Chapter 2

Breakfast was quiet at the start. Laura was very wakeful, but not very talkative, and Amanda was still half asleep and her mind was pondering the nightmare she'd had. Was it a warning or a random dream? Was it a promise or a threat? She was all muddled up, and it didn't help that although the dream had made her feel scared and vulnerable, it had also made her feel excited and something she lacked a good word for.

Amanda had seen girls do all sorts of crazy things for boys, losing their independence and sometimes even their dignity just for the sake of being rewarded with a little approval, and sometimes even for attention. Though she would have liked to think otherwise, she had also seen a few girls act the same about other girls, so lesbians clearly weren't immune to that. She had never quite understood the appeal, even if perhaps Nadya had acted silly about herself. Amanda had always dealt with her kindly, and felt that, if Nadya's attentions were perhaps a little over the top, they were rather enjoyable and well worth the little splinters of guilt she felt, thinking that she was perhaps using her.

"So how's work going"? asked Laura.

"Not bad. I had been testing certain new statistical refinements over the summer and it seems I can trust them to be stable. So I'll be able to decrease the surface area of the sensors, weight, bandwidth to the microcontroller ... everything basically. So smaller and cheaper than I thought possible."

"Hmm, how small is small? I understand you were working on something wearable. Something perhaps the size of a large bracelet. Is it worth making it smaller, and how far can you get?"

"It's worth making it smaller for two reasons: aesthetics and price." Laura laughed when she heard about aesthetics. "Well, when you're dealing with your subjects, they're tied up to your equipment, they're in your world. But this stuff is for clinical use, outside a lab or a hospital room. One of the things that became clear as I was reviewing the literature is that if patients don't like your gadgets they won't cooperate. They'll "lose" them, break them, forget them, etc. So the nicer and more unobtrusive you can make them the better."

"I must admit I never thought of it that way! To me, it seems so obvious to take care of your health that it'd never come to my mind to interfere with the treatment."

"Well, perhaps you're an exceptionally docile patient then," said Amanda, "but we can hardly count on paragons of virtue like you. The other advantage to a smaller system is the price."

"I'm not sure I get that. Generally, the smaller you have to make something the more expensive it is. I know that the EM deconvolution stuff we use couldn't be practically made portable until recently."

"In general you're right, but this is a special case. The type of solution I found allows me to obtain the same margins of error with fewer data points. So this is not a case of making the same sensor smaller, but just using a smaller, less capable sensor. Now because these sensors use some expensive catalysts, it makes quite a difference to the price, and because the data rate of the sensor is lower, the interface to the controller doesn't need to be so capable either. There is a small time penalty in using this technique, but it's not even very significant."

"I see. I never got much involved in hardware, as you probably have deduced. So how small are we talking now then?"

"I think, if all goes well, I'll be able to make it into a ring."

"A ring? That's ... interesting. Do you think you'll make it in the shape of an actual ring?"

"Yes, why not? It has to be afixed to the skin, it has to be worn all the time, so perhaps it could even be shaped as a jewel to make it more acceptable to the patients. What about your work?"

"I'm close. Given a certain person and enough of a baseline I can start finding significant patterns, but every person seems to be different. Some of the calibration actually depends on the subject being honest and cooperative, and that's not going to work for natsec applications. Speaking for myself, I hate diversity", she quipped.

"Hey, at least it gives you the most important thing you have", said Amanda, pretending earnestness quite well.

"Oh, and that is?" asked Laura, wondering if her roommate was going to go on a boring political rant.

"An interesting problem, silly! Or do you think it'd be worth what you'll get for solving it if calibration weren't an issue?"

"Put that way, I must admit you have a point", said Laura, amused at Amanda's little joke.

"Do you think you'll manage it somehow, or will you have to depend on mind games like you did to that guy? Alan I think he was called."

"I don't know. I get the feeling that there should be better ways. Plus it's not always straightforward to induce emotions reliably, for what it's worth that guy could have been into group sex or something weird like that, and he could have been getting excited at the thought of his girlfriend asking me to join. Thing is, how can you tell? You can make some inferences, but it's a non-trivial problem."

"Well, I'll let you know if something occurs to me", said Amanda.

"Sure, you do that", said Laura smiling. It amused her how her roommate thought she might find a solution to something like this, when Laura had been working on it for years. In normal circumstances she might have found it offensive, but because of the way she perceived Amanda, she just found it endearing, like a little girl trying to help a grown-up with something hard.

