Sozont was in his lair, working on the SIGMA project. It was difficult
to explain the Σ project without going into considerable detail about
how Furry Fairytale Land really worked. That was one of the things
that Sozont liked about the project. One of the things he didn't like
was Springer the Leopard, with whom he had to work.
Sozont was doing the kinesthetics module, receiving
input from the player-furs. Springer was doing the core-database access,
finding meanings for the player's actions. There was a defined interface
that specified how their modules were to interact, but Springer disliked
it and wanted changes. His emails didn't make sense to Sozont; when
Springer talked about "client/server models" it seemed he was trying to suggest
that the database access module should be telling the kinesthetics module
what to do, which was not the Furry Fairytale Land way. He kept sending
diagrams showing the database access module on top of the kinesthetics
module, which Sozont thought was simply wrong-headed. Kinesthetics should
be on the outside, with DBAccess closer to the core. Sozont
was in the middle of yet another long email to Springer, trying to find common
ground.
Sozont's life had not gone very well until he
came to Furry Fairytale Land. He was now quite good at this job and
the tokens of appreciation (Fairytale Land credits that were convertible
to RL money) were many and frequent. Programming was the thing Sozont
did that other furs liked enough to give tokens for. It would be unconscionable
to do the job poorly just to keep the peace with a problematic leopard.
Although he was getting hungry, Sozont did not
want to stop in the middle of the email to hunt up some game. Despite
what he had said to Marth about not spending money on food, Sozont invoked
a can of salted rabbit. He held the can against the floor with one
foot while opening it with a talon on the other foot. The can was fairly
inexpensive and very easy to obtain, and its contents tasted vaguely like
fresh rabbit. Looked like dogfood, though.
Sozont typed very quickly and generally did not
look at the keyboard. That way he didn't have to see that his VR paws
were not quite keeping up with his RL hands. It was one of those annoyances
you just had to put up with to stay focused on the paying job. Sozont
finished up the email and sent it, then did some more coding work on the
Σ input system.
Later Springer sent a reply email, which made
it quite clear that he thought his module should be dominating Sozont's module.
This was so wrong it was hard to imagine anyfur even suggesting such
a thing. Purrhaps some FTF communication was needed to resolve the
problem. Sozont sent back an email offering his lair for a business
meeting.