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]

"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."

[thinkering]

"Yep."

[mrglam]

"Do they have to come up with the design, or can they just do something you designed, or a compromise...?"

[thinkering]

"They can do my simple designs. The complicated ones seem to work only with instinct operative during the build."

[mrglam]

"...simple? What counts as simple, even?" he laughs.

[thinkering]

She giggles. "No, well, Tinker bullshit. It's good at tools, custom welders and stuff! It can take my pseudocode flowcharts and turn them into bug-free programs."

[mrglam]

"Does it use the same programming language you do?"

[thinkering]

"Yeah, although it can convert things into standard ones long as they're Turing-complete and meet one or two other criteria. Nasty efficiency cost, but sometimes you gotta make sacrifices for compatibility."

[mrglam]

"Or human readability in some cases."