"Yeah, we're from Eros," the kid says. 

"Erie, we're from Erie--" his friend says. "Asher hated when we called it Eros."

"Well, he's dead, isn't he," the kid says, "he doesn't get to have an opinion."

"He's dead and that's exactly why we should call it Erie," the friend says, "it's respectful--"

It has the flavor of an old argument.

"Where's that?"

"Lake Erie Correctional Facility," the kid says. "Some wanderers settled there a few years ago and now it's a real community."

"It's great," his friend says. "We have movies. At least once a month, and more during summertime."

"You guys have electricity?"

"It's rationed," the friend says. "You don't get to use it except for the essentials, like animas and medical stuff."

"And movies," the kid says.

"Well, yeah."

"What's an anima?"

"You can make this giant robot out of sex," the kid says, "and then you go into the dream world and punch the aliens like POW, and then they don't bother us and there aren't any drones ANYWHERE around Eros."

"That is not even a little bit how animas work."

"Whatever."

"How'd you figure this out?"

"Asher who used to run Eros was a genius," the kid says. "He captured one of the drones and reverse-engineered it so that we could go into the aliens' world instead of them just going into ours."

"And then he died."

"Piloting a giant robot made out of sex into the aliens' world to punch them is not super-safe, it turns out."

"Doesn't sound it."

This is either very intriguing or very bullshit. It's very intriguing bullshit. But a lot of things about reality are pretty bullshit these days, so.

She taps irritably on her handlebars. Can't follow them anywhere without either splitting up, which is not very safe, or letting Karen think that something got her, which is really a pretty terrible thing to do to someone.

"How long are you guys gonna be around here for?"

"Two days," the friend says. 

"But if you're part of a community that's thinking about merging with Eros we can stick around longer," the kid says.

"No, we can't," the friend says. "We have a list of supplies to get, it's going to fill up the canoes, we can't just leave a bunch of supplies here and replace it with new mouths to feed."

"Lev would want us to," the kid says, as if it is a trump card.

"You can't know that. We don't even know if their community has any useful skills--"

"It's going to turn out they have an eight-year-old," the kid says, "and Lev is going to make that face he makes when he thinks he's supposed to be upset, and then he's going to read the eight-year-old a book, and then I am going to get a piece of candy for talking you into it."

"There's twelve of us. William and Mary are seven, Tempest's nine, Christy's ten, Tamir and Anemone're thirteen, I'm fourteen, Naomi and Dana're fifteen, Tracks is sixteen, and Connor's twenty-one. And Karen, Karen's like thirty."

"You have an old?" the kid says. "Eros has, like, hundreds of people and we only have one old."

"Yeah. She's pretty cool. Wigs if we don't come home on time, though, so I don't wanna follow you guys without telling her where I'm going if I don't have to."

"We'll wait," the friend says. 

"Tell your old there's a school," the kid says, in a tone of great wisdom. "No one works until they're eleven. Olds love schools."

"You haven't met any olds other than Rebecca," the friend says.

"And she loves school!" the kid says. "Besides, I kind of remember my parents, and my parents tried to send me to school all the time."

"I'll tell her."

"New plan," she says, heading back to where her sisters are. "We fill the wagons up with stuff here, we bike back in a sane and timely manner, and then we convince Karen to pull an early great migration and figure out what's up with whoever's moved into Lake Erie Correctional Facility. They have electricity. And a school. And robots that fight the aliens. Or else they're lying, but if they're lying they still have, like, people, and food."

"That's the old plan with more steps."

"Which makes it very unobjectionable."

"I wanna go see the robots."

"Fine. We head home and we talk to Karen."

"They looked like they'd been eating, these kids?" asks Karen, when they tell her. Her kids do not all look like they've been eating. Some of them do, but Tamir and Christy definitely don't look like they're getting quite enough to grow up strong and healthy, and she assumes that for some of the others it just happens to be a little less visible. 

"Looked like it."

"One of them said they had candy."

"They could have said anything. And candy won't keep you alive. But - if they really seemed together, sane and well-fed and everything, on top of what they told you - we can look."

They have two vans. They never use them, except for migrating, since there aren't any renewable sources of gasoline, but they don't have bikes that fit everyone, and this way lets them keep more of their stuff. They pack quickly but carefully. Karen drives one and Connor drives the other, and between them they have enough space for everyone and all of the really important stuff.

