Silva grins. "That's the way to do it."

    "Can you make a list of stuff?" asks Projection. "And I'll need to know how to integrate that with the rest of the design..."

"I can but I wasn't being very strategic, just trying stuff -" Future computers! Future televisions! ...future birth control would be really hard to explain having tried for, human children wouldn't do that. Andalite stun guns! Andalite translators! Warp replicators!

...what do these replicators do?

He doesn't know he just heard of them in a book and when he tried them they went! Make stuff, he thinks.

...automatically?

Well, you have to put stuff in for it to disassemble into constituent atoms and then it probably needs a recipe. He's just guessing.

Okay but does he get how important this is they could end scarcity!

Yeah it totally does do that - uh, will do that. It's really good.

Can it replicate itself?

He does not know how to make it do that. (It can't, but he catches himself before explaining precisely why not).

Well... can he provide it with some raw matter and see if he can make it make things with the raw matter?

He can!!!

It can make food. Slower than him, but still. It can make parts for another replicator but that one, assembled, doesn't work. "I think there might be parts it can't make." It can make the stun guns.

He's going to need to rework this entire city.

Sorry.

No no he's absolutely excited this is going to be awesome—

    "There are economic considerations to be taken into account," says Silva. "We should look into that after we've exhausted at least the list of possible technological improvements a short brainstorming session yields."

"Yeah I guess ending scarcity will make the economy weird!"

    "Especially if it's not ended everywhere at once," nods Projection.

"More ideas?" asks Silva.

"We could probably end it pretty much everywhere at once. Maybe not some of the places that are all chaotic and warlordy. I don't know what else - I haven't read that many comics - have any of you -"

"There aren't that many anymore, your parents must've been real nerds," says Projection.

"It doesn't have to be comics, television'd do too but I wasn't supposed to watch too much."

"Teleportation devices?" the tinker suggests. "Stuff to clean water, cure cancer—no wait you made that one already—cure other diseases? Cure aging?"

He tries! He has cures for some diseases. He does not have teleportation devices (he could give them a worldleaper, but he does not). He can't do aging.

Now, infrastructure thing... Faster internet? Better transportation even if not teleportation? Clean energy?

Oh boy yes faster internet here are the entire creative works of Earth up to 1994 and here is another device to which they are now wirelessly transferring oh there they're done. 

"The infrastructure might be hard to make much sense of from small-scale models - like, I don't know about the power systems. Same with energy."

"You could make some to-scale models and we could try to reverse-engineer them."