Soul Bound

1            Soul Bound

1.1          Finding her Feet

1.1.5        An Inscrutable Mastermind

1.1.5.3      The Burrow

Her reverie was interrupted by Minion’s voice in her ear:

[Nadine, you have a response from Wellington, shall I play it to you?]

{Yes.}

The voice changed to Wellington’s: {Are you asking how to infiltrate the police systems to find out if human authorisation is required before the remotes take violent action, or do you have a different concern? I’m sending you a link to our group site, The Burrow. Post a clarification of your query in the private forum area.}

Short and to the point, with no additional courtesies. She knew he was capable of them. He just didn’t see the point, usually. It probably worked fine, when he was interacting with stock exchange software in arlife. But how to get him to change mindset inside Soul Bound, where other traders had emotions and personalities? If only she could frame the problem in a way that clicked for him. She put the thought on the back burner.

{Minion, do you have credentials for me to connect to The Burrow as Kafana? If so, please do it.}

A picture of a small green hill, with cartoons of their six avatars poking out of various holes, waving welcome, appeared on the drip cloth. Obviously Alderney’s work - she’d added tiger ears to her avatar, and a twitchy striped tail. The picture blanked as a customer came over and she refilled his coffee. She had to remember to smile at him. Damn, she wasn’t used to multi-tasking like this. She preferred to give her full attention to whoever she was with. She’d spoken to her customers earlier about having the power to control which technologies you accepted and which you rejected. Well, did she want to change how she split her focus while being the host, or did she want the technology to adapt to her pattern?

{Minion, thank Wellington for his reply and say I’ll respond later when less busy. Then set my status to “busy with customers” and use your judgement on what to interrupt me with, and what to notify me about when I’m less busy.}

She spent the afternoon happily keeping her customers content. She liked the game, but she also liked her role here. It kept her connected to her roots. Part of a community that accepted her. Centered.

She withdrew to the kitchens, in the lull before supper, and composed a reply:

Wombles,

The police have far more information about me and my customers, than I have about them. I don’t know their composition, disposition or capabilities. I don’t even know their numbers, let alone what they’re up to, or who is in the pay of whom. Is there any way to tell if my local forces are gathering information relevant to narrowing down who Kafana is, or have me under surveillance? Are there any good ways to plant misinformation or otherwise hamper the informational asymmetry?

Kafana

Alderney replied first: “I can send you a few drones, designed for surveillance and counter-surveillance. Risker, but also useful to have in reserve, would be drones equipped for black-ops such as sabotage or laying false clues. Basically, though, if the authorities suspect you enough to search your place, you’re done for. What might be useful is something to guard against extra-legal forces sent by a corporation or wealthy individual.”

Wellington added to the thread: “Kafana, you can create additional expert systems by asking your tiara to spawn them, then giving them a name and purpose. I suggest you accept Alderney’s offer, and spawn a system to recognise the local patterns and notify you if they change suspiciously. Build up your own database. It will have a fair chance of noticing if the authorities start bribing or threatening one of the locals, just through voice stress indicators.”

Bulgaria added: “If you know anyone local that has an ‘in’ with the authorities, send me their details. I have some contacts who may be able to put them under additional surveillance, and follow up the chain.”

Bungo: “Maybe you should develop a skill or personality for your velife avatar that is incompatible with your known arlife profile, so that no matter how much in-game stuff we broadcast, you won’t be a good pattern match? We can put together a tiger-team system that continually calculates profiles for your online and offline personae, based on the information the enemy would have, and keeps you informed of how well or badly they match.”

Wellington: “Try to keep your in-game music and cooking as varied and international as possible. Dot around the globe. It helps that you speak English online rather than Bosnian, and I’ve fuzzed your accent.”

She looked at some of the other threads.

Bungo and Alderney were debating the ‘correct’ recipe for Greek Fire. Alderney claimed that making authentic Greek Fire was impossible because the process had been lost; only a list of ingredients remained. Bungo championed his personal mix of naptha, calcium oxide, sulphur, quicklime and pine resin. He used an expert system to evolve a succession of improved recipes via testing them in a simulation, and claimed he’d now got a version that matched all known properties of the original. The secret, he said, was in getting the mix to the correct temperature, and adding only just enough water to keep it self-sustaining. Alderney argued back that, just because two things were indistinguishable from one point of view, that didn’t make them identical. If she couldn’t tell the difference between Bungo and an expert system imitating him, would that make it ok to kill off the original Bungo?

