ã€ŠTrading Hellsã€‹


 01: For want of a nail

    I knew beforehand that it would be neither cheap nor comfortable, but the price was steeper than I had anticipated. Still, even this heavily inflated price was well within my means. So the not cheap part was acceptable. The not comfortable part I was still debating with myself.

    The man on the other side of the table was unsavory if anybody ever deserved this label. His overall had seen better days and no washing machine for a few months. He apparently had a distant relationship with a shower. Every 2 or 3 months or so a visit, at least if the odor was a clue, and his long scraggly beard displayed the remains of the meals from the last week. But he was also the first one to be able to bring me to the other side of the continent. And considering that the ground here was becoming increasingly hot for me, that was the most important consideration.

    I tried to suppress a sigh and lifted my credled to him. He only shook his head.

    ¡°Cash only. I don¡¯t want to leave any tracks.¡±

    Figures, a little bit of paranoia without enough knowledge to do any good. But I had to take what I could get.

    ¡°You know that credit bills are easier to track than electronic money? At least if one of the sides knows what they are doing.¡±

    With that, I opened the flap on my messenger bag and reached inside.

    ¡°If you want anonymity you either need deep creds, bullion, or trade. I can offer you gold or Norwest creds. What do you want?¡±

    He seemed a bit surprised but then came to a decision. I bet he would fudge the conversion.

    ¡°Gold. Let¡¯s see, 30k. That would be eight ounces.¡±

    Yep, nailed it. ¡°30k are roughly 5.4 ounces.¡± With that, I got the small bag out, opened it, and counted 10 coins into my other hand.

    ¡°These are Gold Eagles. Each weighs .5454 ounces. Pure gold value is a tad above 30k. Any numismatist will give you 60 to 100k for them.¡±

    I could see greed moving into his eyes, as he looked at the bag in my hand.

    ¡°I would have to find somebody. That is more work. Give me five more.¡±

    Oh humanity. How low have you fallen.

    ¡°Every pawnshop on this continent will give you at least 40k for them. And at the rate credits are deteriorating, in a month you get 50k. Or I can give you the 30k in cash. When we reach New York they will have lost 3% of their value. So 10 Eagles. Or 30 grand? You decide.¡±

    This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

    ¡°Damn it! All right.¡± With that, he grabbed the gold coins out of my hand. ¡°But don¡¯t expect any service.¡±

    He stood up from the table and moved on to go, only to stop and turn back to me.

    ¡°17:30, bay 9. Be there or stay here. I won¡¯t wait.¡± Then he moved out of the bar.

    I emptied my soft drink, dropped a fifty on the table, and left the bar.

    On the way out several eyes followed me, but it was just the typical horny male and the occasional horny female. I detected no deeper interest.

    Once outside I took a deep breath. The air in the bar was breathable, but that was the best that could be said about it.

    I activated my link and ordered the delivery of my equipment to the airport, and moved to my hideout. Two hours and I would be out of this trap that until four days ago was my home.

    On the way, I listened to the news.

    The riots in the last few days were still the top topic. So far the spin doctors of the North-Western Commonwealth had not managed to turn it around into something harmless. More than 3,000 dead, four times that wounded a whole battalion of peacekeepers in heavy gear, and a few thousand street cops deployed. Several blocks were still burning. And officially no one knew what actually happened.

    Nobody, except for a selected few knew. It happened that the peacekeepers roused the Deathlords when they searched the sprawls and the underground for a handful of persons of interest, finding all of them in the first few hours, except one.

    What the Deathlords hoped to achieve by attacking the peacekeepers, nobody will ever know. The few that survived will probably never talk about it. But it spiraled out of control quickly, as more and more gangs used the situation to get even with whoever they had a feud with.

    Mostly that was the peacekeepers and rival gangs, but an unfortunate number of innocent bystanders were caught in the chaos.

    And all that because the peacekeepers were desperate to find one Vivian Juliette DuClare.

    Lucky for me, I had an officially known ¡°secret¡± bolt hole in the sprawls, between the territories of the Deathlords and the Unholy Knights. Not that I was there more often than needed to convince everybody that I would be there if something happened.

    But I was still in the top 100 of the most wanted at this moment. It was the perfect storm for me. A decade of careful plans meticulously executed crumbled to dust at the last minute through a rogue hacker on a joyride without any thought. Dozens of contingency plans useless thanks to the riots that vanished all my contacts or placed all my bolt holes into a warzone. Too much notoriety to buy my way out of it, again thanks to the riots. I could basically give myself up, vanish into the wilderness, resulting in a short and painful life, or flee the Commonwealth altogether. And I had at best a couple of days to choose.

    With these options, it was not a hard decision to move to the East Coast. Sure the northeastern states that still called themselves the United States of America were pretty much in the crapper, and the standard of living here in the North-Western Commonwealth was considerably higher. But on the other hand, the Pures were the minority there, and not the government. A big advantage all in all.

    And my equipment would make up for the technological downsides. It was, after all the best the Commies had to offer. Not that they knew they sponsored me in that regard.

    In my hideout, I packed the rest of my clothes, some food, and a few soft drinks into my backpack. Then I grabbed my board in its travel case, my backpack, and my messenger pack, looked around a last time in my lab, and then left for the last time.

    A few minutes later the incendiary device ignited and the super-hot fire reduced every possible trace of my being there to ash.

 02: Come fly away with me

    It was a bit disconcerting how easy it was to get through the security checkpoint at the airport. But on the other hand, they never really had a chance.

    The computer did all the work nowadays, and the computer knew without a doubt that my ID was legit.

    It had taken Spectre no more than a few minutes to establish the identity of Veronica Sinclair. Including my biometrics was not even worth thinking about. And changing the biometrics and pictures of Vivian Juliette DuClare was standard protocol. Those who did not know me personally were actually searching for a tall blonde, instead of for the tiny redhead walking through the checkpoint.

    The security was not at fault here, as Spectre was one of only six hackers who could do the switch. And few outside of the Abyss knew of the connection I had with one of the most wanted hackers of the world. I had made damn sure of that.

    And I still had activated the new identity only a few hours earlier, to make sure the fail save of the NWC bureaucracy would not come into play.

    The check of my luggage brought no surprises. My PDP 22 .40 was registered, and obviously legal (at least that was what the computer told the guards), and nothing else had to be licensed.

    I reached Bay 9 a bit more than 30 minutes before launch time and for a moment questioned my decision.

    On some level, I was aware of the fact that the Drunken Owl was old. I mean, the Camel was discontinued 40 years ago. So I was not completely surprised that the grav ship was somewhat decrepit. But the vision greeting me was even less than I expected. The ship was mottled with rust spots. I could see a few oil streaks, and the landing gear was a bit bent. But then I remembered my research. Ernest Willinger may be disreputable, but he made the flight to and from New York several times a week and was always reliable. It was the reason why I even talked with him, much less paid 30k credits for the flight.

    As I watched my crates were loaded into the freight compartment. My life here in Seattle was over.

    A screech behind me made me turn around.

    A group of apparent passengers had entered the bay, and at least one member was less than satisfied with the grav ship.

    Four Mongrels, two male and female each, and a Mute without any outward gender identification. A midsized blonde woman, mid-twenties I would guess, was berating one of the males, a big and strongly muscled man around thirty with black hair. The other woman was a bit smaller and younger than the blonde, with shoulder-length brown hair. The second man was a bit shorter than the first, with dark brown hair and roughly the same age. The Mute had a canine face, dark grey fur, and four arms. I had to respect his or her courage. Running around in Seattle as such an obvious mutant could not be easy.

    While only half of the street gangs here were anti-mutant, the Pures in control were less tolerant than the government nearly everywhere else. I briefly wondered how it had come through the checkpoints here at the airport without being turned into a sieve. But I was not interested enough to really ponder the question.

    In the short time while I looked them over, the man not trying to calm the blonde down moved up to me.

    ¡°Hi. Are you part of the crew? This ship is a bit¡­¡± he wrestled with the sentence before continuing ¡°rusty. Are you sure it is safe?¡±

    I couldn¡¯t help myself. Such an opening was to be used.

    I shrugged and simply said: ¡°No.¡±

    He seemed a bit stumped, and I began turning back to the ship when he tried it again.

    ¡°No, it is not safe?¡±

    ¡°No, I am not part of the crew. As far as I can tell, besides the pilot, there is no crew.¡±

    ¡°Oh, then you¡¯re a passenger? I am Marc Holt.¡± He held out his hand.

    I was contemplating using sarcasm, but I guessed it would be wasted, so I just ignored his hand.

    ¡°Veronica Sinclair. Yes, passenger. And before your next question, yes it is safe. The ship makes the trip and back four times a week. So you should calm down your friend.¡±

    The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

    With that, I finally turned around and entered the passenger compartment.  Willinger acknowledged my presence and I looked over the seats.

    As I had expected, the interior was no better than the exterior of the ship.

    The seats were old, and a few were obviously damaged. The smell was barely tolerable. Where there was no crud there was either blank metal or the remains of a carpet on the deck. A few of the seats still had their view pads, but mostly it was disconnected wires coming out of the openings.

    But I was not paying so much for comfort.  I looked around and saw a seat in the back that seemed relatively clean and had neither holes in the cover nor defective upholstery. More importantly the same could not be said of its neighboring seats. It was the best bet I had to be left alone.

    I stuffed my luggage in the overhead compartments, activated my link, and began reading. Not even five minutes later, Marc sat down on the other side of the aisle.

    ¡°That was not very friendly, you know?¡±

    Annoyed, I grabbed the bridge of my nose, and took a deep breath, before I answered.

    ¡°Yes, I know. That was intentional.¡± All the while I tried to get into Professor Nicolins¡¯ not very accessible text.

    I felt his hand on my shoulder.

    ¡°You could at least look at me if we are talking.¡±

    ¡°We are not talking. You are talking and I am reading. An activity I prefer to do alone. So would it be possible for you to leave me alone and talk with your friends? Thank you.¡±

    Obviously, he did not get the hint.

    ¡°Oh please, if you have to make up excuses then use believable ones. I mean no book, no tablet, no computer, no smart goggles, not even a smartphone. My god, why do I always meet the bitchy ones?¡±

    ¡°Implants. And it may be because you come on much too strong. So if you have no other questions, and on second thought, even if you have, would you please leave in peace? If you want to talk to somebody, go to your friends or one of the other six passengers. Thank you.¡±

    I began to search in my messenger bag.

    ¡°What other passengers? And why do you want to be alone?¡±

    He couldn¡¯t let it go. A low growl came unbidden from my throat. He began leaving annoying and slowly entered aggravating.

    ¡°Peace. Commonly defined as a state of tranquility or quiet, freedom from disquieting or oppressive thoughts or emotions, or harmony in personal relations. As we have no personal relationship and while your presence is certainly disquieting, my request for peace was mostly intended to get you to stop disturbing my state of tranquility. So if you would, please, leave me alone, I would be very thankful. If, on the other hand, you find yourself compelled to further incommode my tranquility it will result in a contest of wills. And while I concede you the advantage in a physical struggle, I would not let it come to one. So pester somebody else.¡±

    He confirmed my opinion about his cognitive abilities with his sophisticated reply.

    ¡°Huh?¡±

    When I did not react, his grip on my shoulder tightened.

    ¡°What did you mean with that?¡±

    ¡°So much for taking a shortcut. As you obviously do not know the meaning of the word, ¡°peace¡± I explained it to you instead of going through the motion of asking what in the sentence you don¡¯t understand. I! Want! To! Be! Left! In! Peace! Is there any ambiguity left in these words? Do you understand them? If not, could you please ask somebody else to explain it to you? I don¡¯t have the patience to translate it into two-syllable words for you.¡±

    Meanwhile, I had found my earbuds. Not that I needed them to hear music. My implants were wholly adequate to the task. But I learned long ago that they did not convey the fact that I was not listening. So the earbuds. While I began to insert them into my ears, another voice interrupted us.

    ¡°Marc! Every time. Why do you make an ass out of yourself every single time you meet an even halfway attractive woman? Go upfront, before I kick you there.¡±

    The Mute had come back to us.

    I forced a smile to the Mutant, and said a fast ¡°Thank you.¡±

    Then I concentrated on the text again. While I wished that Nicolins could write better, or at least had a better proofreader, he was one of the foremost experts in implant surgery. Circumstances prevented me from being one of his students officially, but I was still learning much from him. I had watched his lectures on the web. His anti-rejection nano therapy was brilliant, even if he had to do with nanites four generations old, but so far he missed the obvious solution. Again I felt an urge to simply send him a message. But as so often I held myself back. I had worked hard on finding it and had created completely new processes and machinery. It was worth an inordinate amount of money. And more importantly, it was worth an enormous amount of protection if I found the right place. And if I was the only one who could provide it.

    That I had access to a bleeding-edge nano factory and had the blueprints for the next-gen nanites was only the cherry on top. Oh, and of course the backdoors into the research facilities. Those were invaluable for me.

    Then the soft vibrations going through the ship got stronger, as the fusactor spun up from standby. Shortly a low growl announced the waking of the grav coils. And then we were underway.

    I finally managed to relax a bit. While I was not freely out of Dodge yet, the probability that the peacekeepers would get me now was minute. I had made it out of Seattle.

    Roughly an hour into the flight, I felt a short touch on my shoulder.

    As I opened my eyes, I saw the black-haired man standing over me. I inwardly steeled myself, deactivated the music player, and took one of the earbuds out.

    ¡°Yes?¡±

    ¡°Sorry, for Marc. He is not so bad, but¡­ okay, he is an asshole, but if you give him a bit of time he is all right. He is a horn dog though. So everything ok?¡±

    ¡°Just keep him away from me and it¡¯s ok. I just want to be left in peace.¡±

    He looked at me for a few seconds, before he nodded.

    ¡°Ok, I will leave you alone then. Have a quiet flight.¡± With that, he walked back to his group.

    The rest of the flight was quiet and peaceful for me. Four hours in I finished the book. I was contemplating starting another one, but in the end, I gave in to the exhaustion that I now felt creeping in and dozed off.

 03: Welcome to the jungle

    At first, I didn¡¯t know where I was and what was going on, so I panicked a bit. But then I realized what was happening.

    The grav turbines had changed pitch. Only slightly, but the last days had me sleeping very lightly and I was not yet completely beyond the stress, so it was enough to wake me.

    A short look at the time told me that we should be in the landing approach. A much longer look at the news told me that the search for Vivian DuClare was going on unabated in Seattle. It was unlikely to bring any real results, but nonetheless, I wished them fun.

    Then I reviewed the checklist for New York again.

    <ol>

    <li>Lodgings: I would have to pay for a hotel in the beginning. A house or an apartment was priority though, even if I could afford to live in a hotel for quite some time.</li>

    <li>Contacts: Luckily I had one name to drop that would open some doors for me. And of course access to the deep web. Otherwise, I would have to search long and hard to build up a new network.</li>

    <li>A place to work out of: I needed an obvious place to work out of. Something that everybody knew about, that there was an obvious reason why I was a bit shy, but nothing really illegal. Of course, illegality was no problem in New York for the last 130 years, but I wanted to avoid overt scrutiny.</li>

    <li>Paramount for survival in New York, a Benefactor: Since the criminal organizations took over most of the northeastern United States during the big war, anybody who wished to do any business, regardless of light or shadow, had to pay a tribute to the territorial leader.</li>

    <li>Build up my reputation: The overt one and the deep one. That was at once the easiest part and the hardest. I knew that my idea against CRS worked. But to get it onto the streets would take time. And the other¡­ well, that would take a hideout and resources. I could, for a while, use the cluster I had to leave in Seattle, but that was only a temporary solution. So until I had a place to hide a new cluster, I would be a bit hampered.</li>

    </ol>

    After a bit of consideration, I decided to move point 4 to point 1. I would have to get information about the different families and their territories before I would decide which territory to settle in.

    And of course, I would loathe paying two benefactors, so the lab/hideout and the new home should if at all possible be in the same territory. I also had to be careful about my ancestry. Unlike Seattle, my type was often not so well-liked on the east coast.

    Yep, the idiots back west had damaged our collective reputation. Quite severe in many cases. Bigots beget bigots, racism begets racism. Fortunately, I was at least outwardly a unique exemplar of my race. I looked nearly completely like a Mongrel. So I should be able to keep it under wraps. On the other hand, it would explain many other peculiarities. I would have to burn that bridge when I came to it.

    With that, I deactivated the link, and took a Coke out of my backpack. After activating the cool tap, I enjoyed the ice-cold drink, while the ship shuddered a bit. Then the growl of the turbines ebbed, just to fall silent entirely, followed by the ceasing vibrations of the fusactor.

    A few minutes later Ernest came from the cockpit and announced that we had reached New York. He followed this with opening the ramp and going down.

    The others on the flight began to leave the ship, while I decided I would take my time. So I used the opportunity to arrange short-term warehousing of my equipment. I timed it right so that I was the last to leave the ship, thinking that most of the passengers would already have left the bay.

    Well, I was wrong. All the others were still in attendance. In addition to a rather large group of men.

    Five each stood at the three exits of the bay, making it clear that they would not let anybody pass.

    A dozen more stood in a half-circle in front of the ramp, Mr. Willinger and the other passengers.

    All of them were heavily armed and held their various guns ready. Somehow, I managed to escape more than six thousand peacekeepers, twelve thousand rioting gang members, and God knows how many others, just to land in a hold up here on the other side of the continent.

    The obvious leader of the strangers was talking to our pilot when he saw me and stopped mid-sentence. He let his eyes roam over me for a few seconds.

    ¡°Well, well, well. Another one! And even nicer than the others. You brought us a righteous feast, Ernie. That so does make up for not paying. We still have to take you in of course; you understand that, don¡¯t you?¡±

    The malice in his voice was enough to send it cold down my back. Ernest began to beg.

    ¡°I have your money, Frankel. Here, fifty thousand dollars. I can give it to you right here. I would have brought it right to you¡± he wheedled.

    Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

    The answer was even colder than before.

    ¡°And you got it in Dollars, right? Dream on. Nobody would give you Dollars in Nowhere. And Nowhere Creds are not worth it here. You would have to get what? Twenty thousand creds for that? Only to get 50k good old dollars, without a fee for converting of course. No, my friend. No deal.¡±

    ¡°Not creds. Gold! 75 kbucks in gold. By weight. From what I heard the coins are worth even more. Twice as much. Here! For you!¡±

    By now the desperation was unmistakable. Ernest pulled a handful of some things out of his pocket. I was right in my guess that is where the 10 Gold Eagles I paid for my flight with. Frankel took them and looked at them for a few moments.

    ¡°Wow. They seem real. And directly solid. Too bad for you, that you are too late. We¡¯ve already taken you and all you own as compensation. Your rust bucket will be worth a few bucks. You, I will be honest, you will probably end in the arena. And our guests here we have to decide on.¡±

    Great. Ernest had debts, and we had become the collateral. It was of no avail, I had to try to get out of this by myself. How annoying a beginning in a new city.

    So I walked slowly down the ramp, and close to Frankel.

    ¡°Ok. How much?¡± Frankel seemed a bit surprised, but he caught on quickly.

    ¡°How much what, babe?¡±

    ¡°How much do I have to pay to get me and my freight out of here?¡±

    He rubbed his chin a bit before he answered me.

    ¡°Only you? Or for the rest of them too?¡±

    ¡°Only me and my property. The only one of the others I talked more than a single sentence with has gone out of his way to annoy me. So how much?¡±

    Then he began to laugh. It was among the most evil laughs I have ever heard.

    ¡°You got brass ones. I like that. Too bad for you that we will take your money anyway. You have nothing to offer.¡± And then he grinned.

    ¡°You may be able to take my cash, and whatever else I carry in direct worth. Correction, no may in it. But most of my money is actually digital. And I won¡¯t release it to you without walking away free.¡±

    ¡°Oh, babe, you are so funny. We have a very good hacker, so we will get your digital money too. You won¡¯t need it anymore. I think I will keep you as a toy. Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you would be so good to drop your bags and your weapons, of course, we will take you to our home. There we will decide what to do with you from now on.¡±

    With that, the rest of his gang came onto us. I saw no possibility to escape, and no reason to get beaten unconscious, so I complied. None of the others struggled either, so it was over fast. Of course, unlike the others, I was relatively sure that I would not be a permanent guest of Frankel.

    In no time we had our hands cuffed behind our backs, and we were led out of the bay, the airport, and into a waiting van.

    I was able to catch the license plate of the van, and the first thing I did after seating on the floor was activating the link to my cluster. It took me a few seconds to blast through the so-called security of the NYDMV and find out everything about this van, and its owners. Then I piggybacked the navigation and traffic flow apps to get into the vehicle control. Just out of routine I downloaded anything on the onboard computer. I mined the IFF, the garage opener, and the nav system to infect anything they connect with my Trojans.

    At the same time, I switched the link on my credled to my tertiary account. Still 3 million ?, but my real fortune was nowhere near my wrist anymore.

    Then I began investigating Frankel. The fact that my cluster was in Seattle hampered me here quite a bit, but I had built enough bridges to any bigger city in the world in the past that it was possible. What I found out was disconcerting. Frankel was a slaver. Not only that, he was a slaver with a reputation for extreme sadism. A large percentage of his ¡°merchandise¡± was broken beyond any comprehension. Of course, he used slave collars. But it seemed that he also used nanotech to modify his victims. I would have to be fast to escape here.

    While I was still contemplating my situation, somebody kicked my foot. I looked up and saw Marc glowering at me.

    ¡°I am talking to you bitch.¡±

    I let out a deep sigh again.

    ¡°Apparently I can¡¯t stop you. So what can I do for you?¡±

    ¡°What did you mean only for you? Don¡¯t you help others?¡±

    So he still didn¡¯t get it.

    ¡°Mr. Holt, apart from you the only other name I know from aboard the Owl is that of Ernest Willinger. And neither of you have done much to endear yourself to me. Mr. Willinger tried to swindle me out of 15 thousand credits. You on the other hand worked hard to make me not like you. Congratulations, by the way, you succeeded. I can¡¯t stand you. The others I don¡¯t know from Adam. So why should I pay an, as I would guess not insubstantial amount of money for people I don¡¯t know and whose only interaction with me was to annoy me?¡±

    He grumbled something but kept his mouth shut. The others were a bit affronted, but I could see that at least two of them understood my point of view. The black-haired man cleared his throat before he spoke.

    ¡°That is not important now. We have to seek a way to escape these assholes. So anybody has an Idea?¡±

    At least he was halfway focused on the situation. Unfortunately, he was going the wrong way. I had to intervene.

    ¡°Even if I had an idea, and unfortunately I don¡¯t, I would not talk about it here. You can bet that they hear anything and everything we say.¡±

    That brought me a handful of blank stares.

    ¡°If you have not realized it yet, Mr. Frankel and his friends are slavers. We can expect to be fitted with a slave collar in the next few days. So unless your mutated friend is of a variant with a modified neural structure, we all will be obedient little slaves at the end of the week. Unless of course, you can do something about it.¡±

    That woke them up. The next few minutes were a hail of questions and exclamations, and I concentrated on the cluster again. I had to find something, anything I could do. I had the idea to pay for a raid on Frankel¡¯s group. But the danger to me was higher than I liked, so I kept it in the back of my head.

    Then I found the information I needed. Frankel used exclusively Dalgon Tec Mk. IX slave collars. Expensive, robust, somewhat elegant looking, and, for me at least, most importantly with a barely known vulnerability in the central control unit.

    I set the cluster to get anything Dalgon Tec had on the system, as well as to have it scour the deep web about the vulnerability. And then I began to build my exploit. I modified the mines in the van to directly connect any system they encounter with my cranial board. And then I waited.

 04: Rusty Cage

    It took us a bit over 45 minutes to get to Frankel¡¯s compound. From the inside of the van, neither of us could see it, but when the garage opener sent the signal with the data mine embedded, the first layer of the compound''s computer began talking with me.

    At this moment I had only access to the basic house control system, but my Trojans slowly and carefully made inroads into the network.

    The first success was the entertainment system, followed by the low-security network. Then I encountered the first serious roadblock. The security around the more important computer systems was astounding. Nothing I could not get through, but still, much more than I expected. Frankel¡¯s hacker turned out to be at least a fourth-level hacker.

    I wouldn¡¯t have thought that a computer expert of this caliber would work with a slaver group. That changed the situation much for the worse for me. Instead of breezing through the security, I had to work slowly to not alert my opponent.

    In short order, we were dragged out of the van and shoved into a group of cages. The cages were just adequate enough for the bigger guys of us, and for once I was glad for my lack in stature. Not that I made some sort of happy dance. One by one they removed our cuffs and then left us alone.

    I used the time to identify the firewall and hit a bit of luck here. It was a US Army model, just two years old. For most people, it would have marked an insurmountable obstacle. But I knew not only that it was based on a much older model from the Commonwealth, I actually had the source code for both versions. That meant I could set my cluster onto the task of infiltrating the system.

    Time to shut down a bit. It would take a few hours for the cluster to get into everything. Even knowing the vulnerabilities of the firewall it had to move slowly, and suppress any indication of an attack. To gain a bit of time I quickly set up a minefield in my credled account for the hacker to play with. If I estimated his ability correctly he would spend the next week cursing and reinstalling his board. At the same time I erased and then locked down my board, so he would not find anything there. The real work was done on the cluster, and unless he found the q-link he would never even guess about it.

    Then I moved my attention to the outside again. The others were still complaining. Marc was bitching about my bitchiness. To the left of my cage was the blonde, while the Mute was on my right.

    After a while, the blonde tapped at the bars between us.

    ¡°Hey, Red. Why did you shoot down Marc so fast? I mean, yeah, he has the tact of a bull, but I think you broke the record.¡±

    I looked into her eyes and then shrugged my shoulders.

    ¡°Call me Veronica. And how did I break the record? Your canine friend had to threaten him to get him away from me.¡±

    ¡°Oh, that was simply his inability to give up. No, what I mean is that normally it takes at least five minutes before he pisses a girl off. With you, it happened in what? three sentences? Four?¡±

    ¡°If you mean outside of the ship, then it depends on how you count them. Do you think a single no is a sentence?¡±

    From Marc''s cage we all heard an ¡°Aw, shut up bitch. I was just being friendly.¡±

    Yeah, the guy was a good sport. The mutant interceded at this point.

    ¡°I would count a single no as a half-sentence at best.¡± He or she grinned a bit.

    ¡°Well, in that case, it was six and a half sentences. And I simply wanted to be left alone, nothing more and nothing less. And, at this point nothing personal. It was not that I did not want to talk to Marc. I did not want to talk to anybody.¡±

    ¡°So you would give him a chance if the situation would be right?¡± Now I was sure that she was joking.

    ¡°Uhm, it became personal when he invaded my personal space, disrupted my peace, gripped my shoulder, and refused to accept that I wanted to be alone. I can¡¯t stand guys that can¡¯t take a hint.¡±

    Marc''s friends began to laugh at this, which, frankly astonished me.

    One of the other passengers seemed similarly surprised.

    ¡°You folk are awfully happy with the shitty situation we are in. Care to share what¡¯s so funny?¡±

    Black hair was the one who answered, ¡°We are not really happy. But we don¡¯t give up yet, and with a bit of humor everything gets easier.¡± And I had to facepalm.

    ¡°Thank you for getting us all under tighter scrutiny. Want to make some explicit plans to escape that these slavers can listen to? Or do you leave it at this vague declaration that you will make it as hard for them as you can?¡± Whatever these people were, they were not professionals.

    ¡°Wow, you really can be bitchy, you know?¡± the mutant threw into the room. ¡°You nearly sound as those arrogant Pures.¡±

    I thought it over for a moment before I answered.

    ¡°That is mostly education and immersion into the culture. If you grew up in the system there you would sound the same.¡±

    ¡°Ha, bullshit! I know enough Mongrels from Seattle to know that they sound like anybody else.¡±

    ¡°Mongrels in the Commonwealth grow up in a different system. I spoke about the system of the Pures.¡±

    Surprisingly it was Marc who made the connection first. ¡°Wouldn¡¯t you have to be a Pure to grow up in the Pure system?¡±

    And here it was. I could likely keep it secret, but why bother?

    ¡°Yes. And what tells you that I am not a Pure?¡±

    It was the brunette that answered this time. ¡°Oh, come on, you are way too tiny to be a Pure.¡±

    ¡°Contrary to common belief, Pure does not automatically mean tall. Sure, as far as I know, I am the smallest Pure ever, but my mother is only 8 cm taller than me. So yes, I am Pure and I grew up in the Pure school system.¡±

    That created a moment of silence in the room. Then Marc crowed, ¡°Shit, no wonder you are such a bitch. Damn, I had to trip over a Pure bitch. Just my luck.¡±

    I heard a few agreeing mutterings. Just as I expected.

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    ¡°And you all wonder why we Pures don¡¯t like you? Marc had intolerable behavior. He invaded my personal space, not me his. Five minutes ago, everyone agreed that he was in the wrong. And now, just because you know that I am a Pure you agree that it was my fault. I bet you are already thinking about how this whole inconvenience we are in is my fault too. Of course, it has to be the Pure''s fault. You just make me angry.¡±

    With that, I closed my eyes and ignored the jerks around me.

    Not much later, the first one got taken out of his cage, only to be returned 15 minutes later with a slave collar. One by one they collared us, and then it was my turn.

    In spite of no resistance from my side, the three thugs were somewhat rough. Two of them grabbed an arm each and the last walked behind me, while they dragged me through the door.

    On the other side was a laboratory with several contraptions more suited to the Spanish Inquisition than to the modern world. I was shoved into one of them, and several clamps immobilized me. Then Frankel grabbed a collar from a table to the side and then came to me.

    ¡°Well, little miss Pure. We got ourselves a real prize this time. You have no idea what some of our customers will pay to get one of you to play with. With a bit of an upgrade and an enjoyable amount of training, you will fetch quite a sum. Enjoyable for me and my boys of course. You, I fear, will be rather less entertained.¡±

    With that he let his evil laugh out again.

    I tried to remain calm outwardly, and show neither fear nor submission.

    ¡°It is not too late to take my offer. So far it was just a bit uncomfortable for me. As soon as you put that around my neck you will eventually regret it.¡±

    His laughter became louder and he had to grab the torture rack I was restrained in to keep his balance.

    ¡°Oh yeah, you have brass ones. I just know I will enjoy taming you. I am almost sorry that you are worth so much. I would love to keep you around as a toy. But I just can¡¯t justify it. Well, we will have a week to play with you.¡±

    Wow, this guy was clearly deranged. But I was sure that I could overcome his collar and his system.

    I needed a way to neutralize the gang, but if necessary I would order a raid.

    Then he locked the collar around my neck. Immediately I felt a stinging sensation at the base of my skull. Then a short numbness as the nano-probes connected to my spine.

    ¡°Initiate the mapping!¡±

    On Frankel¡¯s order, one of his minions connected the collar to a terminal beside me.

    That was the moment I waited for. My Implants had already made a connection to the collar, and now I piggybacked the connection to the control system.  At once the cluster began to infiltrate the controller and mapped the whole system. After a few seconds, I got the message that the vulnerability has been found, and the controller was partially suborned. Full control would take a few days, and while I could already stop the neural mapping I lacked the depth to mask that yet.

    The initiating of the collar took roughly 10 minutes, and then I was dragged back to the cage.

    The rest of the day I spent going over the data my cluster obediently provided to me.

    The more I saw, the less I liked the solution of the raid. The compound was a fortress. Of course, I could have gotten enough Mercs to kill everybody here, but the risk to me and my equipment was more than I liked. Then I found a solution. Frankel had six ¡°house slaves¡±. Four women as toys for himself and his crew, and two general laborers for menial work. Important was that the toys had unrestricted access to the nano lab and served as cooks among other services.

    I needed full control of the controller, then I could use them to drug the slavers and then open my cage. So it was just a matter of time.

    The next three days were¡­ uncomfortable to say the least. I learned firsthand the difference between levels one, two and six of a General Neurotics Painstick Mk. VI, and of course how the sensitivity of the touched area increases or decreases the pain. Let¡¯s say I believe the rumors that level 10 drives people into madness.

    I also experienced what Frankel understood under ¡®a bit of upgrade¡¯. Two cup sizes. And just for fun he increased the sensitivity of some already very sensitive regions considerably.

    And the fun. Who could forget the fun the ¡®boys¡¯ had. At least they were not enhanced like Frankel.

    He had ensured that he left a lasting impression with his female playthings.

    But while Frankel and his gang were amusing themselves with the other new female captures and I, my Trojans infiltrated the whole compound. And Frankel¡¯s tech guru was screaming curses the whole time.

    Then it was time to act.

    Frankel had, once again, chosen to ¡®interrogate¡¯ me. This time it seemed like he actually wanted information. He and his tech guy were with me while I was clamped in one of the racks.

    Of course they had divested me long ago of my clothes.

    Frankel stood with his favorite pain stick beside the rack, while the hacker sat at one of the tables. He looked not quite healthy as if he had not slept for a few days.

    Frankel tapped the inactive stick in his hand.

    ¡°Well Red, you have given my boy here quite a bit of work. And he says he sees no end yet. You know what we want. So, make it easier for yourself and give us the authorization, or make it harder for you and more fun for me and have me make you give it.¡±

    His malicious grin was not quite as satisfied as at the time we were captured. Could it be that the mines I left with the credled had infiltrated his financial system, and had actually locked him out of his own money? Not long term of course, as the systems had way too much backup for a simple bot like that, but enough that he would likely lose several 100k$ in fines and interests.

    ¡°I gave you the option to let me go. Now you are reaping what you have sown.¡±

    Then he touched me with the stick, and once again my world crashed into a wave of pain. Dang, the ¡®enhancements¡¯ made the stick even worse.

    And that was not even a very sensitive spot. I was really glad that my plan was ready for execution, or I would have had to chance the mercenaries.

    I had sent the orders to the controller this morning, and my shunt into the building security showed me that except for Frankel and Techy all the ¡®boys¡¯ were in dreamland. Unfortunately, neither of them had eaten yet. Of course neither of them got the alert that all the others had fallen down. Something wrong with the security system would be my guess.

    Time for plan B then. Two of the toys grabbed one of the E-Lasers each, controlled by my cluster of course. I hated to do it, but I had activated their voice suppression. Nothing would warn these two assholes. They did not react when the door behind them opened. They did not react while the women pointed the E-Lasers at their backs.

    They reacted of course when the stun charges coursed through their bodies, showing a good imitation of St. Vitus dance. Several minutes long.

    At the same time, the clamps on the rack reacted to my order and released me.

    Next, I summoned the 2 general laborers and had them lift first Frankel, then the hacker into one of the racks. It took a few minutes for them to get over the shock, and I had opened the cabinet where they had stored my clothes, and of course, I released my collar. It is a sad story how these things were designed for an intelligent and relatively good cause, but created so much pain.

    And while I hated the things, I was going to use them on Frankel and his boys. Let them see how it feels. I found the unused collars and selected two with roughly the right size.

    At the same time the slaves were moved out of the room. I would take care of them later.

    Frankel came to while I closed to him, the collar in my hand.

    ¡°Shit Red, let me out and I won¡¯t hurt you too badly. You know that my men will capture you in a few minutes.¡±

    I stood still for a moment and then shook my head.

    ¡°Naaah. Don¡¯t think so. Your imbeciles are sleeping. The compound is sealed. The automatic weapons are active. You two are the only ones of you assholes awake. And you, my dear Frankel, will experience a few fun things from the other side.¡±

    ¡°Damn, you cunt, how did you do that? What did you do to my toys?¡±

    This time it was my evil laughter that sounded through the lab.

    ¡°You made an error. A grave error. Did you ever think about how an 18-year-old had a bit over 3 million ? in her account? Or where she got enough data mines of sufficient power to repeatedly kill the board of that fool there? I was, for a time one of Spectre¡¯s brokers. The moment you tried to hack my account you brought one of the top ten hackers of the God dang whole solar system onto your head. And the implants Spectre designed for me have let me play havoc with your whole computer system. I own your security, your fabber, your databases for patrons and merchandise, and even your little entertainment system. Environmental and communications, you name it, I own it. And most important among them: is your Dalgon Tec controller. Your slaves? They are controlled by your computers. And these I own.¡±

    I then placed the collar around his neck.

    ¡°And now it is time for us to play my game.¡± Next, I connected his collar with the controller.

    ¡°And believe me, it will be really enjoyable. At least for me and your other victims, I think. You, I fear, will be less entertained.¡± Yes, I was vindictive. So sue me. This jerk had me gang-raped and tortured for three days. It would be a long, long time before I would be finished with him.

 05: A new home

    After I collared the tech I took my time to think about my situation while moving into the kitchen to get something to eat a little bit more substantial than the ¡®liquid all protein¡¯ diet the slavers had me on. The compound was actually exactly what I needed. Secure, many rooms and a big lab section. I could convert it to a street surgery relatively quickly, but I would need help. Sure, I could use androids and bots for most of the menial work. Thinking about it, I ordered a group of them. But as I had just proven, depending on your computer exclusively for security is a fool¡¯s strategy. I would need warm bodies. And not the future slaves, aka former slavers. These I would never be able to trust.

    No, I needed people who were at least somewhat trustworthy.

    With that, I walked to the storage room. The intended slaves in the cage were, at first, rather listless on my entry. Until one of them saw me alone and clothed.

    ¡°Shit. Red. What the hell¡­¡± And pandemonium broke out. It was, for a few minutes, impossible to understand a single word. After the racket died down a bit, I was ready to answer.

    ¡°I told you in the van that even if I had a plan I would not tell it. Well, surprise, I did not tell you about it.¡±

    I walked into the middle of the room.

    ¡°Now I have a proposition for you. I decided to use Frankel¡¯s hospitality a bit longer. Especially as he and his boys will move shortly. In here, to be exact, as soon as I have them all collared. So this compound here will be my new base of operation. I will be in need of people I can trust to not slit my throat. So I offer all of you the choice of not only letting you out of the cage and removing the collar but living here and working for me. Of course, I would ensure that you won¡¯t simply try to overpower me. Any thoughts?¡±

    From one of the cages in the back of the room, one of the, so far un-introduced, men made his opinion known.

    ¡°I will be damned if I work for a Pure bitch. How about we simply kick her ass and keep the house for ourselves? Anyone with me?¡±

    Wow, the brightest he was not. I chose to make the situation clear to him, and all the others.

    ¡°Ok, he is out. Not only is he unwilling, but he is an idiot on top of that. One, you are still inside the cages. So overpowering me is a bit hard to do. Two, I managed to take out the whole of the slaver gang. They were armed, and 2:1 in advantage compared to you. So the options you have are:

    You can work for me, except for loudmouth over there. Obviously, I will then let you out of the cage, remove your collar, and then you can get your equipment. Or equipment from the slavers if you prefer that stuff. You can, politely, decline my offer. You will still be let out of the cage, and be decollared. You get your property and can leave. You can, like the idiot, insult me, and make it clear that, if you could, take what I have gained from me. In that case, you will be dragged out of the cage and out of the house. Have fun getting the collar removed. And I hope you get undercover before you freeze to death. Lastly, you can try to deceive me. Should I later find out about it, well then you get a brand new collar and can stay in the cage until the collar owns you.¡±

    I turned around and looked at every cage.

    ¡°One thing you should know beforehand. These collars have a rarely used feature that Frankel had deactivated, but that I activated before coming in here. While they can¡¯t compel you to tell the truth, they show when you lie. So do yourself a favor and be honest with me. Clear?¡±

    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

    A few of them nodded.

    ¡°And before you decide, one of the perks of working for me is that you can play with my new toys. Any questions?¡±

    It took a moment before the mutant raised its hand.

    ¡°Yep. How the hell did you do that?¡± ¡°I will tell that to people I trust, at least somewhat. Other questions?¡±

    Marc Holt had surprisingly one.

    ¡°What about me? You have made it clear you can¡¯t stand me. So will I remain in the cage or walk outside naked?¡±

    That was a good question. For many, it would be an easy one. But I had thought about it already.

    ¡°Nope, you get the same chance as everybody else. Just one thing. If I tell you to leave me alone, get the heck out of my private sphere. Understood?¡±

    I could see his Adam¡¯s apple move. It had to cost him dearly to swallow his pride. But he showed that he was better than I thought by doing it.

    ¡°Yeah, I understand. And I accept your offer. As long as you don¡¯t fuck with me, I will not fuck with you. All right?¡± The front plate of his collar flashed green. I would never have thought that he would be the first, but that¡¯s life.

    ¡°Yeah, all right. Welcome on board.¡± I opened his cage and sent the order for his collar to disengage.

    ¡°You know where your clothes are. I haven¡¯t found our weapons yet, but there are quite a few E-Lasers lying around. Dress, grab an EL and come back. Oh, and be careful. The security system is still in overdrive until I find the time to tune it. I can¡¯t predict what it will interpret as threatening.¡±

    Then I turned back into the round.

    ¡°See, so easy. Who is next?¡± It took longer than expected, but of the 10 remaining captives, two proved they were at the lower end of the intelligence scale by being hostile and aggressive.

    They of course remained in their cages with Mr. Loudmouth.

    Of the others, three, including Ernie chose to leave us with their property intact.

    Marc¡¯s friends and the remaining woman took my offer.

    Then we moved the not yet collared slavers into the cages. It was quite a bit of work, but it had to be done.

    As soon as that chore was behind us, we met in the mess hall. Each of them was soon busy filling their stomachs, while I looked through the inventory of the compound for our equipment.

    It was not long before I found everything except the Owl. The grav ship was neither at the airport nor anywhere else in the inventory anywhere in New York.

    ¡°Ok, good news bad news time. The good news is, with one exception everything the jerks took from us is here in one of the storages. It seems they did not yet come around to examine it closer.¡±

    With that, I stood up and got myself a soft drink.

    ¡°The bad news is for you, Ernie. The one exception is your ship. I can¡¯t find it. Frankel had it moved somewhere else from the airport, but where to is not in the computers here. Maybe we can find out when we begin to interrogate the slavers, but I don¡¯t have high hopes.¡±

    It was easy to see that this information was unwelcome. Ernie first got ghostly pale, just to get burning red the next moment.

    ¡°Shit, you just want the ship for yourself. I should have known that we can¡¯t trust a Pure bitch.¡±

    I slowly began to get mad.

    ¡°If I had wanted your rust bucket I would not have let you out of your cage. I honestly don¡¯t know where the slavers took it. Maybe they scrapped it.¡±

    Ok, not the nicest thing to say, but the past few days had worn down my patience. Ernie seemed to be equally incensed.

    ¡°Sure. First, you ruin my negotiations with Frankel, and then you make it clear that there is much to get from us and then you walk around without a collar. I bet you planned it so from the beginning. Did you call Frankel? Tell him we were coming? That he could get all we have?¡±

    ¡°Mr. Willinger, if I could remind you, it was you who was the only one who knew Frankel before we reached New York. It was you who failed to inform us that there may be problems at arrival. It was you who had 50,000 dollar debts with a slaver. It was you who landed here without care and led us all into the trap for you. We were collateral damage. And I still let you out of the cage. I should have left you in there and showed you over the next week how Frankel liked to play with us women.¡±

    My voice rose louder and louder, and I could feel my temper flaring. I took a few slow deliberate breaths and fought to get my calm back. And then Ernie had to go that one step too far.

    ¡°You pretend as if the playtime with Frankel was such a chore for a Pure slut like you. I bet you enjoyed every minute.¡±

    I never fully registered how the E-Laser sprung into my hand, only that Ernie suddenly was convulsing on the ground while a scream of rage ripped from my throat.

    Then I was over him, kicking and hitting. At the same time, my vision began to blur. And then nothing.

 06: Meet and Greet

    When I came to, I was in a bed. My eyes burned, my hands ached and I felt strangely empty. I had no recollection of how I got here, or how I got out of my clothes.

    The room was dark, and I searched instinctively for a light switch but hit just more bed. Had to be double-size, or even bigger. It took me a moment to remember the low light option of my eye augments, but then I could see the bedside lamp.

    After I had turned it on, I could see my clothes on one of the chairs. While I dressed again, my stomach told me that it was likely a few hours since I had last eaten. A short look at the clock told me I was out for a bit over three hours. I was not happy about that, as time was at a premium in my, well, our situation. But on the other hand, I simply could not muster the energy to be overly concerned.

    When I walked into the mess hall I was greeted by most of the people I freed and sudden silence. That Ernie was missing was not unwelcome. The other two that wanted to leave were also not in this room.

    I was a bit at a loss for what to say, so I kept it simple.

    ¡°Hello.¡± That seemed to break the spell, and the blonde, whose name I still did not know was by my side in a few steps.

    ¡°Hello yourself. How do you feel?¡± A good question that. ¡°I don¡¯t know. Empty? Numb? Do I feel anything? And definitely hungry.¡±

    That made her laugh. It was a warm and kind laughter.

    ¡°Yeah, that I can understand after the way you barfed all over the place.¡±

    ¡°Oh. Sorry about that. And sorry that I lost my control.¡± The black-haired man was the next to talk.

    ¡°Don¡¯t fret. The asshole had it coming. And, honestly, it made you more human. The way you behaved before¡­ I was not so sure you even had emotions.¡±

    I let that sink for a while before I answered.

    ¡°Emotions are a weakness. I never could afford to show any weaknesses. I did my best to keep them down.¡± I felt the tension in my shoulders and my neck increase and a bit of pain came from my temples. I used both hands to massage them for a moment, before talking again.

    ¡°Not that this isn¡¯t an interesting topic, but I think we should introduce ourselves. The only one of you whose name I know is Marc. So let¡¯s begin. I¡¯m Veronica Sinclair. Before you ask, the name is new; my old one is a bit too hot for my liking these days. I am a computer specialist, programmer, electronics designer, and street cyber surgeon.¡±

    The others looked a bit surprised. It was the brunette that answered me this time.

    ¡°You know you don¡¯t look old enough to be even one of these, not to mention all of them, right?¡±

    A heavy sigh later I tried to explain.

    ¡°You look at it from a Mongrel point of view. As stuck up as it sounds, there is a reason that the Pures control the most stable and technologically advanced nation on the planet, despite everybody hating our guts. Fact is we simply are better at many things. Technology, R&D, and learning are among them. I had my advanced degree in computer science at 15, and my nanoelectronics degree at 17. And that is par for the course for a Pure. That is also the reason why there are two school systems in the commonwealth. Normal humans simply can¡¯t keep up with Pures, and the typical dynamic of the Jocks keeping the Nerds in check won¡¯t work as the Jocks are as smart as the Nerds, and the Nerds are as tough as the Jocks. The only ones being lower on the social totem pole would be the normals. But I still don¡¯t know your names¡­¡±

    Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

    ¡°Oh, yeah, sorry, I am Natalie Reynolds. I am responsible for information gathering and also work as a sniper for our group.¡± Then she gestured at the blonde, ¡°that is my big sister, Christine. Infiltration and martial arts. Marc¡¯s name you know already. He is basically our fire team. ¡®Jack of all trades and so.¡± Then the Mute ¡°This is Kate McIntosh. She is our close-range specialist. Obviously our best tracker and a very good shot.¡±

    Lastly, Natalie pointed at the black-haired man. ¡°And lastly Darren Masters. He is a Psionic.¡±

    Wow, speak about surprises. Psionics were the rarest of the human races. ¡°A Psionic. That explains how you got Kate through the checkpoints in Seattle. I had actually wondered about that.¡±

    I looked at the remaining woman. The good-looking dark-skinned woman was visibly nervous.

    ¡°I¡­ uhm, I am nothing of the sort. I am just an accountant.¡± I did not answer and just kept looking at her.

    ¡°You¡­ you won¡¯t throw me out, right? I mean, you will let me stay, even if I can only help a bit? Please?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t remember ever talking about any prerequisites concerning any mercenary work. So no, I won¡¯t throw you out. Provided, of course, that you tell us your name. We can¡¯t keep calling you ¡®Hey you¡¯. Well, we could, but it would become cumbersome.¡±

    She looked like a deer in the headlight but then relaxed a bit.

    ¡°Yes, yes, of course. I am Jacqueline Mondat. Everybody calls me Jacky. So I can stay here?¡±

    ¡°I am way too trashed to make any jokes at the moment. Fact is an accountant is actually more valuable for me than a merc in the long run. But I will explain that tomorrow. No point trying to hack it through now. I would just make a hash of it.¡±

    I had the synthesizer make a bowl of soup for me and stood up to get it.

    ¡°Now I have to eat something. If you have waited for an invitation, I am sorry. The kitchen is completely unlocked.¡±

    I sat back down, and began to eat. Natalie explained ¡°we have already eaten. But thank you.¡±

    After a few silent minutes I remembered one last thing.

    ¡°Ernie and the other two have left? I hope they don¡¯t loaf around.¡±

    The others looked at each other before Darren answered.

    ¡°The other two are gone. But Ernie is dead.¡± That stopped my spoon in mid-motion, and I stared at him for a moment.

    ¡°Oh. I didn¡¯t think I hit him hard enough to kill him. Unless¡­ The E-Laser. Had he a heart attack from the shock?¡± Even with him maybe being the first person I killed I could not muster much emotion over his death.

    ¡°No, he was mostly fine when you collapsed. Bruised but a black eye was the worst you had done. No, he began to curse you and got one of the assault rifles from the armory. When he bellowed that he would kill you, one of the defense guns dropped from the ceiling and placed three rounds in his chest and one in his head. No warning, no fuss. One moment he is waving a rifle around, and the next he is bleeding out. We have him in the freezer.¡±

    Did I¡­ ¡°Uhm, did I forget to mention that the security system is in overdrive? I thought I had told you about it.¡± Dang, such a senseless death. Was it my fault? Did I forget such an important point? But even then, was it my fault if he triggered the system by his aggression? My head had begun to throb while I was eating, but now I had the beginnings of a beautiful migraine.

    ¡°Yes, you told us. But still, I¡¯ve never seen a security system react in such a way.¡±

    ¡°As I said, the system is in overdrive. Full invasion mode. And before I took out Frankel, I declared myself as the absolute top priority to defend. At the moment anything that it can interpret as threatening to me will be met with deadly force.¡±

    Pain lanced through my head, and I massaged the bridge of my nose. A minute alleviation. But it had to do.

    ¡°Sorry, but I can¡¯t take care of it now. I am simply too beat. I assume the room I woke up in is the one you chose for me? If so, I will go back to sleep.¡± I stood up, and it took a moment before I found my balance. My body was telling me that I had abused it beyond its ability to cope. I vaguely registered the agreeing tones from the others and stumbled out of the mess hall and back to my room.

    There I managed to take off my boots and my pants and crashed onto the bed.

 07: Moving in

    Somehow I must have managed to turn off the light because I woke up in the same darkness as before. I felt much better, and the headache was gone.

    When I checked the time it was just before 4:00 in the morning. I had slept nearly 10 hours! I must have been at the end of my capabilities to sleep that long.

    Well, at least I got the opportunity to rest. While I made myself breakfast I looked over the building plans. It was a large five-story building with an additional two-story basement. It had a large atrium with, surprisingly an Olympic-sized pool. Oh, and apparently it had some sort of glass roof that could be closed to make the atrium a winter garden, and the pool into an indoor pool.

    It was made out of carbon-weave plascrete with a diamond coating, but it seems the coating has been neglected over the last few years. While eating I dug deeper into the plans.

    The doors were all out of multilayer carbon composite and with a multilevel lock system. It would be easier to go through the walls, and these were as hard as 20 meters of old-fashioned prestressed reinforced concrete. Nope, one would need a bunker buster to get in here. I also found that the atrium cover was made of several layers of diamond-graphene composite with nanotube weave for extra strength. It filtered out UV radiation and could be turned opaque at any time.

    It was still the weak point of the building, but it favorably compared to battleship armor.

    Whoever designed this house wanted to be sure nothing could come in uninvited.

    And that did not mention the weapon emplacements. My cursory inspection of the active defenses disclosed the true age of the building. Not one of the weapons was younger than 30 years old. So here we had a point we would have to work on. Quickly.

    The main entrance was on the south side of the building and had what appeared to be a significant parking space. The southern wing had a reception area, and what seemed to be several offices. On the second floor, we had a large room, seemingly a conference room, but at this moment it was mostly empty. The offices got bigger the higher the floor number.

    The west wing housed the garage, a few workshops, the storage area, and the armory, which was located on the inside corner of the south wing. The upper floors were as far as I could discern initially used as technological labs. Now it housed mostly a few cages and random junk.

    The east wing was where the slavers placed their operation. The big lab on the ground floor where we were collared and that now housed Frankel and his friends, and the storage room they placed their freshly collared slaves. One floor up we had the group area, with a lounge, a game room, a large kitchen, and the mess hall. The other floors above had 10 rooms each with an ensuite bathroom.

    My room and I guessed the rooms of the others, were directly above the group area. Most of the rooms still had the clutter of the former inhabitants. I discovered eight small prison-cell-like structures marked as slave quarters, and immediately a pang of guilt hit me. I would have to free the slaves, yesterday, if not sooner. Dang, so much to do.

    The north wing was interesting. The bottom two floors were combined into big rooms. Above that, it contained several multi-room suites, with a private kitchen, a private living room, and a bigger bathroom each.

    The two on the top floor had balconies, private studies and three bedrooms each. Clearly, they were intended for the bosses of whatever was housed in this building.

    And it was completely unused. Just junk and clutter, but no sign of habitation.

    The basement housed much of the technical areas. Wow, we had our own water treatment plant? With our own well? Strange. Our energy came from a host of solar panels. At least a trickle came from them, as it looked like they were degraded quite a bit, and a pair of Wilton GBx33 fusactors.

    Wiltons had a relatively good reputation, but from the records I could see that they had not been serviced for 18 years. That was not really good. Also, they were over 30 years old. I send the cluster the order to look into replacement fusactors in the region. The computer room was a hodgepodge of obsolete, obsolescent, and nearly modern equipment. It would all have to be replaced. The other technical areas brought no surprises. We had further storage rooms, and below the north wing, we had a series of empty large rooms. I decided then and there that these would be where I would place my NADA. I was contemplating building a second one, but that had time.

    Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

    I looked into my order for the bots and androids and found them still crated outside of the cargo dock. It seems nobody got the notification. Well, we could take care of it when the others were awake.

    Then I began to reprogram the building systems. First, of course, the security system. I decided to leave my person as the top priority but excluded the others from any reaction unless my life was immediately endangered. I declared them secondary priority only behind my protection. Then I dialed it back to normal conditions. No more accidental shootings.

    Then I started to investigate the history of the building, the territory, and the immediate area.

    The building history was¡­ interesting if you want to call it so. Thirty years ago this was the headquarters of Segden Inc. They were an innovative corporation specialized in AI systems and industrial bots, in their time.

    They were a tad too innovative it seems, as several of their competition managed to have the laws changed so that their products were made illegal to sell roughly 23 years ago. The laws were so specific that they targeted explicitly Segden products. That prompted Segden to simply move to the CSA, selling this building 20% under value. Interestingly from what I could find out, they were still going strong. The buyer was a front for the boss of the local Tong. They moved their headquarters into this fortress and would still be here if they had not made a grave error five years later.

    They challenged the neighboring Irish Mafia in a territorial takeover and lost sight of the shifting alliances. The Irish managed to bring the other two neighbors of the Tong into the fray, and in an ambush killed nearly 90% of them. Then they divided the territory among themselves.

    The Fortress, formerly near the center of a territory was now at the border region. So not really an interesting place for a territorial HQ anymore. As a result, it stood empty for eight years, before Frankel moved in. When I looked over it in the land registry I found out it was officially owned by the Ellis Entertainment Provider ltd.

    The sole stockholder of EEP ltd. was one Francis Ellis. I took the time to set up a transfer of ownership from Mr. Ellis to Ms. Sinclair and make the thumbprint. Sure I had to move to the lab and bend one of his thumbs a bit, but that was no hardship.

