Chapter 170: I Leak Better

Monday, May 2, 2005

I woke up after the usual four hours and a handful of minutes, got dressed in the same sweats I'd worn last night, and eagerly had my delicious pre-breakfast pizza. Thus fortified, I drove my clean car to Julia's.

Getting dressed reminded me of yet another reason to get a mansion: it was a nuisance to have to drive my clothes back and forth to maintain a reasonable selection in both places. Admittedly that wasn't as important as having wild, unrestrained sex with dozens of Ducklings, Carol's friends or whoever else we wanted to invite into the privacy of our own home, but it would still be nice to have one less thing to worry about, if only because that'd leave more time for sex!

The Calculus assignment was under one of the keyboards, but I could ignore it until I'd finished another couple of lectures. I was just getting started when I remembered that I should practice the memory leak stuff again. I didn't expect practicing to help, but it would have been foolish not to. I understand so little about my abilities that there's always the hope that something good might come out of practicing. Not much hope, unfortunately. I'd been nonstop practicing projecting ki out of the top of my head (sometimes in other directions too, just to vary it), and I'd also been pushing walls and the ground almost continuously with my NP fingertips (an especially tedious activity), and there'd been no noticeable improvement in either ability. Probably my maximum NP force was up to 14.3 pounds by now, but that wasn't noticeable outside of a Physics lab. After three weeks of almost nonstop (while awake) practice of those two abilities, I didn't expect memory leakage to get better with so little practice over just a day.

Other things, like my body, have been getting rapidly better for the last couple of months with virtually no 'practice' (i.e., no relevant physical exercise). Other abilities, such as my having independent eyeballs, were impossible when I first tried them, then somehow became so easy that I started using them independently without being conscious of it. The general rule seemed to be that my mental abilities seem relatively unchangeable once I acquire them, while my physical abilities take much longer to develop and improve, which did not make me hopeful about improving the "Lack of Memory Leakage" problem. I tested it anyway, as it was such a big problem and the tests were quick.

I did a similar test to that of yesterday's, by picking a random word on a random page. We concentrated hard on sending and receiving the word, and it worked, just as it had yesterday.

I repeated the test, dialing back on the effort a little, to check that it'd fail now, as it'd taken damn near a maximum effort yesterday. To my surprise, the next word got through.

#1: <This is good! Let's try again with half as much effort.>

#4: <Nah, I'm bored. Let's read some online porn stories instead.>

#1: <{Raspberry}.>

We did it again, and succeeded again. Then with about a 20%-of-maximum effort (we subjectively guessed), which also worked.

#2: <Try no effort from the sender. That's ideally what we want. Look at a word, but don't try to send it.>

That failed. The group consensus was, <Bummer!>

A few more experiments, and we had it worked out. Both sender and retriever had to put effort into the process, but it was only about 10% of the effort required yesterday.

#4: <What does that mean to our college studies? We can now share knowledge far easier than we could before. 10% is sustainable, whereas yesterday's effort was so intense it was mentally tiring.>

#2: <I'm inclined not to worry about it. We could spend half an hour discussing it, and trying experiments using our college material, but why bother? It would all be invalidated if we continue to improve at this rate. Let's just wait and see what happens over the next few days?>

#1: <I was going to say that we need to practice, but this improvement didn't come from practice. There's a quantum difference between the two sessions, not a gradual improvement. Quite possibly we'll get further improvement without doing anything.>

#2: <If we do nothing, and get no improvement tomorrow, we'll go back to practicing, but I bet practicing isn't necessary. Don't ask me where the improvement comes from, but it doesn't seem to be from practice.>

#4: <We can practice during the day anyway, by sending little things back and forth.>

#2: <That's true, although it doesn't seem worth making a special effort for it when we can just wait to see if it's dramatically better again tomorrow.>

We started our studying.

[Because we were very motivated to have our memories leak, quite often during the day, when any two minds didn't have anything else to do, we practiced transferring memories. What we discovered added confusion to our lack of knowledge, as it got steadily easier, although "steadily" is a simplification. Occasional practice seemed to help, so out of curiosity we did no practice for a couple of hours, which did seem to result in a somewhat reduced improvement over that time. But if we practiced virtually nonstop for an hour, it didn't seem to have much more effect than a mild level of practice. ("Seem" is a key word, as making these judgments was problematic at best. The hourly changes were small, and our judgments of effort were entirely subjective.) After the few hours of experimenting, we pretty much maintained a small level of practice for the rest of the day. By the end of the day, if we had to put a number on it, we'd say the effort required was down to nearly a half of what it'd been at the start of the day, so from about 10% of maximum effort to about 6%.]

We finished the last lecture before the assignment, turned the assignment face up, and read through it. It looked easy. I'd thought it would, but it was a relief to have that confirmed. I decided to play safe by actually answering some of the questions. For the first time I used one of the programs on the main computer besides the browser - I fired up Excel and wrote a tiny spreadsheet to generate five random numbers between 1 and 25 inclusive (the number of problems in the assignment). I suppose I could've done every fifth problem, but I like playing with spreadsheets.

