"Sure." She will write them out instead of composing in her head this time.

Dottie goes over them; Isabella doesn't quite have a handle on the style, yet, though the emotional content is already pretty impressive. He makes a few suggestions, giving examples of simple Triumph chants he's memorized for this exact purpose- one for strength, one for sewing, and one for focus. This is what you could do if you knew what success would look like in detail...this is what to do when your idea of success is vague for good reason- it's a skill that you value because of reasons that go beyond the skill itself, like that it was something your beloved grandfather was good at, and trying to hone in on specifics will make you lose grip on that emotional connection- things like that.

Isabella is not sentimental about hypercognition and has a pretty good idea of how she wants it to work, though it's not perfect yet.

"The nice thing about Triumph is that if you don't have it quite right in your head, your progress will be slower but you're still improving on nothing. Envy is the one that can really bite you if you're missing something."

And that's enough revision. They can start chanting. Dottie will try again with Envy, which will hopefully respond to the preliminary research, conversation, and Triumph of today. He really wants working precog.

He can see into the future! And it's not a future where he's catatonic, this time!

It lasts one second!

Dottie is immensely cheered by this. There's a chance. Even if it's slim- he could bootstrap his way into something that will give him the edge he needs.

He's not sure he'll figure it out before they arrest Jackson.

"My precog range is one second, but that's better than nothing. You?"

"I can fit so much hypercognition in here, it's amazing even if the user interface is awful. I started with one second too."

"Do hypercog and precog play well with each other? There must be all kinds of untapped potential at the higher levels for eclipsed."

"Precog and hypercog don't synergize especially well? I mean, hypercog sort of synergizes with everything but precog doesn't benefit more from it than any random psion skill."

"Which interactions are you most looking forward to?"

"Learning speed."

"What kind of things does learning speed help with?"

"Picking up all the other tricks, for keeps, sooner."

"I should get started on cornering the market while I'm the only chanter around. Think I can get a meeting with your lawyer set up soon-ish?"

"Yeah, looks like - yeah, I can book him for tomorrow, I'll do that."

"Thank you."

Dottie plays around with her (?) precog until she's he's satisfied that he knows the broad strokes of what he wants his next attempted design to look like. It's hard to make meaningful improvements at a scale of one second, but she he has plenty of opinions about the interface- that'll help. Maybe he can look up descriptions of people's interfaces- is there a forum for people complaining about how hard it is to design good precog?

There does not seem to be a forum that specific; Dottie can find eclipsed fora but would need to dig harder to find the exact topic.

Fair enough. Dottie goes back to basics. What if he searches for things like 'what's the coolest precog interface you've ever heard of'? 'When did you know your precog had come in exactly the way you wanted it'? 'If you could have precog without all the work, how would you design it'?

my precognition clicked! I have 1.5sec but still

cool man what's your setup

it's like fast forward on a TV and then I snap back to now

if i was a precog I'd just do one that didnt mess up when some1 else was doing it. lame

Precognition is taking FOREVER. Why do I have to do this much work??

I hear you, sister!

'Coolest precognition setup'?

Webcomic with fourteen pages drawn in MS Paint.

She'll obviously need to probe deeper if she wants to find some appealing designs other people have tried- maybe designing her own will work, now that she's bootstrapped this far. This still seems like a fine way to waste a few minutes.

The webcomic sets up a clichéd epic plot with a precognitive deuteragonist as narrated from the perspective of a blue-haired anime-looking princess who is in love with him but must resolve to never tell lest he unlock the secret by precogging particular circumstances in which she'd disclose.

It's sufficiently different from anything she's he's ever read that she he can tolerate the clichéd plot. Dottie finishes her his dinner, brushes up on basic history, geography, and pop culture via Wikipedia, and soon enough, it's time to sleep- as well as he can, when his dreams heavily feature his arrest and the following cruel and unusual punishments he can imagine.

The next morning, he'll watch some TV and eat some food until the time of his appointment approaches. Presuming getting to the meeting isn't a big hurdle- should he be taking public transport, or is the meeting at the hotel?

He should be taking a taxi or the subway and Isabella will lend him the means to do either.