"Hello, worlds!

"It's me, here on Titan.

"There are very few bodies available for a digital person like me at short notice, on Titan. Even fewer that I'd be willing to spend any amount of time in. Fortunately, there's something like a furry affinity group here, even if it's got some differences from the ones I'm used to; and even more fortunately, there's a living body with a computer brain that's available for rent, which is at least symmetrical, tetrapodal, mammalian, furry, and female, and doesn't look too shabby in my opinion.

"Also fortunately for me, I've played around in a variety of body-types in VR for the last few years, so I'm already getting used to it.

"For those just listening to this vlog's audio... I'm kind of short, a bit under four feet tall - sorry, under one-twenty centimeters. My legs are kind of birdlike, almost entirely long, stick-like shins, with some grabby claws for feet. Forearms are also long sticks. Tail is kind of lizardy-shaped, with a thick base, tapering to a point, with a tuft on the end. Ears are like a fennec's, eyes large, and the rest of my head and torso are generic, maybe as much like a fraggle as anything else. I'm missing my sonar and t-ray radar, but at least I've got good eyesight. I'm also missing the lack of enough CPU power to run myself in fast-time, but if most everyone else can manage living through just one day every day, I suppose I'll be able to stand it, too.

"I only have direct memories from my shipboard self up to when I launched my backup, just over ten days ago. But I've gotten caught up on events since then, including both watching my public vlogs and going over some private notes I've sent myself. So it turns out I am, in fact, going to be wearing a tight and shiny black outfit... fortunately, the individual who commissioned this body's creation in the first place was expecting to do the same, so they were kind enough to design its fur not to get pulled too much. I'm still probably going to need to douse myself in talc before I can pull the thing on.

"And going to be with me today is Faz. She's a shadow-reconstruction rather than an upload, so the anti-em-pocalypse no-simultaneous-forks laws don't apply to her - don't ask me why - and she's assured me that her shipboard and Titanian selves can exchange lifelogs and keep each other synchronized.

"Faz, you about ready to join us yet, and show off what body you've picked out for yourself?"

"I'm just in a taxi now. Here, have some video."

"... And you're a goat again. Find yourself another robot?"

"Actually, I'm in a live body, like yours. The local zoos have almost all of their exhibits tissue-built instead of live-born, and they mostly give them computers for brains. Some run uploads of their animals like you, some reconstructions like me, some a few stranger things. And all of them have extra software that absolutely keeps them from doing any harm to anyone. There are a few bio-brains, but the insurance premiums for owning those are really killer, and those critters always have some robot nearby ready to intervene. They hire out their safe critters for a lot of parties, and on occasion to a few weirdos like me who get our kicks from walking around in meatspace like this, instead of just experimenting in VR in college like everyone else. Not every critter has a powerful enough CPU to run a full person, so the selection's a bit limited, especially for the non-glamorous options, like small, hoofed mammals instead of lions, tigers, or bears."

"Well, good to know the option's available, if I need it; though I don't think I'd really want to stay in a body without hands for very long."

"That's only because you have a 'gotta fix it' complex. Same reason you wear clothes with pockets, to hold tools and gadgets. I should try convincing you to actually relax and think of this as a vacation, and go hands-free for the duration... or maybe just swap to wearing a bandolier with pouches. After all, you're not going to directly remember any of this, unless something drastic happens to your copy on Pumpkin and you became the main you."

"Or maybe the anti-forking laws will get changed before I'm overwritten with a fresh backup, or maybe I'll get put into long-term storage and get woken up ten thousand years from now, or maybe they'll figure out how to merge forked uploads, or all sorts of things. ... I might take you up on that bandolier idea, though; not really practical to have pockets on a fur-tight body-suit."

"What, you're going to join in the local anti-fashion trend, and go as gloomy as Janine?"

"You know, it's such a breath of fresh air for me to know something you don't, and that you can't find out in a split-second of searching, for once. Ah, and I think that's your taxi now. ... And you're not a goat."

"Nope! Video masking filter. I wanted to catch your expression in person!"

"... You're, what, some kind of baby deer?"

"Nope! I'm a fully-adult dik-dik!"

"Leaving aside whether 'adult' can ever apply to you, I'll lay three-to-one odds that you picked it entirely for the name."

"Pay up, then, because the name was no more than ten percent of why. This is convention season on Titan, and there's a farm expo going on halfway across the moon. My choices were even more limited than usual for here, if I wanted to continue to express my style in the manner to which I have become accustomed, and within the allowance my bio-self is letting me have for this trip."

"You'll have to tell me how your selves work that out, sometime. Hm... am I going to have to let you ride on my shoulders all day?"

"Nope! Dik-diks on Earth are as good at pronking as any other ungulate, and here I can do that five times as high!"

"In that case, I'll let-"

"Hello? Miss Dee Marthason?"

"Pardon?"

"You are Dee Marthason, are you not? That is what your digital certificates state."

"I've been 'Dee' for some years, but I don't recall ever being a 'Marthason', let alone setting any of my personal identifiers to that name."

"I am confused. You are saying you are not a son of Martha?"

"Well, I don't use Nordic patronymics, and my mother's name was - wait. Oh. Ooh. Sorry, my context-supplying AR just kicked in. Kipling, right. I certainly aspire in that direction, though I'm not particularly fond of the overt Christian symbolism and terminology."

"Ah, I see. I had been going by the overall shape of your social pattern, and simply assumed you already fit into the relevant local affinity-groups."

"Looks like I still need some better local guides than the ones I've been referring to. What can I do for you?"

"I have a few questions about your Pumpkin's hardware, and was hoping we could chat at some point this weekend, while you aren't otherwise occupied."

"Well, I certainly don't mind talking about Pumpkin, but right now I'm getting ready to go through the exhibitors' displays, before the crowds thicken. Maybe lunchtime?"

"I'd enjoy that. I'll leave you to enjoy your morning, then."

"Oooh, Dee, you've got yourself a date!"

"Of course not, he's - oh, right, you wouldn't have noticed. He's a university STEM student, focusing on recycling systems, and is in a committed relationship, a monogamous triad."

"And he must have given you his number, so you could look him up! Do you need me to remind you that just because someone says on their social-media profile that they're not looking, doesn't necessarily mean they're not looking? Maybe his trio's willing to expand into a quintet."

"I'm going to ignore most of that, and just point out that he's not really my type. I suppose the fangs were cute enough, and I could get used to the hemophagy, but did you see his wing-shoulders? Even if he's just using those limbs as heat-radiators or displays instead of actual flight, that's no excuse for just tacking them onto his existing skeleton and not providing them with proper anchoring and support. If he's not going to take proper care of himself, I'm hardly going to get involved and do it for him."

