Vivai is going to end up sitting on a patch of grass. The air is cool, a little below room temperature, but the sunlight is warm. There are cows – at least, things which look very similarly to cows – nearby, grazing. Off in the distance, perhaps fifty meters away, there are two people who appear to be checking on the cows.

If he looks up, he'll notice that there are actually two suns in the sky: one yellow one, and one smaller red one. Based on their position on the sky, it looks to be early morning.

There's a large house in the distance, about a kilometer or more away, although it's too far away to make out any further details. Other smaller buildings are nearer that appear to be barns or something along those lines. He does appear to be in a rather rural area. Opposite the house is a forest.

Cool. It really does work that way. Vivai didn't actually expect it to work that way. Hey, wait, are those twin suns? He . . . supposes it's not all that unusual, for a random human-habitable planet, but the science fiction stench his brain smells on it is still weirding him out.

Well, the worst that can happen if those folks tending the . . . cows? turn out to be skittish or hostile is he gets isekaid again. He gets up, shakes himself off, and struts his way toward them.

The sun feels nice.

They're wearing a plain shirt and pants, both dyed dark blue. One of them is wearing overalls too, as well as carrying a long spear-like cattle prod, almost as long as him. This one is wearing a tool belt. It's giving 1900s farmer.

They look humanoid, actually, very much just like relatively tall human men, but then tapering forearm-thick tentacles emerge from both of their backs. So much for that impression. They remain still, like, very still, aside from the tentacles, which seem to be alternately emerging and retracting in a wave-like pattern. They do this for several seconds, and then stick out similarly long tongues which flick in the air before retracting, as though snakes sniffing the air. This continues for several more seconds, until this one asks plainly: 

"Who are you?"

The aliens speak Irethal? That's not right, they should be speaking Byway. Also, Vivai has had time to notice that his clothes came with him, which doesn't make any damn sense. Less sense than him ending up in proximity to Irethal-fluent aliens, actually. 

"I'm -" oh. I'm not speaking Irethal. Neither are they. Huh. "I'm Vivai? I'm an alien. I just died and ended up here. Do you guys by chance need work? Also, please let me know if this is out of line, I'm sort of in a post-death-survival mania, but I don't have those" - he gestures behind himself - "back tentacles, and they are fine."

The two of them bow deeply, seemingly reflexively, just after Vivai says "I'm".

"These drones* sincerely apologize, Sir; they did not know they were speaking to a prenu. This drone is confused: you, Sir, say that you are a prenu**, but you are clearly not a remna** – there is speculation on whether non-remna prenu were possible, since none have yet been observed. Apparently, they are, given that you, Sir, are an non-remna alien, who is still a prenu. This resolves the confusion.

Could you, Sir, explain what you mean by 'need work'***? These drones have already been assigned tasks by our Master.

You, Sir, are clearly not dead, unless being able to speak is consistent with death in your species."

They ignore the compliment.

* One syllable and one word pronoun in Standard Imperial.

** "Prenu" means "person", and are used for any sapient entities which have 'spirit', now more commonly rendered as 'free will' or 'ontologically-basic-capacity-for-desire'. "Remna" is the term used for their species.

*** Standard Imperial has an extremely intricate system to manage obligation in interrogatives and imperatives. This one is [strongly recommended but not obliged or critical].

If Vivai had signed up for fucking cryo he would be home right now instead of stuffing these poor aliens' precious work hours with the tedious task of translating his likely-useless arbitrary cultural baggage. Well, at least Soirem (<3) will be fine. Because he's responsible. Vivai, this is what consequences look like.

"Sorry, I should have been more clear. I have no idea what is happening, except some vague hints I half-understood from something I once read somewhere. What I remember is, I was home, and then I died, specifically in a" - hm, can't say 'pelletizer' in this tongue I've magically picked up - "machine for turning lots of mush into very small pieces, it didn't get my brain, I was just stupid and had never paid for my brain to be preserved, and then I woke up here. Your guess may be as good as mine.

If you already have all the hands you need" - and they do have hands, another WEIRD - "then never mind, I just thought I had better ask, in case you were out a man, and then I wouldn't have needed to travel further. But I certainly don't mind traveling to find someone who can use me." He is emphatic about this.

The alien is speaking very weirdly. The alien implies, by using the pronouns reserved for prenu, that he is one, and yet his words indicate behavior that would be expressed by drones. Is he an unowned drone? That would explain needing to travel to find an owner. Rend actually isn't sure what happens to unowned drones – is that even possible? People's wills have provisions for which people get which drones in the case they die.

Rend is going to remember what Vivai says about brain preservation and machines, but is going to ignore it, since it doesn't seem like it's relevant to the current conversation, and it wasn't a question or an order.

"Why would you, Sir, offer to help drones with work? [recommended but optional] You have no obligation to do so. Further, animal husbandry is not the sort of work Keepers practice."

The other man begins speaking. Both of them are muscular, but Las is just really, really big. The sort of body that takes years of bodybuilding to achieve. It* adjusts his grip on the cattleprod, lifting it off the ground and holding it in one arm, the bottom of it in its hand.

"What brings you to this place, Sir? Do you have business with our Master?  [tone: negative consequences may be imposed by the speaker if question is not answered] This drone may bring you to Him if that is the case."

* Drones use impersonal pronouns, unlike Keepers.

He addresses the big threatening dumb one first.

"Like I said, I have no idea why I materialized here. I would be happy for you to take me to your Master if you think he might be interested in talking with me, or if the nearest remna settlement isn't within walking distance and I must beg his help getting there, but otherwise I have no desire to waste his time or yours. If the nearest settlement is walkable, you have only to point me to it and I swear I'll be on my way."

To the other.

"I -"

- wait, what? . . . Keeper?

The semantic associations finally break through into Vivai's consciousness. He can't quite believe them.

Keeper: one who keeps drones. Begets them, owns them, commands them. A person with free will, volition. Unlike his drones, who -

"You - aren't getting. Paid for this."

"He literally just said that he died and had no idea how he got here. Update appropriately," Rend says to Las.

"Have you considered that this is some type of trick?

Hm. This is sufficiently outside the expected-range-of-variation that this drone would prefer to seek its Master's guidance."

Then, to Vivai, "The nearest city is Kosfor City, which is about six kilometers away. That is about one and a half hours walk. This drone believes that its Master would be greatly interested in talking to you, Sir, being that you are an alien."

Rend responds to Vivai's last statement.

"No, of course not, Sir. Why would we be?"

Well, now the big one is making more sense. To that one:

"I'd be happy to talk with your Master if you think it'd be a productive use of all our time. And sorry, I didn't get your name, what was yours?" He turns to the other.

"And yours? And because - because you're contributing value? Because your Master - and more importantly because whoever is, I forget what people do with cows, actually, hey, pop quiz, are the cows conscious? because whoever is in some way relying on getting value out of these cows, needs you to watch over them, or they wouldn't get that value, so to them, you in this context are value, and if they aren't competent to pay for your work they are in fact shooting themselves in the foot?"

(Vivai is very proud of his lung capacity, and practiced at inhaling after the ends of long sentences discreetly.)

"Yes, this drone believes it would be very productive, Sir. My Master is likely to be able to direct you to places where you can find work suitable for prenu. It is theoretically possible for prenu to do farm work, but virtually no prenu does so. At your leave*, these drones will escort you to their Master's house.

This drone's name is Las, Sir."

* One word in Standard Imperial.

"This drone's name is Rend, Sir.

Cows are used for milk, or slaughtered for meat. The cows are sentient, but not sapient.

This drone is very confused, Sir. You imply that if its Master did not pay it for its work, that it would withhold the value that it provides to Him. This drone would never do that – drones-in-general* would never do that. Hence, there is no need for its Master to pay it.

Hypothesis**: your world, Sir, lacks drones, which is causing your confusion. Validation requested***."

Vivai may notice that Rend and Las have long since retracted their tentacles, and have also barely moved at all since the start of this conversation, only moving the muscles around the mouth to speak. They haven't scratched themselves or made any discernable facial expressions, and their voices remain monotone.

* One-syllable suffix in Standard Imperial.

** One syllable sentential marker in Standard Imperial.

** Two-syllable interjection in Standard Imperial.

"Rend's hypothesis that my world lacks drones is correct."

Vivai suppresses the hysteria trying to rise in his voice. Rend spoke so matter-of-factly about slaughtering cows for food and then their being sentient but not sapient in the next sentence, at least it turns out death isn't real but dear bleeding-hearted heroes what kind of world has he wandered into.

"To either of your knowledge, has cow sentience ever in any way been tested and verified? Is it known what a cow does when placed in front of a mirror, and particularly what the same cow does when you place it in front of a mirror later with a strange mark on its forehead?

I would be happy to continue this conversation on our way to your Master, if this is amenable to you." Death isn't real and the cows probably aren't getting slaughtered in the next hour, they can wait.

Las will begin to walk in the direction of the large house. Rend will follow.

"Cows are verified to be sentient because they are averse to painful, uncomfortable, or noxious stimuli, such as being poked with cattle prods. Likewise, they are attracted to pleasurable stimuli, such as the sight and smell of grass. It is not known by this drone whether cows experience emotion.

These drones specifically do not know how your hypotheticals would resolve, Sir, although this drone suspects that this experiment has probably been performed and the results published at least once, somewhere in the Imperium."

Rend and Las walk briskly. 

Vivai nods, hoping for the still-maybe-sentient-cows' sake that he doesn't show his relief and therefore his allegiance with them. "Thanks for the data."

He has to pump his shorter legs just a little bit faster than Rend and Las to keep up. Somehow the experience of getting ground into mash and booted between universes not twenty minutes ago puts even that into perspective.

He's sure he can get this species to let him do farm work in general. He's not sure why this is suddenly so important to him, except that he's never been forbidden from doing any type of work before. He's never heard of such a thing. It's not just inhuman - inprenu, that is - it's obviously madness! To draw the boundaries of skill before the potential prodigy or idiot has any chance to test himself! How does these peoples' society function. Is it in fact currently collapsing.

Vivai vaguely addresses the direction of Rend because that drone has shown itself more eager to answer Vivai's abstracter questions, although he leaves it open to Las as well: "How long has your society stayed stable under the norm that keepers do only some kinds of work, and drones do only others?" I can't imagine this having gone on for more than fifty years at the very longest. Society would crumble. No one would voluntarily build anything. Although - he retastes the semantics. Drone. Keeper. There's a biological distinction. 

He considers asking for a crash course in their biology, but they're getting closer to the Master's house and he figures he'd better not hold them up.

"You are welcome, Sir."

Rend is more eager to answer Vivai's questions because Rend has been ordered to be more proactive – to anticipate its Masters desires and to act on them even before He has expressed them. Rend suspects that answering Vivai's questions now will save its Master from having to answer questions later. Proactivity training is a core part of drone training. Of course, there is a limit to how proactive they'll be – Rend isn't going to talk about proactivity training, even though it might infer Vivai's confusion.

"Other remna societies have existed before then, but the largest and most dominant polity, the Imperium, is eleven gross ten dozen and eleven years old*. The norm is not absolute. There are no Imperial or regional laws on which types of work drones do which is illegal for Keepers to do, and vice versa. It is simply that many Keepers find some types of work unseemly or unpleasant, and so order drones to do them.

The categories for which types of work are drone-coded and Keeper-coded are also capable of changing. In the early Imperium, computing used to be a Keeper job, but nowadays, as computing became more central to daily life, and the average amount of computing necessary to conduct business increased, most computing is done by drones. This drone's Master used to want it to become a computer, but it is below average in mathematical intelligence. It scored about one standard-deviation below the mean in tests.

Calibration requested**: This drone suspects that you, Sir, are in need of more context in question answers than the usual Keeper, because you are an alien. Have its answers been free of irrelevant information and contain information which resolves your confusion?"

* 1715 years.

** Also a two-syllable word in Standard Imperial.

The house – which is very big, whether by Earth or Bywayean standards – is giving 'historical rustic Italian countryside villa'. It's very clear, however, that the rusticness is a choice, and was a deliberate aesthetic choice by the makers of the house.

