"Usually for a test law you only do it in one city, so that most people aren't affected if it doesn't work. But sometimes a law that did work for a long time stops working because of technology changes, and then you have to change things everywhere."

"Like what?"

"Like, hmm, we require a special kind of occupational licensing to operate heavy machinery because it is dangerous, but then someone builds machinery which has safety features and is not dangerous enough to reasonably require licensing."

"Huh."

"Or we made a lot of rules about what you could share on the internet during a war, a very long time ago, and now we need to update them because people use the internet differently."

"What do they do with it besides order tokens?"

"Post pictures of themselves and their friends, write stories, stream videos, participate in forums..."

"Why does that mean the rules are too old?"

"When the rules were written people mostly used the internet for academic collaboration and messaging."

"But what does it have to do with wars?"

"It is not allowed to tell the people you are fighting things that might help them hurt our country. When we wrote the rules we said that if you wanted to post pictures you should put them through a special site that would check if they might hurt the country. But then last time we had a war, that site was very hard to keep working, because hundreds of millions of people wanted to put all of their pictures through. So we need a better solution."

"Ohhhh."

"Hopefully there will not be another war but if there is, the laws will be better-targeted."

"We are supposed to have rabbits. If we had a war what would it be about?"

"If someone decided they wanted our land they might start a war, or if they blamed us for something bad that happened in their country. Or we might choose to go to war with someone if they broke the population treaties or were behaving unstably or having a terrible internal war that didn't look like it was going to end."

"Population treaties?"

"All countries agree not to have more babies than we can feed, so the thing with rabbits can't happen with people."

"...the rabbits were feeding their babies just fine."

"There were ten rabbits and then there were a hundred thousand rabbits and they were eating Baravi's crops. With people it is important not to grow that fast or people will worry that you will eat their crops when you run out of your own."

"Okay. And you would have a war but not with flus."

"Everyone has agreed not to use people flus in war because that would be very terrible."

"Yeah."

Hug. "Probably there will not be any wars and if there are we will keep you safe."

"Okay."

"Most people take more time off than that," says Kan's mother worriedly.

       "Most people have a newborn. Newborns are a lot of work and you don't want to miss an hour. Lintalai is a delight but I will not regret an hour."