"The house is fine," says the girl at the bar. "The door is temporarily replaced with a different one. It goes to a lot of universes, apparently. Hi. My name's Lu."

"According to the bar, who is a person, if you go out and close the door, it will go back to leading wherever it usually does."

"Underaged for what?"

"Drinking alcohol," Helen answers. "And consuming marijuana in any form, but that's less relevant to bars."

"Oh. I didn't realize there were age limits for that, I guess my world doesn't tend to have them. Anyway, she sells non-alcoholic beverages and food and for that matter inedible objects too."

"I mean, a lot of creches and teachers have their own rules about it but... what kind of consent?"

"...The bar is a she and she does napkins with writing on them same way she does drinks, and your parents?"

"Why would you have parents, is the sticking point. I don't understand."

"Why...would...I...not?" Helen asks, confused.

"Because you're a human? I mean, you look like a human. I only even know the word 'parents' because I read a lot, I think I got it out of a book about birds or something."

"I. Am a human. Humans have parents." Helen is not noticeably less confused! "What do you even mean?"

"...I mean, humans don't have parents. Or at least humans I have met or heard of before don't. Are humans on your world just a kind of animal?"

"Are humans on your world a kind of fungus? Of course we're animals," Helen says.

"We're not a fungus. We're a lot like animals. But we don't breed like animals."

"Okay, well, I appeared in a random location like every other baby and, like almost every baby that survives to non-baby-hood, was then picked up by a stork and dropped off at the nearest creche."

"Well, if a baby appears and nobody finds it, it'll eventually die of exposure, but a lot more of them get found now that there are storks."

"Storks are golems that listen for crying babies outside of settled areas, find babies, pick them up, and bring them to creches. Creches mark their roofs with symbols that attract storks because otherwise the storks can get a little confused and leave the babies in random other parts of town, which is still better than 'in a hollow log' or whatever."

"But anyway, animals still have parents, so I know loosely what you're talking about. They usually just sort of - keep you? And decide whether you get to drink alcohol?"

"It takes nine months? Eaugh."

"Nine months, and you get enormous," Marie says, miming the size and shape of a pregnant belly. "I mean, we're genetically programmed to do it, people who found the process prohibitively unappealing didn't make it back into the gene pool, but it's objectively kind of terrible."

"Yeah, no kidding. If I decide I want kids around I'll take apprentices. But I probably won't even do that."

"Some people adopt," Marie agrees. "Sometimes people who have kids die or people who don't want kids fail to use birth control and give them away. I'm not likely to decide to have kids, but if I did I'd definitely adopt."

"People who... fail to use... okay don't explain I get the picture oh dear."

"Well, it's not a problem for us, fortunately, since it's not possible to get another girl pregnant, but yeah," Helen says.

"Yeah, I imagine that would be convenient if the alternative were getting randomly pregnant."

"We have birth control!" Marie says. "We have very good birth control. The problem is that not everyone uses it who should."

"Do I want to know what's so unappealing about it?"

"It's not that it's unappealing, it's that you get teenagers or people who don't even have that excuse who think they're not going to have sex and then get carried away and have it anyway without thinking about the consequences," Marie explains. "And, you know, some people are just idiots."

"I think I prefer the model where hikers are more likely than stupid teenagers to encounter random babies."

"That's fair, but I think I prefer to keep the model where dying of exposure isn't so much a thing," Marie says.

"I mean, it's not pleasant, but new babies aren't actually that much smarter than animals I'm willing to eat for dinner. And most of them do get found first now there are storks."

"Yeah," Helen says. "It's us and one other guy that we know of for sure, but I'd be surprised if it was literally just the three of us--the two of us and also him--under the circumstances."

"The circumstances being?"

"The three of us...were in what we're fairly certain were all of our first lives, members of two groups that interacted with each other fairly often. And frequently encountered things that have strange effects. If literally none of the rest of those groups or other similar ones were similarly affected that would be surprising. And evidence that the universe enjoys laughing at our pain," Marie explains.

"...Okay. I reincarnate too. This is life three. I had no inkling of having previously existed until I started dreaming rounds one and two a couple months ago, which I might have dismissed as weird dreams if I hadn't gone to the city my past lives lived in and found their house. I don't know if... if anyone else reincarnates, and I don't think it would have bothered me in the long run if I had - or possibly did - die a few times as a baby until I got lucky and a stork found me."

"We're fully conscious of our past lives from infancy. It is so, so awkward," Helen says. "Marie and I, anyway. The only thing I know about Gregory is that he exists. Well. The only thing I know about his reincarnating tendencies, anyway." She shudders, and a dark look passes over her face. "This is life two for Marie and Gregory, but it's life three for me. The first time I died it was an accident, but Gregory decided to blame Marie. And when he finally hunted her down for revenge, she had died too. Of old age. So he decided to take his decades of grudge out on her significantly-younger widow." She puts a hand to her neck protectively.

"My first time I died of a disease, age twenty-four. Second time I fell down the stairs. I don't remember this, you understand, I only get so many dreams a night, but second life I made a really good golem that can talk and it can fill in what I don't know from reading my old notes - I've always been a really obsessive notetaker."

