Merrin cannot currently assimilate complex novel information very well, since she can only look at screens that are not her main sensor data or machine settings in fifteen-second chunks before an alarm starts screaming. Can someone review it and then explain to her like she's eight what the differences are from the version she's drilled in sims. ...Maybe starting with just the differences in phase one, there is no way she's going to retain details for six hours. 

Of course! It was predicted that Merrin was going to want this. There is a simplified flowchart that just highlights the differences, and someone will go over it verbally with her as well. 

They're going with slower rewarming - twelve hours, not eight. Justifications: they have more degrees of total rewarming to cover since they're starting from a lower temperature, they think the patient can tolerate it, and the prediction markets on Merrin have faith in her ability to stay on her feet and maintain consistently adequate performance for that length of time, if she has the support she needs, which she will. They're moving these three peptides from phase two to phase one, and adding this custom protein. (It's possible that additional custom proteins will be added in phase two and three, but that depends on whether they can synthesize them and test them in vitro before the relevant timepoint.) They've tweaked a lot of the dose and rate ranges, based on a genetic analysis and models of how Kalorm will respond, but the computers will handle those calculations and they have people double-checking them, Merrin doesn't have to worry about getting one wrong out of inattention or something, just be aware of it as an aspect of the system she's managing. 

Okay. She can do this Kalorm can do this. The hard part is all on him. Merrin just has to be a helpful sidekick and tough it out with him for the duration, and she can do that, staying on her feet and functional for sixteen hours really just takes willpower and pushing through suffering. 

(...This is not really true. In moments when she has more metacognition online, Merrin knows this isn't true. But when faced with a situation this daunting, framing it that way eases the strain on some part of her that she has a hard time looking at directly.) 

Seen from the air, an hour or so before dawn, Default City is beautiful. (Especially the region around the hospital, which has lighting even at night.) And finally, years after Merrin left Harkanam, it feels like coming home. 

Fanthim is the Support Worker assigned to the family – separate from the Medical Crisis Liaison, whose attention will be mainly on staying up to date with the medical case, her full attention will be on the family. If Kalorm survives rewarming, he's likely to be here for weeks recovering, and while the Medical Crisis Liaison will be reassigned once the situation is no longer actively a crisis, Fanthim will stay on the case through to its conclusion. Whatever that ends up being. 

She is, like Merrin, an outlier on stamina – not to the extent that she could do something as cognitively taxing as Merrin's current role for sixteen hours, but she can be on duty through the end of the rewarming period and a little longer. She works for Exception Handling, is considered highly legibly trustworthy and cleared to make a very high grade of secrecy oath, and she is currently reviewing the full dossier of non-public information on Finnar and his children. 

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh!!!???

The basics: 

Finnar's parents, like many couples, had prediction markets on whether they ought to have children. They were both highly intelligent, talented people. It was predicted that the child they would have if they combined their genes would be very very smart, neurodivergent in a potentially-valuable-to-Civilization way, and not at incredibly high risk of a lower-than-average happiness setpoint. 

It was also predicted that their child was likely to be challenging to parent, and that, combined with his mother Mirrell's other risk factors, it was likely that having a child would make her unhappy, and the odds were high that this would spiral into untreatable depression. The overall policy recommendation came out solidly on the side of not taking that risk. 

Mirrell wanted a child, and she knew that her partner wanted to be a father, and she was very stubborn. She ignored the prediction market recommendations. 

The markets, unsurprisingly, weren't wrong. After her child was born, Mirrell was in fact miserable, and this didn't resolve over time – in fact, it was getting worse as years passed. She was likely suffering from some sort of post-partum chronic fatigue syndrome that made her depression harder to address. Mirrell's depression was making her partner, Firrin, unhappy as well. Living with two deeply unhappy parents was not considered a great childhood environment. 

Mirrell expressed wishing she could die for years, but didn't want to leave the other affected people in the situation worse off. At some point, though, prediction markets concluded that if Mirrell were no longer in the picture, and Firran remarried another woman, they would be compatible partners and he would eventually be significantly happier than he was while co-raising a child with a suicidally depressed coparent. 

Mirrell didn't want to be cryopreserved. She said that she saw no particular reason to expect the Future to be any better than this. 

Firrin convinced her to talk to a Keeper about it before making a decision. She did. The relatively shallow conversation - its contents confidential, of course, but likely mostly about Mirrell's preferences and whether her reasoning included a flawed premise, and perhaps some vague details about the Keeper's information on the Future - did not change her mind. 

