[b]Zhang and York: [/b]

Zhang snickers. “Hey, I thought you were just asking to change the subject, didn’t think you actually meant it. I like iced tea? Jasmine tea when I can’t sleep. I don’t get you. It’s like, when you ask me if I like tea, it doesn’t really feel like you’re asking me if I like tea. Right? Like, when I ask you about welding and you say you ‘know the basics’ - I can’t tell if you’re underselling because you don’t want to flex, or if you’re overselling because you want the excuse to hang out. You know?” She asks York.

“No.” York says “HartlyDworkin says hi.” Zhang shrugs, and raids York’s backpack and pulls out a thin jacket. He must have brought it for her, it’s brown pseudoleather with a line of sharp silver studs from the shoulders to the wrists. 

Zhang falls in step alongside brown again, hands in her jacket pockets. “Makes you a good pretend lawyer, though.” She’s noticed Brown’s awkwardness, then, it’s just put her into Cool Older Sister mode. 


[b]Tools in a Toolshed:[/b]

It’s a good question, in that both Serino and Shtern agree that wireless is inferior. It’s a great question in that they disagree on what kind of cabled is better. 

“Wireless.” Serino spits. “It’s cheaper, less parts, looks neater.” He rolls his eyes. 

“It’s great for outside the hull.” Shtern admits, clicking the new band into place. “Here? It is a good thing that they use in a way I do not think is sensible. Wireless power, you send whether or not it is received. If the receiver is broken, how does the projector know to stop sending? They have to run a wire back. But if that wire has been broken, too?” Shtern shakes his head and clicks his tongue, [i]tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk[/i]. “Wire is fail-safe, wireless is fail-deadly.” 

“Messy. Too easy to interfere with. Vulnerable.” Serino shakes his head. “Mayors change to wireless for a while, then change it back when they learn why everyone else did too.” 

“But this time!” Shtern snips.

“We will fix all the problems they could not!” Serino agrees bitterly. He projects a hologram from his wrist of a weaving machine, and spins it for Blue to inspect from every angle. “Look. This is a Charcoal Loom, for electronics. Prints entire circuits in carbon nanofibre for you. As flexible as fabric, as resilient as the station hull, the loom can even thread fibre optics. I refuse to use anything else for a project that requires less than a quatronic core.” Carbon nanofibres can be near-superconductors or incredible insulators based on a minor tweak of structure. Serino shows how the Loom can weave its tapestries as thin as the ink on a page, or as thick as a wool sweater. 

“Cannot be fixed or maintained.” Shtern crawls back out of the machine, wiping his oily hands on a rag before taking his beer again. “Only replaced.” 

“What could damage it?” Serino counters, and Shtern waves a hand instead of arguing back. “Expensive to buy, very expensive, but you save in the long run. Raw carbon is cheap. And look. The fibres themselves are like muscle tissue. They can pull tight. They pull tighter when cut is made to restore connection.” Actually, there’s a lot more you could do with a carbon fibre material that is also a microprocessor which is also a hydraulic motor. Serino’s just talking about power transmission right now though. 

Shtern shakes his head at the Charcoal Loom projection. “I still like platinum. It’s good, it’s cheap, it does not rust, it does not corrode. I can fix it how I like. I can solder it, and weld it, and cut it. Fifty years ago men would kill to have platinum wires, but now it is common, it is [i]boring[/i].”

“Carbon, though. This is just what you can do here,” Serino waves at the tool shed. Nearby, a bunch of teenagers gather around a rough set and simulate different trebuchet designs trying to figure out the best way to launch a cinderblock through their Principal’s office window all the way from Gwen’s apartment roof. “Think of what you can do with grid wiring, with this. Can you do these things with wireless?” 

Pink and Crystal could make some very, [i]very[/i] interesting things with that loom, but it’d be the Christmas item - she’s only going to be able to afford one thing she’d [i]want[/i] like this, to still be able to afford everything else she’s decided she [i]needs[/i]. 


[b]Cyberspace:[/b]

"Keep changing if you like that more. That's not affecting your score, but you really do get points for trying. Or, just, I love dragons, if you wanted to keep being that?" She's curious if Green changes like this for herself, or because of her indecisiveness in what she thinks she should be for her audience. "You've already started winning at Fiona, though - I'll give you your first prize." 

Fiona throws a file to Green - it’s her library asset for the body she used to run, but doesn’t anymore. It’s about 36 times the size of the cleric she’s running now. That number might not sound like much in the context of general computer files, even a small image can trivially be thousands of times larger than a large word document. In this case, it’s the difference between a xylophone and a cathedral pipe organ. 

The body Fiona has given Green is made of dozens of fist-sized glass orbs, all connected by cobweb-like threads. Some of these threads are as thin as hairs, others as thick as pipettes. It's jank. The threads are there because the simulations always required the body to be physically coherent in some way. Controlling it all required entirely remapping her motor cortex, so that every thought sends one of these nodes to wherever her attention wanders, and stays there until that attention is needed by a new thought.

The fuzziness coalesces around an orb in the middle like the pupil of an eye. This isn't a deliberate decision, just a consequence of where the most attention has been. Focus on one thing and the pupil dilates, constricts when the attention spreads elsewhere. The eye can't move all at once, it moves as growing and shrinking edges, fuzzy and flickering.

The dimensions of it means no matter where you stand relative to the eye would make it feel like Fiona is staring at you, because she would be. Did you know humans can see in full 360 panorama with mechanical assistance? And that's when they still rely on their eyes. Each of those glass orbs gave her panoramic sight and sound of wherever she sent one - all of them, at once. You were supposed to cluster several together to represent a bigger or smaller percentage of your attention, but you didn’t [i]have[/i] to. It’s a question how far Green could disperse this and still handle the information stream. 

This body gives you what it feels like to move through the world as an author experiences a world in the middle of creating it, omnipresent but not omniscient. Information impresses directly into the mind, lucid dreamlike, exploiting the eccentricities of a direct brain spike connection to hardware that has to know what it's simulating. You need to use eyes in the out-there because meatspace doesn't know itself, the eyes need to convert light into knowledge. The simulation is converting knowledge into light - it doesn’t have to. 

This is what really broke the drivers in Fiona's head to be too long, her most bodiless body, her ultimate escape. Put her in a sensory deprivation tank and this is what she still is. She doubts she and Green have the same reasons for escaping, she hopes this at least shows they had the same reasons for the place they escaped to. 

This body is also definitionally unfuckable. Any sensory input like that got scrubbed for being overwhelming noise without signal. 

“So, that's me.” She says cheerfully. “Here’s me fully mapped out, and I couldn’t find any expectations in there so if [i]you [/i]find any, tell me what they look like. This is what I’m capable of, of taking, of dealing with, what the inside of [i]my[/i] head looks like. Do you really think you’re more dangerous than anything I’ve done to myself?” This is a serious question, not a challenge. As of handing this body over, Green now knows more about Fiona’s levels than Fiona knows about Green’s. 

She’s not ignoring the undernet stuff, or the glitchwork AI goddess thing. She can’t argue whether that’s right or wrong for Green until she knows who Green even is, and interrogating that first would just lead through misunderstanding Green anyway, with a lot of time spent talking past each other on the symptoms first to get there. That’d make this too much like fighting with someone on the internet. 

Empathy first, so she can get explanations instead of just warnings. She doesn’t know what [i]dangerous[/i] means yet. She has no idea what Green thinks her core identity is, and if it’s different from what Fiona has seen of her. She can’t talk Green down from a ledge if she doesn’t understand why she climbed out to it in the first place. At least she can try to show Green she might be capable of understanding.