"Because you're obviously not considering etymology when you name your kids!"

"He thought I looked like him as part of an impersonation plot."

"Could you impersonate him? If you had the real him to extract information from, I mean."

"For a casual conversation, maybe. At his job no."

"Too many fiddly details you'd have to recall in the moment?"

"Too much knowledge - he's been at it for fifty years, he can look very quickly through a table of numbers and notice things about it I wouldn't notice, he knows thousands of people I don't know, he has a baseline of quality of work to expect from them and will notice if they're doing unexpectedly well or poorly, he knows Amentan phrasings and customs..."

Nod. "Puppet government. - What do you mean exactly about not worrying, to the extent he's you, about the memory charm -"

"The thing I'm doing that is going to hurt him is taking our planet back. Compared to that, how we actually treat him going about it is - irrelevant, pretty much. Hurting his family would be different, but - if I imagine someone who tortures me just for fun for a week, in a way that doesn't cause long term damage, and then gives me the tools to save a planet, I feel about the same way about them as I feel about someone who just gives me the tools to save a planet. Where I end up matters. What people think of me matters a lot. But something like this just doesn't have much long term salience. If he's me. Like I said, I wouldn't do this to someone I suspected was a you."

"Let's nevertheless not torture him for fun for a week."

"Of course not. But - prioritize the things we want, and then the things he wants, and then not hurting him."

"If you say so."

They go home. Timothy summarizes everything again. "I'm at this point inclined to sell him Veritaserum, screw with their birth control test results, leverage the Veritaserum thing to get them to leave the wilderness alone for the moment, and plan to topple their government in ten years or so once we've gotten most of the benefits and the costs are starting to really loom. But I might be biased because of whatever ways in which Aitim Neli is like me, and we probably have the resources to do better than that if we aren't too worried about Amentans or their next unhappy subjects."

"Do you have side effects in mind for the test subjects - it'd have to be something, uh, acceptable to us but unacceptable to them -"

"I was hoping that, like, baby born hairless with spotted skin is the kind of thing that'd worry their scientists and at least make them delay. It'd be distressing to the parents, though - I don't know of anything that wouldn't be distressing to the parents but that'd freak out Amentans appropriately - maaaybe red hair?"

"Oh, I thought you meant side effects, not just 'they have babies anyway'."

"If all the test subjects are ardently trying to avoid pregnancy because they don't want to be pregnant it'd be really fucked up to sabotage that but if any of them are like 'we're okay with waiting and the money is good' then, yeah, they get pregnant anyway, scientists have to start over."

"Are you going to interview them?"

"...is there a reason not to?"

"Well, if the Amentans investigate, you'd have had to memory-charm them to cover your tracks, and also do you speak the language?"

"I don't. They're going to teach everyone Anitami once the schools open, though, and I don't think asking 'oh, you're participating in that trial? what's that like? why?" is very suspicious."

"Okay, so you're imagining a longer timeline, not swooping in nowish and making everyone break out in spots."

"We have five years, yeah, no need to rush."

"The longer we wait to interfere with the tests the odder it is that nothing showed up earlier."

"I can make him tell me when they have a prototype they're ready to test. He thought the end of the year."

"Okay."