"It kinda sounds like it may be easier to just generate it the mundane way."

He shrugs. "How do you do that?"

"Ooh, lots of ways! The basic principle is converting types of energy—I should teach you physics—so you can get quote naturally occurring unquote sources of energy to turn into electricity. Wind turbines that are sorta like mills, waterfalls, solar power, burning fuel, a thing you guys don't have a word for but is basically getting electricity out of the energy that binds matter together..."

"If you can turn fuel into power depending on what else needs building for it we might be able to just... Buy an engine. Windvale steelworks churns out twenty or thirty engines a day and coal is like 300 Kava a ton."

"I'm pretty sure I can produce fuel myself, so we only need be concerned about the engine. I'm reticent about introducing electricity via burning fuel, but I don't know what that'd do in a flat infinite world that doesn't have a good reason to have an atmosphere."

"Hm? Oh, pollution. I don't think it's an issue. Tiles reset, the air does too sooner or later."

"...reset?"

"Yeah, if you leave something alone on a tile long enough it likes to go back to template. Blow a hole in a hill tile, drain a swamp, exterminate every rabbit in a three tile radius, mess up the boundaries... Come back a few months later and it will have reversed itself as if you'd never done any of that. Especially if nobody was looking at it."

"Especially? So it can reset while someone's looking?"

"Not fully and not fast, usually too slow to notice without specifically looking for it and taking measurements, but what I meant was it takes longer to do things like that if someone lives nearby. Habitation suppresses it, sometimes even seems to change the underlying template. Makes trails appear in bits of wood people walk past but not actually through, that kind of thing."

"...huh. Well, okay, then I guess pollution and global warming aren't gonna be problems."

"Yeah, I don't think so. That said, tile templates are one of the perennial mysteries. Big academic debate and stuff. If enough pollution-causing things are used maybe the template becomes polluted, I don't know."

"When you say 'template' do you mean the underlying structure slash type of an individual tile or...?"

"Both? When a new species starts showing up, it tends to start showing up in lots of places at once, but not everywhere. There's a lot of guessing and not a lot of proof for what this actually means about how templates work."

"Hmm and you guys don't have computers that can apply machine learning to the project."

"Or particularly good ways to collect and manipulate data. Bio department always complains that data is expensive - I think they pay a few people to live in huts out in the Reach and wander around on flying platforms counting birds and bushes."

"Hmm, I wonder how much they'd pay me, I could probably get the run of a few dozen tiles in a few days."

"Can't hurt to ask but I don't think they have infinite funding or infinite need for data."

"Wouldn't think so, no, but there are lots of perks to having so many comparative advantages over pretty much everyone."

"You can take a tour of campus while I go to class and do homework and club meets and have a little alone time to think without, erm, distractions tomorrow." (He glanced over Sadde as he said it.)

She grins sheepishly. "I will be out of your hair."

"Hey, I'm gonna shower and maybe wash some things and then I'd like to hear some more about the different computer 'languages' you mentioned..."

"Okay! ...can I join you?"

"Mm, tempting... Just remember that I am only human and three you-know in a row is possibly a bad plan."

"I only mean to get cleaned. Being a vankire does not make me automatically pristine all the time, even if I don't sweat. And, 'you-know'?"