"I don't know if I actually think I'm likely to wind up with yet another accidental army in my pocket, it's just there's definitely a pattern and I think it's left me under-prepared to deal with the circumstances in which I find myself. Not that this is a huge surprise. If I showed up and knew to the last detail exactly what to do in order to save the telepathic elves from the mountain-shattering Power, that would be surprising."

"You've been doing pretty well."

"Glad to hear it," he says, half-laughing but at the same time extremely sincere. It's very fulfilling on a fundamental level to hear a positive assessment of his results from someone whose opinion he respects and values.

"But yeah, Nelyo's the one to ask about anything politically complicated."

"In his position I wouldn't - well, all right, I'd be bored and restless and arrogant about my ability to play the implied game and I'd probably leap at the chance, but in his position I would feel it was imprudent to get into extended political dicussions while I still wasn't sure whether or not my current reality was a malicious lie. I'll see if he's interested, though."

He smiles. "I think he'd also enjoy the implied game. Not sure if too much to resist it."

"I guess we'll find out."

"Have fun."

"I likely will. Enjoy your construction."

Off he goes to the library.

He's not sleeping.

"Afternoon. Storytime? Alternately, help me figure out how best to create an army with which to destroy Moringotto?"

Drop your shuttle on Angband again, and shoot him with every kind of weapon you have. It may not work, in which case we cannot beat him at all, but if it does the whole thing will be over. This isn't a situation that will be improved by time, though we're pretending otherwise so people don't lose hope.

"But I didn't even bring an electron orbital randomizer," he says lightly, with a mental image that concisely explains why it's a war crime to fire one of those inside the atmosphere of an inhabited planet. The war at Tau Verde saw one used on a station he was occupying: any matter caught in the path of the beam disintegrates violently, and in vacuum the resulting firestorm is neatly vented to space through the large hole thereby created in the target, but in a planetary atmosphere there is no such escape route.

He does a pretty good job of keeping the substance of Maitimo's advice out of his publicly readable thoughts.

"Have those weapons been fired on a planet?"

"I'm sure it's happened at least once or it wouldn't have been made a war crime. Most planets are more densely inhabited than this one, though. I'd have to do some calculations and maybe reread the geology section of the Survey Handbook and do some more scans, but I'm pretty sure if you got very close to Angband and fired straight down, you'd end up with a very excited volcano where there used to be a fortress and there'd be some seismic disturbances but overall the collateral damage would be pretty low. It'd be a suicide mission, of course. And first you'd have to have someone reinvent the electron orbital randomizer."

"My brothers might be able to do that. It'd be useful to have as an option of last resort."

"Yes, I agree. I'll put it on the medium-term list."

In the midst of reorganizing his mental notes and contemplating the entertaining game of 'extract useful information from someone who thinks you're a malicious interrogator while not prompting them to divulge any information that would be useful to the malicious interrogator', his thoughts happen to fall on a subject he's been half-consciously shying away from, and he doesn't catch himself in time; his mind rapidly spins out the full hypothetical of what he'd do in Maitimo's situation.

His first response would definitely be to play along. Keep the nature of the game in mind, but act like he believed it anyway. He expects he could hold out for a while like that, and it might either take the fun out of it or let him map out the space of their available information better than they could get information from him in turn.

After enough iterations, though, once he's truly brought to the point where any legitimate rescue must in principle be indistinguishable from another round of the game... well, at that point it comes time to make a choice.

Either he decides to trust in his own relentless optimism and keep right on playing, accepting that he will never know when the real thing comes along... or he decides that he's done waiting for a rescue he won't be able to believe in, and starts ruthlessly experimenting with methods of suicide that will function on a deeper level than the false reality. In this hypothetical, one of the resources available to the Miles in Maitimo's place is supposed to be a deep connection between the soul and the body. The Enemy can spoof sensory input, but as far as Miles is aware, there's no good evidence that he can interfere substantially in the opposite direction. So all he'd have to do would be to dig up the memory of being fifteen years old and wanting his body's destruction with a desperate intensity, and hold fast to it until it worked. It might not actually work like that for Elves, but Miles isn't currently aware of any reason why it wouldn't.

... He blinks, thoroughly distracted from his original train of thought.

"Yes. But if there were people, or the simulacra of them, present and they were people who owed you fealty, in the way that matters...."

"...I don't exactly mean to argue in favour of my hypothetical strategy, but..."

Maitimo in his current condition is not exactly being maximally helpful to his people. The suicide method at least leaves him in a situation where he can believe in his reality, which seems like a big improvement both personally and from an effectiveness standpoint.

If it was Miles, he would either play the game or he wouldn't. He'd be up and meddling extensively as soon as he was able to so much as speak to anyone, or he'd rupture his soul from his body with maximum force and await whatever followed. It wouldn't be an easy or a pleasant decision to make, but it also wouldn't take him more than a few hours.

"You're not me, though."

And you're confident I'm not meddling extensively because...

"Oh, you really aren't me. My meddling is not nearly subtle enough to be accomplished on a schedule of 'does not, as far as I can tell, ever do anything'."

(Gregor, though, could probably run empires from a sickbed if he had to.)

...it has been two days.

Miles giggles. "Sorry. I'm not - I don't even know what I would be trying to accomplish if I'd gone down this conversational road on purpose, but I'm not trying to do it, whatever it is."

It seems very much like you're trying to convince me to kill myself, but I've already debated the point at length and am unlikely to be suddenly moved to reconsider by a lecture from a stranger, so you don't need to worry. 

"Well, I apologize for giving that impression. The inconveniences of not being able to control which thoughts I make known to people may be starting to outweigh the strategic benefits."

And why the hell does he keep seeing the glaring white light of Dagoola behind his eyes...