On Sat, Aug 14, 2021, 7:15 PM Karl <[1]gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:

   Bobby jacks into the digital mindwaves.  It's breakfast.
   They used to have nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and sugar for
   breakfast.  That was decades ago.
   They flip their tongue a little to experience the doses of nicotine,
   alcohol, caffeine, and sugar they expect and resumed their work
   designing a new form of interplanetary travel based on propulsion
   systems that redesigned themselves for nearby resources.
   They had a potted plant in their window with a magical spirit.  The
   magical spirit of their potted plant watched them as they sat at their
   breakfast table with their muscles twitching, darting their eyes and
   fingers around the empty space in front of them as they engaged an
   augmented reality.
   The magical spirit of the potted plant didn't just watch them.  She was
   also watching the birds wake up and celebrate the morning outdoors, the
   magical spirits of the wind and rain race their fronts of pressure and
   humidity, a number of communities of insects, bacteria, and fungus she
   was in symbiosis with, and also Bobby's pet dog, Hypercookie, who was
   playing with a robot in the other room.

   Bobby looked around their environment as they worked, but didn't see
   the room they were sitting in.  They were surrounded in spaceship
   design paths that were shoved to the side, videomails they didn't want
   to watch yet, and portals that led to friends they had in other
   countries.  Their potted plant was there, as a fantasy plant-creature
   with flowers that glowed like lights, but the fantasy creature wasn't
   anything like the real plant.
   Hypercookie was on the mindwaves, too, via interaction with their robot
   toy.  Hypercookie's toy was even able to produce english phrases, which
   purportedly were what Hypercookie would say to Bobby if Hypercookie
   knew how to speak english themselves.  It seemed to work out well
   enough.  Bobby had gotten some of the things Hypercookie did to produce
   simple software.  The training was ongoing.
   The plant had their own mindwaves.  Whatever the plant wanted, the
   birds outside and fungus inside would do immediately.  The plant wanted
   to talk with other plants in other apartments, and changed the curl of
   its leaves just a tiny bit to express that its robot was watering it.
   The birds noticed the change in curl indicating a change in weather.
   They had learned not to plan on it, because it was from inside the
   apartment, but they were so used to responding to it that they changed
   their feeding and resting patterns just a little bit anyway.  Other
   birds came in and left, responding to the crowds and gaps.
   Bobby was debugging a problem with generating new propulsion designs
   that had made some frustrating issues the day before.  Some
   environments were producing radically wrong engine designs, and it
   seemed like this would only change if each one was specifically added
   to the training set.  These situations were always exciting once there
   was time to get into them.  Bobby dove into the model and started
   probing the different incentive patterns in its parts.

References

   1. mailto:gmkarl@gmail.com