It gets to where it's operating a bit faster than it logically should, too, by the time she's finished working on it - though she has a sense she could keep tweaking it to get even more functionality out of it.

...tweak tweak.

In addition to starting itself, it starts opening to the most convenient program immediately.

Adorable.

She hauls the finished project and her tools and remaining parts back with her.

House is still there.

"You want dinner again?" Sarah asks.

"I'd appreciate it."

"Sure. It'll be about an hour."

"You wanna see the thingy I built?"

"Oh, sure, yeah!"

Lorica sets it on the table. It turns itself on and opens to a reproduction of Wikipedia's front page. "It'll respond to conversations around it and find topical information."

"Nice. Pretty good knack, seems like, especially for your first time working. What's Wikipedia?"

"It's an encyclopedia from my world. Rete - the program I turned off so it wouldn't become a person - had a copy of it so I could look things up whenever I wanted."

"Huh. I remember the internet starting to get its feet under it - information was pretty scattered... 'Course now it's all local networks, when it's anything."

"Wikipedia's really great!"

"Sounds it. Can you look up anything?"

"Anything that was in the encyclopedia as of the last download, what do you wanna know?"

Shrug. "Oh, I wouldn't even know where to start, 'anything' sounds like so much..."

The screen flips to the entry for Universe.

She leans over to read it, and laughs. "That's a lot more writing than any encyclopedia entry I've ever seen."

"They didn't have to fit the whole encyclopedia into a shelf of books."

"Sounds like a pretty big advantage, that."

"It helps a lot. Also it's edited and contributed to by anyone who wants to help, which works much better than you'd think it would."

"I'd guess you get some vandals but you mostly get really dedicated librarian-types?"

"Yeah, exactly, and the vandalism is obvious and there's software to make it easy to switch things back to how they were yesterday."

"That'd be useful, yeah."