In you'll excuse a small digression, I had an idea for a spreadsheet that I was very much looking forward to writing. If we win in Vegas, I'm going to write a "Day Trading Profit Simulator", which will create my fake daily profit values, similar to what Julia had said. Starting small, with random fluctuations up and down while it trends up to a final value of just over $500,000 in a day (I'm assuming we succeed and that I do this after the last trip, so there's my share of $10 million to allocate to different days). I had some cool ideas for how I wanted to write it, but first we had to have some money to apportion.

I did the five problems, writing them up properly to give to Prof at breakfast. Doing just five didn't take long, so I was soon back to my normal studying.

Julia came in at her usual time. Snuggled into my lap and required me to wish her "Good morning" in a sufficiently thorough manner.

When we'd finished the kissing, she checked that everything was going well, the assignment was okay, and anything else she could think of to ask.

I had a few points of my own to mention, including telling Julia about Carol's modified plan to get Ava to push Carol into my arms.

"Into your bed," corrected Julia.

"Into my lecherous clutches." Which Julia thought was even better. She also thought Carol's plan was a good one, and agreed with starting it today.

I told her about Lily's washing my car, and asked her what she thought about Lily not driving legally.

Julia said, "I've got too many other things to work on, so I'm going to ignore it, other than making sure none of us ride in her car. I've told Mom and Dad, so they won't let anyone of ours be her passenger either."

"I'm surprised they don't do a lot more than that. They're going to let her keep driving that way?"

"They might; I didn't ask. They might talk with her parents about it on Saturday, but I've got too many other things to worry about."

"I won't worry then. For what it's worth, Pat says Lily is a reasonably good driver."

Julia just shrugged. "I'll go shower. You coming?"

#1: <Hmm, finish the lectures to a convenient point, or go have a shower with Julia? Decisions, decisions.>

I didn't need to write an Excel random number generator spreadsheet to help decide.

When she was laying out my clothes after our shower, Julia asked, "What clothes do you want to wear on your trip tomorrow?"

That took me by surprise. I could count on the fingers of one hand how many times Julia has asked me what clothes I want to wear, and still have several fingers left over. I'd have to double-check to make sure I didn't have six left over, that's how rare it is. Not to mention that tomorrow was a whole day away. Who thinks about their clothes that far ahead?

"Ahh, I haven't thought much about it."

"I suppose you'd wait until you were about to get dressed in them?"

"That's the usual process, yes."

"Haha..."

#1: <Why is Julia laughing? Cancel that, I don't want to know.>

" ... You're such a boy. What would happen if the clothes you wanted needed to be washed?"

"It's quite complicated, especially for so early in the morning, but I'll try to explain how it works. I'd either wear them anyway if they weren't too dirty, or I'd wear something else. Did you follow that? Sorry it was so complicated, haha. I'm only a boy, so I'm well aware that there are bound to be at least a dozen things wrong with what I just said. Aren't I lucky that I've got you to look after me?"

"Good save at the end there. For a while it sounded like you were heading for trouble, haha. With great difficulty, I'll resist the temptation to list all the reasons your answer is wrong. Let's get back to tomorrow's clothing choice?"

"The only thoughts I had on it was that I was WAY overdressed when we did our test visit. Judging from what I saw, people dress BADLY in casinos. I'm not going to be betting much myself..."

#2: <Which reminds me, we'll need to take some cash. We'd better ask Prof at breakfast how much we'll need.>

" ... so it'd be better that I don't look rich, because that'd make me stand out. Vegas is hot, so cool clothes would be good."

"Won't you be inside the casino nearly all the time?"

"We've got some things to do around town first. Open up a bank account at least. I don't know what else or how long it'll take. I don't want to wear shorts, because we'll be traveling down and back, and that could be too cold for shorts."

"Okay. How about black jeans, white T-shirt and the leather jacket? That'll be very different from what Dad will be wearing, so people will be less likely to connect you."

"Sounds fine. Just so long as the pockets aren't so tight that I can't get $1.75 million in, haha."

At breakfast I gave Prof the assignment and my answers, telling him, "All the questions looked easy. I chose five at random just to make sure. Would you have a look at them when you've got a moment, to see whether I'm on the right track?"

It only took him five moments to look at them immediately. "They're all correct, Mark. Good."

"It's no big deal. They're very basic questions. Straight out of the lectures, no tricky stuff or anything. I doubt anyone would have any difficulty with them."

"I know. They're only intended to make sure you're keeping up with the basic material. That's why I said not to bother doing all of them."

"Ahh, yes. Silly me for telling you how your own job is done."

"Yes. Maybe one day, when someone gives you some praise, you could just say, 'Thank you, ' rather than trying to downplay your achievement." Prof gave me just long enough to feel uncomfortable, before he added, "Although you are getting better at that." And then he went on to talk about the other course, checking where I was up to, whether I had any small questions, etc. Just the usual morning progress check-up.