And then Othrem finds himself naked, in a damp blind-dark space, and with what feels like rough rocky stone under his feet.

He was not particularly expecting to find himself anywhere at all, be it very clear.  It wasn't going to be the kind of plane crash where they can find your head afterwards and freeze it.

"Did I just get isekaied."

"Tsi-imbi."

"HI!  IS ANYONE THERE?"

Finally! Oh, this is exciting. Inga has been dutifully taking her shifts as Cave Monitor, as one of the newest members of the enclave, but it's a pretty dull job most days. She uses the time to write and to study, mostly, but of course she is prepared to spring into action. She doesn't need to consult the playbook. Time is of the essence!

She alerts her secondary, pulls on her reflective vest, makes sure the two-way radio is on her belt and powered, grabs a flashlight and a clothing-bundle, and out the door she goes. It's less than two minutes to the mouth of the cave, if she hustles.

She hustles.

When she gets there, she calls out the standard New Arrival Greeting.

"Hello! Welcome! I am friendly and you are safe! I have clothing for you!"

In the early years, they experimented with putting a speaker directly in the cave, but they found that inbound arrivals reacted better to a friendly face than to a disembodied voice, after what they'd just been through.

He's been fumbling around in what is evidently a cave, in the dark, in the damp, in the moderate chill, trying to make his way upward or toward breezes whilst being very careful where he places his feet in case of Suddenly Hole.

The sight of possible rescue is tentatively welcome.  The words would be "surprising" if Othrem was not already so surprised as to be running on all zero probabilities anyway.  There's something already here and it speaks Baseline.  Was that Baseline, or did his memories get swapped around, is he understanding a new language without realizing that?  He focuses his attention on the particular syllables of "clothing" and either that was Baseline or a lot of his memories got swapped around.

Possibilities:  (1) Other dath ilani have already arrived here, (2) this is a dath ilani, (3) they already read out the contents of his mind's language centers, (·) all other possible shit.  (·) is getting more probability mass right now than it usually does.

"Hello!  Thanks for having me over!  I too am friendly as a default!  Clothing would be welcome!"

"You must have so many questions! I will refrain from pre-emptively answering them, in case I give the answers in a disorienting order! I will instead wait for you to actually ask!" This was covered in the playbook.

"Ah, right, here are the clothes. They probably won't fit very well, we never know who we're going to get, but they're better than nothing."

She hands over the bundle. It contains a very large sweatshirt, some boxer shorts, sweatpants, and a pair of flip-flops.

"Don't worry, we won't have far to go before we can find you something better."

Huh.  Weird.  He would've figured they'd have had much more time to figure out optimal presentation orders for information under better conditions.  Maybe the range of people these people run into is wider than dath ilan and different presentation orders work better for different arrivals?

Mostly though he's focusing on changing into clothing rather than composing his own questions list.

"I guess if I had to pick a top question, it would be something like, are there any timers burning down?  Processes already in motion where I need to learn about those particular things quickly."

"Oh, no, absolutely not, we wouldn't do that to you! We have an entire New Arrivals program designed to help you integrate as comfortably as possible."

"The only timer is, of course, your internal sense that nothing is right and nothing makes any sense any more and that you have to rebuild everything from scratch and that this is deeply unfair. And that you have to figure everything out under adverse conditions with inadequate infrastructure, in a bafflingly backward world."

Inga has a sinking dread that she has gone off script in a worrying direction but isn't entirely sure how to fix it. She's pretty sure she's saying too much and should try to stop talking, but she can't just stop there.

"That feeling is normal, but we will do our best to help you with it!"

"Hmm.  You might be seriously overestimating my intelligence.  From only the data I'd seen so far, I had not successfully worked out that I should be worried about 'nothing being right' or 'adverse conditions', until you just now reassured me about it.  Though, I mean, to not understate my intelligence, I had worked out that I was probably rebuilding things from scratch."

"Oh! We don't, like, live in caves. We should head back to the enclave! I'm sure you've had enough of being outdoors!"

And she'll start to lead him out of the cave and back to the nearby door of the monitoring station, unless he looks reluctant in any way?

No, he'll follow.  If giving him clothes and leading him out of a dark cave is the first step in the plan of a Dark Conspiracy, he's not going to figure it out while he's got this little information.

She's right about the outdoors thing, definitely.

And some few minutes later - for they are not hustling, in this direction - the new arrival seems uncomfortable with flip-flops? - they are approaching the outside of the monitoring station.

Flipflops are not familiar to him.  There's higher-tech ways to put things quickly on and off feet, if you go as hard on optimizing that problem as a market ought to go when the benefits are being sold to one billion people with two billion feet.

...and that sure is not normal architecture.  Not the weirdest building he's ever seen, of course.  But definitely Deliberately Diverse Architecture rather than Carefully Optimal Architecture; or it would be, in his native Architecture Distribution.

"So what sort of world is this?"  There's probably a cleverer way to narrow down that question but eh.

What kind of world is this. That is such a good question. Inga wishes she had a catalogue of all possible world-types, with their relative frequencies, and a sensible type system for them, such that she could efficiently answer this question in a satisfying way.

Alas, she knows only of her own world and of this one, and two points is not enough to fill out an entire world-type-system.

"I can't really put it in context with any sort of larger possibility-space. All I can say is, it's not like home. It's wilder and stupider and more chaotic and unkind than home, though of course it could be worse. It is always easy to imagine far, far worse. And we've done our best to create a little pocket of familiarity and home, and we're improving that little pocket all the time."

"I am very sorry about the circumstances that brought you here, whatever those were, and for the tremendous upheaval and loss you are probably going through, but I will admit that part of me is glad that you, and every new arrival, are here. The more of us there are, the better we can build a sensible environment here on this world."

As she says this, they arrive at the monitoring station and she holds open the door to let him in.

'Not like home'?  That sounds like she expects all arrivals to be from the same place, in which case she speaks Baseline because she's from dath ilan... or her parents/ancestors were from dath ilan... or maybe, she expects them to both come from some much larger continuum, that this place is still not like?

