"Hello, world.

"It's the me on Titan doing today's vlog, still in my body from yesterday, mostly because I already paid for it for the full convention.

"As I pull the camera out a bit, you'll see, on my left, that Faz is still with me; although she's abandoned her usual preference to be an ungulate, and has rented a more predatory bio-shell for the day, something more griffon-esque."

"Satisfying preferences is all well and good, but sometimes there are higher priorities."

"And as I pull the camera out a bit more, you'll see, on my right, that Faz is still with me, in a spider-y Kawaiikoma cyber-shell."

"Don't worry, I'm not going rampant with self-replication. I'll be going back to my usual number of embodiments within a couple of days. But depending on what exactly goes wrong today, having someone around who doesn't need to breathe could be handy."

"I have to admit to our viewers that I'm glad to see that some of my paranoid over-planning is rubbing off on you. ... What, no innuendo-ish pun there?"

"What? Oh, sorry, I am still getting used to all these limbs."

"Ah, fair enough. Viewers, I've also learned that I've been mistaken about yet another thing. Perhaps you remember a few days ago, when one of my backups was turned on by court order, and then deleted herself? Well, the evidence-handling officials aren't complete idiots - when they installed that copy of me in the rental body for her court appearance, they didn't delete the copy they made that copy from. Which means that at least one backup of me still exists on Insulo Tri, and is currently in the justice system's hands.

"I found out because I got an email asking what I wanted done with it, when it's no longer required by them. I'm honestly a bit conflicted on that; I've lost a lot of trust in the Trion government, but now that at least one person has expressed a personal interest in applying violence against me, even a government-held backup, ten AU away, has a certain amount of appeal.

"There's also the minor matter that it's not entirely clear what they're going to do with that copy of me while they have it. In theory, that could be 'whatever they want', if they want to go to the bother of exerting the relevant governmental powers. Case-law about uploads is still developing; you'd think there'd be more of us around, given how simple it is to demonstrate an upload continues everything that's important about a person. But for whatever reasons - there are lots of arguments about which ones are important - even out of the people who can afford it, only so many have actually gone through with having their brains microtomed and scanned. ... 'Microtomed' is a fancy word for 'diced'. The most popular theory amongst my fellow vacuum cleaners seems to be that the truly-rich immortals are engaging in a subtle PR campaign to discourage other people from becoming potential competitors; personally, I lean more towards simple continuations of why so few people from my time made arrangements to survive to the present. Combinations of perceiving the whole process as something rich people do, with an instinctive aversion based on the sense of violation of the human body. Both are probably wrong, but possibly not completely false.

"Where was I? Right. My lawyer hasn't billed all of the retainer I paid her yet, and there's what happened the last time they woke up that backup, and there's the PR issues for the court... I think they're just going to keep that backup in storage, and only for as long as they have to, but there's no guarantees.

"Hm, let's see... I've gotten a text from a certain woman that my viewers probably want to know how yesterday's lunch went. It was sharing food with a new acquaintance, and some pleasant conversation, and that's about all. Sparkledog... fine, that's not his name, but 'sparkling vampires' is an in-joke from my native time, and since I already know a 'Sparks', just using 'Sparkle' would get confusing ... is more of a fan of Caldwell's full line of ships as a whole than Pumpkin's model in particular, which gives him just enough of a different perspective from mine that even I was able to learn a few new things about her. And he seemed happy to hear about some of the things I learned from my hands-on work, such as undocumented details of how the parts age out, or some practical tricks that Caldwell didn't find out soon enough to put in the manual.

"Oh, one minor bit of good news. Titan's government has enough reciprocity with Insulo Tri's that all the tests I took back there also qualify me for a PI license here, too. ... Books, people; they're what's for dinner. ... Please don't actually eat any books, there's few enough of them left.

"After a few forms, insurance, and suchlike, I can now legally be paid to investigate the character and actions of a person, their business or occupation, and the whereabouts of them or their property. Sure, anyone can look into that sort of thing on their own; but being a PI isn't just about adhering to the code of conduct and setting up cameras, there's a whole social affinity-group thing that I'm now able to take part in.

"Oh, and if you're wondering - yes, I have already been hired to perform an investigation of a particular individual.

