He laughs. "I mean, you're a malcontent intercaste kid, I'm a malcontent intercaste kid, the data adds up, and everyone knows that's how statistics works, right?"

"Yes. Our sample size is perfect. My neurological balance disorder that neither of my parents has was obviously spontaneously generated by the wrongness of intercaste marriage. I probably inherited my disinterest in grey work from my mother whose list of top three things she'd do if she were grey rotates through twelve things depending on her mood."

"—twelve things?"

"Dance, teaching kids to dance, stunt doubling, modeling, police child victim handler, sprinting, sailing, scuba diving instructor, skydiving instructor, rock climber, arcball player."

"I was actually more curious about someone having that many interests."

"My mom is the undisputed champion of having many interests. When school's out in the spring she loads up on classes and does a hundred things, and she fits a surprising amount in around work too."

He giggles. "That's really adorable."

"Yes it is. They'd be likelier to get a third kid before they're too old if they didn't dump so much money into that but she'd wither."

"Well, it's nice for her to have many hobbies like that, I guess she never gets bored."

"You could say she needs all the hobbies because she gets bored easily!"

"I guess that's a way to look at it. Me, I'm just so easy, give me someone to talk to or a nice book."

"I consider the Internet the perfect synthesis of all Amentan entertainment possibilities that won't kill me except for how I do like to swim."

"I like to swim also, and I enjoy my work. But yes, the Internet is an eternal source of joy."

"I'm so glad I live in the era with the Internet, it would suck so much to not and not even know what I was missing."

"On that note there might just be something as relatively amazing as the Internet is that we don't know we're missing."

"We know perfectly well we're missing FTL."

"—well. Yeah. I'm not sure I'd put it in the same category but, yeah."

"Yeah, it's different. Hmm, aliens might be a multiplier to ways to occupy oneself the same way the Internet is?"

"Ooh, yeah, meeting aliens would be so cool."

"They'd have invented all their own ways to fill time! Art forms under different constraints, scaled to different statistics of interest - whole planets full of people with tastes that'd make a tiny fandom on Amenta."

"I wonder what if any castes they'd have. It's not natural at all to divide ours the way we do, it'd make a lot of sense for stuff to be completely different—I mean, not that we haven't already talked about fiction about that, but thinking about meeting aliens in real life—"

"Yeah, fiction's aiming at - interesting characters and plots, not for solving life problems? And authors vary in how much they nod to life problems."

"Right, and fiction's also not aiming for realistic forecast of what the world might look like. Or most fiction isn't, anyway."

"So they don't have realistic alien traits and histories and they don't extrapolate from what they've got realistically either, yeah."

"And thinking of it there's no real reason they'll even have approximately the same emotional makeup or social structures or anything like that. Even using animals would be wrong, they share our evolutionary history and pressures."