    The territory was that of the Irish Mafia, and the Benefactor here was a Mr. Benjamin Walker. He could pose a problem, from what I was reading. He seemed a bit of a misogynist, had a strong traditional viewpoint, and was known as being rather hard in his dealings. It was he that suckered the Tong into the war they could not win, so I would guess he was fairly intelligent, and through and through ruthless.

    I would cross that bridge when I came to it. The immediate area on the other hand was a positive surprise. Sure it was a long way from the better places in Seattle. But it was relatively modern, it had enough food and medical support, and it seemed that the schooling system here worked for a change.

    It was of course not Brooklyn, where the corporations had moved to when Manhattan was reduced to still glowing rubble in the war, nor was it the revived Bronx, where the more affluent inhabitants of NY city had their home.

    But it was working somehow.

    The clock showed it was just after 7:00 in the morning now, and I decided to get the bots working. A crowbar was quickly at hand, and I opened the loading dock.

    The crates were bigger than I thought, but that was no hindrance for me. I looked through the packing slip until I found the big industrial unit I ordered. Of course, it was the biggest crate. I immediately set out to open it, just to fail big time. The workmanship on the crate was better than I expected.

    I hung at the crate for nearly an hour, trying to break it open, before one of the others found me.

    It was of course Mark, who found me red-faced with sweat-soaked clothes. I was literally hanging on the crowbar, using booth feet as an anchor and exerting all my might, without any effect on the crate.

    ¡°Is that a new type of sport?¡± His question startled me, and I quickly found myself on my behind looking up at him. ¡°What?¡± He was obviously amused at my predicament.

    ¡°That looked not really comfortable. So what are you doing? And what is in these crates?¡±

    With a sigh I scrambled to my feet.

    ¡°These are a few bots and androids I ordered yesterday. And I tried to get the goddanged crates open.¡± I gave the big one a kick, only to stub my toe. ¡°Argh¡­ and they ¡­¡± It could not be helped.

    ¡°I simply can¡¯t get them open.¡± He took the crowbar still wedged into the crate, heaved and popped the side open. ¡°Did not seem so hard to me.¡±

    ¡°Hrmph. Yeah, rub it in.¡±

    ¡°Hey, I thought Pures were superhuman strong. That should be easy for you.¡±

    I could feel the heat in my face, and murmured an answer, that he could not understand.

    ¡°What? Sorry, I did not get that.¡±

    ¡°I am a runt! Are you happy now?¡± I screamed it out and then stormed away. The nerve of this jerk. I did not get far before he caught me and gripped my shoulder. Again.

    ¡°WHAT? Not enough fun yet?¡± Surprisingly he did not look smug.

    ¡°I wanted to apologize. I did not want to insult you or whatever I did.¡± That took the wind out of my anger. It came to me that he would not, could not know what a sore spot this topic was for me.

    I took a deep breath and looked him in the eyes.

    ¡°Ok, I am sorry too. My lack of strength is a¡­ very sore spot for me. It has nothing to do with you.¡±

    He let go of my shoulder and nodded. ¡°As I said, I did not want to rile you up. But you should tell the others about this, so they don¡¯t make innocent comments that hurt you.¡± Then he crossed his arms.

    ¡°Now, what were your plans with the bots?¡± I shook my head a bit to get it clear again.

    ¡°It is ok. I wanted to launch the industrial one to have it unpack and activate the others. But the dang crate¡­ ¡°I stopped myself. ¡°Let¡¯s just activate the big one. Then we have to have a group talk.¡±

    Fifteen minutes later the bots were happily activating each other and we moved back into the group area.

 08: Creating a new order

    The others were sitting around the table eating breakfast.

    Darren had a grin on his face as he asked Marc: ¡°You found her. Good. What took you so long? I can¡¯t see her going for a little fun with you.¡±

    This would be strenuous. Marc could not let it go apparently.

    ¡°Well, first I had to find her. This place is big, you know. After I got the idea to look into the security system I found out that the loading dock is open, and looked there. You have to look at it on the CCTV, or you won¡¯t believe me. It seems we have a few bots now, and Red here was hanging on a crate with all her weight trying to open it. Then we got it open, activated the bot to let it unpack and activate the others, and now are here.¡±

    I facepalmed. ¡°I can¡¯t convince you to simply let it go, right? All right, short form, I am very sensitive about my lack of size and strength. Just for your info, so you won¡¯t be surprised when I rip your head off about it.¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°Otherwise we have to talk about several things. First, what is your opinion about the slaves?¡±

    That stunned them. They looked at each other before Christine asked back: ¡°What slaves?¡±

    ¡°I mean the four sex toys and the two menial workers that Frankel and his sociopaths held. The ones that are still controlled by the computer system.¡±

    ¡°I¡­ we thought you already released them.¡± Came from Kate this time.

    ¡°No time yet. I would have if the situation had not come apart with Ernie. But then¡­ well, I think we should talk about the big decisions. It is not ¡°we¡± if I make all of them.¡±

    They all agreed to that. Then Darren spoke up.

    ¡°Anybody against freeing them?¡± Nobody reacted. ¡°Ok, so there you have it. Free them.¡±

    ¡°That was the easy part. Now to the hard part. What do we do with them after freeing them? I thought about letting them stay here. Not that they will be useful for quite a time. Oh, and if nobody has any objection, I will ask them what they will do if decollared before doing it. Not to be catty, but we don¡¯t need them to go on a rampage.¡±

    Again I got no dissenting vote. Wow, democracy is easy.

    ¡°Ok, that¡¯s point one. Point two: How do you see us organized? I mean, I want to use this building to open an implant surgery. I would hire you all on as guards and helpers. But that is only the day job. Your merc jobs would have to be separate. Any thoughts about that?¡±

    Jacky¡¯s eyes tried to spring out of her skull with that.

    ¡°Merc jobs? I don¡¯t¡­ we¡­ I have no idea about how merc jobs work.¡±

    That brought tinkling laughter from Christine.

    ¡°You¡¯re the bookkeeper. That means your only part of the merc jobs is to help us keep them profitable. Damned time we get somebody who keeps the money straight. To answer your question, Ronnie, if the pay is right, then I have no complaints. And it would be rad if you could help us with the merc jobs. Often enough we need computer support.¡±

    ¡°Please, not Ronnie. Then rather Red. And if you believe that I go on the mission with you, think again. I am Alpha Neg. Neither of us would enjoy it if I would go with you. No endurance, no strength.¡±

    Darren intervened.

    ¡°Nah, computer support is usually before the mission and mostly done from home. Normally we hire comps for the mission. Cuts into the profit.¡±

    That was different.

    ¡°Ok, that I can do. As long as you keep me away from the action. Then the next question, how do you, or we, divide the spoils?¡±

    Darren again: ¡°Usually everyone gets a share. Then the boss of the mission gets another share. Spoils and pay together.¡±

    Hmm, good plan. But there were ways to improve it. So I made the suggestion.

    ¡°Good baseline, but I think we can make it better. How about this.

    One share for each member of the group. One share additional for each member partaking actively in the mission. One share for the mission commander, and if there are more than one each gets a share. And finally One share for the group as a whole. For group equipment, common expenses, and such.¡±

    They all mulled it over before Christine asked a question.

    ¡°What do you mean with one share for each member and one share for each member partaking?¡±

    I had to smile.

    ¡°Well, Jacky won¡¯t actively go on the missions, and often you won¡¯t need me. So in the case that you don¡¯t need computer support, Jacky and I get one share each. Each of you except whoever commands gets two shares each. Whoever leads gets three shares. And one share goes into the group account.¡±

    And a third time I heard them all agreeing.

    ¡°OK, I hope it works. Now, do we include the slaves into our group, and give them shares, or not? Personally, I am for including them.¡±

    They talked hushed for a bit, and then Darren answered for all.

    If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

    ¡°Yeah, I think we include them. At least for the start. Let¡¯s see how it works out.¡±

    Good, now to the important points.

    ¡°That is nice. That means seven of us, six slaves, and the group share¡­ 14 basic shares. Now while I took over here, I also took over the slaver''s accounts. All in all roughly 40 million, if you include the building at the current estimate. 14 basic shares, I was the sole member partaking and the mission commander, making 16 shares at all. Makes 2.5 million dollars per share. The building estimate is 4.5 million. I would like to take it as part of my share if that is all right.¡±

    The others sat there, silent and open-mouthed, looking at me in apparent shock.

    After a minute the silence became awkward and I asked:

    ¡°What? Is something wrong?¡±

    Jacky was the first to recover.

    ¡°You¡­ you are giving each of us 2.5 million dollars? Just so?¡±

    It dawned on me that we had a communication failure somewhere.

    ¡°Uhm, yes, why?¡±

    She looked at the others.

    ¡°2.5 million dollars is a, well how do I say it, that is a shit load of money. And you are just giving it to us?¡±

    What the hell was the problem here? I was at a loss what got them into a twist.

    ¡°We have made the rules on how we divide the loot just a few minutes ago. Of course, I give you your shares. What do you think I would do? Cheat you on the very first day?¡±

    I was getting irritated. I mean, yeah, we were all pretty new to each other, but please give me some credit.

    At this point Darren interrupted.

    ¡°Ah, no, it is not that. I can only speak for me, but I have thought that the agreement counts from now on and that everything you got from Frankel was yours. We are simply shocked that you give up so much money. You are giving over 30 million dollars away.¡±

    That was it? Really? I had to correct their expectations.

    ¡°Duh, it is only money. And not as much as you seem to think. For Jacky, maybe, she could live 10 or 20 years on that, depending on where she settles. But for the rest of you, if you equip yourself you burn through 2.5 million in no time flat.¡±

    Christine swallowed hard before she answered me.

    ¡°Only money? You call 2.5 million dollars only money? Shit, we would have to work 3 or 4 years to get 2.5 million. And forget about ever getting more than 30. What the hell are you doing here if 30 million are only money for you?¡±

    I silently counted to 10.

    ¡°A decent set of implants costs 1.5 million and up for each of you. For a high-end set you can calculate 10 million per. And if you want to go to the bleeding edge you better plan for 100 million each. And keep planning 50 million on upgrades per year. Darren will probably have to spend twice that and Kate even more. No armor, no weapons, only the cyberware. And that is with me doing the personal adaption and the implantation. Otherwise, you can double that.

    I am not here for the money. What I have in my accounts would last me a long time.

    No, I am here for safety. I work because it is interesting. I learned implant surgery to enhance my own implants and found out it is an interesting job. I am a tinkerer.¡±

    Phew, that took quite a bit out of me.

    Darren shrugged his shoulders.

    ¡°You assume we want cyberware. I mean, sorry, but I don¡¯t want to croak on CRS. And AFAIK the others think the same. From what I heard it is a really bad way to go.¡±

    Oh, yeah, I forgot, their information was suboptimal.

    ¡°You wouldn¡¯t get CRS. If the implant surgeon knows what she does, the probability of CRS goes down considerably. That is what I meant by personal adaptation. A good surgeon can reduce the chance of CRS to 4%. That is, of course, a mountain of work, and costs accordingly. But even superficially adaption reduces the chance to 15%. Only the idiots that go to the self-declared street doc on the corner with a hacked surgeboy as the end-all-be-all, and pay only a few 10k for secondhand implants get the risk at 60% and higher. And even then, if it is caught early enough, it can be treated. Either replacement with cloned tissue or with the new nano therapy up to 50 years living with it.¡±

    Should I¡­? Ah, ok, I would with luck work with these people for years to come, and the cat would be out of the bag soon anyway.

    ¡°Of course, you won¡¯t have to fear anything if I adapt your cyberware. I have developed a new technique that eliminates CRS completely. Only for the implants I treat with it of course, and sadly not yet for everything that can be implanted. So if somebody has tech from somebody else they are still at risk, but what you get from me will not kill you.¡±

    Again they looked at me shocked.

    ¡°I have thought long and hard about CRS. For neural implants it¡¯s especially bad, so I took measures that I would never have to confront it.¡±

    Marc nodded. ¡°Wow! That has to sink in. I mean, yeah, cyberware is a big power-up, but as a rule, you die young, and don¡¯t leave a pretty corpse.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Well, let¡¯s change the topic. I am willing to pay each of you 5k a month, plus of course room and board. For that, you help out as guards at the clinic. Just keep unruly customers in check. Jacky would do the books. You would be free to work as mercs, as long as you can provide me with a modicum of protection. The heavy lifting will be done by android so no hard work. Is that acceptable?¡±

    That brought the hushed talk out again, and again, it was Darren who answered.

    ¡°You just told us that we would need 100 million and more each. In that light, do you think 5k is reasonable?¡±

    ¡°That depends on your point of view. If I let you just live here for free, and a customer becomes violent, I assume that you would lend a hand. That is essentially all I want from you. For that I think 5k a month is more than reasonable. The big bucks you get from merc work. I don¡¯t know what you made previously, but I think we can get you the 100 megabucks each in 2 or 3 years.¡±

    Darren looked at me for a moment and then nodded. ¡°Yeah, you¡¯re right there. It is not that much work. And anything above room and board would be fair. I vote to agree.¡±

    The others followed fast. Good, only two more points to go.

    ¡°Another question, how do you evaluate shares with solo jobs?¡±

    Darren again: ¡°That depends on what you mean as a solo job. As a rule, when a job uses group resources we view it as a group job with shares. If it is just one of us in his or her specialty without anybody else from us involved then the pay is yours. Why?¡±

    I had to smile again.

    ¡°Well, a major reason why 30 megabucks are only money for me is that I was a broker for computer services, and one of my clients was a top hacker. I want to rebuild this side of the business, and would, not exactly loathe, but not like to pay out several million bucks for my exclusive work. Also, honestly, a Jack has much more solo work than a merc. Much less competition.¡±

    He nodded and I could feel the topic was closed. Good, now to the hardest part.

    ¡°Last topic from me. We have to register with the local mob boss and pay our tribute. I don¡¯t think we should wait much longer. If we wait until the mob becomes suspicious they will be much more displeased. And the more displeased they are, the harder it will be for us.¡±

    I looked around.

    ¡°Anybody volunteering?¡± After a few seconds, I sighed. ¡°As I thought. OK, then the other question, who do you think should go?¡± They all looked at me. Figures.

    It was Darren who answered for all of them.

    ¡°I think it has to be you. You are the one trying to open a business here, you took the building. From the perspective of the mob, the rest of us are only hirelings. And one doesn¡¯t send hirelings to the Don, or however this particular mob calls its boss.¡±

    Yeah, they had me there. Damn.

    ¡°They call him boss as far as I know. And sadly you are right.¡± Another deep sigh.

    ¡°Can one of you come with me as a bodyguard/driver? I think it is necessary to impress at least a bit. Depending on what you have in the way of attire we will have to fab you something. And Jacky, if I give you the number, can you call and make an appointment?¡± I saw her nod, and let out a fast ¡°Thank you,¡± before looking around again.

    ¡°That were my points. Have you any questions?¡±

 09: War stories

    Christine was the first one to speak.

    ¡°Yeah, well, we all asked ourselves, what could make a Pure leave the Commonwealth? A Mute, even a Mongrel, sure. We are second-class citizens there. But a Pure?¡±

    Hmm, that was a tough question. How much of that could I answer?

    ¡°All right. Please accept that I only talk in generalities. I have taken a new name for a reason. Well, here it goes¡­¡±

    A deep breath, and then I continued.

    ¡°Contrary to what you seem to believe, the Commonwealth is no utopia. It is a police state with a corrupt ruling class. Even as a Pure you can find yourself on the wrong side of the law with no fault of your own. Just a peacekeeper throwing his weight around or a tin-pot dictator decides that you have to have done something even if it is only that you annoyed him.¡±

    I stood up and walked to the fridge.

    ¡°Anybody else something to drink?¡± No reaction, so I took a soda and got back to my seat.

    ¡°The worst corruption is in the council. There were, until a year ago, three major power blocks. Two of them were essentially corrupt power-grabbing clubs with the only thing they fought over was who deserved the power and the riches. The third block was actually trying to rule fair and enforce the laws for everyone equally. But they were the smallest of the three major blocks. The minor powers often tipped the scales but had no real power of their own. My problem was that I made a convenient whipping girl for someone who had angered the biggest of the blocks. They couldn¡¯t touch him, but through some scheming and distortion of the truth, they could punish my mother for his perceived impertinence. And me as an extension. That happened before I was born, so there was no way I could be at fault. But nonetheless, they made it so that my life was a living hell.¡±

    I took a mouthful of soda and waited a moment.

    ¡°Two weeks ago, I was nearly done with extracting myself from under their thumb. Nearly everything was ready and only one hurdle was left. After that, while I was cleaning up all the traces, somebody, another Jack, thought it fun to crash the whole network. As far as I know, he ceased to find it funny when the intrusion countermeasures fried his brain. While I came out physically unharmed, my files were still with the traces of the manipulation, and unfortunately glaringly so, as I was just in the middle of working them over. And suddenly the peacekeepers were very interested in my person.¡±

    I gave a sad smile.

    ¡°I hope you can understand that this situation was untenable for me. So I made my way over here. Any other questions?¡±

    Jacky sounded a bit breathless.

    ¡°But, but I thought the Pures were so much better. How can there be so much corruption?¡±

    Marc answered before I could

    ¡°That the Pures are so much better is just propaganda. They need something to justify setting themselves up as a master race.¡±

    Wow, that sounded bitter. And wrong. No better time to clear it up then now.

    ¡°That is so not entirely accurate. The Pures are better in quite a few areas.¡±

    ¡°Oh, come on. That is just supremacy drivel.¡± This came from Natalie.

    I looked at the table and shook my head.

    ¡°I think it is myth buster time then. What do you know about Pures?¡±

    Of course, I got the typical jumble of prejudices, misinformation, half-truths, and flat-out lies.

    ¡°Let¡¯s go through it one after the other. First, with the exception of Marc¡¯s sentiment that Pures are mostly arrogant assholes, everything you just spoke is more or less completely wrong.

    First, the wars: There were only three World Wars and three North American Civil Wars at all. Two of each happened decades or even centuries before the release of the Nephilim virus. The Pures were not around when they started and were concluded. The third World War started a bit over 30 years after the virus, but the Pures mostly kept out of it for twelve years. Sure, there were a few individuals that fought in the war, but that was less than a thousandth of a percent of the Pures.

    That changed when Sanderson released his plague. After that, the Pures took part and ended the war within two years. The Pures did start the third civil war though, but they had their reasons. More of that a bit later.¡±

    I nodded to Christine.

    ¡°The wastelands were created in the great war, but not by the Pures. It was the last gesture of defiance by the losing sides. The whole war was about food and water. And when they could not gain the corn belt or the Ogallala aquifer they used neutron bombs and unstable mutagenic retroviri to poison them for millennia to come. China used the neutron bombs, while Mexico and the NAN used different viri. We are lucky that they did not manage to poison the ice caps.¡±

    I looked at Jacky.

    ¡°The Pures are neither angelic nor demonic origin. That prejudice is actually one of the reasons for the third civil war. It was roughly 20 years after the second American Civil War that a group of scientists bought wholesale into SMI2LE. That is Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, Life Extension. Space migration was a slow progress then, as the world had still not recovered fully from the decades of depression and the various civil wars that followed all over the world. Increased intelligence and life extension were more or less taboo, as it took genetic manipulation to do that, and after the gen food debacle, many tried to kill any genetic research.

    Nonetheless, these scientists were of the opinion that they were entitled to upgrade humanity. After several years of work, they had results that they found satisfying. They had combined all the small component upgrades into one retrovirus, and in a fit of utter stupidity released it into the world.

    Even if they had done their work and more importantly their tests, correctly and had taken the necessary care, this move would have been highly unethical. Unfortunately, they had neither the prudence nor the diligence needed to make the virus safe.

    For one, they had not one non-Caucasian in their group, and therefore in the test group. Second, they had a way too small test group. To make it short, the virus was deadly in roughly a third of all people who got it. The death rate was considerably higher in non-Caucasians. That is the reason why roughly 70% of all Pures are white today.

    What the Nephilim virus did was increase its victims and their descendants in five separate categories. It increased muscle mass, density, and energy metabolization, increasing strength and endurance considerably. They called this category Alpha. It increased the signal speed and precision of the nervous system, increasing hand-eye coordination, reaction speed, and manual precision, which they called Beta. They increased the interconnectivity of the brain cells, as well as their number, and increased malleability, increasing pure intelligence and memory, called Gamma. They decreased the autonomous filters for sensory input as well as increased the number of sensory nerves and upped the size and efficiency of the sensory regions of the brain, making the victim more observant, increasing all senses, including pain and pleasure, calling that Delta. Then they increased the random association capability and as such creativity and the feel for art. That they called Epsilon.

    An average Pure is 67% stronger, 46% more coordinated, 51% more intelligent and 23% more observant than the average human. It is not possible to quantify the increase in creativity and art, as those are subjective areas, but an increase is there.¡±

    I took another sip, and let that sink for a moment.

    ¡°Unfortunately the scientists made some non-negligible errors. First, as mentioned, the virus killed roughly a third of its victims outright. Considering that more than 1.3 billion people got infected, we are talking about over 400 million dead. Fortunately, it could be stopped before more than 13% of humanity was infected. Before you ask, yes, the scientists were held responsible for that. They were all executed as mass murderers.

    Second, even the ones that survived the virus had some serious problems. It never occurred to the idiots that some of the limits they deactivated were there for a reason. A high Alpha will most likely have joint damage and destroyed ligaments before he is 40. A high Beta will experience cramps and tremors throughout his life. A high Gamma is prone to crippling headaches, and much more importantly, to mental problems, as most of the coping mechanisms humans developed over several hundred millennia were just gone. A high Delta is as a rule either a hedonist or a masochist, or both, and is crippled with sensations that others find only mildly inconvenient. A high Epsilon is often trapped in his own world, with only occasional contact with reality.¡±

    When I looked into their faces this time they were showing a different expressions. I had thought that the last point would make them think.

    ¡°Especially the higher vulnerability to mental problems is in large part responsible for the way the Pures act today. Simply put, the ones clawing for power and wealth the hardest are usually the ones who have lost a few marbles. Megalomania, narcissism, paranoia and good old sociopathy are rampant in the upper echelon of the Commonwealth. But to continue, after the virus ran its course, the world was confronted for the first time with a truly different human race. Before, racial differences were there, but mostly cosmetic. Size, skin color, and broad features in nearly all cases. Some had a few internal differences like sickle cell anemia, but even these were exceptions and not the rule.

    It took not long before one of the mass media coined the term Nephilim for the new race.

    Which media outlet it was is lost. But it spread fast and in less than a month that was what the new race was called.¡±

    Jacky interrupted me: ¡°Oh, Nephilim sounds so much cooler than Pure. I like it.¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°It sounds cooler until you learn about the origin of the word. It comes from the Abrahamic religions. Accordingly, to their holy texts, there was this one almighty God, who created earth and anything living, crowning his creation with humanity. This god had a servant species called angels.

    The angels were divided into several subspecies or orders, and God charged one of them, the Grigori to watch over the humans. The Grigori now impregnated human women, and the children were the Nephilim. In the actual holy texts that is not even fully fleshed out, but in the legends that grew around it, it was more or less told that Nephilim had the strength and power of their angelic fathers and the free will of the humans. God saw them as a plague, punished the Grigori, and then exterminated the Nephilim, going as far as nearly killing off all life on earth in the Flood to do that.¡±

    I smiled sadly.

    ¡°So for the pseudo-religious semi-informed, we suddenly became monsters one step, if barely, above demons. And they railed against us. In the three decades between the Nephilim virus and the big war, the Nephilim population shrunk from a bit over 900 million to a bit less than 700 million. More than 90% of the dead were killed by religious fanatics.

    The invention of the grav turbine and the subsequent scramble into orbit, followed by asteroid and lunar mining averted war for nearly a decade, as it solved the most critical shortage. Raw materials. But the other shortages, mainly water and arable land increased tensions to the point of breaking again.

    Shortly before the war, a few Nephilim tried to help the world by designing the fusactor and pairing it with a desalinator. Technically this would have made massive amounts of fresh water available, enabling the people to turn arid territory into arable one. Over the years, that would have made gardens out of the deserts. Unfortunately, at this time the Nephilim were already deviled by the media and such by the population, so this invention went mostly ignored.

    And then the war broke out. Who fought against whom is¡­ complicated to the extremes. I am not sure that I know every belligerent. I know that China wanted the North Pole and Alaska, for the water. Mexico wanted the Corn Belt and the Ogallala Aquifer. The Native African Nations were simply peeved with the outcome of the Second American Civil war, and that the African-Americans lost it so badly. Other regions had their own reasons for fighting.

    If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

    It was a big free-for-all slugfest.

    The Nephilim had meanwhile mostly congregated in what is today the North West Commonwealth. With the Nephilim virus outbreak centered in Seattle, it was the most logical choice. They tried to stay out of the war, and offered multiple times to help with the shortages, tried to bring the warring sides to the negotiation table. But to no avail. The algae tanks that produce 90% of our food and our oxygen today are the results of that effort. The Nephilim only intervened when Bryce Sanderson started his lunacy.¡±

    Marc interrupted me here.

    ¡°Don¡¯t talk bad about St. Bryce! He saved the world from the Pures.¡±

    I sadly shook my head.

    ¡°You heard me when I explained that the world needed no saving from the Pures? Sanderson¡¯s Disease was what forced the Nephilim into the war. It was a bioweapon aimed directly at us. But Sanderson was an idiot of the same magnitude as those that released the Nephilim virus. If we find no way to reverse its damage, he will have the sole distinction of being the one who exterminated humanity.¡±

    Marc¡¯s face became hard.

    ¡°So you say. I have seen no proof of that.¡±

    ¡°Then you are blind. What is the average number of children a woman gets in her life?¡±

    That confused him.

    ¡°Every third woman gets one, why?¡±

    ¡°Before Sanderson¡¯s Folly, a woman had two children on average. Before the war there were roughly nine billion humans on the world. When the war was ended in 2093 it were still 8.6 billion left.

    Today we have 1.1 billion humans on this planet. In only a bit over 150 years, we lost 78% of our population. We are back where we were in the mid 19<sup>th</sup> century. And the numbers are falling.

    And you know what the really bad part is? The only ones even trying to do something about it are the corrupt and self-serving Pures. The Commonwealth is the only nation that makes a concentrated effort to reverse the trend. We are dying out, and Sanderson is responsible for that, but because he preached against the Nephilim he is considered a saint.¡±

    I had to take another sip to get the bad taste out of my mouth. Unfortunately, it did not work.

    ¡°Well, long story short, the Nephilim were prepared for entering the war, even if they did not want to. They had built several automatic factories that they fed with raw materials from the orbital smelters. They had built new weapons, like the coil gun, the plasma projector, and many more. Their missiles were faster, harder to see, and nearly impossible to stop. And of course, there were the combat automata. For every soldier the other sides sent into the fray, the Nephilim sent four bots.

    For every grav destroyer, the Nephilim sent two automatic cruisers. The war lasted another two years until everyone accepted that they could not beat the Nephilim forces. At last, they simply wanted to spite the US and her Allies and used weapons of mass destruction against us.

    Washington is mostly a hole in the ground and from what I learned still glowing strong enough that it is visible from orbit at night. And of course, southern California is simply gone. I never will understand what they had against LA but they used roughly five percent of their warheads there.

    New York was relatively unharmed, only Manhattan was completely destroyed and rendered uninhabitable.

    Seattle was also targeted, nearly as hard as LA, but again, the Nephilim had planned ahead. Not one warhead reached what is today the Commonwealth. Nearly every formerly arable land was poisoned beyond all recognition.

    The Nephilim could not prevent the Alliance from retaliating in kind.

    So in one moment, what is now called the Night of the Falling Stars, practically 90% of all food production and 78% of all oxygen production ceased to be. The wastelands are teeming with mutated monsters, some of whom had human ancestors.¡±

    I made a short pause, and let them think about it for a time.

    ¡°After the war, the algae tanks saved us all, as honestly, all life would have suffocated before they could starve to death. The first batch was a rush production but it came in time to keep humanity alive.

    It took three years before enough algae tanks were built to stabilize the world. The desalinator design was now insufficient to deal with the irradiated and poisoned water, and a new one that could deal with the pollution was hard to build.

    Without the water from the ice caps, humanity would have died from thirst. And even if enough water had been available, the land that could have been made arable with enough water was mostly destroyed. After six years the newly designed water desalinator/purifier made water shortage a thing of the past.

    The effects of Sanderson¡¯s Folly were not yet evident, so it seemed as if the world would slowly regain its balance. Unfortunately, while the Nephilim concentrated on repairing the damage, all others started an arms race to negate Nephilim superiority, and the zealots gained footholds in many of the governments, including the one of the United States. In 2103 they gained enough power to ram through some acts that essentially stripped the Nephilim of their rights as citizens. The Nephilim were no longer allowed property above $100,000 in worth. They had to pay 90% in taxes and were excluded from welfare and social security. Also, Nephilim had lost the right to bear arms, to self-defense, and to a jury trial. Further acts that essentially would have allowed the government to shove the Nephilim into concentration camps were only a vote away.

    These changes in the laws would have taken effect on January 1<sup>st,</sup> 2104. When all appeals and negotiation attempts failed, the Nephilim, who had by now 70% of the population of the North-Western region decided to secede. That was the start of the third American Civil War. The US thought that they had closed the gap to the Nephilim military enough to force them to their knees with higher numbers. For some reason they assumed that the Nephilim would not improve their military. Nor did they think that the Nephilim would keep producing combat automata the whole time. So what was expected to be a rout became a rather protracted war.

    In 2108 the South Eastern States decided they had enough, and they seceded and founded the Confederate States of America.

    With the breakaway of these resources the US could no longer keep up the pressure, and in 2110 a peace agreement was signed, that accepted the creation of the NWC and the CSA.

    The southwestern States were a hotbed for the fanatics and viewed the peace accords as treason, so they split from the US and founded the Alliance of Free States.

    The AFS immediately declared war on the NWC. And that is the situation we have now.

    In a full bore information campaign, the Nephilim renamed themselves the Pure. Something about that we are the purest of the remaining races or such drivel. It sadly stuck. I personally prefer Nephilim.

    The change did nothing to increase our reputation, and I have to agree with Jacky, that Nephilim simply sounds cooler. But the only ones outside of the Commonwealth who still know about it are the zealots of the AFS. So Pure it is. As a label, it is as good as anything.¡±

    After I stopped for a while they all started talking at once. Then Marc emerged victorious.

    ¡°You talk a good talk. But you don¡¯t have a single shred of evidence for what you have said.¡±

    OK, that was funny. I had to laugh a bit. When he looked at me pretty irritated, I got myself under control and answered him.

    ¡°I will  have you know that what I told you is not the history taught in Pure schools.

    If you had that, then you would know the difference between truth and propaganda. Concerning proof, how much time do you have?

    Roughly 90% of what I told you can be found in the surviving library systems all over the continent. You can even get it online in many cases. You just have to dig.

    Look for July to October 2047 to get the information about the Nephilim virus.

    You will find the articles about the trials of the scientists from January to September 2049.

    You will learn about the tensions rising between March 2058 to May 2070, when the invention of the grav turbine by Kobashigawa Atsutane was announced.

    In the next three years you will find articles about how this invention made the space industry affordable, and then about how ores first from the moon and later from near-earth objects eased the lack of raw materials.

    Then you will read about how the tensions about water and food began to grow.

    On August 23<sup>rd,</sup> 2078 you will find the notice about the desalination project. If you look at different sources for that you will learn that most of them were pretty derisive of it, and if you read between the lines you will see that the derision was solely aimed at the Nephilim who invented it and not the project as such.

    Then of course comes February 12<sup>th,</sup> 2079 with the headline that China invaded Taiwan.

    That was the start of the Big War.

    Over the next 12 years, you will find out that several of the mainstream media blamed the Nephilim for not doing anything, and that the Nephilim were considered too unstable to use in the war. Sometimes in the same article.

    Next is July 16<sup>th,</sup> 2091 when Sanderson¡¯s manifest was released together with his virus, on the 54<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the Nephilim release.

    Over the next year you will find reports of how Nephilim units defeated this foe or another, while the MSM still celebrated Sanderson.

    Then on October 4<sup>th,</sup> 2092 you will find a press release from the CDC, that the massive reduction in pregnancies was the result of Sanderson¡¯s Folly.

    Of course, at this time Sanderson was already safely dead. And lastly, you will find on November 9<sup>th,</sup> 2093 a much-reduced number of articles about the Night of the Falling Stars.

    Much reduced because the majority of the MSM had their place either in Manhattan, Washington or LA, so only the survivors could report.

    Over the next years if you will search carefully enough you will find the work the Nephilim did on the algae tanks and the desalinator/purifier mentioned in some offhand comment.

    Between June and November 2103 you will find first the proposals and then the votes for the new laws that would take the rights of the Nephilim away.

    Then on December 18<sup>th,</sup> 2103 you will find the public outcry over the declaration of independence from the North-Western States.

    Between April and September 2108 you will find the declarations of secession from the States that now make up the CSA.

    Finally, on June 12<sup>th,</sup> 2110 you will find the signing of the peace accords and formal recognition of the NWC and the CSA by the USA.

    The secession of the now AFS happened between July and October 2110.

    The history taught by the schools in the Commonwealth has the basic dates right, but emphasizes much more the heroic deeds and sacrifices of the only pure people of earth.¡± I tried to make the sarcasm drip onto the table with this last sentence, before continuing:

    ¡°Not quite as wrong as what is taught in the AFS but propaganda at its finest nonetheless.¡±

    I had to suppress a chuckle.

    ¡°Of course, if you set out to do it yourself you most likely will spend a few years searching all the archives you can reach. It took me 6 months, and I wrote a news aggregator that I let run on a borrowed supercomputer to get it all.

    I could offer you to use the aggregator, and would even be willing to try to help you find a supercomputer, as unlikely it may be that we will get one for you, but I fear you would accuse me of tampering. So you are on your own in this. Have fun. Next question?¡±

    Darren was next.

    ¡°You talked about the five categories. Are you willing to tell us where you are in that respect?¡±

    ¡°This question is considered pretty rude. I hope you accept that I want that information to remain private. Nothing against you, but that was one of the reasons I had to flee from Seattle, and I don¡¯t make it too easy to find me.¡±

    He was visibly disappointed but nodded anyway.

    ¡°Any other questions?¡± Marc raised his hand. ¡°Yeah, you talked about how Pure''s coping mechanisms are gone. What exactly does that mean?¡±

    Urgh, OK, here we go.

    ¡°Humans cope mostly by forgetting, repressing and filtering.

    They forget things they can¡¯t handle.

    They repress memories that are too painful.

    And they automatically filter things they can¡¯t cope with.

    Pures don¡¯t have these capabilities anymore. A very real example we have here just now. All of us women were tortured and raped for three days.

    It is hard to process for all of us. With time Natalie, Christine and Jacky will forget the pain, the humiliation, and the helpless anger. They will remember that they were in pain, were humiliated, and that they were angry. But the pain itself, how it felt, they will have forgotten.

    Same with the humiliation and the anger. They will have flashbacks of it for a long time. But still, it will be a muted thing compared to the real experience.

    For me, I, unfortunately, have a perfect memory. That means I only have to close my eyes and think about it and feel the pain again in crystal clarity. I will feel the same humiliation as at the time Frankel played with me and the same rage I felt when his boys entertained me. It is as if it were burned in crystal. It will be so today, tomorrow, in twenty years, and if I live that long, in 200 years.

    Fortunately, there are techniques that were developed to keep the trauma down, or I would be bonking mad in a few years.

    But these techniques require a bit of discipline. So remember, if you hurt or humiliate a Pure, he will remember it fully, even decades later. He will never forget. What somebody else would laugh off after a few months or years, a Pure has vividly in his memory.

    Now I would be happy to simply talk with you about whatever you want to know, but time is at a bit of a premium for the next few days. We can sit down and have a history lesson or talk about the differences between the various races and whatever, but for now, we should concentrate on things you really have to know. OK?¡±

    They all looked sheepish, and Kate a bit dejected, but they all nodded.

    ¡°Well, then, any questions pertaining to what we have to do in the next few hours?¡±

    Christine spoke up.

    ¡°Yes, what do we do with the slavers?¡±

    ¡°That is easy. When the bots are ready, especially the big security bots, have them dragged individually into the lab, slapped into a rack and then collared.¡±

    ¡°Uh, how?¡±

    I had to blink at that. ¡°What, how?¡± By now we both were confused.

    ¡°How do we get the bots to get them? And how do we collar them?¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ ok, the bots will obey your verbal orders. So simply tell the security bots to fetch the first un-collared slaver out of the pens.

    You should make sure you are in the lab when you do that, otherwise the bots may bring the slaver into your room or wherever you are.

    They are a little dumb that way.

    Then order the bots to place them into an empty rack beside one of the control consoles. Watch that the bots don¡¯t mess this up. Afterward, get a collar of approximately the right size, don¡¯t worry, they resize a bit, and lock it around the slaver''s neck. At the back of the collar you will find an OPB jack.

    Grab the OPB cable from the console and jack it in.

    Then on the console you agree to the new link and, when it tells you that it has established the link, activate the options ¡®Voice Suppression¡¯ and ¡®Truth Indication¡¯ and then hit the option for ¡®Neural Mapping¡¯.

    Then have the bots bring him back to his pen and fetch the next one. Anything else?¡±

    Nobody answered me.

    ¡°All right, Jacky, do you have any professional business clothes? Something you can impress in? If not, we need to get you something from the fabber.

    Dress to impress, and then please call Benjamin Walker.

    The number is already programmed in the phone system.

    Tell the secretary you most likely will get, that you want to make an appointment for me to pay my respect and negotiate my opening a business in his territory.

    Don¡¯t mention my name. Just refer to me as your boss. Can you do that?¡±

    She nodded, and I looked at the others.

    ¡°Who of you will play the driver and bodyguard?¡± They gestured toward Kate.

    ¡°Do you have anything like a black suit or any formal clothes?¡± She shook her head.

    ¡°Then we will have to make you something. We will meet at the fabber after you have finished your breakfast. I think that is all for now.¡±

 10: Meet the Boss

    Jacky managed to get an appointment with Mr. Walker at 11:30. Meanwhile, Kate and I created an outfit for her for the day. The extra pair of arms made that a nontrivial exercise, as the standard patterns were designed for two arms. Simply adding additional sleeves was strangely disturbing. It just did not sit right. After a bit of fiddling, we got something fitting that nonetheless looked smart. Kate was a bit surprised when I insisted on light body armor.

    While the fabber extruded the outfit I was mentally going through my own wardrobe, trying to find a suitable combination. After a few minutes, I decided that I had nothing appropriate to the situation. At least not anymore.

    While I could still wear my old t-shirts, sweaters, and overalls with my¡­ enhanced bust, even if a bit tight, anything business smart I owned would now make me look like I was soliciting horizontal work, so I had to fab a new outfit for myself as well.

    I was in luck, as the fabber was, while old, a luxury model with all the bells and whistles, including a body scanner for tailored extrusion. That the available selection of synthetics was three times that of the basic model and included synthetic spider silk did not hurt either.

    Even before Frankel decided to increase my sensitivity I had problems with coarser fabrics. Now I did not really want to think about wearing wool anymore.

    Not that I had more than a single wool shawl, considering how expensive the dang stuff is.

    Spider silk was actually one of the best materials one could use, as it was at once extraordinarily soft to the touch and incredibly tough making it one of the best materials for ballistic fabric. At least if one did not have a working Nano Assembler or a nanotube fabber. Carbon nanotubes were orders of magnitude better, in both aspects, but usually, it would be cheaper to wear chainmail out of gold.

    With both Kate and me newly equipped with business attire, I prepared for the meeting. I had never developed a habit of using makeup so I left that out, but I put up my hair. Looking in the mirror I decided I had done the best I could do.

    On the way out of my room, I placed my PDP in my holster and then entered the Lab.

    In the back, Frankel was howling in pain, something that brought a little smile onto my face. I saw Christine and Natalie standing around him as I closed to his rack, pain sticks in each hand.

    ¡°You know you can mute him if he gets too loud, right?¡± Booth women wheeled around to face me, and Christine answered me: ¡°Nah, that¡¯s all right. We wouldn¡¯t want to miss the music.¡±

    Frankel¡¯s former clothes were on the ground around him, resembling cleaning rags more than clothes, and I saw several of Frankel¡¯s more¡­ imaginative toys placed on various parts of his body. This vision made me ask an important question.

    ¡°Have you given him the enhancement formula yet or can we look forward to it?¡± That made them both look thoughtfully first at Frankel, then at me.

    ¡°You know, I hadn¡¯t thought about enhancement at all. You Nat?¡± Christine looked at her sister, who shook her head.

    ¡°No, but in hindsight, it is obvious. Well, Red, do you want to be present when we give him the honor of being enhanced?¡±

    Frankel made some inscrutable noises, and I noticed that something was rammed into his mouth. Apparently, the sisters did not want our toy to annoy them.

    ¡°Not necessary. I don¡¯t want to hog all the fun.¡± We all chuckled at that.

    ¡°But seriously now. Do I look like a professional businesswoman?¡±

    A worried expression moved over their faces, and they looked at each other for a moment, silently debating with each other. Finally, Natalie answered me.

    ¡°Uhm, in all honesty, no, you don¡¯t.¡± That was exactly what I did not want to hear, and I could feel my face falling.

    Christine elaborated on the point.

    ¡°You look like a kid playing business in her mom¡¯s clothes.¡±

    Several feelings fought for dominance in me at this moment, only to settle on resignation a moment later.

    ¡°Carp¡­ carp¡­ carp. That is¡­ dang¡­¡± I took a deep breath, and then asked them: ¡°Do you think there is anything we could do about it? Other clothes? A different hairstyle? Makeup?¡± I tried to sound not too needy.

    But they shook their heads, with Natalie answering me. ¡°Sorry, but no can do. It is your size more than anything else. That you simply have a cute face does not help at all. You would need two or three inches more.¡±

    At first, I was a bit confused before I remembered that they still partially used the Imperial system on the East Coast. Then her statement struck. Nice, five to eight cm were missing from my being seen as an adult.

    And if my research was right, I would have quite a few more years being treated as a kid before me.

    ¡°That¡­ will make negotiations with a traditional older misogynist so much easier. Well, it can¡¯t be helped. I have to somehow convince him that I won¡¯t be an embarrassment to him. Thanks for the honesty though.¡±

    I turned around and walked slowly to the garage. On the way, Kate joined me, and then commented:

    ¡°You don¡¯t look particularly happy. Something wrong?¡±

    I had to suppress a snort.

    ¡°Yeah, quite a few things are wrong. I have to meet with an Irish mafia boss, who is known to be very old-fashioned and against women in business, except for traditional women¡¯s jobs. I have come at best only superficially to terms with my ordeal over the last week, and going into the lion¡¯s den like that scares me more than anything I have ever had to do.

    I have been told that I look like a kid playing businesswoman, and that of course means I will have to work just so much harder to convince this man to grant us his blessing. It is only by the skin of my teeth that I keep from running away.

    So yes, something is wrong. But if we want to build a life here, I have to tough it out. Just don¡¯t expect me to make a happy dance about it.¡±

    Directly after I unloaded on her I regretted doing it.

    ¡°Sorry, it is not your fault. It¡¯s just that I am stressed about it like nobody¡¯s business.¡±

    ¡°Ah, it¡¯s all right. I think none of us got how hard this would be for you.¡±

    Then we reached the garage, and I got the first real look at the vehicles there.

    The van we were transported with was here of course. As were several smaller vehicles. In the back corner was what looked like an older skimmer. Kate immediately moved in that direction.

    ¡°Can we take the skimmer? I always wanted to fly in one.¡±

    I had to rain on her parade.

    ¡°Can you fly it? I can¡¯t, and the trafcon in New York is famous for being unreliable.¡±

    Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

    She shook her head, but still looked wistfully at the massive vehicle. I could understand her disappointment. A flight in what was essentially a light grav ship sounds fun. But I still pointed at a silver-grey sedan.

    ¡°Let¡¯s take that. It is the best we have available.¡± She nodded, and I sent a quick order to the computer system to reprogram the AI of the sedan before we drove out of the garage.

    It was the first time I had seen New York in real, and I have to say, I was not impressed. There were scars of the big war in Seattle. Several buildings were abandoned. But they were still either kept in a reasonable state of repair or demolished to keep the risk down.

    Not so in New York. At best somewhere between 20 and 30% of the buildings were occupied. The rest were crumbling slowly. Everywhere was decay and while the roads were free from rubble they were old.

    If their condition was an implication the last maintenance was sometime before the Third Civil War. Maybe even before the Big War.

    But there was still life in this territory. I could see several small shops, either in the buildings on the ground floor or in what appeared to be improvised shacks on the broken sidewalk.

    The drive was otherwise unspectacular, and we arrived at Walker¡¯s headquarters with 15 minutes to spare.

    Compared to the fortress, it looked rather small and weak. But looks can deceive as even I had often experienced.

    I decided then and there to prepare a scorched earth approach and primed the cluster to go full destructive on the mob here if it either got the signal from me to do so or if it did not get the abort signal in an hour after the appointment started.

    After thinking about it I also prepared The Lamb to start six hours later. If Walker would capture or even kill me he would not enjoy the experience.

    I would not go gently into that good night! In hindsight, even considering The Lamb was an overkill of several orders of magnitude, but as I had told Kate, I was scared and I was grasping for anything I believed would give me an advantage.

    With a last deep breath, I steeled my face and we exited the sedan.

    Inside the building we were greeted by a cordial young man, early to mid-twenties, with dark blonde hair.

    ¡°Hello. My name is Patrick. May I ask what you want?¡± There was an undertone that promised uncomfortable consequences if there was no reason for us to enter. Fortunately, I had a reason.

    ¡°My name is Veronica Sinclair. I have an appointment with Mr. Walker at 11:30. Could you please let the relevant persons know that I am here?¡±

    He nodded and sub-vocalized something, and a few moments later a group of obvious security came from one of the doors. The apparent leader of the group came close to me.

    ¡°If you would please remove any weapons you have with you!¡±

    While he said please it was clear that it was no question, just a polite order. Still, I was prepared for that.

    ¡°Of course.¡± While I removed my gun from its holster and offered it to him, I continued. ¡°Is it all right that my guard stays here?¡± He took my PDP, visibly surprised at the rather small weapon, and then looked at Kate. Then he nodded.

    ¡°Yes, that is all right. Do you have any other weapons?¡±

    ¡°No, I personally don¡¯t have the physical propensity for violence. I let others more suitable for such endeavors do that.¡± I forced a smile and opened my coat so he could see that there was nothing else.

    He looked me over, and the fact that I wore a relatively short and tight skirt seemed to convince him that I had no holdouts. Of course, any holdout would be roughly the same size as my PDP, which looked quite big on me.

    ¡°OK, follow me please.¡± After he gave the gun to Patrick he led me through one of the doors, and up a staircase. I could see signs that betrayed the age of the building, even if it was in seemingly good maintenance. After we were two floors up he brought me to a set of double doors.

    Inside a young woman sat at a desk and was working on a rather dated computer.

    My guide announced me: ¡°Mr. Walker¡¯s eleven-thirty is here.¡±

    The young woman gestured to a second set of double doors and said: ¡°Go right in. He expects her.¡±

    I took a moment to compose myself a last time before I followed my guide through the door.

    Inside I saw Benjamin Walker for the first time. He was in his late 40s, early 50s, with dark brown hair going gray. He obviously had had several cyber upgrades, as his eyes had a slightly artificial touch, and the muscles under his shirt were simply inhuman.

    The office was¡­ traditionally set up. It would not have been out of order during World War II.

    Heavy oak paneling adorned the walls, and the furniture seemed to be real wood. A thick carpet covered the floor and several bookshelves stood along the walls of the 5x8m room, full of old books. If I had to guess the worth of this room, I would estimate several million dollars.

    But something was wrong. I could not decide what, but something tickled my senses. After a few seconds, I decided that it had to wait.

    ¡°Hello. I am Veronica Sinclair.¡±

    He nodded and pointed at one of the seats in front of his desk.

    ¡°Benjamin Walker. Take a seat.¡±

    As I sat down, I noticed two guards sitting in the corner of the room. My guide joined them.

    ¡°So you want to open a business in my territory?¡±

    ¡°Yes. Despite my admittedly youthful appearance I have some expertise that I think would allow me to earn a living here.¡±

    He looked at me intensely for a few moments, and something in his stare bothered me, but I couldn¡¯t exactly say what. Then he answered me.

    ¡°And you decided to come to my territory exactly why?¡±

    ¡°That was not quite my decision. I believe you know Mr. Frankel, right?¡±

    With his nod, I continued.

    ¡°The man who piloted me here had an outstanding obligation to him, and Mr. Frankel decided to confiscate him and his property as compensation. Unfortunately he also decided to confiscate us passengers and our property.¡±

    I showed a thin smile.

    ¡°You can hopefully understand that I took umbrage at this behavior. Well, Mr. Frankel forced the issue and was not able to enforce his opinion on me and my acquaintances.

    In the end, I found myself owning him and his property. Including the nice big house of his, that is optimal for my work, and that is part of your territory.¡±

    He formed a pyramid with his fingers in front of him, and I could see several of his muscles twitch.

    ¡°And you assume now that I would be willing to let you keep the property that Mr. Frankel held previously. What if I decided that I wanted Mr. Frankel back in control there?¡±

    ¡°Unfortunately I can¡¯t give you that. While Mr. Frankel is still alive, he made the mistake of drawing the ire of the majority of my people.

    I fear that he would have an unfortunate accident if I decided to let him go, let alone to give him the house back.¡±

    ¡°And if I decided to keep you here and let my people look into the situation?¡±

    Uh oh. That did not sound so good. But I had to remain calm. At least outwardly.

    ¡°That, I fear would be a very bad decision. I think you know that, while you will certainly be able to gain control of the building, you would lose quite a few men doing that, but that is not the aspect that should worry you.

    What finished my altercation with Mr. Frankel in my favor was the fact that for a while I was one of Spectre¡¯s brokers. You can assume that Spectre will watch the situation closely, and the consequences of your actions against me could be disastrous.¡±

    His eyes twitched and he leaned back into his chair.

    ¡°I am not used to being threatened, and I have to say I don¡¯t like it.¡±

    Good. I conveyed the danger, now I had to take out the sting.

    ¡°I am sorry if you thought of it as a threat. Just to warn you.

    I assume you know of Spectre¡¯s reputation for protection brokers. At this moment, I have absolutely no control over anything that could happen.

    I can only guess what Spectre will do. I confess that I did not issue a warning in that respect to Mr. Frankel, but unlike you, he chose to negotiate with drawn weapons.¡±

    He scratched his chin before he answered.

    ¡°I will think about it. But first, what is the business that you want to open?¡±

    ¡°I want to work as an implant surgeon. Besides that, I can offer services as a computer specialist and electronics designer. Additionally, I intend to resume my role as a broker.¡±

    His look intensified again, and I felt strangely captured by it. In my head, I was going over the mantra ¡®keep calm,¡¯ over and over again. I just had to keep my concentration.

    ¡°I find it hard to believe that you are old enough that you can do it.¡±

    Yeah, the old problem.

    ¡°For one, I am cursed with looking younger than I am. I have been told that I look like a kid playing business, but unfortunately I can¡¯t do anything against that. The other point is that I am a Pure.¡±

    I saw the tension in his face intensify. Ok, not so good, he did not like Pures.

    ¡°Unfortunately I can¡¯t do anything about the label the more obnoxious members of my race have given us so I have to use it, but I can assure you that I am not one of the ultra arrogant jerks most people associate with the word.¡±

    Unfortunately, his face did not relax.

    ¡°But the point is that three specialties like that are a bit above average for Pures, but nothing extraordinary.¡±

    He shook his head slightly, and I could see that his brow was moist. The temperature in the room was a bit low, so I was asking myself what could make him sweat.

    ¡°And I am supposed to simply believe you?¡±

    I had to smile again.

    ¡°I could offer you credentials and diplomas, but we both know that somebody who has access to Spectre can provide anything like that regardless of actually earning it. So you have sadly only three options. You can believe me, you can believe I am lying, or you can give me the chance to prove that I can do it. I would honestly prefer the last option.¡±

    ¡°We already have quite a few cyber surgeons here. What makes you think that we need another one?¡±

    That was an easy question.

    ¡°I would guess you have not many implant surgeons trained in the Commonwealth. We all know that the NWC is a decade ahead of the East Coast concerning cyber technology. And I can assure you that I did not have to relocate here because of my work.¡±

    He stood up and walked around the desk. Wow, he was even more massive than I thought. I would guess he was around 150 to 160kg and had no fat. I forced myself to not show any reaction.

 11: A new approach

    He gripped my chin and moved my head to the left and right. My heart pounded and I had to force down my beginning panic. This whole situation was intimidating as hell. But somehow I managed to keep my anxiety from my face.

    Then something happened that I did absolutely not expect. Despite my fear, my nervousness, and the fact that this giant of a man towered above me, I felt myself getting wet. That derailed my thoughts for a bit, while Walker examined my face. I fought myself to calm down. This was not a normal reaction for me, so I had to research it later. Now I had to ensure my immediate future.

    As calmly and as coldly as I could manage I asked:

    ¡°Is this normal behavior for you?¡±

    ¡°I still have to decide if you are worth it.¡± Still, he let go of my chin and took a step back.

    ¡°And what, pray tell, has my face to do with it?¡±

    He slowly moved back to his chair.

    ¡°If I decide to let you open your business in my territory, there may be ancillary services despite the tax that I might demand. And for some of those, your appearance could be important.¡±

    Frick, that was not a direction I wanted to go in. But he was the boss and at least he was considering letting me work here.

    ¡°These ancillary services would have to be negotiated. I hope you are not affronted, but I want to know beforehand¡­¡±

    Suddenly it clicked.

    The smell, the twitches, the sweat, his slightly unfocused eyes whenever he did not concentrate.

    ¡°You have CRS!¡± I immediately regretted my outburst but it was so surprising that I could not stop myself.

    His look became cold, as well as his voice.

    ¡°Why do you think I have CRS?¡±

    Damn. Hope for the best.

    ¡°Something bothered me the moment I entered your office, but I could not immediately identify what.

    You have many small indications.

    Your cybermuscles twitch every so often.

    Your eyes defocus when you don¡¯t concentrate, as well as twitch.

    You have a slight sheen of sweat on your brow.

    Your breath is a bit labored.

    That all could have any number of causes, but not the smell of Tricyclin. From the strength of the smell, I would estimate that you have late-stage three or even stage four CRS.¡±

    He stared at me.

    ¡°And, as an implant surgeon, what would you advise in this situation?¡±

    That was the question.

    ¡°With what I know at this moment, nothing. I simply have not enough information to give a sound opinion, much less advise how to go from here.¡±

    That seemed to surprise him.

    ¡°Give me a general outline of what you would suggest.¡±

    ¡°Well, generally you have four options.

    The easiest is of course to do nothing. Depending on the severity of your CRS and what cyberware you have, this will kill you sooner or later.

    Could be weeks, could be months. From your breathing and the sweat I would guess you have a cybernetic heart and that it gives you problems, so years to live should be unrealistic.

    Next, what you apparently are doing, using anti-rejection drugs. Tricyclin is good, but if you have a cybernetic heart then Demakilan would be a bit better choice. That would extend your life expectancy by 20 to 30%.

    Third option, you could replace the cyberware with cloned organs. That would of course stop the CRS, but leave you without cyberware and demonstrating a weakness. It would also depend on your surviving long enough to get the cloned tissue. I don¡¯t think a man in your position would survive long in that situation.

    Fourth you could try Nicolins¡¯ nano therapy. That could increase live expectancy by up to 400%.¡±

    He leaned forward.

