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Akibel Mowar is on his way home from the blacksmith's when he spots it. People are shrieking and fleeing from it, which seems reasonable, as it's a fuckoff huge snake with a mirror for a face. A big mirror.
Kib can't so much flee. He can shriek - he can lurch in the direction of the nearest house and try the door - it's locked. He can amble briskly...
He can break into a run when the snake gains on him and fall flat on his face.
And he can get eaten up.
And it's too bright too bright too bright and he flings his arm over his eyes.
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secondchance
"I got the impression my mother had several girl names she'd wanted and now had a girl and was damned well going to use them. It's Lári most of the time."
"Should we head over right now, or do you want to come find me when you're at a good point to stop?"
So they make the trip out of the city. Fëanor is not in his workshop for once; he is sitting inside, holding the baby, and there's an exhausted-looking woman with him. "Hello," Maitimo says. "Kib thinks his magic does data handling magically."
"Oh, really," he says. "The whole field of cryptography will be born dead, then - or, depending exactly what you can do - what can you do?"
"Oh, really," he says. "The whole field of cryptography will be born dead, then - or, depending exactly what you can do - what can you do?"
secondchance
"I don't think they do cryptography - or at least they don't yet - but sophisticated libraries sometimes have talking golems who read everything in the library and can tell people what they're looking for, mathematicians occasionally use them if they can get them, that sort of thing. They're not that widely used because they're so time-consuming to make, but that's by human standards."
"There are two approaches to immortality that make sense from where I'm standing," he says. "One is raw power - I can try capturing the light of the Trees in a form amenable to further engineering, and then I can wield it probably very bluntly at first but eventually with some precision to do things like end decay and possibly aging - though ending decay wouldn't strictly end aging and tons of raw magical power around mortals could actually serve them poorly.
The other is to do it very carefully, which makes it a search problem, mostly: trying to identify of the hundreds of billions of overlapping resonances that can be ambient which ones are affecting aging and how we can counter them." And he launches into the search problem and how it could be approached.
The other is to do it very carefully, which makes it a search problem, mostly: trying to identify of the hundreds of billions of overlapping resonances that can be ambient which ones are affecting aging and how we can counter them." And he launches into the search problem and how it could be approached.
secondchance
"Okay," Kib says, "the obvious problem here is that I don't know how to program a golem to perceive resonances."
"Right, you don't innately have osanwë. Does that mean it's probably impossible, or just that it'd require giving them a sense that you don't have - could a deaf person program a hearing golem?"
secondchance
"I don't know about deaf people in particular but it's not strictly required that it be a sense I have - golems that can see in the dark have been made, storks are suspected to have ludicrously good hearing. It might however be easier for an Elf to learn to program golems and for me to only do the waking part than for me to try to wrap my head around the sense well enough to write it in."
"I would love to learn to program golems," he says at once. "I think some of the books in the library cover it, though I haven't had time to read them all yet because I now have a daughter."
secondchance
"You can get most of the way on books alone but I'm happy to help if you think that would be useful to you at any stage of the process."
"I shall write you with questions. Maitimo says that you're trying to reinvent stork golems to solve the baby situation?"
"Good skill. We should also teach the people who work with children in your world the songs for quieting crying children, that sort of thing, see if we can make the job more appealing."
"Canafinwë," says Fëanáro, "come downstairs. That's possible? An automata that plays music? We've tried but we haven't been able to get sufficient fidelity..."
secondchance
"I don't know how much fidelity's necessary. You could make an automaton that played a normal musical instrument, though, or a hurdy-gurdy -" He sends a mental image of a hurdy-gurdy. "If it was a short song or the object could reasonably be stationary furniture."
"You need pretty high fidelity, but we weren't doing things like that, it's definitely worth it."
Macalaurë comes downstairs. "Oh no," he says to Kib, "you've poked my father's periodic interest in music-machines. It should work in principle. It is hard to get them good enough."
Macalaurë comes downstairs. "Oh no," he says to Kib, "you've poked my father's periodic interest in music-machines. It should work in principle. It is hard to get them good enough."
"The player just doesn't make good enough music. Or you can get very weak effects but not strong ones."