"No. You're - not obliged to be convenient to people, if there wasn't a preexisting agreement about that."

"The whole thing is very odd."

"Is it? I have nothing to compare it to."

"Well, I'm just comparing to its absence. It tracks something about how people feel about things - I have been told it's expensive to touch me - but that's certainly not all of it - when I was figuring out ways to settle up with someone who'd touched me to wake me up for sleeping in their territory it was suggested I could stab him, which I wouldn't enjoy at all and he would clearly have preferred to me just not stabbing him, and he seemed annoyed about me insisting that he just draw me a bunch of pictures instead."

"It tracks pain, does it hurt when people touch you? It doesn't like secondary considerations. Most people prefer time-efficient ways to settle debt and then some people have more idiosyncratic preferences which the system doesn't care about. I know someone who hates sitting still. I don't like sex with girls. Some people don't enjoy stories at all."

"It doesn't physically hurt, necessarily."

"Huh. Then it might be keeping track of something I don't have experience with."

"If it cared more about what things people liked that would explain it but it doesn't."

"If it were more idiosyncratic than it is it'd be really hard to balance conversations neatly."

"Would it?"

"I think so? If giving an answer it mattered how much the person liked the answer, it certainly would. Or if you had no idea what sort of thing might be needed to level up at the end of a negotiation - maybe we'd all get used to it."

"Oh, I wasn't thinking if it mattered how much the person liked the answer, just if it mattered how much they wanted it answered."

"That does matter."

"See, I had no idea!"

"I guess maybe it could track more things and not get that much more unpredictable. But see, with wanting, you can avoid asking the question if you can't pay for it, knowing how much you want the answer. With how much you like the answer you'd get ambushed more often, I think."

"I guess."

"It's not how I would've designed it but I don't know that I'd make it match peoples' wants more."

"What would you have designed?"

"I think I'd make childdebts smaller, and make killing people more expensive, and make you incur ongoing expenses for imprisoning someone."

"Well, as incremental changes go those sound good."

"I'm not persuaded we'd be better off without it. Humans have organized mass killings of one another, all the time."

"I think the - debt model in particular isn't doing you any favors. I don't necessarily object to it being costly to kill somebody but the frame could be different and that could still be there."

"Hmmm. I'd be willing to try something like that but I can't say I'm longing for it."

"Would you long for what you have, if you didn't?"

"I can't really imagine it. People'd still care whether their relationships were reciprocial, one imagines."