I hope not. It'd be terrible if you're someday the only person in the world who isn't invulnerable to physical injury.

I think that implies a much better than default future!

If we get this working we really get it working. My magic system's really flexible, the thing wrong with it is that it's really really slow, and software improves that significantly and software tinkers improve it past that and if only the actual artifact-making were fast there'd be no reason you couldn't have everything Earth needs to not be terrible inside a century. 

 

The mortality necklaces really better work on you.

I'm flattered.

Mortality's what I was working on before I noticed the world was going to end. I think I'm pretty close but I haven't put any time into it lately.

Rete'll help as much as it can.

Yeah, it's great. I should get back to work. Don't get killed in skirmishes with bank robbers.

Do my best.

He wishes he could compose songs here, none of the angles he tried on an artifact that'd make him think faster paid back the investment in time and he thinks it'd be a straightforward extension of the reflex song but while he can sing the song just fine he can't tinker with it. At least artifacts don't work that way, that'd be really frustrating. He sits in his library and sings to himself in Kirundi and works.

[Rete] I submitted a request to confidentially collect trigger data and was flatly refused, no reason given.

I really wish the PRT was the sort of organization where I could just be confident there's a good reason.

[Lorica again] yeah me too.

Could just set up an anonymous form online but I don't know if people'd be truthful.

It might illustrate new hypotheses even if we couldn't be confident in it. Rete'll set it up.

Thanks. I am almost done with the artifact that should let other people write artifacts. Gonna recruit someone to learn to make little rings glow - that's the fastest enchantment that gets visible results, only 18 hours.

Continuously?

Even I can't usually do that long without breaks, get sloppy after ten. The chunks for it are all shorter than three hours. 

That's a long time to do anything fiddly without making a mistake.

Yeah. It's kind of - meditative? After a while? We come up with songs that match recurring number-patterns, you get very absorbed, it's not exactly mindless tedium. But it's still hard. I expect it'll take them weeks to get it, but weeks would still be proof of concept.

Sounds sort of like a video game.

Haven't had a chance to check those out.

I don't play much. Programming's more fun.

Writing the algorithms is way more fun than encoding them. I wonder if I could write a video game with simple controls where by playing it you thought of the right sequence of bits.

Like that protein folding game!

He looks that up.

Yeah! I'd have to adapt the artifacts quite a lot and it won't work if human brains are doing sufficiently different things when they're playing the same games, but if I could get it working it'd be much nicer - imagine, 'to get an eidetic memory you can buy it at the store or beat this game while wearing the artifact and the necklace you want to encode' -