She's met the people in her dorm already but that's not nearly enough. One of the points of even being here at all is networking, right? Right. And the fact that the dom toward whom she's making a beeline right now is cute as a button has nothing to do with it. Nope.
"Excuse me?" she asks, managing to sound very small despite standing up while he's sitting down. "Is this seat taken?"
"Yep, formal logic. It's really hard to explain this stuff... Magic is sort of like this crazy bundle of loops and wires and latches and portals and, uh, parentheses, and to be able to do something I tug or tap on the mess in a certain way so the tug goes through it all just right... And there are rules, it's just... There's so much to look at, I can't possibly hold it all in my mind at once. Yet. And the formal logic helps me sort of chunk it into bigger pieces so I can think about more at once? I was already doing that, but now I can say, oh, if and only if three wire loop over to that two wire, the latch will open. Three wire has to be off loop so two wire will always be off so therefore that portal will also be off and thus this happens... Any of that make sense? At all?"
"In the abstract, sorta, but it's not how mine works at all. Mine works like—doing the splits. There's a resistance and I can feel this resistance but there isn't a clever solution anywhere other than just doing it enough times that I eventually can get it. And, I don't know, maybe sometimes I'm sitting wrong or doing the wrong thing—actually maybe the best analogy is yoga in full generality—the thing it is is something physical that I can feel when I do magic, you know?"
"Magic is weird. Physics studies have made no progress on it recently, I think, which just makes it weirder."
"I usually say that I'm an atheist, but, twelfth birthday. I'm at best deistic, to be honest."
"I do think we'll nick it some day. Martin Luther - the guy who nailed 99 theses to a church door, not the civil rights guy - supposedly thought that babies were proof of God because no science could possibly explain such a wonderful and complex thing."
She giggles. "I mean, magic is in fact different in character from—other things. It treats minds as ontologically basic, for one thing."
"There's maybe something to that line of inquiry. Hmm. I'm normally in a much better mood for philosophizing, but today is kind of just... Bleh."
Sadde and Wendy, how'd that go down...? Nope. Don't ask that.
"Oh, I read the book you recommended. Very good twist."
"That was great, right? I wish more people would think of stuff like that."
"It's surprisingly hard to be genuinely novel. Writers have to combine things that have been written by someone somewhere in a new way most of the time."
"Oh yeah definitely, if it were easy to come up with interesting twists they wouldn't be surprising and wouldn't be interesting anymore."
"Executing well on a previously-used idea is still fun to read or watch or whatever, of course."
"Yeah. I think I have a few more recommendation of books in a same vein to that one, if you want."
"Sure, though I may well skip 'em for now. I'm so close to getting memory to snap together."
"Ooh that's awesome! Tell me when you have it. Is it gonna be retroactive?"
"Not retroactive. Yet, possibly... That smells precoggy, though, retroactive anything. Haven't tried anything in a precoggy direction yet. It'd only be on while I'm paying attention to it, at first. Sometimes I need to figure out, like, concepts and architecture. But sometimes, like now, I know it's right there, it's about to work and it's just a matter of executing the plan, sewing up all the little holes, so to speak. Making it totally automatic as opposed to needing to concentrate is going to be tedious but straightforward, too. And even then I'll be able to turn it off and, uh, purge things... If I ever want to for some reason."
"Privacy? Spoilers? Trauma? I didn't really try for that feature, it sort of fell out of how I was doing the rest of it."
"Huh. Cool. It would be pretty awesome to reread something without remembering the first time."
"I don't think I'll use it too often, but that's an option. Like if I find a book I remember I really liked the first time but I can still remember some of the details..."
"Or if you want to go see a movie you've already seen with someone and want to not spoil them accidentally, or just experience it for the first time multiple times..."
"Yeah, could be handy I suppose. I don't want to go forgetting things all the time though, that's the whole point."
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