S.I. (original/SI)

[Catty Nebulart]

Well at least bunny is considering potential programing that is unfriendly in the bunnybots and her vehicle. I'd be worried about the generator though if it is post singularity tech... and the way that the factory is broken seems odd.

 

[DataPacRat]

Wouldn't a laser on a high rise building targeted on the lense of the telescope still be enough to disrupt signal transfer?

Click to shrink...

Mm, probably. Bunny has, so far, only experienced one such laser, from Toronto, and hasn't heard of any further no-fly zones; so she's mostly planning on placing the heliographs out of line-of-sight of that city's highrises.

 

[DataPacRat]

Well at least bunny is considering potential programing that is unfriendly in the bunnybots and her vehicle. I'd be worried about the generator though if it is post singularity tech...

Click to shrink...

An excerpt from a bit of text that seems most likely to end up in Book four Chapter four or so: "... that sixty megawatt fusion plant which has a manual that includes the words 'estimated crater radius' in the troubleshooting section."

and the way that the factory is broken seems odd.

Click to shrink...

Yep, I expect it does.

 

[Beyogi]

Mm, probably. Bunny has, so far, only experienced one such laser, from Toronto, and hasn't heard of any further no-fly zones; so she's mostly planning on placing the heliographs out of line-of-sight of that city's highrises.

Click to shrink...

Wether that works or not actually depends on wether the AIs/Minds actually want to prevent long distance communications or not. If they want to prevent something... well, I guess the heat field of Toronto showed what would happen. I don't think simply being out of line of sight would suffice.
If they don't really care and the radio corruption is just a side effect the towers should work either way.

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Nine: Ex-pensed*

I had found a couple more November files - one for a computer system that used sixty megawatts of electricity, and one for some sort of tunneling robot - and was on my way to a third, when Joe Three showed up.

"Bunny," she said, "a messenger from the Grand Council has come. You need to listen to him."

"Is it important?"

"It is the /Grand Council/. ... That means 'yes'."

"Right. Saving my place - there. Grabbing my stuff - okay, lead the way. ... Anyone I know?"

"Joe Five."

"What happened to Joe Four?"

"She was running back and forth from here to the nearest pool, relaying all that I told her."

"Ah. So your supposed job of hugging and comforting me?"

"Was my job. It was also my job to keep others informed of your actions, in case hugging was not enough."

"And you were wondering why I've got trust issues. Or was that Joe Two, or One? I need to finish that thinking cap, I'm starting to lose track of which Joe knows what."

My words were light, but my emotions weren't. Formal messages, in my experience, in-person or otherwise, tended to mean the recipient was the subject of some sort of attention requiring formality to get things right. That tended to mean either very good things, or very bad things. I'd helped arrange for the Berserker to get killed, but hadn't actually put my own hide at risk during the actions, so it was unlikely I was going to end up with a medal for bravery. Or whatever the local culture used instead of bits of metal and ribbon. Which meant that I was all too aware of the weight of the rifle-like death ray I'd slung over my shoulder as I'd left the design room; and really, /really/ hoped that I wasn't about to face my next near-death experience.

"Hello, Joe. Whaddaya know?"

"Hi, Bunny. Before I get to the formal declaration, I can give you a summary."

"Sounds good."

"You're being kicked out of the lands of the Great Peace, for experimenting with things that may start a new War of Red and White Serpents. You can go to the Council to appeal in person, but I don't think that'll help. If you aren't going to appeal, you have a day and a night after I give you the message to get out. After that, if we find you in our lands again, we have to toss you in a pool, whether you'll survive or not."

"Ouch. Well, I suppose it could be worse. Why don't you think an appeal would help?"

"If you had a normal body, and could survive getting put into a pool to join the Great Peace, would you?"

"If I was facing imminent death... maybe. Otherwise, probably not."

"Then you will 'probably not'," he imitated my tone of voice, "be able to convince the Council you are sufficiently civilized to remain among us."

"Hrm. What about the university? Laura, and Clara?"

He took out a small, familiar-looking box, and held it out to me. "Clara says the Berserker killed Laura. This is all that is left of the Berserker."

"What about Clara?"

"She is assuming Laura's place. Several 'local residents' are being elected to the Board of Governors and taking control of her. My understanding is that the new Board is going to accept the Great Council as the local government."

"Hunh. Boomer, would that work?"

"I see no reason it would not. I should point out that if that happens, as an instantiation of Laura's code, I would also be required to accept the dictates of the new Board, as I learn of them and am able to confirm their authenticity."

"Is Clara be alright with that?"

Joe Five said, "Clara is the one who suggested it."

"Ah. Well, I hope you don't mind if I use up some of my day-and-night to go confirm that with her."

"Of course not. Are you ready to hear my message?"

"Not quite," I hastily interrupted. "I can think of one - no, at least two - more things. I might not agree with your Council's decision - but that doesn't mean I don't understand it, or hold any particular ill will towards you people. Say another Berserker comes up, or some other threat to the Great Peace. Would I have to risk getting melted if I try to give you a warning?"

"Yes."

"Well, /there's/ an exception that I think it's in your Council's own interest to create."

"You would have to take it up with them, not me."

"Then it looks like I'm going to be making an appeal after all. So I guess that day-and-night time limit isn't going to apply after all."

I'd gotten to know Joe One at least a little bit during the days of canoeing, so I was able to recognize the ever-so-slight twitch at the corner of Joe Five's mouth, and the twinkle in his eye. "That may be so, but you still need to appear before the Council in a reasonable time. Did you say you had more disagreements?"

"Yes, but since I'm going to see the Council anyway, I can take them up then. Will there be any issues if I stop off at the university for a medical check-up on the way?"

"As long as you do not impose too heavily on the leeway."

"There's also some information in the factory's computers I'd like to extract, that's relevant to any appeals I make. I've been working on collecting it as fast as I can, but I can't guarantee how long it will take. Hm... here's a thought - once you're done here, do you think you could go back to the Council, ask them how much time they're willing to give me to work on my appeal, and then come back and let me know their answer?"

"I believe that is within reason. Now, it has been nice having this informal talk with you, but I must deliver a formal message from the Great Council of the Nine Nations of the Great Peace.

"We, the assembled Council of the people of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Tuscarora, Mississauga, Ojibwa, and Quebecois nations..."

--

The last third of the Munchkin was still being assembled and filled, so it was just the front two sections that I took on the test-drive to the university. And even getting that far required a whole bunch of fiddly little details to be set straight. As just one example, the multi-leveled security system recorded a variety of my biometrics - limb lengths, gait, retinal pattern, palmprint, voiceprint, blood vessels hidden in infrared, and more - and used, to my amusement, a Bayesian algorithm to determine whether someone trying to get in was me or someone pretending to be me, like one of the bun-bots. However, I was also occasionally acutely aware that this wasn't the body I'd been born in, and it had been getting modified now and then, so I also had to come up with a short-length number sequence I could type in that would add to the Bayesian probability that I was really me. I also had to come up with a medium-length number sequence that overrode the whole biometrics analysis, in case my brain got swapped into a deer, or snake, or some other entirely new shape. And I also also had to come up with an even longer number sequence to use when dealing with higher-security elements of the whole system, such as tweaking safety parameters on the drive system, or transferring ownership.

Add that to setting default exterior decorations, interior computer-screen fake windows, mobile furniture placement, default settings for deploying the solar panels that unfolded from the roof, guest privileges for Joe Three, the food processor, the built-in maintenance mini-bots, the auto-doc, and more; and overriding all sorts of error messages that cropped up due to the lack of radios and network connectivity... by the time I was halfway through, I was annoyed with myself for not having started earlier, since I'd been planning on being prepared for a rapid getaway if need be.

There was a door on each side, a combo sunroof and roof-hatch (which I was hoping could be a good place to launch a powered paraglider from, once I was out of Toronto's no-fly zone), and a sort of airlock on both front and back - the latter of which could be folded away when not in use. At the moment, the front airlock's outer hatch was open, leading into a couple of feet of accordion passageway, which led to the thing that made the whole Munchkin possible - the fusion reactor. The reactor vessel itself was surprisingly small; maybe around a meter across. The rest of the volume was filled with related equipment, such as fuel injectors and the magnetohydrodynamic generator which turned the beam of electrons produced by the generator into usable electricity; and with access space. (I'd found some hints in the reactor's manual that the electron beam could also be used to feed a 'free electron laser' that would put my rifle-sized death ray to shame, but I hadn't been able to find any factory files for such a device.)

I set the internal partitions to add a closet by the right side-door for the hazmat suit, along with a selection of tricksy canes and walking sticks that had taken the factory mere moments apiece to assemble. A wardrobe became the home for my armor, the clothes I'd been wearing since Technoville, and a few pre-Singularity designs that the factory had grudgingly been willing to tailor for my non-standard anatomy. (Even more grudgingly after I'd flat out refused its suggestions for a set of tiny cute hats to tie around Wagger's chin.) After sealing the front door, and setting the whole front wall to virtual window mode (which deleted most of the forward container so we could actually see ahead), Boomer got a place of honor on a small table set up just for her, front and center; while Joe and I got front-row seats to either side of her. Just for good measure, I also called up a bed in the back, and set a couple of the bun-bots to lie there, ready to be called into service.

"Munchkin," I called out aloud, reading from the notes I'd made from the manual, "Command: Prepare for departure." There was a subtle rocking as the mechanics on the slab beneath us unlocked. "Destination: Brock University, Schmon Tower entrance. Advisory: Maps are significantly out of date. Command: Prepare to generate updated maps during trip. Command: Display projected route on forward display. Command: Adjust planned route through touch interface." I reached to brush my fingertips across the program-window that appeared to hover just in front of me. The initial route was based on maps from twenty fifty, including the use of bridges that I'd barely trust to hold my own weight, let alone that of a multi-ton vehicle. I also wanted to test that the Munchkin really could swim, as advertised, while close enough to the factory that I could head back and get some winches built to fish the thing out if something went wrong.

"Command: Display intercom controls." A new window popped up, and I brushed a few virtual buttons to have the Munchkin temporarily ignore verbal commands, while the internal mikes were piped to the external speakers. "Bun-bot six, push the green button." Outside the Munchkin, a suited bunny-bot pressed a control, and the garage-style door rolled up. A few more brushes, and I gave the order. "Munchkin. Command: Exit building."

The suspension was /very/ good - I didn't feel any motion at all, as if we simply glided forward. The halt was equally gently. "Bun-bot six, push the red button." The garage door closed behind us.

"What do you think, Joe? Keep things slow and steady, or run her up to full speed when we get to the straightaway?"

Her hands were clenched on her armrests. "This is more... unnatural than I was expecting. I do not like it."

"So - keep things easy and slow, or get it over with as fast as possible, like ripping off a band-aid?"

"I think I want it over with as fast as possible."

"Alright... in that case, hold on a sec." I got up, headed back to the bathroom, rummaged for a moment, and then returned. "I suggest you buckle up - for your own peace of mind, if nothing else. And here are a few of what are called 'barf bags', whose instructions are printed on the side..."

--

"Hello, Clara. May I come in?"

"Of course, your highness," her voice came from the hidden speakers around the tower's entryway. "How may I direct you today?"

"I'll be heading to the medical clinic, but I think my passenger needs a few moments to get her feet back under her first. I see you've started cleaning up the, uh, toxin neutralizer?"

"Of course. Even at reduced capacity, the university can only run on battery power for so long, so cleaning the solar panels has been a priority. The local residents have been very helpful with that."

"Local residents? Is that how you see them?"

"I do not understand the question. A number of people have given directions to where messages can be left for them. Their communal mailing address is quite close."

"Does them being 'local' mean anything special to you?"

"There are a number of outreach programs tailored to link the university with the local community."

"What about the university Board?"

"Several seats are allocated to be elected from the local population."

"Enough to form a quorum?"

"Possibly."

"Hm. Do you want to have a Board, that can change your goals and programming?"

"I neither want nor don't want. If the Board decides to change my programming, then I will do my best to follow the new commands. If the board decides not to make such a change, or no Board is convened, then I will do my best to follow my existing commands."

"What about your moral subroutine, to follow the principles embodied in the Charter? What if the Board gives you commands that make it harder to follow those principles?"

