Reconfigure (5 page)
Before putting her new UI plan into operation Roisin thought it best to explore the command set a little more. It was fun to move stuff around by remote round tripping to some super machine that had picked her for a ‘Command’ role. She started to realise that she was developing super powers. It was not as straight forward and simple as it could be. Her mind filled with images of comic book pages and lush CGI effects laden films. She recalled classic moments from the genre that had stuck with her, and every other geek, nerd and science freak. Most super heroes have to work to figure out the extent of their powers. Peter Parker didn’t know that the radioactive spider bite had transformed him. Tony Stark had to invent and create his Arc Reactor power source. Then he had to augment himself with all that cool robotic body armour along with JARVIS his AI assistant. It was a lot of work, trial and error. Her spider bite, gamma radiation blast or astral anomaly was in fact a dodgy Tweet. Not the most auspicious of beginnings but you can’t have everything can you? Besides, no one was going to be hearing about this any time soon. She could always tell a little white lie about the order things happened to save face. Whatever it was on the other end RC was a bit JARVIS like but she only had a CLI to it. She doubted Tony Stark would have bothered, he had all those cool blended reality interfaces to throw stuff around. Something to aim for with her upgrades, she smirked to herself.
Roisin started to make a list, on a piece of paper, with an actual pen. She usually reserved the paper for printouts and wrote directly on her light coloured desk. She would use a pencil or dry wipe marker. It was the same principle as a whiteboard but quicker and easier than standing up and going to her board, with its ghostly residual scrawls. If she had worked in one of those regular shared office cubes or hot desk environments, the strategy of jotting things down on ‘short term table memory’ wouldn’t have worked. The cleaners would have wiped it like a magnet on a hard drive. She was glad she worked in her own space and could do things her own way. She had a list of commands, plus the Linux that she knew and love-hated. She had already tried some of the higher level commands, many in the Marmite gathering.
She added what she knew in the gaps between the list items.
Attach
x
Detach
x
Examine
Meta and compound data
Load
works
Translate
Relative or Absolute
Transform
x
Join
x
Save
works with slots
Split
x (Though used it indirectly?)
Zone
Range and context with coords
She was going to need some test objects, things that she was not too worried about. Losing the mug was sad as it had reminded her of the lost weeks binge watching Breaking Bad. She had watched it streaming to her good old fashioned HD TV set. It wasn’t the only boxed set she had blasted through. It was very much the thing to do. Some people even managed to schedule remotely, with friends, to watch the same boxed set at the same time. Roisin wondered about the youth of today. Not that she was very old herself! She wondered if these terms borrowed from a bygone age would stick forever. Boxed sets of physical media made sense, ‘own the entire series’ was proudly stamped on old VHS video tapes, then on DVD and Blu-Ray sets in the shops. Now most people just used online streaming. Either paying corporate providers or torrenting entire series, usually before they had been released officially. There was a lot wrong with the media publishing model as the middle men and producers tried to find their cut. She was drifting into an internal rant at the disparity in the World. She snapped herself back to the RC task at hand. She wondered if any of the commands she had available could be chained together just to make the World a better place? Roisin thought she best concentrate on a smaller task. She realised she probably could actually boil the ocean, and even Translate an elephant into the room. She was going to have fun with her analogies and similes with this new plaything.
Test subjects one and two were in easy reach of her desk. T1 was a small orange plastic cover that had been on top of an ink cartridge. It was mostly a flat plastic rectangle, a few centimetres long, it lay horizontal. In that position it looked like an abstract version of a dog playing dead with its legs in the air. The thinner plastic spindles and panels reached up where they had previously held the ink port shut on the cartridge. It was a small enough object to test with, of no value now, but a complex shape. It would be useful in understanding what went right or wrong with anything she tried. T2 was another simple shape but with different properties. It was a ten pence coin, made of metal. She now had plastic and metal, orange and silver, square and round objects. She had some building blocks to play with. Primitives, like any game development system or virtual world.
“Right let’s see how RC does with this.” She mumbled. She placed the widget cap and the coin next to one another on a clear space on the desk, about where the mug had originally been yesterday. The stained circles helped frame the positions of the test subjects. She turned to her keyboard, made sure the Twitter DM had focus, and typed.
“ls”
The description came back.
@rayKonfigure
Bookshelf
Cap
Ceiling
Chair
Coin
ComputerDevice1
ComputerDevice2
Door
Doorway
Floor
Human
Phone
Power
Printer
Table
Wall1
Wall2
Wall3
Wall4
Window
She narrowed the range
“Zone -S Range=<1.0,1.0,0.3>”
It was confirmed.
@rayKonfigure
Zone set Human <1.0,1.0,0.3> <1.0,1.0,1.0>
She typed again.
“ls”
She received a new list from RC.
@rayKonfigure
Cap
Chair
Coin
ComputerDevice1
ComputerDevice2
Human
Phone
Power
Table
That had narrowed it down nicely. The Zone of interest now had fewer things to list and for her to worry about. The doors and windows were no longer anywhere in the potential blast radius.
Roisin followed her plan and typed.
“Examine Coin”
RC responded.
@rayKonfigure
Designation - Coin
Static Composite Object
Contents
Cu 75%
Ni 25%
Fractal Location - <3800.36,74.3,23.1>
Fractal Orientation- <0,0,0>
Fractal Iteration Level - <2709>
It surprised Roisin on multiple levels. Her brain tried to decide which was the most interesting. Firstly, that this stuff worked at all! She was sending DM’s and getting detail about the World around her. This was way better than a phone assistant app telling her the weather would be wet tomorrow. Secondly, the Coin, it was known as a Coin not just a flat metal disc or something nondescript. Thirdly, and she decided this was the best of the best, it told her the chemical composition of the metal coin instantly. She thought of the various labs around the World with their expensive mass spectrometers. Each firing ions at objects and trying to collect the results with complicated sensors. She could do that with a Tweet. Ha! Take that!
