Thomassian people, of all skin colors and genders, have arrived to the Summit. They're wearing a dazzling array of clothes, in ways that put no weight on gender: men and women, and etc. all in suits and gowns, the common feature being the high level of formality in everything. The first thing that they put on the agenda: who, and what, might want to move between these worlds? For thomassia, their healthcare and simple, standardized robots are their pride and joy, and happy parents and people willing to work the vast farms are 2 things that they're really, really hoping that the people from this other world could help them with.

Green sent a much smaller contingent into the cave itself, though there are support staff hanging back in electronic communication.

"We'd love robots. What do you mean by... happy parents? What good does it do you for people to go to your world and raise children there?" asks Shrey of Alund, the lead Green diplomat.

"Well, we're trying our very best to make childcare as stress-free and supported as possible, but we still require rather hefty fertility subsidies, together with many parents experiencing burnout and finding the work quite draining."

"We had an issue with fertility for a brief period, before the subsidies, but having people who are much more enthusiastic around children would make things much easier for us, and give us peace of mind about any hypothetical fertility crisis."

"Glad to hear that you'd love robots! We can talk quite a bit about the various robots we have to offer you."

"I'm sure you can attract some people who want to start families if the living conditions are appealing enough, we aren't having a fertility decline problem at all. Currently most people do most things we'd like robots for with trained animals or manned equipment; our robotics tech doesn't fail gracefully enough to be trusted with unsupervised labor."

"Wow, that's glad to hear. Thomassian parents live quite richly by our standards, so we'd be ecstatic about people starting families in our parent cities."

"Trained animals? What are the trained animals doing? It sounds like they might be useful for things on our end, that require more flexibility than robots."

"Parent cities?" asks Shrey.

"The trained animals do things like household chores, deliveries, transportation, playing with children," says one of the other diplomats.

"Well, we built cities designed from the ground-up to be kind to both children and parents. Just because our traditional cities proved a bit unfriendly to young children. Not enough many spaces for playing in, that kind of thing."

"Oh, we still do household chores by hand at the moment. It really helps to have everything designed to minimize the time needed or chores, though. Deliveries and transportation are things that robots do spectacularly well. We're not sure we get what playing with children means; they still need parental supervision, right?"

"Is your issue with fertility... longer-standing than the tendency for your normal cities to be unfriendly to children? It seems like those problems could contribute to one another... are people expected to move out when they're grown, or their children are? That would also introduce a lot of friction to starting a family..."

"A lot of our appliances are designed to be easy for a dog or a cat to operate so that once the animal is trained the human doesn't need to interact with the situation or even remember the chore needs to be done, at least unless something odd is going on. It's advisable to have an adult within shouting distance of a younger child, and closer than that for a baby, but animals have a lot of patience for repetitive or active play that adult humans often don't."

"Well, we're not 100% sure what happened? Our fertility issue was fairly brief and recent, and people had plenty of children in the same cities just a few generations ago. People are indeed expected to move out at a fairly young age. It's mostly because it's such a fantastic adventure to move out, really. Maybe moving out less would help? Someone's probably written something helpful here..."

"Designing appliances for cats and dogs sounds awesome! It also sounds like it'd be a lot of fun to have animals doing repetitive or active play with kids. We've written stories where people have, like, dogs that they can pet and hug in the hospital. But we just can't pull off getting animals trained like that, for whatever reason."

"...you have dogs, domesticated dogs, and you can't train them to be petted and hugged in a hospital setting?" says Shrey incredulously.

"Well, we have a very few, but they're exorbitantly expensive and rare, and we keep running into behavioral issues. We're not sure what's so difficult about it!"

"Behavioral issues like...?"

"They're often randomly barking and waking up the patients, and they leave the patients and walk around constantly, and they knock things over, and they bring in so much dirt and dust! Into a hospital! We've really struggled with training animals, and there are tons of hospital volunteers happy to be there for patients, so we've largely given up on having them in hospitals. But it would be ideal."

"You... do have to bathe dogs, if they're dirty, they aren't like cats who will take care of most low-grade mess themselves, but everything else sounds like your dogs aren't bred or trained well enough for the task, yes. We can source some hospital therapy dogs as a diplomatic gift, though they'll be trained on commands in Green languages and their handlers will need to learn those."

"We do bathe dogs, they just run around and get dirty the moment you take your eyes off! That's a fantastic gesture, we greatly appreciate it. I also think that our handlers would be able to learn your languages and use your commands."

"In response, we feel like it'd be fitting to build several thomassian model farms as a gift, with a modern farmhouse and modern agricultural equipment, built for you to learn from our practices and technology. Does that sound like it would be of interest to you?"

"You said you were having trouble with finding people to work your farms, too, is that likely to be an issue?"

"I think we could easily find a few people happy to start working on a farm in Green, just because it's a novel world? Although we were mostly hoping to have the farmhouses be a gift to your people, and your farmers."

