CHAPTER 160: SECOND MONDAY (5)

Jack looked between Madison and Samantha, and asked, "Well, was I right? Did hugging help?"

They both nodded.

Samantha said, "Yes, it did. The first twenty minutes were awkward. But after that, it felt more natural. We talked and I think we worked things out."

He looked at Madison. She nodded.

"I found them while they were still hugging," said Miranda with a grin.

"Just because I played with your milk balloons once doesn’t mean I’m interested in girls," grumped Madison.

Samantha reached over and hefted one of Miranda’s milk jugs and said, "They are sort of fun to play with. They’re just so big."

He could tell that Samantha was mostly doing it to make Madison feel better. What Samantha was really feeling was jealousy.

He reached out and pinched both of Samantha’s nipples between his thumbs and forefingers and pulled.

"Well, I like playing with yours as well," he said.

She bit her lip and tried not to moan. He could tell she was both pleased and embarrassed.

Madison had winced when he first pinched Samantha’s nipples, but seeing how they were now rock hard, she was feeling some curiosity.

"You ready to learn a martial art?" he asked while looking at Samantha.

"Do I have to?" she asked.

"No. But I recommend you at least learn the stuff Rina is focusing on. It might save your life someday."

They turned and watched as Rina threw a Jack sized training dummy over her shoulder. It was awkward and he could tell she still need to build up more strength, but she was able to complete the move.

"I also have a room full of professional gym equipment and free weights, so you can do more traditional exercises as well. All of us do more than just martial arts training."

"Oh, um, I was kinda hoping we could..."

She wanted him to fuck her again.

"Aren’t you still sore from last night?"

"Yeah, but..."

He gently patted Samantha’s cheek.

"Let yourself heal for a day. We can go again tomorrow."

He needed to set some boundaries. If he had sex with his girls whenever they wanted, as often as they wanted, he’d wind up a dried out husk in a week.

’Absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ or in the case of Miranda, and probably Samantha, ’Abstinence makes the pussy grow wetter.’

"Okay," she said.

"I think I have a working data-sync device," said Madison, changing the subject.

Now this was some good news! Finally, he could keep an eye on his body while he was inside his soul space.

"Do you have a parts list? I can place the order now and we can set it up when the parts arrive."

"Yep. Also I asked Jeeves, and, turns out, you can set background tasks."

"Background tasks?"

"Yeah. You can tell him what linked template you want updated and on what schedule, and he’ll do that even when he’s deactivated. So you can keep the data flowing without having to pay the cost of keeping Jeeves active."

Now that was even better news.

He’d planned to just manually trigger the sync every now and then, when he remembered, because the cost of keeping Jeeves active the entire day for second days was prohibitive.

But now he could keep the data flowing without paying the Jeeves tax.

"That’s great. Thank you for thinking to ask about that."

He hugged her again, then dragged her back to her office so she could walk him through what he needed to order.

He temporarily dropped the time ratio back to 1:1 so he could enable continuous memory sync along with parallel self.

While she showed him the list of parts, his physical world self grabbed his laptop and began ordering the parts online.

She pushed him into her desk chair, then sat in his lap, straddling him, then hugged him, nuzzling his neck. He could still see over her shoulder to read the parts list displayed on her computer screen.

"Jack, I’ve been wondering..."

"Hmm?"

"Now that I have a data-sync device we can use, I was thinking we could run the Cerebras inside a simulation."

He groaned, "Why didn’t I think of that?"

The cost of running 10 kilometer radius simulation at Subatomic detail only cost 10 EP/sec. The cost to start it was 10,000 EP, but that was only a single second of his EP generation.

He could fit an absolutely massive amount of Cerebras servers inside a simulation that size.

A single square kilometer of solar panels could produce 260 megawatts of power.

And because he could control the weather inside a simulation, there would be no cooling problems.

A single Cerebras consumed 25 kilowatts. That meant a single square kilometer of solar could power 10,400 Cerebras.

A 10 kilometer radius circle had 314 square kilometers of area. If he only used 300 of that for solar and the rest for computers, they could run 3,120,000 Cerebras in a 10 EP/sec simulation.

That was a million-fold increase in efficiency!

The amount of compute power contained in over 3 million Cerebras was beyond astronomical.

Even if you combined all the cloud providers together, it would only reach a fraction of what he could achieve in a small simulation.

She giggled, then nibbled his neck, interrupting his thoughts.

"Because you were too busy fucking Samantha’s brain out?"

He was going to say he was too focused on school, martial arts, and trying to keep up with Nora on her CRISPR and nanotech work. But his budding relationships were also a factor. It was a "problem" he was very glad to have.

"What about getting data in and out?" he asked.

He knew you could use linked templates between the physical world and his soul space or a simulation, but what about between his soul space and a simulation?

"I asked Jeeves. You can use linked templates between your soul space and a simulation. So we don’t have to worry about our proprietary data touching physical world computers."

"Okay, that’s good to know. But seriously, do we even need that kind of compute power anymore? It can’t be used for my surveillance idea. And now that Rina and Nora can design and run Genesis Heart simulations directly, why even bother with all those servers?

We can’t even connect them to the Internet. And if we did, we’d be painting a giant target on my back. There’s no way we could explain the sudden acquisition of 30 trillion credits worth of Cerebras overnight!"

"Remember Rina saying they were able to run hundreds of simulations per hour?"

"Yeah?"

"What she didn’t mention is that the bottleneck isn’t Genesis Heart. It’s the Cerebras. Each Genesis Heart simulation generates a massive complex file, and it takes time for the Cerebras to analyze it and produce actionable results."

"Ah, okay. So if we had more Cerebras, they could increase that from hundreds per hour to hundreds per second?"

"Yes! Or maybe thousands or more per second. And that’s not all."

"Oh?"

"We can use them to get a head start on training A.I. models. Some of the best models are trained in virtual environments. We can do that faster and better than any of the current A.I. companies. Those models might need an entire Cerebra just to run, but once Rina figures out photonic chips, you can have a supercomputer in your pocket!"

"Okay, but why? What good is A.I.? What problems does it solve?"