Three Worlds Collide
Eliezer_Yudkowsky

"The kind of classic fifties-era first-contact story that Jonathan Swift might have written, if Jonathan Swift had had a background in game theory."
-- (Hugo nominee) Peter Watts, "In Praise of Baby-Eating"

"Three Worlds Collide is a story I wrote to illustrate some points on naturalistic metaethics and diverse other issues of rational conduct. It grew, as such things do, into a small novella. On publication, it proved widely popular and widely criticized. Be warned that the story, as it wrote itself, ended up containing some profanity and PG-13 content."

1) The Baby-Eating Aliens
2) War and/or Peace
3) The Super Happy People
4) Interlude with the Confessor
5) Three Worlds Decide
6) Normal Ending
7) True Ending
8) Atonement

http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/

The Baby-Eating Aliens (1/8)

21Eliezer_Yudkowsky30 January 2009 12:07PM
(Part 1 of 8 in "Three Worlds Collide")

This is a story of an impossible outcome, where AI never worked, molecular nanotechnology never worked, biotechnology only sort-of worked; and yet somehow humanity not only survived, but discovered a way to travel Faster-Than-Light: The past's Future.

Ships travel through the Alderson starlines, wormholes that appear near stars. The starline network is dense and unpredictable: more than a billion starlines lead away from Sol, but every world explored is so far away as to be outside the range of Earth's telescopes. Most colony worlds are located only a single jump away from Earth, which remains the center of the human universe.

From the colony system Huygens, the crew of the Giant Science Vessel Impossible Possible World have set out to investigate a starline that flared up with an unprecedented flux of Alderson force before subsiding. Arriving, the Impossible discovers the sparkling debris of a recent nova - and -

"ALIENS!"

Every head swung toward the Sensory console. But after that one cryptic outburst, the Lady Sensory didn't even look up from her console: her fingers were frantically twitching commands.

There was a strange moment of silence in the Command Conference while every listener thought the same two thoughts in rapid succession:

Is she nuts? You can't just say "Aliens!", leave it at that, and expect everyone to believe you. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence -

And then,

They came to look at the nova too!


In a situation like this, it befalls the Conference Chair to speak first.

"What? SHIT!" shouted Akon, who didn't realize until later that his words would be inscribed for all time in the annals of history. Akon swung around and looked frantically at the main display of the Command Conference. "Where are they?"

The Lady Sensory looked up from her console, fingers still twitching. "I - I don't know, I just picked up an incoming high-frequency signal - they're sending us enormous amounts of data, petabytes, I had to clear long-term memory and set up an automatic pipe or risk losing the whole -"

"Found them!" shouted the Lord Programmer. "I searched through our Greater Archive and turned up a program to look for anomalous energy sources near local starlines. It's from way back from the first days of exploration, but I managed to find an emulation program for -"

"Just show it!" Akon took a deep breath, trying to calm himself.

The main display swiftly scanned across fiery space and settled on... a set of windows into fire, the fire of space shattered by the nova, but then shattered again into triangular shards.

It took Akon a moment to realize that he was looking at an icosahedron of perfect mirrors.

Huh, thought Akon, they're lower-tech than us. Their own ship, the Impossible, was absorbing the vast quantities of local radiation and dumping it into their Alderson reactor; the mirror-shielding seemed a distinctly inferior solution. Unless that's what they want us to think...

"Deflectors!" shouted the Lord Pilot suddenly. "Should I put up deflectors?"

"Deflectors?" said Akon, startled.

The Pilot spoke very rapidly. "Sir, we use a self-sustaining Alderson reaction to power our starline jumps and our absorbing shields. That same reaction could be used to emit a directed beam that would snuff a similar reaction - the aliens are putting out their own Alderson emissions, they could snuff our absorbers at any time, and the nova ashes would roast us instantly - unless I configure a deflector -"

The Ship's Confessor spoke, then. "Have the aliens put up deflectors of their own?"

Akon's mind seemed to be moving very slowly, and yet the essential thoughts felt, somehow, obvious. "Pilot, set up the deflector program but don't activate it until I give the word. Sensory, drop everything else and tell me whether the aliens have put up their own deflectors."

Sensory looked up. Her fingers twitched only briefly through a few short commands. Then, "No," she said.

"Then I think," Akon said, though his spine felt frozen solid, "that we should not be the first to put this interaction on a... combative footing. The aliens have made a gesture of goodwill by leaving themselves vulnerable. We must reciprocate." Surely, no species would advance far enough to colonize space without understanding the logic of the Prisoner's Dilemma...

"You assume too much," said the Ship's Confessor. "They are aliens."

"Not much goodwill," said the Pilot. His fingers were twitching, not commands, but almost-commands, subvocal thoughts. "The aliens' Alderson reaction is weaker than ours by an order of magnitude. We could break any shield they could put up. Unless they struck first. If they leave their deflectors down, they lose nothing, but they invite us to leave our own down -"

"If they were going to strike first," Akon said, "they could have struck before we even knew they were here. But instead they spoke." Surely, oh surely, they understand the Prisoner's Dilemma.

"Maybe they hope to gain information and then kill us," said the Pilot. "We have technology they want. That enormous message - the only way we could send them an equivalent amount of data would be by dumping our entire Local Archive. They may be hoping that we feel the emotional need to, as you put it, reciprocate -"

"Hold on," said the Lord Programmer suddenly. "I may have managed to translate their language."

You could have heard a pin dropping from ten lightyears away.

The Lord Programmer smiled, ever so slightly. "You see, that enormous dump of data they sent us - I think that was their Local Archive, or equivalent. A sizable part of their Net, anyway. Their text, image, and holo formats are utterly straightforward - either they don't bother compressing anything, or they decompressed it all for us before they sent it. And here's the thing: back in the Dawn era, when there were multiple human languages, there was this notion that people had of statistical language translation. Now, the classic method used a known corpus of human-translated text. But there were successor methods that tried to extend the translation further, by generating semantic skeletons and trying to map the skeletons themselves onto one another. And there are also ways of automatically looking for similarity between images or holos. Believe it or not, there was a program already in the Archive for trying to find points of linkage between an alien corpus and a human corpus, and then working out from there to map semantic skeletons... and it runs quickly, since it's designed to work on older computer systems. So I ran the program, it finished, and it's claiming that it can translate the alien language with 70% confidence. Could be a total bug, of course. But the aliens sent a second message that followed their main data dump - short, looks like text-only. Should I run the translator on that, and put the results on the main display?"

Akon stared at the Lord Programmer, absorbing this, and finally said, "Yes."

"All right," said the Lord Programmer, "here goes machine learning," and his fingers twitched once.

Over the icosahedron of fractured fire, translucent letters appeared:

THIS VESSEL IS THE OPTIMISM OF THE CENTER OF THE VESSEL PERSON

YOU HAVE NOT KICKED US

THEREFORE YOU EAT BABIES

WHAT IS OURS IS YOURS, WHAT IS YOURS IS OURS

"Stop that laughing," Akon said absentmindedly, "it's distracting." The Conference Chair pinched the bridge of his nose. "All right. That doesn't seem completely random. The first line... is them identifying their ship, maybe. Then the second line says that we haven't opened fire on them, or that they won't open fire on us - something like that. The third line, I have absolutely no idea. The fourth... is offering some kind of reciprocal trade -" Akon stopped then. So did the laughter.

"Would you like to send a return message?" said the Lord Programmer.

Everyone looked at him. Then everyone looked at Akon.

Akon thought about that very carefully. Total silence for a lengthy period of time might not be construed as friendly by a race that had just talked at them for petabytes.

