"... I would be very wary of trying to do brain surgery on any of you because all my medical training has to do with a different species which seems metabolically dissimilar. But if 'exploded' is destroyed enough I could maybe design something."

"You can pull up my chip and see if exploded does it. They're magic, it's hard to say."

"I don't know how good his data recovery mechanisms are," Cam explains, "or what the chip data structures are like, so I can't just see if I can get anything off an exploded chip."

"Okay. Maybe ask Melian?"

"Melian being?"

"Queen of Doriath, thataways but you won't be able to find them. She's a Maia."

"Is that the place I couldn't send drones to survey?"

"I don't know what a drone is but at a guess, yes."

"Little autonomous thingy that goes places and sends back pictures. I wanted to scope out the planet before everybody landed."

"Doriath's protected by Melian's magic. If you try to go there you just find yourself going elsewhere. It's also protected by lots of other stuff."

"Well," Cam says, "then how do people ask her things?"

"Go to the border, swear an oath not to harm anyone inside Doriath's borders, swear you haven't to your knowledge been in contact with the Enemy, come on in."

"...okay," says Cam, "how am I supposed to ask her things?"

"Does that not work for you?"

"I do not have a chip. Well, not your kind of chip, I have one to operate my computer."

"Are chips the reason oaths work? I always thought they just did."

"Yep, chips are it. At least according to the ex-Valinorians. I can't oaths. I guess I could try to install a chip in myself but it seems like a bad idea, honestly, and has not started seeming like a better one today."

"Osanwe's very useful. Backups I have mixed feelings about."

"Yep. Also my can't-make-minds thing might mean I can't make a functioning chip at all even if it starts blank."

"But on the bright side it means that people like you can't torture us on a whim!"

"Yes. It does mean that."

"I am a big fan of that." They cross a street. She points at a cleared-of-rubble area in the middle of a bombed-out section of the city. 

"All right, what's the grocery list?"

"Rationed items list, most recent, begins with 'given current wartime conditions'..."

Cam makes one. "Relative quantities?"