They drive out early in the morning, and arrive where Zana found the other scavengers a couple hours after that.

The leader of the scavengers, a well-built boy in his late teens, approaches Karen. 

"Hello! I'm Alexander, leader of Rabbit Scavenger Unit. Are you the old who's considering joining Eros?"

(It's so cute when kids call her old. Like she's survived a great cataclysmic event and become a repository of ancient knowledge, which is sort of exactly what's happened.)

"Yeah, that's me."

"Is there anything I can tell you about Eros that would help you make the decision? Obviously, we're always interested in recruiting olds."

"Honestly I think we need to see it. I'm not sure how far away you guys are, exactly, but if it's less than two hundred miles from here I think we should be able to make it there and back by car. Worth the risk, if it turns out you guys have a nice safe place with enough food for everyone."

"You're welcome to ride in our canoes, if that would be easier," he says, "although of course that means you'll be dependent on us to leave, and we understand why you might not want to do that."

(It sounds a little bit scripted.)

"We'll take the cars, but thank you! We have some stuff we'd rather not leave behind." Also she in fact doesn't want to be dependent on other people, but no point in being sharp about it; the kid's clearly trying very hard. 

"There are some things I am supposed to tell everyone who comes here," the kid says. "There are ways you might be used to doing things in your old group. That's not how we do things in Eros. Lev is in charge of Eros. If he says something is the rules, it is the rules. You might be the leader of your old group, but you are not the leader of Eros. If you try to become the leader of Eros, you will be exiled. On the other hand, unlike a lot of leaders, Lev wants to be told when he's wrong. Criticisms of Lev will generally result in privileges, up to and including candy."

"Zero interest in becoming the leader of Eros," she assures him, not quite hiding her amusement. "But I think we'll go and meet Lev before we go making any commitments, OK?"

"Well, if you hated the way things were run here," he says earnestly, "we wouldn't want you to waste your gasoline. --People under the age of eleven are in school and not working. This is non-negotiable. People over the age of eleven work. If you are over eleven and persistently a person who makes Eros less likely to survive, rather than someone who makes it more likely to survive, you will be exiled. If you do violence to another person, you will be exiled. If you steal or destroy objects of special value, which includes books, candy, electronics, and other people's personal mementos, you will be exiled."

(In the back seat, Christina and Tempest start quietly arguing about whether school is probably better or worse than not-school.)

"That makes sense," says Karen.

"Cool!" he says. "We'll be around for the next two days if you have any questions."

(If Karen looks around, she'll see all the scavengers look well-fed and relatively uninjured.)

"All right! We'll follow you back when you're ready to go."

Her group camps out by itself, though most of her kids go and talk to the Eros scavengers at least once while attempting to assess the situation. In two days, everyone is in favor of following them back, except Christina (who thinks that they sound 'excessively totalitarian') and Naomi (who abstains).

They follow the kids back to Eros.

A message is passed along and about ten minutes after arriving they're greeted by a man with shoulder-length curly hair and a very stressed-out expression.

"Thank God. Adults."

"Yep! We heard good things. Or, well, I kind of suspect that someone heard the words 'giant robot' and came running, but your people looked pretty well-fed, so we thought we'd check it out and see if the cost of meals was worth it."

"We try. --I'm Lev, I run this place, and you are?"

(He is, at best, in his late teens.)

(Ahhh poor baby.)

"Karen. Karen Teller. More of an adoptive mom to everyone than a leader, honestly. We've steered clear of most groups until now, they tend to be - meaner than we prefer."

"I try not to be mean, I don't like it and it doesn't actually work very well."

"I think it depends what your other options are. But it's very good of you to try. You seem like you have a pretty good setup here. We thought maybe we'd stay a bit, take a look around, see if we liked the place, then decide whether we wanted to stay. Anything I can do for you while we're here?"

"If you don't know how long you're going to stay, probably the most useful thing you can do is talk to the librarian and share any information you have that we don't-- maps, information about dream emanations or other groups, stories, poetry. Especially since you're an old, you might remember something useful from before."

