Without more than an instant to prepare for the event, I found myself hovering in the air twenty feet above the ground, staring into a pair of gargantuan eyes that were each twice as big as I was.

Fuck.

I waved at the dragon. “Hello.”

She stared at me.

Fine weather, ain’t it? Good for a war, don’t you think?

Really, what was there to say when you met a creature that was bigger than a train?

However, I had no fear at all.

The sheer level of comfort that Sesako had while close to the dragon ensured that while in this body, I couldn’t participate in the only proper and reasonable course of action for anyone faced with any living thing that much bigger than me: Extreme panic.

Eh, or maybe not. I mean actually lots of responses are reasonable.

“Little one,” the dragon rumbled. “The other soul within your body does not like you.”

I had noticed. Maybe I smell a bit?

Wisecrack failed to be voiced. I couldn’t banter back with a solemn being, who, based on Sesako’s memories, might literally be as old as the dinosaurs that she looked vaguely like.

“I know him. I know what matters most to him. But you, what matters most to you? Do you know what matters most to you?”

Unblinking dragon eye.

“I know what matters most to me.”

A patient look, waiting. Unblinking.

And then I felt the touch of her mind on mine. By instinct there was no attempt to resist this spell.

Deepest desire. Speak.

“Being admired and respected as a good person.”

Ummmm.

That wasn’t what I had thought my deepest desire was. It certainly was not what I had been about to say in reply.

And was that even fair? — I cared about things outside of myself. I wasn’t a person who was obsessed with how other people saw me, or who was willing to say or do anything to gain the approval of others.

I really wasn’t.

“If you wish to be admired, why do you not wish to stay and fight? Others would then see you as a good person. A good warrior is admired even by his enemies — and a great warrior is admired especially by his enemies.”

Don’t die. Not again. Yellow van, hurtling towards me.

“I also am afraid.”

“Your fear does not stop you. If you honestly believed in the worthiness of a cause, you would die for it.”

That voice sounded very certain. I wished to believe what she said, but I was not confident that it was true. I no longer trusted myself in such a way.

“I do not know. I don’t think I could make myself die again. But also, I don’t care about being admired and respected based on an illusion. I have to actually do something good for it to count.”

The voice boomed out, a gigantesque Socrates. “And what is good?”

Your Truth. Speak your heart.

“Thriving happy people. As many individuals as possible being able to enjoy their own lives according to their own standards. Each growing, each living their own lives fully, whatever that means to them — no one forcing them to become someone different than who they want to be. Everyone becomes who they wish to be, everyone becomes the best version of themselves.”

The dragon’s unblinking eyes did not say what she thought about my enthusiastic speechifying. She was attentive; Sesako’s instincts said that.

I repeated, “Admiration doesn’t count if it isn’t based on something real. Faking isn’t winning.”

“This is the reason you wish to help others? You wish to be admired, and for that admiration to come from doing that which is actually admirable.”

“Yes — but that means I can’t be thinking about how it looks, or how it makes me feel, or whether it is connected to what I already care about. It must be about the other people. Often people give money for a reason that makes them feel good, and I like that. Anything that leads to people helping is good. But there is something really admirable when the gift is truly focused on the other person. It has to be focused on what really helps someone else, whether you ever know it, or whether it makes you feel good personally.”

“And fighting to protect the nation of this island would not lead to thriving happy people?”

“First, it would be unlikely if the thing that Sesako and you care about for reasons which have nothing to do with making the world the best place possible actually was the most effective way to make the world the best place.”

“Why?”

“Uh… orthogonal optimization pressures. If something is picked because it is really good for… you know, patriotic reasons, or because it protects the people nearby, it is unlikely to be the single best way to help someone thrive no matter who they are, or where they live. The decision to fight to protect the island wasn’t made after checking all of the other possible options for doing good and going ‘yes, this one is best’. That just isn’t how Sesako decided to fight.”

“No?”

“The people in this country — and also you. None of you are more valuable than people in any other place. I’m also not more valuable from an impartial perspective. Though I matter more to myself, everyone matters the most to themselves, but insofar as we are trying to do the most good, we shouldn’t only focus on ourselves in that way. Everyone is equally valuable.”

