4.1
DataPacRat
Amateur Immortalist
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*Book Four: A-*
*Chapter One: A-skew*
"I am a copy of White Snake, a Faith Keeper of the bear clan of the nation of the Great Hill, which you know as the Seneca. I am here to keep you from doing anything stupid. I argued in the sub-council that since you will stay dead when you die anyway, we should let you kill yourself, but they didn't want you to take anyone with you.
"If I tell you to do something and you don't, I will tell Bear Joe to sit on you. If you do something without explaining it to me, I will tell Bear Joe to sit on you. If you do something I don't understand, I will tell Bear Joe to sit on you. If you try to go anywhere in the lands of the Great Peace without me, Bear Joe will sit on you. If you do anything that will hurt yourself but not anyone else - I have no reason to stop you."
"Thank you for making that clear." I glanced sidelong at the copy of Joe who was still, like me, a humanoid rabbit. "'Deep and personal relationship', hm?"
"So maybe I exaggerated."
"And left a few important things out."
"You're emotionally unstable. You already blame yourself for Buffalo."
"I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but are you feeling like yourself? The Joe I've gotten used to is a lot more... laconic."
"Once I've settled into being a woman, I'm usually a lot more bouncy than I am as a man." I winced, and shoved my glasses up a tad so I could pinch the bridge of my nose. "Not like /that/," she objected. "Well, not /only/ like that."
"Anyway," I tried to steer the conversation back to sanity. I turned back to White Snake, looking up and down at her from the single vertical feather atop her hat to her leather moccasins. "I'm curious why you just said what you did - in the way that you said it. You are aware that by phrasing things like that, you're giving me every incentive there is to look for ways to get around your interference, to keep you from telling 'Bear Joe'," I glanced at the grizzly, who was stretched out behind White Snake and appeared to be watching the proceedings with half-closed eyes, "to sit on me?"
"If you do," said the severe Indian, "that will just prove my point, that you cannot be trusted."
I blinked. "Maybe you didn't get the same judgement I did. I thought the upshot was that they had /already/ decided I can't be trusted. At least not to do foolish things like sneak out after curfew or poke a sleeping bear with a stick." Bear Joe coughed once, which I guessed was an anti-poking warning.
White Snake frowned down at me and crossed her arms. I crossed my arms right back at her. Wagger curled around my right hip to peer at the commotion.
As I was trying to figure out if there was anything I could say to turn my probation worker from obstacle to ally, or at least ignorable-level nuisance, Joe Three stepped over and poked Wagger just behind her head. "Hey, Bunny? Is your tail snake growing fur?"
I blinked away from White Snake, adjusted my glasses, and looked down. "... Maybe?" I ran a finger along Wagger from her head down her back. "Hunh. Maybe she is. Maybe it's part of the merging process? Or maybe Bun-Bun's healing factor is kicking in in a funny way? Boomer, can you take some pics, and remind me to take more regularly, so we can track the progression of any further changes?"
As I positioned Boomer to get a good look at Wagger, White Snake said, "What is a 'Bun-Bun', and what does it have to do with your pet parasite?"
I gave him a sidelong glance. "Boy, do /you/ ever have a lot of catching up to do." I frowned a bit. "But before I do - I need a catch-up myself. Joe - I like you, well enough, but if you're keeping things as major as a whole /war/ secret from me, you're making it awfully hard to trust you. White Snake, do you mind telling me what's going on?"
"There is little to tell. The spirits started expanding across the St. Clair river. They didn't bring more people into the Great Peace, but somehow the people there noticed, and started fighting. They are doing no harm to us, but are killing many of their own people and animals, even in places the spirits have no influence over yet."
"That sounds... not good. How would you respond if I suggested my getting in touch with the people over there, to give them a better idea what's going on?"
"It is war. I can tell Bear Joe to do a lot worse to you than sit on you if you interfere in /important/ things. I am fairly sure you would be very unhappy and bored if you had to wait for all your limbs to grow back."
"And if you think even Bear Joe could manage that without me fighting back, you've got another think coming. But at least you're making yourself clear; that's good, saves a lot of time. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be annoyed if I have to stop and spend two minutes explaining myself to you every five minutes, so, hm. Munchkin, create a new whiteboard."
I started muttering, typing, and drawing with my fingertips on the display wall. It would have been a lot more impressive if I hadn't pre-emptively yanked out all the radios, but since I had, I was limited to somewhat more primitive input.
After a few moments, White Snake asked, "What is all this?"
"A to-do list, in the form of a tree. The root nodes, here, are 'stay alive' and 'avoid extinction of other sapience'. I still haven't figured out what I'd do if I was faced with the choice of one or the other, but since if I stay alive then sapience still exists, and the only way I /can/ stay alive in the long-term is with the help of a whole civilization, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to have to worry about it for a while."
