i believe i can fly

[self_composed]

Alice eventually goes home for the evening.

Bella goes up and sits in her room.

She has five hexes.

Five.

That's rather a lot of hexes.

She gets out her notebook, with the lists, and she makes some wishes.

And then she goes to bed, grinning.

In the morning it will be time to make plans.

Comments

[edgeofyourseat]

"Also they had never heard of Wolverine," he contributes. "Huh. Why not just get an Internet connection in your brain too? There's gotta be a superpower for that."

[self_composed]

"I'll think about that one," Bella says. "I'm not sure about that. It might mess with the servers somehow - I mean, how would I assign my head an IP address?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Not a clue. I'm done raiding your pancakes, by the way."

A single, lonely pancake remains.

[self_composed]

Bella puts the pancake in a plastic bag and puts the bag in the fridge, and turns the oven off. "I also wouldn't want to hardcode my brain with a particular browser, when the state of the art in browsing and web standards are going to be all different in a year or two anyway."

[edgeofyourseat]

"See, you are smart," says Alice. "You think of things."

[self_composed]

"Also, I wished myself programming powers a minute ago," Bella says brightly. "But apparently I wasn't specific enough, so I don't know any programming languages, just general principles and pseudocode and so on - which is fine for what I wanted them for, anyway."

[edgeofyourseat]

"I love you," says Alice.

[self_composed]

"I'm so surprised," Bella deadpans. "Goodness gracious. What brings this on?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"I dunno." He shrugs; smiles. "The fact that you wished yourself programming powers?"

[self_composed]

"Why that, though?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Not sure," he says. "'Cause you used magic, and you used it to do something useful and cool?"

[self_composed]

"In that case, I wonder how long it'll take for you to get tired of reminding me," laughs Bella. "Okay, I have one hex left on here." Necklace-heft. "I think I have enough symbols and I can presumably add more with pentagons if I'm getting too many black squares - meaning 'other'. Let's see, what am I trying to neglect?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Huh?"

[self_composed]

"What would I smack myself on the forehead for not thinking of, if I wished without taking however long it would take to come up with it?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Oh. Not a clue. But then, I don't know what you have thought of."

[self_composed]

"Your signals, and my input stream and how I can manipulate it," Bella says. "And an image compression algorithm of sorts. Should I be able to poke around in your memories? Should I be using something other than a naive magical heuristic for generating the words - like, should the power be consulting you to determine what words you'd attach to a thought if prompted?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Yes," he says after thinking about it for a moment, "and... I dunno, actually. They're my thoughts, but you're the one who's reading 'em."

[self_composed]

"So I need an interface for sorting through memories - browsing some organized representation of the whole shebang? Searching by keythought? Picking them out of an index by date?" She closes her eyes. "Man, wishes do not make everything simple, do they. How about - if you could produce a word for a thought, then that one, otherwise if I could produce a word for it if I was having it, then that, and otherwise, a first pass at a naive magical translation - and otherwise a symbol. And I'll color-code 'em."

[edgeofyourseat]

"You are smart," he sighs, happily.

[self_composed]

"So," Bella says, "let me guess - you think in thoughts, and also, you remember in memories?"

[edgeofyourseat]

"Yup."

[self_composed]

"It's almost like your brain's fundamental architecture is not as much on board with this project as you are," Bella comments. "I think I'll see what I can do about a mixed strategy - category sorting and search and date organization as much as that's possible, and then if I can't find what I'm looking for I can try another way. And let's represent that thusly -" She expends another square to repeat the "abstract contact", a shade cooler, like she's just come in from the snow and her hands are cold. "Good?"

[edgeofyourseat]

He smiles. "Sure!"

[self_composed]

Bella closes her eyes and carries on thinking about how she wants to interface with Alice's mind until she's got a very clear mental picture of what that might look like and how she might poke things when she pokes them. Right before she's about to expend the hex, she remembers to include an option to manage scroll speed and how big everything looks, and then she has to take another couple minutes just to make sure that's the only thing she forgot.

Finally, she says, "Here goes," and makes one extremely complicated wish.

[edgeofyourseat]

"Well, did it work?"