The current tally of the things Stevie and Kiernan had disagreements on that they didn't bring up any longer was about ten items long. I know because I was the keeper of the tally.
I didn't particularly agree with either one on any of the issues, especially the issues regarding trim we wanted for the common room. You think that we are able to avoid these types of issues and satisfy everybody but no that was not the case. So while Levi was gone I started looking back into some of my old projects just to see which ones would be most useful for the future. Scholars to the ages have tried to predict the future. In the recent past a highly dedicated group of people began to use the wisdom of the crowds to start making bets on the future. I dabbled a bit especially when I was bored working in my startup but I never really got anywhere with it. The thing is for as smart as you think something is and how much you think it's going to catch on there's no real telling and a lot of things just don't do what you think they're going to do. For instance I did not think that 3D printing and Von Neumann frogs would be so important to my continued afterlife. But here I am typing up a blog post from the safety and comfort of a giant artifact way out in space. So what I intended to do was to start to simulate which things will be the most useful for us and which things kind of weren't worth the investment in time. I'm not going to say that we lived in the post capitalist era but I couldn't Buy a spaceship. Even back home from what I'm hearing you couldn't just buy one of the original Mountain spaceships they had to be given to you freely. Sure it took a lot of energy to create one but really it was the time. Asteroid belts like those on Earth and the Kuiper belt here and beta Centauri had enough resources for us to bootstrap ourselves up though I hate that term.
And yes I know you're saying a startup guy hitting the term bootstrap. This must be some kind of joke and yes I'm here to say it is a joke. If it's a joke on the butt of the joke or the punchline. I never really got how to make humor work. Didn't mean I wasn't a sarcastic bastard. It did mean that I really enjoyed Levis trying to layer humor and jokes during our role playing games work. He really did try.
“The party arrayed themselves around Lady Steelheart. Her wound was Grievous and she didn't have long, ‘Keep those you trust close or in the end family is what you make of it save your friend if she means so much to you those who fight for you with you make a pirate's life worth living."
Our three player characters were all on very friendly terms with our once quest giver, and now that she had been violently shot, it was time for each of us to swear a blood oath. She’d been mortally wounded through her golem armor, in a cruel way, with Levi making sure that we got his reference to her being part android. The armor itself was her familiar, one that he had made oblique references to as a pet.
“All we really have in this cruel pirate life, is the crew we pick up along the way,” I said, trying to stay in character, “I swear to get vengeance for you, milady.”
“Lady Steelheart grasps your hands, ‘For such a pledge of loyalty, I must reveal the painful truth…’” The dungeon master said.
“We’ve known the whole time,” Stevie said, trying her best to be in character, “Your secret is safe with us… we knew that you used to be Lord Steelheart.”
His decision to drip that the Lady Steelheart was transgender was an allegory that we kept bringing up to Levi, but it did add just that extra kick of spice. The particular homebrewed flavor or his world didn’t allow for magic to be used to fix that particular issue, causing the non player character to have to hide their motives. How he had orchestrated the whole stealing ships as a metaphor for stealing an identity, and then one two punched us with the particulars really brought us all to the table with wet eyes.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Lady Steelheart looks fondly at you and then passes you a note. ‘You’ve made us a target, and I want you to do your best to get out of the situation. This is all that I’ve had. Don’t mourn for me, or what could have been, but do… give them hell.’”, Levi emphasized the last part, “Her golem turns into a pool of liquid metal, and it turns to you all expectantly. Do you want to bring it with you? Chibi eyes gaze up from it.”
“Why of course we’ll bring the murderous cute golem with us,” Kiernan said with glee, “Revenge will be a sweet thing now.”
We all chuckled at the idea of a golem with puppy dog eyes.
The problem with people who think that they know are that they are not always the ones that actually know. So when I designed the virtual reality interface for our system I passed from the latter to the former. As in, I couldn't just replicate the systems that worked in a zero gravity ideal white room scenario.
You know what sucks about the real world that you don't think about when you're designing something? Gravity.
Gravity is the real bugger here. I'm not one of those people that is going to ship you a shoddy product. No, and especially when I was working on software I wanted a functional item. If I was going to put my name on it, it damn certain was going to be quality. This perfectionism turned out to be a problem and I got to a place where I was okay shipping a beta product. It took me a while. Then I joined the Army trying to find some adventure and get myself into this particular situation.
Shipping a beta product to land on a planet's surface was a bit beyond the pale. Even as the ship engineering guy I was using a tried and true dropship to get us where we wanted to go. I wasn't going to be responsible for reworking that particular wheel, no thank you. The original Malcolm was hard at work on designing ships that I wasn't going to even try to touch. I had one advantage that he didn't though. With the actual bulkheads of what had to be a star faring species I would be able to update and refine some larger habitation projects. If I got my hands on some engineering assets I would probably be able to test and at least attempt to reverse engineer what we found. I trained as a civil engineer after being a software engineer. The size of cruise liners and moon bases were large enough that it ended up being in my wheelhouse, rather than some space architect. Honestly not having the infrastructure to create spacecraft the way I wanted to was the biggest hurdle between us and whatever species we were about to go and get really friendly with. Because good engineers borrow, but great engineers steal.
Hopefully then they would push their findings out to the larger community. But the way that things worked now, it would be a miracle if someone was somehow transported back to say the stone age and had to reinvent society. Actually doing it would be quite nearly impossible. Sufficiently advanced technology of the kind that we use now? It didn't just seem like magic, it effectively was.
And I was an android mancer.
Or at least I would be if the damn things could start to march to the beat of my drum.
So when the android testing began in earnest, you know that I made absolutely certain that my bots worked. The four that I had painstakingly made with the android models we found had proved to have a quite alien look and feel. The haptics while being in the suit also gave a lot of feedback that although I wasn't unfamiliar with, felt all new from the months of the biggest sensation being fake food and sometimes a fake aftertaste.
It was with reluctance that I let the boss play with my jumped up kids toys. She got the first dibs of course and although I didn't think that she had something to prove, I appreciated her enthusiasm.