"Resurrection."

"Uh. Condolences."

"...thanks, but that's not really - it."

" - do you, like, need somebody who is dead in order to clear your name or something - is this a setup for a movie, I'm going to be so mad if there are secret cameras -"

"...it's a really long story and there are no cameras of which I am aware."

"Well. We don't have resurrection. Kind of a good thing, we'd have run out of space long ago if it were widespread so it'd probably end up just a few centuries-old politicians with centuries-old opinions and centuries to get a stronger grip on power."

"Why are you so crowded?"

"Were you not, before you got FTL? I guess if you got it really fast - we've got thirteen billion people. We've had population controls for, like, fifty years, when we had five billion? Before that it was wars keeping the population in check. Wars and plagues and starvation and stuff."

"My original civilization doesn't actually have it. But they colonized some other places in the same solar system."

"The other planets are too hot or gaseous. We've got the moons, but we can't season them. And  - one more planet would help, but in the sense credits are maybe ten thousand ni cheaper, it doesn't touch the fundamentals of it."

"Season them?"

"Cause them to have seasons."

"Is that important?"

"Without them our hormones get out of whack and no one's found an adequate artificial substitute."

"Oh."

"You don't have that?"

"No."

"I guess that'd let you get a little farther before you needed strict population controls, you could build underground and underwater and the poles and the equators and so on."

"There's not very much of that. People started having fewer children after we invented birth control. - do you have that -"

"Yep. Free and universal, so's abortion, people just want five, on average."

"...well yes that would do it."

"It's hard. My mom's a music teacher and my father's an untenured philology professor and they both worked crazy hours until they were eighteen and could take out a mortgage to afford me."

"How long are your years?"

" - I don't have a point of reference - uh, they have 1475 days, a day is -" he checks his pocket everything - "I've been here twenty minutes and a day is fifteen hundred of those."

Cam does some calculations. "Okay, good to know."