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Post by Gatekeeper on Oct 17, 2018 8:45:32 GMT -8
This is going to sound completely insane, and Seshat briefly ponders not doing it at all. She's reluctant to hand Shamsa over to the authorities, and even more reluctant to offer them the knowledge that she can truly interact with the shards at a level henceforth thought impossible.
She starts idly querying the SRI database, studying as she sits and stares at the woman in the coffin.
In the end, though, her curiosity, her need to understand the deepest secrets of the universe, is too much to bear.
She starts rattling off compounds even as the fabs kick into gear. This is going to take a couple layers. Symbols carved into disks of material and placed around the coffin - she spends at least an hour just marking down the placement.
Like with Zosime, it looks fucking arbitrary, but there's a pattern deep down. Listen to the music, see the shard in your head, and let your hands figure out where to place them, not your body. It's Zen, in a way.
This is more complicated. With Zosime, she had to anchor the broken shards like a dentist does bracers or a doctor does shattered bone, to slowly let them drift back together until they heal.
With Shamsa, the process is ten times as complex because she's, in her head at least, creating a supportive environment for her to persist without dissociating. Once the coffin is "reinforced" she begins work on an environment suit using similar principles.
None of her Infrastructure goes into this, interestingly, no more than it did Zosime's suit. In a way, she's building something opposite to it - with her Infrastructure, it has to be placed on appropriate media in order for her artificial shards to be lasting and effective. With this, she's already got the shard, she's just creating the medium by which it can exist.
In the end?
She doesn't create a body suit.
She creates a body.
It's made out of carbon fiber and does, in fact, use small amounts of her Infrastructure. These signs offer it a false life similar to her Ahlat, even if it's made out of lightweight advanced material instead of stone, and the skin and limbs look and feel almost real, able to bend in all the ways humans can. The mind, though, is empty - instead, she's cast a skull out of rare platinum group metals and embedded it with others and receptive crystal diodes. The inside is like someone printed a circuit board, because she did.
If it weren't for her implant she'd have no idea what time it is, because she's worked as if in a fever state. It let her think about shards and what goes into them, recording the thoughts produced by her bio-brain.
In a way, she feels a flash of pride at one thing: not even a clone could take her exact Seed. There are prenatal development differences in how one's internal organs develop that are impossible to replicate, barring some sort of power that allows a person to be recreated cell-by-cell. In order for someone to share her exact Seed, they would need their internal geometry to exactly match hers.
Of course, the other option would be to create a shard exactly like hers and then invest it into an infant - then they would grow up with their own expression of it, rather than an exact copy.
That's a nice realization - even when she "steals" someone's power, she's not really. She's copying function, but the exact expression is individual.
"Done as we're going to get," she informs R&D. Sometime during the process he went to bed and came back, but she hasn't slept. She had to tell her mother that there was a national security issue and she wasn't coming home for the day.
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