"All right. I'll be there soon."

He goes out and gets a "breakfast burrito" and calls a car.

And the car deposits him at a large house. The door is opened by a small child. 

"Daddy says you're an alien from the future."

"I'm from another planet and the future but I'm a human, not a real alien."

The child looks unimpressed. "I think you should be green like the aliens on TV."

"Sorry to disappoint. Where is your daddy?"

"Daddy! The alien is here!"

Lev appears. "Sorry about Abram."

"It's all right."

"He's, uh. Precocious. My office is this way--"

In lieu of conventional decoration the house is decorated with stuffed animals, half-finished Lego projects, and the occasional crayon drawing on the walls.

That's a lot of toys. Maybe there's more kids around. Kyeo follows him.

They walk past posters at child-eye level that are labeled things like The Eras Of Life and Native Tribes Of North America and A Logarithmic Map of the Universe.

Every single surface in Lev's office, except for one chair, is covered in papers, pens, books, Rubix cubes, and stray snap circuits and magnatiles and test tubes. He shoves a pile of papers off one chair onto the floor and gestures for Kyeo to sit. A bulletin board has pictures of six kids (three black and three white), two smiling women with their hands around each other, a happy-looking black man standing on one hand, and some arrangement of stars.

"I'd say I'd have cleaned up but, uh, no I wouldn't."

Kyeo steps around the floored papers to take the offered seat. Six kids might be enough to explain this much stuff; his household had only two and with a substantial age gap. And obviously some of it is for work. Though it's curious to let kids play in one's office. "It's all right."

"So... obviously the most important question we have for someone from the future is artificial wombs."

"We don't have those. They seem like a good idea even in our context but have not to my knowledge been put into practice anywhere."

"Yeah. We guessed but-- it was worth asking. So many things would be so much easier if we had artificial wombs."

"It did sound that way. It's possible on some planets they use them and tolerate some sort of side effect but Ibyabek does not and I don't know what the side effects are."

"--honestly I have a huge list of questions I am supposed to be asking but if they wanted me to ask about spaceships they really should have sent you to an engineer and not an economist-- do you know economist--"

"- yes, if it's the same as the Kularan. Someone who studies, ah, employment?"

"In theory we study producing and distributing and consuming goods and services, in practice we study everything about people where knowing math helps you understand it."

"Do you have questions about those, then?"

"How the fuck do you make central planning work."

"...I'm not sure I understand what about it is meant to be difficult. Perhaps our computers being better helps?"

"So there's a thing called the local knowledge problem. Uh, I know that my shoes have holes in them, so I can buy new shoes. And then the store owner knows that he sells so many shoes, and he can put in an order to the factory, and the factory knows how much leather they need for a certain number of shoes, and-- no one in the system has all the information? The guy who tans the leather doesn't know that my shoes have holes, and he doesn't need to. And it's generally been considered impossible to get all the information and put it in one place. So central planning tends to lead to some people having extra shoes and some people not having any shoes, because the central planner doesn't know as much about my shoe needs as I do."

"...shoes do not get holes in them immediately, so provided you are given new shoes often enough this should not be an issue."

"So you're... post-scarcity? Or pretty close?"