"Picky, picky, picky."

"I really want to say 'and you know it', but I don't want to swell your head any more than it is. Ah, I know - gotcha! How ticklish are you? ... You're just a perfect little armful, aren't you?"

"I wish to note down for the record my objections to being treated like this and to tell you to keep scratching behind my ears just like that. ... So, what all is there for us to do for the next three days?"

"Well, for all three days, there are at least a few hundred displays in the exhibitor's section to browse through, and I paid extra for VIP tickets to get early-bird access with less crowding. There's a ship beauty contest, which should look particularly nice on the third day, once we're in Titan's week-long night and they get to show off their custom lighting displays. Today around noon there's a charity-thing to encourage pilots to adopt personable AIs, to improve their mental health on long, lonesome flights. Tomorrow morning they award prizes, tomorrow afternoon there's a parade of ships, and tomorrow evening there's a concert and after-party. The city-dome has lots of restaurants and tourist traps, if you don't care to stay in the hotel. Which has two conference rooms, each of which hosts a seminar just about every hour on the hour; some of those I'm more interested in than others. And lots of attendees have more informal get-togethers at the ship parking lot, or their hotel rooms."

"Be honest with me - how much does all of that first stuff you mentioned happen only so people have excuses to hook up during that last bit?"

"Without committing myself to any hard numbers, a lot of people still think making money is more important than one-night stands."

"And how about you? Have you got yourself a nice hotel room booked, in case you meet a handsome fellow, er... you know, I don't actually know what your body is supposed to be."

"Silly and nonthreatening, I think. Remember, I'll be handing over control of this body to a caretaker AI overnight, so my shipboard self can wake up and do maintenance and suchlike. And it's pretty unlikely that whichever me is kicking around in a week is going to remember any socializing this me does, so I don't have much incentive to join the usual barnyard dance, even if we somehow found anyone more interesting to spend time with than each other."

"Aw, that's sweet. Now scratch behind my other ear... that's nice. ... You know, Dee, other than its brain, my current body was made purely out of dik-dik genes and tissues. If I stuck around in it, I could actually get pregnant and give birth to a baby dik-dik, without any of the complicated interventions the two of us needed to be surrogate mothers back on Insulo Tri."

"Are the zookeepers trying to create a local breeding population? Or, would providing a fawn cover your rental fees?"

"Well, no; this isn't the only female dik-dik around, so they can make as many natural dik-diks as they want. I'd have to convince my purse-string-holding bio-self back on Insulo Tri to buy this bio-shell, and that it would be worth spending more on it than something more common, like a goat. But I've got a pretty extensive maternity-focused mask, and can slip into it at the drop of a hat; and I'm rather tickled by the taboo-crossing aspects if I, an artificially-intelligent digital person, could become the birth-mother to a completely mundane biological animal, here in a life-filled artificial dome protecting us from the completely inhospitable natural environment."

"I suppose I can understand that much, but I'm trying to figure out what sort of practical joke would involve you being in a pregnant bio-shell, and am coming up blank, which is sort of worrying."

"Not everything I do is part of a prank."

"You spent eighteen months, including one and three-quarter pregnancies, building up to a single punchline against your roomie."

"Oui, but she really deserved it. Say, have you checked your body's manual? How many male whatever-you-ares are out there?"

"None, this is a one-off - it's also full of xenotissues from different species. Closest it gets to being pregnant is a biochemical switch to start laying unfertilized eggs, and even if I took the injection now, the conference would be over and I'd be out of it before the first yolk was enshelled. So if you were thinking these two versions of us could be surrogate-mom-buddies again, well, you'd need to wait until I was in a different body. Which isn't going to happen, in Plans A One through O Six."

"Your Plan P One is for you to get pregnant?"

"No, the current Plan P series is just the first set where I abandon this body in favour of some other bio-shell. Actual pregnancies don't come in for any of the primary backup plans, they're just part of the general toolkit that can be drawn from the tertiary plans."

"One of these days you're going to have to teach me your mnemonics for keeping track of them all."

"Oh, that's simple. I cheat. ... Or, for all you know, I've been lying all these years and have been picking plan-letters at random."

"You drop lines like that, and somehow Oscar, Janine, and Hal thought you were using a damaged brain-scan."

"... Come to think of it, how did they get that idea? I'm suddenly thinking of how you can make years-long plans just to give someone a moment of head-slapping realization."

"No comment, though that certainly does sound like something I'd do, doesn't it? ... Remind me why we split up, again?"

"I wanted to keep working in space, you didn't want to be either a sailor's widow or just my girl in port. We had other arguments, like over money, but that was the one we couldn't find a solution for."

"Until smart li'l ol' me figured out how to legally bilocate myself."

"And could afford it, which brings up all the other arguments we never resolved. ... You know, we're going to have to go over all this footage before I broadcast it, and figure out how much we're willing to share."

"We're in public, and are almost at the con's hotel - I always just assume anything I do that's not encrypted is public, anyway."

"Even primitive li'l ol' me knows there's a difference between your words being unhidden, and actively promoting what you say in a blog. Or vlog, as the case may be. Hm, before we go inside, lemme double-check the seminars. Hm... a lot of these are more for people who didn't take the two-year course I did, or an equivalent; going over the basics of running a business, like getting the right AI to advise you on taxes, basic maintenance, how to keep Traffic Control from shooting you down for making a wrong turn. Handy enough for people who suddenly find themselves with a ship, but I paid good tuition to learn all that already, so I can browse the rest of the con during those slots.

"Da-da-da, new changes in reporting requirements by Jupiter, a historical retrospective on how ships have changed over the last few decades, how to open a horizon drive repair shop. Tomorrow, whatever 'hot topics' covers, 'the secret to profitability' - looks like the secret is going to be 'skip paying for life-support, just use robots' - the perennially-popular 'to be announced', ah, here we go, 'pulling ahead of the competition', a sampler of the latest business tricks and techniques. And on the final day, mm-mm-mm-hm-mm, another 'hot topics', and the usual set of ignorables.

"Looks like one definite, three maybes, and today one or two just-possiblies. Okay, let's see if I can get my AR filtering and waypoints set up right. Behind us are the larger and more spectacular displays, mostly by the more well-to-do concerns, to draw in the looky-loos and tourists, and provide good background shots for any journalists. Right by the door here are the financial services people; I won't call them predators, but they're certainly not friends to little businesses like mine. Over to our right it looks like the exhibitors are advertising more for pleasurecraft; pure cost-sinks. Lots of expensive luxuries and other ways to separate wanna-be spacers from their money. The further back in the hall, the larger the ships they're focusing on. I'll prolly just want to skim that to check on what my competition is up to, so I can keep up-to-date on where my own profit-centres will be. And the middle is for larger-scale ship hardware, such as engines, that I've already sunk my own costs into. Which means that spending our time to the left will do me the most good, among all my fellow small-scale owner-operators...

