Contraband [2430-1-4-Fri-2:00am]

[Eli Wellington]

"See now the eating rats, that I can unfortunately relate to," Eli shuddered, thinking on how long he'd survived on mostly rodents and other small animals. "Why is it that the nastiest of creatures are the ones who spread the easiest?" He almost laughed the minute the question came out of his mouth, realizing that the statement was much broader than he'd originally intended.

He watched her carefully as she showed him how to access information on the padd. He hadn't realized it could do that. "...so like an encyclopedia, except... without actual pages?" It suddenly dawned on him that this might be how people read for fun too. Could this weird slab of electricity really have replaced books for the humans? The thought suddenly had him a little depressed.

[Grace Forjacks]

"Because they breed like gangbusters, eat trash and live anywhere they can get a foothold." Grace responded, and started eating the core of the apple. She'd caught the second meaning, but she was hardly offended. It was the truth. Humanity were like rats. And vampires were like sharks. They'd been graceful, powerful killers. And then, 60 million years ago, they stopped evolving. 60 million years, and they had done nothing to change their ways or improve because they thought they were beyond improvement. Then humans industrialized and within three centuries, they were extinct. But rats? Rats weren't. Rats lived on, in the Below, in the Inbetween, even in the Top, and even now, they were living on ships, spreading out to every world the humans touched.

She smiled to herself, then dismissed it. They'd already wandered onto enough touchy topics in this conversation. Grace didn't need to tell Eli about how his species was doomed without more vampires like... well, like him she supposed. Though, if he was as forward-thinking as they came, they'd be gone in another century when the Terran government finally made up their mind to get rid of the menace.

"Exactly like an encyclopedia. Except, from what I understand, much more portable. There are databases with all sorts of information, some accessible for free and some for a premium." Grace pulled up her own list, an assortment of news sources, encyclopedias, entertainment databases and some odds-and-ends. "Anything you need to know, anything you need to find, anything at all, you can get it on the Network. Holo called it a... a digital library." She'd had to search for that last term. There hadn't been any libraries in the Below for at least a hundred years, but Holo remembered one growing up in the 'Tween. He seemed to have a sort of fixation with physical books that Grace honestly couldn't understand. Now, a hard-copy backup made sense, in case the Network ever collapsed, but these weren't just back-ups. They were... preferred somehow.

[Eli Wellington]

"Digital library..." Eli pondered over that one. He wasn't completely sure what 'digital' meant, but it must be in relation to the electronics. "...guess it's a space saver. And faster to find what you need..."

He still didn't like it though. The bright screen was blinding when he stared at it too long--though probably not an issue for humans--and cold metal didn't really have the same feeling as a paper book. Or a smell. Books didn't always smell good, but they smelled like they had history, and that was part of the interest to Eli. Maybe humans didn't notice the smell. "Damn, I thought I was going to be able to check out some libraries on Terra for new material we haven't had in a long time. Some of the vampires wrote new things, but with the rest of the world unchanging around us, they got bored and uninspired and nothing new has been made in centuries. I was reading the same books over and over again..." Although Eli had gotten bored with the same books, he was already regretting not bringing any along with him. "...I'm gonna miss books." He admitted out loud.

[Grace Forjacks]

Grace shook her head at the sentimentality. She'd just showed him a billion books and he was missing the bulky ugly physical copies. He really was an old man, despite the fact that he looked younger than she did, "You and Holo. There are still a few of the physical libraries around, but they're not public. Private collectors mostly, a few preservation societies, and some larger back-up vault. But otherwise? Most people my age have never even seen a paper book, not unless their parents were collectors or inherited them. We ran out of wood long before we perfected the engine for space travel, and a few geniuses came up with this."

She took the eInkr back from him, trying to decide what she could do. First things first. She set it to sideways format for all books, and after digging around, she found the turning-page options. It was just a special effect, but it made a sound and everything, and she knew Holo preferred it. Holo also liked the letters bigger, but she was sure that Eli wouldn't have that problem. Still...

