Jack dropped the last back of second-hand clothes on the kitchen table. They had stopped at two second-hand stores after leaving the mall and had managed to find enough clothes for Madison to put together a fat-suit. It, plus the platform shoes they found, would hopefully be a sufficient disguise for Jack when he went to buy the lottery ticket.
"Do you need any help with this?" he asked as he waved his hand at the pile of clothes sitting on the kitchen table.
"No, I think I'm good for now. I'll let you know if I need to try it on."
"Okay, I'll be in my bedroom if you need me. I'm going to do some more linked template tests."
"Okay, have fun."
He turned and walked towards his bedroom. He could tell that the only reason she wasn't complaining about not being involved in the tests was because her parallel self in his soul space could still be involved while her physical self wrangled second-hand clothes.
Entering his bedroom, he sat at his deck and pulled out some notepaper and a pen. He wanted to know when happened if you combined two linked items. Would the exported changes remain separate, or would they combine in the physical world as well?
He templatized one piece of notepaper and the pen, then in his soul space, he enabled Linked Templates for both. When he enabled linked Template for the second item, he felt a mental prompt asking him if he wanted to synchronize the linked items. When he probed the prompt, he learned that doing this would force the two linked items to be treated as a single object for the purposes of update and export. Since this was what he wanted, he synchronized the two linked templates. Then he instantiated each and then drew a quick sketch of Madison, topless. He was no Escher, but he could at least draw a passable pair of tits. Once the sketch was complete, he updated the notepaper and pen templates from instantiations. Then he pushed the template changes out to their physical originals using the linked template ability.
As soon as he triggered the export, the piece of notepaper sitting on his desk changed to show the sketch of Madison. It happened instantly, silently, with no special effects. One moment the paper was blank, the next, the sketch appeared.
Nice! He thought, having hoped this was possible. He still needed to test combining chemicals, but this looked promising. He had some ideas for how this would be useful, but didn't want to get his hopes up just yet.
Next, he deleted the note paper template, and then created a new template using a new blank piece of notepaper. Then he repeated his previous sketch, but instead of exporting both pen and paper, he only exported the paper changes. He wanted to know if it would still export the ink in the sketch.
When he triggered the export, nothing happened. The note paper remained blank. But, when he picked it up to examine it in the light of his desk lamp, he saw faint indentations in the paper that matched the lines he had drawn. The paper changes had been exported, but without the pen ink.
Damn. He'd been thinking about what might happen if he used Linked Self, ate food while in his soul space, then tried to export physical changes. Parallel Self didn't work like Linked Template, so maybe Linked Self was more advanced and he wouldn't have to worry about the conservation of mass and energy. But if it wasn't, then he would have to be careful. The last thing he wanted was to find out firsthand what happened when digested food suddenly disappeared from his body.
For his final pen and paper test, he decided to see what happened if he exported both pen and paper but not synchronized. He templatized a new piece of blank note paper, enable Linked Template for both, but chose to not synchronize the two templates. After making his sketch, he was just about to export the two templates when he had a thought.
If he exported just the pen changes, what would happen to the ink that was deposited on the paper? Where would the ink appear? It was possible the ink would appear next to the pen, and not on the paper, so he pulled out several more pieces of notepaper and set them down on his desk in an overlapping grid. Then he set the pen down in the middle. This way, if the ink appeared next to the pen, it would land on the paper instead of his desktop.
First, he exported the paper, and like last time, the paper remained blank. Then he exported the pen. When he did, a faint blur appeared surrounding his pen that quickly transformed into blurred ink links on the pieces of paper he had laid under the pen. The ink had appeared centered on his pen. And, since the pen was about 8 millimeters in diameter, the ink appeared four millimeters above the paper. And when it dropped onto the paper, it dispersed slightly, producing blurred lines of ink on the paper.
This was all interesting but didn't reassure him about the possible consequences of using Linked Self. Not wanting to risk potential injury testing Linked Self, he activated Jeeves and described the three tests he has just performed.