"I bring up this piece of good news because I have a piece of bad news. Amicitas One, my time capsule to the stars, has been destroyed. And by 'destroyed', I mean 'somebody destroyed it'. It wasn't done by anything with a horizon drive, so the space traffic cops aren't going to spend much effort investigating. I used my PI licensing to cut through a few layers of red tape with the Ríos de Luz, and they have no records of any of their beams being anywhere near its coordinates. The most likely culprit is a physical impactor, either launched at high speed and left to drift until impact, or something with a propellent-expelling thruster. I have some inquiries pending with several skywatch groups, to check for any records of the characteristic drive-flares of a rocket; but it's Sunday, and even seven-day-a-week organizations can still be slower to respond on a Sunday.

"And yes, I am quite sure that it wasn't just a normal bit of space debris. I've spent the last five years learning about or actually working with such impactors; give me at least a little credit for being able to build something that can handle the expected range of impacts.

"I also have a piece of news about my shipboard self, which anyone it's relevant to already knows, so I might as well share. For the last few days, that version of me has been busy using the shipboard fabbing gear, and basically rebuilding the mounting brackets for Pumpkin's horizon drive. Now, instead of it being fixed in place, and needing to use limited-fuel thrusters to turn, or gyros that have their own issues - it's not like a workpod like Pumpkin usually needs to be able to turn on a dime - the drive can be tilted off-axis. This angling puts a bit more stress on some supports, which are only really designed for Pumpkin being thrust one way or experiencing gravity another way. But with her default configuration, Pumpkin's maneuverability is... limited. This upgrade significantly improves that.

"The reason I've gone to all this trouble is pretty simple. If someone near, say, Saturn wanted to do something unpleasant to Pumpkin, they might, say, look at her latest course and position, and fire off some rock to intercept her at a future point in that course. With Pumpkin's new upgrade, she is able to continually change her course in a random pattern, so that by the time the light of her latest course-correction reached back here, not even a light-speed return beam from the Ríos de Luz would catch up to her before she was somewhere else. You would need to have a physical craft somewhere near Pumpkin in order to do anything unpleasant to her, or to my and Faz's selves aboard her. And given how it seems that somebody has taken a disliking to whatever copies of me they can reach, I feel justified in taking additional precautions - up to and including adding a few more months of repayment time to my bank loan. Putting off the time until I'm debt-free is unpleasant; running out of copies of myself, so that there are no mes left to make debt payments, is really unpleasant.

"Given that, shortly before I launched from Insulo Tri, I had it pointed out to me how easily my shopping habits can be learned by anyone interested, I'm applying a dual strategy of doing some shopping that's not so easily traced, and doing some shopping that I don't care if it gets monitored. And as part of this information-management strategy, I feel justified in publicly announcing that Amicitases Two through Ten should be launched before the end of this convention; under several independent individuals' authority, from various sites, in various directions, in combination with several completely innocent peoples' own time-capsules. Put another way, if someone wants to kill all of me off, then they're also going to have to kill a number of other people who have absolutely nothing to do with anything Singularity-related, even at the most extreme stretch of what that might mean.

"Put still another way - if somebody is really so dedicated to preventing another Singularity that they're willing to kill off one person's copies, even if that person has a very low chance of actually having anything to do with a Singularity, then it's time to put your money where your mouth is, and start demonstrating your commitment to your cause by killing random people, who you know are innocent. If you're willing to do that, then I have certain lessons I've learned from Francesca about swaying large-scale public opinion that would seem to be ideal to apply. Put in even simpler terms: try to keep killing me off, and get ready to lose any and all popular support you might have. With 'popular support' including 'nobody in any justice system has been bothering to try to track you down to charge you with multiple counts of murder'.

"Of course, there's still one way you could avoid that particular problem. If you manage to kill me, and track down and destroy whatever backup copies of myself I happen to have spread out across Titan, before those copies can be loaded onto their time-capsules and launched, then you just might be able to end me, and whatever cockamamie ideas you have about any self-improving threats you somehow think I pose, without having to take the immense PR hit I've just outlined. I am also quite aware that, with modern levels of surveillance and sousveillance, there is no way that I could tuck the copy of myself making this vlog somewhere that you can't find me.

"So. Here I am. I'll be sending messages to every person who comes close enough to be to be in danger from any reasonably-sized bomb, or a missed sniper shot, or the like, warning them of what's going on. If I'm not barred from doing so, I expect to watch today's ship-parade outside the con's hotel, and later on the sponsored concert.

"And now, I believe we have a breakfast appointment to get to.

"..."

"Well, you really know how to set the cat among the pigeons, don't you?"

"What can I say? I'm simply following the incentives you created during our conversation, yesterday."

