"- But snakes aren't four-legged!" says the teenager in the black hoodie, leaning animatedly over the opposite side of the round table. They were apparently too focused on the guy pacing around up in front of the whiteboard, to notice the person materializing out of thin air in the seat across from them.
The other four people in the room have noticed, and are staring.
"We know what a brothel is, it's just - ours don't suck by way of being absurdly coercive like everything in the deep past did. They're normal workplaces where the employees can do whatever they want when they go home, and can quit whenever they like, and most people would quit if their boss ordered them to let their . . . holes . . . get more . . . abused . . . than they would otherwise have chosen."
A short, hysterical half-giggle escapes Toy-Mun's lips.
- No. You don't. You really, really don't, Kwaiets. What you described is a courtesan's work, it's… way better. - A cough. - Of course, it also requires being attractive. Which I could never boast. Being a brothel worker - a whore, as they're usually called - doesn't, it just requires having holes and not literally decaying.
A short pause.
- Oh, and yes, while this is not my area of expertise, male whores also mostly get… used as holes rather than the other way around. Most buyers are male anyway.
A long-ish, sad pause.
- Anyway. As I said, this is far from the worst of what could happen to a child sold elsewhere. Apprenticeships are a different thing, they normally don't imply full adoption if you have parents that can feed you. How did you… how… how did you manage to stop everything from sucking?
"Well, then, I'll just insist that you don't understand what a human is because real humans don't have b -"
Toy-Mun narrows her eyes, looking at Asic. Before, they mistook her blushing for being mad. Now, they saw her actually being mad. Her nostrils flared, her face paled back, her pupils seemingly contracted, looking for weak spots.
- Oh, really, Asic, - she just said, folding her arms under her breast - which wouldn't even fill an AA-cup but which was still a bit outlined by that gesture under the dark vest, seemingly intentionally. - Yes, Henreyyah, I would love further elaboration. Seeing as we seem to harbor many… illusions about how a world inevitably works, which happen to be disproved by the other's experience.
"So, humans. Only sapients on our world - this is not essential to the not-suckery, just an incidental feature of the situation. They start out as just really intelligent biologically successful apes with absurd brain capacity, a lot of which is used for intergenerationally transmissible firmware and anomalously abstract reasoning. But their lives, modulo complexity of politics and techniques, are still not hugely different from chimpanzee lives - stay fed, stay warm, evade danger, evade illness, evade ostracism, have kids, help the next generation."
"Then one guy - be it regretted that history lost the many true names of the people who were this one guy - was like, 'You know how plants just keep growing over and over again, under the right conditions? Maybe we could just reliably create those conditions and then we'd have a predictable harvest and we wouldn't have to worry about wandering around for food so much anymore.' As it always is, it was way harder than it sounded, but that one guy - bless his many instances - was so right that most of the holdout bands who didn't adopt farming initially were eventually physically displaced by those who did. Those who weren't physically displaced, were out-reproduced and overshadowed. It turned out there was a lot more to farming than just allowing your little band to stay in one place. You could support quadratically more people in the same land area by optimizing both the growing conditions and the heredity of the crop plants themselves."
"Agriculture was more time-intensive per calorie than hunting-gathering for a while, and settlements had people who didn't know each other by name, and that created new problems that had to be solved with new institutions of arbitration, but if the effect of settlement was really overall bad for the people in it, they would genuinely have just gone back to living the other way. If you live in a settlement, even if more of your hours are nominally eaten up by food production than would have been the case for your hunter-gatherer ancestors, the rest of your hours are entirely, predictably, structuredly free. Want to get really good at just making shovels? Plows? You can do that, in those extra hours, without worrying that it'll end up advantaging you literally not at all in the end, because hey, your city will predictably be here, and predictably need these things, basically, regardless of what happens in the next few years. People had a sturdier social foundation on which to build things, and they did. And so there were better shovels, better plows. Eventually, techniques for making better metal and better stone. Preparing food faster, washing clothes faster, making cheaper paper . . . and each of those industries became a social-island-of-stability-and-predictability unto itself, a platform for further optimization by experts within it who could then see something to gain thereby."
"Your world is already to that point, I know. My meaning is - people in your world don't have enough choices, by a long shot, as to what they'll do with their lives - which of course is dependent on who they can associate with, because anything you produce for money must be sold to some reliable consumer who understands that, be that the market or your boss - but they have vastly more such choices than their ancestors who lived in the first settlements, who had vastly more such choices than early humans who scraped by in bands of 50 people - assuming your lineage's group size wasn't too different from our own."
"Take that process, of settlement, of increasing industry, that your world has already undergone, and extrapolate it, and it turns out that within a few thousand or hundred years, you get almost-costless universal food, almost-costless universal housing, with plumbing and effortless temperature control and light at night, cheap clothes and transportation and childcare and info-recording-storage-and-transmission, cheap easy-to-use self-defense weaponry so even the physically weakest people don't have to worry about meeting overwhelming force, and - it looks like, pretty soon - immortality."
"But the structure underlying all that technology, the essential thing to why life doesn't suck here nearly so much anymore - is that even the least trainable people have multiple bosses to choose from. Our least-skilled have thousands of of times more options for bosses, than when our world was around your world's level of development, if I'm reckoning right."
