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Sometimes the best way out of a bad situation is to entirely replace your personality and memories with those of a complete stranger
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"It's fine, honestly today was being a really unproductive day so no big loss, my co-workers can cover everything I can do. This company's pretty good at redundancy."

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"What do you do?"

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"I'm an engineer and I do R&D for a robotics company but I'm under a sufficiently heavy NDA to not even be allowed to tell you the name of the company," he says apologetically.

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"Wow. Can you tell me what kind of robots? Like, toy cat ones or like package pickers at warehouses or...?"

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"Hmm, let's see, what can I say... It's mostly for human assistance? Some stuff the company's worked on in the past—though not me personally—has included, like, prosthetics, I think if I specify any further I'll be in breach.

"The more specific stuff I personally work on which is sufficiently low level it doesn't reveal anything is something called error correction in signal processing, are you familiar?"

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"No, though I can get the gist from the name - if the robot's parts are sending messages to one another sometimes they get garbled and you want the computer to be able to guess in what way so it can figure out what's going on?"

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"Yeah! It's not even that they can sometimes get garbled, so much as that there is a guarantee that a relevant fraction of them are going to be and the overall job description is creating robust structures that will provably and verifiably reduce that fraction to measurable maxima.

"And some of this stuff needs to communicate with human nerves, right, like a prosthetic hand, which I will neither confirm nor deny that I or my company in particular work with, it needs to have motion but it also needs touch and temperature and pain and pressure—those are all separate types of nerve, did you know?—and you need to guarantee that people won't randomly be in excruciating finger pain because of a freak error in transmission."

He is clearly very excited about this topic and holding himself back from going on long in depth rants about his special interest. His eyes light up as her talks about it and he starts fidgeting excitedly with his hands at the same time.

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"Huh! Do you need excruciating finger pain to be an option at all, as long as you're designing a hand from scratch couldn't you cap it at some useful informative amount?"

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"It's less that it's an option and more that human bodies are complicated and something that's slightly off nominal values can have a bunch of unexpected effects when communicated up the nervous system all the way to the brain. You know how some people who have lost limbs have phantom limb syndrome, and some of those have phantom limb pain? So yeah, even zero nervous input can cause issues, figuring out what the right thing to do there is really difficult."

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"Oh, huh, that's so fiddly. I guess you could have somebody's hand constantly reporting that they were in just a very very tiny amount of pain so the brain wouldn't decide actually it was lots? But probably there's a better way..."

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"Yeah, and I mean, we've been making huge strides, there are a handful of prototypes of things already in widespread testing around the country, pun unintended but endorsed, and the basics are already known. The devil's in the details."

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You're making Oliver Houston get kind of infatuated with you by doing exactly the right thing. +1 SED.

ERO Notification: The perk "My Mind to Control" prevents the immediate application of the stat increase. You may at any point accept it yourself, if you so wish, by visiting your character screen.

* Note: You cannot munchkin this in order to operate at higher levels of eroticism than your stats permit. If you start pushing the boundaries of your skills too hard you will be assumed to be consenting to the increases in stats that come with them. You will be notified if you are nearing that point unless you actually have the intent to rules lawyer things.

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- she will go add that probably once she is not in the middle of a conversation.

"I guess if your hand malfunctions and you've only got the one prosthetic you can yank it off, or, no, they'd be kind of wired in, can you even take these off at all?"

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"For most modern ones there's a socket that gets attached to the limb stump and then the prosthesis itself hooks onto it and you can take it off, but if it's the socket itself that's malfunctioning, or if it gets stuck in whatever configuration the prosthesis left it in, then yeah you're S.O.L."

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"So probably you want all the complicated stuff to be in the hand and the socket to be very simple? Or maybe - possible to turn off, you could give it a hardware switch under where the hand is?"

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"Those are possibilities being studied! Especially the off switch, something that can be done easily but not accidentally would be ideal."

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"- fingerprint sensor for the off hand?"

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"People do rub their hands against each other even in inconvenient ways at times but I've seen a design proposal for like two or three fingers in unusual but not difficult positions simultaneously, yeah.

"Most of this is still at the design stage, mind you, the prototypes being tested are a lot less advanced and complex than what R&D departments have, or so I'd assume based on rough analogies to what my company actually works with which I cannot explain, Christ it is a pain in the ass to have to disclaim this kind of stuff all the time."

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"It sounds it, I hope they pay you the big bucks. I was imagining the fingerprint sensor in the socket, so you'd have to take the hand off first."

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"Oh! Yeah that's the most promising design I've seen so far with that idea but I think I've never run into someone actually live testing it. —as in, in a lab or something, not with actual people, that one takes forever to get government approval for and there are tons of stages of prior testing needed for it.

"Maybe we should hire you and get you to generate ideas for us, that's five minutes of nonstop good ones."

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"I don't know if the NDA would agree with me."

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"It doesn't agree with most people, I had to sign an NDA about the NDA."

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"Wow, harsh. Well, if you want to pitch your boss on tossing me a freelance fee for whatever I come up with based on hearing concepts that aren't covered by the NDA, it's not like I have another job competing with that one."

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"I'll let her know."

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"Failing that I should probably try to find some other kind of income so I can pay rent - to you, if you like having me around, but I don't know how good a roommate I am. I am quite without legible credentials, unfortunately..."

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