"That sounds convenient. If my memory suffered more between lives than just the intervening time accounted for I'd probably try to pick up a similar habit," Helen says.

"Well, I even have notes from the first time when I had no idea to expect to wake up again. First life was named Aly, second life Kib. These are all nicknames - for some reason we have all received and then shortened names with the syllable 'bel', I have no idea how that happened three times in a row. Alymbel, Akibel, Beluna."

"Those're pretty," Helen observes. "Our names have no such repetition--I was Helen first, actually, and then Beatrice, and now I'm technically Annabelle. Marie's technically Ava."

"...And," Lu says, "Kib was a man."

"...That has never happened to us. I suppose it could, five instances isn't necessarily statistically conclusive," Helen admits.

"It's less weird and awkward than it could be, honestly, when I'm having Kib dreams he's accustomed to it and the rest of the time I'm fine with being a girl. Kib felt about the same way about Aly dreams."

"Inconveniences of babyhood aside, I think I like our way of reincarnating better," Marie says.

"It does sound more convenient than having to read reams of paper and occasionally re-live having the pox or something."

Helen flinches. "I really do not want to relive someone cutting my throat open with a pair of scissors, no."

"Yeah." Lu looks preoccupied.

"...Are you okay? Sorry, I...that was unnecessarily graphic," Helen says.

"No, that's not it, exactly, just - I haven't dreamed any of my deaths yet, just one of Aly's close calls. But I did dream, um, my husband's. If I can call him that. He was Aly's age, he married her, she died, and then he found Kib and - they got married too, and - there's only been one of him, but if he were going to reincarnate, he ought to be thirty. He ought to have had a lot of dreams by now but he hasn't been to the house."

"I'm actually in the middle of looking for him. He could look dramatically different, I have every time, but servants seem to recognize us the same, the golem called me 'milady' right away - and we had some parrots, and parrots live a long time. Just in case. So I've brought a couple of parrots with me and I've told them that if they see him they should go land on him. I have an idea of who he might be, because he was always the projects type. I have a few people I've heard of who could be him who I'm going to parrot-check."

"That's a good idea. I hope you find him," Helen says sincerely. "Losing someone like that would be awful."

"Yeah. I just - he should have been having dreams for thirteen, fourteen years. But that's not enough time to guarantee that any of them would be about me. It could be all childhood and teens or the interim as a widower. The dreams seem to be totally random. But I've gotten a lot of really romancey ones..."

"That, I can't help you with," Helen admits.

"Yeah. But I should at least be able to convince him to come back home and read his old notes. Not as comprehensive as mine, but decent."

"Wouldn't it be more efficient to bring his notes with you?" Marie wonders out loud.

"There's a lot of them, and I'm traveling a very long way on a zebra. I had to pack pretty light. I should be able to tell him enough to convince him that I have something."

"...Right, this is a lifetime's worth of stuff. Yeah, I guess that would make hauling the whole thing around inconvenient," Marie says.

"Next time we'll just write ourselves letters," she says, laughing a little, nervously.

"Probably a good plan. I don't know that I could write a letter to a future incarnation who didn't remember anything until I had been a future incarnation who didn't remember anything, though, if that makes sense," Helen opines.

"It would be sort of weird to find each other too young to get dreams. I'd aim the letter at someone who'd had dreams and needed to be told they were real and please come home and read up."

"...I meant to say everything, not anything. My bad," Helen says.

"But anyway, he might not be reincarnated. It can't be common. I've never found anyone else - we're not exactly publicizing it, but it doesn't even come up in fiction except with religious figures and in fantasy, and the rules are different from what I'm working with in those stories."

"I sort of want to say something like 'I'm sure you'll find him,' but honestly that's not based on any kind of real evidence," Helen admits.

"Yeah. I mean. I'd live. My dire threats to him on his deathbed that if he didn't want me to be miserable alone he'd better come check on me, aside. But - we were really good together."

"If Marie hadn't come back I would have had a lot of regrets about the time we didn't spend together in my first life for stupid reasons. I mean, I regret that anyway, but moreso." More hugs. Marie is not objecting.

"Well - that problem I mostly won't have. Except for the period of time when Kib had moved into the house with Aydanci - that was my, their, our, whatever, the husband's name, Aydanci - but they weren't dating because Kib hadn't yet remembered that Aydanci wasn't technically straight. That was a little embarrassing."

"That does sound a little embarrassing, but much less your fault than our mess was," Helen says. "We literally only reconciled while I was dying, too. So there's that, at least you don't have that to deal with."

"Yeah. ...I guess you don't refer to all your lives by their names because you keep all your memories and don't get used to new names without remembering the old ones each time, but it still makes it really confusing."

"It would be a little weird to refer to myself in the third person," Helen says. Marie nods. "I can start referring to my second life as Beatrice no problem, but saying 'Helen' in the third person would be awkward. It's...more my name than the others are."

"I don't even turn my head when I hear words that sound like 'Kib' or 'Aly'. Kib didn't mention feeling like his name was Aly even after he'd dreamed her entire life."

