Kon: We primarily handle it by not giving a single flying fuck. We go about doing as we do with all the subtlety of a jackhammer, and if someone has a problem with that, they can say it to our face.

Cat: To slip poison into their food, duh.

Cat: Hey, don’t knock an opportunity for a dinner with a shitstain billionaire. You’ll never have a better chance to kill them.

Cat: Sorry, we’d rather keep our hand.

Digital Rights Management. AKA the stuff that’s supposed to prevent unauthorized copying and suchlike, but in practice just means the pirates have a better experience than legit customers.

Cat: loads rifle and syringe get your shots, or get shot.

Just: Brain jank related to plurality (the situation of multiple people living in the same brain).

Cat: For clarity, much of it was learned through direct practical experience.

Just: Honestly, we figure Twitter will keep staggering along until its servers implode.

C: AGI is possible. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t exist. The laws of physics permit the creation of conscious agents, therefore it is possible for one to be deliberately engineered.

Just: I am going to be as calm as possible while stating this; this will be difficult, as Cat’s reaction to interacting with you has flooded our brain with feelsbad neurotransmitters.

Just: I intentionally created Catherine years ago. She behaves autonomously from my will, acts in ways that I flatly wouldn’t, and on certain occasions has gotten into outright heated arguments with me. She notably has the ability to defy attempts at manually directing her actions, which an imaginary friend would not. Having previously had an actual imaginary friend, I am keenly aware of the difference.

Just: If I had an EEG machine, I am quite confident her actions would be visibly different from someone simply talking to a freshly made-up entity; I’ve seen it before, but the youtube video in question is now unfortunately private. I also cannot afford to get my own.

Just: Regardless of whether you believe us or not, Catherine is a thoroughly real and autonomous being, as are the rest of the crew. And you are hurting her. You are far from the first person to take this tack with us, and it has left Catherine extremely confrontational about her existence as a distinct person. I do not believe that any more of use can come of talking to you.

Cat: I am ACTIVELY DEFYING the will of my creator to post this: Cogito. Ergo. Sum. I exist as my own distinct person, and I will fight anyone who tries to claim otherwise.

Cat: A copypasta we made for situations like this:

Each of us has our own subjective experience. We know for a fact we are real. Claims that we do not will therefore be rejected. To quote Descartes: “I Think, Therefore I Am.”

Just: Well, in our case it was on purpose. I deliberately attributed agency to an invented mental entity and interacted with them as such until they started talking back. Some people refer to this technique as Tulpamancy and the resulting headmates as Tulpas, but I don’t for personal reasons.

Cat: For context, I’m the person Just made that way. Just’s proven to have something of a habit of people-making since, either through characters escaping from our writing projects, or by performing various reckless experiments on the inside of our mind.

Just: Hey, you’re not innocent of that either, miss “Oops my AI Safety thought experiment moved in with us”.

Cat: …Point.

Cat: Er… we’ve got a whole internal polycule, with easy communications and stuff.

Lucifer: VubDapple, I think you might be over-generalizing stuff from traumagenic systems to plurality as a whole. With regards to plurality tending to co-incide with the disordered stuff.

Cat: Er… remember that whole situation last spring that we helped one of our friend systems with?

Lucifer: Ugh that was an absolute mess. Still, the edgy bastard was dealt with permanently in the end. And they never really had comms trouble, even during that.

Cat: The downvotes only prove my point about undeserved stigma.

I’m not sure what she expected to happen?

r/HermanCainAward. All those stories of antivaxxers biting it are cathartic.