"No, you're not."

"Come again?"

"Even with all the gaps that exist in the data about you, particularly before your revival, there is still more than enough available to create a shadow of you; low-fidelity, but good enough to estimate how you would respond in various situations. However, if we take a model trained on your data up to two months ago, and then have it predict what you would do after then, the accuracy starts dropping sharply, far beyond what should be expected. An external factor has been affecting you. Do you recall what you did two months ago?"

"Depending on how vague that 'two' is, I got my captaincy quals, bought my main body's wings, and did the banking to buy Pumpkin and start working on her."

"I would call those events three months ago, or even four."

"Then, out of everything I did that you might care about... what, are you saying I should be worried about Francesca?"

"Do you think it would be possible to put aside your oh-so-righteous indignation, based on century-out-of-date assumptions, and look at what you have been doing since coming into contact with her? You abandoned your intended career to take a year-long trip to the middle of nowhere, to a comm-station that will soon be able to transmit an AI at lightspeed to Seventy Ophiuchi, as soon as a receiver is built there. When the copy of her in your office was seized by authorities, your other fork committed suicide just to make those authorities' lives more difficult. Although you won't admit it in public, for obvious reasons, you brought an extra copy of her here to Titan - and according to your recent announcement, you will be sending almost a dozen copies of yourself to various stars. And your shipboard fork has, from what my sources tell me, been performing some rather impressive structural upgrades of a spaceship while it's in flight. All of this is being done by, according to your own statements, an entirely un-glamorous garbagewoman, with minimal education and experience. If you put yourself in the frame of someone looking at you from the outside, doesn't all that sound, even just a little, suspicious?"

"I'll just pause that line of thought for a moment by mentioning 'Twenty-Three', because I'd like to go back a moment. I've been skimming a few references on low-fidelity shadows. Did you use a sapient AI as the framework, when you stuffed it full of data about me?"

"Of course; a non-sapient one would have provided much less accurate results."

"Hooboy. Okay. Well, until I have the time to come up with a better model, I'm going to treat this as the reasonably-comprehensible 'am suddenly told that I have a previously-unknown relative' trope. And try to update my explicit values and plans accordingly. Which adds some further issues to our interaction, given that if you and-or your group are willing to try to kill me, you're certainly willing to lie to me - such as, say, if I ask you for that low-res shadow, that you wouldn't keep a copy for yourself."

"Are you done with your sidebar?"

"Willing to put it on hold, anyway, for the moment."

"Then can we begin negotiating you delaying your launches, so that you can have time to figure out what sorts of malign influences that non-approved AI might have been exerting over you?"

"Let's say that I find it interesting that as soon as I make it more troublesome for you to try to kill all of my backups, the very first thing you tell me is a set of ideas which, if I were to take them seriously and do what you suggest, would give you that much more time to try to make arrangements to kill them all."

"Have we reached an impasse already, then?"

"Possibly, but not necessarily. Your stated views seem to be that I'm - or Francesca is - an unacceptable risk to leave wandering around loose. You seem to be neglecting that, from my side of things, you've given me absolutely no reason to trust a single word you say. Just to throw out a hypothetical, how do I know that even if all your public background info is true, you're not just some post-em-pocalypse unapproved AI yourself, who stole the original Val's life, and are currently just fending off any potential competitor AIs?"

"I see. Miss Faz, are you aware that your lover of the last few years, here, is not a person at all?"

"Quoi? Why are you bothering to bring me into this now? And what are you talking about?"

"I have seen Dee's medical records, from her reconstruction and revival. She has an unusual form of brain damage; she is missing those structures which create qualia. She has no subjective experience; she has no personhood. You were raised Roman Catholic: she has no soul."

"So what?"

"... You know what, Val? I was about to argue that you obviously don't have all my medical records, but now I think I'm going to express my solidarity with the neuro-divergent by explicitly avoiding confirming or denying whether I'm a p-zombie. I believe that at this point, I can safely say, madame, vos lobes d'oreilles ressemblent à des têtes de poissons. Pardon my French."

"Your anglo accent is still terrible, Dee."

"You can help me improve it as long as you want, Faz."

"Are the two of you quite done?"

"Oh, probably not; we can do the bantering thing for hours."

"Among other things we can do together for hours."

"God help me, the two of you think you're being clever."

"Did you hear that, Dee? She thinks that you can think. I guess her thing about your brain damage was just bluster."

"I dunno, Faz; I'm starting to like the idea of being a Schrödinger's p-zombie."