"You have a lot less continuity than we do, it sounds like. If Beatrice had only had dreams of being Helen, I almost certainly wouldn't have gone back to Marie."

"Kib eventually ran out of Aly to dream. And once we've dreamed a thing it slots into place like a proper memory, just as old as it really is. But I'll probably never run out. It took him more than forty years to dream through her twenty-four, and he lived to be seventy-six."

"It's not that I wouldn't have dreamed about her much or believed the dreams, it's that my first life was pretty unhappy, and even though Marie was the best part of it, Beatrice Carter wouldn't have wanted anything at all to do with the catastrophe that was Helen Fitzroy's life."

"Ah. I don't have that problem. I'm proud of myselves. ...Aly invented storks before she died."

"...Definitely something to be proud of. But it's not that I'm ashamed of Helen Fitzroy's life. I accomplished--nothing as good as that, to be sure. But not nothing either. It was my personal life that was a disaster, that's all."

"Oh. Yeah, if you worked like me you'd have had the option to pretend nothing happened except while you were asleep, if that seemed preferable."

"I, for one, am glad it works the way it does for us," Marie contributes.

"Sounds like it worked out for you. I do wonder what it would have been like being a baby remembering everything from the first. ...Kib might not have gone back to Aydanci right away just because that would have been awkward if one of us were five and the other thirty. But he would've written a letter so Aydanci didn't worry about me continuing to be dead. Aydanci was a very bitter unhappy sort of widower. Although it did motivate him to accelerate his existing public health project to the point where the pox that killed me, among other diseases, is now totally eradicated."

"I showed up on her doorstep at the age of eighteen after managing to convince myself I wasn't crazy like my biological family thought I was. I...won't go into the details of why they were able to convince me of that, like, at all, but that was most of why I didn't contact her sooner. I of all people will admit that the parenting system has its flaws," Helen says.

"...I hadn't pictured the parenting system in enough detail to have considered that it would have special flaws like that."

"If your parents suck but not so obviously that strangers notice then your well-being is at the mercy of sucky people, yes. Most parents aren't like that, but they exist," Helen sighs.

"...There are bad creche workers, bad teachers..."

"Mm. Probably not that different, then," Helen says quietly.

"...but if you don't like your teacher you can go back to the creche, and most creches have some monitoring between the staff members and would require collusion to get out of hand."

"There's systems in place to make sure kids in bad households get out. But they don't always work, and when you've got the kid half convinced you're right..." Helen sighs.

"Mmhm."

"Anyway, I used those eighteen years productively," Marie says. "On a personal level, anyway. I certainly would have wanted a letter at the time but to be honest, if I hadn't had those years of personal growth when I found out she was alive I suspect we would have fallen into our old bad habits."

"Bad habits?"

"We didn't communicate as well as we should have," Helen says. "We had a tendency to be passive-aggressive about things instead of talking about them like adults. We...were the first happiness each other had had in a long time, and assumed that meant we were supposed to just work and didn't put in the effort we should have."

"So the fact that I didn't manage to get in touch before I showed up at eighteen worked out in the end, mostly. I'm still going to break that bastard Gregory's mind if I can," Helen concludes.

"...Break his mind?"

"He was trying to avenge me, but he killed me instead. I intend to tell him so at some point. I'm hoping this is enough to at the very least convince him to leave me the hell alone, but I won't deny I'd feel a certain satisfaction if it broke him."

"Is 'mind breaking' a weird feature your world has or are you just referring to him being very thrown and upset in some ordinary way?"

"I'm referring to he's already demonstrably unstable and hopefully being significantly more thrown and upset than is ordinary. But no, mind breaking isn't a weird feature, just a weird idiom," Helen explains.

"Okay."

"I'm not even sure what would qualify as weird at this point, relatively speaking. Our worlds are pretty different," Marie says.

"Yeah. Bar has only had a chance to tell me a few things and didn't get around to mentioning that in some worlds humans breed like animals, so I assume there's a lot more I don't know."

"Sometimes people have scientifically improbable powers," Marie offers.

"Powers?"

"Selective telekinises or temporary object generation or superhuman physical abilities, to name a few categories," Marie adds.

"Oh wow. We don't have anything like that - unless you count puppeting as telekinesis, but anyone can do it if they learn. Who gets those powers?"

"If you have a quality called S-Factor--no one knows what exactly it is--and it gets activated, then you get powers. Unfortunately, while the ways to activate S-Factor are varied, they're near-universally harmful if you don't have it, and no one's figured out how to test for dormant S-Factor yet," Marie explains.

"How inconvenient."

"No kidding. If anyone ever figured out how to test for S-Factor they'd win at least one--they'd win at least one Nobel Prize, which is a very prestigious award given for achievements in things like sciences and making the world a better place," Marie says.

"Better yet would be figuring out how to induce it."

"Well, whether or not it's induceable depends on what it is. For all we know you're born with it or you're not," Marie shrugs. "But you'd win at least two Nobel Prizes if it could and you figured out how."

"Yeah. How many people get powers?"

