"What was the culture like?"

"Uh - it's not trivial to describe in a way that doesn't sound even more judgmental than I mean to be. You ever read about how oranges get 'compassion burnout' from having to put all their cases through bureaucracy and having lots of them every day? The cops didn't bother having anything to burn out in the first place."

"Yeah I can see that."

"They're not all terrible, some of them are nice at least some of the time to victims or sympathetic perps, but they're handling it like - they go in and do things because that's what cops do - not because there's any underlying reason for why cops do those things."

He nods. "I never interacted much with them, when I was younger and my father worked in law enforcement but, yeah, that fits."

"It's probably different department to department and precinct to precinct, honestly, but finding one that would work for me would be really difficult and one doesn't typically get full control over assignments like that."

Nod. "And the underlying—thing that permits this sort of culture to exist and develop in the first place is a bit more widespread."

"Yeah. The year I was three school was horrible."

"People pick on you 'cause of the balance or something more—general? Or, well, both."

"The first year of school my mom was my class's primary teacher. I stuck close to her and got other kids in trouble pretty casually if they bothered me. My mom's school only has one-year-olds, so after that I went to an intercaste school, which only covered through age two. Then I couldn't get into any plausible specialty schools because they all have fitness tests or military service requirements, and I mainstreamed grey and - I mean, the balance thing was typical as a target, and I got tripped and knocked over more than I got anything else in particular, but I didn't get as much crap as the wheelchair sports teams. I think it was an intersection of not having anything visibly wrong with me as an excuse and the lack of culture fit. I marked time till I could drop out and then self-taught from there, my parents worried about my being caste-nonconforming and think it'll bite me later but I just couldn't stick it out another year ahead in all the academics and pathetic in all the gym."

"I'm sorry," he sighs. "I didn't really have anything people picked on me for, per se, but I used to try to stand up for the kids who were picked on and we often got slotted together. I used to fight back something fierce, though."

"I got that advice once. Tried it. I needed fifteen stitches afterwards."

"...yeowch."

"Yeah."

"I'm—really glad you got out of there."

"Me too."

"Let's talk about happier things. What d'you do between the awesome blog and swimming?"

"I watch my sister when my parents are busy, I go to arcball games and take notes. I read a lot."

"What do you like to read?"

"Mix of old fiction - only Anitami or hand-translated, the thing I like about old fiction doesn't survive machine translation reliably - and sorta popular-level nonfiction, I don't drill deep into most topics to the point where I can go around nibbling on legit research papers but I read the sort of thing nonspecialist greens would read. Like, uh, I liked Mountains, Ilata Imentami, it's cultural geography."

"That's cool! What is it you like about old fiction?"

"The stuff that's still read is usually still read because it's good along multiple axes - cultural resonance and linguistic sophistication disappear in machine translation but a good manual translation can keep it or transform it."

"...you know, I never thought about it like that before. Maybe I should give it a try."

"If you tell me what your taste's like generally I can recommend something."

"I like some science fiction, but more for the—exploration of our capabilities, of the ways society would or could be—that aspect. So that's sort of hit-and-miss, when it's miss it misses badly but when it's hit it's pretty good. I like stuff that explores the way society—is, the day-to-day things, the way people live their lives, especially in other castes and other cultures. And I like speculative fiction."