"Definitely," Cordelia assures her. "I'll go play with it right after dinner."

"Have you told Miles? Was he absurdly excited?"

"I don't know about 'absurdly'. But yes."

"I really hope these things prove to be as useful as they are charming. For once Barrayar could be technologically ahead of the rest of the galaxy on something."

"One nice thing about them is that they will network with each other even if there isn't an underlying infrastructure. So if you distribute them to people who don't have comconsoles they will still be able to write each other notes - or send each other drawings, for that matter, though the current tutorial edition does presume literacy in English I could probably develop or contract out the development of a pictorial version. And they do have to have electricity, I didn't have a way around that part."

"Interesting. That direction might have a lot of potential."

"They are currently kind of expensive per unit, but the price point should drop over the next year or so as the supplies of relevant materials readjust to the demand."

"It would sure be convenient if they could be made cheaply."

"Yes. I might be able to simplify it further, the casing especially, but that would probably come at a cost of reduced performance - the casing is pressure-sensitive and will be able to learn how you hold your hand when you're making specific gestures, which lets you be a lot sloppier and faster," she explains.

"Makes sense. Well, we'll see."

One particular morning, Miles is unusually chipper and fast-moving on his way back from the bathroom - less of a shuffle and more of an actual walk. He climbs into bed and snuggles up happily.

"Thankfully yes. I would not have been pleased if the aching turned out to be a permanent feature. It's still there, but it has noticeably decreased."

"I would hope the surgeons would be more competent than to leave you with permanent aches and pains," says Linya, "yes." Nuzzle.

"Demonstrably, even the cutting edge of the cutting edge can't get it perfect every time," says Miles with a wry gesture at his own body. "For all I know maybe I have one of my weird reactions to the plastic they use in the synthetics, and I'd have to wait around for somebody to hunt up a different formulation and synthesize me a whole new set of leg bones and replace them all again. I'm not saying I actually thought that was happening, and happily it doesn't seem to be, but competence and effectiveness can sometimes be separated by a wide margin."

"Did they not test you for allergies to the plastic first? Assuming it's not sufficiently hypoallergenic for that to be a guaranteed nonissue."

"Oh, sure they did, and sure it is. But I've had plenty of bizarre and apparently unprecedented drug reactions before; it wouldn't surprise me that much if my body took two days of constant exposure to decide it hated the things. I can be very pessimistic about medical matters."

"Huh. Is there a known reason for that idiosyncrasy?"

"Not known to me, anyway."

"...Mm?"

"...I don't think that question has a 'delicate' setting," he says. "Um. You could certainly ask my mother about her family history on the subject without offending her."