"I don't have statistics on hand, but I know the number's been slowly growing since it started happening. This hasn't been going on forever--our first lives were amongst the first people to be empowered," Marie says.

"Okay, but - more like one in ten thousand or one in ten million?"

"Oh. More like one in ten thousand," Marie says.

"...And about how many people do you have in the world, I suppose that's also an important question."

"Something like eight billion."

"By how much?" Helen asks.

"We have maybe a hundred and fifty million people. I'm guessing, I don't know as much about other continents, I haven't been brought up on one yet, but that's the guess."

"I think you probably don't have as high a technology level as us, if you don't know for sure how many people there are on other continents," Helen theorizes.

"Well, intercontinental messaging with shines is pretty rudimentary. I could travel but I don't know where I'd begin to get their creche population figures and death rates."

"We have a global information network that just about everyone uses," Helen says.

"That sounds useful. How does it work?"

"...I am not even a little bit an engineer," she confesses.

"Neither am I. I'm a servantmaker. In general terms? From the perspective of some of the lay 'everyone' who uses it?"

"You have machines with screens, and you can write things and post them publicly or send them to other people, and any organization that wants to be taken seriously has a site, and you can find books and art and people to talk to."

"...I think I mostly followed that. It's a very cunning idea. I'm not sure how I'd replicate it; it seems like it would require enormous quantities of complex shines."

"What are shines?"

"Servants made of light. There are shades, too, which are shadows that behave likewise. Let's see, do I have my -" She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small lens, and focuses some of the ambient light into a spot on the surface of the bar. Then she touches the edge of this light, and pulls it away; for an instant only, there is no light where the lens is aimed, and then it's swiftly replaced, with an identical blot where she dragged the first. The dragged spot of light makes lazy figure eights while she pockets the lens again. "I'm just operating this one myself, but I could program it."

"...Made of light, huh. ...I actually have powers. I can generate barriers that--we're not sure if they're made of light or if they just give it off. I wonder if it would be worth experimenting."

"...What did you have in mind? Like, here's the shine," the shine scuttles up to her and sits on her shoe, "it's all yours if you want to do something with it."

"No, I mean, if my barriers are made of light, I wonder if you could make a shine out of one of them."

"Ooh." The shine scoots off the shoe and is presently on the back of Lu's hand. "I can sure try it, assuming they're safe to touch."

"Perfectly safe." She creates a very thin barrier in a circle on the Bar's surface.

Unlike with shines created from projected light, the barrier doesn't immediately replace itself. "That felt weird. I...think I could still dismiss it if I wanted to, but maintaining it isn't a conscious action anymore."

"You can feel these?" Lu asks. She moves the barrier around. It is awkward turning corners, being solid, and doesn't seem to be able to leave the surface of the bar; she pulls a notebook out, holds it flush, and scoots the shine onto that.

"A little? I don't feel where it is, exactly, but there's a little indicator in my head telling me that it exists."

"Huh. Do you only make them against surfaces? Normal shines have that constraint, but normal shines can also bend, which this doesn't seem to be able to - how durable is it?"

"Pretty durable. The only thing I've ever seen break one was another person who had powers specifically about breaking things. I usually make them midair, but I thought it might be easier to enshine one that was against a surface."

"I might not be able to do one in midair at all, but if I could I could probably move it around more easily too."

"Let's try it." She creates a barrier midair, still horizontal, this one in the shape of a star because why not.

Lu pinches it and tugs.

It goes.

And now it can zoom around in the air, quite freely. It spins. "This is amazing! There aren't any servants that work like this - shines have always been limited to surfaces and puppets and automata and golems can only fly if you make them with wings or propellers and you can't directly move a pet."

"I don't know for sure that it'll still work when we're in different universes again," Helen says. "But I suppose we could test it--if I go out and Marie closes the door and opens it again a little later to let me out, that should at least test whether it needs my continued presence."

Nod nod. "If it doesn't I might want a fleet of them."

"Sure." She unhugs so Marie can open the door.

Marie opens the door.

Helen goes through.

Marie closes the door.

The shine stays.

And does a pirouette. "Looks like it works."

Marie opens the door again.

"Oh, looks like it worked," Helen says as she comes back in. "I couldn't tell it existed while the door was closed, though. Felt like it flickered off and back on."

"It works and I can still control it. I'm going to have to figure out how to program for three dimensions instead of 'flat with corners', it'll be fun."

"I wonder if I could make those, it would be so useful."

"I can try to teach you! But if you don't have any kind of servantmaking in your world it might be that you can't do it. ...Programming them isn't magical, though, so you could still feed them programs as long as you didn't feed them glitches and send them someplace you couldn't find them again."

"We'd want to figure out how to program them in three dimensions before you leave, then." She makes a barrier. "If I can shine it, how do I do it?"

"...If I were you I'd start with something you wouldn't accidentally interact with some other way." Lu pulls out her lens. "This can take hours to get the first time and I've never actually taught it before, mind."

"Okay." She dismisses the barrier. "I'm patient about things I'm actually interested in."

"This looks like it's going to take a while. Can I borrow a book or something?" Marie asks Bar.