I stopped typing long enough to gesture at various branches. "Here's a list of the most likely ways I can end up dying. Hostile parasite infection, starving, getting shot in a war, tripping and hitting my head, suicide, drowning, poisoning, and so on. And branching from each of them, various ways to minimize the risk involved. You'll notice that a lot of those ways are basically 'be helped by a medical expert'. Those all merge into 'have medical experts available to help', which takes us to the civilizational side of things. Again, a list of things which can wipe out a civilization instead of myself, and ways to ameliorate them. Many of those ways merge into 'have a robust culture that can grow and adapt', which brings us to such things as promoting rights, reigning in the excesses of capitalism when those threaten overall adaptability, being able to defend said culture against those who would loot its resources and enslave its people to their own short-term ends, and so on."
"Very well," said White Snake. "You have a tree of words. So what?"
I shrugged. "Now, whenever you don't understand why I'm doing something, I can save a lot of time by pointing out the tree, or a branch. If I'm lucky, you won't even have to ask a lot of the time."
"/Everything/ you do is based on this?"
"Well - this is just a quick draft for illustrative purposes. I should really take the time to work out each branch thoroughly, including listing how likely any given item is, what evidence that probability is based on, what evidence would significantly alter that probability, where the most important unknowns are, what the most likely tipping points are, and so on and so on. And, well, apparently I'm not /entirely/ in my right mind, so sometimes I'm going to do things that actually reduce the odds of the root nodes happening instead of increasing them."
White Snake took a step closer to the virtual whiteboard and started running her eyes over it. As she did, I continued nattering.
"If you /really/ want to stop me from doing something, instead of siccing Bear Joe on me, you can tell me that whatever I'm doing is undermining the tree instead of helping it. If that's true, then I'll /want/ to stop doing, um, whatever it is. Of course, if you just /say/ I'm undermining the tree to get me to stop, and it's not /actually/ true, then I'm going to stop trusting you to tell the truth about such things, which will mean it'll be harder for you to get me to stop doing things later just by you asking me to. After all, the Nine Nations counts as a civilization for purposes of this tree, if not necessarily that useful of one, given your preference for pre-Industrial technology, which limits the medical techniques you have that are of any use to me."
"You are saying," she said, "that if I ask you to stop doing something, you will, just like that?"
"At first, sure, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. That's what rational people do - they /listen/ to each other, to find out things they don't already know. Sure, eventually we're going to find points where we disagree and can't come to a compromise, at which point you're going to try to get Bear Joe to sit on me, or worse, and I'm going to try to not let you, but for the wide swathe where we do agree on things, there's no reason not to cooperate so we all get more of what each of us want done, done. Munchkin, create another whiteboard."
On the new surface, I made a big title, 'To Do List', and started copying a lot of the end-points of the branches into it. "If that tree's the reasoning and motivations, this one's the actual activities. For example - I haven't got any medical professionals on hand who can surgically remove a parasite. However, I do have the bun-bots, who can use tools as directed; and the university has all sorts of medical information in its library. So one possibility is to arrange for a communications link between wherever I happen to be and that library. Since radio is so jammed as to be nearly useless, not to mention being a danger to any computer hooked up to it, something other than radio waves. There are a few possibilities, such as semaphore, or trying to adapt a laser so it can be modulated by voice, or laying telephone wires down everywhere I go, but one thing I mentioned to Joe earlier just might fit the bill without needing too much effort to be worthwhile: heliographs. Or a powered light-telegraph, for nights. So here on the to-do list, I'm adding 'Ask Clara about setting up heliograph station'. And now, when I go to the university to talk to her, you understand what I'm doing, and you don't need to sic Bear Joe on me."
Joe Three piped up, "What if Clara refuses?"
I shrugged. "Then I'll be sad, and go on to working on whatever item has the next highest priority. Speaking of priority, here's one of the top ones. 'Singularity'," I wrote as I talked. "One known example, results very negative. Barring other evidence, odds of another Singularity being very negative, sixty-seven percent. Odds of another Singularity happening, unknown. Fermi estimation suggests that ten percent is too low, ninety-nine percent is too high, which results in somewhere around seventy-five percent chance of happening again. Don't look at me like that, I'm using logarithms instead of straight percentages to do the math. However, Fermi estimates are more for order-of-magnitude estimations instead of pinning things down closely, so it could be anywhere from fifty to ninety percent, or even twenty-five to ninety-seven percent. Now, the more accurately that number is known, the better all the percentages based on it can be estimated, such as whether it's more important to focus on preventing a new Singularity altogether or to try to force a forthcoming one to be positive instead of negative."
White Snake turned away from the wall to Joe Three, and asked, "Is she always like this?"
Joe Three said, "Not always. She is also very happy to be quiet and keep all the words inside her head. I think you want her to say as many of the words out loud as possible, to keep from being surprised when she comes up with a 'clever plan'."
White Snake looked at me, crossing her arms again. "You say you will listen to me when you make a mistake?"
I paused from the writing I'd continued scribbling during her aside. "You see one already?"
"Yes."
After a short pause, I rolled my eyes, and gestured at the two whiteboards. "Where?"
She pointed to the '67%' figure, that a second Singularity would be as bad as the first. "There."
