"Yes, Controller.

The estate's main crop is tea, of which there are five dozen acres. The estate processes the tea leaves to make black tea only.

Tea leaves are pruned by hand, and harvested by hand also, by careful plucking. There are three harvests for our type of tea: one in early to mid spring, and another in early summer, and the last in late summer. These are processed separately, and also packaged and sold separately, since they have different tastes.

After harvest, the leaves are dried indoors for hours, or overnight. Then, they are rolled and crushed, and then left to oxidize. Oxidation usually takes eight hours, but make take more or fewer depending on climactic conditions. Usually, you, Controller, would supervise in this step because the oxidation time has the largest effect on the taste of the tea, with regards to its processing. To stop oxidation, the tea leaves are placed in a very mild oven – in a temperature below water's boiling point – for a little less than half an hour. 

The tea leaves are sieved and sorted. Whole tea leaves are most desirable and will sell the best, whereas dust and fannings will sell for cheaper. We package these differently.

We do not blend our tea with other ingredients.

We purchase our packaging from Cenmin and Suras Food Packaging, which has a factory near Kosfor.

We sell our products wholesale to tea shops in Kosfor and other nearby cities. We do not sell our own tea in retail, although rarely there have been people who have come to the farm directly to buy from us. In this case we offer slightly cheaper prices.

Our products are registered with the Imperial Standards Authority and bears its seal on the packaging.

The first harvest in early spring will begin soon."

"What tasks of this estate besides tea oxidization do … did Gifit usually supervise? In particular, how did Gifit manage his drones? Tangent, I prefer to use the name 'Grifith', or 'Grifit' if the 'th' sound is infeasible. Consider it a medium-priority task for the household to learn this and a low-priority task for them to learn to pronounce 'th'. Additionally, suppose I have a mild preference for simplicity and derive no enjoyment from punishing drones. When discussing Gifit's management regime, note points at which it could be modified towards these preferences while continuing to function."

"Additional low-priority task, prepare to serve me a sampler of teas from this estate with details on production and commentary on the production's effects on the tea, including small samples of safe but undesirable batches if we have some around."

Griffith keeps glancing at Damin during this. This is how he's supposed to handle things, right?

"You, Controller, supervised all aspects of tea processing and cultivation to some degree, but the oxidation most intently. Usually, after the tea is processed, it would be tasted by you, so that you could determine whether or not the tea passes quality control standards. 

This drone apologizes, Controller: that question is very broad and this one does not know how to answer it to your satisfaction.

Your drones can be trained to pronounce 'th', Controller. 

Yes, Controller, samples of our tea can be procured. Sadly, there are no undesirable but safe batches, since those have all been composted."

Damin makes...a curious face when Griffith mentions punishment. He tilts his head slightly.

"You're really going in on the no punishment thing, huh? Do you mean only corporal punishment? 'Punishment' is very broad."

"I'm not necessarily going in on it! I just don't want to do things which are neither fun nor useful. I suppose it might be the case that it would be fun in some context that I have here but didn't have in the past, but I don't want to rely on that being true. I also don't have a good model of how one typically punishes one's drones, aside from generalizations from historic mistreatment of people and recreational agreements between people, which I expect to be underinformative."

"That makes sense. Corporal punishment is the most common type of punishment, which can either be you doing things to your drones – like whipping – or making them do various exercises. Konrad likes that one.

Alternatively you could ask it to humiliate itself, or beg for forgiveness, things like that. That's also fun.

If your drones are well trained enough, you could just say 'You did bad', and that will be aversive enough to them to count as meaningful punishment, as effective in operant conditioning as whipping them. Not as fun, though.

Ah, I should clarify my words, I've kind of been using them loosely: 'torture' is inflicting of bodily pain or discomfort on someone deliberately, while 'punishment' is merely causing aversive stimulus so that someone stops doing something. These two are very interrelated but are not equivalent. Is it that you are against torture but are fine with punishment?"

"I'm not against torture in the case of consenting people doing it recreationally or some other person doing it to their drones, I just anticipate not personally enjoying inflicting it. Though again, this anticipation could be incorrect, because I am in a very different environment with very different options. For instance, the option to order a drone to hurt itself was not previously salient to me, and I didn't expect drones to experience humiliation."

"Hah, yes. Sometimes I'm too lazy to punish my drones, so I have them do it themselves. It can be fun too. 

