"Also there's all these obnoxious social scripts that praises guys for having lots of sex and shames girls. Makes it a lot more--threatening--to proposition one out of nowhere."

"Oh, nobody got praised for having sex with me. S'why it was always plausibly deniable and under the bleachers."

"Yeah, but--as a girl, even in this comparatively enlightened day and age, if I am approached by a boy I don't know very well and he asks me for sex, especially if he has a reputation for being trouble, before I can even think of how I want to respond I have to weigh the possibility that if I say no he might try to rape me. One in three women experience sexual assault at some point in their lives. Now, me in particular, I don't so much have to worry about that, on account of being a Kryptonian surrounded by squishy humans. But, uh, it's been tried. Admittedly also in the other direction--there was this woman this one time who mind controlled guys, it wasn't pretty--but, yeah." 

"Huh. Well, I didn't have those statistics or that perspective, but since for unrelated reasons I never approached any women I guess I can give myself a cookie for never having accidentally threatened to rape them either."

"Most girls don't think it through this far, they'd just react. But here," she says, miming handing him a cookie.

"Thanks."

He examines the wall paintings. "Anything else to check out in here? Hidden Kryptonian supercomputer, or something?"

"There's...some stuff...but I can't control it, I'm pretty sure the Jor-El AI is controlling it and, uh, fuck that." 

"Yeah, reasonable. Let's get out of here, then."

"Sure. Anywhere in particular you wanna go next?"

"Not sure, honestly, my Smallville really did have nothing to do. Did we get a halfway respectable library at some point in the last forty years? If so I could sit down with the Britannica and flip through for some planetary context."

"We have a halfway respectable library! Its selection is, well, it's still a small town, but you can order books from Metropolis and pick 'em up there, and it's better than the Communist Manifesto and To Kill a Mockingbird, and they have at least one encyclopedia."

"Miracles do happen. Let's go there, I guess, and I'll flip through what they've got and see what's changed."

"Sure!" 

She zips out of the cave and through the streets of Smallville, stopping in an unobserved spot near the front of the Smallville Public Library. 

Xan follows, and follows her into the library itself.

What does the illustrious Smallville Public Library have to offer in the way of a reference section?

It has, in fact, two encyclopedias, the Britannica and the World Book. There are also about a dozen shelves of miscellaneous informative nonfiction on various subjects. 

Between the door and the reference section is a long table up against the wall with four computers on it. 

Wow, computers got almost usable. From Jor-El's crystal he knows they've got a ways to go, but this is some pretty serious progress from the machine language monstrosities he'd have had to work with back in the sixties.

He goes through the Britannica not at top speed but at a clip such that anyone looking on would think he was just looking at the pictures. The World Book follows.

"We've got an Internet now?" he asks Clara, sotto voce. "Or, well, a planetary intranet. But still!"

"Oh, yeah, that super didn't exist in the sixties. We do!" 

"It still sounds pretty primitive compared to some of the specs in the crystal..." He goes over to one of the computers and logs in with the guest password taped to the monitor. Within a minute or so, he's on Ask Jeeves looking up circuit board diagrams and Moore's Law.

He whistles quietly. "This is some good stuff. If Krypton still existed I'd have a hell of a routine for the comedy clubs."

Pout. "Unfair. The Jor-El AI never gave me an engineering education." 

"Maybe yours wasn't as interested in having you conquer the planet. Or maybe the AI got corrupted and didn't want to make you capable of replacing it. Or maybe he just didn't think girls could code."

"Oh, I'm pretty sure he wants me to conquer the planet. No, it's probably just that he's a cryptic stingy bastard and doesn't think I need it yet." 

"Well, his loss, now I get to teach you instead. -I do wish I had the memory crystal, the direct transfer is easier, but I can probably get most of it across in plain Kryptonian."

"Cool. --Actually, hey, my boyfriend's brother owns, like, an actual company, with scientists and an R&D budget, how do you feel about catapulting Earth's tech level forward and also getting rich." 

"-Positively! Jor-El would hate it, but that's a plus, honestly, fuck that guy. I don't think I ever got your boyfriend's name?"

"Julian Luthor. His brother's name is Lex."