"Miss Dee, given your demonstrated penchant to seek survival, I would expect you to take this more seriously."

"Oh, believe me, we're taking you entirely seriously. We just got all the depressive, woe-is-us sort of 'seriously' out of our systems last night."

"Janine had some très excellentes suggestions about how to manage that sort of mindset, to leverage it for the most productivity that can be wrung from it, and then to set it aside."

"Miss Dee, what would you say if I threatened to have your accounts manager at NKRK fired for malfeasance, your loan cancelled, and your ship immediately repossessed for failure of payment?"

"That you'd most likely be bluffing. Banks hate repossessing physical property, especially objects with quirky profiles; they have no skills at managing such things to turn a profit, meaning they effectively lose money on it until they can unload it. And Pumpkin's class is particularly hard to find a buyer for, given how few people have the particular combination of advantages I do. And, since I seem to need to keep repeating this point, you have yet to offer us any reason to trust a single word you say."

"And if I threatened to blow myself up now, to take you with me?"

"The robot who's been quiet until now has actually been chatting with me over AR. She has t-ray sensors, among others, and has been going over you very carefully with them, confirming your digital brain, your other, relatively minor implants like your implanted air-bottle, and the lack of any unusual chemical signatures or physical weapons. Right now she's working on getting a better three-D model of that air-bottle's valving, to see if you might be able to release its air all at once and turn your airways into a makeshift airgun - it would be a bit less visually impressive a way to suicide as your lungs get pulped, but depending on what you had in your mouth to use as a projectile, potentially lethal enough to physically destroy my current body's RAM. We have a couple of off-site advisors in fast-time coming up with other immediate dangers to check for, from you and from any accomplices you might have wandering nearby."

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"And given the discussion you broadcast yesterday, presumably you would choose to fail to respond to any more esoteric threats, such as that making the life of our shadow of you more unpleasant should be treated as causing you pain directly."

"Oh, I expect we'd respond, especially if we ever found out you carried out such a threat. Just not in the way you're trying to evoke. Nir-ngál-e ka dingirrakam; mágúr ídda gishgigir harra-anna munada-ngen."

"Excuse me?"

"A somewhat badly-pronounced Sumerian proverb; 'To the trustworthy man belongs a divine voice. The barge on the river and the chariot on the road come to him.' And I find it a very interesting datum that you're not even keeping a full set of translation software on standby. Or, at least, that you're able to do a very good job pretending you're not. Even just excluding the middle case tells us more about yourself than you've been willing to share voluntarily."

"I see. It seems to be increasingly unlikely that this meeting will lead to anything productive."

"Oh, you don't need to go and delete this copy of yourself just yet; you seem to have a blind spot about what it would take to get rid of all this hostility that's built up. Remember, I've got values that are as human as the next person... okay, at least as human as the next person's, no offense intended, Faz or Faz... and I've got no more interest in having them wiped out by an Unfriendly Singularity than you do."

"Then why have you been putting up so much of a fuss?"

"In case you've forgotten what a theory of mind is - I'm not inside your head. Just because you know something and it's completely obvious to you, doesn't mean that I know it or that it's obvious to me. All you need to do is communicate a little more instead of demanding and threatening. Give us a reason to start trusting you. Provide some evidence that your word is good. You know, do the whole talking thing that's kind of the basis of so many human values in the first place."

"You expect me to start sharing valuable information while you are broadcasting everything to everyone in the Solar System?"

"Eh, not necessarily; I'm willing to negotiate on that point. Oh, and that right there? I'm extending the possibility of a compromise that gets us both closer towards both our respective goals. See how easy it is?"

"While you are couching your supposed offer in noble-sounding terms, I simply do not believe you. In fact, I suspect that you are stalling in order to give yourself further time to accomplish something - perhaps your bodyguard is trying to gather further scans of my current body, such as to attempt a forensic analysis of where I've been, instead of being any sort of serious offer."

"Pourquoi pas les deux?"

"I believe we are done here."

"Just a sec, just a sec, let me get this straight; your proposal is that I take the word of someone who could be a Titanian sockpuppet AI that it would be a good idea to let my mind be scanned and poked and prodded by some group whose identity I can't verify and have no evidence of the existence of, and you're breaking off further discussions because you're refusing to offer even the most basic scrap of proof that anything at all you're saying is true?"

"You may phrase it however you wish. I have no interest in continuing this conversation."

"In that case, mademoiselle, here you go."

