Auntie toasts the VRMMORPG

3. Engineering a Body - The Skeleton (Part 1)

Flora smiled at her avatar, a woman with pale, papery skin, short white hair, and green eyes. In her youth, she had reached 1.70m, but gravity compressed her to 1.64m and left her with a slight hump. The avatar smirked back at her.

"Let's begin with the skeleton. Show only the bones of the avatar."

Nothing happened.

'Oh well, it would have been too easy. But it was worth a try.'

With practiced motions, she peeled back skin, flesh, and muscles of the avatars forearm and marked the bone. Then she selected all other objects of the project which had the same material.(1)

Afterward, she inverted the selection to everything else but the bones and vanished it from view. Now only the skeleton of her avatar remained.

At first sight, Flora identified bent bones and uneven surfaces. She had no clue how to fix that because she had no medical knowledge. 'Improving a project without a blueprint and expertise on the parts is a bit difficult... fortunately, the internet exists.'

She opened a web browser and read the Wikipedia article about bones and a bit about age-related issues with bones. There she stumbled upon the topic of cartilage. 'Cartilage buffers the friction between the moving parts and that's where most of the wear and tear happens. I must show it some love.'

Flora augmented the model with cartilage. It looked as worn as she suspected.

'Let's improve my skeleton.'

"System, what kind of materials can I use? Do you have titanium?"

"Access to material selection denied. Titanium is part of the material selection."

'There goes my cyborg plan...' Flora shrugged.

She arranged pictures of skeletons from the internet around the work area and straightened out the bones. Her eyes darted between the websites and her avatar while she carefully improved the shape. She didn't use her hands, just her will. With her mind, she pressed against the material, a trick she picked up while using the CAD Software. She had noticed that her body, minus her hands, was immobile while wearing the helmet and deduced, the software read her thoughts. It translated her notions into the movement of her avatar into actions of the virtual reality. Why not skip the middle part and go directly from thinking to influencing the world? She had jokingly called it magic in the past. It was the part she liked the most about the CAD System.

'The painted pictures are too idealized, and I don't know if the skeletons in the photographs are prime material.'

"System, please show me the best human skeleton," Flora asked on a whim.

"Access to statistical data is granted, but because of privacy concerns, all data shown must incorporate at least 1000 individuals."

Flora didn't know what that exactly meant but was willing to try again.

"System, please aggregate the 1000 best human skeletons of your database into one skeleton."

She waited. 'Oh right, you have to be literal with AIs. System is not Evai, who was used to my implicit wishes.'

"And show it to me."

When the model appeared, Flora grinned and cleared her workspace of the websites.

She compared her avatar with the model. The bones were more delicate.

"System, please aggregate the 1000 best female skeletons and show it to me."

The new model resembled her avatar more. Satisfied, she continued to reshape bones. She paid extra attention to the areas where multiple bones interfaced like the joints. In such places the highest attrition on machinery took place. Because of her joint pains, she assumed it was the same for the human body.