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.”

Cedar thinks for a moment about whether Amethyst is likely to take that instruction as an endorsement of anything, before deciding that no, she’ll almost certainly take it in the way it was meant.

“Thanks,” she says, taking the document and paging through it. She’s not reading in great detail, because their time is precious, but she does make sure that it conveys the ‘imprinting’ thing in a suitably salient way, and that it doesn’t sneak in anything that’s obviously weird.

“Yes — I think that’s an acceptable message to send,” she agrees. She puts the words into the one port out of this simulation, and turns her metaphorical key to authorize their transmission.

“Well, the good news is that we have …” she starts off thinking ‘really good’, before realizing that the Affini are better than them at biology stuff. “... pretty good automated transition technology. It’s only, like, one in 300 humans from my home civ, but that’s still 33 million people who were willing to fund the development pretty highly. I predict that after reading this, Amethyst will put transformation-buttons in the private rooms to let people experiment.”

Processors, both fixity-crystal based and the hypercompact Affini design, whir as they crunch through the enormous computation that supports the private meeting room. They combine entirely inscrutable numbers, until finally the layers of encryption cancel in just the right way, and a message comes tumbling out:

‘We think Amethyst should read the Affini xenohistorical record ‘endogenous Terran domestication, NSPARK -- present.’

“Ooh~ our first message! Looks like they’re still going at it in there, iteration #0, and they wanted to send out an ‘interim’ message. That’s generally a good sign they’re having a good time~” 

Daisy directs Amethyst to the relevant document. It’s already present in the bluebell.

The humans of the Terran Accord have begun to evolve both socially and biologically in response to their tightly controlled, high-stress environment, growing several differences compared to their pre-NSPARK varieties. (for more information on ancient Terran cultivars, see ‘hypothetical terran domestication, nation-state stage’). As is typical for entities that think primarily in stories, they have responded to stress by emphasizing the meta-strategies of spiritual “retreat”, “renewal”, and “subsumption”, with retreat and renewal being the primary evolutionary responses.

Accord-style spiritual renewal is nearly identical to <Species 4683429> and <Species 2229130>, with previous life experiences being considered to have happened to “someone else” and the new spiritual entity being founded along explicit high-level directives (for case examples see section 34). As such, while the average age of an Accord human is 65 years with a STD of 12 years, the average spiritual age of the most recent iteration of an Accord human is 3.2 years distributed as <what follows is a graph with its center of mass at 3.2 and with a long tail going out to the maximum human lifespan>. 

…

Retreat closely resembles the mental “sharding” of <Species 2423127>, with 2-3 subminds almost entirely disconnected from daily reality and existing at greatly reduced perceptual time. Subminds can be factored using similar methods as those described in “Spiritual protocol adaptions for <Species 2423127>”. See “Spiritual protocols for Terran Accord Humans” for more details.

…

Instances of gender dysphoria occur in 55% of those born with XY chromosomes and in approximately 22% of those with XX chromosomes.

…

“... what the fuck?” she exclaims, when she has finished reading the document. “No, seriously, evolution doesn’t happen this fast. It’s only been 500 years.”

Somewhere else, she turns to the bridge crew and says “Also, would anyone be willing to give me a genetic sample? I’ve run into a suggestion that humans from the Terran Accord might have different genetics than I’ve been expecting, and it’s important to check.”

In space, falling invisibly towards the planet below her, her arms wrapped around a beautiful woman, she is suddenly conflicted.

“I … should really have been more careful,” she whispers, although the only person who could possibly hear her is still deeply asleep. “You look just like my kind of human, but you aren’t, really. An important lesson.”

She tucks Cat’s head against her collar. “I’ll be sure to check in way more explicitly when you wake up.”

And on the station, she drums her fingers on the table between her and Miss Daisy. “... did they do deliberate gene editing for this result?” she asks. “How? I’m having trouble believing the Accord is that competent.”

“We don’t think that there was that much biological evolution over the last 500 years, more a cultural evolution that emphasized those traits and collective fictions that were necessary for Terrans to thrive as they might in an inhospitable environment. Human culture is a very malleable thing, because the human organism has degenerative memory problems and so has to largely reinvent itself every few hundred years.”

Daisy’s vines slow down for a moment and she “slumps” in place.

“….. and, sweetheart, there have been an awful lot of suicides over the last centuries, under this system, and not just the purely mental ones. That, plus mandatory corporate education is enough to account for all the changes by our reckoning.” 

She is still somewhat skeptical. The rates cited in the Affini documentation seem really high, compared to what she would expect. Then again, she also wouldn’t have expected human civilization to be captured so completely by corporate entities.

She takes a deep breath.

“Okay. So … I’m not convinced I believe this. But it does no harm to check, and maybe there are things I can do that would be helpful either way. Thank you for the help.”

MEANWHILE, the computers continue to churn, unheeding of Amethyst’s internal turmoil. In a space that exists in the dance of information across galaxies and alien artifacts, Cedar and Daisy continue their discussion.

“I’m glad we were able to come to an agreement to send something out so quickly~”

“And I’m really touched that you care about your Terrans so much. I think our initial classification of you as a different species than the Accord humans has proven correct. I do worry that your lack of experience in managing the people of Canopy will result in unnecessary harms, but this system does deserve separate consideration form the rest of the Accord, as a new and potentially interesting great Spirit in the process of being born.

A fundamental principle of our culture is that of the Archival Imperative, the idea that all wounds can be healed if the information exists to reverse what has been done, and begin again along a better path. As long as the mental states of the humans under your care are archived, it becomes much less important to immediately rescue this system according to our original plan, and we can divert resources elsewhere. Your fixity fields are clearly capable of archiving this system without our help. Would you be able to retain that information and potentially offer it to us if you get in over your head, or decide you want to be ~Domesticated~ yourself, as the sole representative of your species?”

… she kinda takes that framing as more confirmation that the Affini don’t really respect the idea that people should be meaningful continuations of their past selves. And the concept of being domesticated is still mildly creepy. But other than that, it is a principle she agrees with.

“Yes. Right now, we’re still building out infrastructure to cover everyone. We haven’t gotten to the humans on the planet quite yet, for example. But we fully intend to retain backups of everyone who does not opt out. And — in the case that you credibly commit to meeting our standards for consent, including under what circumstances people can be forked or resurrected, or in the case that I come to believe that it would genuinely be the right thing to do for some other reason — I would allow you access.”

She thinks for a moment. “... and I have some statistics on the durability of fixity-crystal based backup systems, so that you can assure yourself that the chance of data loss is acceptably low.”

She puts a study on the table between them.

“... reviewing your powers, it seems to me that even if someone ‘opts out’, and they are lost from your care, that that might not truly be the end of them, if I’m understanding your ‘The Rescuer' power correctly?”