"Yes, it's normal for people to finish public school after turning 18."

"Then, yes, your summary is correct."

"Can we discuss the more technical side of things now?"

"Yes."

"On the local side, we figured out which machines had the pictures on them and physically broke their storage systems. On the Antarctic side, people figured out which machines had the pictures on them, had the pictures removed from their storage systems, repeatedly stored other things where the pictures were so that it would still be really hard to figure out what the pictures were by looking at the system, and then eventually got the storage systems broken once there were replacements."

"Since no one but me on the planet has spells such as Mending that will presumably suffice for now but I might like to take custody of these broken systems and burn them to be really sure."

"I'm not actually sure if they're flammable, if they instead melt would that work?"

"I would expect that to work, yes."

"Great."

"How did you come to be confident that these were all of the affected storage systems?"

Ambassador Geary has a lengthy, detailed explanation, which includes visiting multiple sites, and various people whom Chris seems to think are remarkably important issuing orders. He personally did this on the theory that it might look strange if he couldn't vouch for this and wasn't replaced in so doing by someone more important.

Blai appreciates this! He will need to also talk to other people involved in the situation so they can all share a Zone but he is fine with getting his overview of the considerations from Ambassador Geary.

"I am willing to answer extraneous questions in the Zone but would appreciate you not asking them of other parties, they normally wouldn't be personally involved in these sorts of conversations."

"I don't have any intention of asking extraneous questions in the Zone. If there's anything you wish me to be more assured of, you can tell me now, and it will be covered when I ask if you've been truthful."

"I believe that on net the United States is a force for good in the world and you will be better off working with us than you would be working with our geopolitical rivals. I don't know what specific assurances would be useful to you."

"I've been translating honestly," the interpreter chimes in.

"What leads you to believe this about the United States?" Blai inquires.

"So, the world has a lot of countries but far fewer great powers. We're one of them. This means we have a lot of power to act in the world. We've sometimes used this power for preventing disease spread, preventing mass murders, and protecting civilian ships, even when it doesn't directly benefit us. Most of our allies stick with us primarily because they share many of our values and it's profitable to them. There are some occasions where we've instead used military force to keep governments favorable to us, but those are the minority and other countries in our position would have likely acted similarly or more harmfully. We've also contributed a lot to the world getting richer. Our last famine was, at the latest, over a century ago, and we contributed a lot to the development of agricultural improvements which are extreme enough to have turned famine into a problem which only appears in the context of political instability."

(Tag written with help from celer.)

"May I ask what makes you confident in your history education?"

"Record-keeping this past century has been very good. If, say, China used their military in some specific anti-pirate operation, but we said it was us, China would say something like 'everyone knows it wasn't you, because we have video recordings of us doing it, and meanwhile the ships you said were involved didn't appear to go anywhere near the operation'. And then American news media would publish China saying that, because we have freedom of the press, so we can't just tell the media to not publish things we don't like. Questions of what the world would be like if the United States did not exist are more speculative."

Huh, the thing that makes it hard to ban cults also makes it hard to fuck up everybody's history education, which is obviously a good trade to make if your cults are ineffectual. Neat. "I think I follow."

"That's good."

"Will I be able to meet the other parties to the erasure of the copies today?"

"Yes."

"All right. I think I am out of questions for the moment."

"In that case let's bring in the other parties."

The other parties have a transparent bin of shiny scraps and can vouch for the data erasure, including in a Zone of Truth.