It has exposed stone walls and walkways which are not entirely smoothed, with terracotta shingles. The doors and windows are wooden. Plants in pots and gardens are present, and they seem to be flowering ornamental plants, although only some are showing buds, with even fewer actually in bloom. The season is late spring. Vivai is likely to recognize the season – the marks are similar to Earth – but it's not guaranteed. This is an alien world, after all.

Vivai does not visibly react to the scenery at all.

Maybe he has time for one more well-aimed question.

"I understand wanting to work without pay if your Master is really awesome. Presumably that's why you do this? An" - can't say unpaid-internship* - "arrangement where you get paid exclusively in the accumulation of your own human capital, that happens naturally as you learn the job?" Well, that's a lot of words to express a very basic social mechanism.  

. . . Byway would probably sound as stupidly circuitous about some things to these people, though. Vivai wonders which things those are.

*Yeah, this is one word in both Irethal and Byway.

"Yes, in this drone's opinion, its Master is really awesome. But, that's not why we obey Him. How to explain...ah, here we are."

Rend removes his boots, puts them on a rack, and knocks on the door.

"May this drone remove your shoes, Sir?"

". . . Sure?"

(Of course Vivai has been taken right up to the point of learning about the implied existence of the doubtlessly mind-exploding remna concept of Awesomeness-that-transcends-Awesomeness, but no further, until the concept can be cinematically explained to him by its wielder. A tiny wordless spark of suspicion flares within Vivai. It's probably nothing. The last eleven dozen gross times it turned out to be nothing. Post-death is nothing special. Probably. Would I even be asking myself this question if it were an ordinary day visiting a partner's boss at home? No.    . . . Still, it's not an ordinary day - )

Rend is initially confused by the Bywayean shoes, but Bywayeans and Zmavilpre have very similar foot morphology, so the drone manages to remove the shoes, placing them gingerly on the rack. Las does the same.

The two drones also remove their hats, and it appears that their heads are also different. They don't have hair. Instead, they have a large shell-like plate covering their head – where a helmet would cover – with small ridges and spikes. Rend's has splotches of brown, but Las's has brilliant streaks of yellow. It's quite striking.

Rend will open the door for Las and Vivai to enter first, then close the door behind them, following.

There will be a man eating breakfast on a dining table. There's about six separate dishes on the table, enough to feed three or four humans. Presumably this is their Master. Their Master looks very handsome, if you go by Earth standards – most people would say so – and he is also wearing a gorgeous blue and yellow pattern dyed wrapped-garment-dress, like a sari, but it probably wouldn't meet Vivai's expectation of 'Awesomeness-that-transcends-Awesomeness', unless Vivai is specifically looking for attractive aliens. His head plate looks like pearl, or nacre, and is similarly iridescent.

Rend will kneel, looking up, and speak. Las does the same, with a barely imperceptible delay. It looks like they're thoroughly practiced in it.

"Master, these drones found an alien wandering the edges of the farm. These drones brought him to You, as they believed that You might be interested in speaking to him. Further, he has said that he is in need of help, specifically, that he wishes to find work."

The Imperium has no laws mandating people help strangers, but there is a strong social norm to help them, with an accompanying strong social norm that the person helped will recompense the other when or if they are able. Many lost-drone insurance policies will pay out to people who help convey the lost drone to their Owner, for example. 

Vivai turns around and starts to leave when it turns out the guy is eating, but they don't follow him. Instead, he hears Rend start talking business with the Master like nothing unexpected or prohibitive has happened.

Reality breaks through Vivai's thick skull and wakes him up to how he's not dealing with anything even basically human as he knows it.

His sympathetic nervous system kicks in; he has no emotional bandwidth left over to be angry at how the alien is characterizing him to its boss as 'wandering' and 'in need'. Vivai's brain fires up.

Is the Master still audibly eating?

"Rise," Damin says, and the drones do so.

Damin will stop eating immediately after Rend starts talking about the alien. He does the same tentacle thing and tongue thing that the drones did earlier, and then he's going to look very shocked!

"Wow – I – you really are an alien! Amazing!" He covers his mouth. 

"What can I do for you? Sit down [purely optional]. Do you want to eat [purely optional]? Ah, our food might be poisonous to you, though. Do you want me to get the drones to bring something for you [purely optional]?"

The food might not necessarily look like Bywayean food, but it does look food-like. Approximating, there appears to be bacon and ham, bread, rice pudding, red berries of some sort, some sort of jam or fruit preserve, pound cake, milk, and water.

Damin is kind of confused over Vivai turning to leave, but ignores it.

"Report [order]," he says to Rend.

Rend will summarize what has occurred so far. They found Vivai near the edge of the farm, where Vivai said that he 'died', and was also an alien, so they brought him here.

"Wow, that did not clear things up at all. Would you like to explain instead [strongly recommended; not mandatory]? Regardless of how you came here, it is clear that you are one. Not just because of your scent, but you have hair!" He laughs, and makes a sort of flicking away gesture with his hand. 

The two drones respond to this cue and stand aside, moving closer to the wall to make themselves unobtrusive, but won't leave the room.

The interior's aesthetic is very similar to the exterior's. Much thought has also similarly been put into the decor and ambiance of it.

Vivai sits.

"Thanks for asking, I do not want to eat, in my home culture eating is" - he flounders - "really a private thing.

I suppose I will have to figure out whether the food here is poisonous to me at some point, and I guess since I'm not an expert organic chemist the way I'll do that is by eating something - it is really shocking to me how similar the food, as well as your body plans, is to what I'm used to at home - and dying again if it's fatally toxic, and living if it's not. I guess there is some chance it's a non-immediately-fatal neurotoxin, so I'll want to have a quick suicide method ready . . . sorry, that's really gruesome. I am ζ6% [tendozen-six pergross, ~90% in decimal] sure that if I die again I'll just go somewhere else again, and anyway I'll have to eat something here pretty soon, and unless your world's civilization is way more medically advanced than it looks to me, there's no way to guess ahead of time what might be safest.

I want to clarify right at the bottom, I am not presently in need of help - Las told me Kosfor City is only an hour and a half's walk away, and I am perfectly able to walk and in fact would prefer walking to incurring implicit debt to you. Strongly.

I do have hair!" He smiles. Those plates remind him of ram dinosaurs, and he wonders if their evolutionary source was ever used for mating rights contests - the aliens' facial bone structures and builds are comically skewed toward masculinity in a way that suggests a relatively aggressive prehistory - martyrs, why should there be any correspondence - but he's not about to escalate and start openly objectifying the boss's "hair", which after all is normal here.

"I . . . " where to start. "well, it's really just like Rend said. Sorry I can't be more illuminating. If you have speculation, I would love to hear it. I was just working - I was a line operator/maintainer at a factory making food for animal test subjects, mostly mice - that's where my middle name comes from, my full name is Vivai Alith Latitude* Sareksal, the feed company's name was Alith Latitude and the factory was located in the city of Sareksal - I suppose I'll need new trailing names soon - anyway, I was working and made some mistake and the machine I was responsible for, chewed up my arm, down through the shoulder" - he holds up his right arm - "and I bled out. And then I woke up here. Presumably you don't have cryonic preservation here, which I would be freaking out about if I still believed in subjective death, but I'll explain anyway: I think I would have woken up at home, sometime in the far future, if I hadn't been an idiot and procrastinated on making arrangements for my brain to be preserved, so it could be thawed out later. But I was that idiot. And so someone may have tried to charitably assist me, but it wasn't fast enough, and ultimately my brain was incinerated, and I woke up here, and I have no idea why here in particular, and not somewhere else.

. . . Do you have any idea? Or further questions, I would be happy to answer." Vivai has his own further questions, but with some people you have to lead with your gives or you'll leave the conversation in a mountain of implicit debt with your head spinning, and he hasn't ruled out the Master being one of those people.

*translated

Damin will listen intently. His facial expressions are quite animated, totally unlike the drones.

He makes a motion with his tentacles to eat, but stops when Vivai says that 'eating is a private thing'. What does that mean, exactly? Probably just a cultural difference.

"Yes, I was surprised at the similarity of our body plans too. Not that I have any other aliens to observe with which to calibrate."

He frowns when Vivai mentions suicide. "You can do whatever you want, but I will not help you kill yourself until you write a suicide intent letter and have it notarized at an Imperial or regional office. Of course, there is virtually no chance that I would be charged with murder even if you do, but it's better to be safe.

Implicit debt...? Oh, no, no! I am helping you purely as a-gift-which-requires-no-reciprocation-not-even-the-reciprocation-of-expressing-gratitude*! You are an alien! Of course I want to be hospitable, even if I have no obligation to. I, and my drones, can accompany you to Kosfor and get you the things you need, or connect you to other people, such as scientists and chemists and biologists who can see whether our food is suitable for you. I'm a planter and a therapist – these things are totally outside my expertise. Or would you prefer to have your existence be secret? Many, many people would want to meet with you, simply by virtue of being an alien, and I imagine having to deal with that amount of public exposure and interest would be tiring. At least, it would be to me.

You can even ride on my carriage – I wouldn't want you to suffer the indignity of having to walk, well, unless you want to. My drones can carry two people just fine – you're definitely lighter than Konrad. Ah, Konrad is my husband."

Not mating rights exactly, but having colorful and pearlescent plates is considered a very attractive trait among remna.

Vivai is named after the company he works for??? Right, cultural differences. He knows of people who have a gross drones or more, who simply call some of them by their roles.

"Apologies, I forgot to introduce myself. I am Damin Bales Sertes. Damin is my birth name, and Bales and Sertes are my birthing-parent and impregnating-parent's names respectively. Call me Damin. No, I have no idea what to make of that. There are stories here about people being transported to other worlds, but those stories are fiction. 

We don't have cryonic preservation here. Or, hm, maybe? The Imperator arranged for his body to be transported to the cold tundra in the south, near the poles, where the ground is frozen year round. In his last days, when he was dying of illness, he ordered the navy to take him there, just before his death. I suppose you could call that 'cryonic preservation'. Certainly, his body won't decompose there. Er, why do you think that getting your body frozen would lead to you waking up in the far future?"

He starts tapping his foot.

"Questions I have. Hm. How are you talking in Imperial, if you're an alien? Nevermind, that probably has something to do with your inexplicable means of travel, doesn't it?

Rend said you don't have drones in your world, which tracks with you having to operate machines in an assembly line. We have drones do that kind of work, here. Hm. Questions about biology seem most salient to me, now. How does your species reproduce? We are hermaphroditic – are you familiar with that term? Does that translate? We can reproduce both sexually and asexually. Asexual reproduction always results in drones – dear Las here is a product of that; I gave birth to it. Sexual reproduction is the only way to produce Keepers, although most of the time it also results in drones. Only Keepers can reproduce – drones are entirely sterile. I believe the term for that would be 'eusocial' – is that familiar to you?"

* Two syllable word in Standard Imperial.

Aaaaah that's so cool. 

". . . Aaaaah that's so cool!"

He's still on that adrenaline high. Cough.

"Yeah, we have two non-hermaphroditic sexes that reproduce sexually and that's it. I'm assuming you guessed that, seeing as how you defined remna as eusocial to me. Um, and with regards to cryonics, nobody knows exactly how to thaw 'frozen' people without killing them yet, but it seems in principle possible, and certain if humanity* - that's my species, human is the singular word - keeps on trucking for long enough."

Vivai thinks quickly. What predictions does this reproductive pattern make about remna psychology? Drones, being themselves sterile - shit. Unambiguous worker ants. And the queens are the Keepers. Everything Rend said about drone obedience to the Master - Damin - clicks into place. (Are the drones haploid? They must be, or similar. Las doesn't look like a near-clone of Damin, to Vivai's eyes. Whatever the drone genetic transformation is, anyway, it has significant effects. The particulars don't matter at the moment.)

What about the Keepers? They'd be genetically incentivized to keep their drones in working condition, but it'd be a lopsided relationship - both parties emotionally recognizing the drone only as an extension of the Keeper. Like a limb.

He's read science fiction with eusocial aliens, but . . . sapient ants giving their lives for a colony - that's alien, but romantic. At this modest scale, the fate of the drones just feels - sad. Or maybe the difference is just that they're flesh-and-blood and right in front of him. Everything's different when it happens to someone you know.

He searches, hits on the right first question.

