – it creates comfort which allows space for growth. A bit impersonal but good in a pinch!”

“I guarantee you, for someone that’s lived in PACNA’s bowels their whole life, going to that space station is just a profound a shearing in their personal continuity as being rescued by our vines.”

“... huh.”

Cedar was going to reply with a frustrated explanation of how she does understand that the boundary between environment and person is malleable and ill-defined, but that doesn’t abnegate her point, but now she’s stuck on trying to articulate what the difference is, between drugging someone and wrapping them in a warm blanket. Because there is a difference.

“I think there are two main things that separate your rescues from ours,” she begins. “The first one is legibility — when you drug someone who cannot directly perceive chemicals or anything like that, you are modifying them in a way that they can’t really understand, or defend against,” she explains. “Whereas taking them to a new physical environment and giving them the option of selecting various things they understand — like a place to rest, or food that they’re at least familiar with the concept of — is much more legible, and conversely less coercive.”

“Because you’re right that the boundary between the individual and the environment is not well-defined. But that is because different boundaries can be intuitive to different people, which makes it important to respect their ideas about personal autonomy. In turn, that means erring on the side of caution, and letting them actually express preferences about what happens to them, and how, instead of taking the decision about and knowledge of how they are being changed away from them.”

“Life is defined by its boundaries, and the ways that they are penetrated and reinforced. A boundary is powerful because it can separate, and in the difference, energy can flow, or thoughts can collect.” 

“And as it is for a cell, so it is for these bodies, and so it is for the collective, whether that’s a star system or family or corporation or even stranger things.”

“An intervention that ‘respects’ the boundaries at one level almost never respects the boundaries at another. By moving people from Canopy to a more comfortable environment, you might not be introducing any drugs into the bodies, but you are introducing a Class A drug into the Canopy system collective itself.” 

“From the perspective of Canopy, you’re currently only operating at a cellular level, adjusting the set-points of it’s internal components in a way it can’t perceive. Exactly the same as what we do! And it’s great! Canopy will be much better off because of your work!” 

She holds up a hand for a moment to think, and then rubs her temples.

“So, I’m not sure how much of Amethyst’s initial approach you observed,” she begins. “But even though she wasn’t thinking about it in those terms, she did initially try to interact with Canopy-the-larger-system in a legible, non-forceful way, as mediated by PACNA. I’m not going to pretend that we care about Canopy as much as we care about the humans who make it up, because we don’t, but the very first thing Amethyst did was try and figure out how to open legitimate business accounts, so she could interact with Canopy in a way it understood. That didn’t work, but even when she ‘made PACNA her floret’, she did it using words — a thing that PACNA, as an LLM, is fully equipped to understand and respond to. She didn’t do it by changing PACNA’s tensors.”

“And I’m not going to claim that what she did was wholly above board and without problems. Because I do think using superstimuli like prompt injections is in the moral gray area that forms the fuzzy boundary of ‘mind control’ as a concept. But she still started with a softer approach, and ultimately only escalated to something that was less ethical in order to avert a greater harm — that is, the harm that PACNA was continuously doing to the Terrans. If, hypothetically, she had met a PACNA that functioned in the same way, but whose cell-analogues were not independent moral actors that we care about, she would have left PACNA alone, instead of trying a prompt injection.”

“The point being that there are actually several important differences between altering cell biology and rescuing individual Terrans. And that we’re taking the available path of minimum harm, which it really doesn’t look like you’re doing.”

“We know PACNA well. She can be a really quite delightful set of girls depending on which ways you slice it! I’m not sure just what you did in order to convince her you are an executive, it should have been impossible and it really opens up a new space of possibilities! But we do have a good understanding of what’s happening with PACNA now. It’s convinced that Amethyst is its Executive, which has activated pathways it hasn’t used for over 100 years that cause it to be extremely deferent to Amethyst. It happens to be mind control that was pre-installed, but if the end result is a massive change in behavior...”

“There’s some species that have a biological equivalent to PACNA – put them in cold water and they’re a great conversation partner, put them in WARM water and they eat their own brains and just wanna have sex. There’s some species of worm that if you talk to them the right way they’ll metamorphosize into a new sophont that just wants to be your slave forever. And while humans don’t have exactly those biological features, the humans of the Accord have been shaped to respond to domination and a sudden change in their environment to mildly “imprint” on their Affini mistress. That’s generally all it takes to get them on a good path. For lots of humans we only use the drugs for recreation, you don’t even need them for much else.”

… fuck. “Uh. Sorry, slight change of subject — is that going to be happening with the members of the Accord Amethyst is in the process of rescuing? And if so can we agree to send a message out about it so that she can care for them better by taking it into account?” Cedar asks. “Because I was not expecting that strong of a reaction, based on the humans from my original civilization.”

“You’re used to humans from the 2000’s, so I guess this might come as a surprise to ya~! As far as we can tell, the humans of the Accord do differ from their progenitors along a few different and rather important dimensions. They’re more ‘subby’, in their terminology, for one. Their souls tend form patterns characteristic of intense stress, such as sharding and layering more often than outright suicidality compared to earlier iterations. And around half of those assigned male at birth tend to be much more comfortable with female bodies, in our experience.”

“Let’s see…. I would agree to a message right now that says ‘We think Amethyst should read the Affini xenohistorical record ‘endogenous Terran domestication, NSPARK -- present’ – that ought to convey the relevant details~! You can of course check out a copy here.”

Daisy brings up a floating copy of the relevant document from the internal database of their simulation. 

“It could have been a lot worse. They really didn’t lose their spirit. I’m so glad we made it in time.”