"Alright," I said, getting ready to erase it. "If you've got a better probability, I'd be happy to use it instead."
"One hundred percent."
"Ah, fudge. I'm not good at trying to teach math, but I think I'm going to have to. Alright - what evidence do I have, available to me, that indicates that I should increase my estimation that this number is higher than two-out-of-three?"
"It is not an estimation. It is a fact."
"Whether or not you are wearing a bra is also a fact. However, I don't have that fact available to me, only indirect evidence, so I can only make a guess of some probability about whether or not that fact is true."
"The spirits say so."
"And all I have to gather that fact is your word. Given Joe Three's selective editing of facts, then out of all the things that members of the Great Peace have told me, a certain number of those things are misleading at best, or false at worst. That means that I can't trust your word as providing evidence reliable to one hundred percent accuracy."
"I am not Joe Three."
"Which means that you are /more/ reliable than her-"
"Hey!"
I ignored Joe. "-right now, not that you are /completely/ reliable."
"You do not trust my word?"
"I don't trust /my/ word to one hundred percent. Or the evidence of my own eyes. I can get to ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine, and so on, up to around, hm, I think I worked out it was up to about eight to a dozen nines in a row."
I finally managed to get an expression out of White Snake other than angry disapproval: slight confusion. "How do you not trust your own eyes?"
"By having seen all sorts of magicians, misinterpretations, and outright conmen and fraudsters. One hundred percent certainty simply isn't an option, at least for me."
"If you cannot be certain, then what is the point of... all this?"
"Because when making plans, there's a big difference between thinking something's ten percent likely to happen, and ninety percent likely to happen. There's also a big difference between something being ninety percent likely to happen, and ninety-nine point nine percent likely."
"If my word will not change your mind, then what will?"
"I didn't say it wouldn't change my mind - just that it wouldn't change it to one hundred percent. That sixty-seven percent figure? That's based on a single piece of evidence, the fact that the last Singularity was a bad one. Every other piece of evidence I can gather can change it - the more reliable the evidence, and the less it's tied up with whatever other evidence I'm already using - so that I don't count the same thing more than once - the more it'll change the figure."
"I trust the spirits' word."
"That's good for you. But if they're saying one hundred percent...?" At her nod, "That's mainly evidence to /me/ that they're not using an evidence-based probability to generate that number. So I've got to use other evidence. And since I don't have much evidence, and it's kind of an important number to get as right as possible, that means that when I can, I've got to collect more evidence. Which is why it's here on the to-do list: 'Poke around the Singularity, gather evidence'."
White Snake was back to frowning. "What do you mean by 'poke around'?"
I shrugged. "Try to find out as much as I can about what happened. See if I can find out more about how all the people disappeared, when exactly they did, where they went, what was going on, what it would take to make it happen again, what it would take to keep it from happening again, and so on."
"The spirits can keep it from happening again."
"Yyyeah, that may be true, but it doesn't actually provide any /evidence/ about that number."
Her frown deepened. "You say you want to know how to keep it from happening again?"
I tilted my head at her, more to give myself a split-second to think without looking like I was delaying. "I've got a small crossbow or two somewhere about the place. They have triggers that set them off. How can I keep other people from setting them off if I don't at least know where the trigger is?"
"So you do wish to know how to 'trigger' a Singularity?"
"If you want to put it that way," I shrugged, "I suppose I do."
"Bear Joe, sit on her."
The rather enormous ursine grumbled a complaint, got to its feet, and took a step toward me.
I yelped and jumped, straight up, grabbing hold of one of the Munchkin's air-conditioning vents. "Hey, call him off! I'm not trying to find that out right /now/!"
Joe Three put a hand on White Snake's shoulder. "You shouldn't set Bear me on her every time she says something like that, or you'll never be able to persuade her she's wrong and you're right."
"I'm not concerned about persuading her. I'm only concerned about stopping her."
Bear Joe sat back and reached up with one heavy-clawed paw. I hurriedly called out, "Munchkin, open ceiling hatch two."
Joe Three sighed as I pulled my legs up and out. "Plus, if you push her, she'll start trying to get... /creative/. Bunny, get back down here."
"Don't see why. I can take the rest of Munchkin to the factory. You won't mind if I leave you all locked in here for a few hours?"
"White Snake, I don't want to be stuck here for a while. Either tell bear me to rip her arms off or to lie back down."
"Hey!" I hurried up my wriggling to avoid the claws and to get out, spreading my legs into a split outside the hatch to support myself.
White Snake frowned up at me. "Will you listen if I tell you /why/ you must not 'poke around'?"
"Hey, I'm all about the words, the listening and reading and occasionally writing or speaking."
"Bear Joe, lie down."
He did, which gave me a chance to sort myself out, resulting in me lying on top of Munchkin, with my head watching down at White Snake.
Joe Three said, "You can come back down now, Bunny."
"Nah, I'm comfortable here."
"Bunny."
I gestured at White Snake. "She's already shown she's willing to resort to force when she hears something she doesn't like."
