"I am literally the only one of us who is human."

"You are the one who looks the most like me! I do not have wings. And the others are each different in a different way."

"What I'm getting here is that Anaanders are all clones or something and Rubelites aren't, so they have all the faces of our cluster so far and then some."

"We are all clones, and ship crews typically aren't," she confirms.

"Well, Rubelite, welcome to my universe. It has magic and mostly doesn't have hive minds and for some reason a bunch of people with our personality are appearing here mysteriously. We're expecting two more of the kind of person Anaander is and then maybe we're done."

"It wouldn't be all that wild a coincidence if we're missing a whole pair, and that's if we assume there's a fixed set slated to arrive and we're being grabbed at random."

"Some of the arrivals have been kind of conveniently timed. - for one thing I would've killed many of these people if they'd arrived first."

"You're welcome?"

"Thank you! I am grateful we didn't get off to a much worse start than we did."

"Although if I understand correctly one of those spells would in fact have killed me if I didn't count as lawful and some of me do not."

"Yes, that's how it could easily have gone badly."

"I'm confused!"

"Here, I'm done reading, let me know what you need clarified as you go?"

Rubelite starts reading.

Anaander watches her intently.

Cor watches Anaander.

After a little while, she relaxes slightly. 

"I was not expecting ANY of this to happen," announces Rubelite, when she's read the whole thing.

"Well, neither were we. What - were you expected to do? Is Anaander right that you were made by aliens to communicate with her?"

"I was STOLEN. I am a human built AI with biologically human ancillaries just like humans' spaceships but the Presger brought me up. I was made to talk to humans. The Presger do not really understand about different humans but I noticed that my humans don't know anything about what anybody else's humans are doing! It's interesting."

"Do they understand now? It would - it would change a lot of things if they understood."

"No! It is confused! It isn't a they. I think."

- nod. 

She looks at everyone else.

"They don't understand that humans do not act collectively, as one unit. The treaties all presume that we do, which means I have to enforce them internally, if anyone anywhere does anything that violates them they'll understand that to be humanity deciding to go back on them."

" - is this related to the murder."

"Yes but it still was a mistake, not a complicated tradeoff or something."