Gazari comes over after work, his one-year-old strapped to his back. "Hey. What's on your mind?"

"Well. - Help yourself to anything in the fridge if you want. - Look, if I asked you what the absolute worst possible job to try to get after cleaning would be, what would you say?"

"I mean, worst in what respect?" he asks, peering into the fridge and grabbing an applesauce pouch for the kid to suck down.

"Most likely to end up not getting the job, not being able to get another job, not being able to integrate socially and not being able to swap into Miolee."

"Governor."

He laughs. "I hope someone does that. I hope they make it. And now that we’ve established that I'm not the most reckless person possible... I'm thinking of becoming a police officer."

"- it's not completely insane. Some districts have red cops. But it's... you know, pretty insane."

"Yeah. But - if no one does it then - I don’t see how we can ever really integrate, if all the cops are... the same as always."

"Some people'll go into - the sex industry, or the army, or they'll marry grey, and eventually..."

"I guess, but - people will live and die waiting for that."

"You could do the army version. Apply to cop jobs now and then."

"...I guess. This person on the internet thought I should have at least two backup plans and I guess the army can be one of them - there are really not that many good grey jobs, huh. There's - dancing, firefighting, bookmaking, I think that might be it?"

"Firefighting's only grey up north, but you could move up north, I guess. I guess you're not going to be teaching dance classes any time soon."

"Yeah. I think that's about as good as it gets - maybe move up north, maybe join the fucking army, maybe hope out of everyone in Miolee there's one stupid enough to want to be grey. Just - I don't know. It seems like the kind of thing that might be worth it?"

"If you had a family I'd be telling you to keep your suicidal tendencies in your back pocket for your late thirties but as it is - man, I guess if you think somebody's got to do it and nobody else is crazy enough you'd be all right at it. If you got that far."

"Yeah, if. Do you think I’m wrong that it needs doing?"

"I dunno if it needs pushing."

"I think if the way it happens is that eventually we disappear so completely that no one can pick out our great-grandchildren it’ll be worse in that people will die along the way and worse in that - insofar as we have any strengths of our own they'll disappear too. But mostly it’s about the people dying along the way."

"I'm not about to pretend I'm excited for people to clock my great-grandchildren."

"On TV sometimes characters have half an inch of roots or a character who’s a nurse mentions their uncle who does grocery delivery and they aren’t scared or stressed about it and I’m pretty sure that’s realistic but maybe it’s too much to hope for, for us."

"Maybe it isn't. But it'll be a long time. Even if you're a cop."

Shrug. "Like I said. It’s mostly all the people who’ll die in the meantime if everyone knows all the cops hate us."

"Somebody might figure you're self-hating."

"There's thirteen billion people. Somebody might figure anything."

"I'm just saying, it's not a guarantee that people will be like, 'oh, a' - what are they calling them lately - 'a cousin, in the police force, this is so reassuring, I will call the cops on my drunk grandma when she starts hitting people' -"

"Yeah, not that. But - if there's something that's a bigger deal, or isn't just us. Or when other people are thinking about what they can get away with."

"What is it you want people thinking about what they can get away with?"

"That the chance that anyone involved in responding to violence against cousins might think of us as people isn’t zero."

"I guess even if they give you a hyperspecialist desk job having you on the payroll at all does that, doesn't it."

"Yeah! And I guess the other thing I’m worried about with this plan is - I don’t think there’s anything else I could do that would matter as much, I don’t think I can invent a way for people to season on Katme or become governor but - I'm not sure there isn’t something I'm overlooking?"

"Money's - all the same once it gets where it's going, but it's still important. You'd be in an early batch, since you're sane and healthy and haven't got much of a family, so it'll matter if you can put cash back into the cleaning program."

He smiles lopsidedly. "If you can call me and my plans sane. I - guess I could work rotations but Voa has too many purples as it is, I could try programming just because it’s so recoverable if I suck but I do think I suck at it - if I were trying to maximize how much money I eventually make there are a lot of good orange jobs but mostly ones that require a lot of education and I'm not sure how much more it’s worth to be faster."

"I don't know either. I think it's too complicated for anybody to be sure, really. What would you do orange?"

"I don't know but it's the too-many-options kind of not knowing, maybe I'd be a paramedic or a medical lab tech or an occupational therapist or - I think 'social worker' is actually a euphemism when it's referring to, uh, anyone we've ever met and the thing it is when it's not a euphemism might be nice - and it doesn't seem completely absurd to imagine teaching math to purple three year olds or something. And if there are that many options that I was able to figure out with Citrus and a couple days of thought then there are probably others."

"Kind of sounds like you should be orange."

"Wouldn't be a bad fit or anything, there's just a lot of lead time."

"You could probably do some of it while you were in decontam. And it's not like having a - if you're not going to be stealth, I mean, either way, it's not like having a cousin social worker or a cousin schoolteacher is much less symbolically powerful than a cousin cop, just differently."

"Seems like there must be someone doing that already."

"Probably. Yeah."

"It seems like there'd be a bigger difference between one and zero than one and two but I don't really know. - I guess also if I went orange and realized I'd made a terrible mistake I'd have an easier time swapping into Miolee and then probably going grey from Miolee wouldn't be hard."

"Oh, yeah, that'll be pretty easy, somebody's going to go into porn and get a nasty case of stalker or something."

"I don't know that it's - helpful? Grey is the high-variance option that makes me want a backup plan, and the worst that seems likely to happen with orange is I sink some time and money into education that doesn't actually let me get a job and that's not something I can fix by switching castes again."

"That's true."

Sigh. "Anyway. Thanks. I think you’ve helped."

"Anytime, Val."

He grins. "I’d offer you the same but I bet your plans are sensible."

"Oh, no, I'm going to take this one with me," he pats his kiddo where she's sleeping on his back sighing into his shoulder, "and we are going to be positively ridiculous pretending that six different cartoons have collided for no reason at least until her mama's home."