But he doesn't have time to formulate a careful question about that and ask it, because he is stepping inside the Houselike Object and looking around to gather info that way.

Inside is an entryway where they can leave their shoes and put on slippers. The entryway opens into a larger room, mostly empty but for a few comfortable chairs. The room has five doors (plus the one they just entered through).

"Okay, now you have some choices! What do you most need at this moment? I have different resources behind these doors."

"This first door on the left is a bedchamber with a desk and some writing materials. You can go in there and be alone if you would like to regulate yourself and process what has happened so far."

"The second door leads to a room for handling toilet and grooming activities. I will probably need to explain the fixtures, but if you want that room, let me know and I'll show you how it works."

"The third door leads to a room for preparing and eating food. I'll probably need to help you with that as well."

"The fourth room is my room - at least, when I'm on duty here. It's the room for whoever is running the monitoring station. And the fifth room is the office, for working and listening for new arrivals."

"Oh, and of course we can stay in this room and you can continue to ask me questions!"

"I do need to take just a moment and let my team know that I've safely collected you, but after that, we can take care of whatever is your top priority."

He is not currently hungry nor does he need to visit the washroom, and the concept that anyone in his actual position would be ready to start processing using a notebook rather than asking more questions first, is making him increasingly worried that she incorrectly expects him to be either much smarter or have a lot of additional information in his prior.  And he is not sure what, exactly, he ought to be doing about that.

"Notify your team, check.  After that, I think additional questions, like the 'chaos' and 'unkindness' thing."

If she describes a world that sounds exactly like dath ilan, but which to her, seems very chaotic and unkind, then that'll be reassuring in some dimensions, but also worrying in other dimensions about his own reception here.

"Great! Happy to do that."

"Just so I can tell my team: What is your name, age, previous occupation, and home city?"

"Othrem, 25, onsite robot repair for not very complicated robots, small town of about 2000 people called Trampolines-by-the-Water."

If he just blew some sort of cover, well, he wasn't about to start lying.

This all sounds very reasonable to Inga!

"Perfect, thanks! Be right back."

She'll disappear into the office and send a brief report to her team, containing Othrem's basic identifying information and her own impressions so far.

He's especially eager for information and seems less disoriented and upset than I was expecting, based on my training, but I guess he's my first one so what do I know. His questions are further down the question-frequency list.

I think I'm doing okay and don't need backup yet. I think I can keep an ear on the cave while I talk to him; he seems stable enough that, in the unlikely event we have another arrival right away, I can leave him here for a bit and he'll be fine.

Will definitely be ready for shift change as scheduled though.

She sends that off, receives an acknowledgment and no corrections, and returns to the main room.

"So... you have more questions! About... chaos and unkindness, I think? What kind of information are you looking for?"

"Can you give me three examples of local chaos and local unkindness respectively?"

If he asks 'how chaotic exactly' he's worried she'll quantify her answer in standard Chaos Units that he is supposed to already know about.

Sure, Inga can do that. Thank goodness he's not a local, or he'd be asking for the most chaotic and the most unkind thing she'd seen. Why do they do that, it's so awful.

"So of course these will just be examples, not guaranteed to be representative or median or whatever, just examples that come to mind. And I will restrict myself to things I have personally witnessed, rather than things that I have heard about from others in the enclave, or seen on news reports. And bear in mind that I am relatively new here myself and have mostly stayed within the enclave, so I have only a little direct experience of this world to draw from. With all those caveats in mind..."

"Chaos:"

"Example one: I went to a local library to obtain special-interest-obsession-feeding picture books for the preschool-faction-of-my-childcare-collective and found that the books were instead organized by ... "bedtime stories" and "read-alouds" and ... well I guess that was any kind of organizational system but it felt like they deeply misunderstood the principle of primary-user-primary-axis?"

"Example two: Sometimes the electricity stops because trees fall on the 'power lines'. Sometimes it stops for days. I can understand this happening a few times, but it has happened to me once already, in less than a year of living here, and I wasn't going to report hearsay but I hear that it happens more years than not! How have they not fixed this yet?"

"Example three: It would take too long to explain how they elect governments here, it's very complicated and we'll have a whole optional module on that for you when you get deeper into orientation, but I'll just say that winner-take-all, plurality-voting is very common and it is not even the worst thing that happens."

"I think maybe I should stop there before I get into the unkindness examples."

-----

NOTE: Struck-through words sound like gibberish to Othrem.

...huh.  Those sure are some conlang words that she expects him to already know.

Or, you know, since he apparently just DIED and stuff, something much much stranger is going on.

"Is there a known-to-you explanation for why they haven't designed an electrical grid with redundant connections, or why they can't vote to change the voting system?"

"My older-wiser-mentor-figures would probably not like it if I just say BECAUSE THEY ARE VERY STUPID HERE so I won't say that, but I can't really rule out that as the reason. We have had some trouble gathering reliable information about average intelligence on this world as compared to home, because we don't have any local expertise about how it was measured at home and we have not yet managed to create trustworthy instruments of our own, and we find the local instruments dubious at best. Anyway, they are definitely not as smart."

"Anyway, to give a more nuanced and less judgy answer - I don't really know, but I think they have not fully grasped the principle of superlinear-returns-at-high-levels-of-infrastructural-reliability, and so they keep muddling along with what they think is good enough. Or maybe their civilization truly can't afford the higher reliability because their economy is so leaky. I'm not really sure. Some other folks who have been here longer and specialize in civilizational-adequacy-improvement can probably give you better answers."

"As for the voting system... I think they can in theory vote to change their own voting system but the way to do that is so insanely complicated that literally all of them have better things to do."

-----

NOTE: Some complicated phrases come through just fine, somehow.

"Is there an understanding of a full story that ends in this unpleasant way, or is the path to unpleasantness significantly confusing and mysterious to you rather than merely having some unknown latent parameters?"

"Uh... come again? I didn't understand that."

Uh oh.  Was one of HIS words just a mysterious conlang word to her...  Which one would that have been, though, he wasn't using any complicated words.

He'll try to rephrase while using different words and hope he doesn't do it again.

