Heee.

She runs up a bit of a backlog with the reds project; DZ's still keeping an eye on it to make sure nothing egregious happens, but that's about it. Anything interesting to look at, when she finally comes up for air?

They have started the collections project over in another city with clearer terms and it's going along. The researchers have determined that richer reds are happier, inworkers are happier controlling for wealth, and reds who spend less time on the internet are happier. ...they think she's probably going to say they shouldn't kill their internet but they are not sure why she would say that.

She is going to say that! As a general principle she doesn't want them taking things away from the reds; she expects having things taken away to have side effects that are much worse than whatever the original harm is. And right now in particular they need to be careful of reds' perception of the government, since they're going to want their cooperation with the robots project; if the government does something to them that they feel harmed by, it doesn't really matter if they're actually harmed less overall, they're still going to trust the government less.

Okay. They have not taken the internet away from any reds. The researchers find the social workers annoying, so they're going ahead and getting rid of them slowly.

Cool. They should put up a website like she mentioned, too; they should still come out ahead financially if they're dropping social workers all over.

Does she want to register any opinions on site design?

Peka?

Actually genuinely totally anonymous feedback that somebody actually has to read modulo normal email-account levels of spam filtration!

She can probably get them to do that! She reminds them again very carefully about the whole 'needing reds to trust the government' thing and points out that they aren't going to have a second chance to get this one right when she makes the suggestion.

Well, but reds can't tell the difference between actual genuine total anonymity and not that if they don't actually use the not that.

If they're actually not going to use the information why do they want to have it?

In case they ever really need it more than they need the reds to believe they have the thing.

...for example?

Like if they had writing style analysis suggesting that some red they found agitating for riots online was the same as a feedback-sender, and they couldn't find them through the online posts but could find them through the feedback form. That one would even be plausibly deniable.

She's not afraid of a riot, but they have ever gone after blues, okay, fair.

She doesn't want them ever using that information without her permission.

They had been under the impression she didn't wish to be bothered about these details.

She doesn't, but she wants even less to end up in a situation where she has to figure out what to do about the government having already burned its bridges re: reds trusting them, and this is a situation where there's an especially high risk of that. So, their alien-approved options are to not collect that information at all - which she would, personally, prefer - or to not use it without her sanity-checking to make sure they're only taking appropriate risks.

They have a prolonged debate about this.

DZ'll send her the conclusion.

Eventually they decide they will have a really anonymous form but add in tracers if things get tense with the reds in general.

Combinations of 'not gathering the information at all' and 'gathering it but only using it with her permission' are also fine.

They proceed with their science and with the getting her and DZ anything they should happen to want, up to and including an empty warehouse for installation art pieces to be turned into a public museum after aliens are revealed.

Winter comes. It's a pretty bad winter.

She notices, in a vague sort of way; the snow only barely affects her, and the temperature not at all, but sometimes her warmth aura comes in handy when Kesa comes out to visit DZ.

Kesa appreciates that.

A huge storm hits. Trains shut down. Power is only flickered in the hotel - nice part of town has local generators - but goes out other places.