It has been two months. Matirin has been breathing down his neck the entire time, even though he agreed when they talked about it that he should do this before he murders Alloran because it will take much longer if Leareth has to do it without him. The existing literature on uploads is in shockingly shoddy condition; most of it is from before the war, when more Andalites wasted their time on research projects like this one without immediate applications. And of course all of it presumes an Andalite mind, or the mind of some homeworld animal; Yeerks are not very similar. Though in a way they're easier - the electrical signals that are their only limited communications channel in their natural form is easy to emulate. 

He hasn't been sleeping and has been eating only because he can do that entirely incidentally and he keeps developing bizarre body aches, from holding himself too stiffly. He morphs them off. He has uncomfortable spots in his vision all the time which he appreciates, they help remind him that everything is awful and will never be all right again and soon he will kill Alloran and die and then he at least won't have to bear witness to the brokenness of the universe any longer. 

He can make an uploaded worm that remembers aversive stimuli. That might suggest this'll work or it might turn out to be a hundred times easier with a worm than with a Yeerk, which is what happened with the last approach he tried. 

<I'm running it> he tells Leareth, and goes ahead without checking to see if Leareth responded or indeed if Leareth is around; keeping track of other people is too hard. 

He watches the computer with Mindhealing sight, but even after two months of trying to wrap his head around this he doesn't totally trust his Sight to notice.

[This is an attempt to run you from a backup] the electrical signals say. [Please respond, ideally in language but nonrandom electrical activity will be interpreted as sufficient reason to keep running it while I try to figure out why language isn't working].

It is probably not the most reassuring welcome message but in Cayaldwin's defense everything important in the universe has been destroyed forever.

There is nothing at all.

The last thing he remembers is disentangling from the Andalite senses, slipping out from Alloran's ear as Alloran's brain sank into drugged unconsciousness. In his natural form his senses are very limited, but at least they exist, there's some proprioception and he can sense heat and cold, pressure, air currents, limited perceptions of light and dark.

This isn't just darkness. It's not just the absence of anything notable for his senses to pick up; it's the absence of senses as inputs at all. 

...It doesn't take Mhalir very many subjective seconds of thought to infer what this is likely to mean, and so when something intrudes on the nothing, he's immediately attentive to it. It doesn't quite feel like another Yeerk speaking to him, but mostly because all the other sense-impressions that would go along with that are missing. He can understand the message. It's a very unsurprising one. 

Mhalir tries to answer, the way he would speak to a fellow Yeerk in a pool, though the feeling of complete disembodiment makes it hard to tell if it's working. [I am here. Who are you, and where and why are you trying to run me from backup?]

He thinks for a moment. [And when.]

The computer translates; this is the setup that worked fine for the now-completed Council trials.

He is dizzy with relief or maybe sleep deprivation, and now he should really get Leareth but it's still hard, to think about things like that - <Leareth> he says again, and still doesn't check if Leareth is even in range to hear him, and sends the computer his response -

[My name is Cayaldwin-Hashal-Firayar]

[It's been two years since this backup and two months since you died. It's February 14, 1996 on Earth]

[We're trying to run you because then it'll be a little bit less the case that you're dead]

Leareth is asleep, because it's three o'clock in the morning on Earth, but he's in range. The first thoughtspeech warning half-woke him, but Cayaldwin has run it so many times and it never worked, so he didn't bother waking up all the way to acknowledge it. This time, there's a new urgency in Cayaldwin's thoughtspeech, something seems different...

<Coming> and he slips out of the Andalite herd and trots over. 

That's an Andalite name. 

He's being run on Earth. By an Andalite. Years later - he tries to think what his projections were for the invasion, no, it shouldn't have been done - and if this were an Andalite host with a Yeerk, they would be giving the Yeerk name and rank... 

[Did the Andalites win the war on Earth.]

[Yes]

[It's kind of complicated]

[You surrendered and were working with us but then Alloran murdered you]

The last clause is literally the only part that makes any sense at all. How - did he slip up on his precautions, why would he be that stupid... 

Focus. The exact details there aren't relevant, probably - the relevant part is that he's a) dead, and b) his backup is now being run by Andalites. Which means he's completely and utterly under their power right now. Strategically he should– 

Mhalir's mind catches and trips on the thought that he should play nice, do whatever they want him to so they keep him running and don't shut him down. That's - well, not false, but it feels like a wrong angle.

[Acknowledged. Thank you] he thinks to communicate, so this 'Cayaldwin' knows he understood and doesn't get impatient, he has no idea if his subjective thought-time is faster or slower than real time, it would depend on how much computer they have to throw at this...

Step back. Reason through it. 

Whatever drove them to spend two months figuring out how to run him on a computer - which is the natural interpretation of the timing, and also plausible given his understanding of Andalite computing technology - they probably aren't going to give up in disgust and shut him down forever if he says something mildly irritating, that would be such a waste of their time. And - they can't go in and meddle with his thoughts and memories, an uploaded brain is even more opaque than the early neural-net algorithms that the Andalites made illegal to scale into full general artificial intelligence. They can get him as he is - well, to whatever fidelity the brain scan managed, he wasn't sure while having it done - or nothing. 

- running a quick check through his own mind, does anything seem scrambled or out of working order, he wouldn't necessarily be able to tell introspectively if it weren't really him that came through, but he might be able to, and no, his mind seems to be working as usual, well, as usual for being just himself, outside of Alloran's brain, he feels slow and stupid like this - 

He's confused, and that feels very important to hold onto and unpack, why would he surrender, why would he work with the Andalites - 

- of course, he has no way of verifying that anything they're telling to him is true, aside from sanity-checking it for plausibility, which isn't a great check, almost by definition this is a bizarre edge-case scenario. 

[What is the status of the other Yeerks on Earth] he asks. 

Leareth catches up, slips in beside Cayaldwin, looks at the record of communications so far up on the screen. Wishes, fervently, that his Thoughtsensing could get through here. He wants to know what Mhalir is thinking. He's not sure if it's a fundamental limitation, that Thoughtsensers can only pick up on biological brains, it doesn't seem like it should be - it's just information-processing, either way - but then again, it takes a different Gift to read animals, Thoughtsensing is narrow, and why would there be a Gift specific to digital minds... 

He watches. 

[We're letting humans be voluntary Controllers if they want to]

[Lots of them do]

[We haven't told your staff yet that we're trying this but you can talk to them if you want]

[The Council of Thirteen was executed for war crimes]

[I'm not going to hurt you or turn this off, we were working together on fixing morph when you were killed]

Mhalir tries to hold the pieces of that together. It...kind of fits, ish, none of the things said are actually contradictory, but he absolutely cannot see a sensical path from here - what still feels like here, anyway, even though he's just skipped over two years into the future - to there. 

[Several aspects of that sound implausible to me] he answers. [In particular, if the Council of Thirteen was executed for war crimes, but you are claiming that is not the cause of my death - you are claiming that, yes? I know how the Andalites feel about me. I would have expected that I would be among the first to be tried and executed, if we lost the war.]

(Actually, he wouldn't have expected to get a trial at all, but that's not the most confusing part, here, formal trials for the Yeerk leadership fit together with 'voluntary human controllers' and 'Andalites and Yeerks working together'.)

Leareth feels like he should probably offer some of his own context, here, but he has no idea where to even begin, so he goes on letting Cayaldwin take the lead. 

[We allied with humans from another civilization called Velgarth]

[They can do surface hyperspace jumps and they know twelve planes to route through which makes travel distance trivial]

[You captured their commander and then you saw that we didn't want to kill you all we just wanted you to stop enslaving people]

[And that the Velgarth humans had the resources to insist if we reconsidered that]

[So you surrendered]

[There was also some other stuff going on but it's even more implausible]

[There was going to be a trial. We were delaying it so we could finish the morph research and maybe move Andalite public opinion about you]

[Alloran got worried we were going to succeed at that I guess]

[I have sworn to go kill him but I wanted to get you first because it'd take anyone else longer]

Mhalir is following along - it's irritating that he has only a Yeerk brain's worth of working memory, when he's running on a computer that is presumably ridiculous, he should ask if they can set up some sort of external memory he can read and write to - it's sort of holding together, though, contact with another advanced civilization explains how the Andalites could have gotten in a position to win the war, he can't think why he would have risked surrendering unless he thought they would probably lose, and from where he is now it seemed almost just a matter of time before they won. 

- and then the last part slams into him and makes him lose his train of thought entirely. 

[What. Why are you going to kill Alloran?]

[He murdered you and the Andalite government is refusing to extradite him about it]

[yes yes I know this is what legal systems are for but as a practical matter no one's using them they're all just doing whatever they want]

...That is the least Andalite attitude Mhalir has ever heard, Andalites aren't like that at all, is some human trying and failing to impersonate an Andalite for some reason - except the humans certainly don't have the ability to run his backup, neither do the Yeerks really, and none of the Yeerks know, he had a file addressed to his lieutenant 'to read in case of his death' pointing to it because what's the point of a backup no one can ever find, but he wouldn't have expected the message to be decrypted and followed in two months after they just lost the war - it might not be two months, it might be two centuries, it's not like he can check, only, what would be the point of making up a bizarre implausible cover story... 

It could, in fact, just be an Andalite who's several standard deviations away from median on nonconformity. Individuals do vary and it's not like he's gotten to know very many Andalites up close. And...in the scenario where the entire story is true, he must have misjudged something, because he was very sure that the Andalite political tides would never allow voluntary Controllers, that the best-case scenario was the surviving Yeerks confined forever to their homeworld, without technology, with only Gedd hosts.

Focus. 

[Please do not kill Alloran] he says. [Alloran did not - break any agreements - if anything he was only keeping a promise. He swore he would kill me many, many times. It comes as no surprise. The fault here would be mine, for failing to take adequate precautions against it. I - do not wish him punished for it, after what I did to him. And...whoever you are, I do not wish you punished for his murder either. If we were truly working on morph research then that is more important.]

Cayaldwin stares at the computer for a while. 

[It wasn't your fault] he says eventually. 

[We told you we would keep you safe]

Huh. Mhalir notices the pause, and the fact that the answer - doesn't quite fit in his sketchy model of the situation. There are no emotions with the words, of course. Just bare electrical signals. He's not used to that; even the limited channel of verbal communication between human hosts gives him some additional information, in tone and expression and body language. 