    ¡°Ok, now I am a bit impressed. You are only the second who mentioned the nano therapy. Not that anybody here can do it.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°I know how it works. I mean, I haven¡¯t done it before, but I have the parameters and programming for the therapy. But I can¡¯t promise you that it will save you. Also, it will only prolong your life so much. Fortunately for you, I may have a fifth option that might save you and eliminate your CRS.¡±

    I saw how he tensed all over his body.

    ¡°What would you need?¡±

    I mentally walked through the necessary steps.

    ¡°First and foremost I would need access to a medical scanner that is no more than 30 years old and would have to scan you. Also, I have just arrived in New York, and have no equipment except a few irreplaceable pieces I brought with me from Seattle. I would need to get the rest.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°And you want me to give it to you?¡±

    ¡°No. I want to buy it myself. Don¡¯t fear, I have the money for it.

    What I don¡¯t have yet are the contacts necessary to buy it. As well as replacement parts for the cyberware you have. My method won¡¯t work with already implanted tech.¡±

    He scratched his chin again.

    ¡°And what else?¡±

    ¡°Time. If you survive long enough to modify the cyberware I can almost certainly save you. But that is a big if, and I can¡¯t tell you the chances until I have a detailed scan of you.¡±

    ¡°Almost certainly?¡±

    ¡°There is never a 100% guarantee. Even now any surgery has its risks. But if you are alive when we have the surgery, then your chances are somewhere around 98 to 99%.¡±

    He thought for a moment and then nodded.

    ¡°All right. You get your chance to prove that you can do the job. Follow me.¡±

    He stood up and moved swiftly to the door. I scrambled after him, followed by his bodyguards.

    In the anteroom, he bellowed a quick order.

    ¡°Janet, call Doc Schaeffer. I will meet him in the clinic in 15 minutes. Then he moved out. When he walked toward the stairs I cleared my throat and he stopped looking at me.

    ¡°Is there a lift here?¡±

    He had a sardonic grin when he answered. ¡°Yes. Why? Are you struggling with stairs?¡±

    I reciprocated his grin.

    ¡°No, it is for you. From what I already know about your condition you should avoid any exertion at all costs. Taking the lift may make the difference between you dying or living.¡±

    That wiped out his grin, and he started moving again, in a different direction. Shortly we arrived at a lift, and not long after reached the ground floor. There we were met by another three bodyguards.

    Kate jumped from her chair when we moved through the reception, but I shook my head, not having time for more.

    A brisk walk outside later we entered the building beside Walker''s headquarters. Now I noticed that it was a clinic, and an older man with a white coat stood beside the counter. He looked less than pleased.

    ¡°Ben, I thought I made it clear that you have to avoid any exertion. You could kill yourself the way you move.¡±

    Walker made a waving motion.

    ¡°I know, I know. But this time it might be important. Let¡¯s get to your office.¡± The older man sighed, before walking to a set of automatic doors in the back.

    Walker signed me to follow him and moved along. Only two of the bodyguards followed us inside.

    Inside Walker took one of the chairs in front of the desk, directed me to the other, while the apparent doctor took place behind the desk, before asking:

    ¡°Ok, Ben, what is so important that you have to risk the last few weeks you have left?¡±

    Walker leaned forward.

    ¡°This young woman here claims to be an implant surgeon, and frankly, after the way she worked out that I have CRS I tend to believe her. More importantly, one of the options she mentioned was this nano therapy of this Nichols you talked about, Richard.¡±

    Richard threw a short look at me, before again looking at Walker.

    ¡°Nicolin, not Nichols. And knowing about it won¡¯t help you a bit.¡±

    I entered the discussion.

    ¡°Sorry to interrupt, but I do not only know about it.

    I haven¡¯t done it yet but I know how to do it.

    And frankly, I have something better than the nano therapy to offer, if Mr. Walker has enough time left.¡±

    Now Richard looked much more intensively at me.

    ¡°Young woman, I don¡¯t know how you convinced Ben, but if you want to play doctor please leave real sick people alone.¡±

    I ground my teeth but held back my sarcasm.

    ¡°Doctor, I can assure you that I know what I am talking about.

    I don¡¯t know how much time we have, so I will keep it short.

    Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

    I am a Pure, I have an IQ that would be deemed genius level for normal humans, I have a perfect memory, and I look extremely young for my age.

    All together, yes I am an implant surgeon, and I know how to do the nano therapy.

    I also have a way to beat CRS. A proven way. The only thing that could prevent me from saving Mr. Walker is time.¡±

    Richard looked at Walker and then nodded tiredly.

    ¡°All right, if Ben thinks you should try it, I will give you a chance.¡± He sighed. ¡°What do you need?¡±

    ¡°I need access to a medical scanner no older than thirty years and have to scan Mr. Walker. After that, I can tell you more.¡±

    ¡°OK, that is at least a serious approach. Then follow me.¡±

    We all walked to another room, where we found a scanner. I did not recognize the make, so I had to ask.

    ¡°What model is this? I don¡¯t recognize it.¡± Richard looked shortly at me again.

    ¡°That is a Norville MSP 337a. It is 13 years old.¡± I sent a short request to the cluster and received the answer shortly.

    ¡°OK, that should be sufficient. Mr. Walker, if you would enter the scanner please?¡±

    While Walker moved towards the scanner Richard turned fully towards me.

    ¡°Can you tell me why you need a scanner not older than 30 years?¡±

    ¡°37 years ago Panacea Inc. combined the MRT with the grav anomaly scanner, giving us resolution on the macro-molecule level in real-time.

    It filtered through to most manufacturers by 2216.

    With the inclusion of a bit of a fudge factor 30 years is a good limit.

    I need the resolution to get a precise evaluation of the damage the CRS has done and an estimate of how much time we have left.¡±

    Meanwhile, Walker had entered the scanner, and I worked on the console.

    Then the scan proceeded.

    ¡°Now we have to wait.¡± And waiting we did. I signaled the cluster to set the timer for the attack back two hours.

    The picture that was slowly created on the display was not good. It was not good at all. Suddenly something caught my attention. That¡­ would be a problem.

    I turned toward Richard.

    ¡°Doctor, would it be possible that you give me access to Mr. Walker''s file? It could help me begin to tailor the therapy.¡± No need to induce suspicion quite yet.

    Richard thought about it for a while and then nodded, and with a few keystrokes opened the file on the secondary computer. I scrolled forward to the last half-year and quickly found what I feared.

    ¡°Hm, I read here that you gave him Aspertone. Any reason for that?¡±

    He smiled a bit.

    ¡°Yes. I bet you think that it is wrong. I thought so too until Denzel made a bet with me. I then researched it further, and found out I confused it with Asparane.¡±

    I took a moment to work that over.

    ¡°Sorry, but can you show me your research?¡± He shrugged his shoulders and made another few keystrokes.

    Then I read the entry about Aspertone. To be completely sure I set the cluster to get anything about this drug it could find. Meanwhile, the scanner was finished, and Walker joined us.

    ¡°And what is the verdict?¡±

    I thought a moment.

    ¡°First I would ask the doctor here to give you a mild sedative.¡±

    Walker''s face darkened, but he kept his calm.

    ¡°And why that?¡±

    I waited a few seconds before answering.

    ¡°I have to tell you a few things that will agitate you, and that could be deadly at the moment. I was considering not telling you about them for medical reasons but I fear you have an urgent need to know them.¡±

    Now both Walker and Richard looked worried, but the doctor left and came back with a syringe a few minutes later.

    After he injected Walker, it took a while before the mob boss became rather mellow, and Richard turned to me.

    ¡°OK, he is calm and should remain so. What is so upsetting?¡±

    Now the hard part.

    ¡°First, the CRS has attacked the cyber heart massively. If we do nothing, Mr. Walker will be dead in a week, two maximum. Three would be an outright miracle.¡±

    Richard¡¯s face clouded, and Walker had a sad smile.

    ¡°That is what I expected. Well, it was a good life.¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t give up so fast. I said if we do nothing. With nano therapy, we can extend that considerably. That will give me time to adapt a replacement heart for you. I won¡¯t lie to you, even if everything goes right, your chances are no better than 60%. And that is with a Dworak Pulse III.¡±

    That got Richard into the talk.

    ¡°Why a Pulse III? It is barely better than a natural heart.¡±

    ¡°Exactly because of that. It will take time to adapt any implant. I can convert a Pulse III in six weeks. Anything more complicated and the time needed goes up. A Kolvar Excelsior like he has now would take me a bit over three months. The chances that he survives so long even with nano therapy are a bit less than 20%. Everything else that is damaged is not critical. Even if it craps out, he will only be inconvenienced. But the heart will kill him. His neural implants are still unaffected, so with the therapy, we have a few years before they become critical.¡±

    Walker made a pyramid with his fingers again.

    ¡°All right. What do you need to start the nano therapy?¡±

    I answered with a smile.

    ¡°Actually that is the easy part. I just need access to the nano fab here.¡±

    The doctor¡¯s face fell.

    ¡°We don¡¯t have a nano fab.¡±

    I had to blink at that a few times.

    ¡°No¡­ nano fab? I thought these were standard equipment for clinics nowadays.¡±

    Walker answered me: ¡°For you Commies maybe. But here these things are rare as hen¡¯s teeth. Hard to come by is an understatement. Damn. Maybe we can trade for access to one.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°If they are so rare, how did Frankel get his?¡±

    That surprised both of them, with Walker exclaiming: ¡°Frankel has a nano fab?¡±

    ¡°Had a nano fab. I told you that I took possession of all his property.¡±

    ¡°So you can use it to make this therapy?¡±

    ¡°Sure, I could. But if I have to go to the fortress anyway, I will use mine. It¡¯s better.¡±

    Richard gasped.

    ¡°You have two nano fabs? And why is yours better?¡±

    I shook my head to get the confusion out.

    ¡°Honestly, I don¡¯t know exactly what Frankel had. But mine is bleeding edge for the Commonwealth. There simply are no better nano fabs. If you want I can give you Frankel¡¯s. I think you can make better use of it than it catching dust with me. Or if you have a few months'' time I can build you one. I just have to make the tools to make the tools first.¡±

    That of course was a fib. I could make a new nano fab in three or four days if I got the right raw materials, but that would reveal the NADA, and I was not prepared for that yet.

    Walker in turn got a thoughtful expression.

    ¡°You can make a nano fab?¡±

    ¡°Yes. I told you I am among other things an electronics designer. I specialized in nanoelectronics. In addition to allowing me to make nano fabs, it helps me design neuronal implants and computer systems.¡±

    Walker smiled weakly. ¡°Ok, that I can understand. So you have to go back to Frankel¡¯s place and make the therapy? Then go.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°My place now, and a bit of a moment, please. I am not finished with the things you have to know. Before I continue, I have to ask, who installed the emergency air tank?¡±

    Walker looked at Richard.

    ¡°That was Denzel, right?¡±

    Richard shrugged his shoulders. ¡°I think so.¡± Then he addressed me. ¡°Why do you need to know that?¡±

    ¡°Because the CRS is neither an accident nor surprising. This Denzel tried to murder you and may have succeeded if I can¡¯t stop it.¡±

    They were visibly shocked by that. Then Walker asked me with an intense gaze.

    ¡°What makes you think that?¡±

    I gestured towards the scan display.

    ¡°The tank itself told me that. Honestly, I have never seen an implant done so wrongly. Even a surge boy fresh out of the box would have done a considerably better job adapting it. Then it would have only a risk of around 55 to 60% to cause CRS. As it is, the surgeon must either have been intoxicated up to his gills, or he intentionally adapted the tank in a way to increase the risk as much as possible. This tank had a chance of roughly 80% to make you sick. I would guess that this Denzel has either moved or is dead.¡±

    Richard shook his head.

    ¡°I can¡¯t believe it. Denzel was always so a good man.¡± Dead then. That fit the pattern.

    ¡°Believe it. But he did not work alone. You have at least one more in the plot. The database here was hacked.¡± I turned toward Richard.

    ¡°Your first instinct about Aspertone was right. Somebody changed the information in your database. It is actually strongly contraindicated to every implant. It nearly doubles the risk of developing CRS. With it and the way the tank was adapted, there was maybe a chance of one or two percent of not getting CRS. This was without a doubt intentional. And whoever paid Denzel to do this covered his tracks.¡±

    I turned back to Walker.

    ¡°Essentially you have somebody in your organization that wants you out of the way without the appearance of murder.¡±

    It was clear that despite the sedative Walker became agitated.

    ¡°Mr. Walker, calm down. If you need it, let the doctor here give you another shot. Any agitation can kill you.¡±

    He slumped down.

    ¡°What do I do now?¡±

    I shook my head. ¡°I can only help with your health.¡±

    He gave me a weak smile.

    ¡°That is better than what most can do. So what now?¡±

    I made a mental list before I answered.

    ¡°First I go to my place and make the nano therapy. Meanwhile, you have to get somebody to start searching for the equipment I need and the replacement parts. Or alternately have somebody introduce me to the right persons.

    Decide now what heart you want. I would strongly suggest the Pulse III first and I can adapt an Excelsior later when we have you free of CRS.

    Then you make the necessary changes so that you can take it slowly for a bit over a month. You have to be as stress-free as you can. I know you can¡¯t disappear for so long but reduce it as much as you can.

    Try not to think about who may want to have you killed, as that may be too much for you yet.

    When I come back I will start the therapy for you.

    You will need an injection of nanites every two days, so I will bring Frankle¡¯s nano fab here and show the good doctor how to program the nanites.

    You won¡¯t be the only one needing it, as I would bet that he used Aspertone for a few of your men. If it were not deadly for cybered persons it would be one of the best drugs you could get for shortening recuperation time.¡± That produced an exclamation from Richard, but I ignored it and continued.

    ¡°Then, when I finish adapting the replacement heart I will hopefully have equipped my practice. I originally planned three to four months for that, but now I need at least the bare minimum in six weeks, so I hope you can organize the required contacts for me. If you survive until then I will replace your heart with the replacement and we have the time to take care of your other cyberware in a more leisurely fashion. Any questions?¡±

    Richard cleared his throat.

    ¡°Um, yeah. If it is not too blatant, could you explain how you made cyberware CRS resistant?¡±

    I held up a finger.

    ¡°Not resistant, proof. And it is at least quite simple in concept. I developed a biological sheathing for the cyberware.¡±

    The good doctor looked crestfallen with that. ¡°Damn and I had such hopes. I fear it won¡¯t work. The same approach has been tried nearly 40 years ago. Without success, I have to say.¡±

    ¡°You mean encapsulating the cyberware with cloned tissue. And that approach has been tried 72 years ago, 68 years ago, 63 years ago, 59 years ago, 51 years ago, 39 years ago, 23 years ago, 17 years ago, twelve years ago and lastly seven years ago.

    They all made the same error.

    They encapsulated the entire implant with biomaterial, and when the implant needed a direct connection they left that uncoated.

    They also used straight cloned material, without considering that while cloned material may not be attacked by the immune system it only slows the immune reaction, even if by a substantial amount. The only difference between the different attempts was the way they created the encapsulation.¡±

    I gave both of the men a happy smile.

    ¡°I have chosen to call it a biological sheathing for a reason. What I do is not encapsulating the implant but I take it apart and coat the different parts separately with the biological tissue. For the needed contacts and openings I build a nano filter system that actively keeps the immune system away. The bio-sheathing also blocks the immune system.

    With respect to the researchers of the other attempts, I have to confess that it has only been possible for the last three to four years to create the nano filters.

    But I tested it extensively. I even used Aspertone on my lab rats and the only adaption I did was the coating.

    It should have had a risk of around 99% for each rat to develop CRS.

    Out of 10000 rats, not one developed it. Unfortunately, I haven¡¯t adapted the process to every type of implant yet.

    I can only help with about two-thirds of them so far.

    Also, I only have an experimental bioreactor sufficient for relatively small parts. I intended to build a full production model here. With that, I could have adapted an Excelsior in three or four days if my projections are right, but for now, I have to disassemble any implant to rather small parts to do the coating.¡±

    Richard nodded thoughtfully.

    ¡°I really hope you are right. The explanation at least sounds plausible. Well, please don¡¯t take me for rude, but I think you should hurry. I would hate to have Ben die just when a cure is in sight.¡±

    I nodded but did not leave my chair immediately.

    ¡°I understand that, but before I go, I would like to at least know your name. I am Veronica Sinclair.¡±

    He had to laugh.

    ¡°Sorry, but I completely forgot about that. I am Richard Schaeffer.¡±

    ¡°Nice to meet you.¡± Then I turned toward Walker. ¡°If you could signal your men that I am free to go, please? I don¡¯t want any mistakes to happen. I will be back in roughly an hour. Good day.¡±

    Then I stood up and moved to the door. One of the two bodyguards hurried along, and reached the exit before me, opening the door.

    Outside he gave a signal to the other guards, before walking alongside me.

    When we reached the headquarters he opened the door for me again. Inside he got to the counter.

    ¡°The girl can go. She has to run an errand for the boss.¡± I walked to Patrick.

    ¡°If I could have my gun back please?¡±

    Kate had meanwhile left her seat and came to my side. After I got the gun back we left the building.

    ¡°You look better than I thought you would. What happened?¡±

    I moved vigorously to the sedan.

    ¡°At first it went almost exactly by the script.

    He was obviously disinclined to accept my proposal and hinted at getting Frankel back in position. I think I could dissuade him with the fact that the fortress is a, well, fortress.

    I also played on the fact that I bested Frankel and insinuated that a confrontation might not be to his advantage.¡±

    After I got into the car, I stopped the timer on the cluster, and set The Lamb back to dormant status, before I continued.

    ¡°Then we both had quite a bit of luck. I found out that he has terminal CRS.¡±

    Kate made a strange sound and then asked me.

    ¡°How is that luck? I mean, yeah, we won¡¯t be dealing with him in the long run, so that might be a bit lucky, but for him? I would define luck differently.¡±

    I had to laugh at that.

    ¡°Normally I would agree with you, but not in this case. His luck was not in the fact that he has CRS, but in the fact that I noticed it. Do you remember what I told you about cyberware without the risk of CRS?

    It can be used to replace older cyberware that is already attacked by CRS. So I am the only person that might have a chance to heal him. It is still a gamble, but he¡¯s gone from ¡®no chance in hell¡¯ to nearly two-thirds.

    My, and by extension, our, luck is of course that if I manage to fix him it will be very unlikely that he has a lasting grievance with our setting up shop.¡±

    I rubbed the bridge of my nose while I ordered my thoughts.

    ¡°I have to get back there in an hour or so. I need to start Walker¡¯s nano therapy, and show his doc how to use the nano fab Frankel used for his enhancements.¡±

    I closed my eyes and leaned back into the seat, relaxing for the first time in the last few hours.

 12: All in a Dayâ€™s Work

    Kate¡¯s ¡°What the hell is that?¡± ripped me out of my reverie, and when I opened my eyes I immediately understood it. We were nearing the fortress and on top of the west wing was a big lump. It took me a moment to identify it.

    ¡°Ah, it seems we have found the Owl. I wouldn¡¯t have thought that a grav ship can land on a building.¡± Too bad Ernie had to make trouble, or he could have gotten his ship back right this minute.

    Then we drove into the garage. As we were moving into the group area I stopped Kate for a moment.

    ¡°Do you want to come with me when I get back to Walker?¡±

    She looked at me for a moment and then asked back: ¡°Do you want me to?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I would like that very much. I¡­ still don¡¯t fully trust them yet. Way too much that can go wrong.¡±

    She nodded. ¡°In that case, yes, I will come with you.¡±

    That eased my mood considerably. ¡°Thank you. You probably can¡¯t understand what that means to me.¡±

    When we entered the mess room only Christine was present, and I made a beeline toward the synthesizer. Christine called me: ¡°Hey, Red. We have a problem.¡± Of course, that sentence made me flinch, and I felt a sudden urge to punch something, anything. I slowly turned toward her and sighed.

    ¡°Please tell me it is nothing serious.¡± She had a serious expression.

    ¡°That depends on your definition of serious. One of the slaves¡­¡± She visibly struggled for the right words.

    ¡°When we asked her what she would do if we removed the collar she told us she would kill herself. We don¡¯t know what to do.¡±

    That felt like a hit in the stomach. I had hoped that none of them turned violent, that we could help them. Now that¡­

    While I frantically thought about a solution that was not forthcoming I turned to Kate, the Synthesizer, Christine again, and finally to the door.

    ¡°Damn. I so don¡¯t have time for something like this now. We can¡¯t¡­ shit¡­ I can¡¯t concentrate on that at this moment. I have to be back at the clinic in 40 minutes.¡±

    With that, I turned back to the synthesizer.

    ¡°We can talk later about it, but right now I have to run just to stand still. Kate, do you want something?¡± The last part I called back over my shoulder.

    ¡°No, I make something for myself when you are done. I have more time.¡± Too true that. I made myself a pretty generic sandwich. Even with all the different flavoring choices this stuff still tasted all the same. The underlying algae paste could maybe be prodded into different textures, consistencies and forms, but the taste¡­ no comment. At least it was nourishing. At time I would have to organize real food.

    With the sandwich in hand I moved toward the lab. There I found Darren collaring one of the slavers.

    ¡°Hey, Veronica, we have a¡­¡± I interrupted him. ¡°Yes, I know, but I don¡¯t have any time right now. I have to get back to Walker in less than 40 minutes.¡±

    I sat down at one of the consoles and began to sort out the programming, schemata, and recipes for nanites and their various medical applications I had, first by generation then by capabilities. At the same time, I send a bot to fetch my nano fab, some empty OPB-drives, had the computer here download the memory of Frankel¡¯s nano fab and wrote a step-by-step manual for Nicolins¡¯ nano therapy on my cranial board, occasionally taking a bite. When the bot arrived with my nano fab I jumped up and had it placed in the utility room of the lab, where I also found Frankel¡¯s fab. I reviewed the download of Frankel¡¯s recipes, while I supervised the bot set up my fab. When my fab was operational I loaded the design for the most versatile nanites I had and started a production run for half a liter of them. That should be enough for three or four weeks. At the same time, I cleared the memory of Frankel¡¯s fab and reinstalled the basic operating system. Then I had the bot dismount it. It was obvious that I would need to bring the material tanks too, so I called another two bots, to help bring the whole system to the van.

    Then I rushed out towards the console, and incidentally, my half-eaten sandwich, only to find my way partly blocked. The others, including five of the six slaves and exclusive Kate, were standing there.

    ¡°Hey, Veronica, what got your panties in a twist?¡±

    I ignored Mark¡¯s taunt and moved through them to the console.

    ¡°No time. Have to rush. Will talk later.¡± With that, I dived back into the sorting. Now that I had seen what type I had to work with, I reduced the recipes to what the fab could handle, which was sadly not particularly much. After a - very - short contemplation I decided to reduce the lower end too, and have Dr. Schaeffer concentrate on the optimal nanites he could make. I finally finished the manual and send it over to the console, while the bots began moving the fab out of the utility room. While I searched for the user manual of Frankel¡¯s fab somebody exclaimed:

    ¡°Hey, what is that?¡± Without turning around I answered: ¡°That is Frankel¡¯s nano fab.¡±

    Exclamations sounded behind me, as apparently a nano fab really was something special.

    I felt a hand on my shoulder.

    ¡°Hey, what are you doing with it?¡± ¡°I will give it to Benjamin Walker''s doctor so that he can use it in his clinic.¡± I grabbed one of the OPB sticks and copied the user manual and recipes onto it. I decided to use another stick for the manual and recipe for Nicolins¡¯ therapy to make it easy to find, even if I wasted nearly four EB doing so, as I found out I had not told the bot to bring me the smallest drives and so it had brought me two of my biggest. Two 64TB sticks would have been more than enough, but I just did not have the time.

    I was rather rude turned around, and saw Darren standing above me.

    ¡°What do you mean you will give it to Walker''s doctor? Do you have any idea what a nano fab is worth?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Honestly? No. But I assume the price is rather inflated. And will be falling hard in the months to come.¡±

    I tried to turn back to the console, but he kept me pointed towards the others.

    ¡°Did it not occur to you that one of us might have wanted it?¡±

    What about ¡®No time¡¯ did they not understand?

    ¡°It is a piece of crap. The only reason I am giving it to Doc Schaeffer and not just scrapping it is that he has none. If one of you wants a nano fab then I will make him or her one as soon as I have made the tools to do so. But for now, I need the space for my nano fab that is six generations newer. And now, as I already told you, I don¡¯t have time now.¡± I shoved his hand away and turned back to the console. The data was transferred and I inserted the other stick to copy the Nicolins-therapy.

    At the same time, I ordered another four dozen bots. A look at the watch showed me that I had just enough time to release the building pressure and then had to move out again.

    After I took booth sticks and grabbed a handful of wrist controllers, I nearly walked into the solid wall of the others, who looked rather bewildered.

    I suppressed a sigh.

    ¡°Ok, short version, I have the opportunity to show Walker what I can do, and in the process save his life. That in turn will make our position here quite secure. But this opportunity is time-sensitive because Walker is dying from CRS. Any minute could be his last until I can get the therapy to him. The rest we will talk about later, as I don¡¯t have time!¡± I shoved through between Natalie and Christine and run towards the WC, and a few minutes later to the garage. There I found Kate watching the bots secure the last of the load into the van.

    ¡°I take it we won¡¯t use the sedan this time?¡±

    ¡°Yup, you got it. We need to deliver this nano fab.¡± I jumped into the passenger seat of the van, with Kate taking the driver¡¯s seat.

    The drive back to Walker¡¯s HQ was no different than the other two drives, except that this time we stopped in front of the clinic.

    I took the ?l bottle of nanites in my hand and entered the building, where doc Schaeffer already awaited me.

    ¡°Ah, there you are. Are those the nanites for the therapy?¡± He waved towards the bottle.

    I nodded and continued towards him.

    ¡°Yes. It should be enough for three, maybe four weeks. I did not have time to set precise parameters yet.¡± I gave him the bottle.

    ¡°If you have some strong men, I have the old nano fab in a van outside. Just don¡¯t expect me to carry it.¡±

    He was looking at the clear liquid inside the bottle with an obvious sense of wonder. Then he looked at me.

    ¡°So we don¡¯t really need for you to provide the nanites, right?¡±

    I shook my head and gave a sad smile.

    ¡°I would strongly suggest that you use these nanites for the therapy. The nano fab I¡¯m giving you is better than nothing, but it is still only a 2<sup>nd</sup> gen and not an especially good one at that. It can make you 3<sup>rd</sup> gen and a few of the simpler 4<sup>th</sup> gen nanites. What you are holding in your hand are 12<sup>th</sup> gen nanites. If you use the nanites you can make yourself now for the therapy it will probably reduce the effectiveness of it by 75% or more.¡±

    That shook him up.

    ¡°Your fab is so much superior? Would it then not be better to place your fab here?¡± I had to chuckle at that.

    ¡°Depends how you see it. For you and your clinic, it may be better, but honestly, for Mr. Walker, it would be disastrous. I need at least 10<sup>th</sup> gen nanites for the bio-sheathing to work. Using anything less than 12<sup>th</sup> gen would increase the time needed for the adaption extensively.¡± I shook my head a bit. ¡°Also, to be frank, it is my nano fab. I build it myself. And I have an aversion against giving away things I see as mine.¡± Then I smiled at him.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry! As soon as I can I will build you an 8<sup>th</sup> gen fab like mine. But for that, I would have to ask for some remuneration. Not as much as a nano fab apparently costs here, but it will still not be cheap. This one is on the house so to speak. Seems to me that if you are fast enough you can sell the 2<sup>nd</sup> gen for most of the price I would take for the 8<sup>th</sup> gen. Unless, of course, if somebody spills the beans I can build them. But time is a bit pressing. Would you call Mr. Walker so that we can begin, please?¡±

    ¡°He never left here. I have sedated him a bit more, or he would have gone through the roof.¡± He laughed a bit.

    ¡°You got him spooked. Well, at least he listens now. Before, he just was going on until he dropped.¡±

    That made sense. With only weeks to live and virtually no chance of survival, why bother with going slow?

    I followed Schaeffer to the examination room. Walker as well as a few of his bodyguards were there.

    I sat down opposite him and studied his appearance. He looked beat, and a bit out of it, but he focused on me immediately.

    If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

    ¡°You know that we did not finish the negotiations, right?¡± Oops.

    ¡°Oh¡­ you are right. Sorry, that was totally derailed.¡± Damn¡­ I hoped that this would not bite me in the behind.

    ¡°We can continue now. Good for you that I was the one who derailed it.¡± I was tempted to continue now, oh how was I tempted. But I decided that in the long run, I would be better off if I did not abuse the situation.

    ¡°I am sorry, but I think you are not in a condition to continue negotiations. You are drugged and I am working at saving your life. I fear that if we negotiate now it could sour any relationship we might build later.¡± I thought a moment.

    ¡°How about I pay you a normal tribute for me and my people until I replace your heart and you are out of immediate danger? We can negotiate then.¡±

    He nodded, slowly, before he answered. ¡°You seem to have thought about everything, huh? What if I don¡¯t make it? You thought about that?¡±

    I sighed. ¡°Of course, I have thought about that. It is a distinct possibility. But in that case any negotiations with you are moot anyway. And frankly, with what Dr. Schaeffer knows about your condition if I only manage to keep you alive for four or five weeks I will have proven my worth. Not as much as if I manage to save you but still.¡±

    Then I had to grin.

    ¡°You have also to consider that if I manage to fix you that your predisposition towards me will likely be quite a bit more favorable than today.¡±

    That brought a grin to his face too. ¡°Yes, I think that is a logical expectation. You planned on this?¡±

    ¡°Not really possible. Until two hours ago I had no idea you have CRS. But I won¡¯t waste an opportunity like that if I can help it. Now, please accept that I have no idea what an adequate tribute is, so if I lowball it, it¡¯s not intentional or an attempt to insult you. How is 1000 per month and person? Plus 5k for the business?¡± He thought for a moment and then nodded.

    ¡°Until this situation is resolved either way that¡¯s all right. We will negotiate further if I survive this.¡±

    He held out his hand, and I gripped it.

    ¡°Now, not to make any pressure, but in your condition any minute is valuable, so we should start the therapy.¡±

    I stood up and turned toward Dr. Schaeffer.

    ¡°We need a treatment room with a big console, so I can show you what to look out for.¡±

    Then I turned back to Walker.

    ¡°It would be better for you if we knock you out. For the first 30 to 90 minutes every movement is bad.¡±

    He let out a small laugh.

    ¡°You can be really bossy, you know that Kitten?¡±

    Kitten? It took me a moment to process what just happened.

    ¡°Uh¡­ Kitten?¡±

    He showed a toothy grin.

    ¡°Yeah, you are tiny, cute and look quite cuddly. But your tiny teeth and claws are really sharp.¡±

    What the¡­ where did that come from? Cuddly? CUDDLY? And where did he get the idea that my claws were tiny? I think I stood nearly a minute there dumbfounded and watching him grin. Then I got it. Apparently, he was really doped up. I looked at the grinning bodyguards, the equally smiling Dr. Schaeffer and then let my head hang down.

    Seems I had just gotten a new nickname. I hoped to hell it would not stick.

    ¡°Whatever...!¡± I snorted disgusted.¡±We need to get going.¡±

    ¡°No comment on your new name?¡± He was slowly getting on my nerves.

    ¡°Yes, that we should anesthetize you rather sooner than later. Doc, if you would lead us to a treatment room please?¡± They finally got onto their feet and we all moved out of the office.

    On the way Dr. Schaeffer waved me to his side.

    ¡°I have to ask, why do we need to put him under?¡±

    ¡°Do you want the short version or the long version?¡±

    He thought for a moment.

    ¡°The long version I think. I have to understand why in the future.¡± At least he was planning ahead.

    ¡°Ok, then here''s the question. What do you know about nanites?¡±

    He struggled for a moment and then answered me. ¡°They are really small robots that can manipulate things on the molecular level?¡±

    ¡°Mostly correct. The most important point is, that they are measured in nanometers. People had a pretty hard time engineering an energy source and a control system small enough that it fits there. 3<sup>rd</sup> gen nanites like you can make now has enough internal energy to work for roughly 20 minutes. It has enough processor capacity to either move or use its manipulator, and it has enough memory to keep 10 to 12 instructions. Pretty damn useless in other words. It is also more or less blind as a bat. It has no idea where it is, much less how to get where it needs to be.¡±

    We reached a door and Schaeffer directed us through it. I took one of the wrist controllers out of my pocket and with a: ¡±One moment¡± turned towards Walker.

    ¡°Here, that will be your constant companion for the next few months. You will wear it if you are working, eating sleeping or showering. Do not under any circumstances take this off. Do you understand?¡±

    He hesitantly took the controller.

    ¡°A credled? I already have one. And it works just fine.¡±

    ¡°It was a credled. It has been discovered that these things are optimal for controlling nanites inside a body. The only change one has to make is replacing the OS with another one.¡±

    I looked at Dr. Schaeffer.

    ¡°That OS and the tool to install it are on one of the sticks I gave you.¡±

    I returned my attention back to Walker.

    The display will tell you if something needs to be corrected. If it is green, everything is all right. Yellow means the nanites need something. What they need will be written on the display. You can either eat it or have it injected. Red means something is wrong, contact me at your earliest convenience.

    Blinking red means sending a skimmer to get me. Understood?¡± He nodded. I looked at the assembled bodyguards. ¡°That is also important for you. He might not notice it blinking. Or ignore it. When you or your colleagues see this display turn red speak up immediately. It can be a matter of minutes if that happens.¡± I saw several grim expressions and decided that meant they understood.

    ¡°OK, that out of the way, where were we?¡± I thought a moment.

    ¡°Ah right, nanites are pretty limited. There are several ways to work around it. They tried it with a big external controller and near-field communication. Problem was that you need a couple of million of these little buggers and any identifier that made the individual nanites capable of receiving orders was so complicated that it left nearly no free memory available for instructions. Also, it did nothing to solve the power and navigation issue.¡±

    I motioned Walker onto the couch.

    ¡°They tried it with beamed power. That worked to a small extent. And they got the idea to solve the navigation issue by providing three modulated power beams. The problem was that the subject had to remain motionless for the whole time, and the power beams slowly cooked it. They tried to solve the issue with the nanites harvesting the needed energy out of the blood that surrounded them, but to get enough energy to make this worthwhile the nanites had to get at least an order of magnitude bigger. So much less useful.¡±

    While I prepared the console, Walker put on the controller on his right wrist.

    ¡°They tried to solve the control issue by building so-called queen nanites with a much-increased memory and processor to do the thinking for the workers. That worked relatively well, but the queens were, again, bigger by an order of magnitude. Then some genius got the idea to create nav points in the subject to get the navigation issue out of the way.¡±

    Just the OPB cable from the console to the controller and I was ready.

    ¡°That worked great, but the other two issues were still bad until they combined the queens into the nav points and build a charging station into it. The stations or depots as they are called are actually visible under the magnifying glass if your eyes are good enough, but they do all the C3 work. So since 3<sup>rd</sup> generation nanites the first thing they do is set up a depot network. For that the recipient has to remain as motionless as possible so that the nav system can set up properly.¡±

    I turned to Dr. Schaeffer.

    ¡°You can put him under now, Doc. And then it will take an hour, plus minus 30 minutes. It is critical that the patient is under medical supervision during that time. The depots should not make any problems, but they have the annoying tendency to set up in¡­ unsuitable places. Most often that is not really critical, as the damage can be easily repaired. But sometimes they insist on setting up in a nerve cluster that, for example, controls the breathing or something like that. Or inside an important nerve fiber.¡±

    I watched while Dr. Schaeffer narcotized Walker, and then prepared the nanites set up. I called up the scan results and then calculated the needed nanites per dose. Hm, 46ml per dose, that was on the upper end of what I guessed. Well, three weeks of nanites were enough for the beginning.

    I filled an auto-injector with the doubled dose he would need the first time, and then waited for Walker to be knocked out. Then I held out the injector to Dr. Schaeffer.

    ¡°Do you want the honor? This is the initial dose, of 92ml. He needs 46ml every two days.¡±

    He looked at the injector for a moment before taking it.

    ¡°Any preference on where I should inject him?¡±

    ¡°It should work everywhere but I prefer to inject them near the controller. In my opinion, it makes the setup a bit faster.¡±

    He injected the nanites into the right arm bend.

    ¡°Just so you aren¡¯t surprised, the 3<sup>rd</sup> gens you can make take significantly longer to set up. Up to 24 hours if the network is complicated. 3<sup>rd</sup> gens differentiate from 4<sup>th</sup> and 5<sup>th</sup> gen only in the energy storage and control systems. They need a much denser network. That is actually the main difference between the generations up to the 10<sup>th</sup>. There they integrated the valence grabber. Oh, and you have to do it under the scanner, as the feedback system that allows the depots to call back and tell where they want to set up shop has only been introduced in the 6<sup>th</sup> generation.¡±

    Then it began.

    ¡°Ah, you see the requests? The depots ask if the place they are in is all right. If you don¡¯t answer they set up anyway, as the sheer number is simply too big to do anything else. The trick is to only observe critical areas. Everything else can be repaired.¡±

    Then I had my first customer. One depot tried to set up inside the Radial nerve. I quickly negated its request.

    ¡°See, that happens in less than a percent of all depots, but they will set up a few 10 thousand inside him. This was not really critical as we could have repaired the damage afterwards, and when I have to divide my attention between real critical areas like the Vagus nerve or any of the other autonomous nerves and some peripheral places like arms or legs I will have to accept that, but now it is not critical.¡±

    For the next half hour we talked about the evolution of nanites. I was not surprised that his opinion of what nanites could do was way above what they could really do. Most don¡¯t even know about the nanites-trinity. Energy, communication and control are oh so boring compared to horror stories about grey goo scenarios or near-magical transformations. But in the end he got it that nanites were useful tools, but hardly in the range of the horror stories.

    I stopped four other bad setups when it became really interesting.

    ¡°Sorry, Doc, I have to concentrate here now. The nanites are coming into the brain. I use my cranial board from now on as it has a better resolution¡±

    With that, I immersed myself into the controller, and suddenly I found myself in cyberspace. Around me was an approximation of Walker''s brain and I watched the bright yellow-white spots move into the brainstem. I was thankful that these 12<sup>th</sup> gens needed so much less network density than even 11<sup>th</sup> gen. I would only need a third of the depots. There was one that tried to set up in the medulla oblongata, but I caught that fast. Then the brilliant spots moved out into the rest of the brain. One spot in the hypothalamus caught my attention. It was seriously close to critical parts of the brain. Any failure here could be, well not immediately fatal but very bad. It could leave Walker crippled beyond recovery.

    The setup message came forward and I had just begun to inspect its placement when suddenly I felt something grab my throat. I had a feeling of flying and then something hit my back and the back of my head. Hard.

    Nearly immediately the cyberspace vanished, and I looked into the face of a giant of a man, who held me by my throat in his outstretched hand. I could hear screaming, from many persons, but I could not quite make out what was going on.

    What was capturing my attention was the hand on my throat, squeezing the air out of me. I struggled with all my might, and clawed at that hand, desperate to get to breathe, but the precious air would not come. The man holding me was screaming something at me, but my vision began to dim.

    Then he literally threw me across the room, and a sharp pain shot through my right arm and hip.

    But the oh so treasured air was flowing into my lungs again. I can¡¯t say with certainty how long I was lying on the floor sucking in air, coughing, and trying to understand what had happened.

    The bodyguards had the giant pinned down and two of them and Dr. Schaeffer came toward me. Then I remembered the setup message and tried to get back into cyberspace. Nothing. I was locked out. For a moment I felt panic well up inside me, but I fought it down.

    I focused on Dr. Schaeffer and began to talk. ¡°¡­¡± Or I should say I tried to talk.

    Nothing came out.

    I tried to sit up, but touching the floor with my right hand send spikes of pain through me, and for a short while I saw only red.

    Schaeffer pried my left eye open and shone a light into it. I struggled to get up and waved towards the console.

    Schaeffer pushed onto my shoulder but it seemed my urgency got through to him, as he helped me up. When I put weight on my right leg I nearly fell down again, but with the help of the two bodyguards, I managed to limp towards the console.

    Arriving there I found the setup of the depots complete. And no critical placements. I slumped in relief, and nearly fell down again. One of the bodyguards lifted me into his arms and followed Schaeffer out of the room. My head began to pound diabolically and I found it increasingly hard to think. I was placed onto a stretcher and then a soft hum came from all around me. Something above me was circling, and my stomach choose this instant to make its displeasure known. I managed to not throw up, but barely.

    Then the stretcher was moved and I saw Dr. Schaeffer with an injector in his hands. A sting at my left shoulder, and then everything turned blissfully black.

    Agony greeted me like a long-lost pet when I came slowly back towards consciousness. My head apparently was in the process of slowly exploding. My right arm and leg fought over who hurt worse. And my throat simply burned. The dull ache in both of my shoulders barely registered. When I opened my eyes, blinding light made me close them immediately. I heard voices, loud voices. It took me some time to understand them.

    ¡°¡­ should be ok in the long run. The concussion is bad but nothing life-threatening. She will have to take it slow over the next few days. The break is a relatively simple one, and thanks to the nano fab she gave me it should be healed in roughly two weeks. The bruise on the hip will make walking painful for her for a few days, maybe a few weeks, but that is all. What was really dangerous is the throat. If Oleg had gripped her only a tad harder we would have had to do a tracheotomy. For now I have her intubated.¡± I knew that voice but I could not place it. Another voice came on.

    ¡°You said she should be sleeping for six to eight hours?¡±

    I called up the internal diagnostic but got nothing. Something should bother me, but at the moment I was incapable to think about it.

    ¡°Yes, no need for her to feel the pain.¡±

    It seemed my audio filters were offline as I was bombarded by several high-pitched sounds. Why was that important? I knew it was, but I could not remember why.

    ¡°Well, I think you should dope her again, she is awake.¡±

    The first voice became urgent.

    ¡°That can¡¯t be. I gave her enough sedative to knock you out for an hour. With her size she should not¡­¡± it stopped, before continuing, ¡°Damn, you¡¯re right. How?¡±

    A few moments later I felt a prick in my left arm. I tried to defend myself, but I just couldn¡¯t get my arm up. Then the voice again.

    ¡°That¡¯s¡­ she has already broken down nearly all of the sedative. If I didn¡¯t see it I would think it was impossible.¡±

    Then another prick in my arm. I could still not fend it off, and somehow I could not protest. Then everything dimmed and it got black again.

 13: Morning has broken

    When I got back among the living the next time I was vaguely aware of what happened. My head still felt as if several somebodies were digging out of it with old-fashioned pickaxes but compared to before it was tolerable. A dumb pulsing ache came from my arm, and my throat was still burning. Thankfully my hip seemed to be quiet at the moment.

    The first thing I noticed was that all my sensory implants seemed to be offline, as neither the light filtering through my lids nor the sound should be this intense. The attempt to display the diagnostics showed that apparently, all my neural implants were dead at the moment.

    I opened my eyes a bit and immediately regretted it, as bright light burned in my retinas. I heard a scratching moan and realized that this came from me.

    Almost immediately I heard a male voice. ¡°Welcome back to the living.¡±

    I forced my eyes to open a small slit and after a few seconds it became tolerable. Damn, I missed my flash protectors. After what seemed to be an eternity, I had my eyes open enough to see the room I was in. It was a typical hospital room, with white walls, a white-tiled ceiling and I would guess a tiled ground, but I could not see it. I slowly looked around, and in a chair in the corner I found the source of the voice.

    One of Walker''s bodyguards was sitting there and had a tablet in his hand.

    When he saw me looking at him he continued.

    ¡°I call the Doc. Just wait one moment.¡± He tapped something on the tablet while I wanted to ask him what happened, but the only thing I got out was a miserable croak. That got his attention again.

    ¡°Don¡¯t try to speak. The Doc will be here in a few minutes.¡± So I did the only thing I could at that moment. I closed my eyes again and tried to ignore the pain. When I heard the door I opened them again. Doc Schaeffer had entered the room and moved directly beside my bed.

    ¡°Good morning Veronica.¡± He held a small plastic bottle with a straw in his hand.

    ¡°Here, drink something. That will make it easier for you to talk.¡± When he shoved the straw between my lips I realized how parched my mouth and throat felt, and the liquid he gently forced inside felt heavenly.

    ¡°OK, that should be enough for the first. Now, try to talk please.¡±

    ¡°W¡­ what¡­¡± Oh wow, not good, not good at all. My voice was a grating rasp, barely understandable, but worse, it hurt.

    After a few seconds, I tried again.

    ¡°H¡­ hurts!¡± He had a sad expression.

    ¡°Yes, I can believe that. Oleg nearly crushed your throat. We still don¡¯t get why he did it. How are you feeling?¡±

    What a fine, friendly man¡­ not. I just told him it hurts me to talk and he asks me questions. Well, maybe if I could communicate my pain he would give me a painkiller or something.

    ¡°Pa¡­ pain.¡± Hell, that was cumbersome.

    He looked a bit surprised. ¡°I have given you enough painkillers that you should float, and I controlled your blood, you don¡¯t break them down any faster than any other human I met.¡±

    Aw shit. Most likely an opiate and nobody here knew that these are worthless for a Pure.

    ¡°Op¡­ i¡­ a¡­¡± he interrupted me. ¡°You are already on opiates. I can¡¯t give you more.¡±

    ¡°Don¡­ ¡®t wo¡­¡± I had to take a pause, but understanding dawned on his face.

    ¡°Opiates don¡¯t work for you?¡± I nodded, already exhausted. ¡°Shit, that is¡­ what the hell can I give you? No, that is¡­ not strong enough¡­ opiate again¡­¡± He talked to himself in broken sentences, before focusing on me again. ¡°Can I use Epzitecan?¡± Whew, he had the stuff we Pures developed to replace opiates for us. I nodded as eagerly as my head allowed.

    ¡°This is expensive stuff, so we mostly don¡¯t use it but¡­¡± he let the sentence taper off. Then he rummaged at the drip I just noticed this moment, while calling for a nurse to bring a dose of Epzitecan. Then he offered me the bottle again. A few minutes later that were akin to hours for me, a nurse brought another drip bag, with which the Doc replaced one of the bags there. Meanwhile, I had problems keeping my eyes open, and the only thing keeping me awake was the pain. Then the agony slowly numbed down to a dull roar. I tried to smile at the Doc, but I was not sure I managed it. Then I drifted off.

    When I came back to it was dark outside, and only a nightlight illuminated the room. Another of Walker''s guards was sitting in the chair, dozing. My pain was reduced to a dull ache, and except for a nagging thirst and hunger, I felt relatively fine. As I looked around the room I noticed a call button beside my left hand as well that my right arm was in a cast from the elbow to the fingers. After observing the nightly activities in my room for a few minutes, and deciding that nothing was the appropriate description I pressed the call button.

    Not long after that, a middle-aged nurse entered, startling the guard by opening the door, and looked enquiring at me.

    ¡°Oh, you are awake. What can I do for you, sweetie?¡±

    I tried to speak once again, and to my relief, while it still ached and was hoarse, it worked.

    ¡°Water, please.¡± She looked at me a moment further and then, with an ¡°Of course, one moment please¡± she walked out again. The guard was looking sheepishly at me.

    ¡°Damn, I have to have dozed off. Sorry about that.¡± I had to smile at that.

    ¡°Won¡¯t tell.¡± Then I tried again to activate my implants, again without success. Then I remembered the safety feature I designed into them. Before I implanted myself I researched extensively what could go wrong, and build in as many safeguards as I could. One of the risks of cranial implants was that in case of head trauma, any neurological damage could be massively aggravated by active neural implants. Ergo the trauma switch, in case of any situation where head trauma is probable my implants shut down. I would have to reboot them before I could assess the actual damage. I also began to think that it was too aggressive. Maybe I should reprogram it to reboot automatically after a few days.

    I was contemplating the options when the nurse returned, with a bottle.

    ¡°Here you are, sweetie.¡± I winced at the sweetie, but I eagerly accepted the bottle. After a mouthful of the nectar of the gods, aka water, I addressed the nurse again.

    ¡°I need¡­¡± my voice faltered a bit, and I took another sip, but still I was a bit less hoarse now.

    ¡°Sorry. I need a tablet and an OPB cable please.¡± The nurse, whose name I now noticed was apparently Carter frowned at that.

    ¡°Sorry, sweetie, but the Doctor ordered rest for you. No playing or reading the whole night. You can talk to Doctor Schaeffer in the morning.¡± Hu, what age did she think I was. I was taking a deep breath to tell her what I thought about the whole situation when the guard interceded.

    ¡°Save yourself the trouble. She won¡¯t budge.¡± I looked at him a bit confused.

    ¡°Sorry Kitten, but sometimes you have to choose the battles you can win. This is not one of them.¡±

    I took a deep breath and tried to relax, closing my eyes for a moment. Then I felt movement at the tube in my left arm, and opened my eyes again, to see Nurse Carter withdrawing a syringe from the drip.

    ¡°So, sweetie, that will help you sleep.¡± What the frick?!? She just drugged me? I wanted to rip her a new one, but sudden drowsiness came over me. Great, did this imbecile not understand that I had work to do? Alas, it was to no avail, and I drifted off again.

    I came to hate waking up in this room. It was day again, and the first guard was again in the chair. At least the pain had taken another turn down. This time a bottle with liquid was in reach of my left hand. The guard jumped up when I reached for the bottle. That, in turn, startled me and I nearly pushed the bottle over. He looked at me and relaxed back into the chair.

    ¡°Sorry, I did not mean to frighten you.¡± In the meantime I had managed to take a mouthful of liquid. Not water this time but something with flavor. After I satisfied my immediate thirst I looked at the guard again.

    ¡°No problem. You just startled me. Is there a way to get a tablet and an OPB cable for me?¡±

    He snorted. ¡°How should I know that? I am only here to make sure nobody kills you in your sleep. The hired help better keeps out of any real decision.¡± Ouch, it seemed that somebody had made it clear to the guards that their opinion is unwanted, hard.

    With a sigh, I pressed the call button again. When the nurse, not Nurse Carter this time to my relief, entered, she appeared annoyed.

    ¡°What do you want?¡±

    Well, I was annoyed as well.

    ¡°What I already asked the night nurse, when she instead drugged me. I want a tablet and an OPB cable.¡±

    Her expression became arrogant. ¡°Do I look like I have time to bring you toys? If you want entertainment then get a book.¡± What the hell is wrong with the nurses in this clinic?

    ¡°If that is your opinion, can you then please call the doctor? Immediately?¡±

    ¡°The doctors here are way too busy to come running when a little girl has a whim.¡± With that, she turned around and stormed out of the room.

    I took a few minutes to calm down and then turned my attention to the guard again.

    ¡°I assume you have been on the receiving end of those idiots?¡± He nodded slowly.

    ¡°Do you have an OPB cable?¡± He nodded again.

    ¡°Would it be possible to borrow your tablet and your cable for a few minutes?¡± He sighed but got the cable out of the bag back that was beside his chair. Then he offered both the cable and his tablet to me.

    ¡°Thank you. Sorry, but I never got told your name, so until anybody remedies that, I have to refer to you as hey you.¡± That got him to laugh. ¡°Yeah, I can see that, but we have too many hey you¡¯s already. My name is Wallace. Ryan Wallace.¡±

    I offered him my left hand.

    ¡°Nice to meet you, Mr. Wallace, I am Veronica Sinclair.¡±

    He shook my hand and answered me. ¡°Also known as Kitten, I know.¡±

    Damn, the name obviously stuck.

    ¡°This name will follow me around, right?¡± Even in my ears, I sound dejected.

    ¡°Yeah, sorry, but if the boss gives you a nickname, you keep it, whatever may come.¡±

    ¡°It seems like it. Well, there are worse names.¡±

    With that, I took the cable and then fumbled to get to the skull jack. I certainly regretted placing the only jack capable to reboot my implants behind my right ear, but after a bit of swearing, I managed to jack the cable in. The connection to the tablet proved to be a harder issue. Finally I resorted to stabilizing it with my right hand, despite the ache this caused in my arm. The loading of the boot manager to the tablet took only seconds. It came without any descriptions, just a rather big text box. Entering the startup code was cumbersome, and I silently cursed myself for choosing a 1024 character long Unicode string. Sure, it was incredibly secure, but it was the first time I had to type it, and with one hand, and even only using the private use area the string used way more characters than the standard keyboard of the tablet offered. After quite a few uncomfortable minutes, and while my arm began to hurt quite a bit I finally had the code entered completely. I looked it over once more to make sure that I had made no typo, and then tabbed the OK button. A few seconds later my HUD came on, with the counter-question.

    This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

    <external boot request detected>

    < confirm yes/no>

    When I chose yes, a rapid sequence of messages ran over my vision only to vanish almost immediately, with the last being the exception and the one I hoped for.

    <continue boot process yes/no>

    Again, I thought yes. After a few seconds, my vision dimmed a tiny bit as my implants took over the control of how much light reached my retinas. At once the muscles in my eyes relaxed and I felt the tension threatening to aggravate my headache vanish. Then a series of small pops and my hearing was dampened down to more acceptable levels.

    Finally, my HUD came back online, but it was rather bare. The clock was nowhere to see, the navigation system showed only undefined, the net was down and I had only peripheral access to my files. Two things that stood out were the two messages in the left upper corner.

    <Errors: 27>

    <Warnings: 133>

    That looked anything but good. With a deep breath I steeled myself for the bad messages and opened the error queue. The first error was a bit surprising.

    <Error: NTP failed Time undefined>

    I resisted the strong urge to slap my face. Of course, everything was on the fritz. I had designed my implants to use the time as a system variable for many functions. Mostly encryption, but many other security functions as well, but when I designed it, I neglected to provide for the case that I had no secured access to a Stratum zero system. The last time I booted my implants up I was in my relative secure lab in Seattle and had a synchronized nuclear clock there. The next secure source for an NTP sync was my board in the fortress. Until I got there I had to make do with a severely crippled cranium board. Then I remembered that I had deleted the board, and began silently to curse. I was contemplating how I would get a secure NTP signal when I remembered the Q-link. Unlike WiFi and optical networks, the Q-link as I had designed it was equal to a cable connection. It should¡­ yes it did work. Of course the cluster was reluctant to give me access, as I had only the basic authentification available, but I got enough through passwords to get it to give me an NTP.

    Over the next seconds my HUD built up to my normal configuration. As soon as my date/time field showed up I learned that I had spent two days in the clinic so far.

    The counters on errors and warnings fell down until there were only three errors and five warnings left.

    When I looked into the error messages this time I learned that the boot sequencer had failed. Three programs that have to be started in sequence to avoid conflicts were started simultaneously, and conflicts ensued. That was solved quite easily by manually stopping all three and starting them in sequence, but I would have to look into the issue later, and the error count fell to zero before vanishing. The warnings were reduced to three.

    Two of them were about the unexpected shutdown, and the last was a warning that the automatic file system maintenance had been missed. Now that my implants were in working order again I called up the diagnostics, and this time I was rewarded with an overview. My implants all showed green, while my biologicals showed varied shades from yellowish-green on my left side over yellow in my head and orange on my right hip up to red in my throat and right arm. When I looked at the nanite count I was shocked that I lost nearly 35%. Considering that I had an extensive depot network I should have lost no more than five percent over the last week. I found some 3rd gen nanites knitting at my arm, apparently, Doc Schaeffer had tried his new nano fab on me, and so I diverted my remaining 12th gen to enhance the remaining problem areas. I was happy to note that the emergency controller I had implanted near my stomach had already sent nanites to repair the damage the concussion did and was responsible for the fact that I could speak relatively easily again.

    When I looked into the backlog I found that the damage to my larynx was actually crippling. Without nanites I would have never spoken again.

    Then I decided a lesson in courtesy was in order.

