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

"Right now?"

"Timothy has, as I understand it, no intentions of allowing us to govern the planet that long, but the eventual intent is to have the law treat Amentans and humans the same."

chanuphis

"How were you planning to phase in renting Canada to Canadians?"

"Build train stations, hire construction companies to build facilities around the train station. Hotel, restaurant, a couple blocks of land, an indescribably tiny fraction of -" gesture - "but enough to fit sixty, seventy thousand people. Lease those buildings to anyone who wanted to live there. It was our hope that many people in currently-nomadic human societies would choose to live close to medical care and sanitation and internet access, given the chance, and that if we got good at building small towns we'd build some they were happy to reside in."

too-early-and-too-late

"And if that hadn't happened?"

"We would have relocated people rather than just gradually develop into the places where they lived. Details pending sixty years' more study of the question - there's so much space, it wouldn't come up at all for so long..."

chanuphis

"I'd probably be able to get more worked up about this if there weren't already colonists coming to densify and render unsustainable the habits of the people who were here first."

"I mean, yes, it is completely inevitable that without an extremely powerful government hell-bent on preserving vast swaths of wilderness and persistent in that determination across centuries, then people will settle it. It's a completely predictable part of the arc of history and the next few chapters are 'mass displacement and mass death until you invent population controls'."

too-early-and-too-late

"Wizards really don't need 'em."

"For probably the same reason blues tended to keep their populations stableish, more or less. If there's a subset of humans who need them..."

too-early-and-too-late

"Yes, Ana argued that."

chanuphis

"It's interesting getting an advance look at Future Joanna and trying to mentally subtract Amentan-ness and fill in the blanks."

"I think the girls are having a lovely time."

too-early-and-too-late

"There's something else I wanted to talk with you about."

"Oh?"

too-early-and-too-late

"A lot of the discussion surrounding wizards sort of adds up to you having an interest in collecting your own and smuggling them off to be socialized onto your side of this - disagreement about the future of Earth."

"I assume you have to, like, learn how to do magic, and wizards raised among Muggles would be ineffectual, or those places you've mentioned which shun Muggleborns would have more problems."

chanuphis

"This is true but not impossible in principle to mitigate if you really wanted."

"I assume you're not here to offer me orphaned magical children."

too-early-and-too-late

"It would be a serious breach of trust if you tried it."

"It'd do so much for my blood pressure if you'd be more Amentan about this kind of thing."

too-early-and-too-late

" - meaning -"

"What is the demand, what kind of proof of compliance do you want, what are you threatening."

too-early-and-too-late

"Don't recruit wizards. Don't have interactions with wizards which are secret from us, and in particular don't try to find or import or reeducate or get leverage over wizard kids. Proof we want to talk about. If you do that, we'd have to escalate before they got powerful enough to level the playing field."