"I mean, I'd probably go along with a yellow who showed up and looked like they'd otherwise shoot me, so I'm not sure what the proportion of greys has to do with it!"

"We don't have that many guns. Enough to do sweeping mass arrests but not enough to just hand every grey one or anything. The problem is that you don't really want to cripple your own ability to do mass arrests, could kind of need that -"

"Or at least don't want to make it obvious that if it were needed it wouldn't happen."

" - we do not maintain at home the capacity to conduct sweeping mass arrests and I am not sure under what circumstances we'd need to."

"Attempted coup, war that's both desperate and has a sizable faction against it - it's not likely but it could be quite sudden, if - I don't know- someone with important blue family shot one of our ex-reds on camera -"

"Ah."

"Are people with important blue family shooting folks all the time and I'm not hearing about it because it disappears?" wonders Isama.

"That one I would disappear but no, blue criminal's mostly people who have heard it all and are hard to buy and blues have a very low violent crime rate. White-collar nonsense gets covered up some. Treason prosecutions are pretty political."

"In our society it would be an appalling mortal insult to try to bribe a judge."

"That sounds nice but I've no idea how to get there from here."

"I wonder if people try to bribe Shasali."

"Does she strike you as very bribable?"

"I don't really know what that looks like!"

"I suppose if you're good at it it doesn't really look like anything. - there's leaning on a judge to keep something in mind during sentencing, everyone does that and it hardly even counts."

"I just had a price sheet, back when I was working, it was very clearly itemized, I learned to say 'ooh that'll be an extra fifty' very flirtily."

"I'm sure Shasali doesn't take bribes for money."

"This really seems dreadful for deterring crimes!"

"It's not great but you can't exactly just order people to stop. They might get less overt about it, maybe."

"Besides, if they just did whatever they thought was right then ones who thought it was right to let off people who were undermining the ex-red thing wouldn't have to do whatever Aitim told them to."

"I don't have that much leverage. Litif was mostly doing that, before she retired, and I think more out of general fondness for law and order than any specific interest in our social experiment."

Giggle.

Ladah waits until Alien Dad is done swooning over a melon slice to ask, "Do you have the thing Dad has where reading is annoying?"

" - I required some chip adjustments but we got them done very discreetly -"

" - what, it's, like, a secret?"

"Well, people shouldn't have to think about it.