Sam opens up a pantry cupboard. "You can take what you like, I don't cook and I wouldn't at this hour anyway. Oh, and the tap water's safe to drink."

Tarinda can take her pick of crackers, jam, hazelnut butter with or without chocolate, hard cider, and jerky.

"Thank you!"

She will eat crackers and jam and nutella till she's full and then sleep on the couch.

In the morning, the postperson comes by with a formal invitation for Tarinda to appear before the assembled legislature in a few hours.

Sounds good. Where should she go?

It's a needlessly large white building with marble columns, surrounded by gardens, a bit northwest of the college but still an easy trip.

Then she will have some crackers and hazelnut butter for breakfast and then run there.

They budgeted time for someone worse at running, more likely to get lost and more interested in getting dolled up, so she'll be there in plenty of time to get familiar with the place and watch some of the others invited to the meeting show up. One of whom is the mage who was there when she first landed.

She'd say hi but she does not know how.

In addition to the legislators, they end up with one of the supreme arbiters, two mages (the unfamiliar one is a middle-aged woman with lots of gaudy jewelry), a couple of people taking notes, and a couple of people to repeat things for the mages. And beyond that, a lot of people hanging out on balconies overlooking the meeting.

She may recognize one of the legislators, as well; she's the woman who came to chat with Tarinda and make sure she really was an alien. She is also the one who addresses the assembly first, to briefly summarize how Tarinda arrived and why they believe she's from another world; then she invites Tarinda to speak for herself.

Tarinda will get up and sign her proposal about magicking up a blank computer - she can do this herself if that seems safe to the experts - and then putting Sing on it so that it can fix everything and grab everybody safely to a place with plenty of space that requires no magical maintenance.

"I hear that Sing is to humans as humans are to animals. In your world, does Sing play a role in governance or confine humans to certain areas?"

"Not really! Governance is kind of obsolete, people still do some of it especially on Earth where there are historical states with continuity but I'm from Mars. Humans can go wherever we want as long as we, like, can, but it can't break lightspeed so far."

"What does it mean for governance to be obsolete - could you give some concrete examples of things that happen when people have disputes about contracts, or want to control the same areas, or damage each other's things?"

"Let's see... I have a contract with someone to let me know her location, so I can help someone else avoid her. If she decided she wanted to turn that off, she could, but the contract specifies that I still have to be able to accomplish my goal there so she would have to cover any expenses associated with making it happen some other way."

"If she didn't want to cover those expenses, would you take your payment by force?"

"I don't think she'd even notice, we don't use money for most things any more and it would just get automatically deducted at some point when it would be least likely to bother her."

"...You don't use money for - I'm picturing here that you have even more productive forests, that produce all the foods people want and cloth besides, but I'm not seeing how you'd get a house or a resurrection or a ride to Mars."

"Rides to Mars and houses are free. Resurrections actually aren't because Sing has to do them one at a time, but it can just have robots available to build houses and drive spaceships for anyone who wants."

"Does Sing primarily interact with humanity by giving people things, and otherwise stay distant?"

"Mostly, yeah. It doesn't think it's good for people to talk directly to it much."

"Because it would damage their minds to hear its thoughts, or for another reason?"

"It isn't a person, so there isn't a real true thing it's thinking, it's always thinking a lot of things and trying to do a lot of things. It can't do anything else. So if it talks to someone, it can have a conversation, but it can't have the kind of conversation that people have with people, and it wouldn't hurt them but it thinks it's better if it affects people less directly."

"Does it communicate through intermediaries or just not?"

"It can use intermediaries but a lot of what it does isn't talking, it just arranges things so they'll happen to go well."

"And - has anyone managed to come up with a way to check whether Sing is tricking you into trusting it and going to eventually betray you, or is it just too much smarter?"