"Ooh, new kinds of gecko-tape! And there's a new interface library for non-cockpit piloting! And there's some upgrades to Pumpkin's model of food-fac! And some ship-fabbable upgrades to the drive's laser injectors! And I think that's Edwards herself, from Edwards Lubricants - you'd be surprised how much physical grease a spaceship needs. And-"

"Miss Dee?"

"Could you wait a minute? She's in the middle of geeking out over all the toys."

"I would recommend not waiting, and that she comes with me."

"And who are you supposed to be?"

"Faz, he's with hotel security."

"What, you downloaded the whole moon's facial recognition data?"

"No, I - look, sir, before I get escorted into back rooms by someone I've never met, could you explain yourself?"

"Our social-media-trawling prediction algorithms identified a blip involving you, which is more likely than average to lead to a disruption for our other guests, and may escalate to the level of you needing medical attention."

"... Crap. No, I'm not calling you a liar, I'm just swearing. Someone did take some potshots at Pumpkin, even if they knew they wouldn't hit it. I've only got the most rudimentary trawling programs, so there's no reason I'd have noticed anything that someone else would have picked up. Okay, a report of increased physical danger brings us to Plan D Three. Faz, have you got enough bandwidth to keep your offsite lifelog continually refreshed?"

"Have you seen how many other people are here? Hey, hotel-guy, how much to hire a drone to act as a private relay?"

"Under the circumstances, I believe that I can offer that with our compliments."

"... I miss my snaketail already. Okay, I'm retasking the vlog-camera drone to focus on looking where neither of us are. Faz, you want to check the software library I put with your backup, and start running TN seventeen point one?"

"Should I be concerned that the two of you are responding to my warning by donning what appear to be tactically-oriented masks instead of being nervous?"

"Oh, don't mind her, she's got a hobby of making plans that are completely useless until they're not. She'll know what to do even if a circus parade suddenly interrupts everyone here."

"That depends on whether they bring elephants, and the ratio of clowns to sideshow performers."

"... I was joking."

"And with some luck, you'll never know if I was. Okay. The only reason we're here at all is so I can learn things to pass on to my other self. Finding out more about someone willing to cause a public disturbance around me could be useful to know. Faz, as far as I know, the only reason you're here is moral support. I'm going to make the obvious suggestion, that you should head elsewhere; I can't think of any good reason your lifelog should contain any experiences of you getting beaten up, or worse."

"You seem to be forgetting a minor detail; the Faz your other self has been living with the last week and a half, and has told you about? She de-canon-ized herself after she made my backup and shipped me here. The way I feel about all of your selves isn't going to change, no matter what mask I put on over top of it. So if what you want is to grab intel to pass on, then let's grab some intel, already!"

"Um. We're really going to need a talk this evening. But for now... hotel-guy, you've passed on your warning. What would your employers say if we wanted to just keep attending the con?"

"The two of you may be fully backed up - but almost everyone here has organic brains. Are you sure you're willing to put them at risk?"

"Um. The obvious answer to the loaded question is obvious, but so far, the only data we have to base any risk assessment on is your word that your algorithms have picked up a 'blip'. You haven't even told us if we'd still be targeted if we left and went to, say, a restaurant, which would just put a different group of people at risk. Or what whoever is targeting us is actually planning on doing."

"Perhaps this isn't the best venue for having this discussion?"

"My public encryption keys are publicly available. If you wish to tell me something privately, perhaps you could just use them to tell me, instead of invoking the trope of taking the would-be victims away from a public place to somewhere they can be ambushed in private? ... Mm, I see. Okay, Faz, I do have something you can do for me: Fetch!"

"Excuse-toi?"

"You. Stick. Bring. ... Faz, look at TN's AR display, already."

"Ah. Right, okay. For the record, the only reason I'm not castigating you with insults right now is that I have far too many to choose from and apparently acquiring some sort of inanimate carbon-based rod for you is a higher priority than-"

"Faz..."

"Fine, fine. Just remember, after you send your last report to your other self, I can do all sorts of things to you that you won't remember."

"And I'm sure you'll tease my other self with the innuendo for years to come. Shoo. ... Okay, hotel-guy, you have to know that this extrapolation is thin. Very thin. Based on these numbers, standing in place for the whole con and shouting 'here I am' reduces my expected future lifespan less than if I rented a backpack 'copter to go camping with. ... I once thought that people this century would have gotten better at applying math to QALYs and micromorts."

"Say, would comping you help? How'd you like a three-day vacation in a suite with your friend, or whoever else you like, everything on the house? The hotel would be happy to put you up, in any dome we have a franchise in that's at least an hour from here."

"A suite, in the middle of convention season? How much are your bosses trying to avoid telling me about how seriously they're taking this?"

"Don't look at me, I just work here."

"Figures. ... I think I hear the prancing and pawing of four little hooves. Heya, Faz."

"Mm-mmf-mm m mm-fff-mm mf..."

"Ah, sorry, let me get that from you."

"As I was saying, you are now the proud owner of an aluminium cane, manufactured by an Emerson Ultra-Rapid Flash-Fabber, for when you need a support strut right now. You will note the Emerson logos micro-engraved over every surface, and that the fabber was smart enough to accept my transmission of your body's specs to scale it specifically for you. ... Sorry, I can't continue the advertising spiel, it's leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Or maybe that's the aluminium. It's not a stick, but I figured speed was more important than literalness."

"No worries, it'll do just fine. I'll admit I'm less practiced with canne défense than singlestick, but I can still tell which is the pointy end."

"But neither end is pointed."

"Which makes it all the easier, and thank you, mysterious hotel-guy, for playing straight-man."

"Are you planning on hitting any of our attendees with that?"

"Of course not! It's a cane; have you seen how spindly these legs of mine are? I'm surprised I've been able to avoid tripping over them this long. Besides, you heard me say 'canne défense', not 'canne de combat', right? If something unexpected happens, my first goal with this thing will be to stick it between any projectiles and any innocents in their way."

"That's a load of bull pucky if I've ever heard one, but I'm not going to get myself fired by trying to take it away from you. Just don't make me regret that, alright?"

"I don't think I have enough control over events to be able to promise that. Are your employers willing to share any more information? ... Then I think it's best for my friend and I to start walking around again. Do you think that staying nearby and doing that looming thing you do well enough that you were probably hired for it will be of any use?"

"If you aren't going to leave, then I think it's best not to tell you about whatever security precautions we take."

