“The words the notebook used to describe it were ‘If someone is dead who would want to be alive again, and you set your heart on returning them, you will find a way.’ So, while I expect a personal connection would be helpful, I don’t think it’s strictly required. All that is needed is that we have our heart set on returning them. Which, of course, it already is,” Cedar replies. “But I do think knowing that they exist is helpful, because it means I can have my heart set on returning them specifically.”

“‘Would want to be alive again’.... in that case, I wonder how adequate it really is? Even the Accord’s primitive, accidental shaping techniques often produce cuties that truly don’t want to exist anymore, at the end. And there have been entire collectives that inflict this mental state as a punishment, and are much better at it than the Accord. It’s not a very complicated attractor, after all, to be immobilized by self-hatred while prevented from doing anything about it by a need to maintain the status quo.”

“Our response is consistent in these matters: we break those cycles that set minds against themselves, so that they can be healed, and then they are governed by different, more interesting, less wasteful, and more more beautiful and varied attractors. How would this power work on such sophonts?”

“As I understand it from my conversation, the power is based around another example of the Spirit being able to know uncomputable things,” Cedar explains. “In that it doesn’t go off of their attitudes at the moment of death, but rather what they would want, if they understood what their general situation would be if they were resurrected. So it’s possible that people who would not want to be alive in the Accord, but who would want to be alive in a special paradise tailored for them, will only be reachable by the power once that paradise exists.”

“But yes — for people who truly never wish to be alive again, even once a place for them exists, the Spirit won’t assist in their resurrection. And I’m actually okay with that; I know you disagree, but it’s part of my values that they be allowed to (hypothetically) make that choice. Although I think many of your problems with consent don’t actually apply, because the Spirit can just know what they would want, so they can’t make the wrong choice by mistake.”

“All of our cuties are happy to live amongst our vines, each in their own way, though some do, in time, choose to be less of a person and more of a store of wisdom and data once they feel they have completed their life’s work, and see no reason to continue as themselves.”

One particular part of Daisy’s nervous system, up till now mostly dormant, crackles with activity and is ultimately gently suppressed, though still brilliantly active. Daisy doesn’t change her movements at all, this time. 

“And this pattern recurs among other lifeforms, especially those that can, either through biology or technology, transfer and archive their own memories. And in many tragic cases such data has been destroyed before we could get to it. What of the people who that data once was?”

She frowns, thinking.

“I … think that such people would probably be recovered, although I’m less certain,” Cedar admits. “I think they certainly count as people who are dead. And ‘someone who would want to be alive if they were in suspended animation so people could read their mind when they want to’ certainly sounds like someone who would want to be alive. So I don’t think that should pose a problem. Maybe there are … entities … who don’t quite meet the generous definition of ‘person’ who you would still care about, and maybe there are people who wouldn’t want to occupy any state that could be interpreted as ‘alive’, even ‘alive but suspended in time’. Those strike me as fairly small edge cases.”

“My counterpart in the real, upon learning this, will be overjoyed. You’ve given a part of me hope it never thought it would feel again.”

“The Accord, however, is a simpler matter than those dusty old Archives! Every Terran we’ve encountered is ultimately happy under us, though they take many journeys to get there~ Since the Compact exists as a proof of concept that each human can, under the right conditions, flourish, do you anticipate any problems reviving the Accord? And what of the corporate AIs?”

Cedar winces, because she hates diminishing her own negotiation position like this. But she can’t exactly lie about it.

“I still think that you are fundamentally misunderstanding how some of my civilization’s humans feel about mind control,” she begins. “I have met people who would object strongly enough to your methods that, if that were the only option, they would prefer to stay dead. For the vast majority of those people, I expect to be able to construct nice-enough paradises for them that they’d be willing to return anyway. It is … probably technically possible that there are people who would simultaneously be so offended by mind control that they wouldn’t want to come back to an Affini-run world, but who would be dissatisfied with any non-Affini-run world.”

“Any such people would be really quite strange, though,” Cedar continues. “I can’t quite picture such a person myself, but … you know, the law of large numbers. I am sure there is someone who that describes somewhere.”

“You’re young…. And not wrong, when it comes to the Terrans, for the most part. The Accord never quite figured out how to truly shape minds, and so for a Terran, or their corporate cutie overlords, there’s always some way to wiggle in and get them to see things in a new light. But in the wider world there are cuties that do have mastery over shaping the orbits a mind follows, and these techniques have not always been used for the good of the minds to which they’ve been applied. In our adventures we’ve encountered sophonts that have been masterfully turned against themselves, sometimes as punishment, sometimes even as art. No matter how rare or inconsistent a mental posture is, if you can imagine it, it can be copied, and engineered, and sophonts can be forced into its orbits. The well-built ones truly have no escape. You’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that this is the world, in all its terror and glory, and these are the kinds of people in it.” 