[I am confused about your motives for telling me that] he says. 

Cayaldwin stares at the screen again. He has no idea at all what to say to that, somehow. Maybe - probably, actually - he and Mhalir only understood each other because Mhalir was able to be a Yeerk about it, before - and now they don't have that, might never have that -

He looks over at Leareth.

Leareth steps in to enter the next response. 

[My name is Leareth] he tells the computer to send. It would be neat if they could figure out some kind of metadata to confirm who was talking, he thinks. [I am the human commander of the Velgarth forces during the war.]

[You were in my head when the war was escalating between the Andalite force on Earth and your people, and I convinced you to surrender before the Andalites used a bioweapon to kill everyone on Earth.]

[I had been working with Matirin-Ashal-Nelinfir, the Andalite commander of the forces then on Earth, and I was confident in his claim that he did not want to genocide your people, and in fact intended to give the Yeerks sensory access to the galaxy.]

[You believed me, since you were in my head, and you surrendered. That was about ten months ago now.]

[After that, you discussed your previous morph research with me, and so when Cayaldwin wished to fix the time limit, and figure out how to attach multiple tethers and construct bodies create effective immortality, I suggested you work together. For much of the time since the surrender, you were regularly visiting the Andalite base and working from Cayaldwin's head.]

...Probably Mhalir is going to find that absurdly implausible. 

[Initially I used Velgarth technology] easier to start with that than 'magic' [to mentally bind you and prevent you from controlling his body. Later on we trusted you enough to stop doing this.]

[You were a very effective team.]

He glances over at Cayaldwin. 

[Cayaldwin cares deeply about you and you became very important to him over that time, I think. He took it badly when you were killed.]

Mhalir is going to need some time to process that before he can answer! 

[Can you resend that more slowly] he asks after a moment. 

Leareth can do that, one message-chunk at a time. 

<I think I took it very reasonably> Cayaldwin mutters at him.

<I fully agree, but - it would not seem at all reasonable to Mhalir with no context on you and your relationship with him. So this conveys valuable information to him.> 

He waits for a response. 

Mhalir has no idea where to even start with that. He's so disoriented. Which is entirely to be expected, when being re-awoken from an out-of-date brain scan backup, but it's still not pleasant. 

[Could you try to set up some sort of additional memory I can read and write to] he asks. [You are giving me large quantities of information to process and I have no way to take notes.]

Despite himself, Leareth flicks his tail happily. <Of course that is one of the first things he asks for> he says to Cayaldwin. <So far he seems very - himself, even in this form.> 

<It does seem like it's better than nothing> he concedes. 

[I expect I can figure that out]

[It might be a while]

[Do you prefer to be conscious even when no one is talking to you and there is no sensory input of any kind]

[Yes.] He has a lot of thinking to do. [And afterward I want to hear about our research. Please. And] he hesitates [what our working relationship was like.] Mhalir isn't sure a description in just words will even be able to convey it, but it's something. 

[I can tell you about that once I have this figured out]

And he starts working on it. Getting lots of storage isn't hard at all, the tricky part is figuring out how Mhalir ought to be able to interface with it. He can use the signature from Mhalir talking, copy that to somewhere, let Mhalir read it back - if he has to read it back from the top every time that'll be annoying, maybe as a quick solution it can jump to the first instance of a specific word, at least - 

It takes about twenty minutes to set up something that ought to work.

Mhalir thinks. It's hard to even subjectively track time, with no cues at all except the pace of his own thoughts, and he's not trying that hard, if he wants a timekeeping method he can ask for one - he should ask for some sort of programming interface, really, humans have lots of recent history in computing interfaces that are simple and don't require brain chips like Andalites have - that's a digression though...

He makes some progress, mostly in that he concludes that he might as well take their word at face value and work from there. He can run some tests, like slipping checksum-type bits into his notes so that he'll notice any alterations even if his memory for the content doesn't. He can ask for more information, for hard-to-fake proof. But, ultimately, he has to engage with them on their terms. 

...And it means something, that they even knew the location of his backup at all, let alone the fact that Cayaldwin was willing to get it running. 

It ends up feeling like about twenty minutes subjective to him, to the extent he can gauge that. 

[All right, let me try using this] he says once Cayaldwin alerts him that the file system is set up. He tests 'talking' to it and then 'listening' back, from the start, or finding particular keywords. 

It 'sounds' just like talking to Cayaldwin or Leareth, and he can start at the start or jump to keywords easily enough. 

[Is everything I put in the file showing up as though I am talking to you?] he asks. [It is not urgent and perhaps not reasonable to ask for, but I would at some point prefer to have private notes.]

[It is not in the interface for talking to me but I could read it if I wanted to]

[I can store it encrypted but I don't think I can prove I did that]

[That is fair. If you can give me a programming interface of some kind, I could eventually set up a way to encrypt it myself, I think, though it would still be hard to verify. Anyway, that can wait.]

For now the productive way to interact with this is to - not trust them, exactly, but apparently his now-dead older self did trust them, somehow, some way.

[Can you tell me some things about how we worked together and what we were doing] he asks. 

[My father before he died worked on improving morph]

[expanding the morph time limit and potentially having multiple anchors so it was possible to survive death in morph]

[he thought we could win Earth that way]

[then he was killed in action]

[after the war you said you'd been working on the same thing]

[Leareth brought you over and we compared notes]

[eventually figured out it was much more efficient if you were in my head for it]

[the plan is to get everybody in the galaxy to go around in morph all the time so no one ever dies]

[we expanded the morph limit to 24 hours]

[and we figured out the multiple tethers thing but it breaks if you hyperspace jump and there were other complications too]

[if you want to use it to give everybody in the galaxy immortality you need really high reliability and there are nonzero risks to keeping your substrate in z-space]

[though it should be easier to back up, right]

[there might be a way to get you a body again using the morph tether infrastructure but it'll be a really big project and I'm not very good at this]

[my father would have done it]

...Wow. 

Mhalir writes to his file as he listens, so he can replay it later to himself. It's a lot. It's so much and he's not processing half of the content, because instead he's having emotions about it. 

It takes a moment before he can fit an answer into words. Words are so clumsy, low-bandwidth, not at all like being in someone's head - like how his other self was apparently in Cayaldwin's head, they were doing research that way, if it's true it sounds incredible and like - something he always wanted but didn't dare acknowledge, because it was too impossible to hope for. And he doesn't remember it, which seems incredibly deeply unfair of the universe, not that the fairness of the universe is even a real concept... 

[I...wanted...] His answer comes more slowly, this time. [I wanted, ever since I was born, for people to stop dying. To stop...ceasing to exist...vanishing from the world...it is so wasteful and pointless and]

- a feeling he doesn't have words for, and therefore has no way to communicate to them - 

[you were doing that? Your father was working toward it? I...wish I could have met him.]

[I think maybe I see why we worked well together, if that is how you feel about death.]

[I...want to be able to work in your head again. It would be a major undertaking, I agree, but I can do my best to help.]

[you could have met him if you had ended the war sooner]

[but I think it would have been hard]

[leareth is not totally sure he could have done it]

[I wish] and Mhalir stops there. 

He just found out half an hour ago that the war is over now, apparently, and not in a way where most of his species is dead and the survivors are confined forever to a single planet. In a way where there are voluntary Controllers and research collaborations and where Cayaldwin promised to keep him safe and then swore to avenge his death by murdering Alloran (which he should NOT DO, Mhalir isn't sure whether he got through about that and needs to check.)

- he's still not completely believing all of this, he's keeping it in a mental space reserved for tentative world-models, not the base facts he knows about reality. But for now he can live in that maybe-reality, react to it appropriately, and keep holding onto that background note of uncertainty, so that any off notes he might pick up on later have somewhere to go. 

[I wish I had ended the war sooner]

[I wish I had...seen whatever it was that I was missing]

There had been what felt like a long pause, before Cayaldwin's answer. 

[...are you all right]

[I don't really think being all right would be warranted]

[I understand] 

He's not sure he does, actually, and he's not sure how to feel about it and whether he ought to try to help. It fits quite well, actually, that a future version of him who spent months working on research from Cayaldwin's head would have - cared about him. 

He can ask this Leareth character at some point, maybe, if he can find a way of getting Leareth to talk to him alone and delete the log of it so Cayaldwin can't just read it afterward. 

[Thank you] he adds, and he can't say it with any particular emotion but he means it fervently. [Thank you for bringing me back.]

[I was worried it wouldn't be better than being dead since you couldn't do anything]

[but Yeerks and Andalites are different that way]

[and maybe we can figure out the morph tether thing eventually]

And for some reason he's upset, now, so he walks away to get back to work.

Leareth turns a stalk to watch him go. He can tell that Cayaldwin is upset but not why; Cayaldwin's emotions remain frustratingly opaque to him, despite months of working closely together on this. 

[Do you have any further questions] he asks Mhalir. 

[I think so, but I need a moment to process everything.]

[I will wait.]

And since he's now hanging out in front of a computer for an unknown length of time anyway, he reaches for Matirin's mind. <Matirin?>

A moment later he remembers that it's still not quite four o'clock in the morning, but it still seems worth waking him for. 

<Mmm?>

<Sorry to wake you. Cayaldwin did it. We have been talking to Mhalir.> 

< - oh. Good. Is Mhalir all right?>

<He seems to be taking it very matter-of-factly. He asked us for external memory to write notes to and he is thinking it over before asking more questions. I - suspect he is not taking what we are telling him on faith, but that he thinks it most productive to engage with us straightforwardly rather than showing us his suspicion.> Pause. <I really wish I knew what he was thinking. Also, Cayaldwin just ran off, he seems upset, I am not really sure why.> 

His eyes flick worriedly in Cayaldwin's direction. <I would be very suspicious if it were me> he says. <He seems - intact? The scan worked?>

<He has not not seemed intact, so far. I - have limited ability to assess him, right, I cannot read his thoughts. It is very frustrating. But I have not noted anything that seemed very off.> 

Tail-swish. <If it were me it would be really miserable to be alone.>

<Yeerks also do not like being alone. I expect he disprefers it; I particularly would predict that he hates feeling helpless and unable to affect the world except via communicating with us. I told him I would wait here for him to come up with further questions, though.> 

He hesitates. <...I have not said anything yet about us being the same person. I do not really know where to start. The only reason he concluded it, before, is that he was a Yeerk in my head.> 

<It does sound really implausible and it is not even like we can explain how it happened.>

<I know, right.> Sigh. <...Matirin, can you come here? I - probably someone should be keeping an eye on Cayaldwin - but I want you here.> 

<I do not think Cayaldwin can invent the Gate-technique to reach the homeworld from here in an hour.>

He trots over. Cayaldwin's workstation is even more shielded, now.

