"Oh, is that what Earth Standard counts from? It's 2152 in Earth Standard when I'm from."

"Oh, good, so not that far in the future. --You ended up fixing the fertility crisis with space colonization, I take it?"

"Pardon?"

"The... fertility crisis? The thing where we pumped lots of bitoxiphosphene into the air and it made women unable to conceive, or they miscarried, or their babies were born too sick to live?"

"I'm afraid I'm not familiar with it. I'm not a historian, of course..."

"It seems like it would have come up if people on your Earth still had trouble having babies!"

"I haven't been to Earth. I do know it to... exist... so they must have handled it somehow..."

"I... guess...?" he sounds doubtful. "Well, here most women struggle with some form of infertility. In Cascadia we've hit a TFR of 2 and we're working on reaching full replacement soon."

"The owl did not teach me 'TFR'."

"Oh, sorry, total fertility rate. Average number of six-month-old babies per woman."

"...six month olds in particular?"

"Yeah. Sometimes people want to keep their babies when they turn out to have disabilities incompatible with life instead of euthanizing them, so we have to count from a point where all the babies with those disabilities are definitely dead."

"The owl did not teach me all of those words either."

"Oh, sorry. The bitoxiphosphene means that some babies are born too sick to live more than six months after they're born. Normally we kill them right away but sometimes the parents don't want us to. So we have to count from a point where all the babies too sick to live are definitely dead."

"Oh, I see. That makes sense. What a tragedy for your people."

"Yeah, it's-- not great. --What were you, before, I don't suppose you know anything about keeping babies alive--"

"Star Cadet. Junior space-side military rank."

"You can help us build spaceships!"

"I've helped assemble one but I am not in fact an engineer or a physicist."

"Well, that's an improvement on the zero knowledge of interstellar travel we currently have."

"I suppose."

"So, uh, things that are unusual about Cascadia compared to other countries both historically and in the present day"-- he ticks off on his fingers-- "we're a democracy, teenagers can vote and have jobs and have kids, women can do anything men can and saying that they're fundamentally different will piss people off, you can have sex before you get married, no one cares if you're gay or trans, polygamy is legal but some people do care, sex work is legal and unionized, most newborns either have multiple legal parents or will acquire them when they get older, we keep pigs and chickens as pets and people usually eat them, a bunch of drugs are de facto legal and the rest are legally equivalent to a parking ticket, disabled people usually commit suicide when their lives aren't worth living anymore, health care is usually paid for by the government, you can get public housing for free by walking into any public housing building and asking for it, no one is allowed to arrest you for anything you say or think, no one is allowed to arrest you for your religion or for not having a religion at all, there's no official government religion-- uh, feel free to ask questions about any of these--"

"I am missing some of those words from the owl. - how is 'gay' spelled, I might recognize it from the Kularan."

"G-a-y."

"Okay. I still don't have some of the other ones - 'suicide' and 'religion' and 'trans' and 'polygamy' and 'facto' and I don't know if that was all of them."