"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?"

There is very definitely something of approval on his face. "The Valar are not knowledgeable about golem programming."

"I mean, I guess if they can just stop it in its tracks or break it should it do something unexpected, that's a useful safety? Complicated golems are often activated with a couple puppet etchers on them ready to scratch out instructions and break them if they do something unexpected. The problem is when they usually behave like they're supposed to and then do something weird. Or when the maker's careless, but I'm not."

"I have confidence in your caution. They can in fact just stop it in its tracks if it does something odd, so there's reason to prefer complicated ones awaken when one is paying attention."

"Are they going to supervise it for, like, weeks? It can take a long time to evaluate golem stability beyond a shadow of a doubt and I have very unclear information about how the Valar allocate their time, like, on the one hand they are a two-digit number of deities who live weeks' travel away from what I understand to be your major population center, on the other hand they're consulted on architecture."

"Were consulted on architecture, back when Tirion was built. They used to have a much more hands-on approach and live here and mediate all our disputes and help build our houses and let people petition for their preferred weather and so forth, and eventually everyone reached the conclusion that this was unwise. So now they're at a distance that makes them not unapproachable but not easily called over to settle whose property an apple that has fallen from a tree has landed on."

"Oh, I see. But they're not dispositionally opposed to golem supervision."

"New things make them nervous. New things that could kill someone and ruin Tirion's perfect record would definitely get supervision."

"Literally nobody has died here? Ever?"

"No one has ever died in Tirion. A few people have died in all of Valinor - mostly in remote places in accidents where help could not be summoned in time - and in general the dead are swiftly returned to life when they do die, so it's not a catastrophe. But Tirion itself has never seen death."