"Should do it outside in case they wrote a lot more."

"...yeah, good plan."

So Cam goes outside and attempts to produce in searchable electronic format Everything In That Language.

"...it's so small," says Tiro.

There's a fair amount of it, but the language was spoken by a subplanetary civilization with no electronic records. It all fits on a handful of chips.

"It's very compressed," Cam says, setting it up for crunching. "It'd be bigger on paper by a lot."

"How do you compress it that small?"

"...this requires a long explanation indeed! How curious are you?"

"Very! Very curious!"

"Okay. You have lightning where you're from?"

"Yep!"

"So, you can learn to generate small amounts of the same stuff, and it can do many interesting things, including flow in a manner loosely analogous to water through paths in special materials. The paths can store information and the flow can move the information around. And it can be very very small. I will proceed to elaborate on all of that." He produces a version of his computer and starts explaining electrons.

Tiro is fascinated.

They can just have an entire Electrical And Software Engineering From First Principles lesson here if Tiro wants, while the translation software nibbles on the corpus.

Yes! Tiro wants! Tiro is really fucking excited about Electrical And Software Engineering From First Principles!

What fun! After he has gotten as far as the concept of the logic gate, Cam pauses - "I'm hungry, you hungry?"

"Yeah kinda!"

"Whaddaya want?"

"I dunno. Some kind of food you like."

So now they have linguine in clam sauce and a side of broccoli with hollandaise! And dishes.

Whoa. Food.

Tiro is tentatively enthusiastic about the food.

Yay! "Have you been eating bacon and nothing but? ...Do you even have a way to cook the bacon?"

"Yeah, I can cook the bacon. And I have fruit trees and vegetables and stuff."

"Okay, so you're probably not desperately malnourished. Have a multivitamin anyway." Cam hands him a multivitamin.

...He blinks at the multivitamin.

"You swallow it - or chew it, if you prefer, but it is not delicious - and it contains various nutrition so you don't come down with some deficiency of something? Or don't, maybe you're immortal enough that you could survive on bacon alone, I don't know."