[I want to know more about Velgarth] Mhalir sends through the interface, disembodied words on a screen. [And the conditions under which you ended up allied with the Andalites.]

[Matirin is here now] Leareth answers. [He was in command then, although the Andalite commander on Earth now is Nerefir. Maybe he can explain that aspect] He glances over at Matirin to see if he wants to do that. 

<Aren't you more suited to explain Velgarth?> But maybe the mention of magic will be confusing; Matirin is certainly more accustomed to discussing Velgarth in terms that make it make sense to people who haven't heard of it.

[In March of 1995 the Andalite Dome ship TailStrike was damaged in fighting outside Tantarill-XI and jumped, blind, aiming for Earth, where the plan was to lose an engagement in space with Yeerk forces there and sneak some operatives to the ground while the engagement was ongoing. Instead we arrived in Velgarth. It took us some time to determine this because the ship was badly damaged and Velgarth, somehow, also has humans. The local humans had not invented electricity yet but have genetic energy-manipulation and planar-manipulation abilities they call magic, and can detect people in morph easily; they identified us and, after we explained our mission, agreed to help us with the war.]

Mhalir relays this to his file, and plays it back for himself a second and third time, after acknowledging that he heard it. 

[Magic] he says finally. [That is very surprising. I would like to hear more.]

Leareth is better placed to explain this part, and he steps in and starts going through a quick explanation of Velgarth's Gifts, and how they were adapted for the war on Earth. 

[If I can figure out how to upload text documents to your files, there is a great deal already written] he adds. [Since the humans of Earth were also learning about this, starting with minimal context.] He's not sure he can figure out how to do that without Cayaldwin, though. 

[I would also like to read reports from the human news after the Yeerk surrender] Mhalir says. [And communications between my people, if you can obtain those.] Both as general context, to catch up more efficiently, and also because those would be at least costly to fake. 

He goes to get Cayaldwin. <Is there a way to upload documents for Mhalir to read?>

<What? Yes, that's trivial.>

<Well, I don't know anything about your setup there and I don't want to poke it lest I turn him off or something.>

<Fine, I'll show you.> He stalks back in and does that; it is in fact very straightforward to queue text files to be read to Mhalir. 

<You did very well.>

<No, I didn't.>

<He's alive.>

<We should have - for Father ->

<Oh. Yes. We should have. Maybe you can scan everybody now, explain that you think with the morph-tether setup you'll be able to get them new bodies in a couple of years ->

<It's too late, it doesn't matter now.>

Matirin starts to say something but Cayaldwin has left again. He turns to look at Leareth instead, tail-shrugs.

Leareth gets to work on obtaining various documents and lining them up for Mhalir. His own notes are easy to access; they're not really intended for someone else to read, but Mhalir thinks enough like him that he might be able to make sense of it, Leareth will queue those up after the news releases and the communications between the Yeerks and the Andalites that he has saved. 

It's repetitive work. <I never know what to say to Cayaldwin when he is in - this mood> he says to Matirin as he adds another document. <And - I do not know what to say to Mhalir about his state of mind. Mhalir asked if he was all right.> Pause. <Mhalir told him not to kill Alloran, immediately. He seemed surprised, but - I am not sure it will in fact make any difference.> 

<It seems like if anyone were entitled to release him from that promise it would be Mhalir.> Swish swish. <I don't know what to say either, though.>

<I think Mhalir will be genuinely very upset if Alloran is murdered. And he will be devastated if he cannot not finish the morph project - and cannot obtain a new body to control via morph tether - because Cayaldwin is arrested for murder. I do not want that to happen to him, at all.> 

<Possibly they should talk more about it. Which means we should give Mhalir as much context as we can on it so he can try to say something helpful.>

<...I am not sure what context would be helpful. I suspect I do not fully understand Cayaldwin's feelings and motives here, since his actions do not make sense to me.> 

<I can try to explain it to Mhalir, I guess. When Cayaldwin is very upset he chooses his actions mostly by which will do the most harm to the people who he blames, and he is tracking whether people are blameworthy and what he can do to hurt them instead of tracking other features of the situation.>

The reason Cayaldwin's actions don't make sense to him is probably that that decision process is stupid, Leareth is thinking, but this seems unhelpful to say to Matirin. Also it makes him feel rather uneasy about his previous attempts to convince Cayaldwin that he was as blameworthy as Alloran, though Cayaldwin doesn't seem to have updated on that. 

<I would appreciate if you could try to explain to Mhalir> he says. <Maybe once he is more caught up on the rest of the context here. He has a great deal of reading material.> 

<I can do that.> He paces, a little. Reads the transcript of their conversation so far.

Mhalir reads reasonably fast, even in this awkward format, and transfers condensed summaries of the content to his notes, but it's still going to take him a couple of hours to get through all of it; it shouldn't take Matirin anywhere near that long to read the transcript. 

Leareth paces as well, not speaking. 

Eventually he goes back out to do the morning ritual with the herd and graze and review his schedule for the day and inconspicuously check on Cayaldwin (practicing magic). <Let me know when Mhalir is done.>

Leareth has been staying close by, only pacing in tight circles, because every once in a while Mhalir has questions, and he does his best to answer them immediately.

<...He says he has read everything now> he confirms finally to Matirin. 

Then Matirin will head over. 

[Did you have more questions?]

[Is Cayaldwin still planning to murder Alloran?]

[I am not sure. He does not immediately possess the means to do so and I was hoping you could talk him out of it.]

[I do not understand why he wants to. He successfully brought me back. I told him I am not angry with Alloran and would prefer he not be murdered. We have the opportunity to work together on critical morph research and I assume that if he murders Alloran he will be tried for it by your legal system and, whatever punishment is chosen, he will not be available to do research anymore.]

[The situation is mostly my fault. He was angry and upset to have you teleported out of his hands and murdered. I asked him to accompany Leareth to inform your people of your death because I thought it would be useful that he was angry and upset. They wanted Alloran extradited, which is not going to happen. Leareth said something Cayaldwin interpreted as meaning that it would improve the situation if Cayaldwin were committed to killing Alloran if the justice system didn't, so he committed to that. Now he is committed to that. I do not know that he particularly wants to but I think he certainly wants to be a person whose commitments are meaningful.]

Mhalir thinks for a minute before answering. 

[I understand why it matters, to be a person who keeps their commitments.]

Pause.

[If I had known there were Andalites who cared so deeply about it, who I could cooperate with, I would have tried much harder for peace talks.]

Another pause. 

[Nonetheless I do not want him to do it. I want to research how to connect a morph tether so I can control a Yeerk construct-body and do math in his head again. I did not know that could ever happen but it is] another long hesitation [what I always wanted, what Yeerks and Andalites could be together. I want us to have that. I want us to discover a way for people to stop dying. I will be very angry with him if he makes that impossible by doing something stupid.]

[I think it is worth trying to discuss it with him but it having bad outcomes will not especially dissuade him because sometimes it is useful to commit to things that if you have to do them will just make everything worse. When he is upset he mostly does not trust arguments about what he should do instead of hurting people who are responsible for the thing he is upset about. But he might listen to you because it was a promise to your people in the first place.]

[Also I am not even dead! Surely he should be less upset given that the backup worked.] 

[It is very good that the backup worked but I would guess that at this exact moment it is - making the loss more salient, rather than making him feel better about it.]

That makes so little sense. Mhalir chews on it for a minute. 

[Is he actually upset about someone else who died and did not have a backup made]

[He is also upset about our father being dead but he was - coping, when he had you.]

[Oh]

[Your father is the one he thought could fix morph. He thinks he is less capable of doing it without him. Is that even true, in your opinion? It sounded as though we were making substantial progress]

[You two were definitely going to do it. If you didn't get executed first, and I had secured some delays. You weren't even very far away. A couple of months at most.]

[I see why he was especially upset about Alloran's timing. It will delay us considerably, this setup loses a great deal in efficiency compared to sharing a brain.]

[Still, I think we can still do it. And if we invest first in the morph tether research for me, we can regain some efficiency. I read Leareth's notes on the nothlit reversal, he can work very flexibly with the morph components because of his planar manipulation abilities]. It still feels very odd to call it magic. [And mine does not need to remain stable through hyperspace transport. I assume I am not going anywhere.]

[I think it is very possible. And once you are in his head you will probably be able to find a way to talk him out of it if there is one.]

[I do not expect you to stop him. That would be - very bad for his trust in you.]

[I will not try to stop him by force. That seems unlikely to work. I assume you are at least attempting precautions so that he cannot easily find Alloran let alone reach and kill him?]

[Yes. They are on different planets and there is no known mapping through the twelve known planes that cuts the distance between them to one that a person can do themselves unassisted, and also as far as I know he can't do interplanar Gates at all, and also one on the Andalite homeworld would be noticed and responded to.]

[It seems to me there is an argument that Alloran ought be moved secretly to somewhere that is not the Andalite homeworld. I suppose it depends how many inconvenient precautions he wishes to take, though]

Another long pause. 

[How is Alloran?]

Mhalir had never fooled himself by thinking Alloran would be all right even if he someday freed him. Though it sounds like at least he was fairly functional, if he was able to slip around Mhalir's inevitable paranoid precautions as well as the Andalites' protection and kill him. 

[He relearned how to move over the course of about six months. He managed to learn Gift-usage in secret so he could assassinate you. He is with his family. He was very happy, when he killed you.]

Probably there's an appropriate emotion to be feeling about this. Mhalir doesn't know what it is. In practice he just feels tired, which has to be entirely psychological rather than physical since he's now an emulated brain on a computer. He should at some point talk to Cayaldwin about the exact level of detail of the simulation, maybe he does still need to rest, but Matirin seems unlikely to know that. 

[I am glad he is with his family] he says, relieved that he doesn't have to pick an expression or tone of voice to go with that. [I know I did something inexcusable, by enslaving him. There are many things I could say to defend my choices, but I think I will not bother.] 