"I'm off, then. I want to go by the department today and see what I get told about fabbing a prototype. Last time I was told it wasn't quite there yet ... and to be fair they were right."

"Alright, I'll go do my own thing too. Prepare a little for today's subjects, see if I can manage to find some more powerful model that accounts for this variation, that sort of thing. Good luck with admin, they're arseholes."

Amanda went to the department, wondering in the back of her mind why Laura found admin to be arseholes. In her own experience they had been reasonably helpful. Still, Laura probably had her reasons, like having to stand for hours while interviewing young students who mostly volunteered for beer money. Good thing her work was so much easier.

The biotechnology department was housed in a fairly modern building. It had that organic aspect which so many of the new structures shared: fewer angles, less symmetry. It had been one of the first "grown buildings", essentially printed in 3D by small mobile robots, based on a procedural generative plan: instead of it being fully designed and constructed by people, certain rules were written down about room sizes, light exposure, and so on, and the robots randomly poured materials to make it happen. As most architectural beginnings, the first attempts were a bit too ostentatious, making a clear statement of the technique, and the Biotech building had been at the cutting edge. Over time, that inevitable organic feel was kept, but trying to harmonise it slightly better with human aesthetic preferences.

Amanda liked it though. It had been the first place where she had introduced herself, on her merits, by virtue of her own work. No friends, no parents, and no prejudice. By that time society had fully accepted that heterosexuality was not a normative obligation, but the new common notion was that bisexuality, slightly tilted towards the heterosexual norm, was the healthy thing to be, and that hard-homosexuals or -heterosexuals must have been missing out. Amanda had met plenty of people in highschool who thought she must hate men, just because she didn't want to have sex with them, and the girls seemed even worse than the boys about it. It had been a relief to come to a place where none of that crap mattered.

Although she had set an appointment with her supervisor, she still had to take a seat at a waiting room. She had chosen Professor Robertson to guide her research, and although he was a very well-regarded academic, that also implied there were many demands on his time, some of them unpredictable. Additionally, although he had an impeccable name as a researcher, he was known to be somewhat absent-minded, and his time management and admin skills left a little to be desired. Not that Amanda minded: he had managed to direct her to solutions to some of her thornier technical problems a number of times, and that was well worth waiting to meet him now and then.

After a few minutes passed, Amanda saw another professor come out of Robertson's office. She seemed very annoyed, and before leaving, she turned back and spoke to Robertson, loud enough to be heard by everyone at the waiting room.

"This is unacceptable, and either you deal with it and make it stop, or I will! You can't hide in here forever and pretend that you have no responsibility."

"My dear colleague," said Robertson in a tone of voice which lacked all warmth, as he got out of the office himself, "I never denied my responsibility. I am responsible inasmuch as my contractual arrangements with this fine institution state it so, and I believe no-one has made complaints about the way I have discharged such duties. As it happens, my primary responsibility (and I think also yours) is to conduct research, and this mess you brought me is nothing to do with that. Now, I shall point out that my responsibility is not to you, but to this department, and if you wish to proceed further in this quest of yours, that's where you should go now. I have students who deserve and require my guidance, and so I bid you good-bye. Please, Amanda, will you come in?"

"Er, yes, Professor Robertson", she stuttered. Everyone was looking at the two contending professors, and, now that her name had been mentioned, at Amanda herself.

Blushing, she got up and walked towards the office. As she got through the door, it seemed obvious that Robertson wasn't going to say anything else, and so the younger professor turned away and left visibly angry.

"What was that all about?" Amanda dared ask, after she took her sit.

"Oh, never you mind, child. It's all politics. Nothing that should concern you, or me for that matter. I'm not here to play such games. But let's talk of something more pleasant: how goes your work?"

At first Amanda had been puzzled at being called a child. Asking around, though, it seemed that was just how Professor Robertson spoke to anyone under 50, so she couldn't in good conscience take it as a personal slight. The truth was, being dealt with warmly, like a close relation, had helped her feel more comfortable expressing her difficulties and doubts, and inevitably awe had been replaced by respect and consideration. It had worked out for her.

"My work goes well, Professor Robertson. I have applied the Lange-Lucas transform to the data, and it held up. I am getting reliable readings with fewer data points, so it will be possible to reduce sensor surface by a factor of 1.6."

"So you solved it!" Professor Robertson looked genuinely happy. "I must say, I thought it was a very difficult challenge. I would not have thought of applying LLT. I had some alternative ideas, but I'm glad that you no longer need me to guide you in this matter. So, smaller by 1.6. What does that mean in terms of fabbing?"