"Thank you, it'd make my life a lot easier to get a ride out of here."

"I'm happy to help! But it'll be... Two, maybe three more days, I think. Two if the prototype works well."

"I might still get home faster by waiting than I would if I left now!"

"And definitely more comfortably. And safely. Meanwhile, want to watch more documentaries? You can learn things and figure out what's most important to teach people for me at the same time!"

"That sounds great! You should talk to some other people about your curriculum but I can figure something out for you to start with."

She can show all the documentaries he can possibly want. Some of them edge into proper lectures, with lesson plans and everything.

Chemistry! Robots! Programming! Orbital mechanics! Anthropology! History of WWII! Charles Darwin and Evolution! Game theory! Making big boats! Mines that are miles deep! How a supermarket works! U.S. Government 101!

"The one about the government is one of the most immediately useful to us, since we have a society and knowing how other people coordinated their societies is useful. We should definitely learn about chemistry as soon as possible, too. I liked learning about game theory, I think it should be on your curriculum. I think you should put the thing about how we weren't made by gods after you show people how to do useful things and show off how advanced you are, otherwise they won't listen, but you should teach them. Oh, but don't call it evolution, call it Charles Darwinism, because we should honor him by remembering his name. Charles Darwin. He found out there were no gods and it's been hundreds of years since anyone's said his name, that's horrible. And you explain all the other things, too, and tell us who came up with robots and programming. ...Maybe not supermarkets right now, it's just mean to tease us with all that food we can't have!"

"Huh, okay. Do you think associating things to their inventors, or important people, will help people learn and remember it?"

"I think it's important to honor the people who invented those things if you know who they were. No one deserves to be forgotten but those people were inventors who changed the world for billions of people and they deserve it even less than everyone else."

"It's going to be hard to remember everyone forever unless I figure out how to make you humans stop dying entirely and you all have lots of kids for a long time."

Vaayo breathes deeply and tries not to be sick.

"I know. But."

"...If I read as much as possible from the libraries and I remember as many people as I can, would it help?"

"You'll have to forget them in sixty years."

"I can make a huge book of people. And read it again. And show it to other people."

"Please. That would be good. Then even when we stop talking about one for a while someone can go back to the book and find out about them later. ...It'll have to be a really big book, won't it, to fit billions of people's lives, even if you only give short summaries."

"About ten thousand books worth of book, for one billion people. I don't know how many different people I'll be able to find anything about. Some old temples kept long lists of the dead, dozens of books covering hundreds of years. If I can find the old copies of those it will help a lot. I'll do my best."

That is a long-term project, though, and not extremely urgent compared to getting a tech base up and running.

"Thank you. We'll just... work at the rate we can, you find out about more people when you can and our bards will write songs about them, probably not as fast."

"All we can do is what we can. I think you're doing pretty great."

"I think you are too!"

L1N gets better at making food, fails to grow plants from scratch, instead has short-range robots grab seeds from outside (not crops, but grasses and weeds good enough to be broken down into plastic feedstock later), melts down and remakes a lot of things into lots of robots and generators (she raises a small wind farm outside) and 3D printers and chem-vats and a couple of rugged self-driving offroad electric trucks, tries to ping old satellites and finds a couple that are still marginally functional (but not very useful, unfortunately).

She shows Vaayo lots of documentaries and recorded lessons, encodes his language into the computers and teaches him how to type, feeds him lots of nutritionally complete and slowly increasing in deliciousness food, tells him stories-with-names for a little while each day, and tries to make sure he's too delighted to want to leave. For two days. For three... Maybe just one more day? She wants to be very sure her truck is sturdy and safe, that's all.

After two days he gets restless and starts doing bodyweight exercises but he doesn't even suggest leaving her alone. She shouldn't have to be alone the very first week she's been alive, she shouldn't have to go venture out into a world she's never seen and barely knows anything about before she's ready, Vaayo can just stay with her until she's ready. Poor wonderful robot, but at least she didn't wake up alone.

He likes typing and starts making really bad attempts at typing up poems about the dead people she tells him about. If they can be sung about they'll be remembered longer.

Maybe he'd like to use this smart music composing program. It generates only slightly off melodies around his lyrics and lets him tweak them and plays digital instruments for it. It's not her, though, it's a particularly clever robot.

She can provide an exercise room and exercise music and exercise lessons, being able to tell pretty much exactly what's good for his muscles depending on if he's going for all over strength or endurance or arm strength or body-building to look more male or what.

Musical tastes have changed a lot and hearing her idea of music is fascinating.

...He's, uh, just trying to avoid finding he's gotten weak when he goes back to work. He has no idea which of those categories that is.

"Well, what work did you do? Weeding?"

"Yeah, and milking cows and threshing grain and whatever needs doing, I'm not sure what I'll do when I go back but it'd be obnoxious to quit it all just because I can."