"They were a very good idea. You and I are the best paaaaair!" He's rotating this way and that as he says it.

"Do you want to see bot footage of the seven minutes you missed?"

Blink. "Oh, yes, definitely. Missing seven minutes of my life is annoying, next time I'll get her and lock her up, ugh."

The display on the wall shows what he missed, shifting view as bots are disabled or lose a good angle on the action.

"I'm a little worried about the stun gun thing having been loudly advertised twice. I don't know if anybody on the field was paying close enough attention or speculating very much, but..."

"Well, the news footage only caught the second time, and I played it off on the forums as being because 'it sounded funny at the time and could distract or confuse the enemy.' And given that Rewind" to whom they'd given a name during debriefing "had booped me, I don't know if it's that relevant that it happened twice."

"Doing it once makes... some sense. Doing it twice makes it look potentially important. You were operating without remembering having done it, but you didn't act otherwise exactly alike each time."

"Yeah. I mean, my reasoning was the same both times I presume, even if the battlefield had changed enough that all my actions weren't. But yeah, you're right."

"So cross your fingers, hope everybody who's anybody knows now that you're partial to stun guns, and don't repeat yourself."

"Yes, definitely don't repeat myself. Unless Rewind can send me like days into the past, in which case she's absurdly terrifying and needs to be taken down immediately."

"I think she's limited to ten minutes, but she might have been handicapping for some reason. Anyway, you still shouldn't repeat yourself days in the past because she only sends back the things she touches and everyone else will still remember, but I suppose you won't remember being told so if it happens."

"Pretty much. If I'm ever sent back into the past and you're in a position to do it remind me of it, please?"

"Will do."

"Replacement robots. I've been poking at the central software enough that I think it can handle a couple dozen now, but I have to build 'em."

"Oh. And you can't mass produce them? Like, make a sufficiently detailed list of instructions that another bot could follow them and it'd be algorithmic enough that it wouldn't have room for creativity, or something?"

"I could do that, but I'm not planning to graduate to robot-making robots until I, well, graduate."

"Why?"

"The assembly would be kind of stationary, for one thing."

"Oh. Fair enough. But couldn't you program a bot to operate your current workshop while following those recipes? Like, effectively replace you, once you're done with the 'figuring it out' part and all that's left is the 'repeat same motions ad nauseam' part?"

"The bots do all have to be slightly different because I avoid random number generation and the software needs a way to decide which bot to send to do any specific thing. But I could program that in too. But - when I design a bot-assembly apparatus, in my head, it's a big stationary thing, it's not a pair of hands and my actual toolkit. I couldn't begin to tell you why. I might be able to get around it, but there are other reasons I don't want self-reproducing robots while a Ward. The Protectorate freaks out about self-reproducing anythings."

"We are pretty cool."

"Yeah! Though I dunno that I'd be a very good Tinker. I'd probably want to take everything I made apart to figure out why it works and how to reproduce it all and how to explain it to non-Tinkers. I mean, I spent a long time grumbling about how I can't actually look too closely at anything I make."