repair

Repair

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2016_R(Alternate words: range, relay, racing, and reinvent. In this case, repair was chosen because it was the only word which was submitted independently twice.

With special thanks to Jennifer Linsky on G+, whose article post finally let me break a week-long creative block.)

Spiders. Why did it have to be spiders?

I’m not an arachnophobe. Not, dammit. I had that taken out years ago, I’ll have you know.

And I know all the good reasons why your repair-clanks are the shape they are. Multiple legs for maximum flexibility of stance and attachment and wielding many tools at once. Multiple eyes to examine a work-piece from all angles and in several different spectra. A rounded central body to minimize the possibility of scratches from sharp corners.

And that’s not hair. It’s just that branching fractal nanomanipulators look… fuzzy, to the naked eye.

But put a couple of dozen of them in one place, all swarming over the job together chittering at each other in modulated-binary, and…

Well, anyway. You just take care of it as you see fit, and I’ll sign off on it when I get back. I’m off to see a soph about some follow-up psychedesign.

 

Aftershocks (3)

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From Elyse Corídatry, Psychedesigner Excellence, to Advisory Panel, Involuntary Dysfunction Eleemosynary COG, and Adm. Gileon Cularius, Imperial Navy, greetings.

Gentlesophs, I understand the urgency of your desire for good news concerning the status of the 14,934 mind-states entrusted to the care of the COG by Adm. Cularius, but must regret to inform you that this is an extremely complex piece of repair work. The changeling AIs used by the Iltines in their weapons systems were produced by methods that are, by our current standards, extremely crude as well as grossly unethical.

While I remain confident of eventual success, the Iltine weapon-programmers were, if you’ll pardon me, a bunch of semi-competent butchers stacking wire-and-tape jobs twelve deep. None of these are capable of operating in an organic, robotic, or even infomorph ‘shell at this time; this is the easiest of the problems to repair, since motor and sensory cortices can be patched with standard models. However, aversive and proversive conditioning have garbled the emotive-promotor loops all to dark and hash, and there’s noise all through the supporting structures. The majority of pre-installation memory is nothing but garble to wipe, and the rest of them will take considerably longer to unthread and reroute back to something resembling sanity, and as for the primary personality encoding structures, well, I can’t patch over the problems in those if you give a damn about who you’ll be instantiating at the end of this process.

Give me six months, and I’ll tell you if it can be done at all. A year after that, you might start seeing results.

(Unless there’s any chance you can get me one of the Iltine project team’s mind-states…?)