    I removed the OPB jack and held out the tablet to Wallace.

    ¡°Thank you for the use. It made quite the difference. Say, are there any nurses here that are actually courteous?¡± He looked at me for a moment, before he took his tablet, and then grinned.

    ¡°Yeah, a handful, but they are more or less sidelined by the dragons. Doc Schaeffer is a nice enough man, but he has not enough time and delegates most of the administration to a total suck-up tinpot dictator.¡±

    I did not even try to suppress my evil grin.

    ¡°So it would be¡­ let¡¯s say, beneficial if something riled up the nursing staff a bit?¡±

    His grin joined mine, and he had to actually suppress a burst of evil laughter, while he gave me a thump up.

    I activated the restored WLAN and connected it to the network of the clinic. The security was¡­ adequate. Nothing to write home about but also not something one could simply ignore. Unfortunately for our friendly nurse, adequate was not enough to keep me out, especially as I was already in a part of the network thanks to being inside of the building.

    When I found the overworked and time-impaired nurse in the security system she was sitting in a comfortable chair, reading something on a tablet and munching some candy. No time, for real! I then activated the call signal for a room at the end of her area. She looked annoyed at the signal, placed the tablet on the table, and walked toward the room I designated. Meanwhile I was reprogramming the call system to activate for random rooms at three-minute intervals. Then I connected to her tablet and looked at what she was reading. Urgh, some trashy pseudo-historic romance of all kinds. What drove people to such garbage? I infected the file with an improvised virus that would show it was responsible for the chaos in the computer system before I shuffled the paragraphs of the refuse randomly. Have fun reading it.

    After that, I looked around in other areas of the clinic. The reception and the waiting area were bursting, and the nurses on duty there were harried to the extreme. Other areas were less stressed, and I saw a whole gaggle of apparent doctors stand around the nano fab, and if I could identify it correctly, playing with the nanites. They had the nanites dissolve something. From what I could see it was once a rat. Doctor Schaeffer was not in the building. Then I looked into the administration. It took me less than a minute to unearth proof that the administrator was defrauding the clinic, and his memos were¡­ tinpot dictator was a very accurate description of this man.

    I decided that I had to do something. A bit of graft and corruption may be unavoidable, but this was going far beyond that. First I locked the door to the room with the nano fab, launched an alert from the fab, and then cut the power there. It was quite funny how the doctors tried to get out of the room. Then I had the computer of the administrator send the proof I found, along with whatever else I found in the hidden folders, to every mail account in the admin¡¯s address book. That included among others Doc. Schaeffer, Mr. Walker, and a few other high-ranking members of the mob here. I followed that by messing with his computer, switching the mouse axis, making part of his icons melt, letting it emit random noises, and such fun.

    Meanwhile, the nurse was running around from call to call. When the randomizer led her to my room I feigned surprise.

    ¡°Yes? Do you have a tablet for me now?¡± She was red in the face and visibly angry now.

    ¡°WHAT? Why did you call me?¡± I looked at the call button that showed no signs of activation, and back at her.

    ¡°I did not call you. Are you sure you are all right? I mean, if you hallucinate about calls, maybe you should go and get a check-up.¡±

    She let out a growl and jumped towards me, only to be intercepted by Wallace.

    Then she lid into him. ¡°What do you think you are doing? You¡¯re nothing more than a hired goon. Get out of my way.¡±

    Wallace on the other hand grabbed her hands and twisted them behind her.

    ¡°I may only be a hired goon, but I was tasked by Mr. Walker, you know Mr. Walker the man who pays for this clinic and for your salary, to make sure nobody threatens this girl. What you just did. So I am sorry, but I have to restrain you.¡± He grinned with that. ¡°Oh, sorry, I am wrong. I am not sorry.¡±

    From somewhere he got some plastic cuffs and cuffed her hands behind her. Then he forced her into one of the chairs, before taking out his phone and making a call.

    ¡°Hey, Nick, Ryan here.¡±¡­ ¡°We have a little problem.¡±¡­ ¡°No, not that serious. Listen, Nick, one of the nurses here jumped at the Sinclair girl.¡±¡­ ¡°Yes, Kitten, but I don¡¯t think she likes the name very much.¡± Wow, he was perceptive, who would have guessed that? Still, he continued. ¡°Of course, I¡¯ve stopped it, but I now have the rabid nurse here and can¡¯t leave the room.¡±¡­ ¡°Just send someone to get the nurse out of here, and notify the Doc that this floor needs a new nurse.¡±¡­ ¡°Thank you.¡±

    With that, he put the phone away and then spoke to the nurse.

    ¡°Somebody will come to get you. You are in luck. It is unlikely that the boss will decide what to do with you himself.¡± The nurse looked at him shocked and then began to whimper.

    Meanwhile I was watching the doctors desperately trying to open the door. I may not have ever seen the movies, but I would guess that the demi idiots in white made a splendid rendition of the Keystone Cops. When one of the orderlies noticed the commotion and moved to look into it I unlocked the door. I couldn¡¯t tell who was more surprised, the doctors that the door was open or the orderly when he saw the chaos. I would incline towards a draw.

    Then I noticed that the admin was desperately trying to get his computer under control. I couldn¡¯t suppress a chuckle when he applied engineering method # one and rapped the monitor. Then I upped the ante, and let his phone ring.

    Sadly, my fun ended, when he shut the whole shebang down, including the webcam. Nothing left to entertain me, too bad.

    I decided to look into what I missed over the last few days.

    The backdoors into the commonwealth R&D laboratories wielded no new information, as expected. My normal messages were not exemplary interesting either. A few offered missions for Spectre that I declined citing time issues, and a few posts in academic discussions I partook in. I would read them later. I had let everybody know that I would be out of contact for a few days, so no harm was done.

    With the mundane activities finished I connected to the cluster again, this time with full access, and used one of the cutout bridges to enter the Abyss. Here I trawled the bulletins for something interesting. I found another few job offers for Spectre on the private bulletin, but as every broker was informed that there would be no jobs taken for a while I guessed that they just were being paid to post the offers anyway. I marked all of them with the message that Spectre was taking a time out, and anybody wanting these jobs were free to poach before moving them to the general board. It would not take more than five minutes before the offers would trickle through the brokers of the other hackers here. I would have to send the other brokers a serious message about that, but no harm done. Spectre would take care of this if it would become a problem. Unlike me, they did not incorporate Q-links in their proxy chain so finding them was much more trivial. I looked over a few boards to get the newest trends, but nothing interesting here also.

    So I got back into the UWS servers, looking at what I might like to study next. Gravitics looked interesting, as did fusion technology and on a whim, I downloaded everything from both. I found a new treatise on quantum computing, but that was still not going anywhere useful. Another paper on the creation of carbon allotropes, interesting but nothing really earth-shattering.

    Bored I chose to visit the black labs. Darkvault had made an incremental improvement to its NADA project. I looked it over, and the new features would work well with my approach, but they still had not solved the resolution issue. Too bad for them, but I would not ruin their fun for them by telling them how to do it. Eclipse had built a new gravity scanner that had nearly 25% better resolution. With an inward smile I copied the design, it would serve me well. I found a new attempt to cure Sanderson¡¯s Folly in Desolation Point, but that was a bit outside my experience. When I looked into Talon Station I found the same thing I found every other time I looked into their research. The top research facility of the AFS military was roughly 20 years behind what was deployed frontline equipment of the NWC. I don¡¯t think anybody not in the NWC realized that the war is not a stalemate, but that the NWC simply choose to not crush the AFS. Yet, I have to say, as the new administration of the NWC seemed to tire rapidly of the permanent war.

    All that took me approximately six minutes, and when a group of Walker''s guards entered the room, I closed the connection. The nurse was protesting her treatment, but the guards were not quite willing to listen to her. When she was dragged out of the room by two of the guards the third had a quiet exchange with Wallace and then turned to me.

    ¡°Well, Miss Sinclair, Ryan here tells me that she jumped at you for no reason.¡±

    I let my little evil smile come up.

    ¡°Well, not entirely without reason. I confess to suggesting to her that she should have her mental health examined. Apparently, she did not like that.¡±

    He nodded, and walked out again, leaving me with Wallace alone.

    He had an equally evil grin on his face.

    ¡°I assume that you are somehow responsible for our friendly nurse getting her hackles up?¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°It could have to do something with the call signal going off every three minutes at random rooms.¡±

    He guffawed a bit at that and sat back down in his chair.

    ¡°You managed all that with my little tablet? I didn¡¯t know it was capable of that.¡±

    ¡°Hu? No, I just used your tablet to reboot my implants.¡±

    For some reason he did not seem to like that.

    ¡°Ugh, shit. You were supposed to avoid anything even resembling work. Damn, I hope you did no damage to yourself.¡±

    ¡°Please, give me some credit. I know what I am doing. I needed the implants to check up on my status. The damage was¡­ extensive, but I got my nanites to repair it. Only after I have made sure that I will not damage myself further have I used my other options to shake the joint here up a bit.¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°I think good Mr. Reyes will not be the administrator here for much longer. I fear we will hear of his unfortunate demise in the not-so-distant future.¡±

    His eyes tightened and his whole demeanor changed from happy-go-lucky to predator going for the kill in one blink of an eye.

    ¡°What did you do to him?¡± His voice had become very, very cold.

    ¡°I? Not much. I just send the proof that he embezzled a bit over $11 Million from the clinic over the last few years to Doc Schaeffer, Mr. Walker, and a few others that he probably did not want to know about that and in the process played a bit with his computer, but nothing major.¡±

    That changed Wallace¡¯s expression to utter shock.

    ¡°He did WHAT?¡±

    I was thankful that my audio filters were working again.

    ¡°He stole Mr. Walker¡¯s money if what you said that he finances this clinic is true.¡±

    He nodded thoughtfully.

    ¡°Yes, I think you are right. The poor Mr. Reyes is not long for this world.¡±

 14: Help, I need somebody

    The clinic computer alerted me that Mr. Walker had entered the building. I brought up the video and man, did he look peeved.

    ¡°It seems Mr. Walker received the E-mail. We will soon know how it works out.¡±

    He looked at me quizzically.

    ¡°Come on, I have hacked the whole building in less than ten minutes. Of course I have access to the security system.¡±

    He became thoughtful again.

    ¡°You could have taken over the HQ in the same manner, couldn¡¯t you?¡±

    Where did that come from?

    ¡°Don¡¯t know. I haven¡¯t tried it. Why?¡±

    ¡°It has the same security setup as we have here.¡±

    Oh, yes, that was interesting data.

    ¡°Well, in that case, yes I could. I think I should offer Mr. Walker to set up something better.¡±

    He had to smile at that.

    ¡°You really want to ingratiate yourself to him.¡±

    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t you?¡±

    ¡°Yeah, I think in your position I would too.¡±

    Then the security system showed something interesting.

    ¡°Oh, your boss has just stormed into Reye¡¯s office. Unfortunately, there are no cameras in there.¡±

    Then the next alert came from the security system. Doctor Schaeffer had arrived. He stormed directly to the staff room where the bedraggled doctors were waiting.

    I took another sip, only to find out that the bottle was empty. Damn, I shouldn¡¯t have driven the nurse mad until I got a refill. Well, I will do better next time.

    I looked at Wallace and held up the bottle.

    ¡°I can¡¯t get you to fill the bottle back up, can I?¡±

    He smiled. ¡°Sorry, Kitten, but guard duty only. I can¡¯t leave the room. Why don¡¯t you use the call button?¡±

    Okay, that was evil, but I could not fault him.

    ¡°Too bad. The call button is useless at the moment. I could of course send a message to the nurse''s desk, but that would create questions. Well, Doc Schaeffer should be here in a few minutes if I gauged him right.¡±

    The doctors looked collectively like scolded puppies, and Schaeffer shook his head in disgust before leaving the room.

    As I predicted, a few minutes later, Doc Schaeffer came in.

    ¡°Hello Veronica, Hello Ryan.¡± Ryan mumbled a ¡°Hello Doc¡±, while I managed a ¡°Good morning Doctor.¡±

    Then he concentrated on me. ¡°Well, you look much better, and it seems that you can speak in whole sentences again.¡±

    ¡°Yes, it is a bit scratchy but tolerable.¡±

    He took out his tablet and apparently studied my file.

    ¡°You are surprisingly alert for somebody who has a bad concussion.¡±

    ¡°Two reasons for that. We Pures have a jacked-up regeneration and I have a relatively smart nanites controller implanted, including a relatively big nanite colony. They had begun to repair the damage to my brain and throat.¡±

    He looked a bit surprised.

    ¡°Strange, I looked, but I did not find any recipes that would help with either.¡±

    ¡°2<sup>nd</sup> gen fab, 3<sup>rd</sup> gen nanites, I only gave you recipes that your nano fab can produce. They only got the necessary fine control with the 5<sup>th</sup> gen for tissue damage like the throat, and with 8<sup>th</sup> gen for neural tissue. I have a 12<sup>th</sup> gen swarm.¡±

    ¡°Oh, that explains that. I can¡¯t do this?¡± I shook my head. ¡°Not until I can build you a modern fab, sorry, and honestly, if your doctors here keep abusing the fab for their amusement I will think long and hard before I give you a better one.¡±

    Now he looked shocked.

    ¡°What do you mean?¡±

    ¡°I mean that your doctors ignored an overflowing waiting area to amuse themselves by dissolving rats with nanites. I hope you understand that I will be reluctant to give an even more dangerous fab to such infantile idiots. Even if the rats were cloned, they still feel pain. If the research needs it, then yes, we have to sacrifice them, but simply torturing them for fun? No way.¡±

    He looked at me thoughtfully, before sighing hard.

    ¡°Now what happened to the nurse here?¡±

    ¡°You mean the one who had too much to do reading her bodice ripper romance and eating candy to react to a relatively simple request? I think she is gone for now.¡±

    ¡°What do you understand under simple request?¡±

    ¡°I simply asked for a tablet and an OPB cable. It was even the second time, but the night nurse simply drugged me into sleep. The nurse today ripped into me that she had no time to provide toys for me, and advised me to get a book, before storming out again.¡±

    ¡°You know the nursing staff is under pressure, right?¡±

    ¡°As I said, she was busy reading her trashy romance and eating sweets.¡±

    ¡°How do you know that?¡±

    I pinched the bridge of my nose.

    ¡°I needed, not wanted, the tablet and cable to reboot my implants. After your nurse brushed me off in such a friendly manner I borrowed Mr. Wallace¡¯s tablet and cable and started them back up. After that, I inspected my status and optimized the nanite activity. Then I took the chance and actually looked into her activity. If you want I can give you¡­ one moment please.¡±

    I watched the security video of the nurse station in fast forward and looked for when she was reading.

    ¡°I can give you roughly three hours of video of her sitting on her butt reading and snacking. That should be enough¡±

    He shook his head.

    ¡°Did you just hack our computers?¡±

    ¡°Just? No, I just logged in now. I hacked your network a bit over 20 minutes ago.¡±

    ¡°You just admit that?¡±

    ¡°Why should I not? It isn¡¯t as if it would not come out. Especially as I talked with Mr. Wallace about it, and Mr. Walker should be aware of it any moment now, considering that I blew the whistle on Mr. Reyes.¡±

    He massaged his temples, and I felt kinda bad about bombarding him so, but he had let the clinic run into chaos. Sometimes one had to be cruel to be kind.

    He took a deep sigh.

    ¡°Now what has Hector done?¡±

    ¡°Besides letting the clinic turn to ruins? He stole 11 million from you. Well, from Mr. Walker through you, but that is semantics.¡±

    ¡°At least I agree with that.¡±

    He took out his com and dialed.

    ¡°Hello, Ben¡±¡­ ¡±I am already here.¡±¡­¡±Yes, I just heard about it.¡±¡­¡±No, I don¡¯t know about any E-Mail.¡±¡­¡±Miss Sinclair told me about it.¡±¡­¡±Yes, obviously she is awake.¡±¡­¡±No, she hacked the network here in the clinic.¡±¡­¡±How should I know? You can come down and ask her yourself.¡±¡­¡±I assume that Hector will be, ah, retired?¡±¡­¡±If he really has done it there will be no choice I fear.¡±¡­¡±Yes, see you then.¡±

    He ended the call and put the com back into his pocket.

    ¡°Well, you can explain everything to Ben in a few minutes.¡±

    ¡°Can you remove the tubing in the meantime? Especially the catheter, if you would?¡±

    How nice, he blushed, but then turned to Wallace.

    ¡°Ah, Ryan, ehm, could you give us a bit of privacy?¡±

    Thank goodness Wallace complied. A few minutes later I was once again free to roam the world, or at least limp around.

    It hurt quite a bit, but my right leg carried me well enough, yet I still quickly sat down back onto the bed.

    Then Mr. Walker stormed into the room.

    ¡°What the hell have you done?¡±

    Sigh.

    ¡°I found out somebody had stolen more than 11 million bucks from you, and, friendly as I am, notified you of it.¡±

    He snorted.

    ¡°We have only your word for it. We both know that it would be easy for you to forge anything inside a computer.¡±

    ¡°Partially true, with enough time I could have falsified the records in that way, but keep it real, it would have taken me several days to create something like that. All the references, the accounts, the electronic trails, not impossible to forge, but that would be anything except fast. I am in New York for six days now. Three of them I spent being raped and tortured, and two mostly unconscious.¡±

    He calmed down a bit.

    ¡°You could have prepared all that beforehand.¡±

    That surprised me.

    ¡°Why should I do that? 10 days ago I was planning to stay in Seattle. Only eight days ago I decided to go somewhere else, and only seven days ago I decided on New York. I learned about your territory a few hours before I made the appointment. I learned about this clinic when you led me here.¡±

    ¡°You can prove that? Or shall I kill a man on your word alone?¡±

    ¡°Well, luckily for you, whoever set up your security system here was smart enough to create offline backups in hard burned crystals. It would be easy to get any halfway decent computer user to find the pertaining files inside there, and please, don¡¯t try to tell me that I could have planned this over the last three years.¡±

    Maybe not the best way to talk to the boss of the territory, but I had gotten quite a bit irritated by his accusations.

    ¡°Damn it. A fine mess you got me there.¡±

    He walked a bit up and down.

    ¡°There¡¯s no helping it. Reyes has robbed us. He has to pay.¡±

    It seemed that this topic was finished, finally.

    ¡°What about the other chaos you caused?¡±

    On to the next fight, it seemed. Sometimes I wondered why I even bothered to try to do the right thing.

    ¡°Do you mean teaching the rather unprofessional and rude nurse the meaning of work? Or scaring the lazy doctors hopefully into realizing that a nano fab is no toy?¡±

    He sighed, walked to a chair, and sat down.

    ¡°Damn, you make too much chaos.¡±

    ¡°Would you have preferred that they kill somebody by casually using dissolver nanites? Or simply by playing instead of doing their job? There were somewhere around 100 people in the waiting room and no doctor around as they were torturing rats to death. I have to say, if they behave in this way in the future, then I won¡¯t sell this clinic a modern fab. That is way too risky.¡±

    Doc Schaeffer began to protest, but I waved him off.

    ¡°I don¡¯t think you understand what they did. They used dissolvers in an unsecured environment without any precautions, in shirtsleeves in massive amounts to torture rats to death. They treated it as some sort of magic trick. I can¡¯t even begin to describe how irresponsible that is, but the ONLY valid uses of dissolvers are biohazard removal and extremely carefully for anti-cancer treatments. If not for that I wouldn¡¯t have included them in the recipes, but they are valuable for that.¡±

    I carefully relaxed my hands, which I had balled into fists automatically, trying to ignore the pain my right arm gave me in protest.

    ¡°The amount of dissolvers they used was enough to kill everybody on the ground floor if something had gone wrong. The manuals I gave you have 12 pages of warning about dissolvers. 12 fricking pages, most of it written in fire engine red, to tell anybody who bothers to read it exactly how this stuff can kill and maim people. I know for sure that the fab throws a warning every single time somebody wants to make dissolvers. So they were warned but still played with it like a toy. As it is, you have to send in some bots to recycle the dissolvers to make use of the room safe again.¡±

    The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

    Damn, that took more energy than I thought, something was wrong. When I called up the diagnostics I got a blood sugar alert. It seemed as if the last few days had depleted my emergency reserve.

    ¡°Damn¡­ sorry, my blood sugar is falling. Can you send for some glucose?¡±

    Doc Schaeffer stood there with his mouth hanging open but then shook his head.

    ¡°Uh, yes, yes. I had no idea that these things are that dangerous. I thought you said that nanites were much less dangerous than most thought.¡±

    I smiled sadly at that.

    ¡°They are. Even dissolvers can¡¯t start a grey goo scenario, and you have to confirm at least three different times that you are sure you want to make dissolvers. At the amount they made it should have been more like a dozen times. It takes active stupidity on an unbelievable level or malicious intent to make them dangerous. That is exactly why you should weed out your staff. If I had not been knocked out I would have talked about this with you, and helped you program the access to the fab accordingly.¡±

    Then a nurse brought a bag, giving it to Schaeffer. He reached for the drip stand, but I shook my head and reached out for it.

    With curiosity in his eyes, he gave me the bag and managed to open it with my teeth, slurping the glucose down. Nauseatingly sweet, but exactly what I needed. Within minutes my blood sugar was back up, and the excess was stored in the reserve.

    When I finished the bag, I noticed the stares of the three men.

    ¡°What?¡±

    It was Schaeffer who answered me.

    ¡°That, wasn¡¯t that disgusting? How could you drink that?¡± He shuddered in revulsion.

    ¡°Yes, it was a bit nauseating, but I needed it.¡±

    At the blank stares, I sighed.

    ¡°I am a Pure. All these enhancements come with a price. I need roughly 5000 kilocalories a day, and my nanites need another 1000 in addition. I know you put me on intravenous feed, but you gave me less than half of what I needed. I got even less the days before. I have an emergency reserve in an implant near my stomach that holds a bit over 25000 kcal or I would have nearly starved, but that ran out sometime this night.¡±

    I dropped the empty bag on the nightstand.

    ¡°Now, can somebody tell me what the heck happened Monday?¡±

    Schaeffer grimaced and took the last chair in the room.

    ¡°Well, you had just told me that you would use your cranial board, and then you simply stood there doing nothing. Then out of nowhere Oleg Hopkins, one of Ben¡¯s men came in, grabbed you by the throat, and crashed you into the wall. When the other men tried to intervene he threw you to the side. You got a concussion, a broken arm, a bruised hip and a bruised throat out of it.¡±

    It took me a moment to realize that he had finished.

    ¡°That is nice. I now know the name of the giant who attacked me. The rest, well I was there. Is there anything besides the name I did not know?¡±

    Walker answered me.

    ¡°Somebody drugged Oleg, and more or less convinced him that you were poisoning me.¡±

    I suppressed a few curses, before asking Walker: ¡°Have you found the bugs?¡±

    Schaeffer looked surprised, Wallace let out a small snicker and Walker looked at me calmly.

    ¡°Yes, we have, in my and Richard¡¯s offices. How did you guess?¡±

    Schaeffer now looked a bit shocked at Walker, but I ignored him.

    ¡°Between the time when I told you that I might be able to save you until the attack it was barely three hours, and only one and a half between when I told you that this is an attempted murder and the attack. On both occasions the number of potential leaks was small. I know that I was not responsible for somebody I don¡¯t know trying to kill me, I simply assume that you won¡¯t kill your only chance for survival, Doc Schaeffer could theoretically be the culprit, but I think that is extremely unlikely considering that he seems to be your general practitioner and had ample opportunity to kill you in a way that will not create suspicion and if you can¡¯t trust your bodyguards this whole scheme to kill you with CRS would have been unnecessary as well, as any of them had the access to you to lead you into a trap or an accident. As there was nobody else in the vicinity the only possible options that remain are some well-placed bugs or a hacker that appropriated your webcam and microphone on the respective computers.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°From the way the computer security here is set up I can¡¯t exclude the hacker, but the system is good enough that anybody who could do it without getting found out is expensive with a capital E. To waste that kind of money on simple surveillance is¡­ unlikely, considering that the bugs cost only a few k. So the bugs it is.¡±

    The whole affair became uncomfortable in a hurry.

    ¡°What was the quality of the bugs?¡±

    ¡°High end, microscale, environmental powered. We only found them when we used an RF scanner in a multi-band modus. From what my people tell me, it is Commonwealth tech.¡±

    ¡°Somebody wants you dead for sure. I don¡¯t think it is easy to get commie bugs here.¡±

    ¡°Could you get or make them?¡±

    ¡°Huh? No idea where to get them. If I would still be in Seattle I think I could get them, but here? No way.¡±

    ¡°That answers getting them, and making them? You said you had a degree in electronics.¡±

    ¡°A degree in nanoelectronics, geared towards nanites and implants. I wouldn¡¯t even know where to begin¡­¡±

    I could use audio and visual implant tech as the basis. I would need to¡­ no, that would make the signature too great, but if I instead used¡­ yes, that could work. How to make the data transfer, though? I could use¡­ no that is the tech I won¡¯t sell, frequency hopping? An RF scanner would be able to find it, maybe¡­ if I could get the emitter small enough¡­ yes, that could work and would be nearly undetectable. Powering it would be easy. Just use environmental charge. Just how to place it? Should I make it mobile? That would increase the size by 50% at least, but it could be disguised as an insect. Should I build in an EM scanner? A discrete cough ripped me out of my thoughts.

    I looked at the men, and they looked back at me with amusement.

    ¡°What were you just doing?¡±

    I felt myself blush.

    ¡°Oh, sorry, that happens sometimes. I get an idea and run away with it.¡±

    Walker chuckled.

    ¡°Am I right in the assumption that you just now designed a bug?¡±

    ¡°Uh, yeah. I would have to test it of course, and at the moment I don¡¯t have the equipment to build it, but yes, it seems surprisingly easy.¡±

    ¡°Easy you say?¡± He lifted one eyebrow and looked at me quizzically.

    ¡°Yes, implant tech has many of the same constraints as a bug. It has to be small, has to be energy efficient and it can¡¯t irradiate or heat its surroundings. When I thought about it, it was easy.¡±

    I tried to clear my head.

    ¡°Well, where were we? Oh right, somebody has a strong wish to kill you. That is way too much effort for some, sorry to say it so, small-time mob boss in New York. Whoever they are, they have sunk serious money into it. For a fraction of that they could have simply paid a killer with a sniper.¡±

    I was seriously considering repacking my equipment and cutting my losses, moving to the CSA.

    ¡°Dang it. You know that this is quickly becoming more trouble than it is worth for me.¡±

    I pinched the bridge of my nose again and was weighing my options. In the end, I saw not many benefits to keep helping Walker. Whoever was on his case was unlikely to stop.

    Still, they tried to kill me, and I had given my word. I may not have to go much for me, but my word was sacred for me, always was, always will be. At this moment I cursed my bruised hip that prevented me from pacing. I had no way to release my anxiety.

    ¡°Dang!¡± I had made my decision.

    ¡°That is way too much effort for getting you out of the way. There has to be more.¡±

    I shook my head, and then looked at Walker.

    ¡°They¡¯ve gone a long way to keep me from rescuing you, and they may have succeeded.¡±

    All three men gasped at that, and Wallace accused me.

    ¡°So you will run?¡±

    ¡°What? No, of course not! What gave you that idea?¡±

    I held up my right hand and waved it around.

    ¡°That is what may prevent me from helping. I need both hands to work on the replacement parts. It will take roughly two weeks before I can use that hand again. Two weeks may be more than Mr. Walker can afford.¡±

    Walker was sinking back in the chair but said nothing. Schaeffer on the other hand perked up.

    ¡°What exactly do you need two hands for?¡±

    ¡°I need to disassemble the heart, sheath it in the bioreactor, and then reassemble it. Both disassembly and reassembly need two hands.¡±

    Wallace interceded.

    ¡°Can¡¯t you use a bot or an android?¡±

    ¡°Sorry, but not enough computing power. I would have to take each model apart manually and then make a program for each.¡±

    ¡°But these things are made mostly by bots.¡±

    ¡°Yes, of course, but these bots are part of an industrial complex and have been painstakingly programmed for each step. Give me this program, and I can have my bots disassemble and reassemble them. Or give me enough time and I can build a specialized machine for disassembling cyberware. That was my plan anyway, but my timetable was quite a bit more relaxed. I did not plan to have my first customer here for the next six to nine months. Then it would take me between four and six days to convert the Pulse III, and a week to nine days to convert an Excelsior, but I had just begun designing the necessary equipment when my need to relocate came up. I took only the pieces I can¡¯t replace with me, the nano fab, the experimental bioreactor, and a few other toys.¡±

    Walker threw in the next question.

    ¡°What do you need to build the equipment you need?¡±

    ¡°I need a chip fabber, a winding machine, an industrial fabber, and a carbon extruder.¡± Or my NADA up and running, but I like heck I would tell them that.

    ¡°Sadly that will still not help you. Even with all that it will take me a couple of months to make the equipment.¡± Of course, the NADA would reduce that to a couple of days, but telling anybody about it could be, no would be disastrous.

    Doctor Schaeffer had, in the meantime thought about something.

    ¡°What if¡­ what if you have somebody else be your hands until your arm heals?¡±

    Possible, but still¡­

    ¡°I have just come to NYC. I don¡¯t know anybody who could do the work.¡±

    ¡°I have a student who wants to branch out into implant surgery.¡±

    He wanted me to teach one of these idiots? Was he crazy or simply kidding?

    I struggled to find the right words.

    ¡°I¡­ I really don¡¯t think that any of your doctors here is suited for the job.¡±

    ¡°You don¡¯t know my doctors here.¡± It was easy to tell that he was perturbed, but I was not sorry for him. He had let the situation here crumble.

    ¡°We had the discussion just a few minutes ago. If you think I let any of these idiots that you call doctors and that abuse dissolver nanites for fun even into the same building as my 8<sup>th</sup> gen nano fab then you have to think again.¡±

    He got red, seemingly a mixture of anger and embarrassment. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

    ¡°Yes, I can see that you don¡¯t want any of them, but I did not think of one of them. The girl I meant is not yet working here. If she did not want to be an implant surgeon I would have her of course, but cyber tech is one of the fields we don¡¯t do here.¡±

    OK, that sounded quite a bit better.

    ¡°That could actually work. She needs a very steady hand, but if she wants to go into any kind of surgery she needs them anyway. I reserve the right to throw her out if she shows any proclivity for the kind of stupidity your other doctors showed.¡±

    I thought about what the fact that somebody was moving heaven and earth to kill Walker meant for me.

    ¡°You know as it stands, I will not come back here until this shit is resolved. It is way too open and too dangerous. If anybody needs treatment, he or she has to come to the fortress.¡±

    They seemed surprised, but Walker slowly nodded his head.

    ¡°I actually feared that you would cut your losses and run, so I can¡¯t complain. Anyway, what is this fortress you are talking about?¡±

    ¡°Oh please, as if you did not know that the Sedgen building is a fortress. You would need a veritable army with heavy weapon support to breach it.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°Yes, you are right. If it were located more central to my territory I would have moved there, but as it stands, I will send two of my men with you. At the moment you are way too valuable for me to take any risks with your security. Ryan here is one, the other is Justin O¡¯Donnell. They will accompany you everywhere except your bedroom and the bathroom.¡±

    That was, well it was unexpected. On one hand, it would give me some additional protection, even if I would not leave the fortress again in the near future. On the other hand, I had some things to do that I did not want anybody to know about. On the gripping hand though, he was the boss, and any protest would be futile.

    Reluctantly I nodded.

    ¡°OK, as long as they understand that if I need my peace I need my peace. They can be in the same room if they want, but need to keep some distance and leave me mostly alone then.¡±

    ¡°That would be no problem. Now then, as we have the important points out of the way, what do you think is actually happening?¡±

    Where the hell was that coming from? Did he think my last name was Holmes or Maple or something?

    ¡°How the hell should I know? I have seen exactly four buildings in New York from the inside, if I include the airport. I know less than 20 people here by name. I only knew that this was your territory by researching it on the net. I can at best give you a superficial report about the political and territorial situation in NYC by compiling net sources.¡±

    He looked me into the eyes before he answered.

    ¡°Anybody walking the Abyss is somebody who has resources far beyond what we normal people have.¡±

    I had to suppress my surprise, and my opinion of his intelligence rose a few notches.

    ¡°What makes you believe that I even know what this Abyss is let alone walking it?¡±

    He smiled.

    ¡°Don¡¯t be coy. You told it to me yourself. Every broker is a hacker of high standing him or herself, and one of the privileges for the so-called hangers-on is access to the Abyss. You are most likely a way better hacker than whatever we find here in New York.¡±

    ¡°OK, you have me there, but that still does not give me any insights into the rough situation here in New York, never mind the intricacies. What I can do is look into who manipulated your database here. For the rest, I simply lack information.¡±

    Schaeffer asked confused: ¡°What is the Abyss?¡±

    I looked at Walker inviting, and his smile got a bit smugger than before.

    ¡°You remember what I told you about the Dark Web? The Abyss is one step deeper. It is some sort of exclusive utility for some of the best hackers in the world. Only they and their hangers-on can enter there.¡±

    He looked at me and dared me to speak up. What could I say, challenge accepted.

    ¡°Nearly right, but not quite so. It is more of an exclusive club than a utility but generally on the same level as the deepest of the Dark Net. Technically everybody can get there, but unless you really know what you are doing and can get the people there to acknowledge you, it would be vastly better for your continued wellbeing to not go there. If you annoy the trolls in the dark web it can become uncomfortable, or even costly up to including your life if you are unlucky, but if you manage to aggravate the trolls in the Abyss enough, well the last time somebody did that was in June 2241 and he was from Hyderabad.¡±

    It took a moment for Schaeffer to place the date and the city I named, but then he paled.

    ¡°They¡­ they used a nuclear weapon to kill one man? What monsters are they?¡±

    Hyderabad did not exist anymore, as an ICBM of the Indian strategic command had a glitch and launched its six two-megaton MIRVS onto the Indian city on June 26<sup>th,</sup> 2241. Nearly 600 thousand people had vanished in the inferno. A glitch called 5h3ph3rd that is.

    ¡°Some of them are monsters, yes. Others are¡­ better, but you have to understand that the standard test that they send you will destroy the computers of 99.9% of the hackers in the world. The ones who can withstand that are the elite of the elite. Quite a few of them are arrogant monsters that view anybody who is not one of the ultra-elite as a step above vermin. If you are extremely respectful they may, and I stress the word may here, may tolerate you. The hangers-on are divided into two types. We call them groupies and minions.

    Groupies are brownnosers that tell their hacker how wonderful he is or in some rare cases somebody who actually has an affair with the hacker. They are essentially bootlickers of the Abyss.

    Minions on the other hand are hackers of the secondary or tertiary order who work for one of the elites in one or another capacity. Most of us are brokers, or in other words, people who can be contacted with job offers, some are research assistants or work on social engineering, and some are even technical support. As Mr. Walker said, one of the privileges a minion gets is access to the Abyss without having to go through the test. Minions are mostly immune from the harassment, while groupies should keep their time in the Abyss to when their master is present.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ somebody there used a nuclear weapon to kill hundreds of thousands of people. You know who it was. You have to do something.¡±

    I let a sad little smile on my face.

    ¡°You confuse me with somebody who can do something. I am a minion. The one who launched the missile was in the top 20. Of course, he has gone way too far, but nobody there can out him. It would be a death sentence. Not that this protected him when a few of the top 10 decided that he has gone way too far, and eliminated him. They drove him mad, destroyed his computers, his network, and soured his contacts. For a year they destroyed everything he touched. From what I heard, he committed suicide in August 42. By the way, I was ten when he launched it. I may be a bit faster than average, but that was way too young even for me. Spectre was not on the scene then, so I had no master to bring me into the Abyss even if I would have had the abilities needed there.¡±

    I saw it working in their minds, all except Walker. He had a grim expression that told me that he knew most of it already. He shrugged his shoulders before he talked.

    ¡°Back to the topic, if I understand you correctly you can look into the computer side of this mess but further help is unlikely.¡±

    ¡°Yes, that sums it up. Is there anything else?¡±

    Walker waited for a moment before answering.

    ¡°Not from my side. Ryan will bring you back to¡­ ¡°He made a short pause, ¡°your fortress.¡±

    Schaeffer then continued.

    ¡°I will have Mia come to the Sedgen building then. I hope you two get along. The rest of the day I will be busy chewing out my staff as it seems.¡± The last was pretty dejected.

    I felt sorry for him, but it was crucial for him to get his house in order. A nano fab simply was no toy.

    Then I noticed the strange, unnerving grin Walker was giving me. I could not understand how Doc Schaeffer¡¯s plight could lead to it, and it managed to make me feel a bit insecure.

    ¡°Why are you smiling?¡±

    I hoped that I kept my uncertainty out of my voice when I addressed him.

    His grin got quite a bit wider.

    ¡°Well, you are aware that you are wearing only a hospital gown?¡±

    Where the hell did that come from? Of course, I knew that I wore a hospital gown. I was a patient in a clinic. What else would I be wearing?

    ¡°Yeees? Your point is?¡±

    ¡°My point is that I know for sure that you are wearing only a hospital gown.¡±

    The way he emphasized only made me pause. Then I followed his gaze towards my legs and my gown that shifted from calf-length thanks to my height-challenged frame and one size has to fit all mentality, to barely covering my crotch. Immediately I felt the heat rising on my face, and I was proud about neither the screech I let out nor the haste I scrambled back under covers with.

    I was sure that I would glow red in the dark at this very moment.

    ¡°Why didn¡¯t you say something?¡±

    His grin got quite a bit lewd.

    ¡°I was too busy enjoying the view. You have nice legs, you know.¡±

    Goddang it, sometimes I really, really hated my life.

 15: But not anybody

    It took not much longer than 30 minutes before Wallace was driving me back to the fortress.

    Dressing had eaten most of that and was a literal and figurative pain, followed by the release rituals of the clinic. At least I was thankful for the wheelchair, as walking was something of an inconvenience.

    While I was being wheeled to the exit, one of Walker''s men gave me an OPB stick and told me it contained the contact data I needed. At least something going right.

    During the drive I was mentally going over my To-Do-List, unable to prioritize. I needed to begin the setup of the NADA, I needed to reinstall my board and I needed to set up my bioreactor. Somewhere, I had to squeeze in the training of this Mia, and if my guess was right I was in for a rather lengthy discussion with the others. Oh, and of course, I could not forget to use the contacts to get equipment. I originally planned to build my own toys.

    Not just because I could disregard such pesky things as copyrights and patents, something commercial makers were strangely unwilling to do in my experience, but because with the NADA and my backdoors I could make instruments of a peerless quality and functionally. Sadly this option was not available at this moment. Knowing me, I would build them anyway but for the time being, I had to lower my expectations to commercial grade.

    Hmm, maybe I could build the auto-surgeon myself. I would not need it for six weeks at the earliest. If I could get a good supply of raw materials¡­ I would have to get the alias equipment before that. I hated that. Industrial fabbers were expensive. Not that money was really a concern for me, but I simply hated to waste it on something that would effectively stand in the corner and gather dust. With the chip fabber, the carbon extruder, and the winding machine I could get away with buying more or less hobby-grade equipment, so it should not be too expensive.

    I had to force myself back onto the topics at hand. Priority.

    I decided to shorten the discussion with the others considerably by playing the injury card. It should not be too hard. The bruises on my throat and the cast would be mostly self-explanatory and my voice was still pretty raspy.

    Then I start with the NADA setup. Fortunately, most of that could be done by bots and for the few things I had to do myself, I could use a remote-controlled Android. I wistfully wished that Androids had the manual dexterity for implant work but they still lacked the processor capability for such fine control, and subsequently the builders left out the expensive as hell, muscle control systems for it, making remote control at this level also impossible. At the same time, I could reinstall my board, considering that I would be mostly sitting around and watching the bots work. I had just to make it clear to Mr. Wallace that I needed to be alone in that room, as I did not want notice of the NADA spread.

    During the phases when neither the setup of the NADA nor the installation of my board demanded my interaction I could make a dent in the contact list. When the board was installed I would then dive into cyberspace and look around the clinic''s net a bit closer and in much more detail.

    Oh heck, somewhere in there I would have to talk to Mia. And of course, I would have to eat.

    So much to do, so little time, but somehow I would muddle through. It was surprising to see the garage doors open for us, and after Wallace stopped the car I looked at him imploringly.

    He gave a lopsided grin and shrugged his shoulders.

    ¡°Walker has arranged for Justin and me to be lodged here, and the Mute brought us a remote code for the garage.¡±

    I was of two minds about that. On one hand, it was nice that they took care of the problem. On the other hand, they were quite trusting with the security of my property. I would have to talk to them, but no harm done. I could easily bind the code to the car, as that was only a small adaption of the security program.

    I learned that getting out of the passenger seat of a car with a busted right hip and a broken right arm was much more interesting than getting in, not to mention quite a bit more painful, but in the end, I managed it. Wallace was fast at hand to offer help, but I got this stubborn idea that I wanted to do it on my own. In hindsight, it was a¡­ suboptimal decision. I equally scorned the wheelchair that somehow had materialized, including an android to push it, although only for a couple of dozen steps. Then my leg gave out and I had to be kept upright by Wallace. The pain when I sat down made me hiss, and right there I decided that the wheelchair was not such a bad idea as I had thought.

    A short time later we met the assembled group in the mess room. I managed to keep the discussion brief, claiming onerous time pressure, and promising to go into the details when I had more time available. I answered the salient points, that, yes I was sorry that I did not make it back to the talk on Monday, and I was equally sorry that I worried them by being attacked out of the blue, and no, I had no idea how to deal with Yokata Sayomi as I had scarcely the time to think about her. I explained that I bought the additional bots to clear all the junk out of the unused rooms combined with some major renovations. All that while eating another mostly tasteless sandwich accompanied by a soda.

    I was half finished with my meal when the doorbell rang, and Natalie jumped up and ran towards the entrance, only to come back a few minutes later accompanying a young woman of Mediterranean ancestry that I guessed at early to mid-twenties. Apparently, Mia had made good time to come here, and if I read her expression right she was anything but happy about it.

    She let herself fall into one of the chairs with a huff and glowered at all of us for a moment, before beginning to talk.

    ¡°Ok, I am here. So now can somebody please tell me why Doctor Schaeffer more or less ordered me to come here?¡±

    If I didn¡¯t know it better I would have guessed that the reaction was choreographed in the silent way everybody including Wallace turned their gaze to me.

    I sighed and placed the remains of my sandwich on the plate.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know what Doc Schaeffer told you, but essentially you are here to serve as the substitute for my right arm for a couple of weeks,¡± I said as I held up my right arm to show the cast.

    ¡°I have a task that requires two hands, and obviously I have a slight problem for the time being. Seeing that the task is basically saving Mr. Walker, it is time-critical and something an implant surgeon has an exigent need to know, Doc Schaeffer offered your services.¡±

    Her expression moved from annoyance to bewildered and finally scorn while I talked.

    Then a derisive sneer marred her face.

    ¡°Oh please. As if a kid like you could know anything about cyberware. Now, how about you let us grownups talk?¡±

    On one hand, I had expected something like this, but on the other hand, what the frick? That was Doc Schaeffer¡¯s hand-picked implant surgeon? Somebody really dropped the ball here. I slowly looked at the others present and stopped at Wallace.

    ¡°I assume that this exemplifies the typical reaction I can expect here in New York, right?¡±

    The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

    At his silent nod, I pinched the bridge of my nose and then turned my attention back to Mia.

    ¡°You are aware that you are quite discourteous in collusion with ignorant, right? I can understand that you are a bit peeved that you have been ordered here, but as none of the people in this room are responsible it is not appropriate behavior to vent your aggravation on us. Your mother should have taught you better than that. Also, you make assumptions at face value, which of course hints at lazy thinking and more or less proves your ignorance. Do you wish to leave and tell Doc Schaeffer that you decline the work or do you want to start over?¡±

    Again her face moved through emotions. Anger followed by indignation, then mortification, obstinacy, and in the end a bit of fear.

    ¡°I¡­ I can¡¯t go. Doctor Schaeffer has done so much for my family and me. I can¡¯t disappoint him.¡±

    I continued to silently look at her for a few moments longer, and she visibly gulped.

    ¡°All right, I don¡¯t actually want to harm you, but please keep it polite. What you are here for is to disassemble a Dworak Pulse III cyber heart so that I can process the parts. I will give you the step-by-step for the disassembling, but it will need an exceedingly steady hand and a keen eye to do it without damaging the heart. In exchange, I will give you the virtual lectures from the University of Washington: Seattle for implant surgery and I will help you with learning it.¡±

    For a handful of seconds, she looked at me doubtfully, before she answered.

    ¡°All I have to do is take this Pulse III apart, and nothing else?¡±

    ¡°Nope, nothing else, but if that is all you do you will hardly learn anything. I would advise you to at least watch the lectures and read the accompanying literature, even if it is hard to digest.¡±

    So she could smile, I had my doubts about that.

    ¡°Yes, I think I can understand that requirement to learn something. So when do I begin?¡±

    It was my turn to smile.

    ¡°As soon as we get the heart, or rather hearts as I want to make sure there is no problem later on.¡±

    Meanwhile, I had finished my meal, and I began asking some important questions.

    ¡°Now, that could be important, but are you jacked?¡±

    Her expression answered my question before she even opened her mouth.

    ¡°What do you mean by ¡®jacked¡¯?¡±

    ¡°That is the common jargon for having one or more data ports implanted. And obviously, you aren¡¯t. You should invest some time to learn street lingo by the way, it will help you immensely when you are a cybutcher yourself.¡±

    Again I was met by an apparent lack of comprehension, and I raised an eyebrow before answering the unasked question.

    ¡°Cybutcher is said street lingo for a cyber surgeon. I assume it was a try at being funny, merging the words cyber and butcher, but while it is common parlance, I have a distinct dislike for this expression.¡±

    Understanding bloomed in her face, and she stammered a nonsensical answer.

    ¡°Well, the jack is out, so do you have at least a diadem? If not, we should get you one pronto.¡±

    She shook her head obviously bewildered.

    ¡°No¡­ I never needed a diadem, not to mention a cyber port. Why do you think I need it?¡±

    I moved my attention to Marc.

    ¡°And you wonder why the Commonwealth is so much further ahead technically?¡±

    I focused back on Mia.

    ¡°Cyberspace is accelerated virtual reality. A diadem makes it possible to get compression of up to 4:1. That means for every hour of real-time you spend in full compression cyberspace your mind spends four hours doing whatever you are doing. Watching lectures for example, or doing the homework, or reading.¡±

    Mia nodded, but Marc threw in a question.

    ¡°What the hell is a diadem?¡±

    ¡°A neuronal connector net. Most of it vanishes in the hair most people have, only the brow part is visible normally, and that looks just like a nice little princess diadem.¡±

    ¡°And you got one? That would fit you perfectly, little princess.¡±

    I was seriously questioning letting him stay at this moment, but I gritted my teeth in frustration and answered as calmly as I could.

    ¡°Every student in the commonwealth gets a diadem in third grade. The curriculum of pure schools is AFAIK much more comprehensive than what you get here, so we spend the equivalent of roughly 12 school years until the end of seventh grade. Then college, and on average, we compress eight to ten years of an advanced degree into two years. I was a little bit faster, and that is why I made my Ph.D. in computer science at 15.¡±

    Marc wanted to say something but Darren hit him in the shoulder. I would have to do something nice for Darren later. Mia on the other hand was very thoughtful.

    ¡°So, if a diadem can do that, why would I need a¡­ jack?¡± The last word was pretty tentative.

    ¡°The diadem has pretty low bandwidth, abysmal resolution, and limited mod options. A jack on the other hand is much more¡­ versatile. With the much higher bandwidth, roughly three orders of magnitude higher, the right mods, and of course the right console or board you get a higher compression depending also on your intelligence. The official record is a bit below 50:1, or a bit over two days per hour. Don¡¯t expect that though, as it was a tuned highly experimental board, a super genius with an IQ above 300, and a highly adapted software suit. 20:1 is much more realistic if you get a good implant and a reasonable board. The material I will give you will contain nearly 3000 hours of material. If you use a tablet or anything else externally you will have to spend all 3000 hours, if you use a diadem, you have to spend nearly 750 hours in real-time, and with the jack and board, I talked about, 150 hours real-time. And there is way less fatigue in cyberspace so you can actually work through it. I would be surprised if you could get eight hours of work a day in real-time in, but let¡¯s assume that. You can either spend one and a half years learning the material via smart goggles or tablet or whatever, four and a half months with a diadem, or three and a half weeks via a jack. Also with the diadem or the jack, you will be able to work the eight hours real-time.¡±

    I had many shocked faces to look into, most of all probably Mia.

    ¡°That¡­ that is brilliant. Why the hell don¡¯t they do that here?¡±

    I could only shrug.

    ¡°How the heck should I know? From what I know it could be that you still have this dreadful teachers union that has managed to destroy education for centuries now. If the students only have to have seven years of schooling instead of 12-13 then you obviously need fewer teachers. And considering that the computer does almost all of the work in the Commonwealth you need way less. Wouldn¡¯t do for the union to allow their almighty importance to wane, would it? Now the important question, do want me to order a diadem for you or not? Or do you want to run to the next cyber surgeon to get jacks?¡±

    ¡°Uhm, jacks are pretty risky aren¡¯t they? I mean I don¡¯t want to have CRS.¡±

    I nodded at that.

    ¡°Yeah, CRS with neural implants is¡­ let¡¯s say bad and keep it at that. That was the primary reason for me to develop the biosheathing. If that is your only reason to not get one then we will implant one into you as soon as we can make you one.¡±

    Oh wow, she was pretty fast to anger.

    ¡°Did you not listen, I said I don¡¯t want to have fucking CRS!¡±

    I was very thankful that I managed to reboot my audio implants; otherwise, I would have been the victim of severe pain in my ears right now. From the way the others grimaced and massaged their ears I was not the only one impressed with Mia¡¯s volume right now. But I had to smile anyway, only to hold up my hand when she drew a new batch of air.

    ¡°Please, give me some credit. Why do you think the modification of a cybernetic heart for Mr. Walker is so time-pressing that it can¡¯t wait for my arm to be healed? I have developed a method to prevent CRS, and from all my tests and the, admittedly few customers, it is more or less absolute, as so far nobody had the implant attacked by CRS.

    Mr. Walker is dying of CRS right now, as it attacks his heart at this moment.

    We have, with only a little luck, the six weeks it takes me to convert the most simple cyber heart out there, the Pulse III so we can use it as a replacement. If we had to wait for my arm to heal it would take a miracle.

    But as soon as we have done that we can begin making a data port implant for you. A single jack with only the necessary periphery to make it usable won¡¯t cost more than a couple of hundred bucks, even with the adaption.

    The jack will be very useful for you anyway, as you can control the autodocs with it in much more precise fine detail. Seriously, the best you can be as a cyber surgeon without a jack is mediocre.¡±

    That took the wind out of her sails, and she slumped back down into her chair.

    ¡°You¡­ you have beaten CRS?¡±

    To make it short, for the fourth time in two days I explained my biosheathing. For the fourth time, I had a captive audience. I was contemplating a second sandwich but decided against it, instead, I let the android push me to my room, to change my clothes. I learned fast that undressing was even harder with an arm in a cast than dressing, so I ended with having the android help me. Despite it being a machine it felt creepy to have a male figure help me, but I did not think that ordering a gynoid would be so much better. At least the work clothes were mostly pretty loose. Unfortunately ¡®mostly¡¯ excluded my chest in this instance, as the shirt that was very comfortable and at best created a hint of my former A+ sized breasts was now practically painted onto my newly improved C+ verging on D-sized bust.

    It took me a few minutes to suppress the urge to play with Frankel right this minute but decided that as he liked big breasts that much I would find a way to give him his own set to play with as soon as I could find the time for it.

 16: On wings of light and shadows

    As soon as I was finally dressed and had myself wheeled towards the future residence of the NADA, always followed by Wallace of course, I was greeted by two of the androids and half a dozen bots that had moved the crated NADA there, as well as my board. Of all my worldly possessions my board was the most, well the second most, all right the third most precious to me.

    The most precious by a wide margin was actually the NADA, but that was so new that I was not yet accustomed to including it, and it was a close choice between the board and the cluster. If I would go from the pure monetary value or even the utility, the cluster would win 15 times out of 10, but the board enabled me to dive into cyberspace, and this ability alone made her priceless for me, even if my cranial board could manage the same, if to a lesser degree.

    But for now, my Precious was wounded, injured to her core, and I had to heal her before we could soar again.

    A harrumph from Wallace ripped me out of my reverie and I realized that I was petting the travel case of my board. I felt myself blush, again, and ordered the bots to carefully uncrate the NADA.

    At the same time, I had one android place Precious on the table, before struggling to unlock the case with one hand. When Wallace attempted to help me I slapped his hand away out of reflex.

    ¡°Nobody touches Precious but me!¡±

    Finally, I managed to open the case. The fuel cells were still at 83% power but I plugged in the external power supply regardless. Then I struggled again to connect the OPB cable to my data jack, deciding there and then that I would mirror the jacks on the left side of my head as soon as possible, before starting the boot sequence.

    I wished that I could just use the Q-link to reinstall directly from the cluster but sadly the basic structure of Precious was already a bit over 17 months old, and at that time I had just cracked the resonance problem and had not yet had any idea how that would revolutionize my work.

    So the Q-link was a plug-in component that was not accessible through the hard-burned Basic OS. I had upgraded her in every aspect, but the basic structure was becoming increasingly obsolescent. Especially now with me having a working NADA.

    The same was true for my cranial board but that was decidedly newer and I included the Q-link from the ground up into the design.

    If I had even dreamed of building a NADA even three months before I would have waited to design and build my skull tech until I had made it work, but despite going through the black lab''s computer networks for more than half a year, I mostly ignored the NADA as it was so far from completion that in essence what everyone else had was a very, very expensive fabber and not an especially good fabber at that.

    When I finally lowered myself to actually read the project summaries in a fit of boredom, I was quickly fascinated with the problem. I am still a bit embarrassed that it took me nearly two days to get to the solution. It was so glaringly obvious once I found it that I should have found it within a few minutes, an hour at max.

    Of course, I can¡¯t fault the scientists for trying to find a solution in vain, as they, unlike me, lacked the most important component. Without the Q-link, a NADA is not possible, and as far as I knew, I was the only one who had it.

    With the Q-link it was comically easy. This was why I was the only person in the solar system who had a working NADA. That, of course, exemplified the problem should anybody learn about it. The fight for this technology would start wars, a fact I was sure of.

    After the basic boot I transferred the custom OS I designed for her, and boy was I glad that I kept the copy I had stashed in the cluster up to date. That would save me four to five hours of adapting, but I still had to take at least three hours to install her.

    It took just under three EB to install the blank OS and the drivers for the Q-Link. After that, she would download the other nine EB from the cluster and install all the tools I usually used. And at any time I would have to be ready to intervene if one of the installers hiccuped, something nobody could prevent.

    Of course, I knew that one could get the OS for a professional board including all the tools a starting hacker needed at less than two EB, but please, that is off the shelf. Nobody would get more than 25:1 out of that setup, while Precious got me the unofficial record at 57.663:1.

    And unlike the students who held the official record, I can use her for other things than virtual porn. This level of acceleration needed an ungodly amount of predictors, AI assistants, and optimizers up and running.

    Additionally, the utilities needed to be compiled in a manner that made execution as fast as possible. If I would compile all I had optimized for size it would go down to 5.5 EB. Still more than the starter pack, but three-quarters of that would be my utilities, and these had never come even into the same zip code as the shelf.

    I had spent nearly 30 virtual years programming them including the updates to the OS, which took me eight virtual years to get the first version just right. In real-time, I had spent nearly four months on the OS and six on the tools and upgrades.