"All right," Akon said. He cleared his throat. "We are still trying to understand your language. We do not understand well. We are trying to translate. We may not translate correctly. These words may not say what we want them to say. Please do not be offended. This is the research vessel named quote Impossible Possible World unquote. We are pleased to meet you. We will assemble data for transmission to you, but do not have it ready." Akon paused. "Send them that. If you can make your program translate it three different plausible ways, do that too - it may make it clearer that we're working from an automatic program."

The Lord Programmer twitched a few more times, then spoke to the Lady Sensory. "Ready."

"Are you really sure this is a good idea?" said Sensory doubtfully.

Akon sighed. "No. Send the message."

For twenty seconds after, there was silence. Then new words appeared on the display:

WE ARE GLAD TO SEE YOU CANNOT BE DONE

YOU SPEAK LIKE BABY CRUNCH CRUNCH

WITH BIG ANGELIC POWERS

WE WISH TO SUBSCRIBE TO YOUR NEWSLETTER

"All right," Akon said, after a while. It seemed, on the whole, a positive response. "I expect a lot of people are eager to look at the alien corpus. But I also need volunteers to hunt for texts and holo files in our own Archive. Which don't betray the engineering principles behind any technology we've had for less than, say," Akon thought about the mirror shielding and what it implied, "a hundred years. Just showing that it can be done... we won't try to avoid that, but don't give away the science..."


A day later, the atmosphere at the Command Conference was considerably more tense.

Bewilderment. Horror. Fear. Numbness. Refusal. And in the distant background, slowly simmering, a dangerous edge of rising righteous fury.

"First of all," Akon said. "First of all. Does anyone have any plausible hypothesis, any reasonable interpretation of what we know, under which the aliens do not eat their own children?"

"There is always the possibility of misunderstanding," said the former Lady Psychologist, who was now, suddenly and abruptly, the lead Xenopsychologist of the ship, and therefore of humankind. "But unless the entire corpus they sent us is a fiction... no."

The alien holos showed tall crystalline insectile creatures, all flat planes and intersecting angles and prismatic refractions, propelling themselves over a field of sharp rocks: the aliens moved like hopping on pogo sticks, bouncing off the ground using projecting limbs that sank into their bodies and then rebounded. There was a cold beauty to the aliens' crystal bodies and their twisting rotating motions, like screensavers taking on sentient form.

And the aliens bounded over the sharp rocks toward tiny fleeing figures like delicate spherical snowflakes, and grabbed them with pincers, and put them in their mouths. It was a central theme in holo after holo.

The alien brain was much smaller and denser than a human's. The alien children, though their bodies were tiny, had full-sized brains. They could talk. They protested as they were eaten, in the flickering internal lights that the aliens used to communicate. They screamed as they vanished into the adult aliens' maws.

Babies, then, had been a mistranslation: Preteens would have been more accurate.

Still, everyone was calling the aliens Babyeaters.

The children were sentient at the age they were consumed. The text portions of the corpus were very clear about that. It was part of the great, the noble, the most holy sacrifice. And the children were loved: this was part of the central truth of life, that parents could overcome their love and engage in the terrible winnowing. A parent might spawn a hundred children, and only one in a hundred could survive - for otherwise they would die later, of starvation...

When the Babyeaters had come into their power as a technological species, they could have chosen to modify themselves - to prevent all births but one.

But this they did not choose to do.

For that terrible winnowing was the central truth of life, after all.

The one now called Xenopsychologist had arrived to the Huygens system with the first colonization vessel. Since then she had spent over one hundred years practicing the profession of psychology, earning the rare title of Lady. (Most people got fed up and switched careers after no more than fifty, whatever their first intentions.) Now, after all that time, she was simply the Xenopsychologist, no longer a Lady of her profession. Being the first and only Xenopsychologist made no difference; the hundred-year rule for true expertise was not a rule that anyone could suspend. If she was the foremost Xenopsychologist of humankind, then also she was the least, the most foolish and the most ignorant. She was only an apprentice Xenopsychologist, no matter that there were no masters anywhere. In theory, her social status should have been too low to be seated at the Conference Table. In theory.

The Xenopsychologist was two hundred and fifty years old. She looked much older, now, as as she spoke. "In terms of evolutionary psychology... I think I understand what happened. The ancestors of the Babyeaters were a species that gave birth to hundreds of offspring in a spawning season, like Terrestrial fish; what we call r-strategy reproduction. But the ancestral Babyeaters discovered... crystal-tending, a kind of agriculture... long before humans did. They were around as smart as chimpanzees, when they started farming. The adults federated into tribes so they could guard territories and tend crystal. They adapted to pen up their offspring, to keep them around in herds so they could feed them. But they couldn't produce enough crystal for all the children.

"It's a truism in evolutionary biology that group selection can't work among non-relatives. The exception is if there are enforcement mechanisms, punishment for defectors - then there's no individual advantage to cheating, because you get slapped down. That's what happened with the Babyeaters. They didn't restrain their individual reproduction because the more children they put in the tribal pen, the more children of theirs were likely to survive. But the total production of offspring from the tribal pen was greater, if the children were winnowed down, and the survivors got more individual resources and attention afterward. That was how their species began to shift toward a k-strategy, an individual survival strategy. That was the beginning of their culture.

"And anyone who tried to cheat, to hide away a child, or even go easier on their own children during the winnowing - well, the Babyeaters treated the merciful parents the same way that human tribes treat their traitors.

"They developed psychological adaptations for enforcing that, their first great group norm. And those psychological adaptations, those emotions, were reused over the course of their evolution, as the Babyeaters began to adapt to their more complex societies. Honor, friendship, the good of our tribe - the Babyeaters acquired many of the same moral adaptations as humans, but their brains reused the emotional circuitry of infanticide to do it.

"The Babyeater word for good means, literally, to eat children."

The Xenopsychologist paused there, taking a sip of water. Pale faces looked back at her from around the table.

The Lady Sensory spoke up. "I don't suppose... we could convince them they were wrong about that?"

The Ship's Confessor was robed and hooded in silver, indicating that he was there formally as a guardian of sanity. His voice was gentle, though, as he spoke: "I don't believe that's how it works."

"Even if you could persuade them, it might not be a good idea," said the Xenopsychologist. "If you convinced the Babyeaters to see it our way - that they had committed a wrong of that magnitude - there isn't anything in the universe that could stop them from hunting down and exterminating themselves. They don't have a concept of forgiveness; their only notion of why someone might go easy on a transgressor, is to spare an ally, or use them as a puppet, or being too lazy or cowardly to carry out the vengeance. The word for wrong is the same symbol as mercy, you see." The Xenopsychologist shook her head. "Punishment of non-punishers is very much a way of life, with them. A Manichaean, dualistic view of reality. They may have literally believed that we ate babies, at first, just because we didn't open fire on them."

Akon frowned. "Do you really think so? Wouldn't that make them... well, a bit unimaginative?"

The Ship's Master of Fandom was there; he spoke up. "I've been trying to read Babyeater literature," he said. "It's not easy, what with all the translation difficulties," and he sent a frown at the Lord Programmer, who returned it. "In one sense, we're lucky enough that the Babyeaters have a concept of fiction, let alone science fiction -"

"Lucky?" said the Lord Pilot. "You've got to have an imagination to make it to the stars. The sort of species that wouldn't invent science fiction, probably wouldn't even invent the wheel -"

"But," interrupted the Master, "just as most of their science fiction deals with crystalline entities - the closest they come to postulating human anatomy, in any of the stories I've read, was a sort of giant sentient floppy sponge - so too, nearly all of the aliens their explorers meet, eat their own children. I doubt the authors spent much time questioning the assumption; they didn't want anything so alien that their readers couldn't empathize. The purpose of storytelling is to stimulate the moral instincts, which is why all stories are fundamentally about personal sacrifice and loss - that's their theory of literature. Though you can find stories where the wise, benevolent elder aliens explain how the need to control tribal population is the great selective transition, and how no species can possibly evolve sentience and cooperation without eating babies, and even if they did, they would war among themselves and destroy themselves."

