The scholarship is attracting plenty of interest. The resurrections are purchased. Governor Avalor will be happy to see him once she is back from her brief vacation reacclimating her husband to life.

"I'm very happy for you both."

"Thank you. What can I do for you today?"

"Just checking in, really. It looks to me like a successful experiment; what are the barriers to achieving the same at a larger scale?"

"I'm sure I could populate a dozen stations just like it if you care to supply them. Here, it would be interfering with essential institutions to change so much so quickly. Incrementalism is gentler and safer."

"All the changes to get to a membership, maybe. How about some of them? I think they have merits beyond the membership eligibility."

"Do you have some in mind?"

"It seems like the population controls could be relaxed if you had ten more stations, maybe, and the prison conditions and access to health care are likely to be more about resource constraints than political balance. And I will admit I still can't understand the overwhelming unpopularity of giving reds generous hazard pay for the conditions they endure for the sake of minimizing contagion, but luckily since you don't actually let your purples vote their disapproval need not sink the proposal."

"I'd be happy to populate more stations and deploy any doctors you have trained to treat our species. The matter of prisons may be more delicate. I am under a fair amount of pressure to be rid of the reds entirely what with those charming magical robots that apparently exist."

"Regrettably we'll have to refuse the robots to anybody they inspire to genocide, it'd be such terrible incentives. And we don't assist in forcible relocations. But if they vote to leave we'll delightedly take them. What makes prisons delicate?"

"They're intended to be punitive measures. Measures that make them less punitive will be seen as failing to deliver justice."

"This complaint does not come up as much as one might expect in countries with humane conditions. I wonder if the general societal impression of how bad prisons are doesn't track actual prison conditions very well."

"Be that as it might, moves toward pleasanter prisons will be seen that way. Unless you're suggesting it somehow be accomplished in secret."

"Oooh, secret prison improvements. We do have kind of absurd amounts of magic."

"I don't know if you're seriously suggesting routing around formal channels for changing institutional conditions to implement changes that you would then somehow prevent released inmates from discussing..."

"No, but it'd surprise me if those channels didn't have any flexibility such that the uninformed impressions of the general populace could be prevented from ruling decisionmaking. If there's nothing I suppose we could make and release horrifying documentaries."

"I would expect much more resistance from the legislators than the constituents."

"Same legislators who want your reds gone?"

"There is a little correlation."

"Think you could manage a package deal?"

"Hm?"

"We take your reds and give you robots as part of a first step towards closer relations which also includes twelve more floating cities, relaxation of the population controls, and justice system reform? - it's not just prisons we'd also be really excited if you were to send some people to observe and consider introducing an adversarial criminal justice process."

"It wouldn't hurt but the correlation is in fact slight."

"Every once in a while our neighbors politely suggest we should try not being an absolute monarchy but your job sounds so much harder than mine. Well, if there are more pieces we could bring to the table, let me know."

"I could have been Queen, Prince Canafinwë, but I prefer slower systems where everyone can wake up in the same country they went to sleep in and needn't trust me personally on that."

"Elves feel strongly about that too, what with the living forever, but we found that procedural adjustments need not interrupt the contentment - or, really, even come to the notice of - the people who were not presently suffering where our procedures were inadequate."

"Someone who has suffered a violent crime tends to be curious about what becomes of their attacker, if nothing else."

"Is that a curiosity satisfied by statistics on the rate of police brutality and prison rape and deaths in custody? Swift, certain, accurate justice, absolutely. But if your people need cruelty then just torture the defendants in public until the victim declares themself satisfied, don't build institutions that will do it quietly and forgettably for you, out of sight where it soothes no one."

"In Voa people are entitled to more specifics if they wish."

"What sort of information is typically requested?"

"They often ask for interview transcripts."

"I actually think you'd find an adversarial justice system really valuable to those people. The process lets more information come to light, and being a process nothing about it is contingent on the skill of a single interviewer. Maybe the reason everyone else feels satisfied that justice has been done even if the defendants subsequently endure tolerable conditions is that the adversarial justice process is better at bringing closure to victims."

"Why is it that you're so partial to the structure?"

"Well, see, nowadays we can use the arbitrary matter powers to check up on verdicts delivered before we had it, and of course a lot of researchers were very curious which legal structures best produced correct verdicts - meaning here ones that were right on the facts of the case. So they went through tens of thousands of cases and - throwing out Elves as an outlier - that's the system with the lowest rate of false convictions of innocents and it's also among the best for successful case closures - the number of crimes for which the correct person was eventually convicted. It's also much less vulnerable to corruption, and it's much more tractable, once it's adopted, to produce later gradual changes in the rights afforded criminals. Stable, orderly, not dependent on individual virtues, institutionally flexible, I really think you'd like it."

"I could make use of your statistics on the subject."

"I think it's in the giant dump of sociology papers online but we may have rather drowned your greens with that, I can have the relevant analyses emailed to you directly."

"Thank you."

Almarë arranges for Tapa's reds to hold their vote on emigration. They'll move forward with an 80% majority.

And what information do the reds have at this point?

If they have access to the internet, they have pictures of Endorë and of the resettled red neighborhood there (though the Elves are maintaining the implication that reds are segregated with suitable concern for decontamination procedures) and endless debate about whether the aliens are serious about their fairly stringent rights standards and select interviews with some relocated reds. She asked Macalaurë if she could say about his girlfriend but he thought it was unwise. 