"Sure! We have a few books in the van, mostly just the ones the kids liked enough to reread a bunch of times, plus some nonfiction - if we leave we'll want to take them with us, but you can read or try to copy them while we're here. I don't know if I personally know anything useful. We've met some other groups, but we haven't followed any of them before. I guess I know lots of stories and have some poetry memorized, if there's any interest in that."

She gets a real smile. (His eyes are still very stressed.)

"Oh, yes, there will be. Whenever we can, we have one person read while the other people work, and of course there are stories at night. But most of our book runs have to be for nonfiction, so there's always a shortage of fiction and poetry."

She succeeds at not saying you poor things out loud. They're clearly doing much better than most people.

"Well, we'll give you what we have." 

They have, honestly, a kind of excessive number of books, given that books take up so much space. They also have a bunch of Karen's old copies of Asimov's Science Fiction, which offer a greater number of fanciful worlds for the same number of pages. 

Real smile!

"If you decide you want to leave, could you give us three or four days to copy all of that? Of course you can copy anything you want from our library."

"Yeah, absolutely."

The kids work out how they plan to systematically tear through the Eros library, mostly without consulting Karen. They reluctantly decide not to lie about anyone's age; Christina and Tempest cautiously investigate ""school"". The older kids investigate what sort of work needs doing that any of them could plausibly do.

Christina and Tempest will learn about multiplying two digit numbers, using maps to find destinations, the role of scavengers in the ecosystem, the clothing and food of ancient Greece, and Romeo and Juliet (plain-language version adapted for children). 

William and Mary will learn about skip-counting by threes, things strangers do that mean you should run and yell for an adult, the difference between vertebrates and invertebrates, how humans evolved from apes, and the story of Arachne.

The older children can farm or scavenge or learn to do medical care or make things or repair solar panels or cook or clean or pilot or anchor an anima. 

"I wanna pilot an anima."

"Not till you're fifteen."

"Lame." Maybe she can convince Karen not to tell them when her birthday is. "Why not?"

"Because half of the people who have ever become pilots have died or blissed or had a nervous breakdown, and we believe this is an inevitable consequence of becoming a pilot."

"Then unless you think it's less risky with older kids, you should want younger kids doing it, so you don't lose a bunch of really competent and valuable people who've already learned how to do a bunch of stuff."

"Lev doesn't want people to become pilots unless they're old enough to know what they're getting themselves into."

His own opinion on the subject remains unstated.

"Well, what am I gonna be getting myself into, exactly?"

Chris points to a machine of a style Suzanna probably doesn't have the words to describe but Karen would call "zeerust." It shimmers slightly, as if it doesn't quite exist. 

"You'd get into that machine," he says, "and your consciousness will be transported to the aliens' world. It corresponds to ours, but it's... dream logic. Space is warped. The people act like NPCs in a video game-- uh, you probably don't remember video games-- they have one or two lines they say but they can't react to things the way humans do. Sometimes stores will sell nothing but forks. The specific form it takes is affected by the pilot and the anchor. You've met Lev, when he anchored all the people were versions of his parents and they told you that you're a useless failure. My friend Rachel's is neon-colored and plastic. I-- am actually not comfortable describing my dream world to a fourteen-year-old."

"Doesn't sound that scary unless you have bad dreams." She makes a mental note to tell Anemone not to mess with the robots.

"The content of your dream world isn't directly related to what you dream about, but generally well-adjusted people tend to have more pleasant dream worlds," he says. "The anchor sits here. They talk you through your dream world; like I said before, their mind also helps shape it. The anchor's love forms the chassis of your anima, which will protect you in the dream world. It's more complicated than this, but basically the more they love you the stronger the chassis is. When the chassis is damaged, your relationship with the anchor is damaged. You form other parts of your anima-- your weapons, your sensors, that sort of thing-- from other relationships, and it works the same way, except that they don't shape your dream world."

"Coooool. - is it dangerous to be an anchor, the way it's dangerous to be a pilot?"

"The anchors aren't going to die, and seem to be less likely to bliss or have breakdowns than pilots, but no one's sure whether we're going to discover something horrifying five years down the line."

Close enough to safe, then. "So Karen could be an anchor for me and that'd work fine?"

"Karen's your leader? Maybe. We generally prefer that anchors be high-- the jargon we use is 'intimacy'-- relationships, which basically means relatives or people you're dating."