"Presumably we'd need Thomassian help to learn how to operate the model farm as intended - if you don't have weeding goats and herding dogs and all your equipment is unfamiliar the farm would in short order be useless or just like all the existing Green farms."

"Well, yes, we'd send in those too. We don't have a shortage of technical instructors, that we can guarantee. Although the focus would mostly be on the luxuries of the thomassian farmhouses, at least in beginning; introducing our technology would come a bit later."

"Actually, we think that our construction technology would also be another thing you'd find great use for. We've managed to significantly standardize buildings, affording us considerable economies of scale, and making our workers build impressively quickly."

"That's an impressive achievement, but since we don't already have a strong international standard for buildings, adding one more way to build them wouldn't actually get us there. I'm sure we can mine the designs for insights, though."

"Huh. Well, we're happy to be of help! Speaking of mining designs for insights: what are your nuclear reactors like, have you done anything you'd consider awesome with them? We're especially proud of our public-domain nuclear reactor designs; I'm sure you'll find tons of things that you'd find incredibly useful within them."

"Public-domain as opposed to what?"

"Copyrighted or proprietary? Like, some people have copyright in some of their studies and courses? It's very niche, but it can happen."

"Huh. If we have that at all it's very obscure indeed. None of us are nuclear power plant specialists but we can certainly rustle up some experts who'd love to talk to yours."

"How charming. Now, beyond that: is there anything that you wish you had larger export markets for? Do you have any needs that you're hoping that we'd be able to help you serve better?"

"Do you have a large market for fiction, a way to revive cryonically frozen people, or good human genetic engineering technology?"

"That would be no on the 2 more consequential questions, unfortunately. Although reading alien fiction would be deeply fascinating; personally, I'm feeling like our fiction has been getting just a bit stagnant."

"Well, we have lots of people who love producing fiction. Anything on space travel?"

"Not really. We're constantly speculating about transition to space-based Internet, in particular, but our system of microwave transmitters simply works too well at the moment. And although we love a good challenge, it just felt kind of pointless when the rockets eventually came down again? We've basically put it on hold until we get a good idea for what to do once we're up there."

"Understandable. We might be a little ahead of you on that then, though I expect much of the enthusiasm for space to be drained into enthusiasm for what we can transmit through this cave."

"That was quite the discovery! And who knows. Maybe satellite internet would end up making sense, using your tech."

"It's increasingly popular! I don't know if we ever used microwaves for it. We mostly use those for warming up food."

"Microwave cooking is actually a growing hobby among us! We use tons of accessories that help a microwave replace other cooking equipment. We think it's kind of awesome to work around that particular limitation, actually."

"...I'm again not quite sure what you mean. A lot of Greens like to cook but the microwave is mostly for ingredient prep - melting chocolate, defrosting vegetables - or for bringing something that was already cooked to a pleasant temperature."

"Wouldn't it be extremely limiting to not even have the special microwave browning pan? Like, it'd be pretty impossible to make even something as simple as a pizza without any of the accessories. You can't be doing home cooking by just beaming in thermal energy through a microwave, right?"

"...right, pizzas would be made in ovens."

"An entire oven, in your own house? Isn't that just unnecessary? For those not living in isolated areas, of course. Or people who are really hard-core about home cooking, to be clear!"

"Most houses have ovens in Green. There are SROs that don't, but those would usually have access to a shared oven. But if you're only cooking for one you can also get a small oven that doesn't take up more space than a typical microwave."

"Huh. I've never heard about those microwave-size ovens, sounds like it'd be niche. Or an SRO, actually."

"SROs are living arrangements, most centrally for teenagers and young adults who are having friction with their parents but some other sorts of people also like them, where each occupant gets a bedroom, sometimes an attached bathroom too, and all other features one expects a house to have are shared in common, often supplemented by the management."

"Huh. Maybe it's a thing with us? I've ever heard about someone living in just a bedroom without even an attached bathroom, just because basic income lets you afford to get the bathroom as well."

"Most Green countries haven't been able to implement basic income yet. I think the appeal of not having one's own bathroom would be neither needing to clean it nor have a cleaner come into one's space."

"Maybe a few thomassians also do it like that, then. It seems like an extreme step to take because you don't want to clean your bathroom or have a cleaner enter it, either. But maybe you really dislike cleaning in general?"

"...do a lot of Thomassians like cleaning?"

"They don't despise it enough to avoid having bathrooms in their own homes so that they can avoid it! Saying that, I feel like there's some kind of context there I've managed to miss..."

"- on Green, children are both much less inclined to do chores such as cleaning than adults are, and much more upset about having strangers in their space. While they're little their parents generally override them to have a clean home. But teenagers who move into an SRO often still have both characteristics in force."

"Maybe thomassians don't have particularly strong needs for personal space, then. I think that's were the difference might come from, because thomassian teenagers would just have someone clean things for them and be fine with that."

"There are Green ones like that too but it's not the stereotype."