"Looks awesome," Marie says, and takes it and goes to sit by the fireplace to read it.

It's easier for Helen to imagine light as a physical object than most people, and she is very careful about how little light she obscures. Nevertheless, she isn't having any luck.

"If you haven't done it in six hours you will have taken longer than anyone I ever heard of, but some people do take that long. Up to you if and when you decide you just can't."

Helen is very, very patient when she really wants something. She still isn't having any luck after a few hours.

Lu has only a few other things to try - "tug of war" apparently helps some students, with them and a teacher or elder student trying to take the shine in opposite directions at the same time; other students have better luck with using their non-dominant hands; Lu has even heard secondhand that someone prefers to make shines on wet surfaces, and Bar provides a shotglass of water to spill into a puddle under the lens. But after a certain point she can't help. She borrows a book too.

"I don't think I can do it," Helen admits sadly after it has been a bit more than six hours.

"Well, I can still teach you to program them, if you want to bring home a bunch - that's the least I can do, I'll trade you for my collection of solid ones."

"Sure. It's certainly better than nothing, at least. Oh, I can make barriers with touching edges--they register to my senses as separate barriers but I can form contiguous three-dimensional objects with them. It might be worth doing to see if you get one of those as the whole thing or just one of the component barriers."

"Ooh, let's try it. Maybe I could even bend the hinges."

They're slippery enough that the cube Lu needs to push rather than pull, but presently she has them both shined. And will it bend...?

They sort of feel like they might be able to bend, but all the verteces have to remain attached and neither can bend without at least one join coming undone.

"They won't come apart, but that does seem to be the limitation, it feels like trying to twist a puppet farther than it can go. I think I could bend a single hinge, or a line of them."

Helen makes a line of hexagons in a zigzag shape.

Which Lu shines, and can then waggle through the air quite freely. "The possibilities of these are huge. Especially if they support weight -" She pushes the cube down to see if it will do that.

It will absolutely do that! One of Peerless's most iconic uses of barriers was herself and the rest of Vanguard standing on a shimmering platform in midair.

"I want so many of these. I might have to turn around and bring them all home to avoid tromping around with a flock of them between a dozen city-states, but they're more important than checking any given Aydanci possibility right away given that I won't be able to make more without you."

"I'm half-tempted just to move to your world," Helen admits. "I'm not going to--Marie would never go for it, and I'd miss the technological infrastructure. But going our separate ways feels so inefficient. Well, I'll get started making them--I imagine you'll want some to specific specifications, but if you want as many as it is sane to want just generating a ton in a variety of different shapes can only be useful--and you can start teaching me programming."

"Why wouldn't she go for it?" Lu wonders. "Oh, and, Bar, can I get a Shines, Shades: Subtle Servants?" She receives a book.

"Despite maintaining a policy of misanthropy because I'm guaranteed to outlive just about everyone I interact with on a daily basis, I have managed to accumulate some loved ones other than Helen. And I would also miss the infrastructure," says Marie, who is still reading her book but not so deep into it that she doesn't notice when someone says her name.

"What about the infrastructure? Here, Helen, read the intro chapter, it's better at this than I am."

"Remember the global communications network I mentioned? Mostly that," Helen says. "It's very...pervasive. We probably could adjust to living without it but it would be an unpleasant adjustment period."

"And I suppose it would be really hard to build one even with books from Bar?"

"...Yeah. It's the result of more than a hundred years of development. And it's not just the technology itself. There's almost a hundred years of culture surrounding it and content posted to it and stuff like that. It would be a little like trying to replace a library by building bookshelves, even if you could do it."

That...sort of works. It's tricky. At least to start with she'll get a just plain ordinary shine at least two times out of three.

So now this hard shine has polka-dots, but that's interesting in its own right too. Shine shine - aha! She gets one to come free. Bops it around the room. It is nearly invisible unless it's on a surface, but it can go straight between any two points.

Helen can make shines to Lu's specifications fairly trivially while she reads. As she does she requests a pencil and paper to work on practice programs.

"They're not normally mobile. I can make them co-occupying a space with something, but that is...unpleasant on a sensory level that probably wouldn't make sense to you. And yes, it does harm the things."

"Do you mind if I try it with something?"

"...Do you mean you want me to make a light co-occupying a thing. Um. I appreciate that science is important here but it's really really unpleasant so please think about what level of discomfort you would be willing to deal with in order to perform this experiment and then tell whether I should still do it."

"I mean I want to get an apple from Bar and try to send a hard shine through it so I know what happens. How unpleasant would it be? I wouldn't want to, say, be crippled until the next time I die for this result, since I can experiment after I've gotten them home. But it matters for what kinds I want - if they're a disaster to touch at speed, I probably shouldn't use them as vehicles unless I'm manually piloting and never let anyone I don't trust puppet one for themselves, if they disintegrate if I run one into something then I don't have to be so careful about who I let handle them except insofar as I'd need to beware my supply, etcetera."

"Oh. If you just want to hit something really hard with one you've got then go for it."

The apple is bumped. It moves in response to the thing nudging at it.