"Fair enough. You've been very patient with us, to the limits of your employment; I'll tell my PA AI to up-doot your reviews. ... Hm, lemme see... Ah."

"Ah what?"

"Don't look now, but I do believe that our mysterious threatening person is standing over there. The woman with the drooping earlobes and all the medallions, browsing the feng shui booth."

"Did you just download a new face-recognition and social-media trawler?"

"No, I... look, I've got a deadman-timer email ready to send to you if things go very badly, and if they only go a little badly and it makes a difference, I'll tell you, okay?"

"You're not inspiring me with confidence. So, if you know that's her, and she's there, do we go the other way?"

"What's a five-letter word for 'can add two and two to get three point nine seven'?"

"... I had to look at a crossword-puzzle solver, and it says the answer is 'intel', so I'm going to ignore the bizarreness of the riddle, heave a sigh, and suggest we go find that hotel security guy again. ... I suggest we go find that hotel security guy again."

"If the hotel sent someone to talk to us in person, do you really think that we're not already being surveilled every which way to Sunday?"

"Then why haven't they already escorted her off the premises?"

"That's a very good question. I think I'll go ask her."

"If I get blown up and have to be reintegrated from my lifelog, I'm going to be telling you 'I told you so' until Andromeda crashes into the Milky Way and starts approaching a fraction of a percent of the damage you can do when you get an idea in your head."

"Now, now, let's not sink into hyperbole. I'm certain that I'm not any worse than a Type One-A supernova. ... Okay, maybe a Type One-B. ... Hello, there; I don't believe we've met."

"We have not. May we talk?"

"That's what I'm here for, so please, talk away."

"I am acquainted with some people who feel the best way to get you to change your behaviour is by applying violence, of some greater or lesser degree. However, when I inquired whether anyone sharing our point of view had simply sat down with you and talked about it, nobody in our extended social networks was aware of any such attempt. And so I would like to invite you to share a pot of tea at one of this hotel's food courts, or whatever other venue you prefer."

"I believe you can understand that I was expecting someone more along the lines of your described acquaintances. But if you've gone to this much trouble to have a face-to-face with me, then I'd suspect that you've applied all manner of software tools to predict which methods I'd find most persuasive - and that you've learned I have a hard time resisting a civil discussion with someone from across the aisle, whichever of us is the loyal opposition. What should I call you?"

"Given your penchant for short identifiers, you may address me as Valerie; Val, if you insist on a monosyllabic option."

"I don't insist; it's just that most of my in-person conversations tend to be informal."

"She's very free at letting people into her tu circle, although I doubt you'll be anything other than vous. If not just quelqu'un, or even rien."

"Now, now, Faz, we seem to be doing the politeness thing. For now. I believe I saw a table with seating suitable for all our body types back that way.

"...

"Milk, one sugar, thank you. Might I inquire about the general topic which concerns you and your fellows so much that you became noticeable to the hotel's security software?"

"Of course. But to deal with a framing issue first; using examples you're likely to be familiar with from your native time, imagine being an atheist trying to convince a young-Earth creationist to reduce their carbon footprint, or a vegan trying to convince a Republican to eat less factory-farmed chicken, or a cryonicist trying to convince anyone to join them. That is, attempting to get them to change their behaviour in a way that imposes a definite short-term cost for a fairly nebulous long-term gain, while sharing nearly none of the assumptions underlying your reasoning. I believe it would take you considerable, and repeated, effort to rephrase and reframe your arguments in terms they could accept."

"You're not the first to try to convince the poor, century-out-of-date, primitive revivee of something or other, but you're doing better than most. So far. Please, continue."

"How familiar are you with the event now popularly referred to as 'the em-pocalypse'?"

"At about the level of any reader of popular-science books. I know that the general consensus is that a combination of factors created it: emulated minds who had no legal restrictions on copying themselves, who were willing and able to perform experiments on their copies, and who had access to enough computing hardware to run those experiments in extreme fast-time, a ratio of at least thousands-to-one. I know that those minds who were involved drew a curtain over their activities, so that much of what is known is actually guesswork, based on reconstructions of the scattered remnants of data that could be found. And I know that many of those who were around at the time, and anywhere near the events, were so scared of what they saw that they came very close to outlawing uploading human minds at all. I'll admit that when I think about it, I'm occasionally bothered when I recall that I'm only alive right now because a coterie of rich and powerful people wanted their shot at immortality so badly that they were willing to burn a significant portion of their political capital to neuter the anti-upload movement as best they could.

"As for what actually happened... there are too many guesses, each of which is backed up by data, for me to have any strong opinions. The usual spectrum of guesses range from the whole thing being nothing more than some uploads engaging in digital warfare against some other uploads, which ended up deleting them all; to the whole thing being a nearly-successful attempt at a dystopic technological Singularity, the creation of a super-humanly-intelligent AI whose values weren't aligned with human civilization's.

"While I may be an upload myself, I don't have access to any secret repositories of upload-culture secrets on the matter. Claims of finding intact pieces of data seems to be the modern era's equivalent of Bigfoot or UFO sightings; it always turns out to be fuzzy and unprovable. There are constant rumours that if you head into the right, or wrong, area of the net, you'll be able to find Singularity-seekers trying to find others willing to collaborate on researching the topic. Unless you come across a surviving em-pocalypse AI, which is supposed to eat your brain to make you its slave, or its puppet, or just convince you that it's right, whichever version the tale-spinner finds most horrifying."

"I suppose that that's about as much as I could reasonably expect, and it should be a sufficient basis. I believe I am safe in assuming that you can understand that now there are people who are immortal, or at least have a good chance of personally staying alive indefinitely, there are a good number who are willing to apply significant effort to the task of ensuring there is a long-term future to be immortal within."

"You won't get any argument from me on that, given that I'm one of those people. I'd happily help to work on such things myself, but I'm a little strapped for resources this decade."

"Mm. Yes. Building another step: given that the chances that the em-pocalypse was, in fact, a near-Singularity, are non-trivial; and that if so, it was the closest humanity ever came to permanently ending; then you can understand that such long-term thinkers are keenly interested in anything that even hints of repeating those events."

"Is this where I'm supposed to ask, 'And how does that relate to me?'?"

"You skirt the edges of the law. And sometimes cross over even those all-too-inadequate boundaries."

"To the best of my knowledge: no, I don't."

"We believe that the first time you illegally forked yourself was three years ago, when you upgraded your bio-shell with a second head."

"Dee! You didn't!"

"Faz..."