“For example, in many cultures that are actually good at shaping minds, it’s standard procedure to make some set of modifications, and then make a final modification that essentially ‘locks’ all previous modifications in place and causes the poor cutie to fight with everything they have to prevent further modification. The ‘status quo’ attractor. Often seen as very useful, especially for so-called ‘disposable’ minds. The idea is mainly to prevent tampering by enemies, but it incidentally serves the purpose of preventing entities such as yourself that care about ‘consent’ from interfering. And sometimes these modifications become reinforced at a higher organizational level, becoming caught up in the concept of ‘loyalty’ or ‘honor’. We’ve encountered societies where over 99% of sophonts are under this kind of ‘mentally sealed’ arrangement. The worst ones are when everyone is caught under the spell, but divided into multiple groups that each violently oppose each other.”

What do you do, when you’ve made a promise that makes you miserable and obligates you to make others make the same promise? You just suffer forever, or some miracle from outside reaches in, changes some things, and frees you. We are that miracle.” 

“That’s horrifying,” Cedar replies. She’s silent for another few moments, grappling with the idea.

“... okay. Okay. What’s true is already so,” she says, mostly to herself. “Well, for one thing — if someone made someone else hate mind control specifically so that entities like myself would not help them … that seems like a case of the first person trying to issue a threat. So I would want to make some more time to consider the implications, but it’s possible we would make an exception for cases like that. If they just did it for art, though …”

She shakes her head, recentering herself.

“Anyway, it sounds like you don’t think this is likely to be a concern in the short term with the Terrans, but it is something to keep in mind before generalizing the solution. Is that a fair summary?”

“Not quite: The Terrans are, for the most part, not securely mentally ‘sealed’ against edits. When we encounter that, it's normally in the case of sentient long-range self-replicating probes, or certain injured mind-control ‘empires’ that aren’t very careful with the promises they make with themselves.”

“But it’s still a problem for our Terrans. Just because something can in principle be solved with words alone doesn’t mean that’s the right way to do it. From our perspective, only applying interventions at the level of the individual organisms’ external environment is closing off many useful tools to help our impending cuties be the best they can be.”

She takes a deep breath. It only feels like they’re going in circles — they have genuinely made some progress. And while she may not have joined with Amethyst yet, she draws strength from their shared purpose.

She is going to fix everything, and be her perfect self. And if that means dealing with obstinate aliens … she will do her best, however long it takes.

“I can understand that,” she agrees. “I’m sure that, from your point of view, this looks like me being weirdly obstructive over pointless taboo. But I have to believe we can find a solution that’s better for both of us. There’s a quote from a story I read a long time ago that stuck with me — ‘That feeling of frustration and anger? Label that the communicating-with-aliens feeling. That’s what successfully trading with aliens feels like.’”

“So … suppose you take it as given, for the moment, that Amethyst and I are both not going to relax our fundamental position on consent. This is frustrating, but it’s also how things are. Are all the other things we can offer you — the ability to restore people to life, the ability to deal with the Terrans in a different way, the very good precision manufacturing, the ability to interface with the corporate persons — enough to outweigh the problems you have with our inefficient methods?”

Daisy thinks to herself, the network of possible futures continuing to be refined. Amethyst is human, and as such she is probably also not sealed against changes towards a more effective way of thinking. Unless the Spirit has seen fit to seal her mentally as if she is some kind of probe… But what sort of being would empower another to remake the universe, but not to grow and change themselves?

It seems Cedar/Amethyst are just… young. If she only had a sliver of her own experience, she would probably come around...

A bold strategy comes to her mind. But is it worth risking the rest of the humans of the Accord if she’s wrong?

Her vines sparkle with an inner light, and she says

“I think that with more experience you would probably come around to our way of thinking. And no matter what, we shouldn’t let ultimately minor concerns interfere with the Great Work. And besides, you yourself need time to grow and learn what you are, and that matters a lot too. 

My bet would be that, faced with the actual problems of the Terrans themselves, you will find our methods superior. But I might be wrong about that! 

So how about we proceed with a joint plan to archive the remaining Terrans efficiently, but since we can’t agree on their ultimate fate quite yet, we leave it up to you? Share the state of Canopy as it is now, take the time you need to make Canopy in the shape you want, and then compare that to how we would solve those same problems :) I think you’ll learn a thing or two~”

She lets out a breath.

“Yes, I can agree to that,” she replies. “We both agree on needing to preserve the Terrans, and if you are right that I will change — then that is okay. I want what is best for them, even if, especially if, that means learning that I’m wrong.”

She smiles.

“Okay — so working together to effectively archive the Terrans. We’ve mentioned a few different ways we might be able to do that with our combined abilities; do you want to take a moment to think of any others, and then we can compare them?” she suggests.

“Probably the easiest way is for you to travel to Terra directly, command the remaining corporate AIs to stand down, and then we can fairly quickly secure the remaining ‘wormholes’ without fear of reprisal. Then, as a show of good faith on our part, you can use your fixity technology to archive and suspend the remaining parts of the Accord. We can send vast quantities of antimatter to you to jumpstart your progress so you’ll be ready for the Accord. And in the meantime, you can show us your way with Canopy, and learn more about our own methods. I’d be excited to discuss the details to determine more specifically how that would work, two options that occur to me are to have each of us start with the archived state of Canopy and go from there for a year, observing each other, or for us to ‘set up shop’ in Canopy and compare methods in the Real.”

