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She's a four-year-old girl, and people (especially her Dad) insist she's a boy.
Not that she isn't sometimes. She is. But not today! Today she's a girl. And Dad keeps saying that's not true, that God made her body perfect and she shouldn't second-guess God's plan for her. God made her a boy, so she's supposed to be a boy. And on the one hand that kinda makes sense. God doesn't make mistakes, right? So if she were really a girl sometimes, then she'd... what? Her body would change, she guesses. But on the other hand, she knows she's a girl. She's a girl with a peepee, that's obvious. She'd prefer not having a peepee when she's a girl, but it's not the worst thing ever. And if God doesn't make mistakes, God also didn't make her feel like a girl sometimes on accident, right? It must be part of His (because God is always a He, even though God made everyone, boys and girls, in His image, he's always a He, Dad says) plan.
She tells Dad that, today, and Dad gets angry, and yells at her, and she doesn't know why he's yelling. It makes sense to her! But he won't explain why she's wrong, he's just yelling, Dad's so mean, she hates him, and she's not crying, shut up, you're crying!
And now Mum's coming and she's talking to Dad, and that usually makes Dad stop yelling and go away but he won't stop now and Sadde's angry and afraid and hurt and she's running away. A part of her thinks that it doesn't make much sense to run away, the park is pretty open and she can't really hide anywhere, and she'll have to go back because she'll get hungry (not now, though, she just ate a sandwich).
So she runs until she finds some bushes where she can hide, and she hides there, and she doesn't cry, and she spends a long time not crying. Mum and Dad don't come after her, though, and after she's done not crying she doesn't wipe her eyes and her nose, and she comes out the other way of the bushes she was hiding in.
And she's pretty sure that's not the park.
(He is not smiling. He is not. This is serious, scientific inquiry.)
"Again, now recording...?"
"None here and now, we've tested what I've thought to test, but there might be a few more tests I'd like to run once we have access to more sophisticated tools," he answers instantly and completely, not even thinking about it. "Okay... so it's not about recording or not recording per se, and I suppose we could've guessed this from the fact that watching someone write on paper works. But on the other hand it's not about the literal source of the order either, since using a phone like a camera is equivalent to recording the order and then immediately displaying it. What is it about?"
"It being vanishingly unlikely in principle that the signal would be interrupted by any agent other than the master."
"Oh. That makes a lot of sense. Are you speculating, or is that really how it works?"
"So this suggests... a lot of stuff. What counts as vanishingly unlikely? Would a great distance count? Would this take relativistic effects into account? Perhaps having a computer actually record an order and then play it back? Or a delay? Maybe adding a middleperson..." He starts writing down these ideas on another page of the notepad where he's been sketching the plan.
"I don't know how unlikely because we don't have all this technology to muddy the waters in Fairyland. Distance doesn't do it, fairies with very good hearing or who can project their voices work at the appropriate ranges in the appropriate directions. I don't know what a relativistic effect is."
"Never mind, I'll explain it at some point if you want me to but it won't actually be relevant to our purposes. What about a great enough distance that the sound takes, say, five seconds to arrive there, for instance?"
"I don't know; I didn't know sound could take that long to travel."
"Sound travels at three hundred and forty metres per second—and I'm getting distracted again. Okay, so, maybe a delay could work, but I don't have the hardware to test it right now. But, hmmm... What if the means of communication is under someone's constant control? Like, say, suppose you were speaking an order into a walkie-talkie and Yellow were holding the button?"
"Then Yellow could cut me off, but he couldn't spoof my voice. Unless you did not mention a very important walkie-talkie feature. I'd expect it to work fine."
"He cannot spoof your voice with this walkie-talkie, but that's not impossible to do with other bits of tech. But didn't you say it was about it being vanishingly unlikely that the signal would be interrupted? If Yellow were holding the button he could interrupt it at any time."
"Interrupted meaning transformed by the interruption. Merely stopping an order just means it only takes effect up to the point where you stopped hearing it. With writing, for instance, if you watch it written and then you stop someone's hand before they finish a word it just won't work, and if you read something someone wrote and meant to enforce but it was a while ago, it won't work; but if you watch and they finish a verb you're bound by it. ...This is for writing in use as orders qua orders, not in use as an extension of 'obey writing in my hand' or something."
"Ah, I see. That... may or may not mean relativity doesn't affect it, but it seems like an artificial delay or it being recorded and then played back shortly after would work."
"Not to test the recording hypothesis with fine enough precision but the delay itself... hmm... I have an idea that'll take about half an hour to test, I'll need to go elsewhere to do it and you'll need to stay here with my phone, if that's okay? ...and your order means I need to explain it all in detail, erm, the idea is my using a computer elsewhere and then creating a videoconference with you so we can communicate remotely and then I'll artificially route it through a server in another continent so there's a delay."
"You may in general invite me to decline prolonged explanations of things if you think I will not particularly benefit from them." She hands over the keycard to the second room.
...you stop that at once.
"What d'you want me to do with that?" he asks, about the keycard.
"You said I needed to stay here with the phone and you needed to be somewhere else. Is the other room not far enough?"
"Oh. It is, but I don't have a computer with me, too heavy and wouldn't fit in my backpack, it'd slow me down. I'm gonna go to a cyber café and use a computer there. And anyway, I need to show you how to accept the call on the phone here."
"Oh." She takes the keycard back and looks attentively at the phone.
He opens the appropriate application and shows her how to navigate on it and where the call will appear and what she'll have to do to accept it.
"Okay, so, er... I guess we'll talk again in a bit." And off he goes into the dangerous wilderness of mortal cities.