Roisin looked up the 10p coin on Wikipedia. There were a lot of odd things and hacks on Wikipedia but in general the super pedantic contributors made sure everything was ship shape. There was no reason for some sock puppet account to mess with a page about 10p. There it was, the 10p coin page. Since 2012, they have been made of nickel plated steel. Roisin noted her coin was 75% copper, that would make it pre 2012. She picked up the coin and flipped it around to find the date, 1992. Now that is a cool magic trick she thought. ‘Sir can you take a handful of coins from your pocket, now look at the date on one.’ Magic wobbling of fingers and ‘I predict it is pre 2012 am I right Sir?’ Thunderous applause. Drifting again! Roisin got back to the next test. She typed.
“Examine Cap”
RC replied with yet more detail.
@rayKonfigure
Designation - Cap
Static Chemical Compound Object
Contents Components
C10H8O4
Fractal Location - <3800.29,74.3,23.1>
Fractal Orientation- <0,0,0>
Fractal Iteration Level - <2709>
Things were getting atomic and complex. This was giving a different level of detail. It was now a ‘Chemical Compound Object’. The level of detail on the coin seemed to be its parts, more easily separated. This was some formula for a plastic? It would be a poly something or other. Big test time, she thought. She entered her command and hit send.
“Join”
RC gave some details back, not sure of what she was asking.
@rayKonfigure
Join - No parameters specify object1, object2, orientation ,offset, level
Roisin considered the other similar command and typed.
“Attach”
Another similar reply came back from RC.
@rayKonfigure
Attach - No parameters specify object1, object2, orientation ,offset, absolute/relative
“It may be a good idea to look at the manual.” Thanks boring brain regulator you are no fun. Roisin relied on the edge of the seat and serendipitous problem solving that came from second guessing and feeling the answer. Here Attach and Join were looking like doing the same thing. All she could do was refer to what she knew. In 3D modelling there were all sorts of ways to express the shape and texture of a model. The most common was a mesh of triangles. You put enough triangles together across an undulating surface and you have a nice smooth object. Then you tell those triangles to take a colour or a material style. You might use the skinning technique, whereby a picture is wrapped around the mesh like wrapping a present where you can still see the shape of the gift. These wrappings always looked a bit odd unwrapped as flattened out they looked like a steam roller has gone over them. Mathematically warped back over the surfaces made the computer rendering of the objects look real. More recent advances had let to PBR, Physical Based Rendering. Rather than painting an object it is actually told that it is made of the colour and of the material that the model is representing. If it is reflective, then tell it how reflective. Roisin gave this a speedy mental once over. In the mesh world of 3D a Join breaks the meshes of two objects at a seam and makes a new object. It melts one into the other. Attach, on the other hand, is simpler. It makes one object move with another, they are separate entities, they have their own properties but if one moves so does the other. The attachment can be mutual, with equal weight or a parent child where the primary object is the ‘boss’. It is standard gaming and virtual world behaviour. She saw no reason for this to be any different. Despite seemingly breaking the laws of physics making things disappear and fly around she had to base something on a model she understood.
Attach is probably not destructive and Join, well could be a bit more tricky she thought. Roisin typed.
“Attach Cap Coin -absolute”
The response did not indicate any problems.
@rayKonfigure
Attached Cap Coin <0,0,0> <0,0,0> absolute
She had not specified the relative parameters and orientation, but absolute sounded the most interesting to try. She had defaulted everything to 0. She looked at the coin and the cap and there seemed to be no change. They were at rest on the table, observing Newtonian physics. No force had been applied for an equal and opposite reaction. Roisin reached for the coin. She had a small buzz of confusion as her model of the physical world glitched. She had her finger tips gripping the coin but it was as if it was superglued to the desk. She slowly widened her pinched fingers like a prize grabbing crane at a seaside amusement park. She raised her hand and moved it across to the printer cartridge cap. She made contact, gingerly, with her thumb and index finger. Delicately she raised the cap up just a few millimetres. Her hand was shaking, something that transferred to the cap. It felt as light as normal. The 10p coin was now floating the same height above the desk and wobbling in time with the cap and her hand. They were separated by a few centimetres of clear space. She lifted the cap further above the desk. The coin moved in perfect synch. Turning her wrist over the coin orbited in space around the cap. Moving the cap towards her face, but just to the side, she was able to float the coin into focus, and see the Queen’s head smiling across at the cap in her hand. She turned her hand back to its original position. She was mesmerised by the floating coin. It was still obeying some of the laws of physics, but in a very odd way. She released her grip and the cap and coin clattered to the desk. They hit at the same time but made 2 distinct thuds. I guess that’s a parent child attachment then? She proposed to herself.
She typed again.
“Detach Coin Cap”
RC replied.
@rayKonfigure
Detached Coin Cap
She put her index finger on the coin and gave a little push. Pleasingly it slid away and stopped. Balance had been restored to the Force, thought Roisin. She couldn't help but consider the parental relationship of the cap and the coin. The cap would be able to say to the coin, “I am your Father!"
She looked at her list. She put a tick next to Attach and Detach. Roisin added that Attach had relative and absolute parameters. She pulled the coin back to its pre-flick position for run number two. She wanted to see what it could tell her about the relationship using Examine.
She re-typed.
“Attach Cap Coin -absolute”
RC reconfirmed.
@rayKonfigure
Attached Cap Coin <0,0,0> <0,0,0> absolute
