Perhaps so. I can't quite imagine but then I suppose it would be foolish to imagine that humans are so like me that I would be able to understand all their preferences.

Well, the books might not say, if they haven't thought of such a thing, but presumably there would be an opportunity to ask them first.

Indeed. Though before you explained I had planned to grant it to them without first asking.

I think asking would be better.

Agreed, asking costs little. I just had not imagined that the answer was not a foregone conclusion.

It's polite anyway.

The etiquette of your culture seems to differ. Among my people if one knows another's preferences asking them for confirmation is simply wasting their time.

I think your culture may have a much higher rate of justifiable knowledge of others' preferences. Elves generally keep some thoughts private even from spouses. Gifts are often surprises, but higher-stakes things customarily are not.

That makes sense. It seems like humans are more likely to follow your people's norms on this matter. I'll have to consider that when designing things for them. I wonder what other things they keep secret.

It may be difficult to find out unless they write fiction about examples of the general cases or have a lot of variance in secret keeping behavior.

Indeed. Do you know how your chip works?

Not in much detail. They're natural, in our species, not implanted.

Without relevant knowledge on your part I would be surprised if I could make good use of your chip architecture. The real difficulty in uploading is in matching the physical structure to digital or mental structure. It would be very surprising if your brain built around the chip as it is, was laid out similarly enough to humans that the knowledge would be applicable. Perhaps you meant something different though.

No, that's what I meant. I'm still feeling out the limits of your abilities.

My people have been surveying the biospheres of millions of worlds for many millions of years and thus have extensive knowledge of biology, including that of species with very different biochemistry than our own. In general we have not been confronted with others who possess superior technology and have not concerned ourselves with analyzing their technology or deriving information from it.

And certainly don't know how to explain it to someone else.

Indeed, I cannot explain technology do I do not myself understand. I could explain my own technology, though some of the specific technical details I'd have to look up. I'm much more personally knowledgeable about biology because I was training to help my clan with survey work, and I'd like to think I could explain what I know of biology.

I didn't mean that you didn't know how it worked, I mean that while you know how it works you don't have practice explaining it to members of other species.

You are the first person not of my own species I've ever spoken to. I have not had an opportunity to practice. I'm sorry if I'm doing a poor job of explaining things.

Oh, not at all, under the circumstances you're doing beautifully. You switched to pictures when the ring glowing didn't help to get us communicating in a higher bandwidth mode and I feel like most of the things you say are very informative. They just don't seem to have been arranged in an order in the way I'd anticipate if you'd met lots of aliens before.

It would be useful to have your help in determining how to explain things to the humans we rescue. Especially if they're rescued before the humans become aware that their world is in imminent danger.

I'm happy to help with that.

How many humans do you anticipate being able to rescue?

By teleportation I don't expect to be able to rescue more than a thousand without an unacceptable risk of discovery. There were about eighty humans included in the building I scanned for books. I'm currently trying to determine how closely their world is being observed. If the observation is minimal I might be able to scan upwards of three billion people. If the observation is heavy I might be limited to as little as a hundred million. For comparison their population is between seven and eight billion.

Thank you for the comparison number.

I assume you have evaluated the prospect of convincing your mother not to kill them. Perhaps they could be prevented from developing mindspeech and be rendered inoffensive?

Would that it were the case, but my words would be those of a disobedient child and I have no confidence that my desire to protect the humans would survive the drugs I would need to take before I would be taken seriously.