Kevin's Watch

The room Tanner led him to was identical to his office in Design, and held an identical chair. Tanner noticed his reaction to this, and explained, “The hardware has changed little from the models you are used to. The software, however, is quite different.”
He indicated a terminal on the wall and Simon moved over to stand near him as he tapped commands into the screen. Pieces of coding and diagrams flashed up on the screen as he spoke.
“There has been a complete overhaul of the way the software interacts with your cerebral implant. As a result, you should find connecting to the console a much more, ahem, pleasant experience.” He stopped tapping at the terminal for a moment and turned to Simon with a serious look. “You might be best advised, however, to avoid staying connected for extended periods of time. There will be no difficulty for you working your normal hours on the project, as long as you take a lunch break, but the new software can be, ahem, somewhat of a drain on your system.” The researcher returned to the terminal display. “That brings us to the most important change that has been made. The system no longer models itself as an analogue of the world we see around us. In fact, in order to make better use of the full capability of the human mind, the system architecture is modelled in several extra dimensions.” He pulled up another diagram, this one crowded with lines and notations, and Simon leaned closer to make out some of the detail of the image. “The human mind is perfectly capable of performing a number of operations at once. Often people make the mistake of thinking there are only two levels to our thought, the conscious and the unconscious, when in fact there are many variations of both.” Tanner’s voice was picking up speed, and he seemed to become more absorbed in the topic as he went. “To give a simple example, your mind can take in and analyse the information from your senses—what you see and hear as you walk across town, for example—while at the same time keeping an entirely unrelated train of thought in a separate level of your consciousness—this would be what can be called your inner voice, the part of the mind of which a person tends to be most aware.” He glanced at Simon to see if he was following. “There are even multiple levels to that part of the consciousness. A person can hear a piece of music in the morning, and have it running through his head for the best part of a day without interrupting his—ahem—usual mental activity.”
Simon had given up trying to follow the information flashing across the terminal screen, and instead listened only to the researcher’s voice, trying to come to grips with what all this meant. This was what R&D was working on? And successfully, if he believed what Tanner was saying. But what had his supervisor said yesterday? This will be the first time they’ve been put to full use.
He had the distinct feeling that he was being lied to.

Murrin wrote:For people who want to do something like NaNo, but without the tight pace:
community.livejournal.com/novel_in_90/profile
750 words a day, 90 days. I thought about joining in, but don't think I'll manage it.

Murrin wrote:Also, I need to learn to ignore the majority of people on the NaNoWriMo forums. Otherwise I find myself getting annoyed at the fact that, for example, most of the people in the fantasy forum don't even seem to be capable of grasping the concept of magic realism, contemporary fantasy, or just the whole area of speculative fiction in general. Note to self: don't try to hold random strangers to your own high standards.

Some gimp on the NaNo Fantasy Forum wrote:Kinds of magic systems involving writing/words?
Does anyone have some examples of ones that have been done that way? I'm thinking something where there are already words on, say, a sheet of paper, and you have to use them somehow.