"Yeah, so I think it's the type of thing modern humans don't like?"

"Okay. Maybe they're not supposed to have castes at all and we are and you're supposed to have the age castes thing."

"Yeah. Shoggoths are also still experimenting, I think? The age castes thing isn't super formalized, and we haven't had a ton of generations..."

"Do you think you'll wind up doing a different thing?"

"Eventually? Though that might be another thousand or couple years."

Zada nods very seriously. (They're sitting with her friends, mostly purples and one orange with purple roots and one yellow, all of whom seem content to let Zada conduct her interview uninterrupted.) "That's a really long time, won't everybody be super used to what you're doing now?"

"It feels long to me because I'm young, but I think we also get bored of the same thing pretty easily. We don't know if we ever die of old age? And it's weird to do the same thing for all of eternity."

"I guess that would be weird. You'd get really really good at it though."

"Yeah; that's why the stuff that does best when you've got lots of experience is for older shoggoths right now."

Eventually lunch is over and Zada shows Bright to her history and civics class. They are covering the Prewar Period.

History's important! And it involves stories about people. She pays lots of attention.

This lesson is about technological development in the Prewar Period. They'd just invented the internet and most people still didn't have it back then.

Hmmm, might be good to listen if they're mentioning how the internet changed stuff...

The internet was invented in Cene and was very slow back then! It used primitive phone lines and was mostly only enough bandwidth for simple text messages, which was not a strong improvement on phone calls for most purposes.

Sounds like fast telegraphs she guesses? (Bright is not certain how telegraphs work.)

The teacher says telegraphs weren't as good because they were encoded, and the internet was only encoded and decoded by computers, not operators, but otherwise yeah, sort of like a combination telegraph and very slow library.

Okay, that makes sense!

They have a quiz at the end of class, and Bright may look at a copy but isn't required to hand it in.

She tries to figure out how much information she's retained! (She retained a lot more of the stuff she'd been involved in conversations about.)

They do peer grading, so Zada can check off her answers for her when they get the key afterward!

Neat! That's nice, since Bright's not sure what she got wrong...

Should she be checking Zada's quiz?

Yup, they trade. The quiz is multiple choice so grading it isn't too hard.

That's good!

She's a meticulous grader, though her handwriting's messy.

"You did pretty good for not having been here for the whole unit!" Zada says, handing back the quiz. Zada herself got an eight out of ten.

Bright got a six out of ten.

"Some of it I could guess, yeah."