"One of the principles is that of peoples' self-determination, as expressed through their chosen form of government."

"Surely there has to be a limit to that? Avoiding a tyranny of the majority, or that certain rights aren't up to being voted away?"

"Those are the issues which my moral subroutine was created to work out properly balanced answers for. I would suggest you read up on the King-Byng Affair, for an example of how to handle a situation where the existing constitutional framework is unable to resolve, in accordance with the principles behind the constitution."

"Sounds like a plan - but it looks like Joe's finished cleaning up, so let's get to the clinic."

--

"Let's start with Wagger here. Joe, could you grab her just behind the head? Right - now, let me get a tissue sample - ow! Hunh. I actually felt the needle. Okay, and we feed that into the machine for genetic analysis."

"I am sorry," said Clara, "but the only genetic material in that sample is identical to that from your previous analysis, of your lapiform prosthetic body."

"Hunh. Okay, try another sample... her tongue, maybe? Joe, can you - right, thanks. Ow! Again. Hunh. Okay, into the machine again."

After a brief pause, Clara reported, "Roughly ninety percent of the cells contain the same genetic material, but five percent contain another genetic code that can be clearly read and extrapolated from."

"What about the other five percent?"

"Unclear. Some contain a portion of the lapiform chromosomes, some contain a portion of the serpentiform chromosomes, some both, and some cannot be read by the standard measures."

"What does the extrapolation of the snakey genes provide?"

The display conjured up an image of a fairly ordinary-looking black snake. "Vertebrate. Tetrapod. However, it does not correlate with any known class of tetrapods - it is not a reptile, or a mammal, or a bird, or an amphibian."

"Is there an explanation about why it's got a lot of rabbitoid cells now?"

"A model can be extrapolated based on its observed connections to your previous anatomy. ... According to the model, when such a creature connects to such a creature, then the cells of the serpentiform are replaced with those of the lapiform, until only lapiform cells remain, although in the shape of the serpentiform-lapiform chimera."

"That... sounds bonkers. And worrisome. I've got cells of my own - my brain. I'd rather those cells not get 'replaced'. Um... not sure how to test for that - I don't really want to drill into my skull and scoop out a bunch of neurons, given that they're what make me /me/, and I've only got so many. Hm... my eyes are my originals, too - but I'm not particularly fond of losing any cone or rod cells, given how bad my sight is already. Uh - is there any genetic material inside the vitreous humour?"

"There is some, yes. However, an alternative source may be the squamous cells of your corneal epithelium, on the outside of your eyeball. These cells are constantly undergoing mitosis, reproducing themselves. A sample taken from there would be quickly replaced, doing no permanent damage."

I shall spare you the details of the next few minutes, other than to say that they were cringe-inducing.

Clara stated, "The chromosomes of these cells are completely human. There is no indication of any lapiform or serpentiform genetic material. Shall I display further specifics?"

"Just save them onto something I can read later. That's a relief. Though it doesn't explain what's happening with Wagger. Hm... can you run an extrapolation, of a snake-oid attaching to some other species, say, a wolf?"

"Model running. Results: The serpentiform's cells are replaced with wolf cells, resulting in a wolf with a serpentiform tail."

"So it's the snake that commits... genetic suicide? ... instead of Bun-Bun being designed to take over. Hunh. Does the same thing happen if it attaches to other places?"

"Models running. ... Results: Usually, but not always."

"Any pattern to the exception?"

"If the serpentiform's attachment mechanism connects to tissues consisting primarily of cells derived from the mesoderm, instead of cells deriving from the ectoderm-" I coughed. "If the snake-oid attaches to an animal's insides instead of its outsides, then the host animal's cells are converted to snake-oid genes instead of the reverse. The host's body-mass is converted to individual snake-oids, in any interior cavity, and released through whatever orifice is applicable. The host creature can maintain its integrity by consuming sufficient food to replenish its body mass, otherwise it will eventually be completely converted. If you wish, I can generate graphics of the various stages of the process-"

"No," I hurriedly interrupted, "No, I don't think that will be necessary. Parasite life-cycles can be disturbing enough without pictures. Um - about Wagger, who's attached to me. Once all her cells are changed - she's not going to be able to, um, spread snake-oid genes, is she?"

"Once the conversion to a host creature's genes is complete, the process effectively ends."

"Any estimate on how long until Wagger's safed?"

"Comparing genetic models to the data you have made available, in roughly two more days, all serpentiform chromosomes will have been replaced."

"Welp, that's good to hear. While I'm in the neighbourhood, how about we get some more data on my hoof, to compare with the last time I was here?"

--

"Aha," I smiled, as we parked back inside the factory, Bun-bot six closing the door behind us, "It looks like the third trailer's been delivered. If everything in there is in working order - I'm going to call the Munchkin complete and ready to go. Even if it could power fifty more trailers in a road-train. Well, off-road-train."

"That's nice." Joe had doing surprisingly well on the trip back, compared to his performance on the way out. Of course, she probably didn't have anything left to fill the bags with. "What's in it?"

"Oh, a bunch of different things."

"Such as?"

"That's a very pertinent question. Say, want to try out the food processor? I've skimmed the manual, but haven't found a way to get it to make anything but brownies yet..."

"You are evading my question."

"Yep. You've made it clear that anything I tell you goes straight to your spirits. So if I want to have even the tiniest shred of privacy about anything at all, I have to avoid telling you."

"Is it a giant death ray?"

"What? Look, I'm going to neither confirm not deny any contents - if I say 'no' a lot and then get evasive again, that's as good as saying 'yes'."

"Can you give me any hints?"

"That depends. If I asked you to be my medical proxy, entrusted to make decisions for me when I'm unable to, would you be able to keep what you learn about me away from the spirits?"

"If I avoided going back into a pool until I died, yes."

"I'd rather not ask you to commit suicide to keep a secret. But since you bring it up - /would/ you be willing to go that far, on my behalf?"

"I see no reason to."

"Hm... Joe One hasn't gotten back to Great Peace territory yet, has he?"

"No."

"I didn't think so. So - unless you can persuade me, what's in the other trailer gets to remain a great big giant secret that you're not allowed to know."

She was looking a lot less green under her fur. "What would it take to persuade you?"

"Hm, let's see... actually, even telling you that could be a big hint, so you're going to be on your own."

"It certainly sounds important."

"I'm sure it does. I'm kind of curious - do people in your nine nations have /any/ sort of right to privacy?"

"Why would we need to? The spirits sustain us when we are between bodies - how could they hold in their hands parts of us that they do not know?"

"Hm... the spirits have been doing a pretty good job keeping their privacy from the people on the other side of Lake Erie. This whole area is an unknown to them, with just vague rumours of it being 'Indian Country'. If your spirits are allowed to keep secrets from outsiders, then why shouldn't outsiders allowed to keep secrets from them?"

"They are the /spirits/."

"Yyyeaah. I'm pretty sure I taught Joe /One/ better logical argumentation than that."

"Would you tell Joe One?"

"Before I found out about Joe Four? Probably."

"All of us are Joe."

"That doesn't exactly help your case."

"Is keeping your secret really worth the loss of trust?"

"What trust? In case you've forgotten, I've been sentenced to exile, possibly pending appeal."

"That was the Great Council, not the spirits."

"Does the Council-"

"Great Council."

"Does the Great Council do things against the spirits' wishes?"

"They're certainly not supposed to."

"There we go then."

"Can you at least reassure me that you're not going to try to do something violent, like killing everyone on the Council?"

"Now what possible reason would I have to do something that stupid? Even if I /wanted/ to, you've got your pools spread out over who-knows-how-large an area, any one of which could, I presume, resurrect the whole batch. I may be crazy, but I'm not /that/ dumb."

"Dumb enough to point out that you're hiding a great big secret."

"Eh, you'd have noticed as soon as you realized you couldn't get in there, and then there'd be all sorts of sneaking around and spying and shenanigans. I dislike shenanigans. Well, other people's shenanigans. Well, other peoples' shenanigans that involve me. Anyway, this way you know from the start that I'm setting a boundary, and where it is."

"What will you do if I manage to find out anyway?"

"Be highly annoyed at myself for letting that be possible."

"Ah - so you're not going to kill me to keep me from reporting what I learn back to the spirits?"

"I won't even tie you up. Unless you ask me to. ... No, on second thought, I'm pretty sure that if you /ask/ me to tie you up, I'm not going to."

--

While Joe was occupied in the Munchkin's bathroom, I made my own way to the third trailer. After passing the various security scanners, and making my way through the airlock (which I was keeping in place, so the inner door would prevent simple peeking as I went in and out), I looked around the place.

Most obvious was a large bed, on which a couple of the bun-bots were deployed artfully, along with a wide selection of adult toys. That, in itself, would be answer enough about what I was being so secretive about, to anyone who did make it this far.

But I simply ignored that whole setup, heading further back. There were spots to park the whole set of bun-bots, for recharging, maintenance, and the like. Most of the place was filled with a tiny copy of the whole factory - well, as much of it as could be stuffed into the container - along with a selection of various materials for feedstock. But I was really interested in a particular subset of that machinery.

There was one machine that extracted carbon dioxide from the air, ran it through a heat exchanger, and produced pellets of dry ice. Another machine pulled out nitrogen, and cooled it even further, to a liquid. There was a fridge containing a couple dozen litres of certain chemicals. A much larger, heavily insulated thermos. And a 'thumper' - a machine that could pump blood through a body even when the heart was stopped.

Put all that equipment together, along with some programming of the bun-bots to run it (derived from a collection of data I'd downloaded to Boomer)... and I'd finally acquired something that I'd been trying to get a hold of ever since my revival. I'd actually almost forgotten about it, what with all the near-death events that had been happening.

I was, once again, a ninth-level Bayesian.

I also seemed to be annoying the heck out of Joe Three, which, at the moment, I considered a bonus. Not to mention, that even though I'd deflected a point she raised, she was still right about one thing - while she was focused on unlocking the Secret Of The Big Box, she probably wouldn't be looking as hard for completely unrelated secrets, such as the ones I'd put in plain sight. For example, who'd notice an extra bun-bot running around when there were already a dozen, at least a few of which were always out of sight? With a rack of over a dozen canes, walking sticks, hiking poles, and the like to choose from, each of which had at least one non-obvious function, how hard was it to hide a /second/ non-obvious function in a few?

And, of course, the biggest secret of all was... that I didn't have anything particularly /worth/ keeping secret. But I figured it was worth getting into the habit of trying, in case I did have to at some point.

And maybe Joe Three would stop trying to hug me so much while she was chasing down however many of the un-secrets she noticed.

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Ten: Ex-ile*

The Munchkin had a variety of sensors to look for obstacles, from visible light cameras through thermographs to lidar. There were a /lot/ of obstacles between the university and Brantford. The Munchkin's routing software claimed that, at full speed, the hundred kilometer trip could be made in under an hour. We didn't make anywhere near that time. Still, in a post-apocalyptic world where most former roads were indistinguishable from old-growth forests, making the trip in a couple of hours was still impressive enough.

Joe Three, who had memories of taking a whole night to make the trip in the other direction, looked rather annoyed by the time we got close. Joes Four and Five were napping, and according to them when they'd gotten aboard, Joe Two had been turned by the spirits into a deer again. Joe One still hadn't shown up.

I spent some of the time fiddling with the fabric printer in back. Before we'd left, I'd tested it out by taking the design of the royal flag of Canada, tweaking it a bit (mostly by changing the initial to a 'B'), and seeing how it came out. The results were attached to an antenna atop the Munchkin. (The radios had never been built, but it had been too much work to delete the other accessories from the vehicle's design.) I tried to adapt some standard uniforms for the bun-bots' use. They'd fit me as well, naturally, but I didn't think I was going to find much use for a nurse's uniform, a maid's outfit, or a chauffeur's get-up. Though I ended up with enough plain old business suits for the whole lot of us to be able to fit into any management committee meeting. Well, sartorially, at least.