Slightly melty smile. "See? I have no constructive criticism of that plan at all."

And off goes Gazari and kid.

And - he does some back-of-the-envelope math about the likely rate of decontamination and orange salaries and so on, to try to come up with a list of orange jobs that seem interesting and would let him actually help fund the project before it's probably all done with anyway.

And then he spends an unreasonably long time composing an email to the one police department he found that was openly open to hiring ex-reds, asking about their vision for the program. It needs to sound polite; it also needs not to use any turns of phrase clean people don't use.

Re: hiring policy:

Danshoe District has in the past participated in "red deputy" programs to maintain order and visibility into the red districts and their potentially unstable elements. These programs were discontinued due to province-level decisions but in Danshoe worked well. Hiring decontaminated reds who choose grey is a natural extension of the same idea and such a hire would be principally dispatched toward managing incidents pertaining to other decontaminated reds, possibly including outside of Danshoe if neighboring districts need the expertise.

- Vik be-Sonza de-Nanedur, assistant to the office of the Danshoe Chief of Police

Hm. It's almost like a distorted mirror of his exact concerns, except sort of... stripped of any concern for the wellbeing of the reds and ex-reds or investment in integration. And not really seeming to care about their well-being is probably sincere on priors but not really evidence, but the implicit pessimism about integration is more of an actually worrying sign.

Who does he know who knows anyone from Danshoe?

He has a first cousin once removed who has a friend there!

He asks his cousin for the friend's email so he can ask the friend if they know anything about Danshoe's red deputy program.

Before my time, it was like twenty years ago.

Thanks anyway! Do you know anyone who remembers it?

Though that's a while ago and might not even reflect much on the current decisionmakers. Might be more useful to see what if anything the cleans have said about the topic recently.

Great-great-grandma maybe? She's a voice calls person though.

Voice calls are fine!

He can provide his number and schedule and inquire about hers.

He gets a call the following evening.

He answers it and drops the cleaning he's doing so he has both hands free for notetaking if that seems like a good idea.

"Hello? Somebody wanted to know about the red deputy program from twenty years back?"

"Yeah! The person who answers the Danshoe Chief of Police's email mentioned it when I asked what they're hoping to achieve by hiring ex-reds and I'm trying to figure out exactly how concerned to be about that."

"Those initiatives mostly worked all right as far as they went if the cops were on board. They just collapsed because reds don't snitch as much as they were hoping and they wouldn't take 'nothing to worry about' for an answer - especially if there was something to worry about, like a riot about somethingorother, though robotics was barely an idea that long ago..."

"Huh. That's better than I was expecting. What did not taking 'nothing to worry about' for an answer tend to look like?"

"Oh, I don't know, I wasn't the deputy, my uncle was and he's long gone now. I think he said something about arrest quotas? Something about scapegoats?"

Sigh. "I guess that sounds like a thing they'd do. So what makes you say they mostly worked all right if the cops were on board, and what did it look like when they were on board?"

"It meant there was something you could do if someone in the district was starting trouble, stealing or beating their kids or whatever, we'd talk to the deputy and they could take them off to the lockup - it was near the incinerator on red land, I'm not actually sure we couldn't have finessed most of something like this all on our lonesome, but the deputy got a dedicated car and could radio the other cops and stuff, got paid for it..."

"Huh. That sounds like something it'd take at least thirty seconds to tell apart from a real attempt to do right by the local reds."

"Yeah, not a high bar but not much clears it."

"And - how are things now?"

"Well, it's back to normal now, isn't it? They dismissed the deputy and he tried to go on a bit for a while but eventually a drunk knocked one of his retinas loose and he went to work the incinerator instead."

"Well, that sucks but I meant - normal's not exactly the same everywhere and I'm trying to see what I can figure out about the culture of the police over there, if they still have the kind of institutional culture that leads to running programs like that."

"Oh. We've had the same ones on our beat for a long time and once I addressed one by name and he didn't act like that was very weird?"

"Well, that's not a bad sign. I'm guessing you don't know much that'd be useful for guessing whether I could get along with them as people but do you?"

"I don't. I don't even know you and who you get along with among reds!"

"People smarter than me, honestly. But anyway, thank you, I appreciate you taking the time to talk about this."

"You're welcome, hon."

Next on the agenda: o great all-seeing Citrus, what trove of knowledge might be found by one searching for "top ten obscure grey jobs you never heard of", "red deputy programs", and any non-pseudonymous public internet presence of anyone the Danshoe Police Department website mentions as working for them.

Top Ten Obscure Grey Jobs You Never Heard Of: sports injury physical therapist! Fire inspector! Gambling surveillance officer! Ski patrol! Fishing warden! Insurance claim investigator! Park ranger! Sports talent scout! Kayfabe author! Bomb disposal technician!

Red deputy programs: yeah it was popular about twenty years back, but most provinces eventually cut it during the recession as an unnecessary expense and since then people have cited instances of the red deputies not tipping their bosses off about impending riots as a reason not to resume.

A beat cop has a personal blog, mostly shitposts. An office yellow has a side gig doing party planning. A records office grey has a parenting vlog. A detective has a dormant springtime-only hooking profile. A traffic cop has a work blog, but hasn't updated it since last winter. A lockup supervisor has a Picci profile with a lot of selfies.

Some of those jobs sound remarkably interesting.

He reads the blogs and watches the vlog and checks who hires fire inspectors and bomb disposal technicians and whether they have policies about ex-reds yet.

"I am citizen, I pay your salary, my tax dollars bought you everything I have" ma'am this would be more convincing if you were not under arrest for embezzling offshore

No, you shouldn't drive drunk. No, even if it's a liquor truck. No, even if you are driving the empty liquor truck back to the shipping depot having previously driven it to the bar. No, even if the bartender is a certifiable moron who in most countries wouldn't be allowed to breed and he tips you in absinthe. No, even if you know the route like the back of your hand.

