An odd group of people were gathered together in the institute reception. Cluma, Tirrani and Dennacta were all standing around wearing the slightly dazed expressions of people not permitted to understand the conversations around them. The receptionist, who didn't speak English, kept reacting to the state of the others, asking what was wrong, then forgetting she'd even asked when she didn't get an answer. It was a sight which our earthling guests were not at all pleased with.

"(Look at them. And you're okay with that?)" asked an incredulous Harry.

"(Are they unhappy?)" wrote Tennacti.

"(Well... No, but...)"

"(Are we unhappy?)"

"(I... can't tell from your faces, but from the way you're writing in italics, I'll assume not.)"

"(Sorry. My beak makes reading expressions harder. Yes, we are content.)"

"(Anyway, that's not the point!)"

"(Then what is? They were born that way. They don't know any different.)"

"(Yes, that's my point. They aren't allowed to know any better.)"

I took a few steps backward from the arguing pair, putting an arm around Cluma. She didn't react, maintaining her emotionless expression, her ears remaining completely still. The receptionist looked at us in confusion before blinking and looking away.

"(I understand your argument that something shouldn't be able to reach into your brain and muck around with it without your permission, and I totally agree.)"

"(And I... understand you've given that permission, however much I can't comprehend why, and that's your right. But these people haven't.)"

"(Again, they were born that way.)"

"(So? That doesn't make what has been done to them any less evil.)"

Wow. He outright called it evil...

"(Then, in a similar vein, would you ban parents from bringing their children to church?)"

"(What? How is that related?)"

"(Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.)"

I recognised the quote, although I couldn't say who'd made it. The principle was obvious enough; raise a child, fill their brain with a 'common sense' of your choosing, and the adult would behave as you wished. Einstein had said something similar; that common sense was the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

"(That's not the same at all!)"

"(It's exactly the same. Children aren't born capable of making decisions. Parents make them for them, and those decisions help shape the person that child grows into.)"

"(This is not a choice made by their parents. And even if it was, parents shouldn't have free rein.)"

"(Some cultures on Earth give parents more control than others. How many stories do you see on the news about parents murdering their own children for sleeping with the wrong person? I think that sort of behaviour is evil, yet they somehow see it as their right.)"

"(One evil doesn't excuse another.)"

"(Okay, then look at it another way. In Christian belief, how did humans begin?)"

"(Huh? God formed Adam from dust, and Eve from Adam's rib. What does that have to do with anything?)"

"(Not that. Afterwards. Christians believe that when God created humans, he made them wholly innocent. Just like the people here, they had no knowledge of evil. They ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil against the wishes of God. From that, couldn't you say that God condones this state?)"

Harry paused briefly, glancing at Calvin, who was looking conflicted. Given the existence of people like Camus and Angus, there was no way in heck I'd describe this place as biblical Eden, but nevertheless, her argument had apparently hit home with one of them.

"(Erryn is not God,)" pointed out Harry.

"(She made everyone here. They are her children.)"

"(That does not change the fact that she is not God. A parent, perhaps, but she has no claim on creation. On top of that, after Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, God did not strip them of their newfound understanding. He punished them for their choice, but he did not deny them it.)"

He wasn't arguing that Eden was just a myth. Out of respect for Calvin, or did he believe it himself?

"(Yes. That is true. Should any of these people seize that knowledge and refuse to relinquish it, I would respect that too.)"

"(But they can't! They don't have the choice.)"

"(Nor did Adam and Eve. It took Satan himself whispering into Eve's ear for her to disobey God.)"

"(Am I the only one who sees anything wrong with this?)" complained Harry.

"(Not at all. I think it's horrible, what Erryn has done to these people,)" said Abigail.

"(Uh... I can... see the good points...)" said Cara carefully, causing Harry to frown at her.

"(I'm staying well out of this,)" said Russell, Dominic nodding behind him.

Harry turned on Calvin, who gave a longer opinion. "(As you say, Erryn isn't God. But perhaps she doesn't need to be. Back on Earth, we have laws. The government tells you how to act, and will punish you if you disobey. If you murder someone, you will be imprisoned. That's not a trade. It's not 'you can murder someone for the price of x years of imprisonment.' It's punishment, to get someone dangerous off the street and to discourage others from following in their footsteps. If the government could render everyone physically incapable of murder, don't you think they would? Aren't laws against gun ownership and bomb making already steps in that direction, trying to take away the ability of people to murder? They even try to take away information, by making knowledge of bomb making illegal, rather than just the act of making one. The only reason they don't go even further is because they lack the ability.)"