You know, that matter is actually up for debate – whether drones can meaningfully feel humiliation the same way Keepers do. Regardless of whether or not they can, it is still fun to see, externally, even if their internal experience might be different. It's like roleplay, in that way. I suppose for some people that diminishes the appeal. Does it to you?"

"I have never in my life observed a roleplay at the level of realism available to you. In the general case, roleplay does sound appealing. I don't expect the knowledge that something is a roleplay to significantly diminish my appreciation of it in the near term. Anyway, I don't need a drone-management plan to last me a duodecade yet, just something for the interim while I get my bearings."

"Right. Well, I think the fact that you don't have drones isn't the limiting factor, but the fact that like, your people can't lie. Which I would imagine hampers roleplay a lot.

That makes sense. If you're having trouble with your drones, you can always ask me for advice. That's a gift-without-any-expectation-of-repayment-not-even-with-the-expression-of-gratitude. I will charge money if you want me or Conrad to have your drone or drones come over and be trained."

"Yes, that was the point I was making."

"And I don't think I'm having trouble yet, in that things generally seem fine to me, but apparently I don't know how to handle them pretty much in full generality aside from telling them to do things I want, which seems like an indicator of impending trouble."

Sip of water.

"Yeah. I think...you have Gifit's memories, right? Whatever he says would work would probably still work. I can't really give better advice unless you ask a more specific question, because this is...commanding drones is like, a Keeper's job from birth. 'Telling them to do things you want' is like, our entire thing.

There's a balance that has to be struck between how much you want your drones to report to you, and how much you want them to rely on either protocol or judgment. If you're fine with being annoyed and having to sift through status reports, telling your drones to have more detailed reporting will probably be good."

"I have access to his memories, I just need to take the time to look through them. And I'm fine with status reports." He turns to the drone. "Log a preference for more detailed status reports."

And now he'll have a look at Gifit's memories. How did he manage his drones? Also, according to said memories, what's the status of the following here: vacuum tubes, transistors, magnetic tape, knowledge of U-235 being the right isotope for chain fission reactions and centrifuge operation, dubious radiation fads, phonograph with vinyl records, silver nitrite/nitrate(?) film, liquid crystal displays, cathode ray tube with red green and blue phosphor dots (what cones do aliens have anyway?), light-emitting diodes, batteries, and electrical amplification for music instruments? And how hard is it to get drones to learn musical instruments? It seems aesthetically correct for someone in his position to have a chamber orchestra.

[Gifit took a hands-off approach with managing his drones, and didn't really do much corporal punishment, although it did occur occasionally. He usually supervises the work process closely enough to forestall problems and not need that many detailed reports, and besides, he has been running this estate with very little change for dozens of years now.

Vacuum tubes: Yes.
Transistors: weird science thing.
Magnetic tape: he's heard about it being used for recording but it's worse than vinyl. Very promising though!
U-235: what is that?
Radiation: It's not good for you but you don't really need to worry about it unless you work with it.
Phonographs and vinyl: some of his friends have one!
Film: They have both monochrome and color film that's sensitive enough to be used with fractions-of-a-second exposure times.
Liquid crystal displays: what is that? Seems like a weird science thing.
Cathode ray tube: weird science thing. They have humanoid three-color vision.
Light emitting diodes: weird science thing.
Batteries: Yes, most popularly zinc-carbon ones.
Electric amplification of sound: Yes, with vacuum tubes.]

They don't know what the chain-reaction-friendly isotope of uranium is yet! Griffith gets to work on fission power! This is going to be really cool, and also probably more tedious than it sounded in people's biographies, but still. Also, can he actually get paid for demonstrating that refrigerants can harm ozone and that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide can trap more heat? He wants to do this either way, but knowing whether there's bounties for that sort of thing is relevant. There's apparently prediction markets, at least.

"Thank you for your advice. Actually, I think I do want to form a company with Xaber if he's interested, because according to Gifit's memories you're missing some key insights into fission plants, and I think it sounds incredibly aesthetic to do a bunch of work on fission power, which will hopefully compensate for tediousness."

Cadmium control rods to absorb neutrons and slow things down, though those are toxic and need to be handled accordingly! Graphite to something something neutrons something something go faster! Heavy water to … it'll probably come up if he pokes at his thoughts more but he's pretty sure it's relevant!