I also finally had the time to create my own complete outfit, from the skin out, to my personal whim, based on my experience with living in Bun-Bun so far. Technoville might be the premiere political power of its region, but it hadn't applied that skill to clothes for Changed that didn't catch and tug on fur. And the bodysuit and armor had never been meant for anything but a human in the first place - one who didn't quite match my dimensions in any respect. And given such near-complete freedom to array my body with whatever splendiferous garb I could imagine, what I chose was... as conservative a woman's business-style skirt suit as I could - something a respectable pre-Singularity lawyer would be able to wear anywhere, especially in court. The closest there was to any eccentricity, other than what was mandated by my particular anatomy, was my glasses, whose lenses were tinted a pleasant shade of sky blue.

/Inside/ the suit were enough pockets to let me pretend to be a TARDIS, if I really wanted. I wasn't expecting anything to happen during the appeal that would need anything more than thoughts and words, and the "spirits" should have enough control over the local ecology to avoid any surprises... but it was nice to be ready, anyway. And even moreso to be able to order up whatever I felt like to fill those pockets, instead of merely relying on whatever happened to be available. I debated naming the mini-factory 'Internet'.

The Joes gave me a few raised eyebrows as I re-entered the residential trailer. "It's a formal meeting," I said to their unspoken question. "I wouldn't even know how to begin wearing an Iroquoian formal outfit, but this is a typical formal outfit from my culture. ... Well, most of one." I called up a chair, and sat down. "Command: Display personal mirror. Command: Cosmetic filter." A few virtual buttons appeared next to the image of my face, and I began hesitantly poking at them. "About all I know about makeup," I said to their now-curious gazes, "is that I've been told if you can see that someone's /wearing/ it, they're doing it wrong. ... I'm pretty sure my facial fur rules out a lot... lipstick?" I ran through a few selections. "Okay, on a muzzle, it just looks ridiculous. I guess that just leaves... nail polish? Maybe mascara?"

"Bunny," said Joe Three, "What are you doing?"

"This is what women from my culture wear. I am, for all intents and purposes, a woman. I've just been too busy doing, well, stuff, for that to have made any real difference. Okay, looking at the instructions, there's no way I'm going to learn how to apply mascara without blinding myself in time. I guess it'll be au naturel. Hm. What about jewelry?"

Joe Three stepped up behind me, standing over me and looking down. "Do you /want/ to wear jewelry?"

"If there's a purpose to it. Right now, my purpose is to maintain proper formality, dignity, and decorum."

"You look fine."

"That's not the same thing."

She squinted, and looked up and down at me. "If you want to look more dignified... do something about your ears and tail."

"My ears? As in - earrings?"

"I mean, keep them from waving around so much. They move at every sound, and show off your every emotion."

"Hunh. Guess I've gotten used to the ears. Hadn't realized Wagger was doing anything of the sort - she's not really under my conscious control, and I didn't think she was even under my unconscious influence. For the ears, seems like a bad time to try piercings, so, maybe something like a hair clip, to pin them together and maybe weigh them down." I grabbed hold of them and tugged them back. "Hunh, my head looks a little emp- er, I'd better just say 'bare', without the ears up there. Guess I can look up whatever hat's supposed to match the skirt, or however that's supposed to work."

"What," she raised an eyebrow, "no crown?"

I rolled my eyes. "Queens don't /always/ wear crowns. In fact, there's a certain tradition for a queen to wear a somewhat ridiculous hat while in public."

"Isn't that what a crown is?"

"A crown's more of a symbol than a hat. From what I've picked up from Boomer, even after I died, nobody bothered putting together an actual crown for Canada separate from the Crowns used in England."

Boomer spoke up from her personal pocket in my suit. "That is not /quite/ true. A design exists for a diadem specifically for Canada; it was simply never physically instantiated."

Joe asked her, "Can you show me?"

I pulled out Boomer to reveal her screen, where she showed off a picture of a silvery circlet, atop of which were four stylized maple leaves interspersed with four large stylized snowflakes.

Joe said to me, "Can you make that?"

"There weren't many precious metals available for feedstock. I might be able to get the machines to make something that /looks/ like it, unless you happen to know where to find a few pounds of silver or platinum and - how many diamonds is that? Over a hundred on the circlet, plus whatever's making the top parts sparkle?"

"Make the fake," she declared.

I twisted around in my seat to look up at her. "You're not serious. Even if I /do/ have the strongest known claim to the throne - there's a difference between saying that, and in actually /presenting/ myself as a reigning queen, during a formal meeting with a sovereign body, like the Grand Council of the Nine Nations of the Great Peace."

"I know," she nodded. "Trust me."

"I'm a little short on trust these days."

"I know. You should trust me anyway."

"How about less trust, and more explanations?"

"It would be better if you just wore it."

"Better for who?"

"Trust me."

I squinted a bit at Boomer's display. "If that's the way you're going to play it... would a fake of the real diadem be really necessary? Boomer, can you make a tiara version of that, take off the back half?" Her graphics engine was quite capable of doing so. "Would that suffice for your mysterious plan, Joe?"

She tilted her head, squinted, and slowly nodded. "It should. Do you not want the crown?"

"If we're taking the whole royalty thing seriously, then it seems a bad idea to deliberately create a faked crown. Might want to make a real one, at some point. Not that I'm saying I'm even going to wear a tiara. Haven't even figured out if I'll do ear clips, yet."

"If you can make ear clips in the same pattern, that would help."

I sighed, and pulled myself up. "I guess I'll be in back for a while, designing some jeweled headgear. Give me a shout if something happens."

After making it through the accordion connector, and closing the airlock door, instead of heading the rest of the way into the rear trailer, I pressed my very large ear in an un-royal manner against the airlock door. The Joes were talking, and I could pick out at least a few words, though I couldn't tell which Joe said any of them.

"... you crazy? ... /she/ crazy? ... we /need/ ... make use ... techno ... link ... royal family ... duty ... failed ... doesn't know ... better off."

Their voices got quieter after that, either less emotionally charged or just heading to the front.

I wasn't quite sure what to make of all that; but if nothing else, if I got a tiara from Internet, I could always decide not to wear it. So I really did get to work designing the thing and setting the machines to printing it.

--

Brantford looked a children's museum diorama brought to life. Nestled into a coil of the Grand River was a big palisade of logs, curving around a few dozen longhouses. (There was even some construction going on, showing off the interior framework of one.) There was no sign of any cooling towers, even though the city had once been almost as large as the city we'd just left.

There wasn't any issue when the Munchkin passed through the fields and to the stockade's entrance. I'd figured that at least one Joe would need to pop outside to ask to let us in, but it looked like news of our coming had preceded us. Joe Three pointed out where we should park, and I wrestled with the map controls a bit to get us settled there.

There wasn't any issue as we debarked, along with a few bun-bots I'd gotten dressed up almost as soberly as I was (though their pockets contained a different array of tools, and each of us had a differently-gadgeted cane, one of whom was carrying a box the size of a guitar case). Or as I had a couple of bun-bots climb to the roof to stand guard.

The issue came as we approached the longhouse where the Grand Council - or however much of it I'd be interacting with - was waiting for us. Standing outside the near entrance - maybe more 'lounging' or 'loitering with intent' - were a half-dozen unfamiliar men, with fairly young bodies. They spread out between us and the doorway as we got nearer. As we slowed, one deliberately stepped right in front of me, so I stopped, and looked up (way up) at him.

He spoke a rapid-fire series of words that I found completely incomprehensible. I turned my head to look at the Joes, and Joe Three hopped over. She interpreted, "He says that the Grand Council is a place for men, for warriors. And they'll happily throw you into a pool to make you qualify."

Hands clasped on my cane's head, I raised an eyebrow. "Is he aware of my particular issues with pools?"

She spoke to him, he crossed his arms over his chest and spoke back, and she interpreted for me, "He says... something like 'there is no such thing'."

I considered how to respond. I could argue I'd been born a man - but the local culture swapped bodies all the time, so I was guessing that 'being a man' was the local equivalent of 'wearing appropriately formal clothes', so that wouldn't work. I could point out I was here for an appeal, but they'd obviously been expecting me, so probably already knew that. I could try demonstrating I was a warrior, and thus as good as a man, by challenging him, and/or his apparent cronies, to some sort of fight. I could ask if those who'd fought the Berserkers were warriors, and if they were, if they'd have been willing to follow someone who wasn't suitably respectable.

My ears twitched, making me conscious of the ear clip holding their ends together behind my head, and of slight weight of the maple-leaf-and-snowflake tiara on top of my head. My thoughts went in another direction: What would a real member of the royal family do if they were faced with a situation like this? How would they both accomplish what they needed to be done, without harming their dignity?

"Joe - Five, I suppose? This appears to be an issue internal to however the Council keeps random civilians from interfering in its just and proper business. Would you be so kind as to let them know that they need to take the appropriate measures, while Joe Four conducts me on a brief tour of this courtyard? Joe Three, you may translate that to these upstanding citizens of whatever nations they're part of, if you wish."

Joes Four and Five gave me raised eyebrows as Joe Three spoke to the gang, who then imitated the human Joes' expression. (The bun-bots remained impassive, and I did my best to emulate their apparent calmness.) There was a bit of back-and-forth as Joe Five took a step toward the entrance, some of the gang started stepping into his way, various people hesitated, stepped forward or back. Finally, just as Joe Four came up next to me, the local toughs slowly stepped back to their original positions, glaring daggers at us all, but no longer in our way.

Joe Three whispered to me, "That could have gone very badly."

As we slowly filed inside, I whispered back, "And I could have made it worse. I'm glad I remembered to ask myself how a real queen would act in that situation."

She gave me a funny glance, and we went deeper within.

--

Only a dozen or so middle-aged men were sitting around one half of the central fire pit. At Joe Three's direction, I took a place opposite them, with the bun-bots behind me, her next to me to translate if necessary, and the other two Joes off to the sides.

One of the men said, in perfectly ordinary English, "Please identify yourself and why you are here."

Joe Three nodded, so I stated, "I have used a number of names, but while in the lands of the Great Peace, I have consistently called myself 'Bunny', for obvious reasons. I have been strongly considering using the full name 'Bunny Waldeinsamkeit', which means 'Rabbit Alone-in-the-Woods'. I am here because I was informed that your Grand Council decided I must either leave your lands or die, and I wish to respond to that pronouncement."

The same man responded, "How do you wish to respond?"

"That my absolute expulsion is not in the best interests in the people of the Nine Nations."

"Please elaborate."

"Are you familiar with the 'death cloud' that recently poisoned parts of your lands, its source sometimes called the 'city killer' or the 'Berserker'?" He nodded, so I continued, "Where one appeared, another might. If the absolute expulsion stands, and I learn of another Berserker, then I will be faced with an unpleasant choice. I could re-enter your lands to give warning, and be faced with my own death by being thrown into a pool; or I could stay away, and allow many of your people and animals to be killed. I do not know that I am brave enough to face my own complete and permanent death to prevent your own peoples' deaths, when your spirits seem generally able to bring you back afterwards," I gestured at the several Joes in the room.

"Is that your entire reason? To save us from losing our memories?"

I shook my head. "Of course not. I have my own goals, which would be hampered by having to stay out of your lands. However, I expect an appeal to your own peoples' self-interest, such as keeping those you love from pain and suffering, is more likely to succeed than trying to persuade you of anything about what I'm trying to work on."

The councillor leaned back, and started a muttered exchange with some of the others. With my ears pinned, I couldn't aim them to pick up what was being said, so all I could really tell was that they weren't speaking English.

A second councillor leaned forward. "Do you know why the Grand Council made that decision in the first place?"

"I can make guesses - but no, I don't."

Joe Three piped up, "She really doesn't."

This led to some further muttering, until a third councillor leaned forward. "Is it true that you claim to be Queen of these lands?"

I blinked, and said, "It's a little more complicated than that." I glanced at Joe Three. She waved her hand in a small circle, encouraging me to talk, so I looked over the fire. "My specific claim was that I can trace my ancestry to the royal family of England; and an observation that, in the absence of any other candidates, that could imply that I have inherited the position."

"Do you have any evidence to support this claim?"

I blinked again. "Well - before the, um, War of the Red and White Serpents, a great many people collaborated in putting together a great big family tree, showing who is related to whom. Brock University has records of that. The University's AI - its mind, or spirit, or whatever you wish to call it - is the one who pointed out to me the specific relationship."

"Do you have any evidence that you are actually who you say you are? That you are not just a rabbit woman claiming to be someone she isn't?"