"Do you feel like you basically know how this world got to be that way, or is it to you like the hidden and probably terrible secret of a novel the protagonist hasn't figured out?"

Okay, that's still kind of a weird question, but Inga thinks she mostly gets what he's asking.

"I personally do not have a well-developed theory of how this world got to be this way, other than 'slightly stupider people,' and that seems to me to be a sufficient explanation? I do not know physics here to be any different, for example."

"I am not sure what you are getting at with the whole 'novel' thing. Do you... think you're in a novel?"

The playbook did say to be encouraging and validating even if the new arrival had weird ideas.

Inga's never had a weird idea in her life, all of her ideas are very normal, and all her family and friends back home were pretty normal too. But Othrem's from a pretty small town. Maybe they also selected for weirdness.

Obviously not in the sense of letters on a computer screen, but some sort of generalized novel complicated enough to support consciousness does seem like an obvious thought?  She seems to be replying as if she already knows that to not be true, though?

"No, I wasn't intending to import that aspect of novels from the analogy that used novels!  I just mean, are you, from your own perspective, inside a mysterious situation or a known one, with respect to this planet having nonredundant power lines.  Like... the sort of mystery where there's enough room in it for the answer to be, 'There's aliens we didn't previously know about mind-controlling people', or the sort of sad but understandable situation where the aliens would be redundant because there's already a pretty good theory with no need for aliens."

What... is Othrem even talking about.

There's reality, where people live, and then there's fiction, where made-up stuff happens. And sometimes fiction is very realistic, and seems a lot like reality, and sometimes it has magic or magitech or whatever, and then you get to play what-if about the magic.

But reality is just reality, you don't ask if sometimes reality is secretly a mystery novel. Reality is not secretly a mystery novel. It's just physics. It's just atoms bouncing around and doing their thing. And isekai, of course. Isekai is a very normal part of reality. But you don't go around asking if there's an alien-shaped plot hole in reality. There is not.

What is she going to say to Othrem.

"Uh... I think I am going to have to refer you to someone more senior on the Arrival team with that question, I don't seem to be doing a great job of answering it."

All right.

He's now pretty sure that she is not a dath ilan native from his own timeline of dath ilan.

He just straight up cannot imagine having to ask someone else in order to know whether you'd collectively found a basically good story about the terribleness of the surprisingly terrible planet you'd all landed on.  And if there was some kind of miscommunication whereby she didn't understand that was what he was asking, well, that still bespeaks a larger cultural gap than he'd expect from the other passengers of his crashed airplane...

...no, he's still jumping to conclusions.  What if she's, like, from his great-grandparents' generation shortly after the screening, when Baseline had just been redone?  He has never spoken to a great-grandparent for more than a few sentences, but obviously there'd be some amount of cultural drift.

"Noted.  Three examples of unkindness?"

"Like I said, I've spent almost all my time inside the enclave, but the Arrival team has been trying out a new protocol where new arrivals take a... field trip, I guess you could say... to a city nearby, to absorb more of the local culture. I went on my trip a few months after I arrived. I learned a lot, and so did the Arrival team!"

"Naturally, soon after I checked into my hotel, I returned to the front desk to report the noise-and-light-pollution-issues with the room and ask for remediation, but they refused! I asked whether it was a new hotel and if I had gotten a discount for needing to provide my own remediation, and they didn't seem to understand, and when I insisted about the discount they told me that I was being disruptive and needed to settle down and at first I was confused because I did not feel any internal sense of disquiet, but then I remembered from my training that I should not argue with this strange off-topic false claim because locally this is code for wanting to terminate-the-conversation-until-conditions-improve or possibly terminate-the-conversation-and-the-relationship, which seemed pretty extreme to me but anyway I decided not to stay in that hotel after all."

"So I took my things and went out to the park nearby. I attempted to use my handheld device - they call them 'phones' - to locate alternative lodging. I found several potential candidates but I thought I would get a local opinion about which ones already had suitable noise-and-light-pollution-remediation. There were some kids on a bench nearby and I thought surely this must be the local teenagers-giving-dubious-life-advice outpost. So I asked them, but they were very rude! They wanted to know if I had any... I can't remember their words, but I think they wanted inadvisable-stimulation-medication? I admitted I did not have any of that, and then they refused to answer any of my questions. So much for that idea."

"I used the local transportation system to go to the nearest alternate hotel. The transportation system was subterranean and it did take me some time to decipher the signs and determine the right way to go, but I figured it out and was feeling fairly pleased with myself. When I arrived at my destination, I noticed that there was inadequate signage helping to orient the rider directionally on the street level. There were signs about the names and numbers of the streets but there was nothing absolute about the cardinal directions. I examined the signage inside the transportation system station and found it did not already bear the signage-already-optimized-do-not-attempt-further-optimization-mark, so, after stopping to check the true cardinal direction situation, I got out an indelible marker from my bag and began optimizing the signage."

"They, uh, did not like that. The station personnel, that is. I am still not entirely sure why, because I did verify that the information I was adding was correct. It was later explained to me that civilization here is too low-trust or low-intelligence or something to permit for a culture of guerilla-optimization? Anyway that was the point where I called for extraction and I went back home to the enclave."

"The Arrival team has made several updates to the pre-field-trip training materials but I'm not sure they actually sent the arrival after me on a trip at all, they're still rethinking the whole thing."

Okay he feels like he almost got that word 'signage-already-optimized-do-not-attempt-further-optimization-mark'.  Especially given the context, it sounds like it should be a cognate or descendant of 'naively-looks-subject-to-a-further-optimization-but-is-not+mark', that society puts on physical objects that look broken or improvable but which are actually that way for Nonobvious Reasons--

Ohhhhh maybe he is from the past version of dath ilan!  And that's why Baseline has new words and she expects him to be smarter!  He would not be trying to explain the nature of a completely unknown world to a new arrival by recounting only his own personal experiences, he'd lead with the clearest or most enlightening examples that had happened to other people, even at the price of having fewer additional-details available about those.  But if she expects him to have much lower sample complexity / higher general intelligence, then she is probably expecting him to do well enough about inferring everything she means to communicate using only data she has personally witnessed.  Probably all of society converges more to norms of 'when possible, answer only using data you personally have verified directly' as it becomes possible to deduce more from that and there is less need to hear about other people's data.