"(But we aren't talking about murder here. These people can't even lie properly.)"

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"(So you would be okay with the mind control if it only blocked serious crimes?)"

"(I am not okay with mind control however restricted its use.)"

"(Then where is your line? At which point between gun control and mind control does it become evil in your eyes? How does that point shift with the severity of the crime? Is restricting information okay as long as it's done by making information inaccessible, rather than by making someone's brain incapable of comprehending it?)"

Unlike Tennacti, Calvin didn't seem at all irritated, but rather was genuinely interested in what Harry thought about the situation. I had to admit that I was too; I didn't exactly have a wide pool of people with whom I could discuss this.

"(I don't believe suppression of information is okay. No government should be allowed to tell us what we are or aren't allowed to know. And gun control... Okay, I'll admit my opinion that plenty of people shouldn't be allowed to get their hands on weapons of any sort, but I know that even there lots of people would disagree with me.)"

They certainly would... Trying to separate certain areas of the west from their guns would be harder than separating them from their legs.

"(It's precisely because it's so hard to draw the line that restrictive laws like that are such a danger,)" continued Harry. "(Who do you trust to decide who can buy weapons and who can't?)"

"(Isn't trust an important factor?)" I asked, breaking into the discussion. "(Given that narcissism and corruption are more or less job requirements for an Earth politician, I can see why you wouldn't trust any Earth authority, but what if you could? Is that not why you trust God with such power?)"

"(Erryn is not God,)" he repeated.

"(No, and you have no reason to trust her. And even if you could, she is neither omniscient nor omnipotent, thus her implementation of the Law is not guaranteed to be flawless, even if you agreed with the principle of it.)"

It certainly was flawed; not only did the backlash contribute to her death, but also there were people like Graham Morant, who managed to be racist jerks despite the Law.

"(Then what's your point?)"

"(I wasn't making one; I'm just interested in hearing your point of view. I've never met anyone who considers the Law evil before.)"

"(Then yes. If the people making decisions were irreproachably trustworthy, I would permit them to decide who was and wasn't permitted to buy guns. Maybe even to redact information. But still not to mess with my mind.)"

"(Then what about Calvin's question about the severity of the crime? If there was a button somewhere, and pushing it would wipe out all life on the planet, would you be okay with rendering people physically incapable of pushing it?)"

"(Yes, but by locking the button away, not by brainwashing everyone into believing they couldn't push it.)"

"(And if it couldn't be locked away?)"

"(Constructing increasingly implausible thought experiments does not help to advance any arguments. You must have a rough idea how something like nuclear weapons are managed on Earth. There are always ways of handling these things.)"

"(Try telling that to the previous two civilisations.)"

"(And what's that supposed to mean?)"

"(Soul magic. Someone's available affinities are an intrinsic property of their soul, and can't be taken from them or locked away, but soul affinity is deadly. There's feedback from its use. There are precautions you can take, but sooner or later, it drives the user insane. Worse, users can feed on surrounding souls to strengthen themselves. Both previous civilisations were ended by soul magic users, the first accidentally, the second deliberately. How do you propose to defend against that sort of thing? Forbid anyone with soul affinity from learning magic? Put mana shackles on them? Here, everyone simply thinks that surface races can't use soul affinity. I can't think of a better solution than that.)"

"(Given that the two previous civilisations lasted long enough to be called civilisations, you're obviously overplaying the risks.)"

Was I? I'd certainly hurt myself badly by trying to wield soul affinity, but he made a valid point, and it wasn't as if I had in-depth knowledge of the fates of the previous civilisations. I only had the basic outline that Erryn and not-Blobby had shared with me. I'd hit enough people with [Eye of Judgement] to know that soul affinity was, while not common, not vanishingly rare. If every soul mage self-destructed in an apocalyptic fashion, this planet wouldn't stand a chance.

"(So your position is that my scenario can never arise, and thus doesn't need to be considered?)"

"(Fine, for the sake of argument, if anyone in the world could, with a thought, end the world, then yes, I would agree that extreme measures should be taken to prevent it.)"