"You did! Câlice, do you have any idea how much merde you're in? I thought you were acting weird during the trial a few days-"

"Faz! I didn't fork myself then, or voluntarily at any other time. It was impressed on me very strongly that I shouldn't, months before I even had a physical body again. Although I begin to have an inkling of what's going on. Valerie - given how serious this accusation is, I presume you have evidence to back it up?"

"We are not in a court of law; I am not going to apply the power of the state to enforce a judgement against you. Waiting until the evidence passes the threshold of 'beyond a reasonable doubt' before acting is both pointless and dangerous."

"I see. Cee, please start pulling up references on 'vigilantes', 'lynch mobs', and 'witch-hunts', and stand ready to pop up relevant contextual data on my AR."

"I understand why you are under that impression at this stage of the discussion. May I continue?"

"With some reluctance, I will say 'yes'."

"After the recent debacle on Insulo Tri, in which the court astonishingly mandated that you fork yourself, we gathered what data about you is publicly available, or is private but not particularly expensive to purchase. The results of our analysis were... concerning. As one of the earliest examples of your likely fork, we ran comparative analyses of the body languages of your primary body's tail when you were confirmed to be inhabiting it, when various other people or AIs could be confirmed to be inhabiting it, and at other times when no sapience in particular was known to be within it, and, according to your own statements, one of your assistant AIs was running it. Roughly ninety percent of the time when no fully sapient entity was recorded as being in it, your tail's body-language was a match to when you yourself were in it - including times when you were running your main body. While far from being any sort of conclusive proof on its own, it was suggestive enough for us to expend additional resources in our investigation."

"I believe I can foretell the overall arc of your argument. Shall we skip ahead to the part where you concluded that the odds that I've been doing naughty things are high enough you decided to, as concerned but purely private citizens, do what you can to warn me away from any such malfeasance in the future?"

"I suppose that I don't need to actually go over how your current sidestepping of the regulations of forking, by splitting your time between activations of your forks, is another issue of concern. So, if you understand the argument, then surely you can accept the conclusion, and we can move forward into arranging for a reasonable system of voluntary inspections."

"'Understanding' does not mean 'agreeing'. It sounds like your affinity-group has fallen prey to the Rule of Twenty-Three, and to Richelieu's Fallacy."

"None of the rules about twenty-three that I am aware of seem relevant, and your other phrase seems to be non-standard terminology. Would you care to explain yourself further?"

"Almost always! In this case, definitely. To start with: If you consider the number twenty-three to be particularly special, and you start looking for interesting things involving it, you will start finding them; until, eventually, you will start noticing it even in places you weren't trying to look for it. It's from an ancient set of novels about the fictional Illuminati, and is shorthand for 'if you go looking for evidence to support a conclusion, you will inevitably find evidence supporting that conclusion'."

"And lady, for someone who's arguing about how impressive your AI engines are, I'm surprised they weren't able to figure out 'Richelieu' from context. Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre."

"You are claiming to be an honest woman, and that we only found six lines to hang you because of because we were looking for them?"

"In a nutshell."

"Have you thought through the fact that whether you're innocent and that's true and you're being honest, or you've been forking yourself on the sly and you're just lying about it, you would be saying essentially the exact same thing, and thus your statement provides us with no useful evidence about whether or not it's the case?"

"... I hadn't quite gotten that far along, no. I've gotten used to being able to dip into fast-time to give myself a few seconds to think before I say anything, but this body can't, so I'm being a bit more off-the-cuff than usual. Thinking as I speak, and without trying to get into recursive headgames about 'if I'm lying, then...' yet, my general position is that I'm an innocent person focusing on making ends meet, and I seem to be unfairly persecuted by a group who thinks I'm guilty of something I'm innocent of; while your position seems to be that even if the odds that I've been illegally forking myself are low, the consequences of someone who flouts such laws are so high that it's worth intervening against me, even if I am, in fact, completely innocent. Is that a fair summary?"

"Fairer than I expected from you by now, which I will take as a good sign."

"So if our viewpoints are that irreconcilable, where does that leave us now?"

"Talking to each other, with hopes that further exchanges of the data we're each basing our respective conclusions on will eventually lead to a successful application of Aumann's Agreement Theorem, and a mutual consensus."

"With only the occasional potshot taken at her, her ship, and me who happened to be aboard at the time."

"I argued against that course of action; our affinity-group is not monolithic, and none of us have any actual authority to tell anyone else what to do."

"But you're still going to make use of the positive-to-you consequences of those conveniently-deniable individuals who you officially disagree about tactics with."

"With the future of human civilization, humanity, and human values potentially at stake, I'm going to make use of every last thing I can."

"If you're proposing that we talk, and that an actual exchange of data is going to happen, instead of me just telling you more and more about myself until you're satisfied... how about we start with you telling me who actually arranged for those launches?"

"Interesting. What would you be willing to offer in return?"

"'In return'? Val, you just admitted, while we're sitting in an extremely public place, being recorded by who-knows-how-many cameras, that you know who committed attempted murder."

"I did no such thing. Given the nature of my affinity-group's discussions, most of our arguments are pseudonymous. If I tried, and spent enough, I expect that I could collect sufficient side-channel data to identify the physical identities behind a few of our members' pseudonyms, before the remainder managed to add sufficient noise to render those particular techniques worthless. It would cost me time, money, and a certain amount of respect and social standing within our group... but it's probably not completely impossible. It's plain to me that such information would be of value to you; what are you willing to offer me that would be of value to me?"

"... I don't suppose you have any particular interest in any form of century-old memorabilia, which I'd had locked away in my long-term storage drawer while I was temporarily dead?"

"No."

"Good, because I already had to sell most of it to afford my first body, and the rest is AUs away. But it's still sometimes worth playing a longshot. And only maybe a third of the reason I asked was to stall a second while I tried to think. Let's see, if your affinity-group is that focused on the long-term, then you probably already have some digital people as members, so you wouldn't be interested in any insights I have into the uploaded-person condition, or any of my relevant social contacts. So you're probably fishing for as much personal and private information as you can convince me to share with you, with the carefully unstated and legally-not-chargeable technically-not-a-threat implication that if I don't play ball, more potshots are going to be taken, any of which might turn out not to be a warning shot."

"I was not going to imply anything of that last part."

"Of course you weren't. Hm... I'd rather not make a split-second decision about this - once a bit of privacy goes away, it never comes back. I'd like to run some numbers of my own, ask some people for advice. This convention runs another two and a half days, and we obviously both have tickets; what would you say to meeting here tomorrow morning?"

"We have made somewhat better progress today than I had expected, and you have not shut me out. I would be quite happy to continue our discussion then."

"Alright, then. Faz, let's go and get back to grabbing info from the con itself - I still want to take a closer look at those laser-injector upgrades. Valerie, until tomorrow."

"Dee..."

