Cobbler is... still skeptical.

Carver will maybe do that. If Vaayo's descriptions make it sound safe, whenever Vaayo gets around to telling people what it's like down there.

Candlemaker would love some scents for his candles. And dyes for the wax, maybe? So he can color-code them? By the way how does she know her scents won't produce a toxic smoke when the candles are burned? Did the ancients test them?

Cobbler and carver can just watch dinosaurs some more then.

They totally tested them, pretty extensively too, he could read the reports on the testing if he wants but they're pretty boring.

A robot tries to find and get the attention of one of the leaders, holding a credit card.

(He will totally read at least some of the reports!)

"Hello! How can we help you? Did you need to buy something?"

"I want to talk to you all about economics. These weren't money to the ancients. Well, not directly. You use them because nobody can make more, right?"

"And because they don't rot. A lot of our long-distance trade uses metal ingots instead, it'd just be a little difficult to make that work domestically. Were the cards sacred, is there a problem with using them?"

"No. The problem is, I made this one five minutes ago. I can make thousands and thousands. Easily."

It looks totally normal, except perhaps less dented and bleached. There's a picture of an animal of some kind on it.

She looks alarmed for a moment.

"I think we need to have a council meeting. I'll tell everyone and you meet me there, okay?" She gives directions to a nearby building.

"Emergency economics lecture..."

A robot goes to a place!

And so do some people!

In fact more than just the council meets to talk about economics. By the time they're ready to get started there are twenty people there not counting Lin.

"I can make new cards. I could make thousands and thousands of them, enough to make all the ones you have for yourselves now totally worthless. I'm not planning on doing that because it'd scare and hurt people for no real reason, but if people learn what I want to teach, someone will, eventually. The same thing happened to people who were ancient even to the ancients. When Spain suddenly found an extremely rich source of gold and imported all the cheap gold, many farmers and makers found that their life savings of gold were suddenly worth a lot less. I think your society needs a new kind of money. A kind of money that this council controls, that by law only this council can make, so you can avoid problems like that. It might be bumpy but I think if you do it right you will be better off in the long run."

"I don't think we can enforce that, we don't control people out in the country," someone says.

"But they'll care about this as much as we do," says someone else. "We can use metals like we do with the northerners?"

"She just said metals have the same problem."

"Grain is always worth just as much, it's worth the amount of grain it is."

"And we don't already use it because it's heavy and it rots."

"But we can't make people outside the town follow our laws. Do you want to call a council of every single settlement? Someone could go found another village!"

"Lin, how did the ancients prevent people they didn't have jurisdiction over from making more of their currency?"

"There are ways to make money difficult to copy. Special inks, special patterns, special paper... Add enough special checks to it and it's hard to copy exactly. Most places claimed all the land in a certain area and had police that will find and punish people who print money without approval or try to spend fakes. Some places did money with only computers, no actual physical money, but you don't know enough about computers to understand how that works and trust it yet."

"What did their police do about people outside the land they claimed? We don't claim anywhere out of town, unless you count the mine."

"Somewhere on the line of 'ignored them' and 'have deals with those places about which laws will be enforced on which people'. Most of these places had way more people than you do, millions of people. It's possible you won't actually have problems keeping the current system for a while. Of course, being aware of it and planning for it makes a lot of difference even if you do nothing right now."

They discuss the likely practical effects of counterfeiting and how they might prepare. Someone argues that fundamentally all disasters besides disease are disasters because they interrupt the food supply and from there the conversation turns to whether they can stockpile longer-lasting food if they ask Lin for help.

"Can you preserve things any better than we can?"

"Oh, yeah. There's canning, and salting, and drying, and freezing, there's synthesizers that can make some food from electricity even on a bad harvest. If you do it right canned preserved food can last for decades... Do you have honey? Yellow and black flying insects make it? Honey keeps really well even without technology."

"We have honey! Those insects are called bees and they stab anyone who tries to steal from them. So we don't have much honey."

"What would you like in exchange for some samples of food you've synthesized or preserved? I'd like to have some people try them, they'll be very useful if they really are safe and really do last that long."

"I want that too, if you're willing to humor us about our currency for a while I can offer half a card for food samples."

"I can make bee-keeping equipment and show videos! You can wear bee-proof clothes and make special bee houses that getting the honey out of doesn't rile them up as much. It'll make it a lot easier. I can bring over synthesized food, and if someone gives me some food I can preserve it and show you how too. I might have to take it to my home though, I didn't bring everything I had on those trucks."

A couple of people volunteer to go find some food they can spare and head out.

"I really think if this works out we'll have less to worry about no matter what happens with our currency," says the person who got them on the topic of food security.

"We still need to try to avoid sudden inflation," says someone else. The conversation turns back to monetary policy for a while.

The others come back shortly with several plums and a few pounds of potatoes.

"I have books on economics where people studied and theorized about currency policy and how people spend and stuff, by the way."

L1N has Fruit Paste and Nutritionally Complete Bread(tm) and Fake Butter, all synthesized. She takes the potatoes and plums and says she'll be preserving them a couple different ways and bringing the preserved foods back so they can look at them probably tomorrow or the next day.

"That would be very helpful, is it translated?" someone asks.

The council deliberates briefly and two of them volunteer to try the synthesized foods.

"Probably not perfectly, I don't have enough vocabulary, but a few books, yes!"

The synthesized foods taste like food. A bit bland.

"We'd love to read them if that's possible."

The councilmembers cautiously try the food. "It tastes... not worse than porridge, I guess," says one of them. "We'll see if it makes anyone sick."

"To be sure we should really wait a few years before we try her preserved foods," says someone else. "But we can at least find out now if something in the preservation process makes them poison."

"Seems unlikely that it would, I think we just need to test the shelf life."

She can't expect to upend their entire world inside of a day.

She fetches a tablet and puts economics textbooks on screen.

She tells the doctor that the replacement teeth for the guy who got hit by a rake are ready, and the woman with a sprain could come back now, too, for checking.

Both of them will come back when asked. Teeth guy in particular looks like he half expects he's making a noble sacrifice so no one else has to be the one the robot mangles, but both of them are willing to let the autodoc poke them some more.