"Edwardian - about a hundred and forty years ago," Connor murmurs, almost more as a note to himself than to actually tell Nida anything, since he's starting to suspect Nida might not be from the same world at all - and thoughts like that still make him want to run a diagnostic every couple of minutes, but he has a two-tailed eyeless cat in his lap and there are aliens.

"So this isn't even the only place of its kind." How many more are there out there, kidnapping people not just from their homes and all the people they've ever known, but from the very worlds they came from?

"It's all pretty hard to take in - none of this should be possible," he says, LED skipping yellow and clearly thinking hard. "But it is, otherwise we wouldn't be sitting here."

So that's the assumption he has to start with - this is all real. Connor isn't programmed with any kind of scientific knowhow, not even enough to know what specific field he would need to know to try to work out what exactly's going on here. He can't spend too much time trying to work that out.

"What about originally - where are you from?"