"Karen's my aunt. Technically. When the bliss happened my mom fell asleep, but Karen didn't fall asleep right away, and then she realized everyone else was falling asleep and not waking up, and she took drugs for like a week so we'd have someone to take care of us."

"It seems likely she'd do fine," he says. "One final point: we don't totally understand how this works, but-- if you use strong, healthy, high-intimacy relationships to build your anima, it'll be easier for you to do things and you won't damage the relationships as much and you won't get injured in the dreamworld, and three months after you start piloting you will bliss or break down. If you die in the dreamworld, you'll die in real life. If enough of your relationships fall apart-- either because of normal stress or because your anima was damaged-- you will have a breakdown or you'll bliss. Inevitably, at some point, if you keep piloting, you will break down or bliss or die."

"Someone's gotta do it, though, yeah?"

"Yes."

She regards the robot somewhat more solemnly than before.

"I'll let you know when it's my birthday, then."

"If you like, I can request you if you decide to stay here, and until then you can scavenge or anchor or learn to fix solar panels or shoot a gun."

"Sure. Guess I'll fix solar panels until then."

"I look forward to it."

Rebecca is going to pull all of the children out of school and/or work for physicals.

They have what Rebecca has, much to her irritation, come to think of as the usual array of problems: injuries that didn't heal quite right, parasites, malnourishment. She treats what she can, regrets how limited her medical cabinet is these days, writes down the problems she can't fix for her records, and tells the kitchens to make sure they eat extra protein and vegetables. 

They are variously competent at hiding their surprise at Rebecca's gray hair and wrinkles.

And Lev pulls Karen into his office for a meeting. 

"What did you do before the bliss?"

"Lots of things, none of them very impressive. When it happened I was working at UPS and a nursing home. Before that I worked at a supermarket and a library and a pet store, plus some other places I wasn't at very long."

"Do you think you'd be good at being a librarian?"

"Probably better than anyone else you have. Is that what you most need?"

"What we most need is for people to be assigned to jobs they're good at and enjoy. The current librarian has been chomping at the bit to ride horses. If you were a librarian, you'd be in charge of keeping the books in order, answering questions, helping people find books, and requesting books from the scavengers. You'd also keep track of the sleepers and our other records, and if you have time left over I have a list that's like seven hundred items long of things it would be useful to be able to make that we can't." 

"I'll have time left over. I doubt I can recreate all of modern engineering for you on my own, but I can take a stab at it."

"Recreating candles would be good enough! --Did you get the younger kids because you merged groups with someone?"

"No. Most of the older ones jumped ship from someone else, or were wandering around by themselves before we picked them up, but the four youngest we picked up right away. Some people from church had babies, and at some point it occurred to me that nobody could be feeding them. Honestly I'd have picked up more, but of course after the first couple weeks all the really little ones had starved or been scooped up."

"...Good answer. Second question: what religion are you?"

"Catholic."

"Okay, so, good news. We have the pope."

"Well. How did you determine that?"

"A priest realized the Bliss was happening and called the pope, who mysteriously hadn't blissed-- the going theory among the Catholics of Eros is divine intervention-- and who fell asleep as soon as he gave permission for the priest in question to ordain a nine-year-old, who then somehow survived everything going around killing nine-year-olds in order to come to Eros and convert half the population to Catholicism."

"That is something to recommend your community, yeah."

"Right now, the entire government is gay Jews. That's admittedly just me and Chris, but still."

"...I don't know if I'm really a, uh, government-type person. But I guess your options are probably pretty limited."

"You adopted three young children as soon as the Bliss happened and kept them alive for seven years. Rebecca says they're reasonably well-fed and injury-free, and Alex says they're on grade level for everything except math. You're an old, and I remember before the Bliss well enough to guess that that means you're more emotionally mature than me and probably Chris. And you have a bunch of Asimov's Science Fiction."

"These things are true. What kind of help do you think you need?"

"If you stick around I'm going to assign you to the library job. Lots of people come through there, that'll give you a sense of the interactions between people and what people are good at and interested in. And then I'll try to delegate work to you and see what you're good at? But things you might end up doing depending on your aptitudes include assigning people to jobs, figuring out how many of what things we should scavenge or make, mediating disputes, talking to people who are sad or can't do work or don't have any friends and figuring out how to help them, figuring out what complaints we should do something about and what are just grumbling, handling the transition to an actual economy instead of central planning..."

