Amethyst takes a deep breath, and then she says six things at once. It’s different, to do things with multiple of herselves that are directly interacting. When she was working separately, it was easy to pretend that she was still doing things in a more-or-less linear way, but now there’s no denying it. It’s a strange feeling, and she expects it to feel unsettling, but instead it just feels … easy. Right. Entirely within the scope of what she can do with the Spirit at her back. She relaxes into it, and converses.

“So what is the etiquette or conversational protocol for talking like this?”

“Oh! If you can stay in sync remotely, do you want to come on a tour of the station?”

“Since we have a bit higher bandwidth now, I think we should maybe dig into the exact nuances of what we both want other people’s lives to be like …”

“You say you’re worried that my actions with PACNA are going to cause problems — would you go into a little more detail on what you’re expecting?”

“Would you mind telling me a bit about how you actually treat Terrans once you’ve uploaded them?

“Is there anything else that you want to talk about right now?”

“How about this? I’ll tell you one of my favorite ways to manage a first-time meeting among affini, and then we can reshape it so you’re comfortable. I like to have a diverse set of connections going at once so as to minimize confusion: where one way of talking fails, the others can help to route around the difficulties. So start with the Standard Three: one pair entirely communicating with words, one pair communicating with a suitable touch-based language, one pair enjoying an activity together to create useful analogies. Throw in one pair alone to ground themselves and enjoy observing the others. And of course one pair drugging and fucking each other senseless~ It’s a great way to get to know someone for the first time, as well as get a lot of work done.”  

She blinks. Well, at least the aliens are consistent about drugging people.

“I think I am … not interested in either of us drugging the other. I am immune to most drugs, and I don’t particularly enjoy the thought of drugging you — although it would be an interesting biochemistry challenge, to try and improvise something that would affect you,” she begins, thoughtfully turning the FTL-space transfer diagram she had been working with in her fingers. On the other hand, Miss Daisy is gorgeous. Deliberately, superhumanly so, which also means she must understand at least a little what appeals to humans, even if she has different ideas about consent. She thinks about objecting on the basis that sex between aliens is likely to be difficult to do well without a lot more knowledge … but she got a bunch of magic sex powers, so, uh, almost certainly it will go fine.

“I am down for having some nice consensual sex — meaning asking for and receiving explicit, revocable consent before attempting any new particular act,” she continues. “If you’d still be interested in that, I have the suspicion that I’d quite enjoy it.”

She looks Miss Daisy up and down appreciatively.

 “Although I sort of doubt that it will be that much of a productivity booster.”

Some light seems to shift behind Daisy’s eyes as she raises her eyebrows. And the six of her say:

“Then let’s you and me go for a walk among your lovely station, and talk about the future: just what we intend to do with the terran cuties we’ve uploaded, and what our longer term plans are and how you might help.”

“Then let’s you and me start a little lesson about our language of touch; if we make progress, I’d love to chat about our respective thoughts about drugs, and if not, it’s rather fun in its own right. Some things you can say with either a thousand words or a single touch, and they’re relevant to this conversation.”

“Then let’s you and me sit back and enjoy it all, and focus on the bigger picture.”

“Then let’s you and me talk about something serious: the treatment of all the cuties in this system.”

“Then let’s you and me talk about something serious: we’re worried about causing needless suffering by your actions here. The reasons are sensitive, so before we can truly discuss them, we need to come to terms about how you’ll use the information we provide.”

“~I think you might be surprised just how productive sex can be~”.

“Sure, that seems like a good place to start,” she agrees. “What kind of assurances would you need from me in order to be comfortable sharing that information? In my home civilization, I would offer to abide by a nondisclosure agreement, and pay for insurance to cover the case of breaking it, but we don’t exactly have any financial institutions in common.”

She could say more about her reputation for trustworthiness, but Miss Daisy won’t have a frame of reference for that either.

“I’ve done some negotiations before involving sensitive data, and my preferred way is for myself and my negotiating partner to each create a copy of themselves, who then meet together in an isolated simulation. They discuss among themselves ~all the secrets~, and what they intend to do with the information, as openly and honestly as they can. Then at the end, they both have to agree to leave the simulation together. If they can’t come to an agreement, then both of them are killed.”

“A lot of times it can take a few tries to get it right. For example if there’s a few areas that the pair can’t find agreement on, they can choose to leave a message saying to avoid that area in future discussions, before killing themselves. But eventually you are able to come to know the things your partner is actually willing to share with you.”

“I have a beautiful and self-verifying design for a basic physics simulation that can serve as an appropriate meeting place, or we could use one of your own.”

Amethyst purses her lips.

“I’m definitely open to that kind of negotiation in principle,” she agrees. “But there are some practical difficulties. What have you noticed about the computational complexity of the abilities I’ve displayed?” she asks.

Because it’s no secret that she’s doing things that aren’t possible with conventional computing, if you look. Some of her Spirit-given powers have to solve NP-hard problems, or worse, just to operate.

“We’re very impressed that you were able to get PACNA on your side so quickly. It’s an art form to craft just the right sort of appeal to someone, and while in theory PACNA is “open to suggestion” as it were, as far as we can tell it’s totally infeasible to craft a suggestion that works as robustly as whatever you must have done.”

She nods. “Yes, exactly. So without giving too much away, it suffices to say that the procedure you’ve described would not actually be sufficient to carry out negotiations without me learning the details of whatever it is you would like to keep confidential. Would you accept negotiating with a close fork of mine, where the procedure would be sufficient to remain secure? We have less than a day’s worth of effective divergence, but we are not literally the same person any more.”

Thank goodness Cedar hasn’t joined up using Chaser Six When yet. She pings Cedar to ask whether she’d agree to take part in negotiations, and gets back a thumbs up.

Daisy’s core flashes and her vines shudder slightly in anticipation. If Amethyst can see the various pinhole wormholes in her core she might notice them rearranging themselves as more attention and sensation comes online.

“~That is a truly surprising thing! One of the great pleasures of this world is to encounter the truly new. It’s a “heady” feeling to be on the precipice of the unknown – I’ve felt it before, hiding parts of myself from myself and having to reinvent them, but it’s a rare treat to encounter it in the Real. I’d be delighted to learn more~ 

A ‘fork’ can be perfectly fine, as long as you include the relevant differences; a day is barely anything!”

She has been keeping an eye on the more exotic parts of Miss Daisy’s anatomy, so she does see the wormholes rearranging themselves, but she can’t read much into the significance.

She smiles. “I’m full of surprises,” she promises with a wink. “And yes, I will send my fork in with all the data I have access to, and you can discuss the mechanism I alluded to in detail in the simulation.”

She puts up a diagram of a simple secure multiparty zero-knowledge computation protocol.

“Obviously we don’t want to use one or the other person’s substrate. Will using this protocol to run your physics sim suffice?”

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.”