In an ordinary Midwestern suburb is an ordinary two-bedroom house containing an ordinary couple. One of them has a plate of chicken and green beans and the other is kneeling beside him with his hands tied behind his back, opening his mouth to receive a green bean.
[It is more expensive, telepathy works fine, if you handled the airport you can probably handle a hotel, do you... especially want to play computer games before bed?]
[I know I must sound like a terribly lawful person, but in fact I am not such a pure, sweet, perfectly-coordinated person that I'm not curious about what kind of computer games a civilization develops when it doesn't care about infohazards or superstimuli! But mostly I was envisioning - standard social scripts for starting friend-business-partner-mutual-dependency relationships with people?]
[I don't mostly go for puzzle games, I like civilization-builders, and I'm a little worried that if I introduce you to Civ you will form a grand theory about how Earth is broken because it has Civ.]
[Don't worry! When I fix your Earth it will be a perfect multidimensional improvement that makes all agents better off simultaneously according to their own preference functions! You just watch me! So what is this 'Civ', hmm?]
[...well, you, uh, start out as a very small culture and there are some AI-controlled other cultures, or you can multiplayer it but you don't have a computer, and then you try to keep your culture afloat and accomplishing things while negotiating conflicts of interest with the others.]
[Your computer games are so advanced that you can negotiate with factions inside them? Why, that does sound like it might be secretly responsible for much that is different about your world!]
[It's not THAT sophisticated, it doesn't parse natural language or anything, but you can try it if you like.]
[I really am interested in playing computer games! And similar new-friend activities like having you show me your interesting-favorite foods at our next meal, so you can see my expressions while I react. But please stop me if I'm about to socially impose in a way you find at all unpleasant. I really do not know your equivalent of the protocol for aspiring friends establishing comparable scales of desire and then comparing notes on how much they want various things in order to make sure they don't end up off their multiagent-optimal frontier.]
[I'm not sure we have... anything like that at all... but we do have food and I am absolutely stopping to eat once we're off the subway, do you want pasta-and-tomatoes or rice-and-fish?]
[Whichever seems more likely to be an exotic delight to a stranger from another world!]
[Sushi it is.]
They get off at Isabella's subway stop and she shows Thellim to a sushi place, where they can sit at the bar and behold raw fish. The guy behind the counter seems to know Isabella, asks her "the usual?" and gets a "yeah, plus a sampler for her". Thellim gets an assortment of slices of fish on pats of rice and also an avocado cucumber roll. Isabella gets a giant bowl of rice covered in raw fish and drizzled with mayo and sprinkled with fish eggs, plus a side of edamame and a few shrimps tempura.
Nom! It's not the tastiest thing she's ever eaten but it seems noticeably outside the space of supposedly-wildly-creative dath ilani food variations in some way that's hard to describe! Now this is a proper interdimensional adventure.
Isabella puts away her food very efficiently, pays by card, gets a complimentary matcha ice cream mochi for both of them to munch as they walk back to Isabella's apartment. "It's freezing out!" she tells the guy. "The better to appreciate your warm home!" he replies cheerfully. He has an accent. She eats her dessert.
"The food actually is different from anything on Earth - no, do not translate that, brain. It is subtly different from anything in dath ilan. And tasty! I will chalk that up as minor evidence for your worries about insufficient internal variance in dath ilan. We do have debates about that, you know, and different people have different opinions and everything!"
"Yeah, this is why I was switching to the phrase meta-culture." Here is Isabella's apartment building. It has a doorperson. Isabella nods to her and she nods back and peers at Thellim. "Who's this?"
"Thellim, you can let her in if she's by herself too," Isabella says.
"Yes ma'am," says the doorperson.
"Thanks for taking care of me!" Thellim says to the doorperson. Hopefully she didn't give off any wrong or just misleading social cues by saying that? Then Thellim follows slightly behind Isabella, a natural optimization for following somebody else when you're not sure of the forward path you're taking. Along the way, she absentmindedly brushes her long hair back over her shoulder.
"Sorry," Thellim continues the previous conversation, "I must have missed it when you first said meta-culture instead of monoculture - I don't think it's a standard word in the vocabulary I was given. But I think I rather like it? Meta-culture is exactly what we try to have. Different ideas, one language; people buy what they want, in one currency and transaction system; experimental regions try different things and argue about the meanings of the outcomes, but they report their likelihood functions with respect to the same hypothesis spaces for ease of multiplication."
"No... idea? I've never heard of that being necessary? I don't think the interaction graph between language-users clusters enough for that? I could see how you'd have to coordinate against that before radio had been invented, but we're well past radio."
"I guess that's what I would have expected too if I lived before substantial communications technology but it turns out not to work that way. Like, Americans can understand Brits and vice-versa but there are definite differences."
"Huh! I don't think we've run into that problem - maybe because our population was barely approaching one billion, we were going to celebrate the milestone soon - but I expect that if it started happening, we'd have a big debate about whether dialects are glorious diversity or dangerous meta-protocol corruption. I'd probably vote on the first side if the dialects still had a very easy time understanding each other, and there were no famous catastrophes being caused by 'yes' in one language meaning 'no' in the other. If the concerned side won the vote by a supermajority, we'd probably try... finding people with very central dialects and favoring their careers in radio and television? That's just me thinking very briefly, we'd actually run a big prediction market about what the results would be if we tried the top twenty-four strategies under consideration."
"As far as you're aware nobody's had to vote on this in the history you're allowed to know about?"
"Not that I recall! To be clear, I wouldn't be surprised at all if there was a debate before I was born, or if there's a bunch of Very Serious People in the background half of whom are yelling about the importance of hiring more people from the linguistic centroid of Civilization to prevent drift, and the other half of whom are saying that we should underweight the Great City in hiring journalists because the Great City contains too little interesting variance relative to its population. Any time you strike a balance right it shouldn't be surprising if half the Very Serious People end up arguing on either side of it."
"Is... Very Serious Person... I assume you have some less silly sounding name for them and it's just translating that way... is that, like, a job, or what."