The Most Fundamental Assistance

I watch the two of them move through the misty streets from my seat in the café, while I wait for the thin rain to stop.  The one, tall, pale and dark in the manner of the eseldrae – and clad in rather a nice set of blue-black formal robes, too – but with the very distinct no-expression and flickery eye-hand motions of someone very much occupied with their augmentality feeds, and yet somehow smoothly staying on course; the other, much more alert, trotting at his heels and weaving in and out of obstacles to stay close, golden fur obscured by panniers stuffed with…

Wait, is that a whisker laser reflecting off the droplets?  On a hunch, I call up the local network overlay.  Ah, dedicated high-bandwidth links.  Well, that’s nothing I’ve seen before.

A thinking-brain dog.

3 thoughts on “The Most Fundamental Assistance

  1. Pingback: Trope-a-Day: Inside a Computer System | The Eldraeverse

  2. Love this idea, but from a practical standpoint what are the effects of separation? A mental fogginess until contact is reestablished? What are the effects of limited bandwidth, such as radio interference or, as mentioned here, rain interfering with the comm laser?

    • In either case, that depends on what parts of your mental function you’re outsourcing.

      Your sensible users of this sort of tech just find themselves becoming somewhat slower and stupider (closer to the level of just the brains they keep in their heads), lose access to some secondary memories (“it’s on the tip of my tongue”), or get the mental equivalent of 404 errors on specific tasks they offloaded.

      If you’ve outsourced vital core functions, on the other hand, the results may include anything from imbecility through catatonia to coma – but that’s why the manual says “This is an unsupported configuration that is strongly recommended against. Cognitech product support cannot guarantee user safety or sanity if this warning is disregarded.”

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