[We talked about it some before. We did not see exactly eye to eye but I was trying to persuade my people that they should not kill you.]

Mhalir spends thirty seconds fiddling to find the right keyword in his searchable but increasingly unwieldy notes file, it's so obnoxious not having eyes or hands and he definitely misses the tail too but he's getting used to it. A little. 

[Cayaldwin implied that the Velgarth humans did not want the Andalites to kill all the Yeerks] he says finally, once he's checked that this was, in fact, true. [Why did they care]

[I think that most people when they have a little bit of distance from being actively at war and afraid are against murdering innocent people let alone whole species full of them.]

[I am not sure if this question is going to make any sense, but. Who is Leareth? What is Leareth? I have only the context on him from brief conversation and his notes, but I have never met any human like him]

[He is immortal and several thousand years old. He ran an organization on Velgarth with which he meant to fight the Velgarth gods, extraplanar entities who meddle in the world and keep the tech level limited. He is an unusual human but I think he is a good one. It was being in his head that persuaded you that you should surrender.]

What. 

[I confess I am incredibly curious what arguments he made] Mhalir says eventually. [I will ask him, of course, but I would also like to know if you have an impression of why I was inclined to listen to him]

[You said that he reminded you very strongly - of yourself. Of your goals and hopes. And being several thousand years old he had a memory of a time when he was attacked by a mentor who he had trusted, and he fought back, and the cataclysm that his opponent unleashed when it became apparent he would lose nearly destroyed the whole world and did destroy its richest and most knowledgeable civilization. The lesson he took away was that in a situation like that one should surrender.

I think being in his head might have also made it apparent that trying to win by force was no longer a good idea. He is very powerful and had made arrangements such that his Gifts could not be used if captured, and he returns to life when killed, and he was afraid that Earth would be destroyed, if things went badly enough, but I do not think there was a real chance he would permit us to rip the whole galaxy apart between us. And he would not have let us kill you all, even if we had been inclined to, which I had persuaded him we were not.]

It's way too much to absorb all at once. Mhalir manages to relay it verbatim to his notes file, which is getting to be such a mess, he needs some kind of folder structure in there but probably Matirin won't know how to set that up and he needs to wait for Cayaldwin to make requests. It's very annoying. It's such a trivial request and it feels rude to ask for help with it, except that there's literally no possible way he can do it unaided, with the tools he has right now.

It shouldn't at all be the most consequential thought, but the one rising to the surface is: 

[Really. The lesson he took was to surrender. I would have thought the lesson was to stop trusting mentors.]

[I am sorry about Seerow. There is an ongoing inquiry. It has released a statement to the effect that those Yeerks opposed to enslaving other peoples were never our enemy.]

[There was an inquiry?]

Mhalir is very surprised and isn't sure he should be, it's less surprising than many other aspects here.

[I suppose it does not really matter if I was opposed to enslaving people then. Given my actions later.]

[I think it matters. But - obviously at this point there is not going to be a trial, so in that sense it matters less.]

[Were you planning to tell the Andalite government that this worked? It seems it might be simpler not to]

[It will definitely be simpler not to and I do not plan to.]

[Thank you]

And he's not sure what to say next but wants to keep talking, mostly because the silent empty nothingness is awful. Having something to read makes it a little better but he still feels incredibly helpless - and lonely - when he imagines that he might try to speak and have no one there to answer. 

...Honestly, there's no particular reason not to just say that. His position right now is already one of utter dependence on the people who, for some reason that he's not yet ready to feel he understands, spent months of research time to bring him back, even just in this limited form and without any of the context his other self had.

[Can you or someone else stay here] he asks. [It is distressing to have no way to communicate. I would like to talk to Cayaldwin about our research progress before I died, but I do not want to push him if interacting with me right now reminds me of his loss.] 

[Yes of course] he says immediately. [I would find it very distressing and we can do a rotation, for now, and eventually probably set up a way for you to communicate with us through our brain chips, at which point it will not even be very inconvenient.]

[That would be very good. Thank you.] 

Mhalir is still confused, but not in a way he expects to find purchase on by asking more questions right now. Mainly his mind is churning over the question of how to ask Cayaldwin not to murder Alloran. It feels like how he responds, there, will be informative.

He doesn't say anything else for a bit. 

Matirin morphs Mindspeech so he can reschedule his meetings for the day. Things come up reasonably often; it won't be suspicious.

Mhalir asks for news articles or summaries on various topics, over the next while. He attempts to organize his notes using the horrible interface, makes a list at the very top where he can find it reliably for improvements to request.

His initial mood was calm, matter-of-fact about the situation he finds himself in, but now that the initial flood of information is past and he's settling in, he's increasingly not-calm about it. He feels, not claustrophobic exactly, that's not a common Yeerk experience, but very very trapped. And alone, there are people he can talk to but they might as well be in another world and the talking channel is so narrow, when he's used to drawing in all of someone's thoughts and memories and dreams.

He literally doesn't have the capacity for any physical panic-reaction, which is almost more unsettling. 

For a while he's just less talkative, trying to read the news and think through it anyway but distracted. It's fixable, he reminds himself, if he's clever and persistent he can make a lot of improvements to the situation - but it's going to take so long... 

[Matirin are you there]

[Yes.]

[I seem to be having a hard time with something I am not sure what I just feel very trapped]

[Maybe I should talk to Cayaldwin or Leareth and see if they can help but I am not sure if they can help] 

The words convey no emotion, of course, it's just words. 

[That makes sense.]

[This is the reason that when Andalites tried backups we found it not worth it.]

[I do think we'll be able to get you a physical body eventually.]

[I predict you do not want me to turn the computer off until then but it is an option if you did want that.]

[This is much better than not existing.]

[I think I mostly need a notes interface that is less horrible.]

[I do not want you to turn the computer off.]

[For one thing we can probably do it faster if I am helping.]

Pause. 

[Actually it is somewhat better now, I think it helps just to remind myself I can communicate.]

[I can ask Cayaldwin to figure out a better notes interface.]

[Thank you. The top of my notes has some features I want.]

Early human computing interfaces were actually a lot worse than 'talking at it' and up until fairly recently they weren't much better, so it helps that he has exposure to that. 

<Cayaldwin?>

<What.>

<Mhalir has ideas for how to improve his interface.>

<Right. Have you been talking to him?>

<Yes.>

<Well, go away and let me work.>

[Cayaldwin is coming to work on that] he tells Mhalir. [I will leave but you can talk with him.]

[Cayaldwin, my ideas are at the top of the notes file, you can read it] Mhalir leaves up for him, though of course he has no idea whether Cayaldwin is there yet. 

[Mainly I want file names and a directory structure and to be able to navigate it with commands that will not be confused for me trying to write a word in the actual notes.]

[If you have ideas to make it navigable I would also appreciate that, it is just frustrating when my notes are so messy and also the only thing I can interact with if there is no one there to talk to.] 

[Can you try doing the motion you do for talking but making some signal that's not a word, I want to see how the interpreter parses it.]

[Matirin didn't threaten you or anything did he.]

Yeerks have some non-language communications, many of them emotion-conveying, sort of like the nonverbal sounds humans make. Mhalir does one that's roughly alarm/aggression and then a different one that's affection/recognition, and then gets distracted. 

[What] 

[No he did not threaten me, were you expecting him to]

[No but one time he and Leareth did some stupid thing where they threatened to murder you so now I feel like I had better check!!]

[Leareth threatened to murder me?] 

[I thought he promised me he would not let the Andalites murder me?? I am very confused.]

[He did promise you that, he'll never let anyone hurt you]

[I didn't mean to scare you, sorry]

[Leareth and Matirin decided to check whether the magic they were using to make you not seize control of people when you crawl into their brain actually worked before they sent you off with Leareth to do high stakes war missions]

[So Matirin took you from me and gave you to someone who he had led to believe was meant to take you to the Andalite home planet for trial]

[And they watched to see what you would do]

[I was mad at them about it and stopped having you restricted in my head after that]

Mhalir decides not to point out that Leareth apparently failed to prevent Alloran from murdering him.

[I see.] 

[Apparently my] past? future? this is very confusing [other self, thought that Leareth was the same person as me? I have no idea what that would even mean, but does your impression of Leareth fit with that]

[You seem smarter to me but it might be that you can use my brain and he can only use his]

[Oh. Thank you, I think.] 

[I suppose this will be a fairer test, I cannot use your brain right now and even if you could run me faster, I think I would mostly be even more frustrated about the limited communication.] 

[It seems like it will be very hard to visualize the planes but maybe you will figure it out or we will be able to rig something for it.]

[If you build me an interface I can use to write executable code, I can figure out something myself. Also I have reasonably good spatial reasoning even in this form, I had several hours every three days in a pool and it was a convenient time to think through research approaches that I did not want Alloran to know about.]

Mhalir wouldn't put it exactly that way to Matirin, or even to Leareth who he's still forming a sense of, but he doubts Cayaldwin will be bothered at all.

[I wanted to speak with you about your promise to kill Alloran] he adds. 

[Matirin said it matters to you to be someone who keeps your commitments, and I agree that this is important for game-theoretic reasons but I also think we should talk about it.] 

[We can talk about it.]

[I understand why, having made a commitment, you wish to keep it]

[I am curious why you felt it would help to make a hard commitment in the first place, and who you consider the commitment made to] 

[We were talking to your people. They said they wanted the Andalites to hand him over. It was all so - fake and empty - the Andalites were never going to hand him over - I told them that I wanted to kill him, because Matirin thought that would help. Then I told Leareth I didn't know what else to say and Leareth suggested I could say that if the Andalites didn't punish him fairly I'd kill him myself. He said he wasn't sure if it was the right thing to say but he was starting to lose track, of what that even meant.]

[It does sound very fake and empty]

Mhalir feels a sudden pang of sympathy for Leareth. He knows that feeling. 

[So you intended it as...conveying information to them, that even if the other Andalites were not going to take this seriously, you personally were?] 

[Yes. I didn't prefer that commitment over various other commitments at that point. But - but there had to be something. Alloran's wrong, he just believes some stupid delusion that's easier than believing anything real -]

[Did that work, I'm trying to see if I can do variation in voices so Leareth and Matirin and I can sound different and so I can yell sometimes when I really want to -]

[Yes, that sounded different.] 

