"If you give yourself the attentional capacity to have ten conversations over osanwë at once you'll be slightly worse at killing time just because you can read books faster and so forth, but I think it's really that after a couple thousand years of using that, it's disconcerting for there to be only a few people to talk to at all."

"Maybe I'd be fine. Introvert."

"Gotten anywhere on chips that don't do remote backups?"

"Nope. I was trying to figure out if there was a way to chiplock them but I think that just doesn't work conceptually, you have to be conscious to authorize things by chip... it'd only be an improvement if the only thing anyone ever wanted to do with chips was fork themselves."

"Whereas what'd really be lovely is the opposite, something that gives the cognitive enhancements without making everyone with a chip a hostage of anyone who knows how they can be used for forking."

"Yeah. Complicating matters is that yours and the kind from my world probably differ in various ways and neither's very well-understood."

"Who developed a way to read to and write from them, did they die in the destruction of Valinor..."

"Findekáno. He's alive."

"And my world's him is on a different ship so we can't ask even alternate-universe-version consent for a fork - how long did it take, how long'll it take to reproduce..."

"About six months, but it was very hush-hush and he had other work to keep on top of."

"Then my fathers can probably get it working faster than that, see if they can get anywhere from there. Though I know they poked at the problem a couple times in the past, so it's not trivial. Why'd Findekáno end up doing it, is his version more into blessings-design than mine..."

"I don't know much about his hobbies."

"I'm also mildly surprised he was willing to hand you something that would make - that strategy to end the war - more appealing -"

"I think he didn't know I had an offer on the table? I'm not totally clear on internal information dissemination habits of Elves. He was appalled when he realized."

"Let's hope we can reproduce what he did without him, then, he'd probably find it unpleasant to work with me."

"I'm certain he'd consent to a fork if it helped fix it, but we shouldn't need it, and -

- at a guess, internal information dissemination would have looked like 'my alt kept that from him so he wouldn't prevent it', I hope my alt didn't keep it from him specifically so I could get the work that required it out of him -

- I realize this is very far down the list of horrifying things about the situation, and unlike many of the others it's fixable without any imported magic, but ugh."

"Yeah."

"Is this touching on something you'd prefer I not figure out or just things you'd prefer not to talk about, because I can drop it either way but in one case I'm going to keep puzzling over it..." and he's already guessing a lot of pieces - Findekáno invented a way to resurrect people, it was not the case that he was keeping things from him at that point -

"I have no particular reason to care whether you know or not, I merely don't think althood is necessarily a guarantee that I can spill one hundred percent of relevant beans."

"They were involved, they were taking out all of the war's psychological pressure on each other in a way that wouldn't have impeded effectiveness but that was immature and probably unpleasant for everyone involved and adjacent - did I die -"

"You were in a city when it died. Enemy had a biowarfare hobby.

Everybody's chips were missing."

"I wouldn't have stayed home if I'd known what I was risking, but - everyone in a city -"

"It wasn't the only city-sized casualty."

"We knew it was going to be ugly - we were at one point considering wiping out the orcs - but we might have been underestimating it."