"Motion to experiment immediately passes, on grounds of value-of-information plus how awesome it would be if we just ended up doing that all the time."

Unfortunately, Alexandre (as he heads off to lunch) now needs to focus more on being alter-Alexandre and less on learning useful things.

He would like to know if he can ask Keltham about computer science at lunch, since that is apparently a dark and deadly power that he therefore deeply desires to possess. (He thinks alter-Alexandre still wants to possess dark and deadly powers, even if less because they are dark and deadly than because they are powers.)

Okay, you know what, actually, NO, Alexandre does NOT get to ask about 'computer science'.  That is going to be Keepers-only until they know what the hell that is, and by 'Keepers-only' Asmodia actually means 'Asmodia-only', with the transcript going to the Most High only, unless and until either Asmodia or Aspexia Rugatonn says it is fine for other people to know about.

Because alter-Cheliax is a very sensible place about these sorts of things, and if it wasn't before, IT IS NOW OKAY.

That kind of sounds like it might change a lot about alter-Cheliax but it's fine as a specific directive for this project given how much god-bothering it has already attracted.

Acknowledged, (- oh no what's her fancy title - most of his best options sound like mocking her - Lady Wall-Keeper would just sound absurd -) Senior Researcher. This slave of Asmodeus will obey your commands.

...she is starting to be seriously worried that maybe in Golarion weird people are going to be first and best at mastering Law, which has in hindsight been something of a noticeable trend on Project Lawful even before this, possibly because failing at Law is normal in Golarion and anybody who doesn't fail therefore isn't normal, all of which could potentially lead to things getting very odd around Cheliax.

Korva still has enough of a functioning brain to figure out that being explicitly invited to sit with Keltham for lunch is probably a good sign and not a bad one, especially since the offer was also extended to Willa, who she's pretty sure is the best at math in the new group. 

This does nothing to change the fact that her emotional response to this invitation is the desire to scream and cry like a literal infant, which even a five-year-old knows much better than to actually do. She wants to go back to her room, bite herself until the desire to cry goes away, figure out how to obtain full transcripts of this lesson, and try working through half the problems again at a pace that doesn't make her feel like she's dying. She also desperately wants to stop having immediate reasons to think in baseline, where all the words are too short and interacting with the normal speed of her thoughts in weird ways, and a bunch of them don't seem to translate into anything except particular technical concepts that she doesn't have enough of a handle on to use.

But she doesn't scream, because she's not an infant, and she doesn't excuse herself back to her room, because she doesn't want to make her weaknesses any more obvious to the rest of her competitors. So she smiles pleasantly, digs her nails into the palms of her hands, goes ahead and eats lunch with Keltham, and hopes that Alexandre and Willa have enough questions to cover for the fact that she's having a horrible day rather than a good one.

Willa's so full of questions about everything that happened during the lecture. Usually she would go hide in a corner and eat her lunch alone, but this was like, practically a handwritten invitation! Even alter Willa would have to be super excited about this right? Even shy, hesitant, alter Willa is studious, she couldn't possibly pass up this opportunity.

She's really thankful that there isn't a voice in her head overruling her talking to Keltham at lunch; being alter Willa doesn't seem like it'll be so bad after all! She'll try to avoid any dangerous topics about Cheliax or related things, but that just means she can talk about SCIENCE(!) instead.

Her head is spinning with all the little details and digressions of lecture that were missed or had to be glossed over for time, but there's one question she has to ask Keltham first, she couldn't possibly resist this one, it's just too tempting. Maybe he even intended them to get insatiably curious.

"What's 'computer-science'? Can you tell us all about it?"

Perhaps this would be a good time to dust off Ione's old idea about how one of the most promising new researcher-candidates should get a Fox's Cunning boost and then commit suicide and refuse to be resurrected!  They could actually kill Willa too, and not resurrect her, to make that part more realistic!

Alexandre refrains from laughing with horrible, malicious glee primarily because then he would be tortured for hours, and secondarily because he is too busy staring in awe, and tertiarily because he has the self-control to get on Project Lawful in the first place and so is maintaining Chelish Dignity. This is great, and also, he's going to be tortured for hours.

Korva, who has the highest Knowledge (Random Nonsense) in the class, has a guess, based on what the words "computer science" and "programming" sounded related to when she first heard them. There are words for the idea of controlling constructs or machines without the use of magic, and Korva has run into them in passing, in a dusty novel that her library had probably forgotten about. It has not yet occurred to her that some people might not have any non-baseline words for this idea.

