"Works for me."

"Thanks for - keeping me up to date - on things -"

"If I hadn't both the Fredrick in my head and the alien one would have yelled at me."

Giggle.

Miranda takes a total of two and a half months before she kludges together a box that you can put an artifact in that allows precision editing.

They don't quite know what to write to the Silmarils in the first place yet but they're not far off. He hugs her and giggles delightedly.

She is very smug.

She is the best person in two universes and he is so in love.

Good. She loves him too. Anything she can help with on next steps?

Curufinwë had to bring the two of them up to speed on how artifact programming works so it's not far removed; he explains it to her. You can only do these few fundamental operations, but then you can build on them, and define whole categories of things with shortcuts so you can build on them further, and now they're at the tricky bit of instructing transfer of information between the Silmarils - "and then we're just going to try turning the anti-decay effect up to its peak and freezing him and his surroundings in place, it doesn't technically kill him but he'd be gone -"

"Does that tie up the Silmarils indefinitely?"

"Well, then we come up with something to kill him, on less desperate a deadline."

"Makes sense. Uh, I might be able to let the Silmarils access the box thing... I don't know how I'd do it but I don't know that I can't..."

"That'd be useful - so the messaging protocol they're written with -" takes three weeks to explain, even with compressed time, but in the course of the explanation he notices a flaw in their work in progress. 

Handy. She picks at the box idea. Slowly.

Michael tells Catherine and Kat the story of how he met Rebecca.

"Am I Jesus," says Catherine.

"Uh. No."

"What's a Jesus," says Kat.

"A Jesus is if somebody gets pregnant all by herself," says Catherine. "Are you sure I am not Jesus, Papa."

"I am actually really confused about how Jesus works but I don't think you are Jesus."

"Then you have to have met her before. Maybe you forgot." She pats his knee.

"Uh, somebody else met her, but he wasn't very nice, so she decided she didn't want to marry him and she didn't want him to be your Papa. - same thing for Kat's Mama, actually - and then when she met me she thought I was good enough to be your Papa. Which is why I am, even though you were already born."

"Or, I could be Jesus," says Catherine.

"I think I am not Jesus," Kat says. "I think there was a bad orc who did not get to be my papa, I think that sounds like something I remember."

"Well, you don't have to be Jesus."

"There was a bad person who did not get to be your papa. We don't know if it was the same bad person for both of you or not."

"I'm not supposed to talk to orcs I don't know already so I can't ask any," says Kat.