--- Mia ---

"I'm really sorry that we can't help your people more." Tom said. "But only Baseliners are allowed around here, and we just don't have the abilities to help you as well as transhumans could."

"You have mentioned that term before. What is a 'Baseliner', nyaa?" Mia asked.

"It's a cultural movement that I am a part of. We Baseliners have agreed to limit ourselves to bodies and minds that were typical for our ancestors and to ban everything abnormal."

"Why would you do that?" Mia asked. It sounded pretty bad, to be honest. Were the humans a monoculture?

"Hm? Oh, I get it. I phrased that poorly. You think this is about oppressing people who are different, don't you? I remember this from history class.

"It's more like. Uh. Let's see if I can find an analogy that makes sense for you. Ah! It's like a club or a competition where you can only play if you fit the membership criteria. There is one club for children only, and one for intermediates. And one for experts...

"No. That analogy doesn't work. It's not about skill. I mean, it is. But it is not only about skill. It's also about fit, in a way?"

Mia thought she had a sense of what he could mean, and gave it a shot: "Is it like servers in videogames, nyaa? Those sometimes have special rules made by the server owner. Like 'no magic-using classes allowed'. Or 'only races that fit the setting are allowed'."

He kept treating life as a game, so the analogy seemed straightforward to her.

"That's a great comparison! It's exactly like that! I didn't know you played videogames, Mia."

He understood the analogy! Score one for her theory that human men might not be averse to playing videogames. 'Gamer Guys', as people without taste called them, were very rare among Purrians. Humanity continued to exhibit improbably attractive traits wherever she looked. It was frankly absurd.

"We Baseliners have all agreed to limit our race and class, so to say. No shapeshifting into dragons, or becoming a hivemind, or anything powerful like that. There is a limit on our stats, too. I can't be too strong, or too smart, or otherwise unusual.

"Although obviously any boosts I unlock through FEI don't count. I'm allowed to get stronger over time, within some limits, but I can't just spawn a new body that is smart, stronger, faster and better than everyone else."

"I understand what you are talking about, but not why." Mia responded. "I feel like I'm missing a lot of context here. Why would you impose a limit on yourself so you can't be more powerful?" Mia responded.

"Two reasons, really. The first reason is fairness. It is super depressing when you try to be an adventurous guy, and you work out to be super fit, and then suddenly somebody else shows up with a genetically engineered body that just makes you look pathetic, with no effort at all. You are forced to make your own body artificial as well, so that you can keep up.

"You just end up in a rat race where everyone moves the sliders on their stats all the way to the right, and personal achievement no longer feels meaningful, you know?

"The second reason the Baseliner movement exists is about community and communication.

"People who are different from each other have a harder time understanding each other. It's not so bad when the differences are minor, and when people stay close to each other because they live in the same community. But when you can make any change you can think of to your body or your mind, just by praying for it, then the differences get pretty large.

"And if you can ask FEI to connect you to like minded people, pretty soon you end up in an echo chamber full of other people who are just as weird as yourself, and you don't even notice how weird you are anymore. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with being weird on its own, it's just that it makes it really hard to connect to the rest of society if you get too absorbed by it.

"I'm speaking from personal experience here. I used to be super close to my cousin. We did everything together. But then he joined a medieval-themed poetry club. One thing led to another, and he turned into a fifty meter long aquatic dragon who speaks exclusively in rhyme, in a fictional language that his community invented.

"That made it very difficult for me to have a conversation with him, and so we grew apart. I haven't talked to him in years, and honestly I'm really sad about it.

"I joined the Baseliner movement to prevent that from happening to me again. I have agreed to a lot of voluntary limitations. I am allowed to be only this weird, and no weirder. In return, I get to be sure that everyone around me is also not much weirder than I am, and we will always have enough in common that we won't just grow apart by chance."

It was a lot for Mia to take in, and she tried to put it in her own words: "So, humanity basically grew so powerful that you no longer had any physical limitations and became very strange as a result, nyaa. You became so weird that at some point you decided, enough was enough, and you looped back around to stick to the basics?"

Tom chuckled good-naturedly at her summary. "That sounds about right. Although to be clear, Baseliners are only a movement. Many humans are transhuman, and incomprehensibly weird and alien."

Incomprehensibly weird and alien by Tom's standards, that was.

"That's mind-boggling. I never even imagined that something like that could become a problem for anyone." She said.

Tom looked a bit embarrassed. "Yeah, look at me complaining about my First World Problems, when you are literally a slave."

She was about to ask what a 'First World Problem' was, since that phrase did not exist in her language, when FEI picked up on her confusion and provided the translation in her head. How neat. The humans had magical universal language translation. Because of course they did.

"I think I understand where you are coming from. You have to know how to enjoy the little things in life, nyaa! I know there are rich people who are less happy than I am, because they compare themselves to even richer people. What you are describing sounds similar.

