"I hope we don't have to turn my storks into death storks."

"Yeah. Me too."

"They're good storks, not going to genocide any cultures at all except maybe if they practice slavery or something!"

"Thinking about letting the slaveowning populations dip?"

"I don't know about right now but it's possible."

"They might fold long before they actually ran out of people."

"Yeah."

"Could even swing by there and size up how likely that seems. Not now, though."

"Haven't even begun a campaign of slavery-throttling."

"We've got time. Do you know if you reincarnate more than once?"

"I've only gotten Aly memories and it would have been a strange oversight for Aydanci not to mention if Aly got dreams. So don't know."

Nod.

"Maybe I get to be cut-rate immortal. For. Some reason. If we have to do death storks I hope they don't death stork me a lot in a row. Not that I seem to get infant memories."

"If storks recognize you they could exempt you from deathstorking."

"I suppose. Seems unfair somehow. I really don't like the idea of death storks - I'd almost rather come up with some entirely different chassis, network them separately -"

"That's reasonable - they wouldn't need to carry heavy loads and so on - I hate it, I do hope you realize that, it's just that I hate the sort of societies that overpopulation produces even more..."

"I can believe you that they suck, but..."

"They go to war. Constantly."

"Like I said, I can believe you."

He bites his lip. "Sorry. I don't - I don't want this either. Maybe the moon thing will work."

"Hope so. The population isn't skyrocketing, at any rate."

"Definitely not. If it's growing nonlinearly at all it's a very gentle curve."

"We've got a while. Might not even grow with the population. Where would it stabilize, if this is just how many babies there are -"

"I don't know how many the storks don't get but definitely a sustainable final population."

Kib nods.