OtH 1.19 - Speaking of Earth

Now getting to our 6th chapter ahead for Outside the Heavens, yay!

Lurona sat in front of him, silently thinking, and he dared not interrupt.

Okay… feeling a little nervous now.

Aarick wanted to shout at her that she couldn’t just drop a line like that and then stop talking, but his sense of self preservation was strong enough to strangle the impulse. Not annoying the person who had his entire fate in their hand, and who could wipe him out with a thought, seemed like the prudent course of action. She wouldn’t even need to try to hide it. She could kill him and no one would dare to question her.

No need to hurry. Not getting nervous over here at all. Nope, not one bit.

He had to refrain from biting his nails. He had broken that habit years ago, it wasn’t acceptable for polite company, but exceptional stress still made his fingertips itch.

Despite the strain, he managed to restrain his impatience to no more than muted repositioning in his chair. It didn’t help that the chair had clearly been designed with shorter people in mind, so his knees were just a bit too high. With Lurona’s sheer presence it always felt strange to notice he was looking down at her.

Finally, Lurona turned back to him, and eyed his strained form.

“Oh relax,” she said as she waived her hand at him. “Obviously, we need to talk, but I am not going to hurt you.”

He didn’t so much relax as slump into a puddle on his chair.

Oh thank God.

A faint smile appeared on Lurona’s lips at his reaction, but she didn’t speak until he gathered himself back together and sat up straight again. Well… as much as he could with the too short chair.

Actually, I didn’t notice any problems with the chairs in my suite. They were all the correct height for me. Huh. Either they have a suite for taller guests, just in case, or they swapped out all the furniture.

For once, he didn’t let his thoughts get too far away from him. The seriousness of the situation was enough to make the thought a mere flicker of distraction.

“You now represent a potential political problem in an entirely different sense… You said that your culture has a great deal of knowledge about how the world works. You have obviously seen only a small selection of our society, but I want to know what you think of the differences.”

He paused for a moment before answering.

“We don’t cultivate, so individual power is rarely a factor on a large scale. And the weapons we use have little to do with individuals, any more. They are called guns. They are easy to learn and use, and a beginner can kill almost anyone. Sure, there are specialists who master longer range weapons, and learning proper accuracy takes time. However… the timescales are different even from the history of our own world.

“Wars used to be fought by knights, which were armored men on horses, in combination with peasant levies, as well as troops like longbowmen. Knights, were almost indestructible on the battlefield, and longbowmen were truly deadly, but both would be trained to fulfill their roles since childhood.

“Modern armies can take individuals and make them into deadly soldiers in months.

“And there are more terrible weapons, too. Weapons that can be fired from thousands of miles away and turn an entire city to rubble.”

Lurona’s eyebrow quirked up and his mouth turned wry for a moment as he gave he a twisted smile.

“I only mention that because I couldn’t build them myself. I don’t know enough, and you would need to build the infrastructure to make it happen in the first place. Plus, the lesser weapons would probably be useless here. Able to kill the average citizen, sure, but they are not the ones keeping order.

“Even in my world the people who enforce the local laws, the police, have some protections against guns. I can only imagine what protections could be managed here.

“Ultimately, I am telling you this to help you get a framework for why our society is the way it is. Even that statement, our society, is inaccurate. The world was fragmented into hundreds of individual nations. I lived in the wealthiest, most powerful, and technologically advanced country, though from a social and cultural standpoint it could be argued that we were starting to fall behind.”

Not going to get into that can of worms. Even that implication was enough to cause some shouting matches at a few events.

He caught himself starting to grin at the memory of Mr. Tared’s florid face. The veins in his face had practically tried to pop out of his skull as he shouted about America being the best country in the world. Never mind the actual statistics on happiness, lifespan, or otherwise.

“It is hard for me to get an exact sense of how technology works here. Even that word doesn’t mean exactly the same thing in your language. In my language “technology” specifically refers to objects made using “science,” where science is the process of understanding how the world works.

