"This is actually an unusual situation! Sing isn't magic, so it can only bring back people who were preserved right after they died, usually by freezing them or vitrifying them. Usually those get brought back right away, or after conditions they laid out beforehand are met, which might include kids but might not."

"People do usually leave notes but almost all of our backlog is people with unfixable brain problems, so, you know, not the most high-quality notes. Come to think of it, I guess they'll want to know what exactly Sing is going to do about that - unless we keep them under till Sing is done, in which case they'll just want to know what exactly Sing did about that..."

"Sing has unusually high standards for how confident it has to be before doing things directly to brains, unfortunately, so some of them might not come back any time soon."

"Do people in your world lose their memories and get worse at things in general and die, usually before they're a hundred and always before they're two hundred?"

"No, aging is fixed! Anyone whose problem is just being old will be fine."

"That'll be the majority of people. And they'll want to know what happened and whether it'll have to happen again in another ninety years..."

"It will not have to happen in another ninety years. I'm in my forties."

"...Good for you? Sorry, I think I missed an inference somewhere."

"Humans do not naturally look like me in their forties, I do not age, nobody has to age."

"And that's a persistent effect - you didn't get it done last year because you noticed some wrinkles and didn't like them - and it's just one thing that prevents all aging - that is honestly very cool. What happens if someone thinks it'd be nice if people knew they had forty years of experience or just thinks grey hair looks neat?"

"Oh, people look however they want, I know some people who like looking older than this."

"However they want like whatever age, or like they can get a whole new face?"

"Whole new face if they want it!"

"My husband does that! We have a catalog you can pick from, if the mage isn't freehanding it - actually I'm guessing you've talked to them already - anyway, does Mars have different standards for getting permission to copy someone's face or are they basically compatible?"

"I don't know what your standards for that are here! Usually people don't replace their face entirely all at once, they change a few things and see how they like that. If somebody did want to copy someone else's face probably that would be allowed but everyone could still tell who was who if we wanted."

"Okay, uh, we have a law against copying other people's features without permission, not even just because of impersonation but because people might feel weird about it, and if Martians go around copying us I foresee a culture clash."

"Sing is smarter than me and will probably come up with something that makes everyone happy, but I don't know what it is. I don't think a lot of people really want to copy, usually people want to look like themselves or at least get something custom and original done."

"How expensive would that be to get and is it Sing doing it or can humans train to do it?"

"Humans can do it! My girlfriend's list of things she wanted arranged before waking included being prettier and I went to a space station to meet a designer and get something worked out for her."

"Man, you must have a lot more going on artistically. With people's bodies, but I'm assuming also with everything else. I'm curious about that but I don't even know what to ask, really."

"I could sing for you if you like, that seems to be a lost art here."

"You can if you want - it's not completely a lost art but people aren't using it for poetry - but I'm mostly thinking about how I would find, uh, art galleries or whatever makes art galleries obsolete, or if you have something equivalent to an art history class I could eventually take, or if there's something completely different that I'd never guess like, uh, weightless dancing with prehensile tails?"

"I haven't heard of specifically weightless dancing with prehensile tails but that doesn't mean no one's doing it! There are museums and classes and the way most people find most things is with a robot-without-a-body assistant that can talk in your ear or show you things in your eyes. I don't know much of this language, I'm copying what mine shows me how to do."

"Actually, I think I have a lot of questions about that - if that's normal, is it safe to go anywhere if you don't want one? Is it risky to get one? How does it find things out like where the museums and classes are?"

"It's safe to do without. I usually have mine turned off, but it's useful to have all the implants and to train the software before you do that in case you ever run into something confusing and don't want to deal with it not having gotten to know you yet. It's not risky to get one. It can connect to a huge information network that all that information's entered into."