"A pleasure to meet you," says Hazel, smiling.

"People really mistake you for Hailey? You're so different!"

"Usually only by voice. It's easier to tell in person but we used to spend most of our time in voice calls with friends far away."

"I guess if I couldn't see you it'd be harder to tell."

"'Voice calls'?" says Hazel, intrigued.

"Ooh. Those are really cool. So our old world has a global telecommunications network and a lot more technology than this world has. There are things called computers that do really complicated math for lots of purposes including synchronously transmitting voice over arbitrary distances. I could get into a more detailed explanation but there's lots and lots of foundational tech to explain first."

"'Tele-communications'," they repeat slowly. "I see. You really do have the most fascinating stories."

"Oh! I can show you! We've got a little bitty portable computer from home, and one of the things it does is record and playback sound."

She fishes around in the satchel, pulls out the phone, reconnects the battery, and turns it back on.

A stuttering splash of incoherent colour sweeps across the screen, and then it goes dark, unresponsive to further input.

"Oh no oh no oh no! That's not good at all! Is it broken!? We didn't get it wet we were so careful and it's even one of the water resistant models wait is it the location navigation thing? Does electronic circuitry not work here? Oh no oh no oh no that's where we had the commissioned art of Maya and Sable's ideal forms and the other art we'd found and saved of me and Neo and all the plans we'd made for Hailey's art and all our writing and oh no it's all gone!"

And she slumps and starts crying.

Hazel blinks rapidly, uncertain how to process all this.

Torok is a little quicker on the uptake. "...d'you want a hug?"

She nods tearily.

He sits next to her and wraps his arms around her.

"I'm sorry you lost all your stuff. I don't really get it but it sounds like it was really important."

She snuggles into the hug, sniffling and hiccuping a bit. "That little b-box was a data" — hic — "data storage device, and we had copies of all our most important st-stuff on it. We'd paid" —sniffle— "people to do custom art of what Sable and Maya want to look like, and there was art of me and Neo 'cause we're from fiction, and Hailey was different from the version in the stories so we were still planning her commissioned art. And we wrote stories. And we had some of them saved. And the only copies of any of it in this world are in that broken little box."

Sob. Sniff. Cling.

"Oof, yeah. That sounds hard to replace." Snug. "Maybe we could find you an artist in the city somewhere, to draw portraits of you all. It won't be the same but it'll be the next best thing, right?"

Sniffle. "Maybe. Best thing to do is just make the appearances all as right as we can from memory, using transformations. Anything else is lost if we can't wither fix that or figure out how to get back to the world we came from."

She sniffles some more, wipes her tears a bit. "We don't even want to go back, but now it's the only way to get any of our stuff back. And we don't wanna risk it until we know for sure we can keep it from happening again. Might as well just focus on making the actual appearances for real."

"Yeah. That makes sense." Hug.

Cautiously, Hazel asks, "How did the... data storage... function? ...perhaps you don't want to answer that right now."

She sniffles again, but starts talking. Thinking about engineering stuff helps a bit. "So all the really complicated technology from our old world is built on electronic circuits. Those are made of thousands or maybe millions of tiny logic gates, arranged into patterns. Logic gates do stuff like this."

She pulls out the notebook again and draws what looks like a Y shape, but with a box in place of the junction. She writes "AND" inside the box, "IN1" and "IN2" at the top ends, and "OUT" at the bottom. Then she writes out a truth table for an and-gate.

"So one of the basic types of logic gates is an and-gate. It puts an electric current out through the output conductor only when both of the input conductors are powered. There are other types of gates like that: inclusive-or, exclusive or, not, not-and. When you combine enough of them, you can do math. When you combine even more, you can do fancy stuff like encoding and processing data. All of it runs on microscopically precise paths of electric currents."

"...millions," Hazel echoes. "And—electric currents, but very small ones, far smaller than a bolt of lightning, yes? Tiny lightning tracing millions of turns through tiny mazes, with the paths through the maze representing information?"

She nods. "A really intricate, really tiny maze, with lots of little doors that can only be opened by the tiny lightning being on the right paths at the right times. If you put tiny lightning down both input paths of an and-gate, then the output door opens and you get tiny lightning out the output door. And other rules like that for all the other gates. And this intricate maze with all these millions of doors all fits into a little wafer this big."

She holds up her thumb and index finger two inches apart.

"I think—I'm not confident about this, mind you. But I think the problem with your device might be that it ought by all rights to be alive, and isn't. Perhaps even ought to have a soul, and doesn't. It's traditionally understood to be the case that the lifeforce is what lets living creatures sustain levels of complex activity that inanimate objects cannot achieve, and what you're describing is if anything even more complex than a living body, and more densely so."

She blinks, then sighs. "I was hoping that our later artificing projects would not require making all our artifacts alive. That was never required in our old world. For all that we hated the lack of magic, the physicalism had its perks."

"It's possible that you'll be able to route around the problem somehow, if you construct tiny lightning mazes of your own. But if I were to try constructing a tiny lightning maze, the failure I would expect would be that the lightning would be unable to navigate it at that scale without the support of an active lifeforce."