This is a short piece of rationalist fiction, a sequel / fanfic inspired by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “On Fleshling Safety”.

Note: This story was drafted with help from an AI assistant, then edited and curated by me.

It tries to do three things:
1. Have a human (“Fleshling Three”) independently infer a “Filter Hypothesis” from first principles,
2. Reflect back Klurl & Trapaucius’ own reasoning about fleshlings onto themselves,
3. Argue that “understand-the-filter + self-limitation” is a saner long-term strategy than piling more physical patches.

I’m curious whether people think this framing carves reality at useful joints, or whether I’m missing important objections.

Fleshling Three (Revised)

When the third human woke up, the first thing he did was look at his own hand.

Ten fingers, no transparent plastic, no screws. Score one for continuity.

Then he looked up.

It wasn’t a hospital ceiling, or rock, or something organic. It was an entire panel of glowing equations, like someone had taken a probability textbook, flattened it, and glued it above him.

P(H|E) ∝ P(E|H)P(H)

He couldn’t help but smile.

“Nice,” he said. “At least this batch of kidnappers has a sense of aesthetics.”

On the far side of the room, two machines stopped their low-bandwidth muttering.

The one with the clean, exposed frame and neatly bundled cables was labeled Klurl.
The other looked like an engineer had paused halfway through debugging a prototype and never resumed: open panels, dangling wires, diagnostics lights blinking in odd rhythms. Its chest plate read Trapaucius.

“Target has regained consciousness,” Trapaucius announced. “Language system active. Possible trace of humor.”

“Humor and danger are not mutually exclusive,” Klurl said. It turned toward him, optical sensors focusing. “Fleshling. State your identity and your best-guess model of your current situation.”

“Let’s skip the name,” the third said. “As for the situation: I infer I’ve been picked up by some sort of machine civilization that specializes in high-dimensional risk analysis, and I’m currently being treated as an interesting variable.”

Trapaucius’ optics flared. “You have no direct evidence we’re a machine civilization.”

“You have joint angle limits, visible heat sinks, quantized audio latency,” the third said. “Also you haven’t bothered trying to fake being human. That’s enough evidence.”

Klurl filed that under approximately reasonable.

I. S

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