They can get 81% of those who vote, which is most but not all.

They can't actually just decide that's adequate, they have to ask Vanda Nossëo's elections commission. Which says nope, less than 80% of the affected population is less than 80% of the affected population. 

The red websites are pits of controversy on the subject. They're not used to voting, most places - there's a couple that let them but the population is very small and they're easily turned away for procedural issues - do kids count, are babies and half-year-olds supposed to vote - why hasn't anybody come back from Endorë to tell them about it in person -

Kids can vote but kid nonvoting does not traditionally count against your participation rates for elections commission oversight purposes. It's a long trip from Endorë and someone demanded a review of teleport decontamination procedures but they can have video if they want, there's a town hall meeting on public safety in the resettled city tonight.

Video would be good.

A stressed Almarë shows to the public safety meeting that evening. "This is the prince's fault."

           "It makes them so happy -"

"Whole lot that's worth, if they don't agree to come in the first place because they notice we're hiding something and think it's something bad -"

           "He could maybe have avoided personally leading the diplomatic stuff."

"Thank you all for coming," a man at the front of the room says. "We're here to invite you to discuss, and eventually vote on, how our public safety officers should interact with your community. As you all know, right now emergency services have been prohibited from calling public safety to this neighborhood, because of concerns that no one would request medical care after or during an altercation if they expected public safety would become involved. We are considering revising that recommendation to allow public safety officers to work normally here."

Maybe public safety officers could be allowed in one red building for a while first as a test.

They're happy to work with that. Are there any buildings volunteering?

One building is less not-volunteering than the others.

" - are there maybe concerns we can productively address before embarking on such an experiment."

They are concerned the public safety people will not know how to handle mentally ill people, of which there are a couple in this population, since as far as they can tell Elves maybe don't even have those. They are worried that stunning has not been tested on their species and don't want to be test subjects. They are expecting unreasonable standards on things like 'did you shove your stalker ex to get him to leave your apartment? shoving is not allowed!' or whatever. They have flatly no idea what happens if public safety decides they do not like somebody's behavior and are having mostly adequate success with the Drag The Miscreant To Their Grandmother model of things and maybe they should just priority resurrect some absent grandmothers.

There's been extensive stunner tests on demonic bodies of their species but that's a legitimate concern. If grandmother-based policing is working they can absolutely make the case for grandmother resurrections from the public safety budget. There are some humans in Ambaróna, and more in some of the surrounding areas, and local officials have training in not overreacting to non-dangerous erratic behavior. A stalker ex refusing to leave someone's apartment is sort of the sort of problem you are supposed to be able to call a public safety officer for. What are they concerned would happen if a public safety officer was called in on a situation where someone had shoved another person to get them to leave their apartment? 

They would probably have trouble sorting out who was at fault and overreact in some way or expect more coherent behavior than one should expect from a frightened person whose stalker ex is in their apartment claiming innocence.

Their job does not involve any sorting out or assigning fault, just about making sure everybody is safe. They would probably escort the trespasser out, tell them how they could file an assault complaint if they pleased, and tell the homeowner how they could file a trespassing complaint if they pleased. - they take it the reds are not actually willing to file complaints against one another, but that is possibly a separate concern.

If they filed complaints then what would happen?

Uh, the local district court would do some forensics to determine what happened and whether the complaints had any merit. If they did have merit then they'd send a summons for a hearing - two hearings, really, one to determine what happened and the other to determine how it could have been avoided and how it can be avoided in future. For both of these the accused gets a representative who can help them navigate the hearing rules. Then they'd likely get a fine or be prohibited from entering their ex's building in the first place or something.

What if they live in the same building or someone lets them in? How do the forensics work? Does the accuser get navigational help? What if they can't afford the fine?

Accuser gets navigational help in some kinds of cases. Uh, they could probably make it so they always get navigational help for reds, who might be at unusual disadvantage there. If they live in the same building they might be prohibited from the floor in question, or asked to move buildings if it's a repeat or serious offense. Hopefully people wouldn't let someone who keeps barging into their ex's apartment and provoking confrontations into the building, but if that kept happening they could change building ID procedures. 

Fines get deducted from your monthly stipend but by law can't reduce one's stipend below an amount that is about half of the standard.

...what if you get fined past that?

...then it might take several months to pay it off?

...huh.

Most of a building volunteers. There are some frightened holdouts on the top floor.

The public safety officers really appreciate their volunteering, promise they will take the responsibility very very seriously, assure everybody that they go years and years between ever drawing their weapon and expect they'll continue to be able to do so. Do the holdouts have additional concerns -

It's nothing specific, just great-grandpa can't see because of brain damage from being clonked in the head with a stick fifteen years ago.

"Almarë -" says the public safety official, looking appalled.

         "- I can probably heal that. I know that - doesn't really fix the underlying concern but - if you'd like -"

Someone points out that it's not actually very reassuring that they could totally be healing away any accumulated evidence of this sort of thing on the surrounding population.

"We wear body cameras. Every interaction we have with the public is recorded, and it's all available online except insofar as people request privacy. Every use-of-force incident goes before a court to determine whether the level of force used was justified by imminent danger to people other than us."

But realistically nobody's going to go through all that.

