"Scraper's off the shelf, I'm afraid, I'm not much of a programmer."

"Ah, yeah, makes sense. Never wanted to improve or decided it wasn't worth it? Or just haven't gotten around to it?"

"Hasn't been worth the time. It's interesting but it wouldn't make it much easier to earn money for the time, and I have to be pretty focused on that."

"Yeah, that's fair."

"There's not enough time to learn everything, it's very tragic."

"It's horrible is what it is. This kind of thing is what makes me sometimes think I'd make a good green."

"They don't have any more time than we do."

"I think most other greys don't care about not getting to learn all of the things."

"Maybe more of them would if they'd been encouraged to consider it but yeah, nah."

"To the extent caste aptitude is not inherited, yeah."

"Rephrase?"

"To the extent caste aptitude is inherited, one would expect most greys to not care about or want to look into learning for the sake of learning," he explains. "So the greys that are interested in that are the ones that deviate from the norm enough, and this deviation is greater—so there are more of them—the less strong the heritability of caste aptitude is."

"I don't know that the aptitude for it is selected against. A strong innate interest in it probably is, but the mere ability to pick things up - things in full generality - when they're suggested to you seems like it'd be neutral to positive."

"I can see neutral, but positive?"

"Sure. Better ability to switch careers instead of being four feet tall and fixated on the long jump. Better work/life balance, better ability to take care of yourself and your family with a little purplish and orangeish skill-building in the home..."

"Hmm, yeah, that makes sense. But the selection pressure applied by credits will probably limit its usefulness."

"Yeah, you might expect more of it in Voa where most of the bottleneck is in ease of partner selection."

"Makes sense." Sahde looks at his clock. "And I think he'll be here any minute now."

"Speaking of partner selection."

Giggle.

And a few minutes later this cute green on an electric wheelchair appears zooming closer to them. The chair is really quiet, and it seems to be pretty easy to control from what little Ohan is doing to the buttons on the arm of the chair.

"Hi!" She waves. "You must be Ohan."

"Yup," he says, smoothly parking his wheelchair close to them. "And you must be Pelape Milath. It's so exciting to meet you! Sahde told me all about you."

"Nonsense, I'm sure I don't know nearly as much as 'all' about her," Sahde says, grinning up at Ohan.

"What things did you manage to cover, then?"