"That's not - she -" Joe rubbed her fuzzy face and sighed. "Fine. But will you at least /listen/ to her?"
"Of course. No promises about agreeing, or even believing, but listening, that I can do."
White Snake took a moment to look at the tree, then the to-do list, then back up to me. "You say you think another Singularity is... seventy-five percent likely to happen?"
"Somewhere in that neighbourhood."
"If you 'poke around' Singularity stuff... is there a chance you can set something off to make another Singularity happen?"
"Of course. I haven't gotten around to estimating the number on that yet, but if you want me to-"
She held up a hand. "You may not believe the spirits, but I do, when they say another Singularity would be one hundred percent bad. I cannot allow you to do anything that increases the odds of it happening."
"Okay," I nodded, "I can understand that. Are you willing to listen for a moment?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"Of course. If you want to leave, just let me know and I'll unlock the doors."
"I will listen."
"Right. That seventy-five percent figure - would you be willing to accept that another Singularity is, somewhere around that number, likely to happen again?"
"No."
"Hm. Okay, got a better number?"
"When the spirits take over the world, they can prevent it from ever happening again."
"I can't be the only idiot who might poke around Singularity stuff and trigger another one. What are the odds that /that/ will happen before your spirits can spread across the planet?"
"No more than a tenth."
"A tenth. Hm. Well, we can talk about that number later, but let's run with it. I know /I/ wouldn't be happy with a one-in-ten chance that a one-hundred-percent-guaranteed bad thing is going to happen. So here's the important bit. What can we mere humans - and parahumans, and AIs, and so on - do, other than what your spirits are already doing, to /reduce/ that one-in-ten chance, down to one-in-twenty, or one-in-a-hundred, or less?"
"Absolutely nothing."
"How sure are you of that?"
"Anything we may try to do can only increase the odds of everything going wrong."
"Why should I believe that?"
"What do you mean?"
"Those crossbows I mentioned? I know how they work pretty well. I know /exactly/ how to keep them from being triggered. If I didn't know how they worked, I could only guess. And, even though I know, I haven't set them off by accident myself. In fact, it's /because/ I know that I know how to not set them off. That goes for all sorts of things other than crossbows. As far as pretty much everything I've experienced goes, the more I know about something, the better I'm able to control it, and the less damage I can arrange for it to cause."
"Playing around with things beyond your understanding makes bad things happen, more than ninety-nine times out of a hundred."
"Well, what do you know - we've gotten you down from at least one hundred-percent certainty down to ninety-nine. That's a lot more progress than you might realize. And in case you've forgotten - I don't actually want a bad Singularity to happen. That would completely uproot both roots of my motivation tree there. So I'm not going to /try/ to tinker with things that are more likely to blow up than not, if there's any way around them."
"You are still planning on tinkering."
I shrugged. "If I just sit on Wagger, I figure there's around a three-quarters likelihood of a Singularity, with a two-thirds likelihood of it being a bad one. That's at /least/ a fifty percent chance of all living people getting eaten. You seem to think that it's one-in-ten and one-in-one, for a ten percent chance."
"So we disagree."
"Right now, yeah. But imagine this scenario - that I kick an old city's cooling tower, which is just the right one, and out pops a manual explaining exactly what happened and how to keep it from happening again. Surely there are /some/ things I can try looking into that don't increase the odds of a Singularity? I don't mind starting with the completely safe stuff first. In fact, I'd really prefer it, so I'm as prepared as possible when I look at the almost-as-safe stuff, and so on."
"There is another 'scenario' to imagine. That you learn how to keep a Singularity from happening - but you are tortured into revealing all you know, and someone else uses your knowledge to make one happen."
"I can think of a few ways to minimize the odds of that. And I expect that if we keep talking, then between us, we can come up with more. But that kind of depends on us talking, without me having to pause and re-think everything I say to keep you from siccing a bear on me every time I make a suggestion you don't like."
"It is my job to sic a bear on you every time you make a suggestion I don't like."
"No, it's your job to keep me from /doing/ anything foolish. According to what you said when you introduced yourself. If you can. If you sic a bear on me when talking would have kept me from doing not just one foolish thing, but a lot of foolish things, causing me to avoid and ignore you as much as possible, which will keep you from being able to stop me from doing even more foolish things... then won't your spirits be annoyed with you for not doing what they set you out to do?"
"Perhaps. But that is between me and the spirits. I do not believe there is anything you can suggest that will let me let you poke around the Singularity."
I grinned down at her. "How certain are you of that?" She glared back up. "Right. More seriously - would you be interested in helping me work out a list, of what things I can try to do, and how dangerous they're likely to be?"
"Everything related to the Singularity is dangerous."
"In case you've forgotten, you're standing in a vehicle I arranged to create - and when I arranged to have it made, I learned a few things about the Singularity. Every piece of knowledge is connected to every other piece. Remember the Berserker we all ganged up to destroy? Apparently I've got a copy of it - would you want to sic a bear on me if I suggested I talk to it to learn everything I can?"
"What does that have to do with the Singularity?"