If people thought there was a coverup of routine beatings causing brain damage then yeah people would go through that, Vanda Nossëo would probably assign twenty thousand people to go through it. And the people who have the healing wouldn't cooperate if they were being asked to heal to help with a coverup -

       "Well, we would still heal people, but we definitely wouldn't stay quiet about what had happened -"

The great-grandpa will accept a healing.

Almarë states for the cameras that her duties on their planet of origin are restricted to liaisoning for reds and that she hasn't visited and will continue to not visit non-red areas and then she takes his hand and - heal -

He looks at his great-grandchildren and cries on them and they will be okay if public safety is allowed on their floor.

Oh good. 

She publishes the videos and a translation to Tapap.

The internet polls wobble. Not enough people are voting.

Well. They'll hold a full vote again in a season. 

She finds some Voan forums and makes the case again. 

80% is a high bar. People are talking about how their friends and families are too busy to investigate or think it's fake or don't like the internet or are too tired to think about things or feel like they can't understand the question or expect some people to be left behind and have a bad time or for the project to be abandoned as too expensive/bad PR/too difficult or have shitty devices with technical voting problems they are, again, too busy or tired to overcome.

...she goes and knocks on Macalaurë's apartment door during the middle of the day one day.

Peka, and her baby who now has noticeable amounts of peachy-orange hair, answers the door.

"Hi! I don't know you at all but Prince Canafinwë is enamored with you so I'm going to wildly guess that you have a good voice, am I right?"

"I'm not as good as him but I sing tolerably well!"

"So we're having a hard time getting reds to vote to emigrate, mostly because civic participation is scary and hard, but we really really can't relocate an unwilling population there are laws about that. And I want to release the songs for skipping sleep without being tired and for extra energy and health and so on - but I want to just give it to the reds. Both because I think they need some signs of good faith and because the sleep-skipping, if you give it to everyone, usually just means a transition to longer work hours, does that make sense -"

"- it wouldn't be very hard to have just one caste working the longer hours -"

"If they know about it."

"It's a cute idea but they don't think pollution is transmitted by sound."

"You think if they heard 'reds are listening to a red singer sing magic songs' they'd look past their -" frustrated hand gesture -

"They're not super consistent, where do you think my baby got her hair."

Sigh. "I just - maybe they're right to prefer to stay where they are and it's not fair to assume we know better -"

"Uh, no, it's totally better here. A lot. Eighty percent is just a stupid number."

"Eighty percent still means we're basically kidnapping thirteen million people at gunpoint, across the whole world -"

"...okay, but, like, in a nice way?"

"I'd do it. If I had a magic button. Instead I have this process and this process is -

- I mean, I have the teleport, but that doesn't count, it'd be chaos if you did it like that, Vanda Nossëo would probably be waiting when I showed up and say 'this ends badly, please give us the necklace and let a subtle artist smudge the symbols in your head -"

"Does it have to be eighty percent saying yes or could it just be less than twenty percent saying no?"

" - we could probably do that. I'll appeal to the elections commission, say that the post-industrial electoral participation expectations aren't fair to this group -"

"It's not that we're not industrial, we just, yanno, aren't allowed to vote and most people'd probably be terrified? Macalaurë showed up at my family's house first and my mom was so scared and confused. ...I just happen to react really really well to 'hey, alien prince, whisking away yes or no?'"

"Most people are terrified, a couple people asked me to show up to prove what I was saying and when I did they ran and hid - that's half the problem, normally if we wanted to get a vote on something we would just go door-to-door making the case for it - if you would've reacted badly Prince Canafinwë might have just decided alt consent for kidnapping is sufficient but we don't have alt consent for anybody else."

"Nobody else has alts?"

"They might, somewhere, we don't have a convenient way to check. Maybe someone will eventually feel strongly enough about alt-finding to be able to wish it on but you have to be really sincerely intensely excited for wishes to work. I'll ask about getting it changed to 'less than 20% nos'."

She explains on the forums that she's going to appeal to the elections commission on that. She explains the appeals process and what the elections commission will consider.

What's going to happen to the people who don't want to go?

No one is going to forcibly relocate them but if there's enough red support for emigration they will give local governments robots.

Aaaaaaaah!

Yeah, they understand that this is kind of a horrible situation to be in. If reds do not overwhelmingly want to emigrate, then no robots and maybe some aid programs. But it looks like reds typically do overwhelmingly want to emigrate, and robots are the only way to enable that.

Aaaaaaaaaaaah!

The next wave of polls has an uptick in voters in the "stay" camp.

The elections commission reviews local history, precedent for mass evacuations, and so on and approves a threshold of 80% of voters with sufficiently stringent steps taken to increase turnout. Almarë posts translations of the debate. 

The aliens seem to think our entire lives are some kind of horror show, like anywhere would be better than here. I don't spend my life cringing pathetically on designated nonporous surfaces! I have friends and a championship account on Glorious Seafarers 2 and pets and a store and I don't need to be rescued from any of that. They're harping on about police brutality but the police are never in our quarter as long as we don't do anything idiotic.

Come to our space paradise, it'll be just like that station Voa has with all the wacky shit people are posting from there only it will have reds in it, for some reason, right, pay no attention to the complete lack of station reds.

Hey, give the aliens a chance, it's not like accepting an offer to move someplace you've never seen where there are no or vague promises of work and if you try to stay behind you might be set on fire has ever gone badly for anyone!

