“Every generation improves,” injected Jennifer, ”We built them to do exactly that. We are still unravelling some of the programming from Gen 16, for God’s sake. We haven’t even cracked open the Gen 17s OS yet. Gen 16 could speak to us very plainly, I’m not shocked that Gen 17 can use SMTP.”
but these last two lines are a bit rough as far as transitions go; something less abrupt if it can be managed might make the narration here feel more natural. I almost feel like they could be removed and you could go straight into the next paragraph.
He felt bad about his thoughts - after all, this was work and these were respected colleagues. In the midst of all this, Roger stepped in and got the meeting moving.
Great exposition and character set up,
Jake had a thing for Emily Rothberg, but he didn’t think she would ever realize it. He’d dropped a brick house of hints and work safe innuendo on her, but she blazed forward with her work at all times. Emily was a world class programmer and mechanical engineer. Jake thought she was quite the philosopher, but she would never acknowledge that title. Her intellect and capacity to drive the project forward were, with the exception of Roger’s own, without peer. And Jake knew something that Emily didn’t seem to realize - she was stunningly beautiful. Jake looked over at Jennifer and thought about how strange life could be. Jennifer was brilliant as well. She graduated at the top her class at MIT, and became famous when her thesis AI (named “Lorax”) won The Loebner Prize. It didn’t just beat the Turing test, it redefined how future scientists would evaluate AIs moving forward. But Jennifer shared none of Emily’s outward beauty. Jennifer always looked a little dirty and unkempt. Her dirty hair tangled down over her threadbare t-shirts, and on rare occasions when Jake had been close to her looking at a screen, he’d noticed that she didn’t smell great. Where Emily smelled like oranges or tangerines most of the time, Jennifer smelled like a college dorm room.
I liked the sign-off you had in the first edit that followed this, it implied character and intrigued me.
These processors represent an exponential increase in capability, along with a substantial savings in cost (energy, housing, heat exchange and time).
The last write up you had was good, but this one got my attention. If this were a book preview I’d have ordered it by now.
A government sponsored project designed to further AI and robotics research goes better than expected. Or worse.