Moira is not bothering to fake eat, and will instead use the time to start a discussion about city planning for the red city.

"What are we going to, like, eat?"

"We can import in a bunch of pre-made things at first, while we get multi-story robot farming set up! And some recy-clers to turn sewage back into fuel for replicators to make food outta!"

"Wow, replicators can make enough food for somebody off what they excrete?"

"Not quite enough easily, but it can re-cycle a bunch of if and that helps! Replicators are really really cool."

"Where'll they get the rest of the fuel?"

"We can grow some on the multi-story farm things once those are working, till then we can import a bunch."

"Where is all this money coming from, Moira said something about Ferengi but I didn't really understand."

"So, there are three places money is coming from."

"The biggest one so far is Ferengi who are buying bonds I think - where the city is spposed to pay them back with interest at some point. If they don't get paid back the Ferengi will be mad but noth-ing else happens except it'll make it much harder to sell more bonds later if the city doesn't pay them back sometimes, and selling bonds is a really useful thing to be able to do."

"The smaller one that's happened so far is Moira spending her own money, some of that is in the form of buying bonds but some of it is also just her spending money on nice places for people she likes and things."

"The last one, which hasn't been used yet but would be used for some of the things we're talking about today, is the Amalien Expanse spending it's own re-sources and time. Amaliens want to help people and so we do things like terraforming Katme for Amentans but reds weren't really repr-esented in the deciding-to-do-that process and were just helped as a side eff-ect of that and Moira doing things with Ferengi, and we want to help reds separately from that help. So we're pri-or-itizing you now."

"Cleans aren't gonna like that," Peka snorts.

Sigh.

"Yes, it's really sad. We are trying our hardest to not cause con-flict about us helping people, but we are not going to stop helping people just because someone else objects."

This is basically the motto of the Amalien Expanse since the war with the Fedreration ended.

"I guess you could take 'em so they probably won't not-like-that violently."

"I really don't want to make us being able to win a thing that matters."

"But we would win if we really really needed to."

"Well, as long as they know you'd win, you don't have to actually do it, probably, if you don't really rub their noses in it."

"Mhm."

"Do you think there are things we can do to help be-sides helping setup the city for reds?"

"Well - how many reds are you going to be able to siphon off, anyway, even if your vertical farms are basically magic you might need more than one city for sixty-five million people, particularly if it has to be under a dome -"

"It won't have to be under the dome at first! We could also build it really really tall! We could build like, just really really giant buildings!"

"Well, that would work. I think the biggest cities on Amenta stall out around forty million but maybe you can get us all in one place with fancy enough buildings."

"I'ma build so so big buildings and also things that are under-ground!"

"It'll be really cool to figure out heating and transpor-tation and things."

"Have you, uh, built a city for sixty-five million people before?"

"Nope! It wouldn't be nearly this exciting if I had!"

"And probably not worth her time, I'd add. Vira's generally focused on figuring out how to do new things. She's really quite good at it."

"Buuuut if there's a problem it affects sixty-five million people."

"I made a viral vaccine that would have affected a lot more people if it had prob-lems. And a plan-etary force field. And Borg treaty code."

"Though I do like working with other people some-times and did for a bunch of those things and will prolly for this too."

"I mean, I'm not sure who you'd work with, all the city planners on Amenta are cleans, but." Shrug.