"I didn't see you do that either."

"- how would you do it."

"With this." He holds up his everything. "Or with paper, but we mostly don't use paper anymore."

"Oh. Well we do it with our - with the thing in our heads where information is."

"...I don't understand."

"Dwarves don't have it. Maybe you people don't have it. Elves - and orcs since orcs were Elves - have a thing in our heads. It has - it has us on it, you can get a person back as long as you have it, if they die. And you can use them to talk to people, and buy things, and add words to a dictionary."

"You have computers in your heads?"

"Are those computer things?"

"I don't know. If it's not that I don't know what it is. This is a little computer," he says, pointing at the everything. "It doesn't - have me on it - but it can talk to more things like it, and do money and dictionaries."

"Then maybe we have computers in our heads. We don't know how to build the things we have in our heads, they are complicated. We were made with them."

"Maybe they aren't computers, I don't think computers can - grow -"

"I know someone who has one for her sister who died, do you want to see?"

"...okay."

She sets off down a side street.

He follows her, nibbling his kabob. He pockets the stick when he's done.

And she comes to a house and waits, not knocking; after a minute another Elf pops out. 

"Hi!" says the second Elf. "You are Nelen of the third planet?"

"- it's called Amenta. The planet. I'm Nelen."

"I'm Thiaben. You wanted to see -" And she pulls it out; it's in a locket kind of thing. It does look like a computer chip. 

He squints at it. He takes a picture. "This was - in your sister's head?"

"Yes." She taps the back of her neck. "It's here."

"It just grows there?"

"Yes. By - by a hundred-forty-four days after you decide to have a baby the baby will have enough chip to save if you die then."

"It looks like metal."

"Bodies have metal in them. That's why you should eat green things."

"Our bodies have some metal but not - pieces of it."