Your Move

Chapter 14 - Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable from Magic

I felt like I was opening my eyes for the first time ever, as orbs of light appeared, followed by shapes and lines becoming clearer. Finally, after about five seconds, I could actually see somewhat blurrily. It reminded me of the effects of blood rushing to my head when getting up suddenly, but this was quite a bit worse. A popup, clearer than anything else I could see, prompted me that I was now in 'full-neural' mode as I reoriented myself.

"Whoaa, what in the world just happened??" I demanded toward Mike.

"Neural mapping. Sorry for not warning you about that ahead of time, it's only done once the first time you trigger full-neural mode and it's been a while since I did mine," he explained regretfully.

"They should put a warning on the box or something; that was really disorienting."

"What box? This stuff is black tech — it's far from being commercially viable." He laughed.

As I blinked away the last of the blurriness, I noticed something odd. I could still see the holograms with my eyes closed!

"Mike, what exactly does full-neural mode entail?"

"You control the cyrano with your thoughts and it injects output right into your brain by tapping into your central nervous system and essentially interfacing directly with your neurons."

"Wow..."

Open a browser. Nothing happened. I concentrated harder, visualizing the action. Open. Browser. Still nothing.

"It's not working."

"What's not working?"

"I'm trying to get it to open a browser by thinking, and it's not doing it."

"You're forgetting the magic word."

"Oh, please?"

"Nope."

Hmm... "Sudo?"

"Noo," he chuckled.

What then? I looked quizzically at Mike.

"You need to direct your thoughts towards the cyrano for it to register them," he explained. "It's a safety feature hard-coded into the firmware to prevent accidental triggers. Easiest way to do it is to prefix thoughts with 'cyrano'."

Cyrano, open browser.

A window instantly popped up in front of me like magic, startling a stream of pee into my diaper. I hadn't been so shocked by a piece of technology since... oh right, just about everything in this dimension. The default page was a search engine from this dimension that I'd never heard of before.

Cyrano, can FIDE ratings be transferred across dimensions?

No, but you can regain it.

Cyrano, you sure?

The browser loaded an official-looking rules page by the ICF that displayed tens of thousands of lines of rules and regulations, instantly. A quick question revealed that the International Chess Federation here was called, well, THAT, instead of la Fédération International Des Échecs. Something about being founded in Albion instead of Gaule, wherever those were.

Cyrano, share my screen view with Mike.

It mirrored what I was seeing onto the window beside us.

"Here, we can read through this," I told Mike and started skimming through the page.

"No need. Just get your cyrano to summarize it for you."