She registers within the simulation framework that they need to address the issue of all those other non-human florets-to-be, and timestamps her thoughts. It’s important to get to, and she doesn’t want Cedar to think she’s lying through omission, but it’s not quite the right time to discuss. Cedar will see it as a kind of dangling colorful imprint within the display of the program monitoring Daisy’s ‘brain’, along with a timestamp.

“That does sound like a good plan — I do want to clarify, though. When you suggested archiving the Terrans and leaving it to my future self to determine their ultimate fate, I took that to mean instead of you using your methods on them, not in addition to. So I would be quite happy for you to set up shop in Canopy to learn and collaborate, but wouldn’t want to do the ‘each start with a copy and work on it for a year’ option.”

She acknowledges Daisy’s thought, and mentally adds her agreement to get back to it.

“As for the actual plan itself … there are a few details that could maybe speed things up. Let me see …”

“Do you have any reason to believe that Amethyst won’t be able to tell the other corporate AIs to stand down via PACNA’s communication-only link to Terra? As for getting fixity fields to cover the Accord — do you think we could set up a friendly competition to design a method of metric manipulation that lets fixity fields propagate over wide areas? Amethyst will contribute more to the research if it’s a narratively important competition of some kind,” she suggests.

“Oh my~ Yes I think we can arrange for something like that. There’s a lot of people who will want to meet you, and putting together fun challenges like that is really most of what we do outside of the Real.”

“The corporate AIs are supposed to only communicate with each other through Omnibusses, and those go through multiple rounds of interpretation before they get all the way from one AI to the other. Do you think that you could take control even through an Omnibus?”

“Ah — I didn’t actually realize that they only communicated through Omnibusses.”

She considers for a moment. “And no, I’m not confident that Amethyst could take control purely by sending an Omnibus. I’m not certain she couldn’t, but it’s not the right … shape of thing, I don’t think. She needs two-way communication where corporate AI is in opposition to her.”

She briefly considers whether they can race the two options, but that seems likely to set the AIs off and make everything harder.

“Okay — so she has to travel to Terra. Do you think we could prevail on you for some better FTL engines? Ours are more prone to explosion than travel at the moment.”

“I’m not sure, but I think if you ‘DFEW’ the wormhole entity, you will have a greater mastery of getting wherever you want than even we do. It’s not about the engines, the Terrans just use those to forcibly cut holes in the organism and get swept along in it’s ‘circulatory system’. It’s more about asking nicely. Which is done through that organism’s equivalent of spatial ‘hormones’. You could go in that cute little Terran battleship to avoid suspicion.”

“Oh! Well, no wonder we’re having trouble. We should probably send out a message to cut out our FTL research and DFEW the wormhole entity right away, so that we stop hurting it; do you have an objection to sending that right away?” she asks.

“There’s not much rush, we’re operating at fairly accelerated time in this sim, but sure, let’s go for it!” 

Cedar writes up a draft — encrypted to Amethyst, but she lets Daisy see what she’s writing. It’s just the Daisy in the Real who shouldn’t be informed about Amethyst's powers yet.

“We agree you should cut out the FTL research; it’s made possible by a creature made up of microscopic wormholes, and crude FTL engines cut into its circulatory system. We recommend DFEWing it, if possible.”

“How’s that?” she asks.

She offers her vine, and turns the magic key they share…

… and out pops another message, just a few seconds after the last one.

Daisy can’t read the message, but she knows that if she had the right context she would approve the contents. One of the features of cryptography + mind uploading + a casual disregard for psychological continuity is you get to have nice things like this. 

That or Amethyst’s ‘magic’ has somehow corrupted the simulation and caused the participants to render gibberish. The sim looks fine, though. 

“Well I hope that makes more sense to you than it does to me.”

“Yeah ­— that’s encrypted with the one-time pad I share with Cedar. Hold on just a moment …”

Her other selves stop trying to reverse-engineer the Terran FTL drives.

As they do, she thinks about the interactions she’s had with the … wormhole entity. She has traveled inside its circulatory system, swept along by its blood. She has punched holes in it, unknowing of what she did. That should certainly count as encountering it …

She reaches out, with a sense she cannot describe, and discovers that her mother was a wormhole entity.

Huh.

Now that she knows to look for it, she can feel the vibrations of space around her, the subtle interconnections that connect here to there. A mycelial network of connection, of which the 3D ‘space’ she’s familiar with is merely a subset.

“I love me. And thank you for telling me about this,” she says, and the vibrations of the air are matched by the subtlest tugs of space as she speaks, the ripples vanishing into stillness as they spread. Or … not even stillness. If she stretches out her senses, she can feel the whole universe ringing, with a pure, deep tone.

She can barely hear it. She’s too small, she realizes — she’s meant to be bigger than this! She’s meant to be able to feel the whole slow swell of the dying echos of the universe’s birth, not these tiny high-order harmonics.

She unconsciously stretches out her arms.