Felt cute, might delete later.

Today little Kimmu and his friend didn't agree on how to play! Usually this would be a time for conflict resolution skills, but Kimmu wanted to play house and his friend wanted to play Imperial Warriors. Why is that show even aired in Voa? Sign the Programming Protection Petition today, or you, like Kimmu's friend's dad, might have to explain some atrocities to your little one.

Well, hey, at least that makes the military a little more attractive.

Gotta wonder how many more "felt cute, might delete later" selfies there once were.

The photo log does not specify!

It's not too many days before the community organizer swings by to speak to Valsin.

That's not really a surprise. He'll stop trying to mimic this orange vlogger's body language and invite them in.

"Hey. I've been asked for a raft of thirty to put through decontam from here. No dependents, healthy adult, able to work, all that. Do you want to be in the batch?"

"...Yyyes but you should know I'm waffling between grey and orange and obviously grey's pretty high-risk but also all the orange jobs I'm seriously considering have a really long lead time before I can actually... do them."

"I'll put you as a maybe and include you if I don't have enough people who want to go be truck drivers and paralegals."

"If it seems like a really good idea I could try being a paralegal but mostly because it's probably doable to swap to Miolee as a yellow when I inevitably can't stand it anymore, and I'm not sure it does seem like a really good idea."

"If you're planning on Miolee you shouldn't be in the first batch, yeah."

"Only if I have to be yellow, otherwise I like Voa."

"So don't be yellow. We'll get to you when we get to you. I'll come back if we're short on ideal candidates."

He nods and half-smiles wistfully. "Just let me know."

The organizer's back later that afternoon. "We've got twenty-eight who are shoo-ins, but they want thirty. Gotten anywhere on deciding how to declare?"

"I have an ordered list of my top twenty choices of job or educational program to apply to once I have a firm date to tell them I can be out of here by but the list is - arguably technically three castes. To a first approximation it's 'if I can't be a cop or a fire inspector I'll go orange', but firefighting's on there and options nineteen and twenty are purple."

"...okay. How desperately will you hate porn if you go grey and that's all that's left?"

"Depends on how narrowly you mean it, but I don't think I'd like anything in that vein."

"Do you think you will get closer to resolving this in the next couple of months?"

"Can I tell places I apply to that if they want me and say so in that time then I’ll be out with the first batch? I’ve already gotten as far as confirming they all in theory accept ex-reds and aren’t too obnoxious to bother with."

"You can tell them that but hedge it, I have a few other people in similar situations to talk to."

"Okay. I’ll see how that goes."

He leaves again.

Well. The police department is first on the list.

He's directed to the practice exam website.

Well! If he's a complete failure at it he'll feel very silly about all the agonizing he's been doing. What is on this practice exam?

Questions of legal procedure, the org structure of the police department, service weapon facts, obligations to report, basic academics - there's a way to upload school records but he doesn't have those in a format they'll use - navigation in a map of Dashoe, facial recognition, memory and observation of short videos or images referenced later in the tests, judgment calls in various hypotheticals, and some of the obvious gimmes about whether you should sexually harass your coworkers or beat up your arrestees or take bribes or swipe confiscated items or do other malfeasance.

It hadn't occurred to him to study their weaponry in advance and also he maybe kind of on an emotional level expects typing any relevant search terms into Citrus to get his whole family killed.

But - he's been paying attention to the org structure (albeit from the kind of slant perspective "who needs to be in favor of what kinds of things to make them happen and what's the best angle discernible from their internet presence and job description?") and to the laws and policies that at least supposedly govern police behavior, he's sort of well-educated in general (a couple years ago he thought he wanted to be yellow and the process of discovering that he really didn't involved a lot of self-study), he has a great memory, and he is not somehow under the impression that anyone anywhere wants their employees to admit to taking bribes.

He scores a 77%; there are practice materials available to shore up the spots he's weaker on.

Good study habits include breaks. That gets interspersed with chores and - the next thing to look into (according to a byzantine ordering taking into account lead time and caste and coolness and likelihood of being turned down) is whether training for emergency services dispatch can be done remotely and whether the training requires some kind of application or just the work.

That's another thing there are practice tests for, though the test is not the only thing you need to get a job at dispatch.

Practice practice. Test test. There are only so many hours in a day to obsess over clean (!) jobs that he could do (!) in a season (!) and he hasn’t prioritized obsessing over this one.

The tests are mostly about what he says into a speech recognition app and how quickly and comprehensibly he does it in response to sample prompt calls and how quickly he can push the correct dispatch buttons in response to sample prompt texts and alerts. It's sort of like a video game except it has audio of people hysterically pretending that their baby isn't breathing or their factory is on fire.

He’s good at all those things for not particularly having trained at them, and not thrown at all by the distressingness of the scenarios.

Then he'll perform pretty well on the dispatcher training video game!

He’s so pleased. He hugs his stuffed axolotl about it and then does another chunk of studying police weaponry and then comes back to - what's next with emergency dispatch?

They want a resume, of course, and usually do interviews to check things like conscientiousness.

In hindsight, there are some things that maybe could have been a higher priority than making sure he had topics picked out for smalltalk with purples.

Maybe the internet knows how to write a resume that somehow doesn’t disgust the cleans?

There is an enormous amount of handwringing over this. It seems very difficult. Lying on a resume is not illegal, but it does mean that you are later subject to a lot of reprisals that honest-resume hires are legally protected from.

He's not going to lie to them! Not for a job that's - it's hard to articulate what exactly makes a job where he wouldn't be willing to lie. This one's a job where people would be placing their lives in his hands, so many people, over and over again, because they trust - not him personally but the people and the systems that decide whom to hire, and him a little bit by extension. Police work is less like that - a lot of the time police are instead interacting with people who were trying very hard not to interact with them - but the Danshoe Police Department's policies are the closest he's going to get to an extended hand. He can imagine lying to get a job washing windows, but he's not aiming for that.