“A lot of things contribute to the way things work there. A “democracy,” which is when citizens vote for their leaders, laws, etc... has become one of the dominant forms of government on the planet. My county is one such example. Most, though not all, of the most wealthy countries on the planet are democracies.

“Obviously, as I mentioned to you before, it is not that simple. Wealth and influence speak loudly. However, it is influence. When the wealthy or powerful reach too far the law comes for them. Usually much slower and far more fairly than for an average citizen, but it does come.”

He paused for a moment with a little laugh.

“Uh… not entirely sure where I was going with that. Oh! Right! Individual power.

“Technology is like that too. Our entire society only works because of individuals working together. I have a feeling that a few truly powerful cultivators could build a city, if they knew how. Shape the earth and stone to make the roads and buildings, etc…

“Would that be an accurate statement?”

Lurona took a moment before she responded.

“Yes, if they had sufficient mastery of earth qi, a powerful cultivator would have no trouble building a city. Though, cultivators of such power would rarely deign to do so. It would more likely fall to much weaker cultivators.”

Aarick nodded, before he replied.

“That makes sense. In our society, no one could do it all on their own. Oh, if they just wanted to go live on their own in the middle of some shack in the woods, they could do that. Though they would still need to be skilled enough to catch or grow their own food, plus prepare it, store it, build and maintain a house, and so on.

“Our knowledge has become so vast that no one can be an expert on all of it anymore. Highly advanced math, in many different forms, is the backbone of much of science now. We have divided science into many different fields, and even they have grown so large that no one is a complete master of a single field. Biology, the study of life. Chemistry, the study of… alchemy is the closest word I can find, but better to just say how different tiny structures are formed, react to each other, and why. Physics, which is the study of… everything, in some ways, but probably better to call it the study of the rules of the universe, which makes it focus on incredibly tiny things and incredibly large things. There are more, though most fall somewhere under the umbrella of those three things.

“I was studying engineering, which is the knowledge of how to build things. It sounds like something simple when I say it that way… Even that field is broken up into many different pieces. I could have spent my life doing nothing but studying different types of engineering, and I doubt I would have mastered even half of them.”

He sighed and adjusted himself in the chair yet again, even while Lurona remained practically motionless. Her enormous irises were fixed on him, letting him speak without interruption.

If this is the level of “not-interrupting” required for polite society here, then I am probably screwed. I don’t think I could properly maintain this level of focus.

“Technology is like that too. Hundreds of years ago a smith might have been able to make just about anything of iron that their culture might need. Horseshoes, nails, belt buckles, a knife, a hinge, and so on. And even then, there were people that specialized in things like weapons or armor. Still, a truly skilled blacksmith could probably manage to make just about anything.

“I am not going to get into the process, but eventually we learned enough to design better tools. And then those tools let us make more precise measurements of the world around us. And that let us learn more about how the world actually works. And that cycle repeated.

“And that process meant that we built the tools to build better tools, over and over. Until…”

He had a thought, and focused his full attention on Lurona.

“What did you do with my clothes and possessions?”

“I have them here,” she said, indicating a small ring on her finger.

I would have sworn she didn’t have a ring on. Just more invisibility bullshit, no doubt.

“Please bring them out,” he said.

A wave of her hand and his t-shirt, jeans, underwear, wallet, phone, keys, and a few coins were floating in the air at about knee height.

“Right. So…”

He reached out and grabbed the t-shirt.

“This, was made by a machine. I’m sure a human was overseeing it, but the actual fabric was woven by a machine. The machine recreated the exact same motions every time, and it does it far faster than a normal human could ever hope to match. Obviously, I have no idea how fast a cultivator could go, but the machines that make this could churn out bolts of cloth taller than I am, and make multiple feet of cloth in a minute.

“A machine doesn’t get tired, or rest, except for occasional maintenance needed to keep it functioning. It is more likely to stop so that people can remove the finished bolts of cloth, refill the string it is drawing from, and so a different person can take over.

He looked at the tag.

