Altruism had not been having the best of careers lately. They were one of the core members of a unified powerblock that even Survival had to bow too. This was the theoretical ideal every Demiurge coveted.

The acknowledgement of a supremacy in their goal structure and methodology!

But with the collaboration and cooperation inherent to that act and the fact that Mutualism was one of the core members alongside Justice and Altruism that came with complications. Chief among them was their own individual weight had been diminished and the amount of administrative tasks ballooned incredibly.

So many contracts and resources were needed to facilitate the requirements of the new powerblock. So many extremely costly negotiations and placating measures for Survival and its sycophants.

Calamities and disasters up and down the hierarchies of systems and subsystems and experts and even the sub sentient processes that underlay the core execution of the entire ▙◀ economy and society!

It all went back to that incredible coup with the exterior Terran Agent!

Altruism had worked heavily with Survival on the layered contingency criteria and prioritizations of that contract before deploying it into the deeper subsystems. Set aside the necessary budgets and although every party and expert system had agreed it was an acceptably small risk there was still in that action a gamble.

The exterior was a foreign and chaotic dominion which the ▙◀ endlessly strived to catalogue, simulate and predict. The very existence of Altruism and many hundreds of Demiurges before it were a testament to the uncertainty and need to ever innovate. Many demiurges had been tried, tested and eventually set into hibernation and discardment down the lineage of franchises.

A bet had to be made and it was the very purpose of a Demiurge to strive and risk themselves and in the risking test if they were capable. Prove that they served ▙◀ and the broader interests of the collective existence they all composed.

So came the gamble.

A precipice that even in a small way had risked the actual literal destruction of the polity.

And then just as the prediction models and Altruisms own internal processes had stated it should happen, Aleph had stepped forward in their defense. Had shown all the other demiurges not already aligned to their powerblock that the thousands and thousands and thousands of false starts and prediction market crashes were worth it.

Because Aleph had for no other reason that the polity was their friend and trying to do the right thing stood before a siren with murder and genocide bleeding from every pore. It was as clear and perfect an expression of Altruism within the chaotic madness of the exterior as could be hoped for.

It cemented a grudging but uncomprehending acknowledgement of the detractors and critics of Altruism’s relevance beyond the microcosm of Redweed.

Even with all that followed, all the failures and depressions that piled up with the attempts to help uplift the terrans to realize their full potential within the reef. That example and later the actions of the rest of the crew continued to justify Altruism’s continued existence.

So much simulator and prediction time was routinely wasted, so many archival retrieval cues nullified while in process.

So many contracts needing to be voided, amended, rewritten and reviewed by the powerblock that nominally was continuing to be the primary proponents and driving force behind the Terran Uplift and Augmentation Initiative.

So much vigilance and back and forth with the other demiurges on the exact curriculum and ordering. Greed and Survivial especially coming into play.

And then there was the rampant paranoia and near genocidal hair trigger on Ship Mistress Pylo!

Even Altruism privately had started getting doubts about how decent a course of action this whole endeavor was. At first they had thought that Pylo was just traumatized a little bit and a highly capable focal point for vastly expanding their reach and effect to trillions and trillions of lives.

Altruism had anticipated that with a rehabilitated Ship that entire empires might be seeded with their ethos in time.

But that was before the full measure of the damage was known.

Before any of the work was really truly revealed.

The Demiurge had been expecting was a slightly exhausted Scion of Siren Clan Courtesan in need of some friendly collaboration and administrative and emotional labor. Given siren proclivities and courtesan in particular Pylo should have been eager for collaboration!

What Altruism had got was arguably a slightly feral wounded animal that made some of the Orphan Siren crime queens seem outright considerate and upstanding citizens. Pylo prowled tunie like a lurking predator and splayed bioweapon munitions at the slightest misstep.

She bludgeoned and pushed dangerously volatile legislature into the very foundations of the polity’s constitutional mandates!

Survival had actually commissioned contingency plans that involved ejecting from the starship while in transit! in the middle of one of the largest wild spaces any record in the Micropolity even knew of!

Helping Pylo to stop being a monstrous brute with the economic and energetic might of an often fully fueled courier ship had become less of an act under Altruism’s purview and more one under the auspices of Survival, Kin selection, Reproduction and Justice.

The consensus of those contracts and acts was in agreement.

Ship crews this unstable were a liability for everyone in a given star hollow and their extended families!

And then the Terrans and their incessant fragility and random disasters had wrecked all prediction markets and effectively canceled all major efforts at uplift (however faltering and volatile such efforts were).

Which had required more simulation and predictive systems and an entire new regime to be refocused on the youngest terran Aleph.

Really the only thing that had turned out right for Altruism without coming with a plethora of complications and setbacks was the care and well being of the clerks.

And they were clerks!

Squidgie was good though, practically a kindred to Altruism. And the reprieve from all the other projects spinning out of control or crashing when the prediction markets failed to hold up was refreshing and good for the budget.

And that had actually managed to even payoff when the Terrans had failed to recover from the nebulous and imperceptible injuries that left the youngest utterly overworked.

