Well, she isn't thinking about that right now. Right now she is actually thinking about what Haru's abs might look like. The bond doesn't pick up on this though, only less immediate feelings.

"If there is a specific reason for - that is, if my wild guess about why you wanted me to know is correct you - I don't know how to put this and hadn't meant to say anything but I'm still backlashed."

"... I don't actually follow."

"Backlash makes me lonely and I get compulsively talky and sometimes if I can't think of anything else to say I say things that I have not fully developed into conversational-quality sentences."

"Ah, would you appreciate me making conversation on some unrelated topic?"

"Please. I think we were expressly saving a couple."

Oh yes, she has the list here in her study.

"You declined to explain computers previously?"

"A computer is kind of like - uh, is Jacquard of weaving fame here, or here yet -"

"If so I haven't heard of him?"

"Alas. Uh, a computer is a device for storing and organizing and manipulating information. In their most primitive form they mostly just do arithmetic. But as they get more capacious, it becomes possible to - assign different representations to a particular number. For example, there's a number assigned for every color, and you can store an entire picture, as thousands of tiny tiny specks of numerical color arranged in a grid. And then if the computer is expecting those numbers to represent a picture, it will arrange and display them."

"Is this useful because.... you can turn calculations into pictures, and thus create graphs as you mentioned previously?"

"That's one thing computers can do, but also, while computers start out very large, they get progressively smaller as people work out more and more compact ways to store numbers and squeeze in the other features a computer needs to have, so by the time a computer is a thing a private citizen might have in their house, they'd fit easily on your desk with lots of space left over, but be able to store a tremendous amount - not just pictures, but also text, you can assign each letter a number."

"So it allows you to distribute books in a much more compact and affordable form?"

"It does eventually, though at first the use case is mostly office work things - reports and accounts and articles and suchlike. They don't start out so much more affordable as they do more searchable. It's easy to ask a computer to keep all of its files in an order, like alphabetical order, and to collect some of those files into virtual folders. So if you're running, say, a bank, you have a folder of your customers and name each file after them, and then when John Smith comes in you find where the S customers start and look under Smith."

"Oh that does sound rather useful, like a personal librarian."

"Yeah. And after a while people came up with ways for computers to, instead of copying the numbers onto portable doodads that could be read by other computers, they came up with ways computers could communicate with other computers directly, over great distances. At first with wires, and at first with wires they were already using to transmit people's voices, but later there were faster computer-specific wires, and then they figured out how to do it with signals that just travel through the air at least for part of each journey for a given bit of data."

"Oh... are all the coomputers connected to each other?"

"Pretty much, in the sense that there is a single decentralized network of computers communicating and almost any time you want a computer to be able to talk to other computers you want it to be able to talk to that network, but there might be like, military computers that are only networked to each other and not the rest of the world, I'm not sure."

"What sort of information is communicated using the main computer network?"

"...it's an exaggeration to say 'all of it'. But... most of it."

"Your world seems extremely good."

"It's nicer than this one, though I think that's actually the calendar year and attendant advances rather than the magic system, it's not like dungeons aren't torturing anyone."

"Are computers related to the magic system?"

"Not really. Some of the advances in making the computers smaller and faster and so on involved materials reverse-engineered from dungeon harvests but that wasn't required, it just helped."

"I've formed the impression that your world is generally much wealthier than mine, though I'm not sure if you've made this explicit?"