"Grey goes with everything, I hear."

"That’s secretly why I picked it," he deadpans. "I am so attached to such a whole rainbow of outfits that I simply insist on wearing my hair grey and I would rather have terrible job prospects than wear an orange hat to work. Don’t tell anyone."

"My teeth are glued together," says his neighbor solemnly.

Valsin grins at him.

And meanwhile - there are clean people here. It's a good thing someone else is drawing them into conversation right now but he really should try that at some point. Maybe after he's had a chance to listen to them enough to know what they're like as people. He totally should have looked up what kind of schedule they have, it must be some kind of rotation because it involves working with pollution. How many of them are there going to be? Probably the internet will know.

The internet will show him the hiring postings! Though apparently the plan is to have ex-red oranges working on this as soon as there are enough of them, so the postings aren't permanent. It says explicitly that they're willing to consider applicants who are unable to find other nursing positions for various reasons.

Desperate people are useful. (He doesn't have a specific use in mind, just, they are.)

He really doesn't know any of these people well enough to have a guess as to how to interact with them yet but that's the kind of thing it should only take a few days to get started on figuring out. What are they like? When are the biggest periods of time when they aren't focused on their work but have to be nearby?

They catch up on their social media when they are monitoring patients after various treatments to see if any of them try to die.

He eventually tries asking one if it’s okay to get up and move while boringly not dying, he hates sitting still.

(This is true but also he'd put it differently if he weren’t trying to come across as obviously meant to be grey.)

"You can pace but stay near your chair so we don't mix you up," yawns the orange.

He does a handstand on the seat of the chair, which must count as staying near it, right?

"I don't think you should do that, you might wind up with blood pressure issues."

He stops doing that. "Thank you," he says half-automatically as his brain catches up to the fact that it's informative that that was phrased as advice. "That especially common here or just especially annoying to deal with?"

"- I don't know about here, it's just an interaction with some of what you're on."

"Oh, thanks. Should I be careful about standing up?"

"I said you could pace."

"Yeah, just, should I have my hand on something while I get up? Like you do when you haven’t eaten or drunk anything all day."

"Wouldn't hurt." She clearly wants to be paying more attention to her pocket everything than to this conversation.

It's nice that that was such a complete anticlimax. She can get back to her everything.

He paces. He looks up what new shows are most popular with greys this season and watches one that's popular but not sufficiently popular that it's obvious this was how he picked it.

It's a psychological thriller about a swimming instructor who starts having mental problems that might or might not be the result of malign supernatural influences. It is very suspenseful and atmospheric.

It's very convenient that that's actually interesting.

Maybe it's interesting because he's a grey It's on its fourth episode of a canned fifteen. He'll need some more material to make all these showers tolerable.

Yeah, it's a lot of hours of showering, all told. He has a playlist of about thirty hours of botany and meteorology lectures to get through but that's barely a drop in the bucket. Maybe he can find podcasts that talk about emergency services. Or and some music. And maybe some audiobooks, what is there that's cheap or free and epic and poignant? Or And maybe a mystery. And maybe he should ever watch any bell and stick.

...That still won't cover it, probably.

It super won't but streaming services are happy to go "you might also like..."

Cheap epic poignant? How about this generational story about people who are colonizing a bottomless pit, descending a little farther with every generation, digging into the walls and building out into the gap, climbing vast staircases to trade with other older countries above them, rappelling down to quell the rebellion of the colonies beneath, the surface long forgotten by the fifth book. The audio version is cut together fan contributions.

He'll have to look up the fandom for that one, it seems like the sort of canon that would have an interesting fandom. And also check if the author's written anything else.

...At some point when he’s gone through a lot of hours of more fun content he looks for podcasts that get into red cleaning discourse.

"The thing you have to understand is that while auction countries may reckon that their decontamination products will simply not be able to afford credits or attract spouses who can, Voa doesn't have that luxury. Our commitment to our citizens - and, in fact, to our reds, who have always been under the same protocol - is now going to leave us with a permanent underclass..."

"Candidate be-Dabera, of course, has to think of the green vote, overwhelmingly in favor and of considerable total weight, but polls of purple constituents show much less approval. My next guest is from Purple Union, a cross-industry collective bargaining movement that recently instigated a strike shutting down much of downtown Ovne in protest of the cleaning program..."

"Regular listeners will guess that my next question is: what will this do to real estate? Well, it's good for real estate. Clean neighborhoods next to red ones, in old cities where the old red district has been fully surrounded by the growth of the municipality, are slums. The people who live there will see their rent go up, of course, and may need to move to apartments that are inexpensive for other reasons - long commutes or proximity to noisy industry, for instance - but then the red district itself will also turn into more developed land, after it's cleaned up, and that means dropping marginal rents all over the place. So everybody free to move will move into a slightly nicer place except for those who enjoyed the depressed property values in the environs of the district..."

"Here are six surefire ways to be confident that you aren't picking up a red on a hookup app. One: get their full name. Red names differ from those of other castes. Obviously practically anyone can be named 'Zada', and it turns out that includes reds, but if her name is Zada be-Rishada de-Noenvar, doesn't that sound a little odd? Because Rishada's more conventionally yellow and green, and Noenvar more conventionally orange, and the profile says purple. Two: give them only just enough notice to get to your rendezvous on time - no extra. They don't know how to use the train system. They've never been on it before! If they're running late, cancel; if they want to push back the meeting time, cancel. This tip, of course, will get less useful over time, so moving on to tip three..."

"Anthropology students when polled said that they were excited to meet ex-reds. 'It's like meeting aliens,' one who preferred to remain anonymous said, 'they have so little contact with the majority of the species that even though they're from the same planet they're sure to be fascinatingly different'. Another speculated that real aliens might have conceptualizations of pollution which differ from us enough to imagine that pollution cannot be inherited - a theological point which generally has to be taken as a premise rather than proven. These hypothetical aliens would presumably be relieved to know that the generational cycle was ultimately broken, by whatever means..."

"Asked if he'd play crossball with an ex-red, the seven-time regional medal winner said, 'I don't play amateurs, except my kids!', but then clarified that if an ex-red did manage to win the qualifier he would have no reason to change his plans..."