"Is that what we're going to do?"

"No, see, now Olvala and Biyan and Evalee have so thoroughly burned the commons that it'd be damn near impossible to take any steps towards replacing them without their concluding they're dead anyway and might as well make it cost us. And I don't think purples should do red jobs, any more than yellows should do purple jobs or reds should do my job. It doesn't work very well and I'm not convinced it's safe and anyway the first obligation of a government is not to do high-stakes irreversible things on the say-so of their academics."

"You just pick the wrong academics to listen to."

"No one in all of history has ever picked the right academic to listen to! No, we're going to sit tight with the system that has worked just fine for centuries, and once someone else has developed robots and has them observably working then if cleaning the reds doesn't work we'll try transitioning them to the rainforest. Though I honestly think cleaning the reds will work, there'll be some improvements to the cost as it scales and once they're clean they can work to get their fellows out."

"Cleaning the reds?" asks Isama.

"Nertel helped collaborate on looking into it -"

      "Yes," she says, "no one'd looked into it since the days when the best technology available was washing. If you collect every proposed mechanism by which uncleanliness is transmitted and handle all of them - you do chemotherapy, you do a full-body blood transfusion and a bone marrow transfusion, the full procedure takes six months and costs a fortune - then they're fine. Cleaner than someone who has just touched a red, certainly, and that we consider a single decontamination adequate for. We tested it, of course, had people handle food they'd handled and the people didn't really mind it -"

"It helps when they've dyed their hair but they're not disgusting."

"Let me guess, you had them dye it purple," says Isama, unimpressed.

"I think they also debated black, but ended up voting purple. It's not clear how to assign caste in a case like that but if you assign it by the work they're suited to -"

"The castes aren't blue green yellow grey orange miscellaneous," says Isama.

"No, but if someone's going to do unskilled labor they've got to be purple, it'd be worse to have them taking purple jobs while not purple."

Isama makes a face. "Do reds not take care of their own or each other's kids and sick people? Do reds not know how to type and make phone calls? Can't any of them draw? I assume they don't do literally nothing but wallow in filth all day."

"Do you think it'd help if we, like, tested them and sorted them? I can suggest that to the people running the program."

"Just don't assume they're purple like purple is meaningless, my caste is not a landfill."

"I'll talk with the program people."

Nod.

"You could make them blue, that'd tell people you really mean it."

"I can't actually personally do that but I can mention that it might help with the perception that we're just trying to combine red and purple or something."

"I did fine in sex work till I got all monogamous and I had no previous job experience since in Tapa it's orange!" chirps Peka.

"Yeah, that'd go over well," snorts Isama.

"There are people who are into reds! We keep arresting them for tax fraud and there keep being more of them! But probably not enough for greying a bunch of clean reds to make sense."

"Tax fraud," snorts Isama. "Why tax fraud?"

"Not life-destroying, short prison sentence, doesn't implicate anyone else, it's something they'd universally prefer to plead to, discourages actual tax fraud without ruining the lives mostly of innumerate people who messed up or listened to their cousin who said there was a neat trick for not paying, which is what happens if you actually try to prosecute lots of cases of tax fraud. - we do go after people for tax fraud, but mostly not poor people."

"Yeah, you make plenty of money off child credits," remarks Isama.

"We try to make sure no one's counting on the revenue from that lest they get tempted to have fewer credits so they auction higher."

"Do you succeed?" she wonders.