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.

Total: 6302

Posts Per Page:

‹ Previous 1 2 … 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 … 252 253 Next ›

« First ‹ Previous 90 of 253 Next › Last »

"Not especially."

alicornucopia

"Tawali, get him a chickpea salad."

"Thank you," he says to the waiter.

alicornucopia

"You're welcome," says the waiter, and he goes off.

"What advice would you give someone trying to go into business?"

alicornucopia

"I'm a big fan of standardization. You can fill a niche doing everything custom but if you want your product in every house in the country it has to be all alike so you can streamline. The shipping container, but for everything."

"What do you plan to do with your money?"

alicornucopia

"I'm supporting some family and I have an architect working on a nice house and I give some to charity, why?"

"I don't have an agenda. I could probably get a paper out of differences in the ways rich greens and rich purples spend their money but I'd look at tax records for that. I just - you created a lot of value and I'm interested in what you're doing with it."

alicornucopia

"I reinvest a lot."

"Planning to do this forever?"

alicornucopia

"I'll probably retire when I'm thirty-two or so."

"That's all I had. Thank you."

alicornucopia

His chickpea salad arrives. "You're welcome," says Isama.

He takes a bite. "If there weren't any workplace regulations would you change workplace conditions significantly?"

alicornucopia

It's very good. "I'd love to be able to hire people for arbitrary hours. Some people'd be happy to come late and stay late, or sit up playing video games till dawn while technically on call to come unstick the machinery if it has a problem, but irregular work hours have to come with a surcharge so I can't do more of it than the bare minimum."

"There's a school of thought that there shouldn't be any regulations, people won't take jobs that treat them badly and that'd sort it."

alicornucopia

"Sure they will, if they need the money. You don't look a hungry toddler in the eye and say 'but Mommy's boss grabs her ass' or 'there is a three percent annual chance I'd lose a finger'. I wouldn't want things deregulated altogether - it's like the taxes, you can make things technically theoretically better if you offer more deductions but it just winds up being a time sink - ordinary unskilled workers have enough to do without having to evaluate every potential employer's reputation for everything."

- nod. "That's a big problem? Evaluative overhead, energy and knowledge for navigating things -"

alicornucopia

"Yes. I have a decent tolerance for it but you want a four year old who can barely add to try to figure out injury statistics?"

"The thing I want, is, like, a balance between 'purples are uneducated which is why we have to make decisions about what conditions they should put up with for them, despite not actually being particularly familiar with the tradeoffs they're making' and 'let's build a society with no safety rails and in which you need to be a genius to pursue your own interests' -"

alicornucopia

"Purples're educated fine, but even the innumerate ones who couldn't keep up in math need jobs. You could stand to have better familiarity with the conditions, of course. Maybe have a way to apply for exceptions. A simple way with three boxes on the form, my name is this and I want to take a job that requires that because reason."

- nod. "Do you vote for politicians off their stance on regulation or something else -"

alicornucopia

"I eliminate all the ones who sound like aliens who've never done their own shopping in their lives and find that leaves me little additional room to be picky."