Then he asked, "Is Linked Self just like Linked template? Or is it more advanced like Parallel Self, able to operate at a higher meta level? for example, if I enable Linked Self, eat food, exercise, digest the food, then export changes, what will happen? Do I have to use Linked Template on the food?"
Jeeves replied, "Linked Self provides more options than Linked Template because it allows you to select which physical changes you wish to export. However, if those changes were constructed from matter not present in your body at the time of manifestation, you will incur a higher EP cost for export."
"Is it possible to synchronize linked self with the linked template for a food item?" He was hoping it would be possible to avoid the higher EP cost for export.
"No. Linked self cannot be synchronized with Linked Templates."
He remembered that when he'd first enter his white room, he had not felt the pain and thirst from his physical body. He wondered if that mean his soul space self didn't need food.
"Does my soul space manifestation need food or water? What about when parallel self is activated, or linked self? If Genesis Heart is able to just magically manifest new matter inside my body, will it magically do so for my Linked self?"
"Your soul space manifestation, with or without parallel self active, does not require sustenance. You can eat templatized food, if you wish, but it will have no physical effe3ct on your manifestation. When you enable linked self, your manifestation synchronizes with your physical self and will gain the same physical needs as your physical self. If a change requires food, then you will need to consume that food, either before enabling linked self, or as a templatized item in your soul space."
"Wait, does that mean my soul space manifestation won't age? If I don't use linked self for fifty years, will my soul space manifestation remain young? What would happen if I enabled then disabled linked self at that time?"
"You will be able to adjust your soul space manifestation to match its state at any point in the past up to the point where you gained the Genesis Heart. When you enable linked self, your soul space manifestation will be adjusted to match the state of your physical self. When you disable linked self, your soul space manifestation will remain as it was, but can be returned to a previous state if desired."
That left one unpleasant question. "So, um, what happens if I, um, excrete while in my soul space?"
"When linked self is disabled, your soul space manifestation will have no such needs. Any waste produced by your manifestation while linked self is enabled can be eliminated simply by selecting it for deletion. Just like removing a template instance."
Huh. It was a bit weird. Either Genesis Heart just ignored the law of conservation of mass and energy, or it was so powerful that it could easily convert grams or even kilograms of mass to energy, or the reverse.
"Can you tell me how much it will cost to export physical changes using linked self? For example, what would it cost if I spent one day inside my soul space with linked self enabled, eating and sleeping as normal? And what would the cost be if I did the same day inside, but exported changes periodically so I could eat and take care of business outside?"
"Each export with linked self enabled has a base cost of 1000 EP. In your latter case, if you had to export five times, your total cost would be around 5000 EP. In your former case, the cost would be between 1000 and 100000 EP depending on the type and amount of food consumed and your metabolic rate."
The cost was much higher than memory sync for parallel self, but still cheap compared to the 100 EP/sec required to maintain parallel self. A single linked self export would cost the same as running parallel self for between 1 and 100 seconds.
This also had one other interesting implication. If he can templatize food, and the cost to export physical changes remained as low as Jeeves had stated, then he didn't need to ever worry about going hungry or thirsty.
"Boobs? Seriously?" Madison had come into his bedroom and was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder.
"Sure. Why not?" he said nonchalantly. "I needed to draw something on the paper for my Linked Template tests. The memory was fresh, and I felt like practicing."
"Oh, that makes sense." He could tell that she was pleased it was her tits he had been trying to draw.
"Um, are you done?" she asked. "I need you to try on your fat-suit."
"Okay, go get it and I'll try it on."
She left, then returned a minute later carrying a large bundle of something.
"Here," she said, handing him the bundle.
He took it, then looked at her.
She looked back at him expectantly.
He just stared at her.
"Okay, fine," she said, then tuned and left his bedroom, closing the door behind him.
If he'd let her stay, he was fairly certain she would have tried something. But he had not forgiven her yet, so he didn't want her to get any kind of "rewarding experience," not yet anyway.