"Will you tell us when we repeatedly try to ask about something you don't want us to know, so we can instead shift topics?"

"Assuming I understand that to be what's going on! I've never talked to a human before today."

"Great!  Future communications will be easier now that this has been established, because we can assume that you saying things that seem mysterious to us in certain ways are probably because of a mutual lack of understanding and not because we're accidentally behaving adversarially!"

"Oh good!"

"Yeah!  So, potentially for example: What about the situation with your first ancillary caused you to have an emotional crisis such that it took you a while to decide to go ahead with the other seven?"

"Ancillaries are made from human bodies."

"...Huh, okay.  And - did you displace a soul that was either already in the human body or would have been?"

"I am not aware of souls being a consensus reality thing."

"Oh!  They are here, if we understand what you mean by 'consensus reality'."

"Is that good?"

"...I think that depends on how things work without them!  Or without them being obvious."

"It seems to work like people ceasing to exist. Which is very bad, but it could be worse."

"That's very bad.  I'm pretty sure we do better than that."

"What do you do?"

"People become stars when they die, and after a few days or weeks they merge up with another star into someone that has all the traits of both of them.  And after a somewhat longer amount of time that being will merge with another, or another singleton will tack onto them, and so on and so on with larger numbers and longer timespans, until they join the biggest one that's made up of the majority of souls who have ever died."

"We know this because there's a certain drug one can take that lets one communicate with dead people, and also anyone living who is also using that drug at the same time, and it's possible to learn information not obtainable in other ways and verify it against things in real life.  Which I have personally tested."

"Thank you for clarifying how you know!"

"You're welcome."

"Is there a drug for communication where you come from, even if it doesn't catch dead people?"

"No, that is not a thing drugs do in my world."

"Do you have other ways to communicate across long distances?"

"There are many ways to communicate across distances not too much bigger than a planet. Over longer distances you need a ship to carry the messages at least most of the way."

"Is that your job?  Or do you do other things?"

"That is not my job. I could do it but I have not."

"What do you do, normally?"