"I'd heard something about it from a long-ago co-cultist, in passing, but not ever looked into it myself."

He's already looking it up in the pricey science encyclopedia that's stored to disk on his pocket computer. Evidently, this is a known risk, with several probable historical examples having been recorded before there would have been any human-made electrical equipment for them to affect at all, and one known example from a time centuries ago, when equipment that'd exhibit weird behavior in a 'geomagnetic storm' was a rarity but nonetheless existent for people to write about. Apparently the main untested front-line prophylactic currently employed by power companies with high-voltage supply lines is to have a protocol for disconnecting everything quickly. The article doesn't say anything about further prophylactics. It's not ideal to have to ask Minaiyu before Andor knows, but it really has been a long day.

"If-you-want-to-say, Minaiyu, what were the main preventative measures? Starting with the ones that seem like they might come across as stupid to even bring up."

He readies his keyboard. He'd ask Minaiyu's permission to record audio, but really, the added strain, real or imagined by Andor, doesn't feel worth it.

(No, it does not even darken Andor's mind-threshold that he might be cowing alien!Minaiyu, or giving him an impression of unjust treatment, by being the sole Important Person present in the room and making all of the calls during alien!Minaiyu's first chance to make an impression on Gahai, as it were, of his own veracity.

Of course real!Minaiyu will know that he'll ultimately have as many chances to convince someone of his reality as there are people on Gahai. People don't just take each others' word for things, in an advanced society, at least not when those things are potentially worth insane amounts of money-and-clout and where the potential-value is obviously facially of a class in great danger of being mis-evaluated by slips of feeble, not-yet-grown-up human intuition, like 'visitor from another world suddenly shows up inside someone's head, resembling insanity in all but the subtlest ways that only particular people would know how to test.'

Advanced societies judge you a million times. The only kind of society that judges you once is a 50-minus-person hunter-gatherer band from the State of Nature. Which Minaiyu should know by now that Gahai is not. QED.)

(At the very least, Minaiyu's ability or lack thereof to convince Andor of his reality provides a lot of information on how feasible it will be to convince other people in general.

But he's pretty confident, at this point, that he can at least convince Xakda, who is by far the most important person to convince given that Minaiyu will be living with him for as long as Minaiyu is living on this world at all. If they end up having to stay closeted around all but a few trusted friends, so be it: he'd rather it didn't come to that, but he could live with it. And if, when the next flare hits, Xakda's household is one of only a few to have readied itself...well, then at least Minaiyu will have thrown some starfish into the ocean, not least of which himself.)

He very much does want to say, but under the circumstances he doesn't feel like it would make much difference if he didn't.

"Well, uh, I suppose the one that comes across as kind of stupid to even bring up is to just not use electricity if a non-electric version will serve nearly as well. Like, I know a couple disabled people who use electric washing machines--there exist situations where they can make a big difference--but I use a hand-crank, most people do. It's not like the washboards of the past where laundry took the whole day: hand-cranks are pretty good.

And even if you primarily use an electric version of something, you want to have a backup plan: like, you don't keep any documents that are at all important purely in hot-libraries-- no, wait, that's too literal a translation, probably doesn't make sense. Uh, at-all-important documents should have backup copies that are...towards the durable end of the convenience-versus-durability tradeoff, paper and/or microfilm rather than being purely digital.

And...possibly y'all didn't spec as hard into energy-efficiency, if y'all didn't have 'run all of your household's equipment off of your household's solar' as a goal to strive for and ideally exceed to give wiggle room? Have y'all stopped using incandescent lighting, incandescent lighting is terrible. It's much easier to get hold of enough power to run lighting based off of LEDs.

Y'all seem to have air conditioners, but have y'all figured out how to make reversible ones and use them for heating yet? It's a lot more efficient than heating-elements. Even better if you pull heat out of the ground for it rather than the air: it's more of a pain to set up, in my area we mostly don't bother digging the wells because we have a milder climate, but I hear it handles cold winters better.

I kind of mentioned already, but generally bigger pieces of equipment, with longer wires and more power going through them, are more vulnerable. It's the central transformers and high-voltage lines that blow, not things like individual household appliances. The ideal electricity is produced in small batches and travels small distances to its destination. Most households back home are pretty much independent, with grid connections being for backup and to contribute their excess power. That's...probably less feasible here, since y'all apparently like to live densely and a five-story building has relatively little rooftop to go around, but some is better than none.

And then there's stuff aimed at protecting the big grid, which we certainly aren't confident enough in to bet the continuation of modern civilisation on them given that there haven't been any more major flares since we put those measures in, but they're still very much worth having. Capacitors to block the extra current, telescopes and space probes trying to get advance warning so you can shut things down until it passes."

The alien Minaiyu's society has really weird priorities.

He's not an alien! He's an alter that we're proving isn't actually an alien so we can get this poor tired guy a diagnosis spreadsheet.

