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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chanuphis

"You could be really radical and allow swaps but you do need the fundamental proportions of people who like chocolate and people who like caramel to stay the same, to do otherwise is crazy talk."

"No, no, it's okay to have more chocolate people as long as we can anticipate it four years out and shift the numbers accordingly."

chanuphis

Hee hee hee.

"One nice thing about castes - arguably not worth it, but still nice - is that people identify with their caste across national and regional cultural lines, such that I think yellow humans would be embraced by yellow Amentans as a shared interest group and community and tribe, and purple humans by purple Amentans, and so on. No castes makes it easier to just think of all humans as other."

chanuphis

"Pelape says she keeps trying to mentally caste humans. This doesn't go far enough to permit that identification if it's not a legal category?"

"I don't think it has to be a legal category - if we stopped having laws about castes we wouldn't stop having them - but having a legal definition means you can, in fact, be sufficiently in the tribe, it's not constantly a matter of performing it."

chanuphis

"Pelape doesn't like being grey and she'd swap into anything else if she could but she'll still say 'we' and mean greys."

Nod. "There are caste abolitionists but almost all of them are green."

planetarium

"Are they aware of the irony?"

"They analyze it endlessly. Because they're greens."

planetarium

"Everyone summarizes Ravenclaw as nerd green at first pass but I don't know if I'd actually be a very good green even though I was a very good Ravenclaw."

"If the academic skills you're strong in are more like detail-orientedness and meticulousness and thoroughness that's yellow - not that lots of greens don't have it but the central things with that skillset are yellow things."

planetarium

"...I'm good at rote memorization and I'm sort of creative but in like - a small way?"

"I don't even know if there's any reason to expect the traits that go with our castes to be correlated among people who haven't been selecting for them for a while."

chanuphis

"Except given the weirdness of human alts of Amentans, I don't think so."

"What has Pelape mostly been mentally casteing people as, when she does that?"

chanuphis

"Everybody she's met matches their alts except she thinks I'm some weird orange-green-blue superposition and Rebecca's green. She thinks Karen's yellow or maybe purple."

"I bet Peka'd like green. Orange-green-blue is a weird thing to be a superposition of."

chanuphis

"I do healing but also esoteric charms research and Timothy shortlisted me for receipt of a continent when he took over the world back when I was Amentan-two."

"Gosh. What would you do with a continent?"

chanuphis

"I was going to start with ending slavery and take it from there."

"Amenta was higher-tech than Earth when we ended slavery but even correcting for how much our history classes lied to us I don't think it was as awful. Didn't involve as much dragging people across continents or taking their children from them."

chanuphis

"Well, ours is segregated by ethnic group. Me and Karen are actually both in the designated-acceptable-slavery ethnic group."

planetarium

"I mean, this doesn't affect us that much because wizards don't go in for that and prefer to have slaves be of a magical species that likes slavery."