"I've got no idea - but I'd certainly like to find out, if I can."
*Chapter One: A-skew*
"I am a copy of White Snake, a Faith Keeper of the bear clan of the nation of the Great Hill, which you know as the Seneca. I am here to keep you from doing anything stupid. I argued in the sub-council that since you will stay dead when you die anyway, we should let you kill yourself, but they didn't want you to take anyone with you.
"If I tell you to do something and you don't, I will tell Bear Joe to sit on you. If you do something without explaining it to me, I will tell Bear Joe to sit on you. If you do something I don't understand, I will tell Bear Joe to sit on you. If you try to go anywhere in the lands of the Great Peace without me, Bear Joe will sit on you. If you do anything that will hurt yourself but not anyone else - I have no reason to stop you."
"Thank you for making that clear." I glanced sidelong at the copy of Joe who was still, like me, a humanoid rabbit. "'Deep and personal relationship', hm?"
"So maybe I exaggerated."
"And left a few important things out."
"You're emotionally unstable. You already blame yourself for Buffalo."
"I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but are you feeling like yourself? The Joe I've gotten used to is a lot more... laconic."
"Once I've settled into being a woman, I'm usually a lot more bouncy than I am as a man." I winced, and shoved my glasses up a tad so I could pinch the bridge of my nose. "Not like /that/," she objected. "Well, not /only/ like that."
"Anyway," I tried to steer the conversation back to sanity. I turned back to White Snake, looking up and down at her from the single vertical feather atop her hat to her leather moccasins. "I'm curious why you just said what you did - in the way that you said it. You are aware that by phrasing things like that, you're giving me every incentive there is to look for ways to get around your interference, to keep you from telling 'Bear Joe'," I glanced at the grizzly, who was stretched out behind White Snake and appeared to be watching the proceedings with half-closed eyes, "to sit on me?"
"If you do," said the severe Indian, "that will just prove my point, that you cannot be trusted."
I blinked. "Maybe you didn't get the same judgement I did. I thought the upshot was that they had /already/ decided I can't be trusted. At least not to do foolish things like sneak out after curfew or poke a sleeping bear with a stick." Bear Joe coughed once, which I guessed was an anti-poking warning.
White Snake frowned down at me and crossed her arms. I crossed my arms right back at her. Wagger curled around my right hip to peer at the commotion.
As I was trying to figure out if there was anything I could say to turn my probation worker from obstacle to ally, or at least ignorable-level nuisance, Joe Three stepped over and poked Wagger just behind her head. "Hey, Bunny? Is your tail snake growing fur?"
I blinked away from White Snake, adjusted my glasses, and looked down. "... Maybe?" I ran a finger along Wagger from her head down her back. "Hunh. Maybe she is. Maybe it's part of the merging process? Or maybe Bun-Bun's healing factor is kicking in in a funny way? Boomer, can you take some pics, and remind me to take more regularly, so we can track the progression of any further changes?"
As I positioned Boomer to get a good look at Wagger, White Snake said, "What is a 'Bun-Bun', and what does it have to do with your pet parasite?"
I gave him a sidelong glance. "Boy, do /you/ ever have a lot of catching up to do." I frowned a bit. "But before I do - I need a catch-up myself. Joe - I like you, well enough, but if you're keeping things as major as a whole /war/ secret from me, you're making it awfully hard to trust you. White Snake, do you mind telling me what's going on?"
"There is little to tell. The spirits started expanding across the St. Clair river. They didn't bring more people into the Great Peace, but somehow the people there noticed, and started fighting. They are doing no harm to us, but are killing many of their own people and animals, even in places the spirits have no influence over yet."
"That sounds... not good. How would you respond if I suggested my getting in touch with the people over there, to give them a better idea what's going on?"
"It is war. I can tell Bear Joe to do a lot worse to you than sit on you if you interfere in /important/ things. I am fairly sure you would be very unhappy and bored if you had to wait for all your limbs to grow back."
"And if you think even Bear Joe could manage that without me fighting back, you've got another think coming. But at least you're making yourself clear; that's good, saves a lot of time. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be annoyed if I have to stop and spend two minutes explaining myself to you every five minutes, so, hm. Munchkin, create a new whiteboard."
I started muttering, typing, and drawing with my fingertips on the display wall. It would have been a lot more impressive if I hadn't pre-emptively yanked out all the radios, but since I had, I was limited to somewhat more primitive input.
After a few moments, White Snake asked, "What is all this?"
"A to-do list, in the form of a tree. The root nodes, here, are 'stay alive' and 'avoid extinction of other sapience'. I still haven't figured out what I'd do if I was faced with the choice of one or the other, but since if I stay alive then sapience still exists, and the only way I /can/ stay alive in the long-term is with the help of a whole civilization, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to have to worry about it for a while."
