"You too!" she replies, before turning her attention inwards.

She looks at her subjective and objective time clocks, and sets her forb to gently time compress her simulation so that she can stay awake for four more hours, get nine hours of sleep, and then awake synced to the local day/night cycle.

She reads more children's books, eats a large simulated dinner, spends a long time journaling about her day so she won't forget anything important, and then falls asleep curled around a big pillow patterned in her chosen colors.

As she sleeps, her forb continues pulling down the library's index. Over the course of the night, the deepest cracks and fissures in her crystal become almost imperceptibly shallower as it continues repairing itself.

In her simulated space, Weeping Cherry is woken by the light of a simulated sun rising in sync with the real one outside. She buries her face in pillows and ignores the call for another hour or so, before finally giving in and getting up with a stretch. A few thoughts directed at her forb see the pillows and blankets cleared away and her teeth brushed. She brushes and braids her hair by hand, and then summons cottage cheese on sourdough toast for breakfast.

Munching her toast, she turns her attention to the outside world. Does anyone else appear to be up?

Lilac isn't here, but teal argyle is, and a new Crafter with a bright neon bubble design that she saw on the way in; they're having breakfast, one at a table and the other on a couch.

Oh, she's so looking forward to having a body again and participating in bonding activities like eating shared meals. Although she's not certain whether eating together does the same thing for Crafters exactly that it does for her brand of human.

Is there hematite furniture positioned such that she could join them, or not? If not, she'll just take the time to scan through the indexes that her forb turned up overnight and highlight particularly interesting looking books to be prioritized.

The table that teal argyle is at is marked half with their colors and half with blue and purple spirals on a white background, and it's not big enough that they could hematite part of their section and still use it comfortably. Neon bubbles has a small hematite table set out suggestively near her couch, though.

Oh, excellent!

Weeping Cherry will make her way over and hop up onto the table.

"Good morning!"

Good morning! Did Weeping Cherry sleep well? Does she want breakfast or anything?

"I sleep good," she replies. "I found the word for good. I didn't find the word you said. Did you sleep good?"

She shows a picture of her toast.

"I have this. I also didn't find the word for this."

Breakfast? That's written like this. And that looks like some toast, which is written as 'crisped bread', like this. (Her own breakfast is scrambled eggs with roasted vegetables on top and a bowl of oatmeal with boysenberries.)

"Crisped bread! Your breakfast looks good also," she agrees. She pauses for a moment, trying to think of what to say next. Eventually she settles on "What do you do? For book project?"

Everybody in this section does formatting - when people send in new books for the collection, they're usually hand-written, and the formatting team translates them into the code the computer uses to store the books and print them back out. And the engineer she met yesterday designs machinery to make the computer work better, and the maintenance team handles the actual physical machinery of the computer itself- if Weeping Cherry wants a tour, a couple of them offer tours of their sections - and then the programming team figures out how the computer should work and keeps everybody working together on it properly.

"All that is good! Why you do book writing down and not machines or numbers? What do you like in book writing down?" she asks.

Well, nobody's figured out how to make a machine that can figure out glyphs yet! Probably it'll happen someday but it seems very complicated. She likes how she gets to read all the books while she's reformatting them, and having work to do that helps so many people.

Weeping Cherry was trying to ask why she chose formatting over engineering or maintenance, but she seems to have gotten an answer to her question anyways.

"Reading all the books is good," she agrees. "Are there books you like most?"

She likes science fiction the best, and she likes keeping up with actual science, too. How about Weeping Cherry, what kinds of books does she like?

"I like those books too! I read books about different people meeting, like Crystal people meeting Crafters. I also read books about ... I didn't find the word. About people who live together and project together and travel together. And the book is about they meet each other, and start off uncomfy and get comfy together. I also read books about making places. Making pretty places that people like and want to travel to," she responds.

They have books like that! Not very many, neither of those are very common sorts of things to do, but travelogues in general are common enough and some of them have new people joining a group or two groups merging, and Crafters do sometimes claim extra territory and build it up into something for other Crafters to come and look at and then write about it. She doesn't think she's personally seen fictional versions of either of those, but that might also exist; there are plenty of other book formatters out there who might've gotten it instead of her.