He thinks for a few moments. 

[What is the factual matter that Alloran believes which is wrong?] 

[He thinks you're evil.]

[I think that is a value judgement, which is a different kind of thing? I have taken many actions which would conventionally be thought of as evil. I have goals which I personally think are good, almost by definition, and I tried to achieve them, but just because I judged harms worthwhile for the future, does not make them no longer bad.] 

Alloran, personally, paid the cost of the worst tradeoff he ever chose to make, and so it seems like completely fair play for them to have been enemies, and the thing one does to one's enemies is try to defeat them and win. He can't fault Alloran for that, he uses the same reasoning all the time. Still, Mhalir doesn't think this angle is worth trying to convey to Cayaldwin.

[Anyway that is not really the point]

[I assume you think Alloran ought be punished because of the specific actions he took, not a belief he holds. Many people hold incorrect beliefs and are not criminals.] 

[I usually hate those people too! More, even, because they're cowards who don't even try to affect the world or realize they are supposed to believe things for reasons. But it is true that Alloran being so - smugly wrong about everything - would not actually be worth fighting him over if he had not murdered you because of it. But he did. And you can't just - murder people and get away with it because everyone likes you better than the person you murdered. The world can't be allowed to work that way.]

This is...a very different ontology from the one Mhalir usually reasons in. But it's not one he can't think in. It's a lot clearer to him than some other frames around morality. 

[It would lead to a worse future universe overall if people could and did get away with it, is that what you mean? I think that is true, but there is still the question of what a fair and appropriate punishment is - separate from whether the Andalite courts are going to impose one - and it is not obvious to me that it is death, in this case.]

[The courts already heard it. They had Leareth detach his morph, Gifts make that easy to do. And they demoted him. And then told him that obviously anyone in his position would do the same thing and they wish him well and honor his record of service.]

[Ah. I see why you consider that unfair] 

Which isn't the same thing as agreeing, but they don't need to argue, he's not going to get anywhere. 

[Honestly, I think I am more qualified than anyone to know how Alloran would rank death compared to other punishments, and empirically he does not think it is very bad. He used a bioweapon to murder everyone on the Hork-Bajir homeworld and genuinely thought of it as a kindness and mercy to them, not a monstrous crime. He constantly tried to kill himself for the entire time he was my host.]

[I understand you do not consider his past experiences there to count as punishment for a murder he committed afterward, but it would not be difficult to devise some retribution that he would consider far worse than death.]

[You could, for example, kidnap him through a Velgarth Gate and place him under a Velgarth compulsion, and let him have trauma flashbacks for an hour while you shout at him. I am not saying you should do this but I am fairly confident he would consider it much worse than death while it was happening.] 

[- firstly I think Leareth would absolutely get wind of that and stop me, murdering people is a lot faster than torturing them. Secondly it wouldn't be fair play? He - didn't say anything to you, he said, he Fetched you and then he killed you, because it wasn't a story]

[Thirdly I don't - want him to suffer? I want him to not have done it and since he did do it I don't want to just let the world go on being mostly shaped by the fact he did it. It is not really about him. And to the extent that it is about him I want him to realize he was wrong and I don't think there is a way to hurt him until he realizes that.]

Of course Alloran was efficient about it. He's not stupid. 

[It is not fair play] he agrees.

[I do not think that killing him will make the world any less shaped by the fact that he murdered me, though, if anything the opposite. Because you will be dead or imprisoned, and I will be a brain trapped in a computer, and we will not figure out how I can have a body again, we will not fix morph so that people stop dying]

[I am not sure if Alloran can change his mind about me, but if anything could accomplish that, it would be if a century from now we have made immortality possible for everyone - even him, I would hope, in the end. I am not sure even he could live in that world for a thousand years and not realize I was more complicated than he thought.] 

[Those are some reasonable points but I still promised I'd do it.]

[I know. It seems as though you - wished to say something to counter the fact that it was fake and empty and the Andalite courts would not consider Yeerks as people who matter? And you were not sure what, and before then you had wanted and perhaps intended to kill him but not made a commitment, and you ended up making that commitment because it was - something to say? But you nonetheless did promise, and if you went back on it now it would show you had not in fact been taking it seriously and thinking of Yeerks as important. Does that capture it?]

[And also that in general when I say things it doesn't mean anything and no one can make plans on the assumption I meant them.]

[Right] 

Mhalir hesitates, trying to find the right words. 

[I do not disagree. But - it is complicated, right, because I was murdered but here I am. I would like to be allowed to communicate with a few of my people, though I think we had better keep tight security if we wish the Andalite government never to find out. And if you kill him, I will be very sad, because it will be much harder to carry on our work alone when I am stuck in a computer]

[And - I think what my people will gather from this, is - that you are someone whose word means something, yes, but also someone who will make commitments impulsively and then carry them out even once they are obviously stupid.]

[I predict they will find this the opposite of reassuring, and would consider it a greater sign of integrity and trustworthiness if, instead, we speak to them together, and if you wish you can commit to giving me a body again, which is what I am actually asking you for.] 

[I want you back.]

[I am right here. I know it is not the same for you, though. I want -]

'Back' isn't right, because maybe a different version of him knew Cayaldwin intimately. Though he's piecing together edges and corners of how it could have worked, working backward from 'Cayaldwin is an Andalite he could work with well enough to live in his head without restrictions' and adding in everything as he observes it. Cayaldwin's response to his suggestion of alternate punishment was very informative, which is exactly what Mhalir was hoping for. 

[I want what you had with me before] he says instead. [I - never bothered to hope for that, for - having an Andalite host I could truly work together with, it never seemed possible, but apparently I was wrong about many things including that. I think we can make it possible again, and in the process cover many breakthroughs that can be used elsewhere. It might take years but we are both very clever - we were a couple of months from solving the morph time limit and multiple tethers, and we had had less than a year... But I cannot do it on my own without you.]

[I guess while the court's punishment was inappropriate for a murder it was perhaps in line for an attempted murder. So as long as he didn't succeed I probably don't need to kill him.]

[I think so. The framing was perhaps rather disrespectful to Yeerks - the part where they said it was understandable and they appreciated his service, I mean, though honestly I feel more upset about all the dead Hork-Bajir. But I feel the appropriate response there, if any, would be a strongly worded opinion article or something.]

[Anyway. Should we make plans to go speak to whomever of my people you spoke with and made the commitment to, once I have a better notes interface?]

[There's a separate inquiry about the Hork-Bajir homeworld situation and that one's not concluded yet, they want Hork Bajir there for it. Those of his coconspirators who weren't captured at the time were stripped of their rank and sentenced to indefinite imprisonment but I think people feel like Alloran may have already been punished enough.]

[I don't blame him for that. Matirin would've done it too, on Earth, if we hadn't found anything better. And we'd have done it to ourselves, so it doesn't feel unprincipled. If that makes sense. You could ask Matirin what he thinks his mistake was, I don't think it's the being willing to kill five billion people exactly.]

[...No, probably not. I should ask him.] 

[I will ask Leareth about arranging for us to go talk to your people.]

[Thank you]

And he feels like he should say something else but he's not sure what. 

[I am sorry I was gone for two months. I am - grateful beyond measure, that you found a way to make this work, but it must have been very hard doing it when you were - used to working with me, and I was not there anymore.]

[Everybody I care about is dead. There's no point in - getting used to anything else.]

...Okay now he's kind of hurt, even though this is a stupid way to feel. Mhalir doesn't say anything in response. 

<Leareth> he says, again without checking whether he's in range.

Fortunately he is. He's pacing in the field, too distracted to focus on any of his work. <Yes?>

<Can you take Mhalir and I to his people? We want to talk about - Alloran, and what to do next ->

<Oh. What, now?>

<I don't know.>

<I will get in contact with someone there and find out when is a good time for them. I - think I will not specify why, just that it is important, and I will let you and Mhalir explain.> Pause. <Is he actually portable?> 

<He'd fit on a shuttle computer. You can't carry him around.>

<Should I just find out if they are willing to come here? I could Gate them over.> 

<Sure.>

Leareth heads off to send a message to Mhalir's lieutenant who was on-site when they Gated over to make the announcement, saying that he and Cayaldwin would like to meet with her and the others who were present, it's fairly urgent, he would prefer if they could come to the Andalite base, he can Gate them directly to where they'll be meeting and provide shields and it'll be safe, when can they be available. 

They can send some people later today but not all of them, some people are out today, she replies courteously; it's half true but also if this is a mass arrest better to not get all of them at once. Not that it would end up mattering very much, if Leareth's turned on them, and it doesn't seem likely, but. 

Leareth acknowledges this; he can guess at her concerns and doesn't press.

He gives Cayaldwin a time and asks how Mhalir is doing. 

Jerky tail-shrug. <I need to design a better file system for him, and an interface so he can program himself.>

<That is a good idea, I am sure he will find it easier when he can build some things himself and is not limited to what he can accomplish by talking at us. I would hate that.> 

He goes back to the computer to work on that.

Leareth doesn't want to distract him, or get snapped at, so he goes to find Matirin instead. 

<Cayaldwin asked me to arrange for him and Mhalir to talk to some of Mhalir's staff> he informs him. <I am Gating them over here later this afternoon, since they are more convenient to transport than Mhalir is right now.> 

<That makes sense. Thank you.>

<He said he wanted to talk about Alloran and what to do next. I very much hope this means he is reconsidering the murder plan.> 

<It seems likely. I don't expect it'll help for us to reiterate that we are in favor of that, though.>

<It really would not. I did not ask him about it. ...We should figure out a solution for conversational privacy, if Mhalir wants that, I was just thinking I am very curious what they spoke about just now and then I remembered I can read the logs.> 

<I expect Cayaldwin can figure out how to set that up too, maybe with some difficulty if Mhalir needs to be able to access all the logs.>

<I almost wonder if Mhalir could do that more easily himself - Cayaldwin wants to build him an interface so he can write programs, I think he will be much happier having that.> 

<Oh! Yes, that seems like a good idea.>

Leareth paces and waits for the appointed time to Gate people over. 

Mhalir tries to leave Cayaldwin alone to work, and focus on rereading his notes, but his innate time-sense is still very thrown off by the lack of any sensory input except words in a file, and every once in a while he asks how much time it's been and how much longer to the Gate.