(Othrem does not immediately conclude that this new hypothesis is correct, because he is not seven years old (as is the age you start to be trained out of that sort of thing, by the gauntlets of lures and gotchas that children run into when they get old enough to start seriously trying to escape their children's-escape-bedrooms).)

"How is life in the enclave different from what you expect me to expect?" he says.  That'll give him info about both what his possible hosts are like (they may not be from future quantum branches of dath ilan, or not of his dath ilan; that whole hypothesis class could be incorrect); and also, where they expect him to be from.

Oh, that's a pretty good question. She'll pause for a moment to organize her thoughts.

"Okay, three categories of answers come to mind."

"First, of course, are the bad-surprises that pretty much everyone has when they arrive, that have to do with what resources we have available on this world. So, like, this house is weird, right? The architecture is odd. When you get around to using the bathroom, you're going to be disappointed by the fixtures. That kind of thing. We are doing our best to bootstrap better infrastructure but it's easier in some domains than in others and it has not yet felt important to improve the entire supply chain for how bathrooms are built here. It does actually work to pee here, so we just pee and get on with more important things."

"Second are the bad-surprises that are within our immediate ability to fix. And of course we observe each new Arrival and see what gives them trouble and then we try to improve our Arrival procedures to smooth out that problem for the next person. Obviously. So by definition, we have already fixed the things that we know to fix - but also some, like the field trip I went on, are still a work in progress - and there is always so much room for continued improvement!" She's just saying obvious things now, move on.

"Third are the bad-surprises that are particular to you as an individual. I don't have a lot to go on here but you are definitely different from the median new arrival in a few obvious ways. You don't seem at all upset about having DIED! You seem completely calm! You haven't taken any time to yourself to go and calm down and organize your thoughts! You haven't written anything down! You haven't even ASKED FOR PAPER!"

"And maybe the reason you haven't asked is that it's already completely obvious to you, but following-the-principle-of-saying-obvious-things-out-loud, yes, of course I am your Temporary-Starter-Girlfriend, and if you would prefer instead or in addition to have a Temporary-Starter-Boyfriend or something else entirely while you build your new polycule, we have a whole team for that. We are so very sorry for the loss-to-you of your previous polycule and we realize what a heavy blow that must be - we all went through it ourselves - and we don't want you to be alone in this time of emotional upheaval."

And with that, she'll come over to the loveseat where Othrem is sitting, sit down right next to him, and give him a hug.

WHERE IS HE INSIDE THE COSMOS ACTUALLY AND WHY DOES IT INCLUDE SUDDENLY HUGS

He stops himself from panickedly yelling "I think I am not from your planet!" before things get any more horriblyawkward, because he should think about consequences before doing that.

"I -- maybe should go-off-and-think-by-myself, actually," he says, from within the complete body freeze of Offscript Hug that he is not concealing at all because the concealment reaction would be to freeze instead of reacting and he is already doing that anyway.

She expects him to either have better priors or more intelligence, and if she thinks he is supposed to go-off-and-think-by-himself, maybe this conceals wisdom-you-do-not-know-is-wisdom about why he should do that.

His brain in the background goes on deducing things anyway, all marked as not-actually-known of course, but that is not a reason to not let yourself think the wordlessly obvious first-thoughts:

- People his apparent visible age are already supposed to be super attached to entire polycules.
- Dying and waking up elsewhere is so legible to them that they start having emotions about it right away.
- They expect arrivals to know it's okay to display those emotions at strangers.
- There are completely different rules about who you hug, when.

Finally! Inga has no idea how he's made it this long without needing any alone time, and frankly the conversation has been long and a bit overwhelming for her as well. She is ready for a break, and to go and update her team.

She does wonder why he's so stiff, as she hugs him, though. Something is definitely off, there. Probably he has some polycule-fidelity-agreements and his brain hasn't quite caught up to his new reality yet. He'll get there.

She releases him from the hug and stands up.

"Of course! Your private room is right over here." She opens the door for him. "Just let me know if you have any trouble with the lighting or anything. I'll be in the office, that door over there." She points. "Feel free to knock or just call out if you have any questions or need anything."

"Oh, and also, by default we will head back to the main enclave in another hour or so. That's when my Cave Monitoring shift ends. Someone else will be coming to the monitoring station then, and I can drive you to meet the rest of the Arrival team. Unless of course you are too overwhelmed and would prefer to stay in the Arrival bedchamber for awhile. Many people prefer that. One step at a time, you know."

She's talking too much, to a person who just asked to be alone. She should stop.

"So, uh, yeah, see you later."

And with Othrem safely ensconced in his private room, she retreats to the office to send an update to her team, and to take several deep breaths herself and stare at a wall for a while.

He certainly is... odd. Intense. A little... flat? She's never met anyone quite like him before.

She reminds herself not to judge him on what may be the worst day of his life so far, given that his life, you know. Ended.

The first thing Othrem does is let his wordless thoughts expand into words from their most recent working-memory-active anchors.

- People his apparent visible age are already supposed to be super attached to entire polycules, as if they'd already found multiple surprisingly-perfect-and-irreplaceable-partners and invested a ton of human capital in them.  (Implied: much more refined mating markets that can do that when you're 25?  Or, it's not just a small fraction of Happy Couples that are running off and getting subsidized to have lots of kids?)

- Having died and woken up elsewhere is much more legible and expected to them.  They start having immediate emotional reactions to the isekai right away, rather than their emotions being mostly on hold pending having resolved a lot of uncertainty.

