(A woman standing next to the Queen nudges her and holds up a pen.  The Queen glances toward her and nods.)

"Of course," she says to Mira.  "And as Idith has reminded me, I have other business too today.  Do you think your computer would be better used as it is, or investigated as a sample for research or duplication?  And do you have any other proposals for where we can help each other?"

"I'd be a bit tetchy about giving up the accumulated personal history I have on my computer, and really, I think I can probably teach you more of the stuff you'd need to know to replicate it with it intact than I could with it taken apart or anything.  I do think we'll be able to get quite a few things from investigating the peripherals, though, and I care less about them.  Besides, the way crystals work absolutely wants to be all microcontrollers and such.  As for where I can help you...I know a bunch of random stuff about a bunch of random things.  What sort of problems are there?"

"Figuring out how to communicate faster, to teach people better, to fly - even all the way to the moon - and figure out whether people's bodies and minds really are inherently magical, and for that matter of course figure out how to safely make golems -"

Several people look taken aback by this list, especially the last item.

"I would agree with the earlier items, and add..."  She stares off into the distance.  "... Perhaps we shall say, medicine.  And if you do go so far as to study golems, be very careful."  She grins hollowly.  "By which I mean, ask someone else from this world whether you're being careful enough."

"Oh trust me, I've got plenty of speculative artificial intelligence horror stories to add to the pile on top of what you have.  On the other hand, there's a surprising amount of stuff you can do entirely without intelligence, just on the strength of mathematical modeling heuristics - self-driving vehicles, for example, were something that was very much becoming extant, regardless of the fact that computers do only and exactly what you tell them."

"...Medicine...yeah, I know some things about that, though it's a field where there's so much that I know I don't know, and furthermore some I couldn't know - such as magic interactions - that it's going to be a long-term project even if there's a few immediate results.  Speaking of which, handwashing, especially with soap, is good, diseases must be transmitted through some medium and you can avoid transmission by filtering said medium, lead and mercury are bad for your health...not just lead and mercury, there's a laundry list of heavy metals that the body doesn't like, but those are historically common..."

"Oh, what sort of intelligence do they not have, if they have modeling systems?"

"I'll arrange a group of physicians too, Your Majesty."

The Queen is staring off into the distance again, but she nods.  "Thank you.  And thank you, Miss Mira.  I hope we can talk again, soon."

"They don't have...planning, is, I suppose the best way to put it - only the inputs and outputs and rules to convert inputs to outputs."

"Thank you, your highness.  I hope to help your kingdom thrive."

"That has been my struggle too."

Queen Elethy nods to Mira as she and Aeslin leave.

"...I think I like her."

"Of course.  She told me once -"

At that moment, Tilda comes around a corner with a long roll of paper in her hands, sees them, and grins.  "Oh good.  I hope things went well at Court?  Mira, did Aeslin forget to get lunch again?"

" - we both did, but uh, possibly revolutionizing magic covereth a slightly delayed lunch, I hope?"

"Oh well.  I don't suppose you figured out how to duplicate people to get a dozen things done at once?  Aeslin, do show her to the dining hall - I'll be there as soon as I get these things delivered, I hope."

"Oh, all right.  And I do want to hear more about computers!"

The dining hall is several hallways away in the same building, without any obvious method or mention of payment.  The table of food is showing clear signs of having already been picked over, but there's still the tail end of some sauced roast meat, some salad, lots of bread, and a few different sorts of pies with notes saying "Sheep," "Veggie, Spice," "Veggie, Smooth," and "Apple".

(Aeslin takes the salad and smooth veggie pie.)

"Not quite anything that exciting, unfortunately; I'll see what I can do on that front, though!"  She grins, though she's only mostly joking.

Ooh, pie.

She'll try a little bit of the roast meat, a little bit of the smooth veggie pie, definitely grab some bread...And, of course, the apple pie.  She just does not pass up desserts.

"So, what would you like to know about computers, Aeslin?"

"How do they even work?  How can they do math without magic?"

"Hmm, alright.  Let's start with binary.

"So you know how numbers can be written like...

"Expanding 543 to 5 times 100 - ten to the second power -, 4 times 10, 3 times one?

"Every computer these days would represent 543 as...

512 - 2 to the... 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 ninth, plus 16, two to the fourth, plus eight, plus four, plus two, plus one - two to the zeroth.  Or, one zero zero zero zero one one one one one.

"And you can represent those ones and zeroes with a simple on-off switch or similar easily-monitored thing.

"The original computers used punch-cards for data entry, which they inherited from mechanical looms.  Which I'm assuming y'all have, because you have that sort of mass-produced clothing quality going on, but actually, do you?  Anyway.

"You have binary representation of numbers.

"The next part of how a computer does math involves boolean logic.

"Boolean logic is a whole field of math that this one guy named Boole came up with, so I'm guessing that if you have it you have it under another name, but if you can tell me what True XOR parenthese False NAND True close-parenthese would evaluate as, you know it.

"And through hooking together enough NAND gates in particular ways, you can take a binary integer from some register A and a binary integer from register B and add, subtract, multiply, divide...hell, even exponentiate.

"It gets more complex when you start involving negatives and decimals, especially arbitrary decimals, but it's possible."

"So... you'd be representing numbers as something like the dots and dashes of heliograph code?  Except more systematized, so 13 would be... let's see, base 2..." (she counts) "8+4+1 so 1101, which would be" (she taps on the pie with her fork)

**_*

"I haven't worked with this Boolean logic... but it sounds vaguely familiar?  Maybe I heard about it at school once?"

"Heliography is also one of the predecessors of computing!  Or, well, telegraphy; we did ours with wires and magnets instead of sunlight and mirrors.  Heliography is an example of a character encoding - agreeing that a sequence of bits means this specific thing.

"It's also a good example of networking."

"Telegraphs must be a lot more convenient; you wouldn't need manual relay stations everywhere in line-of-sight!  We only have a few lines because of that.

"So... how do computers actually do things?  How do these logic gates work?"

"Well, I don't actually know the specific structure of silicon logic gates.  But it's about how electricity does or does not flow through them.  ...And I could probably figure out how to make y'all telegraphs, but honestly I'm tempted to see how much you can just skip it with magic."

"... Because we can get magic conditional gates, so if I just had enough materials and knew the designs, we could build a magic-run computer right now..."