Isabella tap-tap-taps along with her cane. "The cars you can hire are called taxis, and sometimes they're a good choice for a particular trip but they require telling the driver where you're going and making a slightly more complicated transaction and sometimes traffic is bad and if it's bad enough I sometimes get a little carsick, while I don't get subway-sick."

"Ah, the automation on subway vehicles is superior because they operate underground in a simpler environment?  That would match my expectations if so.  But why do the subway vehicles sound larger?  What's 'traffic' in context, it sounds like a turbulent flow kind of traffic?  Feel free to say this is not a priority question."

"I don't think they're actually very automated but they're on rails. Traffic means when there's too many cars and they have to slow down a lot."

"Too many cars, not enough road?  You can't build more road or charge more for cars during traffic?  I've been coming up with hypotheses about magic-assisted reproduction to explain why your world's equilibrium had more homosexuality, but the more weirdness I run into, the more it seems like magic somehow disrupts the general process of balancing supply and demand."  Or it's a generalized weird story premise that some generalized author isn't really trying to justify.  It honestly seems more and more likely the more she runs into concepts like 'subways' and 'traffic' - the moon magic she could maybe buy, but the small economic details of this reality give a strong impression of having not been thought out.

"Magic was very very rare like thirty years ago and they had traffic then. Also I don't think most people in same-sex relationships need magic, like, if Jackson and Brian want kids they will find some women in a similar situation and arrange that with them probably."

"No, I don't mean psions and mages do it locally, I mean the whole nature of this being a magical world?  And if Jackson and Brian each have one kid that way, they each end up with one kid they're 1/2 related to.  If magic let them have kids with each other they'd be each 1/2 related to 2 kids, like heterosexual parents, and there'd be no fitness advantage for heterosexuality, which is why I thought that plausible... how recent is this sexual situation?  Maybe your world just plain isn't in equilibrium and is currently experiencing rapid selection against homosexuality."

"The women would presumably also want to keep some of the kids so I'm not sure they'd wind up with fewer all things considered. Almost no one is monosexual at all and I don't know off the top of my head if it's more common to be heterosexual than to be homosexual if you're going to be one or the other but I think people who care about having kids a lot do actually select for the opposite sex when they're looking for partners. Like, I don't especially care about having kids so I'm more likely to wind up with a girl because most subs are girls, but my mom cared about having kids so she married a man."

"Is variation in who wants kids not genetically heritable around here?  There's several proverbs I'm trying not to say literally because they'd probably come out as three paragraphs long, but 'the future belongs to people who have children' isn't a bad gloss."

"Thellim, there are nearly seven billion people on Earth, I don't think anyone actually needs to worry about not having enough."

"That's an awful lot by our standards," and it makes it even weirder that their economy has such awful food on planes, there should be seven times as many people to develop better recipes than that, "but I'm not thinking about the absolute number, I'm thinking about the relative frequencies of alleles in the breeding population, and why everybody doesn't already want kids.  I mean, in our world, it's not the case that everybody wants kids, but that's because we're making a conscious effort not to breed ourselves into the... into fictional aliens who really, really want kids."

"Well, we are not making conscious efforts to breed ourselves any which way. People who want kids have them and people who don't don't. Plenty of people don't."

"Your Civilization just doesn't care about its eugenics at all?  And in the absence of coordination, your reproduction is driven mostly by how much you want to reproduce?  That really sounds like a recipe to end up as pregnancy-obsessed aliens in two hundred years or maybe even faster."

"Let's say... experiments... with eugenics... were tried, and went really really badly, and we are now largely agreed we'd rather do this instead."

"How badly does an experiment have to go to give up on eugenics?"

"Do you want the civilian casualties or the total?"

"...you tried to breed supermagicians."

"That was among the things they tried but it didn't work, actually, it's not genetic."

"You obviously did something with enormous unforeseen negative externalities, and I don't see any way to get that out of an experiment in directed reproduction without phenomena my civilization would call supernatural..."

"I don't think you know as much as you think you do about what humans will do without it being magical, since at some point your planet was taken over by a meta-ideology which openly refuses you all the historical cautionary tales you might otherwise have benefitted from."

"It would seem self-evident that of the two of us I have more knowledge of what humans get up to with zero magic, but I agree that you may know much that I do not about what happens in prehistory.  I suppose that if prehistorical societies tended to have sufficiently little magic you may know more than I do about my own world's environment of evolution.  Though I'm currently entertaining several classes of hypotheses where the lunar eclipses are just the surface of the way your world fundamentally differs from mine.  What of it?"

"Through most of history the extent to which magic mattered was that occasionally there was a natural disaster and occasionally a twelve-year-old got murdered. Then for a while occasionally the twelve-year-old would be sent to live alone in the woods for a couple years and be around later somewhat the worse for wear doing magic on medieval calorie sources with very little information on what they could theoretically accomplish, and most people never interacted with one. Then for a while there were somewhat more systematic setups for living in the wilderness with routine food and water drops, enough that there were enough lockdown psions to go around and nobody had to do that who didn't want to. Virtuality is new and most people still don't go and the skills take a long time to learn so many appear only once or twice the world over. Many, many things are not directly affected by magic. Meanwhile, everything in your world is governed by an extremely specific meta-ideology. So I would bet on myself over you if we were both trying to predict a nonmagical population of humans which did not happen to have received any missionaries or whatever from your planet."

"I don't think I can easily describe just how much lunar eclipses producing psions and mages does not fit with the character of reality, where I'm from.  It's why I would be so incredibly shocked if you could successfully contact my mother.  Our reality is - mathematically simple, deep down, and closed, things don't happen that aren't in the deep-down math.  Something like your lunar eclipses can't be truth in isolation; it can't be that your reality is just like mine except that it has psions and mages on top, it must have a different character.  This whole place is very different from my world in some deep ontological way, though somehow those two regions of reality intersected at having air and gravity and humans.  You say that sex-indifferent attraction and too many cars needing to slow down aren't being caused by mages and psions in a way that's visible to you.  And maybe it's not the lunar eclipses doing it at all, not directly.  But my running hypothesis is that the strangenesses are interacting with something much deeper, the different thing about your world that allows psions and mages to exist at all."

"I guess that's not ridiculous from your own perspective but I would appreciate it if you would frame your questions less like you are an expert on how humans in general ought to behave when actually what you know is how one specific metaculture ought to behave."

"I... think I understand, and appreciate, your caution against generalizing from one example, but I'm not sure you realize the extent to which your own civilization seems to depart from universally convergent optima that can be derived from first principles and which a normal human civilization ought to reflect, even taking into account that humans aren't ideal bounded agents.  It's one thing to end up on a parallel planet and find that clothing styles and cuisines are different.  It's another to find out that - people are using addition that isn't commutative, their system of probabilities isn't some isomorphism of the Probability Axioms, scientists are reporting statistics not using Bayes's Rule, sexual attraction isn't evolutionarily optimized for reproduction, the number of cars on the roads doesn't adjust to match road capacity, and advertisements don't make any sensible argument for why people should buy the advertised products!  Our civilization doesn't have a random form in those dimensions, it's being pushed both emergently and deliberately toward optimal forms."

"Our addition is commutative. Advertising is actually one of the most optimized items on your list, as it happens, since they change things and try to figure out what moves the most product. What are ads like where you're from?"