From REST in Practice: Hypermedia and Systems Architecture:

The current state of a resource is a combination of:

• The values of information items belonging to that resource
• Links to related resources
• Links that represent a transition to a possible future state of the current resource
• The results of evaluating any business rules that relate the resource to other local resources

a) why would "links to related resources" also represent the current state of a resource?

b) I also don't quite understand why "Links that represent a transition to a possible future state of the current resource" also represent the the current state.

Namely, those links represent the possibility, not the current state. Analogy would be an int variable set to value 10. It's possible that in the future this variable will get processed and set to value 100, but we don't claim its current state also includes possible future state of 100?!

thank you