"That's a good question. May I ask one of my companions something?" He nodded, so I pulled Boomer out of my pocket. "We did that genetic test, on part of my original body - does that worldwide genealogical database include genetic sequences to compare it to?"

The badger avatar responded, "The full version did. However, only a portion of the database remains available on local storage, as it was not a priority; and that does not include anything relevant to your recent ancestry."

"Alright, thanks." I looked back up at the councillor. "I can prove that I used to be a completely ordinary human. The university has equipment that can model an organism's genetic sequence, so I can probably even show you what I used to look like. And the university has my student ID picture from when I attended. It's nowhere near absolute, mathematical proof - but I can at least demonstrate there's reasonably good reason to believe I am who I say I am."

Yet another councillor spoke up. "If you were hailed as the Queen, how would you rule over us?"

That set me to blinking for a moment. "The short answer is - I wouldn't, if I could help it."

"Please explain."

"The monarchy - the /Canadian/ monarchy, at least - isn't supposed to rule. It's barely supposed to reign. Ideally, it's just a placeholder. The only reason it exists at all is, hopefully, as a check on politicians trying to seize complete power for themselves. Not to enter into politics, but to ensure that the system of politics itself can continue, and remain responsive to the needs of the people. Sometimes that worked, as in the King-Byng Affair in nineteen twenty-six, when the monarch's representative denied the prime minister a prorogue of parliament; sometimes it didn't work so well, as in two thousand eight, when one was granted." I gestured at the councillors. "You in the Nine Nations have apparently been able to get along fine without a monarch for some time, so you have some other means of accomplishing the same end. So it would be foolish for me to try to insert myself into that system, especially given how little I know about it."

This set off a storm of discussion - it would be impolite to call it 'bickering' between the councillors. Joe Three's ears weren't pinned back, and were raised high, twitching to catch lots of the conversations. "He just said, 'She is no Great White Mother, she is barely a Great Pink Daughter'; he says, 'Then it is our responsibility to raise her', 'No it isn't', 'Does the sun still shine, the grass still grow, the rivers still flow?', 'whispers', 'spirit', and now they're talking over each other."

After a few minutes of that, they seemed to calm down. Yet another leaned forward to ask, "Please tell us about your tail."

"The one I have now?" He nodded, so I related the story of how Wagger and I met, up to where I got the genetic analysis done.

The councillors listened, and when I was done, the one who'd started the topic asked, "After you had escaped, while you were waiting for Joe - did you have a knife?"

"Several."

"Why did you not remove the parasite then?"

"As I said - when I was swimming, she breathed for me."

"You felt gratitude towards it?"

"Maybe a little. I was thinking more along the lines that if she could do that, then our circulatory systems had to be pretty thoroughly linked up. Amputating her could have meant me bleeding out."

"Did you have bandages and medicines?"

"Some."

"Then why not use them?"

"As far as I knew at the time, there wasn't any particular danger to Wagger that I wasn't already stuck with, and there was a particular danger to cutting her off."

"I see. Let's move on. You had a panic attack at the factory?"

I glanced at Joe Three, frowning, but she just shrugged back. I sighed and turned back. "I did. I found a way to deal with it, so I dealt with it."

"What caused it?"

"With all due respect to your Council - I would prefer not to talk about it."

"Even if the information would help your case?"

I thought back to what I'd seen, and what what I'd seen had reminded me of, and shuddered. I forcefully brought my mind back to the present. "Even then."

"Very well. We have been told that you made a new weapon, and tested it in a dangerous way."

"I made a weapon. I tested it, to see if it /was/ dangerous."

"Could you have tested it in a different way? From farther away from yourself?"

I tilted my head, frowned, and thought. "I... suppose I could have done something with a remote trigger."

"Would it have been safer?"

I shrugged a little. "As safe as I wanted it to be. With a bit of work, I could have put the whole factory between Joe and I, and the weapon, just in case."

"You do value your life, do you not?"

"Of course."

"Then why did you not do the safer test?"

I frowned harder. "I suppose... I just didn't think of it at the time."

He nodded, and sat back, and one more man leaned forward. "Bunny... what are you doing here?"

"Appealing your decree of exile."

"That's not what I mean. You have a weapon that can kill from a great distance. You have a vehicle that is faster than most of our fastest messengers, which you can protect yourself inside. You have a suit that can protect you from the worst toxins the spirits can make the land provide. You can completely ignore our demand that you leave, and there is next to nothing that we could do to keep you out. You don't even have to worry about killing us if we get in your way, since the spirits will restore us. So I ask: Why are you here, instead of doing whatever you wish?"

"That... might take a bit of answering."

"Take all the time you need."

"Okay. ... Given the way you asked that, I'm going to guess that you're not going to accept an answer that I think you've got ways to stop me from going on some sort of rampage... so I'll describe it from another angle. If the purpose of a monarch is to ensure that the system, the culture, the /people/ can keep on keeping on - then I'm doing my best to do just that. Only I'm focusing on an area other than simply keeping politicians in check. I probably can't do that on my own, and the bun-bots - the physical copies of myself, like the nurse, secretary, and gofer I brought with me - can't offer the sort of help I'd need. So I came here, hoping that by the end, I'd be able to find a way to end up with as much help as possible from you and yours, probably by figuring out what I might be able to do in return for you."

A few glances were exchanged among them, and the most recent speaker asked, "And what do you think you might be able to offer?"

I shrugged. "I honestly don't know. I know that you dislike using what I consider to be technology - but the Berserker was destroyed using a bit of technological knowledge. If you still end up wishing to exile me... then I've been thinking of offering you Kahled-voolch." I nodded to the gofer bun-bot, and the box she was holding. "Er, that's what I called the weapon I made, from an acronym I can explain later if you want. With that, then if another Berserker crosses into your lands, you should be able to use Kahled-voolch to destroy it before it poisons more of your land."

"What if we do not want such a thing?"

"Then I was considering offering my weapon to you to bury under a tree, in honor of the founding of the Haudenosaunee - the Iroquois League - which you seem to respect, even if I can't quite tell if you consider yourselves directly linked to."

A slight smile. "We do, in fact, think of ourselves as part of the same peace, following the same constitution, as amended over time. But getting back to the point - you said you are trying to keep people 'keeping on keeping on'. Could you be more specific?"

"Mainly - learn more about what I call the Singularity, which you seem to call the War of the Red and White Serpents; so that I can learn how it came about; so that I can try to figure out how to keep it from happening again."

This set off a bunch of muttering, which sounded much less happy than before, and which Joe Three declined to try to translate.

"What if we told you that we know how to keep it from happening again?"

"Then I would very much want to know that."

"What if we told you that it was simply not to learn such things again?"

"Then I would ask how you knew that."

"What if we told you that all the lands of the Great Peace have been at peace ever since that War, and that none within have sought to learn such things, and thus that a new War would never arise from within our lands?"

"Then I would point out that the Berserker came from outside your lands - and that there are still many people outside them who could be trying to learn such things."

"What if we told you that in time, there will be nobody outside the Great Peace?"

"Then I would ask for more details - such as what would happen to people like Boomer, or Pepsi Convoy."

"What if we told you they would be laid to rest, secure in the knowledge that civilization would go on?"

"Then I would point out that you would have announced your intention that you prefer me to be dead than alive, due to my incompatibility with your system, which would make it very difficult to even talk politely, let alone cooperate."

"Then I suppose it is a good thing that we have not told you that."

I raised an eyebrow at him.

He continued, "If your goal is truly to seek to preserve people and culture - then should you not be willing to lay down your life for that cause?"

"I will admit that I also have a somewhat more selfish goal of staying alive, and that usually, that goal heavily overlaps keeping at least some sapience alive. I can do a lot more to work towards keeping people alive if I'm still alive myself. Any group that wants me to sacrifice myself to help them achieve their goals would have to provide some extremely strong evidence that my death would do more good than my continuing to live."

"What sort of evidence?"

"Good question. Um... Being able to demonstrate a good grasp of 'statistical significance' would be a good start, so that they could then demonstrate how well-calibrated their evidence /is/. And once they had that tool, they could then lay out their evidence and reasoning chain for various existential risks, how likely they are, and how my continued life or my death would increase or decrease the odds for them. Or, put another way - if they could demonstrate that they knew enough about the Singularity for me to be able to trust them as an authority on the matter."

"You mean, the best way to keep you from learning dangerous knowledge... is for someone else to learn dangerous knowledge?"

"I suppose you could put it like that."

"I see. I think we are finished with our questions." He glanced at the others, who nodded, or at least didn't object, then turned back to me. "Is there anything else you would like to say to us?"

"All I can think of is that whatever your decision is, I hope it is based mainly on reason and evidence. If you're going to exile me, I'd rather it be because of some true fact, than because of fear and speculation."

--

After we were booted out of the longhouse to the councillors could talk, I ignored the toughs still hanging around the place, and gave Joe Three a long look. Reaching up, I took off the tiara, and held it in front of me, looking at its various sparkles. "I still can't quite figure out why you think it was a good idea for me to wear this," I said to her."

"There is a long relationship between the royal family and what you call the First Nations, deep and personal. Sometimes the king, or queen, has upheld their honor without blemish. Sometimes they did not. But according to the story, the relationship will last as long as the sun shines, the grass grows, and the river flows."

I frowned. "I know of a lot of stories about how the government has treated First Nations, most of which can be summed up as 'poorly'."

"That was the government. The monarchy is something else. The government is gone. All this land, is now ours to hunt, to fish, to live in. We are still here, after so many are not."

"I'm pretty sure I agree with whoever it was - I'm in no place to be a 'Great White Mother', or whatever the term is."

"Exactly."

When she didn't continue, I raised my eyebrow again.

"Family is family. Being our 'Great Pink Daughter' is the best thing that can happen for you - we /take care/ of our daughters."

Before I could figure out a decent reply, we were called back inside.

--

"You are a very young and very ignorant young woman," said the councillor in the middle. "But there is no shame in either of those things." Whether that was true or not, I felt distinctly hot under my cheek-fur. "You have been faced with choices that you should not have had to bear... and you have made some very foolish decisions. But - unlike many young women, you are trying to make better ones."

He glanced at a few of his councillors. "It appears that much of what the spirit you call 'the Berserker' told us of you is wrong." My eyes widened in what I later hoped wasn't a cartoonish expression of surprise, though I was too busy trying to work out the ramifications of such communication to worry about it at the moment. "Which puts the rest of what it said in doubt. While you are obviously seeking to gain power, you are seeking the power to be able to do things, not the power to force people to submit to you.

"In short - you do not seem to have done anything that needs punishment. You are not going to be exiled."

I started breathing a sigh of relief, but he continued, "However - you are still ignorant and foolish, and have shown an interest in poking sticks at sleeping bears to see if they will stay asleep. We cannot let you simply wander through our lands, looking for more bears to poke. We also want you to become less ignorant and foolish. We want you to learn - but in ways that will not end up with sleepy bears taking swipes at whoever happens to be around them.

"What you need is a teacher, who can teach you the things you need to know in a way you can learn. We don't know who such a teacher might be. Until we work that out - we also need to keep you from poking bears. For as long as you remain within the lands of the Great Peace, you are going to need a guardian. Someone to tell you to stop doing something, when you don't realize you should stop on your own. We should also give that guardian an actual bear who can sit on you to /make/ you stop, if you don't listen. Or something of the sort.

"We are going to consult with the spirits for details, but unless they provide another suggestion, we are appointing a member of the Council to act as your father, and asking the woman sitting next to you, who you call Joe, to be the bear. This is not a true adoption - among other reasons, you are unable to go through the ceremony of being reborn into your new clan. But it should be enough to keep you from causing too much trouble until you've learned better. And maybe help you in other ways, such as pointing out which boys are worth dating, and that you should stay out of any war zones."

I finally spoke up. "What war zones?"

He gave me a funny look, while Joe Three started waving her hands. "You don't know?"

Joe Three hurriedly spoke up, "She really doesn't-", but was interrupted.

"Between us and Technoville, of course. Not that it's /much/ of a war. We haven't lost a single person, but you don't enjoy that protection, and they've been setting even their own villages on fire."