But is there at least some kind of consensus on whether it's worse to go into detail about how driving a garbage truck has given him the opportunity to practice things relevant to the jobs he's applying for, or to be brief, or to just say he's driven a truck and that's all, or just say he hasn't actually done grey work before? Surely every day someone somewhere is getting their first grey job and for most of them it's their first job, period.

If there isn't a clear consensus about it on the internet he's inclined to go with the last thing for dispatch but go into more detail for the police department, which is openly interested in considering ex-red applicants and probably wants to know that he can drive.

Nobody on the internet confidently pushes a different strategy.

He proceeds with that plan. Dispatch first because it’s faster and easier to skip the part where he figures out how to describe his work history, and because he wants to squeeze in a little more time spent studying the things he needs to know to be a cop.

His résumé comes off like he played madlibs with a template for greys fresh out of school (because he did), though the dates make it clear he's been out of school for years. His cover letter leaves it at "I haven't had a grey job before" and he lists as a reference one of the other mods of the aquarium hobbyist forum he moderates. (He thinks they might be under the impression that he's yellow, but he's never said and doesn't think they'll be stunned to hear he's looking for a grey job, he's never claimed he wasn't grey.)

He has a good enough score that someone will in fact contact his references.

For what it’s worth his internet friend hasn’t gotten the impression that he’s wildly corrupt or irresponsible.

(Meanwhile he goes to work and then spends some time figuring out if there’s an easy way to improve on the first résumé template he found.)

One city calls him up to see if he sounds red on the phone, as that would be a pretty serious drawback for a dispatcher.

He has been practicing to not sound red for years. He does not sound red on the phone. He sounds like maybe a grey who talks to a lot of yellows, or the other way around. (He thought it through a while back and decided he was about eighty percent sure he could pull off just uncomplicatedly sounding like he was born grey, and much more sure in a limited context like this, but if he did aim for that and get it wrong it'd be very obvious. This way maybe gives a little cover if he does make a mistake - maybe it's an obscure yellow thing, maybe it's an obscure grey thing, it's less likely that any individual listener has quite enough context to know what to expect.)

Oh great, that is basically the exact voice type they like for dispatch. "We're burning temps pretty fast right now," says the interviewer. "Your available start date is later than convenient for us but even if we do make a permanent hire between now and then we can probably still use you then."

"Thank you! If you're only at 'probably' I'll keep looking but I'm excited about this job, it’s pretty likely I'll still be interested then even if I end up with something else to fit it in around, so please do let me know."

"Yeah, absolutely. Even if you can tolerate it for one whole season running that'd be better than we get out of some people, it's just a lot of meeting people at the worst moment of their lives."

"It’s no easier to stand by knowing exactly what happens if an ambulance is too late," he says softly. "I won't burn out in a season."

"Cool. I have your file, we'll - email when the time comes, yeah?"

"Yep! Thanks so much." He'll wait a second in case there is more but if there is not then he'll hang up.

There is not more.

And now... the police department. He's studied the things he missed on the practice quiz. He has a more detailed résumé for them that in fact lists every job he's had. There was his very brief attempt at a plumbing apprenticeship (he does not go into any detail) and then he did some database work for this innocuously named business and at his current job he has used all these important skills like driving and situational awareness and always showing up on time. He sounds slightly less like he played madlibs with the first template he found on the internet and slightly more like he has genuinely done a bunch of things that he's really proud of. And they can have more references, since he's not - it's not lying, with the other people, but keeping things they don't want to think about hidden where they don't have to think about them, and here he's not really doing that. If they would be too disgusted to talk to his current boss they can simply decide not to.

They don't get back to him for a few days but then they give him a date and location on which he can sit the exam, in person, after he's out.

He just kind of sighs at this because that is approximately the least helpful response possible for getting back to the organizer.

He looks at the rest of his list. Most of it is skilled work that requires a lot of education he doesn't have and can't fit into the amount of time that decontamination takes - even if he could take every single class in medical school remotely it takes a year. Becoming an insurance claims investigator takes two. He might be able to test out of some things - he's listened to a lot of lectures online - but the vast majority of his will just not allow him to hit the ground running. And then of the things that require less lead time than that, becoming an EMT absolutely can't be done through remote study and dance is kind of awkward to try right now (not that he doesn't know any dances but he can't really be part of a group, and he's legally required to have red hair for just a little longer so people probably wouldn't like to watch even if he put videos online, and anyway decontamination is going to kind of suck, physically, so - there basically aren’t steps to take).

In Miolee he could take the dispatch job and also go to medical school. But Miolee is a tiny equatorial auction country with a jury-rigged law code at risk of being bombed into oblivion and dependent on foreign industry, and his Evaleen isn’t very good, and also planning to move there wouldn’t get him out of here as fast as possible. And strictly speaking he could do that in Voa, too, it’d just be awkward. Very awkward.

But both of the jobs he’s applied to have had practice tests, so. Are there similar things for the orange schools he's considering? Or for the orange careers he’s considering studying for? Can the internet tell him if he’s totally unfit to be a medical lab tech or social worker?

There are practice tests and online educational materials for most things! Lab techs and social workers are... not especially among them. Lab techs are too hands-on - it's less about whether you can identify the chemicals than about whether you reliably follow the procedures about them - and social workers too soft-skills.

Unfortunate.

Grey is starting to seem like the responsible choice with the more certain payoff, strange as that is. Two possible backup plans neither of which is swapping into Miolee, Yellow Mod said. He has one very good one, and doesn't actually have an offer from the police department so maybe arguably being a cop is the backup plan. Every other grey job on his list has lead time, a lot of lead time, several times longer than he has before he has to decide if he's going grey. Still, though. He looks up tests to give him some sense of whether he'd be any good as a fire inspector or park ranger or insurance claims investigator or firefighter or dancer and - maybe. He can't do better than "maybe", can't get as far as a job offer, could maybe take some relevant online classes during decontamination but can't get far enough to have new evidence about his prospects as a grey.