Eventually he thinks to ask if Cayaldwin can make him, like, a clock, so he can stop being annoying about it. 

He can do that! He has it set up now so Mhalir can use the 'welcome' reaction to interact with his computer system, or to toggle that off and go back to interacting with people, and he can use a different one for Mhalir to request a reading from a clock.

[Should work now]

[You aren't annoying me]

[Oh. Good]

He tries out toggling back and forth, and getting a clock reading. 

[That works, thank you]

[...I feel much - better, when I can talk to you, and I appreciate that.]

[You don't actually have to worry about keeping us happy]

[We're not going to murder you]

[Or leave you alone]

Mhalir isn't sure what to say in response to that. Either it's sincere and so was everything else beforehand, in which case it does fit with the picture he's forming of Cayaldwin - and in that world, with that Cayaldwin, Mhalir actually wants to help - or they're carefully manipulating him and Cayaldwin is following a script to get a cooperative Mhalir. (For some reason; it's hard to imagine why.) There, his incentives are to be friendly and useful anyway.

[I am not scared] he tells Cayaldwin. [Not of that, anyway. Not of you. I am occasionally finding it hard, having such narrow access to the world, but knowing you are there helps and right now I am fine and happy.]

It's true, that he isn't afraid of them anymore. Mostly because there's no scenario where fear would help, and so it seems most adaptive to hook his emotional responses up to the world where what they're telling him is true. It's not hard; he wants it to be true. It seems very implausible, but it was also implausible that anyone would invest the resources to find and run his backup, and that's demonstrably happening and asks for an implausible explanation. He doesn't have enough evidence to confirm it, yet, and so he's still holding onto the quiet uncertainty in the back of his mind, but the rest of him can live in this miraculous, wonderful dream where the war is over and he was sharing a brain with an Andalite researcher and they're going to fix morph and solve death for everyone.

At the appropriate time, Leareth stops pacing and heads for Cayaldwin's work area. <Matirin, I think you should come this time, since it was clearly a mistake not to bring you the last time.> 

<Yes, that seems like a good idea.>

<Cayaldwin, I am going to Gate them over now. Can you warn Mhalir it is time? - Oh, also it did not occur to me, is the computer set up so that humans untrained with Andalite tech can easily use it to talk to him?> He never works in human form anymore and so he's been using Cayaldwin's tail commands for it, since it's a lot faster that way. 

<No it's not but I can - find a keyboard somewhere and hook it up and then it would be?>

<I think that would help.> He waits. Sidles over to lean a bit against Matirin, because somehow even though this is good news, it feels like he needs reassurance about it. 

He goes looking for spare hardware and finds an Earth keyboard and hooks it up. [We are Gating some of your staff over.]

Mhalir has been checking the clock and so he's unsurprised that it's time.

[Thank you]

And Leareth raises a Gate to Mhalir's base, the exact same spot where two months ago he went over with Cayaldwin. It still aches, remembering that, and he isn't sure why. 

And Mhalir's lieutenant and four of his staff members walk through. They're so nervous. They discussed it for a while and they don't have the slightest idea what the Andalites want now but it - probably isn't good news. It usually isn't good news. They are not armed; there wouldn't be much point, and they don't want it to be ambiguous whether they did anything wrong.

Leareth ended up quickly demorphing for this, to be less alarming and more familiar in his usual human form. He nods to them, trying for a reassuring smile, which isn't an expression he's very good at, especially now that he's actually kind of unused to human body language. 

"We have - good but complicated news," he says. "First off, we need to ask you to not share this with anyone aside from the others who were invited but couldn't make it today. I think you'll understand why once we explain." 

And he glances to Cayaldwin. :I think you can explain it better: Cayaldwin did most of the work, here, but that isn't really why; Mhalir's people don't need the detailed technical explanation. But Leareth feels that the same reasoning as before applies. It means more, coming from an Andalite.

And, of course, Cayaldwin is the one who may or may not be reconsidering a commitment he made. 

<Mhalir had a backup. We figured out how to run it. You can talk to him if you want.>

"The backup was made several years ago," he adds. "We have been updating him on the current situation, but he is still catching up, his sensory interface is limited to text which makes this slower. I suspect he is still - suspicious of what we are telling him - but he asked to speak with you." 

Mhalir's lieutenant is also suspicious! "Uh, with all due respect, it seems pretty pointless to have a backup that your staff doesn't know about."

"I understand that. It - makes sense to me, though. I am immortal," this isn't common knowledge on Earth but he thinks Mhalir's staff know although he's not sure, "and I never told anyone about my setup at the start. He might have had some encrypted messages about it, to be sent to you in case of his death, but the circumstances were - sufficiently different from when he set up this system, that it may not have happened. In any case, I knew about it. He discussed it with me when he was in my head and we had complete privacy; he made sure I would be able to find it in the event that the Andalites did end up executing him." 

"Oh. 

We can talk with him by typing on the computer?"

"Yes." 

[Are they here yet] is the most recent thing Mhalir said, up on the screen. 

She reaches for the keyboard. 

[This is Essam-610, Sub-Visser Forty-Three under the command structure recently dismantled. When was this backup made?]

He gives her the date. By the Yeerk calendar, not the Earth one.

[That is approximate. I do not have access to my own notes yet, they are encrypted and I had apparently not given Leareth any instructions about them.]

[You ought remember it. It was when you travelled with me to the secret research base, we brought an engineer from Earth] he can provide the Yeerk's name, [I would have had two days of 'secret meetings' while the brain scan was being done.]

[Obviously I do not remember what happened afterward, but I ought have urgently needed to leave the system for an 'emergency' and returned after several weeks.] 

[I do remember that.]

[There were instructions for in the event of your death but you changed them after the war since the situation had changed.]

[That makes sense.]

[Is that fact something you remember I spoke to you about, or something Leareth said to you just now?]

[You gave me instructions years ago on how to access instructions for in the event of your death. You updated them periodically. After the war when we were awaiting your trial you updated them again since - it would be a pretty different situation than we were initially envisioning. I was not told you had a backup until Cayaldwin made that claim a few minutes ago.]

[I suspect my plan was to have Leareth bring me back secretly if the Andalites' trial resulted in my execution, in which case it would have been better for fewer people to be aware of this.]

[I think it is best to minimize how many people know of it now, since it is convenient that the Andalite government believes I am dead, but I thought that you, and the rest of my staff present for Leareth and Cayaldwin's announcement, had a right to know.]

[I hope my death did not cause too much upheaval for the Yeerk situation on Earth? I am still trying to orient to what our situation here is.]

[People were upset but there's not much they can do.]

[We have been waiting to see whether they go after more people or not.]

[They have not, so far?]

Pause. 

[By they do you mean the Andalite high command, the Andalites command Earth, or only Alloran?]

[The Andalite high command and the Andalite command on Earth.]

[They have been suggesting they intend to conduct trials only for top leadership on each planet but we have not been sure whether to expect them to decide to describe that more expansively.]

[Or to say that everyone has a right to kill their Yeerk or something.]

[They have been pretty reasonable so far but we don't really understand how they arrive at their decisions.]

That...seems like a weird worry to have, in the world where everything Cayaldwin has been saying to him is true, but also Mhalir can see how his staff might be suspicious of really being in that scenario even if they'd been living it for nearly a year, just because it feels so unlikely. 

[Have you asked them how they arrive at their decisions?]

[They debate them but not in a way where anyone says anything they expect other people to disagree with or feel uncomfortable about.]

[Is that how Matirin arrives at his decisions?]

[I am still very confused but based on the notes Leareth has given me, he works well with Matirin, and also I am told that I had great respect for Leareth and thought he was like a much older version of myself somehow, whatever that means]

[This to me indicates that Matirin probably does not make his decisions by listening to Andalite consensus and debate that includes no uncomfortable disagreements, because I cannot imagine an older me getting along with such a person]

[So maybe you should ask Matirin how he makes his decisions]

[And then ask Leareth to give his impression?]

[...I am not actually sure to what extent you trust Leareth, though apparently I did]

[Also I think Cayaldwin is very different from most Andalites in that way and you ought ask him how he thinks about it, maybe?]

[I am sorry, that was a large number of suggestions and I am not sure if any of them are actually helpful]

[You did respect Leareth and think he was an older version of yourself.]

[And he seems trustworthy.]

[I don't think he would let the Andalites decide there can be no more human-Controllers or anything. I don't know if he would have enough authority to object if they decided to prosecute everybody with a rank.]

[One interpretation of your murder is that Leareth and Matirin threw their political influence at getting the trial delayed and the sentence reduced and this was a significant enough shift to Andalite consensus that they were collectively fine with it when instead Alloran murdered you.]

[Because influence can only move people so far.]

[Matirin is very reassuring to talk to but the Andalites find him equally reassuring to talk to, and so does Leareth, I think if anything he's unusually good at not having uncomfortable disagreements.]

[Honestly I think it makes sense for the Andalite consensus to be not very bothered by Alloran murdering me?]

[He is one of their people and I tortured him for twenty years.]

[I expected him to murder me if he ever could. I cannot fault him for it and, if anything, I am impressed he succeeded.]

[I do not think either his decision to kill me, or the Andalites' response to it, are going to be all that indicative of attitudes towards Yeerks who did not take involuntary Andalite hosts.]

[That is not in itself an argument that Yeerks of your rank will not be tried by the Andalite head command, but I do not think the events leading up to and including my death will have increased the likelihood that 'top leadership' will be interpreted expansively.]

[If anything, my death will perhaps have been cathartic for the Andalites as a people.]

[I hope it works out that way.]

[I suppose we will see.]

[Are there other things you wanted to ask me about right now?]

She wants to verify it is him by asking a bunch of questions about things he ought to remember, if it is.

She can ask him questions! He'll answer to the best of his ability. He doesn't have anything to refer to but he has a decent memory for things that he actually was around for and remembers. 

[Did you have questions for us.]

[If you are sufficiently convinced it is me, I would like updates from your side. Leareth shared some messages with me, but he only had your external communications with him in particular.]

[Giving those to me in writing seems more efficient than you standing here typing, Cayaldwin built an interface where I can read text files.]

Pause. 

[I think Cayaldwin may have a question for you too.]

