Eventually, thanks to stubborn tradition and globalization, everybody’s family name is either Li or Smith. There are some people in San Francisco named Smith-Li but nobody likes them.

Smith men only want to marry Li women and so goes the reverse, which means that while percentages fluctuate, they stay at about fifty-fifty for the next twelve thousand years.

Then one day, Smith Nakhit pings the downtown courthouse construct and demands to change her name–not to Li, not even to the apocryphal Smith-Li, but to Jones.

And it totally catches on! Everybody’s named Jones now! So that’s good.