"Hm," said the Xenopsychologist. "The Babyeaters might not be too far wrong - stop staring at me like that, I don't mean it that way. I'm just saying, the Babyeater civilization didn't have all that many wars. In fact, they didn't have any wars at all after they finished adopting the scientific method. It was the great watershed moment in their history - the notion of a reasonable mistake, that you didn't have to kill all the adherents of a mistaken hypothesis. Not because you were forgiving them, but because they'd made the mistake by reasoning on insufficient data, rather than any inherent flaw. Up until then, all wars were wars of total extermination - but afterward, the theory was that if a large group of people could all do something wrong, it was probably a reasonable mistake. Their conceptualization of probability theory - of a formally correct way of manipulating uncertainty - was followed by the dawn of their world peace."

"But then -" said the Lady Sensory.

"Of course," added the Xenopsychologist, "anyone who departs from the group norm due to an actual inherent flaw still has to be destroyed. And not everyone agreed at first that the scientific method was moral - it does seem to have been highly counterintuitive to them - so their last war was the one where the science-users killed off all the nonscientists. After that, it was world peace."

"Oh," said the Lady Sensory softly.

"Yes," the Xenopsychologist said, "after that, all the Babyeaters banded together as a single super-group that only needed to execute individual heretics. They now have a strong cultural taboo against wars between tribes."

"Unfortunately," said the Master of Fandom, "that taboo doesn't let us off the hook. You can also find science fiction stories - though they're much rarer - where the Babyeaters and the aliens don't immediately join together into a greater society. Stories of horrible monsters who don't eat their children. Monsters who multiply like bacteria, war among themselves like rats, hate all art and beauty, and destroy everything in their pathway. Monsters who have to be exterminated down to the last strand of their DNA - er, last nucleating crystal."

Akon spoke, then. "I accept full responsibility," said the Conference Chair, "for the decision to send the Babyeaters the texts and holos we did. But the fact remains that they have more than enough information about us to infer that we don't eat our children. They may be able to guess how we would see them. And they haven't sent anything to us, since we began transmitting to them."

"So the question then is - now what?"

To be continued...

War and/or Peace (2/8)

16Eliezer_Yudkowsky31 January 2009 08:42AM
(Part 2 of 8 in "Three Worlds Collide")

..."So the question then is - now what?"

The Lord Pilot jumped up, then, his face flushed. "Put up shields. Now. We don't gain anything by leaving them down. This is madness!"

"No," said the Ship's Confessor in professional tones, "not madness."

The Pilot slammed his fists on the table. "We're all going to die!"

"They're not as technologically advanced as us," Akon said. "Suppose the Babyeaters do decide that we need to be exterminated. Suppose they open fire. Suppose they kill us. Suppose they follow the starline we opened and find the Huygens system. Then what?"

The Master nodded. "Even with surprise on their side... no. They can't actually wipe out the human species. Not unless they're a lot smarter than they seem to be, and it looks to me like, on average, they're actually a bit dumber than us." The Master glanced at the Xenopsychologist, who waved her hand in a maybe-gesture.

"But if we leave the ship's shields down," Akon said, "we preserve whatever chance we have of a peaceful resolution to this."

"Peace," said the Lady Sensory, in a peculiar flat tone.

Akon looked at her.

"You want peace with the Babyeaters?"

"Of course -" said Akon, then stopped short.

The Lady Sensory looked around the table. "And the Babyeater children? What about them?"

The Master of Fandom spoke, his voice uncertain. "You can't impose human standards on -"

With a blur of motion and a sharp crack, the Lady Sensory slapped him.

The Ship's Confessor grabbed her arm. "No."

The Lady Sensory stared at the Ship's Confessor.

"No," the Confessor repeated. "No violence. Only argument. Violence doesn't distinguish truth from falsehood, my Lady."

The Lady Sensory slowly lowered her hand, but not her eyes.

"But..." said the Master. "But, my Lady, if they want to be eaten -"

"They don't," said the Xenopsychologist. "Of course they don't. They run from their parents when the terrible winnowing comes. The Babyeater children aren't emotionally mature - I mean they don't have their adult emotional state yet. Evolution would take care of anyone who wanted to get eaten. And they're still learning, still making mistakes, so they don't yet have the instinct to exterminate violators of the group code. It's a simpler time for them. They play, they explore, they try out new ideas. They're..." and the Xenopsychologist stopped. "Damn," she said, and turned her head away from the table, covering her face with her hands. "Excuse me." Her voice was unsteady. "They're a lot like human children, really."

"And if they were human children," said the Lady Sensory into the silence, "do you think that, just because the Babyeater species wanted to eat human children, that would make it right for them to do it?"

"No," said the Lord Pilot.

"Then what difference does it make?" said the Lady Sensory.

"No difference at all," said the Lord Pilot.

Akon looked back and forth between the two of them, and saw what was coming, and somehow couldn't speak.

"We have to save them," said the Lady Sensory. "We have to stop this. No matter what it takes. We can't let this go on."

Couldn't say that one word -

The Lord Pilot nodded. "Destroy their ship. Preserve our advantage of surprise. Go back, tell the world, create an overwhelming human army... and pour into the Babyeater starline network. And rescue the children."

"No," Akon said.

No?

"I know," said the Lord Pilot. "A lot of Babyeaters will die at first, but they're killing ten times more children than their whole adult population, every year -"

"And then what?" said the Master of Fandom. "What happens when the children grow up?"

The Lord Pilot fell silent.

The Master of Fandom completed the question. "Are you going to wipe out their whole race, because their existence is too horrible to be allowed to go on? I read their stories, and I didn't understand them, but -" The Master of Fandom swallowed. "They're not... evil. Don't you understand? They're not. Are you going to punish me, because I don't want to punish them?"

"We could..." said the Lord Pilot. "Um. We could modify their genes so that they only gave birth to a single child at a time."

"No," said the Xenopsychologist. "They would grow up loathing themselves for being unable to eat babies. Horrors in their own eyes. It would be kinder just to kill them."

"Stop," said Akon. His voice wasn't strong, wasn't loud, but everyone in the room looked at him. "Stop. We are not going to fire on their ship."

"Why not?" said the Lord Pilot. "They -"

"They haven't raised shields," said Akon.

"Because they know it won't make a difference!" shouted the Pilot.

"They didn't fire on us!" shouted Akon. Then he stopped, lowered his voice. "They didn't fire on us. Even after they knew that we didn't eat babies. I am not going to fire on them. I refuse to do it."

"You think they're innocent?" demanded the Lady Sensory. "What if it was human children that were being eaten?"

Akon stared out a viewscreen, showing in subdued fires a computer-generated graphic of the nova debris. He just felt exhausted, now. "I never understood the Prisoner's Dilemma until this day. Do you cooperate when you really do want the highest payoff? When it doesn't even seem fair for both of you to cooperate? When it seems right to defect even if the other player doesn't? That's the payoff matrix of the true Prisoner's Dilemma. But all the rest of the logic - everything about what happens if you both think that way, and both defect - is the same. Do we want to live in a universe of cooperation or defection?"

"But -" said the Lord Pilot.

