synopsychic | A Very Important Safety Lesson

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A Very Important Safety Lesson

Hokay, so. Now is the time for a network announcement that has nothing to do with ‘holy shit possibly Harrogate,’ other than I can share the load of beefing up mental firewalls. Otherwise network-fu isn’t so much my thing. Instead, I have a couple follow-ups to Riddick’s ‘hey we can turn Liminal Space into usable electricity’ discovery.

Thing One, during the last jaunt I figured out how to properly wire my rooms, so you can bring your own plugs. The downside is I think it has a measurable limit in terms of energy output, so I didn’t rewire the server room for Liminal Intranet. That’s still on… hell, I don’t know, cognitive power? I expect it to work so it works?

Thing Two, and slightly scarier: It’s possible to draw some serious shock power out of Liminal Space, if you play your cards right. The really bad news here is that shock power is measurable in milli-amps. Very Important Safety Lesson, guys – amps can absolutely seriously hurt or kill people. I’m reasonably sure anything fatal would take a deliberate effort, but it would be very easy to contact-paralyze someone by accident.

I’m not here to tell people not to chase it in the first place or whatever. Just… be careful. It’s one thing to have another weapon in your arsenal and another thing entirely to risk accidentally Flooring someone.

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Sweet, sweet civilization.

If you had a really big, really strong battery, I could probably charge it. But a) it would have to be more advanced tech than I've seen around here, and b) most likely it would explode and get acid all over us. My stuff's pretty volatile. Working on that.

So let's be realistic and say I can just help craft some power cables, converters, and plugs for the schlubs out there who don't have them. You're... not the only tech person here... right?

[[ Please let there be more than just one computer person or he is going to apply his palms directly to his face. ]]

Claudia's better than me, but I can do some programming and I'm passably familiar with hardware. Jules is probably up there with Claudia.

Oh thank God. I really thought I'd landed myself in a techless wasteland and would be forced to become some kind of computer messiah. It's a thankless job, messiahing.

Naw, there's a couple of us computer people around. And some of us who at least have used computers in their pre-Traveler life.

... I mean, on the other hand, there are way too many people here who think computers are full of tiny people, but at least most of those people come from pre-computer times.

Tiny people? What the fuck? They actually believe that? Even if it worked, that sounds like the stupidest idea ever.

[[ Tiny people, what the fuck. Apiculture mainframes he can understand, but those still rely on the intelligence of the user. Tiny people in his husktop, if it were even physically possible, would only fuck shit up. ]]

Anyway, I wasn't asking about any hack who could type insults with two fingers. I was more interested in people who could actually get shit done. What's the point of people knowing how to use computers if no one can fix them? I should offer my services. For food, that is.

They do. Stubbornly. And if you point out that there are no tiny people walking around on the circuit board they'll just answer that obviously the tiny people are too small to be seen by the naked eye.

[She may have had some of these discussions with her boyfriend.]

And hell, if you want to trade that for food you're welcome to, but there's also people who'll give it away free.

What do they want in return? There's always something.

[[ Clearly the concept of free food is foreign to him. He's only known one small group of trolls who did that. ]]

... nothing tangible? I mean, they give it away because it's in all our best interest to not have Travelers starving and wasting away when they can get food. We're all stuck together here, so we have to take care of each other.

There's got to be a catch. Anyway, I'm not going to be in anyone's debt, and I definitely don't want to rely on someone else for sustenance. What if they're killed?

... they'll probably get brought back to life by the Arcana. But okay, that's a legit worry. Maybe see if you can get people to teach you how to will food into being? It's totally possible here if you learn the right way of doing shit.

...Hypothetically speaking, does this mean I could eat cotton candy forever?

[[ He's a troll of simple needs. ]]

Yes. Yes, you could. Well, I mean, from a technical perspective, I've never seen anyone able to make more than fifty pounds worth of liminal matter per day--and most people can only do half that--but you could at least eat cotton candy every day, even if you can't just do nothing but eat cotton candy.

Given all that, light-weight things can be made in bigger quantities. Not much help with food, but some things are both light-weight and valuable....

[[ He's not thinking of jewels or some such thing. He's thinking of computer parts. ]]

Is this 'liminal matter' reliable? Does it work as well as the real thing?

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thornsofmalkav - 2017-10-02 04:49 (UTC) - Expand

...Yeah, let's... maybe skip anything involving explosive batteries.

Me and Jules are the main 'making computers do stuff' crew, but we're not the only tech-savvy people by any means. With most of the pre-computer-era folks, it's a pretty even split, I think, between people who don't know and don't care, people who found out via infiltrating, and people whose first exposure to computers at all was the Grid. That last group is gonna be the 'computers are full of tiny people' crowd Thorne mentioned.

Did they get duped by some sort of simulation?

On the Grid everyone was a person inside a computer.

How do you know? And whose stupid idea was this? It even sounds stupid. Making up tiny people to explain away the intelligence of the person who built the thing.

I know because I was there.

[[ Mother Grub's second sphincter, he cannot with this right now. ]]

...Did you at least get some cool loot?

[In general, Claudia can't either. In this particular case, she can only vouch for the world they visited - and really, 'tiny people' doesn't necessarily disparage whoever came up with the system, it could just mean they underestimated what would come of it.]

Hell yeah we did.

Is this the main way we get supplies? Whenever we're able to travel to another world and hope it has computers?

The main way we get basic supplies is making stuff here. Not many people know how to build a computer from scratch, so until recently that's been a 'hope the jaunt world has something' commodity. Where jaunt worlds really come in handy is when they have nifty local tech.

I know how to build a computer from scratch, but... I'm the only one of my species I've seen so far. My stuff's probably as alien to you as Jaunt stuff. We'd run into compatibility issues until I can reverse-engineer some samples, and I'd rather experiment on some throwaway shit than someone's prized husktop. 'Nifty local tech' it is.

If you want something you can poke at in the meantime, just say the word. It almost certainly won't be what you're used to but it might be better than nothing.

[Or it might be worse, but that's his call to make.]

Yeah, I'll take your old shit. I'm not bragging [[ he's totally bragging ]] but I've been known to make shit into gold.

[[ He neglects to mention that he had perfected this skill because he'd been a poor slave and had had to fend for himself. ]]

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