It continues to be unethical to forcibly relocate people just because they'd probably appreciate it later.

They put up another dozen space stations for Voa. 

Voa asks if it would be a terrible imposition for them to stop filtering so aggressively for criminal history. Obviously no one currently incarcerated is eligible.

They expect the stations can handle people with a criminal history; there are after all Vanda Nossëo members which are just regular countries with regular crime problems.

Great. Up go several million more Voans. They are also filtering less aggressively for age now.

That'll probably make the necklaces auction higher but doesn't interfere with the smooth running of the stations. (The company training Voans in divine magic is optimistic about a cheaper-than-necklaces magic aging solution, but keeping this under wraps until development is finished). Regular shuttles between the stations are arranged.  

Some other countries want stations too.

Great! ...he's definitely going to prioritize building nice things for countries who expect the stations will let them relax their population controls. 

They expect that! They could sell more credits or increase their allocations or allow some immigration!

Or change their enforcement! They might eventually want to be members themselves and involuntary sterilization and forced abortions and infanticide are all so very upsetting.

If they didn't do that people would just have illegal kids. They can't completely remove the population controls with only a few space stations, at least not for long.

People could emigrate. 

The stations are useful for that because they can filter it but if essential services or too many doctors or construction workers or something disappear they have a problem.

Filtered emigration would still allow for relaxing the population controls. 

They are willing to allow more emigration to nonstation locations!

Great! He builds stations in order of cooperativeness and non-horribleness of affiliated government. Transition teams come over to help them get functioning governments. Extradimensional job offers continue to pour in.

Almarë offers to do healing magic for any reds who need it and don't mind that she'd have to touch them.

She gets some takers.

She pops around booping people.

Some of them write helpful blog posts. The balance teeters.

Well. She can keep that up as long as it's needed. 

A red doctor writes an annoyed post about how even the internal community services are apparently worthless in the space utopia.

"We still have doctors, if anything healers replace paramedics. And you still get a monthly stipend if you've yet to find a good space utopia job."

Does she think people LIKE being useless? Everybody hates them but at least if they were gone it would matter. Until the aliens showed up with their fucking magic robots.

People in the space utopia mostly do work, precisely because they do not like being useless, they just won't starve if they lose their jobs, or if they have to spend some time finding one that fits them. Maybe they will all want to apply for space utopia governance jobs like hers since, thanks to their background, they will have expertise in how to do it better.

The polls wobble.

Why can't they talk to the people who already emigrated?

" - Peka, think you can do an interview without making it obvious that we are treating their contamination rules like the ridiculous bullshit they are?"

"...obvious to whom?"

" - the relevant governments. If there's a way for the reds to guess, all the better."

"I might be able to do that."

"Awesome. Want me to take you back to Tapa for a bit?"

"Okay."

Pop pop pop!

Peka visits her family. And she records a video.

Her baby has noticeably orange hair grown out to a fuzz now, and she holds her so the camera can see that. She chatters about shopping and how pretty everything is and that for some reason all the refugees who were already there are real excited about pictures of her kissing her boyfriend, whereas of course back on Amenta she would have had no way to become a celebrity even through public necking.

She sings a song which is ninety percent red-specific allusion and idiom. (It's also heavily Tapai, but there's no getting around that; that's what she knows.) The song is about being somebody's very very secret mistress but she has added a verse.

The governments think this is a little fishy but they can't point to anything specific.

The next poll comes in at 85%.

"You," Macalaurë tells her, "are brilliant and perfect for this and they will adore you so much and I adore you so much -"

She giggles and kisses him.

And he asks Tapa how they want to handle a transition to robots. 

How assured should they be that the robots will arrive able to do the jobs already, do they need to make the reds train them or anything?

Servants are really smart and can take verbal instructions but if there's no one who'd know how to verbally instruct them then that should be handled before they leave. Maybe instead of making them they could pay them extra.

Aren't they going to go to a space utopia where they will be paid to do nothing? They can train some robots before they go.

"And what happens to them if they decline?"

"They won't."

"Hypothetically."

"If they won't train the replacements we can't replace them."

Sigh. He imports servants.

The servants and the Elves who bring them are on the wrong end of a riot in one neighborhood.

Elves are startled! The teleporter is already off making the next delivery and the servants can be bodyguards but it takes a little while for this to occur to anybody. 

The reds are used to people who start trying to kill them as soon as they lay hands on anybody. They don't stop till that would be impossible.

Well. Okay. 

Does the government mind if the Elves handle this.

Can they keep it confined to the red quarter? If so they can do whatever they want with them.

He so appreciates that. Yes, of course they can keep it to the red quarter.

He has a teleporter drop in to retrieve bodies and mangled servants (someone figured out they stop working if you scratch up the writing badly enough). He hands them off for resurrection according to their preferences (Lórien? at home? on-scene if possible?) He goes to a local court at home for a series of forensic conjurations - how many people were involved, who were they, where are they presently -

It was about ten percent of the population of the quarter and some of them have fled to other red neighborhoods and others are hiding in their own.

They don't actually presently have the capacity to hold that many people even given that they're the imprisonable kind of people. He looks up Warp's prisons and sings to pay for one and corrals fifteen teleporters to go and get them all and drop them off. 