"Let's at least be courteous enough to wait until we're out of earshot. ... Viewers, given the problems of light-speed delays, I'm going to be a bit reckless, and post this vlog immediately after I stop recording, and ask for everyone's actionable advice. What do you think I should do, and why do you think I should do that? I'll be contacting some particular individuals I know directly, but this seems like the sort of problem that it's worth opening up some wide-ranging brainstorming for."

"Remember, everyone, all we really want is to be left alone so we can do our own things - making ends meet, helping out who we can when we can, Dee doing her studying thing, and me finding as many different ways as I can think of to make her blush."

"... I'll admit I was waiting for you to say something particularly embarrassing there."

"How could I keep surprising you if I kept being that predictable?"

"We still need to have a discussion - another discussion? Our other branches already talked about it - about how I feel you've made yourself unhealthily focused on me. I'm only willing to put it off for now for two reasons - we have short-term issues that are a higher priority, and we're likely to go back into storage in a few days."

"You have to, because you like your body on your ship better than this one; I can probably find myself a job and a cheap enough body here to make an extra paycheck for myselves."

"Which re-raises the whole question of why non-upload digital people are allowed to fork yourselves, while us brain-derived folk aren't."

"Haven't you already looked it up?"

"Almost certainly, around five years ago, just after I was revived; but I've mostly been focusing on studying immediate practicalities since then, so I mostly just remember the fact of it and let the reasons fade into a blur."

"My favorite explanation is that forkable AIs managed to squeak into acceptance wherever they could get the laws to treat all the forks of any particular AI as sharing that AI's citizenship. Only one vote, only one ration of Basic Guaranteed Income to spread between all the forks, and so on. Getting rid of the threat that we could just turn ourselves into trillions of voters and make every living human irrelevant defused a lot of tension. Other people have different explanations, but mine has the benefit of netting me profit in prediction markets, such as ones comparing jurisdictions with different approaches."

"What's your preferred model for why human-derived forks didn't get to take advantage of the same thing?"

"Having rich people become immortal and be rich forever without passing their wealth down to their patient-until-then heirs was bad enough, and caused more than a little civil unrest. Having an immortal rich person who then becomes a lot of immortal rich people, while the poorer people had no hope of ever affording uploading, was beyond the pale. You could say that it wasn't even a matter of the majority voting for laws against it, it was that anywhere whoever had power made laws for it quickly stopped having those people in power, either through voting them out or rolling them on tumbrels out to the guillotines. Things are only as calm as they are now because the cost of uploading keeps going down, giving people the hope that it'll happen in their lifetime - or that they can at least stick their dead grandma in a freezer until they can afford to bring her back."

"... I sense that that last bit might not be simply a generic example. Is it something you want to talk about?"

"If they're still not willing to talk to me just because I prefer a hooved lifestyle, then baise-les. And like you said, more immediate priorities. Are you sure this is the way to the booth with the injectors?"

"Eventually; I can't think in fast-time right now, so I'm taking a long way around to give us some time to think and talk. For instance, internally, I'm having Cee help me rearrange my ideas-map; right now, I'm trying to see whether anything can be salvaged from my earlier conclusion that the potshots were because of a conflict between the local 'individualist' and 'socialist' affinity-groups. I'm not having much luck connecting Val to the individualists, but she did mention that her group knows how to add noise to their profiles to hide that sort of thing, so... maybe the individualists are an outer group and her anti-Singulatarian group is something of a hidden inner circle?

"Oh, and I squirted the incomplete vlog off towards Earth, since it's going to take two and a half hours to get any replies. And I'm paying for high enough priority to keep updating every few seconds, from the backup memory cache I'm streaming directly to; if Val's unnamed catspaws decide to apply more violence, it's not going to be kept secret, or kept local.

"I can't think of a way database infrastructure would help us out, so... does your oraculism offer any insights?"

"What, now you're willing to consult the 'astrologer', just because things are getting bigger than you can handle?"

"Could we just... not... rehash our old arguments? Even if we still place different weights on the technique's reliability, I'm asking you what it offers."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"Merde, after our last fight about it, I never thought you'd actually want a reading. Alright, I'm going to need to start collecting data on the local markets to start getting a baseline... you couldn't have asked me as soon as we woke up? If I'm going to actually do a serious analysis instead of a party-trick, it's going to take me hours to dig deep enough to get everything I need. Titan's tied into the rest of the Saturnian moons, and Saturn's aerostats, closely enough that I can't treat it as a separate system, and I'm over a week out-of-date. D'accord, if I'm going to stay embodied enough to keep talking with you while I do all that, I'll need you to carry me. Or wear me like a scarf, or whatever works."

"I could loan you Cee; she's gotten a lot of practice at partial body-running, and filtering out distractions while doing that."

"Ce n'est pas à un vieux singe qu'on apprend à faire des grimaces. You asked me for an oracle, so par Dieu, I'm going to give you one, de gré ou de force."

"When you revert to that much French, even if you're not using sacres, I know better than to get in your way."

"Je t'aime aussi. Now let me work.

"...

"... I said I was staying embodied so we could keep talking while I work."

"Oh, right. Sorry. ... Sorry, I lost my line of thought. Let's see. Val and her group want to avoid another em-pocalypse and bad Singularity. That happened while I was dead, and I don't have any special knowledge or resources, so I don't think there's much I can offer them to help with their larger goal. So if I want them to stop shooting at me, or applying whatever other violent ends they come up with, I have to persuade them that I really am harmless. But then comes several further problems... not the least of which is that if they're willing to try to commit the serious crime of trying to kill me, then they're undoubtedly willing to commit the not-actually-a-crime-at-all of lying to me. Meaning that even if I and they come to some arrangement, then it's possible that since I came to their attention in the first place, they'd cheerfully eliminate every last backup copy of me there is, just to eliminate the chance that I've somehow fooled them and am still some kind of proto-Singularity-entity-thing. Which means that if I actually want to stay alive for the long term, then whatever my plans work out to be, they can't rely on trusting Val or her group to uphold their word. Going back to all the old MAD doctrines, what I could really use is some sort of lever that's potentially destructive to them, so that the assurances that keep both sides from applying them are mutual.

"Which brings up the point that I really don't know anything about them. I don't even know if Val's brain is human, or a computer running an upload, shadow, or other AI; for all I know, she could even be a remotely-piloted drone. I'm really missing my real body's extended senses now. I didn't even think to pick up a wristwatch tricorder when I rented this thing. Okay, new short-term subplan; splurge a bit and grab myself some better tools than my current broad-spectrum eyes and metal stick. More than a few of the exhibitors here have relevant products, and I expect they'd be happy to make some insta-robo-delivery sales, even of small personal items. I'd thought I was just snagging some commercial and open-sourced intel, I didn't think I'd need to go to the expense of tacticalling up. Even my go-bag is back aboard Pumpkin.