"You just press this button on the top to get to settings." Grace showed him, messing with the settings to demonstrate what she meant. "You can change the letter side, the colours, volume, brightness, contrast, and then some other more fiddly stuff. You can always just hit the default option if you mess up and change anything you didn't mean to."

Grace gave it to him to let Eli play with it. "I'll figure out a few good book databases and get you some subscriptions. I'm not sure how closely Terran humans and Nox humans evolved, but I'd say we've got at least a thousand years on your culture, and a thousand years of new ideas and new problems to whine about in book-form. They may not be on paper, but they're still books."

[Eli Wellington]

"Hmm. Sounds like I could have made a fortune bringing some of my books with me..." he pondered. He was also pondering how hard it would be to con his way into those sacred book places to take a look at them.

He leaned over the padd once more as she demonstrated how to make reading easier. "Oh, that's cool. Thank fiking gods you can adjust the brightness. That was the biggest thing that was pissing me off about it. Now I can actually justify reading on this thing."

He paused, trying to calculate his approximate "age" with the time the humans were finally gone. "They were gone maybe fifteen hundred years ago, give or take. That's only a guess. Don't know where they were in comparison to the humans on Terra, but it took a hundred or so years after I was turned for the last one to go... the vampires were really only considered myth when I was human, so I totally got taken by surprise when I got turned." He was surprised at how much he was remembering just by talking about it. He was fairly certain he was partially to blame for vampires coming into the public eye, but that wasn't yet clear in his memory. He wasn't going to say it out loud, though.

[Grace Forjacks]

"If I'd know there were surviving books, I would have happily bought some from you. I know people who know collectors." It was almost a shame. She'd have to talk to Malcolm, though she had a feeling he'd be unlikely to give up physical copies. Grace was certain he knew how to use that padd for things other than just messaging.

Fifteen hundred years, let's see... what would that have been in recent human history? Middle-ages, feudal bullshit. But Eli's people were beyond that level of development. They had coins, and huge houses, roads and neighbourhoods. They didn't seem to have electronics or vehicles, so what did that make them? 1800's? Early 19th century? Grace wasn't too familiar with that time period, only that it had involved a lot of fancy dress clothes and boring wars. "I think you may have been ahead of us developmentally. If vampires hadn't taken over your society and stopped it's growth, maybe your descendants would have discovered space travel before we managed to build the first skyscrapers."

[Eli Wellington]

"Oh yeah, I don't know about the houses, but we've got a whole library of them at La Notte. They're pretty old and brittle and it's hard to read them now without destroying them, but they're there. It's my favourite room in the house." Eli had to hand it to the padd... at least he didn't have to worry about it falling apart while he read.

He listened as she decided the Nox Humans would have been more advanced than those from Terra, had the vampires not taken over. He couldn't help but grin a little. "...my bad."

[Grace Forjacks]

"Holo's got a shelf full of them. They're not brittle, but their pages have all yellowed, and he's broken the spines." He liked to reread them, over and over again. More than once, Grace had come home to find him wearing his glasses (which he hated) and paging through them for the 100th time. Grace enjoyed reading, but she enjoyed reading new things, not the same old one over and over. There were a few exceptions, but that's all they were, exceptions. Spending a lifetime with only one shelf of books? "Honestly, I don't see the appeal, but you're not alone in your preference."

"Your bad, my good." Grace grinned at Eli. Of course, there was no guarantee that his branch would have developed space travel. It took brilliant minds, a generation of Holos who could approach the engine and rapidly disappearing resources and say to themselves 'I know how to make this work'. Who knew how differently things would have been with Weres in the mix. They weren't exactly the most scientific people. "I make pretty good money selling to your kind. And, if your humans had discovered space travel, then there's no way I would be around. And I like being around. Life's too fun to give up."