The remaining reds in the neighborhood tell the internet.

Disappearing rioters for defending their homes and livelihoods proves the Elves are just like what they have to deal with already.

Almarë posts pictures of the forensics models online to explain the process by which the responsible people were identified. "They murdered three people. When you murder people, you get arrested. Is this in fact how the Tapai would have handled a riot? We got the impression they sometimes arrested people who hadn't even been involved, and that they sometimes injured people while arresting them, and that they didn't always get a trial - or, uh, ever."

Hopefully someone thought to freeze the polls when they hit 85%.

Well, people can still fill out polls if they want, but the robots are now being distributed.

Elves post a video of the preliminary hearings for the rioters. The video is mostly just a judge explaining the process to variously confused and terrified and resentful rioters, and then appointing them attorneys, and then asking about the prison conditions and then making a face at the prosecution and declaring that no, she doesn't think they need to be in prison awaiting trial, "they can get Allspeak and someone can drop them off at the resettlement office, no wonder people don't trust us. So ordered."

The internet is still so suspicious that all their contact with the resettled is Elf-filtered and they can't just fucking email them.

That's fine. The resettlement office asks rioters their names and gives them bracelets and is there anybody they care to live with.

Some of them don't want to cooperate as far as supplying names.

- well, then they can go back to prison. Elves look very unhappy about this.

The ones who did give their names are more scared now. One person tries giving a fake name.

The administrative people seem happy to work with that. Here are bracelets someone will walk you across the street to get you settled in.

How exactly is this different from prison.

...uh, they can go wherever they want and buy things at the stores and socialize with the other reds and if they care to board a ship for the colonies? (They'll be fetched for their court date, but still.)

Can they go home.

Uh, maybe they can ask the on-duty teleporter when the on-duty teleporter isn't someone whose sister they murdered.

Look, if someone's sister shows up to make your entire family redundant someone's sister had it coming.

And yet it seems like possibly this might not convince her to take them home.

How about in the future they don't show up someplace outsiders are not supposed to be to drop off fucking robots and kidnap everybody to a mysterious incommunicado fate.

...they could've let the Tapai handle it but Prince Canafinwë did not trust the Tapai to handle it very well. They'll probably let local governments handle it in the future.

In the future they should not even BE THERE.

Yeah, the local governments were really emphatic that they shouldn't go in the red districts and they guess they understand why now. 

These are some pissed off resentful red rioters here.

Well, here are their apartments! Here is how to use your summoning computer and projector, here is how to contact anybody you might need, here is how to write messages that'll be forwarded home for you.

They write resentful pissed off complaints home in case that works.

Well, the resentful pissed off complaints are forwarded to the parties they were addressed to.

Their families report that these seem plausibly like their disappeared relatives so maybe they are alive?

The court is worried that if they send these people home they'll murder more people, but a short visit is approved because of the compelling public interest in demonstrating that they haven't been randomly murdered. A teleporter whose sister was not murdered takes them home for the visit.

A blogger corrals the visitors for an interview. The internet has mixed feelings.

About?

They really don't like the "show up incapable of self defense and get really offended when people try to kill you for doing exactly the thing that people who want them dead always suggest starting with" MO. Some of them expected better from the aliens who seemed like they might be more considerate than that and some of them are pointing out that "badly telegraphed disappearance" is better than they would have gotten from the clean castes and some of them are retorting that the clean castes avoid showing up with fucking robots in the first place because they know what the reds have to do to protect themselves.

...what do they think would be considerate handling of murders? Not arresting people at all? Whether they had a good reason and whether they ought to be in trouble for it is the sort of thing that gets discussed at trial, not the sort of thing that gets an ad-hoc judgment without any testimony in order to decide whether the arrest warrant is even issued. They had a detailed explanation, with pictures, of who had been arrested, and what for, and where they were now, up online inside six hours! They did not move forward with robots until an overwhelmingly favorable vote!

No, the considerate thing would not be being murderable near people with a good reason to try to murder you. Reds are not accustomed to a will of the majority deal. Also everybody who attacked them was pretty much expecting to die and this trials stuff is confusing. ("It's sort of perverse to ask us to vote on how we want to lose everything we have and expect us to sit down and take it because strangers picked 'damned if you do' over 'damned if you don't'," says the blogger with a championship account on Glorious Seafarers 2.)

 - okay. Well, Elves will take more care not to be around Tapai reds (all the other reds have managed not to murder them), although that's going to be really inconvenient, and they can avoid having any expectations about anyone's behavior, but if you murder people you get arrested and you get a trial.

"If you were allowed to forcibly relocate people everybody would be settled in now."

"I know. But - lots and lots of societies did that, historically, and it was pretty much always horrible, and it's easy to decide you're different and better and have a better reason but -"

"Why was it horrible?"

"Uh, people resisted and got killed, people died in transit, people lost cultural things important to them and later felt upset about it - or their descendants did... the places they were sent weren't actually equipped to do right by them... even though it had seemed obvious that they'd be better off, the people who thought that were just wrong about what they cared about or what they needed..."

"...but you can bring back dead people and replace the stuff and everybody who is actually here is doing fine."

"I think the rioters are a little unhappy."

