"We have an incredible variety of general anesthesia drugs, actually! We've come up with lots of them that are incredibly safe and predictable for people to use, and that they wake up from as quickly as they can. We take pain incredibly seriously, so we've gotten incredibly good at doing things as pain-free as possible. We don't think they cause much brain damage at all, at this point. But that's only on people without souls, again..."

"Well, it seems like a good sign that you've been able to optimise for wearing off quickly and not having aftereffects, at least.

I guess there's nothing for it but to read up on Thomassian anesthetics, maybe compare them to Rekkan medications, and do my best to figure things out. And ideally avoid needing surgery in the first place.

And, like...I'd like to stick around for a long time. I like what I've seen of this world so far," other than the existential horror, "and it would suck to have to leave before I've had a chance to teach you what I can about Rekka, and I like my original body" other than the novel microbes it's carrying "and it's nice not to have to negotiate with anyone on when and how to use it. But I could, uh--" he laughs a little "--live with dying, if I had to.

...I wonder, do soulless human minds ever share bodies? Even if you don't count walk-ins--uh, that's the word for dead people who are possessing living people--Rekkans are born that way sometimes: twin-souled bodies are about as common as separate-bodied twins."

"How would that ever be possible without a soul? The brain is the only reason people feel like they are anything at all; every thought and feeling and sense of self come from and are people's brains! At least you're happy about what life is like here, even though you haven't seen much more than the house you're in right now. Seeing everything else we have to see must be something you're full of excitement for!"

It feels too soon for excitement, when he doesn't even know if he'll ever see it in-person or just through pictures.

(The bird leans its head against him, cooing happily. He doesn't think it was intentionally trying to convey "even if you end up having to stay in quarantine, at least you have me", but nevertheless it has a point. He smiles at it.)

"What would you recommend I see first?"

"I think one of the big cities, or their huge transport systems, or some of our massive dams getting people power and water. And while you're still just here, in this suburb, you can get a chance to see all the things we do to take good care of moms and dads."

"I saw a big city in a Thomassian movie, my first night here. It looked so strange, like some kind of alien hive-- well, I suppose it was alien. It'll be interesting to see up close how much of it was real."

(...the future tense kind of slipped out there. Well, if it comes down to it he supposes he could probably remote-control a camera drone or something.)

Can he see from here whether there are any solar panels on his roof? There don't seem to be any ground-mounted ones in the clearing.

There are no solar panels to be seen anywhere, as a matter of fact, and he can't recall seeing them on anything else, either.

If only he had books about modern electrical gridcraft. It's probably going to turn out that the encyclopedia doesn't have enough information to reconstruct it, like with mesh nodes. He'll just have to tell them the starting points from the bootstrapping training and let them figure it out from there.

"...massive dams getting people power? Is that still the norm here?

--sorry, that maybe came out sounding more insulting than I meant, and hydroelectricity has its uses even now, but, uh, it's really bad to rely on long-distance transmission lines for, like...anything vital or uninterruptible, anything where your life would grind to a halt if you didn't have it."

He rubs the wristband on his emergency distress signal, wondering what would happen if the power went out on his phone charger and backup camera.

he doesn't even have a pantry

"There's quite an extreme level of redundancy, and we have near-perfect uptime? There hasn't been a situation where grid issues made life grind to a halt for very many decades, at this point. Hospitals have their own on-site generators, still; but close to everyone else can handle the infinitesimal chances of significant outages on our grid."

'Many decades' is not a long enough track record. His grid's track record of not getting destroyed by solar flares is 72 years long. But it isn't 73.

"...how hardened is your grid against electromagnetic pulses? What's the strongest solar flare it's withstood--uh, the language implant doesn't stretch far enough to let me understand classification-system jargon on that, I guess the most intuitive way to measure would be how close to the equator the auroras got--and do they have solid reasons to think it can withstand worse?

...I guess you might not know the answers to those, if you don't have the legacy of the Blackout impressing its importance onto everyone. That might be specialist knowledge, here."