    While the installer was churning through the processes I controlled the work of the bots so far. For something so high-tech and valuable, the NADA was pretty simple in its structure. It basically consisted of four parts.

    If the specialized nano fab was the heart the brain was for sure the control system.

    The fab was only marginally different from what every other NADA in the world used, but the controller¡­ the controller was the secret to why my NADA worked and none of the others did.

    The third component, the tank for the substrate gel was more or less standard, but my energy pylons were different.

    Instead of four distributed to the 2D corners, everyone else used I had 14 placed at all eight corners and the six planes of the tank. After I solved the resolution and control issue via Q-links I designed the pylons to additionally serve as a nav system. That enabled me to get tolerances in the 100 picometer range. That meant I could literally build things from the atom up.

    The bots had already installed the tank, as well as the lower pylons, and were installing the side plane pylons. My superficial inspection found no fault, so I tackled the next point on my list.

    For the next two hours, I was busy ordering all kinds of stuff, while I learned that the fixers on the East Coast were in no way easier to work with than the ones on the West Coast. Greedy jerks, all of them, but I got most of what I needed.

    First of all, I managed to get five Pulse IIIs. So even if Mia ruined something we should be covered, and I did not pay more than 30% over the legal market.

    I also got a discrete line for raw materials, and this introduction cost me only $50k.

    It got a bit harder getting replacements for the Wiltons, but finally, I got a surprisingly good deal on four brand new Yasoshi f33 GAMMA fusactors that were considerably more powerful than what we had now.

    Apparently, it was en vogue to diss Japanese companies here in the USA at the moment or something like that.

    Personally, I did not understand the problem, as the Yasoshi¡¯s may not have been up to the qualities of Simpson & Proctor but they were a good second choice, better than anything produced in the US, and getting them for 45% of the normal price¡­ we just had to somehow live with six times the electric generation than before.

    Lastly, as I had dreaded, the industrial fabber was expensive. The dang thing cost more at $12 million than the four fusactors at $7 million combined. Although it did have some advantages, as it combined the chip-fabber, the carbon extruder, and the winding machine in addition to quite a few other options.

    If I did not have the NADA it would be a veritable godsend, and grudgingly I conceded that the price was pretty reasonable for the versatility it offered. While I was at it I finished the 20 million by getting two new algae tanks and a new water purifier.

    Finally Precious was ready, and I explained to Wallace that I would be unresponsive for some time, before diving into cyberspace at last.

    It took only a moment for the alternate reality to form around me, and I relaxed a tension I was not aware I had. I was finally home again. Here nobody would call me runt, pimp, pipsqueak, freak, or whatever they dredged out of the cesspool they call mind.

    Nobody here would gang up to ambush me, nobody would steal whatever I have with me and most of all nobody here could see me as weak.

    Here I was not Vivian DuClare, daughter of the infamous traitor Julian DuClare, nor Veronica Sinclair, not Red, and most certainly not Kitten.

    Here I was Seraphim. My avatar was not the 151cm (or five feet nothing for those metrically challenged out there) small dwarf pure, no, to the cyberspace I presented a tall figure made of light with swirls of smoke-like shadows creating the illusion of contours.

    Three pairs of majestic wings, made out of almost blinding light accented by the same black tendrils of shadows adorned my back.

    Nobody could tell if my avatar was clothed or not as all features were only the shadows moving in random, but still intricate patterns over my body. Sometimes you could see them, other times not, they changed form and position.

    It was known in the Abyss that I was female, but that was all.

    I stretched my wings slowly and self-indulgently, and let my gaze flow over my mindscape.

    Even after nearly a subjective century, I felt awe when I looked at the seemingly endless reaches of my mindscape. Prismatic colors swirled through the dark blue eternity, reminiscent of drug-induced fever dreams I have been told, accented by bursts of brilliant light and tendrils of abyssal dark. Originally only the colors and the light were present, and my avatar was an indescribable figure of pure light, but after I began working for Spectre I choose to accent my light with the shadows preferred by this most enigmatic hacker.

    Many mundanes, nearly all of the Jokers, and even a few Kings questioned the value of the mindscape for a hacker. These benighted souls argue that most of the work is done by the machines, that the programs and utilities are the only things important, and of course the power of the originating machine.

    Fools that they are they never understood how formal and scripted computers are. Without the unpredictable chaos of the Jack''s mind, it is indeed just a point of who has the better utility and or the better machine to run. In this world, supercomputers like the cluster reign supreme, but even a low-level Jack can run circles around any of them, as the human mind shifts the patterns without logic or structure.

    Still, that alone did not necessitate the mindscape, as uniform structures would lessen the load on the boards considerably, and the power of the used utilities was untouched by the mindscape, but it is the full mind, not just the conscious one that drives the might of the Jack.

    Intuition, instincts, guts¡­ all things that influence the performance, and these you can¡¯t trick with uniform structures.

    A Jack that gets his or her mindscape bent by the opposition has practically already lost. You lose your sync, your compression plummets and the opposition can play mind games with you while being able to directly attack your board.

    No bot, no VI, not even a supercomputer is capable of that.

    Ironically the subconscious also affects the avatar.

    If you can¡¯t convince yourself that yes, you really are protected your defense utilities are at best marginally effective.

    If you can¡¯t make yourself believe to 110% that the wet tissue your avatar has in its hands is actually a deadly attack utility, don¡¯t even try to use it for anything other than cleaning your nose.

    And if your avatar runs around in cyberspace with a marching band and a neon sign, even the most sophisticated stealth utilities would be worthless.

    All because the subconscious has much more control over us than most of us believe.

    That is the reason why defense utilities usually manifest as some sort of armor, shield, or rarely an energy barrier.  Attack utilities routinely posed either as companions if they are bots or as weapons if not. And of course, I had to go into a stealth form to not unduly draw attention when I did not want it. Actually, a Jack who has only one stealth form is soon a dead Jack.

    Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.

    On the other hand, even a mystical Zen master would never exceed the maximum his utilities could bring, so regardless of how you convince yourself that what your avatar holds in his hands is a weapon, if the utility behind it is a scanner you won¡¯t do any damage, and if your stealth utilities are subpar you will be detected.

    With a last flex of my wings, I jumped up, and finally, I was flying again. To this day I can¡¯t understand any Jack who has no flying form for his or her avatar. The dream to fly was ingrained into us humans since our ancestors climbed down from the trees, and we are finally able to soar on our own. It has been said that in some of the space-habitats there are areas where one can fly, but from what I found out, it is more of a gliding than real flying.

    Here in cyberspace, on the other hand, flying is simply glorious. I can, somewhat, understand those that decide against a Jack and become Queens out of fear of CRS as that is an ugly way to go, but seriously even a Queen can¡¯t come even close to this feeling. A diadem may be enough for some of the less powerful virtual reality games, that are sadly the only ones still being made,  out there, with their reduced resolution, but even there, if you play a flying character, it is not the same. Believe me, I tried both ways.

    I spent nearly an hour simply rejoicing at the feeling of the air rushing around me, of the gravity pulling me into a dive, of the g-forces of tight turns, releasing the pent-up stress of more than a week without virtual reality, but any playtime has to end. Of course in real-time, I only wasted around a minute, so it was nothing I could not afford, but I had work to do.

    I connected my mindscape to the matrix, as the net was called by the geeks and nerds after several antique Sci-Fi sources, and my consciousness flowed into the glittering world of ones and zeros.

    The NYC matrix was a reflection of the Big Apple at its greatest time. Titanic buildings that in reality were nothing more than rubble, a sea of lights, and an unbelievable number of bots.

    Apparently, the Feds still took token supervision of the City, as I could see several obvious law enforcing utilities, but they were decidedly low level.

    More dangerous were the several watchers from the corporations.

    Especially the banks had the net swarmed with watchdogs, looking for the discretely embedded distinct markers that better security systems tagged anybody that enters their domain with.

    Unless one had a good reason why to have said markers one was neck-deep in excrement if one of the dogs sniffs the marker.

    That is one prime reason why the professionals only hacked better corporations after they gained much experience.

    Without the patience to avoid these places until one had the experience, one would not get to be a professional.

    There are, of course, ways around this security feature. Most simply used a disposable shell that they jettison as soon as the job is done, while others, including me, thought that we left too many traces in the shell.

    Sure, it should be dissolved and untraceable but honestly, nobody should ever trust on should.

    Instead, we used the vastly more challenging method of slicking. We balanced the incoming data to repel any marker, and still let in the environmental data we need.

    This took way more concentration and experience than a discarded shell, but if done right it only left the information that something was in the system.

    The third way was only done once as far as anybody knew.

    Roughly six months ago, somebody hacked every single bank in North America without leaving any trace. It only was known that they were hacked because a substantial amount of accounts were suddenly closed out, and more than 3.7 trillion ITB were¡­ diverted.

    Even in the Abyss nobody had any idea how this phantom did it, much less who it could be.

    The speculation ranged from aliens to a real AI. A few even thought it could be a human who did it, but they were in the minority.

    At this time, though, I had other things to do, so I sped along the matrix until I found the node of Doc Schaeffer¡¯s clinic.

    Speeding in this instance meant sadly that I reduced my compression to 4:1, as anything higher would scream of combat diving, and attract attention.

    Still, it took only a few seconds to reach my destination.

    Of course, I could have used the backdoor access I created automatically, but I wanted to actually see how hard it would be to break in. With that in mind, I changed to my general stealth form, something I called my predator form.

    From the outside, the only visible parts of me were faint distortions in the air, similar to an optical mirage. In addition, my avatar levitated above the ground, so there were neither steps nor wing flaps that my subconscious could interpret as broken stealth.

    Behind the mindscape, my board activated an IP spoof that fooled the system that I was using one of its own computers and a combined pattern analyzer and simulator that enabled me to practically vanish into the background pattern of the data streams in the clinic net.

    This should make it quite hard for the automatic systems to see me. Especially the pattern simulator depended on me really believing that I was nearly invisible and sneaking, or some random spike could trigger an alert.

    The inside of the clinic net was¡­ austere is the best description I could give. One look was all that was needed to know that it was a King that had designed and installed the network here, and a rabid detractor of Jacks at that.

    Even a Queen would have taken the dangers of the mindscape into consideration and would have integrated at least marginal virtual environs that a Jack had to override, such causing at least some stress and difficulty, while at the same time making it harder to enter undetected.

    As it was at this time, it was almost laughable. Instead of even a standard viron that somewhat depicted the clinic net, I was greeted by a purely digital representation. Wireframes of the different processing units including the name of the unit integrated into the frame, and streaming blobs of data that unmoving embody the programs running.

    A handful of roving hunter ICE patrolled the higher-level units with half a dozen from the server patrolled the net as a whole.

    Each of the higher units had at least one watcher ICE on the lookout for any deviation from the standard behavior, while most of the programs running had some low-level barricade ICE around it, standard DEP if I was right.

    All that would be quite good security, in a world without Queens and Jacks that is.

    Against Kings though with their pure external interface who only could run utilities from the OS, not to mention Jokers, who at best can run bought scripts and utilities it would be more than enough. But even Queens with their virtual reality hampered by the diadem would at best need 20 minutes to get all of it dismantled. 19 minutes and 59 seconds laughing followed by one second to actually breaking through.

    Against a Jack¡­ well the time laughing might be the same, but otherwise, no Jack who knew what he or she was doing would need a full second to raze the ICE.

    I would seriously have to talk to Walker about this.

    If his HQ was similarly protected there was a grave security risk in his organization.

    On the other hand, statistically, there couldn¡¯t have been more than four or five Jacks in NYC.

    The number of Jacks in the whole system fluctuated around 11 thousand so it could be that it was not so critical a chinch as I thought.

    At that moment a very evil thought shot through my mind.

    What if the viron was created specifically this way to hide the actual protection? That would make a nasty surprise for any Jack laughing his or her ass off. While I designed such a viron in the back of my mind I looked for any indication that the designer here had done that.

    My sniffers swarmed out, taking the forms of floating bloodhounds, hawks, and bats, flooding the different higher units, testing the ¡®viron¡¯ all the way.

    At the same time, I manifested the readout of my pattern analyzer as a form similar to that of a weather radar display.

    Any change in the viron that any reacting ICE would create would be displayed. In this way, I waited for 15 minutes.

    When all my sniffers reported back in the negative, I was unsure if I should be disappointed or elevated. Remembering that it was friendly territory, I fell into disappointment. More stuff I had to work on it seemed, but at least it would be good training.

    Next, I released my deep scan utilities, as a swarm of ghost-like apparitions. These I had instructed to search for any break in the data structure, without expecting much of a return.

    With the lack of a viron, a Queen or a Jack would scarcely leave any trace behind, but it did cost me nothing, as these were run by the cluster without impeding my board in any way.

    At the same time, I moved toward the medical database and looked into the logs.

    I scanned explicitly for any discontinuities, or any holes, and let the deep scan of the cluster run a binary analysis.

    Again I was not expecting much, so I was not surprised that I was able to find the manipulation, including the approximate date, but no other traces.

    Just to be sure I let the cluster scan the database for other manipulations.

    I was sure that as soon as the ghosts came back with a negative report I had narrowed the suspect list down to roughly 11k suspects, but I would never be able to weed them out any further.

    That of course explained why I was so surprised that I actually got a trace and a pretty good one at that.

    It took me a few seconds to comprehend the report I got.

    I knew for sure that it had to be a Jack that planted the false data, as even a Queen could not have sneaked through the defenses without at least some form of manipulation that would have been visible on any halfway thorough inspection and should have triggered an alert months ago.

    But here it was, in my virtual hands. Somehow my ghosts had found an IP trace.

    I was, honestly dumbfounded. Anybody determined enough to get a data port and become a Jack is either dumb as a stone and such unable to hack anywhere without leaving a trace akin to a bulldozer in the forest or is capable enough to use the bare minimum of stealth, including IP spoofing.

    Even then an IP trace is nearly impossible in a net without a viron.

    One had to virtually engrave the trace into the net to leave a trace here.

    The cluster had meanwhile finished with the database and revealed three other slight modifications. They all would increase the risk of developing CRS if acted upon, so any already nearly nonexistent chance of this being an accident vanished.

    I waited until the last of the ghost reported back before I returned to my board, where I pondered over the situation.

    I simply could not wrap my mind around the facts as I knew them. It took me the better part of an hour until I found a scenario that could fit the information.

    An especially talented queen could have, however unlikely, bypassed the security of the clinic without disturbing the watchdogs.

    At the same time a small glitch in the OS, network driver or the IP spoofer could have created the IP imprint in the buffer my ghost found it in.

    Of course, I knew I was grasping at straws, but I simply could not find any other logical explanation. Shrugging my shoulders, an action that shrugged all six wings alongside my arms I decided to investigate the trace a bit further.

    I fully expected to run into either a temporal IP or the starting point of a long series of bridges and was simply flabbergasted that instead, I found a permanent IP leading to the HQ of the Berardino family.

    My already threadbare theory had just gotten translucent, and it was impossible to see a viable scenario in which the facts fit.

    In the end, I decided I lacked information, and moved into the net again. This time I would not enter friendly territory but rather investigate an outright attack from the perpetrator''s place, hopefully without them realizing I was there.

    By entering the Berardino-net I was again surprised, as while I found a virtual environment here, it lacked in other areas.

    Despite searching for nearly two hours the only countermeasures I found was a low-level gatekeeper bot playing a firewall on TV.

    Oh, it certainly put up a good front, but anybody actually looking into it found quickly that it only pinged a possible intruder, without even receiving the return.

    In this, it was comparable to dummy cameras that some cheap shops still used as a shoplifting deterrent.

    Of course, I could not believe this and used every single tool in my arsenal to probe for surprises, but even when I tasked the cluster with a full-scale assault, protected through Q-link bridges, there was absolutely no reaction.

    Finally, I accepted that somebody really messed up here and snuck in. The viron created an air of old money. Dark wood paneling, tasteful decoration, old-fashioned fixtures, and everything designed as a small mansion.

    The different PU¡¯s were represented as rooms, the net was the corridors, and the entrance was the gatekeeper.

    It was manifested as a middle-aged uniformed guard including several weapons ranging from pepper spray to an antique revolver, but all that, and the walkie-talkie he carried were just for show.

    One of the cluster''s attack-bots practically danced in front of the gatekeeper, and it just walked around it on its patrol round.

    The rest of the rooms made a decent impression, but all the programs running, all the bots, everything, did nothing, absolutely nothing else other than producing the illusion of activity.

    After a bit of searching, and it was surprisingly easy, I found one database that was more than randomized junk. Instead, it contained several e-mails between a certain Giorgio Berardino and somebody called 3n1gM4.

    The mails contained several voice prints of somebody, apparently Giorgio explaining his plan of secretly killing off most of the other bosses and then taking over.

    The written parts showed a timeline of how the work was going, who was hacked now, and what 3n1gM4 had found where.

    One of the files contained a list of cyber-surgeons that were bribed, how much they were paid and how they were ensured to remain silent.

    I wished from the bottom of my heart that I could have believed all that, but while the database was encrypted, it took me less than a virtual minute to decrypt everything.

    Oh, sure, I used the cluster for that, as a routine measure, but even the cluster needs between 15 and 20 real-time minutes to decrypt anything protected by standard off-the-shelf encryption tools.

    No, everything here made it clear to me that somebody was doing a frame-up, but nothing I found gave me even a hint towards who could have done it.

    To make sure of it I left the Berardino net and started a search on the darknet for the Berardinos. Lo and behold, I found the IP of their network, but somehow it was different from the one I found on the clinic net.

    When I arrived there and started my standard pre-intrusion work I was presented with a completely different picture.

    The viron was the same, so I concluded whoever created the false front had copied it, but the activity was, well it was there and it was real.

    Instead of a gatekeeper it had several low-level white ICE watch dogs patrolling the ports of the router.

    Nothing that would even incommode me, but real ICE nonetheless.

    Further in I found no less than three different activity watchdogs, including a heuristic one.

    Again, nothing that would slow down a somewhat competent Jack, but compared to the ersatz-net it was there.

    I did not want to trigger an alert or leave any traces so I took my time and slowly moved into the mansion.

    With an eye on my pattern scanner, I was somewhat relieved that they did not have a traffic randomizer running, as that would make the work of my pattern simulator so much harder.

    Nothing I could not have dealt with, but one did not have to ask for punishment that is not necessary.

    Tempted as I was I left nearly all the rooms alone as I did not think Walker would be amused if I accidentally started a gang war. Instead, I made my way as directly as possible to Giorgio Berardino¡¯s private PC.

    I was in luck and it was already up and running, negating the possibility that somebody could come in and be surprised at the running computer.

    There I copied the e-mail archive and folders to the cluster and let it start decrypting them. I also copied any recording, Giorgio made on this machine. Finally, I wiped any traces that I was there and left carefully not disturbing the watchdogs.

    As soon as I had retreated back to my board I queried the cluster about the decrypting process, getting the expected answer that it would take between one and two hours in real-time.

    I thought about getting a good look at the other targets mentioned in the frame database but decided I would have to talk with Walker about it beforehand.

    There was no doubt in my mind that it was a false flag operation but who was behind it and what exactly they wanted to achieve I had absolutely no idea.

    I simply had nothing pointing to anybody and no idea how to get any hints. Well, not quite, I had one option left, but that would take a few hours to launch, and maybe what I already had was enough for the cluster to get at least the identity of the hacker, hopefully sparing me from using up a valuable favor.

    In real-time I was in cyberspace for not even 20 minutes, even if it seemed like half a day to me and the bots would need at least another half hour to finish installing the pylons, meaning I had time to kill, so I began the design for the auto-surgeon.

 17: Building a better Future

    Technically, began was not quite the right word, seeing that I had played with auto surgeon designs on and off over the last year. As a result, I had dozens of concepts already in my files. Some of them were actually quite advanced. Sadly nearly all of them predated me building a NADA and were obsolete before they were ever built for that reason alone. On the other hand, I would not have to start from scratch, and most important I had the bare bones of the software available. Sure, what I had I would have to adapt to the new platform but at least I wouldn¡¯t have to pour another 5 virtual years into it.

    That of course led to the most important question, where to start. It took only a short brainstorm for me to decide that I would start with the computer-architecture. Sure, I could use slightly adapted commercial components as I had with the cluster and Precious, but that would be a horrid waste.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, both the Tesseract VI I based the cluster on as well as the Cirrium k8 that beats inside Precious were state of the art. Created in the three-nanometer process that marked the endpoint of what is possible with lithography, they were the best one could get for their respective mission.

    But neither had Q-links integrated, and neither took the possibility of being constructed atom by atom into their design. In other words, both designs were essentially two-dimensional, badly cooled, clunky designs with snail-speed pipelines compared to what I could create. That, of course, did not mean that I would throw out the basic architecture completely. I viewed the processor design as akin to a building block system.

    The massive multi-parallel design of the Tesseract was optimized for supercomputers, and what I needed was more along with a few more versatile cores instead of the swarm of small, fast optimized number crunchers. With that decision made I started out with a Cirrium core.

    Immediately I replaced the pipelines with Q-links, separating the distinct elements of the core physically. Then I stacked them into the third dimension with cooling layers in between.

    I was debating if I should jump from 256 bit to 512 bit architecture, but decided that would cost more in adapting than it was worth.

    Still, I quadrupled the bandwidth of the data pipelines, followed by increasing the number of instruction pipelines to eight.

    Meanwhile, my simulation showed that in a 414 picometer architecture with integrated cooling layers my new processor would be able to run in excess of 40 gigahertz without getting over 40¡ãC.

    I looked at the results for a few minutes, trying to find words for them. In 250 years nobody had cracked the 10GHz barrier without massive liquid nitrogen cooling, and only liquid helium allowed even coming near 20GHz.

    Instead of the floating-point operators of the Cirrium, I adapted the basic Tesseract core into my design concept and replaced the 64 Cirrium operators with 512 Tesseract operators. That would give this new processor nearly 13% of the parallel processing capability of the server processor without sacrificing the versatility of the desktop processor. At a hunch, I added a dozen fuzzy logic cores to make the work of a possible VI more smoothly.

    When I came to the cache I was thinking hard.

    Level one cache is generally rather small to integrate it better into the processor, and such shortening the response time, but my Q-link took care of that.

    A side effect of that was that the data could be read and written exceptionally fast though.

    For more data level two and three caches were added. In the end, I decided to experiment and integrated all three levels of cache into one, 256 GB-sized module connected by another quadruple bandwidth Q-link. The result was, if my simulations were to be trusted, rather fast.

    This new core I had designed was somewhere between a thousand and two thousand times faster than the Cirrium core it was loosely based on.

    That came not without a price of course, as it was also five times bigger and used nearly twice the power. But honestly, that cost was insignificant compared to the jump in processing power.

    To make things easier with the conversion of the programs I had already written I combined the instruction sets of the Tesseract and the Cirrium lines.

    As usual, I combined 16 of my cores into a single processor that was light years ahead of anything available anywhere else. With a sad feeling, I knew then and there that I would have to replace Precious soon, and that the replacement of the cluster with something closer to my new base would have to wait until I had designed a similar substitution for the Tesseract.

    Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

    As the auto surgeon did not need any fancy graphics I took much less care with designing the GPU. Sure, I put the standard building blocks into the same 414pm process and connected the distinct operators and cores by Q-links while integrating the cooling layers, but I left the basic design as I found it. That netted me only roughly 300% performance improvement.

    When I called up the motherboard design my alert triggered. Apparently, I had spent nearly 25 hours on designing the processors, virtual of course, and the bots had finished with the pylons.

    It took me nearly two minutes to extricate from cyberspace. Theoretically, I should have been able to get out in an instant, but for reasons nobody could explain yet, it did not work that way. Whenever the surfacing was too fast it scrambled something in the Jack''s brain. We only knew two of the factors determining the time needed for a safe return to reality. One was loosely based on native intelligence of the Jack.

    Basically, the higher the IQ, the faster a surfacing the Jack could stand. While the first factor favored me, the second more than equalized any gain I had.

    The second identified factor was the compression. The higher the compression the longer it takes. An average intelligent Jack with a 25:1 compression would need around 20 seconds.

    At 30:1 it would have already increased to 45 seconds. All that real-time, unfortunately.

    At 57:1 I should need around twelve minutes to surface, but my Pure enhanced brain was better at resisting the scrambling than the average Mongrel brain.

    I came back into reality to Wallace still reading and the bots standing at attention waiting for new orders. Unplugging the OPB cable was way easier to accomplish left-handed than plugging it in, and I inspected the tank and the pylons, most of it from the wheelchair, but a few connections I had to stand to reach. The bruised hip would be painful for every normal human. For me, it was considerably worse.

    The average Pure felt pain between 20 and 30 percent stronger than the average Mongrel. Unfortunately, I was many things, but average was not one of them.

    My Delta was 133, with 24 being the average Pure. In other words, I felt anything around three times as strong as a normal human, including pain. And that was before Frankel had the brilliant idea to enhance me further.

    I did not know how much this asshole had increased my pain sensitivity but from what I felt I guessed that he at least doubled it. And thanks to the sanctimonious prick that was lead designer on the immune system upgrade they gifted us Pures with and his teetotaler agenda I could not even take most pain killers.

    For all purposes the only option I had was Epzitecan, and that had some unwanted side effects. It was, of course, addictive, and had the tendency to increase pain sensitivity with prolonged use.

    It interfered with the neural signals up to convulsions if given at a strong enough dosage.

    All that I could somewhat live with. An addiction can be overcome, the increased pain sensitivity would be of no concern over the time my hip ached and the, at the dosage I needed relative small decrease of dexterity was of no concern until I got my arm out of the cast.

    It was the last side effect that prohibited it for me now. It had the unfortunate tendency to impact cognitive capabilities. Essentially it made me feel as if I was swimming in jello. Dumb, slow, and anything but happy. Nothing I could allow for the time being. And unlike opiates, I would not even get a nice trip out of it. I could afford to take a dose when I was going to bed. That would only increase my sleeping time to six hours, maybe seven. But for now, I needed my brain working.

    Long story short I clenched my teeth and inspected the upper pylons.

    Naturally I found a few small problems there, as well as at the lower pylons. Nothing major, just a handful of a tad too loose connections, an insufficient vibration dampener, and one connection switched. Except for the connection, nothing of it would have prevented the NADA from working but would have made a few problems later on. Ordering the bots to correct the issues made short work out of it.

    The next step was installing the raw material storage. I had included the absolute minimum in my equipment when I escaped Seattle, so at least I could build the most basic parts. I would have to get, or build, additional containers for the more exotic materials. Thankfully this was a job the bots could do without supervision.

    After I sat back down I contemplated diving back into cyberspace, but I decided against it. I was frankly still pretty beat, and the pain in my arm and hip was getting way too distracting. Sure, in cyberspace I would not feel anything of it, but the price was that at least the hip would be considerably worse when I got out.

    Add in that I was still not quite over the concussion and the nearly six hours since I woke up in the clinic were nearing the limit I could do that day. I longed for a shower and some painkillers.

    Luckily nothing on my to-do list was that time-critical at this moment anymore. Until the cluster cracked Giorgio¡¯s files and completed an in-depth comparison with the probable frame-up, a process that would, depending on the quality of the encryption and the quantity of files, take the whole night or even longer, I could do nothing on that front.

    The installation of the material storage would take a couple of days, give or take a few hours, none of the Pulse III would arrive before the next day, and it was irrelevant if I finished the design for the auto-surgeon now or in a week.

    After another less than satisfying meal, I skipped the shower as I did not think I would be thankful for standing even that short. Instead, I took my medication. It took not long before I felt my thoughts grinding to a near stop in the Epzitecan created molasses that became my mind, but at the same time, the pain lessened to a degree that made it possible for me to sleep.

 18: And the universe designs a better Idiot

    The next day began relatively easy. The second guard, who I assumed was Justin O¡¯Donnell was on duty at the moment and greeted me when I left my room. A quick consultation of my status convinced me to use the wheelchair for another day, but gladly my hip was healing rapidly.

    Breakfast was unfortunately the same old, bland tasteless refuse everyone had. While I grew up on that garbage I should be used to it, but one of the few luxuries I allowed myself when I began to earn real money was real food. Most other indulgences wouldn¡¯t let me stay under the radar.

    So I remained in my crappy one-room efficiency, used public transport, kept my state-provided entertainment system, with modified feedback mechanism of course and not that I used it, going into cyberspace and using the cluster instead, and wore mostly standard sponsored clothing.

    I did enough official work for a slightly lazy queen, which provided my official income, while my real work was done via the jack at more than eight times the speed, later nearly 15 times. That all kept me off the government watch lists but led to me becoming somewhat obsessed with the taste of my food.

    Real food had become very expensive since the great war, as while the algae tanks provided nourishment and oxygen, the best we could do was eliminate the taste, instead of keeping the taste it had.

    From what I heard the first iterations were so bad that some people choose to starve to death instead of eating the algae products. It was astonishing that bland was actually better. The algae we used were, out of necessity, optimized for oxygen production, and in the last days of the war, every other line of algae was lost.

    Unfortunately, these optimized algae made the meat absolutely unpalatable. That was of course not so bad concerning us humans and anything that wanted to snack on us, but a disaster with meat animals. Beef, pork, fowl, you name it, and it¡¯s inedible.

    Considering that over 90% of the agrarian space of the world was destroyed, real vegetables and meat became virtually unaffordable overnight.

    Not to mention where our protein came from. As far as I knew, it was not common knowledge, and that was one piece of information I would love not to have.

    Spices too were an absolute luxury, as nearly all spices were plant-based. Sure, salt was still available, but everything else?

    The first time I had real food was an epiphany. I spend several virtual months learning cooking, and fortunately, that translated into the real world. In the end, I spend nearly ten thousand credits a month on food, an incredible sum considering that my official before tax income fluctuated between 2500 and 3000 credits. One of the things I regretted the most about the way I had to vanish was that I was unable to pack my spices and ingredients.

    Well, the good thing about the move was that I now had no reason to hide my affluence anymore, and with time I would be able to recreate my kitchen. So I fought another tasteless sandwich down, slightly bemused at the way the others seemed to like this¡­ stuff.

    With me on the table were the two male former slaves. One of them was of what was politely called mixed ancestry. African and Native American roots were discernible, the rest was not. The other was of pure Caucasian stock. What surprised me was the glaring disdain in the way both of them looked at me.

    After a few minutes of their silent glower, I sighed and looked directly at them.

    ¡°I don¡¯t think we have been introduced yet. I am Veronica Sinclair, and you are?¡±

    They continued staring at me for a bit before they looked at each other, as synchronized. When they turned their attention back to me, the Caucasian sneered at me before answering:

    ¡°We know who you are. This is Riley and I am Quirk.¡± I had to fight down a sigh for the sheer venom he managed to invoke with the first sentence, even if his, well let¡¯s generously call it accent, was barely understandable.

    ¡°I would love to say nice to meet you, but it seems that you are somewhat unhappy.¡± I thought I managed pretty well to keep my rising annoyance out of my voice.

    ¡°So how about we shorten the drama and you come out with what irks you?¡±

    Riley¡¯s expression could be called a smile, with much imagination and benefit of the doubt at least. What it definitely wasn¡¯t was friendly, and his voice was quite cold.

    ¡°We don¡¯t want another boss. And for certain not a bitch. And a Pure bitch at that.¡±

    It took me a moment to parse what he had said, and I can only approximate the exact wording as his accent was hard to understand, but in the end, it was the same old. I shrugged my shoulders.

    ¡°Well, in that case, you are free to leave anytime. Nobody forces you to take the job.¡±

    Of course, I did not have any high hopes that this would be the end of it, but I had to try.

    Quirk¡¯s smile was not an iota better than Riley¡¯s when he spoke again.

    ¡°You don¡¯t understand bitch. We are not leaving, we are taking over.¡±

    The situation was escalating rapidly, so I elevated the defense condition from save to danger likely, in combination with reducing Quirk and Riley from protected to guest/ danger likely.

    ¡°I assume you two were informed about the distribution of income in the group or about the fact that I simply gifted each of you with $2.5 million? If that is the case you should also know that the building here is part of my share. Adding in that I am the only one here that has actually a pretty good chance to get a viable business up and running I don¡¯t see how you could take over in any way.¡±

    I made no attempt to disguise the contempt when I said that. Again it was Quirk who answered.

    ¡°You don¡¯t get it. We simply take over. Cry me a river, but this is now our house and our operation.¡± He gave me a burst of malignant laughter.

    ¡°But don¡¯t fear, if you are a good girl we keep you here and let you work for us.¡±

    His grin would probably have been better without his desolate teeth but it managed to convey his smug joy anyway. I on the other hand began a beginning migraine. This time I failed to suppress a sigh.

    ¡°Your planning capacity is apparently severely limited, otherwise you wouldn¡¯t have overlooked the quite obvious flaws in your plan.¡± I saw that neither of the two idiots noticed the security bot entering behind them.

    ¡°First, regardless of what you may think about my physical prowess, and I admit that you are probably right in this, I nonetheless managed to overcome and capture Frankel and his slavers more or less on my own. Compared to them you two are relatively small fry in comparison.¡±

    I send the android to bring me a mug of coffee. Synthetic like the rest of the junk, but it had at least a bit of flavor.

    ¡°Second, along with you, I freed all the others in this building except Mr. O¡¯Donnell and Mr. Wallace. Unlike you two though, they seem to be at least marginally thankful for that, not to mention for me gifting everybody of them $2.5 million. It stands to reason that they would more likely support my claim over yours. Kate alone would more than reverse your physical superiority.¡±

    The android gave me the mug and I took a sip.

    ¡°Third, one of the first things I did when I took over here was getting some bots, that are programmed to follow my orders, and while they are as a rule not among the best in martial arts, they are strong as mountains. Once one of them gets hold of you, you won¡¯t get free again until I say so.¡±

    Another sip, then I placed the mug on the table.

    ¡°Fourth, I don¡¯t know if you noticed but there are two newcomers among us. Well, three, but I don¡¯t know if Mia sleeps here as well, so I let her out. But the two new men, I think I already mentioned them, Mr. O¡¯Donnell and Mr. Wallace, were, as far as I understand, send here to keep me alive and kicking for the next six weeks. From the look of it, unlike you they are professionals and I would guess each of them would be more than enough to protect me from you.¡±

    I moved my left index finger along the rim of the mug.

    ¡°Finally, should you somehow manage to overcome these odds, you would certainly not enjoy your victory for long. The aforementioned boss of Mr. O¡¯Donnell and Mr. Wallace is none other than Mr. Benjamin Walker, the territorial patron of this part of the city. Considering that I am his only chance to survive longer than two months I would assume that, if I am alive after your little coup, he would be rather invested in freeing me, and if not, punishing the idiots that more or less killed him. I would estimate your chance of survival should you stay here as somewhere between nonexistent and negligible.¡±

    I placed my hand beside the mug.

    ¡°I hope you understand that the offer for a job with room and board already is off the table for you. If you ask my opinion you have exactly four possible outcomes here.

    You can go peacefully, with your accounts of 2.5 million each.

    You can go struggling and depending on the amount of resistance you show you lose at least the money, and possibly more, up to including your clothes.

    You can try your harebrained scheme, and survive, in which case you find yourself in a cage with a brand new slavery collar around your neck.

    You can try your idiotic plan and make enough trouble that you are killed.¡±

    During my little speech, they both visibly paled, but at the same time, it was clear to see that they would not choose the first option.

    It was sad, but they did not strike me as the intelligent type of person. Their position in Frankel¡¯s operation was wholly-owned to their raw strength.

    At nearly the same time both of them let their right hand fall under the table, presumably, to get to some weapons they strapped onto their hips.

    Simultaneously the defense system lowered the weapons emplaced into the ceiling of the room, O¡¯Donnell raised an impressive hand cannon and the security bot gave a warning whine while it pointed an E-Laser at each of them.

    The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

    The idiots now showed first signs of intelligence, by slowly lifting their hands up.

    My head began to pulse with pain, and I massaged my temples, hoping to alleviate the oncoming curse.

    ¡°So you choose to not take the money with you. Now you have only to decide if you go at all and what you take with you if you go.¡±

    That, of course, was the moment that Darren and Mark entered the mess and saw the mess. Quirk proved that while he lacked in planning capacity and basic intelligence, he was at least fast on the uptake.

    ¡°Hey, help us. This crazy bitch has totally madded up on us. Wants to kill us no reason.¡±

    Mark¡¯s hand fell onto his gun, but Darren gripped his arm shaking his head while speaking softly:

    ¡°Let¡¯s listen first. Each story has at least two sides.¡± I knew I liked him. I forced a smile at him.

    ¡°Thank you.¡± Then I turned back to the two former, and as it seemed, future slaves.

    ¡°And congratulation, you¡¯ve nearly thrown away option two already. If you stop making a fuss I let you keep your clothes. But¡± I let my voice become cold and menacing ¡°this is your last chance to escape the collar or the coffin. Think hard and careful before you make your next decision.¡±

    I waved Darren and Mark to sit down.

    ¡°Just to clarify the situation, these two nitwits were somewhat unhappy to have a, what did you call it? Right, a bitch as boss, especially a Pure bitch. So in all their cleverness, they had the excellent idea of taking over the operation here.¡±

    I took a deep breath trying to force down the headache, still rubbing my temples.

    ¡°In their boundless benevolence, they declared that if I was a good girl they would allow me to use my equipment in my house in their service. After I explained the hurdles for their ingenious plan I made a counteroffer. You came in after the first phase of negotiation.¡±

    Mark seemed a bit confused, but Darren nodded.

    ¡°Let me guess, they waived the option to simply go away peacefully?¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Yes, and they are in the process of rejecting going away at all.¡±

    Unfortunately, Mark had to give his opinion as well. ¡°Why do they have to go at all? It is below freezing outside.¡±

    That was too much at this moment, and I snapped back at him.

    ¡°Because regardless of the weather I don¡¯t see a reason to share my house and my food with pricks that have proven beyond any doubt that I can¡¯t trust them, and I see quite a few reasons to not share with backstabbing idiots who probably see it as a marvelous idea to kill me in my sleep.

    If you want to do that, take your 2.5 million and search for a house where you can offer them a place.¡±

    There was a shocked silence. I knew I had gone too far, but Mark was going under my skin.

    I closed my eyes and slowly counted to ten in my head, trying to get my temper under control again.

    Then I looked at Mark.

    ¡°I am sorry, I shouldn¡¯t have said that but honestly, my head is killing me thanks to these imbeciles, and if they had just accepted that their plan was a dud from the start they would leave here with 2.5 million bucks each and as much equipment as they could carry.

    But they are too dumb to see a losing hand and kept going. While I try to do the right thing I simply can¡¯t be seen as weak. At the same time, I¡¯ve had it with jerks trying to take advantage of me.¡±

    It took way too much out of me to speak calmly, but somehow I managed it. All the people in the room including the security bot began to develop halos and I knew that I would soon be visited by the curse of the high gammas.

    I hastily ramped up my audial- and visual filters and the room began to dim. Of course, I knew that this was not enough but at this moment it was the best I could do. I almost missed the notification that my nanites began to record the onslaught.

    Maybe, with quite a bit of luck, I would finally get data on what exactly caused this pain.

    I looked again at Quirk and Riley.

    ¡°Now what is your decision?¡± Quirk¡¯s face contorted to a sneer, but Riley was faster.

    ¡°We go, we go! You have won.¡± Quirk looked at him and then grimaced while nodding. ¡°Yeah, what he said.¡±

    At this time I was just thankful that the whole spectacle was over.

    ¡°Good decision. And because I try to be a nice person, I let you keep your weapons, if you keep your hands off them while in my house.

    Mark, could I bother you to lead them out, please? The bot will keep them honest.¡±

    I closed my eyes again and lowered my head onto my hand. I knew that I would get nothing done today. Then I felt somebody touching my shoulder, and I heard Darren talk.

    ¡°You don¡¯t look good. Is there something you can do?¡±

    I forced myself to look at him and immediately increased my visual filters again when the light send spikes of molten steel into my brain.

    ¡°Not much. I will return to bed in a few minutes.¡±

    He looked at me inquiring before he asked softly.

    ¡°I assume a painkiller won¡¯t do much?¡±

    Despite the pain, I had to smile. ¡°No, small fry like Aspirin is a drop in the bucket, and of the stronger stuff only Epzitecan works on Pures, and that stuff has too many side effects to use on headache.¡±

    ¡°There is something I could try. I can¡¯t promise it will help, but maybe it will.¡±

    I looked him in the eyes and saw only compassion and honesty. Not that I was especially good at reading people. I forced another smile.

    ¡°It can¡¯t make it worse. Please, if anything can help, try it.¡±

    He nodded and brought his palms to my temples. ¡°Close your eyes, that will make it easier.¡±

    I did so, slightly confused, and moments later a warm feeling radiated from his hands into my skull. At first, that was all, but then the pain began to retreat, faster and faster, from exploding skull to a dull roar, to a pulsing headache, and finally to what I considered normal.

    Surprisingly it did not stop there, but a basic level of pain I did not even register any longer receded, and a tension I barely noticed all over my body left me. Even my hip and my arm stopped aching.

    My eyes sprung open, and I saw Darren swaying, before he fell down back on his chair, visibly exhausted.

    Fragmented thoughts run through my head, none of them clear enough to register, and I struggled for words. I couldn¡¯t understand what had just happened.

    Finally, I managed to get a few words out:

    ¡°What, what did you do?¡±

    He smiled weakly.

    ¡°One of the psionic abilities I have is biokinetics. Basically, I can manipulate biological processes and structures. Encourage wounds to heal, take away the pain, let body parts or plants grow or shrink, even let hair grow, or remove it permanently.¡±

    He wiped his brow and I now noticed the sheen of sweat on it.

    ¡°I have to confess I am not very good at it. But normally pain does not take so much out of me, though. What you had was¡­ bad. No idea how you were even conscious. ¡°

    Meanwhile, I had somewhat regained my balance.

    ¡°I had no notion that Psionics could influence biological processes. I honestly assumed it was something like telekinesis and telepathy.¡±

    I had already decided that I would look quite a bit deeper into Psionics. This subset of humanity was relatively unknown in the NWC. It was assumed that it was an accidental mutation coming from a freak combination of bio-weapons of the war.

    That theory was supported by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Psionics came from either the Midwest of the old US of A or Central Europe, where the same bio-weapons were used.

    Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, depending on your perspective, one of the things the Nephilim virus did manage to do right was the upgraded immune system. Whatever combination of viri created the Psionics had no effect on our people, resulting in there not being any Pure Psionics.

    That in turn lead to the NWC never researching psionic abilities beyond a ¡®yes, they exist, but how, no idea¡¯ level, and according to my, admittedly limited research no other nation had done so either.

    Darren looked rather bad though, and I felt a bit of guilt seeing him so beat.

    ¡°Well, thank you from the depth of my heart. You have no idea what you have done for me. You don¡¯t look so good though. Anything I can do for you?¡±

    Again a weak smile played over his face.

    ¡°No, it¡¯s all right. I have just overdone it a bit. Nothing coffee and a bit of rest won¡¯t fix. But honestly, you should look into your headache. Part of it was just tension and stress, and it would help you to relax now and then.

    Use the whirlpool, swim a few rounds, relax in the sauna, whatever. Just relax. The other thing¡­ I have no clue what it was, but it was the worst pain I ever encountered.¡±

    Now it was my turn to smile weakly.

    ¡°Oh, I know what it was, even if no one knows how exactly comes to pass. Do you remember that I talked about how the enhancements we Pures have bring with them some negatives? Well, that headache was what is called the gamma curse.¡±

    He nodded at that, while the android placed a mug of coffee in front of him.

    ¡°And you don¡¯t know what exactly does that?¡±

    ¡°Partially. We know that it is a runaway feedback loop of brain chemistry. We can even pinpoint exactly what neurotransmitters get out of whack. What we can¡¯t do is explain what starts the loop and how it actually happens.

    Every trial to recreate the loop failed so far. We simply can¡¯t start the feedback mechanism even if we recreate the complete brain chemistry during the loop, it simply does not start the feedback.

    We are equally unable to stop it, even if we more or less force the neurotransmitters to normalize, the loop still forms and unless the overriding medication is kept active it only delays the headache.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Well, hopefully, my implants recorded this attack, and I will be a bit wiser. It was my first encounter with the curse since I had the last upgrade.¡±

    After his first few sips of coffee, he looked much better.

    ¡°Can¡¯t you build some implant? You know, something that regulates the pain center?¡±

    I had to laugh at that.

    ¡°That is in the theory a good idea, but sadly defeated by the fact that the pain center is a myth. There is no single region in the brain that experiences the pain.

    Every sensory cortex can experience overstimulation, which expresses itself as pain.

    Theoretically, it should be possible to reduce the number of undecapeptides and glutamates in the brain, which in turn should reduce the experienced pain, but as I already said, it does not work with the curse. Unless somebody finds whatever starts the feedback loop we Pures are simply out of luck.¡±

    With a morose shrug, I finished off my coffee, and then shoved the wheelchair back.

    ¡°Well, you have no idea what you have done for me, but believe me, I owe you one. And I will try to follow your advice about relaxing. Swimming is out at the moment obviously, but¡­ wait a minute, did you say we have a whirlpool?¡±

    I immediately opened the building management and lo and behold, there were indeed not one but three whirlpools.

    Two relative small ones in the top suites in the north wing, for six, or maybe eight people, depending on the body size of course, and a big one for twenty or even more people besides the sauna? Adjacent to the gym? How the hell did I miss the gym? Oh, of course, the whole area was somewhat run down. It was marked as a gym in the building plans but I automatically placed them as a junk room.

    ¡°Wow. You are wrong. There is not one Whirlpool, there are three. Have you looked at the big one? Is it usable?¡±

    He chuckled a bit. ¡°Three huh? Interesting. The big one is sadly trashed, but I think we can fix it relatively fast. Unlike the pool. That one is as far as I can tell wrecked. Needs to be rebuilt, if not replaced. The Gym is full of junk, and I have no idea what equipment is there, much less what is usable.¡±

    Involuntary I shook my head. Such a nice building and these Idiots had left it to rot.

    ¡°I fear neither the gym nor the pool is a high priority just now. Depending on how bad the whirlpool is, you can bring it back to life if you think you can do it fast. ¡°

    He nodded at that.

    ¡°Otherwise I have tasked the bots to remove the trash. The priority here is the workshop beside the garage. I have bought an industrial fabber, and that is the best place for it.

    By the way, if one of you wants to use it when it¡¯s up and running be my guests. I will need it for a few projects, but I am sure we can come to an agreement.

    Material you have to provide yourself though. Also, I bought 4 new fusactors and a new water purifier. These should come today or tomorrow.

    More than enough to feed the new fabber. I marked where the two additional fusactors should be placed. The people who install them are already hired to remove the two potential bombs in our basement.

    If they come I try to work with them myself, but that looks not very promising. Too much to do, not enough time.¡±

    He frowned a bit.

    ¡°Another fabber? I thought the one we have is quite good.¡±

    ¡°Fabber is a catchall. It goes from simple 3D printers and material extruders up to small but universal industrial plants. What we have is a pretty good household fabber with a small chip builder and electronics maker and an older but rather decent autotailor with an excellent for its age fabrics extruder.

    It can make clothes, small throw-away electronics like credleds, low-level coms, tablets, and so on, and smaller tools, as long as they don¡¯t need to be too hard like knives. But for example, encrypted coms, serious computing hardware, weapons and so on are beyond it.¡±

    I took the last of the coffee.

    ¡°What I now bought is a top-of-the-line industrial fabber. That means it has a molecular foundry to refine materials and create alloys, a complete and comprehensive electronics fabricator that with the right materials can build anything up to a supercomputer, a complete automated workshop to form the created materials into any desired form, and a few other goodies.

    It can build, in small numbers, of course, practically everything and anything. Weapons, munitions, armor, vehicles, you name it, it can deliver it. Not as efficient as a full industrial plant specialized in the product, but for the small series or unique designs like tailored cyberware the very best option.¡±

    Darren nodded at that.

    ¡°I understand. At least Mark will be happy.¡±

    ¡°Why that?¡±

    ¡°Mark is our go-to guy for weapons. He constantly badgers us for this new gimmick or that toy. Now he can make them himself.¡±

    ¡°If you think so. I have no idea about that so don¡¯t ask me. Just make it clear to him that anything that can be as well bought mass-produced is usually equally good and a good way cheaper out there. I have work to do. See you later.¡±

    With that parting shot, I ordered the android to wheel me out.

 19: Hate the traitor

    I had now to decide what to do today. Sure, the first thing to do was to inspect the work on the NADA, which should be finished. But until the resources arrived I could not do much with it yet.

    It would not help that over the next few days the new fusactors would be installed. Don¡¯t get me wrong, naturally I integrated a separate UPS into the system that should be able to power it through the power fluctuations, but I was not all too happy about using it for the very first time under complicated circumstances, but when I wanted the auto-surgeon up and running there was not much I could do.

    I was less sure about what to do after that though. I had the comparison to control, and if my suspicion was right quite a few combat dives to do, but equally important was it to start Mia on disassembling the Pulse III that should begin coming in today. Then I had to finish the design of the auto-surgeon even though it could wait another day or two. And of course, I wanted to supervise the installation of the fusactors and the fabber.  Sadly it seemed that I had to trust the others for that.

    I pulled up my checklist to make an update.

    <ol>

    <li>Benefactor: Mr. Walker fulfilled the role quite handily. Provided I could keep him alive of course.

    <ul>

    <li>Biosheath a functioning cyberheart.

    <ul>

    <li>Have Mia successfully disassemble the hearts to get at least one functional example.</li>

    <li>After running the parts through the bioreactor reassemble the heart.</li>

    </ul>

    </li>

    <li>Build and/or buy the necessary tools to implant the cyberheart.

    <ul>

    <li>Finnish the design for the auto-surgeon.</li>

    <li>Build the auto-surgeon.</li>

    <li>Buy a scanner.</li>

    <li>Buy at least 3 biobeds.</li>

    </ul>

    </li>

    <li>Implant the cyberheart.</li>

    </ul>

    </li>

    <li>Lodgings: The fortress here needed a bit of polish but was better than anything I had expected.</li>

    <li>Contacts: I made a good start but I had quite a way to go here.</li>

    <li>Workplace: As with point 2, the fortress was tailor-made for my needs.</li>

    <li>Reputation: Again, a good start but a long way to go.

    <ul>

    <li>Find out who is behind the murder complot.

    <ul>

    <li>Examine the result of the comparison of the presumably frame up to the real Giorgio Berardino.</li>

    <li>Advise Mr. Walker of the result.</li>

    <li>Depending on the reaction investigate the other potential victims of the attack, as I did not believe that it stopped with Mr. Walker, especially as other crime lords were mentioned in the presumably faked orders.</li>

    </ul>

    </li>

    <li>Replace the rest of Mr. Walker''s cyberware with biosheated versions.

    <ul>

    <li>Build a full-sized bioreactor.</li>

    <li>Work with Mr. Walker to design his cyberware.</li>

    </ul>

    </li>

    <li>Help the rest of Mr. Walker''s people afflicted with CRS.</li>

    <li>Establish myself as a broker for Spectre again.</li>

    <li>Offer my CRS-free cyberware in the Darkweb.</li>

    </ul>

    </li>

    <li>Build up the fortress as much as possible.

    <ul>

    <li>Replace the fusactors (in progress).</li>

    <li>Replace the algae tank (in progress).</li>

    <li>Install an industrial fabber (in progress).</li>

    <li>Renew the diamond coating.</li>

    <li>Remove the junk (in progress).</li>

    <li>Repair the furniture.</li>

    <li>Replace the obsolete computer systems and upgrade the computer security.</li>

    <li>Update the defense system.</li>

    </ul>

    </li>

    <li>Deal with the new slaves a.k.a. former slavers

    <ul>

    <li>Sell the majority of them to the highest bidder</li>

    <li>Offer the tech-head to Mr. Walker.</li>

    <li>Play with Frankel, give him a dose of his own medicine, before selling him.</li>

    </ul>

    </li>

    <li>Solve the conundrum with Yokata Sayomi.</li>

    </ol>

    For a moment I was a bit put off seeing the sheer number of things to do. But in the end, there was nothing really new. Well, except points 7 and 8. Everything else would have had to happen either way. Unfortunately, the list failed to make my choice easier.

    Finally, I decided to prepare the disassembly guide for the Pulse III including AR help.

    Unfortunately, my fabber here was insufficient to make diadems, and even using the industrial fabber would be way too expensive for that.

    So I ordered a dozen of the things, while I loaded a cheap smart glasses template. I then queried the security system about Mia¡¯s whereabouts.

    To my disappointment she was not in the building, necessitating a call. Just in time for the first delivery of the day.

    Two of the Pulse III came at the same time. While I moved into the lab and placed the hearts on the table, I had one of the bots deliver the smart glasses and synced them with the main computer, loading the disassembly guide. I followed that by hunting for the necessary tools for disassembly. When I returned with the tools I found Mia at the table examining the cyberhearts.

    ¡°Hey. Good that you are here. The glasses on the table are for you. They have the step-by-step guide already on them. And here are the tools.¡±

    I had myself wheeled beside her.

    ¡°Now I have ordered several Pulse III, in case you damage a part during disassembling, but I won¡¯t be disappointed if you don¡¯t use them all.¡±

    She laid the heart she examined back onto the table.

    ¡°Well, it can¡¯t be too hard. Let¡¯s begin with it.¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t underestimate the difficulty. A few of the parts are quite finicky and are not designed to be taken apart. So please be careful.¡±

    Her expression became serious. ¡°Ok, I get it. So, where do I begin?¡±

    ¡°By using the glasses. The guide is fully AR. Give it a moment to inspect the tools and then follow the instructions.

    And despite what I said, don¡¯t despair if you ruin a part or two. I would have ordered at least three parts if I had to do the disassembly myself.

    It would be a miracle if you make it through without breaking something. Just don¡¯t break the same part on all the hearts. That would be fatal.¡±

    ¡°Three? You have just two here. How should I make it with just two if you would need three?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°You got that wrong. First, in all likelihood, I would get it done without breaking anything. At least I have done it already without failure.

    The other two would be insurance. But more importantly, the two before you are only the first of five that I ordered. Hopefully, five will be enough, otherwise, it becomes a bit harder to get replacements. I cleaned out the readily available stock.¡±

    After that I watched her as she first unsealed the casing, using the sonic cutter to dissolve the glue holding it together. Her hands were relatively steady, and so far everything went fine.

    That was the easy part though. I activated the magnification of my eyes to follow her next steps. She successfully disconnected the synthetic cardiac plexus from the vagus connector, followed by unclipping the connector completely.

    That netted us the first critical part intact. Sadly, that was where our luck left us. When she unclipped the plexus from the right atrium control link she slipped and trashed the link and nicked one of the papillary muscles, ruining it.

    ¡°Damn. That is really harder than it looks. This stuff is really slippery.¡± She began to put the heart aside, but I stopped her.

    ¡°Keep going. Every functional part of this heart you can get out intact helps us. And so far you only damaged a control link and one artificial muscle. If that is all you do then you can celebrate.¡±

    She looked at me for a few moments before she nodded and continued. In the end, she lost 3 muscles, one control node, and damaged the left ventricle during the two hours of disassembly of the first heart.

    ¡°Take a break. Clear your head and eat something. You are doing fine. You got 80% of the parts out in working order. That is pretty impressive.¡±

    She looked at me with some exhaustion before agreeing. I then had myself wheeled back from the table.

    ¡°I think you can do the next heart alone. Just take your time. Better to take a few hours longer than to ruin everything and having to procure another heart running against the clock. I have other things that need my attention.¡±

    Silently I ordered a bot to bring the tray with the parts to the corner where I had placed the bioreactor and another with the DNA of Walker to my nano fab while moving there myself.

    It was relatively simple to create a batch of the filter nanites, so it took nearly no time until I began the process of sheathing the parts. Unfortunately, the bioreactor was relatively small, experimental design that it was, and so I would have to sheath the parts separately.

