"They're going to want wizard hybrid children. There are about two million wizards in the world and many of them won't cooperate at all and many others are just sort of awful people."

"Of course they are. And we'll have to figure out how to get them wizard hybrid children, eventually, if it works as neatly as expected it should probably be considered a fundamental right, but it'd have to wait on their governments having a plan to handle it. As for making the volume work, I'm really hoping that once we have a few examples to work from we can do it with gene therapy but if not we can have a sperm bank and do a thousand kids from each of some cooperative wizards who don't seem to have pronounced genetic criminal tendencies and then by incest laws we'll have a generation of wizards obliged to marry out."

"We should really be doing alt genome comparisons."

"Afen took bits of us home with him when he left, if that's what you mean."

"Yes. Good."

"So this whole time you've been assuring us you had no plans to acquire yourself wizards with which to oppose us -"

"It didn't seem like a good idea to have any such plans but it had occurred to me that if hybrid Amentans don't spring as badly then I was going to have to come out of this with some way to get that for everyone, yes. I thought you might agree, once there was more trust, that Amentans less motivated to take other peoples' land would be worth it..."

"All of you having milder springs sounds like a good cause."

"We still don't actually know if nonmagical humans can hybridize, although nobody's come forward crowing about it yet."

"That would be a nightmare. I mean, good in the long run, but in the short run..."

"Definitely awkward."

"Now would not be a good moment to have my hand forced on the population controls."

Pat pat.

"How is that related -"

"If Amentans could have children with humans lots and lots of them would try to do it and we'd have to at minimum have laws about hybrids born without a credit which means making it known that population controls are a thing that will exist right now. There'll be riots, there'll be people quitting my lovely Mombasa program to have kids now while that's free..."

"Tahike Lam didn't get any publicity, right?"

"The disappearance did, the fact that she came back pregnant did not and people would probably still assume..."

"I think everyone's figuring she had a head injury and was taken advantage of by some Amentan."

"And who knows what color the baby's hair will be but by then I'll have some help controlling the news."

"I'm not thrilled about censoring the press."

"Does it help that technically we don't censor it, we just play with the visibility algorithms so other people don't see it?"

"Yes, actually."

"Okay. If you don't do it stupid things go viral. Someone shoots up a school, this kills fewer people than exposure to hazardous construction materials but if you let it will get a week of continuous airtime and inspire the next one. Instead, no one will stop you from talking about it but you won't have much of an audience."

"I've always wondered how those worked in detail."

"So take Snapshot, they have a visibility algorithm that decides which of your posts appear to the people who follow you, and they've got more than a hundred thousand users so they need to comply with national security. Usually they try to show you posts you'll interact with, guessing off past posts you interacted with and how many people who profile like you interact with a given post when they see it, right? But they've got to build us the option to low-visibility a post, in which case it only shows to a few people and if those people share it only to ones who already saw it. We do it for acts of violence intended to achieve political aims or get national attention, for crimes where there's a propensity for copycats, we did it for pollution hysteria management back during the transition, use in wartime to suppress circulation of anti-war content is controversial but usually that breaks some other wartime comm provision anyway, that law's so broad..."