He lets the organizer know he has a tentative job offer.

"Really? Wow. Good for you, I don't have anything even slightly lined up - though I won't be in this first batch so I have a while -"

"I am confident someone somewhere will have the good sense to hire you. Anyway, the tentative offer is grey - it's emergency dispatch, apparently they have a hard time keeping anyone but I bet I'm better suited to it than pretty much anyone - and the police department I applied to scheduled a test for, you know, later - they definitely know but I guess I could still turn out to be too clumsy." He is not remotely clumsy. "And there's nothing orange that I could make comparable progress on, I could sign up for classes but unless I got in a time machine and signed up for them three seasons ago I couldn't get as far as applying to jobs before I need to pick. Also the time machine rental place would probably be furious about having to wash it. So." Shrug. "I think maybe it's settled and if nothing comes up I'm going grey."

"Huh, they have a hard time staffing dispatch? That's really good to know, you should put that online in case anyone else wants grey."

"It’s probably not a great option for most people. But sure."

"Grey's not a great option for most people."

"Yeah. I still have no idea how I’ll deal with - being surrounded by people who think of me like that. It's going to kind of suck."

"Maybe practice online?"

"I have internet friends, I've had internet friends for years. It's the - literally being surrounded, all the time, even when I'm not at work."

"I meant internet friends who think you're grey, but - yeah, I don't have advice for that."

"It'll be fine, I just don't know yet how it'll be fine. So - so is that - I don't think I should hope everyone else is having a harder time, but - "

"I don't think being surrounded is weighing heavily on most people but nobody's completely unstressed about it, just - about different parts."

"...Thanks. Um. What I meant was do you know yet if I seem like a better choice than the other people you were considering." He kind of obviously finds this a mortifying thing to say out loud.

"Oh. Yes, you're in."

He smiles so hard it hurts and half-turns his head and puts his hands to his face as though he's embarrassed to be seen celebrating. He vibrates a bit from the effort of not jumping for joy or hugging the organizer or trying to do both at once.

It takes him a moment to say anything but then he manages, in a slightly strangled voice, "...Okay. Thank you."

The organizer pats him on the shoulder. "I'll email your whole batch the details."

...Yeah okay it’s hug time.

Hug. "You're going to do great. And you can always email with any questions."

"I will. Thank you."

That pretty much means it's time to say goodbye to everything. Not everyone, it might take a while but he'll see them again and anyway he can email them. But the neighborhood is going to be destroyed afterward, and so - if there's the slightest chance he'll wish he could check if that weirdly-shaped rust stain feels like anything if you poke it, or get up on the roof and enjoy being on his roof and not some grey building's roof, he'd better do it while he can.

He makes sure to hug his little sister. He skips down every street and pokes a really questionable fraction of the objects. He sorts his possessions, though at first only by writing up lists. Clothing can be washed, though it's old and will only be older when he gets out; he'll need a mostly new wardrobe anyway. His pocket everything can go to his little sister, though not until he's really actually entirely done using it and ready to touch a new one with clean (!) hands. Part of his aquarium could come with him, in theory - the slightly broken plastic bin that's serving as a tank is smooth and nonporous, almost trivial to clean, and the miscellaneous bits of hard plastic with all their sharp edges filed down that make up the cave are too, and the fake plant went through a really thorough scrubbing before being added to the tank and could probably tolerate that again. But the eggs can't and someone else might want to keep one more generation of annual fish; there's probably time for them to live and die before the district empties. He offers his little sister his stuffed axolotl again but she turns him down (he made it for her when she was a baby but she never did care for it much), so he pets it and informs it that it's very difficult to clean but he's going to do that and will only have to replace the stuffing - "and it won't hurt at all since you're lucky enough to be made of cloth and not actually a moral patient" - and cuts some seams and adds the pieces of the empty cover to the list of things to clean. His shoes can be cleaned. His hairpin can be cleaned. His horrible mattress has really belonged in the trash since it first ended up there and only belongs there more now.

He does still have to keep dyeing his hair red for most of the time he's in decontamination, it doesn't take that long to reach the maximum allowed length of non-red roots. He looks at pictures of short, stereotypically grey haircuts. And yellow, why not, might fit with the accent. He asks Citrus for tips on how to make new friends as a grey. He starts looking for apartments.

Citrus thinks that greys make new friends by playing sports together and suggests hanging around courts of various games that require specific numbers so you can volunteer to make up an odd count, or alternately ones that are extremely flexible on that front so you can insinuate yourself into an existing game. Social dance and of course parties and friends of friends are also suggested.

And Citrus can probably also tell him where to find social dances and the rules of various team sports. It’s so convenient like that.

It can super find that.

Grey apartments exist at a range of spaciousnesses and amenities. The bottom of the price range is where he can find little shoebox studios with a bathroom and a loft bed over a table/desk and just enough room for a fridge and a combination toaster/microwave. The ad copy suggests they are mostly for people who hate being indoors and will only grudgingly sleep there.

Wow, simultaneously cozy yet miserable. He’s not picky, he’ll take one of those. Assuming they'll take him.

They want to hear from his previous landlord.

...By phone or by email?

Either works for them.

Great! He has a previous landlord who has an email address.

And what does the previous landlord have to say about his tenancy and relationships with her neighbors?

He makes a habit of paying on time and doesn’t start drama with the neighbors.

Yeah that's most of what they need to know. He can put a deposit down for one of the interchangeable apartments in this block and they'll make sure one's empty for him when he's ready to move in.

He spends a lot of the wait euphoric, skipping anywhere he goes in the district, when the end looms large and freedom feels so close he can almost touch it.

But by the time they're ready to get started what looms large is the nine months of medical procedures it'll take to get there, and he's quiet and careful in the way he gets when he's scared.

