in color | Glowfic Constellation

His hair is green.

His mother was green, and in lots of places he would follow her, but Anitam is not one of those places; castes are patrilineal. He is a blue with hair inconveniently reminiscent of his dead mother, that's all. He will grow up and be a politician or a diplomat or an ambassador, like his father, like his father's second wife. His mother did embroidery, stunningly beautiful tapestries and fabric concepts and artwork that hangs in the state buildings and museums. But he's not green, and he can't follow her.

He runs away from home, of course. He would probably have done that anyway; looking back on it it feels a bit overdetermined. The hair would have been enough. Entis, his father's second wife, would have been enough. His siblings - two of them, blue in hair and ambitions and manner and talents - would have been enough. His hair is green. He runs away from home and shows up at a university in Anitam's third-largest city and sits in on classes, front row, asking questions and taking notes and turning in effortlessly brilliant problem sets.

In the third week he tells a professor, biting his lip, that he's not technically enrolled - family couldn't come up with tuition this year, and said maybe next, but he didn't want to wait - and the professor ruffles his hair (green!) and says that it's a delight to grade his work, he can keep sitting in and if he does well he'll talk with the administration at semester's end.

He excels in all five classes he sat in on. They find a scholarship. He vaguely mentions his mother's family.

He graduates with honors and co-authorship of four papers and offers from eight higher degree programs. He accepts one and publishes machine learning papers at a pace that has his advisors gently asking if he's going to burn out and he's green green green and he lives off microwave dinners and praise and envy and he marries the co-author of one of his papers about fluid dynamics and eventually someone pieces together his parentage and asks -

"Are you," he says, "suggesting that someone wrote my papers for me?"

" - I - what - no - I was at your thesis defense, no one else could possibly have -"

"Right. So then are you suggesting that the person who achieved those things wasn't even green?"

"There's no need to be confrontational. I was just - it's matrilineal lots of other places."

"Yes, it is."

And he's green green green.

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"...uh, I'd copy somebody and then delete everything I didn't understand, to start out."

"Who should I copy?"

"I mean, I'd default to Anitam because I understand it better but I haven't exactly done research - Hala don't eat that - why?"

"We're gonna do it. And if it goes well we have a strong case for getting Anitam to do it."

"Do what?"

"Make the laws and infrastructure and government system for the new ex-red country and see what happens."

"...can you start at the beginning?"

" - right, sorry. Okay. So Evalee bought a patch of territory, ten thousand square miles but equatorial, for all their reds to go after we clean them. Isel came to me because, like, you can't dump a bunch of untrained people in the rainforest, they'll die. I got everyone I know with related research to apply for grants or spend their lab funding or spend next season's lab funding on research projects related to building a state from scratch, because it's the perfect test case for a whole lot of things.

And they'll all be ex-reds, so - it won't be casteless, because of swap rules with other countries, but the castes won't be very socially ingrained nor is there any particular reason in my opinion to write them into law. But - there are things that will go wrong if I just try to design the economy and legal system of a new society, so I wanted to ask you."

"It could be internally casteless if they had a way to fake it whenever somebody wanted to move. Are the ex-reds gonna let you design their state? Maybe they want to do it themselves."

"I'll consult them as I go but they've spent the last couple years in a low-grade guerilla war, I think they will want something orderly to start out with more than anything else and will be better equipped to modify it in a couple seasons than to design it from decontamination."

"Makes sense. I'm just wondering if I can open a factory there, I bet they work for food. Birth control and food as soon as they reseason."

"I think you should absolutely open a factory there and whatever laws are relevant on the Anitam end I will tell Aitim to blackmail people until they collapse- that's how he got the first decontamination center funded, I'm pretty sure -"

"And I bet a hundred other businesses have the same idea. Have one of those forms online, 'what would you need to employ or sell to rainforest decontaminees'."

Nod.

"So they don't starve or whatever."

"They won't starve. They'll have work. And they'll have simple laws anyone can understand and no forms longer than six or seven boxes and castes'll be a - legal fiction of no day-to-day relevance, like gender or something."

"I wonder if they'll even bother dyeing their hair."

"Probably depends how much they dislike being red even where it doesn't matter. You won't worry that people might hesitate to buy furniture they assembled if they still look red?"

"Nobody's sanctioning Anitam generally for having decontaminees. I doubt it's hair color."

"One of the reasons they aren't taking any refugees is they worry people might sanction us - or, like, shy away from our products - if we had a reputation as a red country. Even if they're clean. But so far the whole thing's just made us very rich."

"It'd be a bit belated for anyone to panic now."

"Yeah, barring, like, some magic scanner that reliably distinguishes polluted and unpolluted things and that says they're not clean I think it was settled when they did the experiments on the first batch. It's - you can easily imagine a society that had come up with a way of cleaning electronics or that thought you could launder cloth with the right sequence of soaps or that the sequence of soaps should be different and I don't think it makes sense to say that they'd be getting it wrong. So as long as everyone's on the same page, it really is a cure."

Isama nods.

"And they will have a nice rainforest place and then there can stop being reds without sixty million murders and it will be great."

He sets up the web form.