"They know," Akon said, "that they can't wipe us out. And they can guess what we could do to them. Their choice isn't to fire on us and try to invade afterward! Their choice is to fire on us and run from this star system, hoping that no other ships follow. It's their whole species at stake, against just this one ship. And they still haven't fired."

"They won't fire on us," said the Xenopsychologist, "until they decide that we've defected from the norm. It would go against their sense of... honor, I could call it, but it's much stronger than the human version -"

"No," Akon said. "Not that much stronger." He looked around, in the silence. "The Babyeater society has been at peace for centuries. So too with human society. Do you want to fire the opening shot that brings war back into the universe? Send us back to the darkness-before-dawn that we only know from reading history books, because the holos are too horrible to watch? Are you really going to press the button, knowing that?"

The Lord Pilot took a deep breath. "I will. You will not remain commander of the Impossible, my lord, if the greater conference votes no confidence against you. And they will, my lord, for the sake of the children."

"What," said the Master, "are you going to do with the children?"

"We, um, have to do something," said the Ship's Engineer, speaking up for the first time. "I've been, um, looking into what Babyeater science knows about their brain mechanisms. It's really quite fascinating, they mix electrical and mechanical interactions, not the same way our own brain pumps ions, but -"

"Get to the point," said Akon. "Immediately."

"The children don't die right away," said the Engineer. "The brain is this nugget of hard crystal, that's really resistant to, um, the digestive mechanisms, much more so than the rest of the body. So the child's brain is in, um, probably quite a lot of pain, since the whole body has been amputated, and in a state of sensory deprivation, and then the processing slowly gets degraded, and I think the whole process gets completed about a month after -"

The Lady Sensory threw up. A few seconds later, so did the Xenopsychologist and the Master.

"If human society permits this to go on," said the Lord Pilot, his voice very soft, "I will resign from human society, and I will have friends, and we will visit the Babyeater starline network with an army. You'll have to kill me to stop me."

"And me," said the Lady Sensory through tears.

Akon rose from his chair, and leaned forward; a dominating move that he had learned in classrooms, very long ago when he was first studying to be an Administrator. But most in humanity's promotion-conscious society would not risk direct defiance of an Administrator. In a hundred years he'd never had his authority really tested, until now... "I will not permit you to fire on the alien ship. Humanity will not be first to defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma."

The Lord Pilot stood up, and Akon realized, with a sudden jolt, that the Pilot was four inches taller; the thought had never occurred to him before. The Pilot didn't lean forward, not knowing the trick, or not caring. The Pilot's eyes were narrow, surrounding facial muscles tensed and tight.

"Get out of my way," said the Lord Pilot.

Akon opened his mouth, but no words came out.

"It is time," said the Lord Pilot, "to see this calamity to its end." Spoken in Archaic English: the words uttered by Thomas Clarkson in 1785, at the beginning of the end of slavery. "I have set my will against this disaster; I will break it, or it will break me." Ira Howard in 2014. "I will not share my universe with this shadow," and that was the Lord Pilot, in an anger hotter than the nova's ashes. "Help me if you will, or step aside if you lack decisiveness; but do not make yourself my obstacle, or I will burn you down, and any that stand with you -"

"HOLD."

Every head in the room jerked toward the source of the voice. Akon had been an Administrator for a hundred years, and a Lord Administrator for twenty. He had studied all the classic texts, and watched holos of famous crisis situations; nearly all the accumulated knowledge of the Administrative Field was at his beck and call; and he'd never dreamed that a word could be spoken with such absolute force.

The Ship's Confessor lowered his voice. "My Lord Pilot. I will not permit you to declare your crusade, when you have not said what you are crusading for. It is not enough to say that you do not like the way things are. You must say how you will change them, and to what. You must think all the way to your end. Will you wipe out the Babyeater race entirely? Keep their remnants under human rule forever, in despair under our law? You have not even faced your hard choices, only congratulated yourself on demanding that something be done. I judge that a violation of sanity, my lord."

The Lord Pilot stood rigid. "What -" his voice broke. "What do you suggest we do?"

"Sit down," said the Ship's Confessor, "keep thinking. My Lord Pilot, my Lady Sensory, you are premature. It is too early for humanity to divide over this issue, when we have known about it for less than twenty-four hours. Some rules do not change, whether it is money at stake, or the fate of an intelligent species. We should only, at this stage, be discussing the issue in all its aspects, as thoroughly as possible; we should not even be placing solutions on the table, as yet, to polarize us into camps. You know that, my lords, my ladies, and it does not change."

"And after that?" said the Master of Fandom suddenly. "Then it's okay to split humanity? You wouldn't object?"

The featureless blur concealed within the Confessor's Hood turned to face the Master, and spoke; and those present thought they heard a grim smile, in that voice. "Oh," said the Confessor, "that would be interfering in politics. I am charged with guarding sanity, not morality. If you want to stay together, do not split. If you want peace, do not start wars. If you want to avoid genocide, do not wipe out an alien species. But if these are not your highest values, then you may well end up sacrificing them. What you are willing to trade off, may end up traded away - be you warned! But if that is acceptable to you, then so be it. The Order of Silent Confessors exists in the hope that, so long as humanity is sane, it can make choices in accordance with its true desires. Thus there is our Order dedicated only to that, and sworn not to interfere in politics. So you will spend more time discussing this scenario, my lords, my ladies, and only then generate solutions. And then... you will decide."

"Excuse me," said the Lady Sensory. The Lord Pilot made to speak, and Sensory raised her voice. "Excuse me, my lords. The alien ship has just sent us a new transmission. Two megabytes of text."

"Translate and publish," ordered Akon.

They all glanced down and aside, waiting for the file to come up.

It began:

THE UTTERMOST ABYSS OF JUSTIFICATION
A HYMN OF LOGIC
PURE LIKE STONES AND SACRIFICE
FOR STRUGGLES OF THE YOUNG SLIDING DOWN YOUR THROAT-

Akon looked away, wincing. He hadn't tried to read much of the alien corpus, and hadn't gotten the knack of reading the "translations" by that damned program.

"Would someone," Akon said, "please tell me - tell the conference - what this says?

There was a long, stretched moment of silence.

Then the Xenopsychologist made a muffled noise that could have been a bark of incredulity, or just a sad laugh. "Stars beyond," said the Xenopsychologist, "they're trying to persuade us to eat our own children."

"Using," said the Lord Programmer, "what they assert to be arguments from universal principles, rather than appeals to mere instincts that might differ from star to star."

"Such as what, exactly?" said the Ship's Confessor.

Akon gave the Confessor an odd look, then quickly glanced away, lest the Confessor catch him at it. No, the Confessor couldn't be carefully maintaining an open mind about that. It was just curiosity over what particular failures of reasoning the aliens might exhibit.

"Let me search," said the Lord Programmer. He was silent for a time. "Ah, here's an example. They point out that by producing many offspring, and winnowing among them, they apply greater selection pressures to their children than we do. So if we started producing hundreds of babies per couple and then eating almost all of them - I do emphasize that this is their suggestion, not mine - evolution would proceed faster for us, and we would survive longer in the universe. Evolution and survival are universals, so the argument should convince anyone." He gave a sad chuckle. "Anyone here feel convinced?"

"Out of curiosity," said the Lord Pilot, "have they ever tried to produce even more babies - say, thousands instead of hundreds - so they could speed up their evolution even more?"

"It ought to be easily within their current capabilities of bioengineering," said the Xenopsychologist, "and yet they haven't done it. Still, I don't think we should make the suggestion.""

"Agreed," said Akon.

"But humanity uses gamete selection," said the Lady Sensory. "We aren't evolving any slower. If anything, choosing among millions of sperm and hundreds of eggs gives us much stronger selection pressures."

