Technology Exchange - 22/Jul/2012
December 2010, Dublin.
Contractual agreements. NDAs. Promises. Hand shakes. Past a certain point you just had to trust people.
O'Neill Station really needed a Body Builder. If one of the AI Crew was badly injured then the easiest thing was to produce them a new body. But, the Body Builder was the basis of Arthur's multi-million dollar business. How could they be trusted with one?
Some sort of exchange was required. They sat down with their lawyers and engineers. Surprisingly, it went quite well. The fact that one side was Sarah and Kelly, and the other was Janet and her family lawyers helped. Kevin Wright chairing and facilitating had a lot to do with it.
The Hollywood Machine was obviously not on the table. Both sides agreed that. It was too fundamental to the operation of the station. So, it came down to various of Kelly's creations. And, whether they could be reverse-engineered from Steam Punk to something more generally acceptable. Sarah agreed Kelly had some rights as to their disposition.
Kelly suggested her self-propelled "crash cart". This was generally accepted as a good idea, but the medical profession was naturally conservative, and something as obviously handwavium-based was tricky. Similar the rest of her medical gadgets. The farming tools might be of interest, to other people with bio domes, but this was currently a bit of a limited market.
Building a non-camouflaged version of Kelly's "Mirror Spiders", with something that looked a lot more like conventional hard tech, looked attractive. They could be sold for station maintenance. "Work Spiders" sounded a usable name, after they turned down "Wright Spiders". Looked like a good long-term project.
Eventually, they decided there was only one choice. Kelly's "Uniform Machine". In some respects this was comparable to the Body Builder, in that it made uniforms that were high-quality, hard-wearing, and, most important, handwavium-free. Oh, and they were custom-fitted spacesuits. Anyone could wave-up a space suit, but these were comfortable day-to-day wear. Kelly was pretty sure they could be tweaked to have different colours, and, probably even to fit men.
There was a digression into fashion, but it was agreed that a basic standard dull-grey model would sell well for $2k - bright orange was turned down; pink firmly rejected. Ones customised for a particular organisation, with places to attach rank markings, for $3k. And, top-of-the-line individually customised ones for $5k. If it was made clear these were subsidising the basic ones they could probably get away with this.
Maybe they could even make them for vacuum sports teams? Kelly said she'd experimented on the suits, and couldn't find any suitable dye, or bleach, that didn't also damage their space-worthiness. "Wright Suits".
It'd been a long meeting, but everyone was reasonably satisfied. Kelly needed to get them a Uniform Machine to work on. Arthur needed to build or find a spare Body Builder, and agree what anti-tamper precautions went with it. Janet agreed, as an aside, to look around for some better waved medical equipment for Kelly. Something that could induce safe suspension without risking a biomod would be good.
They very carefully didn't discuss the elephant in the room. Alice. Janet and Kevin were pretty sure that Kelly (and hence Sarah) knew Alice was Faster-Than-Light communications technology, and, there was a good chance they knew it would work off Earth. There were people who'd literally kill for that. And, probably everyone in the room knew it.
Janet had worked on the problem. The best she could come up with was the size of two bath tubs, weighed half-a-ton, drank power like a fish, and could only handle a single data stream. Admittedly that was terabits per second, and had an estimated pseudo velocity of tens of kilo-lights. And neither end had to be at a fixed location.
Janet started to talk about causality light-cone considerations, phase-space configuration issues and virtual spectra, but while she could see Kelly's bright encouraging expression, other eyes were glazing over. She quickly switched-back to matters of general interest.
So far she could only manage about 90% up-time, but was still fighting the prototypes into accepting substitutes for thermionic valves, and was pretty sure she could hit 99%. Assuming 10k hours per year, that was still about four days per year downtime, but, with any luck she'd get it up to 99.9%, about ten hours per year.
The others were impressed. Kevin Wright particularly so. Janet explained she'd been stealing ideas from all over science fiction, and this was just one that looked to work. She suggested they sell the 1.1 version (0.1% downtime) for off-planet use. Say, for a $100k each, giving them about the same profit margin as the robot frames.
Sarah said she'd need to check, but she was pretty sure they'd want to buy one. Or, more sensibly at least two, the other end for their Australian offices. She suggested Janet prepare for the stock markets to descend on her, waving their cheque books. Micro seconds counted to them. And, to tie them up with non-resale agreements, for the 'satellite' data link; call it a round $500k for all the bits.
It looked like "Wright Now Telecom" was going to be formed...
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
December 2010, Dublin.