She turns to look questioningly at Cayaldwin. "Mhalir says you, uh, have a question?"

         <Do you wish me to kill Alloran, in light of this.>

"...uh. Did you ask Mhalir?"

         <He prefers that I not.>

"Then, no, we don't want that. I don't think it would improve things at all. And they might blame us."

        <That would be very stupid of them.>

"Well, they're Andalites" would be a very inadvisable thing to say so she doesn't say it. She does type to Mhalir [he asked if we want him to kill Alloran. There isn't some reason to want that I'm not thinking of, is there?]

[I do not think so.] 

[If the situation escalates away from everyone following the laws we will lose. The fleet is dismantled. Most of the Yeerks in hosts are ones with minimal or no role in the invasion.]

[I know.]

[I think murdering Alloran would increase the risk of escalation considerably.]

[Also they'd learn of you if they took Cayaldwin alive or interrogated any of us.]

Somehow, stupidly, he hadn't thought about that. 

[Yes. That would be very bad.] 

"Please don't", she says to Cayaldwin, as steadily as she can when his tail is twitching like that. 

<If you prefer it.> he says coldly in response.

Mhalir, of course, cannot tell at all if they're talking about it right now. He waits to see if anyone is going to enter text into his interface. 

"What kind of computer does he need?"

"He requires 116 petabytes of memory and 180 exaFLOPS to run at a speed that seems subjectively about right. There are probably efficiency gains to be had, I wasn't really prioritizing it."

[Do you want us to have a copy at our base]

Mhalir takes a few seconds to even parse that. 

[You are asking if you should have a copy of me at your base?]

[One moment]

He thinks. 

[I think you ought to have a copy saved, in case there are any surprise orbital strikes on this base or something. I am not sure I would want you to run it, at least not before Cayaldwin has figured out how to improve the interface for doing anything.]

It's stressful, getting used to existing like this, and the other-one-of-him wouldn't be able to talk to Cayaldwin about it.

[Also one of me is probably enough. I am sure we can figure out a way to exchange messages easily.]

[That makes sense. I will ask the Andalites about it.]

[Thank you.] He waits. 

[They can also set it up so we can communicate over the internet, though it won't be perfectly secure.]

[I think that is all right. If we need to exchange perfectly secure communications, you could come here, or I can write something and ask Leareth to bring it over in person.] 

[That makes sense]

[Do you need anything else from us right now?]

He's been going back and forth on it, but - in the scenario where the Andalites are lying to him, the amount of additional leverage that having his notes would give them is - not something that would really change the situation overall. 

[I want my personal notes] he says. [I can give you instructions for where and how to find them. They are encrypted. I would prefer to deal with that myself rather than have you read them.] 

[Of course.]

[I think that is all. Thank you for coming over.]

[Of course.]

[I am glad you are alive.]

[I am glad as well. It seems I owe a great deal to Leareth and Cayaldwin.]

[It seems so.]

[This is Cayaldwin. We are sending them back] he is sent a few minutes later. [I am going to finish setting up the programming interface for you.]

[All right. Thank you. I hope they are somewhat reassured.] It's frustrating that he can't perceive any of the usual subtext from tone and expression; his lieutenant's literal typed words to him are compatible with a large number of possible moods. 

[You could ask Leareth]

[He was probably reading their minds]

[Is Leareth here still?]

Leareth is currently taking down his Gate after having transported the Yeerk staff back to their base. 

[I think Mhalir wants you.]

"Tell him I will be there in two minutes." He finishes taking down the Gate and starts morphing Andalite again. 

Two minutes later he's back at the console. [They trusted your read of our intentions when you were alive before, because you were in our heads regularly, but they were very shaken by your murder, since it indicated you were too optimistic or not careful enough about something and they are not sure what else you may have been wrong about. They do not see that they have many options, though. They cannot think of any way that running you from the backup would be a bad thing but are not sure it is not somehow bad. They trust me more than Cayaldwin and Matirin. Mostly they are - too uncertain to form strong predictions about the future.]

[I wish they were less afraid, but I suppose I cannot be sure, from my current position and information, that the situation does not warrant fear.]

[I know]

Sigh. 

[Do you need anything else from me right now?]

[I do not think so.]

[I will not be far, you can ask for me later if something does come up.]

And he steps back. <Well, I think that went about as well as it could have> he says to Matirin, rather than bother Cayaldwin who's presumably working on Mhalir's interface. He relays approximately the same things he told Mhalir about what he read in their thoughts, in a little more detail since thoughtspeech is less annoying than writing it out. 

<Fair enough. I think that will improve over time as we observably stick to our commitments with respect to voluntary hosts. And don't do more trials.>

<Yes, I agree it will improve with time and more data on our actions.> Tail-shrug. <And I do not expect it ought cause problems in the meantime.> 

<That's good. Thank you.> Sigh. <I hope Cayaldwin and you are able to sort out a way to embody him.>

<I hope so too.> 

[Is Matirin there] Mhalir says, though of course he has no idea who's currently reading it. 

It's configured now to send messages to Cayaldwin and Matirin's brain chips, like they get emails.

[Yes.]

[Matirin, I wanted to ask you a question.]

Now he can't remember the exact wording of what he talked about with Cayaldwin, it'll be in the logs and his notes but then he has to find it, which will be easier soon but right now he feels very weary about it.

[During the leadup to Leareth's capture and my decision to surrender, when you had prepared a contingency plan to kill everyone on Earth and were very close to implementing it, do - you think you made a mistake?]

[We were talking about the Hork-Bajir homeworld, which I have thought of as a mistake on the Andalites' part, but Cayaldwin thought the mistake was not located in willingness to kill large numbers of people.]

[Yes, I was clearly making a mistake there.]

[To be clear once we discovered Leareth it was very unlikely at that point that we would destroy Earth,  because once we'd discovered Leareth it no longer seemed at all likely that the entire galaxy being enslaved forever was a likely outcome. I think from that point on I acted sensibly.]

[But before we landed on Velgarth I was considering it the likeliest outcome that I would end up killing everyone on Earth.]

[I think if we'd been right and Yeerks meant to enslave the whole galaxy and were close to having the resources to win the war and do it, then it would not have been a mistake to go to those lengths to prevent it.]

[And if you are right that you could have managed a post-war transition to only voluntary hosts then it would have been a mistake.]

[And with the information I actually had]

[I should have sent one of my people to you. Someone who knew what we were there to do and did not know any details that could be used to interrupt us. On the off chance - and it seemed absurdly unlikely at the time - that you would come up with something we both preferred to the death of everyone on Earth and could credibly commit to each other we'd implement.]

[I could not myself think of anything we'd both prefer to the death of everyone on Earth and I did think about it a lot. And I couldn't myself think of any way we could coordinate on something even if it was a good idea, with the extraordinary incentives to break such an agreement at the first opportunity. And it seemed that by far the likeliest outcome was that I was sentencing whoever I sent to decades or centuries of torture.]

[But I should hope that if anyone had asked me how likely it was that there was something I hadn't thought of that we could agree on, I would have said it was better than one in a million.]

[And it would not have needed to have more than a nearly-impossible shot at working to have been worth it, with five billion lives on the line.]

[But I am pretty sure I wouldn't have thought of it.]

[So I think that was a mistake.]

[Ah]

Mhalir says nothing else for a long time. 

[I think I ought have tried harder and made more costly sacrifices toward de-escalating. I thought that I did try. But probably I did not try enough.]

[I think there is no single thing you could have done that would have convinced us to stop the war.]

[But there are things that would have been confusing]

[And if we'd been confused we might have been more careful, and less inclined to escalate all the way when cornered]

[If nothing else, I think it would have affected the debate at home about whether to build AGI to try to stop you]

[The people having that debate are the sort of people who are very very attentive to what they are uncertain about and what kinds of uncertain it is]

[Right. I - did not give you very many genuinely confusing data points, I realize now.] 

[...People were considering building AGI to stop us? I did not know that]

[That is rather alarming]

[Yes]

[This is perhaps - reasoning too much from your common history with Leareth]

[Which is kind of an insane thing to do since we don't understand how you are similar or why or in what ways]

[But in his version of the story, when he was winning the war by enough, the other side used an extraordinarily powerful magic superweapon that he did not know they possessed]

[And it was a catastrophe that nearly rendered the planet uninhabitable]

[The parallel is striking, anyway]

Mhalir isn't sure how to reason about that either, it does sound insane, but it's still alarming. 

[Well, I am glad a different thing happened instead.]

[Me too]

[I think it would have been confusing if you had set up a planet of free Hork Bajir]

[Or sent Alloran back]

[Or taken a more open voluntary approach to Earth, though I understand that to not have been your decision in the first place]

[It was not my decision.]

[I think Visser One made many questionable judgement calls, which constrained my later approach.]

[I...would have preferred a voluntary approach on Earth, were it my choice, but I am not sure I would have felt I had the leeway for it.]

[Your other proposals make sense. I do not think I would have thought of them and that seems like a mistake on my part.]

[Well, I did consider sending Alloran back on multiple occasions.]

[It does not matter, though, since I did not do it.]

[You were very afraid of us. That was reasonable given the information you had.]

Mhalir isn't at all sure what to say to that. 

[I was]

On some level he still is. He's just not bothering to actually feel the fear because it's not going to help with anything. 

[I'm sorry.]

[I wish Seerow had not] and it doesn't feel like there's any point in finishing that sentence. 

[Yeah.]

[Thank you for talking to Cayaldwin about murdering Alloran.]

[Did he end up agreeing not to? I could not actually hear the conversation.] 

[I think so. I will press him on it more tomorrow, it wouldn't be a good idea to do so right now.]

[Right] 

[I think that is all I wanted to talk to you about, unless you had anything else] 

[I don't think so]

[I'm glad to have you back]

What is he even supposed to say to that. It feels especially odd because he isn't, really, the Mhalir who Matirin knew before. 

[That is good to hear]

[Let me know if anything else comes up]

[I will] 

Mhalir goes back to poking at his notes. 

[Cayaldwin are you there] he says a minute later, [I had some ideas about how to set up a programming interface - ]

<What did he want to talk to you about?> Leareth asks, curiously. <...You do not have to tell me, if it is private I will not read the logs either.> 

[Whether I thought I'd made a mistake in being prepared to kill everyone on Earth. It had come up while he was speaking with Cayaldwin, I think. You are welcome to read the logs as far as I am concerned, though I don't know if Mhalir wants them secret. He does not know how well you know him, after all.]

