Quoted By:
You are getting irritated, you'll admit. Being a subject to a Noble's mind games is bad enough on its own, without also having to endure the grating sensation of being in the presence of far too much magitech.
But you'll be damned if you give this woman what she wants. So instead you present her with a thin, polite smile.
"Are you familiar with the concept of a 'death tax', Marchioness? It's another engineering term."
"That sounds rather grim."
"Because it usually is. Imagine, if you would, that you're the production engineer in a factory that makes heavy duty exo-suits. One of your responsibilities is quality assurance and testing of the product to ensure it performs to specifications. And during a particular round of testing you discover a design fault in the power system of one of the suit models - an edge case in which, should a rare but plausible set of circumstances arise, it may produce an electric fault, causing the battery pack to violently explode without prior warning."
"I assume it's something that I'd want fixed?"
"Being the responsible sort, you set about doing just that," you nod. "You do a new round of tests to make sure you can reliably reproduce the problem and define the cause as narrowly as possible. Next you investigate the possible solutions and find that the most effective one would be installing additional shielding on the battery. So you collate all your data and present it - along with the solution - at the next boardroom meeting with the owners. However, there is a problem."
"The cost?"
"Your solution would require new components to be purchased, brought in, tested, and integrated into the design. The production line would need adjustments - which would shut it down for weeks and not months, and massively delay any orders the factory is in the process of fulfilling. And between the fines, the lost clients, and the stopped production, it would indeed cost a lot of money. So the executives debate things for a bit and finally reject your solution, arguing that the edge case required for the electric fault to trigger is so unlikely that it will never happen. And that, as far as they're concerned, is the end of the matter: you're told to keep quiet and go back to work."
"I think I can tell where this is headed."
(cont)
