Why do people drink alcohol. It's such a weird thing to do. She feels a kinship with Armsmaster but considering the nature of the kinship she does not at all attempt to go be his friend about it.

Lucien doesn't drink but stays at the party at least until Vista leaves - she deserves all the celebration she can get. He tries to stay late in case Clockblocker appreciates it given he also was running around the city with no credit during the bombings. Eventually Clockblocker, also probably inebriated, hits on him a second time during the same night and he calls it quits. 

How small can your furrows be?

Sure he can check that.

I don't know how to tell how small the smallest ones are? Smaller than anything I can see.

Can you borrow Armsmaster's microscope and check?

Sure.

The one he let me borrow can't see my smallest ones either, unless I'm using it wrong.

Cool. How complicatedly can you do 'em?

Pretty complicated as long as the lines are straight and all? I need to be able to think through what I'm doing, though I can repeat patterns easily enough.

Wanna see if you can beat the Toybox supplier who just gave me a stupidly pricey quote on circuit boards?

What. How?

(Yes.)

There's more stuff going on in them but I can do a lot of it, the etching is just too deterministic for me to program my bot to do it. It'll send you the design.

A few minutes later.

Huh. I can do a bunch of this but the bits on the left are too complicated for me to do quickly on my own? I think if I had a version pre-made, even at a different scale, I could copy it.

If a different scale will work, sure. Bots bringing you a big sample wafer in five.

He's pretty sure Lorica is in her workshop one room over. Tinkers and their fugues.

Much quicker than the prior time:

Done. Also, your wafer has really neat etchings.

Neat how?

I didn't actually realize I had a Thinker power until just now when I touched it and had the whole design in my head a second or so later. It was a lot bigger and more complicated than anything else I've had in my head before. Hence, neat.

Oh, congratulations!

I think I have you beat for lowest tier Thinker power. Was it any help?

They aren't ranked by how cool they are, they're ranked by their combat threat potential, so I still win. Bots're installing it into a test box right now.

I will defeat you with my ability to tell where the tiniest of trenches are.

The Lucien-etched chip performs better than she'd have expected the Toybox chips to work.

Good news, it's cleared every benchmark I had in mind. Expect more commissions. Toybox would have charged me fourteen thousand dollars for that. For a finished version, admittedly.

That's uh. Rather nice rent money.

If fourteen thousand dollars were in my budget I would have most likely bought it from Toybox instead of brainstorming long enough to wonder if you could scale down, but I can kick you five K.

Over the next few weeks Lucien makes more from fabbing chips (for Lorica and others) than he made in the past year, enough for his family to move into a nice part of town, with a sidedoor that will let him discretely come and go and a small study and bedroom big enough for him to actually have a bed in. He hasn't been this happy since before the Simurgh attack.

And Lorica's call screening bot has someone on the line.

"Hi I need to talk to Lorica but only in a way that guarantees that a precog who can't see into her brain won't be able to forsee. Can you verify that this isn't a precog's vision of the future?"