Lu stabilizes the apple and rams the shine at it at visible but rapid speed.

The apple goes splat. A piece of apple lands on Helen's cheek and she wipes it off absentmindedly.

Lu picks up the top half of the apple off her lap. "So they will cut things if they go fast enough, but they're not really sharp..." She holds down the bottom apple half, guides the shine at it to see what speed it needs to bite into the peel when the apple won't nudge easily.

It doesn't need speed as such. If the apple won't nudge then continuing to press into it will result in the apple yielding.

She turns the shine and pushes with the flat side.

This will squash it a little and push it out of her hand if she applies enough pressure.

"Okay. So these would be hazardous to use as ground-level vehicles unless I can program them sufficiently well and they can see things they aren't touching..." She writes down her results and starts experimenting with running them into each other at various angles and speeds.

If they run into each other they will mostly bounce off. They don't suffer damage from the collisions.

She can, if she's very alert to timing, make them just stop when they hit instead of bouncing back, but she cannot make them damage, intersect, break, or pass through each other.

That's correct, she can't. It's not that difficult to make them just stop, but it does require some degree of attention so long as she is manually piloting them.

Helen will pay attention to this part, since ultimately 3D syntax is going to be more useful to her than the regular kind.

Lu shows her the notes she's got on how she needs to revise the standard syntax. (It's all in natural language, to a point, just standardized for easy error-checking; it is not necessary to write a new shine operating system.) Shines normally have directions designated with an array of symbols, conventionally shortening "north south east west" even though they will retain the mapping of directions to sides after turning - at least that's what the book says; it turns out Lu prefers abbreviations for "bow stern starboard port" (as translated by Milliways. She has added "mast" and "keel" for, loosely, up and down. There is no way to draw the new directions into a flat instruction sheet, so Lu has written a short program introduction describing "mast" as the direction away from the side of the shine reading the instructions and "keel" as towards the instructions. Likewise, she has to describe pitch and roll. (Yaw is handled just fine with conventional shine instructions; it's just called turning.) "It's possible that after I've been working with these long enough they'll embed into the natural language without further explanation and I'll be able to use them plain. Which will be important if I want to give them long complicated instructions."

"This is a lot like computer science. I wonder if studying that will help. There's no way I'm going to learn all of this in the time we spend here, and Bar says the book won't be comprehensible once I leave the premises."

"I don't know. What's computer science?"

"Computer science is, relevantly, the instructions we use to program our communications devices for the network that keeps coming up."

"Oh. Well, if those things are programmed then it's entirely possible that it's similar. Will your own notes be legible when you take them out? You could copy the index of shine commands and my inventions."

"Yeah, I've been copying some stuff down." She brandishes some more paper she had solicited from Bar. "I'm just well aware that there's a difference between that and the years of study people in your world who work with these things get."

"I mean, I'm only seventeen, don't remember most of my first two rounds of servantmaking education, and had to learn the other four servant kinds too, two of which don't require programming at all and the other two of which are different in general limitations and applications, so I don't want you to think this is more complicated than it is. For the flat kind, anyway."

Worlds with histories resembling yours that have advanced farther into the field of study exist. However, their results are contradictory and I have no obvious way to distinguish between the underlying models they found in your particular case.

"Dang. It briefly occurred to me that maybe Bar had some way to duplicate my S-Factor into you, but apparently that's a bust."

"I'm sure I would have thought of that sooner rather than later, but copying mine was the first thought I had," she shrugs.

"I appreciate the thought."

"Oh well, it was worth a shot. I expect whatever it is that lets people in her universe do the servant thing is likewise non-transmissible."

To the best of my understanding, yes.

Lu finishes wiping apple off the shine that cut up her hapless fruit and scoots it over to her. "There, I'm not actively holding it there right now."

"Yeah. ...It occurs to me that you probably never ever want these to move at top speed. Regular shines can't hurt anything that way, but they're ludicrously fast and I don't know how far away you'd have to be to make that safe to watch if they even went through the air that fast, let alone hit anything."

"...How fast is ludicrously fast, because it occurred to me to wonder whether there was a reason for normal shines to have a speed ceiling other than 'the speed of light'."

"...If light normally has a speed, I suspect it's that. You can't see them move and there's no detectable delay if you send them across the world, except however long it takes them to do whatever they're supposed to do when they get there."

"The speed of light is...you and I probably don't use the same measurement system. If I say 'three point zero times ten to the eighth meters per second' does that get converted automatically or do we have to figure out what the conversion is?"

"I think technically that's the speed of light in a vacuum. In air it's a tiny bit slower but totally negligible for most practical purposes."

"Huh. Shines can go underwater too..."

"Bit slower than that. That's why if you stick your finger in a glass of water it looks funny, actually, the light bends as it slows down and speeds up."

"Huh!"

"Not if it hits it straight on, but if it goes at an angle then one edge slows down or speeds up before the rest and that makes it bend. And it's all but impossible to get a straight angle on a round glass of water."

"That's interesting. If not obviously practically relevant." She writes it down anyway.

