Tiger is also much smarter than the median Evalite child, and almost as smart as the median Evalite adult, at least on paper. She's not going to say that where an adult might hear her, though. They might then insist on treating her like one.

Like many ten-year-olds, realising they have only two more years of this before a court could reasonably decide to treat them as an adolescent over their own objections, Tiger wants to make the most of it.

This could well be her last chance to safely answer some big questions about herself. Could she make it as a criminal? Are adults really that smart? Are society's defences against malicious actors really strong enough to stop her, or just strong enough to stop other, less clever children?

There have been some efforts by more civilised factions to have "Tiger", along with a few dozen others, removed from the long list of around eleven thousand suggested first names for children. They argue this based on small but firm statistical evidence that naming a child such things very slightly increases their tendency towards violent misadventure. Their efforts have been primarily opposed by:

- People who have one of the names they're disparaging.

- People who have ever had a mild annoyance caused by meeting someone else with the same name and therefore think the list is too short already.

- People who subscribe to one of several alternative interpretations of the data where it's less clear that removing the names from the list will improve things and not just make the next few dozen edgiest names on the list the new "Tiger"s of the world.

- And the sub-factions of the pro-crime factions who agree with their interpretation of the data and are therefore trying to bring back even more cool names already removed, like "Blade" and "Assassin".

To be clear, they're not trying to force anyone to name their kids anything. They're just trying to get it removed from the list that normal, well-intentioned parents randomly draw from when naming a child. Such parents trust the government to have already filtered all the words that provoke bullying or that sound silly in common contexts off of the list. Names that make a child slightly more prone to violence oughtn't be on there, either.

They've already removed it from their own political faction suggested lists, but it doesn't work. Nobody uses those because naming your child off a list suggested by a particular political faction would be arbitrarily imposing your own beliefs on a new person's personal identity until they come of age and probably just change it anyway. The overwhelming majority of parents wouldn't want to do that and would rather just draw straws off the same list of supposedly safe names that everybody else uses already.

And we're supposed to believe these "pro-crime" factions are more politically influential than, say, anti-vegetable factions?

Yes?

The crime factions have a Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement of just committing a lot of crimes themselves. The anti-vegetable factions usually won't resort to arson about it. Anyway, you should be saving second-order objections until the end. They're not necessarily dispositive.

Thus was organised a conspiratorial meeting between Tiger, Toffee, and Bun, who had resolved to attempt an armed bank robbery before any of them turned twelve.

Adding more members to a conspiracy is always risky. They could dob the others in for a reward and ruin the whole scheme, but then none of them would get to learn if they could theoretically rob a bank, and to her team that didn't seem worth it. Having fewer would make the challenge harder than it already was, but she thought she could trust these two.

Waiting too close to the end of one's childhood is also risky. It was known that either the Guard would watch you closer as your twelfth birthday approached, or that they pretended they'd do that in a way that wouldn't trick a smart girl like Tiger but could easily scare some of her would-be co-conspirators into defecting. They'd be better off doing it sooner rather than later, and not dally about it and risk creating more opportunities for feet to get cold.

Ordinarily, armed bank robbery would have a lot of negative side effects and be very negative-sum overall.

A large amount of money might also change hands, but that part at least is only zero-sum. Call it the zero-sum component of the bank robbery. With respect to that component, society is in strict competition with bank robbers and no hope of peaceful trade exists.

With respect to all other components: The death or risk of death of bank employees, civilians, guards, and the robbers themselves, the destruction of property, and anything else considered bad, the robbers are harming society in a way they don't benefit from and don't particularly intend. There is a possibility of reducing the harm by coordinating in advance so long as everyone is very honourable about it. Call that the negative-sum component of the bank robbery, the part that is solely a harm.

Thus, the government creates a Commission for Harm-Reduction of Crime, called just the Harms Commission for short. It allows the pro-crime political factions oversight of that Commission, though obviously all of the actual employees are extremely honest and trustworthy people, and when children are approaching an age when it might start to be relevant it ensures representatives have an opportunity to meet with a lecture hall full of kids at a time and explain what they should do if they're thinking of being evil themselves.

It is difficult to convince children that the government is serious about this kind of thing. Of course the government is serious about this kind of thing.

Four separate times a criminal conspiracy has independently built a working nuclear weapon, and given the Commission a detailed plan for how they could obtain the equivalent of several hundred worker-lifetimes of value by detonating it. The Commission just gave them the money to buy the nukes off of them, it's not going to risk actual harm.

For more pedestrian criminal activity, you can at least expect to get to do a re-enactment. This representative, for example, once forced a senior minister into retirement by successfully planting a fake bomb in his hotel room.

I built a real one first, and then the commission agreed to swap it out for one that wouldn't actually get anybody hurt. I still have no idea who paid me to do that. The guard still hasn't managed to prove it was me who did it, which is why I’m out free. Obviously this conversation isn't admissible proof, the Harms Commission asked me to come here and talk to all of you, so it's protected.