    That I had to create the biosheathing by brute force with nanites did not help either. Each sheathing process would take nearly 12 hours. Not really so much, but the size of the reactor dictated more than 80 parts, so the total time was a bit less than 6 weeks.

    Fortunately, this was an easy to automate process. I simply ordered one of the androids to switch the parts in the reactor, add the appropriate amount of nanobots, and run the program for the new part. Then I initiated the reactor with Walker''s DNA, loaded the sheathing program for the Pulse III, glad that I already had tested the reactor on this model and did not need to create a new program, and pressed start.

    When I turned back to the table and found that Mia was still sitting there.

    ¡°Oh, I nearly forgot, when you have the remaining parts place them simply on the tray. The Android will do the rest.

    If you have any questions about this come to me. I may be diving into the matrix. If that is the case send me a message and I come to you as soon as I can.

    If you have questions about the course load I have given you, we can speak about it daily. I have ordered a few diadems, and you can use one for this if you want.¡±

    Again she nodded, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath.

    ¡°Ok. I just hope this becomes a bit easier. I wouldn¡¯t have believed you if you told me that it is so straining.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, it gets easier. For one, a large part of the strain is the unfamiliar work. When you do this more often it becomes routine and you don¡¯t have to concentrate that hard. Another part is that you only have smart glasses. With implants in your eyes, you can use magnification and work much easier. And unlike me, you can increase your dexterity and hand-eye coordination with cybernetic hands. That will make it much easier to do the delicate work.

    And lastly, as soon as I finished the actual production bioreactor the parts don¡¯t need to be quite this small. If the reactor was big enough we could do a Pulse III in three parts. Not to mention many other implants. If we were not in such time constraints you would not have to do this.¡±

    With a small salute, I left the room, to move to the NADA. As soon as the doors opened I realized the pretty good sound isolation of the lab. The whole building reverberated with heavy building sounds. Apparently, some of the ordered heavy technology was being installed.

    Following the cacophony, I quickly found myself in the door to the shop beside the garage, where some workers were installing several heavy machines. At first glance, I could identify the carbon extruder, the wiring unit and what the men were just now working on was seemingly the chip fabricator.

    What I couldn¡¯t see was the most important part, the molecular foundry. It alone was nearly worth the cost of the whole fabber.

    Sure, it would only provide one or two tons of material per day, compared to the output of a proper industrial foundry of several thousand tons, but it would enable us to recycle whatever we threw in there and get materials exactly as we needed them.

    It would not make us fully independent of external resources but we could buy relatively simple materials and do the rest ourselves. It had of course a horrendous energy cost, but our new fusactors would have no trouble feeding it.

    I haven¡¯t been in the garage for more than a couple of minutes when one of the workers came toward me.

    The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

    ¡°Hey little missy, that is no place for kids here. You should keep away until we are finished.¡±

    It took me a moment to parse his sentence and realize that he meant it well, but that did hardly lessen the anger I felt rising up. I took some deep breaths nonetheless, trying to remain calm before I answered.

    ¡°Contrary to what it may look like, I am not a kid, I am aware of the intrinsic dangers of an active construction site in general and one with heavy high-tech machinery like the one found here in particular, and most importantly, I am your customer.

    So please remain courteous. I won¡¯t enter the building area and I won¡¯t be in the way, but considering that I just paid more than 12 megabucks for this installation I think it is understandable that I am a bit curious.¡±

    He opened his mouth only to quickly close it all the while looking somewhat baffled. Then he turned around to the rest of the workers and loudly called:

    ¡°Boss, I think that is more of your problem than mine.¡± Another of the workers, apparently the foreman came to us.

    ¡°What is the problem? You only have to shoo the kid away. Can¡¯t be that hard.¡±

    ¡°The problem is that I am no kid, but instead I am your customer.

    Also, I don¡¯t need any shooing as I don¡¯t intend to come any closer. I was just observing your installation of my new industrial fabber.

    Did anybody give you the layout or did you plan it yourself? And why were you not announced? I expected you tomorrow at the soonest so I haven¡¯t prepared the plan yet.¡±

    His face took a distinctively unpleasant expression. ¡°Well, Missy, if you don¡¯t want to have these things then say so and we pack up and leave.¡±

    It seemed to be the day of deep breaths for me, and I silently counted to ten.

    ¡°Why are you so belligerent? You are not the one who is constantly called a child.

    And my question was why nobody asked me how I want the machines arranged, considering that I am the person who bought them and will be the primary user.

    I don¡¯t want to rearrange everything just because you were too stubborn to ask the customer about her preferences.¡±

    ¡°Listen, girly, I know what I am doing. This is not my first tango. I looked at the room and planned the layout. So are you finished and we can continue or will you waste our time even longer?¡±

    I lifted an eyebrow.

    ¡°I think I will waste our time even longer. Please show me your layout so that I can either correct or accept it.¡±

    ¡°God damn, I don¡¯t have time for that shit. Listen, kid, I know what I¡¯m doing, and that daddy gave you his credit card to buy this stuff does not make you knowledgeable about it.

    I have done stuff like this for a couple of dozen years, and no snot-nosed little girl will tell me what to do.

    So you want to play industrialist and somehow managed to get daddy to spring for a few million dollars, so what? I have a job to do and you are wasting my time. So go, play with your dolls or whatever but get out of my hair.¡±

    ¡°Considering that I pay you several million dollars you should probably be a bit more courteous, don¡¯t you think? For your information despite my looks I know what I am doing, I know what I need and I am capable to decide for myself how I want to have my machinery arranged.

    So would you kindly show your plans to the fully qualified nano engineer or do I have to call your superior?¡±

    He grumbled a bit, but then took his tablet in his hands, tapping a bit on it. ¡°All right, but don¡¯t blame me if we are late.¡±

    With that, he gave the tablet to me. I took a minute to study the plans, noting that they were mostly adequate, but two problems were apparent quickly.

    ¡°Generally not a bad layout, but switch the chip fabber and the CNC.

    I will use this fabber primarily to build tailored cybernetics, and will mostly use carbon for the skeleton parts, so the chips are of a much higher priority for me.

    And second, I can¡¯t see the molecular forge on these plans.  Is there a problem with that?¡±

    ¡°Molecular forge? You haven¡¯t ordered the packet with the forge. And ok, the switch is done easily.¡±

    I raised my right eyebrow. ¡°What do you mean no forge? I am pretty certain that I ordered the forge too.¡±

    He took the tablet back, tapped a few more times, and gave it back to me.

    ¡°See! No forge here.¡± Indeed he had given me the order list, and the absence of the forge was obvious, as was the price for the whole fabber. The total cost was given as roughly $5.5 million.

    ¡°There seems to be a bit of a miscommunication here. I ordered the fabber including the forge for a bit over $12 million. Somewhere in the process that must have been lost. Can you add a forge to the order? I will of course pay, but I think I will do it directly instead of using a middle man for that.¡±

    Of course, I was sure I ordered the forge too. And had paid for it.

    But I did not order it directly from the vendor.

    It seemed as if somebody decided to abscond with a good chunk of my money. Not that this would discomfort me.

    Much.

    I had more than enough funds to buy 100 fabbers if need be, but I hated it that somebody stole from me.

    The foreman took off his helmet and rubbed his hand over his hair.

    ¡°Hm, I have to ask for that. I will tell you after I called the home office. That will take a minute or two.¡±

    He moved a bit away, pulled an honest to god smartphone out of his pocket, and began talking into it. Wow, talk about old school here.

    These things were obsolete since shortly after the second civil war when wearables gained more and more ground. Well, everybody has his own quirks. During my silent musing, he finished the conversation and came back to me.

    ¡°All right, we can add a forge. It will cost you $8137312 including taxes. Is that acceptable?¡±

    Ouch, an increase of 32 percent over the $6122507 that I originally bought the forge for. But beggars can¡¯t be choosers. The forge was actually the only part of the whole fabber that I intended to use regularly so I had to have one.

    ¡°Yes, that is acceptable. Can I inquire about the price increase?¡±

    ¡°Sure. The other price was a set price for a special customer. You have bought the rest of the fabber as a set via a special customer. If you had bought the complete set by yourself you would have to pay a bit over $13 million, but now the forge is a separate order and that takes the full price.¡±

    Of course, I was not happy about that, but I had no other choice.

    ¡°All right, then please include the forge into the plan and give me your account numbers so I can pay. And I would prefer the forge in a position where I can easily use it. It is one of the more important pieces for me. Thank you.¡±

    He tapped a bit on his phone and an NFC request scrawled over my HUD. Upon my acceptance, I received the invoice with the account information and my order number. It took me only seconds to authorize the payment.

    ¡°Done. You should have the confirmation at any moment. If you excuse me now, I have a few other things to do. Among them is a call to request why my order did not include the forge originally.¡±

    I ordered the Android to bring me to the NADA, where my board still was. When he turned me around the foreman interceded.

    ¡°Hey, how about you pay for the forge now so that I can include it into the setup?¡±

    ¡°I use implants. So the payment is already on the way and should arrive at your accounts any moment now.¡± While the android wheeled me out I heard him mumble something but I could not quite understand him.

    When we reached the NADA I turned to Mr. O¡¯Donnel. ¡°As I explained yesterday to Mr. Wallace, I will likely be unresponsive for a while. At least after I make my call. That is nothing alarming. I will dive into cyberspace to resolve some issues. So I hope you have something to read with you.¡±

    He nodded and sat down on the same chair Wallace used the day before.

    Then the fun finally began. I called Maximillian Vasilienkov, the fixer that mediated the sale of the industrial fabber.

    ¡°Ah, Miss Sinclair, I did not expect your call before tomorrow. It seems that Brian had a crew ready earlier than I hoped.¡±

    ¡°So it was no accident that the most important, and most expensive part of the fabber was not included in the order. You know of course that I will not leave a good rating for your service.¡±

    ¡°Oh, and why not? After all, I provided you with a priceless service. I made it clear to you that you can trust nobody in this business.¡± The slimy bastard had the gall to smile at that.

    ¡°So I can¡¯t expect you to pay me back what you took too much from me, am I right?¡±

    ¡°So bright of you. You know that it was simply too tempting. An absolute nobody, a vast amount of money, and the only backer you can list will be dead in a couple of weeks. Of course, I took advantage. And there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.¡±

    ¡°I understand.¡±

    ¡°Isn¡¯t it nice to work with professionals?¡± He laughed again and hung up. Well, he really provided me with a priceless service, but it was a different one than he thought.

    ¡°Ok, I will be in the matrix for a while. If something needs my attention press the blue button on the top right corner of my board. Don¡¯t touch anything else.¡±

    I fumbled again to get the cable into the jack and then started the dive.

    Again I was greeted by my mindscape, but this time I wasted no time playing.

    It took me no effort to localize Mr. Vasilienkov¡¯s business in the matrix. It took me a bit longer to scan the immediate surroundings for unwanted attention, fortunately with negative results.

    Then I activated my stealth mode and began to probe his computer system. In the first seconds, it became clear that this would be harder than my leisure strolls yesterday.

    Much harder in fact.

    That of course did not mean it was impossible. The viron here was set up as an ancient office, complete with office workers, old-fashioned telephones, typewriters, and many, very many filing cabinets.

    Several watchdogs patrolled through the system, literally and figuratively.

    The majority of the ICE was in the form of one of these old European guard dogs augmented by armed security guards.

    The whole style of it had a touch of comics.

    A small handful of sprites used over and over again, a bit of lack of dimensionality, a lack of realism. But it still was a viron, so superior to what Walker had. I had a distinct feeling of knowing this style, but I could not place my finger on it.

    My careful probe into the office unveiled a rather sneaky tripwire. The ceiling fans generated a regular tracking pulse. Sneaky as I said, and somebody hasty would trigger an alarm.

    No King or Joker would manage to infiltrate these systems, that was for sure.

    But the pulses brought it back to me where I knew the style. ArgoNaughty! Lo and behold, Vasi had hired not simply a jack to design his system, he moved to the top 100.

    Sure, at #67 Argo was not the highest on the list, but he delivered solid work.

    Unfortunately for him, and Vasi, he was not the best programmer among the hacker elite. In truth, while he was pretty good at using it, most of his software was bought from various sources.

    And the kicker here, among those sources, was none other than me.

    Argo was one of the hackers who bought my firewall framework. And no, I did not bury a backdoor deep in the code. While Argo would have likely missed it, others were much more proficient in ferreting out such easter eggs.

    No, I build my reputation on delivering exactly what I promised, nothing more, nothing less.

    That still provided me with a downright indecent wealth of advantages. I knew exactly how these pulses worked. I knew exactly how the security tokens were generated.

    And most important, I knew where the backdoor Argo had left behind had to be, as there was only one place in the framework.

    Oh, and that I knew how the password encryption scheme of the firewall worked was just a bonus.

    While I thoroughly analyzed the pulses to get the salt and hash algorithm for the token I adapted my chameleon utility.

    Unlike the stealth mode, the chameleon did not even try to mask my presence. Instead, it made it seem as if I were an authorized part of the system.

    With an actual valid security token, the chameleon would allow me to wreak havoc in this system. That was exactly what I wanted to do. Assuming the form of one of the office workers I simply walked into the system.

    The watchdogs registered my presence, sampled the token, represented by sniffing, and ignored me then. Without their alarm, the more powerful ICE remained peaceful.

    It took me a moment to translate the viron into what I knew the framework was like, before I walked calmly to one of the cabinets, rummaged in it, and produced a single file.

    My board translated that automatically into login credentials. Then I moved to the fuse box, to enter the login, and presto, I had absolute admin control over the security system.

    I upgraded my security token accordingly, and in the eye of the firewall I was not only authorized, I was the alpha and the omega. Additionally, I set the system so that any other person in the system would not notice my presence.

    Then I began to spin off several data utilities, each similarly protected by the security system as I, to begin copying the contents of all the cabinets over to my cluster.

    Then I made my way over to the office that represented Vasilienkovs private computer.

    How thoughtful of him to have it running, so I did not have to try a silent boot, always a risky approach.

    I took my time going through the whole office. Having one of my porters copy everything after I read it.

    Argo was especially naughty here, as I found not only a backdoor, reacting to the same credentials that unlocked the firewall, but a keylogger as well. It seemed that Vasi had upgraded his system six months ago. So I only had six months of activity in front of me.

    But that provided me more than enough data to get every single of Vasi¡¯s passwords. It also logged every biometric authentification as well.

    The other rooms in the system provided similar dividends. All in all, I stole whatever secrets Vasi had.

    Then I began programming my little present.

    Nothing new of course. I adapted one of my destructive frameworks to the system here.

    All this activity took me four hours, virtual hours at that though. So I was not even five minutes in Vasi¡¯s system at the time I activated my little toy.

    Immediately the cluster logged into every bank account Vasilienkov had, and transferred the balance to one of my throwaway accounts.

    From there the money took several steps through a handful of countries that took it not so seriously with banking laws and others that took it very seriously with banking secrets to end up in one of my accounts.

    He stole eight million bucks from me. I was of the opinion that the $62 million he had would be a ¨C barely ¨C adequate repayment for that.

    The virus I started first infected the firmware of the backup drives that would activate the writing laser instead of the reading one after the number of crystals was read. That would ruin the crystal. All the while the system would simulate a readout of the backups.

    After all crystals of a set were ruined it would issue an error message that the medium was corrupted. Of course it was. Now.

    I would have to come back in a few days and research how many backups they ruined that way.

    Then I triggered a system-wide wipe. No speck of data remained.

    After that, I set the cluster to decrypt the data. With the keys that Argo provided me with that was no problem. That was a task for a later time though

    Finally, I started the timer for the alarm. It was time to make Vasilienkov aware that he had poked the Stomper and had been mauled in the process.

    I was mildly interested if he would recover, but in the end, it was not important enough. Much more important though was it to actually extract the service Vasilienkov provided for me.

    For that, I had to surface from the dive. With the usual pang of regret, I disconnected from Precious and took a few moments to regain my bearings. Then I redialed the previous number. Vasilienkov seemed a bit surprised to see me again.

    ¡°What? You don¡¯t have enough?¡± He took a deep breath and changed his tone to something lecturing.

    ¡°Okay, again. You fucked up, I took advantage of that and there is nothing you can do about it. Anything from here out only serves to humiliate you further. So what do you want?¡±

    This time it was for me to smile smugly. ¡°I wanted to thank you for the service you provided to me.¡±

    His expression became a bit confused before he caught himself again. When he started to answer I continued: ¡°Of course, it is not the service you believe you did for me.

    Instead, you will serve as a prime example of why not to fuck with me. My response should hit you in 3¡­ 2¡­ 1¡­!¡± Right on time, I heard several alerts going off in the background of the call.

    ¡°You see, that is the reason why one is professional if one works with professionals. Cheerio!¡± With that, I hung up.

 20: Insanity provided

    I heard a tentative ¡°Did you do something I should report to the boss?¡± from Mr. O¡¯Donnel.

    I looked at him for a moment. ¡°Probably. At least he should know that Vasilienkov knows about his CRS. Not that he is a particularly strong threat anymore, but your boss should ask a few hard questions there.¡±

    He smiled a bit. ¡°Sure, that was the plan anyway. But what I meant was what you did.¡±

    ¡°And what did I do?¡±

    He smiled a bit. ¡°That is what I want to get out. What problems will what you did cause? And of course, I want to find out what exactly you did.¡±

    I smiled back. ¡°Do you really want to know? At this time you can honestly claim that you know nothing.¡±

    He looked at me thoughtfully, before he answered.

    ¡°I am not sure I want to know, but I am pretty sure I need to.¡°

    ¡°As you wish. Vasilienkov was apparently of the opinion that I am helpless and too rich, and he could steal from me without consequences.

    He was wrong.

    As I have told your boss, I am welcome in the Abyss. What that means is that I am a pretty accomplished hacker.

    I made a combat dive into Vasilienkov¡¯s computer system, copied any data he had before deleting it, appropriated his liquid reserves, and initiated a system alert before leaving. The call was the culmination of that effort.¡±

    He scratched his chin a bit.

    ¡°That sounds dangerous. Are you sure you are no danger to the boss?¡±

    I had to snort with that.

    ¡°Ok, first, if I knowingly posed a danger to your boss, do you seriously think I would tell you that? You have to take my answer with a bit of faith.

    To answer your question though, no, I¡¯m not a danger to your boss or your organization as far as I know.

    For once, why should I?

    Our relationship is pretty cordial and advantageous for both your boss and me. I have no reason to risk that, especially as any betrayal on my part would sour any future relationship with anyone else.

    Another factor is that your organization is virtually immune to such attacks.

    Vasilienkov is¡­ was a fixer.

    His strength was his cache of information and his contacts.

    Unless such a person has extensive offline storage, and surprisingly few of them do, their Achilles heel is their database.

    Sure, he most likely has backups on crystal, but there are ways around that.

    Your organization on the other hand is less about information and more about manpower and possession. Try as I might, it would be impossible for me, or any other hacker, to threaten that.

    Sure, I could do some damage, but that would be mostly superficial.

    You don¡¯t have any secrets that could threaten your group, any money you lost would be replaced rather fast and the people are immune from the matrix.

    But before you talk to Mr. Walker you should wait a bit.

    I started an avenue of investigation yesterday evening and I should have some preliminary results in a few minutes. I am sure he wants to know them.¡±

    He nodded at that and leaned back. I on the other hand renewed my connection and dived back into the matrix. I couldn¡¯t help myself and played a bit. I managed to keep it under an hour though.

    With a pang of regret, I forced myself to attend to the results the cluster had ready for me. Immediately I was glad to have access to the cluster and having used it to make a deep comparison.

    The first and even the second layer were exquisitely faked.

    Anybody without a rather sizeable server would have been incapable of proving it false.

    At least in a single lifetime, and the normal server would chew several years on it.

    The cluster though was a supercomputer.

    It was probably not in the top 20 in the world, but still extremely powerful.

    To make it short, it was able to isolate the inconsistencies in the voiceprints.

    I had the proof that somebody played a seriously messed up game and used considerable resources to make it look as if the Berardino family tried to kill Mr. Walker and who knows how many others.

    Sadly there was no trace of who did it, which in itself was pointing to a rather select group of people. Access to something like the cluster was a necessity, the needed skills were few and far in between.

    All in all, it was either a super-national corporation, one of the top 30 from the Abyss, or something similar.

    There was a ¨C very ¨C remote chance that it was a spy organization of one of the bigger nations, but I wouldn¡¯t bet on it.

    As I had kept the compression relatively benign at 30:1 it took me only a few seconds to surface.

    When I arrived back in reality O¡¯Donnel was still looking at me instead of reading. When he realized I was aware he questioningly raised one eyebrow.

    ¡°I was right. What information I got is something that should interest Mr. Walker tremendously.¡±

    He nodded and activated his phone.

    ¡°O¡¯Donnel here. Kitten says she has some information the boss needs. Yes, I will wait.¡±

    I winched when he mentioned the nickname. It seemed that I was stuck with it.

    ¡°Ok, I will bring her. Till later.¡± Then he faced me again. ¡°The boss wants to meet you. I will drive you there.¡±

    ¡°No!¡±

    He looked baffled. ¡°What do mean with no?¡±

    ¡°I mean that I will not leave this building for the time being. Whoever is behind this already has locked on to me. They have your base of operations infiltrated as the event with Oleg demonstrated.¡±

    ¡°And you are sure that this building is secure? With all the workers installing who knows what?¡±

    Carp, I never thought about that. Of course, our security was compromised. Naturally, that did not mean I would go out.

    ¡°It is safer than anything else. I have the security system and security bots. There are weapons mounted everywhere. And thanks to your reminder I will up the thread level.¡±

    ¡°That of course works when somebody shuts down your reactors.¡±

    ¡°They have an emergency power supply, and the bots are independent for several hours.¡± Did he not understand that I seriously did not want to leave? Dang was he persistent.

    ¡°You know that the boss is aware that our organization was compromised, right? He has trustworthy people working security. What do you have here? Do you even know the others? I mean really know them? From what you said you met them a week ago? I¡¯ve known the majority of our people for years. You on the other hand had two of your people try to stage an uprising just today.

    If they had been smart they would have kept a low profile and sabotaged you in secret.

    It would have been easy for them to take a gun and accidentally kill you. Or poison your food. Or let somebody into the house.¡±

    Honestly, that shocked me.

    I had completely missed the fact that I couldn¡¯t really trust any of the others yet. It would have been no problem if the situation hadn¡¯t developed so rapidly into high pressure.

    With more time, as I planned initially, and without the unknown enemy we would have had time to develop a better relationship, but now O¡¯Donnel was right.

    I was not much more secure here than I was in Walker''s headquarters.

    I reacted as the mature, intelligent person that I was and cursed up a storm.

    After my outburst of expletives slowed down to a standstill I began to think again.

    ¡°All right then. If either Darren and/or Kate come with us we can do it at your HQ.

    I need to refill Precious¡¯s fuel cells.

    And I have to extrude another outfit. At best we can move out in 30 minutes.¡±

    He nodded. ¡°Ok, I can understand the Mute, but why Darren?¡±

    ¡°First, don¡¯t call her a Mute. That is the same as when somebody would call you a Mongrel and she has not earned that level of contempt. And I want Darren because he is a Psionic. I don¡¯t think that regardless of who our enemies are, they can defeat a telepath. Otherwise, the whole scheme would make even less sense as it does.¡±

    This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

    Preparing Precious for transport was quickly accomplished.

    During that time I had ordered the fabber to fabricate new outfits for Kate and me.

    After I was done with that I queried the security system about the location of Darren and Kate. They were both in the Gym, apparently tidying it up, so I wheeled there. Convincing them to accompany us to Mr. Walker took some talking, but in the end, both agreed to come, so Darren got a new outfit too.

    After consulting my diagnostics I decided to take the wheelchair with me. I could have walked, but the pain would have been at least distracting, if not crippling. And with the only available pain remedy having the side effect of zombifying me I chose not to torture myself.

    When we reached Mr. Walker''s headquarters we were subjected to a cursory inspection and then let through.

    I still decided to offer them my gun, and the guards seemed to appreciate the gesture. Then Patrick guided us to a somewhat bigger room, where Mr. Walker with three other men awaited us.

    Two of the new men were middle-aged, while the third was maybe a couple of years older than me.

    Mr. Walker gave a slight wave and gestured to a place on the table.

    ¡°Ah, welcome Kitten. You came just in time. We are discussing how to react to this attack.

    But first, this are Dylan Cox, my second in command¡± he was gesturing to the man on his right in a smart business suit,

    ¡°Leon Reid, my computer associate,¡± the other older male, this time much more casually dressed,  ¡°and his son Hunter, who assists him.¡± The younger guy, in jeans and an originally dark or black but very washed out t-shirt.

    Then he pointed at me.

    ¡°This is Kitten. She is the computer specialist and cyber surgeon who discovered the plot.¡±

    Dylan bowed his head, Leon seemed less than enthused and Hunter gave me a small salute.

    ¡°You told Justin that you have information that I need? To make it quick, we already followed up on the database hack. Leon said it was only a matter of hours to find where it originated. So what more do you have?¡±

    I relaxed a bit.

    ¡°Whew, I am in time then. Please let me explain the full situation before you come to a conclusion. First, the trail will lead you to the Berardino compound.

    There you will find files containing conversations between Giorgio Berardino and a hacker named Enigma but written in leet.

    You will find that Giorgio has ordered the hacking of the database, and that of more than half the crime bosses in New York.

    Furthermore, you will audio logs and planning documents where Giorgio lays out his plan to sweep aside most of the competition.¡±

    Dylan was the first to react.

    ¡°Damn, we have to prepare the men. We can¡¯t let that asshole walk over us.¡±

    I lifted my hand.

    ¡°Wait, please. We are extremely lucky that I was there and investigated, or a gang war would be unavoidable.

    First, to make the alterations to the database without having the regular inspections scream about them it takes either an exceptionally talented Queen or a halfway experienced Jack.

    Or in other words, somebody who was good enough to leave not enough evidence behind to trigger the security.

    People like that have the knowledge and experience to use basic stealth approaches like IP jamming or at least spoofing.

    To make it clear, it should be impossible to find an IP trace of somebody proficient enough to make the alterations or if, and that is a very big if, the person messed up and there is a trace it should lead to an unrelated computer.

    Even then if everything fails, and we have encountered a complete and utter idiot savant that made a trail back, it would lead to the hacker, not the employer.

    Honestly, I can¡¯t think of any real situation where the trace should exist and lead back to Berardino.

    Second, the ¡®Berardino compound¡¯ the trace leads to looks nice and professional until you actually look deeper.

    The security is only for show, to make it look like any hacker you employed was good enough to break through and luckily get the data.

    The payload is pseudo encrypted.

    It looks like a strong encryption but any tablet you have would be able to break the encryption in a couple of hours.

    The rest of the ¡®data¡¯ is pure and utter nonsense. Random generated junk, while the computer activity follows a relatively complicated but automated algorithm, meaning it is simulated.

    All in all, if you look deeper, with enough computing power, the whole thing is nothing more than a mockup of a computer network.

    Third, when you look at the Berardino compound from the matrix without following the trace you will find a network that, at first glance, looks pretty similar, but in reality, is completely different.

    The security is real, and by the way leagues above what you have here, the activity is realistic and finally, the data you get is encrypted in a schema that takes an average server a few weeks to break.

    The difference is in one word startling. In my opinion, there is no way that the two compounds were set up and used by the same people.

    And finally, I took some of Giorgio Berardino¡¯s correspondence, and some of his audio logs and had them compared to the data I found at the end of the trace.

    It took some work but in the end, my comparison found that we have an extremely good forgery. And with extremely good I mean so good that, if my estimation of your computer resources is not off by an order of magnitude or more, it would have taken you years to find the artifacts and got proof that it is false.

    If I had no access to Spectre¡¯s systems I would not have been able to get it, but luckily for us, I can use the supercomputer for such things.¡±

    Mr. Walker made a pyramid with his fingers.

    ¡°So if I understand you right, the whole thing is a frame-up. Somebody wants to incite a gang war. Honestly, that sounds pretty farfetched to me.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Of course it does.

    The whole thing makes absolutely no sense.

    The costs have had to be exorbitant.

    The alterations to your database will have cost a couple of million bucks. Not cheap but relatively affordable. But if the fake data is right, the same alterations were made to more than 30 crime families. We are talking about around 70 million dollars. Only the alterations.

    I have no idea how much it did cost to subvert several cyber surgeons, but I would be surprised if it was much cheaper.

    The construction of the fake compound would be almost negligible, a few hundred thousand.

    The fake e-mails are also not that expensive, ten million or so.

    But the faked audio logs? That was not simply a professional but somebody who used a supercomputer or a decade of work.

    You can¡¯t get that type of work for below 2 or 3 hundred million.

    So all in all my estimate is that this whole scheme cost something around 350 to 450 million dollars. For that amount of money, you can hire a whole horde of assassins and have the bosses and their lieutenants murdered and come still out ahead.

    So yes, I agree with you, it is pretty idiotic. My guess is that somebody with way too much money and way too much time on his or her hands fell in love with his or her cleverness and wanted to play evil genius.¡±

    I leaned back in my wheelchair and looked at the men.

    Dylan was the first to respond.

    ¡°That is complete bullshit. Nobody would try such a convoluted mess. So are you working for them? Is that it?¡± He propped himself up on the table. ¡°You want to kill us all? Or milk us of money?¡±

    Mr. Walker put a hand on his shoulder and dragged him back into his seat.

    ¡°That would make even less sense.

    If she had not intervened we would still not know about it. In one or two weeks I would be dead and about a third of our guys would be slowly dying from CRS.

    So if anything she hindered this plot.

    And as of now, she has not asked for any money.

    On the contrary, she pays us.

    She gave Richard a nano fab. I concede it is an older one, but these things are still worth several million dollars.

    Even if her cure for CRS does not work, then we still got out ahead.

    We know that the nano-therapy works.

    Better for me with the more modern nanobots she provided than for you or the rest, but even with the older nanos that Richard uses for you it increases your life expectancy to decades instead of months.¡±

    Dylan was not completely satisfied.

    ¡°And if the nanobots used for you are so much better then why don¡¯t we use them for all of us?¡±

    This I could answer.

    ¡°Because making nanobots by the liter takes time.

    And my nano fab is used otherwise.

    The best that Doc Schaeffer can do is apparently what he is doing, considering that his nano fab is five generations behind mine.¡±

    ¡°So why don¡¯t we then just take yours?¡±

    ¡°You can if you want to ensure that your boss doesn¡¯t see next spring. Even with the nano-therapy, I would be surprised if he would survive two months.¡±

    ¡°So if we take your toys you won¡¯t help our boss, is that what you¡¯re saying?¡±

    I had to sigh and shake my head.

    ¡°No, what I am saying is that my nano fab is busy converting the new cyber heart for your boss.

    If you take it, I can¡¯t use it to adapt the tech, in which case I can¡¯t save him, so he will die.

    Simple as that.

    If there is an urgent case among you I can make the nanobots for his therapy between using it for the adaption, but it only has the capacity for four, maybe five patients.

    Honestly, if you are not in the fourth stage of CRS then the third-gen nanos that Dr. Schaeffer can make in his nano fab reduce your life expectancy at best marginally, and when I have my operation up and running, in three to six months the whole point is moot anyway.¡±

    That deflated him. Somewhat.

    ¡°Ok, so we can¡¯t use your nano fab for us, I understand. But that still does not change the fact that this so-called frame job of yours is in any way realistic.¡±

    I massaged my temple for a bit.

    ¡°Again, I agree with you to the fullest.

    This frame job can be only described as madness. But as one of the early fictional detectives said if you eliminate the impossible, then what remains has to be true, regardless of how unrealistic. And I think it is impossible that Berardino was the culprit.¡±

    ¡°And of course, you have evidence for that, right?¡±

    Now he sounded nearly insulting.

    ¡°Yes, I have evidence for that.

    To recapitulate first is simple logic.

    Anybody who has the capabilities to modify your database in the way it has been modified has to have the capabilities to remain undetected. And even if not the trace would lead to the hacker, not Berardino. Unless Berardino has an experienced hacker working out of his compound it can¡¯t be true.

    The second and third are easy to prove if you hire another hacker, a Jack or a Queen instead of a King like Mr. Reid, to compare the compound the trace leads to with the compound the Berardinos actually use.

    The fourth is a bit iffy.

    Here you have to trust me to provide true evidence.

    Otherwise, you would have to hire a hacker, and here you would need somebody who walks the Abyss, to hack Berardino¡¯s files and run an in-depth analysis to compare it with the easy-to-obtain files ordering this murder plot.

    While it may be if not easy, then at least possible for an exceptionally good Queen or an average Jack to get Berardino¡¯s files, the comparison needs a supercomputer if you want the results this decade.

    So unless you are prepared to pay 10 to 15 million dollars for that you either trust me or not. Verifying is not possible.¡±

    Walker leaned forward.

    ¡°Ok, the first point I have to agree. It is possible that Giorgio obtained a talented hacker, but unlikely. And you are right, somebody talented enough to do this damage is talented enough to not leave tracks.

    Second and third, why can¡¯t we use Leon for that?¡±

    ¡°Because if my examination of your computer systems is right, Mr. Reid does not believe in the mindscape¡­¡±

    ¡°Too true, that stuff is pure hogwash.¡±

    ¡°As I said, he does not believe in the mindscape.

    While that is his privilege, it limits him massively in what he can do concerning cyber combat.

    There is a reason why not one of the top 100 hackers in the world is a King or a Queen.

    The coupling of a human mind with the cold computer creates something bigger than the sum of its parts.

    Your computer security is alarmingly inadequate for that very reason. A Jack or a Queen will be able to actually see the reaction of the security systems in real-time, instead of getting a sterile line of message that the computer was pinged.

    The Jack will also get the message of the ping, but unlike the King, he will see that the security gives no reaction to an echo.

    That is exactly what I did. I had one of my bots, disguised as a spam bot generate said echo, without result.

    The software interface of a King simply can¡¯t convey that.

    It only shows that it was pinged.

    So a Jack or Queen will need a couple of minutes in the fake network and a couple of seconds in the real one to realize that there is no way in hell that these belong to the same people.¡±

    Walker nodded. ¡°Ok, that makes sense. And for the fourth, I assume you have evidence for that?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I do.¡± I lifted Precious up on the table and removed the case. ¡°I have it here on my board.¡±

    At the sight of Precious Reid Jr. let out a whistle. ¡°Wow, is that a Seraphim Mk. IV?¡±

    I was, in all honesty, surprised that anybody recognized her, well at least to the extent that Jr. did.

    ¡°Uh¡­ no, she is an Mk III.¡±

    ¡°Hu, I never knew that there existed an Mk III. Cool. But I would rather have an Mk IV.¡±

    ¡°Not surprising considering that there are only two Mk III in existence.

    And the Mk IV is the downgraded commercial version of the Mk III.¡±

    He was visually surprised, while I booted Precious up and activated the holo emitter.

    ¡°What do you mean downgraded. The Seraphim Mk IV is one of the best cyber boards one can buy.¡±

    ¡°And you can¡¯t buy the Mk III. But this is a discussion better suited for another time.¡±

 21: In the eye of stupidity

    ¡°Is there an electrical outlet around here? While Precious here has an onboard power supply it is somewhat limited and this will probably take some time.¡± With that, I took the AC connector out of the case and held it up.

    Hunter immediately jumped up and plugged it in, while I booted up my board.

    After I logged in I activated the onboard holoprojector.

    I found it funny that this was the first time I actually used that thing after I build Precious but I have to confess that I am somewhat solitary and most of my business was done over the matrix anyway.

    ¡°Ok, first the small fry. While I have no further proof for the trail being fake, I have the recording of the spam bot test in the fake compound as well as a similar test in the real compound.¡±

    I displayed the timeline of the tests simultaneously.

    ¡°On top is the fake compound. The graphs are security ping in red, spambot activity in blue, and IP trace in green. On the bottom is the real compound. The graphs are the same. The bot was the same, the simulated spam was the same.¡±

    I started the recordings and we all saw that at the top the red graph was stable and the blue graph was rising, there was no green graph.

    At the bottom, it was a bit different. Here the red graph initially was stable as well, but within microseconds of the blue graph rising it rose faster than the bot.

    Only moments later the green graph began to rise even more rapidly than the red one until a hair over a second after the spambot activation the blue graph suddenly crashed down to zero. Meanwhile, the green one slowly sunk and the red one remained at a high-level activity for several seconds longer before lowering back down to the initial level.

    ¡°As you can see, in the top there is absolutely no reaction from the security, despite the activity from the bot.

    To put it into perspective, the activity was enough to shut down an average computer with spam, so no possibility of it not being noticed.

    At the bottom, the same bot started and almost immediately the countermeasures are ramped up. You see the security begin a higher alert cycle, and the IP trace trying to find the bot.

    Within a second it found it and killed it.

    After that, the IP trace searched for other threats, while the security analyzed the activity.

    After that, the trace shut down while the security, having deduced that it was a spam bot reduced its activity to the standard level.

    I am sure Mr. Reid will agree that these are not the same system.¡±

    Leon grudgingly nodded at that but did not look happy in the slightest.

    ¡°Now I have no further evidence that the two systems are not the same or that it where the system at the end of the trail and the Berardino compound, but it would take maybe 10k to pay a Queen to repeat the test if that.

    You have to either trust me or pay to have it verified. I personally would prefer you verify it as it will give credence to my next points.¡±

    The display switched and several texts opened on it.

    ¡°Now the emails are, as I already said, a pretty good forgery.

    There are some discrepancies in phrasing and choice of words but they are at best minor and alone it would only prove that Berardino was a bit stressed when he wrote them. So I show them only for the sake of completeness.¡±

    Several sentences in the hologram got highlighted, with the discrepancies in red. Also, a list of words came that showed how often the words were used. This took a couple of minutes.

    Dylan shook his head after some time.

    ¡°That proves nothing. We all sometimes write or talk differently than normal.¡±

    I had to sigh.

    ¡°Yes, I know. And as I said, I brought it up for the sake of completeness. That is not the proof. I can send the analysis to you gentlemen and if you want you can study it in more depth but in my opinion, it would be a waste of time. The real meat of my point comes now.¡±

    The text files were replaced by several sound waveforms.

    ¡°That are the audio files. And the part that will take several hours to go through. But first, let us confirm that it is the voice of Giorgio Berardino in them.¡±

    With that, I played a file from the fake compound where ¡®Giorgio¡¯ made audio notes to himself about how he would remove the other organized crime bosses from the playing field.

    After a couple of minutes, I stopped the playback.

    ¡°Am I right that that is the voice of Mr. Berardino?¡±

    Mr. Walker and Dylan both nodded, Walker thoughtful and Dylan visibly angry.

    ¡°Yes, that is Giorgio.¡± ¡°Good, and now that.¡±

    I started another playback where Giorgio talked about his usual business. Again after a few minutes, I stopped the playback.

    ¡°Again, is that Mr. Berardino?¡± Again, nods from the two mobsters.

    ¡°Ok, the baseline is established. The first one was obviously Mr. Berardino planning to remove you and most of your associates from the game. The second was only the comparison.¡±

    I enlarged the first and second waveforms and removed the others from the holo.

    ¡°Now the next part will be pretty technical.

    But for a preface, we are somewhat in luck that Mr. Berardino uses high-quality equipment for his personal office. The modern systems don¡¯t care much about compression and reduced storage space and instead focus on optimal sound quality.

    That is not surprising as file storage has become exceedingly cheap and it would be more expensive to make a professional and a consumer version of the soft- and hardware.

    But that is important because the equipment encodes much more than just the sound of the speech. It encodes background sounds like the air conditioning, the ticking clock, the hum of the massage motors in the chair, and so on as well as other artifacts like the specific resonances of the computer, the microphone, the frequency of the wireless LAN, and the wireless connection between the mic and the computer, the quirks of the electrical net and even the effect of the background radiation including the cosmic radiation.

    It is barely measurable in the file, but barely and not at all are very different.¡±

    While I said that I zoomed in on the second waveform and enlarged a small segment of it until I could highlight the points I was talking about. For the cosmic radiation, I zoomed really deep before the somewhat randomness of the CMBR was visible.

    ¡°And that is the important factor.

    For such forgeries, there are several levels of quality. At the lowest, only fit to outwit dumb speech control systems is to simply take the right words in the right order without any consideration of timbre, tempo, stress levels, and whatever.

    Anybody intelligent enough to breathe on their own will know immediately it is a forgery.

    Then one can take the right words in the right order and adapt the different factors so that it sounds homogenous.

    That will fool the inattentive listener but anybody who pays any attention at all will be able to tell that it is not right.

    There will be no emotion, no emphasis, no personality. Just a monotone slush. You don¡¯t need computers to tell it is fake.

    After that one has to invest some effort to make it sound real. Adjust the tempo and the timbre so that it sounds the same but with enough variability and emphasis to make it sound like a real person said it. But even a cursory analysis with computers will show many artifacts. The compression, the encoding, and the whole waveform will simply not be a single thing but a Frankenstein of one.

    Next, we have the so-called deep fake.

    The forger has used software to homogenize the compression and encoding.

    The best way to discover it is to measure the variability of the waveform. This level invariably has none, if you excuse my pun.

    If what I assume is your computer power is in the right ballpark you would manage to analyze a 10 minutes long file in a day or two.

    Still, nothing that you could not do. Spectre¡¯s supercomputer will manage the same in a couple of milliseconds.

    Then we have what I would call the professional deep fake.

    Here the professional uses an algorithm to vary the variability.

    To figure it out you need to analyze the file and measure the variability to find the algorithmic regularity.

    Depending on the complexity of the algorithm I would put your computers at a week to a month for the same 10-minute file.

    But still, you can manage it. The supercomputer I used would manage that file in 10 seconds or so, and do up to 128 of them at the same time.

    But what we have here is what I would call the virtuous deep fake.

    Whoever did this actually used a random number generator to modify the algorithm.

    There is no way an analysis of the waveform will show that. If Spectre had not encountered something similar before the supercomputer would have concluded that these were real recordings, so count yourself lucky here.

    The only way to spot it is to actually look into the recording artifacts I mentioned before.

    While they vary from day to day and even from minute to minute the change is gradual and in the same recording should be mostly the same.

    And the program I used to analyze the files was actually set up to use that as the last measure when none of the other tests show a fake.

    As I said, Spectre encountered it before.

    To bring it in perspective, the supercomputer took an average of 5 minutes per file.

    Your estimated system would take a year or two to analyze one of the files.

    Just to make it clear how high level that technique is, I would guess that there are less than a dozen people who can do that in the solar system.

    I can remove 2 from the list because I know it was not Spectre and neither was it me.

    And that is what I meant with that this forgery would have cost somewhat north of 200 million dollars.

    Oh, and before you ask, yes I could do something similar, and no, even I can¡¯t remove every artifact. The CMBR is impossible to fake as far as I know.¡±

    Over the next two hours, I used the first waveform to show first the variability and then zoomed in and highlighted the breaks in the artifacts, where the deep fake changed the timbre or the tempo of the word, adapted the emphasis, and made it seem legit.

    When the waveform was in deep enough zoom it was, while still not obvious, noticeable to see the differences if they were highlighted.

    After the grueling session with a few pointed questions from Dylan, I concluded the analysis of the first faked file.

    ¡°Ok, that was the first one. Are there any questions?¡±

    Dylan took a deep breath and then leaned forward.

    ¡°That looks all pretty convincing but what is your proof of it?¡±

    I had to shake my head.

    ¡°Pay somebody to get the data from the fake compound.

    Take one of the files there and compare it to the analyzed one I have given you.

    Otherwise, what would convince you?

    If you wait until your computer system has analyzed even one of the files whoever is behind it will have most likely put the next plan into motion. Sure, you can super zoom into the waveform, but if you don¡¯t trust me then you won¡¯t take my word that the breaks show a fake.

    You would have to find another one who actually could identify it.

    And as I said, you have, at best, 10 options.

    One of them made this stuff, so you have if you are lucky a ten percent chance of paying tens of millions to your enemy while he or she lies to you.

    So you would need to contact at least two of them.

    So just for that, you would need 30 to 40 million dollars. The options are you either trust my explanation or not. I can¡¯t tell you anything to change that.¡±

    He looked me in the eye.

    ¡°You said that you could create the fake. So even if it is faked and we get the information from other experts what tells us it was not you who did it?¡±

    I was, in all seriousness baffled at that. After I lifted my chin off the table I rang for words for a couple of minutes.

    ¡°That is¡­ if you think that the plot I described is over convoluted and insane what do you propose I would gain from that?

    Fact is, somebody, hacked the database. Not just your database, but the databases of more than 30 organizations here in New York.

    That happened months ago.

    Fact is, for some reason several cyber surgeons here in the city simultaneously decided to implant cyberware that almost ensures that the recipient contracts CRS, and the hacked databases increased the chance significantly.

    Fact is that from the hacked database in the hospital next door there was a trail that should not exist to a matrix compound that identifies itself as the Berardino compound that looks as real as painted canvas.

    I give you that you have to take my explanation for the artifacts at face value, and sadly I simply can¡¯t help you there.

    But the rest you can verify, and I already urged you to do exactly that.

    The possibility that it were the Berardinos is in my professional opinion vanishingly low but it is not zero.

    That would mean that it is some elaborate plot.

    I can¡¯t ascertain what the end goal of the plot might be, but there has to be one. But for me to be behind it the plot morphs from insane to ludicrous. So why would I do that?¡±

    ¡°Easy. You want to get a ready market for your new cyberware. For that, you had to get rid of the cybutchers here in NYC. And with that plot, you made them all suspect.¡±

    Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

    I closed my eyes and took a couple of deep slow breaths.

    ¡°My cyberware is immune to CRS.

    That is a pretty unique selling point for it I would think. I have absolutely no need to drive any cybersurgeons away.

    My projections are, or were, I made them before this whole fiasco, that it would take me a year before I was the premier cyber surgeon in New York and no longer than five before I and whoever I taught the technique would be the sole providers for cyberware in the US.

    Another five years and my market would be the whole dang solar system.

    And without CRS the potential target demographics will increase to somewhat around 50 to 60% of humanity.

    For some tech like ARC implants, I would place it north of 80%.

    Of course, if my technique would not work that would not happen, but in that case, the only thing I would have achieved with this plot would be to kill off my potential customer base while at the same time destroying my reputation.

    It either works and I can rescue most, if not all of you, in which case I have no need for this convoluted mess, or it does not work and it will make my work as a cybersurgeon impossible.

    And considering that I have implanted the fucking stuff into myself and openly have used cyberware, fucking neural cyberware at that, in front of people from your fucking organization I would think it is fucking obvious that I at least fucking believe that this fucking shit works!¡±

    During that speech, I continuously raised my voice until I essentially screamed the last sentence into his face.  Only the piercing pain in my hip made me realize that I stood up, and I slowly sank back down into the wheelchair, hissing in pain. Then I realized what I had said, and I felt my face heat up.

    ¡°Sorry, I¡­ ¡°

    Mr. Walker waved me off.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about it. I think most of us understand. Everybody loses their cool sometimes.

    And it is reassuring that you actually can use profanities.

    And Dylan, while I am sure that Kitten is smart enough to cook up such a plot, I am sure she is also way too smart to actually do it.

    Also while she is smart enough, she is nowhere devious enough.¡±

    I had calmed down somewhat when he spoke and bowed my head towards him.

    ¡°Thank you. It is¡­ wait what?¡± I was completely taken off guard by what he said and could only stare at him. Then he began to laugh softly.

    ¡°That is nothing bad. In our world, we meet way too many people who are too devious. Sometimes it is for the better as you need it to navigate some of the traps and dangers we face, but all too often it is used like a broadsword where it needs to be a scalpel.

    I fear it is all but impossible to trust many people here.¡±

    Dylan shook his head.

    ¡°You sure boss? I mean, we don¡¯t know her. She could be playing us.¡±

    Mr. Walker took on an admonishing tone.

    ¡°Dylan, do you remember what I told you about what your greatest weakness is?¡±

    ¡°Yes, boss. But why are you so sure?¡±

    ¡°All right, I explain it to you, but someday you will have to develop your own ability to judge people. One thing you need to remember is that you need to observe more carefully before you judge.

    In the case of our Kitten here, while she has the smarts for being devious and then some, and I would guess she also is clever enough, but so far I have not seen that from her, what she lacks is the dishonesty needed. To be blunt, she is too direct and honest to be this devious. It is clear that she is not very experienced with lying.

    Either she is a covert operative of a caliber that makes any attempt of us to unmask her simply laughable or she is exactly what she tells us she is.

    And I chose to believe that nobody would use such a valuable asset against us. We are simply too small time for that. Somebody that talented would be used against a class AAA megacorp.¡±

    My thoughts spun completely chaotic at that. I was¡­ bad at lying? I had thought I was pretty good. How was I bad at it? Did everybody know what I was lying about? Did they read me like a book? How could it be that I did not know that?

    Mr. Walker returned his sight to me.

    ¡°Calm down Kitten. Yes, I know you lied about some things. So what, everybody does. In our business, we don¡¯t expect much honesty so it is no big deal. My point is that you are not good enough at lying that you could conceal any basic treachery. We know you did not tell us everything but we also know that what you did not tell us is nothing we have to be concerned about.¡±

    I took a few calming breaths, counted to ten in my head, and then nodded.

    ¡°I have to take your word for that Mr. Walker. Do you have some advice on how I can address some of my shortcomings?¡±

    He chuckled at that.

    ¡°You too need to learn to listen my dear.

    I don¡¯t see your lack of dishonesty as a shortcoming. You are in the enviable position that you don¡¯t need to be good at it.

    On the contrary, in your case, it would actually be a disadvantage.

    With few exceptions, you deal with people via the matrix in messages or directly as customers in your cyber-shop.

    In the first case, you don¡¯t need any ability to lie, as I would guess you have several filters to mask yourself, and in the second I assume that you don¡¯t want to sell your customers something they neither want nor need.

    In that case, your honesty will make it easier. Especially when it goes around that you are not especially good at lying.¡±

    Well, that shot some of my plans right into the foot. Oh, sure, I did not intend to promise more than I could deliver, but I had actually planned to search out the local universities sometime, and I would definitely not do that either as Vivian DuClare or as Veronica Sinclair. It would also limit my possible interactions with other groups or individuals. I would have to overhaul quite a few plans.

    ¡°O¡­k. I understand. But to get back to the topic, I can show and explain to you the other files in the fake stack but we would be here a month or longer and I think neither of us wants to do that. So what do we do now?¡±

    Walker nodded. ¡°You are right Kitten. I assume that if we choose a file at random you would be able to go into some details with the results. So how many files are there?¡±

    I shrugged my shoulders.

    ¡°Sure I can. Just point at a file.¡± I displayed a list of the files in the fake stack. All in all roughly 130 sound files. Walker stood up and slowly walked to the hologram looking at the files and more or less randomly pointed at one.

    ¡°Use this one.¡±

    This time the demonstration was decidedly shorter. I did not have to go into the depth about how the analysis had marked the file as fake but only had to show the markers. All in all, it took another half hour to get it done. But Walker seemed to be satisfied.

    ¡°Ok. I assume you will give us the files and results of the analysis? Leon? Can you get the files from the trail? And then check them against the results Kitten gave us?¡±

    Leon nodded his head. ¡°Yeah, shouldn¡¯t be a problem.

    My reapers should crack the compound in two or three days.

    After that, I only have to check if the files are the same that the analysis was done on so I should get you the results in a week, maybe two.¡±

    A week or two? Two or three days? Frick, that was worse than I imagined.

    Mr. Walker needed matrix support ASAP. Even a halfway competent Queen would get the data in the real Berardino compound in a day.

    If they could get it at all that is, the security there was no joke.

    In the fake compound, it would take a couple of minutes.

    And the comparison, if run on a decent number-crunching distributed setup should take no longer than a day, two at the outset. Heck, the cluster could do it in less than half an hour if I tasked it with high enough priority.

    As it was I had to bite onto my lips to keep myself from interjecting. It was not enough.

    ¡°I see you are not quite satisfied with that Kitten?¡±

    I felt my face heat up again. ¡°Uhm¡­ yeah. These times, they are excessive. Sorry to say so, but if you hire any Queen you will get the results in two to three days.

    It should take no longer than half an hour with an abysmal connection to get the files from the fake compound.

    And if you run the comparison on a standard Beowulf cluster, even with only 3 or 4 nodes, you get the result in a couple of days.¡±

    Leon was visibly not amused with what I was saying.

    ¡°Look here, missy. We are not all irresponsible jackasses that run willy nilly through the matrix without any regard for security. Something like this has to be done carefully and that means slowly.¡±

    ¡°I already told you that there is absolutely no security on that site. So link to it and download the files. No problem here.¡±

    ¡°We have only your word that there is no security.¡±

    ¡°Then replicate my experiment with a spam bot.

    It will take not even five minutes to verify the lack of security.

    If I am wrong you have lost five minutes.

    If I am right you have won two to three days.

    Do you realize we are at a time limit here? There are over 30 other patrons in this city that are at this moment most likely dying from CRS.

    It would be a surprising stroke of luck if Mr. Walker was the most severe case so it is unlikely that we will manage to save all of them.

    What do you think will happen when this whole situation comes to the attention of the organizations that were so targeted?

    Do you think we will be able to prevent quarrels? If I am right, and one of them finds the tampering and follows the trail we will have a gang war. And that is a losing proposition for us all.

    Our only chance to prevent this is to inform the other organizations about the truth and convince them that it was an insanely overcomplicated frame job.

    For that, we need more than just my word.

    We need independent confirmation. In the best case some mercenaries not associated with any of the organizations. And we need it to be somebody who can work fast. It might already be too late but we have to try anything to keep the situation stable.¡±

    Dylan snorted.

    ¡°You don¡¯t know much about the situation here? Do you think that this will explode in this way? We are smarter than that.¡±

    It took me a moment to process what he was saying.

    ¡°Do you remember what you said before I explained the frame job to you?

    You were practically already on the way to attack the Berardinos.

    And you can bet that the majority of people will react the same way.

    Remember, without the knowledge about artistic deep fakes and how to detect them it is impossible to tell that the fakes are fakes.

    And even with the knowledge, without a supercomputer, it will take years to prove it.

    So there may be some people who will think something is fishy, but they will probably be in the minority, and won¡¯t have more than a gut feeling to make their case.

    So yes, I think that this will explode in this way unless we can defuse the situation almost immediately.¡±

    I looked Dylan directly into the eyes while I said that, and it was pretty obvious he did not like what he was hearing, but could not dispute it.

    Walker on the other hand was much harder to read. After a few moments, he leaned forward and placed his hands on the table.

    ¡°So what would you suggest we do then Kitten? You are right, it will be hard to convince the others that it is a frame-up, so any suggestion would be welcome.¡±

    I had to think for a moment, formulating my vague idea.

    ¡°If I were you I would hire one of the jacks from the Abyss to do the verification.

    Dunedain or Aqua Paradox should be relatively affordable, reliable, fast, and trustworthy.

    They are neither at the top of the heap and such exceptional expensive nor barely capable to be in the Abyss, and they are known for doing their job well and telling the truth.

    I could also bring Spectre to the table, but that could backfire, and if I am honest, he is quite a bit more expensive, as is proper for the number six of the top 10.

    I would then advise the other patrons to hire their own hackers to verify the information we provide, so I would only hire one of them.

    I could provide a list of abyss-dwellers that I think are trustworthy but coming from me this list would probably automatically suspect, so let them search for their own.

    Not all will get a cost-efficient or reliable result but enough should that the consensus will support what we told them.

    Of course, you should give them the data I unearthed along with the analysis results so that they can get their own cyber specialists to run their own Beowulfs over the data while they wait for the abyss-dwellers to get them the answers.¡±

    Walker leaned back.