In another world, if Mirrell had been a somewhat different person, perhaps they would have been able to give her the option of swearing a high-level secrecy oath, and learning more specific details about the work being done in the Basement. But this was a very high bar, and Mirrell - especially at this point of her life - was not considered legibly reliable enough to make that oath. 

Finnar's mother truicided when he was six years old. 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH it's a good thing Fanthim had some warning and can read this in advance and get her own emotional reactions under control and tucked away where she won't be making this poor family deal with that as well. (It's okay for them to be emotional in front of her, she fully opted into that by having this job at all, but the reverse is very rarely helpful.) 

This was, of course, an Exception of enormous magnitude and stakes, and after it happened, Civilization did direct quite a lot of its resources and collective intelligence toward managing the fallout and mitigating the damage. But there was only so much that could be done. Possibly the whole tragic series of events had been almost-guaranteed to play out like this from the point at which Mirrell decided to make a choice with predictable, and predicted, consequences. 

(It's genuinely hard to know whether Civilization should have had a different policy of what to do, of how much to step in and meddle in the lives and decisions of two fully-informed adults. It's clear that Mirrell, making that decision, valued something a lot more than her own happiness, and maybe got it; she did express, strongly, that she had never regretted choosing to have Finnar, that she was grateful to have been a mother and glad that Finnar, specifically, existed, however much suffering those six years had brought her. And although it's not true that her choice harmed no one but herself and her equally-consenting-to-this-risk partner, because Finnar was very much harmed, it's still true that in the counterfactual, Finnar never existed – and though the actual Finnar who did exist was of course devastated and furious, it wasn't obviously the case that his existence was net-negative from his own perspective. Besides, while 'Mirrell is unhappy' was something the prediction markets saw coming, the resulting outcome was a lot worse than the median prediction.) 

...Civilization does believe in causal attribution, whether or not it makes sense to frame it as blame. It has Official Experts and Standards about attributing causality (as plays a central role in impact markets). There was an answer, or at least a best available prediction, of "why did Mirrell truedie, and was anybody responsible for that even in the sense that they'd have been paid a bonus if that had been a good thing". Civilization also does not believe in concealing that information from involved parties, and there was a straightforward market-grounded-nonmarket-prediction of the counterfact that Miriel would've had a 30% chance of still being alive or in cryo if she hadn't given birth to Finnar.

That information was available to Finnar himself, if he chose to seek it out, which he did. 

(From a fault analysis perspective, the main actor in the situation who made a deliberate choice, and could have made a different choice, was Mirrell, though the counterfactual world where Mirrell placed more of her trust in the policy markets, and was more willing to let that override what she wanted and cared about, does sort of boil down to "if Mirrell had had different values". And from another angle, one might attribute fault to all of Civilization, for failing to offer Mirrell something worth sticking around for. Just about nobody would place any fault, even fault-not-in-the-sense-of-blame, on the small child, who hadn't chosen to be born and could not meaningfully have decided to, instead, be a different small child who was easier for Mirrell to parent.) 

From Finnar's perspective – a child more than smart enough to follow that causal analysis, but still with the emotional maturity and nuance of a six-year-old – it seemed pretty clear that his mother's death was his fault. 

But not only his fault! Mirrell had, after all, cared about the wellbeing of her partner and her son, and stuck around as long as she believed her departure would leave them worse off. Which meant, from Finnar's point of view, that another blameworthy actor was the woman willing to remarry his father after his first wife's True Death. Or at least this was probably his reasoning; the observable effect was that, from the very beginning, Finnar hated her with the fury of a thousand supernovas. 

(This was perhaps foreseeable in advance, if the right eyes had been on the situation before rather than after Mirrell's truicide. It's also unclear if it reflected a mistake in Civilization's priorities, that those eyes weren't on the situation until too late.) 

In any case, Firrin wasn't going to subject his kid to a stepparent he detested, and so Firrin was not going to pursue a relationship with Indis as long as he was still raising Finnar, despite the fact that he was grieving, deeply miserable and clearly struggling to parent his traumatized and also very neurodivergent child (who on some emotional level he probably did resent after what had happened with Mirrell), and the prediction markets thought that he would be happier if he remarried. 

Finnar was not oblivious to this, and was also very bitter and angry with his father. He was about nine when he started insisting that he would be FINE on his OWN and DIDN'T NEED A PARENT ANYWAY and everyone would really be better off if he MOVED OUT. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the sheer accumulated tangle of emotional history with his father, the policy markets agreed with this assessment. 