There's no way that nuke thing is true. If it were you wouldn't be allowed to tell us.

I'd only be not allowed to tell you if I found out legally. If I either found out illegally or just correctly guessed I wouldn't have any binding commitments about not telling people, would I?

Are you seriously expecting to increase your credibility by claiming that you might have correctly guessed the information?

I keep forgetting that that argument doesn’t work on children. Adults find it persuasive all the time. There's no fundamental reason I couldn't have just correctly guessed it.

What you should do, they'll explain, is pre-register your schemes with the Commission, before you do anything. Then, the commission can figure all the harms that would result, if you did that as described, and what your likely sentence would be if caught, and suggest ways you could work together and make it not as bad. In exchange they can offer a significantly reduced sentence if caught, and sometimes even direct cash to make working with them worth your time, too.

Not all of this only applies to criminals, there are some socially agreed upon standard practices that affect everyone. For example?

Oh yeah, I'm supposed to tell them about that too.

Now that you're old enough to hopefully understand this sort of stuff, you should also know that, if anyone ever shoots you with a paintball gun while out in public, society expects you to lie on the floor and play dead for ten minutes or until the situation is over. Also you're not allowed to, for example, try to tell the guards where the gunman went, or stop the gunman from grabbing your wallet, or anything like that. If you get personally robbed in any situation like that the Harms Commission will almost always just compensate you later anyway. 

Afterwards, you're prohibited from testifying against anyone about anything prior to when you got shot, if the guy who shot you doesn't want you testifying about it. That sounds weird, but remember that if society didn't agree to that standard, people like me would just shoot witnesses with actual guns and then they still can't testify against us and also they're dead.

If you really strongly don't like the idea of having to do that, you can fill in this form with the Commission and they'll try pretty hard, to the extent it's possible, to make sure that you're not around when crimes are scheduled to happen. From my experience most people think it's pretty fun, though.

As for the bad guys side, if you do a robbery and then shoot a bunch of witnesses with a gun, you'll be charged with robbery and mass murder, and probably spend the rest of your life in a maximum security cell. If you use a paintball gun instead, you're not actually guilty of murder, just robbery, and you can't get more than 10 years in a medium security apartment for only property crimes.

If you don't get caught, which isn't easy but they still can't testify against you and the guard would have spent way more resources hunting an actual murderer, then you get to keep all the profits just like you would've otherwise.

I've personally killed over a hundred witnesses, and since nobody saw me do a crime and lived to tell the tale, I'm still out here free.

Why is everyone letting this moustache-twirling supervillain talk to us kids, exactly?

Many political factions convincingly demonstrated that they could, if they wanted, migrate to cities dominated by their own faction members, raise their children in a culture of their own propaganda, and produce faithful faction members out of a supermajority of children. This would then turn politics into a race to the bottom of who could mass-produce the most brainwashed children to control elections, until a faction got a majority and could convincingly demonstrate it could take over the world by force if everyone else didn't just capitulate first.

Since most factions would prefer to avoid that race to the bottom, it was compromised that all factions would forfeit the right to do that, or else be ganged up on by everyone else.

The compromise agreed is that all children get exposure to representatives of all political factions, mostly in proportion to voter support and with relatively few other constraints.

Some people vote for the crime faction, so they get a turn at trying to brainwash children into their ideology, too. If you stop applying the rules of fairness to people just because you don't like them, you were never really applying the rule of fairness in the first place.

Wouldn't a supermajority of factions at least be willing to gang up on the faction explicitly in favour of crime?

If they'd be going to do that, the sort of people in favour of crime would stop calling themselves a "political faction", and start just shooting everyone they didn't like. Who's to say who'd be left standing at the end of that, the guys who believe in following the rules, or the guys who have repeatedly made nuclear weapons in their own basements?

If you stop applying the rules of fairness to people just because you don't like them, you get to play out the rules of nature, instead.

Tiger will, on behalf of her conspiracy, turn over their plans.

If you do this with an actual gun, it'll count as lethal violence and they're not just going to release you when you start claiming to not be a child anymore.

Actual murder gets taken very seriously.

But if, hypothetically, I did it with a paintball gun?

We feel you're not acting in accordance with the spirit of harm-reduction, if you were never willing to do the non-harm-reduced version of your own crimes. It seems unlikely that you'd still be planning to do this if you didn't know you could bargain away having to do any actual violence, and remove any risk of real consequences at the same time and just get it all suppressed at adolescence.

That's an interesting theory you've got there. Maybe you're really confident in it. Maybe you're 99.5% certain. If that were the case, by refusing to bargain, you'd expect to be stopping 199 robberies, and causing 1 mass murder.

Do you think that's worth it?