"Thanks."

She dithers and calls the prince's number.

She gets his secretary. What's she calling about?

"My probation officer said I should tell him instead of her to cut it out with the robots?"

"- uh, okay, let me put you through." Click.

"This is Macalaurë, domestic affairs." He has a hella pretty voice. Even by Elf standards.

"Hi, my probation officer said I should call and tell you to cut it out with the robots."

"Who's speaking?"

"Peka Atan."

"And who do you think should be developing robots?"

"Uh, nobody. Zero robots. Total absence of robot."

"There are twelve independent Elven nations, three on Valinor. There are sixteen orc nations, and seven Dwarf ones. Most of them have never heard of reds, many of them will happily take commissioned work from Amenta because why on earth wouldn't they, lots of them have already automated most of their manufacturing and manual labor."

She takes a minute to process that, then picks up her sleeping baby and pets her.

"I understand that reds are really nervous about the technological transition. But not personally doing any robotics research just means that everybody who wants robots will source their robots elsewhere. If we do it, we can make sure it's rolled out responsibly in a way that doesn't get anyone killed. And we'd love to talk with the red community about how best to achieve that but - none of our efforts have gone anywhere."

"What have you tried?"

"We asked the social workers if they could ask the reds to get in touch with us. That went nowhere, and after several months of demands and no reds we fired them all. New social workers got a single, miserable, terrified red to show up once a day and comment inanely on the weather. My brother, who runs the country, personally sat in on this after a week and asked him to get someone else who we could talk to, and he did, and we asked her how we could earn some trust with the community and she gave us periodic wishlists and we got it all done. No one else ever showed up to the office, though, and she wouldn't talk, just come in with the lists. She did ask once what the plan after the technological transition was and we described some of the options. She didn't comment on them. We have no idea which ones you'd like best. And then someone said yes, of course we're working on robots, and she went out to club them to death and now she's dead too and we don't even hear about supply shortages anymore."

"Yeah that was not the best way to convince us we aren't all going to die of redundancy."

"Then please tell us how to do it?"

"I barely speak Oahkar so I dunno if there are lots of regional differences but social workers in Tapa are worse than useless, for one thing."

"We've been working on retraining them but that's the reason we didn't try to directly have a conversation through them, yeah."

"What do you mean she wouldn't talk?"

"We were hoping that once we'd solved enough problems we might, uh, get feedback, or suggestions about how to scare you all less, or - or instead of killing people who had nothing to do with it and dying they could've said anything at all to us - she'd been coming by every week for a season and we fixed everything they brought to us, and we did it without - getting employers or cops or suppliers mad at the reds, without even making it obvious that the policy changes had anything to do with the reds - but no one would say to us 'hey, unless you provide convincing reassurance on these six points there'll be a riot' -"

"Uh, sometimes the cops come too fast to leave chalk messages so back home they always did riots instantly so it'd be obvious what it was about."

Sigh. "I can see why - when it was just Amenta - you didn't have a choice. I just don't know how to - now that it's not just Amenta at all - give you choices you'll actually take."

"It's kind of weird that they sent you a person who'd give you complaints but not have conversations if the person she was having conversations with was, like, not horrible?"

"I don't think she's horrible? I took a look at all the supplier-auditing and cop-reassigning and it took real finesse and I don't think it ever backfired and I know she never gave up on a problem. Uh. You could go talk to her and tell us if that's the problem?"

"I guess. Can I bring the baby?"