- And then they're sure enough of where they'd end up, that they'd rely on the continued correct-rule-application of their culturally standard protocols about when it's okay to have loud emotions in front of strangers.  Like he'd broken a leg or had introspected the possible start of a psychotic episode, and she was on-duty emergency response personnel... which, sure, that's reasonable enough in one sense, but she expects new arrivals to know it.
-- Her bright reflective over-vest doesn't have to be casual fashionwear.  It could be a way of saying, 'Look here at the emergency personnel!'  His own version of Civilization accomplishes this with a particular color of bright LEDs, because lots of people wear reflective things; but an alternative arrangement is not unreasonable.
-- But she sure is not otherwise acting in the way he expects emergency personnel to present... well, of course not, she isn't part of actual Exception Handling, she's from a bunch of arrivals who banded together... but then why would she expect strangers to display strong emotions at her, if she's not trained about that?  "Different customs", is the overly general answer.  Or, her clothing encodes specifically that she's fine with emotional displays.

- Her version of Civilization has completely different rules about who you hug, when, after having what kind of existing relationship / after thumbprinting what sort of sentence written in very large letters on what sort of weird-city entrance-agreement.

To be clear, Othrem does mentally distinguish that these are his first reactions, his reactions trying to explain away her version of Civilization as a minimal-departure from his own, with everything else held constant and asking what fewest things would need to change.  Possibly, she is from further away than that.

...Othrem is getting more worried about that hug the longer he thinks about it.

She does NOT think he is a stranger from an actually pretty different version of Civilization.  She thinks there are supposed to be EXISTING CULTURAL RELATIONSHIPS HERE, and there are NOT, but she thinks there ARE, and she is already HUGGING HIM ABOUT THAT.  She's not that pretty, but she's pretty, and buying a hug off a girl like that would ordinarily cost at least 0.2 ULH if she sold hugs at all.

She might not be the sort of person who'd give out ANY hugs to a weird alien creature.  And then once she finds out what actually happened, might incur some amount of distress or sadness about the violation of her own sexual or romantic nature.  Common sense is saying INCREASINGLY LOUDLY that he should blurt out the truth and abort this course of events, rather than trying to be Very Cautious and Paranoid.

Realistically, probably nothing terrible or irrecoverable has happened so far.  But one can very easily see how this could escalate beyond hugging.

Of course that very sequence of events, and his reaction to it, could be a standard part of their Dark Conspiratorial Plan to detect people like him, whom they have already encountered a dozen times before.

And with that he has exhausted his pent-up thoughts about the most recent events in working memory.  At this point, he should go back and think over this whole matter from the start.

Where is he, right now, inside of Reality?  What can he infer, what can he wildly guess, from the information that he has?

The first obvious thought is that he is not likely to succeed on an immediate or overly naive attempt at explanation, because he was not expecting this to happen to him at all.  It is very far off his mainline probability of 'you are Dead and can make no further observations', and even supposing that to not happen, it feels in an intuitive sense like multiple generalizations are being violated that he would have expected to hold.  If quietly watching aliens had grabbed him to rescue him from true-Death then he would not have woken up naked in a cave.

To explain is to predict; to predict is to explain.  If he predicted Not This then he is not the best person in the world to try to explain it after the fact.  One ought to go grab somebody who predicted it to happen, and ask them instead.

He is of course going to go and ask what he would make of the situation anyways.  One cannot make progress in the face of confusion by freezing in epistemic helplessness.  But he will not put too much weight on what he concludes; and he will be looking for places that his prior or his logic or his rules of reasoning are broken, not just the explanation with the largest tiny probability inside his existing prior.

On one obvious interpretation of "Go ask the people who actually predicted it in advance", he ought to go and ask the authors of isekai novels what they were thinking.  Perhaps all of those books are secretly concealed advice to true-Dead people like him, with the actual logic of their reasoning having been classified by the Keepers as an infohazard.

Othrem permits himself to think this obvious thought, that it may pass over him and through him, and then he sets it aside for a time until after he has tried to take things at face value first.

Right, so.

What happened to him, and where is he...

That's not returning an immediate answer.

Back up and approach from a different angle.  Why do these events have such a tiny prior probability?  Why are they such a surprise to him?  What part of his prior, his reasoning, or his metaphysics is being most clearly attacked by Reality and the Actual Outcomes?

Put that way, there's two obvious answers.

The first answer is that the locality of physics is being violated, contrary to his previous metaphysical belief that causal relations only applied over local neighborhoods within a reality-process.

Wherever he is, it's not adjacent to the moment in space and time of his crashing plane.  Taking things at face value, and ignoring all pranks and Conspiracies in his first attack on the problem:  Both himself and some group of people from an alternate quantum-branch or future of dath ilan, have arrived to some third place not yet named and which is unfamiliar to new arrivals.

There's no story explaining that which involves amplitudes proceeding through the local causal neighborhoods of quantum physics as he knows it.  It involves action at a distance, or even if there was a continuous action through neighborhoods, they are not the neighborhoods he knows.  They are, almost equivalently, faster than light, or sideways in time.

The second answer is that anything which could violate the physics that he knows, on this scale, ought to involve some exotic contrivance, whose origin ought to be intelligence, and not the intelligence of the dath ilan he knows.  That intelligence ought to be optimizing for something.  Then having him appear naked in a cave is not visibly optimized for much of anything in particular.  The moment he appeared could be optimized for preventing his true-Death but, like, where is all of the other optimization here?  His isekai looked like, or had been made to look like, an accident or a spontaneous phenomenon.

Do new arrivals always appear in exactly the same place?  He has already seen enough to infer that (taking the Others' words at face value) new arrivals do not appear at predictable times, or not exactly predictable times; there was a duty officer who had to come down and find him within a couple of minutes of his appearance.

Again thinking just the obvious thoughts to get them out of the way, there is from his perspective an obvious angle of attack that sort of begins to address both puzzles.

Physics as Civilization knows it is simple.  Simple theories are more likely to be correct.  Simple theories are not certain to be correct.  If you tracked planets through the night sky by eyeballing their motion, the theory you would invent to explain them is classical mechanics, which in some senses if not others is simpler than General Relativity.  But classical mechanics is false and General Relativity is true.  A simple theory that excellently fits all the evidence you know is not always correct.  Something very much like it is essentially always correct.  General Relativity is like classical mechanics and that is why it gives nearly-classical motions to planets.  But the actual simple theory is not necessarily correct.