"Socially, are there any contexts in which it doesn't matter whether a person is a Keeper or a drone, you treat them the same?"

*Vivai uses the Byway word here.

"I see! So you don't have drones, then, everyone is a prenu in your system. That explains why you were willing to do farm work. You reproduce exclusively sexually, and are dioecious. I guessed only that you weren't eusocial, not that you were dioecious."

Damin wants to press more on the cryonics question – it seems interesting – but it can wait until later.

Damin instinctively wants to take another bite of food with his tentacles, but again stops himself. 

"Socially, hmm. Ah. Er...let's see...I suppose if you were unsure about whether the remna you were talking to were a Keeper or a drone – perhaps because the drone is very tall or the Keeper very short, or because it's raining heavily and you can't distinguish by scent – you'd assume them to be a Keeper. If you wrongly refer to a drone with Keeper-language, it'll just correct you, but it would be terribly insulting to address a Keeper as an 'it'. 

But I think that isn't the answer you're looking for...thinking deeper on it," and from his facial expressions, it does seem like he is, "I don't think there are. Drones are not prenu, so how you would talk to them would be entirely different from how you would talk to Keepers.

Your scent is very different from remna. If you are concerned about being mistaken for a drone, or an organism similar to a drone – one that lacks ontologically-basic-capacity-for-desire – you can just say you aren't."

". . . Ontologically-basic-capacity-for-desire?" He doesn't want to tread on any toes here, but - "Don't drones have that? I mean, maybe not directed primarily toward their own survival, psychologically, but." He looks back at Rend and Las, meeting their eyes straight-on like he does with lower-downs whose trust he wants to gain. It doesn't feel right, he didn't earn higher status than them, but it's the best he's got here. Back to Damin. "Rend and Las seem possessed of cognitive volition, to me. What am I missing?"

Rend and Las are not going to look him back in the eye. Instead they seem to just be staring into the distance, unmoving. It's mildly eerie.

"Ugh, how do I explain this. This is a fish-in-water moment – this fact is so basic to us that it's difficult to explain it to others. Hm. Drones have very simple desires, the chief of which is to obey their Master. This desire remains stable, unlike with Keepers, who are not...hm...coherent-agents. People can change in what they want – drones don't. Does that make sense*? They are capable of thinking, of planning and executing such plans to achieve the orders they've been given, and they also feel emotions and sensory qualia. But they don't like – get urges to eat ice cream, or something like that. Does that make sense?

The traditional conception of this is that animals have body and spirit, drones have body and mind, but only prenu have all three. 'Spirit' here being an older word for ontologically-basic-capacity-for-desire. An older synonym is also free-will. Do you have that concept in your world? Drones do not have free-will – all they want is to serve their Master."

"Isn't that right?" he asks, and turns towards the drones.

* One syllable interjection in Standard Imperial.

"Yes, Master," they reply in unison. Again, their movements are very synchronized and practiced. "All we want is to serve You."

Okay then.

Vivai is pretty disturbed. Like the majority of philosophers (the gamemakers among whom are admittedly much smarter than Vivai of the solidly average tested g, and whose word he must thus partially trust), he had thought of free will as probably inextricable from sapience. Technologically primitive cultures have ever been wrong in their basic ontological categories, but he gets the feeling there's something more going on here than just pure error on the remnas' part.

". . . Sorry if this is a baby confusion for babies, but I can hardly see how drones could literally have less 'capacity-for-desire' than the worker classes of eusocial nonsapients." He might be marking himself a heretic target for who knows what kind of alien violence here, but YALFFF (you actually live forever, for free.) "Does the three-category system for minds" - he struggles to find the right words in this tongue; it doesn't feel horribly philosophically ill-equipped for a society at this tech level, just ill-fitting for Vivai, like an unfamiliar but not inelegant programming language - "strongly mirror physical-logical reality, or is it more of a free-floating cultural motif at this point?"

Damin sighs.

"It may be a productive analogy to think of drones as very complex machines, such as those large computing machines that take punched paper tape. You put in particular inputs and you get particular outputs – and this is deterministic. Of course, drones are not exactly like that – they are still biological and not mathematical – but it points in the right direction. Prenu have desires...outside of themselves, which come and go unbidden. Drones have near perfect self-insight into their desires because their desires are few and stable. Drones want to obey their Masters – they want their Masters to be happy and fulfilled. 

Mmmm, ah, another potentially clarifying point: There are terminal-desires and instrumental-desires. For example, suppose I want to eat ice cream from a creamery. To do that, I need money. Suppose I do not have money. Then, I instrumentally-want money, because it will help me to achieve my terminal-desire, even though I do not desire that money for its own sake. Keepers may change in their terminal-desires, and may have many of them. The terminal-desires of drones are few and stable. Drones and Keepers both can have instrumental-desires just fine. If I order Las to get ice cream from the creamery for me, then it'll instrumentally-desire that it has money, even though it would not terminally-desire the money.

Both? It is the way the world creation myth categorized things. We now know – for a long time now – that this passed-down myth is merely metaphorical, but the way it modeled things continues to be useful and emotionally-resonant to the modern day."

He will push away the mild upsettedness over not eating the breakfast in front of him – talking to the alien is clearly the more important thing right now.

Aaaaaaaaaagh he's clearly said something to miff the boss fuck fuck fuck.

At least his confusion is resolved now.

"That makes total sense and I was being thickheaded for not seeing it before. Thanks for clarifying. I have lots more basic questions about drone psychology that would probably be best answered by a library. Anything else you want to know from me? Otherwise I really will be on my way, feel free to get in touch if you want to ask me anything more, I would have been so much more lost if I had not landed in your field, but if you'll excuse me I'd prefer to tread with absolute caution when it comes to incurring debt."

(Seriously, the alien's insistence earlier was bordering on implying coercive intent, which Vivai is thrilled he doesn't have to pay the slightest attention to, because YALFFF.)

"It's a pretty big thing with my people. And I like walking!" He really does.

"Library? Oh, I have one. Hm, although I haven't had it trained specifically on drone psychology – I do therapy on Keepers, not drones. It's Konrad that does drone training. Do you want me to call for the librarian regardless? It can also read books to you, in the case the mechanism by which you are managing to speak Imperial now does not give you literacy. Ders, the librarian, has a lovely voice. Absolutely delightful to listen to – that's why I bought it. And it is also a computer besides.

I have lots of things I want to know about you, of course, you're an alien. 

I feel like...it would also be good for you to have someone who can help you navigate our society, so that you don't waste other people's time. It seems like imposing on others is a big thing in your culture. Other people may not be so patient, alien or not, especially if you walk onto land or buildings they own. We may mutually-satisfy-each-other's-desires* by having me convey you to the city, so that we can talk more on the way. I'll have to eat first though. I was planning to eat while talking to you, but you said that your culture interpreted eating to be something you do in private. 

Does your culture do gift-giving? I hope I've made it clear that I expect no reciprocation for the things I do for you. If I want you to repay something I did, I would make it clear what the price was before giving to you."

* Three syllables in Standard Imperial.

Yeah he doesn't buy a word of that not for a second. It's not that he has experience with such blatant attempts at gaslighting, in reality or in fiction, people at home aren't dumb enough let alone evil enough to conceive of let alone try this shit, it's just that he has better interpersonal instincts than a rock. But fine. Damin clearly isn't letting him go without a fight, at this point Damin has run out of plausible deniability that he isn't knowingly imposing on Vivai, there are no guarantees that the other boss aliens will be any less difficult, and he'd like to avoid dying again at least long enough to confirm that he can't get this world up to speed on immortality tech within his lifetime. And if you're planning to stick around somewhere, you fundamentally don't make enemies.

When in Crazytown.

He seethes. He hides it pretty well, although he's not particularly practiced at poker-face among the people he knows.

"You're very persuasive." In a manner.

"I would love to speak with Ders while you eat. Thank you for your patience."

Damin notices the subtle shift in facial expression, but he isn't sure how to interpret it.

"Of course. Rend, take Vivai to see Ders."

Rend bows. "Yes, Master. Right this way, Sir."

Rend will lead Vivai to go to the library, which looks pretty standard for a library at an industrial tech level. There's a typewriter, writing materials, some of which look very fancy, and several bookshelves. There's a man sitting on the desk, reading. Presumably that's Ders. This is confirmed when Rend conveys Master Damin's instructions to 'answer Sir Vivai's questions and furnish relevant materials when necessary. Assume very low context. Adopt high proactivity.'.

Ders is wearing a white button down with black pants. Ders stands, also bows, similar to Rend, vacating its chair, and standing well away from it, seemingly to indicate that Vivai can sit if he likes. There are couches elsewhere, although they won't have the correct angle or height to write on.

"What answers may this drone provide you, Sir?" The drone's voice is indeed lovely. It's low, whispery, and calming. Very soothing to listen to.

Ders is pretty.

Also, huh. Typewriter, and they have computers, and semi-modern medicine . . . Vivai has been systematically underestimating the tech level of this world. Probably because it dresses more like Ancient Byway than any way Byway has dressed itself in the past few centuries. Update. They're modern, just a few duodecades behind Byway, give or take. Maybe he won't have to do anything at all to catch them up to longevity escape velocity . . . or maybe he'll give his whole life in the attempt and still miss the boat by an embarrassing amount and be permanently cognitively aged. He still has to get a good handle on the size of their population, their average intelligence and the shape of their intelligence distribution, and the eumemics of their social structure.

"Hi, Ders. Um, sorry, I might need a minute to figure this out." That his words to perhaps the prettiest creature he's ever seen, okay that's hyperbole but still, might have been anything else.

Vivai reflects.

His obvious central line of attack here is to untangle the precise boundary between the Keeper and drone cognitive repertoires. They obviously don't know yet, or they'd have computers smart enough to make Ram Askielal look like a trash ditch. With any luck, the wildly divergent cognitive philosophy of Byway, applied to this world, will beget a picture of sapient cognition more complete than either world possessed by itself - even under a mind as relatively slow and clumsy as Vivai's. Maybe the picture will be complete enough to make smarter computers. Far more likely it'll just make for a couple really good books authored by Vivai himself. Either way, he'll have not only an earned source of status in this world, but also some really fun new paradigms.

. . . But first he should sort out some of the more basic aspects of how this world functions, about which, he now realizes, his thoughts up until now have been embarrassingly unclear. And about which he's expressed a cringey amount of overconfidence as his brain instinctively attempts to avoid looking childish. Brain, you moron, we're an alien. If they expect us to understand their culture right away without any questions that's their deficit. Now he has the chance to grill this world's self-understanding frankly. No pressure.  

Hopefully this alien supermodel with the ASMR voice has a deep respect for frank epistemic triage.

"So, some really basic questions to start with now I realize I don't understand the fundamentals of your world as well as I've been putting on. First: how long do drones and Keepers, respectively, naturally live?"

Ders will give him a minute to figure all this out, and won't speak or make any noises until Vivai actually asks a question.

Neither the drones nor Damin interpret him as acting childishly, although they wouldn't know they had to dispel that misconception. Vivai's size is what would be expected of teenagers in the Imperium, though.

"Prediction: your world, Sir, has different time units than this one. Here is one second: zero...one. Five dozen seconds make a minute. Five dozen minutes make an hour. Two dozen hours make a day. There are three gross* days in a year. 'Day' and 'year' are time units which also correspond to the rotational period – defined sidereally – and the orbital period of this planet around its suns respectively. The 'day' time unit and the rotational period are very close, but the 'year' time unit is slightly shorter than the orbital period, such that extra days must be inserted approximately once every dozen years to ensure alignment with the seasons.

Prediction: you, Sir, lack the computing training or working memory to process all these numbers and are in need of exocortical-aids**. This drone will write them for you. Please correct it if it is mistaken in any of its predictions so that it may calibrate properly." And Ders will write down the numbers and labels using a dip pen. It writes just as well as it speaks – all the numbers look like they've been printed, and the letters are in perfectly even cursive.

"Are you literate, Sir? If not, this drone may recite the numbers and labels for you at your pleasure.

The Imperial Census, which occurs every dozen years, collects data on mean Keeper age and Keeper life expectancy. The most recent census is eleven years ago. The mean Keeper age currently is four dozen three gross*** years, with the mean Keeper life expectancy being nine gross nine dozen and five****. The Imperial Census does not collect such data for drones." Ders will similarly write those numbers down.

