Chapter 757

“You know, not to be rude about it but why do demons need to go to school at all?” asked ‘Lily’ “I mean, I’m just thinking about it now and you don’t really need exercise. The classes might be relevant might not but you will never be sent on a Contract you can’t do so I’m not sure if that’s the point. Then there’s the fact that magic and technology is very advanced here. Surely you could just shove information into peoples heads?”

Kamiko brightened at the question, “OOOh, I actually know this one quite well. I made the same argument to Mum once. First off, yes we do have technology to shove information into people’s heads but you’re not allowed to use it at all until you’ve lived for at least a century. I guess I’ll talk about the tech first because it’s pretty cool.

“So, the first way of using it is basically just compressing a textbook straight into someone’s mind. The problem though, is it’s a lot like shuffling a deck of cards and handing it to someone and saying ‘find the seven of hearts’. They have a full deck. They know with 100% certainty that in their hand, the seven of hearts is somewhere. In the end though, it’s not like you know where the card is just because you’re holding it. So you have to look through the whole deck randomly searching for your card.

“In the end, the problem is it takes quite a bit of shuffling to find the information you need, you haven’t really learnt about the rest of the cards or where they are... and finally, because of how our memories work once they start towards perfect is that you don’t usually save memories of looking at memories. It’s a different system. Having crystalised information shoved into your mind makes those memories even more solid and unyielding. Teasing the information out into the rest of your mind is hard.

“So even if you’ve found the seven once, your memory of finding the seven won’t work properly. You’ll need to go back to the top of the deck and look again. Maybe you vaguely remember it was closer to the bottom and you start there instead but you won’t be able to do much better. This is because when you’re remembering remembering your memories you don’t actually live through the new memory, you get directed back along the same... ‘track’ I suppose.

“So that’s the first problem. Memories don’t come with understanding and it’s really difficult to use them for understanding. Even reading at high speed is more efficient. As long as you’re actually reading instead of just looking at a large wall of text and then trying to play everything back. Once it was shone that sort of thing didn’t really work they tried to find another way of going about it all...”

Kamiko paused her story to take a drink of water. Kat had a moment of confusion where she tried to work out where the water came from only to realise there was a water jug on the jelly cart. Apparently she’d overlooked that amongst all the jelly. Once Kamiko had rehydrated herself she continued her story, “So once that was done they tried to figure out how to transfer not just information but understanding as well...

.....n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

“That’s where a lot of the problems came in. See, ‘understanding’ is pretty broad. When you start to go for understanding it pulls in a lot of other information as well. The only way to really get understanding is by copying it from someone else... but they have different worldviews and upbringings, which causes problems, different memories, more problems, and they reached their understanding through connecting those two things, causing yet more problems... and that’s just for demons that are exactly the same species.

“A medusa has snake hair. Those snakes are real, and sort of mini-minds, but those mini-minds are not the same mini-minds beholders have in their eye stalks, or the same as the semi-automated minds that can come alongside clone abilities. They all provide another layer of issues complicating things further.

“This means that you can only really get understandings from demons of the same type, gender, and who are already similar enough to you that the memories are at least in combatable formats. See, another things, Kat has a perfect memory, something I do not quite yet have. That means that despite both of us being Succubi, we couldn’t share memories...

“But it’s not like I can share them with Sue either. Sue and I are much too different in personality, temperament and maybe upbringing. That’s not even getting into the age difference. It’s why you need to be at LEAST a century old. Even then, if you need memories with understanding you can only really get it from people eerily similar to you, who aren’t more than fifty years older than you, and are the same kind of demon. It’s so incredibly difficult to get that to line up and involve the topic you want.

“Consider, how likely you are to find someone who is nearly your clone that made similar enough choices to you that they haven’t deviated far enough for the process to fail AND decided to learn the information you want. The chances are much more likely that if you can find such a person, they’ll also be trying to find someone with the memories you already want. Because remember, they need to be a very similar person. It’s just a mess.

“And bad things happen to demons that choose to ignore all the criteria. Best case scenario the memories are unusable. More commonly you’ll end up with schizophrenia, fall into a coma, or your brain will start leaking out of your ears. I do sadly mean that literally. Your brain deforms and starts to break down resulting in some of it leaking from your ears. Not fun,”

*Well. Shit. I guess that explains a few things... and makes me want to never use the feature. Not that it’s likely I ever can...* “Good to know. I’ll probably never be able to use it right?” said Kat.

Kamiko nodded, “Yeah, being a Non-dem means your experience is already so far removed from most people that you’d need another Non-dem Succubus that grew up in an orphanage with only one best friend who eventually they eventually got into a magical bond with. Trust me, the chances are so astronomically low you’d probably spend more time searching for the person in question than it’d take for you to learn basically everything. Not about what you want. I mean everything. All the things.”

Kat nodded, “A shame but yeah. I see it happening like that. So what about school though?”

Kamiko took a swig, this time from a jelly cup, and continued, “Right well. That’s the big reason we don’t just shove information into kids. The reason we all go to school though is partly because of the social aspect, partly to keep us occupied while our parents aren’t home and also so that we don’t accidentally cause an apocalypse during our first contract. It’s surprisingly easy to do actually and we have a lot of lessons in our later years dedicated to not ending the world. ”

“I feel a bit of a story there...” said Kat leadingly.

“I mean, sure but it’s not super specific most of the time. I bet Sue knows a bunch as well,” Sue gave a thumbs up, “Yeah see it’s... well I suppose it’s the basics. First rule is don’t inject demonic energy directly into plants or animals. They can handle surprisingly small amounts injected directly and it causes problems real fast. Too much demonic fire can cause this as well, but it has to be pretty intentional.

“Um... what next. Don’t give out advanced technology to just one faction because it’s more than likely they’ll either destroy the world or destroy everyone else and then the world if they don’t have proper guidance. It isn’t um... we don’t subscribe to the idea you should never give that sort of thing out, but you can’t give it to just one faction on the planet or plan AND you have to stick around and basically babysit them for upwards of a few centuries. Like, even after the uplift is finished you’re still responsible for making sure they don’t end the world if you do it.

“You are basically forced to make it your temporary home world. You can’t take missions longer than like two days. You can’t pretend to be a god during the process, and it’s also supremely expensive resource wise because you’re not allowed to earn anything from your summons during the uplift. It’s a sort of punishment to stop people doing it. There are a couple other examples of world enders but those were the two big ones that were talked about pretty extensively.”

“Why such a harsh discouragement?” asked Kat.

“I think it’s because if they want to do stuff like that they should be improving the Hub. Or perhaps it’s because ‘world uplift’ is actually a thing demons can be summoned to do. It’s REALLY expensive but it has been done a few times at least. That and I think it’s because the goodwill generated from it usually lets the demon in question either take over the world or get a tonne of resources from it once it’s been uplifted. So it’s a bit like ‘you want a steady stream of revenue for a long term investment? Well you can but you need to gamble all your rewards between now and when you finish that this is actually the best way to earn money’ or something like that,” explained Kamiko.