The woman on his left is asking earnest questions of the nurses and practicing her orange accent. The guy on his right is trying to scroll through his feed on his everything but keeps bouncing off it and finally settles on trying to make conversation. "So what caste, for you?"

He kind of half listens to the questions and answers; he's interested, or at least would be interested if he were up for feeling things other than nervousness.

"Grey. You?"

"Wow. Better you than me. Purple."

He laughs. "Likewise. Why purple?"

"If I go on a purple employment website it's just full of things that I think I could figure out. Laundry service. Delivery driving. Warehouse picker. Straightforward things like that."

"I guess. I feel that way about orange - not that any of it is straightforward but that half the jobs are the kind of thing I have the aptitude for, but it's all stuff you have to study for a year for and a lot of the studying has to happen in person."

"Well, she seems to have a plan over there," says the future purple, inclining his head toward their neighbor, who has convinced the nurse to let her try depressing the drug plunger.

"Yeah. Hope she can pull it off."

"No kidding. I am here going purple to enable your weird risky gambles, I guess."

"Personally, I decided against taking any risky gambles and went with the sure option where I have a job offer and an apartment because I'm a very sensible person." He winks.

"You have a grey job offer?"

"Kinda tentatively. Emergency dispatch. Probably worth looking into if you think you can tolerate spending every summer fielding calls from people whose babies have quit breathing."

"- I can see why that might have openings, augh."

He laughs darkly.

"Well, I hope you have another plan if you can't do that one any more once you have kids."

"Oh, totally, I'm going to see about becoming a cop."

"- wow. Uh. Why."

"We can't all be smart enough to go purple. But more seriously? Because - they don’t necessarily know us. If there’s an incident with someone who was born orange, you can pretty much expect that everyone involved in responding to it any capacity has met an orange. They can be out of touch but there’s a limit, right?"

"- yes, but does that really... help?"

"Hm?"

"Like, if instead of oranges it were aliens, but not aliens they had any particular reason to think were bad, they'd probably be fine with the aliens."

"TV aliens who are just like us but their hair is black and they split up all the yellow jobs between purples and greens, sure - that's not the point. I think part of that is not knowing things? Half their particular reasons to think we're bad are stuff someone made up on the internet to shock people."

"And you're not going stealth?"

"Nah. They said on their website they’re open to hiring ex-reds." He shrugs and doesn't go into more detail because he wants to say they compared it to a program that obviously wasn't a real attempt to treat reds as part of the population they're supposed to protect, but it's only obvious because nothing is ever that, there wasn't another way to tell. But that's not what he wants to say to the cleans in earshot, to them he wants to say I would never betray their trust, at least if there were any chance he'd be believed, and he definitely doesn't want to say that without detailed caveats to someone who's probably going to lie to get a warehouse job.

"Are you going to tell, like - your neighbors, and whatnot - you're not married, right, I think there's only a handful of couples in this batch -"

"I'm going to stop dyeing my fucking hair red and be polite, and I get the impression talking about reds is not polite at all. I'm not planning to make anything up."

"Huh. What color does yours come in?"

"Grey. Yours?"

"Oh, wow, lucky you. I dye mine but just because I hate the awful magenta it comes in."

"I’ve never liked magenta either. Got a favorite shade of purple?"

"I'm going mullberry."

"Kind of a hard shade to find outfits to go with. I think. Or maybe that's just saying something about my taste in clothing."

"I'll be in work uniforms anyway. I can just wear neutrals off-hours, I'm not a clothes-horse, I'm the kind who'd just bleach things out of the heap into oblivion and wear those till they fell apart."

"I - haven't bothered but it'll be easier. I figure I'll start." It's the kind of "haven't bothered" where he wears whatever happens to be wearable and dyes his hair whatever shade is cheapest and has lovingly curated image collections of things he'd wear in every single other caste.

"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..."

Ugh whatever. ...He would talk to an anthropology student if one asked. He researches what his name sounds like and watches videos aimed at kids about using public transit and drills on train schedules.

The real estate podcast is interesting, just in general, and the one with the hookup tips seems maybe also worth listening to. Surely they have episodes about other topics.

That still barely makes a dent in the more than a thousand hours of showering. What’s the most popular podcast among greys?

Valsin is apparently a name most commonly used by purples and blues; Ana is common in most castes but not yellow; Tirev is actually not unusual for greys though purples also go for it.

The most popular podcast among greys is Commentball and it's about sports takes; they have different regular experts on all the most popular sports in Voa and guests for some obscure ones now and then. They talk about team composition and field conditions and how regulation equipment gets broken in and coaching strategies and game tactics and referee decisions and player performance and sports industry drama.

Well, it... could be worse. For example he could be Ana, who's planning to go yellow. Sucks to be her. ...Also sucks to be his little sister but she seems kind of obsessed with the idea of swapping to Miolee to rule the country and he expects that plan to fail at a later stage than getting out of Voa.

Commentball would probably be more interesting if he played sports. He listens to two episodes of it anyway and then finds something else. How far down the list of podcasts popular among greys does he have to get before he finds one he likes?

There's more sports and then there's a true crime one and then there's a serial adventure about a spaceship captain with really extra sound effects and dramatic actors narrating everything and then there's one that's a history of the Seven Season War told in real time (there are four seasons of episodes now) and then there's more fiction serials.

True crime is great. The serial adventure is okay. History is worth a listen. He goes through the fiction looking for stuff that's sad or heartwarming or grimdark or epic or tightly character-focused or chill or a mystery or accompanied by beautiful instrumental music.

Assuming he's willing to listen to computer audio: there's tragic stories about families torn apart by civil war! There's heartwarming ones about explorers carving out a place for babies to grow up in untamed wildernesses, some of them in space! There are grimdark ones about backstabbing assassins and corrupt militias! There are epic ones about battles between fantastic forces of good and evil! There are character-focused ones about coming of age and the painful decision to retire and executing a coup! There are chill slices-of-life about being a lifeguard! There are mysteries, lots of those, so much copaganda. The character ones and the fantasy ones in particular sometimes have beautiful music.