"Does that answer your question, Sir? Prediction: It does only adjacently.

Hm...Prediction: In the majority of animals, homeostatic processes degrade slowly with age, such that, even under optimal living conditions, there is a limit to their lifespan. This is called senescence. You, Sir, were expecting remna to senescece, and hence were asking about this age ceiling, but they are not – we senesce negligibly. It is thought that, many gross gross years ago, in the ancestral environment, drones used to senesce, but nowadays they no longer do so. Please do not update strongly based on that thought – it has not yet been conclusively proven."

* 432

** Three-syllable compound word in Standard Imperial.

*** 600

**** 1409

THEY HAVE BUILT-IN ENGINEERED NEGLIGIBLE SENESCENCE. (And impressively even epistemics! And . . . training that turns people into actually-efficient computers. It's looking like it's going to take longer for Vivai to find an initial wedge in this world than he thought.) Vivai is happy for the aliens but this is not great news for Vivai. Starting with negligible senescence means you have no incentive to engineer it. And Vivai still senesces, unless the isekai translation magic gave him that, too. (He's not betting on it.) So he's up the inter-reality creek without a paddle. The imperturbable background part of Vivai that calculates his realtime decision tree expands the proportion of relatively immediate nodes involving strategic suicide.

"I - can read." He - he can. Read the alien handwriting explaining their 2-dozen-hour-day-based time units. In the same instant, he groks that all those loop-de-loops are totally semantically useless. (So. Many. Whole. Suitcases.)

Seeing as he is, in fact, in Crazytown, Vivai will not verbally object to Ders doing part of Vivai's rightful cognitive labor, although he will look mildly uncomfortable about it. It's not helping that Ders's . . . just Ders, is kind of distracting. Vivai's not normally a dope! This is just unfair.

"Um, you're correct that we senesce! My body, or at least the body I had on my home world, was guaranteed to stop working sometime before a gross of our years - those aren't too different in length from yours, I think, I'll explicitly figure that in a second - and probably before ten dozen. That is, it would have stopped working then unaided. I was already taking medication designed to repair the damage that naturally builds up in our bodies from our metabolic processes, and when I was younger I paid for a few really expensive viral treatments including one that put copies of my mitochondrial DNA inside my cell nuclei, and then made them authoritative. I have no idea at this point how many of those concepts will be familiar to you, sorry.

Given the biotech development track my world was on, it seemed pretty likely that I and other people my age - I'm a dozen and ten of our years - would not ultimately die of senescence. But here, sans access to that stuff, my body will almost certainly go kaput before it hits a gross. And I'll probably degrade significantly in cognitive agility, and then ability, long before then, in a smooth curve starting now but not becoming really noticeable for another couple dozen of our years. That's the viral treatments - each one I got, significantly slowed the decline of the people who got it in its trial waves starting a dozen or four Byway-years ago. Completely without technological assistance, human bodies almost literally always die before reaching the age of ten dozen Byway-years, and almost always senesce to the point of total physical and cognitive uselessness before eight dozen. So, yeah. Point remna.

I'm - not actually sure I can avoid temporarily updating on that speculation about historical drone senescence, sorry. At least not as much updating as it takes to commit it to memory. It's so fascinating! I'll be sure to tell them Ders warned me." Vivai, it's clear, is making this promise to protect Ders's reputation sacredly seriously.

"Okay. Interplanetary year conversion. Our second is about the same as yours, it's about like this - second . . . second . . . second . . . second. And we have the exact same time units up to also having 20-hour* days, which I acknowledge is really weird. We have the same system with having to insert leap days, ours are every four of our years, and very occasionally leap seconds on top of that, but our baseline year is two gross six dozen and five days long - so shorter than yours, and not a nice round number like yours, but on the same order. So, my body's expected lifespan, a gross of our years, would be, rough estimate, every of our years is about five-sixths of yours, so - " (Vivai, it appears, has subconsciously intuited that Ders, while a computer, will not interrupt him.) " - gross over five-over-six, gross times six-over-five - a gross and two dozen. So my body is destined to go kaput after about a gross and two dozen of your years - no, that's not right, your years are longer . . . " He reddens but does not change expression. "Uh, the multiplier is associated with your year, right, you go a gross times five-over-six to convert. So. My lifespan here is.

Ten dozen or so. Of your years."

He clams up, seemingly expecting Ders to comment.

*The current most popular number system in Aineh (Byway's current most important city) goes: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, ζ, ₵, 10. "20-hour" is of course pronounced "two dozen hour".

It's semantically meaningless, but it's not useless! Ders is trained in business handwriting only, not ornamental – Mag does that. The loop-de-loops are there to minimize the number of pen lifts needed to write, which permits people to write for longer. 

Vivai is correct that Ders will not interrupt him unless he pauses for long enough that he unambiguously expects Ders to respond. Only then does the drone do so.

"This drone is familiar with those concepts. We do not have the technology to use viruses to transfer mitochondrial DNA into cell nuclei. 

Potentially-helpful-information*: You, Sir, are very young compared to remna. Keepers receive their allotments from their parents at two dozen years old, and are considered legally young until the year they turn a gross and one years old. You, Sir, are a dozen and ten of your years old, which would make you a dozen and six and a half of our years old, approximated-to-one-fractional-place. This drone is nine dozen and three years old. Its Master is eleven dozen and eleven years old – both with our years as units.

Prediction: Upon comprehending your situation, this drone's Master will want to help save you, Sir, from your pitiful state by whatever means necessary. Nine dozen years is very short – not even enough to pass legal youngness. 

Prediction: You, Sir, will try to acquire as much knowledge regarding biotech to try to recreate your world's technologies here, so that you may live without senescing. Further prediction: Many companies here would want to invest in you or hire you to learn more about your world's biotech. Given similarity between our biology, it is likely that many human technologies will also be useful on remna.

It is thought that – sincere apologies – this drone may refrain from telling potentially pertinent or interesting hypotheses which-have-some-evidence-but-insufficient-to-be-considered-by-most-people-to-be-basically-true*, if that is your preference."

Yes, drones do have reputations in the sense that their actions reflect on their Master, who is in charge of them. That's very much not what Vivai is thinking though.

* Two syllables in Standard Imperial.

You do not make a process more ergonomic by artificially increasing the constraints on it. That is not how that works!

"Oh, my overupdating-on-speculative-theories thing is ego-syntonic*. Initial overreaction is just - how you let any new evidence into your system at all. It's self-correcting in the long run, and anyway, how are you supposed to productively aim ahead of time for approximately how strong you want to update on something, when you lack this much context? I'll have to make some wildly inaccurate assumptions about the object level, and then build up all my locally appropriate meta-reasoning heuristics from how those really dumb assumptions get exploded. Feel free to withhold for your own reasons if you have them, but it's not necessary to do so for my sake. And now I'm really curious what spurious thing, in particular, you were just going to talk about."

. . . Hm. If they're going to take pity on him about something, Vivai supposes it might as well be his mortality. Surely, though, there's an amount of dignity I won't sacrifice even for the paltry survival of my physical body, right? Not now that I'm guaranteed subjective immortality? Right, Decision Tree Manager?

Decision Tree Manager?

Decision Tree Manager doesn't hear him. It's busy weaving a pretty little spiderweb of futures in which he begs biological immortality from the cognitively dimorphic eusocial tentacled ram dinosaurs.

WHAT?

Decision Tree Manager doesn't bat an eye. Decision Tree Manager points out that Vivai is not a death-based intercounterfactual travel sherpa, and does not actually know the vague space of possible things that may go wrong if he tries to replicate his first jump, let alone how to begin to bend toward protecting himself. Decision Tree Manager shows Vivai many gut-level anticipations of Things Going Wrong.

. . . There's never any point in fighting when his hindbrain is this decided. Fuck.

FUCK.

A really stubborn part of Vivai hopes desperately that the food here is a slow-acting neurotoxin.

"Thanks for all the info, that was really well-targeted to help me understand my current situation. Assuming it isn't all part of some elaborate con - sorry, nothing personal, just a possibility I have to entertain until I'm actually stably situated in the economy of this world and understand, to my own satisfaction, who owes who what." He doesn't confirm or deny Ders's prediction that Vivai will try to make himself biologically immortal in this world, since Vivai's level of conscious intention to do so changed in response to Ders expressing the prediction.

"I should confess right away, then, that I was nothing like a professional bioengineer in my world - just a hobbyist who read some tutorials and kept up on the news. Somewhat. Like, to argue with partners and acquaintances about what would happen next, and to bet on some of the issuing prediction markets - the ones that were about companies and projects so peripheral that even someone of average g, like me, hi, hello, I'm average g in my world, could expect to maybe make money. Although I, personally, always lost money. So far! I am of course subjectively raring to go, and confident that I can deliver, but I think I should calibrate you guys's expectations more realistically."

*Yep, nonawkward, native, single word in Byway and Irethal.

"Understood, Sir. This drone will not restrain itself from sharing potentially pertinent or interesting unconfirmed-hypotheses.

The 'spurious thing' was the hypothesis that intelligence and negligible senescence necessarily evolve together. Both traits are very expensive, biologically speaking. Intelligence is mostly useful only if you anticipate living long enough that you can learn, and, after learning, executing on said knowledge, which would imply not having biological caps on lifespan. For example, if a species was intelligent and not negligibly senescent, then said organisms would have to waste time trying to impart their knowledge as fast as possible to their offspring before their inevitable demise, where all the knowledge they contained were lost.

The hypothesis claims that an intelligent species which was negligibly senescent would be impossible – it may now be safely rejected, with you, Sir, as the counterexample. This drone supposes that inventions such as language and writing would have permitted the rate of information transfer to be higher than the rate at which it is lost by death-due-to-senescence, such that the total amount of knowledge held by the species was higher each generation – higher than the rate at which biology may encode instincts into organisms via natural selection. Er, to the extent that teleology can be applied to nature – sincere apologies, it is simply a useful frame of mind.

I do not know of any outstanding debts which you have incurred, Sir, unless my Master or the other drones have neglected to inform me.

What is g? 

It seems that your world has better communications technology than mine, Sir. The use and spread of prediction markets is hampered by the fact that the teletype networks can only handle so much information to pass through, and also the need to calculate trades. Machine computers are being prototyped for this purpose. This drone's other Master, Master Konrad, is very fond of prediction markets and wishes to see them be more widespread.

It is still possible that the information you have acquired simply by virtue of living in a more technologically advanced society would be enough to speed up the rate of biotech research here."

Hm. That was not the spurious theory Vivai was expecting to hear. He thinks for a strangely long time, looking at the ground, conflicted.

He could - but no, even that gives away too much, too soon. File the evopsych stuff away for later, when he can talk to top field biologists, which - happy coincidence of happy coincidences - Ders says he will likely get a shot at, soon!

"Er, sorry, g is just our shorthand for abstraction ability. It's not quite intelligence, it's - do you have standardized testing for rural people, so that you can find peripheral geniuses and move them into cities?" It occurs to Vivai where he is. "I mean, ordinary rural workers, so you can bring them into cities or places like this!" What kind of place is this, exactly? But Damin is clearly wealthy, clearly well-read, so Vivai supposes what he's said probably holds. "g is our general way of referring to how well you do on the very best of those tests we can design. Some people used to like to confuse it with intelligence." That probably makes Vivai's world look pretty stupid - "But almost no one does, by now. Er, by the point in history from which I left.

Now we know it's an aspect of human intelligence, along with several other things that are real but harder to quickly test, none of which you can talk about in polite conversation without being suspected of narcissistic obsession. I of course only bring up something as uncouth as standardized test scores because I'm an alien, and, Science! Philosophy!

And you're right, we have way more developed info-tech - we have general-purpose computers that can make markets quickly as well as do other things, although in practice I think high-volume financial stuff is mostly handled by specialized info-equipment. And our computers are connected in a network that encompasses the whole planet, which is as awesome as it sounds. The world changed a lot after that." Vivai smiles. "I may be more or less useful in that area than in biotech, I'm not sure." Actually, he's pretty sure he can reconstruct some breakthroughs in signal relaying and computing technology that are way higher return-on-complexity than any breakthroughs in biotech, but Vivai Wants To Talk To A Biologist Now, and if he's going to be staying here, he has years to triage this civilization (s?).

