printing_press
Samantha
“Samantha,” said Agarma, entering the room.
“Hey Garmie. It’s been a while. Glad to see you. Learn any new words? Sorry about the mess. If I need to pay anything back, I have the pennies, though they’re probably back in Lionel’s safe. Who’s that woman with you? I’ve seen her walking around the halls quite often. Before I was arrested, I mean. Is she your maid? Does she have a metal arm? Anyways. Ha. I don’t know, ever since Quincy jumped off that cliff and killed himself I guess I’ve been rather demented. Not that I wasn’t demented before. I mean, I’m not demented, rather, I’m opinionated, and I can be wrong. But I’m human! Yeah. Learn any new words? Did I already ask that? I already asked that. Fuck, hey have you killed dad yet?”
“Samantha,” he repeated.
“Yes,” said Samantha.
“Samantha,” he said. “A decade ago, I used Centigrade to automate the printing press, and traded it for the life of my retainer.”
Blink. “We’re… not so different,” said Samantha. “I wanted to bring Centigrade to Felkner, to get more use from it.”
“It took 2 months of development for the spell,” he said. “Half of that was just learning its interface. That spell is why I’m at Northpoint today. Do you know how a printing press works, Samantha?”
“Uh. You make a metal stamp, cover it with ink, align it over paper, and press it down?”
“Close. The stamp doesn’t have the letters on it. You use the stamp to press the paper down on the letters. My initial improvement was the ability to draw a template on a regular piece of paper, and have that read in to select and arrange the letters. Writing this way tends to be quicker than manually arranging the letters, and it allows you to easily pull out a template you’ve already created, if you find you need more of a particular page. It requires some setup, you need to have your characters pre-organized. My second improvement was to have the letters sort themselves, putting themselves back in preparation for the next page. My third and fourth were to have them apply ink to themselves, and to clean themselves afterward. After that, it became a collaborative effort. The primary issue with this was it was all sequential; every letter had to wait for the previous before it could position itself. Gordian wrote the algorithm to allow them to work in parallel, and I implemented it. There’s work underway to take pre-existing pages and convert them to templates, and to dictate to a page and have a template be written, but thus far, those have proven far more difficult problems.”
“How many characters do you generally use? 26, times 2, plus 10, plus, what, another 20 or so?”
“More or less. We have a total of 696 different stamps, but many of these are quite particular. Musical notation, for instance. Linguistics, too. And math. I review proposals for additional characters every 2 months.”
“I’m sorry for stealing Centigrade. I didn’t realize it was that important. I was under the impression its potential was being wasted.”
“Yes, Vincent seemed to think that too, which is troubling. But no matter, it is a sturdy piece of metal.”
“Oh. Okay, good.”
“Samantha,” he again said. She couldn’t blame him, her name was fun to say. “You are an unpredictable nuisance.”
“I’m more than that,” she said. Draining. “And, being unpredictable isn’t bad.”
“For me it is, Samantha, for me it is.”
“Well, why don’t we work together, then? You can work out who has access to Centigrade and when, I can work out who could benefit from using it. Keep things predictable.”
He stared at her in silence. Considering? Considering? He walked out.