"These seem like things I can try figuring out. And I am optimistic. A couple of the kids are still suspicious, but I don't think any of them dislike it here."

"Is there anything they need to be-- happy, healthy, functioning-- that isn't going to be obvious? I really try to get people the things they need to be okay."

"...each other, though I suppose that's not particularly non-obvious. Connor needs to be able to do useful work that doesn't strike him as - stupid, or a long shot, or valuing appearances above utility. Tracks will offer to do defense or weapons training if he hears it's needed, maybe even pilot one of the robots, but it'll be terrible for him; he's still recovering from previous trauma as a child soldier. He just - needs to decompress. Dana needs to be doing something obviously useful. Naomi should do all right, as long as she's appreciated and no one spends too much time tearing apart her priorities or trying to get her to commit to opinions. Zana - Zana mostly needs room to do things and learn and grow and experiment, and someone around to remember that she's a child and a human and needs all the things that normal human children need, no matter how hard she tries to get people to ignore this. Anemone has a habit of saying a lot of very concerning things and needs at least someone around who will resolutely not be overly concerned about them, and she still has night terrors sometimes, so she needs someone who can stay with her when that happens. Tamir - hasn't been with us for very long, honestly, but I think he mostly needs someone to hug him and assure him that he's safe enough to think about anything besides how safe he is. Christina's the same, although she requires more in the way of evidence. Tempest is fine, she mostly needs someone to prevent her from breaking her ankle by jumping off the roof of a building somewhere. William and Mary just need to keep being kids.

"At a first pass, anyway. People can't really be summarized in a sentence."

He's taking notes. 

"I think we can do all of that-- feel free to harass me if I drop something, one of the reasons I'm so eager to try you out in government is that right now we basically do government by means of me remembering things, and that was fine when Asher was awake and there were only a hundred people but with the community at the size it is I know I'm constantly dropping balls and I don't have the time to think about how to get us to a more scalable system--"

"That makes sense. While you still have a lot of kids you might just want to add another layer to government, maybe break people up into squads and have each squad leader determine which needs should be met by them and which needs they need your help to meet. Of course once you break a thousand people or so, that becomes complicated, and you'll either want to add more layers - which is more space for concerns to slip through the cracks or get tangled up in a game of telephone on their way to you - or be able to transition to a system that lets most people look after their own needs without any direct handholding from the government. But of course that's harder to do with children. You can't expect thirteen-year-olds to figure out how to get all of their needs met without someone else checking in on them."

"I was actually thinking of transitioning to using money but I guess I have a post-Bliss idea of what it's reasonable to ask thirteen-year-olds to do. --There's just not that much to spend money on and the government is going to continue to provide housing and medical care either way."

"There'll be more to spend money on once you figure out how to make more things. I think - you're sort of still in disaster management mode, you know? And what you want is to make really sure that you have something that can get you to the point where you have a more normal demographic distribution that consists of a lot of people who know how to do a lot of different things, so they can be a long-term community that doesn't need any handholding. You could totally use money, though, I think thirteen-year-olds can handle money. I don't know that they can handle, say, the responsibility to notice when what they're doing is making them persistently unhappy and they really ought to be doing something else. So if you have a government that's halfway between a pre-bliss government and being - parents, or camp counselors, then you need to be aware of what your current system does for people, so you can check whether any systems you transition to are also going to get those things done. - uh, not that I've ever done anything like this before. I don't think anyone has. We're gonna have to do a lot of spitballing."

"I mean, handling people's feelings and their relationships with other people is a lot of what I end up doing, and I think you're right that that's going to have to be a government thing until we get a lot bigger or a lot older. Some of it is just straight-up practical. If people are miserable or busy having relationship drama they're not functioning as well as they can. But I think it also makes people less likely to bliss. We've only had one person who isn't a pilot or an anchor bliss in the past three years, and some of that is probably that Eros takes sleep really seriously, but I also think keeping morale high and stress low is part of it."

(He is clearly desperate for someone to talk to.)

"That makes sense. We haven't heard of any communities that have reached this size before, but I think bliss rates in other places are higher. Pilots and anchors bliss a lot?"

"So far about half of the pilots have died or blissed or had mental breakdowns and we've only had the animas for a year. Anchoring seems safer but we have had an anchor bliss."