Imagine a set of rules of physics which is like the physics that dath ilan knows, except that it contains some additional terms or downright if-then-else statements whereby two otherwise distant regions of space-time-configuration end up causally related.  Sufficiently related, indeed, that a damp cave on another planet with breathable air, could end up causally descendant from the moment of a crashing plane in dath ilan.

These laws of physics are more complicated; they should end up with less measure in Greater Reality.  But if their exceptional conditions have no influence at ordinary energies in a place like dath ilan, or if their if-then-else nature is not triggered within dath ilan, these universes of weird and complicated physics may have a dath-ilan-subpart which moves in exact synchrony with dath ilan.

Othrem's plane having crashed and truekilled him, all of him within the simple universes is gone; he continues, then, in much tinier measure, within the sort of complicated universes that have exceptional conditions that can trigger and materialize him inside a cave.

It's not a very good explanation, frankly.

Which is unfortunate, because off the top of his head, it's the only explanation Othrem sees which does not involve intelligence, which if it is involved is hiding.  Either in the sense of aliens copy-kidnapping him, or in the sense of generalized authors of generalized books; if you can't see them, it's because they don't want you to know they're there.

Reasoning gets a lot more complicated once you introduce adversarial intelligences manipulating your evidence in order to hide their own existence.  If they're sufficiently smarter than you, or maybe just smart enough to succeed at a bounded problem, you will never be able to deduce those facts that they did not want you to know.  You aren't going to get it until the Conspiracy makes a mistake, or chooses to drop a hint, which nails down at least what rough sort of Conspiracy you are inside, out of an intractably vast field of possibilities.  If they are smarter than you, as realistically applies to a lot of Conspiracies that can access exotic physics, you end up thinking what they want you to think.  You may as well table those lines of thought, pending the Conspiracy having made what looks like a mistake.

It is an obvious thought that this is exactly what They want you to think; but thinking this doesn't actually help.

So return then to the supposition that things are apparently as they are.  Othrem has materialized in this cave by a fluke of exotic physics, anthropically selected to continue his experience from where it halted in almost all other cases.

...Well, it could also be an alien artifact which wasn't deliberately hidden but which is indifferent to announcing itself, i.e., if new arrivals always materialize in the same place it is maybe worth at least checking for alien machinery in the cave.

But with this little data, it is probably futile to go on staring at the set of 'all nonobvious possibilities' / 'all adversarial possibilities' / 'all the exotic clever hypotheses that don't involve taking things at face value'.  The set is too wide; one ought to try taking things at face value first, and survey how it looks from there.

Othrem has materialized inside a cave, continuing from where he otherwise would have died; it was an event of low probability, but the higher probabilities are ones with no Othrem around to experience them.  There is no visible alien machinery to support this.  One may suppose it to be either an anthropically selected fluke of physics, or alternatively the operation of alien machinery that is indifferent to revealing itself and which happens to not be immediately visible.  Other, much wider sets of Conspiratorial possibilities can be tabled until it is more useful to think about them; until some hint of alien motive has been revealed, or some flaw of alien concealment.

(If Inga were privy to this entire line of reasoning, she would cheer when Othrem finally got to this part. "Huh, isekai. That sure is weird. Unclear how it works. Might as well get on with life, meanwhile!")

(It's worth a few minutes to at least check!  Othrem did not have this line of reasoning precomputed and was not sure in advance it would arrive to the default guessable destination!)

Consider then the Others.  What has been seen of them, what may be deduced?

They appear humanoid up to the limits of visibility.  They breathe the same air he breathes.  They speak roughly Baseline, in the sort of audio frequencies his ear is accustomed to hearing.

The Others share vast amounts of information-data-complexity with himself / dath ilan.  Off the top of his head, Othrem thinks he is being fully inclusive if he categorizes possible explanations of this correlation as 'shared causal ancestry', 'convergence', and 'filtering selection'.

Their time could descend from his own.

His time does not descend from theirs, given that their attitude toward hugs has not been historically recorded.

Both times could descend from a common ancestor; a mutually past dath ilan that decided, after the construction of Baseline, to optimize more around how affectionate people were toward each other, perhaps at the expense of other qualities like a stronger dependency on notebooks to assist with thinking.

Those are the straightforward explanations, the ones in which all shared information is explained by shared ancestry.

You can suppose that the Others descend from a dath ilan ancestor from before the invention of Baseline, and explain away the shared information in their mostly-shared language by saying: there was convergence in which best solutions for language-invention were found.  But unless he's missing something about language invention, surely there must have been some arbitrary choices at some point in the process... well, no, maybe they actually did graph out every sibilant and pitch and their cost to vocalize, figure out what combinations would most cheaply distinguish which basic words, in order of their expected frequency of use...

Okay, no.  Othrem isn't really buying that.  Unless the constructors of Baseline were explicitly like, 'Any time we break a tie randomly it reflects a failure on our part to think of something we should be optimizing...'  Wait, no, actually that's pretty plausible.  Othrem can absolutely imagine the language-constructors reasoning like that.  Just because he can't see all the desiderata, does not mean they are not there.

Can he imagine that this is a world that diverged from dath ilan ten thousand years earlier, and they still uniquely invented Baseline?

Othrem really wants to go 'NO WAY IN SHIT' but he is not, actually, sure.  Maybe there's just enough desiderata to optimize if you are actually a linguist.

However, more likely is that as you start to go further back in time to locate a point in divergence, leading to less shared ancestry, one must begin to postulate filtering selection: Othrem and the Others were selected by the process that brought them here, to share a language.  This is beyond the realm of flukes and near-certainly into the realm of alien machinery and unseen intelligence; there is no quirk of physics which does that.  (Frankly, there was not going to be much of a quirk of physics that materialized him naked in a cave in any case.)

And then once you permit the concept of filtering selection at all, it permits the Others to be from much further away in configuration space and maybe even from some other Reality entirely.  They could have simply been selected, from across some great swathe of locally visible Reality, to happen to speak mostly-Baseline, and to breathe the air he breathes, and to speak in frequencies his ears can hear.  Or vice versa, of course, or both he and they were selected according to some common filter.