"I absolutely have no idea about that first question of yours! Certainly, I don't know of any pulse causing significant damage for the many decades we've had our modern grid; there were some spots where issues happened 130 years ago, which I was told was the last time we've had any problem because of solar flares."

He nods. "I'll have to look into it, see what we can learn from each other on that.

Uh, I should explain: 72 years ago--I guess I'm not sure if our years are quite the same length, but anyway--there was a massive solar flare that pretty much destroyed our whole grid. We...we were lucky, really, to be at pretty much the ideal tech level at the time to learn the lessons that the Sylian Flare had to teach: we used electricity enough for it to drive home how important a problem this is, but not enough for the loss to be crippling. We had no idea this was a risk before it happened, and we were very aware, in the aftermath, that if we'd had a couple more decades of electrification first we would have been extremely screwed.

It's the large-scale equipment that blows, long-distance transmission lines and high-power transformers and not, like, your phone, so...while we've done some work on making the large-scale equipment more robust, and maybe we would be able to rely solely on that and it would be fine, most of the work we've done on it was about how to need large-scale equipment as little as possible. My house back home has a backup grid connection, but most days we get all our power from our own solar panels, feeding into our own batteries. If we lived in an area with colder winters, we would have a geothermal heating system, and most of the backup grid plants that supply power when you need an extra boost are geothermal. There are some dams, I think mostly feeding their power into factories and stuff built nearby."

"It's impressive that you managed to get solar panels to work. Ours are quite terrible, and there are sadly just too few places with good geothermal potential for us to exploit. We used to have dams just feeding nearby demands, but of course, with time there were more and more demands so the dams sent their energy ever further. We do have nuclear energy, if there isn't a dam available, but there aren't many places tempting enough to make us build where there isn't a dam available."

"It wasn't feasible for me to learn all the complexities of a solar-based system as a non-specialist, but I did get some basics: we knew I might end up living in a world that needed them, someday. I'll write them down and upload them after I go back inside.

As for geothermal potential, I think part of it is that you don't need the geothermal sites to be super high-quality, necessarily: you can do geothermal all sorts of places, it's just that some will give less power than others. Maybe you need certain designs in order to expand the range of places that will suffice, I'm not sure.

'Nuclear' energy?"

"Yes, energy coming from nuclear reactions and mass-energy conservation, rather than chemical reactions! It's stupendously, mind-bendingly powerful, as both an explosive and an energy source; unfortunately, you can only practically make relatively big power plants, so it can't be put into cars or anything like that, it would have to be in a gigantic cruise or cargo ship. But it doesn't release air pollution and enough nuclear fuel to fit into a pot can fuel gigantic cargo ships for entire decades!"

He furrows his brow, peering at the semantic bleedover.

"Like the way that stars burn?"

"You must have realized that stars don't burn like coal does, and they use a form of nuclear energy, yes, but that's a different kind from the nuclear energy we use today. You would absolutely know what a nuclear bomb was if you had invented them, so clearly you never figured out how to use nuclear energy like how we use it."

"Yeah, I've heard of stellar fusion, and I was getting a sense that that was sort of the thing but not quite right.

I can't say I have a very good grasp of what kinds of explosives we have: it's not really my area. It doesn't sound familiar, though."

"The largest explosion we've ever made was as big as it'd be if we used tens of millions of tons of traditional explosives, and it was done using a bomb somewhat taller than me while being around 4 times my length. It was done for learning rather than any practical purpose, but we have made many, many reservoirs and changed the course of rivers using similar kinds of explosions, so nuclear technology has really been the backbone of how we get our energy."

"Huh."

He's not sure what to make of that. It's hard to wrap his head around.

He spends a while longer petting the bird and doing a bit more playing around with grass-weaving and the like, then heads inside to type up what he knows about how to build decentralised-solar power systems. He sets aside the respirator translation-work for a bit, in favour of doing the article on the Blackout.

He doesn't shower after going inside, just washes his hands and changes his clothes and washes his hands again. He saves the shower for late in the evening, after going outside again and lying on his back in the clearing to observe the alien stars.