"I'm sort of worried about it, because it sounds like some of those twenty-five thousand knights would've died."

"Well, yes, it's a battle. Still, thousands of attackers dying because they're superstitious and not because they're evil is a good thing to avoid."

"What I was getting at is that part of what I'm construing as my job - it's up to you if it's yours - is to prevent any wars from breaking out in the first place. Which job may not be simplified by international competition."

"I, on the other hand, am likely to distribute books. Although I suppose I could just skip straight to computers and load everything up with fancy crypto."

"I think you've lost me there. Is that something that people would be able to use if you distributed it? Literacy is extremely low, even in Britain."

"That'd be another reason to skip to computers, I s'pose, avoiding having to teach everyone to read first - although it'd break my heart to actually bypass universal literacy in favor of speech recognition..."

"I'll continue working on literacy unless you're very sure it's unnecessary. Because it is necessary for the sort of society I can build, and I don't know yet how reliably your computers can replace it."

"Reliability's up to scratch when I'm from, but text's still faster and more searchable. Are you keeping an eye on the ground so we know when to land?"

"Yes, the entrance to the cave is in the Torpenn Howe—that's a hill; it'll be just past a ruined tower along the road below us."

"Mmkay. Oh man, I bet you will love computers. I am pretty sure you are not familiar even with basic computers unless I have some dates mixed up and you were personally acquainted with Babbage or something."

"I've only heard of computers meaning individuals skilled at arithmetic. I take it your computers are something more than a machine that does the same?"

"Well... they're sort of machines that are very skilled at arithmetic. It turns out if you put a ludicrous amount of arithmetic in a glowy box it can do amazing things."

"I can imagine arithmetic telling you how to do existing things better, figuring the precise proportions of alloys for the strongest steel or things of that sort, but I can't think how a box of arithmetic could do anything you couldn't do without it. How does it work?"

"Mmm - have you invented radio yet?"

"Sure I can." He does. "Radio's not a precursor to computers, it's just really handy when combined with them - oh, wait, I might've got my invention timeline mixed up, I think phones, telephones, the kind with wires, may have been first? Do you know those?"

"Well, I can produce textbooks and magically generate the infrastructure," says Cam. "Since I don't need to know all the underlying physics to conjure things up, I've concentrated on other areas of study, but I've got enough of a library to help you along. But the really cool thing is when you combine a computer with a phone-like thing. The social effects of being able to instantly talk to anybody anywhere, and send them the computer equivalent of books and - do you have movies? Silent ones, even? - and pictures and 3-D printing templates and so on are pretty special. Oh, and fiat money doesn't stop working when you turn it into a digital representation instead of a paper one, that's also big."

"...One of the benefits of going from telephone to internet is making one-to-many communication universally available. Anyone can set up a publicly accessible repository of - whatever. Writing or art or anything at all. It's also browsable - you don't know anybody in New Zealand now, but if there were a good search engine, you could find that exactly whatever thing you wanted to find happened to be produced by somebody there, and it'd be at your fingertips."

"Be my guest. I will be your oddly dressed angelic tagalong."