"I guess if that ever happens to us there will be a lot of cultural changes."

"I'm working on it but don't have a high bandwidth value sink compared to my feasible output."

"You said people in your world can make recordings of songs? Does that not work fast?"

"There might be a way to make it work - I guess if I sped up a song digitally by enough maybe - electronics do not seem to operate in a sped-up fashion, but are sometimes themselves just fast enough that they can still be used from a sped-up vantage point, music just seems harder than performing database searches."

"And if it's not artistically valuable enough it won't work any longer....hmmm. Well, I'm happy to sing. And maybe someday there'll be something else that - if you object to slavery are you not having sex with the girl? Presumably you'll get tired of that eventually?"

"I am not having sex with the girl! She can leave any time she wants and just has really limited options among other humans! I am not going to get tired of all this not sexually exploiting a vulnerable teenager I'm doing! - or get tired of it after she's not a teenager! I can and have gone my entire life without sexually exploiting any vulnerable people! Especially ones who have already been implied to have been raped way the fuck too much!"

"I just mean, maybe at some point you'll pick someone up even if no one was appealing at first glance."

"I'm not going to try to claim that faeries are all unattractive to my sophisticated demonic sensibilities or anything, but I do not feel confident in navigating the mess that is all y'all's sexual norms. Besides, I'm skeptical that even if I put that on the table anything's quite as efficient a form of value transfer as I'd need to revolutionize the resource situation of twenty billion people."

"Probably not." Sigh.

"Which is why I'm hopeful I can figure out some financial system hack, but preliminary experiments weren't all that encouraging."

"My brother's been trying to get that to work for ages. It'd be wonderful if you did figure it out."

"Yeah." Sigh. "Well, I might know something that closes the gap, I had to teach him about fractions."

"If you want to tell me what those are I should sing another song first."

"I don't think it's important except insofar as it's implicit in music stuff I've already explained."

"Okay. I don't have much of a talent for math that isn't about music anyway."

"So we can skip explaining fractions. But it's a basic math concept that has relevance to finance and if your brother didn't have it he might be missing something else that makes a difference."

Nod. "I really hope he figures something out."

"Me too."

And he toys with the piano some more and announces a bit later that he thinks Cam is now a little in their debt and can go give people things if he pleases.

"Cool, thanks. Wonder how long that'll last," Cam snorts.

"Well, you're welcome back."

"Can you roll me back to my room?"

"Sure thing." He does this.

"Thanks."

"You're very welcome."