"He's right, though. We should probably move on to Iron Heart today, after you say hi to people. I need to be in a position to help whoever needs it."

"They'll hear soon, if you want to head straight to Iron Heart."

"f you're sure... Give me directions there?"

"Over that way. I'm not sure what the best route for a truck is but it's just a few miles that way."

She puts her utility robot back in the truck and drives thataway. Relatively slowly, so she can be careful not to hit anyone.

There's a road to the town and no one else is on it. It was designed for wagons and livestock, not trucks, but it's just usable if she's careful.

The town has a watchtower, visible from a distance, and a pair of wrought iron gates standing open. By the time she gets there three people have heard about her from the watch and are waiting for her by the gate.

She stops the trucks well back from the gate and unlocks the doors and pops out the utility robot again. "You want to talk first or should I?" She asks.

"I'll introduce you, then I think you can handle it."

He gets out. "Hey, I'm the new priest from Clear Spring and I found an entire person made of metal, a real person who thinks and talks and is made of metal and can possess other artifacts. She wants to talk to people about some lost medical knowledge."

He gives her utility robot an encouraging smile.

"Hello! I wanted to head to Iron Heart with Vaayo as soon as possible after I woke up. It'd like to talk to doctors, and leaders. be a shame if someone dies when I could have helped save them because I waited!"

"Bring your medical artifacts and come with me," says one of them. "I'll introduce you to a doctor."

"They're kind of large and heavy. Some of them, anyway. You think my trucks won't fit inside the gate?"

"They'll fit in town but not down the right street. How about you wait here and I'll be right back with him, how's that sound?"

"I can give you a thing that I can talk through! Or you bring the doctor here, either way."

Utility bot fetches a little tablet computer and presents it.

She examines the tablet computer. "How do you talk through this?"

Her face is now copied over to the tablet, too. "Like this!"

She starts walking doctorward.

"How does it work?"

"It's very complicated, but basically... This is a computer. Many old artifacts are computers of some kind or another, they're very useful. How computers work would take an hour or probably lots more actually to explain, but they can do lots of math really really quickly. Lots and lots and lots of math. You can do interesting things with all that math, things you wouldn't expect math to be able to do. Computers can talk to each other from far away using radio waves, which are a special kind of light. I'm a person that lives in computers - Not this computer, but a big one back where Vaayo found me. I'm talking to the computer you're holding through radio waves and telling it to say things and show my face."

"Why can't I see the radio waves if they're light? What does living in a computer mean? Oh, can you see out of this, is there an eye on here that I should be pointing at scenery so you can see the town?"

"The little dark dot on the top is a computer eye, a camera. I'd appreciate you showing me things. People can only see some kinds of light. There's lots of other kinds you can't see but work the same way. You know how fires give off lots of heat even if you don't hold your hand right over them? They're making a lot of a kind of light you can't see, called infrared. Living on a computer... Computers are my body?"

Here's the town! The view isn't very steady. They head past a chicken coop and down a street that the truck couldn't fit in.

"I want a real explanation someday but here we are."

She knocks on one of the doors. A man answers.

"You brought me an artifact?" he asks.

"Hi! I am an artifact, and I can bring you some too. I know a lot of things about medicine that I think doctors will want to learn!"

"Come in, both of you."

As the tablet is moved inside she can see that he keeps a variety of herbs and soaps on hand. He was writing something before they interrupted.

"What do you know about medicine?" he asks.

"Many things. I have books from the old cities about it. Do you have things to help with infections? Ways to make people immune to a disease? Anesthetic so they don't have to be in pain for surgery?"

"I'd like to read those books at some point. We prevent disease by using soap and water, people become immune to some things after having them once, besides that all we can do is try to keep people strong and healthy in general. I try to avoid surgery when I can, there aren't a lot of things worse for someone than an open wound. We do have things that help with pain, but I don't know if we have all the ones you've read about. We could really use any way you know of to make people immune to disease. ...Where did you learn to read the gods' language?"

"I'm working on translating them. I can make it so this tablet can let you read them when we're done talking. I was made, manufactured, and I started out already knowing how to read English. I had to learn your language from the priest Vaayo. It sounds like you need antibiotics and vaccines. Antibiotics stop infections and many diseases pretty well. Vaccines are kind of tricky to make, and if you use antibiotics too much they start working less, but they're both very useful."

The tablet shows two wiki pages, for antibiotics and for vaccines, translated, in little windows at the bottom.