"Okay, so, what hypotheses are there then to explain why the USB works better? Harder to destroy, inherent preference for electronic media, higher fidelity..."

"Faster to make copies? Ability to edit it maybe? It considers paper to be joint ownership with a tree or something?" he shrugs. "Maybe because computers can output more light, or you could quite easily put it on a big screen and show it to lots of people whereas the paper copy you have to make a larger copy, or maybe it's due to data transfer rates?"

She writes this all down. "There's a simple way to test the joint ownership hypothesis, the others are a bit more complicated."

"Yeah," he agrees. "I'll just try giving you both a single photo of me? Also we should maybe see how it interacts with stealing, if we can do that without voiding the 'possession' thing because of experimentation."

"Not sure how to control the stealing thing, and I was actually thinking about getting an electronic picture on, like, Dropbox or something."

"And sharing the link? Yeah, that might work."

He hands her the laptop, points out where the photo is saved.

"Actually having a shared folder, just to be sure."

She does that—

—and Willow accepts the folder on her phone.

And now Theo is swayed to both of them exactly as if each of them had a copy of the picture.

Pause. "Works like you both have a copy. A full copy, that is."

Delete.

"Okay so I was probably not sharing the paper with a tree."

"Probably not," he agrees. "We could try encrypting something, see if that affects the sway, then see, if someone encrypts it on someone else's device, who owns it, and then use a random password and get rid of it and see if that affects things? – For more data about how it interacts with things, I'm not sure if this will actually confirm or disconfirm any hypotheses."

"If we find a hypothesis that would help distinguish we can use that. Until then, what about the others?"

He grabs a piece of paper and writes the hypotheses down on it.

"– That test might give information for the 'speed of making copies' thing – takes longer to copy if it's encrypted, if you want the original data, since it requires the password and also you can't access the original data until your computer's processed it. Crosses over with data transfer rates, that was mostly redundant."

"Hmm, I don't think it does, though—if it considers the encrypted version the same as the normal one, copy times are the same."

He shrugs. "It might allow ownership based off transformed versions, but might do power based off ability to transfer the original? Sounds stupid but I still have no idea how this works and it all seems quite– arbitrary? Sort of cohesive in genre – annoying, difficult to ignore mind things and-or physical changes that are subtle when not in active use – but how it does the specifics I don't think I could guess very precisely beforehand."

"Okay, so what's your proposed test, exactly, then?"

"Literally just copy the image into an encrypted folder on my laptop with a password one of you knows, see if you get ownership, see if you get ownership if you close it, see if you only get ownership if I don't know the password, see if you have ownership if you use a random password and forget it, see if any of these give less sway than it just being saved on your phone?" Shrug. "If they don't then it can at least indicate we're looking in the wrong direction – it should indicate where to look better."

"Okay, fair enough, gimme," she says, making grabby hands towards the computer. "Also I have no idea how to do any of that."

He picks up the laptop, puts it on his lap, downloads a wonderful folder/drive encryption program that he knows about for no reason whatsoever and sets it up and then hands the laptop to Sadde.

The folder with the image is open, the program has good instructions, Theo is available in case he needs to help.

Sadde saves it there and encrypts it with a password she makes up on the spot.

Nothing happens.

"Doesn't count as ownership," he says. "I wasn't looking, either, and I doubt it works better for ownership of I do know the password. We could try uploading the encrypted copy to Dropbox? Then after that delete it and see about a copy where only I know the password?"

"Sure." She uploads it to Dropbox, and this time she gets ownership of it—

—but not, apparently, Willow, who does not have the password.

He reports this!

And giving Willow the password gets him swayed by her as well. And in both cases it is somewhat less than the unencrypted version. She deletes the picture.

"This probably means if something's encrypted you have to have the means to decrypt it, probably, to count as owning it."