Othrem thinks he is going to mostly proceed on the guess of mostly shared ancestry with dath ilan, and maybe a tiny bit of convergence where that is plausible, to explain all shared information that is visible so far.  Bringing in the postulate of selection requires a whole huge chunk of assumption about the alien machinery, and throws open the possibility-space so much wider that it's harder to work with the wild possibilities inside.  He will try to try to work with the narrower assumption 'correlation proceeds from shared ancestry' until it is visibly violated.  He is a very average person of -0.2sd and does not actually do that great with trying to actually hold sixteen wild possibilities inside his head simultaneously.

Maybe the Others do natively better than that, and that is what the notebook is for.  Othrem has not really been using the notebook so far because to start visibly recording what he is thinking, he'd have to have reasoned through possible Other Conspiracies first, or how easy they'd find it to decrypt any attempted codes he used.

Well, but having gotten this far in his reasoning, it doesn't make a lot of sense to be trying to play much of an adversarial game against the Others.  They are probably descended from, or cousin to, his own dath ilan.  For them to have been selected to be a pack of supervillains and himself the only innocent among them, is getting into the realm of generalized novels.  If they are a very sophisticated Conspiracy then he already gave himself away the moment that he froze up when hugged.

It does not totally make sense, on the face of things, to try to be Very Clever and Paranoid about this.  His hypothetical opponent would be extremely amorphous and hard to fight; and there is a more coalesced and concrete possible friend standing nearby to it, at whose expense that fighting would come.

Take the Others at face value, then.  A descendant dath ilan or a cousin to it; smarter than him, in the first case, and of unknown relative intelligence otherwise.  They have selected harder on people being affectionate to one another, which is a very defensible sort of choice for a Civilization to make; they give and receive hugs more readily, and bind to their polycules more strongly at an earlier age.

On the face of things, really, they are the ones who should be worrying about adversarialism from him, once their divergence or his past-relegation becomes known.  But they shouldn't be too worried unless there are unfortunate selection effects in play, and this is known to them.  His version of dath ilan probably has more supercriminals and non-law-abiding psychopaths than their Civilization, but those are still very rare.

Can he figure out anything else about the Others?  His reasoning may be too dominated by the overshadowing surprise of the hug.

...not really and off the top of his head.  He has just seen too little of them.  Stronger emotions generally, probably.  He sees the case for that side of that old political fight within dath ilan.

He would sort of expect his dath ilan to have a more tightly organized way of welcoming new arrivals, but also that's because his dath ilan is run by specialist professional Governance.  He really doesn't know what happens if you just take... a few thousand? a few dozen? ordinary people and have them try to Just Do Things, even things that dath ilan would consider Very Important.

Okay, now he's starting to feel the disorientation of having been totally removed from his previous context, as he notices explicitly large parts of his cache getting invalidated.  What does happen if you try to build Civilization out of a few dozen random people just doing things?

And both he and the Others are within a larger world of Aliens who are less organized and less kind, and this is possibly explained by them being less smart.  Not the ones who built the isekai machinery, as an obvious guess, but perhaps a fallen version of a civilization that did?

He knows next to nothing about them, and maybe that's because he didn't ask the right questions, but it still feels like there's some kind of gap of -- it being assumed he'd guess more, or know more, about the Aliens, than he does.  It is very noticeable how little Othrem has ended up knowing about the Aliens despite trying to ask for concrete examples about them.

And from her story, it sounded like -- the Aliens haven't noticed the Others?  Or the Others pass among them without it being an explicit First Contact situation with diplomacy?  If the Others pass among the Aliens unnoticed, and if all correlation is assumed to be due to shared ancestry, then the Aliens are also cousins of dath ilan but perhaps far more distant ones.  Sharing a humanoid shape, maybe, but who knows how much or how little else.

...Othrem would absolutely not assume he understood an Alien civilization well enough to do guerilla-optimization to their street signs.  He'd be playing a much more paranoid and cautious game to avoid being noticed, if it had been decided to maintain the unawareness of the Aliens of the Others in their midst.  But maybe there was some kind of misleading sense of similarity that misled that Other into thinking they knew a helpful and nondisruptive course of action.  Or maybe it's an extension of the Others' increased affection -- something like, increased trust, increased jumping right into things and trying to help.  Othrem thinks that even if he felt an emotion like that, it would be easy for him to notice and override when a larger goal weighed against that; but maybe that's an illusion-of-imaginary-competence, born of him not feeling that strongly in the first place.

...the Others also think it is way more helpful to have a physical notebook than Othrem finds that.  He could think into a computer.  Physical paper?  Not nearly so helpful, not for thinking.

Othrem doesn't know what to make of this, but he is trying to notice all of the anomalies at once.

He does think that it all adds up to telling the Others he thinks he's from a cousin branch of Civilization, not their own; or drawn from a wider distribution of cousinhood than other cousin-arrivals they may have known.  In the case of an adversarial game against smarter opponents, he has already given himself away; there is little to be gained down that road, and much to be lost from distrust and ill-coordination if he tries to play the paranoid against potential friends.

Could They know that this is the sort of conclusion someone like him will come to, if put in a room to think, and offered an inconvenient paper notebook rather than a more actually cognitively useful computer notepad?

Sure.

But he'll explode that pressure-triggered explosive when he steps on it.  Freezing up and taking tiny steps won't get him across the minefield any faster, if it's not just an ordinary road.

He'll nonetheless try and take some notes on the non-Conspiracy aspects of his reasoning, on his little paper notebook, in case putting them down in outline form there still manages to jog something loose inside his mind.

(Regarding the physical notebook --

Look. You just popped up naked on an alien world. What are the odds they are going to have your preferred style of laptop with your preferred operating system and your preferred notetaking software just ready to go?

Sure, they have breathable air and decipherable language and Starter Girlfriends and 99.5% of the other things you would want, but computing hardware and software is way more individual than that. It's just too much to ask.

Hence, a notebook and a pen. Or ideally, multiple pens, in multiple colors. That's a much more reasonable thing to ask for, when you pop up naked on an alien world.

Obviously.)

