"Oh dear."

"Yep. And the people who get made can make people too, and have not always been made to be, themselves, very responsible custodians of the people they make..."

"There's something to be said for a system where producing another human being requires nine months of chronic illness."

"I mean, I don't actually love that part, I'd rather things be easy and just not done stupidly, but barriers to entry can do some of the work of responsibility."

"I won't deny that there are bad parents or that your system sounds more overall convenient, but I do think it's a silver lining that there isn't anywhere I can think of where you have to be that kind of careful about what's on your plate."

"I'll grant you that. Reproducing humans are not agriculturally efficient."

"We're so much harder to keep under control than any other animal and herbivores are way more pasture-to-food efficient." 

"So there's one thing we don't need to worry too much about right now, at least."

"--Do you know if these people know about prion diseases?"

"I don't believe so but I don't have full medical state of the art from there. I think they're behind here in general on tech and medicine and such, but with less of the increased mortality you'd expect because everyone can start really healthy and responsible with contaminants."

"Yeah...anyway, not exactly the lowest-hanging fruit." 

"Agreed."

"So I guess the next step is probably making more of you? Or, I don't know if you in particular, but people like you at least..."

"Atennesi can't make another person for about a week, but I can, or someone else could, using his specs or a refined set if we don't want just an army of me for some reason."

"An army of you seems like it would be pretty cool, but my instinct is that if we only do an army of you then we miss out on any improvements that could crop up randomly even in a sufficiently well-prescribed criterion set."

"That's not untrue but random experimentation doesn't usually produce anything good over a small sample size when people try it in my world. I guess if you're specifying a lot then the fill-in-the-blanks will be concordant with that and that might help."

Nod. "That's what I was thinking...and I wasn't thinking we don't do any more of you."

"Are you thinking of making some yourself?"

"I'd wanna look at all the notes and stuff, first, to see if it's the kind of thing I'd expect to do well...and it might be that I'll think of some criterion Atennesi forgot, just on account of being a different person with different blind spots."

"Hm, I suppose it's theoretically possible that I'm not perfect in every way."

"Well, there is the balance issue, trivial as it may be given the givens." 

"Fair enough. Omit that next time."

"I certainly intend to." 

"Balance issue?" 

"I'm not steady on my feet. I'm correcting for it."