"It is not impossible someone will assassinate him but if you mean execution it'd be poison."

"Wow."

"The 'technically you didn't do something that was actually illegal but it was really damaging so you're going to die' approach was sort of validated back during the Voan food crisis."

"Hmm?"

"I hadn't been born yet but a Voan blue orchestrated the pollution of some food bottlenecks so nobody could trust anything out of Voa. He thought they'd get over it. Instead there was a huge international food security crisis and Tapa with some help including from Anitam seized one of their farm provinces. Voa wouldn't execute him; he resigned into obscurity and is presumably still alive. It's a little ambiguous if they could have prevented the war outright by executing him but they could have improved a lot of the fallout."

" - okay but that's at least his fault unlike not guessing about secret wizards, which isn't Aitim's."

"Well, if anyone finds out he knew this early about secret wizards... the other Amentan countries will have a legitimate grievance, you realize, if there's too many of us and we suddenly don't have space. We're getting slack on issuing more credits because we have this planet. If we suddenly don't it's going to look like we're poised to take someone else's space, especially if we still haven't found a second planet yet."

"Would you do that?"

"It would probably depend. Somebody might decide not to wait and see."

"Ugh."

"We will be absolutely ecstatic about a way to make our species less of a utility monster as long as it doesn't involve enormous suffering in the present generation or sterile kids who don't understand why we want grandkids - there's a condition that prevents people from ever springing, it's genetically pretty simple, we could induce it with a little fiddling, nobody prefers asexual childless offspring though."

"Could you do, like, two normal kids and the rest asexual childless ones or something?"

"I have not conveyed the depth of our discomfort with polar hypovernal syndrome. If it were really important for some reason that your future children never be able to appreciate any form of art would that be okay?"

" - I don't think being asexual and not wanting kids is at all comparable to not being able to appreciate art - and, see, this is why you shouldn't govern us, there are asexual humans and humans who don't want kids and if you're thinking of them as fundamentally deficient in a way that makes them not the kind of people worth bringing into the world..."

"I don't think they're of less moral value and I wouldn't think that of someone who just didn't get anything out of art either, but it's not something I would want in a kid. It's hard to pick an exact analogy, that might not be the right one, but it's a big deal. There's a gamete donor charity where if you demonstrate that at age twenty you have voluntarily never reproduced they'll give your gametes to people with bad springs who don't want to pass it on, that's fine, full on polar hypovernal syndrome is different."

"Huh."

"And like, hybridization would be really good in the same way as that charity only moreso. You're similar enough to us, I don't think there'd be any problem with a blended family or a donor gamete kid at all if the individual personalities worked out, and you don't completely lack all our characteristics but you have them in this, you know, non-tortuous way."

"I mean, I get that, but it also hella sounds like if we give Aitim an inch he will make very sure we can't make you all leave no matter what you do to us."

"How long exactly do you want to retain the option to extract plumbing and Internet from us while retaining the freedom to declare your planet Amentan-free at any time? Can we at least get birthright citizenship for the kids who were born here, that would make the refugee crisis less catastrophic, the adults could flee home and boot the guest workers and only have a crowding problem with the Anitami-born baby boom and hopefully you'd work out some way for the Earthborn children to ever see their families."

"That seems reasonable, yeah, if we don't have Mars by then anyway."

"Mars'd be a great positive sum option. Although I wonder if you're factoring in how much - less motivated, Amentans will be, to provide any help with anything if we've been pushed off the face of the Earth? Like, suppose you extract all our technology and have your own industrial base for it, it seems a stretch but maybe it's doable. But like - suppose you then find more aliens, warping around on your own, and didn't get along with them, do you realize how easy we are as a species to bribe? Suppose you have some kind of natural disaster; if that happens now we can summon all the help we could possibly want from Amenta, if it happens after we've been kicked to Mars with what we could pack in five minutes..."

"Maybe we'll make friends with a country that has a bone to pick with Anitam."

"Everybody with a bone to pick with Anitam at the moment is probably nursing a grievance over red transition."

"Oh, were you heavyhanded and execution-happy over that too?"

"When somebody drowned one of the first three cleaned ex-reds for being ex-red, he was hanged, is that what you mean?"