I've got a list of names | Glowfic Constellation

Afen is disappointed in the universe. He bounds back and forth across his room explaining why to his wife, his infant granddaughter, the end table, and a reporter flabbergasted by her good luck and cringing silently against the wall in the hopes he won't remember she's there.

"There is no reason to suppose that a species evolving independently of Amentans, with their own evolutionary history and living mammalian species likely related to theirs, would end up looking like us. None. Every explanation every scientist has ventured to the press has been unimaginative and unconvincing retroactive refitting of bad models to baffling data. Aliens shouldn't look like us but with different hair colors. Aliens that are not made out of carbon at all would be unsurprising; aliens with only as much physiological dissimilarity as exists between us and animal species on our planet would be mildly surprising; aliens with opposable thumbs would be truly remarkable. This is not remarkable and biologically enlightening; this is just inconsistent with everything we understand about the universe. It doesn't teach us new things about evolution; it should make us rethink evolution. - don't quote that part, they'll take it out of context."

Reporter nods rapidly.

"All of that said, I've picked up three of the languages and I'm working on building a good machine translator, it's a challenge with as little as they've produced in the way of electronic records. I'm absolutely going there to meet them as soon as the politicians figure out what to do with themselves."

"Do you have any predictions about that?"

"About politics? Why would I have predictions about politics? They deliberately obscure relevant information, for one thing, and for another it's deathly boring."

"- I mean, sir, surely you hear from your son about -"

"I have seven children and some of them are very dense indeed but not quite dense enough to try to interest me in politics."

"I was referring to -"

"I know who you were referring to. If you want a statement from Aitim go bother Aitim."

"Thank you for your time."

"I did not alter my activities in response to your presence and therefore you can't yet be said to have wasted any of my time though you should go before you do."

...out skitters the reporter.

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That's not policy.

It's bad enough they don't have proper population controls, letting the mentally ill run around without the ability to use birth control even if they wanted to is just unconscionable.

That is a policy consideration, to be weighed against other policy desiderata like 'we want to increase peoples' willingness to hand over people they can't take care of' and 'we have people who literally want an abortion and are not coming in for one because they expect to be sterilized' and 'we are trying different policies in different locales and need the policies to be enforced as issued if we want to determine which actually result in the most cooperation with population control' and 'her famlly might well have consented for that reason once they were contacted'. Which it does not look like they were, why is that?

She was illiterate and couldn't talk to give her name.

Because she had just been to the dentist and her mouth was swollen. It would have stopped being swollen, that is how mouths work.

She definitely has some underlying problem that is not dental in nature.

They broke policy. They broke policy in a way that is particularly embarrassing, because it was observed by a journalist who has asked Aitim's office for comment on an outraged article about how an innocent, childless woman with a slightly adverse reaction to dental anaesthetic but no underlying incompetencies at all was sterilized with no oversight or recourse for the crime of being mildly disoriented during her adverse drug reaction. Aitim's office is inclined to have its comment be that the visas of everyone involved have been revoked and a complaint filed with their medical licensing board.

She was definitely still incompetent in some way after the anaesthetic should have long worn off.

Taking a longer time for the effects of anaesthetic to wear off is a known kind of adverse drug reaction, and the kinds that can occur in humans are as yet poorly documented.

(He has someone contact a journalist who will be appropriately incensed.)

The journalist is incensed! ...but finds that Kitty Carver definitely does actually have some kind of problem even when she has not recently had dental surgery.

Aitim revokes their visas anyway and has to work harder on phrasing the complaint to the licensing board and forwards the medical records to Aaron.

wealth-of-nations

"The fuck."

"Hmm?"

wealth-of-nations

"Read this!"

"I mean, are you really surprised - that's their whole ideology, it's their whole everything, that the most important thing a government does is ruin peoples' lives if it thinks they don't deserve children -"

Theodore Thowegood Way

"Shoulda just kicked them out right away."

Timothy Laurence Way

too-early-and-too-late

"They have kind of saved millions of lives with the sanitation and ending slavery and ending war and putting serious dents in severe poverty and so on. I have no intention of letting them go on at it but I think it would be - something - to say 'no, it's fine if people die of poverty as long as that's no one's fault -"

Michael Cyrus Way