"You're in the hospital? Are you okay?" Thellim does not ask.
"Around 5% of our population goes to a Quiet City and only a quarter of those still end up unhappy enough to retire to cryonic suspension," Thellim does not argue back, "and if the connection between our carefully designed systemic properties and that number were obvious to your version of Civilization, it would have already fixed its problems."
She's just heard something much more attention-grabbing than that.
[I... I'm sorry. I'm starting to think that I might have traveled MUCH further between worlds, to a much stranger place, than I realized,] and I'm having to spend more of my effort on not just deciding this is a dream and trying to wake up. [Where I come from, entire species, in general, including the human species, have their shapes and forms encoded by genetic information in tiny DNA strands. The content of these DNA strands was shaped entirely by a multi-hundred-million-year process in which copying errors over the genetic information would occasionally give rise to variant sections of information, genes, that produced organisms that replicated and reproduced faster than others. In the human species, reproduction occurs when a male penis emits lots of tiny DNA-carrying cells into a female vagina, one of which combines with a larger cell from the woman, each of which carries half the genetic information to form the child. I can talk later about why the female doesn't just use all of her own genetic information to construct the child, if that part seems counterintuitive; or our tentative theory about why there would be differentiated men and women, instead of just women sharing genetic information with each other, though I agree that it otherwise sounds like a hole in the theory and we probably wouldn't have predicted it a priori either. On our world's view of things, it doesn't make sense to talk about any particular part of an organism being specially for reproduction, like the genitals; hands are equally organs made for reproduction, they're for using tools to get the resources needed to feed babies. People on my world care about finding opposite-sex mates and having children with them because it's literally the only thing that every cell in their bodies is designed to do, and if that's not true here then even though the people are shaped like me and even though the houses look like houses in my world, I don't understand any of the forces that this world is an equilibrium of, and people turn into psions or mages at a lunar eclipse and need to not eat any food with calories but it apparently doesn't matter if there's glycerol reserves in their liver keeping their blood sugar up and I, I, I'm sorry, I won't have a breakdown now because it won't be useful but I need a lot of native textbooks and I need to be able to read them. I'll take out a loan if that's what's required to get the language faster. I don't know where I am inside reality anymore. The part where there was gravity and breathable atmosphere fooled me.]