The Typing Thing
(By CmptrWz)
"What the," Lisa said as she entered the BBFO office. Taylor had shown up earlier, but Lisa had some DWU stuff to finish up before she could come over. The thing confusing Lisa was the spacial anomaly by the computers with several cables running into it. Walking over to the computer she determined that power, video, and USB connections were running into the anomaly.
She turned the monitor still attached the computer on to find the machine had been left in "mirror" mode, and that it was currently browsing PHO. As Kaiju?
Lisa decided this needed more investigation and got into Metis before heading out the back door. Heading over to where the tanker had been processed she found Taylor, as Kaiju, with a keyboard, trackball mouse, and monitor. The keyboard and mouse were Kaiju-sized, while the monitor was normal and sitting on an EDM pole. All the cables vanished into a spacial anomaly, identical to the one in the BBFO office.
"Hello cousin!" Taylor said as Metis approached. "Saurial and I finally figured out an easier way for me to use the internet."
"I can see that," Lisa responded. "I notice the keyboard is fairly quiet."
"I ended up using hydraulic pistons instead of springs," Taylor said. "The mouse was easier, though required some calibration."
Lisa wondered when her friend had figured out how to make and program the relevant electronics, but wasn't really surprised.
"That's something you don't see everyday," Dragon said, bringing up a PHO thread. Colin stopped poking at his project to take a look. The thread claimed to have video of Kaiju posting on PHO?
A few minutes later Dragon and Colin were both stunned. Colin recovered first. "If they didn't have tinker ratings already I think that would be justification to grant them."
"Hydraulic pistons?" Dragon said, apparently giving it some thought. "I wonder what configuration she used, though on that scale I am not surprised she didn't use springs."
"Looks like she posted a blueprint," Colin said, having scrolled through the thread to the most recent posts. "Though apparently her pistons work by virtue of compressed water not liking being compressed?"
"Kaiju's brute rating needs amending again," Hannah said as she entered. "Oh, you are already looking at the thread."
"I can't come up with a good way to determine how one would compress water in a way to make the blueprints work," Dragon admitted. "The pressure would need to be extreme, though."
"So how in the world do these blueprints work?" Amy, currently not inhabiting Ianthe as she wasn't around for long tonight. "I thought water was effectively incompressible."
"Well," Taylor said, scratching the back of her head. "It is a combination of things, mainly the fact that I split the water in two and phase-shift them from reality in opposite directions. It wants to act like a single body of water in-phase but when put under pressure the two halves are able to occupy the same space at the same time. Once the pressure is released the water tries to spread out again, pushing the piston out again."
"You couldn't just use springs?" Lisa asked, not having gotten that explanation yet.
"The ones that were strong enough didn't have sufficient travel distance," Taylor explained. "I gave up after crushing the fifth set."