"Why commutes? Trains are not great but you can read on them."

"It is harder to read in the cheap sections, they get really crowded."

"Oh."

"And lots of people who have a long commute have several train transfers in there, it might not be as bad if it were just one train."

"Oh, yes, that would be annoying."

"I know I would find it annoying but I would not have guessed it would be a lasting hit to my happiness. But that's what the research suggests. If you plan your cities well it shouldn't take more than thirty minutes to get anywhere from anywhere else and then your people will be happier."

"Is Lina like that?"

"Mostly. It's an old city and modernizing all the infrastructure was quite a task, and there are a few places from which it would take more than thirty minutes to get to a different place, but there are very few people living or working here who have a commute more than thirty minutes and the median is ten, which is considered quite good."

"Good. Why is modernizing hard?"

"Well, digging train tunnels is pretty expensive, and buses and trams are cheaper but need big wide avenues to go down. And you can plan a city so that everyone is near a stop without having stops so frequently that they slow down the trains too much. But if you just have a city that has existed since before trains, then it won't automatically be set up like that, and setting up trains that are efficient and accessible is a hard problem."

Nod nod.

"Tapa helped us with infrastructure and planning after the war. It was very good of them."

"Why'd they do that?"

"Having rich stable neighbors is better than having poor chaotic neighbors, and there were a lot of us and absorbing us would have been just as expensive and complicated with more potential downside."

Nod. "Why does it matter what your neighbors are like?"

"You have a lot of trade with your neighbors, and if they are in chaos then some of their people will try to escape to your country, and if they are rich and stable then they can be an ally to you in wars."

"Do people try to escape here from Calado?"

"Not often. Calado isn't so bad that being here illegally is better than being there legally; you can get in a lot of trouble for being somewhere illegally. And most people in Calado don't speak Anitami."

"Is it very bad to be here illegally?"

"If it were better than being in the kind of places people come from, then everyone would do it."

"What's bad about it?"

"You can get emergency temporary legal status here, but you have to keep a job or you get sent home, you pay eighty percent of your income in taxes, you are ineligible to purchase a credit, and if you break the law you are deported unless it's a capital crime. And the only way to change your status is to get a swap just like you'd get a swap if you were still at home. If you don't pursue emergency temporary legal status then you can't get work or shelter and will be deported once we find you."

"What if you marry somebody who buys a credit?"

"Not allowed. It does still happen sometimes. We used to revoke the credit if it did but that was awful for everyone involved - sometimes the other parent didn't know, sometimes it didn't get caught until the child was older - so now anyone born on a credit is legal, even if their parents did something illegal to get it."

"And their parents get to keep them?"