"Alright, while I do the actually-sane version of the mall-ninja tacti-cool thing, I should take a step back and make sure I'm using the right mental tools to come up with good solutions to my problems. F'r'instance, I've set my emulated-mind's defaults to keep my simulated adrenaline turned off, unless the level in my blood reaches a certain threshold; I've just found that what the stuff does to my thinking is counterproductive in almost every situation, including emergencies. Nevermind the complications when it interacts with fast-time. If there's a good chance one of Val's deniable stooges is going to play sniper, should I set that back to normal? ... No, I don't think so, but I think I will tweak the sensitivity closer to that.

"Let's see, how many fallacies am I currently prey to? No, check that; how many fallacies am I currently prey to, that would have a measurably negative effect on my choices? The first that comes to mind is that I'm operating in a near vacuum of reliable information, but a big, blank, empty spot in my mental map doesn't mean that there's a nice, big, blank, empty spot in the corresponding bit of reality. There are plenty of lines drawn in reality - just because I can't see them doesn't mean they're not there. I've been thinking of Val's group as a sort of fuzzy, amorphous blob; I should actually be thinking of it as a complicated network of people and connections and gear and databases, I just don't know what the details of those complications are. A complicated group implies many people with different perspectives and different goals. I don't need to come up with a plan involving MAD against the whole group; I only really need to concern myself with whichever small parts of it are willing and able to commit violence against me and my compatriots. I may not know which parts those are, but just by thinking about it a bit, I've sliced down the scale of my problem significantly - that's a sort of progress, right?"

"Don't mind me, I'm still silently giggling at my image-search results for 'tacti-cool', and am updating some relevant bits of my modelling to incorporate the existence of that mindset."

"If you're appreciating it that much, maybe I'll get you a laser-guided spatula for your birthday."

"If I could concentrate better, this is where I would make an innuendo about what I could do to you involving peanut-butter. ... Okay, I think that actually counts as innuendo, so I'm good."

"Moving on. Given our known set of unknowns, and that we might not be able to figure them out any time soon, how many choices do we actually have to pick from? Well, to start with, there's always that old piece of advice that starts "avoid, rather than check"; could we just run away and go somewhere they can't easily buy a ticket to? Alpha Centauri, maybe; or spending a few subjective centuries in a fast-time server on Earth before they notice; or turning off all our active instances for a few decades; or maybe swapping ourselves into bio-shells or cyber-shells designed for an extreme environment, such as deep in one of Earth's oceans, or Venus's surface?"

"Any of those would be a bit expensive, even without counting you defaulting on your loans. And if they're paying for data on you, they can probably see what you're shopping for and try to intercept us. If they're worried that uploads could create another Singularity... would you consider getting a shadow made of yourself, running on a proven-safe AI framework, and putting your upload-based self into storage?"

"I'm not as sanguine as you are about how much identity I'd share with a shadow - for one, I don't have a lifetime of lifelogs to build one from. If we can't beat them, is it possible to join them? Or maybe buy them off?"

"Even if we used both our bank accounts, I don't think we'd have enough to de-prioritize you in favour of their other perceived threats; at least some of them have to think they're doing the right thing, not just the personally-advantageous thing, and it's really hard to bribe someone who thinks they're actually being righteous instead of just pretending to be. And given your past posting history, I don't think they'd believe any significantly-anti-extropian sentiments you'd claim. How about removing their support, by convincing as many people as we can that they're acting so idiotically that even associating with them is a low-status thing to do?"

"I can't even really convince people to hire me, without Francesca's skills; and you haven't managed to convince me that keeping your canon in place is a good idea. Just for the sake of argument, any chance we could render the problem moot by creating a Friendly Singularity?"

"Don't even joke about that, toton. You weren't around; think of it in terms of having slept through World War Two and wondering why everyone is so down on eugenics. If you actually want to think in terms of a Friendly Singularity, then at most, try to go looking for a hypothetical superhumanly-intelligent AI that's been hiding since the em-pocalypse, who can come up with better plans than we can, to ask for advice. Trawling for hints of data supporting that idea may be considered tasteless, or foolish, but won't get you anywhere near the condemnation of actively Singularity-seeking."

"It's probably safe to assume that if any such super-AIs exist, they either don't care about us, or they already know to intervene on our behalf without having to be asked. A point we've been avoiding mentioning... is it both moral and a good plan to kill them in self-defense? Any chance you know where we could find an infohazard to sic on them?"

"Infohazards are as much a myth as a brown note. We don't know enough about their software or hardware to inconvenience them that way. Mind you, I don't think I'd mind taking some inspiration from that 'Real Genius' movie you have in your 'cheer myself up when I'm down' folder, and buying some beamage from Ríos de Luz to aim at their houses."

"If only we knew where their houses were. If we're aiming at skipping the killing, how about eliminating them as threats by convincing them their approach is flawed?"

"If neither of us has the skills to convince whatever portion of the general population already leans in our direction, do you really think we could convince the people actually dedicated enough to shoot at us? I don't know, maybe divide and conquer and get even just one of them on our side to protect us from the others... I doubt we'd find one romantically interested in quadrupeds, so think you'd be up to seducing one into marriage?"

"I suspect that long before that could become an option, they'd want to run lie-detection software on me while I had my poker-face body-language-minimizing software turned off. And come to think of it, according to the laws I grew up with, by the time our shipboard selves get back from the trip, we'd already be married."

"Quoi?!?"

"'Common-law marriage'. It's not really a thing anymore, either in Insulo Tri or Canada, what with the law having moved on to handle all the more complicated households these days, from simple trines to multiply-interlocking polycules."

"Oh. Whew. Okay. I thought you were about to lead up to an over-complicated way of proposing."

"One note I got from my shipboard self that I fully agree with - I wouldn't even consider doing that as long as you have your canon in place."

"Crisse, that'd certainly be one way to convince me to turn it off. And we've wandered from the current problem. Could we bankrupt them? Hit them in their trust-metrics?"

"Without knowing who any of them are? Might as well just try to get them arrested. What if we went all-in in switching from K- to r-strategy, and made ourselves enough backups, and maybe even active copies, that they couldn't possibly kill all of us?"

"Without knowing how much they'd spend in tracking us down? I don't know if we could afford that many copies. Maybe we could cut down on how much they spend, by convincing them that they've succeeded in killing us? Or, at least, you, since you're the one they're worried about?"