I stopped typing long enough to gesture at various branches. "Here's a list of the most likely ways I can end up dying. Hostile parasite infection, starving, getting shot in a war, tripping and hitting my head, suicide, drowning, poisoning, and so on. And branching from each of them, various ways to minimize the risk involved. You'll notice that a lot of those ways are basically 'be helped by a medical expert'. Those all merge into 'have medical experts available to help', which takes us to the civilizational side of things. Again, a list of things which can wipe out a civilization instead of myself, and ways to ameliorate them. Many of those ways merge into 'have a robust culture that can grow and adapt', which brings us to such things as promoting rights, reigning in the excesses of capitalism when those threaten overall adaptability, being able to defend said culture against those who would loot its resources and enslave its people to their own short-term ends, and so on."
"Very well," said White Snake. "You have a tree of words. So what?"
I shrugged. "Now, whenever you don't understand why I'm doing something, I can save a lot of time by pointing out the tree, or a branch. If I'm lucky, you won't even have to ask a lot of the time."
"/Everything/ you do is based on this?"
"Well - this is just a quick draft for illustrative purposes. I should really take the time to work out each branch thoroughly, including listing how likely any given item is, what evidence that probability is based on, what evidence would significantly alter that probability, where the most important unknowns are, what the most likely tipping points are, and so on and so on. And, well, apparently I'm not /entirely/ in my right mind, so sometimes I'm going to do things that actually reduce the odds of the root nodes happening instead of increasing them."
White Snake took a step closer to the virtual whiteboard and started running her eyes over it. As she did, I continued nattering.
"If you /really/ want to stop me from doing something, instead of siccing Bear Joe on me, you can tell me that whatever I'm doing is undermining the tree instead of helping it. If that's true, then I'll /want/ to stop doing, um, whatever it is. Of course, if you just /say/ I'm undermining the tree to get me to stop, and it's not /actually/ true, then I'm going to stop trusting you to tell the truth about such things, which will mean it'll be harder for you to get me to stop doing things later just by you asking me to. After all, the Nine Nations counts as a civilization for purposes of this tree, if not necessarily that useful of one, given your preference for pre-Industrial technology, which limits the medical techniques you have that are of any use to me."
"You are saying," she said, "that if I ask you to stop doing something, you will, just like that?"
"At first, sure, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. That's what rational people do - they /listen/ to each other, to find out things they don't already know. Sure, eventually we're going to find points where we disagree and can't come to a compromise, at which point you're going to try to get Bear Joe to sit on me, or worse, and I'm going to try to not let you, but for the wide swathe where we do agree on things, there's no reason not to cooperate so we all get more of what each of us want done, done. Munchkin, create another whiteboard."
On the new surface, I made a big title, 'To Do List', and started copying a lot of the end-points of the branches into it. "If that tree's the reasoning and motivations, this one's the actual activities. For example - I haven't got any medical professionals on hand who can surgically remove a parasite. However, I do have the bun-bots, who can use tools as directed; and the university has all sorts of medical information in its library. So one possibility is to arrange for a communications link between wherever I happen to be and that library. Since radio is so jammed as to be nearly useless, not to mention being a danger to any computer hooked up to it, something other than radio waves. There are a few possibilities, such as semaphore, or trying to adapt a laser so it can be modulated by voice, or laying telephone wires down everywhere I go, but one thing I mentioned to Joe earlier just might fit the bill without needing too much effort to be worthwhile: heliographs. Or a powered light-telegraph, for nights. So here on the to-do list, I'm adding 'Ask Clara about setting up heliograph station'. And now, when I go to the university to talk to her, you understand what I'm doing, and you don't need to sic Bear Joe on me."
Joe Three piped up, "What if Clara refuses?"
I shrugged. "Then I'll be sad, and go on to working on whatever item has the next highest priority. Speaking of priority, here's one of the top ones. 'Singularity'," I wrote as I talked. "One known example, results very negative. Barring other evidence, odds of another Singularity being very negative, sixty-seven percent. Odds of another Singularity happening, unknown. Fermi estimation suggests that ten percent is too low, ninety-nine percent is too high, which results in somewhere around seventy-five percent chance of happening again. Don't look at me like that, I'm using logarithms instead of straight percentages to do the math. However, Fermi estimates are more for order-of-magnitude estimations instead of pinning things down closely, so it could be anywhere from fifty to ninety percent, or even twenty-five to ninety-seven percent. Now, the more accurately that number is known, the better all the percentages based on it can be estimated, such as whether it's more important to focus on preventing a new Singularity altogether or to try to force a forthcoming one to be positive instead of negative."
White Snake turned away from the wall to Joe Three, and asked, "Is she always like this?"
Joe Three said, "Not always. She is also very happy to be quiet and keep all the words inside her head. I think you want her to say as many of the words out loud as possible, to keep from being surprised when she comes up with a 'clever plan'."
White Snake looked at me, crossing her arms again. "You say you will listen to me when you make a mistake?"
I paused from the writing I'd continued scribbling during her aside. "You see one already?"
"Yes."
After a short pause, I rolled my eyes, and gestured at the two whiteboards. "Where?"
She pointed to the '67%' figure, that a second Singularity would be as bad as the first. "There."
"Alright," I said, getting ready to erase it. "If you've got a better probability, I'd be happy to use it instead."
