I am experimenting on an IR protocol which is very reliable and can interrupt and wait for the reciever picaxe to respond, although slow in fuzzy conditions, and requires both ends to have a transmitter and a reciever, so it's bi-directional. also, it takes up at least 150 program bytes (about 50 lines), so it's not for the obsolete 08, 18, and 28 parts at all, but great for x and x1 parts.
If this is what you would really like, then you would have a choice:
!. master-slave: much like the I2C protocol, but data is sent via infrared both ways, rather than wired sda and scl lines. advantages: very flexible. however, unreliable at sequential writes as a datum could be written twice when not needed to.
". conversational: just like serin and serout, but through IR, and in 'morse dot and dash' code where a dot represents a 0, and a dash is a 1, so that makes it more reliable. In addition, the byte is sent twice, and the reciever would send an 'ack' when the two bytes match. but, to make it faster, rather than sending the byte twice, an even parity bit and an odd parity bit could be sent after the byte, or possibly an even one before and after the byte.
after anyone has shown me what of the above they want, and using picaxe vsm, I'll create and send the code for your need first.