". . . And that spurious theory is very interesting. I agree I disprove it in the universal case. I can't think of any analogue theories off the top of my head from my world that your species smashes clean through like that, but it'll be weird if I don't hit on some eventually. Assuming I learn more about you guys's biology and psychology. Which - yeah, I would love a chance to speak with some biotech researchers, as soon as it's convenient."

"There is standardized testing for drones, the most popular of which being the Imperial Civil Service Exam For Drones, and a similar test for the military, but it's more physical and less mental. A minimum score is needed for a Keeper to sell their drone to the government, with additional tests being available if you want a higher price for a pre-trained drone. It is possible to take the examination simply to have the drone be assessed, even if one has no intention of selling it. This drone is certified to have passed the minimum score in both the Civil Service exam and also the Computing examination to be sold specifically as a computer drone. It scored one and one-sixth standard-deviations above mean in the Civil Service exam, and two standard deviations above mean in the Computing exam – this drone is quite valuable. Clarification: the minimum score is independent of statistics – the standard deviation scores are only there to calculate the price of drones once they pass the minimum.

There is testing for Keepers to enlist as officers or to franchise an Imperial government office as well, but it's less rigorous and is pass-fail, rather than outputting a number or letter grade. Generally, Keepers do not like to legibilize themselves like that.

...Registering-confusion: standardized testing is not restricted geographically. So long as one can transport the drone to the testing center and can pay the testing fees, the drone can take the exam.

...Prediction: In your world, Sir, people prefer to live densely, such that wealthy people all cluster in the cities, with the poorer people being pushed out into the rural areas.

It is very unseemly to discuss the intelligence of Keepers, but it is not displeasing to discuss the intelligence of drones.

Ah, many people working in the communications industry would want to speak to you, Sir, in that case. Prediction: Many people will pay for you to consult for them, or to be a researcher, including the Imperial government. 

This drone can beg for its Master to contact His biotech company owner friends, so that you may speak to them."

"You begging* your Master to contact His biotech company owner friends sounds awesome, as long as you think he would be into that to start with, and His biotech company owner friends aren't colluding to hold me hostage or something."

Government - he gets an aura around the meaning, something like company, but really really not, like if you picked and chose and fused connotations of company and pirate-gang and cult, and dumped on a cold bucket of further meaning-flavors entirely foreign to Vivai - wait -

"I - I'm new here and just picked up this language through mysterious magical means. 'Government' is a handle for an entirely new concept to me, and about those I've been able to get flashes of semantic insight - but this one is really hazing my brain. Like, for a second I was sure that 'government's just take money from everybody and do whatever they want with it including - making themselves the sole arbitrator of all disputes -" okay the fact his brain is flashing him meaning-hallucinations this nonsensical has to be an aftereffect of the fact he died while bleeding out and half-delirious, of course that turned him permanently insane ". . . and everybody venerates them for this.

What are they actually?"

*Vivai will imitate the attitudinal-flavors and caste cases used by whoever he's immediately talking to, intentionally but without thinking explicitly.

"Yes, this drone predicts that its Master would be keen to do this. 

Imperial law permits property owners to remove any visitors to their property at any time, and permits violent force to be used if they do not comply verbally. The corollary to this is that visitors may leave anywhere at any time, and it is illegal to bar them from doing so. However, this only applies to Imperial citizens on Imperial land – you, Sir, are not an Imperial citizen, and so the court's protection does not apply to you. Still, this drone confidently predicts that neither its Master nor His friend will want to hold you against your will. This drone also predicts that even if His friend were to attempt to do that, that its Master would try to stop it. It is also possible for you to purchase weapons in the city if you wish to be more assured of your safety, but this drone predicts that its Master would not furnish you with funds to do that."

They don't have government? Literally how does that work. How do they just not kill each other competing for resources, if there's no force pushing everyone into a better metastable social equilibrium.

"The Imperial government does not 'take money from everybody' – it only collects taxes from Imperial citizens. You, Sir, are not one, and so do not have to pay. The Imperial government is the sole arbiter only in criminal court. Criminal offenses include assault and theft. The criminal courts are authorized to impose fines, corporal punishment and exile. 

Civil offenses include fraud and breach-of-contract. The Imperial government and the regional governments run their own civil courts, however, it is possible to settle disputes privately, either among themselves, or by hiring a private mediator or court, and contracting that its decision be legally binding. The civil courts, and by extension, the private courts and mediators, are only authorized to impose fines.

People who do not wish to be subject to Imperial law renounce their citizenship and move away from its territory to live on terra nullius."

Vivai's credence that these specific farmers are just messing with him - and probably for something nefarious seeing as they're seemingly too smart to be that entertained by gaslighting an alien for fun - rises sharply.

 "A lot of that just drained through my brain-strainer, but the central issue seems to be this 'law' concept? What is a law. How does it prevent people from doing things - what - rewriting the nature of -" brain no that can't be right please get it together "moral reality? That doesn't make any sense AT ALL.

Sorry, this language-acquisition thing and my, ah, recently scrambled brain don't seem to mix. How do. Laws. Prevent people from doing things." His brain seems to now actually be throwing up a hurricane of random associations now, not any more decipherable than radio static.

"A law is a command for you to do something, or to refrain from doing something, with punishment if you disobey. For example, if you attack and injure someone, that person is entitled to damages from you. The criminal court is the court that will handle this. By continuing to be citizens of the Imperium, people are saying that they are willing to obey laws, and likewise, be protected when other people violate the laws to affect them, such as in this case. The Imperium does not make claims as to which laws are moral or not, simply that the people who live in it have agreed that they like these rules enough not to leave.

Laws prevent people from doing things by disincentivizing them from doing it.

Prediction: Your world, Sir, does not have any governments. This drone will attempt to explain why governments exist given that your world has none.

Suppose that person A desires something P owned by person B, and that B desires something Q owned by A. Also assume that each person is reluctant to let go of what they own, but that each wants the other object more than their own. Person A might choose steal P, or threaten B with bodily harm in order to acquire P – these are the simplest and cheapest ways for A to acquire P without giving up Q. Also assume that, in order for them to talk to one another, they must render themselves vulnerable to each other, since of course they must get close enough to be in speaking range.

This is the way it works in the ancestral environment – it the way of animals, who must kill and fight to get what they want and what they need. It is also an equilibrium of Nacis – this is the old name for it – a state where no single individual has anything to gain from changing only their strategy, and thus it is extremely stable. It is also extremely wasteful, given that A and B could simply trade P and Q and thus both be better off. But why render one's self vulnerable in trying to trade, if one could simply steal and get both? Even if both A and B were inclined to trade, there would still be the lingering possibility that the other might be trying to trick them into becoming vulnerable, and then swooping in to take their item while giving nothing in return.

If they traded, they would reach a state where no person could be made better off without any other person being made worse off – the old name for this is the peak of Partos – and indeed, many people prefer to live in an environment: an environment where it can be assured that the other person is acting in good faith and is not going to defraud you. The Imperium is a collective agreement among its citizens to add a third agent into the mix, which will act to heavily disincentivize anyone who attempts to take advantage of others, such that each individual person is incentivized not to do that, and instead cooperate peacefully.

Does this meaningfully resolve your confusion, Sir?"

"Well, at least one element of it . . . does make sense with something I predicted before, although of course I can't prove that to you now."

He almost starts this off with 'Prediction:' because Ders seems to be getting a lot of mileage out of that habit in terms of added hotness, but decides against stealing Ders's Thing and possibly offending it. If drones get offended.

"I'm going to guess ahead of time that I look to you like - well, not feminine, you're hermaphrodites - like a sort of underdeveloped, neotenic, possibly sickly person? I bet I look just about the least intimidating of any full adult you've ever met." Why tentacled shell-headed hermaphroditic aliens should share human mild anatomical correlates of temperament, he does not want to think about. "Is that true? Either way, once you tell me, I'll explain my theory."

It is not Ders' Thing: the trainer that trained it taught it to speak like that. And drones do not get offended. Sadly, these revelations will remain uncommunicated to Vivai.

What will be communicated to Vivai with his language install is that the word 'feminine' doesn't exist in Standard Imperial, and that what comes out is the Byway word for it. 

"Validation impossible: this drone does not know what 'feminine'," and it repeats the phonemes as accurately as possible, "means, and so cannot assess whether you, Sir, are 'feminine' or not.

Correct prediction: you, Sir, would be considered extremely short for an adult drone and extremely extremely short for an adult Keeper – your height would be expected of someone currently undergoing puberty. 

Validation impossible: you, Sir, are not remna, and so this drone cannot assess whether you look sickly or not. However, you exhibit neither the scent of a healthy remna nor an unhealthy one. Ignoring that, you, Sir, appear to be superficially healthy."

Hm. Vivai was going for something deeper than 'you're short', there, but. Face the music or you'll fall behind beat.

"My hypothesis, whatever state it's in now, was that your species - and I have no idea why your superficial anatomy and psychology should correspond this closely with that of my own, what with the wildly different modes of reproduction and presumably wildly different starting material - we evolved from short hairy little tree-climbing creatures with big eyes and long tails" (he makes a skittering, four-fingered climbey motion with his hand, to demonstrate the concept of 'squirrel') "but anyway that does seem to be the way that it is - evolved down a path adjacent to my species's, except that your ancestors, for whatever reason, ended up in a configuration that favored much more intraspecific aggression.

And that this resulted in the relative amplification of traits Byway would relatively associate with the male sex, and call masculine - though the difference between human males and females on most of these traits is just statistical, humans being just about the least sexually dimorphic animals ever. Anyway, masculinity is generally associated with higher doses of growth hormone, and so bigger, hardier skeletons, and more muscle, and also higher doses of signals that told one's developing brain 'wire yourself to be concerned with domination and combat, rather than social soft skills'.

In our species those social soft skills would include childrearing and mate choice, but I imagine since y'all are all sometimes female around here, those last two don't trade off against aggression as much for y'all.

You and your Master and Rend and Las all looked to me from the start like comically hypermasculinized - comically overgrown, over-matured - versions of humans, to me. And on top of that, you have those head-shells that look like they were selected for use in intraspecific dominance contests. So I thought, back when Damin and I were talking, that maybe your species had evolved down a more aggressive path. And just now you told me that in your ancestral environment, it was the default equilibrium that two people would have items their utility functions said they should trade with each other, and yet not trade out of mutual reasonable fear of getting too close, that the other would defect, go totally antisocial, and steal. And while I can't yet see how a government - whatever that ultimately turns out to be - would be the natural solution to the problem of having evolved instincts geared for conditions like that - I can understand that problem in the abstract, and see why it's a source of social free energy that might feed memetic constructs that my species never generated, and that might look very strange to me after having been optimized under grossyears of your species's intelligence."

He attempts to gauge Ders's reaction to all this.

"It is believed that remna, our species, are descended from cephalopods which made their way onto land, given the similarities in our morphology. However, this has not yet been conclusively proven.

This drone believes that the reason its species developed to be more aggressive is because remna developed sapience during a time when they were being predated by megafauna, which we called jguvi. After we attained to sapience, and hence developed language and tool use, we drove them extinct, at least, in our starting continent. When we began to expand to other continents, many years later, in the Second Imperial Period, we found jguvi there also, and likewise slaughtered them.

It is one of the crowning achievements of this drone's species.

Prediction: Your most recent ancestors were apex predators and did not need to worry about predation, which permitted you not to develop drives for aggression or cozy-places.

Keepers dislike feeling observed or exposed or made legible because it triggers the ancestral-environment feeling of danger, of having no safe hiding place, and of the possibility of being attacked on all sides. The process by which someone must make themselves vulnerable in order to participate in trade or emotional connection or similar activities is known to us as the mortifying-ordeal-of-being-known*. Therefore, it was very hard to break out of the wasteful stable equilibrium, and there needed to be a strong internal force, which in this case was the Imperator, to achieve a better metastable equilibrium closer to the peak of Partos.

Drones do most of the childrearing in the early years, when the child is too weak and dumb to be taught complex subjects. After that, in most cases, drones continue to do many of the chores* of childrearing, while Keepers tutor the child in various subjects. Nowadays, drones are better trained, such that drones can also tutor the child, though usually only in simple subjects like basic numeracy and literacy.