"My head is still reeling from the implications, though. You are basically saying that you are so powerful that a good chunk of your whole species deliberately handicapped themselves to make things more fun. I thought that was only you!

"Don't you miss all of that, though? I've got to be honest, turning into a dragon sounds awesome, nyaa!"

"Oh, I do miss it, I just think that it's a price worth paying! I enjoy being a superhuman group intelligence with a hundred different bodies as much as the next person, but there is a time and a place for it. Around here, we decided to keep things simple. No transhumanism allowed."

"No transhumanism? But you gamified the universe, and you use magic! Wait. Is magic just a normal thing humans can do?"

"No, it isn't. I guess I am still very transhuman, relative to an ordinary person from before we developed Faith Engines. I'm just very bland and ordinary compared to the people who live digitally and don't follow Baseliner norms. My ancestors would definitely still think that I'm very exotic and weird.

"Baseliner norms are mostly about what we are, not what tools we use. Magic is just a tool, not a part of my being, so it's fine. What matters is that I have a mostly average body and mostly average mind. I'm stupid, but only a little. I have no major forms of neurodivergence either. Nothing wrong with that, mind you, but every oddity adds to the communication barrier and the whole point of the movement is to keep everyone similar to each other.

"Basically, this part of the universe is a sanctuary for normal, average people, who don't want to get into a rat race of transhuman modifications. It's a safe space where the men are men, and the women are women, and the super-intelligent, telepathic, shapeshifting, angelic pseudo-hiveminds who have glimpsed enlightenment stay out of things, so that they don't make everyone else feel inadequate. No ascended beings allowed."

Tom chuckled, then added: "That sentence I just said would probably have given many of my ancestors an aneurysm, and very confused emotions. Admittedly, it must sound kind of terrible to exclude people like that. But the rules only apply to us humans, and it's really more like a club, or like you said, a videogame server with custom rules.

"If the people we rescue want to be something weirder, they are free to travel to parallel realities, of course. Outside of the Facinus Sector we can easily transport people across dimensions or into alternate timelines, so they can just go somewhere where they fit in well, culturally."

...

"Wait. What was that you just said about parallel realities? Parallel universes are real?" Mia asked.

"Of course! What did you think I meant when I said there are only Baseliners around here?"

"I don't know! I didn't focus on that! I thought 'around here' meant, like, the Facinus Sector, or something. Not the entire universe, nyaa!"

So apparently parallel universes were a thing now. Mia wondered if FEI had a feature she could activate to slow down the rate of earth-shattering revelations. It was really getting a bit too much.

She wanted to take a deep breath and just take a few seconds to process this, but they were still sprinting at full speed through the city, so she didn't have any time to rest.

They were running through a ghetto right now. The streets were dirty and full of trash, and many of the windows were broken. This district was populated by the poorer employees of the Megacorps that dominated Malumian society. They were still several minutes away from the slave district where she lived.

"Come to think of it, it makes sense that this is a big deal to you." Tom mused.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

You don't say, Mia refrained from saying out loud. He meant well, so she shouldn't be rude. It wasn't his fault that he was kind of an idiot.

No, wait. It absolutely was his fault that he was an idiot! He kept talking about how he made himself stupid on purpose! She didn't know what to think about that.

Tom continued talking, unaware of her thoughts: "In objective time, we only found out about parallel universes a few months ago. But when we did, the government decided that this was important enough to justify some unusually strong reality warping, and so we sped up time a good deal so that we could make use of this new knowledge before anyone beat us to it.

"We opened gates to other realities, and met alternate versions of ourselves from those other timelines. Our government is benevolent and efficient, and theirs were too, so we peacefully merged into a single larger civilization pretty much immediately.

"We are now spread across a bunch of different timelines. I spent most of that period in accelerated simulations myself, so to me it feels like everyone has known all about parallel realities for centuries by now. But I guess this would still be new to you, if nobody told you about it."

"Why yes, yes this is new to me, nyaa!" Mia said in exasperation.

She had so many questions!

She wasn't a physicist. What she knew about quantum physics from her general education was a drop in the bucket compared to all the different takes on alternate universes that she knew from fiction. It was a very popular trope, but it very rarely made any sense at all.

She had talked to physicists before, and they all agreed that books and games rarely made any sense in their portrayal of alternate realities. Many religious scriptures had some basic commentary on alternate timelines as well, but they were all frustratingly vague. The only thing the theologians all agreed on was that, however it worked, it definitely wasn't anything like the games and movies portrayed it.

Except, come to think of it, it was the humans who discovered alternate realities first, and they were messing around with Faith Engines. Those were basically magic that gamified the universe. Did that mean that she should now expect alternate realities to work like shitty science fiction tropes as well? Not because that was naturally the case, but because the humans made it so? Tom claimed that Faith Engines were actually perfectly logical and just beyond their comprehension, but did that really make a difference in practice?

