"Oh gosh, that's awful. Good thing you've got the technology to replace them, we still can't quite do that."

"It's a miserable enough process that he might wish he had an excuse to skip it, goodness knows he puts it off long enough, but yes."

"So were you really going to a grocery store or was that just part of the line?"

"Oh, I was going to the grocery store. Out of groats and cheese and wine and -" He pulls a long skinny object with glass ends out of his pocket, wiggles it, looks at the resulting floating words, and finishes, "Bacon."

"Bar sells things other than drinks. Bar sells things you can't normally get, this drink is made of a fruit that doesn't exist in my universe," she raises her glass and takes a sip, smiling at him over the rim.

"What's that?"

"Oh, I'm a senior in college right now. Pre-med. And you?"

"Imperial Service. Lieutenant, Ops. I'm in the last couple months of an assignment to the embassy on Earth, actually. It's in London, I think London is old enough that you have it already."

"...Yes, we have London. London is already old when I'm from."

"It's a nice city! Have you been?"

"Yeah, my father got his doctorate at Oxford and they ask him to talk about a thing sometimes and I usually get to come along."

"Oxford! Still exists," says Ivan, holding up one index finger authoritatively. "M'cousin's wife kept going there for lectures on things I can't pronounce. She was on the planet for unrelated reasons, gone now."

"That's great. It's a great place. Very beautiful. What kind of lectures?"

"Unpronounceable ones. She's a - engineer programmer neurologist musician polymath sort. Let's see -" He woggles his device, apparently scrolling through message records. "On Nonrecreational Applications for Dream Implants and Allied Technologies, I can pronounce that!"

"Okay, I have no idea what that means, I'm going to blame the fact that you're from more than a thousand years in the future."

"There's a brain implant people get to partake in more immersive stories than just holos, right? ...Maybe you don't have those yet. I don't remember how old they are. But they exist. So this is about things to do with those that are less fun. For some reason."

"Oh, that makes sense. I bet that would make studying things easier, if you didn't have to bring in a real one of everything or rely on pictures."

"I don't think they're widely enough adopted to base educational systems on them anywhere. Maybe some planets. That's probably not Linyabel's interest, anyway."

"Well, whatever it is, I'm sure it's productive."

"Probably. What kind of medicine do you want to do?"

"I haven't decided for sure. Probably a pediatrician or some kind of surgeon."

"If you are a pediatrician," says Ivan with mock solemnity, "do not laugh at little boys who come in with dirt all over them and bumps on their heads and laugh at them when they explain that their escape tunnel to get away from Cetagandan invaders - I think it was Cetagandan invaders - collapsed on them because their cousin did inadequate surveying before ordering said tunnel dug."

"What?"