There's a book for it, code 1128, or he can grab her a copy from the workroom if she wants.

She hops off of the couch and up onto her cart, punching in the book code.

"Oh, actually, I've been meaning to ask -- the maintenance person I spoke to said that it's a pain when they need to add an extra digit to all the book codes. If I share all of the books I have with me, that's about 40,000 books. Do you know if that's enough to cause problems with the current code length, or is that a question for a programmer?"

"I've been thinking about it because the other thing I could do with a custom reader is make interactive books, that change depending on how you request them. But that pretty much requires variable-length book codes, which I'm not sure the machines can support."

Forty thousand books will probably kick them up a digit, yeah, or at least put them close enough that they'll want to do it preemptively. His understanding is that it's not a massive deal, though? They do need to shut most of the machine down briefly to hook everything up but aside from that it's the same kind of extension they're doing all the time.

He doesn't think variable-length book codes would work - she'd have to ask the programmers to be sure - but they could maybe include some 'books' that are actually crystals in the library and have those brought to the ansibles to interact with them the same way ordinary encoded books do, but fancier?

Ooooh!

"That's clever!" she agrees. "If there's a way to send a terminal's keyboard output to the reader, instead of it queuing up more book requests, I could totally make a 'smart book' that worked like that."

"I know some of what I want to write up in my introductory book -- the differences I've noticed between crystal people and crafters, a brief explanation of our history and technology, etc. -- but it occurs to me that you probably have the most context on crystal people of anyone here. Are there things you've been wondering, or that I mentioned offhand, that you think should go in the introductory book?"

He's really curious about their world in general! He's always been curious about how different kinds of Crafter-intelligence-level people would really live, ever since he found out about the previous species that was around here and how different they were. For specific questions... what it's like to not have crafting and how they deal with the problems that causes is a huge one, obviously, and she probably shouldn't get into all the details in the introductory book but it seems like a good idea to at least talk about it a little. Do they have smart animals like crows and mammoths, and how does that work out without them being able to communicate with crafting? How do they spend their time, how do they get things? How does that collective decision making thing actually work and what kinds of expectations does she have for how things work because of it? How does raising kids work, if they can't just teach them to grow their own food and expect them to be mostly okay on their own?

"Oh, those are all great questions! Let me answer you and take some notes at the same time."

She opens a scratch document and starts explaining.

"There's actually a big thing that I think ties together some of your questions about how we live, how we get along without crafting, and how we raise kids. I think that crystal people are a lot more communal. By which I mean, people almost never live on their own. People live together in groups of various sizes, where different members of the group contribute different things."

"When I was young, I lived in a small house with my two parents and my sister, just down the road from my grandmother. Neither of my parents actually taught my sister and I or raised our food, though. One of my parents worked monitoring the safety of automated carts and doing emergency response. My other parent taught people math and some specialized kinds of history and helped people overcome emotional problems. And both of those things were tasks that other people wanted to happen, so they gave us tokens representing our contribution to the community. Then we gave those tokens to people who spent all day farming -- and used machines to farm more efficiently -- and to teachers who were experts in their subjects to teach my sister and I."

"One thing that system does really well is let people specialize -- if someone is the best at something, they can do it a lot, without needing to spend time doing their own farming, or crafting their own tools, or anything like that. One thing that the system does less well is being robust. Because everyone depends on everyone else, you can't really just strike out on your own and live in the wilderness. I think it's probably more similar to the crafters who live on boats than the ones who live on land -- you're all depending on the same shared situation to keep yourself afloat."

"But by working together like that, groups of crystal people can accomplish more than a single crystal person can. Without crafting, developing tools to make tasks (like making more tools) easier is a big deal. There was a pattern throughout our history of a community working together until they got enough slack that a really good inventor could make a tool that made things easier, which let the community do more, and so on, until we managed to create fixity crystals, which are pretty much the ultimate tool."

She pauses to gather her thoughts.

(He crafts up a tablet and takes notes.)

"I'm not sure how well that addressed your actual questions, though, because that was more of a cross-cutting difference that I noticed. For the thinking creatures like crows and mammoths -- we have crows, and we've seen them using tools, but we haven't really figured out how to talk to them. Mammoths used to exist -- we found fossils of them -- but we're pretty sure that our very early ancestors from before the invention of writing hunted them to extinction for food," she continues.

