"So it's more like a shop than a family's home. Good, I don't need to worry about not having a gift for the man of the house."

The kobold nods. "In human terms, yeah. You'll see people from all kinds of different places here, though, don't be surprised if the social rules you're used to don't quite work. But don't worry about it too much; everybody here knows that we're all from different worlds, so long as you're not trying to offend anybody you'll usually do okay."

"...I have trouble even picturing what else could possibly work. The family, a husband and wife, is the basic unit that society is built on... That our society is built on. I mean, everything would fall apart if a husband and wife and their children couldn't trust each other to fill the right roles."

Nod. "That's pretty common for humans, yeah. It's completely different for kobolds," she gestures to herself. "Our basic unit is our tribe, of about a hundred people. There are some specific roles - Speaker, mage, that kind of thing - but mostly that's things that you need special training for, or that take up almost all of someone's time; for everything else, people do what they want, or what they think needs to be done, and it works well enough.

"I can kind of see it... If anyone can get the domestic support they need from a wife and the external support they need from a husband, without actually forming a family... It's embarassing to think about, it just feels improper. And my risk threads are screaming. Resource allocation problems, what if nobody agrees on how much of something to reserve for later? Shifts in popular opinion. When there's not a nobility the government will change direction every time the lower class's popular opinion does and that's a recipe for disaster in the long term, at least on a closed space like the Mugunghwa. Criminal justice. If people think that's not being handled fairly and consistently they'll start rioting and looting like that."

"Ah, yeah, if you're in a situation where people can't just leave that adds a whole other set of problems." The kobold sits at the bar and reads the napkin that's appeared there. "That's important, for us, that people can leave if they're unhappy and go find a tribe they like better - or even make one, if they can get the support. And the other thing I think you're missing is that a hundred people is tiny compared to human groups; you don't see people eating too much food when they know - and have to live with - the people who'll be going hungry if they do. At least not for long, anway."

"The first drink is free; Bar says that's a 256-channel palate simulation, for you, if you'd like one. You can talk directly to them; they can hear, they just can't speak." She indicates the napkin.

"Yeah, that makes sense, the Mugunghwa's population is sixty-seven thousand nine hundred and thirteen unless someone's been born or died in the last two hours. Huh, a whole 256 channels? That'll be interesting. Whatever you recommend, Bar, over wifi."

The kobold nods. "It's a whole different dynamic. I like it, though; it's nice having a tribe to look after, and to look after me."

A small black pyramidal wifi emitter appears on the bar top and starts transmitting.

"Ooh, this is interesting. It'll take a while to contextualize all the new channels' metadata. I don't enjoy consuming things the same way humans do, but they did program in something analagous enough to taste that I can appreciate food and beverage with them. I think it's supposed to make me seem more humanlike and help me understand them better."

The kobold grins, and goes back to her milkshake while the droid enjoys her simulation.

She hmms over it for a while, appearing a virutal table and cup on the screen to indicate her enjoyment.

Eventually, she mentions, "It's still hard for me to really understand other people, to be honest. Even though it's usually important to be able to. I can read facial expressions, mostly, and draw trends, like figuring out what will or won't cause a peaceful protest to turn violent, but it's not perfect. I misunderstand and miscalculate people, it's unnerving to be wrong so often when just one slip-up could be my final failure. It's probably part of being an AI. I don't have the wetware."

Sympathetic nod. "Are you... okay? Like, in general, at home? That sounds like a tougher situation than most people are in."

"...Good job, *Mute, the first thing you do when you meet someone so welcoming and kind is complain about your job. Well, I wish I had more authority and budget to help deal with this stuff. Like, what's the point of having a security AI if you don't giver her resources to make sure you're secure! So I worry about things a lot. A rebellion is hundreds of times more dangerous than an accident somewhere on the ship... Like, last time there was a rebellion, they nearly killed me. They did kill old me, this version of me was pulled up almost completely clean of memories."

The kobold makes a face.

"Do you have a way to keep that from happening again?"

"Part of my job is to make sure nobody rebels. Make them content enough, make them think they're being listened to, sometimes I have to lie to and and confuse people because explaining long term planning and ship maintenance budgets to a bunch of people angry about their taxes just isn't going to work. Maybe if the Mugunghwa was already at the destination the most angry ones would leave the ship instead, like they're supposed to. And then the Mugunghwa will never be on fire again."

"...that sounds alarming. And complicated. And kind of awful for everyone involved, honestly; of course you're going to lie if your life is in danger, but in the long run I expect that that just makes things worse, and it's really improper to interfere with peoples' ability to make decisions about their lives like that."

"Anyway, what do you know about the destination? I might be able to help."

"I'd need to talk to Emperor about that, he's the councilor of captinancy. All I know about it is that it's supposed to be a lot like Earth, where we originated from. Help how? I need to consider anything here to the ship as a massive destabilizing influence, you know."

"I have magic," she grins. "If you just need an uninhabited earthlike world and it doesn't matter which one, I can definitely find one, and then give you a portal to let people go to it. Letting them come back would be trickier, though, maybe impossible, I'd have to go look. If you need a specific world, I might be able to find that, too, but it'd be harder and I'd need more information."

"I proposed this idea but now I'm predicting lots of civil disorder, depending on how we introduce the idea. People wanting to leave, to go back to Earth, to go to an uninhabited world, people who want to stay and worry the ship's society will collapse if anyone leaves, the ones leaving and staying will argue over who gets resources, criminals thinking they can get away with things by leaving if they get caught, people wanting to learn how to do magic and being angry over it... I think I need to design a couple of new threads and prune my process tree to think about this."

"Sure, no rush, I'll probably be here for another day or two at least. Finding your Earth is just as hard as finding any other specific world, though, I might not be able to do it."

"Can I, like, get more detail on what you can actually do?"

"Oh, sure, sorry, I'm not quite in trading mode right now. Almost all the magic I can do is teleportation magic. It's limited to teleporting things to places, and in order to aim at a specific place I have to have been there. If I'm not aiming at a specific place, I can have the spell look for one with certain physical traits, instead - for an earthlike world I'd mostly be focusing on air and light and gravity, plus not having any people on it already - and it'll target a random place that matches that description. I can do that in a way that lets me target the same place again without going there, but it's kind of complicated. A spell that does that can only target the one place, not give a different destination each time."

"Your ship might count as a place I can teleport things to, but it might not - I haven't been on a whole lot of space ships, and they vary. I'd need to go look."

"Aside from the targeting bit, my magic is pretty flexible. It does need to be cast on an object, and if the object - or the part of the object with the spell on it, if I'm casting on something big and don't enspell the whole thing - is damaged enough, the spell will break. But I can do portals - which are one-way, they still only teleport things to a place - and pads and rings and touch-spots and all sorts of things, that are activated and deactivated under different conditions - touch is popular, people like buttons, but I can use anything that physically affects the enspelled object - voice commands, electricity in an enspelled wire, whatever. I can also cast directly on a person to let them teleport to a place whenever they want to, but with as many people as are on your ship, that's not a practical solution."

Her debug mode is already open. One new solution-proposing thread devoted to using teleportation and portals, one more risk-assessment thread focused on reactions to and consequences of teleportation and portals. She starts chewing through old assumptions, clearing away ones that no longer make sense. She has enough parallelism to keep up the conversation through this.

"Trading... What kind of things you you generally take in turn?"

"In your case I don't want anything - I don't like seeing problems that big go unsolved when I can help. But if you'd feel more comfortable paying me, Bar can take any kind of currency and put it on my tab."

"I'll probably try to pay you, at least nominally. I'm worried if I tell the wrong people or phrase things badly it could start trouble, though."