"Yeah. There's lots of names for them but I like 'spirit guide'."

“What things do they do aside from knowing a lot and learning languages really fast?”

"They make sure you never get lost and you can use them to talk to people far away and coordinate all your other machines and Page can show me books and sing me songs if I'm bored and stuff."

“What would you usually have other machines doing?” 

"Well, in my house I have machines shaped like little imaginary animals that do my cooking and cleaning, and sometimes I want a vehicle to fly to another part of Mars with..."

"You have flying carriages?" 

"Sure do!"

"Everything you say about your world only makes me more jealous. Do you have machines to fix your clothes for you too?" 

"I... don't actually know if they usually get fixed or just replaced, I just kind of never notice my clothes needing to be fixed unless I've indicated it's something I want to take care of myself because, like, I made it during a setpiece and know how and want to maintain it alone."

"Gods! You and I are very different people. If I didn't have to fix my clothes I wouldn't go near a needle and thread ever again." 

"She's already discovered she can make me do her mending." 

"Hey, I do not make you, you offered." 

"I don't do this a lot or anything but I have a belt like that and a cloak. I'm not wearing either one right now."

"Are your other clothes, what, impossible to tear or damage and never wear out?" 

"I don't think so? I mean, I know they can be damaged some, occasionally you wanna be able to dramatically slice through somebody's shirt in a swordfight scene. When I take them off at the end of the day the machines whisk them away and then they turn up in my closet and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference if they were new ones or just really well repaired! Page knows but I haven't asked it yet because I think it's illustrative of how much material scarcity we don't have that I didn't know on my own."

"That makes sense! Can you have as many clothes as you want? ...Oooh, what's fashion like in your world?" 

"Yeah, we can have as many clothes as we want! This is what I happened to be wearing so I guess it's an example but people who get really into it wear much fancier stuff."

Vanyel is of the opinion that Dara is really not very focused in her questions about Sing and clothes is not the highest priority thing to ask about, but that does sound tempting. 

"I just had the thought that a lot of people in our world are sad about not having a husband or wife," Dara says. "Seems hard for Sing to fix though." 

–okay, ouch. Vanyel tries not to wince visibly. 

"I mean, it doesn't just declare people married out of nowhere but it can arrange people to meet people they'd click with. Like, I didn't wander through a rack of frozen dead people and go 'that one, I want her', I got a tipoff that there was a whole quest to be had and her list of demands included that she wanted a girlfriend and I did all the rest of the steps and she'd said it was okay to read her diary and I had, so I'd know how to do it just how she wanted, and I liked her, so when she woke up there I was."

Dara wrinkles her nose. "I mean, I guess that's better than a lot of people being lonely. Maybe when you're used to it, it doesn't seem so uncomfortably weird." 

:It seems like a clear improvement on the current state of things to me: 

"It might do something different here, I'm not sure, the point of it is that it's smart, not that it just has a plan. Maybe this only works for us because we were already used to there being dating... things... where you'd tell a dumber machine what you wanted and it would try to help you narrow down who might be that and vice-versa."

"I think a lot of people here would find that weird too! But maybe you get used to it."