It is larger and, well, prettier than the one at the palace, and he recognizes some of the tools but not all, and Fëanor turns around and recognizes him and says hello, it's midday so I hope you've at least eaten, how would I say that in your language?

"Hello, it's midday so I hope you've at least eaten," echoes Kib, by now pretty competent at the telepathy translation thing. "And yes, I had breakfast. Also! I hear you invented writing and that is really cool!"

Kib pulls the shades off his face, runs them down into the palms of his hands. "There's a bunch of kinds of servants. These are shades I made out of shadows - the same shadow twice, actually - and you can do the same thing to patches of light. I'm operating them manually and using them to keep the bright off my face outdoors but they can also be programmed and move ridiculously fast when told to go at top speed, crossing a continent in seconds. I can also render animals obedient to verbal instructions - I had a bird here but I let it go except it'll come if I call it now in case I think of something I want a bird for. And there's also puppets, automata, and golems, which are all hardware servants that are respectively operated manually - like I'm doing with the shines - or do the exact same thing over and over, or respond to their environments in programmed ways. I've been working on a scribe golem, Maitimo's idea."

"And how do you make them?" HIs accent is not bad.

"Procedures are different for all of the kinds; it currently seems likely that only people from my world can do it for some reason. Maitimo tried making a shine, I telepathied him how -" It's like this - "- and it didn't work and I don't think he was making any mistakes, and we briefly thought Tyelcormo might be able to do it but it turns out he's doing something different from what I can do with an animal."

"And golems?"

"Basically more or less complex sculptures covered all over with writing describing how they're supposed to work. There is actually no reason a non-servantmaker couldn't sculpt and program a golem. I'd just have to wake it up. You could program shines and automata too, I'd just have to move the shine over its instructions or install the instructions into the automaton. And I can tell animals to obey other people, too. It's puppets you can't get any direct use out of."

"The golems seem to be by far the most useful to us, if they can really copy books and do all repetitive labor. How much complexity? Can you show me a sample program?"

"I brought my notes on the scribe. Golems have the most complicated minimum viable program, though, they need at least one sense and at least a couple things to do in response to well-defined sensory input." He pulls out his scribe notes and sketches and reads some of the better-developed sections of program.

"That seems much much simpler than our process for magic objects but similar in many ways," he says. "Are there algorithms for complex golem tasks?"

"What do you mean? If you make them fancy enough you can get them to talk..."

"Repeat specific scripted lines? Or more than that? I mean, how much data are you working with, do you store it or handle it in any way..."

"For the program, you have to fit it all onto the golem surface. For the sense data, though, that it stores without using up any physical repository. You have to program them specially to give them perfect memories but it's doable. And they can be more involved than reciting scripts, although there's none that claim to have internal thought experiences or anything worrying like that. Really sophisticated talking golems are not common though."

"Fascinating. So these we can design from your example and then you have to give it a magic tap to make it work?"

"Yes, although you'll have to use something other than the puppet etcher I'm making to carve the program in. And incorrectly programmed golems can be quite dangerous so I'll want to check over the programs first until I'm sure you have the hang of it."

"Do you have any examples we can observe from? Dangerous in what ways?"

"I don't have any golems or full programs on hand, I wasn't really packed for a trip. And they move around with force that's pretty uncorrelated with how they're built, they're really strong unless you make them out of balsa wood or something - if there's a wrong instruction it might just, I don't know, my scribe could swap blue for red when it's doing colors or something, but every now and then someone makes one that can rampage down the street breaking windows and people's ribs."

"Ah, all right." Danger on the level of 'property damage' not 'scorched earth', that's something.

"...One could also make a golem capable of setting things on fire? People do die in golem and automaton accidents? Compared to what exactly is this something?"

"The Valar will probably not let us do things that are sufficiently dangerous, and would definitely object to us doing those things in a way that risked bystander deaths. It does not sound like golems are dangerous enough to be prohibited, but they could be."

"There's safety checks. Scribe's not gonna be able to walk, if it glitches it cannot glitch its way down the street."

"I am sure the scribe will be received with delight. They may want to supervise things that could glitch their way down the street."

"...them and what knowledge of golem programming?"