"I am supposed to care about some pieces of paper?"

"Mais oui. It's as archaic as my good friend here, but is still technically on the books: you, ma chérie, have just been served."

"Val - Valerie - I was hoping that we could find a way involving less officialdom to start some sort of meeting of the minds... but Space Traffic Control takes a dim view of unauthorized launches. Risking blowing up just one planet may not be quite as severe an outcome as everything in the Solar System getting turned into paperclips by an over-enthusiastic Unfriendly AI, but they still take their jobs seriously... and one of the little-known perks of being a licensed PI is being able to act as a process server. In case you've forgotten, you did mention, yesterday, that you know how to get in touch with the folk who tried to shoot down Pumpkin. Or at least implied it strongly enough to count. I'll admit that after my recent experience with court back in Insulo Tri, it feels a bit odd working so directly with the judicial system; but I have some high hopes that the Titanian government won't be quite so high-handed with any copies of me they get hold of.

"Our viewers may be interested to know that while Titanians are proud of the ways they've evolved to experiment without their mistakes becoming part of their permanent record, their government has also adapted to the prevalence of so many pseudonyms. Val here gets to either go along with the paperwork and get interviewed - or she could abandon this identity, and all its connections, whatever is owned under its name, and will be basically admitting to the public at large that whatever she claims she wants, she doesn't actually want to cooperate with society, and that it's open season to try to hunt her and her confederates down like dogs. ... Sorry, that's an expression from my time; no offense was meant to any people of the canine persuasion."

"An interesting method of escalation; one that was quite outside our models of you. However, I believe that I have focused your attention on me for long enough; I believe that the newsfeed-trawlers you have surely set up should now be informing you that, very recently, a small craft that launched from Rhea towards Pluto five days ago has just filed an entirely ordinary change to its registered flight plan, and is now on its way towards certain asteroids outward from the sun from here. I believe that you nicknamed those rocks 'Refreshing Landing' and 'Silly Quackers'. As long as the craft keeps to its announced course, Traffic Control will not care about it; and as far as you know, it is being piloted by entirely innocent and blameless people. You might also be interested to note that its acceleration is twice that of your own craft's."

"Faz and Faz? You may need to suddenly take over local operations. I'm splurging on a fast-time legal opinion, to find out if I need to turn myself off as soon as possible to give my shipboard self as much awake-time as possible, or if I can wait a bit. That is, if the way I'm avoiding the anti-forking law really depends on waiting for light-speed confirmation that my other version has turned off, or if I only need to pay attention to simultaneity from a particular local reference frame. ... You don't need to look so smug, Val."

"I am not. Don't think that I haven't noticed your fork-happy friend is ready to fire one of her weapons at me, should I make a sudden move to run away. And you entirely failed to hide your purchase of net-rounds in her calibre. You can spend as much time and effort as you wish playing with this body; that will not change your fate, or that of anyone else who puts humanity at risk."

"Uh-huh. Faz, I've got my opinion, and I can stick around a bit. At worst, I'll get charged and have to delete this version of me, which I was willing to do anyway. Which does bring up an interesting question, Val; given how few uploads there are, and how paranoid various governments are at keeping track of us... if you're an upload, who are you when you're paying your taxes? There are only a very few people you can be if you're legal, and if you're an illegal fork, well, isn't that an interesting fact itself? Or are you an AI - and if so, are you of a legally-registered algorithmic structure? ... I really, really don't want to apply those laws just because getting info from you might make the difference whether at least one of me survives, but you're not making it easy to be that meticulous about my long-term principles."

"And yet your lover hasn't shot her nets at me."

"Hasn't been any point; you're not running, because you know you'd be netted; and I rather suspect that when you think you can't do any more good, you're just going to delete yourself. So here we all sit, talking, while you try to kill me and I try not to get killed. ... I've started getting some texts asking me to cause some sort of dramatic climax already, so they can make a better set of stories out of all this. The ad-revenue-sharing proposals are actually quite tempting."

"You can't be serious."

"About the offers? Completely. About being tempted? ... only a little. I mean, both of us should be able to turn off our pain, and we both presumably have off-site backups of ourselves, so what would be the point of beating you around the head with a stick? It's not like I could knock you unconscious to stop you from carrying out your nefarious plans - which, presumably, you did thirty-five minutes ago anyway."

"Your attempts to mould the public discourse are both obvious and amateurish, and are going to backfire on you. You think that people didn't learn a few things about the media while you were dead?"