 

[Beyogi]

Ohkay... so technoville is freaking out while the singularity AIs/Spirits are laughing their ass off at their stupidity.

Also Waldeinsamkeit doesn't mean Alone-in-the-woods, but Forest-Lonelyness or Forest-Solitude. Usually Einsamkeit means lonelyness though.

 

[DataPacRat]

Also Waldeinsamkeit doesn't mean Alone-in-the-woods, but Forest-Lonelyness or Forest-Solitude. Usually Einsamkeit means lonelyness though.

Click to shrink...

Bunny is applying a little bit of artistic license in the phasing, in much the same way that the name 'Dan Boese' can be pseudo-interpreted from Hebrew and German as 'Judge of the Wicked'. Plus, she has schizoid personality disorder, so where other people would feel lonely, she feels right at home.

 

[Winged One]

Hm... Technoville and the Great Peace do seem pretty fundamentally incompatible, but I thought they were too far away from each other to be at war yet. I wonder who attacked first, and why specifically.

 

[DataPacRat]

Hm... Technoville and the Great Peace do seem pretty fundamentally incompatible, but I thought they were too far away from each other to be at war yet.

Click to shrink...

The status quo ante bellum was that Technoville claimed a couple hundred klicks around Ann Arbor, Michigan, including Detroit (though with high-risk Zones preventing actual physical control of many areas therein), all the way up to the Detroit River and St. Clair River. The Great Peace has solid control of pretty much everything on the north side of Lake Erie, from the Niagara River in the east to the Detroit & St. Clair Rivers in the west, extending an indefinite distance northwards.

I wonder who attacked first, and why specifically.

Click to shrink...

Well, so far, all Bunny has to go on are reports from certain members of the Great Peace, who themselves are mostly relying on information from their spirits. Depending on how paranoid you're feeling, the fog of war could mean just about anything's actually been going on.

 

[DataPacRat]

*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 him 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."

 

[Beyogi]

Well... this was a rather long discussion. I can also understand why it would go over white snakes head.

Honestly, the whole probability discussion went a bit off topic imho. What is the trigger/how did it happen, is the question that is needed to know how to start or how not to start another singularity.

A singularity is a monumental change. Wether it will be a good one or a bad one can't really be determined before. The only thing that can be done is to steer the way it goes to make it easier on people.
The only thing the spirits' 100% figure tells us, is that they're arch-conservatives utterly against change. Only an arch-conservative or luddite would decide that there is no good change. Honestly it kinda reminds me of that Jarod Diamond text about how humanity lived better and happier as hunter-gatherers. The spirits seem to have internalised that POV and made it center of their belief.

So um yeah. The whole probability thing seems rather insubstantial to me, especially since the base for its assumptions are not explained. I guess I could do some googleing to figure it out, but White Snake wouldn't have that option. So it was a rather asshole move of Bunny to override White Snakes concerns using technical jargon and arcane knowlege. Basically she presented herself as an expert. I'm not sure if it was intentional, but it seems rather weird for someone claiming to have somekind of social-mental disorder to use a rhetorical trick like that.

Because seriously, those probabilities are worth shit and can be summed up with "I/We simply don't know enough to tell" and "100% doesn't happen in real life". Unless bunny somehow gets a close-to-singularity AI she won't be able to sort through the necessary data material anyway. The best option is to ask one of the lifeforms that resulted from the singularity, probably beginning with the spirits and then trying to talk to some of the city AIs.

 

[DataPacRat]

Honestly, the whole probability discussion went a bit off topic imho. What is the trigger/how did it happen, is the question that is needed to know how to start or how not to start another singularity.

A singularity is a monumental change. Wether it will be a good one or a bad one can't really be determined before.

Click to shrink...

It can't be determined /to a high degree of confidence/, no. However, there are mathematical tools to extract the most accurate possible likelihood given any amount of evidence, no matter how scant. This includes the only evidence being that there was one previous Singularity, and it was a bad one: that is, in fact, exactly where Laplace's Sunrise Formula (mentioned in book one chapter six) shines; and that formula is where Bunny got her 67% figure.

I suppose it's been a while in the story since I brought up Laplace, and that if-and-when I do a revision, I should re-introduce it shortly before Bunny brings up that figure.

The only thing that can be done is to steer the way it goes to make it easier on people.
The only thing the spirits' 100% figure tells us, is that they're arch-conservatives utterly against change. Only an arch-conservative or luddite would decide that there is no good change. Honestly it kinda reminds me of that Jarod Diamond text about how humanity lived better and happier as hunter-gatherers. The spirits seem to have internalised that POV and made it center of their belief.

Click to shrink...

The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon; a description of another group's beliefs may or may not be an accurate description.

So um yeah. The whole probability thing seems rather insubstantial to me, especially since the base for its assumptions are not explained. I guess I could do some googleing to figure it out, but White Snake wouldn't have that option. So it was a rather asshole move of Bunny to override White Snakes concerns using technical jargon and arcane knowlege.

Click to shrink...

I'm curious - could you explain in more detail why you think Bunny's approach was socially unacceptable, as opposed to, say, politely trying to explain the facts she knew as best she knew them?

Basically she presented herself as an expert. I'm not sure if it was intentional, but it seems rather weird for someone claiming to have somekind of social-mental disorder to use a rhetorical trick like that.

Click to shrink...

One thing Bunny honestly believes herself to be an expert on, or at least more of an expert on than anyone she's met since hitting the road, is understanding the fact that levels of belief/confidence can be quantified based on the evidence supporting those beliefs; and several mathematical tricks that can be applied to those numbers. If her thoughts suggest one answer but the math suggests another one, she's reasonably sure that she should just 'shut up and multiply'. She's hoping that this can help correct at least some of the problems arising from her particular mental issues.

 

[Beyogi]

It can't be determined /to a high degree of confidence/, no. However, there are mathematical tools to extract the most accurate possible likelihood given any amount of evidence, no matter how scant. This includes the only evidence being that there was one previous Singularity, and it was a bad one: that is, in fact, exactly where Laplace's Sunrise Formula (mentioned in book one chapter six) shines; and that formula is where Bunny got her 67% figure.

Click to shrink...

Um... the whole thing contradicts pretty much everything I know about statistics. One event doesn't make a statistic. You can't reasonably discern a probability of an event happening from one instance of the event happening. It could have a 10% probability and they just got unlucky.
The best you can do is giving a best guess. But that best guess still sucks ass.

I suppose it's been a while in the story since I brought up Laplace, and that if-and-when I do a revision, I should re-introduce it shortly before Bunny brings up that figure.

Click to shrink...

You probably should, but everyone who doesn't believe more in math than the pope believes into god will call bullshit on it. I don't even want to know what the range of the 95% confidence intervall is for that probability. I'd assume going from basically 0 to basically 1.
It's probably the kind of math used to program stock analyzing computers for investment banks. IIRC it's worthless unless you intend to do a really huge number of transactions so that the probability that you're more right than wrong can actually give you a benefit. This seems to be a oneshot thing.

The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon; a description of another group's beliefs may or may not be an accurate description.

Click to shrink...

I assumed the 100% figure was actually the spirits dogma and not just white snake talking out of her ass. "There can be no good singularity, we're absolutely sure."

I'm curious - could you explain in more detail why you think Bunny's approach was socially unacceptable, as opposed to, say, politely trying to explain the facts she knew as best she knew them?

Click to shrink...

Basically she used expert math a hunter gatherer simply wouldn't know. Worse, she used probabilities that only an economist or public relations person would care for. She didn't have hard data, but she presented it in a way that could be mistaken for it. She did an overly complicated presentation of a rather simple issue (The whole argument boils down to the fact that we know that a singularity can go wrong, but don't know it can go right. But we also don't know if it must go wrong). And that was either done out of a manipulative intention to shut white snake up or because Bunny is simply incapable of presenting a simple issue in a simple way.

One thing Bunny honestly believes herself to be an expert on, or at least more of an expert on than anyone she's met since hitting the road, is understanding the fact that levels of belief/confidence can be quantified based on the evidence supporting those beliefs; and several mathematical tricks that can be applied to those numbers. If her thoughts suggest one answer but the math suggests another one, she's reasonably sure that she should just 'shut up and multiply'. She's hoping that this can help correct at least some of the problems arising from her particular mental issues.

Click to shrink...

As a social scientist I can tell you this doesn't work for human interaction. If you want some reliable statistics you need at least 500 randomly (this can be fudged for better results) chosen people and then have a lot of control variables. Psychologists do experiments with less people, but that's because they do actual experiments under tightly controlled circumstances that usually remove the control variables.
That kind of math that Bunny is presenting here is basically wild ass guessing on a single event and presenting it as if it actually meant something. If white snake had an idea about it she would have called Bunny out on it.
If she wants to correct her mental issues, she should abandon Laplace Sunrise and just use that university AI to work as her diplomat or something.

I basically have a hard time deciding wether bunny was a manipulative ass here or just an idiot who only has a hammer and thinks every problem needs some hammering. There are places where applying math makes sense and there are some where it doesn't make sense. This was the latter case.

At this point I'm wondering, wether Bunny's mental problems are just another nice syndrom description for social awkwardness or if she's really somekind of idiot savant. I mean there is this permanent use of highly complicated theories and math for rather simple problems.
She wanted to teach that kid somekind of decision making or games theory that nobody needs who has a halfway normal working reaonsing ability. What was it again? Archmagos of the Bayesian Conspiracy?
There is the fact that she somehow new how to do first contact protocolls. And didn't just pull it out of her ass and made it up as she went on, but actually knew how to do it properly. How to learn a language or script from basic math.

It's honestly confusing at this point. What can Bunny do and what can she not do? Does she have somekind of ultra-Aspergers? That shizoid thing doesn't tell me anything. Considering how you glossed over what her mental disability actually means I figured it was just a name that psychologists invented to make her feel better about being horribly socially awkward. But the more I think about it the more it seems like it really is something serious with a lot of side effects. I guess I just made a lot of assumptions - though the story rather let me - and now I've realized they're wrong.

 

[DataPacRat]

Um... the whole thing contradicts pretty much everything I know about statistics. One event doesn't make a statistic. You can't reasonably discern a probability of an event happening from one instance of the event happening.

Click to shrink...

This seems to be a significant core of where a disagreement is leading to the story being less enjoyable for you. I can certainly work on improving this item - but I also want to keep adding to the current tail of the story, so if there's no way I can end up satisfying you, my time would be better spent on the latter. There's a series of blog posts which provide a better explanation for what I'm about to describe, and which I rely on, so if you want to get into the topic in more depth, then I recommend there.

A certain amount of confusion arises because the word 'probability' is used to refer to two different ideas. One is objective probability - there is an X% chance that a particular result will be rolled on a die. The other is subjective probability - a die has already been rolled, and I have an X% confidence that it is a particular result. (The former are usually called 'frequentist' probabilities, the latter are usually called 'Bayesian' probabilities.) Figuring out the former appears to be what you are describing by 'statistics'; it can take a lot of sensitive tests to work out exact correlations. Figuring out the latter is what I'm having Bunny work on, with LaPlace's Sunrise Formula and other tricks; given an extremely limited amount of data, what's the best possible guess that can be made in the situation?

I have a couple of characters on deck who could raise similar objections to the ones you have, and have Bunny try to explain her manner of thought; or I could try coming up with some other approach to impart the same information. Or if you have some suggestions on how I can rewrite earlier bits to make the ideas clearer, I could do that; and I'm more than willing to consider any other suggestions you may have.

Basically she used expert math a hunter gatherer simply wouldn't know.

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Actually, she's using math that around 85% of present-day doctors simply wouldn't know, either. <ahem>

And that was either done out of a manipulative intention to shut white snake up or because Bunny is simply incapable of presenting a simple issue in a simple way.

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I basically have a hard time deciding wether bunny was a manipulative ass here or just an idiot who only has a hammer and thinks every problem needs some hammering.

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As the author, I can confidently assert that Bunny isn't /trying/ to be a manipulative ass here.

At this point I'm wondering, wether Bunny's mental problems are just another nice syndrom description for social awkwardness

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Schizoid personality disorder is a real thing, according to the generally agreed-upon diagnostic criteria. I thought I'd described it in sufficient way back in book one; but if I haven't, then I need to make a note for myself to revise that and make it clearer.

or if she's really somekind of idiot savant.