As for mate choice, usually Keepers will have an even number of Keeper children, with them being the impregnating-parent for half of the Keeper children, and being the birthing-parent for the other half. From what this drone knows about biology, males invest less in offspring because they do not have to gestate, which is an advantage they have over females. This means that females must be selective about who their mates are. However, the disadvantage is that males cannot be assured of the paternity of their child, whereas females are assured that whatever they give birth to is their children. This strategy of alternation therefore assures that at least half the children are indeed one's children.

Shell-plates which are colorful or pearlescent are considered attractive. They are not intended as weapons."

Ders will remain totally facially and bodily emotionless, while still keeping the same professional-friendly tone of voice. It is well trained in impassivity! This is why it was so expensive to buy.

* Two syllable root word.

* Two syllable compound word, meaning 'menial work suitable for drones'.

. . . Where to start, with that. Unless Vivai is parsing everything wrong, they seem to be consistently making familiar patterns of error when attempting to reduce their own psychology to its most likely proximate causes. Improvement to their current evopsych paradigm is something he could comceivably sell them, but if they're not smart enough (mature enough as a civilization?) to have untangled all these knots themselves, already, they're probably not smart enough to steal his insights off his back without his explicit demarcation of them as Valuable Insights, and, for that matter, proof of their value. So he can't see the harm in just grilling Ders honestly, with no attempt to obfuscate himself, right now, to resolve his own confusions.

"I'm honestly uncertain here - does your world not have any socially-intelligent species with no natural predators, which are intraspecifically aggressive? As you'll have guessed, mine does! Many such species, actually - for social species, especially larger-sized ones with smaller groups, high levels of intraspecific aggression isn't particularly less common than low."

Maybe it's less that the species that intentionally produced Ders isn't smart enough to see what Vivai sees here - maybe it's just that they don't have his data. Home, after all, had a faction that argued eusocial species could never evolve sapience, because the respective inclusive fitness reward gradients for reproductive and non-reproductive castes diverged too high up the genetic-developmental stream for sapience to occur-and-spread cleanly in either one caste or both.

"My species doesn't like the-mortifying-ordeal-of-being-known*, either, but the way we deal with that isn't by aggression and hiding in cozy-places, it's by trading with each other and hiding in cozy-places**."

*, ** Both 'the-mortifying-ordeal-of-being-known' and 'cozy-places' map fairly cleanly onto single words or idiomatic phrases in Vivai's native languages.

"This drone sincerely apologizes; it was not specifically trained in zoology. Theoretically, it is safer to assume a higher level of intraspecific aggression, because it is closer to the equilibrium of Nacis, and hence more stable. Therefore, genes which code for that are more likely to achieve fixation in the population. A mutation inducing aggression in a population which is peaceful will be very successful, but the reverse would be very unsuccessful."

Imperial also has a single word for cozy-places! Although it's a compound.

"This drone is confused as to how trading relieves the mortifying-ordeal-of-being-known. Wouldn't showing yourself to the other person and talking about what you are willing to sell and buy – and hence revealing what you value – be mortifying?"

"Which equilibria are most stable and have the largest surrounding sinks depends on the population's starting configuration and environment! Aggression toward same-species competitors will help you in some initially peacable species but hurt you in others. For example, if the opposite sex of your species picks mates largely based on who has the most social status, then aggressiveness toward competitors will just progressively drop you to the bottom of the status hierarchy and destroy your mating prospects, as conspecific after conspecific assigns negative utility to the prospect of interacting with you.

That's not how it works for most animals, of course, but that's how it works for humans. And like every peculiar or rare thing about humans, you had people arguing that it was necessary for sapience.  

. . . I was actually pretty sympathetic to both the standard argument about non-eusociality being required for sapience, and one of the arguments about why a starting equilibrium of very low intraspecific aggressivess was required. Remna really are a revelation to me.

Yes, revealing pieces of your utility function is mortifying, but less mortifying than the prospect of others not valuing you highly because you refuse to trade with them! To humans, anyway - I guess if you had a psychology that was more like - a chimpanzee's, or something - that's a high-aggression animal that's close to humans on the phylogenetic tree but nonsapient - then, I guess that you might not have much intrinsic desire to trade with others at all." He suppresses a grimace. This is all so weird. He tries to remember what he knows about chimpanzees . . . he read a little about their social structure once. It was volatile, violent, crude, and coercive - seeming to bear no promise of ever being conducive to any kind of cumulative productivity.

"Oh, right, your species, Sir, is dioecious. This drone's is not, which is why it was focused on how things would work for monoecious species. However, I don't see why females would select against aggressiveness towards competitors. Presumably they would select for whichever phenotypes were most able to guard them and provide for offspring, which is likely to include a drive for intraspecific aggression."

One of the drones from the kitchen arrives to say that Master Damin has finished eating breakfast, and that they should [highly recommended] go to the living room now. It bows.

This dialect appears to be getting cruxy. Vivai loves a good crux, but the marginal expected return from switching engagements is positive right now.

He thanks Ders heartily - profusely, actually, since the worst case that can happen to an outsider for overappreciating the entrenched underclass is hardly as bad as the best case is good - and - does-not-bow to the other drone, his language acquisition appears to have given him a slight echo of body language too, although only an echo - only nods and allows himself to be led to the living room, glancing at Ders in case it wants to follow. Or - calculates that it should follow, given everyone else's desires. Drones aren't so different from humans in that respect, Vivai thinks admiringly. Being careful to want exactly what's best in an entirely unchimplike way. Surely he and the harder-working, more-humanlike underclass can ally somehow, even if that is how it works in fiction . . .

"You're welcome, Sir. This drone is happy to be of service," Ders says, but otherwise doesn't make any discernable facial or body expressions.

Ders indeed will follow, and bow when they reach Damin's table, which is now being cleared of plates.

Damin drinks water before speaking.

"I hope you two had a productive conversation. I'll ask Ders to give a summary of what happened, but first, I want to clarify that if you want to just leave and take your chances in town without me, you're perfectly allowed to do so, and I will not stop you. I was very excited over the prospect of meeting an alien and failed to consider-that-other-people-have-different-priors-and-utility-functions, and also that people had different culture. 

I also believe, given that this place likely has a culture different than yours, that you would have trouble navigating it without a guide. But still, it is your choice if you prefer to be alone. I will extend no more help than you actually say you want. You were talking about implicit debt earlier, and for us, if the other person has clarified they don't expect payment, then we indeed expect that they won't. But for you...the impulse for reciprocity might run deeper, or be instinctual, such that it is uncomfortable to be in a state of debt – I certainly wouldn't want to put you through that."

!!! Chance. Do not fuck this up or you will make an enemy.

"I think you have gauged me correctly, Sir*.

If it's amenable to you, I really would be happy to be on my way, and of no further trouble to you, although feel free to call on me any time if you want a favor from the alien [optional, recommended] - I owe you a big one, even if that takes the form of a bunch of message-passed Q&A sessions strung out over time or something, I'd be enthusiastic.

I owe you not least for your shockingly quick empathy for my alien utility function - I am not sure my people would have done as well with yours."

*Keeper_etiquette-wise, Vivai is, in fact, fucking this up. He knows on one level that he should not be Sirring Damin. That level is not the level that has earned the right to pull his mouth-strings.

Damin is not offended over being Sir-ed, but it's...unseemly. It's displeasing.

"I understand. I will remember your offer, but I do not consider you to be indebted to me, independent of what you might feel. If you want to contact me, here's my teletype network address," and Damin writes down some numbers and letters on a slip of paper, which he passes to Vivai.

"I don't see why my empathy should make you consider yourself indebted to me, but how you feel is your prerogative.

You will let my drones escort you out of my property and onto the path to Kosfor [fully mandatory – I will use force if you do not comply]. This is not for your sake, but mine: it's good practice to ensure that people actually leave when they say they leave. Although it is a little for your sake too, I have a lot of land and it's possible you might miss the road.

I wish you well."

Absent any further comments, Damin will have Rend and Las go off to bring Vivai to the road paved with cobblestone.

Vivai will thank Rend and Las, less profusely than he thanked Ders but still pretty profusely, and see if they have anything else to say.

Nope. Nothing else to say, except, "This way, Sir," before they escort him out.

The air is fresh and pleasing, but it's warmer now. Almost noon. It takes ten minutes to get onto the path, at which point Rend will say that they have reached the end.

The path cuts through temperate forest, but the forest looks well-managed. The morphology of the trees and plants are similar to those on Byway. The path is wide enough for two carriages to cross each other. 

As soon as Vivai is alone, he runs.

With occasional walk-breaks to catch his breath, he'll run most of the way to Kosfor City (which should take him most of an hour, given walk-breaks and terrain) or until something interrupts him.

Early on his way, he'll check the Alith Latitude company color-screen wireless device he has on him, and the wrenches and wires and things in his utility belt. The more prosaic stuff has made it out intact.

The company paging device still turns on, displaying his current assignment ["REPAIR PELLETIZER 3 IN PACKAGING"] but it's got no wireless signal of any kind (of course), and it's on half battery. He has its charger, though, and it seems likely that the remna will have stuff he can buy to construct a means of charging it in case he's ever in a spot where he could use a modern minicomputer.   . . . Or to partially reverse-engineer the thing for profit. That seems promising.

He'll watch the scenery - he notices the familiar botany, which makes him feel a smidge less freaked out about the familiarity of the remna. A smidge. Maybe their evolutionary prehistories are wrong, or just Ders's faction's, and this world is actually a close branch of home. There've been people who've claimed all kinds of weird (in retrospect, obviously false) things about how humans evolved, though not recently.

. . . How lucky he is to have landed somewhere with air as fresh as a farm or nature reserve! He'd needed a good outing for a while don't think about home. Of course, the corollary sacrifice is (presumably) not having landed near a central city.

What else does he see? Does anything interrupt?

The road slowly gets wider as it joins with other roads. From the distance, it looks like the city at most has buildings no more than five stories tall, except for the middle part, where it seems like there are taller buildings. Before he reaches the city proper, however, there's a tall stone wall, which in the middle has a wide stone arch opening or gate, where many people are passing through. There doesn't seem to be too many, only about a few dozen, probably because it is a little after noon now, and the sun is hot in the sky. Not terribly uncomfortable, but it's a nonzero amount of uncomfortable.

People's dress is quite elaborate, often with matching patterns. Most remna are either in carriages, or pulling carriages – there are few who are just walking, and those who are have umbrellas or similar sun-protection devices, or carry fans. 

No one interrupts, but many people stare. For a very long time. Many people also stop walking and turn away at him. All of them do the same tentacle thing, if they weren't doing that already, and a significant number also flick their tongues at him. No one approaches. It seems a few drones are ordered to run away, seemingly to carry messages. 

Does Vivai want to pass through the arch? There are two drones on either side of the arch, wearing what looks like elaborate ceremonial plate armor and halberds, but neither of them seem to be interfering with people passing through in either direction and appear to simply be there to Look Pretty. Alternatively, they can stay and talk to the staring people. Or do something completely different.

Well.

He will veeeery slowly, cautiously, approach the archway with the two metal-tipped-walking-stick carrying remna - he thinks those are drones, probably? but he's not sure - being careful to stay as far out of the way of local traffic as possible - and see if anyone makes a move to stop him.

No one stops him! People will just continue staring as he passes. Some people, most of which are those who weren't on carriages, will discreetly follow. Or not so discreetly. But people will continue to remain far away from him and not approach, merely Stare.

The gate opens up to townhouses on both rows, and some sort of square or plaza in the middle, which appears to currently be hosting a farmer's market of people selling fruits and vegetables and other food products. It's too far away to make out what the specific products are, though, unless he moves closer.

In front, and over to the side, there's the smell of Tasty Food, and tables arrayed on the sidewalk, beside what looks like a business. There are people gathered on tables, eating in the open using their tentacles. They are shaded with umbrellas above the tables. The people are talking to each other while eating. He won't be able to tell what exactly they're eating unless he moves closer.

