A Boy and his Dungeon XVII

XVII

I awoke to the girls whispering and giggling across me. When they noticed I was awake, I got kissed by both and managed to pat them both on the ass. They jumped out of bed so I could get to the bath and padded downstairs. I pulled on sweats and a t-shirt and headed down to join them.

For some reason, despite common attitudes, the girls seemed to enjoy being domestic. Unsurprisingly, they were both still nude. They had me sit down, served me a cup of coffee, and chattered away while throwing some breakfast together. They sat on either side while we ate.

“As much as I appreciate the lovely scenery,” I said, “I think we still have a housekeeper and gardener who pop in now and then.”

They glanced down at themselves and broke into laughter.

Doesn’t bother me,” said Jill, picking a stray cornflake off her breast, “what do you think, Jenn?”

“I don’t care either.” Jennifer stammered, blushing down to her nipples.

“You do care,” I told her, “but Jill is corrupting you. Good work, Jill.”

We all laughed.

“Seriously, though,” I went on, “you should dress in something, even if its only pajamas or a housecoat, when downstairs. I you were seen, like this, rumors would be all over town in hours.”

I was a bit surprised that there had not been a parade of well wishers at our door already as my parents had been well respected members of the community. My coming home certainly wasn’t a secret, I’d been seen in town. Maybe some had come by while we ran back down to Swansea, but it still seemed odd. I spent a good part of the day getting my network back online, checking the scanners, and tweaking software. Lisa would be handy now, most of the work she’d done it the Swansea house was with newer computers Conner had arranged for. I studied the notes Jill had typed up from Jennifer’s binder. If we could get chip arrays made to Jennifer’s specifications, the headsets could be made almost indistinguishable from a normal stereo headset.

I was back to testing and cataloging sensations when Jill yelled down the stairs that dinner was ready.

They’d gone all out for our first Sunday dinner at home, roast beef, a potato dish, something green and leafy, as well as a lettuce and tomato salad. I complimented them on the preparation and flavors. We made small talk over dinner, stretching out the conversation, even after we’d all eaten our fill. The girls cleared the table and dealt with leftovers and dishes while I ran down and brought Jennifer’s notes back up. I was rereading parts of that while the girls puttered in the kitchen and finally brought coffee to the table.

Jennifer and I went over her ideas while Jill almost laid on the table to see and follow along. I explained my thoughts on a new headset-earphone combination. Jennifer was enthusiastic, Jill wasn’t sure she saw the point. I explained, if we could tweak up the Bluetooth bandwidth, the headsets could be made wireless and less intrusive.

“The first problem I see,” I said, “is these chip arrays. I can’t see those being less than astronomical in price.”

“The setup is the expensive part,” replied Jennifer, “making the dies for the chips. After that it’s only a question of production. The more they make, the lower the unit cost.”

“That’s just the problem,” I said, “if we want to keep the tech proprietary, we only need about ten pairs. That could be thousands of pounds each.”

“What if we had an application that they could sell?” asked Jill, “If they have another market our cost might drop way down.”

We all thought on that for a while, trying to find an application that didn’t give away too much. We had to have two primary functions, something like read and write. The write function was the stickler, that was the part we needed to keep secret.

“Jenn,” I said, trying to pull an idea together, “your arrays have both read and write functions, Yes?”

“Yeah.” she replied, “For what we were doing the write was important for Jabberwokey and Jill’s favorite toy. Read is for the mapping you’re doing.”

“But if I understand the subchip design,” I said, “The read and write are essentially mirror images of each other.”

“Yes . . .” she trailed off, not seeing where I was going.

“Okay, how about this.” I started, “Remember early on I was producing images of neurons firing? That’s how I tracked down the ‘afterglow’.”

Both girls looked confused.

“What if we made it into a medical scanner? Less hassle than an MRI or CAT scan for looking at what the brain is doing and probably cheaper too.”

“But we would lose the write function.” said Jill

“Not if we could make the sensors work both ways,” I said, “so far we don’t have a reason to use both at once. If the same bit could do both, and we kept the switching off the chip . . .”

“I get it!” said Jennifer, “we present a package for scanning, using a custom chip, then use the same chip with our hardware to get both read and write.”

“Exactly.” I said, “do you think you can work the changes into the design?”

“Probably be easier to redo the design from scratch,” said Jennifer, “might reduce the size by twenty five percent or more.”

“We can demonstrate the concept with the older scanner headset,”I said, “I’ll just rework it without the write array.”

Jennifer grabbed the notes, flipped them to the blank side and was sketching.