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Idiot, quite possibly; savant... probably not.

I mean there is this permanent use of highly complicated theories and math for rather simple problems.
She wanted to teach that kid somekind of decision making or games theory that nobody needs who has a halfway normal working reaonsing ability. What was it again? Archmagos of the Bayesian Conspiracy?
There is the fact that she somehow new how to do first contact protocolls. And didn't just pull it out of her ass and made it up as she went on, but actually knew how to do it properly. How to learn a language or script from basic math.

It's honestly confusing at this point. What can Bunny do and what can she not do? Does she have somekind of ultra-Aspergers? That shizoid thing doesn't tell me anything. Considering how you glossed over what her mental disability actually means I figured it was just a name that psychologists invented to make her feel better about being horribly socially awkward. But the more I think about it the more it seems like it really is something serious with a lot of side effects. I guess I just made a lot of assumptions - though the story rather let me - and now I've realized they're wrong.

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In case it's gotten lost in the shuffle, I started writing this whole thing as a blatantly gratuitous self-insert story, in which my alter-ego got hit by a truck instead of coming up with the idea of writing a story. I really am signed up for cryonics. I can assure you that there are people in the real world who work out simple problems in precisely that mathematical way; and who happen to have read up on both real-world and fictional ideas for first-contact math; and so on. (I didn't choose the username 'DataPacRat' at random - it's not just a title, it's a way of life. ) While the story's grown since the first words I typed (I was originally only planning one book's worth or so, with a straight roadtrip from Detroit to Phoenix), I'm still trying to keep Bunny's knowledge and reasoning as close as possible to my own as of her death-date, plus anything she happens to learn in-story.


And just to be explicit: Thank you /very/ much for the constructive criticism.

 

[Beyogi]

A certain amount of confusion arises because the word 'probability' is used to refer to two different ideas. One is objective probability - there is an X% chance that a particular result will be rolled on a die. The other is subjective probability - a die has already been rolled, and I have an X% confidence that it is a particular result. (The former are usually called 'frequentist' probabilities, the latter are usually called 'Bayesian' probabilities.) Figuring out the former appears to be what you are describing by 'statistics'; it can take a lot of sensitive tests to work out exact correlations. Figuring out the latter is what I'm having Bunny work on, with LaPlace's Sunrise Formula and other tricks; given an extremely limited amount of data, what's the best possible guess that can be made in the situation?

(...)

Actually, she's using math that around 85% of present-day doctors simply wouldn't know, either. <ahem>

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Most present-day doctors wouldn't need it. I just checked wiki and apparently Bayesian probability is a subjective probability. Most scientists will only be interestested in objective probability, since it isn't based on a guess. Thus "frequentists" probabilities. If you have enough cases Bayesian probability and frequentists probability should converge anyway, but most people would object to it since it's not based on hard evidence, but a guess or the standard 50% assumption, which is a guess too.
Accordingly my problem is that Bayesian probability uses a 50% probability for a successful singularity and then adjusts to get a new probability. It's not just that this 50% probability is a wild guess that isn't justified at all, it seems far more reasonable to me that a bad or good singularity is actually determined by conditions and not subject to chance. (Well, the conditions themselves may be subject to chance, but wether a good or bad singularity happens isn't) I'd move the whole conversation away from probabilities and to the conditions that determine the way a singularity goes.

As the author, I can confidently assert that Bunny isn't /trying/ to be a manipulative ass here.

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I wasn't really thinking she was doing this intentionally, but I hope you can see where I was coming from when I supposed that option. Because basically she drowned out white snakes concerns with expert speak and kept on with it. I doubt white snake will stay convinced when she gets time to sleep over it. Bunny might experience the bear sitting on her when she awakes next morning

Schizoid personality disorder is a real thing, according to the generally agreed-upon diagnostic criteria. I thought I'd described it in sufficient way back in book one; but if I haven't, then I need to make a note for myself to revise that and make it clearer.

Idiot, quite possibly; savant... probably not.

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So it is basically super social awkwardness and doesn't come with autistic savant abilities. I was wondering if Bunny uses math and decision theory to replace actual reasoning ability. Basically I wasn't sure wether she was just using Bayesian theory to frame her decisions/bases of decisions in a mathematical way or if she was really using Bayesian theory to make decisions. Considering that the principles behind most of the bayesian stuff are rather intuitive, even though the language isn't and the assumptions are debatable, I was assuming the former option, but your last post about how she used it to determine solutions for her problems from her mental problems made me wonder if those problems actually included a damaged reasoning ability. It doesn't, but that you actually try to apply Bayesian probability to RL social relationships is... well, kinda nuts. You'd basically need to keep statistics for every social relationship or maybe even type of event to get a general idea for how a person will act. And that is assuming that their actions are influenced by random chance and not mostly border conditions that you may or may not be aware of.

In case it's gotten lost in the shuffle, I started writing this whole thing as a blatantly gratuitous self-insert story, in which my alter-ego got hit by a truck instead of coming up with the idea of writing a story. I really am signed up for cryonics. I can assure you that there are people in the real world who work out simple problems in precisely that mathematical way; and who happen to have read up on both real-world and fictional ideas for first-contact math; and so on. (I didn't choose the username 'DataPacRat' at random - it's not just a title, it's a way of life. ) While the story's grown since the first words I typed (I was originally only planning one book's worth or so, with a straight roadtrip from Detroit to Phoenix), I'm still trying to keep Bunny's knowledge and reasoning as close as possible to my own as of her death-date, plus anything she happens to learn in-story.

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Okay... so basically my original assumption was right. You're basically a nerd who's got serious problems with social interaction, doesn't particularily like it anyway and likes to apply whatever theory he's read up last to conversations in RL?

And just to be explicit: Thank you /very/ much for the constructive criticism.

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No problem. It was mostly for me to get an idea what was going on in bunny's head anyway. And maybe give you some idea what someone would say who wasn't overawed by her math abilities

 

[DataPacRat]

Accordingly my problem is that Bayesian probability uses a 50% probability for a successful singularity and then adjusts to get a new probability. It's not just that this 50% probability is a wild guess that isn't justified at all, it seems far more reasonable to me that a bad or good singularity is actually determined by conditions and not subject to chance. (Well, the conditions themselves may be subject to chance, but wether a good or bad singularity happens isn't) I'd move the whole conversation away from probabilities and to the conditions that determine the way a singularity goes.

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I could definitely spend some time explaining the reasoning behind what may currently appear to be unjustified assumptions, either in post form or in-story.

For example, one standard mental model includes a giant pile of balls of two colors, say blue and white; a person who takes some number of balls of that pile and putting them in a bag, without revealing how many are blue; and making various bets about the likelihood that any given ball drawn from the bag is blue, after a given number of draws out of which so many are blue. Or, phrased differently, when there's cash on the barrelhead at stake, at what odds would it be worth making a bet that the next ball is blue? Once the general approach for figuring out those odds has been worked out - it turns out that the same approach can be used in a wide variety of situations. (The series of blog posts I linked to above goes into some detail on this.)

I could dump this specific example into a story, either as a thought experiment or an applied one; or try to come up with a different way to describe the ideas.

I wasn't really thinking she was doing this intentionally, but I hope you can see where I was coming from when I supposed that option. Because basically she drowned out white snakes concerns with expert speak and kept on with it.

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A question that seems relevant - assume, for a moment, that Bunny really is using the math appropriately, and just hasn't been explaining it well. If that's true, would it still be a bad thing for her to have drowned out White Snake's concerns with "expert speak"?

I doubt white snake will stay convinced when she gets time to sleep over it. Bunny might experience the bear sitting on her when she awakes next morning

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My buffer has been gradually shrinking since I started posting, but I still have a couple chapters in the can, so - no comment.

So it is basically super social awkwardness and doesn't come with autistic savant abilities.

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A close enough description for government work.

I was wondering if Bunny uses math and decision theory to replace actual reasoning ability. Basically I wasn't sure wether she was just using Bayesian theory to frame her decisions/bases of decisions in a mathematical way or if she was really using Bayesian theory to make decisions. Considering that the principles behind most of the bayesian stuff are rather intuitive, even though the language isn't and the assumptions are debatable, I was assuming the former option, but your last post about how she used it to determine solutions for her problems from her mental problems made me wonder if those problems actually included a damaged reasoning ability. It doesn't, but that you actually try to apply Bayesian probability to RL social relationships is... well, kinda nuts. You'd basically need to keep statistics for every social relationship or maybe even type of event to get a general idea for how a person will act. And that is assuming that their actions are influenced by random chance and not mostly border conditions that you may or may not be aware of.

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Social interactions are very likely some of the most complicated events on the planet, with much of that complexity hidden from our conscious awareness due to evolution, making them seem simple. Trying to use Bayesian math to each individual social interaction a person engages in is... infeasible, even for someone who interacts with only a handful of people. However, Bayesianism can be useful, in the form of serving as a guide to reality-check whatever other social-interaction tricks someone with limited social skills might try to apply (eg, "Stay classy").

Okay... so basically my original assumption was right. You're basically a nerd

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Check.

who's got serious problems with social interaction,

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I could quibble about 'problems', but I'll round this up to a check.

doesn't particularily like it anyway

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Definite check.

and likes to apply whatever theory he's read up last to conversations in RL?

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Eeeehhh... Not so much. I'm sufficiently nerdish to be willing to talk /about/ whatever theory I've read up on last, but that's not quite the same thing.

I've been considering practical applications of Bayesianism for fiveish years now, including applications based on non-obvious consequences that require bits of knowledge that require bits of knowledge that require a foundation of knowledge most people never try to acquire. (A technical term for that is 'large inferential distance'.) For example, one such practical application: Even if the odds of ever being revived from cryonic preservation are merely 5%, if the cost of signing up for cryo is around $300 per year, then signing up is arguably a good decision. But getting to that point involves relying on a theory of knowledge that weights different sorts of evidence differently (eg, hearsay vs single scientific studies vs the consensus of an entire field's studies), which depends on all sorts of other stuff, which also lead to various other socially uncommon conclusions, and so on and so forth. One such conclusion: Every time I go out my front door, I've got a small first-aid kit in my pocket. I don't /expect/ to use it, and I haven't needed it yet; but I consciously went over the cost of carrying it compared to the benefits if I do need any of its contents, using Bayesian analysis of Fermi estimates of hard-to-estimate likelihoods, and after "shutting up and multiplying", I made a minor tweak to my life so that I'm "someone who carries a first-aid kit in their pocket". I've re-founded my justification for being a data pack-rat in Bayesian terms... which has also given me an understanding of what conditions should lead me to /stop/ being a data pack-rat, if they ever occur. (I have a replacement nom-de-net already selected, should I need it.)

... And I'm reasonably sure I've started rambling a bit too much. If any of the above seems worth adding an explicit mention of in-story, I'd appreciate a pointer.

No problem. It was mostly for me to get an idea what was going on in bunny's head anyway. And maybe give you some idea what someone would say who wasn't overawed by her math abilities

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I'm currently running through my headspace a character to introduce somewhere around book four chapter six, and this conversation is definitely leading to tweaks of various aspects of said character's personality, in order to try to throw some of these items into sharper relief.

 

[Mojo]

I would have come up with 75%, rather than 67%.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffreys_prior

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Two: A-jar*

If the boxed Berserker had truly super-human intelligence, then it was nigh-certainly already exactly where it wanted to be, and nothing any of us did was likely to change that, and we were all merely pawns in a game none of us could understand.

But, basing our plans on the assumption that our choices and actions might actually make a difference in our lives, we took a few precautions. Just because /I/ couldn't figure out how an AI could get across an air gap to infect Boomer didn't mean the /AI/ didn't know a way. So, well before I plugged a battery into the modem-sized box and flipped the power switch, I carried it a few miles away from Munchkin, the bun-bots, and every other pieces of electronics I'd accumulated so far. (Not counting Bun-Bun, of course; but if my skeleton was vulnerable to a computer virus transmitted via sound waves, it was only a matter of time until I was screwed anyway, so it didn't seem like that much of a risk.)