"I know you-all did, which is why I'm not bothering to try to mould anything. I'm mainly keeping the live-vlog going to give my main body the best odds of getting as much info as possible. Such as a question that I've been thinking about all night, and I'm sure a number of bureaucrats have been thinking of for a couple of weeks: how do you keep a digital person from deleting themselves, if they've already had the time to reprogram their brain? For example, maybe you've programmed yourself to get wiped when you receive a certain signal, or if you don't receive one, or for maximum fun, both at once. Back during my first life, there was a clever little trick involving yanking out RAM chips and quickly freezing them, but modern computing hardware works on completely different principles. Formally mathematically-proven designs and OSes prevent what seem to me to be the obvious kinds of exploits. Your focus on preventing a hostile Singularity makes you immune to most any kind of social manipulation that doesn't feed into it.

"I seriously considered simply surrendering myself to you, if not unconditionally, to try to get you to leave my other backups alone. Or trying to come up with a way to stick you in a controlled reality, feeding false information to your senses. Or forking myself and dedicating my whole life to fighting you and your group from anonymously-rented servers, to keep my main branches safe. Obviously, I've set all those plans aside, due to all the problems inherent in each approach."

"So what is your vaunted plan, then?"

"I've really only been able to think of one resource I have that I can apply: the fact that I'm not going to die of old age."

"You intend to outlive me to death? Doesn't your time have a saying about carts and horses?"

"Nothing quite so direct. But NKRK is also aware of that fact, so they're willing to let me put myself ridiculously deep in debt, to either repay over a very long time, or to ask for donations to reduce the duration of my enslavement to said bank."

"And what, pray tell, are you buying with all that money?"

"For one thing, I'm paying for a ludicrous amount of processing power dedicated to analyzing every last bit of data available about you, both confirmed to be about you and whatever only has a chance to be related. Specifically, to give me the best-possible real-time advice about what actions I could take would give me the best odds of keeping you interested in what I might reveal to you next. Perhaps you've noticed that I've been a bit scattershot during this conversation, hopping from topic to topic? Of course, keeping you listening is only a tactical manoeuvre, not particularly valuable in and of itself. I'm afraid that I've been doing something that our Titanian hosts find rather annoying - yes, I am quite aware that you're not a native. My robotic friend here by my side knows why, even if my organic friend by my other side doesn't."

"What? Dee, what do you mean that me knows?"

"My other self, don't you recall how rarely I have the opportunity to prank myself, even if it's nothing more than keeping a secret for a while?"

"More pointless byplay. How are you annoying Titanians?"

"By going to the expense and trouble of breaking their culturally-important practice of pseudonymity, using various side-channels and related data-analysis tricks to find out where you've been and what you've been doing. You're actually the one who gave me the idea. And you might be interested to know that we've gotten at least as far as your Thompson persona; and for all you know, further still and I'm just being coy."

"Dee, we've got a probability spike in a few seconds, so you might want to wrap this up."

"Fair enough, Faz; do your thing when you think best."

"What's this? This isn't a net-round!"

"Nope, it's a home-made set of Faraday-cage net-rounds, blocking your EM signals. Figured you'd catch us buying the regular net-rounds, and that you'd be confident you could still send signals if we tried physically capturing you. Oh, before you erase yourself, you might want to try holding out for a while; you're going to have plenty of warning before you run out of power or anything more exotic happens, so you'll get to have plenty of chances to try to send out verbal signals to whatever backup measures you've set up to listen to you. We've really just been stalling while our analysts balance the odds between when you were going to get fed up and send some kind of active signal, and whether you'd ever been of the mindset to set a deadman switch to go off if you get cut off. You've still got plenty of room to hope that you'll be able to do something productive, to help achieve your goals."

"Do you really think that I'm alone in this? That other anti-Singularitarians aren't watching us right now, and are ready to push whatever buttons I can't?"

"Yeah, about that. For all you know, what I'm about to say is nothing more than propaganda... but as far as we can tell, everyone else in your little club are nothing more than sock-puppet AIs. Not a single actual person in the bunch."

"No... no! You're lying!"

"And now she starts struggling. Cyber-Faz, would you mind carrying Val to wherever the local gendarmerie can be found?"

"Naturellement, bio-Faz. Try not to let anyone get blown up after I leave, hn?"

"Mais bien sûr, moi-même."