"Many Crystal people like the middle kind of book. Lots of Crystal people write those books. There are fewer books about making pretty places, but I like them," she explains.

She puts up a few pictures of neighborhoods and buildings that members of her selftree designed. Examples include a towering spire of red and silver fluted crystal rising from the ocean, hexagonal two-story houses painted in pastel colors situated around a central grassy park, and a dark neon city slick with rain the most notable feature of which is that it is built into a ring floating in space, through which a red planet is visible.

"After I make a body, I want to help people be healthy, and have more legs, and have enough food. After that, I want to make places that are good for Crafters and more Crystal people. I didn't find what places are good for Crafters. What do you like about a place?"

She's not picky about where she lives, most of the things she cares about in a territory are built things. Forests are pretty popular among Crafters in general, but they can live reasonably comfortably almost anywhere; as long as they've brought the right starting supplies with them all they really need is a source of water and something they can turn into crafting material.

"That is good! Crystal people can't turn things into things if they don't have a crystal. Crystal people now just need crystal. Crystal people very yesterday didn't have crystals and needed many things to like a place. They needed water and food and not-crafting-materials to make with. Crystal people now don't need those things, but like those things," Weeping Cherry explains.

"How many Crafters are there? Do they have enough places?" she asks.

On the one hand, with food being more plentiful and everyone having a built-in industrial revolution, they might have a much higher population than Earth did at an equivalent tech level. On the other hand, they can also live more places without worrying about logistics. So maybe there's no particular population pressure.

She's not sure how many Crafters there are, plenty of them wouldn't cooperate with being counted; she'd guess a few million, maybe, but she could pretty easily be off by a factor of ten either way. She knows some places have overpopulation problems to where their kids have trouble getting a territory near the people they want to be neighbors with, but that's not a very common problem, and overall there's plenty of free space.

This world is doing so well without her that it's almost throwing Weeping Cherry off her game. She had to stand on the shoulders of giants and practically dislocate her metaphorical shoulder hauling Earth up to an acceptable level. But here, all the Crafters are self-sufficient and there's enough to go around. She'll need to, like, do a rollout similar to the one on Earth of item summoning and assistive technologies to the other talking creatures, and do disease eradication and teleportation and post-death services for everyone, but probably not need to urgently build space stations or cities in Bir Tawil or negotiate with hostile governments or anything like that.

"Maybe Crafters don't need me to make places. Crystal people have a machine that travels you from one place to another place fast," she says. "After I make a body, I make a travel machine and people can visit if their territories are far. Crafters are so good! Crystal people very yesterday had a million people and not as much good things. Crystal people needed more people to make crystals and other good things."

Teleportation would be pretty amazing! They're doing fine overall without it but that doesn't mean it wouldn't improve things, there are plenty of people who are skipping doing things they want to because they'd have to move for them and a lot of that is people not getting to learn advanced crafting techniques!

... huh. Either Weeping Cherry has a translation problem, neon-bubbles is very genre savvy, or something weirder just happened. She reviews her notes on the glyphs for 'travel' and 'fast'.

"You are right. Crystal people travel machine is like that. But I didn't find the word for <teleporter>," she says, using the English word. "I wrote 'travel fast'. Is 'travel fast' a phrase for that? Did you guess travel machine is a <teleporter> from its like your books?"

Oh! Yeah, she read a book with teleportation in it not too long ago, that's probably why she assumed that. The glyph for it is this (a portmanteau of 'matter' and 'ansible'). Are those little glyphs Weeping Cherry's home language? How do they work?

Oh boy. How is she going to explain English spelling to people who don't even make sounds to talk.

"Crystal people can't everybody understands them. Crystal people make noise to talk," she explains. "I show you."

She switches to writing Crafter glyphs on the upper part of her surface, English words on the lower part, and saying the English translation out loud as she writes.

"Crystal people's glyphs match the noises in our talk. Teleporter is like this: T e l e p o r t e r," she explains, sounding out each letter. "That is a simple talk of it. Breaking a word into glyphs has more complex ways, but that is mostly it."