"One hundred percent."
"Ah, fudge. I'm not good at trying to teach math, but I think I'm going to have to. Alright - what evidence do I have, available to me, that indicates that I should increase my estimation that this number is higher than two-out-of-three?"
"It is not an estimation. It is a fact."
"Whether or not you are wearing a bra is also a fact. However, I don't have that fact available to me, only indirect evidence, so I can only make a guess of some probability about whether or not that fact is true."
"The spirits say so."
"And all I have to gather that fact is your word. Given Joe Three's selective editing of facts, then out of all the things that members of the Great Peace have told me, a certain number of those things are misleading at best, or false at worst. That means that I can't trust your word as providing evidence reliable to one hundred percent accuracy."
"I am not Joe Three."
"Which means that you are /more/ reliable than her-"
"Hey!"
I ignored Joe. "-right now, not that you are /completely/ reliable."
"You do not trust my word?"
"I don't trust /my/ word to one hundred percent. Or the evidence of my own eyes. I can get to ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine, and so on, up to around, hm, I think I worked out it was up to about eight to a dozen nines in a row."
I finally managed to get an expression out of White Snake other than angry disapproval: slight confusion. "How do you not trust your own eyes?"
"By having seen all sorts of magicians, misinterpretations, and outright conmen and fraudsters. One hundred percent certainty simply isn't an option, at least for me."
"If you cannot be certain, then what is the point of... all this?"
"Because when making plans, there's a big difference between thinking something's ten percent likely to happen, and ninety percent likely to happen. There's also a big difference between something being ninety percent likely to happen, and ninety-nine point nine percent likely."
"If my word will not change your mind, then what will?"
"I didn't say it wouldn't change my mind - just that it wouldn't change it to one hundred percent. That sixty-seven percent figure? That's based on a single piece of evidence, the fact that the last Singularity was a bad one. Every other piece of evidence I can gather can change it - the more reliable the evidence, and the less it's tied up with whatever other evidence I'm already using - so that I don't count the same thing more than once - the more it'll change the figure."
"I trust the spirits' word."
"That's good for you. But if they're saying one hundred percent...?" At her nod, "That's mainly evidence to /me/ that they're not using an evidence-based probability to generate that number. So I've got to use other evidence. And since I don't have much evidence, and it's kind of an important number to get as right as possible, that means that when I can, I've got to collect more evidence. Which is why it's here on the to-do list: 'Poke around the Singularity, gather evidence'."
White Snake was back to frowning. "What do you mean by 'poke around'?"
I shrugged. "Try to find out as much as I can about what happened. See if I can find out more about how all the people disappeared, when exactly they did, where they went, what was going on, what it would take to make it happen again, what it would take to keep it from happening again, and so on."
"The spirits can keep it from happening again."
"Yyyeah, that may be true, but it doesn't actually provide any /evidence/ about that number."
Her frown deepened. "You say you want to know how to keep it from happening again?"
I tilted my head at her, more to give myself a split-second to think without looking like I was delaying. "I've got a small crossbow or two somewhere about the place. They have triggers that set them off. How can I keep other people from setting them off if I don't at least know where the trigger is?"
"So you do wish to know how to 'trigger' a Singularity?"
"If you want to put it that way," I shrugged, "I suppose I do."
"Bear Joe, sit on her."
The rather enormous ursine grumbled a complaint, got to its feet, and took a step toward me.
I yelped and jumped, straight up, grabbing hold of one of the Munchkin's air-conditioning vents. "Hey, call him off! I'm not trying to find that out right /now/!"
Joe Three put a hand on White Snake's shoulder. "You shouldn't set Bear me on her every time she says something like that, or you'll never be able to persuade her she's wrong and you're right."
"I'm not concerned about persuading her. I'm only concerned about stopping her."
Bear Joe sat back and reached up with one heavy-clawed paw. I hurriedly called out, "Munchkin, open ceiling hatch two."
Joe Three sighed as I pulled my legs up and out. "Plus, if you push her, she'll start trying to get... /creative/. Bunny, get back down here."
"Don't see why. I can take the rest of Munchkin to the factory. You won't mind if I leave you all locked in here for a few hours?"
"White Snake, I don't want to be stuck here for a while. Either tell bear me to rip her arms off or to lie back down."
"Hey!" I hurried up my wriggling to avoid the claws and to get out, spreading my legs into a split outside the hatch to support myself.
White Snake frowned up at me. "Will you listen if I tell you /why/ you must not 'poke around'?"
"Hey, I'm all about the words, the listening and reading and occasionally writing or speaking."
"Bear Joe, lie down."
He did, which gave me a chance to sort myself out, resulting in me lying on top of Munchkin, with my head watching down at White Snake.
Joe Three said, "You can come back down now, Bunny."
"Nah, I'm comfortable here."
"Bunny."
I gestured at White Snake. "She's already shown she's willing to resort to force when she hears something she doesn't like."
"That's not - she -" Joe rubbed her fuzzy face and sighed. "Fine. But will you at least /listen/ to her?"
