Nimo is very interested.

Curt is an enthusiastic inventor explaining one of his inventions! He's having lots of fun. Barely touches the snacks.

She has lots of questions.

"...You know what, if you don't come up with anything new, come by anyway if you feel like talking again."

"I'll probably take you up on that! I hear you've been learning to work with computers, actually, I might want your input on computer programs and interfaces and so on."

"That'd be good, do you want to schedule a time or just show up and hope I'm free?"

"Schedule, I think. I can probably come back any time that's not - tomorrow, or the morning of the day after that."

"Three days from now in the afternoon work?"

"Sure! I should be moved in to my new place by then. I was at the end of a list for an apartment until I bought my way to somewhere in the middle - no wife or children and no favors owed from anyone doing the planning, see - but I will soon finally have a proper residence again, privacy and quiet and a big comfy bed, I've missed it so. Goodbye for today, Miss Saramel!"

Three days from then she's waiting for him! This time the available salad comes with pecan pieces and dried fruit, if he'd like some.

Pecan pieces and dried fruit are a lot more palatable.

They can talk about programming! He got a computer! It's surprisingly similar to setting up automata but computers can work so much faster!

They can! Has he thought about having a computer control an automaton?

Yes, and a bunch of other people are already working on it, the problem is essentially getting the computer to move the controls on the steam core that powers automata. And feeding data about status and positioning back into the computer. And building a useful library of automaton control functions. He's not closely involved though, and it feels vaguely wrong to be duplicating engineering efforts.

"Yeah. But it's good to know what they're up to anyway. - Oh, that reminds me, you mentioned other inventions besides the detectors and I've been assuming you'd either sold them already or lost the plans in the frost, but I might as well ask if that's right..."

"Well, most of them, yes. That or they're scryable now if you look hard enough." He shrugs. "I have a few other varieties of detector that are still secret, and I made an automatic decoding device a while ago, turns morse code into English letters and vice-versa. Most of the other things I've been working on, I wouldn't consider myself the sole inventor, so I can't just unilaterally sell them."

"What do you use morse code for?"

"Morse code is designed for any signaling methods that rely on a two-state system. Say, flicking a light or an electrical signal on and off. Or flipping a mirror over. Or even just drawing in the snow. For a while they were the best they could do for communicating at a distance - telegraphs. Could still be useful in the absence of magic or technology that works better."

"...Oh, of course. I bet it wouldn't be hard to come up with a program that would do that for Hari letters, too. Probably easier with computers."

"Indeed! Morse code uses the Latin alphabet - shared by a lot of languages - short and long 'on' periods, with pauses of different lengths signfifying words and punctuation. There are only twenty-six things that need to be produced so it can be short enough to remember. It may be difficult to copy it with a few added or removed and different associations for Hari, given the somewhat pictographic nature of the thing... And I'm not actually sure how Ilan or any of the other languages here work..."

"All our languages use the same alphabet, mostly - did your world have some that didn't?"

"Yes, there are quite a few writing systems. No shortage of unusual ones from isolated populations, like the pacific islanders. The original Roman alphabet strongly influences much of the world, from Cyrillic to Finnish to English to Spanish, but there's quite a bit of drift, too. Notably, China and the other Far East nations have an entirely different writing system of characters, where there are thousands of symbols each corresponding to a single word. Some are a bit like multiple letters are written on top of one another, combining other characters, but most are almost pictographic. I am, er, not a linguist, however, so I don't know much more about it aside from - actually, it's a bit like Hari, with the tones - hmm."

"Huh. You know, I think your world was just more than ours. More people, more languages, more ways of doing things."

"Quite possible. There was no shortage of people trying to kill each other, but we didn't have natural faculties capable of annihilating continents... There are only a few million people here on Har, correct?"

"Less than two million. The population's growing a little, but we never really recovered from... uh... tens of thousands of years of war, but especially the continents sinking and the late warring states period."

"I've heard something about a demographic shift. That when the world is rich and full of distractions, people want children less. It sounded like nonsense at the time, but perhaps I should look into the population statistics here."

"Yeah, that happened. The birth rate for caralendri is maybe close to a dozen children per woman and that would be enough to grow the population if half the men weren't with clan higher-ups who can barely remember their names. I think the agerah population might be growing?"