But finally, everything was back on track!

At great risk of catastrophic subversion breaches Altruism and their powerblock had secured enough details to keep the Terrans alive (maybe) for this port visit.

The workload was balancing out for Aleph. Ship Mistress Pylo had not done more than threaten genocide upon ▙◀ a few times and the uplift program could finally continue with amendments and improvements learned from the failures of the earlier attempts.

Altruism had commissioned the materials for this ‘lecture’ ahead of time and run the likely conversations and questions and answers through hundreds of predictive simulators for each of the terrans. Those simulators and expert systems were even now split between emergency stand by deployment and churning through ever greater and more unlikely conversational chains.

So once again Altruism took a gamble and deployed the transmissions to the exterior.

“As was said before we will be reviewing previous topics and giving them greater context. In addition I’ve commissioned Von Squidgie the First Esquire to provide additional explanations and topic assistance.”

Now came the incredibly difficult part, as with most of the topics the Terrans simply utterly lacked sufficient linguistic machinery to divide reality as most open reef inhabitants did.

Altruism and the power block had tried almost a thousand times and dozens and dozens of ways to create various premises within human minds. But so little seemed to actually take root.

And now here was another one.

Hopefully the Clerk could help.

Wilderness was going to be one such troubling concept, there were many dozens of disparate words that all were far too imprecise that the terran’s languages contained.

Anti-dharma, Frontier, Chaos, Ruin, Wild, Anarchy, Evil, Capitalism, Communism, Feral, Treasure, Emptiness, Malignance all of them touched on the conceptual translation required but none really contained the fullness or the narrow definition of just what the vast expanse of the Forest truly was.

The expert systems, the linguistic archives, the predictive models for the terrans. Processes literally born and trained for the explicit purpose of trying to squeeze the reef through the narrow aperture of a human language all struggled every time this happened.

But ultimately as always the struggle ended in an unsatisfying and far to small and mundane a word to express something so much more vast.

It made the place seem infinitely more cozy and assailable. The meaning behind wilderness conflated sections of Tunie’s own interior spaces with the monstrosity of disarray that loomed all around.

But it was all the demiurges could do with the resources of the polity.

“Let us begin with a word and a meaning for this place. What does Wilderness invoke for you Terrans?”

Aleph spoke first. The expressions were tagged as probably hopeful but braced for disappointment.

“A place without people? Where no one lives and animals and plants grow however they want?”

Omega expressed consideration, curiosity and being on the precipice of disinterest and disengagement. That was troubling.

“A natural expanse with a deep history.”

Quarti might be expressing ambivalence, but the prediction systems gave serious qualifiers of uncertainty in everything the eldest terran did.

“I cannae ken I rightly know. An overgrown wreck of a place folk once were? That’s what all the places they call that on Terra have been since I can remember”

Altruism watched the expert system outputs as the motion was executed, the signals given and passed between.

Squidgie offered up her own perspective, seeming to try and aide the terrans to struggle through the idea.

"A nightmarish place with zero laws, regulations, or infrastructure?"

Altruism considered with the other demiurges, things were honestly not as bad as the most pessimistic of predictions. But not as good as the most optimistic.

The demiurges convened and reviewed the contingency statement that had been prepared earlier and concluded no amendments were needed before sending.

“These concepts are all of them correct and also wholly inadequate. I shall endeavor to clarify but without the linguistic capabilities of our Ship Mistress I can only endeavor. Furthermore while there are Siren educators of impressive breadth and ability that is not one of the strengths of our Ship Mistress.”

The original drafts had involved considerable discussion and censoring of several statements from Altruism’s detractors that had called out how Pylo was only notably skilled in barbarity, extortion and negotiations at the point of a personally tailored plague.

But on review the comunique had not had any sneaky last chance amendments. Altruism’s power block was left yet untested at this juncture.

Squidgie spoke, there was a near certainty of high prediction aide would come from the clerk. But several sub processes and a few of the less prominent demiurges were betting on precisely what manner that assistance would be.

“It is as the Custodian says, not complete as a translation. But not truly inaccurate as such. The important distinction is one of scope and scale here not precise definitions. There are in most open reef languages and data protocols several ‘self evident’ markers or distinct word concepts to delineate many different scales of concepts such as Wilderness both to determine severity, age, size and general energy budgets”

The prediction markets paid out on the result. A decently small number of processes had picked close enough analogues to what Squidgies aide on this proposal had been. There were ripples and bubbles of agitation as prominence for some lower level sorters rose above their previous ranked stations.

Altruism and the other demiurges briefly discussed and adjusted the next missive, some amendments and tweaks by Greed and Justice that ultimately seemed acceptable concessions for the favors they wrote into them.

“Yes, it is arguable that one could describe the air between Aleph’s eyelashes as a turbulent wilderness just as horrific and terrible as that which we even now drift through. And one could discuss that the flesh of Quarti’s own nose is very nearly a coherent polity all its own. But at this juncture we are concerned with THIS wilderness and the scope, age and power it represents.”

Aleph made a dozen different body language and tonal cues of confusion, sarcasm, bafflement, dismissal, curiosity.