"There are lots of other creatures we've found that seem to be more-or-less capable of thought, but without crafting we've never really worked out how to talk to them. We still try to treat them kindly, but there's a lot of debate over how much we're entitled to interfere in their lives. There is a kind of animal that we usually think of as being more intelligent that isn't considered a thinking creature here, though. Dogs can be trained to understand basic human language, including things like combining verbs and nouns. But I'm not sure how much of that is inherent to dogs and how much is the product of thousands of years of selective breeding. We've been working alongside dogs and breeding and training them to cooperate with us better for longer than we've had language, and I'm not sure if that's the same here or not."

"As for how we spend our time -- it used to be that the majority of people spent the majority of their time hunting, gathering, or farming to have enough food. Over time, as we got better at producing enough food for everyone, people diversified. When I was born, most people spent a bit less than half their waking hours either in school to learn things or doing something that someone else wanted so they could get tokens, and the other half of their time doing chores and leisure activities. That includes things like spending time with friends and family, playing games, reading, singing, learning something extra, doing hobby projects, etc. Now that we have fixity devices doing all the food creation and the vast majority of all physical labor, people tend to spend somewhere between none and a quarter of their time on things other people will give them tokens for, and the rest on the same leisure activities. Although there are also new leisure activities that fixity devices make possible, like visiting other planets or changing your shape."

"The collective decision making is actually really varied! People have tried a lot of different systems. There were a lot of systems that work less well which are now mostly obsolete, although they still exist in some places. Different communities have different systems, and you can move to a community that has a system you like. Some people choose to live without a community, or in a community with no collective decision making, but those people are fairly rare."

"The way that the community where I live works (and this is a fairly normal system), is that there are a set of posted rules that people agree to abide by when they move there. This includes things like not playing loud music after a certain time of night, not taking things that belong to other people, not starting fires except in designated places, and so on. Anybody can propose a new rule, or propose that an existing rule be removed. There are some rules about what valid rules are, but that's a bit complicated to get into. Each person who lives there also gets one 'vote'*. They can give their vote to somebody else they trust if they want to, and then that person has two votes. If people with more than half the votes in total approve of a proposal, it gets enacted."

"In practice, that usually means that the people who like debating proposals or who feel strongly about the rules keep their votes and use them directly, and the people who don't want to spend time worrying about it delegate their votes to people they trust until those votes end up with someone who does like dealing with things like that. This system is called 'liquid democracy', and it's a refinement of an earlier system called 'representational democracy' that worked in a similar way but was less flexible."

"The way that it would work if an alien suddenly landed on my community and had gifts to give out is that the people who were paying attention could choose for themselves, but people who were busy with other things could have the default choice set for them by the people who they had delegated their votes to. I expected crafters to have a system to do the same thing, even if the system wasn't one I recognized, because I'm pretty used to everyone relying on their community at least a little bit to deal with the most unpredictable events, like hurricanes."

"Once I'm healed up and have gotten fixity devices to people, I'm definitely going to find a little territory to claim and duplicate myself or have some children so that I can have a crystal-people-style community here (although I bet there are at least a few crafters who would find that a crystal-person-style community works well for them too). It can feel a little uncomfortable to be without a network of friends and family, and can be bad for our health if it continues long enough. Friendly touch is also necessary to long-term happiness. I'm fine on both fronts for now, because I'm starting to make friends here, and I think I'll probably be able to figure out the accident that brought me here and get back to my family eventually, but I'll probably get a bit lonely in the meantime."

* She uses the English letters as a loanword

"Let's see -- that was a lot, but I think I covered most of your questions at a high level. Are there bits that you want more detail on?" she asks.

Mammoths used to exist -- we found fossils of them -- but we're pretty sure that our very early ancestors from before the invention of writing hunted them to extinction for food.

Well that's horrifying. For both sides, really.

We've been working alongside dogs and breeding and training them to cooperate with us better for longer than we've had language, and I'm not sure if that's the same here or not.

Crafting would make that work out differently, yeah - crafting can communicate any concept to any creature smart enough to understand it, even if they aren't smart enough to communicate with crafting themselves, so while it's still more useful to have smarter dogs he's not surprised it hasn't been as much of a focus. He does know some things about canine history if she's interested; the extinct species were the ones who domesticated them, here.

Each person who lives there also gets one 'vote'.

Where do the votes come from and how do they get distributed, or does that not really matter? What happens if someone just keeps their vote and doesn't use it, can you save them up? That sounds like a bit of a logistical nightmare in any case, really.

"Oh -- I would actually love to learn more about canine history at some point! I've always been pretty interested in dogs since I learned that they were the oldest domesticated animal," she agrees. "As for the votes -- they're not, like, physical things. People have them in the same way that people have ideas, or have friends. You can't store them up to save for later, they just represent your ability as a member of a community to decide how that community should be."

