"Maybe."

"It is hard to guess things about aliens because they are probably complicatedly different from us in ways we wouldn't even think of."

"Yeah."

"Maybe they have your memories somewhere and will give them back."

"I wonder if they will want me to do stuff to get them. If they took them at all they are probably not nice."

"Probably not. I guess maybe you could make some kind of alien business out of taking peoples' memories and trading them back."

"That would be the worst business."

"It would certainly be right up there."

"I hope plants are not awful people."

"I am sure that not all plants are awful people."

"Well yeah, I'm a plant."

"All the other ones, even."

Giggle.

"They might have a very bad culture, though, that does happen."

"Why does that happen?"

"Culture is sticky, people don't - notice that things that have always been that way are bad unless they're really bad, and most bad cultural things wouldn't still be that way if they were easy to change, so people are dependent on the existing system."

"...say that different?"

"If Anitam changed to killing babies people would be angry and upset and would notice that it was bad. But in Tapa it has been that way for as long as anyone can remember, and they are proud of being Tapa, and they all dealt with it so why shouldn't people these days, and so they don't notice that it is bad. Also, most bad things aren't just randomly bad. The way that they are serves some people, and the change would hurt some people. There is not much free improvement to be grabbed."

"Why don't people tell people in Tapa that it's bad?"

"Why would people in Tapa listen to random foreigners who don't know anything about what life in Tapa is like?"

"...why not?"

"Because there are lots and lots of them and virtually everything they have to say is stupid."

"...like what?"

"People petition the government to complain that the train turnstiles are taking pictures of them nude and sending them to their spouse, to complain that accidentally activating an emergency home alarm and not shutting it off for thirty seconds should be a capital crime, to say that it should be illegal for their boss to fire them for not showing up to work, to claim paternity over random children who are not theirs, to argue that we should exterminate dogs... can you think of any more, dear -"

"To let us know that oysters give ominous signs about the upcoming year, to explain that the government does not have the right to tax them because their credit number is Oahkar-issued and thus illegitimate, to ask if it's illegal to poison food and put it in the refrigerator at work in the hopes that a coworker will steal it, to demand that we shoot a few reds to prove a point to someone on the internet..."