"Mostly it's just interesting. I wonder if I could program a hard shine to leave the Earth's atmosphere, accelerate to--not lightspeed, that would destroy any cameras or whatever, but use them as space probes."

"Maybe! Earth is your planet, I assume? What's a camera?"

"Earth is my planet! A camera is a machine that points a lens at something and creates an image of what it sees."

"Huh. You can sort of do that with shines. Shines can go through each other when they aren't this kind, and they can be any color a patch of light can be. So if you get a bunch of stacks of them in different color, and then put the stacks in a grid, and program them all to change where they are in the stack based on what they see on the surface they're on, you can copy a picture fuzzily onto shines. But shines can only see what they're actually on, not things that are farther away. I don't think I've heard of them being used to match focused light from somewhere else, but that could probably work too."

"I don't actually recall how exactly it works. It involves using lenses to make the light bouncing off something to show up as itself and not just random ambient light, I'm pretty sure."

"I don't know much about lenses except that they're useful for making small shines."

"They are also useful for a wide variety of other things involving making light go where you want it."

"That would seem to follow, yes."

"Yeah. Not really my area, though, you might think that my powers would make me more interested in how light works in general but until now it hasn't really been relevant."

"I'm a reasonably devoted student of meteorology," Marie volunteers. "...Oh, right, we didn't mention. I have powers too, I do wind."

"Do wind? Do what with wind?"

"I...make it exist. Or not exist. Or go here instead of there or make loops or whatever. I'm telekinetic with air, basically."

"That sounds handy. Unfortunately there's no obvious servant synergy."

"I don't know enough about aerodynamics to help with the design there, but I'll shine-ify a sail for you."

"I don't know a lot about aerodynamics either, you're going to have to design anything you want and figure out how to describe it coherently," Helen informs Marie.

"Sure, sure," she says, waving a hand. "Oh, hey, Bar, is this book originally published in English? And if so how much does it cost?"

Spanish, but there is an English translation available. $24.

"Hold the door for me so I can fetch my wallet?" she asks Helen. "I probably wasn't going to finish this while we were here anyway but especially not while I'm doing sketches of aerodynamic structures."

"Yeah, okay." She leaves off writing the practice programs while she's holding the door but keeps reading the book and generating barriers to be shined.

And Lu continues pulling them out of the air in batches, between writing lines of a test three-dimensional program.

Marie nips out and fetches her money, and pays for the book. She then solicits a pencil and some blank paper to design things with.

Bar, as always, obliges.

Convenient aerodynamic object design. Fun. Or at least the end results will be.

Helen, meanwhile, goes back to practice programming. She thinks she's ready to try some basic 3D commands.

Lu has got the basic commands all working; she has a shine doing a programmed little dance in the air. She shows them to Helen. "Remember, I can re-puppet the shines if they go nuts, as long as they don't go completely out of reach. If you mess up a program and can't get it to hold still long enough to put new instructions on it, once I'm not around, you'll have to either dismiss it entirely and not be able to make more or let it keep doing its thing forever. And the hard ones could be dangerous, especially if you forget to speed-limit them."

"Yeah. Oh, let's see if I can keep one from moving using regular barriers, that should make things easier if it works."

"Should work for the hard ones, those don't want to go through each other, but I don't know whether it would stop a standard shine..." Lu sends a standard shine into a box of hard ones and tries to sneak it out a corner.

"I'll definitely cage any hard shines on untested programs. You don't want any standard ones at all?"

"I suppose I might as well. They're just not as obviously useful as the hard ones, especially when I can't make more."

"You can't make more hard shines either, I mean you can make the shapes but you can't turn them into shines. I figured you'd just want plenty of both."

"Sure. I just meant that a finite number of hard shines likely had a higher relative usefulness than a finite number of normal ones. The normal ones seemed a little harder to transport, though, given that I can't just pick them up...although I could carry them out on portable flat surfaces, it's true."

"And they stack... although you probably shouldn't stack them, since then they'll all read the same programs at the same time and you can't puppet them away from each other. So not more than you could fit in a few books of non-programming contents, at least."

"Marie, can I borrow your new book for the purpose?"

"Sure. Hey, Bar, are there any other books in that series? Or anything else by that author you'd recommend?"

Here is a stack of the oeuvre of the author of Jovial.

"Hmm. I can't buy all of these, not if they all cost about the same as Jovial." She begins inspecting the summaries to help her decide.

"...These all look really good. What's the total if they're all in paperback?"

$96.88, apologizes the bar.

She looks deeply torn.

"I'll get them for you. I have a summer job, after all, I can technically afford it. But this is your anniversary and Christmas presents early," Helen teases.

"Extradimensional books I wouldn't have gotten to read any other way are a way better present than whatever you would have gotten me anyway. Thank you so much."

"Well, I can stick the shines in 'em, it's not all generosity."

"Do you want me to fill them all up?" asks Lu. "That'll take a while, a bit longer than turning each page by hand."

"Yeah. Increasing the supply of a resource I won't be able to get more of later is probably a better use of time than anything else I could be doing right now."

The establishment thanks her for her commitment to avoiding damage to the property and guests.