"Of course. No promises about agreeing, or even believing, but listening, that I can do."
White Snake took a moment to look at the tree, then the to-do list, then back up to me. "You say you think another Singularity is... seventy-five percent likely to happen?"
"Somewhere in that neighbourhood."
"If you 'poke around' Singularity stuff... is there a chance you can set something off to make another Singularity happen?"
"Of course. I haven't gotten around to estimating the number on that yet, but if you want me to-"
She held up a hand. "You may not believe the spirits, but I do, when they say another Singularity would be one hundred percent bad. I cannot allow you to do anything that increases the odds of it happening."
"Okay," I nodded, "I can understand that. Are you willing to listen for a moment?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"Of course. If you want to leave, just let me know and I'll unlock the doors."
"I will listen."
"Right. That seventy-five percent figure - would you be willing to accept that another Singularity is, somewhere around that number, likely to happen again?"
"No."
"Hm. Okay, got a better number?"
"When the spirits take over the world, they can prevent it from ever happening again."
"I can't be the only idiot who might poke around Singularity stuff and trigger another one. What are the odds that /that/ will happen before your spirits can spread across the planet?"
"No more than a tenth."
"A tenth. Hm. Well, we can talk about that number later, but let's run with it. I know /I/ wouldn't be happy with a one-in-ten chance that a one-hundred-percent-guaranteed bad thing is going to happen. So here's the important bit. What can we mere humans - and parahumans, and AIs, and so on - do, other than what your spirits are already doing, to /reduce/ that one-in-ten chance, down to one-in-twenty, or one-in-a-hundred, or less?"
"Absolutely nothing."
"How sure are you of that?"
"Anything we may try to do can only increase the odds of everything going wrong."
"Why should I believe that?"
"What do you mean?"
"Those crossbows I mentioned? I know how they work pretty well. I know /exactly/ how to keep them from being triggered. If I didn't know how they worked, I could only guess. And, even though I know, I haven't set them off by accident myself. In fact, it's /because/ I know that I know how to not set them off. That goes for all sorts of things other than crossbows. As far as pretty much everything I've experienced goes, the more I know about something, the better I'm able to control it, and the less damage I can arrange for it to cause."
"Playing around with things beyond your understanding makes bad things happen, more than ninety-nine times out of a hundred."
"Well, what do you know - we've gotten you down from at least one hundred-percent certainty down to ninety-nine. That's a lot more progress than you might realize. And in case you've forgotten - I don't actually want a bad Singularity to happen. That would completely uproot both roots of my motivation tree there. So I'm not going to /try/ to tinker with things that are more likely to blow up than not, if there's any way around them."
"You are still planning on tinkering."
I shrugged. "If I just sit on Wagger, I figure there's around a three-quarters likelihood of a Singularity, with a two-thirds likelihood of it being a bad one. That's at /least/ a fifty percent chance of all living people getting eaten. You seem to think that it's one-in-ten and one-in-one, for a ten percent chance."
"So we disagree."
"Right now, yeah. But imagine this scenario - that I kick an old city's cooling tower, which is just the right one, and out pops a manual explaining exactly what happened and how to keep it from happening again. Surely there are /some/ things I can try looking into that don't increase the odds of a Singularity? I don't mind starting with the completely safe stuff first. In fact, I'd really prefer it, so I'm as prepared as possible when I look at the almost-as-safe stuff, and so on."
"There is another 'scenario' to imagine. That you learn how to keep a Singularity from happening - but you are tortured into revealing all you know, and someone else uses your knowledge to make one happen."
"I can think of a few ways to minimize the odds of that. And I expect that if we keep talking, then between us, we can come up with more. But that kind of depends on us talking, without me having to pause and re-think everything I say to keep you from siccing a bear on me every time I make a suggestion you don't like."
"It is my job to sic a bear on you every time you make a suggestion I don't like."
"No, it's your job to keep me from /doing/ anything foolish. According to what you said when you introduced yourself. If you can. If you sic a bear on me when talking would have kept me from doing not just one foolish thing, but a lot of foolish things, causing me to avoid and ignore you as much as possible, which will keep you from being able to stop me from doing even more foolish things... then won't your spirits be annoyed with you for not doing what they set you out to do?"
"Perhaps. But that is between me and the spirits. I do not believe there is anything you can suggest that will let me let you poke around the Singularity."
I grinned down at her. "How certain are you of that?" She glared back up. "Right. More seriously - would you be interested in helping me work out a list, of what things I can try to do, and how dangerous they're likely to be?"
"Everything related to the Singularity is dangerous."
"In case you've forgotten, you're standing in a vehicle I arranged to create - and when I arranged to have it made, I learned a few things about the Singularity. Every piece of knowledge is connected to every other piece. Remember the Berserker we all ganged up to destroy? Apparently I've got a copy of it - would you want to sic a bear on me if I suggested I talk to it to learn everything I can?"
"What does that have to do with the Singularity?"
"I've got no idea - but I'd certainly like to find out, if I can."