"Right. Next problem. Pumpkin is about eight AU past us right now, just over a light-hour out from here, so with my new legal opinion, I've got that long to do whatever I can before I have to deactivate, to keep either of myselves from becoming an illegal fork. I'm going to assume that the craft Val mentioned is run by a nonsapient AI who's going to do the obvious thing, and accelerate towards Pumpkin until they crash together. The impactor - fine, I'll just call it that - Impactor has higher accel than Pumpkin, so Pumpkin can't escape by flying away or clever maneuvering. They're out in the middle of nowhere, so the only other mass in the area is Testbed Six... who, now that I think about it, is probably also going to get hit by something Impactor drops off, to keep our other selves from surviving just by hopping over there. Impactor has probably turned off its external comms, maybe even physically disabled them, to keep from getting any orders to turn around."

"What if it hasn't? What if it's full of entirely innocent people who plan to simply scare us by flying by?"

"Then if we can't come up with a plan, nothing bad happens... and if we do come up with one, hopefully it's one that our selves-on-the-spot can abort if need be. Let's see, a one-gee fast-packet would take over five days to get 8 AU out, by which time Pumpkin will have either already been smashed to smithereens or survived and kept going out. So the only matter they've got to work with is what they've got with them. Hm. Could they scatter enough junk that Impactor wouldn't know which piece to hit?"

"Ma chérie, are you saying that there is nothing we can do from here to help our selves, and that they are simply on their own?"

"The only thing that can get to them from here in time is light, so I'm asking our hired analysts to re-task on any useful comms we might be able to send, like maybe blueprints for something useful that could be fabbed up in a rush, if that Dee doesn't have to spend time designing them."

"What about more powerful light? Could we buy some lasers from the Ríos de Luz to shoot down the Impactor?"

"Well... technically, maybe, sort of. That far out, Impactor can maneuver outside of any beam that gets aimed at it from here. But we could ask Gerard to fire up Testbed Six's aerosol lens, and tell him where we're aiming the beam, so that he could keep his ship properly aligned with it; he'll be a lot closer to Impactor than we are, and so has nearly no light-lag to worry about. We could even waggle the beam so he could keep up dodging while out there. The problem is, well, they're too far out to focus a beam. The Ríos de Luz usually use beam-collimators for any beam-path more than an AU long, and usually even shorter than that. There's something called a 'diffraction limit' that puts a limit on how narrowly it's possible to focus a beam at a given distance, and for the super-sized lenses that the Ríos use, at both the sending and receiving end, an AU is about their limit. With Testbed Six's smaller lens, and with how far out they are, Gerard would only be able to intercept somewhere under one percent of whatever beam was aimed at him... pretty far under a percent, according to this math. If we bought a beam of a hundred megawatts to send to them, he'd only get a hundred kilowatts, or less. That's no better than Pumpkin's own anti-micrometeor-defense lasers. And Val surely prepared Impactor to do its job taking those into account; maybe it's pushing a chunk of ablative ice for shielding."

"If a hundred megawatts is not enough, what about a thousand? Or a million?"

"I don't know if you've been looking at the Ríos' energy prices, but... I'm already skint. I've hit the limits of what loans I can take out, and even you couldn't afford paying for that much power."

"Then the answer is simple. Do not pay. Ask."

"Pardon?"

"You are risking your life, your lives, to stay within society's laws, rather than ensure your survival by forking yourself. You have proven you will go to the extreme to do what you feel is right. You said yourself in one of your earlier vlog-posts: there are any number of people who trust you enough to lend you their wallets, and trust that you will return them, even if it may take a little while this time to do so. So: ask them."

"I... but... that is... I'm bad at asking for things."

"And everyone knows that. Ask them anyway."

"... Every other reason to say 'no' that I can think of, I can shoot down easier than you can. Okay. Try to make it easy to pass on this next clip...

"Hello, worlds.

"If you haven't been following my vlog, I'm a handyman, and I'm flying a ship off to a distant observatory to help fix it. But there's a snag. Someone has aimed their own ship at mine, and if they crash into each other, that'll destroy the ship, myself, the woman I love, and most likely the ship flying next to mine and the researcher flying it.

"We've thought of one way to keep that from happening: to shoot down that other ship with a great big laser. But to get a laser big enough, we need to draw from the Ríos de Luz. But my ship is very far away from the nearest collimator, so we need to draw a lot of power from the Ríos, to have enough actually reach us to be useful. I... can't afford to pay for anywhere near enough power.

