lung, meet rewind

[msrewind]

She gets the note just before lunch. She's in the PHQ in less than twenty minutes, then she knocks on Piggot's door politely.

Comments

[mrglam]

"Well, if you design things now you'll be able to expand on it or scrap it if you decide it's no good and in general have the idea-having part done by the time you graduate. Saves time."

[thinkering]

"I usually don't revise designs until I've tried them in practice."

[mrglam]

"Okay, so not as timesaving as possible, but still saves some."

[thinkering]

"Only in the long run, and I have more on my plate right now than I expect to as an independent tycoon who can finally let her software do all the work."

[mrglam]

"Tycoon?"

[thinkering]

"I will get a loan, the bot will run a cookie cutter MMORPG with the best moderation and NPC dialogue in the world, and I will be rich."

[mrglam]

"...if you could figure out a way to make non-tinker VR helmets or help other people develop that you'd have the single best game in the history of ever."

[thinkering]

"That's part of the plan! I think I can get rich even if I don't pull that off though."

[mrglam]

"I think I'm gonna want to play it, too. Fighting critters without anyone's actual, real butt on the line is probably way more fun."

[thinkering]

"Plus you'll get XP instead of a vague hard-to-quantify increase in how much you have practiced individual skills."

[mrglam]

"How are you gonna VR physical skills, though?"

[thinkering]

"I mean, it'd be helmets plus controls, I'd have to get really fancy and probably charge a lot of money for something more immersive. Might do it if I had a good idea and there was market."

[mrglam]

"Oh, there's market. You might accidentally remove a chunk of the population from the species' genotype, but there's market."

[thinkering]

"I'm not sure if this market would hold up to having to physically move around to use their rig."

[mrglam]

"If it was immersive enough maybe they wouldn't need to."

[thinkering]

"...Thaaaat might require brain surgery."

[mrglam]

"Would it, though? I'm not sure how sci-fi we're speaking here but if the VR equipment in question could actually read this kind of brain command..."

[thinkering]

"We're veering out of my specialty there. I mean, maybe if I modified the design for my implants, but it'd still be surgical."

[mrglam]

"I suppose. And in any case it couldn't be you who made the individual pieces or the tinker curse would break them."

[thinkering]

"Yeah, it has to be bot-producible."

[mrglam]

"By the way, have you ever tested that? Are bot-made things not tinker-cursed?"

[thinkering]

"I avoid having them make much," she says. "For reasons. I don't think so, though, based on very small tests."

[mrglam]

"You don't think they're tinker-cursed or you don't think they're not?"

[thinkering]

"I think they are not cursed. The bots don't run on instinct the way I do; which means the prototype doesn't always work because I'll have an instinct mid-build and they go with the original design; but if it works so will the next one and they don't seem to - draw on my power as much, when I maintain stuff they made."

[mrglam]

"Oh, that's... interesting. And very, very exploitable."