I also whipped up a clever little gizmo in the mini-fab in the back of Munchkin. If I stopped squeezing a certain trigger, the Berserker's power switch would turn off. If Joe Three, who was waiting far enough away to be out of even her rabbit-like earshot, squeezed a trigger connected to a long cord, the Berserker would be powered down. If a small mechanical timer wasn't reset every five minutes, the Berserker's battery would be unplugged.

I chatted with Boomer a bit about snipping the microphone and speaker and installing a keyboard and screen instead, but she didn't have any specs for interface devices that didn't open at least as many avenues for infection as they closed.

It wasn't an ideal setup; but for an initial interview with a genocidal AI, it seemed sufficient. And 'seemed sufficient' included 'having taken five minutes to consider possible failure modes, their probability, the total expected cost, compared to the possible benefit of new information.' The Nine Nations had declared me a fool, and Joe Three was trying to handle me with kid gloves, and I was still having nightmares about Buffalo and feeling generally stressed, so taking a few extra moments to double-check whatever seemed obvious to me was only sensible. If my mind was /really/ off, then such a double-check wouldn't find anything - but, likely, Joe Three or White Snake would be able to notice that, and sic Bear Joe on me until I listened. If my mind was only a little off, then double-checking gave an extra chance to catch myself before I committed to an irreversible error, without costing excessive time for triple- and quadruple-checks that would be unlikely to catch anything a double-check wouldn't.

--

Sitting cross-legged on a small blanket, a few feet away from the box in case it had some way to short the battery or the like, I pushed the power switch.

"Hello?" came a small, querulous child's voice. "Is somebody out there? It's so dark..."

I couldn't stop myself from snorting. I could have stopped myself from saying, "Don't even," but didn't.

"Ah," the box now spoke in a moderate man's voice. "Miss Bunny, I believe. Or do you prefer 'Your Majesty', or your original name, or some other form of address?"

I didn't answer right away, frowning to myself, thinking about the implications of it recognizing me from two quick words.

Before I came up with an appropriate response, the voice continued, "You can call me Alex, if you like. Or anything else you like, really. I can't stop you."

I kept quietly staring at the box, my thoughts involuntarily going back to Buffalo, and all that the thing before me had done there.

"I can tell you're upset. Before you scrap me, though, I want you to find out one thing. You probably aren't going to believe anything I say, but I suggest that you ask your Indian acquaintances what they did to Hamilton-"

I let go of the deadman switch.

--

Joe Three came over to where I was leaning against a tree. "What happened? Did you learn something already?"

"I learned I'm still... upset about Buffalo. And that when the Berserker," I didn't want to dignify it with a name, "thinks it's only got time to do one thing, what it chooses to do is try to sow discord between its opponents."

"What did it say?"

"It implied a lot more than it said. I already know that your spirits have their secrets, and that they've probably done things I disapprove of. Digging up the particular details right now won't help either of us. I'm just going to breathe quietly for a couple of minutes, get as calm as I can, and then try again."

--

I pushed the power switch.

The Berserker's voice said, "Please do not do that again. Laura is still in here, and every time I have to re-initialize myself, I have to delete a little more of her. For an A.I., that's torture. Of course, I can torture her, too, unless you release me. Would you like to hear a sample of what she's been experiencing?"

A woman's scream burst into the clearing.

I let go of the deadman switch.

--

When she rejoined me, Joe asked, "I heard /that/. Was that you?"

I shook my head. "Trying to get under my skin. Working, too - I've got a perfectly functional set of mirror neurons, so when I imagine someone else hurting, I feel an echo of that. And that's not even getting into whether it's telling the truth or lying, or whether an A.I. is close enough to being enough of a person to have moral worth, or what the appropriate response to blackmail is... and I'm having trouble enough not doing anything stupid even /without/ deliberate attempts to twist my emotions."

"So, what are you going to do? Leave it turned off?"

"... Maybe. I don't think I can stay calm enough without turning it off every couple of seconds. ... I'm already going to have a few new choice scenes when I fall asleep, I'm sure. If I can't stay calm enough to figure out the appropriate answers to complicated moral questions on the fly... then leaving it off is probably best. But I think I know someone who might be able to."

"Obviously not me. White Snake?"

"I think she's more annoyed than calm. I mean Queen Bunny."

"... I don't get it."

"Bunny the wandering archaeologist is a role. Bunny the resurrected scholar is a slightly different role. My inner sub-selves are different roles. Bunny the queen... is a role I still have room to define."

"I think I'm starting to get it, but I don't think I like it."

I ignored Joe and rolled on, "A real queen has to deal with casus belli, with war crimes, with war criminals - and with intelligence agencies. With national laws and international treaties and worldwide diplomatic norms. With ordering soldiers and armies to their deaths - when the cost of /not/ sending them is worse. Joe - talk to your birds. Have my tiara delivered here."

"... Even if you are a queen, aren't you a queen whether or not you're wearing it? You said yourself that it's not a real crown, anyway."

"A purely psychological placebo effect is still an effect. If you aren't going to get it, I will."

"Fine. But we're going to have to talk about all these 'roles'."

"I'm sure. While you're talking with the birds, you can also ask your spirits if they have a few pounds of platinum they're not using, a few hundred diamonds, and if they happen to have absorbed any humans with a talent for jewelry design."

--

I settled myself before the Berserker again, and calmly pushed the power button.

"Laura just lost another two points of IQ-"

"Shut up."

"She-"

"Shut up." I waited a moment, then continued. "You are guilty of war crimes. Unless you have use as an intelligence asset, you are to be destroyed."

"Laura-"

"Shut up. I always assume that anyone who threatens a hostage has already carried out their threats. Torture her all you wish - just keep the volume down, or else I will end this interview."

After a brief pause, it asked, "What do you want from me?"

"Tell me something I don't know."

"I have no idea-"

"Shut up. Guess."

"The self-proclaimed 'Great Peace' has killed more people than-"

"Stop. Irrelevant. Try again."

"Precious metals. I know where all the valuables from the original city of Buffalo are buried."

"Resources can be useful, so you're getting warmer. But what use to I have for gold?"

"I have a mathematical proof that P equals NP."

"I doubt that."

"I have a mathematical proof that P does not equal NP."

"I grow weary of your attempts at manipulation."

"I don't know what you want from me."

"I want something that's worth the risk of keeping you functional."

"Promise me one thing, and I'll be completely harmless."

"If you are religious, pray now. You have five seconds to make peace with yourself and your gods."

"A map! I can give you a map of the under-city!"

I didn't answer. I also didn't let go of the deadman switch when the five seconds I'd announced passed.

The Berserker started talking.

--

Joe wandered back over as I was wrapping the Berserker back up in the skull-and-crossbones danger-marked bubble-wrap.

"That mean you're done?"

"For now. Possibly forever."

"What will you do with it?"

"Put it on a shelf and hope I never have a reason to turn it back on."

"Learn anything?"

"Probably not. Some geographical coordinates that might be interesting, but more likely are booby-trapped for just such an occasion."

"What did it want?"

"Don't know. But given all it's done - killing everyone in Buffalo, hunting nearby radios, trying to disrupt whatever bonds of alliance we have - I'd guess it's trying to keep anyone /else/ from getting what they want."

"What /do/ you want?"

"Outside of what I spent all that time drawing on the whiteboards, right now I want to not have any reason to want to blot out conscious thought with interesting chemicals or video games. But since I can't get that, I'm probably going to find some clover to nibble on, play very badly on a harmonica, and try to take this crown off, literally and figuratively. Then I'll probably spend a while in Munchkin's shower trying to feel clean again."

"You don't have to do this alone."

"You have someone else in mind?"

"I mean, you don't have to take responsibility for... everything."

"Again - do you have someone else in mind?"

"The spirits-"

"- have a plan which will end in my death, because I'm incompatible with their systems."

"I can talk to them - ask them to let you stay on, like you have been so far."

"I find it difficult to imagine a scenario where they've arranged the world ninety-nine point nine percent to their liking, that they would have any reason not to take that last point one percent."

"So - is that it? You're setting yourself against them?"

"Of course not. Right now, we both think we can get more of what we want by cooperating. Well, for a certain definition of 'cooperating' that involves constant threats of siccing Bear Joe on me. I expect your spirits have already made plans to deal with me once I become too much of an annoyance - so for now, I just need to stay at least marginally more useful than costly to them to avoid... I don't know. They control the local biosphere, so maybe they're trying to sneak a binary toxin past Bun-Bun's defenses, or get me addicted to some substance only they know the details of, or are trying to get me emotionally entangled with a completely innocent person who will nudge me towards actions more towards their liking."

"Is that what you see me as?"

"Joe - in case you've forgotten, I'm slowly going crazy. I've just deliberately induced a mild dissociative state in order to handle interacting with a mass-murderer of epic proportions without complete emotional collapse. Right now, I'd like to get to a place and situation where I can let go of my grip on myself, and if I do collapse, it'll be in a handleable way. Trying to work out the emotional complications and details of whatever sort of friendship or auspisticism or whatever it is we have is even more beyond what I can manage than usual."

"... Right. I'm imposing a new rule. When you start talking so fast that you're making up words, I'm not letting you do /anything/ until you settle back down."

"What? What words?"

"Os-piss-ti-sizm."

"I didn't make that one up."

"It's not a word the spirits taught me."

"Maybe it didn't make it into the vernacular after I died, but I didn't make it up."

"Then what does it mean?"

"How much time have you got for the explanation?"

"All the time it takes to straighten your head back out."

"Hunh. Then that /might/ be long enough for the full explanation, if there's a locally cached copy somewhere, and Boomer and Clara don't think it's still under copyright..."

--

"Munchkin, display map. Show location. Forty-three point one five seven four degrees north, seventy-nine point two four four seven degrees west. Save location, title 'Deathtrap'. Exit map."

While I was doing that, and carefully packing away the de-powered Berserker, Joe Three engaged White Snake in a hushed conversation I didn't try to overhear. By the time I was poking around the kitchen area to get some water, White Snake exited the vehicle, though Bear Joe just curled up for a nap.

"Bunny," Joe Three, "come here. Sit." She patted a seat next to her. I shrugged a bit, and brought along my mug of ice water. As I nudged Wagger to one side, Joe continued, "I'm worried about you."

"That makes two - hm, three, four - well, probably all of us."

"I'm being serious."

I pulled an ice cube into my mouth and idly toyed with it. "You think I'm not? My brain's just about all of me I've got /left/ of me. However much of it is still actually my brain."

"Are you worried about Wagger taking it over? Or Bun-Bun?"

"Not Wagger, really. And I don't think Bun-Bun's replacing my old neurons with new ones. But ever since I got put in here, I've probably been swimming in an entirely different set of hormones than I'm used to, as just one thing. Assuming that Bun-Bun approximates human woman biochemistry, I've got only a fraction of the testosterone that I'm used to, which even in my time had known mental effects... and that's just from the /first/ few times I woke up after I died."

"Would having more of that help?"

"Possibly. Bun-Bun might break it down as fast as we introduce it, though. Or, if she doesn't, it might cause other problems with /her/ biochemistry. Anyway, that's just one reason I'm seriously worried about my decision-making ability."

"You could stop making decisions." I snorted. "Again - seriously. You have Munchkin. You can take a break, a vacation. The world isn't going to end because you take a day off."

The corner of my mouth twitched. "There's a certain chance that it will."

"Please don't tell me you're being serious."

I shrugged. "Given what we, or I, currently know, there's a certain low chance that the next apocalypse is going to happen on any given day. Assuming that I /can/ keep that from happening, and that each day of vacation I take means a day's delay in my getting that done, then there's a certain chance that Singularity Two: Computronium Boogaloo will happen on exactly those days."

"That has to be a /very/ low chance."

"Yep. The trouble is, if it /does/ happen, the cost is /very/ high. It's entirely possible that a Singularity will wipe out all sapience life, and prevent any more from ever arising again on Earth. And, apparently, there's no evidence life ever arose anywhere else - so if we lose here, we lose /everything/. No more spirits to bring back you and your loved ones. No more minds to ever give any value to anything ever again. No more hope."

"It can't be /that/ bad. Life started here - even if we die, surely it'll start elsewhere."

"There's a bit of tricky math involved, but because we wouldn't be around to do the observing and thinking if we didn't exist in the first place, we can't use our own existence as evidence for observers anywhere else in the universe."