“And you place no value on the independence of the island — nor on my survival.”

The dragon spoke in a purely curious way. As though discussion of her likely death in the next weeks was no more interesting than a storm on the opposite side of the world.

Perhaps it wasn’t.

I felt guilty about that. “Obviously, I want you and everyone else on this island to have a thriving life, a good life —”

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“That is not obvious, and your behavior at times suggests that your true preferences are quite to the contrary. It is often wisdom to ignore words and pay attention only to behavior.”

“Observed preferences?” I said. “I suppose it has been too short a period of time for you to form a solid judgement of my character. There is little basis for you to predict me yet.”

“No, the pattern could yet fit into many weaves.”

“Let’s provisionally agree I am speaking the truth: Helping people is important to me. I especially care about those who suffer for ridiculous reasons. But none of you are more important than anyone else.”

“So, you are not certain this is the best war to fight in?”

“I mean, the best thing to do doesn’t involve fighting in a war at all? But no. This nation isn't even a democracy. It isn’t driven to help others. It just exists for its own sake.”

“And you do not?”

“I’ve tried,” I said, “To make striving purely for the good of others with a portion of my resources a part of my identity. I swore a long time ago that I would donate at least ten percent of what I earned each year to helping other people, and I’ve usually given even more than that.”

Again, the giant unblinking eyes. Attentive posture.

What the hell was she thinking?

I started babbling. “I do not know what the single best way is to help humans thrive. But my goal is to find it. Not to throw myself away on something else.”

“You are uncertain.”

Before I insisted that I was not, that voice echoed in my mind: Explain.

“So, I try to maximize the expected value. What that means is that sometimes something will definitely do good for someone — for example using a healing spell to cure someone who might die from a serious disease. That is definitely good, and —”

“What if the man is evil? Or what if his child shall be evil.” A deep rumbling voice. The changed tilt of the claws now indicated amusement.

“Yes, well — I don’t know that. So, this is why anything I do is uncertain. But the person I’m helping probably isn’t a future Hitler, and their kid probably won’t be Hitler either. By Hitler, I mean a man who is a symbol of extreme evil. So, I can expect that I will be doing good most of the time when I heal someone, even though a few times I will actually be making the world worse. If I apply an expected value framework I multiply how much good I’m doing by healing the man when this was a good thing — i.e. saving a life, by the probability that I will achieve that good, and I subtract from that the opposite calculation, the odds that I should have let him die, times the harm that this person will do if they were evil, and this gives me the expected value, or the expected amount of good that I’ll do by saving them.”

“How odd. It is rare for a human to consider that the future is a range, rather than a fact. Most people wish to select one correct option and then they judge whether they chose well simply by what happens afterwards — but what happens afterwards is a matter of chance. The best decision is not the one that in fact led to a good world, but the one which had the most pathways from it to a happy world — I never know. I only see the possibilities, and navigate towards that possibility which seems best, without ever expecting to know that it will succeed. If I chose well, the outcome is irrelevant. Yet I ask you: You are merely human. You have no ability to pierce through the clouds of the universe into the future. How do you assess these ‘odds,’ this chance? Perhaps the man is evil. But how do you know how likely he is to be evil, or how much evil he will do?”

“Uh, I suppose… well you often are guessing. You have to ask what number makes sense, and then do the math based on it.”

“You mean to pierce through the veil of fate through such simple considerations. That is not likely to work. It is foolishness.”

I flushed. “You have to make a choice. Even if you don’t do anything, that is an implied choice. And the choice you make indicates that you had a particular belief about the odds. I’m just formalizing this assessment.”

“In other words, you intend to make mistakes with confidence. You are like the generality of humans.”

“This isn’t always the case. Sometimes there is information that does make clear which choice is better. For example, if we’d healed a million people, and knew that only one of them turned out to be a serial killer, we’d know that we’d saved more lives than we’d destroyed. Or you can experiment — there was a group that I gave money to in my first world which just gave cash to poor farmers in a poor country, and then they did surveys afterwards of the people who they’d given money to, and the people who they weren’t able to help in a different village, to compare how well they were doing. This would give us an idea of how good giving someone an amount of money that was equivalent to their income for a year actually was.”

