"I mean Christians think that the Emperor isn't the Son of Heaven-- I guess maybe you guys are a bit confused about how Christians work."

He shrugs. "They didn't cause any problems that I was aware of."

"So right now my plan is to take you to an immigration social worker and get you set up with, like, an apartment and food stamps and health care, because you're probably going to need that regardless. And the immigration social worker can check if you're a missing person. And I sent in a lab order to a local university so we should be able to figure out if you're from a thousand years ago soon." 

"I have no objections."

"We're heading to Coalinga and you can live there if you want but I live in Portland and I am like... the only person you know who is alive in this century. So if you like my company you should tell them to get you a place in Portland."

"I'll make sure to let them know." Being several centuries in the future is weird

"If you turn out to be from the past, probably someone from the government will be along regardless to try to arrange you talking to historians and so on. --You don't have to talk to historians but I think they would be very interested and pay you lots of money."

"I'm definitely interested in money! Especially as I'm not sure my job... Exists? Or if I could get it?"

"What... is your job? We have farmers but it's a very different ecosystem and tech level."

"Vice Minister to the Three Judicial Offices. We investigate crimes."

"We have cops! And members of the civil service, I'm not really sure what a minister is in this context. --Depending on the nature of the crimes you're investigating I maybe should say 'we have an intelligence service' instead."

"We did serious crimes, such as murder, but also crimes that put the state at risk, so that might be intelligence services? If I'm understanding right."

"Intelligence services handles, you know, keeping track of whether countries want to invade us, extracting Cascadian nationals when they do things that are illegal in other countries and not here, that sort of thing."

Trying to overthrow the Gileadite government but you don't get to know that until you get TS clearance.

"We focused more on, hmm, internal threats. External threats was very much the military's job."

"Yeah, we don't really have those, that's what having a democracy is for. If people don't like the government they can vote for someone else."

Democracies are weird. "Surely you'd have problems like--" he's about to say 'massive counterfeiting rings,' but it feels wrong to reveal classified information even if he is somehow several centuries in the future "--massive tax evasion?"

"Oh, that's the IRS, that's a totally different division."

"That makes sense."

The car pulls up at a location!

Lev gets out and says, "can I cut off a bit of your robe?"

"Sure. Is this for the lab?" He rolls up his sleeves and offers a bit of the sleeve of the inner layer to cut.

"Yep! Bitoxiphosphene gets into pretty much anything that respirates. You can fake a lot of things but you can't come up with a robe that looks that new and doesn't have bitoxiphosphene in it."

"That's going to be better proof than 'let me tell you about things that happened last month for me that you don't know about because they happened hundreds of years ago for you'."

"I'll go deal with this, you can talk to the immigration social worker?"

"Sure thing." And Jing Yi heads door-and-presumably-social-worker-wards

When Lev next gets a chance to check his phone, the results from the amateur linguists are back. The language is Middle Chinese, probably Tang Dynasty based on some quirks of plosives and tonality. It's mostly similar to So-and-so's reconstruction, with some traits of Such-and-such's. (The thread discussing this is very contentious. Apparently there is drama in the Middle Chinese fandom intense academic debate about the vowels, and how dare anyone not stick to a specific reconstruction/use the Incorrect reconstruction/etc.)

The speaker is also notably fluent considering this is a dead language reconstructed mostly from poetry and rhyming dictionaries, and also they have a weird accent that is hard to place.

One person would really love to have any more context on where Lev found this recording, please, it's going to haunt them otherwise. It's one minute of rambling about the concept of talking, and then four minutes of free association about the restaurants of Chang'an? Including one that had really good food but got closed down because of a murder??? And they have to know if this is based off an existing text or what, and if so could someone please send them a digital copy of this text.