Sometimes I think I err too far in the avoiding obvious exposition, and create confusion instead. I dunno. I generally prefer to trust that the reader is smart, and has run into some form of enough of the ideas I’m using already that they can put two and two together. This story’s deliberately constructed at a fast pace; if there hasn’t been any action for like 8 pages at any point then I know that SOMETHING EXCITING HAS TO HAPPEN RIGHT NOW. Doesn’t leave me much room for undigested expository lumps!

(As a side note, I get the phrase “undigested expository lumps” from Jo Clayton’s “Skeen” trilogy; the chapter titles in these books start getting longer and more detailed, until Clayton is talking directly to the reader. At one point she says something like “here, have an undigested expository lump” and goes on for like five pages (in a large display font so probably more like one page in normal text) about some important plot information that she couldn’t be bothered to work in more subtly. It is awesome in its shamelessness.)

Although, I still think this might be implemented with a separate overlaid feature space instead of creating ‘false’ arrow-like objects that overwrite part of the normal visual space. e.g. imagine a standard image with r g and b channels, and then instead of putting the HUD icons into the same rgb channels, just add more separate channels for friend/foeness, RF spectra, etc, and put the HUD icons there. After some experience, I am sure you could learn to treat the friendness channel of your visual input with the appropriate “mental distance”, just as you would learn to treat the arrows/boxes in your current depictions of the HUD as being artificial HUD icons instead of thinking that there are really floating blue arrows and boxes in space in front of you. Or I guess another compromise would be for the HUD to be in rgb space but to be partially transparent, as it is in many video games.

Actually, your ideas about divided consciousness are especially interesting to me because I think that even we vanilla humans have a divided consciousness in this way. After all, are you really aware of the minute changes in facial appearance that form each expression (e.g. “eyebrows raised to 70% of maximum, blink rate down to 50% below baseline”), or do you get an executive summary of their social meaning that just pops into your consciousness, coming from a specialized dedicated processor (e.g. “Jane is really interested in what I am saying, Joe is politely feigning interest, Alex is about to make an angry interjection”)? A little of both, I think.

Oh, and before I forget, I wanted to say that I completely agree that it is a very good point of your storytelling style that you simply directly immerse us in the fictional world, without injecting unnecessary, pace-debilitating, out-of-character “As you know, Rita…” and “POWER OF THE ATOM” speeches.

I also tend to see Rita1 as having a very divided consciousness in some respects. I haven’t gotten into this in the story yet (and I do plan to make some offhand references to it), but I basically see Rita1 and all the other software people as running what is essentially an emulated human brain. Some of them actually started life as biological people; some of them are purely software – but I figure most of the ones who were never flesh in any way are a merge of the mind-dumps of their parents*. Rita1 has some auxiliary processors that do a LOT of her tactics processing for her, and I see this data as being presented to her in such a way that makes it clear it is not coming from “herself” – it’s certainly part of the gestalt of “Rita1, the personality and memories” plus “the apps running on Rita1′s ‘reptile brain’”. Where “Rita” stops and “Rita’s favorite apps” begins is a blurry line, given that you can assume she keeps pretty much the same suite of stuff installed on all her bodies. But in general, a significant number of people like to have a layer of separation between “me” and “my apps” rather than blindly trusting a “friend-or-foeness”, and Rita1 is definitely one of these folks.**

This sort of comes naturally from one of the philosophical points I’m trying to make with this story. I really want Rita1 and the other espies to be seen as wholly human, rather than some kind of OTHER that humans have built. If we see the increasingly smart machines we’re building as Things that we can treat worse than slaves, then a Terminator scenario becomes increasingly likely. And I really don’t want one of those. Rita1′s world is one where we have the sense to start treating sentient machines like they are fully human; it’s pretty normal to start new software people out as, essentially, five-year-old kids***, and upgrade their hulls as they grow older and (hopefully) wiser. This results in a population of humans running on different hardware, who have been largely**** trained to see naked monkeys as “my tribe”, rather than a bunch of KILLBOTS WHO KILL MEATSACKS.

I haven’t had a chance to get into a lot of this, since I’m really trying to keep from getting bogged down in having people say “OBSERVE, FRIEND CITIZEN, HOW WE HAVE TAMED THE POWER OF THE ATOM!” and deliver a five-minute lecture about atomic power every time they turn on a light. I’ve got a conversation coming up in a couple chapters that will touch on some of this stuff. Plus auxilliary stuff like the tumblr (which is being excerpted in the printed book).

AND ON THE OTHER HAND: yes, there ARE senses that some of these people have that a 2012 bio-person doesn’t. In space, all the communication is over radio/laser/whatevs, people will have wider visual spectrums, there are people who will gleefully pipe their apps straight in beneath their consciousness and completely trust them. There’s really no One Way To Do It.

Well that got long, didn’t it. Complete with footnotes. Thanks for the thoughtful response!

* there have been some experiments with building minds from scratch, but it’s a complicated process, with some very grey ethical areas involved, and more than a few laws involved. Kind of similar to stem cell research nowadays.

** I am not sure if she was always like this, of if she’s gotten more vigilant about the boundaries of “herself” after the whole thing with the Vespuline Hive. I’m not even entirely sure she’d give me a straight answer if I asked; it feels like a complicated kind of choice.

*** only the most dedicated fetishists want to simulate programming a small potential sentience with language and not shitting itself.

**** just as with biological humans, there ARE exceptions, there ARE psychopaths out there.

A robot drone or a rita1 can presumably do much better by simply having an expanded perceptual space with a larger number of features. Just like us they would sense “redness”, “near/farness”, and “leftward motion”, but in the same way they would also sense “friendness”, “x-radiationness”, “wifiaccesspointness”, and other useful features. Then there is no information loss or ambiguity. Friendness would simply be another perceptual sense seamlessly overlaid with the rest, instead of having to be represented by ‘false’ rgb objects that overwrite real data streaming in from the rgb senses. (Of course these extra features need not all be represented at a per-pixel level like “redness”. Some could be more like semantic tags applied to objects e.g. “friend” or “estimated time to intercept”).

In fact I had always assumed this is what rita1′s perceptions are really like, and that the HUDs you used depict this in your comic are merely a convenience for the benefit of the human readers, to give them a crude approximation of the true symphonic sensory experience, much like allowing a congenitally deaf person to get a portion of the experience of a musical play by giving them a text transcription of the song lyrics. What do you think?

Mostly I’m just trying to make something realistically understated. I think one of the leading problems we face right now is information overload; AR can add a lot of stuff but it can also add too much!

(And I didn’t know that about you! I’d love to have some pointers to interesting work in AR UI. I skim /r/augmentedreality but that’s pretty much dead nowadays…)

Generally, your stuff has been head and shoulders above most other interfaces I’ve seen in film and fiction, which tend to be hollywoodized rather badly, so kudos on that. :)