The Xenopsychologist furrowed her brow. "I'm not sure we sent them that information in so many words... or they may have just not gotten that far into what we sent them..."

"Um, it wouldn't be trivial for them to understand," said the Ship's Engineer. "They don't have separate DNA and proteins, just crystal patterns tiling themselves. The two parents intertwine and stay that way for, um, days, nucleating portions of supercooled liquid from their own bodies to construct the babies. The whole, um, baby, is constructed together by both parents. They don't have separate gametes they could select on."

"But," said the Lady Sensory, "couldn't we maybe convince them, to work out some equivalent of gamete selection and try that instead -"

"My lady," said the Xenopsychologist. Her voice, now, was somewhat exasperated. "They aren't really doing this for the sake of evolution. They were eating babies millions of years before they knew what evolution was."

"Huh, this is interesting," said the Lord Programmer. "There's another section here where they construct their arguments using appeals to historical human authorities."

Akon raised his eyebrows. "And who, exactly, do they quote in support?"

"Hold on," said the Lord Programmer. "This has been run through the translator twice, English to Babyeater to English, so I need to write a program to retrieve the original text..." He was silent a few moments. "I see. The argument starts by pointing out how eating your children is proof of sacrifice and loyalty to the tribe, then they quote human authorities on the virtue of sacrifice and loyalty. And ancient environmentalist arguments about population control, plus... oh, dear. I don't think they've realized that Adolf Hitler is a bad guy."

"They wouldn't," said the Xenopsychologist. "Humans put Hitler in charge of a country, so we must have considered him a preeminent legalist of his age. And it wouldn't occur to the Babyeaters that Adolf Hitler might be regarded by humans as a bad guy just because he turned segments of his society into lampshades - they have a custom against that nowadays, but they don't really see it as evil. If Hitler thought that gays had defected against the norm, and tried to exterminate them, that looks to a Babyeater like an honest mistake -" The Xenopsychologist looked around the table. "All right, I'll stop there. But the Babyeaters don't look back on their history and see obvious villains in positions of power - certainly not after the dawn of science. Any politician who got to the point of being labeled "bad" would be killed and eaten. The Babyeaters don't seem to have had humanity's coordination problems. Or they're just more rational voters. Take your pick."

Akon was resting his head in his hands. "You know," Akon said, "I thought about composing a message like this to the Babyeaters. It was a stupid thought, but I kept turning it over in my mind. Trying to think about how I might persuade them that eating babies was... not a good thing."

The Xenopsychologist grimaced. "The aliens seem to be even more given to rationalization than we are - which is maybe why their society isn't so rigid as to actually fall apart - but I don't think you could twist them far enough around to believe that eating babies was not a babyeating thing."

"And by the same token," Akon said, "I don't think they're particularly likely to persuade us that eating babies is good." He sighed. "Should we just mark the message as spam?"

"One of us should read it, at least," said the Ship's Confessor. "They composed their argument honestly and in all good will. Humanity also has epistemic standards of honor to uphold."

"Yes," said the Master. "I don't quite understand the Babyeater standards of literature, my lord, but I can tell that this text conforms to their style of... not exactly poetry, but... they tried to make it aesthetic as well as persuasive." The Master's eyes flickered, back and forth. "I think they even made some parts constant in the total number of light pulses per argumentative unit, like human prosody, hoping that our translator would turn it into a human poem. And... as near as I can judge such things, this took a lot of effort. I wouldn't be surprised to find that everyone on that ship was staying up all night working on it."

"Babyeaters don't sleep," said the Engineer sotto vocce.

"Anyway," said the Master. "If we don't fire on the alien ship - I mean, if this work is ever carried back to the Babyeater civilization - I suspect the aliens will consider this one of their great historical works of literature, like Hamlet or Fate/stay night -"

The Lady Sensory cleared her throat. She was pale, and trembling.

With a sudden black premonition of doom like a training session in Unrestrained Pessimism, Akon guessed what she would say.

The Lady Sensory said, in an unsteady voice, "My lords, a third ship has jumped into this system. Not Babyeater, not human."

To be continued...

The Super Happy People (3/8)

18Eliezer_Yudkowsky01 February 2009 08:18AM
(Part 3 of 8 in "Three Worlds Collide")

...The Lady Sensory said, in an unsteady voice, "My lords, a third ship has jumped into this system. Not Babyeater, not human."

The holo showed a triangle marked with three glowing dots, the human ship and the Babyeater ship and the newcomers. Then the holo zoomed in, to show -

- the most grotesque spaceship that Akon had ever seen, like a blob festooned with tentacles festooned with acne festooned with small hairs. Slowly, the tentacles of the ship waved, as if in a gentle breeze; and the acne on the tentacles pulsated, as if preparing to burst. It was a fractal of ugliness, disgusting at every level of self-similarity.

"Do the aliens have deflectors up?" said Akon.

"My lord," said Lady Sensory, "they don't have any shields raised. The nova ashes' radiation doesn't seem to bother them. Whatever material their ship is made from, it's just taking the beating."

A silence fell around the table.

"All right," said the Lord Programmer, "that's impressive."

The Lady Sensory jerked, like someone had just slapped her. "We - we just got a signal from them in human-standard format, content encoding marked as Modern English text, followed by a holo -"

"What?" said Akon. "We haven't transmitted anything to them, how could they possibly -"

"Um," said the Ship's Engineer. "What if these aliens really do have, um, 'big angelic powers'?"

"No," said the Ship's Confessor. His hood tilted slightly, as if in wry humor. "It is only history repeating itself."


"History repeating itself?" said the Master of Fandom. "You mean that the ship is from an alternate Everett branch of Earth, or that they somehow independently developed ship-to-ship communication protocols exactly similar to our -"

"No, you dolt," said the Lord Programmer, "he means that the Babyeaters sent the new aliens a massive data dump, just like they sent us. Only this time, the Babyeater data dump included all the data that we sent the Babyeaters. Then the new aliens ran an automatic translation program, like the one we used."

"You gave it away," said the Confessor. There was a slight laugh in his voice. "You should have let them figure it out on their own. One so rarely encounters the apparently supernatural, these days."

Akon shook his head, "Confessor, we don't have time for - never mind. Sensory, show the text message."

The Lady Sensory twitched a finger and -

HOORAY!

WE ARE SO GLAD TO MEET YOU!

THIS IS THE SHIP "PLAY GAMES FOR LOTS OF FUN"

(OPERATED BY CHARGED PARTICLE FINANCIAL FIRMS)

WE LOVE YOU AND WE WANT YOU TO BE SUPER HAPPY.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO HAVE SEX?

Slowly, elaborately, Akon's head dropped to the table with a dull thud. "Why couldn't we have been alone in the universe?"

"No, wait," said the Xenopsychologist, "this makes sense."

The Master of Fandom nodded. "Seems quite straightforward."

"Do enlighten," came a muffled tone from where Akon's head rested on the table.

The Xenopsychologist shrugged. "Evolutionarily speaking, reproduction is probably the single best guess for an activity that an evolved intelligence would find pleasurable. When you look at it from that perspective, my lords, my lady, their message makes perfect sense - it's a universal friendly greeting, like the Pioneer engraving."

Akon didn't raise his head. "I wonder what these aliens do," he said through his shielding arms, "molest kittens?"

"My lord..." said the Ship's Confessor. Gentle the tone, but the meaning was very clear.

Akon sighed and straightened up. "You said their message included a holo, right? Let's see it."

The main screen turned on.

There was a moment of silence, and then a strange liquid sound as, in unison, everyone around the table gasped in shock, even the Ship's Confessor.

