Isabella manages to set her teacup back down without spilling any.

"Appropriate programming here of course represents tons of skilled labor, but still."

"But you only have to do the skilled labour once, correct? And then anyone can use the resulting tool, much like one does not have to be a blacksmith in order to use a hammer?"

"Yep. Unfortunately your local languages have never been programmed into a translator, so this isn't immediately useful to you - like, they resemble some Earth languages but not to the point of good mutual intelligibility. Unless there's an actual Japanese and an actual Greek and so on floating around too there would be massive frontloading to get it into a computer."

"I'm not sure how to explain most of them without context... hmm... Okay, so one things computers can do is talk to each other. In addition to the electrical grid there is what is called the Internet, which is a network of all of the computers that there are, talking to each other whenever this would be useful. People send each other mail that way, or just talk aloud over it. You can get basically the entire corpus of human knowledge and creativity off the Internet. A computer can store anything that you can render as information - text, trivially, but also pictures, including moving ones, and audio recordings. Programs can turn charts of raw data into pretty graphs or models of the solar system or whatever. Banking is totally automated. You can order delivery pizza online. I think you can still do that, anyway, I don't live on Earth myself, I'm a demon and I live in Hell and have no need to be brought pizza."

"So... Mostly, it's much more efficient communication, along with visualization of existing data? If that's all you're using the ability to have machines do mental work for, I'm not very impressed."

"They don't have minds. They are not people. They are not creative. They can only do what they're programmed to do. 'Mental work' is not a natural category."

"Yes, but we already have such things as artillery charts for sighting in cannons and tables of logarithms for celestial navigation. There are many important calculations that could be eliminated or automated by this sort of device, and you use it to order food?"

Cam shakes his head. "The very triviality of it is one of the most important features. People use the 'net - it's actually the 'extranet' now, the 'internet' is the single-planet version but people live on the moon and Mars these days - to do everything. Yes, including order pizza, and look up song lyrics, and settle arguments about what year the Vietnam War ended, and share knitting patterns, and figure out the bus schedule between Phoenix and Tucson, and play stupid little timewaster games, and see what diseases their symptoms that are probably nothing correspond to, and teach themselves to play the ukelele, and collect the complete works of Shakespeare, and warn each other about incoming earthquakes, and subvert government information suppression - no specific individual thing on that list is that important, sure. Shakespeare is maybe important but regular libraries were distributing him pretty effectively before the internet. People have been subverting governments for millennia. But if you add it all up it's a fucking miracle, I tell you."

"...As far as I know the moon the shamans worship and the moon people live on are different moons. But yes! Earth has a moon. People live on it."

"How would you even get to the moon? Do people in your world have the ability to teleport to places that they can't otherwise travel to?"

"No. I mentioned vehicles? Flying vehicles which hold air in and can escape the Earth's gravity."

"How do you fly when there's no air to fly in?"

"Not with flapping. Propulsion."

"There are such things as propeller-driven airships in my world. They have a maximum operating altitude far short of the moon. Even if the crew doesn't succumb to hypoxia, there's an eventual point at which the air is too thin for the gasbag to provide any more lift."

"That's not the kind of propulsion I mean. In their simplest form, spaceships are propelled by explosions. If you show me an appropriate outdoors location I can show you a little model rocket."

"I've seen rockets before during firework shows. You say you built one large enough to carry people to the moon? And your planet survived?" She raises an eyebrow.

"In a word: yep."

"My sympathies for all the people lost to that particular engineering project."

"A couple spaceships blew up in early days but overall they're quite safe. They don't create massive craters, or anything, if that's what you're thinking."

"Apparently your world has better workplace safety standards than mine."

"Wouldn't surprise me a bit."

"Any chance of me being able to come to your world if and when you leave? It seems to have a number of advantages."