Helen, meanwhile, goes back to practice programming. She thinks she's ready to try some basic 3D commands.

Lu has got the basic commands all working; she has a shine doing a programmed little dance in the air. She shows them to Helen. "Remember, I can re-puppet the shines if they go nuts, as long as they don't go completely out of reach. If you mess up a program and can't get it to hold still long enough to put new instructions on it, once I'm not around, you'll have to either dismiss it entirely and not be able to make more or let it keep doing its thing forever. And the hard ones could be dangerous, especially if you forget to speed-limit them."

"Yeah. Oh, let's see if I can keep one from moving using regular barriers, that should make things easier if it works."

"Should work for the hard ones, those don't want to go through each other, but I don't know whether it would stop a standard shine..." Lu sends a standard shine into a box of hard ones and tries to sneak it out a corner.

"I'll definitely cage any hard shines on untested programs. You don't want any standard ones at all?"

"I suppose I might as well. They're just not as obviously useful as the hard ones, especially when I can't make more."

"You can't make more hard shines either, I mean you can make the shapes but you can't turn them into shines. I figured you'd just want plenty of both."

"Sure. I just meant that a finite number of hard shines likely had a higher relative usefulness than a finite number of normal ones. The normal ones seemed a little harder to transport, though, given that I can't just pick them up...although I could carry them out on portable flat surfaces, it's true."

"And they stack... although you probably shouldn't stack them, since then they'll all read the same programs at the same time and you can't puppet them away from each other. So not more than you could fit in a few books of non-programming contents, at least."

"Marie, can I borrow your new book for the purpose?"

"Sure. Hey, Bar, are there any other books in that series? Or anything else by that author you'd recommend?"

Here is a stack of the oeuvre of the author of Jovial.

"Hmm. I can't buy all of these, not if they all cost about the same as Jovial." She begins inspecting the summaries to help her decide.

"...These all look really good. What's the total if they're all in paperback?"

$96.88, apologizes the bar.

She looks deeply torn.

"I'll get them for you. I have a summer job, after all, I can technically afford it. But this is your anniversary and Christmas presents early," Helen teases.

"Extradimensional books I wouldn't have gotten to read any other way are a way better present than whatever you would have gotten me anyway. Thank you so much."

"Well, I can stick the shines in 'em, it's not all generosity."

"Do you want me to fill them all up?" asks Lu. "That'll take a while, a bit longer than turning each page by hand."

"Yeah. Increasing the supply of a resource I won't be able to get more of later is probably a better use of time than anything else I could be doing right now."