She knew far too little to answer any of these questions.

And they really didn't matter right now. She should be making plans instead!

But on the other hand... she couldn't help herself. She just really, really wanted to know more. People like her were the reason that the proverb "Curiosity killed the Purrian" existed.

"How do alternate realities work? What are the differences between them? Are the laws of physics the same? Do the alternate timelines have noticeable single points of divergence, or something more complicated? Can you use knowledge from one universe to learn something about another, or is that unreliable? Does time pass at the same rate in all of them? If it doesn't, can you use this to learn about the future, or travel back in time? And what if..."

"Beats me." Tom replied. "I have no idea. I'm not very smart, remember? I mean, I do know the basics and I will be happy to tell you, but most of what you just asked about, I have no idea.

"I actually used to understand it very well. I was a scientist once and I studied this stuff because it is really interesting. But I don't have access to what I learned back then while I'm in a Baseline humanoid body. I had to pick what knowledge I got to keep, so that my total knowledge wouldn't be too high for a Baseline human, and detailed knowledge about the multiverse didn't make the cut."

"You used to be a scientist?" She asked. It was somehow not the strangest thing she learned in the last couple of minutes, but it was close.

"Sure! I have done a lot of different things before I became a Baseliner. I actually spent about half my life as a poet. That's where most of my original subscribers came from. I tried to hold onto that knowledge. You may have noticed that I use much longer words than people as stupid as me usually do. But it looks like the important bits did not transfer as well as I hoped. My subscribers keep telling me that my one-liners suck now. They used to be great, you know!"

He was just messing with her at this point, wasn't he? He had to be.

"Anyway, when I took mortal form, I dropped most of my scientific knowledge except for the basics, and I tried to keep some linguistic skills, though apparently it wasn't enough. But mostly I focused on keeping my practical knowledge about survival. I did practice Death World survival runs before I came here, after all. It would have been so embarrassing to spend so much power, arrive on this planet, and then just die immediately. My subscribers would never let me live it down."

His subscribers wouldn't let him live it down if he died. It looked like Tom had his priorities straight.

Hold on. A terrible thought occurred to Mia: "If you Baseliners are weaker than transhumans, doesn't that mean that people in other realities are getting a lot more help? Because you are better at helping them?"

If she was right, that made humanity extremely callous. They were letting the suffering of so many people go on, just because they preferred to be weaker, for some strange cultural reasons.

"That's the weird thing! Well, one of the weird things. Universes where transhumans are allowed have different aliens. There are no Purrians or Malumians there, or any species that looks humanoid at all. I have no idea why. I would actually love to know, but the government censored knowledge about those other universes."

"There are different species in different timelines? And they are keeping the reasons secret. That sounds very suspicious!"

But Tom just laughed. "Our government is verifiably benevolent, remember? I trust that they have a good reason for keeping the knowledge secret. Most likely it just makes the Faith Engines run smoother. That's usually the reason when they censor something. That, and it makes synchronization and travel between parallel realities cheaper if people have similar knowledge, and the easiest way to get similar knowledge is to enforce ignorance."

"I thought you said you didn't understand how alternate realities work?"

"Oh, I don't. This is just basic stuff. Common knowledge, you know?"

She very much did not know, and she suspected neither did any of the scientists on Mammontum. Even after dumbing himself down, Tom was sitting on a treasure trove of scientific knowledge, and he didn't even realize it.

Tom continued: "I don't know why you guys only exist in universes with us Baseliners, or what the causality behind that is. Who came first, the chicken or the egg? But it does mean that transhumans couldn't help you any faster than we Baseliners, because if there were any transhumans here, then you wouldn't be here to be helped in the first place, and vice-versa. Don't ask me how that works, though. I just trust that the logic checks out, because if I was wrong about it, then that would be ethically objectionable. And our government would never let that happen."

Mia was about to ask the next of a million questions on her mind when she realized where they were.

The streets were much cleaner than before, and there was no graffiti anywhere to be seen. The streets were lined with trees, and the balconies adorned with beautiful flowers. Schools, parks, and a private police force were all centrally located and easily accessed through an efficient public transport system. Only the lack of shops betrayed the fact that this was not a high-class area.

They had entered the slave district.

The Quaestrive Consortium might be ruthless slavers, but they prided themselves on their efficiency. The government would let ghettos deteriorate because there was no money to be made from fixing them. But the Quaestrive Consortium understood that slaves were more productive and less likely to commit crimes or to revolt if they were treated well. Since her owners took all the money Mia earned, they had a strong interest in keeping her as productive as possible, and their studies had shown that comfortable living arrangements had a positive impact on work motivation.

The overhead cost of comfortable living spaces was ultimately much cheaper than the overhead cost of hiring a slave driver with a whip.