About the only thing he doesn't like is the coming-of-age stuff.

Then he will have a steady supply of material for his many boring medical procedures and showers.

Yep! Toward the end he starts looking for podcasts specifically targeting the "bored and anxious in decontam" demographic on the assumption that probably at least one exists by now.

There's Cousins This Week, which only comes out once a week but is full of cheery news about how Shasali Aven is doing and anonymous anecdotes from cousins all over the cleaning world about their lives.

He listens to some of it. Are any of the anecdotes surprising or concerning?

Nah, it's a very fluffy podcast.

Well, it's good that there's enough material to make up a fluffy podcast.

It feels like decontamination lasts forever. He spent much longer waiting for it to start than waiting for it to end but he wasn't frantically preparing and trying to meet a firm deadline back when it was first invented.

He pushes himself to stay in shape even when he wants to lie down and maybe die. He stares at the calendar more than is probably reasonable. He stays utterly on top of the forum he moderates and all the blogs he reads. (Even the ex-red group blog that fields questions about how reds can stand to live.) He stops dyeing his hair.

And finally he is pronounced finally and totally clean. He gets his care package of new possessions and a month at an extended stay hotel.

It should feel like something. At least, it seems like it should feel like something. Even if the thing isn't clean, even if it's more like relieved to be done. Maybe it will later.

Do any of the people in the batch happen to be able to cut hair? Not necessarily well, just well enough that he can take the result to a real stylist.

This one can, used to do all her kids and grandkids.

"I just need all the dye out - it'd be nice to get it looking neat and pretty, like - " behold, pictures " - but I can pay pretty much anyone to do that."

"One specialty 'just make it shorter' coming right up." Snip snip.

And it's gone.

It's just gone.

He thanks her.

And then it’s time to go explore. Well, it’s time to go handle all the miscellaneous work of moving, but that sort of counts.

The extended stay hotel is not very nice but in a way that means it doesn't have a lot of staffing and the coffee maker doesn't work, it's basically fine.

As long as it has a bed and one of those little travel tubes of conditioner. He's never used conditioner before in his life but apparently it might possibly fix what's left of his hair.

He flops on the bed, which is great, takes a selfie to send to his sister, and does yet more internetting on the excuse that he needs to get used to the new everything. Does he have an email about the dispatch job yet? And how long until that apartment is available? And where's the cheapest hair place near here?

Dispatch job has sent an automated email reminding him that he has an interview at ADDRESS at TIME.

The apartment is ready as soon as he pays his first and last month's rent over what he's already deposited.

Cheapest hair place near his hotel is around the corner that way between a dumpling shop and a massage parlor.

Hair first, because nothing else is quite as urgent. He heads over that way. It's... definitely weird, that suddenly he's supposed to just do that, and not supposed to go back to any of the places he was previously supposed to be.

He takes another selfie near the hair place. He walks in. He doesn't chalk the door where he touches it. He doesn't even have chalk, and a grey wouldn't, and it's totally fine because he's probably about as clean as anyone has ever been.

...And he just, on some level, assumed it wouldn't be new, other than all the hair being different colors, and failed to look up how to get a haircut. Oops.

There is nobody conveniently ahead of him in line to model the process, either! There's just a petite purple who is sweeping the floor and looks up at him expectantly!

It's terrifying but he's being so careful with his body language anyway that he also doesn't look nervous. "Hi! I got some stuff in my hair and had to cut it all out. I have pictures of styles that seem nice and don't take much hair?"

"Sure, let me have a look?"

He pulls up some of the pictures. Here's an intricate ephemeral shaved design. Here's a fade with the hair on top styled in a way he hasn't realized is more complicated than just letting it do what it wants. Here's something slightly longer than his remaining hair. At least his general aesthetic preferences come across.

"Hm, I'm not that good at razor lines, but you can wait for Betta, or I can give it a try and just shave it down from there if I mess it up too awfully."

What's the normal thing to say to that? What's the normal thing to say to that?? He should have studied more, or differently, or. But there's nothing for it now, and if he gets kicked out for being trash he'll know to study before going somewhere else.

"How long a wait is it?"

"I think she'll be done in ten."

"That seems fine."

She gestures at a couple chairs in a corner by the window and resumes sweeping.

He can... sit on a chair. He can do that. This shouldn't be weird anymore, he's had his moment and now instead of feeling like the faces have turned into a vase it's time to feel miraculously clean and wonderful. Not that other people reported that, but.

It just feels like him. Sitting on a chair. He hopes that’s just because he’s still feeling off from the drugs, or because pollution is bullshit, or because reds just don’t react to reds anyway. There isn't any reason to think it's because it didn't work and he's still unclean and shouldn't be here. There isn't. He can't reread Nertel Istalni's paper in ten minutes and really he can barely read it at all, but he can skim it and remind himself that it is scientifically proven that he is fine under every single set of assumptions. It will be completely fine for Betta to touch him, unless, of course, he makes it weird.

He will not make it weird, except in his own head where he increasingly feels like nothing is real.

Betta finishes with her previous client, who was getting his curls straightened, and waves Valsin over.

He has been practicing for literal years and has no trouble walking across a room and sitting in a chair like a completely normal grey who is not, at all, having a very quiet breakdown about the possibility that the hairdresser is going to recoil in horror. Which is not how anything works anyway.

Does he need to pull up the pictures again?

Yup, she wants to look them over. "Okay, I'm going to do a blend of this and that one, you don't have enough to work with for me to pull off this fluffy top thing but I can approximate it..." And she puts a cape over him and gets underway.

It isn't weird. In the mirror he can see some grey getting their hair done by some purple, and that's a normal thing that happens all over Amenta every day. He tries to stop being aware of what he's touched, and who's touched what he's touched, and what Betta's touched after touching him and what those things have touched.

