"Sure, we can slow down."

Slowing down is a good approach to apply to dinner.

They get dessert too. Cheesecake.

“What's Earth like, compared to Mars now and Earth then?”

"A lot of it's preserves and reenactments one way or another - one of the things you can't finagle even if you're a superintelligence is, like, 'authentic Roman ruins, but on Mars', you know? So things - happen less, there, a lot of stuff is protected. I mean things happen but they don't sprawl the same way, you'd probably recognize some buildings and some nature there. Wildlife's wilder because there's all the species and not just ones that were brought in and engineered to fit on purpose. All the groups of people who don't want high levels of Sing meddling concentrate there, like the conservative religious people, plus people who geek out on history and nationalism and nature. But you can still find all the amenities, it's a nice place."

“I'll probably want to see some original nature and some history sometime, but not soon. Do you predict people are going to like it better there and wake them up on Earth instead of Mars?”

"I don't personally but sure, there's sleepers who wake up on Earth."

“Do you-in-general have to be prepared for people from lots of different times and backgrounds and know what they would expect?”

"People get matched to acclimators by Sing, or an algorithm it wrote or something, so it's not a job that requires a lot of training or anything. But there's some people who got cryonically frozen long before the Quiet War, they're different, and a handful who've decided to skip a few decades since then and come back up and they're different from ones around your time too. I think not by as much as being from a different country or whatever."

“Why do people decide to skip a few decades?”

"Usually they don't but sometimes they're waiting for something and really don't want to do the waiting part."

“Seems like a lot of confidence to put in the future turning out how you expect, and most people you know are going on without you…”

"It's really uncommon, there are just billions of people."

“Mm.”

Dessert being disposed of, he asks, “Got any more Castle Lifestyle you'd like to show off?”

"It's not at its castleiest, I don't schedule events while I'm working. Hmm, you haven't tried smart music yet."

“What's that? Or rather, in which way is it smart?”

"There's a range. At its simplest it's not much better than the internet radio stuff you might remember, it queues new songs based on what your tastes are and learns them based on how you react. The smartest music is invented note for note based on how you're responding though. You can do that in groups and it'll find a balance point between whoever's there, it's incredibly danceable."

“That sounds like I will never again have to try to find music through inadequate genre labels!”

"Yes. The nightmare is over."

“Can the invented kind have lyrics?”

"Once it gets to know you, but that's one area where it can sometimes be less good than the prewritten stuff. People do still write music."

“So one way or another I can say I want, say, something musically and thematically like Rise by Katy Perry except about straightforwardly positive achievement rather than not being beaten down?”

"If you specify things in advance it'll find or compose a poem and then it can do the music to that in real time, it's when it needs to do lyrics on the fly that it's less good."

She clicks her tongue and a beat starts up.

Okay yes that is a good match at least so far.

Musical layers add on. A voice sings. It's just what he asked for.