"Machine control stuff, right?" she says, idly moving her food around instead of bothering to look up at anyone else in this conversation.

"Among other things, yes, but I wouldn't have thought you had enough information to reach that conclusion!"

"It's just what the word sounded like, I didn't deduce it or anything."

"That is... interesting.  I would not have expected 'computer-science' to sound like anything, if it was math you didn't otherwise know.  Willa, Alexandre, what if anything did 'computer-science' sound like to you?  Try not to let your answer be influenced by Korva's answer, if possible."

(Honesty authorized, if this is going to happen anyways they shouldn't risk alterCheliax over the details.)

"It sounded like something mathy to do with discrete numbers changing back and forth?"

"It was difficult to comprehend, not easily connecting to anything I understood; something to do with mathematics would be my best guess? There's seems to be some type of connection to 'programming', which translated as - an element of making magic items? Shaping conditionals, or if/then/else statements, into magical items."

(Alexandre has just been ordered to answer, and so does, but right now his top priority is trying to figure out if alterAlexandre could accomplish actual Alexandre's goal of changing the topic of conversation so that he doesn't get tortured later for failing to salvage the situation, or not. He suspects not; he's been issued strict instructions not to do anything alterAlexandre wouldn't do, which means he cannot change the topic to metallurgy or chemistry, topics of much more direct interest to alterAlexandre, because alterAlexandre wouldn't want to offend Keltham by changing his topic of conversation...

He thinks. If his superiors have alternate orders, he is prepared to obey.)

"Huh.  Share Language might be doing more useful work than I thought, if you're getting connotations like that."

"Fundamentally, 'computers' are - containers of raw causality, raw form, that a 'programmer', shaper-of-raw-form, can put into correspondence with real things or mathematical objects that you want to gain information about.  If you got any Validity off the transcripts, it was among the first things I taught here as the underpinning of what Law is at all, if you remember how 'axioms' pinned down the forms of numbers and implied the truths of arithmetic... well, um, either way."

"A 'computer' is something where you could start from YESes and NOs and connect them up by very simple rules like 'YES if the inputs are both YES' or 'YES if exactly one input is YES' and turn that into something which would multiply out 345 * 678 for you, so you didn't have to solve it by hand.  Which you'd do by shaping and connecting up systems of YES and NO that evolved over time, by rules that mortals specified, into a shape that mapped your intents about 345 and * and 678 into patterns of YES and NO, and evolved them into a new pattern that represented the answer to that, which I don't have memorized, in the same code and mapping."

"It's not, to be clear, that 'computers' are directly working with the underlying stuff of reality underneath all molecules and atoms.  You could make red and blue marks on paper, to represent YES and NO, and operate the rules yourself for how they evolve over time, and exactly duplicate what 'computers' do.  'Computers' just use much tinier marks and do a lot of it very quickly.  They can multiply millions of numbers in a second."

"'Computer-science' is how to do clever things by adding and multiplying and branching millions of numbers in a second.  And that is, in fact, how Civilization controls most complicated machines, and also how we end up talking to people on the opposite side of the world, without magic."

"The part where you directly work with the underlying 'realityfluid' beneath all molecules and atoms is 'quantum-computing'.  Though Civilization was just getting started on that.  'Quantum-computing' would let you do calculations that no ordinary computer could complete before the universe burned out, or get the results of calculations that were only actually performed inside a tiny subuniverse much less real than the universe that gets to look at the results -"

"Keltham.  A brief word."

Keltham casts Message.

Is the word possibly going to be 'shut up'?

Yes.

K, he can talk about this with Broom later.

Apparently there's one other sane person on Project Lawful.  Whom Asmodia had almost forgotten about, which, to be fair, Broom is good at getting people to do.

Willa thinks that maybe she has never wanted anything as much as she wants a 'computer'. Maybe not even a headband. Building all the way up from working with single YESes and NOs to lots of big numbers sounds really exciting, and then when you were done you could actually multiply the big numbers too, as a bonus! She's about to ask if there's any way they could start making computers, maybe with liberal amounts of magic to help.

And then there is a surprise Broom and Willa starts back ever so slightly in surprise, her mouth snapping shut before she says anything.

"Sorry about that.  Anyways, 'computer-science' is liable to be pretty far out of reach of what Golarion can do for a while, unless magic is a lot better at manipulating very tiny things than I've heard about so far.  If magic can manage manipulations on even a thousand times that scale of tinyness, I can probably parlay that into reversible male contraception, for example."