There are also other businesses, whose signs he can read. Of the ones nearby: one advertises 'legal services', another sells stationery, paper, and calligraphy supplies, another sells books and articles, as well as teletype machines, and the last one sells phonograph machines and vinyl records of music.

The aesthetic of the businesses and buildings is Very Clearly Coordinated, in what Earth people would say is similar to Art Nouveau. Lots of stained glass, curlicues and latticework in wrought iron, gentle greens, tans, and whites, and floral motifs. Even the signages and logos for the businesses, as well as their advertisements, obey said aesthetic, even though they are clearly marked as Being Separate Businesses Which Are Not The Same. They do vary in how many accoutrements they put: some go all out, while others are more reserved, but never in a way which appears clashing or jarring.

It is also noticeable that, while the remna are not wholly coordinated in aesthetics the same way the buildings are, clothes which have a similar look to the buildings are more common than any other look, at least, from the people Vivai has seen so far.

So apparently people just eat in the open here, okay. Great. He skirts the places where that is happening as widely as possible without it being obvious to onlookers.

Vivai is intimidated by the fact that one person - apparently someone with a very particular and . . . repulsive-to-human-eyes aesthetic, wow, someone must have spent dozens of hours forging that iron into the shape of a combination geometry lesson and fungal infection - owns all of this. There were similarly ostentatious setups anywhere at all, back home, and probably lots more places where a bunch of buildings were owned by the same person, and they just weren't all built the same like this. He didn't get the remnas' population, somehow. Maybe he's wrong to assume it's lower than home's and this boss's wealth therefore corresponds to a much larger fraction of their economy.

If this were his neighborhood in Sareksal, he'd look for the little red bolts of cloth outside businesses' front windows that meant they were hiring. But that kind of thing was done differently everyplace, he'd known. If he were in a foreign town, he'd have found a library that didn't look too busy and paid for an explanation of the local job market from one of the advisors there. Or formally traded advice with them, if he'd had more time than money. 

The closest thing in his immediate vicinity seems to be the book-and-article shop. He goes inside.

But wait! There are two doors to the book-and-article shop, on opposite sides of the large glass pane displaying items and having a painted sign of the shop. One of them is larger and more ornate, while the other door is shorter and less detailed. Both doors have a sign saying the name of the shop, "Tcadas's Literature Company", rendered in cursive script, as well as its opening hours, so it's clear that both lead to the same place.

Which one does he go through?

The shorter door looks both less ugly and less presumptuous. Vivai takes it without thinking.

It looks like a warehouse, with bookshelves piled high. The place is kept clean, very clean, even of dust, and the wooden shelves and equipment is richly varnished. It is also devoid of much ornamentation – it's quite 'passive'.

There's someone there, presumably a drone, checking the arrangements of the books, then hears the bell on the door as it opens.

"What do you want?" the remna asks. He/it's wearing a plain pale green shirt and black pants.

"Hi, I was wondering if there's an advisor here? Somebody who trades in explicating local customs to foreigners. Or if there's one in the area?"

The remna is apparently a drone, because they immediately stop what they were doing to bow deeply.

"Sincerest apologies, Sir. The door to the Keepers' section is that way," and it points. "Please follow this drone [highly recommended]," it says, and will open the door to let Vivai through first, assuming he wants to go that way.

"Local customs to foreigners...Kosfor City is not a border town, so we do not get non-Imperials visiting. However, this one can help you find books or pamphlets covering more specific things, or point you, Sir, to a hotel with concierge service, which may have drones for rent who can help you get around the city."

There was not a single encouraging word in that paragraph.

Why do the remna seem so . . . against people doing things on their own, as the default?

"Thank you," he says, and enters the Keepers' section. Only the demented argue with customer service.

"You're welcome, Sir," it says.

The Keepers' section is similar, but with more ornamentation. It's not as over the top as the outside, though. Most of the 'effort' in the room is put into the beautifully carved wooden furniture, with seats and adjustable-angle tables for pleasant reading, with fluorescent lamps and lighting. The aesthetic is definitely crafted to be 'quiet' rather than loud.

"Do you, Sir, prefer to wander around and look, or would you like this one to direct you to where you might find something you like, or would you like to give search criteria and for this drone to fetch items matching that criteria for you?"

Library! Quick, before I get away, virtuous prosaic investigation -

"I'd like wander around and look, thank you. And if you don't mind answering, who do you work for? What exactly is the setup here? Just so I can get a feel for how things work. I'm from a universe where the only sapient species, us, is dioecious with every member reproductive. I died and instantly teleported here a couple hours ago for reasons that are currently beyond my understanding."

It is nice knowing he'll be able to explain himself to some of the people here without hearing the same exclamations of shock over and over again, Vivai thinks through the extreme guilt and bewilderment of using someone who will never be able to use him back.

The drone is feeling the qualia of shock, but has the impassivity not to show it. We do so love impassivity training.

"This drone works for its Controller, whose name is Tcedas. Sincerest apologies, Sir, this drone is not trained to be a librarian and is trained only in managing the store and items, although this drone's Controller is seeking for it to train in librarianship. If you, Sir, wish for this one to answer to the best of its ability, it will."

The drone will let Vivai wander around, but will follow, always being close enough to hear if Vivai says anything. The sections of the store are labeled. Which ones does Vivai want to look at first?

There's: "history", "geography", "art and design", "physics", "chemistry", "geology", "biology", "scientific journals", "reference materials", "pamphlets and guides", "cooking", "psychology", "training", "military and combat", "engineering", "'beautiful'-books". 

The shelves and ceiling go up quite high – the last few rows will be unreachable.

There's a sign that says that you can request specific books you want to buy, and they'll special order them for you, and even mail it to you for a fee.

There appear to be no fiction books, though there is a section for novels where characters must use various scientific principles to fix problems, with detailed descriptions of their thoughts, seemingly as infotainment or a teaching aid, which is labeled 'Novels'.

Vivai should really be using this time to search the drone's memory for the local distribution of employment opportunities. Or at least asking what currency they'd take . . . not that he has any cash on him. What formal trade they'd take from a broke start-laborer.

Vivai is not doing any of that.

He literally speedruns his first pass at investigation, using the full agility of a dozen-and-ten-year-old male.*

(That is how things work back home. What else would be the point of paying for health insurance at his age?)

A clearer sketch of their evopsych first, he thinks.   . . . Why are "scientific journals" in a category separate from the categories called after all the actual branches of Nature philosophy? Diaries of famous scientists? He'll start there. He picks a book of medium size, an old, worn one, signifying that the information therein has stood the test of time. He opens to a random page.

*Admittedly noticeably less than the agility of a dozen-and-ten-year-old male in some other places.

The drone remains silent unless Vivai asks it any questions, which he really should, because there are no medium-sized, old, and worn books in the 'scientific journals' section. He will also find that scientist diaries and biographies are in the 'history' section. Each journal is bound simply with staples, like a pamphlet, although each one will have a thin cardboard cover.

It appears that 'scientific journals' here refers to the most recent findings or observations in experiments, which are preliminary, and which only cover a single topic in detail – books are longer, and are more expansive, and distill information that has been collected over time.

Most of the journals cost around 24±2 fepni, which is shown on paper price tags.

A random page:

Species of section Aporum are epiphytes found in lowland forests of north-east Gairen Province, extending eastwards to Sedron Islands. Members of this section have thin stems that are erect at first but tend to become pendulous as they lengthen. Leaves are fleshy and equitant. The stem may be more or less completely concealed by the leaf bases. Tips of the leaves end in a point. Flowers are borne singly or in clusters, arising laterally on the stem between leaf nodes or at the tip of the stem alongside a terminal scale. The flowers may be subtended by persistent chaffy bracts. They are generally small and fleshy and tend to be short-lived, wilting after just a few days.

The functional significance of the Aporum section's distinctive leaves remains uncertain. As noted by Kalsad et al. (B98*), the fleshy leaves might be taken as an adaptation to water retention. However, though access to water is a consistent concern for epiphytes, the humid rainforests in which Aporum species are found hardly seem the driest of places. Conversely, the effective even distribution of stomata on both sides of leaf resulting from their equitant condition may make it easier for excess water to be released from the plant.

* The year 1699.

Are there any worn books here? Are there even any used books?

Vivai is transfixed by the Aporum and interalizes absolutely everything about it that he can without him just standing there and reading about it getting awkward.

He will follow the line of reasoning . . . what point is this author making?

There are no worn or used books! This is a shop, not a library, or a secondhand goods store. Everything is brand new, and looks like it.

The author isn't trying to prove a hypothesis or disprove an existing theory, merely describing potentially new Aporum species found during an expedition, with that part being a preamble – the author didn't make any claims about what they thought the leaf morphology was for. Skipping to other pages reveals that the author likes to clearly separate parts where he is merely describing, and parts where he is claiming something and putting forth evidence to prove his point – none of the 'claim and prove' sections concern the Aporum, though.

This journal, "Sensen's Journeys," is a journal run by a single person, in this case, a botanist. About half number of the journals are run by only one or a few people, with the other half being run by some organization that takes submissions for review to be published. Those ones also tend to be longer, more expensive, and be more polished looking.

Frowning, Vivai will turn to the front matter of the Sensen's Journeys pamphlet. Is there anything that indicates what Sensen's source of reputational capital is? The writing style is alien, but. Well.

Reputational capital? Vivai can tell, internally, that that word is much longer in Standard Imperial than it is in Bywayean.

He might be interested in the 'About Me' and 'Contact' section.

I am Sensen Raigul Zebam, previously a horticulturalist – I am the one who successfully bred a variant of Jimpalin* with purple flowers, now grown in many tropical provinces. Nowadays, I do botany and naturalism more generally. I've described and named more than three dozen new species to ISA standard, in my more than five dozen years running botanical expeditions. This journal is where I'll put details on my expeditions and work.

Contact me at this address, or leave a message for my teletype machine.

Below, there's a house address and a series of numbers and letters similar to what Damin gave him. It looks like a Bywayean phone code.

* A rather rare houseplant with scent similar to ylang-ylang.

Vivai very carefully replaces Sensen's journal and turns to the drone. Even he now has to admit that he's gonna need more time alone with their informational ecosystem - not broke in a shop, which is finally dawning on his hindbrain is not a library, and being ogled by the simple-utility-function-having merchandise keeper - if he wants the tick on his bewilderment meter to go down instead of up. Thank goodness he explained himself earlier, or his next question might sound really weird.

"Do you take formal exchanges of anything that's not standard currency here?" He doubts it, for a bookshop, but he might as well ask. "If not, if you'd be alright with directing me to the nearest concierge-having hotel, I'm sorry for the intrusion and I'll be on my way."

"This drone is only authorized to accept gold bullion and Imperial rupnu in exchange for items.

The nearest concierge-having hotel is...The Twisting Vines Hotel," and the drone will take Vivai to a large map of the city framed on the wall (which is for sale!) and point it out. It's about a kilometer north from here. Vivai will now also know that he arrived at the southern gate of the city, and that the hotel is nearer to the city center – the city is roughly circular and about two kilometers in radius.

"Thank you for visiting our shop, Sir, there-is-nothing-to-apologize-for*." Unless Vivai has something else to do, the drone will bow and open the door for Vivai.

* Two syllable interjection in Standard Imperial.

Vivai isn't embarrassed. The inside of an alien bookshop had no business being decorated like the inside of an alien pay-to-enter library.

Small city, geographically, and clearly not much built-up vertically, or very optimized for density. This would be an unambiguously good thing if their speed of intercity communication was much below what it apparently is. As it stands, however, the size of the city just means it'll be easier for the trail of embarrassing and possibly damning anecdotes he leaves behind, to stay stuck to his figure.

He will attempt to make his way to the Twisting Vines Hotel, which is in the center of the city meaning interaction with its resident advisor will probably cost him massively one way or another, but whatever, he is not taking his chances opening up further lines of discussion that could be huge etiquette bombs or worse, he is going to speedrun the path he's on until his footing finds itself.

What does he see on the way? Does he encounter any impediment?

There are more people in the center of the city which stare, but everyone keeps their distance – indeed, people seem to be subtly avoiding him – and no one disturbs him. There are more carriages here, but all of them only travel at a brisk walking pace. No impediments. 

