Sad Cam talks to Ancora
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'That may be less inherent.'

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"Oh. Good. It's more important than blacking out for a moment."

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They ponder and play, something improvised with a lot of long and floating arpeggios.

 

'It is accomplishable in principle,' they determine.  'Other facets of the system already draw on a similar idea.  I expect in the event of catastrophe it will increase the likelihood of my death.'

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"...would you be inserting yourself as the battery backup?"

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'I am already the basis for the system as a whole.  If a large number of vampires simultaneously changed themselves to look more conventionally human while they could draw from a pool of all my magic instead of ones more isolated to themselves, this would naturally have the effect of draining the larger pool.'  An unusually discordant arpeggio.  'With which my attentional capacity scales.'

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"Hm. And you definitely can't set it up so they don't require constant access to magic for thinking?"

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'Not definitely.  Though I have no ideas for how to go about that; it would likely involve reconstructing the entire system and abandoning the existing one.'

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". . . The batteries are a better - more elegant - idea, but it kind of sounded like maybe you could de-vamp people at all, just not like, automatically or at scale or something?  If that's so could you - use it to patch things, even if it's not built in; have the interface advertise that that's an option."

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'Possibly.  Some cases would still carry risk of damage.'

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"Which cases?"

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Contemplative contemplation.

 

'If a human brain is in some ways like a vine which grows densely within a particular volume which is in some ways like a human mind, then becoming a vampire is in some ways like adding a second plant in that same area, which grows alongside and entangled with the first.  Ripping out the second plant would certainly greatly damage the first if there were any more than a very small amount of it, but one could in most cases meticulously pick them apart.  In others, they may be too entwined to cause no damage whatsoever even with great care, though it would still certainly be less than indiscriminate tearing.'

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"That's a helpful analogy, thank you. Could you set up - gradual dieback of the second plant -"

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'I do not believe that is an area to which the metaphor extends.  Unless I misunderstand you.'

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"Like if the plant isn't ripped out all at once but gradually shrivels up, it will leave the original plant time to find ways to support itself without the new plant, and then you can probably -" He makes an illustrative bonsai shrub with some ivy in it. "Here the ivy's alive -" He pulls on it, the shrub bends and creaks. He makes another with the ivy dead. The ivy can be tugged out, with some breakage but exclusively on the ivy's part.

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'I seem to have understood you correctly.'

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Cam sets the shrub aside. "Could you, hm, magically place stably-nonmagical reinforcements to the metaphorical shrubbery that will make it robust to losing the metaphorical ivy?"

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'With personal attention, likely; automatically, no.'

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"How many vampires are there, about?"

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'Hundreds.'  Flap.  'Though the rate has been increasing recently.'

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"How feasible would it be to go through those hundreds once time is unpaused and port them all over to a safer system?"

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'Relatively.  Any complications preventing that plan would be unlikely to arise from that aspect in particular.'

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"Okay. So, should - that plus a general redesign - be the default plan here?"

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'Perhaps.  It is likely to be time-consuming, but remotely ensouling Earth's population will be as well, and I am unwilling to fail to prevent any more permanent deaths.'

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"I appreciate that about you."

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H . . . eadtilt.

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