    ¡°That is the second time that you mention these Beowulfs. Could you explain what you mean by that?¡±

    He did not know what a Beowulf Cluster was? That was surprising to say it mildly. He seemed to be otherwise well informed.

    ¡°Really? Oh, well, ok. A Beowulf Cluster is a small to mid-sized network of mostly similar relative cost-effective computers that uses special programs to emulate a much more powerful single computer.

    It is essentially a massively parallel computing unit that divides the tasks into small parts and distributes them to the single computers in the cluster.

    It is mostly viewed as the poor man¡¯s supercomputer as it is a comparatively cheap way to get a heap of computing power.

    It is, of course not completely scalable as not all tasks can be parallelized well, but most modern supercomputers are in reality a specialized variant of the same principle, just with much more powerful high-end components and processors.

    The supercomputer I used for the analysis is one of them.¡±

    Walker looked at me for a moment before he looked at Leon with a single lifted eyebrow.

    ¡°I think she talks about the distributed servers that some dot-gov types or the bigger corporations have. At least it sounds like that.¡±

    ¡°Wait, you don¡¯t use Beowulfs here normally? How¡­? Where¡­ ? How do your universities, research labs, and schools do their work? How do you simulate game theory? Where do they do the computing for the city administration?¡±

    All eyes were fixed on me with that.

    It was Hunter that spoke first.

    ¡°They use dist-server for that in the Nowhere? Do they have really that much money lying around?¡±

    ¡°Yes, of course, they use them in the Commonwealth.

    A small cluster of maybe 20 or 30 computers is cheap, the software is mostly open source and the network infrastructure is consumer-grade.

    I have seen enough computers here in your HQ that I know you can afford them.

    Heck, I can give you an off-the-shelf standard configuration including software, installation guide, and hardware specs ready to order that would cost somewhere around $100k.

    The only thing needed is the setup and the electricity, and you have fusactors so that is cheap too. There is absolutely no reason for any decent-sized organization to not have a Beowulf ready for running.¡±

    I had to shake my head.

    ¡°Damn, so much for my estimate of your computing resources. Multiply all the numbers I told you by 10.¡±

    They all looked at each other before Walker addressed me again.

    ¡°I think we can talk later about that. But you should make your plans in the knowledge that nobody here has one of these clusters available.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°That changes some of my suggestions.

    Forget them verifying it by themselves.

    No chance for that.

    They need professionals from the Abyss. And you should contact either Dunedain or Aqua Paradox for that.

    They are, as I mentioned in my opinion the best option for this.

    The others will have to pay more for that but that is not your problem. After that, we should seriously talk about your computer systems. They are in desperate need of an upgrade I think.¡±

    Dylan seemed not very impressed by that though.

    ¡°You think we want one of these clusters? Hell, we don¡¯t need it.¡±

    I managed a sad smile.

    ¡°You think you don¡¯t need it. But the game theory alone will be invaluable for you.¡±

    ¡°We have better things to do than to play games.¡±

    ¡°Game theory has not much to do with playing.

    Instead, it is essentially the mathematical and logical construct to analyze and predict human behaviors as well as an invaluable tool for decision making.

    It essentially explains your gut feelings and shows where they are right, where they are wrong, and where you can do better.

    I don¡¯t know your organization enough to make a precise estimate but the average gain in efficiency from using game theory is somewhere in the 40% range.

    The final gain mostly depends on how good the instincts of the decision-makers are.

    But there will be a gain. Another use case for a cluster is loss prevention.

    Something like with your hospital administrator can be relatively easily detected if you have a good database setup and run an appropriate algorithm over the numbers regularly.¡±

    Walker rapped on the table.

    ¡°That is nice and will be an interesting topic for another time, but we don¡¯t have one of these now so we can¡¯t use it for the problem at hand.

    So back to the topic at hand.

    I think you are right, that we need to hire independent help to verify your findings. Not that I don¡¯t trust you but something this convoluted needs many sources of confirmation before we can sell it to the others.

    So yes, we will contact the hackers you recommended and have them check what you have given us. I think that concludes that part. Is there anything else?¡±

    I began shutting down Precious, while I answered.

    ¡°Yes, a few other things, but nothing even approaching this magnitude.

    First, one of the members of Frankel¡¯s gang is a relatively decent tech head. He is in the process of being broken for sale, and I offer you the right of first refusal.

    I think he may be useful for your organization. The other slavers are more or less just muscle. If you need cannon fodder you can have them, but otherwise, I will throw them onto the market.¡±

    Walker took a moment to contemplate the information.

    ¡°What do you understand as being relative decent? How do you say he compares to Leon here?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t have enough information to evaluate Mr. Reid, so take what I say with a grain of salt. I think the tech-head is comparable. Stronger in some things, weaker in others.

    He seems to concentrate on hacking while Mr. Reid seems to me to be more focused on the installation and maintenance side. So he could be a nice addition.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I will think about it. But in all honesty, I will likely refuse. For one I don¡¯t like to use slaves, and then as far as I know it is hard to force somebody to use his intellectual skills even with a slave collar.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°No problem, and you are right.

    In such cases, you need a carrot together with the stick of the collar.

    And I agree with your sentiments about slaves.

    If it weren¡¯t a bunch of slavers I would not enslave them, but they are, and I think a bit of karmic justice is exactly what is needed here.

    Now, the next point is that one of the fixers you send me to decided that I was ripe for a bit of theft. He stole around $8 million from me, and when I confronted him he outright told me that my only backing here in New York would die in 2 weeks latest.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, I don¡¯t want you to intervene on my behalf, but I think you need to know that your situation is known.

    If Mr. Vasilienkov knows it, who knows who else is aware.¡±

    ¡°Hm, ok, that is valuable info. I will look into it, but it was only a matter of time before it got out. More interesting is, why don¡¯t you want me to get your money back?¡±

    ¡°Oh, I already took care of it.

    He had actually quite good data security, he paid ArgoNaughty to set it up. I must confess I had a bit of luck that it was Argo.

    He is a nice enough guy and a pretty good computer user, but he is at best marginal at creating the software himself. He instead used a framework that I sold him as basic for the security suite. Otherwise, it would have taken me a day or two to get through it.¡±

    ¡°So you had a back door? You know, I am a little bit disappointed. That is not how I had estimated you.¡±

    ¡°No, I had no back door.

    I sell the same framework to many people, and quite a few are pretty adept at ferreting out such things.

    And I just don¡¯t like them.

    If I give my word I try to keep it and if I sell something I provide it as complete as I can. It is a thing of honor for me. No, the backdoor was Argo¡¯s. I just had the advantage that I knew the specifics of the security and where the backdoor had to be.¡±

    ¡°I understand. So you took your money back? Anything else?¡±

    ¡°Everything else.

    The backdoor I found provided me with all of Mr. Vasilienkov¡¯s accounts and I decided to establish an example here.

    He is broke and I took all his data.

    So far I have no idea what I have, it will take a couple of days to decrypt it all, but I have it all. Then I deleted it and sabotaged his backup system. He will not get his data back any time soon.¡±

    He tapped onto his cheek with his right index finger for a while.

    ¡°Ok, I can¡¯t really fault you there. Somebody like Maximilian should know better than to rip off a customer and I can understand that you had to demonstrate you are no rollover but try to be more diplomatic in the future, please. How much did you get from him?¡±

    ¡°A bit over 60 million. A nice windfall but I don¡¯t expect something similar in the near future.¡±

    Leon seemed disgusted by the discussion while Hunter looked quite interested. When I mentioned the sum I appropriated Dylan¡¯s chin fell down, and he burst out:

    ¡°Shit. 60 million? How is that so¡­ ¡°

    Walker chuckled softly.

    ¡°Think Dylan.

    Booth Max and Kitten play in a different league than you are used to. Max is, was one of the more successful fixers here in New York, and Kitten told us she is a broker and the tech for Spectre.

    And while she only gets a percentage of what Spectre makes, he routinely gets triple-digit millions for his work.

    A hacker that is accepted in the Abyss can earn 10 million in a single day easily.

    Kitten''s foray into cyber surgery is more a hobby for her than a real way to make money. Even if she gets 100% of the market in the US it will be dwarfed by what she can make doing matrix dives. And if other abyss-dwellers use her software then she gets a nice amount from them too. I would not be surprised if she was worth north of a billion.¡±

    Wow, he was good. O sure, he was off by a considerable margin but that had more to do with the secrets he had not yet deducted and less with his estimates.

    ¡°But back to the topic, do you think there will be any fallout from that dive?¡±

    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think so. He lost his blackmail material, he lost his data and he lost his money. I guess he will lose the majority of his contacts soon, and he will lose his reputation so all in all, I think he is neutralized as a threat.¡±

    ¡°You don¡¯t think any of his friends will come after you?¡±

    ¡°Good point, but no, I don¡¯t think that. The kind of friends that would be a problem are also the kind of friends you buy, and he lost his money. He would need either mercenaries or infiltrators. Any other fixers could, at worst blacklist me, but there are enough of them that I can get by.¡±

    ¡°Yes, you are right I think. I think also that I want a direct talk with Maximilian. We will see what he will have to say. Well, anything else?¡±

    ¡°No, that was all from my side.¡±

    ¡°Good then. It was informative. I am sure we will see each other shortly.¡±

 22: Fools rush in

    While Walker and Dylan left the room I unplugged Precious''s power supply and prepared her for transport. Leon seemed still pretty unhappy with my presence, but I could understand that in a way.

    Unfortunately, he was way too far behind on the technology curve. His workmanship may be solid, but he obviously was subpar in his competence.

    I desperately needed to investigate the security here in-depth, followed by a survey about the used computers. I did not exactly think that he had slacked off, but for some reason, New York was not a decade behind Seattle, but instead more like half a century.

    Add in his blind spot about the mindscape and he was, in my opinion, a security risk. And unfortunately, I did not see him accepting my help in getting up to date.

    Hunter was apparently better prepared for the next step, but his interaction here was limited, so I had nothing to base an opinion on. Speaking of Hunter, he came over to me.

    ¡°Hey, maybe we can now talk about your Seraphim. Do you think you could help me get one? And what exactly is the difference between an Mk III and an Mk IV?¡±

    I sighed and looked at him.

    ¡°All right, at the moment I can¡¯t help you get one. Unless you have the option to build the hardware yourself and only need the schematics you are simply out of luck as Seraphim is working on the next generation and does not build them at the moment.

    I can help you buy the schematics, but that is all. And only the Mk IV schematics at that.

    Now the difference between the Mk III and the Mk IV is that the Mk IV is much more modular.

    It is intended for people who know what they are doing and want to tune the board to their own idiosyncrasies.

    For that, the Mk IV is, in its bare form, much reduced.

    Instead of 32 specialized, and more capable, QDR 16 memory slots, 16 superfast 256 TB/s HNVMH 12, and eight 256 lane UEB 7.3-connections it has eight memory slots, two HNVMHs, and 32 UEB.

    Of course, you can use the UEB to install HNVMH-controllers, or memory slots, but you will lose performance compared to the dedicated connections.

    Instead of two EB/s for the memory, you only get 512 TB, and instead of 256 TB/s for the mass storage, you get 128.

    On the other hand, you have more options for expansions like graphic cards, LAN controllers, coprocessors, signal processors, and whatever.

    That was the result of what Seraphim learned with the Mk I.

    She sold a couple of them, but the feedback was mostly that the configuration was not what people wanted and they wanted x or y or z, so she reduced the dedicated connections and replaced them with modular ones.

    You can get an Mk IV similar configured as the Mk III but you lose about 3% in performance compared to the Mk III.

    The Mk III is essentially the model tailored to Spectre and his way to do things. I use an Mk III because I was trained and work mostly the same way.¡±

    He looked at Precious with awe in his eyes. ¡°Hm, ok, then can you help me get the schematics?¡±

    ¡°Why do you want them?¡± ¡°Is that not clear? I want to use it.¡±

    Ouch. I hated to have to pierce his enthusiasm but I had to do it.

    ¡°Sorry to say so, but a Seraphim Mk IV would be wasted money for you.¡±

    I could see his temper rising at that.

    ¡°Hey, I can work with computers.¡±

    ¡°That is not the reason why it would be wasted.

    To really use a Seraphim board you need a jack.

    Without one, you get maybe two or three % of the potential performance. And you don¡¯t want to get a jack at this moment. I can¡¯t implant you one, as I lack the equipment at the moment, and it will be four to six months before I am ready, and I would strongly advise against using another cyber surgeon.

    The chance of getting CRS with multiconnective neural implants hovers somewhere around 5% if you find an especially talented surgeon.

    With an average surgeon, you get 30% and if you go to a quack it can rise up to 50 or 60%.

    And neural CRS is in one word bad.

    Muscular CRS is bad enough. It attacks and rejects the myosynth that the cyber muscles are made of, and in the end destroys them. That is certainly uncomfortable but unless the cybermuscles in question are the heart, stomach, or other vital ones it is actually quite survivable.

    Mr. Walker has problems because it is his heart that is attacked.

    But neural CRS is worse.

    At the low end, you have the control systems for the cybermuscles, and that can lead to cramps, phantom pain, or loss of control.

    But it becomes worse the more directly your nervous system interacts with the implant.

    In the case of a jack that interaction is nearly at the top end.

    The jack enables complete virtual reality with all senses simulated, including pain and pleasure.

    Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

    Now imagine these connections misfiring. Hallucinations, crippling pain, pleasure without context, and from nowhere, you will essentially go mad.

    And the really bad part is that neuronect; the material that connects the synapses with the implant is similar enough to your neural matter that eventually the CRS will attack your biological nerves.

    It will literally destroy your nervous system. Slowly and inevitably, once it starts.

    From what I have been told the pain is indescribable.

    Most people with stage five neural CRS will commit suicide after a day or two. Those who don¡¯t, who can¡¯t, they are the ones you should pity. It will take them roughly a month to die.

    A month in which every single second, regardless of whether awake or not, is spent in enough pain to drive a grown man insane.

    So believe me, you don¡¯t want to get a jack now when the option to get one without the risk of CRS is only half a year away.¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°The other reason a Seraphim board would be wasted on you is that without a jack you don¡¯t actually know yet how you will do. What your needs are, and what modules you need.

    The reason why the jacks wanted a more modular variant of the Seraphim is that a board tailored to their specific needs gives an immense performance boost.

    But without knowing these needs your board would be, at best, unbalanced.

    I would strongly suggest that after you get the jack you get a standard beginner board and learn what you need with it.

    Sure, it will limit you to 20:1 compression but it will cost you only 10-20k while a Seraphim goes for over a million. And that is a large chunk of money to waste on the wrong configuration.¡±

    Still, he was not yet mollified.

    ¡°And I tell you, I can work with computers, I already have a diadem. And I want to do more than just build and maintain systems. I can do so much more.¡±

    ¡°Do you know what jacks call people who buy a top board as soon as they have a jack?¡±

    ¡°Uh, no?¡±

    ¡°Idiots.¡±

    ¡°What? Why? Don¡¯t they want competition and badmouth us others?¡±

    ¡°There is an old saying that there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots.

    The meaning is that a bold pilot will almost invariably kill himself. A newly implanted jack now buys himself a top-of-the-line board is the equivalent of the bold pilot.

    It takes time, willingness, and care to learn how to do a dive.

    The more powerful your board is the less forgiving it is.

    Sure, it also has more reserves but unless you are an idiot you don¡¯t need these reserves.

    An idiot sees his new elite board, has his newly healed jack and gets the idea that he is now unstoppable in the matrix.

    The live expectancy of these people is measured in days and single-digit days at that.

    It is as I told you, a blindly bought better board is usually badly balanced for the person while giving the jack a false sense of security.

    Add in that they rarely have real experience in the matrix and the usual thing they try is to digitally rob a bank, if they are a bit smarter, and just go on a rampage if they are not.

    The latter ends when they encounter a more sophisticated security system with black ice that fries their brain, the former is simply an exceedingly bad idea.

    Do you know how many successful digital bank robberies there were since the great war?¡±

    ¡°No? That was what? 150 years ago? So I would guess between 500 and a thousand globally?¡±

    ¡°That depends on how you count, but generally the answer is considered to be one.

    This one was a haul of epic proportions and it is mind-boggling what amount of money the perpetrator got when he or she robbed more than 1000 accounts at 33 banks at the same time.

    But the point is, that was the only time somebody pulled that off, and we still have absolutely no idea who it was or how they did it.

    We can only infer that it was done because one morning the money was missing. That was the phantom.

    Attempted robberies on the other hand happen ten to 20 times a year. Except for the phantom, not one survived. If they are lucky they run into black ice and fry their brain. Extremely painful but it is over fast.

    The other option is that the bank sends out a hunter-killer team. And these teams have the order to make it painful and slow. They usually interpret that as using pain sticks to kill the hacker by pain overload, after a few days of entertainment.

    But the gist of what I am trying to say is that you can¡¯t win using a Seraphim board from the get-go and can only lose. If you really want to become a jack you should use your diadem and get a basic board suited for work as a queen, I would suggest a Crystaltech Dream 5.

    Sure, it is sold as a gaming rig, but it is more powerful than nearly all so-called dedicated cybersecurity systems and I can send you the software and manuals to convert it. Or you can use a Kawamoto Intruder Titan but you pay three times as much as for the Dream, get at best 10% more power, and land on an observation list unless you go through a fixer and pay even more.

    With the Dream, you can experiment with matrix activities and do a couple of easy training dives to find out how you want to work. I can send you a list of easy targets, just don¡¯t do any damage, these targets are protected by the better jacks just to give beginners something to train on.

    I will help you compile a library of utilities and you can gain experience slowly. And before you get a different idea, I know of no one active who did not start with a basic off-the-shelf board. That includes me. That includes Seraphim.

    That includes even Spectre or the other of the top 10, with the possible exception of the phantom. Nobody knows how the phantom started so I can¡¯t comment here. ¡±

    I saw that his jaw muscles tensed and he took on a stubborn expression.

    ¡°You will see, I will find a way. You can¡¯t hold me down.¡± With that, he abruptly turned around and walked out of the door, only for Leon to come to me.

    ¡°What did you want with my son?¡± I could only tiredly shake my head.

    ¡°I wanted nothing with him. He wanted to know how he could get a Seraphim board.¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t you give Hunter any strange ideas. We already have planned out how he will take over from me in a few years, so keep away from him.¡±

    ¡°Believe me, I did not give him any ideas. On the contrary, I tried to talk him out of some ideas he already had. And in all honesty, if he inherited your stubbornness then he will manage to kill himself in a few months.¡±

    That shook him up.

    ¡°What do you mean with that?¡±

    I sighed before I answered.

    ¡°He is apparently dead set on becoming a Jack.

    And he wanted to buy a Seraphim Mk IV for his first board.

    Frankly, both are bad ideas. If I understood it right the majority of experienced cyber surgeons in the city are no longer available. It is more than likely that, if he insists to get a jack now he will go to a quack with a more than even chance that he contracts CRS.

    I would implant him but I have to get my business up and running first, and I don¡¯t have the impression that he intends to wait six months as I advised him to do.

    The choice of a Seraphim for his first board is not necessarily deadly, but it is comparable to giving a driving student the keys to a super sports car after his first time behind the wheel and telling him to have fun in traffic. I know of not a single person who started with something like a Seraphim board and survived for longer than a month.¡±

    I looked him directly in the eyes.

    ¡°And it seems that one of the reasons he appears so insistent is that you belittle what he wants to do. I honestly have no idea how you can save the situation, and I am by far the wrong person to ask about father-son relationships, but I advise you urgently to seek help from somebody knowledgeable about these things, or you will most likely bury your son in a couple of months.

    While I personally would think that a shame but would not be impacted much, I estimate that it would have much graver consequences for you. I would help you but after our talk just now I don¡¯t expect that he will be particularly eager to deepen the acquaintance between us.  If you manage to defuse the situation somehow you can tell him that my offer is still open.¡±

    With that I gripped Precious.

    ¡°I assume we will see each other in the future so see you then.¡±

 23: Message in a Bottle

    After we left the HQ Darren walked beside me, and softly asked me:

    ¡°Is something wrong? You sounded so, I don¡¯t know, down.¡±

    I sighed while I looked ahead at the van.

    ¡°I am tired. Tired of this BS. Tired of this situation. Tired of being in a war zone. Tired of having to shoulder the load. Simply tired.

    I don¡¯t know how much longer I can do this. I am¡­ really am tempted to write off my losses and relocate. I got out of Seattle because the idiot gangs and the idiot peacekeepers played war there.¡±

    ¡°The way you say it, you may be tempted but won¡¯t do it. Why not?¡±

    I had to chuckle mirthlessly. ¡°I gave my word. Not only to Mr. Walker, but you and your gang, to Jacky to the former slaves, and of course, I gave my word to Frankel that he would regret not letting me go. And I keep my word if I can in any way possible.¡±

    He chuckled with much more humor than I had managed.

    ¡°You know, people keeping their word is not normal in our world. You might be one of the last examples of a species dying out.¡±

    ¡°I fear you are right. Nonetheless, I choose to be better than those you can¡¯t trust. I know it is not a typical choice, but it was mine to make and I will stand by it.¡±

    ¡°Why? I mean, I get that it is important for you. But it can¡¯t be reputation. I don¡¯t think many people give a flying shit about the other side keeping their word. They don¡¯t expect it and won¡¯t believe it. So why cling to it then?¡±

    ¡°If your honor is the only thing you can call your own when you grow up, you become strangely attached to it.

    I have, obviously, more now, but my honor is still my most prized possession.

    I will not sacrifice it. If I give my best and lose, then I have lost, but I will have lost with my honor intact.

    If I do not give my word and don¡¯t enter the fray in the first place, then if I walk away, my honor is intact.

    But I gave my word, and I entered the fray, so I will give my best. It may not be enough, but my honor will be intact.¡±

    After that, we were silent and napped a bit in the car.

    When we reached the fortress I took a moment to come back to reality. The infernal racket of the installation crew did continue unabashed, and I spent a moment looking over the workers before I looked at the progress Mia made. She had, unsurprisingly, the second heart disassembled, but surprisingly she damaged only one part that the first heart had yet not yielded. So one part to go.

    Then I was left with nothing to do for the first time in weeks.

    I took a few minutes to simply enjoy doing nothing before I moved to one of the cleared offices to plug into Precious. While I had no immediate needs, I had enough other things on the back burner that I could fill years of work.

    So I began my dive.

    As always I did my routine, but there was nothing new in the black labs. The universities did not wield any interesting information either. Lastly, I logged into the Abyss.

    I did not expect anything new, so it was a surprise that there was a message waiting for me.

    Argonaughty had contacted me and sent me a vid-record, along with a short note.

    Intrigued I opened the recording, after a careful examination, of course, we are talking about Abyss after all.

    The recording was, of course about my encounter with Vasilienkov.

    On the right was Vasi, untended, sweating, red in the face, and on the left I could admire Argo¡¯s usual avatar, the tall, muscular Greek warrior with very naughty accents.

    It was Argo who opened the session.

    ¡°You wanted something Mr. Vasilienkov?¡±

    ¡°Yes! I wanted something! I wanted security for my enterprise, my data, and my accounts! You promised me that! You told me I was save from nearly every hacker on the planet! So HOW DOES IT COME THAT THIS LITTLE CUNT SIMPLY DESTROYED MY ENTIRE NETWORK?¡±

    ¡°Calm down. What little cunt? And what happened to your network?¡±

    I could see Vasi take a deep breath.

    ¡°God damn it, I¡­ ok, calm down. I can do that.

    Ok, earlier today I had a little argument with a young who¡­ woman who recently moved to New York. She was pretty pissed off afterward. Not even ten minutes later she called me again and told me that I would be a valuable example. That¡¯s when my computer system shut down. Everything is gone. EVERY FUCKING THING!¡±

    It was, naturally hard to read Argo¡¯s animated avatar.

    ¡°All right, when was the last backup? If you kept the schedule I developed for you then you should have, moment, let me look it up, ah yes, you should make a backup every three days. So how old was the latest backup?¡±

    ¡°Yesterday, the backup was from yesterday.¡±

    ¡°So, you lost half a day. I can dig that you are pissed, but simply use the backup and everything should run fine.¡±

    ¡°Nothing runs fine. The backup is shot! And the one before that! And before that! I have gone back the last five months and not a single one worked. What is that shit you sold me? IT IS NOT WORKING FOR FUCK¡¯S SAKE!¡±

    Oh wow, so close to the grand slam. Only one month more and he would have wiped out the whole new system. Whelp, it was nice anyway.

    ¡°Mr. Vasilienkov, I did not sell you any shit. I tested your backup system myself when I installed your new system.¡±

    ¡°Yes, the new system. The one you told me would give pause even to an Abyss-hacker. The one you told me would stand up to virtually anything that might fuck me up. Well, guess what, it FUCKING DID NOT DO THAT!¡±

    ¡°Yeah, that is harsh. Something is not right here. You said it took ten minutes before this broad shot down your system?¡±

    ¡°Less than that. I paid good money for good security. So how come it did not work?¡±

    ¡°One moment, I am looking at it right now. Ok, first, the monitoring system should have squealed if somebody was fucking around, so why didn¡¯t it?¡±

    Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

    ¡°HOW THE FUCK SHOULD I KNOW? FUCK IT, how can you look it up? The whole system is dead.¡±

    ¡°I told you the monitoring system is offsite. It is still there.¡±

    Oops, that was a blunder. How could I miss an offsite link like that? I would have to look into that later.

    ¡°Ok, I see when the order to purge the data was given.

    Wow, you are right. Whoever it was took less than five minutes.

    They somehow got their grubby mitts on your login data. The system says it was you that fucked up everything. Hm¡­ ok, that was definitely not you. That is¡­ rad. Maybe I can find out how she did it¡­¡±

    ¡°WHAT?!?¡±

    ¡°Oh, sorry. Got how your backups crapped out.

    The bird reprogrammed the firmware in the drives to destroy the crystals if somebody tries to use them. Seriously, that is megarad. So evil man, I think I am in love. But that does not tell me¡­ oh fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!¡±

    ¡°What? What did you find out?¡±

    ¡°You said it was a young woman? Shit man, you stepped into it, man. Fuck I did not know she had come out here. Fuck!¡±

    ¡°What are you talking about?¡±

    ¡°Good news, bad news time man. And the good news is slim. The system I sold you did not fail. It would have worked as I told you. Except¡­ and that is the bad news. And we are talking nuking from orbit bad news here.

    There are two people on this fucking dirtball that could march through your security like that. I am one of them. The other, you remember that I bought the basic program from a techie from the Abyss?¡±

    ¡°Yeah, so there was a backdoor she found?¡±

    ¡°Nope. The techie is Seraphim. And she is known for not selling shit with backdoors. Fucking point is she doesn¡¯t need to.

    The core of your security was created by her.

    She knows how it works.

    She knows how it identifies goodies and baddies. And you, my friend, managed to get her pissed off at you. So what did you do to her?¡±

    I could see Vasi getting defensive.

    ¡°Hey, I did nothing. This cunt simply overreacted. Was triggered or something. How should I know why she got off into the deep end?¡±

    ¡°Mr. Vasilienkov, we are talking about Seraphim.

    She is literally famous in the Abyss that if you treat her fairly you can¡¯t get a better trading partner. But if you try to rip her off, you are toast.

    I know of no less than three hackers from the Abyss who tried to steal from her.

    Their boards melted. Can you imagine that?

    Their fucking boards melted man!

    So for her to stomp your system a new one you have to have done something to make her mad.

    You don¡¯t want her mad at you.

    Even if she can¡¯t reach you, she is the fucking main tech for fucking Spectre. She can simply ask the sixth-best hacker alive for a favor. And she would get it. So, are you going to tell me how you fucked up, or are we done here?¡±

    Vasi visibly sunk down into his chair.

    ¡°But she is a nobody. Unimportant. She got here and ordered a fucking industrial fabber.

    This little girl bought a $12 million industrial fabber simply as that.

    So she threw 12 million away to play with some toys, so I decided she can do with the smaller one. I mean, a little girl does not need a full-sized industrial fabber. And I decided to keep the difference.

    Argo, despite being the animated avatar, facepalmed.

    ¡°Oh, man. Oh, man. That is not fucked up that is strapping a pocket nuke to your balls and setting it off. You have fucking destroyed your reputation man.

    Nobody will trust you anymore.

    Not my problem though. But just for your information, she builds the best fucking boards one can buy. So yes, she fucking can use an indyfab.¡±

    The snarl returned to Vasi¡¯s face.

    ¡°So what? She¡¯s gone too far. Way too far. How much will it cost me for you to destroy her matrix presence?¡±

    ¡°Shit man, did you listen to anything that I just told you or am I background noise for you? She is the main tech for Spectre. I won¡¯t touch her in any way.¡±

    ¡°Then find me another hacker to take her out.¡±

    ¡°Won¡¯t happen man. Shit, first, we are talking Spectre here.

    He is one of the top 10.

    These guys are practically gods compared to us lowly peons.

    The only ones who seriously would risk his anger are the nihilistic assholes and the others of the top 10.

    But wait, there¡¯s more. Seraphim is protected, man.

    There are orders of, one moment, ah yes, there it is, she is not subject of any pranks, feuds, or other destructive activities in the Abyss.¡±

    ¡°So you won¡¯t help me? You won¡¯t even repair the damage?¡±

    ¡°The damage is simple, man. You can piss off the data of the last five months, get new crystal burners, and restore the latest backup you did not frack, or you can ask her for your data back.¡±

    ¡°What do you mean by asking her for my data back? Do you mean she managed to do all that damage and still stole all my data? In less than ten minutes?¡±

    ¡°Yup, she did. Wrap your brain around the fact that the moment she entered your system, it rolled over and played dead like a well-trained dog. It only took her as long as it did because she stole the data. Otherwise, it would have been less than a minute.¡±

    ¡°And there is no other way than to beg for the data back? I don¡¯t want to come begging to the little bitch.¡±

    ¡°Should have thought about that earlier man. I can¡¯t help you there.

    And FYI, I don¡¯t think she will give it back. So the best you can do is move. Your rep is shot, your data is gone, and if I know her right, most of your money is visiting with her.

    You are done here in New York.¡±

    The next couple of minutes consisted of Vasi cursing up a storm. When he slowed down, Argo talked again.

    ¡°Are you done then? Sorry man, but you fucked up and I can¡¯t help you. If there is nothing else, I have other things to do.¡±

    That was the last of the recording. I have to confess it lifted my mood considerably. Unfortunately, it also informed me about a small problem I had.

    Apparently, Argo had linked my account with Vasi with my identity as Seraphim.

    True, Seraphim was not particularly high on the most wanted lists, but it was never good if somebody could identify a hacker.

    Anonymity was our greatest weapon.

    While I pondered the implications I received a com request. From Argo of course. When I accepted I was greeted in a private chat room by his avatar.

    ¡°Heya, Sera. Did you watch the vid? Interesting isn¡¯t it? Fuck, you did a number on his systems. And the firmware hack, rad, girl, simply rad. I have to remember that. You aren¡¯t willing to sell that or are you?¡±

    I had to stifle a laugh.

    ¡°Yes, I watched it. And that was the intention. I can¡¯t have somebody stealing from me. That is bad for business, you know?¡±

    He lifted his hands in faked surrender while grinning maniacally.

    ¡°Sure, girl, sure, nobody here in the Abyss wants to risk it. But honestly, I did not know you moved here to the east coast. How comes?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°That is pretty much private. Please don¡¯t pry into it. But the short version is life got a bit too hot for me in RL on the west coast.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, we have all been there one time or another. But why I¡¯m calling you, I want to upgrade my board. What would it cost me for you to build one for me?¡±

    ¡°Uh, sorry, but at the moment that is not possible. I lack the tools to make the tools to build a board. I am sure that you caught that I just moved. Well, I had most of my workshop behind. The best I can do is to sell you the schematics. That would come up to $750k for the Mk IV.¡±

    I called up a 3d image of the Mk IV.

    ¡°Of course, the Mk IV is the unpopulated modular board. And don¡¯t be angry, but you are as far as I know not the person who can balance a high-end board.¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°Yeah, no prob. I know bestest how I am. And no I don¡¯t want an empty Mk IV. Well, of course, I would like an Mk IV, but it would be much better if you could tailor one for me. I get that with the workshop, so the schematics are all right.¡±

    I had to sigh.

    ¡°Tailoring is, unfortunately also at the moment not possible.

    I landed neck-deep into the sewers here and have to work myself out of it. The actual designing of the board may be fast, less than a day, but I would have to spend more time than I have on getting to know your style to balance it.

    This amount of time I will have in six weeks at the absolute earliest, and that only if nothing else goes wrong. We are talking more likely about four to six months before there is a realistic probability.¡±

    Then I had a stray thought.

    ¡°That reminds me¡­ I just started preliminary work on the next generation. I¡¯ve got access to some new, pretty interesting technologies that should make a new board much better.

    As soon as I find the time for getting it done, it should be a matter of days to have the Mk V and Mk VI available.

    It would probably be better for you if you waited so long. Otherwise, as I said, you can get the Mk IV schematics.¡±

    He rocked back.

    ¡°Wow, next-gen? Am I the first to learn about it?¡±

    I stared at him with a stony expression, assisted by my avatar''s lack of expression.

    ¡°Of course not. Spectre knows, and Spectre will get the first Mk V.

    I get the next Mk V. And then I sell the Mk VI.

    But outside of Spectre and me, you are the first. It is really a brand new development. The CPU is not even designed yet, much less the rest of the board.¡±

    ¡°Sure, girl, sure. I will wait for that. A new Seraphim generation and I am among the first. Excellent.¡±

    ¡°Another thing, you told Vasi that I am protected? What did you mean with that?¡±

    ¡°Come on, Sera. You have to know. You are quite literally among the top three techs in the Abyss. And you are the only one of the top three that is considered completely honest.

    What do you think? That we can walk into the next Kawamoto store and get their best cyberwar tech?

    Techs of your caliber are scarce on our side of the law.

    To get one that we can trust¡­ that is ecstasy, girl, pure ecstasy. And the big guns have commed that they will land like a ton of bricks on anybody who drives you away.¡±

    I had to think about that. I had no idea that my expertise was that valuable. Sure, I was good, but that good?

    ¡°Oh¡­ wow.  No, I did not know that. Thank you for telling me that.¡±

 24: The build is on

    After Argo left the chat room I was left thinking. The information that the higher-ups on the ranking list protected me was reassuring, but at the same time, I had no idea about the ramifications.

    What irked me especially was that nobody had talked with Spectre about it. And I would know if they had.

    I also began a list of all the abyss-dwellers I have sold hard- or software to.

    To my surprise, it encompassed more than 2/3 of the A list.

    Sure, only four of the top 20 used my boards.

    But over the last year, I had custom-build several DSPs for a few of the hackers here.

    Most though had bought a utility or a few from me. A dozen or so had bought complete frameworks like the firewall or encrypting/decrypting software.

    More surprising was that I sold three copies of Precious OS, without the board with it.

    Of course, the version I sold did not have all the bells and whistles the full version had, but again the basic framework that the hacker could adapt to their own liking was what most wanted.

    The full OS, like Precious herself, was too much tailored to Spectre, and following that, my needs.

    I shook my head lost in contemplation and returned to the general Abyss. I found nothing new that was of interest to me. The other brokers had apparently taken my admonishing to heart, as there were no new requests for Spectre.

    With that done, I decided to finish the auto surgeon design.

    With the CPU and GPU done yesterday, I returned to the motherboard.

    My first instinct was to throw it all overboard and build it from the ground up with Q-links instead of data lines.

    But only for a short time, before I realized that it would change virtually nothing.

    The bus width was hardwired into the processor, and the Chimera would be my utility CPU so I did not see the need to redesign the actual blocks.

    I would need to do that for the next CPUs for my next board or my next cluster, but for the auto surgeon and other similar used systems, the old limits would be plenty.

    I would not be able to hit the limits of the processor with any application I planned to use it for.

    Of course, that was no reason not to use the Q-link from the get-go, but without it I could use the industrial fabber to build the board, leaving the NADA for other, more critical endeavors. That would change naturally when I build another NADA, but that was in the future. I had to run the first one through its paces yet.

    So the motherboard mostly remained unchanged. Sure, I replaced much of the signal lanes with Q-link receptors, as the Q-links themselves were easy, fast to manufacture, and cheap as they can be, and would take virtually no resources from the NADA, but otherwise kept the system the same.

    When I began to design the chassis I contemplated for a moment using nano-positors in conjunction with the stepper motors. At first, I was going to dismiss it, but then I thought about neurosurgery, where micrometers might be too much, and decided to include them.

    Sure, they made the design much more complicated and expensive to build, but that translated to at most twice the costs in time and materials. With the decision to include the positors I had of course to choose from the higher end of controlling options. Without the Chimaera, I would need at least three CPUs to make it work, and even then it would be much more graceless, but fortunately, the Chimaera was at hand so I could build the best auto surgeon one could get.

    When I began to integrate the scanner it was the first time I encountered some problems.

    I had several designs of scanners at the ready, but I realized that none of them had the resolution to make use of the positors.

    I have to confess it took me a few hours to design a scanner that included all the little advancements of the designs I could get my hands on.

    Debugging the design in simulation took even longer. I was a bit sad that I could not do it without adding another CPU.

    It would have been nice to make a one CPU auto surgeon to rule them all. At least the scanner design was useful for other functions and it would be trivial to make it stand alone.

    After that, the frame was easy. As so often, Carbon was an ideal material for the task, and it took me only a couple of minutes to combine all of it into a complete if somewhat ugly design.

    Surprisingly it did not violate any published patents.

    Maybe a few submarine patents, but the courts tended to frown upon those. Oh, sure, much of the design came straight out of the black labs, but as a rule, they did not patent their stuff.

    The next task was to have the cluster run the design through a simulated wringer. I was aware that that would not eliminate all problems, but at least the annoying ones would be caught.

    When I looked at the time I realized that I had spent nearly 40 hours on the design, and that was mostly taking stuff I already had and arranging it new.

    Thank goodness for the compression so it had taken not quite an hour in real-time but I was mentally exhausted. The surprising thing though was that my funk had lessened. It was hard work and took an enormous amount of concentration but this tinkering session was exactly what I had needed.

    A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

    If the design passed the simulated stress test it would take around three weeks to build it. At least that is what I hoped. I had so far no valid data about how fast, or not, the NADA was. It should be, if not blistering fast, still quite speedy. But reality had the uncomfortable habit of biting one in the derri¨¨re if one relied on such nice innocent words like should or would.

    To make it short, I hoped for the best, but I had already ordered an off-the-shelf auto surgeon for the worst case. It should arrive later this week.

    With the design work done I decided to play for some time. It is barely conveyable what it feels like to fly through the mindscape. Either you have done it and know the feeling or you did not. It would be like describing the color blue to a blind man.

    Then I thought about a possible next project. It would be irrelevant at the moment to begin a new design for my implant surgery.

    The bioreactor I would have to design from the ground up. Sure, I had the small model in the lab, but that design would not scale well.

    I had built it predominately for my cranial implants, and while it could be used for cyber muscles it was far from optimized for that role.

    Not that the process itself was fully developed.

    Also, I would like to have the possibility to work on several parts at once.

    And frankly, I felt the need to have the ideas simmer for a bit. Except that I would definitely include a nano fab into the design. A big one at that.

    Left study time. I did not think I could learn much more in implant surgery at this moment. Nicolin was the foremost specialist and I more or less learned everything he taught.

    Left the new fields, energy production, and gravitics.

    I can¡¯t claim to be particularly interested in either of them, but I knew that I would be pretty bored pretty quickly if I run out of new things to learn.

    While I contemplated the various merits of both fields, I remembered that I had the first gamma-curse attack since I implanted my new cranial board.

    That, in collaboration with the new 12<sup>th</sup> gen nanos I had started to use only two months prior might be able to finally give me an answer to the curse.

    I called up the records of the onset. Initially, I did not see anything different between normal activity and the initiation of the attack.

    Not completely unexpected though as my nanobots observed around 50 billion neurons, so I employed the cluster to analyze the data for abnormal changes during the curse.

    Honestly, without the storage capacity of the cluster and the Q-link, this amount of observation would have been completely impossible just from the mass of data alone.

    For the cluster, it was trivial work though. I reduced my compression while I waited for the results, and started reading the introduction of gravitics, after a virtual coin toss. As with nearly every introduction text I have ever encountered it was dry working, so it took a while to get into it.

    I had half the book finished when the cluster signaled that it had results. Dry, boring physical texts were instantly put aside and I looked up the results.

    It was not a pretty picture.

    Essentially some of my synapses reacted with a slight denaturation of a couple of proteins in the ion channels, which began to deform the neural signal.

    That, in turn, spread the denaturation around it, increasing the damage. After a certain point, the cascading feedback cycle began, releasing neurotransmitters that were not meant to be released in this amount, closing receptors that were meant to be open.

    All that spread the denaturation further and further increasing the runaway cycle even more. A short simulation of the denatured proteins showed that they would not be metabolized without being slightly changed by specific neurotransmitters docking. These neurotransmitters were not unusual but after the process had begun the amount of new denaturation exceeded that of metabolization.

    The initial factor was apparently an overload of the synapses. Theoretically, it could happen to every mongrel, but the risk was negligible. But the overclocked brain we Pures got free of charge increased the probability massively.

    The catalyst of the overload was in the first instance stress. Hard thinking also contributed, but it was mostly stress. That of course was another reason why it did spin out of control so fast.

    The stress itself was in a vicious cycle. The more pain, the more stress, the more it damaged the synapses, and the stronger the curse, increasing the pain and thus the stress.

    Only when the pain was too much and the victim was unconscious could the stress abate and the vicious cycle shut down. It would still take several hours to clean up the proteins, but it would happen.

    The reason why the previous attempts to break the runaway reaction failed was that they tried to stop the effect, and not the cause.

    The abnormal neurotransmitter activity was the result of the actual curse. If one stopped the transmitters one would also stop the transmutation of the denatured proteins and such the metabolization, so when the medication was released the cycle just started anew.

    It is hard to emphasize how important that discovery was for us high gammas, but I was far from being capable to use that information.

    I might be able to modify the neurotransmitters, and with the help of the 12<sup>th</sup> gen nanos I might even direct them to the affected regions, but that would only kick the can down the road.

    Reluctantly I decided I was not the right person to use this data, so the next virtual hour was spent finding out who the right person was.

    In the end, I found Dr. Katherine Chalmers who, while not the foremost expert in pure neurology, was known to accept information from other sources than the closed university system.

    I composed my message, explaining that I got access to these detailed records of the events during the onset of the curse, pointed her at the denatured proteins, and gave her an anonymous email to contact me.

    Then I uploaded the raw data into an abandoned web storage, all 362 EB of it, along with the analysis of the event. I would naturally observe her behavior over the next weeks and months, making sure she accessed the data and, if necessary point her to the conclusion I had found.

    After that, I signed the message as Seraphim and send it. Hopefully, that name would carry enough weight to get things done. Otherwise, I would have to go a different route.

    Now there was only one mystery left about the attack. I did not send the part of the data where Darren intervened. I had looked at it, but I was puzzled at what happened. It was frustrating, I had several 100 million nanobots recording events in my brain and the only thing I got was some strange radiation and the cycle began to recede.

    Just like that. The strange radiation was a multifrequency EM radiation, and I could measure it, but I could absolutely not explain how that radiation, which should actually have cooked quite a few of my neurons instead repaired the damage.

    Everything I knew about physics told me that that was impossible. I pondered over the results for a while, before I gave up for the time being.

    Either I would get an idea of how it worked or not. Maybe I could get a lab cloning station and a few lab rat strains.

    I had lost my old cloning station when I moved to New York, but I never had much use for it, except when I tested the biosheathing.

    The next idea was to get a full-sized biotech cloning station. I knew it was way overkill for a little research, but sooner or later I would look at the biosciences, and until then I could offer cloned organs and limbs in addition to the implant surgery.

    While I was at it I just ordered the whole biological, chemical, physical, and material science lab equipment. With me beginning to learn about gravitics and later energy tech it would do pretty well for me. It was, after all, not possible to do everything in the matrix.

 25: A new Hope

    The next 3 days were relatively uneventful. Mia had managed to get all the necessary parts from only 3 hearts, so that was a big win in my opinion. It was now just a matter of Mr. Walker surviving until the operation.

    The upgrade of the fortress had progressed nicely. The industrial fabber was up and running and I had already used the foundry to feed the NADA.

    Two of the new fusactors were in the last test phase before they could be activated.

    The other two would be a bit harder as the old Wiltons had to be removed first. Unfortunately, fusactors could become radioactive over time. Nothing critical, and regular maintenance includes scrubbing the filter system before it becomes a problem, but our Wiltons had missed a few too many maintenance cycles, so the building crews had to be careful in dismantling them before they could install the new ones.

    The diadems had arrived along with appropriate consoles and I offered everybody here training sims, especially on driving the cars and the skimmer.

    It was a bit of a problem to get them to work for Kate and Darren, and my workaround would be replaced with custom nets in the future but I could get it to work for them, after a few hours and looking at the mapping data the slave controller had stored for the two of them.

    Mia of course was absorbing the course material I have given her, but surprisingly Jacky was doing the same. I had no problem with that. This implant clinic would be more work than 5 implant surgeons could manage.

    Both of them used the full compression the diadems offered them of course.

    Natalie and Christine asked me for a training sim on computer work. Nothing spectacular like going on a combat dive, but more like bypassing a security system at one of their missions or general computer use. And Marc asked for a tutorial to create training sims.

    Meanwhile, I investigated the changes Frankel had made to us, and more importantly how. Somehow he had managed to incorporate changes to our cells, on the genetic level even. He did not change the basic structure of our bodies, the bones remained as they were, but I noticed that my eyes had taken on a more emerald quality from the somewhat hazy grey-green I had seen in the mirror for 18 years, while my hair began to lighten to a more coppery tone.

    What confused me about the hair color was that it crept slowly over the whole of my head hair. It was apparently a combination of a programmable retrovirus that delivered the change and a different virus that triggered some sort of rebuild.

    The only thing he had done with nanobots was the change in hair color.

    It was the second virus that stumped me. It was, in one word, brilliant. I did a few tests, and Jacky, Natalie, and Christine seemed to have gotten a bit younger. Not much, maybe a year on the extreme, but still. I spend some time having a friendly chat with Frankel about it, but after some vigorous encouragement from my side with the help of a couple of pain sticks, he confessed that this packet was a secret of an underground slaver society. He had gotten it when he was inducted but had no idea how or when it was developed.

    It seemed any reversal of our modifications had to wait until either I found somebody who could research the virus or I found the time, will, and drive to learn microbiology and virology. As I was absolutely not interested in them that was a bit in the future. I was just glad that I had not lost any maturity. I had barely enough of it anyway.

    My hip was finally well enough that I could walk again, the bruise on my neck had receded and my wrist was healing nicely.

    I had replaced the 3<sup>rd</sup> gen nanos repairing my wrist with 12<sup>th</sup> gen ones that, though not tremendously faster than the 3<sup>rd</sup> gens, also worked on repairing the muscle and tendon damage, while simultaneously reducing involuntary muscle movements.

    On the second day after I send Dr. Chalmers the information, I got an e-mail from her back.

    Dear Seraphim,

    The data you have sent is extremely interesting, and if it is accurate might be our first breakthrough in the fight against the curse.

    Unfortunately, we can¡¯t trust it until we manage to replicate it. We would need to know how you managed to record the event in this detail. We would also like to know the identity of the patient including the history if it is possible.

    I hope you can help us in this endeavor.

    Sincerely

    Katherine Chalmers MD N NS

    University of Washington, Seattle

    I did of course not even consider telling her who the patient was, but the rest was easy to tell, hard to manage for her to replicate.

    Without the cranial board and the Q-link connection to the cluster the cloud of nanobots could have recorded their tiny carbon hearts out without accomplishing anything and I would give them neither the cranial board, not that they would implant it into anybody anyway, nor the cluster, and especially not the Q-link. So I had to design a new method to transfer the data.

    Another problem was that it would need at least 10<sup>th</sup> gen nanobots to get the resolution to even see the proteins. 12<sup>th</sup> gen would be strongly advised. So it took a bit to compose my answer.

    Dear Dr. Chalmers

    I am delighted that you choose to at least look at the data. Unfortunately, I can¡¯t give you the identity of the patient.

    The recording itself is in principle relatively easy, but I fear the practicality of it will be hard for you to manage.

    You need a swarm of at least 800 million nanobots, if you use the specification I send with this message, that will infiltrate the brain of the patient and remain there to observe any event occurring. More are of course better. The problem though is that this design consists of 12<sup>th</sup> generation nanobots that need an 8<sup>th</sup> generation nano fabricator. I don¡¯t know if your budget allows for the use of the nanofab. If not, you can get barely adequate results with the 10<sup>th</sup> generation nanobots I send as well, but you will need at least 2 billion of them.

    I strongly advise you to employ the help of a nano engineer experienced in setting up a nano network in people. I know that Professor Nicolin of the cyberware department has some of these on his staff. If you can¡¯t get somebody like that, have the nano engineer you get train on rats first.

    The next step is a computer system with at least 300 EB very fast storage (the one I used was 16 256 TB/s in a RAID10 array but you can probably get away with 512 TB/s overall).

    Next, you need to set up a specialized wireless network. While that sounds relatively easy, it depends on the amount of interference the environment gives you.

    It will not work in the typical UWS building without heavy-duty EMF shielding in place. It would be better to place the whole endeavor in a bunker away from the urban environment.

    Next, you need to fit the patient you will observe with the collar you make from the schematics I send you.

    This collar will, sadly only over relatively short ranges, transfer the observation data to the storage. Unfortunately, the range can¡¯t exceed 20 meters, and even that bears the risk of data corruption.

    You can of course build a network of receivers connected via high-speed fiber to the storage system, but the patient still needs to remain in the place for any event to be recorded.

    Be advised that to get the 20m range you can only have one collar in the area active.

    Finally, after all that you have to wait until the patient experiences the curse, and then signal the storage within 5 minutes of the even if you use the software I send you. The signal saves the last 10 minutes of observation.

    I have to warn you that the analysis of the data requires a relatively powerful Beowulf Cluster to get results within an acceptable time frame. A supercomputer would be what I would advise though.

    I hope you can use the method. Otherwise, you would need to get a patient into a modern scanner within a couple of minutes of the start of the curse, and you still will miss the onset.

    Maybe the preliminary changes begin earlier and can be identified before the damaged proteins reach the critical threshold but I would not depend on it.

    Sincerely Seraphim

    I truly hoped that she would be able to use the findings, as I was way out of my depth with what to do here. If she could beat the curse, we all would win. All Pures that is. Sure, not all Pures suffered under the curse equally, but even the greatest idiot with the lowest gamma among us would experience it sometimes.

    On the third day after the meeting with Mr. Walker, he called me.

    ¡°Hello, Kitten. You were right. We paid Dunedain to check your work, and he more or less confirmed everything you said. His opinion on the fake compound was even harsher than yours. You were also right that I was not the worst case among us bosses. Kryemir Brozi, the patriarch of the Brozi clan, died yesterday from CRS. The situation is beginning to heat up so I called for a meeting of all the bosses. We will meet tomorrow at 10 am in the La Guardia Plaza hotel. I reserved one of their bigger conference rooms, enough for 250 people, so we should all fit. I will pick you up at 7:30. And I will provide security. Nothing against your friends but in this, the appearance is more important than normal.¡±

    I was stunned.

    ¡°Wait, what? You pick me up? Why?¡±

    He sounded reprehensive.

    ¡°Kitten, you should use that brilliant brain of yours. You are the one with the most information. If I don¡¯t present you they will demand that you will be brought anyway, so we will simply have you there already.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ but I don¡¯t want to¡­¡± He cut me off.

    ¡°That, my dear Kitten is unfortunately irrelevant. You need to be there, so you will be there. You should prepare everything you need.¡±

    If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.

    I slumped down into my chair and refrained from cursing.

    ¡°Yes, Mr. Walker. What exactly do you intend to tell them?¡±

    ¡°Everything. The hack, the intentionally bungled implant, about the nano therapy, and of course what you found out. Then I let you present your proof. We will have the holographic system of the conference room, so you only need your data.¡±

    Again I created new clothing for myself, but this time I used the carbon extruder in the industrial fabber.

    The new business clothing held thin pockets of a non-Newtonian fluid in multilayer graphene sleeves, while the outer and inner layers consisted of finely woven carbon nanotubes.

    The nice thing was that I could even change the color of the fabric by varying the thickness of the tubes and the density of the weave.

    I had not known that that was possible, and the description of structural color sounded intriguing. I would have to research that later.

    I copied all the information I had, including the analysis, onto a 4 EB thumb drive. No need to hump Precious if it was not necessary. I hated it every single time I had to take her out of the safety of the fortress.

    I prepared my PDP before I realized that with my right hand in a cast I would not be able to use it anyway. Then I remembered that Mark was something of a weapon specialist.

    I found him at the table with one of the diadems on, deeply in some sort of simulation.

    I linked into it and found he was actually building a sim. I could not make out what exactly he was trying to do, but it was painful to watch him stumble through the manual controls. I had no idea why he used them.

    ¡°Hi, Mark.¡± He literally jumped up, and came down in a crouch while his hands grabbed for guns not there.

    I lifted my hands up and took a step back.

    ¡°Sorry if I have startled you, that was not my intention.¡±

    ¡°Red? What are you doing in here? How did you get in here?¡±

    I was confused.

    ¡°I linked to your VR. That is easy to do if you don¡¯t lock it. Has nobody here figured that out yet?¡±

    He looked equally confused.

    ¡°Lock it? How do you lock it? And how do you link it?¡±

    Thank all the divines that we were at 4:1 compression, so I had time for this. A short command listed the others all in their own VR. Seriously, did nobody here know how to use VR?

    ¡°Ok, I call the others and link us together, to explain it to all of you. One moment please.¡±

    I froze his VR, after saving it, and placed him into a schoolroom simulation.

    After that, I did the same with all the others.

    ¡°All right, it seems that nobody has taught you the basics of VR. That is partially my fault, but in my defense, I am used to the Commonwealth where literally every school kid learns that.

    So here is a very short explanation followed by a link to a tutorial. First, unless you lock your VR everybody can enter it. The only thing protecting you here was the firewall, which is frankly mostly obsolescent at this time, otherwise, some joydiver would have found you and messed around with you.

    And yes, I looked; your VRs were wide open. Think about setup. You should see a window.

    There chose the tab VR. Naturally, the options are all grayed out as this is my VR but you will see the options about compression, resolution, sensory feedback, and security.¡±

    It was Jacky who interrupted me.

    ¡°Sorry, but how do I choose the VR tab?¡±

    The others nodded at that question, and I was stumped for a moment before I understood what she wanted.

    ¡°You have no idea about the basic controls either?¡±

    They all nodded again.

    Damn, no wonder Mark had used the manual controls.

    ¡°Ok, sorry for that. You control it by thinking.

    Think about pressing that tab. The VR is controlled by your mind.

    Depending on the options selected by the VR or the sim you can use your mind to control everything. By the way, Mark, that is also the case with the sim builder you are using.

    Simply think about what you want to happen. It is faster, easier, and much more precise than the manuals. But back to the setup, as I told you, everything is grayed out, but in your own VR, the first thing you should do is to change the security.

    If you press the security option here, you get several options. The ones you should remember are under access open, local, invitation, and locked.

    Open is the one you absolutely don¡¯t want. Unfortunately, it is the standard option. It essentially invites anybody and everybody who can find your VR to come in and play havoc.

    Local is what you should do if you want to work together in VR.

    That means everybody in the same local net, aka the computer in this building, can connect to it, but everybody from outside is blocked.

