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Ariel is coming up on her initiation in the Whores Guild. Sometimes characters have a mind of their own. I had planned a relatively short initiation scene, followed by a lunch where some of the characters get together to celebrate and explore what it all means.
But the characters had a mind of their own. It's a huge transition for Ariel, something that she's been working toward for almost half a month in game.
And if she's going to be initiated, someone's got to do the initiating. It's someone we've met before, but not someone who has gotten a lot of time in front of the reader.
So, I started thinking more about back story. And thinking about the ritual.
What is a big powerful sex magic transition ritual going to be like in this world? Well, it's going to be kind of scary, putting all that power into a single ritual. And a mage who can initiate an entire class of trainees is going to have some interesting challenges to face.
And so, I realized that Ariel will soon face one of the most powerful aspects of her guild. And it's not going to be easy.
By this point in the story, I think we all know what happens when Ariel faces something that isn't easy. She looks at it, considers for a bit and says "Charge!"
And one of these days she's going to charge ahead and fall flat on her face. Will it be today?
We'll find out in chapter 19.
In chapter 16, Ariel will take questions from her fans for the first time. Do any readers have questions they're hoping she would answer? I realize it's kind of meta to collect questions from readers for a character to answer, but it might also be kind of fun.
If questions don't make it in for this fan chat, there's another toward the end of the month.
Also, for those who have been wondering about the interface and how the VR works in the world, chapter 16 is for you. The chapter ended up being written before the most recent round of comments. On my read-through before submitting it for proofing, I realized that it's been discussing a lot of issues that the readers have been exploring in the comments though. So, there will be some great hints for you all Tuesday.
I know I said we would have a break until Feb 4. But I just posted a short chapter 11. This serves as a final transition between part II and Part III.
There will be a longer chapter Tuesday, and there's a bit of a surprise in that chapter about how the story goes.
As always, any feedback you provide is most welcome.
Last week, Ariel learned the big secret: the Whores Guild was formed as a place of safety where NPCs could sell themselves on their terms, rather than facing the ravages of the players.
She still wants to be a whore, but she knows for her it is just play. For them, it may be the only safety the have. Is it fair to intrude on that refuge?
This week, she learns what the emotional cost of that intrusion will be.
Sometimes, when you are writing, the characters jump out of the page and grab you. You are touched by the power of their story. It becomes bigger. The chapters last week and this week were like that for me.
I hope you like it: this is some of the best work I have ever done.
Chapter 6 is in the queue. We get a glimpse into how the world works and a chance to meet the creators of the game in this chapter.
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Building a gamelit world is both fun and challenging. This chapter gives me a bit of a chance to geek out as I get a chance to speculate on the distributed system challenges that would drive the design of a virtual reality game. Two interesting research findings stood out as I was thinking about this part of the world:
<p>Even today we can basically create dense enough displays that they have more pixels than a human eye can detect. So in theory, we should have all the network bandwidth we need to get you video indistinguishable from reality. But only if we knew where you were looking. Getting you enough pixels for anywhere you might look is still challenging. But if somehow, we could move enough rendering resources and enough data about the possible objects close to your eyes--somewhere where we could tell where you are focused and adjust what we rendered--then virtual reality might be within reach. The challenge is edge computation and latency, not bandwidth. Yeah, bandwidth can make up for that somewhat, at least until you want your reality to be responsive.
<p>One year, MIT held a Time Travel Conference. It was mostly silly, but there was some research presented. According to one presentation, the CIA funded some research into rewriting history. The conclusion of that research was that rewriting history was in the general case as computationally expensive as letting history happen the first time. I have no idea whether the CIA actually funded that research, or whether that was a real paper. If not, it could be: the government funds all sorts of random things. The conclusion is almost certainly true though when you think about how computability works and things like Rice's Theorem. As with all things computability and Turing, the words general case are important: shortcuts may exist in interesting subsets of the problem. Let's think about what that means for the genre convention of time compression in gamelit worlds for a few minutes. Or you could just go ahead and read chapter 6.
<p>As always your comments and thoughts are what make these stories worth writing! Please share.
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