Hughughug.

Hiccup. "They t-took her away and I didn't even know if she was a boy or a girl till Michael got her back for me because it was immoral to have ever made her and they needed to separate her from my influence and it would be better for her if they just sort of pretended she was theirs instead - I shouldn't have been alone with that boy I know I shouldn't have but they didn't have to take her -"

He glances at Michael.

Glare.

"We're not going to let that happen to anyone else, Rebecca. We're not trying to keep kids away from bad influences, we're trying to keep them in situations where they're safe. We're not trying to punish people for having them -"

"Yet."

"I am fully persuaded that humans shouldn't have population controls, I just need to figure out how to not cause a war over it."

"But you haven't figured it out, so. You're not taking children away to punish their parents for having them yet."

Miranda pats Rebecca.

"What convinced you?" she asks Aitim.

"Hala's pretty sure and her reasons were persuasive."

"She doesn't tell us research subjects what she's concluding."

"You don't enjoy spending time around kids anywhere near as much as even a non-springing Amentan, you don't prefer to have them close all the time, you outsource way more of your childcare, you spend way less time thinking about it and when there are logistical barriers much less energy or thought is put into how to overcome them, you are altogether more indifferent about having kids than even an extraordinarily disinclined-to-have-kids Amentan, your stories about being infertile and wanting kids tend to be happily resolved with 'then they got a kid', people do it because it seems the thing to do but if it were expensive or a hassle it seems likely that they just wouldn't bother, certainly not bother more than once or twice..."

"It took Hala eavesdropping on us for you to notice that?"

"I already knew that you said those things were true. - they're not really true of the populations we do have a lot of observational record of, people do co-sleep with their children and don't outsource childcare and do plan to have fifteen or something absurd like that and are frequently in a hurry to marry and start a family and almost never evince a desire to wait until their late thirties and frequently seem exhausted and unhappy around their children but, well, Amentans might feel that way too if living in desperate poverty with six kids under age two...."

"Mm."

"It seems likely that the key ingredients are more educational and non-child-related opportunity and careers for women and irreligiosity and acceptable, no-side-effects birth control and cultural norms. But if we did a credit auction you'd just dwindle on us. Possibly even a Voan system with an auction on top."

"If Aaron were here he'd be asking if credit prices can go negative."

" - it would make humans absurdly unpopular with Amentans but there might be a way to finagle it. The thing I really want are hybrids."

("Love, do you want to leave...")

("Yeah I've said my piece.")

"Hybrids with Muggles are probably impossible and attempting hybrids with wizards would look very bad-faith on your part at the moment. I don't think negative prices would straightforwardly solve the problem, although it might do so in a purely numerical sense given enough money - it'd have to compensate for the cost of having to interact with the system at all in the first place, see."

"Yeah, I get that. I would say the kids could be raised in a wizarding community and go to Hogwarts and have nothing to do with me but actually I'm not sure I could get any Amentans to agree to send their children to a school that beats them."

"I never got worse than swatted on the hand and Karen did better than that but they're harder on boys."

"On -" he shakes his head. "Of course they are. Anyway, I think that Amentan wizards would be a good idea and I honestly don't think I've done anything at any point to suggest that I'm operating in bad faith or that my plans for the future will turn on half-Amentan wizard children who will be nine years old at the point where you plan to take back over the planet. But it's not time-sensitive. Humans are extraordinarily lucky not to want children as desperately as we do and if we handle that appropriately hopefully it won't result in humans going extinct as soon as sufficiently appealing alternatives to having kids exist."