But first, I had to confirm her will. Here, it was important to put her in a comfortable position. I sat in the chair in front of my desk and pointed at the bed.
"You can sit here."
When she was ready, I continued.
"Let's talk about the future. I don't want to force you to do anything so I'll ask first. What do you want to do?"
("Even if you ask me, I have no idea.")
She shook her head.
"I don't know. I don't know enough about this place, this… time."
("Ah, but there's one thing that I want. I want to earn enough money to eat something delicious like before.")
"But the food was delicious. What's it called?"
"Doner kebab. Doner is the shape that you make with the bread and kebab is the mix of meats that you put inside."
"Doner kebab…"
("I want to eat it again.")
'It's not expensive. We can get it again whenever we want. There are a few kebab places around and some are decent enough.'
"So, since you're not sure, how about you better understand the world first? Are you willing to learn?"
"Yes. Are you going to teach me?"
"Well, not exactly."
She suddenly looked saddened.
("He doesn't want to teach me? He must have his own things to do. It's a bit of a shame.")
"You see, I'm not super confident that I can teach you well. We also don't have that much time. In the worst case, you'll need to have basic common sense in less than five days."
She nodded.
"Are you going to ask someone else to teach me?"
"In a way. To be exact, I'm going to teach you how to teach yourself."
"What do you mean?"
"You'll see. You can read and write, right?"
"A little."
She was being slightly modest. I know she could read just fine. Her writing might be lacking due to a lack of practice but that wouldn't matter too much for now. I booted the computer and explained.
"This machine here is a computer. Ah, a machine is what we call a complex tool. You can consider this one as… um, something that can answer all your questions."
("Answer all my questions? Is that even possible? What if I ask something that only I know?"
'She's sharp.'
"Is that really possible? How does it work?"
"That's a very good question. You see, I don't want to teach you because I think my explanations for these sorts of questions would confuse you. But for now, you can just think of this machine as a sort of book with a lot of knowledge. You can ask it a question and you'll get lots of answers. I want to teach you how to use it so that you can learn by yourself. This will be much more efficient and it'll also explain everything a lot better than I ever could."
("I should try not to be surprised by everything from now on. Perhaps I should think that anything and everything is possible.")
"I'll try to learn."
"Good. It's not complicated once you get it. Don't feel overwhelmed."
I opened a browser window and went to a search engine. I beckoned her to come closer.
"This part here is the screen. It's just here to show things to you. This one is the keyboard. You use it to write words and sentences. And this is the mouse. You use it to select things on the screen. Let me show you how it works. Try to think of a question."
("A question? Hmm…")
"…What's my name?"
This wasn't the sort of thing that people usually searched for but it didn't matter. I typed her question exactly as it was while showing her the process.
("I see. Each small part corresponds to a letter and if you press it, it shows up on the screen.")
'That's… extremely brilliant of her. Is she much smarter than I thought? Is it because she never had the opportunity to show it before in her life?'
One might think she pointed out the obvious but it wasn't like this. Everything was completely foreign to her and she didn't even have the most basic common sense about the modern world. Instantly making the connection between peripherals like this was quite impressive.
"When you're done typing the question, you press this button or click here with the mouse. And here we are. Look at all these answers to your question. You can click on any of these to get more details about them."
In our case, we received many songs called "What's My Name?". It wasn't the best example so I showed her a few more times with different questions. It worked best when searching for specific words and I explained this to her.
"Whenever there's a word you don't understand, search for it. This way, you'll progressively learn everything. How is it? Do you think you can do it?"
("This is incredible. I have no idea how it works but it really does. How amazing.")
"Let me try."
I gave her my seat and she typed a question, one letter at a time, taking a long time to find where each letter was on the keyboard. This wasn't a problem. Everyone started like this and she would get used to it soon enough. When she finished, she tried to move the mouse and the pointer went wild on the screen. After some more time, she finally managed to click on the search button.
And there we were, success. She clicked on one of the results and avidly read what was written. After that, I showed her how to go back to the search page and she made another query. And another one. And one more. And again. She was glued to the screen, fascinated but all the knowledge she had access to.
When I saw she was handling herself without any problem, I concluded.
"Great. Call me if you run into any problem."
"Hmm."
She barely hummed as an answer, too focused on what she was doing. It seemed my plan was a good idea. She was now pretty much able to learn anything by herself. I left her to her task and lay down on the bed. I had many other problems to think about.