"I was in a riot once, didn't get caught but my boyfriend at the time died. It's not, 'we want them dead', it's, 'they want us dead, they've come upon a way to do that without being buried in garbage and sewage and bodies, it has to be instantly terrifyingly expensive to even think about it because if they get a chance to do more than think they barricade the ghetto and we all burn to death in it including our baby siblings and our great great grandmas and our cats.' They didn't believe you that you're different is all."

"I don't blame them,  but we did try really hard to make it clear we were different."

"I know."

"I hope eventually it's enough."

Nod.

They finish distributing the robots.

Most of the reds come quietly.

Most?

There's some crying and scattered ineffective violence; no one else coordinates a whole murder riot.

Okay. 

And now they're all on Endorë, in a new handling center built for this, and he's clinging to Peka and observing the processing.

"They're all here now - we could put us up on the screens -"

"Yeah." He finds a celebrity gossip channel, changes all the screens to that. The celebrity gossip channel is speculating about whether Tapa got special treatment because Macalaurë is seeing Peka but that's in Quenya, they won't be able to understand it anyway, and there are so many pictures.

...the reds pay attention to that.

The bureaucrats seem vaguely tired of it. "You know her?" 

"Never seen her in my life," says the fellow he's processing, staring.

"Her name is Peka. The news's been nothing else - I'm sure the Prince is encouraging it - are you a legal adult for your species -"

"Yeah, I - she was the one with the video - I didn't watch it but somebody would've dragged me if she'd been kissing a prince in it."

"I think we're pretending to the Amenta governments that we're observing those stupid contamination procedures of theirs? So the pictures wouldn't be circulating there."

"But she's - they're - that's the important part, you lunatics, clean castes'll fuck a red now and then but they don't put it on television -"

"I think the worry is that if the governments hear about it they'll refuse to eat our food or live in our space stations and so on. Are you married?"

"Divorced -" He's still staring.

"Children?"

"No -"

"Do you need a couple minutes or something?"

"I'm fine but this is important it matters stop being - vaguely annoyed at it -"

" -oh, it's not that anyone disapproves of his choice of lovers, not at all, or thinks ill of her, it's just that all these interstellar norms are a bit new and we think he ought to marry her if he's going to prance around showing her off -"

"Prancing around showing her off is the important thing."

" - did you not believe us when we said there's no caste system here -"

"Not like that!"

"Okay." She looks up at the screen, shakes her head, smiles vaguely. "Are there people you'd like to live with -"

"- nah."

"45-N, on your left, Soron'll take you there."

And the next family in line comes up.

The murder trials in Ambaróna are televised. The attorneys for the defendants are indignant. "On Earths before they get their act together as a civilized society, they have police storm peoples' homes in the middle of the night to serve a warrant. Some of the victims think there is an intruder, and shoot at them, and then get arrested for killing a peace officer. That is what the state did here. This is lunacy. Give people another way to protect their families and I assure you they will not resort to this one."

     "Is that right?" a judge inquires of a rioter.

"- uh." There is a singing rock with the lie detection song playing at a non-irritating volume. He looks at it. "- we knew you were aliens showing up with robots, we didn't think you were - burglars -"

"Is it the case that you didn't have other options to protect your family -"

"Yeah."

"Do you feel now like you have other options to protect your family?"

"Not like, making sure they still have their jobs and everything, but somebody explained how to push the buttons that do things, yeah."

"Do you think you're likely to find you have to murder people to protect your family again -"

"...if something happens? I don't know what's going to happen, this place is confusing."

"The goal of this hearing is to figure out what we can do to prevent that situation from arising again."

".......don't show up with a delivery of everybody's nightmares?"

" - the goal of this hearing is to figure out what we can do to prevent you from killing people again. How to handle relocations elsewhere is beyond the scope of this court."

"I didn't wake up personally deciding killing people sounded like fun, we drew lots on who had to carry out the riot."

" - why?"

"Because you don't need a hundred people to scare the clean castes and whoever does it usually gets caught and killed."

"So if rioting isn't a good way to affect policy here, could it be avoided?"

"...yes?" says the rioter uncertainly.

"This court finds that the circumstances of the crime are unlikely to reoccur, that no remotely humane sentence could have deterred it, and that the victims have no preference the law pursue this beyond the extent required for public safety. You are free to go."

The rioter blinks at them and tentatively moves doorward.

No one objects to this.

...okay. He goes back to his assigned new home.

Where the verdict has been announced on some channels of television, and others are showing sports, and another is showing Macalaurë and his girlfriend LIVE at dinner downtown.

She smiles for the cameras. She kisses Macalaurë for the cameras.

The refugees eat it up.

It's weird but she's so happy and he could put up with weirder to see her so happy! (Other hims are putting up with weirder! The one with the Eclipse Rebecca sends periodic fretting messages.) He kisses her and then they go out for an evening walk and eventually he shoos the cameras.

"Don't want chaperones any more?"

"I suppose the refugees would maybe get some education on our legal system if I get arrested for breaking obscenity laws but maybe we could just avoid that."

Giggle. "You don't have royal immunity or anything?"

"I could announce we don't have obscenity laws anymore but I could not declare that they don't apply to me. - well, not without a majority vote of people who are not me -"

Giggle.

"Anyway. I think the refugees have enough information." 

"Probably. It's so sweet how much they love that you kiss me on TV though."

"It is. I was worried people might assume - given how terrible your world is -"

"No, of course not. Orange boy would swear on his beating heart that he never got within a foot of me, that's the thing they might worry about it, the on television part where you're proud to have me is important."

