"- anchored in place by metal bonds and have the food forcibly inserted into their mouths while they scream.  Actually, that seems to me like a strong counterargument that masochism occupies a natural continuum with spicy food.  I've never heard of anybody in dath ilan forming such a powerful spicy food preference that they needed to be restrained in place and forced to eat the meal while they screamed... though I guess it could be very rare, or maybe treated as a failure of intertemporal bargaining..."

"...I think we're having very different conversations. When you say 'optimize masochism' what do you mean?"

"I should not in fact think about that.  I am a little worried about how much flashes of the video I saw are leaking through my attempts not to think about them."

"Do you need, like, a therapist? ...you'd probably be horrified by the practice of therapy somehow. Do you need psionic memory deletion."

"Temporary psionic memory suppression, if I can - remember abstractly what it is that I'm not remembering - is sounding like a buttcheek more of a good idea than it would usually sound to me.  I'll probably be all right but I don't actually know, I have not read studies on what happens when naive subjects are exposed to images of people in extreme pain.  It is not a kind of study that we would do even for the sake of science."

"I don't suppose it would help if I, like, tracked down the actors, sent the sub a letter, asked her to confirm it was fine?"

"It - might.  This is new ground for me.  I want to say that it would constitute updating in a predictable direction, if you can show me evidence whose impact on me I can predict in advance, but it is very much possible that a deep part of me just believes she is dead."

Isabella grabs the computer, looks through the history, finds the video (muted, with the screen turned away from Thellim), and does some searching around. "- okay, her pseudonym is Linsee Harp, or I guess that could be her real name but it's probably not, and she has a Twitter and has posted six times today, although she mostly posts, uh, more porn, so you probably don't want to look. I'll send her a Twitter message."

"I suspect that I'd need to talk to her in live video in order to - believe anything, in that part of me that doesn't already believe things."

"I'll ask if she'll Skype you." Type type type... "...she will Skype you for fifty dollars, I'll comp you fifty dollars."

She doesn't want to do this.  It's really going to trigger Video memories.

"All right, let's try it and see what happens."

Isabella sets up the Skype call. "I'm telling her you came from a weird cult, it explains why you'd be so freaked out and doesn't invite a ton of further questions and will discourage her from hitting on you."

And here's video of Linsee Harp, pigtailed and sipping a smoothie and looking in perfect health.

Yep, part of Thellim definitely thought this person was dead, all right.  Before the world seemed horrible, but coherent.  Now the world just seems inconsistent, like she's in the middle of an educational-prank that's being revealed.  Thellim's brain seems split between thinking the Video must be a lie, and thinking that this video must be a lie.  Nice video-call technology, though.

"Hello," Thellim says.  She's still having trouble thinking of how to ask any of the things she wants to ask.

"Hey hon!" says Linsee Harp, brushing her bangs out of her eyes. "Sorry my vid scared ya! They wind up all over the place. Did yer friend tell you how to do safe search, I think that's pretty good?"

"Wait, you can just directly turn off infohazards in the search function?  How?"  Thellim is genuinely annoyed that this was not mentioned to her... well, maybe it's obscure enough that Isabella didn't know.

"It's in the settings, so kids don't see porn, but it'll work for you too! Anyway, I'm fine, hon, camera 'n editing makes it look more intense than it is and Master's always watching for my safe-sign and they're all screened for diseases 'n stuff."

"Safe... sign."

"Oh, yeah, it's like a safeword but it works when I can't talk! I just go like so -" She makes a gesture with the hand that's not holding the smoothie. "And then Master and whoever else we invited on set all cut it out sharpish and give me ice cream. 'S actually the only time I get ice cream so Master's not worried I won't do it if I gotta."

"So you could have made it stop at any time.  But you didn't."  There goes Thellim's implicit model of the whole thing as some kind of sheer massive failure of intertemporal self-bargaining.  "Why the metal clamps if you - if they didn't need to hold you down - I don't understand."

Thellim tells her Noticing Confusion detectors yelling 'I defy this data' to shut up long enough to hear this out.  It's not going to be a lie, the literary conceit of this unreal world is obviously going to have whatever she hears next be the truth.

"Oh, just 'cause I'm wiggling don't mean I want it to end, hon, they gotta lock me up nice and tight to hold me still," Linsee laughs. "Sorta like being tickled, you ever try to hold still for somebody tickling you? Or tickle a li'l kid, they'll kick and roll away but come right back. Also it's fun by itself, sometimes Master snugs me up in something when we're watching a movie and we don't even have sex about it."

This is like some bizarre-thought-experiment on how awful you can make a scene and then try to justify it afterwards.

Actually it's really really like a bizarre-thought-experiment.  Too pointlessly extreme for anybody in dath ilan to consider good practice to write about - you can almost always make the point in thought experiments without the extreme torture or the rape or whatever, and students with possible edgelord tendencies are specifically cautioned about that - but if you imagine somebody not being warned about that, then this reads eerily exactly like the kind of thought experiment they'd come up with.  Suppose you saw a woman bonded in place and hurt and screaming, now, what kind of elaborate backstory could somebody come up with to excuse that?  And the answer is that some thought experiments have no apparent purpose except to damage your emotions and deontology and you shouldn't go along with their premises.

It is very like that.  To the point where Thellim almost has a horrible feeling that she knows where she is inside reality.  Next, the inhuman superbeing responsible for the eclipses will materialize and offer her insane, contrived choices.

- no.  Thellim forces herself to focus.  It is not, quite, a foregone conclusion that she has correctly identified her story's new genre.

"Did you consent to the sexual part of it?  Explicitly?"

"I been married five years, he doesn't make me fill out paperwork every time about it, hon, he knows me real well. Some places make you record a scene negotiation first but I don't think there's one for the vid you saw. But it was all fine by me, and I could tell him we hadta reschedule if I was feeling off."

"Please - forgive me my ignorance and stupidity.  But if you imagine that I'm an alien and furthermore I just had all my memories about anything relating to submission or masochism psionically erased in an eclipse accident - and that's closer to the truth than you may realize, so please take that really really literally - is there anything you could say to - to explain all this - to somebody whose reaction to the video was to wonder if you could still be rescued?  I just don't understand what it could be like from the inside to, to be screaming, to need to be held down, and to have a sign that would make it stop, and not use that sign.  Unless they were threatening to kill your children but I know by now that's not going to be the answer."

"- well, I like it, hon. Feels - floaty and exciting at the same time - an' I get off on it, obviously - you ever stand around in an outfit without pockets and realize you don't know what to do with your hands, I feel like that a lot, goes away if I'm tied up. If I go a while without getting wailed on - like we had to stop when I was pregnant, for months and months - I get all itchy, kinda, and feel like I'm gonna forget what it's like to be all in my body and none in my head. The screaming just kinda happens, you know, people get like that even when it doesn't hurt at all when they're having sex."