"Mints could decide to do all kinds of things," Bella says. "The evidence suggests that the regularity of mint behavior doesn't involve rendering humans extinct - or screwing with the orbits of neighboring planets, or creating brand new species of megafauna with no evolutionary relation to other animals, or spelling their names in volcanic eruptions across the surface of Asia, or any number of other things that we could certainly notice now if they'd been done in the past. Because these don't seem to be things that are done despite however many thousands of years of opportunity, I do not expect them. Because I do not expect these events, a desire to prevent them does not mean I ought to take ethical shortcuts and spy on innocent people whose only feature of note is being a mint. I also wouldn't put a keylogger on my roommate's computer if I discovered she owned a pocketknife, just because she could decide to stab me with it overnight. The regularity of human behavior is that it doesn't usually involve stabbing." Bella shrugs. "Given the stakes at hand, I might see where you were coming from if you looked just hard enough to see if I had a history of psychiatric problems, or made a habit of distributing extremist manifestos on campus, or something, but you looked longer and harder than that even after finding no such thing."

Bella pauses, steepling her fingers.

"How'd you know to look in the first place?"