Элиезер Юдковски - Three Worlds Collide

They're..." and the Xenopsychologist stopped. "Damn," she said, and turned her head away from the table, covering her face with her hands. "Excuse me." Her voice was unsteady. "They're a lot like human children, really."

"And if they were human children," said the Lady Sensory into the silence, "do you think that, just because the Babyeater species wanted to eat human children, that would make it right for them to do it?"

"No," said the Lord Pilot.

"Then what difference does it make?" said the Lady Sensory.

"No difference at all," said the Lord Pilot.

Akon looked back and forth between the two of them, and saw what was coming, and somehow

couldn't speak.

"We have to save them," said the Lady Sensory. "We have to stop this. No matter what it takes. We can't let this go on."

Couldn't say that one word -

The Lord Pilot nodded. "Destroy their ship. Preserve our advantage of surprise. Go back, tell the world, create an overwhelming human army... and pour into the Babyeater starline network. And

rescue the children."

"No," Akon said.

No?

"I know," said the Lord Pilot. "A lot of Babyeaters will die at first, but they're killing ten times more children than their whole adult population, every year -"

"And then what?" said the Master of Fandom. "What happens when the children grow up?"

The Lord Pilot fell silent.

The Master of Fandom completed the question. "Are you going to wipe out their whole race, because their existence is too horrible to be allowed to go on? I read their stories, and I didn't understand them, but -" The Master of Fandom swallowed. "They're not... evil. Don't you understand? They're not.

Are you going to punish me, because I don't want to punish them?"

"We could..." said the Lord Pilot. "Um. We could modify their genes so that they only gave birth to a single child at a time."

"No," said the Xenopsychologist. "They would grow up loathing themselves for being unable to eat babies. Horrors in their own eyes. It would be kinder just to kill them."

"Stop," said Akon. His voice wasn't strong, wasn't loud, but everyone in the room looked at him.

"Stop. We are not going to fire on their ship."

"Why not?" said the Lord Pilot. "They -"

"They haven't raised shields," said Akon.

"Because they know it won't make a difference!" shouted the Pilot.

" They didn't fire on us! " shouted Akon. Then he stopped, lowered his voice. "They didn't fire on us.

Even after they knew that we didn't eat babies. I am not going to fire on them. I refuse to do it."

"You think they're innocent? " demanded the Lady Sensory. "What if it was human children that were being eaten?"

Akon stared out a viewscreen, showing in subdued fires a computer-generated graphic of the nova

debris. He just felt exhausted, now. "I never understood the Prisoner's Dilemma until this day. Do you cooperate when you really do want the highest payoff? When it doesn't even seem fair for both of you to cooperate? When it seems right to defect even if the other player doesn't? That's the payoff matrix of the true Prisoner's Dilemma. But all the rest of the logic - everything about what happens if you both think that way, and both defect - is the same. Do we want to live in a universe of cooperation or defection?"

"But -" said the Lord Pilot.

"They know, " Akon said, "that they can't wipe us out. And they can guess what we could do to them.

Their choice isn't to fire on us and try to invade afterward! Their choice is to fire on us and run from this star system, hoping that no other ships follow. It's their whole species at stake, against just this one ship. And they still haven't fired ."

"They won't fire on us," said the Xenopsychologist, "until they decide that we've defected from the norm. It would go against their sense of... honor, I could call it, but it's much stronger than the human version -"

"No," Akon said. "Not that much stronger." He looked around, in the silence. "The Babyeater society has been at peace for centuries. So too with human society. Do you want to fire the opening shot that brings war back into the universe? Send us back to the darkness-before-dawn that we only know from reading history books, because the holos are too horrible to watch? Are you really going to press the button, knowing that?"

The Lord Pilot took a deep breath. "I will. You will not remain commander of the Impossible , my lord, if the greater conference votes no confidence against you. And they will, my lord, for the sake of the children."

"What," said the Master, "are you going to do with the children?"

"We, um, have to do something," said the Ship's Engineer, speaking up for the first time. "I've been, um, looking into what Babyeater science knows about their brain mechanisms. It's really quite

fascinating, they mix electrical and mechanical interactions, not the same way our own brain pumps ions, but -"

"Get to the point," said Akon. " Immediately. "

"The children don't die right away," said the Engineer. "The brain is this nugget of hard crystal, that's really resistant to, um, the digestive mechanisms, much more so than the rest of the body. So the child's brain is in, um, probably quite a lot of pain, since the whole body has been amputated, and in a state of sensory deprivation, and then the processing slowly gets degraded, and I think the whole

process gets completed about a month after -"

The Lady Sensory threw up. A few seconds later, so did the Xenopsychologist and the Master.

"If human society permits this to go on," said the Lord Pilot, his voice very soft, "I will resign from human society, and I will have friends, and we will visit the Babyeater starline network with an army.

You'll have to kill me to stop me."

"And me," said the Lady Sensory through tears.

Akon rose from his chair, and leaned forward; a dominating move that he had learned in classrooms, very long ago when he was first studying to be an Administrator. But most in humanity's promotion-conscious society would not risk direct defiance of an Administrator. In a hundred years he'd never had his authority really tested, until now... "I will not permit you to fire on the alien ship. Humanity will not be first to defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma."

The Lord Pilot stood up, and Akon realized, with a sudden jolt, that the Pilot was four inches taller; the thought had never occurred to him before. The Pilot didn't lean forward, not knowing the trick, or not caring. The Pilot's eyes were narrow, surrounding facial muscles tensed and tight.

" Get out of my way, " said the Lord Pilot.

Akon opened his mouth, but no words came out.

"It is time," said the Lord Pilot, "to see this calamity to its end." Spoken in Archaic English: the words uttered by Thomas Clarkson in 1785, at the beginning of the end of slavery. "I have set my will against this disaster; I will break it, or it will break me." Ira Howard in 2014. "I will not share my universe with this shadow," and that was the Lord Pilot, in an anger hotter than the nova's ashes. "Help me if you will, or step aside if you lack decisiveness; but do not make yourself my obstacle, or I will burn you down, and any that stand with you - "

" HOLD. "

Every head in the room jerked toward the source of the voice. Akon had been an Administrator for a hundred years, and a Lord Administrator for twenty. He had studied all the classic texts, and watched holos of famous crisis situations; nearly all the accumulated knowledge of the Administrative Field was at his beck and call; and he'd never dreamed that a word could be spoken with such absolute force.