[It's not that hard to teach drones how to play music. It's about as hard as teaching them to operate industrial machinery – teaching drones how to play music is approached mechanistically. Many, many drills on correct fingering, sight reading, and potentially playing by ear. No improvisation though. And drones don't compose music, they merely play it. Imperial sheet music also has many more symbols for describing specifically how a note should be played – there is very little room for interpretation.

Choir pieces are very popular in the Imperium, and every city will have at least one that will train your drones to sing. It's also partly because drones can sing while working, and you don't need to buy or carry instruments in order to get drones to do choral pieces. Music involving instruments will be a little more expensive.

You can have musician drones simply by buying one from a seller. Musician drones are considered to be highly trained drones, so they'll be on the upper range of drone prices. You're looking at at least six gross rupnu. More if the drone is proficient in multiple instruments. The price for drones who can only sing is lower, though, starting at five gross rupnu.

Alternatively, you can send a drone to be trained to play an instrument. Usually the seller will administer some sort of test to see the baseline characteristics of the drone and try to measure its potential as a musician. That usually goes for six to eight rupnu and lasts the entire day. After that, they'll give you an estimate for how long the training will take, usually expressed in dozens of days, and the price thereof, with the price of each day of training being two to ten rupnu per day, depending on the training conditions, the trainer themselves, the instrument, and the level of instruction. The standard duration is at least a season, or a gross days, but often it lasts for one whole year.]

"Wonderful. I'll contact him once I get back home, and I'll arrange a time and place for you to meet.

Fission power? Does your world have nuclear fission power plants? Were you an engineer in your old life?"

"Thank you for planning to arrange a meeting. And we do have nuclear fission plants! They're expensive to build, and they work pretty well if they're managed decently. I wasn't a nuclear engineer, though, I just read some books about physics and chemistry and some people's biographies and news articles and such. And I went to a presentation once that was about what it's like to be a military reactor operator but it was mostly about the military and not about the reactor operation, which was disappointing. I worked at a company that filled extremely recent corpses with antifreeze – we couldn't tell patients to biologically produce their own antifreeze – and cooled them to liquid-nitrogen temperatures in the hopes that maybe medical science could advance to the point of reviving and un-poisoning them or doing other good things with the information in their brains."

(And okay, that pricing information is useful, but how does it compare to his estate's annual profit, and for that matter its liquid wealth?)

"I'm...confused about that presentation. Could I have more context on that? The military had a presentation on military reactor operation?"

[His estate's annual profit, counting only expenses from the estate's infrastructure (excluding what he buys for himself, and taking care of the drones) is about eleven to a dozen gross rupnu. He spends about ten to eleven gross rupnu on himself and the drones per year, and saves the rest.

He has about two dozen and two gross rupnu in bank savings and gold that he has stored on the estate itself.]

"The military has submarines with fission reactors on board to provide power for the submarines, since the fuel for those is pretty compact, and they wanted submarines to be operable a long while without refueling. They also have some on land, I think? And the military always needs new workers, because of population turnover and also, well, military conflict kills people. So they have workers go around telling people about joining various parts of the military, including the operating reactors part. I'm not sure what step here is confusing."

"Yeah, that was the confusing part. The military here doesn't really...advertise like that? Probably because everyone already knows you can join the military as an officer, and basically everyone who wants to do that has already done so, and all of the low-level personnel are drones which have been sold to the state. So you don't really need to...'entice' people with knowledge the same way you might beautify packaging to get people to buy it."

"Yeah, population turnover means Earth people need to spend a lot of time telling newer people stuff that older people already know. I guess all the implications of that or its absence aren't obvious. Anyway, thanks to you it sounds like I have the outline of a plan for the estate and a plan for working on technology – fortunately for you but perhaps annoyingly for me, a lot of stuff I could provide a few early insights on already appear in Gifit's memories as things people are already exploring."

"Ah, yeah. We do have that problem too, in the sense of people forgetting things and having to relearn them, but that's much easier to fix that starting from scratch.

You're very welcome. I look forward to the technology you'll bring us."

Damin yawns.

"I'm feeling kind of tired now. Is there anything else you wanted to talk about? Otherwise, I'll sleep, and we can talk again tomorrow."

"Nothing that seems particularly urgent to me? I look forward to seeing you tomorrow."

And Griffith spends the rest of his evening trying to dictate everything he knows about nuclear power, and goes to sleep probably later than Damin, but not before instructing his staff to wake him when Damin is ready for social interaction.