The bar is unusually empty. Just one girl, sitting on a barstool, reading one of a rather large stack of napkins.
"Dang. It briefly occurred to me that maybe Bar had some way to duplicate my S-Factor into you, but apparently that's a bust."
None of the models had it as a transmissible thing in a way I can transmit.
"Oh well."
"I'm sure I would have thought of that sooner rather than later, but copying mine was the first thought I had," she shrugs.
"Oh well, it was worth a shot. I expect whatever it is that lets people in her universe do the servant thing is likewise non-transmissible."
"Hey, can you pilot one of those solid shines over here? I want to see if I can move them with my hands or if you're going to have to pilot all of mine onto programs to get them to follow me out the door."
Lu finishes wiping apple off the shine that cut up her hapless fruit and scoots it over to her. "There, I'm not actively holding it there right now."
"Yeah. ...It occurs to me that you probably never ever want these to move at top speed. Regular shines can't hurt anything that way, but they're ludicrously fast and I don't know how far away you'd have to be to make that safe to watch if they even went through the air that fast, let alone hit anything."
"...How fast is ludicrously fast, because it occurred to me to wonder whether there was a reason for normal shines to have a speed ceiling other than 'the speed of light'."
"...If light normally has a speed, I suspect it's that. You can't see them move and there's no detectable delay if you send them across the world, except however long it takes them to do whatever they're supposed to do when they get there."
"The speed of light is...you and I probably don't use the same measurement system. If I say 'three point zero times ten to the eighth meters per second' does that get converted automatically or do we have to figure out what the conversion is?"
Bar prints a number.
"...I mean, this would explain how fast a shine can circumnavigate the globe."
"I think technically that's the speed of light in a vacuum. In air it's a tiny bit slower but totally negligible for most practical purposes."
"Bit slower than that. That's why if you stick your finger in a glass of water it looks funny, actually, the light bends as it slows down and speeds up."
"Not if it hits it straight on, but if it goes at an angle then one edge slows down or speeds up before the rest and that makes it bend. And it's all but impossible to get a straight angle on a round glass of water."
"Mostly it's just interesting. I wonder if I could program a hard shine to leave the Earth's atmosphere, accelerate to--not lightspeed, that would destroy any cameras or whatever, but use them as space probes."
"Earth is my planet! A camera is a machine that points a lens at something and creates an image of what it sees."
"Huh. You can sort of do that with shines. Shines can go through each other when they aren't this kind, and they can be any color a patch of light can be. So if you get a bunch of stacks of them in different color, and then put the stacks in a grid, and program them all to change where they are in the stack based on what they see on the surface they're on, you can copy a picture fuzzily onto shines. But shines can only see what they're actually on, not things that are farther away. I don't think I've heard of them being used to match focused light from somewhere else, but that could probably work too."