"Thanks!" she says, having a seat. "If you have lots of questions maybe I should learn how to do the tactile sign thing?"

"Probably a good idea, yeah. I learned this stuff explicitly, but from the opposite direction - stuff like, 'if you're addressing a crowd, you sign on your own body if the important thing is actually a body part, and in the air on an imaginary person in front of you otherwise.' Although I don't think most people addressing crowds are actually imagining a person, that's just a hack. I can try to list things from over here or I can go over there and say them the way I would if you were a mage and already knew them."

"The second thing should work fine, since it's Page who needs to learn how to do the translation."

Well, in that case he can self-demonstratingly infodump. And try to pick up anything Lia might've missed about her body language - he can't really pick up on anything she might be doing with her face but presumably that'll be what she's most used to arranging on purpose anyway, right, and if she draws on her acting training he assumes she'll use gestures big enough to be seen by people in the back row of a theater...

He can get through a reasonable first-pass description in a couple minutes although mostly by simplifying a lot - here's a cute aphorism about singing space, here's something that surprised him when he first started talking to mages...

"Feel like you're clear enough on it to explain what's up with Page translating things?"

"I can try!" she signs on his person.

"There you go, you're getting it."

"Oh good. So, I have stuff implanted in my body to help me with all kinds of things like healing faster and being stronger and stuff, and also there's some things in my eyes and my ears, which let Page, a non-person assistant made of technology which is also implanted in my body, see what I see, hear what I hear, and add or subtract stuff to what I see and hear - so I don't get bothered by noises that I don't care about, for example, or it'll add flat-not-knots writing to my vision so I can understand what people are signing at me since I can't without help yet."

"That sounds amazingly useful. So Page is smart enough to understand what I'm saying and learn new languages in days - is Page authorized to negotiate deals on Sing's behalf?"

"It's not, no. It's not smart in the same way as Sing, it can't do totally unexpected new things very well - learning a language isn't very unexpected, people make new languages up sometimes."

"That's a shame. Not the making up languages, that's interesting and not a shame at all, it'd just be so much more convenient if, if we had concerns, we could ask a representative to swear on Sing's behalf not to do some objectionable thing in exchange for access to Sathend."

"I guess if you really really want to do it that way you could have me put Sing on a computer just barely big enough for it to work at all but not big enough to do anything interesting, hope it doesn't figure out magic, and have it swear on behalf of regular Sing?"

"It's not just a matter of figuring it out, although I'm not totally sure if I could convince the magic not to help Sing or which of us the magic would side with. Still. If we end up on the fence with some really specific concerns it'd maybe be decisive, we can at least let people know the option exists."

"It's not a good option but it does exist yeah."

"Not a good option because it'd be hard to actually contain or because it'd be aversive for Sing to be confined?"

"Sing isn't a moral patient. It's just usually not a good idea to be at odds with a superintelligence, even one that would never want to hurt you."

"I - you know, I thought when I first heard about it that Sing was less weird than the magic, but now I think it's weirder. Even the magic has - not feelings like we have, exactly, but there are things it's like to be it and some of them are more pleasant than others. We think."

"What's it like to be magic?"

"We think it has experiences that are functionally similar to some kind of social drive - like it wants other agents where it can perceive and interact with them - but not in a directly friendly way as humans understand friendship, exactly. If you underspecify the things you ask for you eventually notice that it seems to have its own preferences about magnetism and some kind of interest in numerical sequences or something. If I could directly experience its qualia I would probably not be capable of talking to you, which I suppose means I don't know for sure that it has them but I have some of the same kind of evidence as I have for humans. It seems to like existing in proportion to how much of it there is, but it's not - singlemindedly devoted to maximizing itself, or anything. It doesn't really interfere in human things very much except that it sort of figured out what consent is and won't let us make other people suffer for it. Which is really more like avoiding interfering, given how the incentives would be, otherwise. I don't really know, though, this is the kind of thing where Dan who retired from magic a couple years ago or Tara who does scheduling might tell you I'm totally wrong about a lot of it and if they did say that they'd probably be right."

"How did humans - meet it?"

"In the old world, there were people trying... rituals mostly designed to evoke narrative rather than make sense in the way that things in this world make sense - and that shouldn't work in all worlds, they don't all have the same underlying physics, I don't know how much evidence Sing not having already figured it out and tipped you off is that it's not possible with the kinds of things you have on Mars but it seems like some amount of evidence. It apparently involved candles and diagrams drawn in blood but apparently it was really about the cultural associations they had with those things, not some actual property of burning wax or blood smears. They got some nice manageable throttled interplanar access to the magic, and they may or may not have been the only ones trying something like that because then very destructive things started happening very fast and I don't know all the details - I expect you can find more in one of the First Chronicles. Then they moved here and they were pretty confident there were no survivors in the old world."

"It's possible Sing knows about it and just didn't tell anybody in case they were going to try it with their eyes open."

"...Yeah, that would be... potentially very bad... except then why not send a robot emissary, or even a letter..."

"Maybe it can't do magic on its own, I don't know."

"And it couldn't tell someone how to visit safely - and if we weren't here then there's not much upside - and if we were here but all irrecoverably magic-touched..."

"Maybe, yeah. Though like I said it's smarter than me, by enough that it's usually not going to work to guess how it would've acted in some weird situation."