POOR TINY CHILD also this is so upsetting.

....And the current situation has to be one of Finnar's worst nightmares come true, for even more reasons than she had previously known. 

....Finnar was thirteen when he noticed some fishy inconsistencies in certain cover stories, made some inferences, and was getting dangerously close to straight-up guessing the existence and purpose of the Basement. Per policy, he was approached by a Keeper.

Civilization does not actually prefer to coerce traumatized young people into making secrecy oaths if they will predictably consider this to be a bad deal for them.

Finnar was not really considered reliable enough that anyone wanted to fully bring him in on all of the Basement's secrets and offer him a job there, and in any case, he wasn't interested. At this point, perhaps reasonably given the events of his childhood, he had very little trust that Civilization's values aligned with his own. The whole situation was somewhat irregular, but they were able to agree on an outcome that all parties considered preferable to the alternatives: in exchange for keeping the Basement's secrets, Finnar would get access to slightly faster computers and some of the existing alignment research, and could have his own independent go at solving the problem.

(They didn't particularly expect him to succeed, and of course disagreed on the matter of what values Civilization ought to impart to an AGI, but it wasn't ruled out. Finnar didn't love the clause that they would step in and intervene if it looked like he was about to do something very very dangerous to Civilization, but he grouchily agreed that if they warned him and he wasn't convinced and didn't stop voluntarily, from their point of view it wasn't totally unreasonable to stop him by force. And if it looked like he was going to solve it, knowably and verifiably, then of course he would be in a position to negotiate a cosmic-level reward about that.) 

(And this part is inferred, not directly observed, but: at this point, Finnar had a pretty good guess of exactly what the Keepers could have told Mirrell, that might have changed her decision, if she had been considered trustworthy enough. Finnar almost certainly blamed himself for not having guessed on his own much sooner, while his mother was still alive and while he was still unbound by a secrecy oath.) 

Related inference: while Finnar doesn't trust the Basement to build a Future that has space for himself and his children, he is, in fact, trying to get there on his own. His son Kurthin made some similar deductions and was similarly brought in on the secret; they now work together.

His son Khemeth is considered very legibly reliable, and was brought in on elements of the secret years ago. (One of the traits that goes into Khemeth's trustworthiness is of course that, when you tell him part of a secret and that he doesn't need to know the rest, he accepts this and doesn't keep digging.) Khemeth is part of the reason that the Basement is willing to let Finnar work on his project with the degree of autonomy he currently has. 

Three of Kalorm's close family members were possessed of information that might, maybe, have convinced him to revisit his medical advance directive and agree to be cryopreserved. All three of them were bound by oath not to tell him. (Kalorm is definitely not considered reliable enough to keep an oath, and also tends to categorically refuse to swear any to Civilization. Making an oath to his family would not be considered sufficient, not for this.) 

It hardly requires a genius level of insight to guess that right now there are probably some VERY STRONG FEELINGS about that. 

Fanthim is high-empathy, and also has a VERY high tolerance for empathizing with unpleasant and painful emotional states, for which she also has relevant training. 

There are still some things that she really doesn't want to even try to imagine. 

They fly over Default City, most of it still dark or lit only with dim red lights, but the hospital region, with work that goes on day and night, is in an area that never sleeps, and is lit. 

They descend. 

Merrin takes deep breaths, and promises Kalorm that they're so close now, and hopes quietly to herself that the pilot can manage a really, really smooth landing. 

Kalorm obviously doesn't respond to this in any way. 

Three hours and fifty minutes after Merrin pulled Kalorm out of the water over a thousand miles away, they land. 

The next part is going to be pretty stressful! Default Hospital is really big. A lot of optimization went into its layout, but the airstrip is not immediately adjacent to the ICU. Rather than transfer to a helicopter for a three-minutes flight, or set up in a room-module and then move the room-module (more like ten minutes), they're going to use one of the underground transport tunnels. They have fully equipped short-distance-transfer-ambulances, one is waiting for her with all the screens already mirroring the ones in the plane, and it'll be, like, four minutes of transport and then a straightforward transfer into the Complicated Patient Intake Room, already set up for the invasive procedures they need to carry out before they start rewarming. There won't be that much acceleration – if they were confident Kalorm could take it, they could be there in two minutes, but they're trading more time in transit for a gentler ride. 

It is still agonizingly stressful. Merrin is going to be so so so relieved when she's finally home in her nice well-equipped ICU room. 