For a time after that, no one spoke. They were just... watching.

"Wow," said the Lady Sensory finally. "That's actually... kind of... hot."

Akon tore his eyes away from the writhing human female form, the writhing human male form, and the writhing alien tentacles. "But..." Akon said. "But why is she pregnant?"

"A better question," said the Lord Programmer, "would be, why are the two of them reciting multiplication tables?" He glanced around. "What, none of you can read lips?"

"Um..." said the Xenopsychologist. "Okay, I've got to admit, I can't even begin to imagine why -"

Then there was a uniform "Ewww..." from around the room.

"Oh, dear," said the Xenopsychologist. "Oh, dear, I don't think they understood that part at all."

Akon made a cutting gesture, and the holo switched off.

"Someone should view the rest of it," said the Ship's Confessor. "It might contain important information."

Akon flipped a hand. "I don't think we'll run short of volunteers to watch disgusting alien pornography. Just post it to the ship's 4chan, and check after a few hours to see if anything was modded up to +5 Insightful."

"These aliens," said the Master of Fandom slowly, "composed that pornography within... seconds, it must have been. We couldn't have done that automatically, could we?"

The Lord Programmer frowned. "No. I don't, um, think so. From a corpus of alien pornography, automatically generate a holo they would find interesting? Um. It's not a problem that I think anyone's tried to solve yet, and they sure didn't get it perfect the first time, but... no."

"How large an angelic power does that imply?"

The Lord Programmer traded glances with the Master. "Big," the Lord Programmer said finally. "Maybe even epic."

"Or they think on a much faster timescale," said the Confessor softly. "There is no law of the universe that their neurons must run at 100Hz."

"My lords," said the Lady Sensory, "we're getting another message; holo with sound, this time. It's marked as a real-time communication, my lords."

Akon swallowed, and his fingers automatically straightened the hood of his formal sweater. Would the aliens be able to tell if his clothes were sloppy? He was suddenly very aware that he hadn't checked his lipstick in three hours. But it wouldn't do to keep the visitors waiting... "All right. Open a channel to them, transmitting only myself."

The holo that appeared did nothing to assuage his insecurities. The man that appeared was perfectly dressed, utterly perfectly dressed, in business casual more intimidating than any formality: crushing superiority without the appearance of effort. The face was the same way, overwhelmingly handsome without the excuse of makeup; the fashionable slit vest exposed pectoral muscles that seemed optimally sculpted without the bulk that comes of exercise -

"Superstimulus!" exclaimed the Ship's Confessor, a sharp warning.

Akon blinked, shrugging off the fog. Of course the aliens couldn't possibly really look like that. A holo, only an overoptimized holo. That was a lesson everyone (every human?) learned before puberty, not to let reality seem diminished by fiction. As the proverb went, It's bad enough comparing yourself to Isaac Newton without comparing yourself to Kimball Kinnison.

"Greetings in the name of humanity," said Akon. "I am Lord Anamaferus Akon, Conference Chair of the Giant Science Vessel Impossible Possible World. We -" come in peace didn't seem appropriate with a Babyeater war under discussion, and many other polite pleasantries, like pleased to meet you, suddenly seemed too much like promises and lies, "- didn't quite understand your last message."

"Our apologies," said the perfect figure on screen. "You may call me Big Fucking Edward; as for our species..." The figure tilted a head in thought. "This translation program is not fully stable; even if I said our proper species-name, who knows how it would come out. I would not wish my kind to forever bear an unaesthetic nickname on account of a translation error."

Akon nodded. "I understand, Big Fucking Edward."

"Your true language is a format inconceivable to us," said the perfect holo. "But we do apologize for any untranslatable 1 you may have experienced on account of our welcome transmission; it was automatically generated, before any of us had a chance to apprehend your sexuality. We do apologize, I say; but who would ever have thought that a species would evolve to find reproduction a painful experience? For us, childbirth is the greatest pleasure we know; to be prolonged, not hurried."

"Oh," said the Lady Sensory in a tone of sudden enlightenment, "that's why the tentacles were pushing the baby back into -"

Out of sight of the visual frame, Akon gestured with his hand for Sensory to shut up. Akon leaned forward. "The visual you're currently sending us is, of course, not real. What do you actually look like? - if the request does not offend."

The perfect false man furrowed a brow, puzzled. "I don't understand. You would not be able to apprehend any communicative cues."

"I would still like to see," Akon said. "I am not sure how to explain it, except that - truth matters to us."

The too-beautiful man vanished, and in his place -

Mad brilliant colors, insane hues that for a moment defeated his vision. Then his mind saw shapes, but not meaning. In utter silence, huge blobs writhed around supporting bars. Extrusions protruded fluidly and interpenetrated -

Writhing, twisting, shuddering, pulsating -

And then the false man reappeared.

Akon fought to keep his face from showing distress, but a prickling of sweat appeared on his forehead. There'd been something jarring about the blobs, even the stable background behind them. Like looking at an optical illusion designed by sadists.

And - those were the aliens, or so they claimed -

"I have a question," said the false man. "I apologize if it causes any distress, but I must know if what our scientists say is correct. Has your kind really evolved separate information-processing mechanisms for deoxyribose nucleic acid versus electrochemical transmission of synaptic spikes?"

Akon blinked. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw figures trading cautious glances around the table. Akon wasn't sure where this question was leading, but, given that the aliens had already understood enough to ask, it probably wasn't safe to lie...

"I don't really understand the question's purpose," Akon said. "Our genes are made of deoxyribose nucleic acid. Our brains are made of neurons that transmit impulses through electrical and chemical -"

The fake man's head collapsed to his hands, and he began to bawl like a baby.

Akon's hand signed Help! out of the frame. But the Xenopsychologist shrugged cluelessly.

This was not going well.

The fake man suddenly unfolded his head from his hands. His cheeks were depicted as streaked with tears, but the face itself had stopped crying. "To wait so long," the voice said in a tone of absolute tragedy. "To wait so long, and come so far, only to discover that nowhere among the stars is any trace of love."

"Love?" Akon repeated. "Caring for someone else? Wanting to protect them, to be with them? If that translated correctly, then 'love' is a very important thing to us."

"But!" cried the figure in agony, at a volume that made Akon jump. "But when you have sex, you do not untranslatable 2! A fake, a fake, these are only imitation words -"

"What is 'untranslatable 2'?" Akon said; and then, as the figure once again collapsed in inconsolable weeping, wished he hadn't.

"They asked if our neurons and DNA were separate," said the Ship's Engineer. "So maybe they have only one system. Um... in retrospect, that actually seems like the obvious way for evolution to do it. If you're going to have one kind of information storage for genes, why have an entirely different system for brains? So -"

"They share each other's thoughts when they have sex," the Master of Fandom completed. "Now there's an old dream. And they would develop emotions around that, whole patterns of feeling we don't have ourselves... Huh. I guess we do lack their analogue of love."

"Probably," said the Xenopsychologist quietly, "sex was their only way of speaking to each other from the beginning. From before the dawn of their intelligence. It really does make a lot of sense, evolutionarily. If you're injecting packets of information anyway -"

"Wait a minute," said the Lady Sensory, "then how are they talking to us?"

"Of course," said the Lord Programmer in a tone of sudden enlightenment. "Humanity has always used new communications technologies for pornography. 'The Internet is for porn' - but with them, it must have been the other way around."

Akon blinked. His mind suddenly pictured the blobs, and the tentacles connecting them to each other -

Somewhere on that ship is a blob making love to an avatar that's supposed to represent me. Maybe a whole Command Orgy.