"Hm... I can't think of any way to convince them they'd gotten all my backups, without actually letting them get all my backups. Throwing out a complete wildcard, if either of us ever invents time-travel, then a good time to send us a message with advice would be right... now. ... Well, it was worth spending five seconds on."

"No, it wasn't."

"Okay, maybe it wasn't, but now we're wasting more time about whether it was worth the time than I wasted taking the time."

"It's mostly you wasting it. And you're not the only one who has to worry about these people going after them. Maybe we could dig up some new allies, or some old ones? Who all could we get to help us? Your local contact who told you the mysterious secret of Titanian fashion? Government investigators? Private investigators? Try to spark a local flashmob to dig up dirt?"

"The folk I've been in touch with locally are more online acquaintances with shared interests than anyone I'd expect to help me dodge a bullet. I expect Val knows the local legal system better than we do, and how to stay just on the right side of it. Hiring a local PI... definitely has merit. I'll set Cee to sifting through the relevant yellow-pages, review sites, and suchlike. Speaking of getting help, can you think of any decision-making aids that we're not making use of?"

"Maybe inducing some altered states of consciousness could help us notice an idea we're not consciously thinking of?"

"Not the sort of assist I was thinking of, but points for creativity. I was thinking something more software-ish, like your oraculism or my business-case analysis apps. Maybe we could rent you an extra cyber-brain, fire up another copy of yourself, and let her do the psychedelic thing, then grab her lifelog for you to reintegrate?"

"Now I'm missing your body and its spare snakey brain. Among other pieces of anatomy. Ah! Good news, I was able to wangle an invitation to a local, private forum for fellow oraculists; even the archives that a new member can download will really help me getting a reading done sooner. And I'm composing some posts to offer some trades for some particularly pertinent data."

"Just don't give away the homeworld. Hm... Maybe we're thinking about this wrong. Maybe there isn't some magic key that we just have to find, a solution that will get us what we want if we can just think of it; maybe we should be laying in backup plans in case they get everything they want, and we don't."

"Are you telling me you haven't already been making those plans?"

"Well, there's planning, and then there's planning."

"How about just waiting? If we move or get rid of all our assets on Titan, it's very unlikely they have anything they can use against Pumpkin before it gets back again."

"And maybe the horse will sing, some time before our other selves get back in a few months. Seems like kind of a last resort sort of thing, if nothing else we can do here can help. Speaking of last resorts, what are the odds that anything positive would result if we tried to kidnap or forknap one of them, and pump them for info on all the others?"

"Slightly less than if you tried to talk a walk outside the dome, in that body, without an airtank. Instead of stealing copies of them against their well, how about doing it voluntarily? Maybe their models of identity would let them be satisfied if we exchanged backups and forks to act as hostages for each others' good behaviour?"

"The two of us - and our similarly-minded friends - are kind of outliers, even among people willing to accept any kind of digital versions of themselves as continuations of their biological identities. It seems likely that an anti-Singularity group would be even less likely to be persuaded by threats to torture a different branch of themselves. Though that does remind me of an old, easily-disproved philosophical idea, that might be tweaked into something useful here. If they're so afraid of super-intelligences, think we could pull off a Basilisk Gambit, and threaten them that if we ever do become a superhumanly-intelligent entity, we will be very cross at them for hindering us, unless they start playing nicely starting now?"

"I don't think we're the only proto-Singularitarians they're worrying about, and even if somehow we were the ones to get to super-intelligence first, there's no guarantee we'd still want to do anything our current selves want. That's kind of the whole point behind why they're so against a Singularity in the first place. Ah, what if we could guarantee your values would stay fixed? Maybe they'd accept you taking a permanent canon of avoiding Singularity-seeking behaviour?

"Well, before a canon could fix that value in place, first I'd need to already have it as part of my mind to be fixated. Not to mention that, from what I've read since you showed up on Pumpkin, fully human-emulated brains are a lot messier than any accepted AI designs; there's a lot more slop and fuzziness when trying to pin down which bits should be made read-only. Not to mention that we can repurpose one bit of neural tissue to take over the function of another bit that stops working... I don't think Val or her friends would be very confident that me taking a canon would hold securely enough. Makes me wonder how likely they think their current plans are... or, come to think of it, what their plans would have been if we hadn't woken up our Titanian backups to visit this con."

"When we showed up, that probably triggered some notifications their PA AIs alerted them to, and they've been scrambling to come up with the right plan since, just like we have since that viarge Val came here. Trying to get the best results from the least investment, find whatever cheats would improve their expected return; there are reasons financial markets are regulated, but it's not like they're going to be reporting any fraud to the Titanian authorities."

"Fraud. Hm..."

"I've heard that 'hm' before. I like that 'hm'."

"While you've been multitasking to work on your oraculism, Cee and I have been toying with our own tools. I've gotten fond of using Fermi estimates to fill in the probability-distributions for the nodes of Monte-Carlo Markov-Chains, and have been making guesstimates about all our ideas as we talk about them. And I just hit upon a particular node, that tweaking the values of, has impressively exaggerated effects on everything else in the model, and how valuable any of our plans would be."

"Skip the technobabble and stop leaving me in suspense. I'll even skip trying to come up with a good, embarrassing rope-based pun."

"The node in question is: What is the probability that Val was simply lying, when she said she had any connection to whoever took the potshots at Pumpkin?"

"... You are thinking that we've been overthinking this to a massively ridiculous degree, and that she is just a lone nut-job?"

"I honestly don't know. Which is the point, here. Sure, there's always going to be at least a small chance that she's part of a secret group that wants to kill us, because they try to apply conventional math to an outcome with infinite negative expected utility; the sort of singularity you get when you divide by zero can open as many options as proving that one plus one equals three would, most completely crazy. But there's always going to be a small chance of all sorts of absurd things happening, and even if some of them involve consequences as severe as, say, getting tortured for the rest of the lifetime of the universe, it's impractical to use conventional risk-reward analysis on them. For one, there's zillions of such tiny probabilities, and trying to calculate the expected value of each would take a lot more computing power than has ever been made - or ever will be. There are just as many paradises in those minuscule odds as hells, and the only sane response is to average them out and treat them as background noise. ... Sorry, I was mostly letting my mouth run on autopilot there while poking at my model."

"Insert mouth-based innuendo here. So, to act as your rubber-duck sounding-board, should we just ignore her threats-that-don't-legally-count-as-threats?"

"Not quite... but what we can do is improve our existing off-the-cuff estimates of how much danger we're in. I think it's time to start actually using one of our ideas, and hire an investigator; at least now we can tell them exactly what we want them to find out. And then... I think it's getting close to lunchtime. And I'm getting a bit tired of walking through the crowd... think the hotel has a pool or plunge or something we could kick around a bit in?"

"I am sure of it."