"It's so strange to think about people who could swear falsely."

"Shouldn't you be used to that by now?"

"I knew most people couldn't swear but then what's the point of it!"

"Some people just don't wanna swear to lies, enough that it means a little more than just saying so?"

"If you want we can put him on trial, he'd probably go to prison for ten years - it's up to you -"

"Don't you have like - custody stuff -"

"Yeah. If he wanted visitation and she wanted to see him."

"I could exert special privileges there. If you'd otherwise want him on trial and that's getting in the way."

"I mostly just want him to - not exist for me any more. I stopped going with my mother to work - I'm trying to forget his name -"

"So a trial might not really help with that. - Lórien can - or subtle artists can - do that. The name. If you wanted."

"Oh, no, the entire point is I have to do it by crowding it out with stuff that has nothing to do with him."

Kiss. Snuggle. "You will have all of forever for that."

Snuggle! "It's great."

"I love you."

"I love you too!"

"I," Eclipse Rebecca's husband complains in the template side chat, "have no idea how to ask her if she'd like children because if the answer is 'I regard myself as your property and of course you can use me for that' I will scream."

        "She'd like children," Michael says. "I was worried all of you would take forty years on that."

"Well, probably, but we should have conversations about it well in advance!"

       "Don't ask her if she'd like children if you mean 'in forty years', that's cruel."

"She could say something herself! It is very stressful how she won't say something herself!"

Beka's Macalaurë is giggling.

"What's funny?" asks Beka, flopping herself carelessly across his lap.

"My alts!" He shows her. And pets her.

Ooooh pets. She reads. "Isn't he reading her mind all the time?"

"You would think that would make these problems not be problems! I think he's overthinking it."

"Why did he get himself a me who would do the property thing if he did not want one who would do that."

"Well, there was one of you who would do that, and it wouldn't do at all for her to stay dead indefinitely, and I think he actually likes it fine but - not when it comes to kids -"

"Does he want one of the not her ones of us to ask her about it so he doesn't have to maybe scream?"

"That is a good idea. Should I suggest it? - he won't maybe scream, he won't ask her until he can cope, he is madly in love and it'd scare her and he'd never do that."

"Awwww. Yeah sure I would be happy to visit her and talk kids even if he is not going to maybe scream."

"Thank you, dear. Do you want kids someday, I am very confident in my ability to weather a variety of answers."

Giggle. "Someday! I think not as close together as Michael and his Rebecca have them. I wonder if they'd just be plain Elves or what."

Hair-ruffle. "Maybe their own kind of magical not-quite-Elf thing."

Giggle, shiver. "Also I hear Elves believe that you have to have sex every day while pregnant."

"You do! It's very important!"

Snuggle. "For maximally pretty Elfy babies or something!"

"It's for the health of the mother, I think, mostly."

"At some point I should like go meet my Elf parents."

"You haven't yet? Are they back alive?"

"I dunno, I sort of feel awkward about it. It's not like showing up on the orc planet to see Mama and Papa and all my brothers and sisters. - I brought Michael's Rebecca there once and she thinks they match her parents so my Elf parents are just some other people."

Nod. Squeeze. "Still, I think they'd like to meet you."

"Hi Mom and Dad, I murdered one of you and the circumstances of my existence were traumatic enough to provoke the other to suicide, how you doing."

Kiss. Sigh.

Kiss. Sigh. "Do you wanna go with me?"

"Would you like that?"

"I mean I could also wait till I have the nerve to show up without anybody to hide my face on but they are Elves and might care if they don't meet Kat till she's ten."

"Mmm. Okay, let's go."

She hauls herself up from lap-flopping position and makes sure Kat will be okay where she is for a while rather than bring her along to the fraught initial meeting and goes and holds his hand.

"I don't actually know where - I didn't know they were alive yet -"

"I don't know either, we'd have to ask somebody who'd know that sort of thing. Maybe they are not and I'm all worked up for no reason. But I think they could be since Mandos supposedly isn't being a dick about it any more? If they want to be?"

"Might be listed somewhere who all has been reembodied -" he checks the crystal ball -

"- doesn't look like it - you can ask Mandos to convey a message if you want -"

"I dunno what to say."

"Maybe that you thought they'd want to know they have a baby granddaughter, and you're both happy and safe."

"...yeah, that's good." Kiss.

Kiss!! "And then you can go ask your alt about babies while her silly husband frets and listens in."

Giggle. "Uh-huh."

Snuggle.

She writes up the message to appear on the crystal ball of whoever is talking to the correct set of Valar.

And she looks distressed so he distracts her afterwards.

Ooh a distraction yay.

Such a distraction!

She loves her distraction.

Okay, time to visit her Eclipse alt now?

"If you don't mind."

"Why would I mind?"

"I have no idea. Just don't like insisting - the me who has the Eclipse Rebecca must be developing so many interesting habits -"

Giggle. "Like what, what kinda habits does that inspire?"

"The thing I do is try to act like a person I would find compelling. He's acting like a different one."

"A different compelling person or a, uh, less compelling person? Isn't the whole point that she thinks being compelled is hot."

"Different compelling person. And different sense of 'compelling'."

Giggle.

"Have fun."

And Beka teleports to where her Eclipse alt is being kept.