He really underestimated how long buzz cuts take and has no idea how people start conversations with hairdressers.

A basic fade would be much quicker but she's getting elaborate. "Floral or geometric?"

"Yes!" Wait that's the wrong type of answer. Are both answers safe? "...Geometric."

"Geometric it is." Buzz buzz buzz. She hums to herself, sort of harmonizing with the tone of the clippers.

It’s... completely fine. He looks like he has a nice haircut that someone could actually want on its own merits and not just because of not having enough hair for anything better. And nothing horrible is happening. And it's - good? He'll have to figure out how leaving reviews works and write a nice one. He thanks Betta warmly.

...It does feel like he’s left something behind that would have spoiled this experience.

"Come back soon! That kind of thing wants regular maintenance to look nice!"

He can pay with his pocket everything.

Fortunately the concept of paying for things isn't new. He does that.

...This is definitely a reasonable excuse for a selfie and won't even seem strange, right? He takes one on the way out to send to his sister later.

Nobody remarks at all on his decision to take a selfie.

He calls that good enough for one day and goes back to the hotel to curl up in a little ball under the blankets for a while. Sends the new haircut selfie to his sister and writes you'll love it here.

(She texts back figure out where the blues get their hair done. And he says, you realize yellows run half the government anyway, right.)

And everything else... happens. He moves into the new apartment and gets a headset even though the soundproofing is probably fine, and makes sure he has very reliable internet, and takes emergency calls. It's - not actually more important than his old job, which was absolutely essential to the functioning of society, but it's as important and feels less like a waste of his talents. He doesn't start donating immediately; it's still very possible something will go wrong. He saves.

The day of the police exam approaches.

It's a substantial train ride and it starts at eight in the morning, so he will need to be up pretty early.

He's very good at getting up early. (And much worse at staying up late.)

Then he can try to figure out the train! How is he doing at finessing subway routes?

He has memorized so many subway facts and can also just pull up a map on his everything and see how far he's gotten. And pay very close attention the whole time, which is maybe not the best prelude to needing to then focus on the exam, but.

Then he will be one of the first ones there. He can run through some of the physical tests which need to be individually proctored while they're waiting for the start time of the written.

He's pretty good at those.

Cool. He gets a little card where the proctors can put the scores and initial them.

Eventually it is Time To Start and he is supposed to sit at a desk and answer written questions.

He's been studying like people's lives might depend on it. Because they might.

They might, though a lot of police jobs are pretty boring.

The test is long and there is a lunch break in the middle; somebody's coordinating a pizza order.

Oh no, he never researched typical pizza topping preferences by caste. Why didn't he do that! What is wrong with him! He'll have whatever helps make the group's collective pizza demand into an integer number of pizzas.

That's mushrooms and peppers.

Well, he doesn't have to like them, he just has to eat them.

If there's lunchtime conversation it's probably a good idea to pay attention to it but he's not quite confident enough to start any if there isn't.

They're introducing themselves. Some of them turn out to have met before in other contexts.

Oh, no.

He will tell them he just moved here, since that's true, and mostly try to be interested in them. People like it when other people are interested in them, right?

"Oh, where from?"

"Mekri. You local?"

"From the suburbs but I was always downtown weekends."

"Cool. Hey, what should I make sure to see here?"

"Museum of firefighting history."

"Binzra Bridge, if you're not in that area enough to see it anyway."

"The zoo's not as good as the one in Gandre but it's got a really good collection of turtles."

"Oh, thank you!" He takes notes. "Turtles are great. I've thought about keeping a little one but I probably won't, they bite."

"I don't think they make great pets, yeah."

"Get a dog. Dogs are great."

"They take a really long time to waste-train."

"It's worth it."

"Maybe if you have a yard. You have a dog?" he says, turning to the person who said dogs are worth it.

"You don't need a yard for a small dog if you take it for walks. I have two, a burrowhound and a goatdog."

"I do hear good things about goatdogs."

Would he like to see pictures of the dogs?

Yes! That sounds like a very safe way for this conversation to go. He can get excited about what good dogs they are.

That will let him coast through to the end of the conversation and then they all go back to testing.

Arguably, the conversation is also a test.

Test test. Sure is a lot of testing.

Yup. It's over in the late afternoon; some people who hit it off particularly well are tossing around the idea of grabbing dinner together but most people are leaving alone.

If they invite him he’ll go but he’s not going to ask. Probably they won’t. it would turn them off their food if they knew

Nobody invites him, though Dogs Guy waves on his way out (not with a group).

Aww. He waves back and smiles and skips on the way out.

Probably he can find time to see that bridge today.

It's a nice bridge. It used to be for trucks but now it's only rated for pedestrian traffic - the structure is fine but the load was putting some stress on some underground things - so now it's a semipermanent open air market with produce and knitwear and honey and jewelry and knife-sharpening services and ice cream and stuff.

Oh.

That’s incredible. He shouldn't spend much right now but that's - what life is for, what cities are for. He examines all of the jewelry and knitwear and mentally calculates prices in hours worked and people decontaminated. Might as well get some produce, he does need to eat.

If he'll take bruised fruit he can get it at a discount.

He'll take it if he observes other people taking it before him and then being treated well by other nearby people.

Some people are taking it. They're mostly purple, and they're mostly not taking very much, but they'll take one bonked peach and cut the bruise out with a pocketknife and eat it right away, or chitchat with the stall owner about making jam.

Hm. People are mostly purple, but still. He'll wait and maybe do it next time if he has more data then.

He does pay attention to the way other people interact with the stall owners. That seems important.

Some of them just pick out things and buy them, or brush off questions with a "just looking" and then leave, but a minority will chat up the stall owners about where the goods are from or whether they'd recommend this one over that one.

Good to get a sense of how that works. He doesn't try talking to anyone this time. Maybe next time.