"If you run a factory, and your employees have other factories they can go work at instead, you can't be a tyrant even to your dumbest employees, or they'll take that choice - at a wage cut, even - and you'll be left at a disadvantage and, in the limit, run out of business."
"Thus, the future dissolves tyranny. Not perfectly, yet. Wherever there's a monopoly, because somebody's figured out how to do something new, little tiny tyranny-bubbles still happen. The future future is expected to be better. We're working on it."
At first, Toy-Mun is still seething due to Asic's comments. However, as she listens to Henreyyah, her face slowly relaxes, and she puts her arms down, seemingly enamoured by the prospect.
- I don't know what a factory is… but yes, it's often down to choice. And to who gets it. When it's "work for me or starve", it's not much of a choice. And, I guess, armies can just leave their tyrant if they have other ways to survive. But magic is a huge factor here. A small group of archmages can hold thousands of people of lesser talents in fear and obedience. Hell, one archmage can hold a city. You didn't have magic, so when you had this… weaponry… you got an edge against tyrants. And gods… after years of vagrancy, I tried to return to dismantle the tyrant in my home village, putting on a mask of an old hero. That's when I met the She-Wolf - a motherly goddess, supposedly, but she was nowhere near motherly. She didn't even let me to get back to the village, she cursed me halfway and I had to deal with that instead. Well, first she held a trial over me with northern spirits. Gods literally intervene to stop change. To hold everything under their control, because it's more convenient to them as-is. I am glad you avoided that.
While speaking, Toy-Mun begins to absent-mindedly sketch a wolf.
"I've never met a problem that trade and time couldn't fix, but, yeah, those are sure some foreign and nasty-sounding problems."
"Oh. Right."
kill him kill him kill him, there'd been a lot to keep track of, between the 'magic' and the vampires and the breasts and the sapient leopards, and it had all just kind of blurred together, but that's no excuse.
- Huh? Oh, yes. Well, at least that was the shape she showed me - a huge wolf, twice as tall as me while standing on all fours. Others might see a different one. Actually, now that I think of it… Angels have a floating city that's somewhat more - I guess more similar to what you described? But only angels - and some half-bloods if they are deemed worthy - are allowed there, so they're unequal in another aspect. I've never been there, obviously, seeing as I am, well, human, - another dagger-stare at Asic. - I guess I should give a quick rundown here? There are - well, were, they were shattered into many shards by elves of the past - two sisters who created the world - The Great Mother, or Theon, and The Blood Goddess, or Shar. Then there are two dragon progenitors, husband and wife. Then… humans of the southern lands deify some of their kin, but they're not, like, real gods, they just got shards of power of the two sisters and used them well. And we the Northerners have the many spirits led by the She-Wolf and her children. She's sometimes also called The Great Mother, but that would only add to the confusion - She-Wolf is not the same as Theon. I guess nagas and sahuagins may have their own cults, don't know enough of those. That's all… oh, no, not all. First dragans were created by the Rebel, not by interbreeding, and dragans view him as god - but I guess he's as much of a "god" as Southerners' "gods", just a guy who got lucky. Hm. Coming to think of it, the dragon progenitors weren't seen for many centuries… but they can't be just guys with shards because they are recorded before the goddesses' shattering.
They have angels, too! Of course they do! The Refutation can mostly, now, compartmentalize away this minor distraction and follow the rest of the exposition.
(They've come up in lists of sapients, before, but before the 'vampires' thing, it was written off as metaphor or translation issue.)
He imagines trying to explain to the Scoryu of five hours ago how he ended up in this conversation. His model of his past self becomes wary, skeptical, and hostile.
- Dragans are scaly people kinda like humans but longer-living. They come about in two ways. There are first dragans, that were created from humans with dragon blood by alchemy by the Rebel, and there are half-breeds that result from a dragan mating with someone or from a dragon mating with someone who's not a dragon. So yeah, not all dragans are half-bloods. That's… a weird story. Do... do you have half-breeds? Maybe not of sapients, but somewhere?
"Who was the rebel? I know you mentioned dragons before - presumably they're very like humans, but scalier? Anybody feel free on the half-breeds thing." Write write write
"- well, if two creatures produce offspring, their offspring is half like one parent and half the other. Sometimes two creatures are just far enough apart that they can produce offspring, but their offspring won't be fertile - horses and donkeys making mules for example. But mules aren't exactly a 'breed', since they can't breed."
- Yeah, we have mules too! - Toy-Mun nods: finally something familiar. - And as for dragons - as I said, two shapes, one human-like, one like this, - she digs out Lin's picture from the pile. - I guess we're all getting tired and forgetting things. And for the Rebel - I don't remember too much. He was a chemist… a dragon chemist probably, I'm not even sure there were humans around yet? No, wait, there must've been since he used someone to create… No, I'm pretty sure he was a dragon. Oof. Since it seems I'm going to be stuck here for some time, where can I... rest?
All getting tired and forgetting things, they are! There are a lot of things, but that's still definitely no excuse!
"You mean for the night? You can stay with me, if you want. If you don't mind I was planning on picking up a temporary mattress on the way home, and sleeping on that. If you'd like to do that now, that's totally understandable."
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