why is there a word for that

[alicornucopia]

Finnah's just arrived at work to open the store for the morning shift; she has her apron on but hasn't put her hair up yet. She lets in the customer who always takes half an angle to determine that he wants four buttercreams, again, and then nips into the back to tend to her hair and check the overnight progress of the rock candy.

This isn't the back.

But that -

No, he's too tall to be Mial, if this is a Mial prank it's a stupidly elaborate one.

"Okay, I give up," she says, "what the hell?"

Comments

[thisvorlunatic]

"Ours is a war hero," says Miles. "It wouldn't be much of a stretch to call him the war hero, of his generation at least. And there was plenty of war-heroing to go around in those days."

[middlingalong]

"Dragons usually don't go in for much nationalism," says Aurin. "Even if we stay in the same place a really long time. It never occurred to me to join the Corenta military, say, because I might decide at some point to pick up my favorite possessions and tuck 'em and fly to Aveha. Aveha's nice, especially in spring. Uncle Avar's got a government job, though - I don't remember your title -"

"I'm in the Imperial Service," says Ivan. "Sort of the done thing for Vor. Do you even have a job?"

"Not like a career. I pick up tour guide work interpreting for foreign tourists who think they're going to teach themselves more than three words of Vansalese and don't get translation spells, sometimes. One time a girl talked me into spending six weeks as a fairground ride only to discover that it was not technically legal for her to pay employees in sexual favors, so I guess that was a job. I help out Mother now and again, I'm pretty good at that but don't want to work for her, might go into some unrelated kind of event planning." At Ivan's headtilt: "She sets up these charity events? Where rich people who don't want to just sign writs of transfer all congregate to give each other excuses to sign writs and show off for each other about how big the writs are. Sometimes she does other things but it's mostly that."

[on_my_word]

"I do the odd bit of translation and solve problems everyone else has given up on," says Avar. "My official job title is National Applied Policy Authority. Translation isn't usually attached, it's just a matter of 'does anyone in the office speak this language? well, the dragon had better'."

[alicornucopia]

"Are we going around talking about our professional lives now?" asks Finnah. "I work at a candy shop."

[isthisart]

"I could reasonably be summarized as an engineer."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I'm a covert operative," Miles says brightly. "And a mercenary admiral. And a courier."

"I'm an exile," snorts Stalas.

"I'm a scoot racer," says Mial.

[unmarred]

"I'm unemployed," says Mark.

[greatcomposure]

"And I'm a research wizard," says Koridaar.

[isthisart]

"I've already collected textbooks on one apparently portable form of magic. Anything I can import from you?"

[greatcomposure]

"Elcenian wizardry doesn't work outside of Elcenia. But I'm interested in your apparently portable magic," she says.

[isthisart]

"It involves a lot of complicated drawing and I have no substantial evidence that it can do anything you can't, except be relocated to other universes, but Bar will supply textbooks on it. What about non-wizardry magic?"

[alicornucopia]

"Generally you have to be born with those," says Finnah. "You'd probably know if you had any of the kinds."

[greatcomposure]

"Purely for my own curiosity, I think I'd like a set of textbooks," says Koridaar.

[isthisart]

The bar quotes a price in aaberik.

"I don't mind buying them for you if that would be meaningfully useful," says Linya.

[greatcomposure]

"Meaningfully useful... hm, yes, I think so," says Koridaar, nodding. "Thank you."

[isthisart]

"You're welcome."

"I take it people who can be reasonably summarized as engineers make a lot of money?" says Aurin.

"Well," says Linya, "that depends on a variety of things."

[middlingalong]

"Linyabel invented the holo-pen, hardware and software, and they sell like ice cream in summertime on Zoave Twilight. She has a pet neuroscientist."

[isthisart]

"Dr. Cheung is not my pet."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Someone explain 'neuroscientist' in more detail?" says Mial.

[isthisart]

"Neuroscience is the rather medical study of brains. Dr. Cheung does groundwork in uploading, which would be the instantiation of a person's mind in software; it's at least sixty years away, even optimistically, but if it works it could mean universal immortality, and depending on some other factors possibly resurrection of adequately stored deceased individuals. I pay him a salary, reimburse him for research expenses, and provide software support, and I'll pay his assistant too when he finds one he likes, because that seems very cheap for universal immortality."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Yeah, no kidding," says Mial. "Although I'm not sure 'software' sounds like a nice place to live."

[isthisart]

"Well, obviously that would require some work, in order for the uploaded individuals not to have to spend all their time in a featureless wasteland, but we've already got a lot of preexisting technology for connecting experiences to minds, mostly used for immersive fiction. Delivering experiences to an upload is almost certainly much easier than getting someone uploaded in the first place. Certainly all the tests will be on animals until we're extremely confident that uploaded people will not be better off dead. And if the virtual environment turns out to be very complicated or people simply don't prefer it, it should be likewise fairly straightforward to put them in robot bodies - or even figure out a way to clone blank brains and redownload them, although that's uncomfortably close to the current leading brand of functional immortality, which involves human sacrifice, and I'd want to be very sure no one would be tempted to take shortcuts with the downloading."

[unmarred]

"Thank you," Mark says dryly.

[thisvorlunatic]

Stalas squeezes Mark's hand and says, "I'm missing something here. Human sacrifice...?"

[isthisart]

"If someone wants to be immortal in the current state of technology, first of all they need to avoid sudden death in any situation that isn't amenable to cryopreservation and subsequent revival, and second of all, when they get very old or develop other intractable health problems, they commission clones of themselves, who grow at an accelerated rate to adulthood and are then murdered and receive brain transplants. This is not very popular and it's only legal on one planet, but it happens on a routine if not overwhelmingly frequent basis. Mark is a clone, just not for that purpose."