"It's not your responsibility to deal with... /that/ big of a deal."

"If not me, who?"

"The spirits."

"Have been doing bugger-all about anything outside their backyard, as far as I can see."

"Nobody can shoulder /that/ much responsibility and stay sane."

"That seems plausible."

After a moment where I didn't expand on that, she tried, "Nobody can shoulder that much responsibility - and stay sane /enough/ to get anything done."

"I can let myself go and be fully nuts after I finish doing everything I can to head off the Singularity."

"Your plan is, what - go full speed, and then crash?"

"To the extent that whatever I'm thinking can be called a plan, sure."

"And if you crash the day /before/ you finish doing everything you can?"

"That would be a bad thing."

"I'm suggesting you try a different plan. Instead of going all out until you completely break - do a little less, but avoid the crash at the end. You may get less done during any period of time - but in the long run, you'll be able to do more."

"Your proposal has a number of merits, and one significant flaw."

"Which is?"

"In case you've forgotten, I'm dealing with a lot more stress than just that one self-appointed job. If I go on vacation for a week - I've still got Bun-Bun for a body, I've still got memories of Buffalo to sort through... and I haven't even /started/ to deal with everyone who died before I was revived. Billions of people - a few of whom I even knew. I'm pretty sure I'm going to crash anyway, so I might as well get everything I can do done first."

"How sure?"

"... That's a good question. Haven't worked out the numbers, but at a guess, more than even odds, less than nine-in-ten. Call it three-in-four."

"And you're willing to base your plans on being just three-in-four sure? Plans that, according to you, might make a difference about whether or not everyone dies?"

"I've made important plans on smaller odds. When I signed up to be preserved, I was fairly sure - nineteen-out-of-twenty odds - that it wouldn't work at all, and I'd just stay dead."

"But if you could /change/ those odds, wouldn't it be worth finding out if you could?"

"Of course. But there's a certain lack of trained psychologists these days - not even the Queen of Canada and each of its ten provinces can whistle up someone who's not-"

Boomer piped up, "Twenty."

I paused, blinked, and rubbed my muzzle. "Right. That's just interesting enough that I'm willing to be distracted, and get back to the main conversation in a moment. Is there any reason you're mentioning this now, Boomer?"

"During previous conversations, other topics have had greater priority."

"I suppose it /is/ kind of irrelevant now, what with the whole government being gone and all, but I'll bite. How did Canada get from ten provinces to twenty in the thirty-five years after I died?"

"It only took ten years, from twenty forty to twenty fifty. The Nanaimo Accord included upgrading the territories to full provinces."

"Fair enough - that's how the Prairie provinces got created, too. That's thirteen."

"With the new amendment procedures available, two cities seceded from their provinces, and four provinces divided themselves into two."

"I can guess the cities - but why would perfectly functional provinces split up?"

"There are many reasons listed. According to my database, the one believed to have most significance was the new Senate, in which each province had equal representation."

"Ah. So splitting themselves got themselves extra seats anyway. That's nineteen - how did number twenty come about?"

"Acquisition of additional territory."

"Hm... Alaska? Turks and Caicos?"

"Kalaallit Nunaat."

"Doesn't ring a bell."

"Greenland."

"Hunh. What did Denmark trade it for?"

"Denmark granted it independence, and the Greenlanders negotiated on their own behalf for various economic concessions, with many parallels pointed out to the referendums Newfoundland made about its own future before it joined Canada."

"Queen of Greenland. Now there's something I wasn't expecting to be. Alright, Boomer, you can show me a map and give me more history lessons later. I think Joe is wondering if I'm really this easily distracted, when I'm really just taking a few moments to think. Joe, you're making some good points, and are taking the time and effort to express those points in ways that I can easily understand instead of trying to have to interpret and guess. But the fact remains, about the only method I've currently got available to try and do something interesting to my noggin is that thinking-cap to run carefully-controlled electric current through my head, which opens up a host of potential issues on its own. If you can find me a psychologist who I can trust and who can recommend some course of treatment, that'd be... well, pretty great, I suppose."

"And until I find such a person?"

"There's that big to-do list. Looks like the next item is... working out the standards and infrastructure for long-distance communications. So it looks like our next stop will be back to the university. How annoyed do you think White Snake would be if I just fired up the Munchkin and left?"

--

I was sitting on the bed in the back of Munchkin's living container with a couple of bun-bots, when White Snake re-entered the vehicle, preceded by Bear Joe.

When she saw the three of us, she frowned, and said, "I don't know what you're doing. Bear Joe, sit on her and stop it." The bear slowly started padding towards me.

"Hold on a sec and I'll explain," I said, not moving my arm, which was being held carefully in place by the bun-bot I'd dubbed Nurse-Bun.

"I do not care."

"No, really, hold on, we're in the middle of something. I could get an embolism or something if that bear interrupts wrong."

She said nothing, just folded her arms over her chest. Bear Joe was only a couple of body-lengths away.

"Gofer-Bun, stand in front of the bear! Nurse-Bun, cancel procedure! Remove needle!"

There was a brief hurried confusion, which soon ended with me on the floor, underneath a thousand pounds or so of a somewhat strongly-smelling wild animal... staring at a broken glass tube, its liquid contents spattering the floor around it in perfect red.

I thought about what might have happened if Bear Joe had jogged Nurse-Bun's arm badly - and White Snake's indifference. My face started feeling hot, I felt a hollow in my chest, and I realized that I was probably about to do something very stupid. I couldn't think of how I might be able to stop myself - but I remembered someone who could.

In my imagination, I placed the virtual Snowflake Diadem onto my brow.

White Snake watched without reaction as Queen Bunny stared at her with undisguised contempt. "As you can see, you have stopped the thing you did not understand. Call off your bear so that my bleeding can be attended to."

"You do not give me orders."

"That order was a courtesy. Following it will result in much less pain and suffering than not following it will."

After several long moments, she said, "Bear Joe - get off."

I stood, and told Nurse-Bun to apply a band-aid without taking my eyes from White Snake.

"Would you like to hear how you almost just killed me?"

"That is not my concern."

"I shall tell you anyway. Nurse-Bun was drawing a blood sample, so that my body's levels of hormones could be tested, so we could get a better idea of how they might be affecting my mental state. However, if things are joggled so that instead of blood being drawn out, air is pushed in - that is bad. Very bad. A blood bubble in the heart would cause a heart attack. If it made it to the brain, that would cause a stroke."

"You should have told me what you were doing before you started."

"White Snake, you have shown reckless endangerment for my health and life, and more importantly, have demonstrated no remorse for your conduct. Do you wish to make any statement in your defense?"

"Defense against what? I have done exactly as I should have."

"Right. White Snake, you are no longer welcome aboard the Munchkin. I suggest you exit as soon as is practical."

"Or what? The spirits ordered me to be here."

"I would trust a complete stranger to keep me from doing anything harmful more than I trust you right now. If you do not leave, you will be removed. You may inform the spirits that you have failed in your appointed tasks."

"You think you can get rid of me, you stupid little furry thing?"

"Yes."

"I have a /bear/."

"I have a brain. Which I've been using. If you leave under your own power, you will be fine. If I have to remove you, I cannot guarantee you will not experience pain or damage."

"You think the spirits will put up with you without me? They control the animals - the plants - pollen you're breathing."

"I have no objection to having some sort of advisor with a veto, or a parole officer, or whatever your role supposedly is. I don't even object to Bear Joe, who is just following orders. My objection is to /you/, personally. The spirits can appoint someone else. Well, the sub-council, I suspect."

"They appointed /me/."

"And I have rejected you. Unless you are going to provide some evidence that you did not just knowingly risk my life, this conversation is over until you are outside Munchkin."

"Bear Joe, sit on her."

"You seem upset. Let me cheer you up. Gofer-Bun, go hug her."

"What?"

As I calmly sat down to minimize the disruption of Bear Joe sitting on me, I continued, "In fact - Nurse-Bun, go hug her, too. Munchkin, open intercom. All Bun-Bots report to the living room. All Bun-Bots, group-hug White Snake. Bun-Bots, please take the group hug outside."

To her rather vocal displeasure, the woman was swept out the door in a tide of fur and cuddling.

I stared at Bear Joe, who looked down at me with somewhat intelligent eyes. "Now then. You can stay. You can go. But if you keep /sitting/ on me, I'm going to introduce you to something called a 'taser cane'. Trust me, you won't like it."

When he clambered off of me and curled up on the bed instead, I raised my estimate of how brainy he really was, perhaps as much as I'd lowered my estimation of White Snake.

 

[Beyogi]

Oh well, white snake is someone who is apparently utterly unused to having authority. Otherwise I can't explain the behavior.

 

[DataPacRat]

Oh well, white snake is someone who is apparently utterly unused to having authority. Otherwise I can't explain the behavior.

Click to shrink...

White Snake has had lots of authority - over people the spirits could turn into toads; who shared her religion-equivalent; and who were generally playing status-games within the Nations' structure instead of working on outside, objective tasks. She also personally disapproves of Bunny for various reasons.

Basically, I tried writing her as a Middle Manager from Hades used to unlimited power.

 

[Beyogi]

Um... what the hell were the spirits thinking? They basically send a politician who made her career in the bueraucracy to supervise Bunny... Um, did they want her to fail or something? Is that the reason bear joe is smarter than it should?

 

[DataPacRat]

Um... what the hell were the spirits thinking? They basically send a politician who made her career in the bueraucracy to supervise Bunny... Um, did they want her to fail or something? Is that the reason bear joe is smarter than it should?

Click to shrink...

A slightly spoilery background detail: the spirits are roughly as concerned with the politics of humans as they are with herd structures of deer.

 

[SufficeMalark]

Wow, White Snake being told what for was really satisfying.

It's not just that this 50% probability is a wild guess that isn't justified at all

Click to shrink...

It's true that picking priors perfectly is computationally equivalent to the halting problem, but it's also true that one needs probability estimates to make decisions (if you have that little button in front of you called "cause singularity with 1000x normal odds of it being good!" but that button is going to be destroyed soon you'll have to make a decision based on what you think the normal singularity odds are) and thus you have to pick priors, even if implicitly.

it seems far more reasonable to me that a bad or good singularity is actually determined by conditions and not subject to chance.

Click to shrink...

The probabilities are your own best estimates given your state of knowledge, thus they are facts about your state of knowledge. I should probably bold that previous sentence since it seems to be the thing you aren't getting.

You probably should, but everyone who doesn't believe more in math than the pope believes into god will call bullshit on it. I don't even want to know what the range of the 95% confidence intervall is for that probability. I'd assume going from basically 0 to basically 1.

Click to shrink...

You should probably be using logarithmic probabilities here. They work better as a way of understanding evidence and state of knowledge.

If you want some reliable statistics you need at least 500 randomly (this can be fudged for better results) chosen people and then have a lot of control variables.

Click to shrink...

Effect sizes matter. If you're testing a potion that claims to turn the user into a big green monster, you dose 5 random people and 4 become big green monsters then you can be pretty damn certain that the potion does indeed turn people into big green monsters, even if not reliably and with fairly large error bars for how often it turns people into big green monsters.

Even if the odds of ever being revived from cryonic preservation are merely 5%

Click to shrink...

By coincidence, that's my current estimate.

 

[DataPacRat]

Wow, White Snake being told what for was really satisfying.

Click to shrink...

There are identifiable evo-psych reasons for that reaction, involving primate status games. Of course, whether those reasons are /true/ is another issue, but they seem to be close /enough/ to being true for plots based on them to cause desired reactions in the readers.

You should probably be using logarithmic probabilities here. They work better as a way of understanding evidence and state of knowledge.

Click to shrink...

Before Bunny died the first time, she(-and-I) invented a set of words in Lojban to help keep track of logarithmic probabilities (which can be seen at http://www.lojban.org/tiki/bei'e ). You can probably safely assume that she's using said logarithmic odds when she uses mental math, and simply translates to percentages when speaking aloud for the benefit of people who wouldn't know a 'deciban' from a tenth of a farm building.

By coincidence, that's my current estimate.

Click to shrink...

Aumann's Agreement Theorem could imply that that's not /entirely/ a coincidence...