More ornamentation and taller buildings! The Twisting Vines Hotel is five stories high, although each individual story is higher than what would be expected on Byway, given the larger size of remna. And because remna do love their high ceilings. True to the name, it has copper latticework on the facade that has been deliberately treated to induce green patina to resemble vines. And, of course, actual flowering vines on trellises, placed on rectangles of soil.

There will be two drones near the large door, which is open, wearing what could be called 19th century servant's livery in white and green, standing still.

Is the latticework actually a realistic sculpture of vines, or is it just green copper latticework that you would say looked vinelike if you'd been very very primed in that direction?

Trying hard to look casual, Vivai will approach the doors, watching the drones, and attempt to enter.  

It's actually a realistic sculpture of vines, although there are a few sections where it's merely a 'generic green twisting pattern'.

The drones will not interfere, because Vivai hasn't said anything, nor does he have visibly heavy bags which they think he would appreciate being carried for his sake.

Inside, the hotel lobby will have a high-ceiling and mezzanine type structure, with the second floor's room doors being visible from downstairs. It's kind of visually noisy. There are plush looking seats and cushions which alternately are colored plain green and white, or having ornate patterning. The floor is white tile. There's two sides of the wall covered in various ornamental houseplants and having a plain white wall, with the other one having a complex tiling pattern, again, in white and green. Drones in green and white livery flit to and fro carrying various things. Green and white are The Theme here. Indeed, the sense that everything is Themed is extremely strong, much stronger than the sense one gets simply walking around Kosfor City.

It seems that he arrived at a quiet time, because no one else is in the lobby. There's a person at the desk. There are two desks with two people, actually, but based on Design Cues they appear to be there simply for redundancy, or for high customer load.

The human-"cephalopod"s sure do like Visual Patterns. An instinctual affection for certain types of chromatophore signals? He hasn't seen any of them change color, but maybe it's only polite to actually do it during mating or something.

He walks toward the desks, half-raising his hand. He knows what a concierge is, even though it's weird that the remna have a specific word for advisor-employed-by-a-hotel-who-is-also-in-charge-of-hotel-guest-experience.

"Hi!" Friendly, professional - if a little higher-pitched than he intends. "I am from another universe where the only sapient species, mine, is dioecious and has no caste divisions. I died this morning and instantly teleported here for reasons currently beyond my understanding. It's taking me a while to get a job, but a very kind bookshop attendant near the South Gate" town's so small he might as well fuck himself "advised me that I should see a concierge here? The teleport didn't leave me with any cash, but if you take formal trades of advice or debt, I am eager to buy your services." The 'I imagine my bid price is higher than your average customer's' goes without further emphasis. He hopes.

The drone bows. Bowing is very common, apparently.

"Welcome, Sir, to the Twisting Vines Hotel," it says, and then listens patiently for what Vivai has to say.

"The concierge service is free, but it's intended for hotel customers only. This drone has not been given instruction on people who want to buy concierge service a la carte." 

A pause. A long pause of several seconds.

"This drone believes that it would be in its Controller's interests to provide said service regardless. This drone also believes that you would be better served if it fetched its Controller – is this true?"

"If you think your Controller would eagerly formally trade with me, then yes, please. If not, then no, thank you. Acceptance of in-kind trades and promise contracts in return for advice-to-broke-newcomers isn't that common even where I'm from; if you don't think anyone here would eagerly accept an in-kind trade or promise contract from a confused alien in return for unorthodoxically formatted concierge services, then I'll try my luck just asking around to see who's hiring, manually." That might be fun, in an absurd kind of way.

"This drone strongly believes that, if it called its Controller here, that He would simply give you information for free. This drone also believes that its Controller will not trade with you, since He would only want to be paid in Imperial rupnu, or gold.

This drone believes that its Controller will happily give away information, and only charge money if you wished to stay at the hotel or want to receive material goods."

Another long pause.

"This drone believes that calling its Controller to come is the best option. Please wait, Sir."

The drone leaves, and a few minutes later, a man in the similar green and white clothing appears – though he's only wearing pants.

Another long pause while the Controller extends and retracts his tentacles.

He opens his mouth as if to speak, then closes it. Then, his expression hardens. 

"I am Zemked, the owner of this hotel. It is a pleasure to meet an actual alien. My drone gave me a summary of the situation. Let's sit down [highly recommended], I think this will take a while."

Zemked will walk over to one of the soft looking sofas and, if Vivai follows, he will sit.

"Hello, Sir. So you are willing-and-able to trade something unorthodox for something unorthodox in my case then? Your drone" so depersonizing "seemed to doubt the prospect."

Zemked will not press the issue of Vivai not sitting.

"You don't need to 'Sir' me, at least, not if you're a person. It is also perfectly fine for you to sit, but if you prefer to stand, you can stand. 

Well, that's true for most cases, but you are not most cases. You're an alien, so I'm willing to accept other currency. You ought to get some Imperial rupnu – I am willing to sell some to you.

As for information, it is not uncommon for us to simply give information and insignificant material items freely, if the other person would value it much more highly than us, and if such information and items were common. In this case, I would totally just give you information about the town for free. Do you not have the concept of gifts in your world?

I'm fine with formally trading though, if this is preferable to you. I work in hospitality – of course, I will accommodate foreign customs. In fact, if we're going to trade..." he turns his head to shout, "Get me Zex," he says, and a drone comes quickly walks over, carrying writing materials, part of which it will depost on the table, and part of which it will keep holding.

"Formal trading here usually involves a drone taking a transcript of the conversation so that both parties may refer to it later, if you consent to being recorded. Afterward, I'll have Zex make typed copies."

"My apologies - for Sirring you, I mean - where I'm from, Sirring isn't about being a person or not, everyone's people, it's about - who's above you." How weird can the remna possibly be.

"Gifts," he says.

Semantic centers?

Semantic centers: Gifts: one-way transfers of value from agent to agent.

"No, I didn't know that word before the same mysterious force that teleported me here also gave me your language. That happened, too, by the way. And the concept confuses me - but I probably won't understand without taking up way too much of your time. It sort of feels like I'm imposing on you -" shit, he shouldn't have said that out loud, it's a stupid frog-sting* that invites posturing from Zemked that will disadvantage Vivai, or at least would if Zemked were a human, maybe Vivai should just give up hope of understanding these people socially well enough to work with them out of the gate and just go open a computer parts shop, let the edible weeds here kill him if they kill him "but then again" Zex's presence is a little reassuring . . . "You do at all have a protocol for this; I was overreacting, never mind." Vivai is fumbling this. "You already know what type of information you have, that I expect to be of value to me; presumably you're interested in information from me - if so, what kind? I'm also happy to offer small labors or a promise of future currency."

*Established idiom originating from Aineh meaning "an action that was obviously taken based upon a bare, un-reflected-upon basic instinct". Originally meant to connote a frog which cannot discriminate whether an object is prey (an appropriate target for the 'sting'ing motion of its tongue) apart from whether that object moves in a certain pattern that the frog's visual system has hard-coded as 'flying-insect-like'.

"Ah. Well, the main difference between our species is between people and drones – people don't use honorifics with each other, and likewise with drones. 

Hm...interesting. That sounds implausible, but your Standard Imperial is perfect. Exactly up to standard.

What about gifts is confusing? And no, of course not. If you were, I would have cast you out. And in any case, this isn't my...house, this is my business. It would be bad for business if I turned away a customer who didn't rent a room after ten minutes, and who want to ask questions from me."

Zemked has no desire to posture, and even if he did, the lobby is kind of currently deserted. Perhaps more people might arrive in the afternoon, though.

"Hm, I'm not sure what exact information I want from you – I don't know what you know. However, I would be fine with you agreeing to talk to me and answer my questions in exchange for a room with amenities including food or water – I may even pay you. Nowadays people like to talk to strangers less, and prefer to pay for temporary housing with money, but in the past, when locomotives didn't exist and all land travel had to be done by foot or by drone, it was common for people to offer to house and feed travelers for the night in exchange for stories and news. Communications technology was worse back then.

I will happily offer this ancient trade to you, for however long you want to stay here, er, actually, making unbounded offers is bad. Let's cap it at a gross days – with you being permitted to leave at any time – and potentially renegotiate after that.

A bounded offer! Backed by a reasonable-sounding explanation of cultural precedent! It seems like an asymmetric trade but Vivai decides to preliminarily accept this as a plausible recently-sunset alien custom, rather than a trick to trap him into debt or dependence, until and unless due contrary evidence materializes.

"Excellent! How much elaboration will be required per day for me to earn my stay?"

"I'm not sure...You talking to me is valuable in and of itself simply because you're an alien, and of course I would want to find out more about you and your world." And also because Zemked is generous and likes to give gifts, but...apparently they don't do that. So.

"In the past, travelers would talk to the host while they ate dinner, and then again the next day for breakfast. I think an hour of conversation will be fine – in this hour I will have full control to switch topics as I wish, and potentially ask you to elaborate on points, as well as potentially bring up topics which might be relevant. We may continue to talk after that, but then you are free to decline to speak on things or to change topics yourself. How does that sound?

I'm not sure what times you would prefer to have this conversation. In the case you are away, I will write down my questions and have you answer them similarly in writing. Is that fine with you?"

That's a weirdly specific custom. Vivai is suspicious he's being charity-ambushed, but attempting to not be charity-ambushed in this world is apparently so exhausting so he will try rolling with it until he has a footing. At least it sounds like it'll actually inconvenience him, which isn't actually a measure of how much it's benefitting Zemked, but.

"Hour twice a day, you have the freedom to switch topics, writing if I'm not around - all good!

Shall I copy down what Zex has typed? Sorry, I don't have paper or a pen on me." Vivai remembers that their tech level is sneakily high. "Actually, do you have a camera on you?"

If you don't yet have the ability to take a photo of you and your co-contractor making signs of consent in frame with the contract, your best bet is to make a copy in your own handwriting, and write your name and draw your self-portrait on both your own copy and your co-contractor's. Variations exist, but that's pretty much the minimum for being as robust as possible to weasels using primitive technology. 

"You can if you want to, but I'm having it type two copies for both of us. And yes, I have a camera.

Are you concerned about fraud? If you want, we can go to the regional or Imperial notary nearby. I can pay the notary fee. That way you can enforce the contract in the civil court."

Sensing another incoming frustration, Vivai thinks ahead, this time, before he speaks.

I'm not particularly worried about fraud, but if people didn't formalize contracts as a matter of habit, there would be little frauds all the time.

Okay, so far, so good.

I'm certainly not consenting to you paying any further fees on my behalf, but that's a sidenote. I get the feeling y'all's convention for making contracts binding is very different from my homeworld's

And awkwardly admit his vulnerability, in terms of having to take Zemked's word for how this is all to be kept in the clear? To what advantage? No.

Go ahead with Bywayean verification? And bind Zemked how? No.

"That seems wise to me, if it's seriously not trouble for you."

Let Vivai figure out how things work around here by watching, without their knowing his ignorance, this time, if he can get away with it. No more asking and being told and having to trust.

"Ah. Wait. Do you have a seal? Or a stamp? They'll ask you for it. They won't take signatures. That's how they tell that you authorized it: you separately register seals for yourself to certify that you've read, understood, and agree to the contract. This isn't my personal seal, only the hotel's decorative one, and people do vary in designs, but it should look something like this."

Zemked has a drone fetch the stamp. It's a circle with a radius of 1.5cm, with the hotel's name in cursive with curlicues of vines, with leaves at the end.

Oh-for-one!

"No, I don't have anything like that, nor is it customary where I'm from. In that case I think trust is the best I have."

You register a seal? With whom? What guarantee does your co-contractor have that your name and face stays linked to it? It's probably a 'government' thing, and the government is acting in its capacity as sole voucher-for-everybody. Thinking about it is like thinking about floating-island-based architecture, but Vivai thinks he understands.

"You register a seal with the Imperial or provincial government. Usually both, so that it's recognized in both. They take your picture and fingerprints and your signature, and pay a filing fee. Also one rupnu. After that, it's taken to be a proof of identity for you. We're looking into ways which are more secure – there is an Imperial Inquiry about this – but there's nothing good yet. The most promising thing they have is something to do with word ciphers or mathematics, but it hasn't been made practical.

I can pay the filing fee for you, but how you want to design and make or buy the seal is up to you."