"...Robyn, would you...?"

"Frankly, sir, I'm surprised you held out this long. Riley, wanna play Truth or Insanity again?" 

"Sure... I forget sometimes how weird we must seem." She reaches out her hand and once in the proper handshake position she says "Everything I've said has been true to the best of my knowledge and said without any intent to mislead you."

"Well." 

"Dare I ask if you'll share this marvelous innovation? Or how long it will take? Huntsmen and Huntresses have truly staggering death rates, to say nothing of the unawakened soldiers we employ." 

"Of course, it would be pretty awful of us to deny it to you. As for how long it'll take, we can distribute versions that can't be reverse engineered pretty freely It does need some infrastructure to do it on a wide scale though. If you want something you can understand. That will require a lot more infrastructure and a more trust on our part because you can use similar techniques to edit people and that's a scary thing to introduce to a society. It's one of the few non-weapon technologies we heavily regulate."

He didn't think his threat estimate for these people could get any higher. Shows what he knows.

Salem is looking smaller by the minute. 

"Backups...Okay. That infrastructure just moved to the top of our priority list." He blows out a breath. "What other...conventional technologies...do we alarmingly lack?" 

"Robyn says you don't have any Satellites... those make it a lot easier to have consistent communications. I expect we're better at producing food compactly which is probably useful if you're as besieged as you imply. Our full range of medical technologies mean that even without backups people live indefinitely unless an accident or act of violence destroys their body... though without implants memory gets tricky once you get past a century and a half or so. You're also clearly operating in circumstances where material resources are meaningfully scarce. With proper infrastructure that ceases to be a concern. Big projects like building a new habitat have to be planned around but habitats are generally at least ten times the size of your floating city here."

He frowns. "Those sound like good priorities. Satellites would be a tremendous gain if they work without Dust. Food production, and manufacturing in general, are good choices. Every so often, one of the nations of Remnant tries to expand into the wilds. It tends to not go well. The death rate for farmers is higher than for anyone else except soldiers. Worse, if you count the number of towns utterly destroyed by Grimm. 

"How long until an envoy arrives? I will likely want to speak to them when they arrive - at bare minimum, they should know the dangers of travel. And if you tell me what you need for that risk assessment, I can get the appropriate personnel on it." 

"None of our technology requires Dust. Satellites mostly work using batteries and solar panels. The most effective food production at scale is probably aquaponics, it's relatively low maintenance and produces fish and plants. It can also be setup to do wastewater processing but that can decrease the yield. Manufacturing tech varies widely it depends somewhat on what raw materials you have available. I can give you recommendations if you have that written somewhere. I can read faster than I expect you can talk. As for the Envoy... probably at least a few hours, I think my logs so far have been interesting enough that someone will come quickly. As for risk assessment, the most useful thing would be access to a library or digital equivalent. Otherwise it's going to relate to running scans on the Grimm, Dust, and people with activated and inactivated aura."

"I'll be very interested in what your scans turn up. In the meantime, it sounds like I have a great deal of arrangements to make. Speaking of, will you be needing a place to stay? We have guest rooms here at Atlas Academy that would be suitable. And I imagine you may be on a different sleep schedule than the rest of us." If she even sleeps. 

"Thank you, I probably won't sleep for a while but it's good for me to get a couple hours a night. Does that mean I have permission to start doing scans? Are there any restrictions you'd like me to abide by?"

Let the security nightmares begin. 

"I'm still less familiar with the technical aspects of your scans than I'm comfortable with. Perhaps we can kill two Nevermore with one cartridge. For now, please supply a list of what you're scanning and what your scan tells you. No scans on robots or weapons for now, please, and especially none of people or scrolls that I haven't explicitly authorized; we need to decide what the proper security protocols should be for this new - " gaping network vulnerability " - approach. Once you've gotten a way to interface with our technology, you should be able to duplicate the data from your scans to our devices, correct?" 

"Definitely, I do need permission from a person to share scans of their body without sufficient sample size for anonymity and aggregation."

Ah, the old "anonymous data" line. An old, familiar friend, of the sort you never want to let out of your sight. 

"I don't anticipate authorizing scans of human or Faunus for a while yet. If and when that happens, we'll start with people who consent to their scans being studied. I want to know exactly what information these scans are gathering before I accept their use on my citizens." He pauses, frowning. "Some rare Semblances could plausibly copy abilities like magecrafting. I have to consider the possibility for security's sake. Is there any way to detect scans, or other uses of your type of magic?" 

"Many bits of magic involve imparting forces to matter, those are detectable though any of the ways you could detect forces from other sources. Some other effects show up under exotic effects analysis scans, and some other realms we've visited have exotic effects with similar abilities. For passive scans the only way to know is from the Heart's archives. Those are accessible in person in the Heart's realm or via certain resonators or with very easy to make arrays. The archives record every piece of magic ever done with the Heart's system."

"Convenient, though hard to check on short notice." Also suspicious, in that Atlas will only ever have someone's word about the contents. He needs his own magecrafters. Salem getting access to this would be disastrous. "You mentioned punishments consisting of removing magic. Can you cut off magecrafters remotely?" 

"We can't, I think on rare occasions the Heart has revoked it's blessing but those were all when a Magecrafter was under the influence of mind editing or in the aftermath of major trauma. When we talk about removing magecrafting as a punishment we mean forcibly moving their mind to an incompatible body or using mind magic to make them incapable of using magic. Neither of those are easy to do at long range."

"The Heart is itself an intelligent actor?

"I will need to have a long talk with your envoy. Someone gaining access to your abilities could wreak untold havoc in Remnant if not caught and stopped quickly. I have reason to think that may be possible." If only that it hasn't been proven impossible yet. Not that it would be much reassurance if it were. Five minutes ago, magical mind backups were impossible. 

"We don't actually know if the Heart is a person, it's possible, but it's also possible that it's an autonomous system built by an unknown actor. You can't have conversations with it but the Heart's realm is somewhat responsive to requests and the way it determines who to give Magecrafting and who not to appears to be personality and intent based. We can't turn the Heart's magic on itself though. As for someone local copying Heart based magic, it's happened before though in our experiences thus far people have only been able to copy the effects of specific arrays or resonators not the overall ability to make new ones. There are no guarantees though."

"That is...moderately reassuring. 

"I think we've reached the end of productive deliberations for tonight. Robyn, congratulations, you are no longer assigned to Cable Post Six." 

"I hoped you'd say that." 

"I'm assigning you as escort, consultant, and guard for Riley while she's here. Team POGO is authorized to know her VIP status and that she has an analysis ability, for now; I'll be sending them to assist with the "guard" portion of that duty. For tonight, requisition Riley a blank civilian scroll on my authority. I'll make sure someone is available to help set it up and connect it to the grid. Riley, once you have scroll access you will probably want to start your reading with Athenaeum. It's a collection of articles written by amateur and professional authors on most topics of relevance to Remnant. Not wholly reliable, but a good primer." Also, completely unclassified and therefore will hopefully buy him time to draw up a semblance of security protocols. He's going to envy Riley those few hours of sleep, isn't he.