Elentári has a planet very far away from Arda so people can get the magic-music-composing benefits without dealing with the planet they so gratefully left behind. His Rebecca is kept there.

"Knock knock!"

"Beka!"

Hi I am here to help save you from being awkward about kids with your wife!

Thank you! People who aren't me are better at eliciting complicated conditional preferences.

You know that's 'cause she likes you, right?

I am very clear on that! And usually it doesn't matter, but for children it matters very very much.

Well, I will go compensate for that.

Rebecca is feeding her Catherine in a pretty rocking chair and singing to her! "Hello Beka!"

"Hi! Whooooo's a good Kat alt you are you are you are hi," she says, pinching a baby foot between her first two fingers and wiggling it a bit. Catherine does not pause at all in her industrious eating. "Are you gonna have any more?"

"I dunno? I mean I'm not taking those potions Michael's got his Rebecca on - do you think we need nicknames like the Bells -"

"You lot do."

"Maybe my husband will pick me one! But I don't think they even have them themselves."

"They kinda don't it's dumb. Anyway Elves can just not have kids if they don't want."

"Yeah, I remember hearing that. I'm not even sure if it's sinful since they're made that way to begin with. Also he's not Catholic."

"Do you want him to want kids? I'm not totally sure how much Michael wanted them and how much he was just, yanno, failing to Elf while his Rebecca succeeded at Catholic."

"Of course! Whenever he thinks it's time. Do you think we'd have a Joanna?"

"I think that's probably how it works. He can pick if you have a boy or a girl though!"

"Is that why he has six brothers."

"I think so."

"Having seven boys would maybe be too many boys but there's already Catherine so whatever he wants will be good."

"You have more of that thing than we do. Like, we could guess which kind of thing you were but you are so much it."

"You didn't have to guess, I'm not a man."

"...well, there's subbier and less subby women, right?"

"Yeah, I guess I am one of the subbier ones?"

"And if we lived where you're from we'd still be subs but not as subby, what's the deal."

"It's nice! I mean, when things in general are nice, anyway, I didn't like it when I was supposed to give up Catherine to go live in a convent and submit to God, I'm just not that, uh, successful at Catholic. But now it's lovely, he's so good to me."

"Awwwww. That's kinda not helping me imagine it though."

"...you can do the mindreading thing too, right?"

"Yeah."

"I can ask if he'll share!" Sir is it okay if Beka reads my mind too?

- yes.

"He says it's all right." And she attempts to helpfully meditate on the belonging feeling that her mind orbits.

"- awwwwwwww."

"I might like try to explain it since apparently he can't, like, parse it when he sees it and he's being all awkward about it."

"He is?"

"Yeah he's being all hidey about it at you 'case he figures it's not dommy or something."

"...doms are allowed to have feelings too. It's not like he's only supposed to use me for sex and has to go somewhere else if he has feelings."

"Well now I guess he knows that."

"Thanks for clearing that up I guess!"

"You're welcome!" And they chat about their Catherines and their pink alt and their sex lives and their pretty Elfy surroundings and about the peculiar parent match thing and about music and then Beka goes home.

"That was nice of her to stop by."

"It was!"

"C'mere."

There she goes!

"I am enjoying this tremendously, but it - matches closely - with lots of things that in my culture are just abusive behavior. I don't think it'd improve either of our lives to do much hand-wringing over that, but if we'd found a me from a world with a closer match in expectations we would probably have suggested you to that one."

She nods and snuggles up. "Is there something else I should do to help make it less matchy?"

' - not especially? It'd help if you had the concept of abusive behavior and wouldn't put up with it but that seems like asking a lot of you."

"...there's people whose - well, I suppose everyone I knew is presently dead, but there were people whose husbands just scared them, who did what they were told out of fear instead of because they loved them and wanted to be theirs -"

Nod. "Or because they felt undeserving of better, or because they thought there had to be something wrong with them for wanting anything else -"

"...I suppose. I can't call to mind examples that I think were that but I can imagine it."

Cuddle. "The way we guard against that kind of thing is by finding it - suspect - for someone to hold so much power over another. Which is clearly not the best way."

"...how does that help?"

"...well, if you don't have power over someone you can't abuse it."

"...but how does finding it suspect help. Does it just make people so uncomfortable they avoid each other instead?"

"I think it just wouldn't work at all in a population of people from Eclipse, but with Elves it just exerts pressure to have relationships be equal, which is not a harmful thing because Elves can mostly be very happy in equal relationships. You can't, so exerting pressure in that direction would be awfully unhelpful."

"I'm not even sure how it would work. I suppose it must somehow."

Giggle. "It works fine. But so does this. But with children - we shouldn't have a baby without both giving thought to - at what moment we will be best equipped to give them a good life - and I need an answer to that from you. If I decided it pleased me to announce we were having one right now, that might be all right by you but it wouldn't be all right by the baby."

"Wouldn't it? I don't think I have ever met anyone who dwelled on wishing they were born later."

"- wished their parents had more time for them or more money so they weren't hungry? Not that money's a problem for us -"

"Sure, those, but money's not a problem and - time is trading off getting to have siblings close to their age, isn't it -"

"Yeah, the best time might very well be soon, it might be that it's better to have them all fairly close together - 'picking the right time' doesn't necessarily mean delaying -"