The “bats can do calculus” thing is funny, because if you play around with synths for a while, you realize a lot of what humans perceive as “natural” sounds are just us directly perceiving certain complex mathematical things as big gestalt gestures. Like recognizing a multiplied wave as sounding like a woodwind. Hearing individual notes within a chord is basically Fourier analysis. Feeling how naturally a note decays is perceiving how linear or exponential the curve is. The fact that a sine wave sounds smooth but a sawtooth wave sounds nasally, and a square wave has a certain hollow fuzz to it. Is someone doing “math” there? Once you get the flavor of what each of those qualities are like, listening to the world becomes like directly perceiving math. Also, listening to birds becomes very strange. Because you realize some goofy easy weird sound you can squelch out of an analog synth is the same thing a bird is doing. Then sometimes they make a sound you can’t make. What kind of math is that bird on? Makes you wonder.
What able bodied authors think I, an amputee and a wheelchair user, would want in a scifi setting:
- Tech that can regenerate my old meat legs.
- Robot legs that work just like meat legs and are functionally just meat legs but robot
- Literally anything that would mean I don't have to use a wheelchair.
- If I do need to use a wheelchair, make it fly or able to "walk me" upstairs
What I actually want:
- Prosthetic covers that can change colour because I'm too indecisive to pick one colour/pattern for the next 5+ years.
- A leg that I can turn off (seriously, my above knee prosthetic has no off switch... just... why?)
- A leg that won't have to get refitted every time I gain or loose weight.
- A wheelchair that I can teleport to me and legs I can teleport away when I'm too tierd to keep walking. And vice versa.
- In that same vein, legs I can teleport on instead of having to fiddle around with the sockets for half an hour.
- Prosthetic feet that don't require me to wear shoes. F*ck shoes.
- Actually accessible architecture, which means when I do want to use my wheelchair, it's not an issue.
- Prosthetic legs with dragon-claw feet instead of boring human feet or just digigrade prosthetics that are just as functional as normal human-shaped ones.
- A manual wheelchair with the option to lift my seat up like those scissor-lift things so I'm not eye-level with everyone's butt on public transport/so I can reach the top shelf by myself.
- A prosthetic foot that lights up when it hits the ground like those children's shoes.




