"Very comforting. Although I will be ever so much more comforted if you assist us in backing up Jarvis to multiple locations."

"Sure why not, you have specs for what hardware you want made?"

"Oh, yes. The main trouble is convincing Jarvis that it's worth duplicating him to Mars. I don't suppose they have instantaneous communications in the future?"

"It's the lightspeed delay that's deterring me," Jarvis explains. "A few milliseconds here or there is acceptable, but twenty minutes would be an unpleasant discontinuity. And Sherlock seems to think that confining my backups to a single planet would be insufficiently secure."

"We don't have faster than light communications, no. Sorry to disappoint. Not a thing you can do with magic?"

"Can be done with magic - yes. Can be done with magic, by me, systematically and reliably enough to hang my internal communications on - not presently. I'm working on it."

"Sorry," repeats Cam. "Could start with the moon, if you'd rather, although the moon won't hold atmosphere so I'm not planning to actually terraform it."

"The moon would be acceptable."

"Sure. I will need a place to take off from in a shuttle about twice the size of one of those intensely vintage cars to get anything to the moon."

"I'm sure that can be arranged. Perhaps when Tony is feeling a little better."

"Right."

"In the meantime, I don't think the situation is quite as urgent as Sherlock makes it out to be. I am reasonably well-defended."

"I don't have an opinion on how well-defended you are, since I am a newcomer to this situation," says Cam.

"I'll spare you another round of the argument, then. Suffice to say I don't like to take chances."

"Not with anyone else's safety, certainly," says Jarvis in the driest of tones.

Cam holds up his hands in a not touching it gesture. "Okay, next order of business is what?"

"Is you do what you like and I go introduce myself to the other one," says Sherlock. "Tony neglected to mention me because he didn't feel up to the task of explaining, but much in the same way that you can factor him in whenever you need something bought or invented, you can factor me in whenever you need something analyzed or found out. I believe you have an inkling of what I mean."

"Informed name-picking, huh? Well, I checked the internet for versions of my parents, both of whom were public employees in the United States when they were alive where I'm from, but no such luck - you have Martin Luther King Jr. and George Washington and Queen Elizabeth the Second but you don't seem to match up on minutiae - but if there is a me I would very much like to locate him."

"That sounds interesting. I'll want more data later, but for now—" he makes a gesture balanced neatly between a beckon and a wave, and heads for the elevator.

Cam goes to the elevator too, meaning to head for his claimed room.

Sherlock, of course, means to head in the opposite direction.

"Sure," says Adana, looking up from her reading of medical science in the 2000's. "Is he coming here, or should I head off to a - place or something?"

"He is just arriving at your door, in fact."