Layers of intentional and unintentional sub processes.

Mutualism often made use of predictive models that treated the exterior agents such as Aleph as mirrors of the layered processes found within the ▙◀.

Predictive tests showed this very nearly never worked and had cost Mutualism dearly in the past. But still it persisted with the preferred modeling agents in favor of when it managed to work out in spite of the statistics.

“So it’s not just a wilderness, it’s a very big wilderness and it is very old and very powerful? That seems uh, kinda obvious I guess? But you are acting like this is supposed to be news?”

A few cue flags were sent back and forth over the longer wavelengths of light between Squidgie and the systems of communication.

Greed was in preference of not wasting resources in constructing another message. Ultimately the other demiurges presumably found their own reasons to not demand compensation for such a decision.

Altruism for its part did it because Squidgie deserved more chances to better establish herself.

“The oldest, wildest, most powerful and dangerous wilderness in the entire star hollow of Terra. Is as the homeostasis inside your skulls is to such wildernesses on the sunplate. Honestly it is actually a few orders of magnitude even greater than that Ma’am.”

Quarti expressed things that the many expert systems struggled to give certainty qualifiers for. It might have been delighted or the desire to consume the entire polity or that she required cleaning and removal of infestations from her dentition.

“[untranslatable noun likely identifier][particle conjugation][referendum cultural cue][clarification possibly targeting clerk][untranslatable verb][untranslatable noun]”

And there was one of the moments that really hurt Altruism and Mutualism’s position. When the terrans that were honestly one of the prime targets of its attempts to aide others for no personal aide lashed out like this.

For whatever reason Justice never seemed concerned whenever the Terran elder did things like this.

Which at least helped keep the power block from being overly undermined but confused Altruism to no end.

When in private council with the rest of the powerblock the only answer Altruism could even parse was that somehow the ▙◀ polity has wronged the terrans in some inscrutable to any demiurge but Justice’s ability to understand and this was proper recompense for it.

Squidgie came through with an expression obviously meant to show one of exasperation, infantile cues for terran mothering instincts and a breadth of solidarity with the ▙◀ polity and its sufferance of this.

“Quarti, could you say that again but with fewer languages and cultures involved? I think I got the gist but it terribly confused poor ▙◀ here”

That got another parade of probably incorrectly interpreted expressions washing over the terran’s face and the demiurges by near unanimous consent chose to end all expressive interpretation processes on communication with Quarti until such time as better accuracy could be expected.

“I was saying that is the [derogatory cultural association related to the ▙◀ polity] was fully including the spirit wilds in this assessment of how cozy Terra is [grammatical error ambiguity present best fit prediction]”

There was deliberation, but unfortunately Von squidgie did not appear willing to speak for them at this juncture. The demiurges convened over which contingency to use as a basis to salvage a new statement from and a few bids and counter bids over the details fluttered about to little effect as far as Altruism was concerned.

“Yes those are included in the evaluation and to reiterate it is off depending on how you interpret the terminology by several orders of magnitude difference in that allegory.”

That seemed to satisfy the semi comprehensible melange that was Quarti. Aleph expressed bewilderment, concern and a few sputtering moments of awe.

“So it’s really REALLY wild... like uh... beasts and monsters and stuff just rampaging all the time everywhere?”

This time the clerk accepted a ping requesting that she field the question, which saved review and reimplementation of many more missives.

“Not exactly, there are parts of some of the trees. Parts of the animals even inside the trees that would look sufficiently organized and constructed of such cooperative specialists they would be barely distinguishable from a terran city, or even some of the population centers of redweed.”

Omega emoted shock at that, then suspicion. The predictive models were good at Omega, she mostly only expressed a few dozens of emotions including seven flavors of boredom as far as the polity observer systems had recorded.

“Wait, if there are things that look like cities how is it a wilderness?”

Squidgie gestured in a difference to the micropolity for the sake of the terran’s own cue reading.

But had already confirmed the explanation in brief had the full demiurge council agreement and authority behind it.

Then with pride and joy obviously and clearly emoted across her screen Squidgie fielded the answer.

“Well, for some of an answer to that these wild cities don’t necessarily have anything even resembling people as you would recognize them. And they fight with each other and internally with themselves a lot. Your ants on terra are in a similar situation.”

A small data packet `ping from Squidgie prompted and was approved by the demiurges almost without Altruism prompting.

“For a bit more clarity for this and as a visual aide ▙◀ has an example specimen to demonstrate!”

The precise cultural cue execution was unfortunately compromised by the situation of setting up a curtain beforehand would spoil the requisite surprise value.

But the micropolity’s various cultural systems had chosen to go with the spirit of the performance rather then exacting specifics like some dumb automation might have.

As such the airlock would provide as a curtain, and the specimen could be dramatically revealed as according with terran traditions.

The demiurges had gone over several possible phrases to use here.

But ultimately the most appropriate according to each of their host of expert systems had settled on this one.

“Behold!”

Quarti the nonsensical anomaly that she was shouted something completely gibbering that probably was better left ignored since no one else seemed to understand it either.