“And by doing so, you wasted money that could have been given to those other farmers by hiring a man to ask these other people these questions.”

“No! The study is how you can pierce through the veil of the Fates and see what will happen. Information has a value, and sometimes the highest expected value action is to acquire more information, because the information can help you do other things better.”

“The veil of fates is in the end impenetrable. Nothing can let us see deeply through it, we can only sense shapes, points, little marks — not the depths. Yet you are right — to see a little deeper into the veils of fate perhaps is worthwhile —why then are you unsure about your desire to leave this place, and to leave behind this country, and me as well. You are not certain that you wish to abandon us all to suffer our fate at the hands of the great celestial emperor.”

More than ever before the emotion that I sensed from the dragon was amused.

She rolled over, still keeping the long twisting head looking at me, and displayed the white scales of her hundreds of meters long belly. She stretched massive feet towards the skies and opened and closed the claws.

The ground beneath her did not shift, and I realized that there must be some sort of magical reinforcement into the ground to keep it from bending and buckling under her weight — but then a creature of that size clearly could not live in the first place without magic.

I took a deep breath. “In expected value terms, if I were able to flee — but I can’t because Sesako is alive, and he can stop me from doing that, just as I can make it hard for him to fulfill his duties.”

“You, neither of you, can fulfill your goals without the aid of the other — soon the two of you shall need to speak, and we shall see what the outcome is. Continue.”

I continued. The dragon really had a very forceful voice. “If I fled, I’d definitely be able to do a lot of good with the money that I appropriated from Sesako — though I don’t really believe in theft, and since he is now alive, ethically I can’t take anything from him anymore, even though —”

“You do not want to steal, not even to help create more thriving lives.”

She was serious about asking this.

“I… there might be some situations where I might, but in general, no. Both because becoming known as a thief would limit my options, and because it feels wrong — wait, isn’t it the case that you never kill any humans?”

“I have sworn. So, we have all sworn. Not to preserve our own lives. That is the set of fates I have chosen.”

“Why then are you criticizing me for not stealing when it might do more good than harm?”

“You choose your fate. I merely ask how you choose.”

“It generally is a good thing, if possible, to do things that are good according to as many value systems as possible. A pure ‘make as many people happy as possible’ only indirectly says stealing is wrong, but most humans feel like they shouldn’t steal. I still have those feelings, even if I think that consequentialism should always be the most important part of making moral decisions.”

“Ah. You are inconsistent, and you do not take the words that you say completely seriously. That is good, because words are weak and limited things.”

“Ummmm —” I wasn’t quite sure what to do with that statement. “In any case there is a small chance that if Sesako won, and the nation survived that I become a hero who might be able to wield a lot of influence and to make lots of good things happen. If the resources of this country went to both helping the poorest inside its borders, and to helping even poorer people outside of them, that would be an incredibly good thing. I am balancing a small chance of having a really big effect against a big chance of having a smaller effect.”

“And you cannot see deeply enough through the veil of fate to know which policy is in truth better. But at least you are aware of your own uncertainty, it is always better to be aware of that than to act with confidence that is unearned and foolish.”

“Besides,” I added. “Why are you better? — this celestial emperor has his reasons for wishing to control this island. How do I know that he is wrong, when I know nothing of his side of the matter, or of what he might say? I only see his actions, filtered through the biased memories of Sesako.”

The dragon seemed amused.

Her rumbling voice replied, “But do you not know that these islands are blessed by the presence of the Great Ones?”

Uhhhhh… had the giant dragon just made a joke?

Or was she serious?

The expressionless dragon face did not give me an answer, but something about how she’d rustled her wings, and how the nose was twitched made me think that it was a joke.

“I have spoken with you sufficiently. I see the scope of the problem. Perhaps you two will cooperate, or perhaps ruin will come upon you both. Or perhaps you will cooperate, but the Fates will not. I do not foresee the future, only potential. There is great potential, and great danger in this combination I have brought forth. But enough! Enough! I have spoken enough! The two of you must speak!”

And then her mind touched mine once more, and I fell into a dreamy sleep instantly.