"And you're right that this system has a lot of logistical overhead -- the older system I mentioned, representational democracy, has a lot less overhead. The logistics aren't really a problem for us, because we can use computers to track them most of the time, so it's worth picking a system that has increased logistical complexity in exchange for working better in other ways," she elaborates.

Oh! That does make more sense, if they have a way to do that.

"Yup! The way that an actual individual person interacts with this system day-to-day (if they haven't delegated their vote) is getting a message whenever there's a new proposal, and indicating whether they approve of it or not. If they have delegated their vote, they can look up what decisions are being made, but they can also ignore the whole thing if they want to. If they decide to change who their vote is delegated to, or rescind their delegation, they can tell the computer that counts the votes that at any time."

"I chose to live in a place where it works like that because I thought that system was more sensible than most of the alternatives," she continues. "I'm not sure if crafters would want to have systems like this at all, and if so what variation will seem best. Do you know how crafters who live on boats make decisions that effect everyone, like where to sail next?"

He doesn't know much about boat Crafters, but he'd expect that they just get together and talk it out until they've come up with a plan that everyone likes, or at least one that nobody thinks they can improve on; that's how group projects usually work.

"That makes sense -- an informal process like that works well when there aren't very many people involved, or when the people involved mostly want the same things," she says. "You only really need formal systems when the community gets larger than a few dozen people, or when people with different goals need to cooperate on a common project for some reason."

Yeah, Crafters don't really do either of those things. Or, like, you get more than a few dozen people living close enough to share public spaces sometimes, but they don't all try to make decisions together.

"I find it interesting that crafters are so solitary," she replies. "I see why you can be, since you have crafting, but I would still expect more cooperation to be evolutionary advantageous. It makes child-rearing easier, for one thing, because one parent doesn't have to completely support their kid alone."

He can barely imagine trying to raise kids without crafting, yeah. It's a logistical hurdle even for Crafters, but, like, it's pretty straightforwardly possible to set things up so they don't have to leave their house or even really their bed for half a year, and handle the end of the pregnancy and the first few months with the new baby that way, and then from there there aren't many necessary tasks that require more than a minute or so of uninterrupted attention as long as they've got a good stockpile of crafting material, and things get much easier once kids are a few years old and don't need to be watched so closely.

She is so jealous. Irrationally so, because actually childrearing will be pretty much exactly that easy for her if she ever gets around to it. But still.

Maybe crafting really is just such a useful ability that they're not really experiencing any selection pressure. It's strange to think of so many basic human instincts that are oriented around creating community are adaptations born of scarcity. It makes her wonder what her world will be like in another million generations.

"What kinds of things do you teach your children, and how old are they by the time they leave to make their own territory?" she asks. "Crystal people usually learn reading, writing, calculation, algebra, geometry, how to stay healthy, basic physics, chemistry, biology, history, and usually a second language before they're considered to have learned everything a child should know to become an adult."

He's not sure if she's intending to make a distinction between things parents make a point of being sure their kids pick up versus things they'll reliably pick up without being taught - reading/writing and basic math are the only really obvious common things in the first category, and even then a lot of kids pick them up without any special effort on their parents' part. It'd be somewhat weird for a kid of twelve or so not to know the basic stuff about crafting and animal care and so on that's necessary for having a territory and taking care of themselves; they aren't mentally ready to do it for a few more years though and a lot of the nicer automation is a bit much for someone that age, they'd really want some source of models for their housewares. Kids usually live with their preferred adult - often but not always a parent, it's pretty common for kids to get along better with one of their neighbors and move in with them - until they're about fourteen or fifteen, and then spend fiveish years living in the teens' transitional spaces before claiming their own territories.

"I was talking about things parents make sure their kids are taught," she clarifies. "Actually, how old do kids have to be before they can start crafting?"

It's been a while since he last read about babies - he thinks they're usually pretty okay at communicating by the time they're a year old? He's not sure when they usually start communicating at all, he hasn't really ever met one that young. For crafting with crafting material, that's an early childhood-as-opposed-to-toddlerhood thing, he'd estimate it as something they'd pick up at four or five years old.

... huh. That sure does say something about how human (or, well, humanoid) children compare to animals in terms of intelligence at various ages, but she'll have to think more about what.

"That's neat, but I think we've maybe drifted a little away from things that should go in the introductory book. Did you have any other questions that I missed?" she asks.

That's all he noticed, he'll let her know if he thinks of something else later.

She notices that the formatting guideline book has finished downloading.

"In that case, would you mind if I wrote up a first draft of the introductory book, and then asked you to look it over?" she asks.