the place to be

[point_b]

Bella finds it.

"Alli!" she twines. "C'mere."

"You c'mere. Easier for you."

"No, you need to come look at this, seriously."

"Okay, fine, where are you?"

"Garage."

So Alli comes out to the garage. Their parents aren't home; Charlie's working, Renée is volunteering with some of the refugee kids at a shelter, trying to find which have parents who just wound up somewhere else, which need adopting, which are going to wind up coming of age adrift in the bursting-at-the-seams system. It's just them, not attending school, recovering.

"Whoa," says Alli. "So when you said you were at the garage, you meant that you were at the freakish restaurant that someone put in our garage."

"This isn't somebody's idea of remodeling," Bella says. "It's too big to be the garage."

"Do you think it's safe?"

"I think one of you should go in first, for sure."

"We don't actually know if I work that way," say two Alli voices, but Bella pushes one of them towards the door anyway.

Nothing happens.

The Allis converge, inside the bar. Bella follows.

Comments

[point_b]

"I didn't know this was a risk until it happened, which was in the first grade."

[iamnotpolaris]

"I more meant the hypothetical second time, but yeah, that wasn't intended as, like, a helpful critique of childhood problem avoidance techniques, I don't think it would necessarily even help."

[point_b]

"Yeah. But all is well now."

[whatamithinking]

"Good. Although I imagine they'd have a harder time separating you after the bonuses came in."

[point_b]

"The gemini schools that twins have to attend are lousy with 'you can tell the counselors if someone is hurting you' etcetera, but they stop being as aggressive about it once we can be trivially healed and have whatever other powers and are sixteen years old, anyway."

[whatamithinking]

"I meant in cases where it was unnecessary, yeah. It's so unfortunate how difficult it is to guard against both unnecessary intervention and not intervening when it is necessary."

[point_b]

"Classic tradeoff between false positive and false negative: unsolved in any world, probably."

[whatamithinking]

"I mean, if you had a world where everyone was a telepath and no one minded having their mind read..."

[point_b]

"...Eugh."

[whatamithinking]

"Well, I added the latter qualifier for a reason! I imagine that world wouldn't have one of you in it, granted."

[point_b]

"No, I mean, even if everybody was pretty chill about it to begin with the vision of society it presents is intrinsically grotesque to me. Even if you assume that everyone is stably chill about it. Which I don't think is a safe assumption in any large population of humans you aren't mind-controlling, that they will always be okay with anyone within a few miles who has a whim to check out their brain in arbitrary detail."

[whatamithinking]

shrug. "I suppose. I'm not proposing instantiating such a world, in any case."

[point_b]

"Good."

[whatamithinking]

"I should probably mention, though--telepaths can keep other telepaths out, my kind at least. I was less thinking 'anyone can read anyone else's mind whenever' and more 'it happens if the police get a warrant.'"

[point_b]

"So: thoughtcrime. Or: a world populated entirely by saints who wouldn't dream of enforcing thoughtcrime even if it was really easy and nobody with nothing to hide would mind."

[whatamithinking]

"I also wasn't assuming a human-compatible psychology. And would be taking more than five minutes to consider problems with the system. And wouldn't actually seriously suggest this even if I was given a chance to instantiate a world."

[point_b]

"Oh, if we're not talking about humans maybe this works without being horrible in some way."

[whatamithinking]

"Yeah, Milliways finds humans most often but there are nonhuman sapient species out there."

[point_b]

"Doesn't surprise me, really. Are there aliens that everybody has or is it like Yellowstone, some places have them and some don't?"

[whatamithinking]

"Well, it's like Yellowstone, but also there are some nonhuman species that have never heard of Earth or humans before, so it's not just an accessory that some human worlds have."

[point_b]

"Mostly I wanted to know if there was someplace we ought to be looking."

[whatamithinking]

"Aha, no. I mean, statistically the universe is big enough that I suspect Earths aren't actually usually the only planet with life, but there's a difference between 'has life' and 'interesting sci-fi aliens.'"

[point_b]

"A bit, yes."

[whatamithinking]

"Given how Earthlike Milliways' outdoors is, I suspect its human-centricism has more to do with Milliways than with the nature of the multiverse."

[point_b]

"I haven't seen the outdoors yet. Is it interestingly Earthlike or meh Earthlike?"