"I wouldn't expect it to be yeah. Some of the other worlds we've contacted might eventually become politically unified powers that want to do interworld diplomacy, but most of them are still busy with their own technology rollouts."

"How many worlds have you found?"

"We have contact with about fourteen at the point, we're aware of a number of others but most of them are too far away for us to feasibly contact. Most explorers are sent to visit worlds where there is no intelligent life, or active magic."

"Can't your bobble-thing get you there?"

"Time won't pass for the person travelling, but many of the places we have not yet chosen to visit are months or even years distant. It would be exceptionally difficult to make useful contact with that sort of lag-time to communication."

"That makes sense. Why prioritize places without life or magic?"

"Oh, I'm sorry for being unclear, we're prioritizing based on distance. It's just that most of the close worlds are without intelligent life that our magic recognizes. We have a tendency not to trust our magic though so we go out to look at those worlds anyway, besides, a lot of them are very pretty, or do have life just not life that is intelligent at the level of you or me."

"How does your magic recognize people?"

"So, our magic learns based on examples, you can use certain artifacts to peer back into the history how what magic thinks is a book or a person or a boat. Really far back in time as far back as we can look, magic was taught to look for some specific microscopic incredibly dense beings and also humans as people. When we did the first uploading experiments those were not initially classified as people but eventually that problem got resolved, we're still not sure quite how magic made the jump. That makes us reluctant to rely on it for identifying non-human intelligence."

"So it's... context?"

"We don't know. Magic might have learned to extend the definition of person itself from context or maybe someone else who understands magic better than we do extended the definition of person to include uploads. These sort of uncertainties are why my people try to avoid depending on magic."

"Have you tried getting it to recognize other sorts of things?"

"Oh sure, we've run a variety of tests with magic's ability to learn. We've also studied the definitions of terms defined a long time ago, like what counts as a boat or a book. Boats apparently counts submarines but not airplanes. Books seem to refuse to count computers."

"What all can your magic do?"

"That depends on how long you want to spend teaching it, and how many motes you have available. At its most basic, magic can apply forces to objects, create light, create matter, gather information about the world, learn from patterns, do computation, move things into sublayers, pull things out of sublayers, bobble things, interfere with bobble creation, push things into or pull things out of threads and send messages. There were also a lot of less basic compound operations that were taught to magic a very very long time ago, one of those is to recognize people, another is to create illusions that only one or a small group of people can see. It's nearly impossible to use complex magic without that illusion capability providing debug output so I'm not sure how the system was used before that capability existed."

"Carefully, probably."

"Yeah, maybe. The origins of magic are still pretty much a mystery to us."

"How long have you had it?"

"I got forknapped by Wanderdeep about five years ago now. I discovered the Institute about two years after that."

"Fork... napped?"

"The magic of Wanderdeep decided I was a good candidate to wield magic so it made a copy of me and placed it in Wanderdeep."

"That's... alarming."

"As far as I can tell, it won't pick someone else that way until all the current wielders are dead. And in the three years since I've found the Institute, Wanderdeep has picked another four people from the various researchers that have been stationed there."

"Has anyone tried to make it- not do that?"

"We're really not sure where Wanderdeep comes from so we're planning to just cooperate with it and ensure there are always active magecrafters instead of trying to destroy its core structures. It's too useful to risk destroying it entirely."