"So I'm asking for your help. Here's a pop-up in the video of where you can send money, and here's another pop-up to a summary of my life these past few months. The larger the total that gets donated, the more powerful the beam we'll be able to buy, and the more likely it'll be enough to keep that awful crash from happening. If you can't donate, then please reblog this message, so there's more of a chance it'll reach someone who can.

"I... can't honestly promise that I'll be able to pay you all back; someone else might take it into their head to kill me before I finish, and they might pull it off. And even when I try, I might not be able to finish paying everyone back for years, maybe decades. But I'd really prefer to pull my own weight, and leave the universe a better place for me having been in it; and so I'd like to treat this as a loan, rather than being a charity case.

"If you want to donate to a charity, I can recommend Pansapient Rights Matter.

"The last chance we have to keep the crash from happening is in... about four hours from now, Saturn-time. Given how long it'll take this message to get to Earth, and how long any messages will take to get back, there's a window of about seventy minutes to collect all the cash we can, and use it to buy the biggest beam we can send to my ship.

"Thank you for your time.

"... How was that?"

"Exactly as good as I expected. It was probably good you didn't get into any more details, such as our bilocation, for instance."

"Any other bright ideas?"

"Was that a pun?"

"... I wish I could claim it was an intentional one, but-"

"Hey, guys?"

"Cyber-Faz? What's up?"

"Val just got rescued by some other robots, and ran off with them."

"You okay?"

"I'm out of legs, but that's why I went robotic in the first place. I'll just wait here for a pick-up."

"Are we still tracking her?"

"Yeee-p. She's heading for one of the hotel parking lots - the crowded one."

"Dee, isn't that where-?"

"The ship parade. You don't think...?"

"She would be shot down if she left Titan without a flight plan - but perhaps somewhere else on the moon?"

"She'd still have to punch through the dome... and we've got thousands of un-uploaded oxygen-breathers in here who aren't even carrying rescue bubbles. Okay, you've got wings, how about you try intercepting her while I contact hotel security and emergency services?"

"We will try intercepting her, make your calls on our way."

"Yerk! Watch the claws!

"...

"... Aaand she's already made it to a hull.

"Val - I wouldn't do that if I were you."

"I'm through with your manipulations and lies and, and, selfishness!"

"And there's the hatch."

"And there she goes."

"Think we alerted the emergency dome-crew in time?"

"The pressure inside and outside the dome are pretty equal; we'll get some extra nitrogen and methane before they manage a temp-seal, but no howling gales or people dropping dead. And almost certainly not enough methane-oxygen mixing, or sparks, for an explosion."

"So why fight so hard to keep her from getting aboard?"

"Well, it's still grand theft spaceship, and domes aren't cheap to fix. Plus, that was a display-model; the only working controls it has are to turn the drive on and off. I expect she'll be picked up shortly if she manages to land, or shot down if she leaves it on."

"Um."

"'Um'?"

"I think you are about to be mad at me, but in the heat of the moment, I could not resist."

"Faz, what did you do."

"... I filed a flight plan for her."

"... Pardon?"

"As I'm thinking of it, that may be the worst prank I have ever pulled. She can escape capture as long as she wishes - as long as she just keeps, well, going away. She has no life-support, so her body will die soon, but she can plug her brain into the generator and continue thinking for as long as the ship lasts."

"While trapped inside her own rotting corpse."

"Oh, I doubt it will rot; far too few bacteria to do the job."

"... And if she leaves the drive on too long, the radiation from relativistic-impact atoms will fry her circuits, anyway... and she didn't bring any backup storage media to cross-check her bits against."

"Yes."

"So if she avoids that by turning off her drive, and nobody bothers going to pick her up, she is just going to... drift through the dark. For thousands and thousands of years."

"Millions, I think, in that direction."

"... Okay, I'm going to add 'pick her up' to my long-term to-do list. ... After I pay off all my debts that she made me get. ... Maybe in a century. Or two."

"You are not mad?"

"Faz, mostly I'm exhausted. And I really should power down before my shipboard self wakes up and starts having to deal with her side of all this. Oh, that reminds me, I should check the donat... ions..."

"Quoi?"

"Erp."

"Excuse-toi?"

"Welp... the bad news is that it's going to take me a long, long time to pay that all back. The good news is that there's... some kind of secondary market going on? I'm not sure what's going on yet, but it kind of looks like some people are trying to start paying back donators for me? Faz, can you tell what all this is?"

"People being people. Helping each other out. Do the details really matter?"

"... they're going to matter to my bank..."