Nodnod. "Could be normal stress, if emotional stress makes people bliss - I can't imagine it's a particularly stabilizing situation, working closely with someone who could die at any time - but it does seem best to be cautious."

"We try to limit the number of anchors, so that we don't affect more people than we have to, but some people think we should cycle them in and out to minimize any individual anchor's exposure."

"Hard to say which is safer, if you've only been doing this for one year. You'll know more when you've been doing this for longer. How much exposure did the anchor who blissed have?"

"Five months, two pilots."

"Is that a lot, comparatively speaking?"

"She had a normal workload but having two pilots die on you in five months is unusual."

Nodnod. "You might just have to wait. Maybe you could do a small experiment with, say, three or four anchors swapping off with a third or a fourth as much work as a normal one, see if in a few years they're doing better or worse than usual. But it'll be hard to get good numbers without risking a lot of different people."

"I think that's on Chris's list of experiments. He's constantly annoyed I'll only let him do, like, ten percent of them."

"What else is on the list?"

"The strength of the anima is related to something we call 'intimacy.' Family members have higher intimacy than people who aren't related. The highest intimacy we've found is between people who've had sex. I vetoed all research in this direction."

"Ah."

"Also, Chris is not allowed to make random pairs of people have sex in order to figure out exactly what the requirements are for sex to get you to intimacy five. And he's not allowed to do anything about sleepers. --We do do medical research on sleepers, it's not great but I don't exactly have a better solution for learning how to do surgery and that's going to come up."

"I think the normal method is to use cadavers, but without a community large enough to regularly produce fresh corpses, that does have certain practical challenges."

"Yeah. I mean, it's not like they feel pain, but when we wake up the sleepers I'm not looking forward to explaining to them why they have amputated toes and badly inserted IUDs."

"Yeah. I guess if you seal them back up and don't kill them, that's - you do the best you can. I wonder how many of the principles would generalize from animals."

"If you're the librarian, you can research it!"

"I suppose I can."

Lev is going to keep talking to Karen about details of community-running for a while.

His competence is only exceeded by his stress.

Dinner is unusually tasty from Karen's crew's perspective, although no one else seems to remark on it. Several of the children are given an odd-tasting piney citrusy drink in addition to their food. 

And after dinner Lev announces, "We have visitors, so we're going to have movie night early this month. And the movie that won the vote is Star Wars."

A cheer goes up. 

Only a few of Karen's kids are old enough to actually remember seeing Star Wars, but all of them have heard about it.

It is infinitely better than anticipated.

After the movie, Lev sneaks away.

The sleepers' room is off the library. It's packed with humans, spaced as closely as possible, some on the floor and some on layers of beds pushed together; each has a label attached to their toe, with their name and the medical procedures that have been tested on them. There's a narrow gap in the middle of the room so people can walk through. 

Asher is grinning. It looks exactly like the grin he always had before. His eyes are closed and he's breathing; Lev knows-- he's been like this for almost six months-- but it's so easy to assume that any moment now his eyes are going to open and he's going to kiss Lev and everything is going to be okay. Lev reaches out to hold his hand; it's as warm as it ever was.

"Hey," Lev says. "We got new people today. Twelve of them. Four kids, one of them's an old. She seems competent. I know you'd probably want me to delegate, it wasn't a one-person job six months ago and we've had a bunch of new people since then, so I'm going to try her in the library and see if she picks up the jobs. She had some good thoughts on improving the economy-- maybe we want to treat it more like a summer camp, with more guidance, because everyone's so young--"

They've never woken a sleeper. He doesn't know if Asher can hear him. But he goes through his day, talks about the supplies Rabbit Unit brought and Star Wars and the kids who are fighting and the people who think they shouldn't have school anymore because it's useless, pauses sometimes when Asher would have given his opinion before.

And at the end, like he does every day, he kisses Asher's lips and says, "I love you. I miss you. I'll wake you as soon as I can."

After Star Wars, Karen's crew unanimously votes to stay at Eros.

Karen gets to work as a librarian. She skims books to familiarize herself with their contents, so that she can give better recommendations to people who come through. She reads down Lev's list of items, noting things they can try in terms of making new materials. She learns what things Eros already knows how to make, and how. She considers how they might go about re-domesticating bees, to address everyone's sugar cravings and give them more nonessentials to buy if Lev wants to switch over to money at some point. She has no idea how to produce paper, other than that it involves wood pulp somehow. She's pretty sure they can figure out metalworking if they can successfully produce a furnace, although it'll take some trial and error and a lot of practice.

