"'Direct skill download'?" muttered Akane, "What is that?"
"Well.., you know how you learn to do things in school?"
"The teacher shows us what to do, and how to do it. Then we practice until we get it down."
"Exactly. But with this technology, we will be able to give you that skill in a single attempt and you would need to do no work at all."
That made the youngest Tendo blink. "If that's true, it would mean that we could learn just about anything!"
"Almost anything intellectual."
"Huh?"
The salesgirl shrugged. "It only teaches the mind, not the body. We could give you the knowledge of how to be the greatest pitcher in baseball, but you would need to practice to learn how to use it."
Ukyo frowned. "But I thought that you said that you could teach someone anything without any work."
"We can teach, but after that, it's just an application of skills."
"And there is no worse downside to this?"
"Ummm... not exactly."
"What does that mean?!" growled Akane.
"You see, at this point, we've never used it on a living human brain before. But as far as we can be certain, it looks like we've got all the bugs out."
"And if you didn't?"
"There is a chance that you could wind up with a bit of a mix up, like between 'martial arts' and 'marital arts', if it's only a little problem. But if it's worse..."
"What would happen?"
"It functions on a connection to your neural pathways, and if there was too much put into it... you might wind up with a whole lot dumped into your head. At best, that might only push you into a type of amnesia, hopefully only temporary, but possibly if it was bad enough it would be a personality death. At worst... you would wind up as a mental vegitable."
Akane went wide eyed at that. "Aaaahhhh! You want to do that to me?!"
"Of course not!" Kumiko protested. "The chances of that happening are so remote that there is nearly no chance of that happening. Besides, we would never allow any harm to come to any person if we could do anything about it, and we would never offer it unless we were certain that it was as safe as could be. And with your physical condition, you'd likely be even better off than most of any other people who might try it. The most likely result would be for you to gain a new skill, like say... a fluency in another language, like... Russian."
A nervous giggle worked its way up the shorthaired girl's throat as she weighed the possibilities. If she didn't do this, she could wind up owing these guys lots of money. On the other hand, there was a chance, however remote, of some sort of disaster happening. But if it did work she could learn things that would have taken years of work...
Working past the lump in her throat, she looked at the salegirl and:
(Posted Sun, 26 Oct 2003 00:38)
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