Given that that's our goal, what do we say now?

....ask him why the society has those weird priorities. There's sure to be lots of obvious incoherence in the ideological spiel backing the priorities of this strange fantasy society, and when Minaiyu gets agitated that you point out those inconsistencies -

- Xakda will also get agitated! I can't see either of them getting agitated anyway, but either way, I'm defusing a poor tired mild-mannered bomb here, not refuting the blasted Wizard Jaun. 

Well, okay, if you have to make him realize it himself - just go full-frontal attack mode on little technical details that he should know, given his subjective history, but almost certainly couldn't actually have researched in advance. 

Dude, that's not what you do when you're trying to talk around a delusive patient, that's what you do to test a claim for yourself.

Well if you yourself don't know why he's wrong -

PRIORS. And 'you don't make them trust you on priors'.

I'm no expert, but doesn't that necessarily mean you, the doctor, are supposed to have more than priors?

Yes! Most frequently, the more consists of a calm and confident disposition!

Tough skill today, Andor. Hurry up and find a different more.

He   ' finishes 'rereading' '   his typed sketch of Minaiyu's answer.

"- I frankly can't think of anything better, now, than testing your - Minaiyu's - technical knowledge, about things you ought to know about, and that it'd be hard for you to know about if you're only from here. It'll be messy, and easy for you to make plausible excuses, but if you make excuses for everything, you understand why that makes your case look bad. Are you game?"

<💭>Are you game. Top Twelve Questions To Ask An Exhausted, Almost-Certainly-Delusive-And-If-Not-Delusive-Then-Maliciously-Malingering Neuro Patient During An Increasingly Fraught Evaluation.</💭>

He can't quite stop himself from raising an eyebrow or two.

"...well," he says, "I can hardly turn that down."

a good grade in personhood absolutely is normal to want, and it had fucking better be possible to achieve

(He's mostly raising his eyebrows at the phrasing. The general idea is unsurprising: he figured it probably would come down to something along those lines, and of course Andor isn't going to want them to have a chance to go home and (for all he knows) research things first.)

He thinks for a few minutes.

He writes:

fair warning:

How reversible HVAC works = fairly common knowledge

LEDs also common

Physical backups of important info = strong norm

He saves his apologies for the end, now. Who knows how many he'd end up giving if he kept up with them.

He realizes the awkward fact of how it will be most efficient to do this.

What he returns with is, essentially, an assignment for Minaiyu to write down all he knows about how to scale solar power, make hand-powered washing machines efficient, and fragment power grids so as to protect against geomagnetic storm damage. Unknowingly echoing Xakda, he explains how nothing else would likely distinguish much between the Minaiyu with a truly coherent subjective history as an otherworlder, and the Minaiyu without. He'll obviously have to stay in Andor's office, but Andor has case analyses to do that he thinks will fairly distract his attention and minimize the sense of watchedness to bearable levels.

as if a fronting Minaiyu is ever not being watched okay, to be fair it does help to at least not have Andor staring at him

He's very nervous about the personhood certification exam, but a noticeable part of him is relieved that at least he gets to do it in writing. His speech is relatively clear and coherent, but speaking is inherently a much lossier method of conveying your thoughts than writing is, and that goes double for tired people and triple for tired-and-scared people. Possibly quadruple for people doing it in a language they didn't speak yesterday.

He writes. The modern electrical grid is too complex to be contained in any single mind, and especially not a non-specialist mind; furthermore, industrialised worlds--or, more likely, worlds in that narrow band between industrialisation and immortality--are rare. However, the crafters of technological-bootstrapping guides were aware that the reader might end up living in a fledgling electrified society one day (perhaps one that they'd played a vital role in building!), and that if they did, geomagnetic storms (and air pollution) would likely be among the very largest problems that society faced: he does know a bundle of tips to aid the aspiring decentralised-solar inventor. Some of the tips are known to Gahai already; some are not. Most obviously, the overview of household-batteries involves an unfamiliar battery chemistry.

Hand-crank washing machines are far simpler--indeed, simplicity is their main appeal--and he can provide enough information to pretty much fully reconstruct them.

As he gives the papers to Andor, half-buried within the anxiety is a little seed of something that...isn't yet pride, but has the potential to grow into it. If the people here really don't know some of this stuff, that means more than just proving he knows things that Xakda couldn't possibly have known: it means that, perhaps, together he and they can avert untold disaster.

I told you!

<💭>Um, no, actually, I know I've been at this research-verification thing for 40 minutes, and Xakda and Minaiyu are probably getting incredibly sick of the Epistemic Containment Cell, but something about this battery design is going to turn out to be impossible within the next 5, because this universe does not receive isekais. It's actually way likelier that this is an elaborate prank!</💭>

Fair enough. But in the remaining segment of the diagnostic spreadsheet that isn't taken up by 'prank'?

<💭> - could still be DID, he could just be a weird genius. </💭>