Contractual agreements. NDAs. Promises. Hand shakes. Past a certain point you just had to trust people.
O'Neill Station really needed a Body Builder. If one of the AI Crew was badly injured then the easiest thing was to produce them a new body. But, the Body Builder was the basis of Arthur's multi-million dollar business. How could they be trusted with one?
Some sort of exchange was required. They sat down with their lawyers and engineers. Surprisingly, it went quite well. The fact that one side was Sarah and Kelly, and the other was Janet and her family lawyers helped. Kevin Wright chairing and facilitating had a lot to do with it.
The Hollywood Machine was obviously not on the table. Both sides agreed that. It was too fundamental to the operation of the station. So, it came down to various of Kelly's creations. And, whether they could be reverse-engineered from Steam Punk to something more generally acceptable. Sarah agreed Kelly had some rights as to their disposition.
Kelly suggested her self-propelled "crash cart". This was generally accepted as a good idea, but the medical profession was naturally conservative, and something as obviously handwavium-based was tricky. Similar the rest of her medical gadgets. The farming tools might be of interest, to other people with bio domes, but this was currently a bit of a limited market.
Building a non-camouflaged version of Kelly's "Mirror Spiders", with something that looked a lot more like conventional hard tech, looked attractive. They could be sold for station maintenance. "Work Spiders" sounded a usable name, after they turned down "Wright Spiders". Looked like a good long-term project.
Eventually, they decided there was only one choice. Kelly's "Uniform Machine". In some respects this was comparable to the Body Builder, in that it made uniforms that were high-quality, hard-wearing, and, most important, handwavium-free. Oh, and they were custom-fitted spacesuits. Anyone could wave-up a space suit, but these were comfortable day-to-day wear. Kelly was pretty sure they could be tweaked to have different colours, and, probably even to fit men.
There was a digression into fashion, but it was agreed that a basic standard dull-grey model would sell well for $2k - bright orange was turned down; pink firmly rejected. Ones customised for a particular organisation, with places to attach rank markings, for $3k. And, top-of-the-line individually customised ones for $5k. If it was made clear these were subsidising the basic ones they could probably get away with this.
Maybe they could even make them for vacuum sports teams? Kelly said she'd experimented on the suits, and couldn't find any suitable dye, or bleach, that didn't also damage their space-worthiness. "Wright Suits".
It'd been a long meeting, but everyone was reasonably satisfied. Kelly needed to get them a Uniform Machine to work on. Arthur needed to build or find a spare Body Builder, and agree what anti-tamper precautions went with it. Janet agreed, as an aside, to look around for some better waved medical equipment for Kelly. Something that could induce safe suspension without risking a biomod would be good.
They very carefully didn't discuss the elephant in the room. Alice. Janet and Kevin were pretty sure that Kelly (and hence Sarah) knew Alice was Faster-Than-Light communications technology, and, there was a good chance they knew it would work off Earth. There were people who'd literally kill for that. And, probably everyone in the room knew it.
Janet had worked on the problem. The best she could come up with was the size of two bath tubs, weighed half-a-ton, drank power like a fish, and could only handle a single data stream. Admittedly that was terabits per second, and had an estimated pseudo velocity of tens of kilo-lights. And neither end had to be at a fixed location.
Janet started to talk about causality light-cone considerations, phase-space configuration issues and virtual spectra, but while she could see Kelly's bright encouraging expression, other eyes were glazing over. She quickly switched-back to matters of general interest.
So far she could only manage about 90% up-time, but was still fighting the prototypes into accepting substitutes for thermionic valves, and was pretty sure she could hit 99%. Assuming 10k hours per year, that was still about four days per year downtime, but, with any luck she'd get it up to 99.9%, about ten hours per year.
The others were impressed. Kevin Wright particularly so. Janet explained she'd been stealing ideas from all over science fiction, and this was just one that looked to work. She suggested they sell the 1.1 version (0.1% downtime) for off-planet use. Say, for a $100k each, giving them about the same profit margin as the robot frames.
Sarah said she'd need to check, but she was pretty sure they'd want to buy one. Or, more sensibly at least two, the other end for their Australian offices. She suggested Janet prepare for the stock markets to descend on her, waving their cheque books. Micro seconds counted to them. And, to tie them up with non-resale agreements, for the 'satellite' data link; call it a round $500k for all the bits.
It looked like "Wright Now Telecom" was going to be formed...
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
![[Image: 593px-Betsy_Hounslow.png]](http://www.fenspace.net/images/thumb/e/e5/Betsy_Hounslow.png/593px-Betsy_Hounslow.png)