[Voice & Text] - Seeking Volunteers

[rlyprivateperson]

Hello again, this is Harold Finch. I'm seeking volunteers for a little project-- Mr. Veidt, Mr. Holmes, and myself want to place some gravity monitoring devices through as much of the immediate city as we can reach. Ready hands and feet would be helpful in this task, as there's quite a lot of ground to cover.

Comments

[private]

[vampapalooza]

But no need to worry about me, Mr Finch. Only joking. Besides, there's so much to do, there's no time to have bad habits.

Idle hands, that's what gets people into trouble, so I'm told.

Fortunately I am never idle.

That's right. A bunch of villages on the West coast-- Lyme Regis is the one you might've heard of. Dunno if you read anything that's not typical sci-fi, but Jane Austen wrote about the place, and John Fowler as well, in The French Lieutenant's Woman (which if you've not read, you ought to-- don't be put off by the title, it's about time travel and it's smashing).

Anyway, there was this lady, Mary Anning, back in the 1800's, she's one of the greats in paleontology. Discovered the first complete ichthyosaur skeleton, and made loads of other fossil discoveries as well. She was the one who worked out what coprolites were! They used to think they were bezoars. Never got the credit she deserved in her day, died broke, you know the drill when it comes to women in science back then, I reckon.

But here I'm rabbiting on. Anyway, yeh, I like dinosaurs all right.

How d'you fancy the computers here? Made any earth-shattering discoveries?

Re: [private]

[rlyprivateperson]

That one I haven't read. I'll keep my eyes open should a library appear. Thank you for the recommendation.

I liked dinosaurs to a reasonable degree, I suppose, but I was always more pointed upward than downward-- space travel, satellites, all that.

They're very... interesting. They're-- well, they're-- different. But trying not to be. Erm. I suppose that's not very clear.

[private]

[vampapalooza]

Don't thank me just yet-- you might hate it!

The thing I like about the old writers like H.G.Wells or Jules Verne is they were considering things that real science got into over the course of the 20th century and even now. Think about how much stuff used to be considered fantastic and now is just thought of as garden-variety science knowledge.

Even flying in an aeroplane, for example, or having modern appliances-- let alone a device like this or an AI system like our girl, here.

Did you ever want to be an astronaut when you were a kid?

What do you mean when you say 'they're not trying to be different'?

[private]

[rlyprivateperson]

Well, that's always been the province of progress, hasn't it: the gradual mundanization of what was formerly miraculous.

No, not with any degree of seriousness. I had rotten eyesight even as a boy.

Emphasis on "they are trying not to be" different. Slightly different implication. They're doing their very best to present to each of us at the level with which we may be personally assumed to be technologically competent. They're trying not to spook us.