They reminded her of Jasic and Cosic. She smiled.

The next thread was from Bungo to her, on the subject of gelato. He gave a load of numbers connected to the proportions of air and fat created by various recipes and ingredients, and a formula linking size of ice crystals to speed of mixing and method of cooling the mixture down. It looked like he assumed she was already using expert systems to create recipes, rather than doing it all herself, and wasn’t intending her to actually read all this stuff. She replied:

Thanks Bungo,

I’m not sure whether I’ll find cooking as satisfying if I use an expert system to do all my experimentation. And that means viewers won’t find the process as fun to watch. Also, I’m not sure what effect enhancing ingredients using magic will have upon the proportions to use for a recipe. So rather than trying to calculate everything exactly in advance, how about you and Alderney design a system with sliders that allow the cook to directly vary the acidity, sweetness, frothiness and stuff? Leave some flat spaces that Wellington can use for rune diagrams. If nothing else, on hot days we’ll want to give the kids a way to alter the end product to have a higher melting point. Do we want to put a buff effect in the gelato? It affects which ingredients we can use, and I’m not sure if any of the kids have a high enough affinity to cast the spell, let alone the mana or training.

Kafana

Bungo was also involved in a discussion about monks with Tomsk and Wellington. It looked like he was spending a lot of time on this. What was he up to in arlife? He’d been a bit evasive when they’d asked him a few days ago. Then again, she’d no idea what Bulgaria was doing either.

Tomsk,

I’ve visited my monks again this afternoon. They’re doing surprisingly well down in the sewers. They’ve emptied a large chamber of rubbish, to make a living area, though I don’t think they sleep. Their meditation now gives them back health, mana, stamina and exhaustion. They spend their entire time in accelerated time mode, because they never talk or interact with others except when I visit them.

I made simple brooms out of the sticks that float down here from the river, and talked to them about mindfulness - being aware of the environment around them and the insides of their heads, but letting it flow through them with no self-consciousness disturbing the natural flow. I demonstrated how to use sweeping as walking meditation, how to aim at moving in harmony with yourself and your environment, each sweep efficient and leaving beauty behind it. That’s the exercise the monk trainer on Divine Mountain insisted I master to pass a stage of refining my Qi, so it probably won’t do them any harm.

I’d like to teach them the Chen-style of Tai Chi’s 71 step spear form. Any suggestions on how to go about it?

Bungo

Tomsk: “Teach them the pushing hands exercise first. Get their stance and balance right.”

Wellington: “Do you want them to fight as a group or solo? From what I’ve read, some martial arts moves in game are formation based and only possible with several people working together, passing the correct sort of elemental energy to each other at the correct time in the correct pattern, forming a circuit diagram similar to those in runic magic.”

Bungo: “Work as a group while they’re learning together. They can always go on individual journeys later, if they want to improve their solo abilities. I’ll guess I do pushing hands with them next, then see if they can direct energy from their hands to each other when they make contact.”

Tomsk: “Sounds a plan. I’ve got some books from Lelio on formation fighting. I’ll see if they have anything relevant there, and maybe try a few things out ourselves tomorrow. Hey, Kafana, you up to becoming a magic battery to allow the rest of us to shoot pretty glowing lights at each other from our fingertips?”

She giggled and replied:

“Sure, but stop if I say stop. I don’t want to go into mana shock again.”

She created another thread of her own:

Bungo, if you’re about town, can you drop by the Speckled Dove and ask Columbina on my behalf if we can buy some nibbles from her tomorrow morning that are designed to buff skill levels, particularly crafting? Alderney has an enormous list to tackle, and since buffs stack if they are not the same type and source, we might as well make the best use we can of the jewellery from Harlequin. Wellington, you’re keeping track of the money we got. How much would it be worth our spending on food that buffs travel speed, crafting speed or combat related stuff? Optimisation problem for you. :-)

She had more thoughts to add, but she could hear the liquid nitrogen and gelato machines being delivered. Enough dawdling. She’d accept the delivery and see to its installation, then go sing for a few hours. If she was lucky, by the time she closed for the evening there’d be enough nitrogen in the storage for one try at a recipe.

{Minion, study the books I’ve got, send copies to the others, and ask for copies of theirs. Logging off.}

She took off the earrings, and left.