L1N starts translating over the narrator as best she can five minutes in. Of course he doesn't understand It! Stupid, stupid, She's failing him...

He offers absolutely no commentary that might disabuse her of that idea.

But he sure is leaning in and forgetting to blink.

It covers what electricity is used for, in broad strokes: Just about everything, apparently. It covers how lightning is the same thing but bigger, and how producing and distributing electricity was a big, complicated, sometimes dangerous, important industry of the gods. After a particularly difficult to translate scientific ramble about things smaller than any other things and electrical charges and magnets, punctuated by a lightning machine sending crackles of the stuff all over a large room, L1N tells him, "I finished making the food! ...If you want it."

"I do want it! Thank you!"

"Good!"

A small, cute little butler robot comes in bearing a tray.

The food is... Two blocks of leathery paste, one slightly red and the other tan, sort of like dried fruit or thick preserves. And a glass of water, and the pills he never ate from the medical bay.

"I see lots of other kinds of food in the videos and stuff but this is the kind I can make right now. I hope you like it. You should take that medicine too. It will help make sure the cut doesn't make you sick."

He tries the food.

"I like it! What kind of fruit is this? I don't recognize it."

"It's not actually any kind of fruit. It's the stuff that fruit has plus a little extra made up from non-food things by a machine. The recipe says it's supposed to taste like cherry and raspberry?"

"I wouldn't mistake it for a cherry or a raspberry. Have you tried it? Do you eat food?"

"Nope. I don't eat. I can tell if something is safe to eat but I can't really taste it? Maybe I should try to figure out how, so I can make better food for people..."

"Taste is overrated. ...Smell, though, can you smell things?"

"Sort of? I have atmosphere sensors and chemical sensors. I don't think they're doing the same thing as a nose?"

"I wish we could trade experiences, I bet it'd be interesting."

"Human brains and god brains are pretty different! I'm thinking about fourteen different things right now. And now thirteen, I just finished telling a robot to fix one of the toilets."

"What kind of fixing did it need?"

"It was old and the rubber parts were cracked so if I put water in it it'd just leak. Utility robot number sixty two is carrying new rubber parts I just made over now."

"I think your toilets are different than I'm familiar with. What are the other thirteen things you're thinking about?"

"Some of them have changed already! But I was thinking about how to fix the reactor starter, whether it's dangerous for you to go in parts of the ship, how to make more kinds of food, if I should go get plants, wondering if you need rest or anything, wondering if you want a room on my space ship, wondering what you want to learn next, thinking about your language, telling robots to fix four things, and designing a carriage in case you want one later."

"Of course I want one! It'd make getting home a lot faster and safer and easier. We don't have the electricity to make it keep going but it looked like they go for a while before you need to give them more?"

"Yeah and I can make ways of making electricity too! I might have to do that for myself soon if I can't start the reactor. I want to help everyone. I... I don't know what happened to them all. It sounds like all sorts of awful things happened... It's kind of scary but I'm here now, of course I'll help people."

"Can I help with that? Since you're, uh, going to go hungry until we have electricity and I'm not."

"Oh! I'm fine. There's an old geothermal power plant built into the launch building. I just can't get that much done unless I build more, and you won't be able to recharge a car or other stuff on your own unless I make you some."

"Okay. Anything you need while I'm down here?"

"I want to know about what it's like out there. There are still people out there, right? Not in big cities with internet, but, it's not just you... Right?"

"Of course it's not just me. There's lots of people! There's thousands, there's tens of thousands, once you get out of the ruins there's miles of farms and managed woods and towns. With how big the world is there could even be people past the wilderness that we just don't know about because they're so far away. It wouldn't surprise me to find out there were more than a hundred thousand people."

"A hundred thousand? Not, billions?"

This number is startling not because it's big - having one person near her is already kind of overwhelming - and because it's too small. There are supposed to be billions.