She doesn't wind up taking the repeat; the end of the symphony without it has her playing the final chord when Lord Auditor Vorthys is nearer than anyone she's hoping to evade. She counts out the beats, holds for a moment longer, and then lifts her hands from the keyboard. She has decided that given her choice of titles she's going to address this particular guest as -
"Professor Vorthys."
"Likewise. My father-in-law tells me you're an engineer, although not the same kind as I am?"
"Electrical. And software, but that's, I think, even less related - unless among the failures you analyze are cryptographic ones, or perhaps crimes against design and taste?"
"Well, that produces a sort of style all its own, sometimes. Although apparently sometimes it also produces ImpSec."
"Well, it's someone's fault; whether ImpSec is culprit as well as victim I couldn't tell you. It seems to serve its every ostensible purpose, including, so far, not falling down, so it could be described as a system working to produce intended results - the problem appears to have been a deficiency in the list of those intents."
"I asked Miles why it was left... like that... and he mentioned expense as a motivator, and I told him it would be improved if neighborhood children were turned loose with spraypaint. And I suppose they'd need ladders, too."
"Safety ropes," suggests Linya. "Whatever grav equipment is most easily resized for children."
"Fair enough. I'm unaccustomed to the relevant habits of thought, although I've been taking economics lessons to fix that - the family business manager is helping me both with the academics and the practicalities, since I'm trying my hand at the electrical-and-software-engineering thing with more of an audience. Mass-producing these." She holds up her pen. It seems she always gets around to showing off her pen.
"I call them pens, although I'm going to need to come up with some sort of brand name to distinguish them from the sort that contains ink." She does her line-of-light-through-the-air demo. "They can handle most comconsole functions. But, obviously, are heavily miniaturized."
"Lots of little hacks - and a lot of it inspired by others' work in other domains and a lot of it handled with machine learning rather than directly written code. It matters that there are projectors on both ends - Miles and his father both want versions that look like old fashioned fountain pens and that's been an interesting challenge - and that the pen can 'see' what it's doing from both ends too. But it also senses momentum and hand pressure and tilt directly, and people don't move nearly as fast as the pen can think. You could throw it off if you took it on a fast carnival ride of some kind, but it'll adapt to straight-line acceleration gentle enough that you wouldn't lose your grip on the thing in the first place."
"Well, there's a first batch of the ones that look more or less like this, in various colors and with the option of partially visible electronics, available already - Cordelia has one of those. The fountain pen version will probably not be ready to go for months yet, maybe longer, but I am fairly confident I can do it eventually."
"That's three for three on Vor men who want their pens pointy. I wonder why."