Sixty Seven

Most good ideas are hashed out over the kitchen table. While they may appear in the shower or the car, the nuts and bolts of something always end up being worked out over a small kitchen table. The kitchen is a place of honesty which leads to productive discussions. There are knives and fire in there, so everybody has to be on their best behavior. Luckily, for Bird and Fyndraxis there was already an air of civility and cooperation between them. There was room for honest discourse.
They had sat down to dinner and prepared to have a couple of glasses of wine, and get to work hashing out the magic system that would be the future of humanity, and by the transitive property, the world.
“Okay,” Fyndraxis said, using his fork to twirl pasta in his spoon to make a perfect bite, “the Hunter units are garbage, I think we should change them. Maybe they should be little hexagons instead of little cylinders.”
“I don’t see a problem with that,” Bird had seen his pasta trick and was trying to replicate it. Forks and spoons were not unknown to her, but the finer points of their application were certainly new territory.
“And they can be more efficient. The original designers of the Wendigo had a very different set of priorities than we do. Also, they just used off the shelf designs they found on the internet. If we make them fifteen percent smaller than the Wendigo, that’s Mycellus’ cut right there,” he popped his perfect bite into his mouth.
“You want to design something from scratch?” She had managed to do the pasta bite trick, and it lay frozen in the air acting as a pointing device.
“Yeah, I think I do. But that is beside the point. The conversation we should really be having is about a magic system,” he chewed.
“What does that mean?” The bite found its way to her mouth, and her eyes lost focus while she enjoyed it.
“In any work of fiction like a videogame or a fantasy novel, the author needs to be able to explain all the cool shit that they can do in a logical way. There need to be rules. Here in my world, there are no rules. I can do whatever I want because I am the root user,” to demonstrate this Fyndraxis turned himself into a rabbit seated in an upside down top hat.
“See?” Said the rabbit, “this sucks and doesn’t make any sense. Most magic systems in things like video games operate on a point system. You get a certain budget of points that you can spend. After they are gone, you can’t cast any spells until you get more magic points somehow. In works of fiction like books there tends to be some kind of exchange or personal sacrifice. Something needs to be consumed.”
“That makes sense. Like the concept of work in physics. You put energy in and get work out. Can you stop being a rabbit? It’s very distracting. This is delicious by the way,” she had returned to twirling pasta on her spoon.
“I know, it’s unfortunately the best in the world, and I plan on changing that. Back to the magic system, what are we going to be consuming? The Wendigo?” Fyndraxis regained his normal human form, “what about when they are all gone and all we have are hunters?”
“Then the Hunters,” Bird Reasoned.
“Yeah, I guess so. But then magic would die. Ideally by the time that happens, humans would have rebuilt their society though. So it could be a good idea to have kind of an endgame scenario. I don’t think the Hunters would be consumed though. Unless you wanted to make something permanent, like a bridge or a house. Like using them as a big printer for infrastructure. At some point in the distant future, I guess we will run out of Hunters,” he had discovered his wine, it had been sadly neglected.
“Mycellus would be very pleased with that. This whole nano business is kind of an existential threat to him,” she also had a wine discovery moment.
“It works narratively too. In most fictional works, there tends to be references to an ancient age of high magic. Not that this needs to make sense from a narrative standpoint, but it is pretty cool,” he returned to his pasta and started twirling another bite. After his bit had been twirled, he noticed that it was identical in every way to the last bite that he had twisted up. Every piece of fettuccine was geometrically identical, the placement of each little piece of rendered pork jowl was the same, it struck him as very odd. Perhaps the act of crafting the perfect bite was pushing the envelope of his simulation, and it was having to cut some corners. He decided to test that out at a later date.
“I don’t really know what you are talking about, but sure,” she swirled her wine in her glass, summoning the spirit of some long dead sommelier.
“Like in the Bible or the Sumerian kings list where people lived for hundreds of years and there were giants everywhere and miracles happening all the time. Like the fucking age of the frost giants,” he had decided that he needed more parmesan in his life, so he got up from the table to grab some.
“I haven’t read those,” she called after him.
“You probably should, they might be myths left over from the last time somebody invented magic,” he had found the parmesan and made his way back to the table.
