He sends for Aitim a couple days later.

Aitim still has a pocket everything with 52% battery.

And a bunch of people try to confiscate its shines, and fail. Although one does put it close to a table and pull off a complex shine that is a blurry copy of one of his photographs.

"Oh, you can get a reflection? That's clever. Anitam doesn't have shines, we invented this instead. I am not sure we would have invented this if we'd had shines, but it can be copied much more easily once it can be done, and that's useful when there are lots of people."

"There's gonna be more with the storks storking around."

"If the rate of baby drops scales with the existing population then you're going to have a problem with space eventually. Anitam has that problem and we can prevent it by stopping babies from being born. Here, that wouldn't work."

"Maybe whoever controls the storks could tell them to back off."

"Or the storks could kill some babies. Slow starvation in the wilderness is a bad way to die."

Nobody looks really comfortable with that.

Because it is horrible. "Are there any ideas on how to track down the person who made the storks?"

"We tried - they're really brilliant -"

"They've been caught and examined, but they don't have a signature or anything."

"It'd be usual to leave a signature?"

"If you wanted people to find you."

"Mmhmm. Does anyone keep population statistics for the whole world?"

"Nah - shine code's not that good yet."

"What does the current setup for using shines to represent characters look like - how many shines per character -" For some reason he anxiously tugs at his hair as he asks this; the roots are coming in green.

"We don't have a setup that sophisticated yet - I think Wrebb and Lapis have that -"

"What's needed to make that happen, is it theory or resources or time..."

"Uh, buy-in from whoever we'd be connecting to and servantmaker time. And if we want it really fancy, lenses and colored glass."

Nod. "Ah, are there countries in the world that have invented indoor plumbing?"

"I think they have that in Lapis."

"Maybe Wrebb too by now."

"Seems like a lot of hassle."

Twitch. "Thanks so much for taking a look at this. I've written up everything I remember about the history of electronics, if you'd like to see if you can get anywhere with it."

"That sounds lovely! Shines are all right for some lighting but they don't really cast light the way a - bulb would -"

"Yeah, bulbs can go brighter, and you can do just enough with shines that I can see how you might not bother with early electronics but once you get good with it it can do things like go to the Moon, and do much faster communications, and the pictures are nice."

"They are!"

"Do you want shines of any of these in particular since you said it stops working?"