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Save Point: Variable Overclocking

The House Of Life, Khem

"What do you think you're doing?" exclaims Zair, not with shock but with genuine concern, as Sethkill starts taking apart his backup generator. It's not so much a process of engineering as of patching together several different devices that were never meant to co-exist, including a nano-filiament manipulator designed to intrude non-destructively within the body from a dangling squid-like umbrella that can be stretched out wide to fit over, or elongated thin to fit within, the body-parts in question. There are several different control routines, all entirely virtual, that were never really intended to share but have been written from the same default templates. They can be persuaded to talk to one another but there really isn't enough time.

"Something incredibly stupid," sighs Sethkill. He should have gone along, he should be there, but didn't and now there's no time left. "Also illegal. So don't ask me where I learned how to do this. Do you have any orme?"

"Sethkill..."

"Do you have any orme or not? My need for it at this point is purely legitimate, as it will vastly increase my chance of surviving this."

"....I confiscated some last week from a patient who was overdoing it. For quite purely medical reasons of course, she was taking far too much."

"Get it and start filling the tank. The big one, the life support one that Subrek put the fishes in that time. If my guess is right we may need to be putting some fires out very quickly. Do you have any flame retardant?"

Zair returns from some back-room hiding place with the folded and twisted piece of paper that traditionally holds orme, the geometry supposedly helping to keep it fresh, and pushes it into Sethkills free hand while he rushes over to start the mass feed that fills the tank. Although Sethkill doesn't know it specifically, Zair used to work at a trauma center and is used to doing inexplicable things on a rush basis, so being talked to like this doesn't annoy him, in fact if anything it sets him loose. In situations like this he has purpose.

Sethkill unfolds the paper, estimates the amount, and then, with a silent apology to Keselt for former criticisms, splits it into two very large pinches and snorts it in through his ears, then inhales the remnants of stray powder left caught in the folds. The world becomes burningly crisp and very sparkly.

Somehow this makes it all easier. The squid allows itself to be persuaded to accept the small backup generator as a voltage supply for all those purposes the current would normally fulfill, such as taking readings and applying electrical cauterization if required. He very much hopes it won't get that far.

Zair slides the lid back from the tank as it fills. There are three multi-purpose plinths placed side by side to one another out in the clear sunlight of the main receiving room, each designed as a multi-function medical device to act as an examining table, emergency bed, mortuary slab in case someone gets killed, and storage drawer if the remains need to be examined later. The bundled support infrastructure associated with the underside of the devices, which includes maintaining warmth or cold, supplying oxgen and intravenous nutrients, and the removal of waste, means that they can flooded with breathable fluid and turned into a comprehensive life support system, or if you're Subrek and have a misplaced sense of humour, a giant fish tank filled with nilotic perch. It was a real wonder he hadn't added some baby crocodiles.

Things have been quite quiet, really, since they reached this world and so he's configured the lids of the two outer plinths to act as highly efficient solar cells, with the layered blue-grey leaf-like microstructure that gives the best performance, whilst leaving the inner one at its examination table default. Of course, someone might wander in and catch an eyeful of another patient being examined, but they're all grown up here and mostly know each other quite well, and really the room looks so much better without the thin dividing screens set up all over the place to divide it into separate spaces.

All of this is far from Zair's mind now as he stacks the now-surplus lid against the wall of the back room with the other dividers and then goes looking for anything that might categorize as a flame retardant. There are various substances he could program into the mass-feed, just about anything really, but the designed content of the breathable tank liquid is quite well established and he's not completely sure what's safe to mix with it here, since this particular issue has never come up before. After some practically instantaneous research in the clear glass pane that serves as his desktop terminal, he decides on ammonium polyphosphate, then decides to speed things up by making it separately using the smaller assembler in his office that normally compiles hot beverages into a large clear graduated flask. It's really intended for making medical-grade nano-suspensions, in which the active fluid volume is important and so sometimes you need to swig down a decently large quantity to get the best effect, but like the plinths it hasn't been needed much and so he's turned it into a drinks dispenser.

The thick green liquid starts to spill out into the flask from two separate but closely placed nozzles. Some things you don't want to mix until they're done, and this way he can throw the contents of the flask directly on the flames if necessary.

Back outside in the main room, Sethkill has finished his creative rewiring and has plugged the generator output, which includes the batteries that store and redispense energy from the solar cells, into the back of the squid using two separate cables to complete the circuit. Normally the squid is a wireless device, purely for conveniences sake, but it still has a couple of generic ports on the back of it to get it working if something should break, or if it needs to be used for something it was never programmed to do. Sethura technology is sufficiently well-developed that a lot of it runs off several generic connectors, each of which both supplies power and runs a specified amount of bandwidth at the same time. Since most things run on relatively small voltages, as a consequence of their highly efficient engineering, it's rare that a device requires more of one than the other, and you can always just plug in more cables. The ports are scaled in a convenient manner so the physically larger ones represent more power and bandwidth than the smaller ones.

Reasonably confident that this will probably work, mostly due to the orme, Sethkill stretches out the squid and slaps it onto his head like a more sophisticated version of the netted weaves that have become popular whilst mingling with the locals. The tendrils align themselves, then push slowly point first into his skin for a short distance before deploying the filiaments, which literally start to slide inside his skull. It's kind of stingy.

"Have you ever heard of neuro-energistics?" asks Sethkill, literally wired. "It's a really stupidly dangerous discipline that was completely banned after they designed a totally wireless neural clip. Early versions of the weave technology involved actually infiltrating your brain to provide the necessary input, like a cythura. Which did work, but you really don't want your nervous system connected directly to an electrical supply. Because it's very much not safe, obviously. Only there's always someone out there willing to do something really stupidly dangerous, and it turns out that you can overclock your own brain provided you get the voltage right. It works even better if you're doing reality manipulation, because you can use up any excess energy to stabilize the process. Until of course you burn out."

"Why are you doing this?" demands Zair. "I heard about that! It was a couple of centuries ago now, but people died! Students, if I remember right. They used it to study impossibly hard and amp up their reflexes in online games until they literally fell over. They forgot to do little things like eating and drinking!"

"I've learned how it works," concludes Sethkill grimly. "I keep seeing it night after night in my dreams, my own brother attacking me, doing something that didn't just burn my arm off, it actually erased it from existence. It won't grow back because it's never there. Which is enough to give anyone nightmares, but now I have this," he says, waving the sleekly compact ceramic prosthesis, "I've had time to think about it and see what he was doing. It happens very slowly in my dreams, all in slow motion, and so I've had plenty of time to watch the gestures, all of his expressions, the bit where he palmed a small amount of something that looked like orme only it was kind of the wrong color. He cheated, if something like that makes any sense. He doesn't have the skill to pull off any of the things he's doing under his own power, so he's just cheating. I could do all the same things he could if I had enough power. So that's what I'm going to do."

"Uh... as your attending physician, I am obliged to warn against this and advise you to contact a post-traumatic stress therapist," says Zair, taking refuge in formalities and listening in total amazement to the well-practised drivel coming out of his own mouth. "You are clearly under a great deal of stress and not thinking clearly."

"I got some of it in me, you know, when he took my arm off. Not enough, not nearly enough, but it showed me how. So now I'm going to help my friends."

Before Zair can stop him, he turns the power back on and _stiffens_behind the console.