on a lark

[alicornucopia]

She combs and combs the world aside and there is another world, just ahead, and she steps in.

The combed-away hole closes behind her. She puts her comb in her pocket.

Thanjen (Unbitwise)

Blueberry (kappa)

Hivers (Rockeye)

Comments

[wind_on_my_face]

“Sort of. Your body doesn't have a specific shape, and it doesn't have any rigid parts except for bones. If you want to say things stop after some motion, you have to say they stop relative to something else in particular, and the only way to do that that doesn't lead to hurting yourself or being unable to move is "this part of your body can only move so much relative to the part right next to it" — when I say part I mean like this patch of skin and the patch of skin next to it — and the result you get when you do that all over and smoothly is what I called a gentle reinforcement. It still makes you really tough, but if you did just that and tried to hit the sand like I did, you'd bend and flop instead of smashing the sand. You'd still be safe.”

[alicornucopia]

"And instead you just held all of you totally still, so you drilled through the sand."

[wind_on_my_face]

“I also had spikes on my feet so that they pushed the sand aside. If I hadn't done that I would have gotten just a bit of a crater instead, and not gone into the sand very much. But that difference is more about how sand in particular works.”

[alicornucopia]

"Okay." Pause. "When I have all my body can I change how it's shaped?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“You could get it to grow differently, a little bit, until you finish growing up, but doing that too much can hurt you.

“But if you want to be a different shape on the outside for a while, then it's easy to do that as long as you can fit inside the shape. You saw me being birds.”

[alicornucopia]

"But it'd be made of glass or whatever?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“Or whatever, yes, but you can still feel things through it. You can even make eyes and ears in different places, but you have to learn to use them.”

[alicornucopia]

"Whoa. Can those be glass or do they have to be different things?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“For an eye, you use glass for the lens, but you also need some kind of material that reacts to light quickly, like the retina in your regular eyes does. There's a few kinds that are available. For an ear, you want something that is naturally flexible and not brittle to make the parts that vibrate, so you use a little bit of plastic or metal.”

[alicornucopia]

"I want to make eyes and ears."

[wind_on_my_face]

“Okay, which should we start with?”

[alicornucopia]

"Eyes first."

[wind_on_my_face]

“Okay, I can show you how to make a slow eye and then you can improve it when you've gotten better materials — all of mine are in the eyes I'm using,” he says, waving at the ex-birds.

He takes some glass and something black from somewhere, and hands her half the black stuff. Presumably he expects her to claim it easily.

“You need something black to block out the light that's not coming in through the lens, and it'll also do for a slow sensor.”

He makes a hollow cylinder with a hole in one end and the other end solid out of the black stuff, and lets her look at the shape of it.

[alicornucopia]

She claims the black stuff. She inspects the shape. She copies it.

[wind_on_my_face]

“For the sensor, we make a fine grid of dots that aren't touching each other or anything else. The finer they are, the better you can see.”

Now there is a black fuzz at the far end of the cylinder, barely perceptible as being in a hexagonal grid.

“Then you make the lens. Since you haven't learned to see with this eye yet, open up the side for now and watch how the light falls on the sensor, then reshape the lens until it's as good as you can make it.”

He tweaks the sunshade above their heads to have a pattern of holes in it, then demonstrates holding his simple eye up to the sunbeams and nudging the shape of the lens until there are nicely in-focus dots.

[alicornucopia]

She follows along pretty capably.

[wind_on_my_face]

“Now just close it up, point it somewhere and keep it still, and pay attention to what you're feeling from the dots. If the sun is in view, that will be easier to notice at first.

“Since the plastic doesn't do anything in particular when the light hits it, it just heats up, this is really slow and it will blur if you move it.”

[alicornucopia]

She sets it up as directed. "How do you make a faster one, then?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“You use stuff for the sensor that does something other than just heating up. The kind I use makes a tiny bit of electricity out of the light, which you can feel just like you feel the heat.

“You could also improve the kind you have by doing something to make it cool down faster, but it still won't be fast enough to make a good eye.”

[alicornucopia]

"Why can't I just get water and... stuff... and make an eye out of that like a real eye?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“Real eyes are very, very complicated. Nobody knows how to make an eye from scratch, and if you did you would have to keep it alive with blood.”

[alicornucopia]

"I have enough blood for two eyes, maybe I would have enough for four."

[wind_on_my_face]

“There's still the problem of making the eye.”

[alicornucopia]

"Yeah. Won't I feel my own eyes and how they work when I get that far?"

[wind_on_my_face]

“You can't feel individual proteins, and you can't make them fit together right either. Animals are really, really, really, really complex.”