"Report freely, Elilandemilaki."

"This planet has sapient inhabitants."

"You found Gems on an alien planet?"

"No, although the resemblance is startling. It's the organics. Sapient organic life."

"Elilandemilaki, the Diamond Communicators are for serious business, not youthful pranks."

"I assure you, I've never been more serious in my life. I didn't believe the initial reports either, but I've verified them myself. I have learned one of the local languages and had several extended conversations with the people of Earth, and I think they represent an opportunity far more valuable than a handful of quartz-bearing kindergartens."

"Elilandemilaki, I commend your drive to improve the lot of Gemkind, even by looking in...unorthodox...places, but I'm not quite sure how it is that organics are supposed to represent a valuable opportunity for the Empire."

"Let's hear her out before we make judgments," murmurs Evandemilaki.

"Thank you, Evandemilaki," she says, bowing her head slightly.

"The essential point is this: Organic life takes far fewer resources to create than Gems. A planet such as Earth can host enough kindergartens to produce a few million viable Gems before we exhaust the available minerals or drain the local ecosystem past recovery, but according to my preliminary calculations, the same planet could sustain a population of billions of these 'humans' for millions or billions of years. They aren't immortal, but given sufficient resources - a tiny fraction of what would be required to produce a comparable number of Gems - they create enough new humans each year to more than replace the ones who die, and I can think of a few promising avenues for extending their lifespan. If we found a place for them in our society, the resource they represent - the industrial base, the expanded population from which to draw inventors, engineers, artists, architects... I can hardly even find the words to articulate the potential gains. We'd have trouble integrating them into the existing structure of our society, of course, but I have faith in our organizational abilities. And we wouldn't necessarily need much contact between humans and the rest of the Empire, particularly not at first. I think, given a few decades for initial setup, I could turn this planet into the basis for an entire new branch of the Empire."

"It rather sounds as though you're presenting them as 'like Ambers, but moreso.'"

"Like Ambers with less than a fifth of the incubation time, and hardly requiring any effort at all to produce - humans create more humans without any outside intervention, they've been doing it since long before I arrived. And a similar problem with unpredictable psychology, but they make up for it with the numbers; I think I'd be up to the challenge of sorting through a population of humans and matching them with suitable tasks, and even if only half of every generation was worth training for anything more complicated than maintaining the rest of their kind, that's still an unprecedentedly enormous population of useful subjects. I really do think I can make it work."

"Would there even be time to train them to do anything worthwhile? How long do they live?"

"I haven't studied that question in depth yet; this is only a preliminary report. But I have identified several of the primary causes of death in their population, and many of them can be trivially eliminated using our technology."

"I can understand why these reports would look...promising, on the surface of it. But I think you're underestimating the disruptive effect these organics would have on our society. The turnover you're suggesting would be highly detrimental to systems that require long-term experience and stability, not to mention the potential psychological effects they might have on real Gems."

"I understand your concerns. I definitely wouldn't expect to integrate humans into the Empire anytime soon. But I'm very, very reluctant to throw this resource away without investigating fully."

"Elilandemilaki, you were sent to that planet to produce Gems, not to play in the mud with unusually complicated flesh-things."

"The proposal is interesting, but I'm not sure we need it. And I find little intrinsic appeal in the prospect of adding a billion crude organic imitations of Ambers to our empire, however useful you expect them to be."

"It's a clever idea," Lisandemilaki says, more gently. "I can certainly see why you would get attached to it. But you'll learn, with time, that not all clever ideas are good ones. We have to prioritize our people. Real Gems."

"I want what's best for the empire, and I believe that the best thing I can do for the empire is to pursue this project."

"Well...you are a Diamond. If you really want to experiment with these things, perhaps you could find and alter some nice moon or dwarf planet for the purposes? But we really do need the Quartzes this planet represents."

Elilandemilaki considers this suggestion for a few seconds, then shakes her head. "I don't yet know what conditions would be required to sustain a human population outside their native planet, and if I move ahead with the Quartz production too quickly, I could end up destroying one of the crucial components of their ecosystem before I have time to identify it."

"I thought you said they were easy to produce and maintain?"

"They are. That doesn't mean I can make them appear out of thin air with a wave of my hand," Elilandemilaki says dryly. "And I haven't yet studied the exact parameters in enough depth to be confident that I could create and maintain a human colony elsewhere."

"If it's not possible to maintain them in conditions that can already be found on Gem-controlled planets, it sounds as though your integration idea would require radically altering the dozens of planets we already have."