(If Othrem could hear that he would infer a greater degree of Personally Specialized Diversity rather than Universally Standardized Stuff Anyone Can Use Immediately among the Others compared to his own dath ilan, but he can't so he doesn't.)

(He's not even going to comment about the fact that Girlfriends are Universally Standardized Stuff Anyone Can Use Immediately? Huh, shadow-of-Inga is surprised by that, that's the sort of thing shadow-of-Othrem would usually pick up on.)

(Girlfriends do have some standardized, universally interoperable parts.)

"Othrem?" she calls softly, tapping at his door gently, in case he's lost in thought or napping.

"The new Cave Monitor will arrive soon, my shift is ending. Would you like to stay here a while longer, or would you like to come back to the main enclave with me?"

Would this usually be a significant or difficult choice to an Other?  Or is it only a nondifficult choice, that does still preserve some element of control or autonomy?  Othrem does not see an obvious reason why he would want to stay here... unless there's an Other need for quiet time that they wouldn't have satisfied by now, maybe.

"Go to main enclave," Othrem is already responding.

...should he maybe wait until he's at the main enclave to announce himself as Otherᵀ, just to preserve his optionality about new info he might see on arrival?

"Great, then come on out when you're ready."

In the distance, a car door slams. A moment later, footsteps.

Schick opens the door.

"Heyyyyyy. Big day! New arrival! So awesome. Can't wait to meet him!"

He heads on out, carrying the notebook in which he took notes.  If obviously he'd be expected to leave that notebook behind or just tear pages, well, he wasn't planning to keep this cover anyway.

"I'm Othrem," he says to the new person.  "Hi."

That sure is a smile, there.

"Inga been treating you okay, friend?"

That is SUCH a weirdly phrased question, what is he supposed to DO with that.

"Not sure what standards would constitute okayness here, really.  Nothing exploded.  I have no specific policy improvements to suggest at this time."

Finger guns. "That's what we like to hear!"

He hands the car keys to Inga.

"I'll just go get settled in. Anything besides a clothing bundle and a notebook need a refresh?"

Schick has been watching way too much local TV and she does not really like how that's working out.

She takes the keys.

"Thanks! And nope, nothing else to replace. Have a good shift!"

And with that, she looks at Othrem, raises an eyebrow, and nods at the door.

...what if Othrem is, in fact, far from the first Other-Other to try to maintain a cover around here?

He will very much start to move in the indicated direction.

Inga will lead the way down the path and out to the parking spot, and open the passenger door of a vehicle very similar to this one, for Othrem to get in.

That is... probably a car??  But it is just -- aboveground, instead of in a cartunnel?  If the Aliens are stupider, how are they solving the level of machine learning problem associated with having cars navigate open environments?  Dath ilan can't do that!  Or are toddlers never allowed outside a house where they might toddle into the way of a car?  Othrem is currently confused.

Othrem will try to get into the indicated car-opening, more or less on autopilot.

"Do you need help with the seat-restraints? They're a little weird, but they are locally-legally-mandated."

"Here, you pull on this, and then you plug it into here." And she'll just lean right across him to show him where to put it.

A typical 25-year-old heterosexual male might notice, at this point, that Inga is female and soft and very close, and her hair is right there, and he had to get right up to it before he noticed but at this range it has a barely-detectable scent of flowers, and her sweater is soft, and she is a girl.

Is this still true of typical 25Ms who've been transported to another world and are being faced with confusing machinery with Alarming Implications?  How would they survive long enough to later reproduce with the women in question?

But, sure, Othrem can spend 5% of neural processing on noticing that... actually, make it 15% because of the earlier suddenly hug.

The other processing power is 60% Following Directions Correctly The First Time and 25% What Is Going On With This Weird Pseudo-Car, like, what is that giant wheel for, or all these other weird levers and controls sticking out at where Inga might otherwise want to, you know, sit.

...are these restraints here because the car accelerates so rapidly and jerkily that otherwise the passenger will fly around the car??!?

Matters of heterosexuality are forgotten.

...there is probably not any other way to get to the enclave, is there.

Oh No.

Having secured Othrem, Inga will close his door and go around and get in the driver's seat. She'll put on her own seatbelt and maybe she'll even get so far as to get the key into the ignition, before Othrem has Additional Questions...?

Asking questions would reveal that Othrem is alarmed more than she expects him to be!  He'd reveal the truth of his origins right now, if that was going to help anything, but Othrem does not see how it does!

How about if instead, Othrem is very carefully checking the connections on his seat restraints, and otherwise sort of looking a bit frozen and expressionless within his seat?

Inga sees that Othrem looks nervous and makes a wild guess.

"I know, it's weird, right? We're only driving on local streets at low speeds, and yet they're all antsy about seat-restraints... and then they half-ass it and only offer three-point restraints? Such weird compromises."

"Anyway, it's a short drive to the enclave."

She turns on the engine, checks her mirrors, and starts backing up.

Hahahahaha of course, that makes sense, the Aliens couldn't solve any machine learning problems so they just have HUMAN BRAINS DRIVING CARS.

And now Othrem is back to worrying about how intelligent she expected him to be, and how fast he was supposed to deduce things that most new arrivals deduce without anyone needing to tell it to them.  Like, hey, the last time they truedied in a horrible crash and a ball of fire they just ended up somewhere else perfectly healthy, so why worry that much about it happening again.

"Sounds fine," Othrem's mouth will say, as the rest of his body sits frozen.  "Nobody ever truedied of high-velocity impacts!"[intonation tag: falsehood]

Is he... okay... over there?

Well, not much she can do about it right at the moment.

She'll switch into forward gear and drive to the enclave, then.

"So the general concept is, we've bought up a small neighborhood. Well, most of a small neighborhood, there's one house of hold-outs... we'll find their happy-price eventually. I hope."

"Anyway we wanted it to be as close to the Arrival Cave as possible but there were a lot more already-constructed houses just a few minutes away, so we bought those, and then separately got the monitoring station, so we could respond quickly to new arrivals."

"About how many of you are there?"

"There are 177 of us. You make number 178!" Inga says cheerfully, and without a moment's hesitation.