Another quote from some probably famous historical figure was that everything had a price. Now I knew that Harry's price for his freedom was somewhere between 'as many lives as a mass murderer could take before being brought down' and 'the entire biosphere of Earth'. That was quite a wide range, admittedly, but it was there.

"(Then another thought experiment. As mentioned, Erryn created everyone here. Intelligence and personality are, to some extent, genetic. If she'd created everyone to be genetically predisposed to being nice, would you find that so morally repugnant?)"

Harry frowned. "(That would depend on many factors. Was she cloning DNA sequenced from real people? Was she generating it somehow? How did she ensure sufficient genetic diversity to create a viable population? If she had access to a bank of DNA and picked which ones to bring back based on their genes, then yes, that would be every bit as bad. If she only had one DNA sequence to go off, and she needed to mutate it to produce a viable population, and she chose not to touch genes that affected personality... Perhaps that wouldn't be so clear cut. But we're getting off topic here. Do you agree with what Erryn is doing to us?)"

"(No. And if it was happening to me, I would be horrified.)"

"(But not so horrified that you would use force to stop it?)"

"(It's not the force. It's the result. Destroying the System would harm this world.)"

"(Earth gets on just fine without it, and the population of Earth is far greater than the population of this world. Aren't you facing a straightforward trolley problem?)"

"(Heck no. There's nothing straightforward about it. You can't point and say this set of people will die if I pull the lever and this set will die if I don't.)"

"(You can make an educated guess.)"

I could indeed. The way the System was infecting newborns on Earth was likely to go unnoticed in the short term. In the medium term, I expected chaos. In the long term, a hundred years from now, the entire planet would be subject to the Law. Assuming it scaled well and nothing went wrong, at least.

A few portals ago, I'd commented that no-one had reason to pour bombs into our world. Now they did. I could imagine that ten years from now, people would be getting desperate to stop the encroachment.

"(And as for you,)" Harry continued, turning back to the twins, "(I'd like to know your reasoning for why you're okay with the fact you'll one day fall under this mind control?)"

"(Our personalities will not be affected. Our decisions will not be changed. What reason have we to protest?)"

"(So you put no value at all on your free will?)" Harry snapped back, obviously angered by their answer.

"(We made our decision by our free will. Compare us using this to make a commitment to how we want to live our lives to someone on Earth saying their wedding vows. Isn't the commitment we're making worth so much more? We won't be breaking it, unlike the majority of marriages on Earth.)"

Harry floundered a little at that. "(Okay, fine. As I said earlier, it's your choice, and I respect your right to make it. But circumstances change... Taking away your ability to consider alternatives in the future seems foolhardy to me, and I doubt you'd willingly do it if it didn't hit you so close to home.)"

"(Close to home? What do you mean by that?)"

"(Your own child was murdered, and this brainwashing would have prevented it.)"

I had to admit that I wasn't too great at reading harpy expressions either, but I didn't miss the confusion on both of their faces.

"(Murdered? The driver hit him accidentally. He was quite distraught over the incident, the poor guy.)"

"(Uh, not the driver. Owen,)" I reminded them.

"(Who?)"

Now it was my turn to share in the communal confusion. "(Owen? My brother?)"

The twins looked at each other before staring back at me. "(We only had one child. You never had a brother.)"

"(I don't remember you hanging around with anyone called Owen,)" added Dirrana, joining in the conversation.

Harry stared at me in suspicion, but I had no idea what was going on. I'd talked with them about him before. It wasn't as if it was a case of mistaken identity.

Unless...

I switched on [Soul Perception], and saw their souls were now pierced through with the chains of the Law. They weren't tightly bound, and they were obviously not yet under its full influence, but they were close. They were no longer unaffected. They were forgetting.

"(What would you say the biggest event on Earth was in the nineteen-thirties and forties?)" I tried.

"(Uh... Things were pretty quiet back then, weren't they? I can't remember any major events...)"

Tens of millions of deaths, and they'd forgotten. They'd forgotten Owen. Their own son!

'Forgetting would be a blessing.' Those had been Tennacti's exact words to me, once.

"(Well, that settles it,)" declared Harry. "(There is no way you can convince me that something that strips a parent's memories of their own child is a good thing. This world is in desperate need of a serpent of its own to whisper into the ears of its inhabitants, and since it seems no-one else is willing, I guess the role falls to me.)"