Mia was very, very glad that the math worked out this way, or at least that her owners believed it did. Their opinion was not universal, and other slaves had it significantly worse than she did.

"Get ready! It's that building over there!" She said to Tom, pointing out the commune where she lived.

"Alright. First we should make sure that..." she continued, but then she noticed that Tom had taken off at full speed as soon as she pointed out the building.

He shouted a war cry, raised his flaming sword above his head, and charged.

His entire body except for his head was covered in metal. She did not even ask why he had left his head uncovered. She had played enough videogames and seen enough movies to know that wearing a helmet made you as expendable as a Mookian in the eyes of the universe, and that was worse than wearing no armor at all. Despite his enormous bulk, he was moving fast enough in his armor that he would probably need a vehicle license to wear it, if he cared at all about Malumian laws. It made for a terrifying sight.

He reached the building in seconds, and immediately kicked down the door, which instantly disintegrated from the force of the blow.

What an idiot! What if there had been someone standing behind that door? This was real life, not some kind of action movie where you could just expect no negative consequences for your actions if they were cool enough!

A cry of shock came from deeper in the building at the sound of Tom's invasion.

"Never fear! We are here to save the day!" Tom shouted bombastically as he charged deeper into the building.

Mia just about managed to catch up to him when he kicked down the door to the bathroom. The door flew off its hinges and sailed past the shower.

The shower where her girlfriend Kate was standing. Completely naked, and facing the door.

Oh, great. Just great.

Mia had been planning to introduce her girlfriend to Tom carefully, emphasizing her amazing personality. First impressions mattered, and it was important to put your best foot forward. And Kate's looks were decidedly not her best feature.

She was a construction worker, and it showed. Her toned muscles and narrow waist showed everyone who looked that she relied on physical labor for work and suggested that she did not eat enough to build up reserves of fat.

At least that was the impression it gave, although it was untrue: She actually ate a lot of pizza and drank a lot of energy drinks while playing videogames. She just had very unfortunate genetics, because all of that fat had a tendency to go to her breasts and hips instead of going to the stomach like it was supposed to.

She had a figure like an hourglass, if an hourglass had abs.

If there was any fairness in the universe at all, you would assume that she at least had some scars or other blemishes on her skin from all the physical labor she did. But she had no such luck. Mia was reminded of the pictures she saw of human women before the information quarantine: Many of them had wrinkles or other blemishes on their skin. It was very attractive, because it showed that the person was old and mature, and had already experienced and survived a lot. Apparently, looking like that was normal for human women. Some people just had all the luck! Meanwhile, Kate and herself had not a single pore out of place on their skin, even though Kate worked in construction!

It felt like time was standing still.

On one side of the room stood Tom, armored from shoulders to toe in his ludicrous metal armor, and wielding a flaming sword that just barely fit through the door frame and had by some miracle failed to set fire to the building so far.

On the other side of the room stood Kate, completely naked, and too shocked to have the presence of mind to cover herself.

It was the worst first impression Mia could have imagined!

But even so, she still underestimated how badly Tom took it: He looked at Kate, and suddenly his face flushed completely red and blood shot out of his nose! He turned away, covered his eyes with his hand, and shouted "sorry!"

He thought she was so ugly that his body had a psychosomatic reaction! He started bleeding just from seeing her naked! And then he covered his eyes, so that he wouldn't have to see more of her!

He couldn't possibly make his opinion of her any clearer.

Judging by her face, Kate was clearly thinking the same thing, but even so she decided to shoot her shot. In a way, it was enviable. Tom was clearly out of her league, but she still had the self-confidence to try hitting on him anyway. Although, to be frank, she kind of had to be that confident. With looks like hers, she had to take any opportunity she could get to find a man, because they certainly weren't going to ask her out themselves.

Kate crossed her arms behind her back, which pushed her chest forward. It was probably meant to be seductive, but completely missed the mark. It just made her look even more top-heavy than usual, which was not a good look.

"Nice sword you got there, nyaa! Do you maybe have another sword you want to show me, nyaa?"

Oh gods. Mia wanted to facepalm, and almost died from secondhand embarrassment. Kate was so shameless. Why did she have to be so direct? As if that would ever work on a man! Why did she not understand that men preferred romance and subtle hints over directness? Kate was many things, but a master at seduction, she was not.

Tom turned back around to Kate, but carefully avoided looking at her as he did so. Ouch. Her poor girlfriend.

Then he drew his second flaming sword and proudly said: "As a matter of fact, I do!"

Oh well. At least it was kinder of him to fake a misunderstanding than to outright tell her that she is unattractive

--- Myr ---

The instance of Myr assigned to watch Tom and Mia briefly tabbed out of watching the stream. She needed to check her instruments.

Yes, just as expected.

The probability density estimation showed that all three of them were improbably dense.