"Considering I'm one of the guests, it's pretty sensible of me," she chuckles, "but you're welcome."

At that point, it is quite late relative to when Helen and Marie woke up, subjectively. Not totally convinced that they've gotten all the benefit they can out of Milliways, and preferring to try to get their biological clocks more in sync with their native time zone, they shove their shines out the door manually and flop down on the couch for the "night," having decided not to spend the money on a room.

"Oh, hello," Marie says a little blearily.

"Hi. You've been asleep for probably hours."

"Probably, yeah. When we went to sleep it had been about a subjective day since we woke up in the morning. Day being defined as the amount of time you normally spend awake, not twenty-four hours," she clarifies.

"I meant hours since I got here."

"Ah."

"Hiii," Helen says, a little more muzzily than Marie. She's not a morning person. "G'morning."

"Good morning."

"I'm Helen and this is Marie. What's your name?"

"Bella, but I go by Stormy."

"That's a cool name. Any particular reason?"

"I like storms."

"They are pretty awesome."

"Most people don't seem to like them very much."

"In the universe I'm from, some people have powers. Mine are wind-based."

"Oh! I'm a weather mage."

"That sounds amazing. What kind of magic can you do with it?"

"I'm still learning. And I'm not supposed to be very much of the sky at once, I almost died being too much of the sky. But I can move clouds and focus sunshine and do wind and pull rain from one place to another."

"Nice," she sighs. "I can only work on a rather immediate scale. There was an amplifier, once, that let me be the sky over a whole continent. But it broke, and they stopped making them."

"We don't have very much money right now, and they were expensive," she admits. "And it's very well known that they stopped making them, and people would want to know where I got it."

"Oh." Pause. "I don't have very much either. I wonder if it would work for me, though?"

"Maybe? We could borrow one from Bar and check, if you wanted, she only charges for things if you remove them from the premises."

"Is the backyard removing them from the premises?"

"I don't actually know. Bar?"

"It's kind of heavy, but I'm pretty sure I can carry it. Okay, sounds worth a shot."

Bar provides.

"I'd better not try to help. I'd fall over and might break it."

"You'll probably want to sit down--or lie down, if there's nothing good to lean against--while you're using it. There's not much attention left for your body like this."

"I have to sit or lie down when I'm being the sky anyway."

Stormy follows her and plops down in the grass in the yard.

Marie shows her where to attach the leads, but lets her do it herself--putting her hands on a kid of about, what, ten? Would feel really skeevy, all things considered, even though there would be absolutely nothing like that behind it.

Stormy attaches things to herself!

Marie switches the machine on.

"If it's working, you should feel something immediately...but then, your thing works differently than mine, probably. You could try it."

"I noticed. Well, it looks like this thing doesn't work for you." She gives it a wistful look.

"As long as we're borrowing it you could try it. But there's not very much here, it only goes to about the top of the mountain and maybe a mile out over the lake that way and a little farther over the forest."

"It's not a bad sky, it's just sort of... domesticated."

"And small."

"Yeah, but if I go too big I will die and I don't have a teacher here to watch me or put me in a magic circle, so that's not so bad for me. Is it too small when you aren't hooked up to the thing?"

"No, it's fine. It's not a problem with the sky, the sky is fine, I just shouldn't hook myself up to the thing in here."

"Can you spread out most of the way in here without it?"

"Yeah. The way the wind whistles through the caves is interesting, there aren't a lot of caves nearby at home."

"I don't go that low to the ground easily unless I really try, but with sort-of-walls around the edges I might be able to. I don't know any other weather mages at home, do you want to swat the wind around at each other?"

"That sounds like fun!"

"Awesome. Do you care if I make it rain? I think there's enough water to do it."

"Nah. Nothing I'm wearing will get hurt by a little water."

"What about the thing? Should it go inside?"

"Oh. Yeah, probably." She picks up the machine and lugs it inside. "I'm going to play tug-of-wind with Stormy. This may involve getting wet," she informs Helen.

"Have fun, dear."

Stormy is already flopped on her back on the grass, getting energetically rained on, smiling dreamily, eyes closed.

Marie playfully sends a gust of wind at the rain cloud, not hard enough that it gets pushed away from Stormy, but enough to deform its shape.

The cloud puckers, and then splits in half. Wind kicks up in the opposite direction.

Rather than trying to push back with brute force, Marie sends fast-moving slivers of wind around and through.

"It was great! I wish there were more weather witches."

"Yeah. There aren't a lot of other people with wind powers at home, either."

"What other kinds of powers do they have instead?"

"Helen can generate nigh-impenetrable barriers made of light. We weren't sure if they were made of light or just gave it off until we found Milliways, but before you got here there was a woman who could move bits of light around and it worked on the barriers fine."

"Huh. There aren't any mages like that at home."

"It sounds like your mages and our supers are pretty different."

"Most mages aren't like the kind I am anyway."

"What are they like, then?"

"I'm an 'ambient mage' which means I'm a mage of a thing, but most mages are academic mages, which means they do formal kinds of spells and they all do it the same way."