“I didn’t see any evidence of that in the memories that Mycellus gave me,” she gestured for more parmesan as well.
“Oh well, it was a fun thought. What about the interface?” He microplaned a generous pile of hard cheese onto his pasta.
“Like, how will people use it?” She also got the cheese treatment.
“Yeah. I don’t think I could make a nanite that could read people’s minds. That’s far too complicated,” he was back to twirling pasta now. He noticed that this was a different and unique bite.
“Magic words?” She dug through the mound of cheese to find the pasta that it concealed.
“Speech recognition would be computationally expensive, and I feel like it would be awkward to use,” he mused, a bite halfway to his mouth.
“You use that nanomancer software you came up with to control them,” she said, through a mouthful, “what’s wrong with that?”
“I use that on my computer. I think a more intuitive interface would be better,” his bite finally found a home in his mouth.
“Like what? Hand signals?” She gestured with her pasta fork.
“That gets back to the computationally expensive side of things. The nanites would use far too much energy trying to figure out hand stuff. Plus, I wouldn’t even know where to begin to program that,” he said, after another moment of wine discovery.
“Why not just give everyone a computer?” She reasoned, twirling more pasta.
“I could see access to an artifact leading to a stratification of society. That’s not really what I am going for here,” another perfect bite was entangled on his fork, this one being another unique phenomenon.
“What about a computer that comes when you call it?” She asked.
“Oooh, like a summoning. I like it. There could be an easy keyword that the hunters could listen for. That’s not too computationally expensive. A little computer could pop up and you could do your magic from there. Not bad. I’d have to gimp nanomancer quite a bit, it’s far too powerful for a public release,” he had gotten up from the table and was pacing with his wine, excited by the idea.
“Yeah, I don’t think we need a bunch of root user nanomancers running around causing havoc,” Bird remained seated, fully engaged by her pasta experience.
“Yeah, I’ll need to work on what sort of privileges a user has,” his pasta remained forgotten.
“Maybe something to restrict violence?” She was really getting the hang of this pasta trick and was running out of material to practice on.
“We’d have to define violence. That’s a tough one. We could possibly make the inside of a human body off limits. We could make it so nobody could block up somebody’s lungs with nanites and suffocate them,” he continued to pace and drink wine.
“Ugh, that would be awful,” Bird, finished with her portion, began to eye his plate.
“Yeah, that would completely suck. The technology is already there though. Your hunter armor knows where your mouth is and knows not to go inside it,” Fyndraxis had noticed her pasta deficit, and gestured for her to finish his.
“Somebody could still make a big sphere of nanites and drop it on somebody else’s head,” she slid his plate over to her side of the table.
“Yeah, I don’t think there is much we can do about misuse like that. I don’t know if we can even define it as misuse,” he returned to his seat, “let’s use the cannibals as an example. Imagine if Kevin had access to the hunters. That whole situation probably would have gone down way differently. He would have kicked the shit out of them if they didn’t know how to use the hunters, and if they did, he would have at least had a fighting chance at defending himself.”
“That poor fucking guy. So cannibals will be able to use this too?” The topic of cannibalism gave her a brief pause in her pasta annihilation campaign.
“Yes, but they will be unlikely to,” he refilled his wine from the carafe on the table.
“Why is that?” She took a second to do the same.
“I’m pretty sure they couldn’t read. Literacy will be key to using this technology,” he said as he studied his glass of wine, it had been white, but he changed it to red since he was done with dinner, “this will have the side benefit of disseminating literacy and critical thinking skills.”
“Critical thinking how?” Bird looked at her wine.
“Programming. These magic spells will be written in Python, or C, or Rust, or whatever. We’ll release it with some standard spells and tutorials and then people will write spells of their own,” he changed her glass from white to red as well.
“What kind of spells would they write?” She grabbed her new glass of wine and swirled it.
“I don’t know. Anything. As long as they don’t break any of the rules,” he said.
“And the rules so far are?” Her pasta had been eradicated, and she reclined in her chair.
“Only eat Wendigo, and don’t go inside anybody,” he recounted.
“I feel like there should be more rules,” she tried the red, and found it to her liking.
“Yeah, two is pretty light on rules,” he observed, a touch confounded.