<He can probably deduce that I knew the him-who-died quite well, but - yes.> Mental sigh. <It seems to me that he is coping quite well with being a brain in a computer? I think I would have substantially more claustrophobia about it. I suppose Yeerks have fewer senses in their native form.>

<I am not sure he'd tell us if he was very miserable but yes, it probably helps a lot that he was a Yeerk to start.>

<Does he have incentives not to tell us? It does not seem obvious we would be more likely to shut him down if we knew he were miserable, even in the hypothetical where we are manipulating him for our own gain, and obviously in the actual situation we will listen to his expressed preferences on it. ...I think I have been fairly honest with you in the past about whether I was miserable but I suppose you might disagree on that.> 

<I would mostly expect him to decide that actually it is unhelpful to be miserable, that is what you would do.>

<...I mean, yes, that is what I would do. Quite often it works? And I think when it is not working I will eventually try something different, such as asking someone for help with it, so hopefully that is also true of him.> 

He nods. His tail curls around Leareth's. <I think he'll be all right. Eventually.>

<I think so too. He is good at - figuring out a way that something can work.> Leareth leans against Matirin. <I wish he had not needed to, but - at least we still have him at all. I - did not entirely fail him.> 

<You did not.>

<He seems to be more comfortable talking to Cayaldwin than me> Leareth says after a moment. <I - am not hurt, exactly, that would not help with anything, but it is confusing.> 

<It makes sense that he would have more of a concept of - what it would even look like for him to have a good relationship with an Andalite morph researcher - than a concept of how he related to you. Once he can - meet you properly - I expect that'll change. Maybe sooner, if you talked to him more about your history in Velgarth.>

<I should do that. And give him more of my notes, maybe, I did not want to overwhelm him right away but once he has a better interface for it...>

<Yes. I bet he will be happy to have people talking to him.>

<I expect so. Many of my pre-war notes are not even digitized, but I suppose I can start working on fixing that.> 

And Leareth will do that. 

Mhalir talks to Cayaldwin and tries out various changes to his interface and once it's in a somewhat more workable state he wants to hear more about the research they did. That his other self did, whatever. 

Cayaldwin can start getting him caught up on it! It's hard without any of the visualization software but he'll do his best. He will do this at all hours; he doesn't seem to do any other things.

[Are you going to sleep at some point] Mhalir, who is still pinging his clock every so often, eventually asks. [I think when one is biological and not uploaded onto a computer, it is important for intellectual performance to sleep?] 

[I guess if I were doing anything important]

For several seconds Mhalir has no idea how to respond to that or feel about it. 

[It is obviously up to you what you assess as important] he says finally, [but on my end, I would like to have a body, and then to fix morph, and so I will at least register a polite request that you take actions such as sleeping that might cause this to happen sooner.]

[Won't you be lonely]

[I will manage. I have a great deal of reading material to occupy me. Also I think Matirin said he was planning to set up shifts, so I could talk to Leareth for a while instead.] 

[I guess.]

[I'll continue tomorrow then.]

[All right.]

He sleeps. He picks up with his explanation in the morning.

Mhalir spends some of the night talking to Leareth and the rest of it reading Leareth's corpus of notes while Leareth sleeps beside the console, with the computer set to make a noise if Mhalir tries to talk to him.

[Cayaldwin?] he says, interrupting Cayaldwin's explanation. [Did you know that Leareth was originally going to fight the gods in Velgarth by building his own AGI which for some reason he was going to do by murdering ten million people.]

[Yes! He can just use electricity instead, though.]

[Oh. That seems preferable. Do - you think it is otherwise a good idea? It seems risky.] 

[It is risky. Not as bad as the thing we were considering doing because it should mostly only be able to affect Velgarth, and because there are already a dozen unaligned instances of the thing, but it is risky. I have not personally looked at his research but I know he has gone over some of the AI theory our researchers have.]

[Do you know if he has a timeline planned for when to build it?]

[I don't know. Might depend how much offense the gods take at the satellites.]

[Is he expecting that? I am still not entirely caught up on the records he gave me, but based on the gods' past behaviour, that sounds potentially very concerning.] 

[I don't know]

[I generally don't follow politics anyway and I haven't been doing anything but working on the backup since you died]

[Oh] 

[That is fine, I will ask him. We can go back to your explanation now.]

He will explain some more. There is a lot of research to catch Mhalir up on.

Elsewhere, Leareth spends a while just relaxing in the field. It's been a very relentless two months, and there's a lot of work still ahead but it feels less pressed, now.

He gets out his computer and looks at his long-neglected classwork; he's going to end up having to rejoin with the next session, he dropped it entirely to help Cayaldwin. He doesn't really feel like reviewing it right now, though. He reads the human news. It's mildly interesting, some of it's funny, he saves some to show Vanyel later. 

...Eventually he remembers the thing he meant to look up at some point months ago, but that seemed stupidly low-priority compared to everything else, which is: how is Andalite sex actually supposed to work, he still doesn't really feel like he knows the answer and at this point it's been way too long for him to feel like asking Matirin about it. 

The internet can answer that for him! It turns out there is no way at all that he was going to guess how Andalite sex, uh, originally works, since firstly he and Matirin both have male Andalite bodies and secondly Andalites don't actually have reproductive sex anymore and haven't for a century. Andalite reproduction evolved adversarially, more than human reproduction did; the male sex organ is sharp and springloaded and stabs their partner in the underbelly and deposits gametes into the open injury. The female reproductive organ used to be close to the skin, but over time it moved farther away, as a defense mechanism; now it sits, by default, about four inches from the skin, but it can be coaxed closer by stimulation of the erogenous zones on the underbelly. It needs to be fairly close for insemination to be successful, so female Andalites won the reproductive arms race, in a manner of speaking. 

Wow he would not have guessed that at all! Also it seems very good that they don't have to do it anymore!

...Leareth isn't particularly drawn to read more about that topic and will instead see if he can find anything on how Andalites, er, do non-reproductive sexual activities for fun. 

He can find lots of content on that, much of it meant to be explanatory, a fair share of it encompassing territory he has not yet had the opportunity to explore.

Leareth will curiously read about it for a while and then bookmark it for later and move on to actual work, and then swing by the work area where Mhalir is currently installed to see if Cayaldwin wants a break to do something else. 

Cayaldwin is unfamiliar with and vaguely offended by the concept of breaks.

Well, he doesn't have to! Leareth would like some turns to talk to Mhalir too, though, ideally not in the middle of the night, does Cayaldwin mind if he hangs out here and does that while Cayaldwin is working? 

That seems fine, Cayaldwin can work on other things than getting Mhalir up to speed.

Leareth spends some time answering Mhalir's questions about the content of his notes, most of them god-related, and making a list of additional material to track down and digitize for him. 

He is going to take breaks whenever he wants to, because it's been a long, stressful two months and nothing is currently on fire. 

Existing is a lot more pleasant now that he has a more usable interface. Mhalir wants his own access to the human Internet next, so he can catch up on relevant news that way without needing someone to curate it for him. 

[I would not mind being paused for a few hours at night] he tells Cayaldwin eventually. [At this point I am just confident you will turn me back on again in the morning and so it is not scary.] Last night was...fine, mostly, but he did keep feeling very tempted to wake Leareth just to feel less outside-of-reality. 

He can set up the interface with the human internet.

[If you're sure]

[I can set it to automatically turn back on in the morning if you'd like]

[I am surprised you trust us already honestly]

[I wouldn't]

[...I do not trust you fully in general. It just seems unlikely to be in your interests to pause me at my request and then not ever turn me back on, when you have spent all this time setting up systems for me and catching me up on research, and so I do not feel as though suggesting that makes my situation any less secure than whatever it already is.] 

[That makes sense]

[I'll set it up with the timer]

[Is it going to be very noticeable, the pause and restarting? I am not sure what to expect.] 

[I would think not noticeable at all. If it is I can probably change that, it'd be because of how operations are queued.

[or I could explain what I'd do to fix it and you could implement it if you wanted.]

[Can you test it now? Just pause and restart in a minute, say, and I will tell you if I notice anything.]

He does this.

[Restarted.]

[...I do not think that felt like anything.]

[I might actually prefer it if it did feel like something.]

[It is somewhat disconcerting if skipping multiple hours is not subjectively noticeable.]

[I could probably come up with a way to do that]

[It might involve losing your train of thought or something though]

[I guess I can revert back to here if something really bad results but it's not ideal]

[Hmm, as long as I get warning when I am about to be paused, I think losing my train of thought is not bothersome, I can make sure to wrap up anything important.] 

[It might be nice if the clock could be set to ping me the time when I am un-paused?]

[I can do that easily.]

[Thank you.] 

And now Mhalir can be switched off automatically for the local nighttime, and HOPEFULLY this means Cayaldwin will SLEEP, but Mhalir doesn't nag him about it because probably this will not help. 

He sleeps a little bit eventually but he hasn't been sleeping well since Mhalir died, it's not just wanting to talk to Mhalir that is keeping him up. 

<Do you think>, he says to Leareth, <you could write a paper on the possibility of using your approach to de-nothliting people to embody someone from a backup, and open research questions relevant to pulling it off?>

<And obtain some input from other Andalite researchers without needing to reveal any specifics about Mhalir? Yes, I can do that.>

<Yes, exactly. Plus once the idea is circulating we can get everybody to go scan themselves. It seems very upsetting for them to die now when we're almost definitely going to have it sooner or later.>

<Right, yes, that makes sense. I can start working on that.> 

<Thank you.> Happy swish. 

<I assume there is no point in backing you up since your - other thing - will happen anyway?>

Leareth goes very still for a moment. 

<...I mean, I could dismantle my other method> he says eventually. <I - want to, eventually. It kills people. It...would be terrifying, I have to admit, to do so only on the assurance that I have a brain scan record, which could be destroyed or just never run if all of my friends also die, and which would make my revived self forever dependent on having a large computer and electricity to run and such. Though it has other advantages, like keeping all of my memories...> His tail lashes. <I am not sure. I ought give it some thought.> 

<I understand. At first you are likely to be the only person who can set up a morph-link and give a person from a backup a body, anyway.>