APPENDIX B: 

PUCKS & SPEX: How they Work

When paired with SPEX, the puck becomes the control center for a much larger and more immersive experience. The lenses handle the visual overlay in the wearer’s field of view, while the puck supplies the identity, timing, voice, and behavioral logic that make the Scion seem physically present in the room. This is how the same companion can exist as a small projected figure on the puck, then appear as a life-size presence through the lenses. The puck is doing the underlying work in both cases; the difference is only in how the visual layer is delivered. In that sense, the puck is the constant, while the visible form of the Scion is flexible.

That flexibility is what makes the system feel believable in daily life and dangerous when it breaks. Under ordinary conditions, the puck manages latency, attention cues, audio routing, and the handoff between a private earpiece and public sound. It also keeps the Scion’s emotional tone and social behavior coherent, so the AI can shift from intimate companion to public conversation without seeming mechanically abrupt. If the system is functioning properly, the user barely notices the technical layers at all. They just experience a companion that can appear small and contained on the puck in one moment, then fully embodied in another.

The experience extends further with the introduction of roaming protocols that maintain a closed loop of interaction. By the time Spex arrive, pucks are updated to allow Scions to move between hosts in real time, forming temporary links with other hosts and their scions. This process—referred to as roaming—is not automatic or unlimited. The roam is limited to perceiving two scions beyond the hosts scion and the hosts scion is responsible to sync the roaming scions at the hosts request. The host will get a message that a roaming scion wants to sync in the form of blinking green light in the upper right of his visual field. The host then asks his scion to make and sever the link. Scions sever all roams and revert to audio only in the event the host is no longer conscious.