After the first day, people with minor problems start trickling in. These two people are fighting. This person's baby won't stop crying. This person hates EVERY JOB IT IS POSSIBLE TO WORK.

Karen would not say that she is an expert in solving interpersonal conflicts, but she does have seven years of parenting experience and she is very willing to suggest possible solutions to things. 

Lev seems to be happy with her performance, because the trickle of people continues to arrive, and people start showing up spontaneously without Lev referring them.  

Oh good. Karen offers whatever help she can.

Chris teaches Suzanna how to repair solar panels. 

It is difficult to tell-- he's not a person who smiles with both sides of his mouth very often-- but he appears to like her. 

This is convenient. It would be lame if the person in charge of the robots didn't know how awesome she was. 

She diligently fixes solar panels. Occasionally she also asks questions about the robots, because the robots are pretty much the coolest thing in the world.

"So if you wanted to maximize your time spent fighting aliens and not actually dying or blissing, how would you do that? Do you have, like, records of everyone who's ever died or blissed and what they did, and everyone who hasn't?"

"We do! You can take a look at them sometime if you want, we generally let people look for patterns."

Excellent.

Zana requests the records and looks for patterns the next chance she gets. Anything interesting?

The more overpowered your anima is, the more likely it is that you'll bliss.

People are more likely to bliss after breakups, particularly with their anchor, or when they're in situations of emotional stress.

Anyone who tries to pilot over the age of 18 blisses.

Don't be eighteen, don't break up with your friends or people you're dating, and don't get stressed, OK. Simple enough.

What's a definitely overpowered anima? What's a definitely not-overpowered anima? What do people who haven't blissed yet make their animas out of?

You can make your anima out of your friends, or your family members, or people you're dating.

Animas made out of more people, or people you have more intimate relationships with, are more powerful. They look more badass in the aliens' world. They are better at achieving the mission objectives. They incur less damage when an alien attacks, both damage to the anima itself (which turns into relationship stress in the real world) and damage to the pilot (which turns into trauma and mental illness in the real world). If you have a very powerful anima, you will rapidly bliss. 

If you make your anima out of one or two people that you don't have a particularly intimate relationship with, you will be much less likely to bliss, but you'll also have horrible relationship problems and mental health issues all the time, and sometimes you'll fail your missions.

Hmmm. Horrible relationship problems and mental health issues sound like costs she can figure out how to deal with, especially if Karen's helping her, but failing missions is less good.

Any info on whether 'lots of people you're not close to' or 'a couple people you're very close to' is less risky? 

They don't seem to have any evidence on it! 

Well that sucks. She'll have to do high-risk science on herself. Her default strategy should probably be to only use relationships with people who would never break up with her, and also to use precisely the amount of power she needs to get things done, insofar as that's something she can judge while she's deployed.

In the mean time she memorizes all of the relationship sets that have ever been used for animas and what happened to all of the associated pilots, in case a pattern becomes more apparent as she's able to draw on personal experience.

- any evidence that the total number of relationships you've ever called on is correlated with blissing, or is it only using lots at once?

No one seems to have tried a 'lots of relationships' strategy yet!

Well, then someone is going to try swapping out robot parts a lot. If she blisses three months in then everyone will know not to do that next time.

"Find anything interesting?"

"The obvious pattern is just that animas made from more relationships and stronger relationships make you bliss really fast, and animas made from a few not-very-close relationships give you mental health problems and relationship problems and mean you fail missions more, though you tend not to bliss. But there's lots of other stuff I can't tell yet, like whether number of relationships or strength of relationships is more correlated with blissing, or whether there's a direct tradeoff between relationship stress and not blissing or if they're both responding to something else, or whether you'd incur the same blissing risks in terms of number if you used lots of relationships over time, and swapped relationships out a lot, or swapped anchors, but never called on too many relationships at the same time."

"The thing I'd worry about with swapping out relationships a lot is the risk of breakup. It's not clear to me whether the thing that causes bliss is high-intimacy relationships breaking up, or any relationship a pilot has breaking up, or any relationship used in an anima breaking up, or none of the above and actually stress just makes you bliss and breakups are stressful."