I've just been cyber-raped. No, I'm being cyber-raped right now.

And the aliens had crossed who knew how much space, searching for who knew how long, yearning to speak / make love to other minds - only to find -

The fake man suddenly jerked upright and screamed at a volume that whited-out the speakers in the Command Conference. Everyone jumped; the Master of Fandom let out a small shriek.

What did I do what did I do what did I do -

And then the holo vanished.

Akon gasped for breath and slumped over in his chair. Adrenaline was still running riot through his system, but he felt utterly exhausted. He wanted to release his shape and melt into a puddle, a blob like the wrong shapes he'd seen on screen - no, not like that.

"My lord," the Ship's Confessor said softly. He was now standing alongside, a gentle hand on Akon's shoulder. "My lord, are you all right?"

"Not really," Akon said. His voice, he was proud to note, was only slighly wobbly. "It's too hard, speaking to aliens. They don't think like you do, and you don't know what you're doing wrong."

"I wonder," the Master of Fandom said with artificial lightness, "if they'll call it 'xenofatigue' and forbid anyone to talk to an alien for longer than five minutes."

Akon just nodded.

"We're getting another signal," the Lady Sensory said hesitantly. "Holo with sound, another real-time communication."

"Akon, you don't have to -" said the Master of Fandom.

Akon jerked himself upright, straightened his clothes. "I do have to," he said. "They're aliens, there's no knowing what a delay might... Just put it through."

The first thing the holo showed, in elegant Modern English script, was the message:

The Lady 3rd Kiritsugu
temporary co-chair of the Gameplayer
Language Translator version 3
Cultural Translator version 2

The screen hovered just long enough to be read, then dissipated -

Revealing a pale white lady.

The translator's depiction of the Lady 3rd Kiritsugu was all white and black and grey; not the colorlessness of a greyscale image, but a colored image of a world with little color in it. Skin the color of the palest human skin that could still be called attractive; not snow white, but pale. White hair; blouse and bracelets and long dress all in coordinated shades of grey. That woman could have been called pretty, but there was none of the overstimulating beauty of the fake man who had been shown before.

Her face was styled in the emotion that humans named "serene".

"I and my sisters have now taken command of this vessel," said the pale Lady.

Akon blinked. A mutiny aboard their ship?

And it was back to the alien incomprehensibility, the knife-edged decisions and unpredictable reactions and the deadly fear of screwing up.

"I am sorry if my words offend," Akon said carefully, "but there is something I wish to know."

The Lady 3rd made a slicing gesture with one hand. "You cannot offend me." Her face showed mild insult at the suggestion.

"What has happened aboard your ship, just now?"

The Lady 3rd replied, "The crew are disabled by emotional distress. They have exceeded the bounds of their obligations, and are returning to the ship's Pleasuring Center for reward. In such a situation I and my two sisters, the kiritsugu of this vessel, assume command."

Did I do that? "I did not intend for my words to cause you psychological harm."

"You are not responsible," the Lady 3rd said. "It was the other ones."

"The Babyeaters?" Akon said without thinking.

"Babyeaters," the Lady 3rd repeated. "If that is the name you have given to the third alien species present at this star system, then yes. The crew, apprehending the nature of the Babyeaters' existence, was incapacitated by their share of the children's suffering."

"I see," Akon said. He felt an odd twitch of shame for humanity, that his own kind could learn of the Babyeaters, and continue functioning with only tears.

The Lady 3rd's gaze grew sharp. "What are your intentions regarding the Babyeaters?"

"We haven't decided," Akon said. "We were just discussing it when you arrived, actually."

"What is your current most preferred alternative?" the Lady 3rd instantly fired back.

Akon helplessly shrugged, palms out. "We were just starting the discussion. All the alternatives suggested seemed unacceptable."

"Which seemed least unacceptable? What is your current best candidate?"

Akon shook his head. "We haven't designated any."

The Lady 3rd's face grew stern, with a hint of puzzlement. "You are withholding the information. Why? Do you think it will cast you in an unfavorable light? Then I must take that expectation into account. Further, you must expect me to take that expectation into account, and so you imply that you expect me to underestimate its severity, even after taking this line of reasoning into account."

"Excuse me," the Ship's Confessor said. His tone was mild, but with a hint of urgency. "I believe I should enter this conversation right now."

Akon's hand signed agreement to the Lady Sensory.

At once the Lady 3rd's eyes shifted to where the Confessor stood beside Akon.

"Human beings," said the Ship's Confessor, "cannot designate a 'current best candidate' without psychological consequences. Human rationalists learn to discuss an issue as thoroughly as possible before suggesting any solutions. For humans, solutions are sticky in a way that would require detailed cognitive science to explain. We would not be able to search freely through the solution space, but would be helplessly attracted toward the 'current best' point, once we named it. Also, any endorsement whatever of a solution that has negative moral features, will cause a human to feel shame - and 'best candidate' would feel like an endorsement. To avoid feeling that shame, humans must avoid saying which of two bad alternatives is better than the other."

Ouch, thought Akon, I never realized how embarrassing that sounds until I heard it explained to an alien.

Apparently the alien was having similar thoughts. "So you cannot even tell me which of several alternatives currently seems best, without your minds breaking down? That sounds quite implausible," the Lady 3rd said doubtfully, "for a species capable of building a spaceship."

There was a hint of laughter in the Confessor's voice. "We try to overcome our biases."

The Lady 3rd's gaze grew more intense. "Are you the true decisionmaker of this vessel?"

"I am not," the Confessor said flatly. "I am a Confessor - a human master rationalist; we are sworn to refrain from leadership."

"This meeting will determine the future of all three species," said the Lady 3rd. "If you have superior competence, you should assume control."

Akon's brows furrowed slightly. Somehow he'd never thought about it in those terms.

The Confessor shook his head. "There are reasons beyond my profession why I must not lead. I am too old."

Too old?

Akon put the thought on hold, and looked back at the Lady 3rd. She had said that all the crew were incapacitated, except her and her two sisters who took charge. And she had asked the Confessor if he held true command.

"Are you," Akon asked, "the equivalent of a Confessor for your own kind?"

"Almost certainly not," replied the Lady 3rd, and -

"Almost certainly not," the Confessor said, almost in the same breath.

There was an eerie kind of unison about it.

"I am kiritsugu," said the Lady 3rd. "In the early days of my species there were those who refrained from happiness in order to achieve perfect skill in helping others, using untranslatable 3 to suppress their emotions and acting only on their abstract knowledge of goals. These were forcibly returned to normality by massive untranslatable 4. But I descend from their thought-lineage and in emergency invoke the shadow of their untranslatable 5."

"I am a Confessor," said the Ship's Confessor, "the descendant of those in humanity's past who most highly valued truth, who sought systematic methods for finding truth. But Bayes's Theorem will not be different from one place to another; the laws in their purely mathematical form will be the same, just as any sufficiently advanced species will discover the same periodic table of elements."

"And being universals," said the Lady 3rd, "they bear no distinguishing evidence of their origin. So you should understand, Lord Akon, that a kiritsugu's purpose is not like that of a Confessor, even if we exploit the same laws."

"But we are similar enough to each other," the Confessor concluded, "to see each other as distorted mirror images. Heretics, you might say. She is the ultimate sin forbidden to a Confessor - the exercise of command."

"As you are flawed on my own terms," the Lady 3rd concluded, "one who refuses to help."

Everyone else at the Conference table was staring at the alien holo, and at the Confessor, in something approaching outright horror.

The Lady 3rd shifted her gaze back to Akon. Though it was only a movement of the eyes, there was something of a definite force about the motion, as if the translator was indicating that it stood for something much stronger. Her voice was given a demanding, compelling quality: "What alternatives did your kind generate for dealing with the Babyeaters? Enumerate them to me."

