"Fair."

Her thing clicks to a halt again. She checks it. "...Five matches, all lined up. Sweet. Okay so as soon as we find today's codes and a radio I can listen to military communications."

"What is that thing?"

"...Codebreaker? I don't know how much you know about cryptography so I don't want to confuse or or sound condescending, but... It's basically a codebreaker, yeah."

"I know nothing about cryptography," she admits.

"I did not invent this, I cribbed some notes from 1951's crypto community. But it'll work."

"Cool. Is it an Enigma machine? I think that was the thing Alan Turing did to crack the Nazis' codes."

"The Enigma machine is the Nazis' encoder-decoder, it's what I need to break. I'm not sure this thing has a fancy name."

"We could look it up!"

"If you like? I don't think the nane is too important if I understand how it works and know it's working right."

"Well, names matter to me," she says, "but I'm not sure the extent to which they matter to me is universal. Also there's the fact that the name I'm thinking of, if it exists, is for the version of the Enigma-cracker that Alan Turing invented, and Alan Turing is relevant to my interests for other reasons."

"Huh. Bar, can I see those conference papers again?"

Read read read.

"Apparently this entire class of devices were called Turing machines until about 1960. The one I borrowed the most from for this was a Grainger-Sharp Model Three."

"Turing machines are a thing I've heard of! Turing's a big name in the computer science community or something. The Turing Test is supposed to be a measure of how human-like an AI is? Or something? And he was gay, hence the relevant to my interests, just being a Big Computer Name is not relevant to my interests, I'm terrible at doing anything with machines other than using them."

"I've had about six hours of access to all this future-to-me tech and spent four and a half of those decompressing. An AI is...? Also, people being gay is relevant to your interests?"

"Well, I'm gay," she says, "so historical people who accomplished important things is relevant to my interest. Also pretty girls but that's a different kind of interest. An AI is a hypothetical person whose brain runs on a computer instead of a brain; the word is also used to refer to programs that aren't people but do...other things...I don't know enough about computers to define it well enough."

She goes kind of motionless for a moment when Hero announces that. Not disgusted or anything - almost fearful? "I, uh, see. I don't know enough about computers either, I'll be sure to fix that later."

"Luck to you on that. You alright?"

"...I grew up in an environment where being gay or expressing much of anything other than disgust for people who are or even associating with people who do the same makes you a target for everything from scorn to trumped up treason charges. I flinched. Sorry."

"It's fine. I thought that was only male homosexuals, and lesbians were just generally held to not exist by the Nazis, but then that was in a world with no Darwinist critters or Tesla cannons."

"Yeah, lesbians catch a lot less of it but not none of it? Mostly we- They're said to be lazy women who are pretending because 'they don't want to do housework and raise children'."

Snort.

"Still not a good thing to be open about back in Berlin around now."

"It's sort of irritating--if people are going to hate me I'd rather they have intelligent reasons for it--but I'll remember that."

"Yeah."

......That is a pretty conflicted face. (Because that is a pretty face and a bubbly and charming personality and she has shut down any thought about that sort of thing for years but had a slip of the tongue just now and did she catch it gaaah.)

"Do you want me to leave you alone to plan and decompress? If being around someone who's open about it is stressful..."