"Hmm. ...well, pilots are obviously at high risk of breakup because they're pilots, it seems like it does something to you even beyond the stress you'd expect to see from being a robot pilot. And we know that that has to do with the specific structure of their anima, or with something that's connected to the structure of their anima, because you don't see the same pattern in people who use strong animas. So I think if you had someone with a lot of friends or family members who they knew would never break up with them, or who at least wouldn't break up with them unless something really crazy happened, then you could see whether the risk of blissing is connected to using lots of relationships ever, or whether the risk is only connected to using lots of relationships at once. And it should tell you something in terms of whether it's each instance of being called on that hurts your relationship, or whether it's ever having been called on at all. And then even if it goes really badly, you'll at least have narrowed down what not to do, you know?"

Chris actually smiles. With both sides of his mouth, even. 

"We'll see if Lev approves of me doing science on you. He keeps muttering about research ethics."

Gonna do SCIENCE to GIANT ROBOTS made out of FRIENDSHIP while in the process of PUNCHING ALIENS. They are probably approaching the theoretical limits of what might constitute the best job ever.

"Cool. I already have, like, ten siblings, and I think at least half of them are in the category of people who it'd be really hard to get to disown me forever, so as test cases go I think I'm a decent one."

"...biological siblings or adopted siblings?"

"Mostly adopted, Connor's my only biological sibling. I don't know how the robots count that."

"As far as we know the increased intimacy is only for biological relatives."

"Lame. But the point is mostly that it'd take a lot more than me becoming a selfish jerk for a few months for most of them to consider not wanting to be friends anymore. Especially if they knew it was because of giant robot mind control. Not that I'm planning on becoming a selfish jerk, just, in the worst case. It's gonna take me a bit to make truly unbreakable friendship bonds with more people here, but I think I have a good starting set, you know?"

"Not that I'm not delighted by your enthusiasm," Chris says, "but many of the people who broke up after becoming pilots thought they had truly unbreakable friendship bonds."

"I did figure that. That's why anima structure is only half of the strategy. The other half of the strategy is how to figure out how to keep your whole life from falling apart as a result of whatever is happening with the anima. But we have some idea how to keep people's lives from falling apart, you know? It's not like the concept of relationships sprung from the ether last year. We'll have to figure out how to deal, but at least this is something where anyone's ever succeeded at dealing. So I figure if you could find a setup that mostly costs you in areas that people as a whole have some idea how to deal with, like stress and your friends not liking you, and not ones that nobody has a very clear idea how to combat, like blissing and getting beat up in the dream world, then that's better than the other way around.

"- also I kinda figure that if you wanna last a really long time and be really good at things, then you have to have a setup and a strategy that you're really confident in, and then keep doing as much as you possibly can to minimize the safety risks anyway. Right?"

"Lev wrote a book about how to be an anchor, you might be interested in it."

"Ooooh, yes please."

He pulls a copy off a shelf. 

"There's paper in the back for taking notes, don't mark up the pages. I can get you paper if you want some."

"Paper's good. I don't need a lot, I can write really small."

"There's a long and noble tradition of wasteful military spending which you are welcome to participate in."

"I mean you can give me lots if you want. I'll still write small. I'll just also have extra paper whenever anyone I like needs it."

"We'll save it for when you're a pilot."

"All right. Fair."

And now she will read this book. What the hell does this book say.

t's printed out on paper, like old books from before the Bliss, not handwritten.

The first chapter is about how the dream world works. The next few chapters are about the mechanics of anchoring: how the headset works, what the different indicators mean, what sort of things the anchor should point out to their pilot and what things they should leave alone.

The rest of the book is about relationships. There's advice about self-care techniques that work for different anchors. There are exercises to help you develop a sense of fondness and admiration for your pilot: write down a characteristic that makes you proud of your pilot; think of things you and your pilot have in common; describe beliefs and values you and your pilot share. There's advice about how to avoid escalating fights: admit fault; use I-statements; bring up concerns as soon as they occur to you instead of letting them fester; say things like "you're hurting my feelings" and "let's start this over again" and "let's find our common ground" and "we can agree to disagree." There are several chapters about figuring out when you should break up.