Wipe out their species, keep them in prison forever on suicide watch, ignore them and let the children suffer.

Akon hesitated. An odd premonition of warning prickled at him. Why does she need this information?

"If you do not give me the information," the Lady 3rd said, "I will take into account the fact that you do not wish me to know it."

The proverb went through his mind, The most important part of any secret is the fact that the secret exists.

"All right," Akon said. "We found unacceptable the alternative of leaving the Babyeaters be. We found unacceptable the alternative of exterminating them. We wish to respect their choices and their nature as a species, but their children, who do not share that choice, are unwilling victims; this is unacceptable to us. We desire to keep the children alive but we do not know what to do with them once they become adult and start wanting to eat their own babies. Those were all the alternatives we had gotten as far as generating, at the very moment your ship arrived."

"That is all?" demanded the Lady 3rd. "That is the sum of all your thought? Is this one of the circumstances under which your species sends signals that differ against internal belief, such as 'joking' or 'politeness'?"

"No," said Akon. "I mean, yes. Yes, that's as far as we got. No, we're not joking."

"You should understand," the Confessor said, "that this crew, also, experienced a certain distress, interfering with our normal function, on comprehending the Babyeaters. We are still experiencing it."

And you acted to restore order, thought Akon, though not the same way as a kiritsugu...

"I see," the Lady 3rd said.

She fell silent. There were long seconds during which she sat motionless.

Then, "Why have you not yet disabled the Babyeater ship? Your craft possesses the capability of doing so, and you must realize that your purpose now opposes theirs."

"Because," Akon said, "they did not disable our ship."

The Lady 3rd nodded. "You are symmetrists, then."

Again the silence.

Then the holo blurred, and in that blur appeared the words:

Cultural Translator version 3.

The blur resolved itself back into that pale woman; almost the same as before, except that the serenity of her came through with more force.

The Lady 3rd drew herself erect, and took on a look of ritual, as though she were about to recite a composed poem.

"I now speak," the Lady 3rd, "on behalf of my species, to yours."

A chill ran down Akon's spine. This is too much, this is all too large for me -

"Humankind!" the Lady 3rd said, as though addressing someone by name. "Humankind, you prefer the absence of pain to its presence. When my own kind attained to technology, we eliminated the causes of suffering among ourselves. Bodily pain, embarrassment, and romantic conflicts are no longer permitted to exist. Humankind, you prefer the presence of pleasure to its absence. We have devoted ourselves to the intensity of pleasure, of sex and childbirth and untranslatable 2. Humankind, you prefer truth to lies. By our nature we do not communicate statements disbelieved, as you do with humor, modesty, and fiction; we have even learned to refrain from withholding information, though we possess that capability. Humankind, you prefer peace to violence. Our society is without crime and without war. Through symmetric sharing and untranslatable 4, we share our joys and are pleasured together. Our name for ourselves is not expressible in your language. But to you, humankind, we now name ourselves after the highest values we share: we are the Maximum Fun-Fun Ultra Super Happy People."

There were muffled choking sounds from the human Conference table.

"Um," Akon said intelligently. "Um... good for you?"

"Humankind! Humankind, you did not likewise repair yourselves when you attained to technology. We are still unsure if it is somehow a mistake, if you did not think it through, or if your will is truly so different from ours. For whatever reason, you currently permit the existence of suffering which our species has eliminated. Bodily pain, embarrassment, and romantic troubles are still known among you. Your existence, therefore, is shared by us as pain. Will you, humankind, by your symmetry, remedy this?"

An electric current of shock and alarm ran through the Conference. The Lord Pilot glanced significantly at the Ship's Engineer, and the Engineer just as significantly shook his head. There was nothing they could do against the alien vessel; and their own shields would scarcely help, if they were attacked.

Akon drew in a ragged breath. He was suddenly distracted, almost to the point of his brain melting, by a sense of futures twisting around these moments: the fate of star systems, the destiny of all humanity being warped and twisted and shaped.

So to you, then, it is humanity that molests kittens.

He should have foreseen this possibility, after the experience of the Babyeaters. If the Babyeaters' existence was morally unacceptable to humanity, then the next alien species might be intolerable as well - or they might find humanity's existence a horror of unspeakable cruelty. That was the other side of the coin, even if a human might find it harder to think of it.

Funny. It doesn't seem that bad from in here...

"But -" Akon said, and only then became aware that he was speaking.

"'But'?" said the Lady 3rd. "Is that your whole reply, humankind?" There was a look on her face of something like frustration, even sheer astonishment.

He hadn't planned out this reply in any detail, but -

"You say that you feel our existence as pain," Akon said, "sharing sympathy with our own suffering. So you, also, believe that under some circumstances pain is preferable to pleasure. If you did not hurt when others hurt - would you not feel that you were... less the sort of person you wanted to be? It is the same with us -"

But the Lady 3rd was shaking her head. "You confuse a high conditional likelihood from your hypothesis to the evidence with a high posterior probability of the hypothesis given the evidence," she said, as if that were all one short phrase in her own language. "Humankind, we possess a generalized faculty to feel what others feel. That is the simple, compact relation. We did not think to complicate that faculty to exclude pain. We did not then assign dense probability that other sentient species would traverse the stars, and be encountered by us, and yet fail to have repaired themselves. Should we encounter some future species in circumstances that do not permit its repair, we will modify our empathic faculty to exclude sympathy with pain, and substitute an urge to meliorate pain."

"But -" Akon said.

Dammit, I'm talking again.

"But we chose this; this is what we want."

"That matters less to our values than to yours," replied the Lady 3rd. "But even you, humankind, should see that it is moot. We are still trying to untangle the twisting references of emotion by which humans might prefer pleasure to pain, and yet endorse complex theories that uphold pain over pleasure. But we have already determined that your children, humankind, do not share the grounding of these philosophies. When they incur pain they do not contemplate its meaning, they only call for it to stop. In their simplicity -"

They're a lot like our own children, really.

"- they somewhat resemble the earlier life stages of our own kind."

There was a electric quality now about that pale woman, a terrible intensity. "And you should understand, humankind, that when a child anywhere suffers pain and calls for it to stop, then we will answer that call if it requires sixty-five thousand five hundred and thirty-six ships."

"We believe, humankind, that you can understand our viewpoint. Have you options to offer us?"

To be continued...

Absolutely awesome! Thanks for sharing! I wanna be a human kiritsugu, when I grow up.

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OKay - I've now finished it.

And I say that:

1- There's nothing wrong with leaving the baby-eaters alone. We leave lions eating gazelles alone, don't we? Or spiders eating their mates? Not to mention that plenty of human tribes had ritualistic sacrifices (or even eating) of both children and adults... Let's put it another way - I do not find the baby-eaters abhorrent.

2- Whoever commented that the SuperHappies confuse pleasure and happiness is not wrong. Humans for all their faults can derive happiness from other things than pure pleasure. Including pain. Or even just effort.

3- We will lie and we will fight. Even to extinction. It's not a matter of odds. We fight, no matter the odds. When it comes down to it, we fight. That's another central truth of humanity. We fight.

And, here, we'd only have to inflict meaningful damage to the SH so that they get really unhappy for them to leave us alone. The terrorist strategy - I can inflict more pain on you than you can on me.

Technology is not necessarily that important. Kamikaze/suicide bombers are nearly always technologically possible. Therefore, intent matters above all. The most committed win.

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Unless otherwise specified, I am posting as a regular poster. When I will act as a mod, I'll make sure you're in no doubt.