The markets think there is about a 40% chance of something going wrong en route. Which will be okay, but the more stable the patient is for upcoming procedures, the more likely it is that he'll tolerate those without complications, and the better their overall success odds. 

STRESS come on Kalorm you can do this STRESS

They get lucky, this time. Merrin's stress is the worst thing that happens, and then they're there, sliding the mattress-and-supports from the transport ambulance gurney to the room gurney, and there's so much equipment and so many people waiting. 

Is Merrin ready to go RIGHT NOW on transferring the patient to full heart-lung bypass or does she need a minute to orient first. 

(Merrin isn't the one with the most experience at the procedure itself, and she'll have help with the surgical prep, with opening the patient's chest, and with pretty much every other aspect - someone already has the pump and filter primed with transfusion blood and circulating through an organ-transport module - but she has more than enough sim time to safely perform the actual cannulation of the patient's heart and aorta, and the timing for that is really delicate, since they need to put the mechanical cardiac pump on standby for each cannula placement. Merrin, with four hours of context on keeping the patient vaguely stable, has the best chance of wrangling that timing without hitting an issue of the type "the patient has no blood pressure for thirty seconds".) 

Yeah she's ready. 

(She is quietly explaining to Kalorm that she realizes this procedure looks really scary, but it's fine, they do it all the time, and it'll make the rewarming so much easier for him.) 

On-site personnel who have not actually worked with Merrin before think this is weird but adorable, not that they say anything about it out loud. 

It's not a complicated surgical procedure. But it's a lot more fraught than usual on a patient this cold, with limited homeostatic regulation functioning, clotting dysfunction, and existing injuries. They're going to do the whole thing under realtime CT guidance, with injected contrast to visualize blood vessels, so Merrin can see exactly what she's doing and how the patient's circulation is responding. (It's a small radiation exposure for the staff, but they'll be compensated for that tiny increased risk of cancer later, and with protective gear it really is a tiny risk.) 

First up: inject contrast. It's normally pretty safe, if the patient isn't allergic, and they know Kalorm isn't allergic to this kind of CT contrast. He had CT scans as a kid thanks to all the times he came in with suspected traumatic injuries after doing things like falling 15 meters out of a tree, and some of those scenarios being scary and urgent such that it was worth the faster imagery at the cost of the low cancer risk. 

It might do something weird at this body temperature, though! Data on that is really limited! The patient's blood chemistry is in a delicate enough balance that there's some chance a perturbation will push them outside the parameters until Merrin can address that, hopefully quickly. The markets think there's a 30% chance this will happen. 

It's not great if it does happen, both because of any direct damage that gets dealt while Merrin is frantically trying to get back on protocol, and because it's a general sign that Kalorm's state is more fragile than they hoped. It'll mainly affect the probability of mild damage; the market is expecting it would react with a 14% increase in that risk, and a 7% increase on the odds of moderate damage, to 27.5%. They don't expect it to affect the odds of severe damage very much. 

If it goes okay, they get a smaller improvement in the prognosis, a 6% and 3% decrease, because one thing going well is at least slightly predictive of the patient having more physiological slack, and other things continuing to go well. 

(There are going to be a lot of dice rolls like that over the next few minutes. No one thing they're doing has a very high chance of serious complications, but they need to do a lot of things very quickly and the patient is not incredibly stable to begin with.) 

.......And this time they got unlucky, because several blood chemistry parameters on the continuous sensor are thrown out of whack, and it's maybe interacting in some bizarre way with the filter pressure on the ECMO circuit, which they still really badly need for the next five minutes until they can get the new oxygenation circuit attached and running. 

Merrin has one more chance to try to get on top of it before it cascades to affect the patient's vital signs! It's a big ask to be that fast, though. Someone with faster processing speed and better raw reaction times than Merrin would have a higher chance, but that person does not also have the thousands of hours of sim time that Merrin is leaning on to do this at all, or the endurance to have already worked with Kalorm for four hours and still be at top performance. 

The markets think she has about a 20% chance of correcting the system before they're very far outside parameters on the really important variables. 

If she navigates this well, and the system is perturbed temporarily but the most critical factors (blood pressure and O2 saturation) don't or barely slip outside parameters, they mostly get back to the previous odds (predicted 12% and 6% decrease on the relevant predicted outcomes). If Merrin has to spend a while wrestling the patient back to stability, the market expects to update on the complication and then a little further, an additional 3% and 1.5% increase. 

Come on Kalorm be nice be helpful this would be a really good time for some teamwork–