"--Monstery how?" 

"Monstery as in if he were ever fully summoned to this plane of existence life as we know it would cease to exist. We're fairly sure the same doesn't apply to us." 

"I...see." To Cam: "So does that mean you can naively create machines to perform specific tasks, is that how--" and he sweeps an arm to indicate the whole room. 

"No, that's not how - I have to know what I'm making, or copy something. In the alternate dimension I'm from it's 2157. Here it's only 1928, they've got some advances you haven't seen but I'm way ahead."

"Oh." 

"Welcome to the future!" Wag wag wag.

"What has happened to my country?" 

"The US enjoys a prolonged period as the most wealthy and powerful nation in the world. It also commits some atrocities but most powerful nations get around to that."

Frown. "What kind of atrocities?" 

"Uh, took a long time to get around to ending slavery, and though it has happened by this year it takes a long time to calm down remaining racism. In my world there was this big war against among other participants Japan and the United States decided to round up its Japanese residents and put them in concentration camps, and also dropped two very destructive weapons on Japan about it, and there's not really a plausible story where this was connected to any of the genuinely bad things Japan was up to in the Pacific theater, that seems to have been a coincidence. Lots of invading random Middle Eastern countries and propping up dictatorships in South America for economic reasons. By 2157 things have settled down a whole lot, though, and I bet this world can skip a lot of crap."

"Oh. Well. I'm glad that slavery has been dealt with." 

"Me too!"

"What else happened?"

"Treatment of Native Americans was awful for an embarrassingly long time, the Vietnam War was real bad... perhaps you would like to hear about some non-atrocities, like the invention of the airplane, that was a couple Americans, and also you're credited with discovering electricity and boy howdy does that take off, lots and lots of inventions happen in America actually."

"Oh good," he says, pleased. "What's an 'airplane,' is it what we're in now?"

"This is a lot of steps past airplanes, but it does build on some of what was learned in the course of refining airplanes! This is a space station. I didn't want to try magic like resurrecting people planetside when it was reasonably easy to just not do that."

Blink. "Why not?"

"The magic system this Earth is working with is very spooky and includes a lot of warnings about ending the world and hostile alien life forms. Plus there was a carefully minimized but perhaps not eliminated risk that you would awaken craving human flesh - it's not actually a serious problem if you do since I can make human flesh but imagine if you'd run off to eat somebody before I explained that?"

"I wouldn't do that!"

"You seem very personable! But this was an experiment, we don't yet know a lot about how resurrectees tend to turn out."

"Was hunger for human flesh a serious risk?"

"These notes didn't exactly have graphs and likelihood ratios but it did come up. I was very careful, which is supposed to help."

Benjamin Franklin looks at the resurrection diagram dubiously. "Well, I certainly don't feel any urge to consume human flesh right now."

"Great! Do you want to consume anything more normal? I fixed your lungs before I made your body since I looked up what you died of and patched up various other things that tend to be wrong with people your age but I didn't attend to your appetite in the process."

"Yes, that would be lovely."