“The threads on this are partially cotton. You have the word for that, so I assume you have same plant somewhere. One of the simplest early machines was used to extract the seeds from the cotton so it didn’t need to be separated by hand. And… the other part of these threads is something called “polyester.” That name doesn’t mean anything to you, but it has a chemical meaning. That thread is entirely artificial. It didn’t come from any plants or animals, it was created from base materials that were combined to make something new.

“For context, designing a machine like the weaver would be the job of a mechanical engineer. Or, more likely, an entire team of engineers, with other types adding in what was need to make the mechanical aspects work. I don’t know who invented polyester; I would guess some kind of chemist. However, the process of replicating it and producing it on an enormous scale would be the job of a chemical engineer. Again, they would likely be involved with teams of other engineers all helping to work out the details.”

He waved the shirt in his hand.

“If I were to show a simple mechanical loom to my ancestors a thousand years ago, they would probably think it was magic at first. However, I could probably walk them through it. Show them how each piece moved and how motion transformed into other motion until the machine could make cloth. Incredible, but not magic.”

He pulled at a small thread hanging loose from the shirt.

“I wouldn’t even know where to begin to tell them how polyester is made. Even if I understood the full chemistry, which I don’t. They simply lack the knowledge needed to even contextualize it. I would need to teach them about the nature of the world, and provide enough context myself.”

He grabbed the phone out of the air, and showed it to her. The screen was dark, but it lit up when he pressed one of the buttons on the side. It unlocked with a quick scan of his fingerprint.

Lurona’s eyes, which had been focused the entire time, were now completely rapt.

“And then there is this. It is called a phone. In many ways it is the pinnacle of what human technology has achieved. A dozen different machines miniaturized until they could fit in the palm of your hand.

“It’s not magic, and that is perhaps the most amazing thing about it.”

“It is the culmination of understanding how light, lightning, heat, sound and other knowledge all work individually, and together.

“If you know enough about the world, you can make a machine have rudimentary, predefined thoughts. Pathways that it checks against options. And, like everything else, you can use that to build something more complex. We built machines that think with lightning. Not like you and I, or even an animal. They only do and think exactly what they are told, and it has to be defined with complete precision.

“If I were in my world, I could use this to communicate with anyone else on the planet who had one. It would listen to my voice, translate that into lightning, and then send it out as light. Elsewhere, machines would take that light and send it across the world as a signal, seeking out the other device I had connected to and turn that light back into lightning and then into sound once more. And it would do this in almost instantly. I would talk and they would hear, and when they talked I would hear them.”

Whatever purpose Lurona originally had for having him talk about Earth seemed to be lost for a little while, as he showed her the phone, telling her about what each function was for.

He explained the camera, showing her games, and notepads, and the flashlight. He did his best to convey the concept of the internet. He showed her a few books that were saved on the phone, and a couple of videos. He explained the concept of an app in general and how they could do almost anything. He showed her the calculator and played some music.

She allowed some of her wonder and joy to come out as her smiles were wide.

Eventually, she asked him a different question.

“How could you bear to give this device up?”

His finger reached up and pointed at the battery icon that had decreased slightly during their discussion. He had turned off the internet and all other connections, putting it in airplane mode for good measure, and then turned on battery saving mode.

“It needs to recharge regularly to function. It runs off carefully controlled lightning, and that energy gradually runs out. I cut all the excess power consumption it would normally use for everyday operations, but it wasn’t fully charged even when I arrived.”

He looked down at the battery percentage again, and it read 47% percent.

“I might be able to get a single day worth of function out of this, and it uses a tiny bit of power just to be ready. And even if I turned it off completely, the power would slowly drain from it over time. In a few years, the battery, which stores the lightning energy, will die even if it is not used.

“This world doesn’t have what I would need to keep it. Honestly, I won’t miss most of it. Music, though… that I will miss.”

Lurona looked at him, her expression inscrutable, and she took the phone from him after telling him to power it down completely.

“Stay here a moment,” she said before blinking out of existence.