The Weapon - Apocalypse - part 4
By Diana the Valkyrie
The Pretty Flamingo Sex Line



Wendy.self:

OK, time for a break.

Wendy.pilot:

Slow, descend. Stop.

Wendy.self:

OK, off with these wet nappies. Now you can crawl about a bit and play -
here's Mr Ted. Mr Ted says "Hello, Matti, hello Rosetta". Say hello to Mr Ted.
And here's Mr Piggy. I wonder what Duncan's doing right now. Bunny bunny bunny
bunny whoops bunny whoops bunny bunny bunny bunny.

"Hi, Duncan." "Wendy!" "What you up to?" "Oh, nothing much. And you?" "Ship's
in the water, I'm playing with the babies. It's nice and sunny here." "Bit of
a grey day here, not actually raining, but thinking about it, you know?"

Wendy.telecom

http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/webcam/webcam13.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/ukweather/

Wendy.self

"Yes, I can see, pretty dingy there. But I think it'll clear up later." "How
are you doing for nappies?" "Still plenty left, Duncan, they don't use that
many, and it's pretty predictable." "You haven't needed the zinc ointment?"
"No. Duncan, why can't I just extract gold from sea water, and we sell that?"

"I already explained this to you, Wendy. There's a very good reason. Gold is
mostly valuable because of scarcity, and if we dump tons of the stuff on the
market, the price will drop like a stone, and that will cause huge amounts of
economic problems for a lot of people, especially in countries where their
currency is backed by gold. A lot of people will lose a lot of money,
businesses will fail, gold mines will close down. " "What about diamonds?"
"Same problem, really." "Fuffle. So, making something that's scarce is no
good, because that breaks the shortage and causes too many problems. And
making something that's widely available is no good, because people already
have it. So ... what is good? Because spending weeks away from home hauling
these dumb ships is getting up my nose."

"Me too, Wendy. Tell you what, though. You are damn good at phone sex." "At
what?" "Er, like last night, when you were telling me what you wanted to do?"
"Oh. Well. But I was just telling you what I'd do." "That's called phone sex.
And people pay for it." "Oh, really? Better than humping ships around?" "No,
just a couple of dollars per minute. Ship haulage is $50/minute." "What if I
did several at once?" "How can you talk to several people at once?" "Duncan,
I'm not actually talking to them, it's all telephony, I'm just inducing
currents in the wires. If I had 25 lines, I'd get the same $50/minute, and I
wouldn't have to fly all around the world for it." "But how could you have 25
conversations at once?" "I just spin up 25 handlers." "Spin? Handler? Wendy, I
haven't a clue what you're talking about."

"Uh. I don't know the right words for this; maybe you don't have words for
what I mean here. You know how you can do two things at once, like talk and
walk?" "Uh huh." "Well, what you're doing is, you spin up a walk-handler, and
let that control the walk, and then you do a talk-handler, to make with the
mouth, so your self just tells the walk-handler where to go, and the
talk-handler what to say. So you can do two things at once. More than two, of
course; you might walk, talk and wave a banner. You just spin up another
handler for each thing. And then there's the handlers for the things you never
think about, like your heart, and for the things that you don't usually think
about, like breathing. You probably have a dozen handlers going at once."

"But I can't have two conversations at once."

"Yes you can, I've seen you do it. The limitation there, is one mouth. But
I've seen you having online conversations with a few people at once, and you
don't even think you're doing anything difficult. So I'd just do the same, I
don't talk on the phone with my mouth, it's all electromagnetic induction."

"Huh. The Pretty Flamingo Sex Line. I'll think about it, there are some
practical problems, like how to market it. But if you could do it while you're
doing other stuff?" "Exactly. You wouldn't even know it was happening, except
for seeing the telephony activity." "OK, I'll think about it, but I have to
say, my gut feel is that it won't work." "Why not?" "I don't know why just
yet, let me mull it over." "OK. Listen, while we were chatting here, I've
changed the babies, gathered them up, got the ship up to altitude and we're
cruising at 300 per hour for Yokohama again." "Feh, any woman could do that."
"Yes, sure." "Well, maybe not lift a half million tons of ship. I miss you."
"I miss you too." "Badly." "Truly madly deeply." "Yeah." "Yeah." "Talk to you
later." "Later, honey."

. . .