    If you want to have a girl''s evening or boy talk or simply want a smaller group in your VR you should choose invitation. Then you have everybody you want to give access an invitation, but that can be somebody from outside of the local net, though for the moment I would advise against it.

    Locked is locked. That is for when you want to be alone. But a short warning, don¡¯t expect this to keep me, or somebody like me, out.

    This type of lockouts, we have a hard time even noticing them, and in this local net I have super admin privileges as well so if I barge into your locked VR or sim, please don¡¯t be mad, it was not in bad faith.

    Next, you see the access level. There are guest, user, mod, admin, and super admin.

    In your VRs you are automatically admins and should limit that to you. Super admin refers to the admin of the computer network here, and at the moment that is me. The important point though is that you should limit access to others in your VR or sim to guests, users, or mods.

    Each level has all the privileges of the previous ones as well. Guest means that the person can view and get information, but not interact. User means interaction. Mod means elevating guests to users, or to drop users down to guests, as well as kicking persons out of the VR.

    Lastly, they can temporarily ban people. Admin has complete control over the VR or sim, can elevate users to mods or admins, can permanently ban people, and is essentially a minor god in this VR. Super admin can do all that, in every VR and can¡¯t be blocked.

    A super admin also can delete VRs or kick people out of the local net.

    That is unimportant for the moment but where the admin is a minor god, the super admin is GOD. As the super admin cannot be reduced in privileges by an admin the super admin could take over the VR at any moment.¡±

    I let that sink in for a moment.

    ¡°Now the second thing you need to know is to link with the others. Think about closing the setup page and then think about the VR list.

    You will see all your VRs there, along with the attributes of your VR, like passwords, that you did not set, access, which is open, so anybody that can see it can simply waltz in, creator, owner, and admin. That is the same person for every one of them. You can hide VRs from the general list, but that will not hide it from the super admins¡±

    I created a new sim, called ¡®Basic VR Tutorial¡¯ set it to local, and displayed it for them, copying the VR tutorial from the UWS for foreign students, highlighting the entry.

    ¡°Here is the tutorial I mentioned. It should explain everything, but if you have any questions then please ask, or send me a message if we are all in cyberspace. Again, I am sorry that I took you out of your VRs but at the moment they are only protected against a joker or a casual joydiver. Anything with a bit of malice behind will get through and without the security set up you would be in a world of pain.¡±

    They nodded at that and one after the other they vanished, first into their own VR. I was not surprised that they all changed to locked status. I followed Mark into his VR before he could vanish to the tutorial.

    Again he jumped when he saw me.

    ¡°Damn, Red, I thought I had the VR locked now. What are you doing here?¡±

    I had to suppress a chuckle.

    ¡°Sorry, Mark. I told you I am super admin here, so locked or open; it makes no difference for me. And I am here because you are the weapon specialist. I wanted to ask you if there is something we can do with my PDP.¡±

    He mulled that over.

    ¡°A PDP is pretty old tech. What caliber are you using? And what size?¡±

    I loaded a simulation of my PDP.

    ¡°A PDP 22 in .40. And yes, I know it is old, but you might have noticed I am on the smaller side of petite. And for some reason, they make no .40 guns anymore.¡±

    He nodded slowly.

    ¡°Yeah, for a reason. Why do you want a .40 in the first place?¡±

    ¡°It is the biggest caliber I can control. I know it is not enough many modern armors but it is the best I can do.¡±

    His look became intense.

    ¡°You carry a .40 for armor piercing?¡± His tone was unbelieving so I got the impression that something was not quite right.

    ¡°Uh, yes? I mean, you need the biggest projectile to do the most damage. I can¡¯t use .45, even the .40 is hard to control for me.¡±

    With a sad shake of his head, he answered me.

    ¡°Damn, Red, you got that wrong. So wrong.

    Against unprotected targets, the caliber is a bit important.

    The bigger the round, the more of the energy is used on the target, and the less is wasted by the round going through.

    The problem for you is that in the case of armor, it is constructed in a way to use up all the energy without letting the round through, and with the bigger round you make that easier.

    To defeat armor you need a small-caliber with a high velocity. In the best case a hardened penetrator. I think the best you can get is a 4.5x26mm Walther caliber.

    It has roughly 2 and a half times the speed of your .40 if you have roughly the same barrel length of your PDP.

    Depending on what type you use it has a quarter to half the energy and recoil.

    If you have the money you should get APDS-X rounds; that is armor-piercing, discarding sabot, exploder.

    They have a sub-caliber 2mm diameter tungsten-carbide penetrator surrounded by the sabot that will be discarded when you fired it.

    The tip of the penetrator is extremely tough and goes through most armor like butter. 2mm do little damage, on the other hand, so they added a ceramic part to the back of the penetrator.

    After it goes through the armor, the round will begin to tumble and the ceramic part will practically explode into an expanding cloud of small slivers.

    Anything soft behind the armor will be shredded by hundreds of tiny little knives. But these things cost a lot, roughly 8 times what other armor-piercing rounds cost.

    The next best option is the spoon tip APDS. Again, they have the penetrator, but the tip of the penetrator is asymmetric. It has a little spoon shape cut out of one side and is named for that.

    They are a bit worse in armor penetration but after going through the armor the tip causes them to tumble violently so that they go through the soft things behind the armor mostly sideways.

    Not as good as the exploders, but good enough for most cases. Then of course you need a new weapon. I will help you with that of course but you need to decide what you want.¡±

    I could only stand there dumbfounded.

    ¡°I assume you know what you are talking about, but sorry, I barely understood what you said. The words, true, but not what you tried to express.¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°Well, at least you don¡¯t know everything. To make it short, to go through armor you need a small fast round, understood?¡±

    ¡°I understand what you say, but how can that be?¡±

    He then progressed to explain to me in intimate detail how smaller, faster and harder bullets are better against armor, and why.

    He also drew up diagrams of the two types of armor-piercing bullets he told me about, and how they worked in penetrating armor and then dumping the majority of their energy into the target.

    After he told me about the various grades of material the spoon tips were manufactured and how it affected penetration power I was a bit confused and had to question him.

    ¡°Ok, I understand that the hardness is important, but why end with tungsten carbide. There are harder materials. Wouldn¡¯t these go through the armor much easier?¡±

    ¡°You are right, there are harder materials, but you are also wrong. At some point the hardness becomes unimportant.

    The tungsten carbide penetrator will be deflected not deformed so harder will just be deflected as well.

    For the thicker harder armors you need more energy.

    And for you, that is not possible I fear.

    We others could soup up a 9x45mm gun for that, Kate could probably even use a 13x52mm. And against the heavier armors, even that is not enough. You would need a full-size anti-materiel round. 12x135mm comes to mind or the 8x122mm.

    And sorry, but you couldn¡¯t probably even lift the rifle you need to shoot these things, much less resist the recoil.¡±

    I felt myself heat up and had to fight down my temper, and it seems that he was paying attention.

    ¡°That is no dig at your size, Natty and Chris can barely lift the rifles, and won¡¯t even try to fire them. The 8x122mm has a muzzle energy of around 10000 feet-pound, and the 12x135mm has 13000. You are having problems with 400 feet-pound.

    These guns are designed to punch full-sized bullets through heavy armor so they are big, strong, and heavy.

    I hate to carry one of them around as they are so heavy, and only Kate can use them without hurting herself. So no, it is just a sign that these rounds are so fucking big and strong.¡±

    Ok, I could understand that, but something else confused me.

    ¡°And there is nothing in between? I mean we are going from 400 feet-pound to 13 thousand feet-pound. There is a mighty big gap there.¡±

    That seemed to amuse him as began to laugh out loud.

    ¡°Oh yeah. There is a whole line of weapons between that. The 400 pound-feet is for pistols. Sure, a big pistol caliber can reach nearly 3 thousand feet-pound, but these are barely controllable.

    Most pistols hover around the 300-600 feet-pound range.

    To get more with keeping it controllable you need a rifle.

    With a rifle, you have the buttstock that helps you, and you have two grip points. The stronger rifle rounds still smart like hell, but they can be used.

    If you want a rifle we can look for one for you, but seriously, you need a gun to defend yourself, not going on the offensive and a rifle is nothing one carries around casually without reason.

    Hell, we can get you everything up to an anti-tank rifle if you really want to, it is your money, but I can tell you that you will never ever use it.

    If you think the 12x135mm anti-materiel is bad, believe me, you get a new understanding of bad when you see the 30x220mm anti-tank rifle rounds, and the rifle for it has a length of a bit over 9 feet and it weighs more than 120 pounds.¡±

    It took a moment for me to convert the units into metrics to get an understanding of his point. The rifle was around 2.75m long and weighed around 55kg. And he was right, I would never tote around a weapon that was bigger and heavier than me. He was also right about the rifle. I would not need it.

    ¡°Ok, I understand. So can we get a good gun for me? Or build one? I mean, we have this fancy new industrial fabber and something tells me that I would be happier with something a bit more tailored to my needs than one size fits all standard gun.¡±

    He shrugged. ¡°Sure, I wanted to try out that thing anyway.¡±

 26: Give that gal a gun

    Mark looked me over carefully.

    ¡°All right, Red, how close is this here to the real you? I mean, if we design the gun for your needs we need to know your needs first.¡±

    ¡°My avatar here is essentially the same as my real live body. I mean some things like muscle mass vary but generally, that is my base form.¡±

    ¡°Ok, show me your hands.¡± He manifested some rulers and made the moves to measure my hands before he hesitated.

    ¡°How accurate are these rulers here? I need to measure your hands to get it right.¡±

    ¡°They are very accurate, but I can spare you that, my right hand is 16 cm wide, while the left is 15.96 cm wide. Length is right 13.46 cm and left 13.38 cm.¡±

    ¡°You know that from the top of your head?¡±

    I had to laugh.

    ¡°No, not really. I told you the avatar is as correct as it can be, and I have the measurements on file. It took me only a few moments to look it up. I can send you the complete modeling file for the hands if that helps.¡±

    ¡°Oh, ok. We will see. But can you convert it into imperial first?¡± I projected a diagram of the hands with the large measurements in standard and imperial.

    ¡°Does that help?¡± ¡°Yeah. You have really small hands, you know?¡± ¡°Yes, I know, size 4. That is, one moment, 3xs in imperial?¡±

    ¡°I am impressed that you made that PDP work at all. I assume you will choose the 4.5mm Walther? It is IMO the best armor-piercing pistol caliber but it is your choice.¡±

    ¡°It would be pretty dumb to go to an expert and then reject the advice. So yes, let¡¯s go with the 4.5mm.

    And I will go with exploders on the general. Money is of negligible concern for me, while my protection is of a significantly higher priority. And if I begin buying them in bulk you and the others can use them too if you want. Makes the logistic easier.¡±

    ¡°Cool. I will hold you to that. For my pistols at least. But let¡¯s start. He manifested a gun, only for it to vanish nearly immediately.

    ¡°Damn. I have no idea how to get a realistic version of a gun here. Maybe you can help me there?¡±

    ¡°That depends, for our design, we have to do it the hard way, but for virtually every other weapon there are VR files available. One moment, I will get a comprehensive catalog.¡±

    I had the cluster vacuum the matrix for VR weapon files and compile them into a single catalog file, which I copied into the local net.

    ¡°So, you have all I could find on the quick here. Just think about the library. There you will find the gun catalog. Then just choose the gun and it will appear.¡±

    ¡°Cool. Wow, some of these I always wanted to try. That will be fun. But ok, what I want you to try is the Walther PVPx SC. It is the gun the 4.5mm caliber was designed for, the sub-compact version.¡±

    A small gun appeared in front of me, even smaller than my PDP 22. I grabbed it and looked at it, just for Mark to hit my hand down.

    ¡°Damn it Red, did nobody ever tell you about gun safety?¡±

    ¡°What? This is VR! Nothing can happen here.¡±

    ¡°Gun safety should be so hard in your system that it works everywhere. And if it isn¡¯t you are not ready for a gun.¡±

    ¡°But this is how I have always done it. What did I do wrong?¡±

    ¡°Ok, so from the beginning.

    First, always tread any gun not disassembled as loaded, even if you just unloaded it!

    Second, don¡¯t point the gun at anything you don¡¯t want to shoot! At no time.

    Third, keep your finger away from the trigger unless you prepare to shoot!

    Fourth, be aware of your target, and what is behind the target!

    The first three rules prevent you from accidentally shooting somebody or something you don¡¯t want to shoot.

    If you treat it as loaded you won¡¯t horseplay with it believing it is unloaded.

    If you don¡¯t point it at something you don¡¯t want to shoot, even if a shot is fired it won¡¯t hit what you did not point it at.

    And if you keep the finger from the trigger then it is much more unlikely that a shot is fired.

    Not impossible though so the first two rules are more important.

    The fourth rule is there so that you don¡¯t shoot through somebody or something and hit somebody behind the target that you don¡¯t want to hit. That is less a concern with exploders, but you won¡¯t always use exploders, so train yourself for that. Now repeat the rules to me!¡±

    ¡°Always treat any gun not disassembled as loaded, don¡¯t point the gun at anything I don¡¯t want to shoot, keep my finger off the trigger and be aware of the target and what¡¯s behind the target.¡±

    ¡°Ok, now what did you do wrong when you grabbed the PVPx?¡±

    I thought back a moment and blushed.

    ¡°The first three I think. I mean I did not think it was loaded so I did not treat it as if it was so, but I am not completely sure about that. The second, of course, I pointed it at you and me both. And the third, as my finger was on the trigger immediately. I had no target so I did not break the fourth rule, but if I had I would have given no thought to what is behind it. Sorry.¡±

    ¡°You have no reason to be sorry if nobody ever taught you that. But you should be very mad at where you learned to shoot that they did not teach you right.¡±

    ¡°Uh, nobody taught me to shoot. I found an old abandoned range and trained there after I bought my gun on the black market.¡±

    He took a deep breath and sighed tortured.

    ¡°That explains that. So back to the basics then.¡± He thought for a moment before he spoke further.

    ¡°Before I do it the hard way, do you have a VR of a shooting range?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Not now, but it will only be a moment. Hm¡­ there are some with tutor function; do I use one of them?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I think it is better. Then we can use it even if nobody is there to teach.¡±

    ¡°Ok, that is the best-rated sim I could find. Of the free ones that is. When I have a bit more time I look into the commercial ones.¡±

    I send him the link to the sim and jumped over, him following immediately. The sim itself was what I would say was a typical gun range with a table and dividers in front of the shooting lanes. An NPC was coming up to us.

    ¡°Heya folks, I see you are new here. Do you need instructions?¡± Mark shook his head.

    ¡°No, I am here to give her a basic lesson and observe her to choose a new gun.¡±

    ¡°Have fun. You know the rules?¡±

    If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

    ¡°Yeah, I do.¡± He led me to the first stall and materialized safety glasses and hearing protection for both of us.

    ¡°It is good that they have these here. On a real range, you will need them. Now put them on.¡±

    I had to resize my glasses but the hearing protection was adjustable. When we both had the protection on two guns appeared. The PVPx SC he had called up for me and a substantially bigger gun that looked very similar.

    ¡°Ok, I will show you how to use a gun safely. As my hands are too big for the SC I use the standard PVPx. The controls are mostly the same, just a bit bigger. Now watch.¡±

    He took the bigger gun at the grip, keeping his finger away from the trigger and keeping it pointed at the target region. Then he took the other hand, gripped the upper part of the gun, and drew it back, looking into the hole at the top.

    ¡°As you saw, I took the pistol in my right hand keeping it pointed downrange and the finger straight. That was following the second and third rules. Then I pressed the slide back and looked into the ejection port to make sure that there is no round in the chamber. Now you.¡±

    I gingerly gripped the smaller gun, following him with rules two and 3, before equally hesitantly gripping the upper part.

    ¡°Is this here the slide?¡± He rolled his eyes up, sighed, and nodded.

    ¡°Yes, that is the slide. And I suggest you get some tutorial that explains guns and what the parts are called. And the hole cut into the top of it is the ejection port. If the weapon were loaded you would see the round then. Just to make it clear, even now, when you looked into it, treat the gun as if it was loaded.¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­k? Why?¡±

    ¡°To get into the habit. If there are absolutely no circumstances where you treat an assembled weapon as not loaded you will never forget to switch. You will always choose the safer path then.¡±

    ¡°Ok, yeah, I can understand that.¡±

    ¡°Right, now we simulate firing with one hand at first. Lift the gun up like so, and place your finger on the trigger, but don¡¯t pull it.¡±

    He lifted his gun at eye level and pointed it towards the targets, softly placing his finger on the trigger. I followed him through the motion.

    ¡°Now, that is important, how does it feel in your hand? Is it comfortable? Too small? Too big?¡±

    I concentrated on the feeling in my hand. ¡°I don¡¯t know. The finger on the trigger is a bit too tense. I have to fight not to pull it back. But it is not as bad as with the PDP.¡±

    ¡°That is what I feared. The PDP is too big for you. As is the PVPx here. What it means is that you will never be a good shot without a customized gun. We will have to thin the back strap some, and maybe move the trigger back a bit, but it should not be too bad.¡±

    A couple of magazines and a few rounds appeared on the table.

    ¡°Ok, take one of the small magazines, and insert it into the gun so.¡±

    He did so and then pulled the slide back. I followed him.

    ¡°Now you have a round in the chamber. Look into it to see the difference.¡± I did, and I saw the back end of the round there.

    ¡°Now, drop the magazine, so.¡± He pulled a lever behind the trigger guard and the magazine fell down into his other hand. Again, I copied him. He then took one of the rounds and placed it into the magazine, then motioned me to take another round. When I had inserted it into the magazine he shoved his magazine back into the gun, and I did the same.

    ¡°Now that is the weight of the fully-loaded weapon. You have nine shots, and I have 17. Again, hold it up like earlier.¡± I did and felt no real difference.

    ¡°Is the weight all right?¡± ¡°Yes, that is no problem.¡± ¡°Ok, so we can go a bit higher on weight. Maybe an extended magazine for 12 or 15 rounds, and a longer barrel and slide. Ok, now aim at the target and pull the trigger.¡±

    I aimed carefully and pulled the trigger. The explosion was expected and I think I did not jerk, but the gun bucked in my hand. Nothing I could not endure, but uncomfortable.

    ¡°So how was that? Do you think that was controllable?¡± ¡°Yes, but not comfortable. I much prefer to use both hands.¡±

    ¡°Of course you do, and that is the right thing, but we are trying to find out how your gun will have to be made. And in an emergency, you may have to fire one-handed so it should be possible.

    Alright then, I think we have the basics.

    The PVP is a good start but we can do better than that. Let¡¯s get back to my VR. But let the range running, I bet the others will want to use it too when they find it.¡±

    We jumped into his VR and he conjured a table with two chairs. ¡°You know, you are right, using the VR in this way is so much better. Thank you.¡±

    ¡°You are welcome. Now, what do we do?¡±

    ¡°Now we design your gun. We know that we want to use 4.5 Walther as the caliber. We also know that the distance from the backend of the back strap to the front of the trigger has to be around three or four mm shorter than in the subcompact. The weight we can go a bit higher than the SC. Now, do you want to have it concealed or combat power?¡±

    I had, honestly no idea what he was talking about.

    ¡°Uh, what? What is the difference?¡±

    ¡°Concealed means that you wear it under the clothes and, in the best case, it can¡¯t be seen.

    Usually, it is just harder to see. The point is that a longer barrel and bigger magazine make it harder to hide the gun, but make it better in a combat situation when you need it.

    So you have to choose to conceal or combat power.¡±

    I thought for a moment.

    ¡°Can¡¯t we do both? I mean sure, I will most likely never go onto a mission with you guys, but if I need a gun I need it. On the other hand, there will be situations where I need to appear to not have a gun. So I would say to build a bigger gun for normal use and a smaller one for when I have to conceal it. Is that all right?

    I mean, I will pay you anyway but isn¡¯t it better to be paid for two guns than for one?¡±

    ¡°You will pay me? Wow, thanks.¡±

    ¡°Yes, of course I will pay you. You offer your time and your expertise in a nontrivial way. It would be unfair to simply let you do it for free.¡± He rubbed his chin.

    ¡°Ok. I would have done it for free. And I would have done both guns for free by the way, but if you want to pay I don¡¯t say no. Now the next is we have to decide on the action. I assume you don¡¯t want a single-shot pistol so we need a repeating action. And not manually operated either.

    A revolver would be an option but not a good fit for the 4.5mm or an APDS-X round. Not impossible but hard to do and you would have to make many compromises. It has to be semi-automatic like the PVPx and the PDP. ¡°

    What followed was an explanation of the different action types for guns, ending with his conclusion that only delayed blowback or recoil-operated were worth the effort.

    ¡°If I understand you right simple blowback is out because it is heavy, stiff, and dangerous. Gas-operated is out because it is complicated. Blow forward is an idea that never really worked. Did I get that right?¡±

    ¡°Yeah, you got that right.¡±

    ¡°Now you said that the delayed blowback is more accurate and faster, while the recoil-operated is safer and more reliable, correct?¡±

    ¡°Yup, you got it.¡±

    ¡°Now the question is, how much faster and more accurate versus how much safer and more reliable.¡±

    ¡°Very few people are accurate enough that the accuracy advantage is important, and the speed advantage is also negligible.

    The safety advantage is unimportant to marginal the reliability is not so much a concern with modern cartridges.

    But recoil-operated has become traditional in the early 21<sup>st</sup> century. In the end, I see no real difference between them and it is a matter of taste.¡±

    I rubbed the bridge of my nose.

    ¡°Not really. I am a Pure, and my hand-eye coordination is way above average for a Pure.

    I would bet with a bit of training I would be one of the people who could use the accuracy advantage. And all other things more or less equal I would say let¡¯s go with a delayed blowback.¡±

    ¡°Sure. Would be rad if you could use that. Then let¡¯s search for a delayed blowback action.¡±

    He gave me a listing of the different delayed blowback systems, ending with:

    ¡°But what I am thinking would be ideal for you is a gas delayed blowback. It uses a gas tap directly in front of the chamber and a pressure cylinder below the barrel.

    When a shot is fired, the gases from the shot flow into the cylinder and pressure against the force of the blowback, holding the slide, and the bolt to the barrel.

    As long as the bullet is in the barrel the pressure drops only a little bit but as soon as it leaves the barrel the slide can go backward.

    The reason why these types fell out of favor is that the gas is hot, and it heats up the cylinder, which is directly above the trigger.

    In other words, the trigger becomes hot. But I think with modern materials it should be easy to keep the heat away from the trigger. Here, look at that. I always wanted one of these, and I will build myself one if you don¡¯t mind.¡±

    He materialized a small pistol with a strange lever on the front of the grip.

    ¡°Why should I mind, and what is that?¡±

    ¡°Oh, I will use the fabber to make it, and that is an H&K P7.

    Mid 20<sup>th</sup> century. It had a reputation for being incredibly accurate. Inherently save, as you cock it with the lever in the front and can¡¯t fire it if you don¡¯t have it in a good grip.

    You need to have the grip squeezed before the trigger works.

    It was just way too complex and expensive for the mass market, but from what I read about it, it was so accurate that average shooters got a boost out of it.

    I think we can adapt the design to your hands, the 4.5mm ammunition, and modern materials and have a beautiful weapon.

    If we make a long-barreled and a short-barreled version and an extended and a normal magazine it will be good for concealed and combat use. Here, try how it feels in your hand.¡±

    He shoved it towards me, and I picked it up, careful to not point it at him and keep my finger away from the trigger. I checked if it was loaded as he showed me. To my surprise it was and I looked at him for a moment.

    ¡°It is loaded. You did not mention what I should do then.¡± For that, he laughed.

    ¡°Yeah, my bad. You do nothing.  Just don¡¯t point it at me. Now take it in two hands, the right is your main hand right?¡±

    ¡°I have no main hand. Pures are nearly always ambidextrous. And do you mean that grip?¡±

    I took the weapon in the grip I had seen in so many vids before.

    ¡°Yeah, that is the one I meant. Now press the cocking lever, that is the lever in the front of the grip, and keep it pressed. The gun is now ready to fire. Tell me if the force you need to keep it pressed is all right.¡±

    ¡°Yes, it is all right. I mean, it could be a bit lighter but I can hold it.¡±

    ¡°Good, now pull the trigger, slowly.¡±

    The shot rang out, and the recoil drove the gun into the back of my hand. But overall it was easier to control than my PDP.

    ¡°Now, how does it feel for reaching the trigger?¡±

    ¡°Same as with the PVPx. A bit too large.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, thought so. You are simply not standard-sized, or even small-sized. No mass-produced weapon will ever fit right to you. Now I will design the weapon for you. That will take a few days I fear, but then we can come back to the range and you can test it.¡±

    I stood up.

    ¡°Nice. Thank you. And tell me how much that is worth. I have absolutely no idea.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, I will look into it. Seeya.¡±

    With that, I logged out of virtual reality completely.

 27: Bosses aplenty

    The next morning came faster than I wanted. I was relatively sure that I was as prepared as possible, but that did nothing to soothe my insecurities. Somehow I had maneuvered myself into a meeting with virtually every criminal boss of New York City.

    Oh, sure, I knew exactly how it had happened, but that still did not make it easier for me to accept the situation.

    Ryan Wallace was chosen to accompany me, and I had upgraded his clothing with the same armor structure I had in my new clothing.

    On his request, I added an outer layer of normal synthetic fabric to make it look like the relatively cheap suits he had worn normally.

    Mr. O¡¯Donnel of course got the same treatment. I was sure that they would make a couple of suits more for themselves, but the industrial fabber was there and it was a laughingly easy thing to produce once I got the material. And carbon was cheap.

    Natalie helped me put up my hair into a halfway professional bun, and I hoped that it mitigated my youthful appearance at least a bit.

    Punctually at 7:30, Mr. Walker''s limousine entered the parking lot, accompanied by three SUVs full of men. Ryan and I were just inside the entrance and left the building immediately.

    The front passenger of the limousine got out and opened the door in the back for me, while Ryan walked toward one of the SUVs.

    Inside the limousine, I found Mr. Walker of course, and Dylan Cox as well as two other gentlemen I did not know. I took my seat opposite Mr. Walker.

    ¡°Good morning, Kitten. Thank you for coming with us.¡±

    ¡°Good morning Mr. Walker, Mr. Cox. I have not yet been introduced to you other gentlemen, so please accept a generic good morning from me.¡±

    ¡°These are Brendan Kilroy, my legal counsel, and Alex Doolan, my, well, you could call him my ambassador.¡±

    Kilroy was a dark-haired slender man wearing a good suit and having a briefcase placed on his knees, while Doolan was a blonde man with an athletic build and a winning smile.

    Surprising was that he was wearing glasses.

    And as far as I could tell they were real old-fashioned sight correcting glasses, as even with modern technology it would be impossible to place the electronics of smart glasses in this thin frame of them.

    ¡°Mr. Kilroy, Mr. Doolan.¡± A collective ¡°Kitten¡± answered me to my dismay. ¡°While I accept that a nickname bestowed by the boss is a nickname that will stay, as much as I dislike it, I think we should treat this excursion professionally. If only to not give the other leaders the impression that my expertise and opinion are irrelevant, considering that we want to convince them that what I discovered is real.

    So would you please call me either Veronica or Ms. Sinclair? Thank you.¡±

    I kept my smile up, and my tone conversational, even if my temper began to flare a bit. Mr. Walker leaned back into his seat and placed his chin on his hand.

    ¡°Yes, I think our Kitten is right in this instance. I have to confess her irritation is a point of amusement for me, but this meeting is too important.

    So from now on until the end of the meeting let¡¯s keep it professional.¡± The others made sounds of assent before Mr. Walker continued.

    ¡°Now, Veronica, do you have anything new to add for us?¡±

    ¡°If you have checked what I gave you on Friday then no.

    I did not think you would appreciate me raiding the computer systems of the other organizations. On the more personal front, Mia has managed to get all the parts for a functional Pulse III ready for sheathing, so it should be ready in a bit over five weeks.

    You should plan for the operation on Thursday, December 21<sup>st</sup>.

    That reminds me, can I look at your nano controller for a moment?¡±

    He nodded and held his right hand out to me. I took a look at the controller and scrolled through the information.

    ¡°That is not good. You have to slow down quite a bit or you will die in 3? to four weeks.

    From the information, you move way too much around. And use the stairs almost exclusively.

    So from now on you enter your office in the morning and leave in the evening unless an emergency happens, and you will use the lift.

    If there is no lift where you have to go, you don¡¯t go there. Do you understand?¡±

    He was visibly taken aback, but after a moment he nodded slowly. I then realized that Mr. Cox and Mr. Doolan also wore nano controllers on their right hands.

    ¡°Do you two want me to control the progress too?¡± Dylan shook his head and murmured something about Richard, while Mr. Doolan offered his right hand.

    ¡°Ok, you actually don¡¯t need the therapy yet, if I interpret this right.

    You have just entered stage two and only your limb muscles are affected. With the situation as it is now, with the therapy it is much more likely that you die in an accident or because of your job than from CRS.

    Dying from old age is not impossible but unlikely, considering that new experimental rejuvenation treatments could let you live as long as 250 years.

    But to make it short, you have, if nothing changes, several decades of life ahead of you.¡±

    Mr. Walker had observed the exchange with interest.

    ¡°Why don¡¯t you tell him to take it slow?¡±

    ¡°You have stage four CRS verging on stage five, for all effects terminal.

    The cyberware affected is your heart. Every time you stress it above resting rhythm you damage it further, accelerating the end of its life, and as such, yours.

    If I would think you would go for it I would tell you to let yourself put into a medical coma to reduce your heart rate.

    With that, your chances of surviving would be around 90-95%.

    But unless you accept that you are dying and we race against time to keep you breathing you will kill yourself before we could save you. So do us all a favor and slow down.¡±

    I fixed my eyes at Dylan.

    ¡°That is also for you, Mr. Cox. Among all of his men, you are the one most capable to make him take it slow.

    And as apparently he is not everywhere with his bodyguards if his controller begins to blink red call me immediately, and send a skimmer to get me.

    Call Dr. Schaeffer and get him as fast as possible. If it blinks red he is dying, at that moment, and we have to put him on life support immediately.¡±

    Mr. Walker smiled at that.

    ¡°Quite bossy little thing, isn¡¯t she?¡± I have to confess, I was irritated at that moment.

    ¡°Yes, of course, I am bossy. In this respect, you are my patient. I do what I can to make you survive. That includes nagging you and the people around you to do the right thing. If you don¡¯t want that, just say a word and I begin negotiations with Mr. Cox right now.¡± Dylan on the other hand defensively lifted both hands.

    ¡°Whoa, hold your horses'' lady. We all want the boss to be around this time next year so yeah, we will watch it.

    Is it possible to make an audible alarm beyond just the blinking? You are right that he is sometimes alone. Best to give more warning than just a blinking red light.¡±

    Oops, I had missed that the protocol, the program in the credled, and all that were designed with the idea that at stage four the CRS patient would be under permanent medical supervision. I would have to adapt that, and that quick.

    ¡°You are right. My only excuse is that this is the first time I actually used the therapy and it was not developed with stage four patients on the mind. If you will give me a moment please, then I will just do that.¡±

    They all nodded and I dove into the cyberspace. My cranial board was severely limited in its capacities compared to Precious but it still gave me up to a 32:1 compression. That maximum though was only advisable in an emergency, as it raised the temperature dramatically and it is for some reason unpopular to heat up the brain beyond a certain point.

    To make it short, in everyday use I was limited to 25:1, but that still left me several virtual hours before we reached the Plaza.

    I was certain it would not take that long. I was right, but also nearly wrong.

    The actual change in the program was a trivial one, but I had to figure out how to activate and control the integrated Bluetooth transceiver as well as establish a communication protocol. It took me nearly ten minutes in real-time to get that done.

    ¡°Ok, I have adapted the system. We have to link your controller via Bluetooth to your com and have that set up to call help. I hope you have one of the standard com operating systems, as I had to write an app to call the on-duty guards and whoever you declare as an emergency contact.

    If you have something exotic I would suggest you get a throwaway com for the next few weeks.¡±

    Mr. Walker shook his head.

    ¡°Should be no problem here. I have a Kawamoto Mercury C44.¡± Ok, KOS I could work with.

    ¡°Yes. Now you have to trust me a bit here, as I need to send you the app, so please activate your Bluetooth setup and connect to CBS dash 71148 dash G.

    The pin is 07112248. And no worry, that is a temporal guest connection from my sandbox. In 20 minutes it will be gone, including the sandbox itself.¡±

    He got his com out and tapped a bit on it before my cranial board told me that the connection request had been made.

    I accepted the connection and started the file transfer, to shove the app over to his com. Immediately after I started to talk to it again when he already had begun to install the app.

    Meanwhile, I connected to the controller and installed the new driver and routine. The connection between the controller and the com was a matter of seconds, and soon he was busy declaring his contacts.

    I was still surprised when he asked me for my com number. I realized that I had forgotten something. My com was actually a virtual one running on the cluster, and the number was still the one I had used in Seattle.

    ¡°Uh, I have no local number yet. At the moment you can contact me via the fortress but it completely slipped my mind that I would need a new one here. I will create an account later today and send you the number.¡±

    It would be comically easy for me to create a new account and get a new number, or to even use the old number, but that would reveal the existence of the Q-link, and I was not ready yet for that unveiling. It would lead to too many uncomfortable questions that I did not want to answer, as well as negating much of my biggest advantage.

    ¡°Hm, ok, but don¡¯t forget it. Now, what does this new app do exactly?¡±

    ¡°That is simple. When the controller recognizes changes that it thinks are dangerous it tells the com to sound an alarm.

    The controller itself will give a warning beep every five seconds until acknowledged, and the com will sound an alarm while contacting everyone you have selected on your contact list for that time frame. I have sent the update and the apps to Dr. Schaeffer, so in the next few days, you all should get it. Not that it is likely to be important unless you have stage four CRS.¡±

    ¡°All right. I am all for saving my life so good girl. I have another important thing to tell you, Kitten.¡±

    I did not attempt to even limit my frown.

    ¡°Did you not just a few minutes ago tell everybody here to keep it professional? What happened to Ms. Sinclair or Veronica?¡±

    He had the audacity to laugh at that, something that did not make my mood any better.

    ¡°Oh, that was for the peons. I am the boss. If I want to I still can call you Kitten, Kitten.¡±

    The others joined in his laughter, though Mr. Kilroy¡¯s appeared a bit forced.

    ¡°But seriously, I will call you Veronica when we arrive, until then you have to bear with me calling you Kitten. I like that name. Now, what I wanted to tell you is that Oleg is in one of the other cars.¡±

    That name did send cold waves down my back. Oleg was, for obvious reasons, not exactly my most favored person.

    ¡°Unfortunately he is known to be my bodyguard and a highly effective one at that. His size and strength make others back down without the need for violence, so I use him nearly every time I leave my territory. It would be an issue if he would not be here. Also, he is actually quite nice. And he is sorry for what he did.¡±

    I had to swallow a few times before I could answer him.

    ¡°I understand. I will try to keep it calm, but unfortunately, I can¡¯t promise anything yet.¡±

    Be strong, Vivian, be very strong. I believed him when he told me that Oleg was a nice guy, but his sheer size triggered a severe childhood trauma for me.

    I had spent the first five years of my life in prison, and the guards there were not of the understanding friendly kind.

    Add to that that they were selected for their high alpha, meaning they were even bigger than Oleg, and¡­ well there are things you simply can¡¯t live down, especially as a high gamma pure with perfect recall.

    I should be thankful that they refrained from doing permanent damage, but, oh well, they all are broke, shunned, and prisoners themselves. I had to only frame a couple of them, and even for them, it was less than 2k ?.

    That did not dampen my instinctive reaction to really big men, and that was not helped by my introduction to Oleg in the slightest.

    For the rest of the drive, we remained in silence.

    The plaza was, in one sentence, a typical airport hotel. These things sprung up shortly after the first airports were built, and have not changed much in the 300 years since. It was of course a grey concrete block with mirrored windows.

    As soon as we exited the limousine, after what seemed like a whole battalion of guards surrounded it, I stood face to face with Oleg. I could not suppress a slight whimper, seeing him there, but I steeled my nerves as fast as I was able to. To my dismay, Oleg actually came up to me.

    ¡°I am sorry, Miss. The boss told me that you are helping him. Somebody lied to me. Told me you were hurting him. I am sorry I hurt you.¡±

    While I still was trembling, his obvious outrage that somebody dared to lie to him was, strangely endearing. If he just weren¡¯t that big, I might actually have liked the guy. As it was though, he had to make do with me accepting his apology though.

    Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

    ¡°I¡­ understand. And thank you.¡± Well, good first impression here. Even to me, I sounded mousy and timid here. Not quite the professional appearance I wanted to project.

    With a downright inhuman exertion of my will, I placed my right hand, cast and all, into his offered hand. When he moved into a position at the rear of the formation I managed to calm my nerves and breathe a bit easier. Mr. Walker came closer to me, and whispered into my ear:

    ¡°You really do not like him, or am I wrong?¡±

    ¡°It is not him personally. I have a bit of a phobia concerning big men. Big for Pures that is. Unfortunately, Oleg would qualify in that regard, and he triggers my phobia.¡± I whispered back to him, to spare Oleg the anguish, slight as it may be. Sure, I was in fear of him, but it was easily observable that he would take that bit of information and would beat himself up over it.

    ¡°Interesting. We will have to talk some more about it. But now, let¡¯s go in. The meeting starts at nine AM but I want to be early.¡± With that, he offered me his elbow.

    I have to confess in the first moment I was confused at what he was doing until I remembered that it was once a matter of good manners for a man to offer his elbow to a woman and that the same convention of manners required me to put my arm through it.

    He started to open his mouth when I did not react immediately, but I was fast enough to make his explanation unnecessary. Still, he apparently could not help himself from teasing me.

    ¡°That took you long enough. Were you deciding if I was worth it?¡±

    ¡°Not really. My problem was to place this archaic custom and remember the correct reaction. But I don¡¯t know if we should keep it up for long. If the other bosses see me on your arm in this fashion it might make them disregard me as arm candy.¡±

    He nodded but kept his position. ¡°You might be right, but I think you are knowledgeable enough to convince the majority of them that you are more than an airhead. And the rest will fall in line.

    The more important of the bosses have their position not on brute strength of will and muscle, but their intelligence.

    They are also the more powerful ones. If you manage to convince them and we can negotiate a peace treaty for the time of this crisis the other bosses will have to fall in line or be annihilated.¡±

    He grimaced.

    ¡°Sure, there are bosses who have their position because they intimidate their underlings, and a few of them have that as the only redeeming quality, but they should be smart enough to keep it low.

    Or the gang war that will erupt by them being stubborn will destroy their organizations only, and we will divide their territories among the neighbors. I give you the nickname but on that, I will have it my way.¡±

    Sometimes we had to pick the battles we had at least a chance to win, and as much as I wanted it otherwise it was clear to me that no amount of arguing would change his stance. So I sucked it up and kept my hand where it was, while we walked into the lobby.

    But I had a small measure of vengeance a few minutes later when he moved towards the stairs. I tried to steer him away from them towards the lift, but he proved too strong, so I had to be verbal in my admonishment.

    ¡°We will take the lift. You can take all the stairs you want in two months when it won¡¯t kill you, but for now, you will not.¡± While I spoke at a low volume, I was loud enough that all the guards heard me, and the whole group steered towards the lifts, making the decision for their boss. His reaction was part amused, part annoyed.

    ¡°That, my dear, was not very nice. You are aware that I can make decisions all by myself?¡±

    I had to hide a grin at that.

    ¡°Can¡¯t we all? But for some reason, some people make decisions for others all the time. I won¡¯t even try to tell you how to run your territory, or what to eat or wear.

    Not even how you generally behave. But as one of your doctors at this moment for this very life-threatening situation, I will insist that you don¡¯t unnecessarily make our work harder or even impossible.

    You have the choice, either follow relatively simple and minimally invasive instructions that will keep you alive, or reject the advice and die. And as long as I am here, I will nag you to the survival side.¡±

    The gaggle of bodyguards called three lifts side by side. I had not known that this functionality existed from the normal controls, as usually, you would need matrix support to reserve three at once.

    But it was not interesting enough to warrant a deeper examination. If I ever needed such functionality it would almost every time be far faster and easier to hack the building computer. When the first lift arrived I started to get into it, but Mr. Walker held me back.

    ¡°The first lift is for the vanguard, to see if there is danger, the second is for us, and the third is for the rearguard.¡±

    ¡°Oh, ok. I will keep that in mind.¡± Finally, we rode up to the 5<sup>th</sup> floor. In front of the conference room, we encountered another similar-sized group. The apparent principal of this group was a bit bigger in every aspect than Mr. Walker. He was also around a decade younger. Mr. Walker seemed anything but delighted.

    ¡°Kursalin.¡± He managed to sound nearly polite, but still disapproving in this one word.

    The light blonde man had an annoyed and arrogant expression on his rather brutish face. I was no expert but it seemed that this Kursalin was at least once on the receiving end of a fist to the nose. Why he had not had it corrected I could not even speculate.

    ¡°Walker. I hope this meeting is really important. I have important things to do. More important than having an orgy with the other old farts.¡±

    Then his gaze fell on me. It was rather leering, but nothing I was not used to. ¡°If I had known that entertainment was allowed, I would have brought a whore too. Whatever, we can share yours.¡±

    He crossed his arms in front of his chest and puffed himself up. From my perspective all that this managed to achieve though was highlighting the involuntary muscle contractions and cramps in his arms and chest muscles.

    I hoped he had a messias at hand and could live without cyberware because while he had CRS I would not waste any resources on rescuing him, and the costs for my services as implant surgeon went just up into the stratosphere for him. Walker on the other hand touched my hand reassuringly.

    ¡°I know thinking is not your strongest point Kursalin, but yes, this meeting is important. Even for you. And no, Veronica here is not entertainment in any form.

    So if you would let me and my people into the conference room I would be thankful.¡± Kursalin¡¯s face muscles distorted for a moment, and his eyes twitched, but after a moment he, and his troupe, stood aside.

    After we crossed the door, Mr. Walker leaned down to me.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, he is all talk and bluster but he knows that if he angers me he will be annihilated.¡±

    ¡°I assume he is one of your neighbors? Is he always this twitchy?¡± Walker pondered the question for a few seconds before answering.

    ¡°No, not really. Maybe he is distracted with something else.¡±

    ¡°No, he is dead. He just has not yet gotten the message.¡±

    ¡°You should not threaten the people here. While I like you to some extent and would protect you, if you piss enough of the people here off I won¡¯t be able to save you.¡±

    ¡°That was no threat that was a statement of a fact. That twitching is symptomatic of neural CRS in stage 5.

    There is no coming back from that.

    His immune system has begun to attack his own nerves, the natural ones. Even if I gave him the same nano therapy I gave you, there is nothing that would keep him alive for more than a couple of months at the extreme outset. So he is dead.¡±

    He stopped walking and looked intensely at me.

    ¡°How sure are you?¡±

    ¡°It is possible that I am wrong, but for that, he would have to have replaced his facial nerves with cybernetic ones. That is, of course not impossible, but one, serves no purpose, and two bears an unacceptable risk of developing neural CRS.

    I have not heard of anybody ever doing that. So for his face to get out of his control this much the nerves have to be damaged.

    And once the nerves begin to be damaged it is over but the suffering and crying.¡±

    ¡°That is worrying information. While I simply can¡¯t stand him and see him as a primitive thug with a touch of megalomania, his second in command is even worse.

    Dumber, more aggressive, and much more ambitious. He will start a grab for territory regardless of the situation. But forewarned is forearmed so thank you.¡±

    The bodyguards gave us a bit more room, and except for Oleg and Ryan stood back. We came up to a group of men between 50 and 60 years old if my guess was correct.

    They were deep in a conversation, but when we closed one of them, on the upper end of the age group if one could make conclusions based on his grey hair, held a hand up in greeting, which stopped the discussion.

    ¡°Ben. Nice to see you. While I always enjoy meeting you, I hope you have a good reason for calling this meeting. Some of the people here are not among my favorite acquaintances.¡± Then he, like Kursalin, looked directly at me, with some disapproval in his eyes.

    ¡°You should not have brought this child here. It is no place for her.¡± Walker shook his head.

    ¡°You know as well as I Vince that I will not abuse the protocol. This is extremely important. And Veronica here plays a vital role today.

    Now, Veronica Sinclair, meet Vincento Luciani. He is something of the elder of our little society.

    Vince, Veronica is a new arrival here in New York and a commonwealth trained implant surgeon.¡±

    That let Vince perk up. ¡°Implant surgeon? We had recently many cyber surgeons move away so more are always welcome. But as you are here, maybe you can give an opinion. How would you treat somebody with CRS?¡±

    At that question, the attention of the other men immediately turned to me. Obviously, they knew the answer was of some import to them as well.

    ¡°Before I answer that, bear in mind that I speak completely hypothetical. Without real data on the patient, I can¡¯t go into details. The answer depends on what type of CRS, what stage, and what implants are affected.

    Now take for example muscular CRS. Until you reach Stage three you can live mostly normally, but I would advise using nano therapy to extend your life.

    Stage four nano therapy is strongly advised. If at all possible remove the affected implant, and replace it with cloned material.

    If it is a vital muscle, like the diaphragm or the heart it might be too late, but with nano therapy, the patient might survive the three months until a cloned replacement is ready.

    If necessary the patient might be placed on life support to ensure survival until the replacements are ready.

    For neural CRS, if it is stage three or below, I would strongly advise nano therapy or better removal of all cyberware with neuronect.

    At stage four the only chance of survival for more than three months is the removal of the cyberware. As soon as possible. As soon as stage five is reached the only thing that can be done is making it easier.¡±

    One of the other gentlemen asked: ¡°What is this nano therapy you are talking about?¡±

    ¡°That is a relatively new development in the treatment of CRS. Nanobots specifically suppress the immune reaction to cyberware.

    Unlike traditional anti-rejection treatments, this will not leave the patient vulnerable to the bioweapons still being around.

    It can be done with 3<sup>rd</sup> generation nanites and upwards, but the better the nanobots the better the result. Also, the results depend on what stage the therapy is introduced.

    At stage two with regular injections of nanobots, CRS will most likely not impact your life expectancy in any meaningful way.

    You will die from old age before CRS will kill you, even with 3<sup>rd</sup> gens. At stage three 3<sup>rd</sup> gen will extend your life by a few decades.

    12<sup>th</sup>gen on the other hand will extend your life theoretically a century or two.

    At the beginning of stage 4, 3<sup>rd</sup> gen will at the very best extend your life by a couple of weeks, while 12<sup>th</sup> gen manage a few years there.

    At the end of stage 4, you don¡¯t need to bother with 3<sup>rd</sup> gen, and 12<sup>th</sup> gen will manage, with luck, a couple of months.

    Stage 5, if you don¡¯t have cloned replacements ready even nano therapy won¡¯t be enough to save you.¡±

    Another of the men was visibly confused.

    ¡°What do you mean 12<sup>th</sup> gen? There are only ten generations of nanobots.¡±

    ¡°No, there are definitely 12. Of course, the 12<sup>th</sup> generation was only revealed three or four months ago, but 11<sup>th</sup> gen has been available in the Commonwealth for a couple of years now. It might be hard to get 12<sup>th</sup> gen as that needs a new generation of nano fabs, but 11<sup>th</sup> gen should be no problem for your infrastructure.¡±

    ¡°So there are now 7<sup>th</sup> generation nano fabs in nowhere?¡±

    It slowly dawned on me that there was some sort of communication problem. Accordingly, my answer became insecure.

    ¡°Noo? The newest nano fabs in the commonwealth are 8<sup>th</sup> gen. I have the feeling we are talking about slightly different things here.¡±

    We stared at each other for a moment before Vince changed the topic.

    ¡°Well, alright I don¡¯t think this will lead to anything. It is irrelevant what is available in the commonwealth. We have to use what we can get here. So, Ms. Sinclair, are Ralcon or Enertech nanos better suited for the therapy?¡±

    ¡°I¡­ I don¡¯t understand the question. I know that Ralcon and Enertech are megacorps but what has that to do with the therapy?¡±

    One of the men who had so far been silent scoffed at that. ¡°Yeah, would have been too good to be true. Well, at least it is a good prank.¡± It was Mr. Walker who answered him.

    ¡°Timothy, remember she is new here in NYC. She arrived a bit over a week ago, and neither Ralcon nor Enertech have the same privilege in Nowhere as they have here.¡± Then he turned to me.

    ¡°The thing is, except for a handful of older nano fabs in private hand, Ralcon and Enertech have a duopoly for the production of nanobots.

    They stopped selling nano fabs a few decades ago. And even then they did cost over a billion bucks each.

    I don¡¯t understand how they can afford to have one in each hospital as it seems to be in the commonwealth. The nanobots alone are expensive as hell.¡± I stared at him open-mouthed for several seconds.

    ¡°You¡­ you are serious! How¡­ why? A billion? I mean, yeah, the first generation, but the second generation already did only cost a few million to make.

    A modern nano fab, like the 8<sup>th</sup> gen from the commonwealth, could be had for less than two million. And that is with a hefty markup.

    The nanos I gave doc Schaeffer did cost me no more than 20 bucks. You could build a 6<sup>th</sup> gen fab with parts off the shelf. Standard electronics, a micro-computer, and some control elements. The only thing you would need to get is the seed stock for the nanobots.

    With my new industrial fabber, I could make the complete 8<sup>th</sup> gen fab except for the seed stock in a couple of days.

    Not an exceptional good 8<sup>th</sup> gen, but working.

    And for the seed stock, while it is expensive, we are still talking about the six-digit range.

    And that is for the 8<sup>th</sup> gen. 6<sup>th</sup> gen would cost around 10k in the commonwealth.¡±

    Now all the men looked surprised. Walker was the first to get a hold of himself.

    ¡°You have to be wrong. We all know that it costs billions to make a nano fab. And that the nanobots are worth their weight in gold.¡±

    I shook my head in confusion.

    ¡°The first generation, yes, they did cost that much. That was because there was no seed stock, except what they made in nano positors.

    It took them around two hours on a machine that did cost around 1.4 billion dollars to make a single nanobot.

    They needed roughly a million nanos to seed each of the first generation fabs so to get the first nanofab in something approaching reasonable time they needed 50 nano positors.

    But it was nearly trivial to make new, better seed stock with that first-generation fabs. That was the second generation. The tech was new and took quite a bit of human supervision so they did still cost in the ballpark of ten million or twenty.

    Now it is mostly automated. I could download a couple of dozen open source 6<sup>th</sup> gen fab plans from the commonwealth.

    Sure, usually for an 8<sup>th</sup> gen you need to pay a licensing fee, as there is not yet an open-source version, and I am not sure there is an open-source 7<sup>th</sup> gen yet, but 6<sup>th</sup> there are dozens.¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°To answer your question now that I understand the context, Mr. Luciani, I would have to look into the specs of the nanobots sold before I could give you the answer, I am sorry.¡±

    He rubbed his chin.

    ¡°Can you instead give us some of these open-source plans you talked about? And maybe sell us seed stock?¡±

    ¡°The plans are no problem, but my nano fab is in nearly continuous use for the next five weeks, so I could not make the seed stock until then. After that, I promised doc Schaeffer an 8<sup>th</sup> gen fab.

    What we could do is that I build the fabs without seed stock and you order the seed stock via the darknet from the commonwealth. Or I sell you the plans for the fab so you could have a workshop build yours.¡±

    Ok, I was not quite honest with them. The industrial fabber could make one of the frames in a few hours if I used the different stations in parallel instead of sequential, and of course, while my 8<sup>th</sup> gen fab was busy, I had still the enhanced 8<sup>th</sup> gen in the NADA.

    There was nothing that my nano fab could do, that the NADA could not. But I had the feeling that I did not want too many of these nano fabs floating around and I wanted even less to be seen as the source of them.

    The frame, sure. That was a simple electronics system. Every workshop with the appropriate machinery could build them. But giving them the seed stock would be a bad precedent. The plans would be for a generic, low-quality 8<sup>th</sup> gen. Mine had some proprietary technology integrated, and the controller was not a mini-computer, making the range of nanobots it could make quite a bit larger.

    Vincent nodded. ¡°Too bad about your nano fab. I won¡¯t ask you what it is busy with but your idea has some merit. How much would it cost for you to build the fab?¡±

    I thought for a moment. I would have to design the fab first before I had a definite answer, but that would be simple cad work. No special design was needed here. I could even downgrade my personal fab design enough for their use but that would be actually more work. While not quite the work of art that Precious was, I had put much thought and work into the nano fab. So I took the generic answer.

    ¡°I guess that the price would be around $250k for me to make it or $300k for me to sell you the plans. The first price includes one license for the design, while the second one would allow you to build as many of them as you wanted.

    You could then license the seed stock nanobots or other designs. The nice thing is, as soon as you have a running nano fab you can simply buy the nanobot schematics online and your fab will be able to make them if it is at all capable of that.

    But you should be aware that 12<sup>th</sup> gen schematics are expensive. The seed stock schematics will cost you somewhere in the range of $5 million. But with that and the plans, you can build as many new nano fabs as you want. Each further nano fab would cost you around $50k to make.

    Oh, and you can get 10<sup>th</sup> gen nanobot schematics as open source. The cost of making these would be in the single-digit price range for the liter.¡±

    Vince nodded again. ¡°I will think about it. It is a good idea. Now I fear we have to cut this discussion short. There are others here I have to speak to. I will talk later with you.¡±

    Mr. Walker led me away from the group and softly asked me.

    ¡°What happened with making the tools to make the tool?¡±

    ¡°That was before I bought the industrial fabber. And if you think your people can be silent about it I can even give you the seed stock. If nothing comes along that will take up even more time of my fab. I have enough breathing room to make one or two sets. But I don¡¯t want to have it known that I sell it.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I can see that. I think Vince will also buy a fab without the plans and the schematics for the seed. He is one of the smarter people here. Many of the rest will probably jump on the chance.¡±

    ¡°And bring Ralcon and Enertech down on themselves if they are not careful. They know of course how cheap and easy it is to make nanobots, so I would guess they milk the situation for what it¡¯s worth.¡± Then I stopped moving.

    ¡°Do you think it might be worthwhile to anonymously publish the plans for the open-source 6<sup>th</sup> gen nano fabs and the specific Raclon or Enertech nanobots that can be used to make the seed stock?¡± He chuckled.

    ¡°Yes, that might be a big fuck you for the two corps. You don¡¯t seem to like them very much.¡±

    ¡°If I understand the situation correctly they are responsible for several thousand deaths each year, just to pad their profit margin beyond the obscene and well into the ludicrous. And if the open-source nano fabs and schematics lift off, it will be hard for them to maintain the lie.

    I would love to really hurt them, but that is beyond my abilities. Also if shops are springing up that can build 6<sup>th</sup> gen nano fabs all over the US then they might miss the small number of 8<sup>th</sup> gen that spring up in New York. Naturally, I will register the patent for the nano fab under an assumed name in the commonwealth first, so they can¡¯t claim it as their patent.¡±

    ¡°That might actually be a good idea. But back to business, don¡¯t bring up the nano fab you gave the hospital. It is too late to keep your nano fab a secret, and it might bite you in the ass later but the plan you proposed might help you there.¡±

    The room had meanwhile filled with people, and gradually the important persons drifted towards the conference table. Walker steered us to one group of seats, and he actually pulled back a chair for me. I began to feel a bit suspicious of his behavior.

    Oh, I could understand him being friendly and supportive.

    After all, I had so far been courteous and helpful to him and I would be an extremely valuable ally in the not too distant future, but this courteous behavior I simply could not assess, and that was slowly driving me to insanity.

    To distract myself I inspected the other participants in the meeting. They all were placed in groups of four to 5, around 40 or so groups and while the majority of them were men, I was not the sole woman in attendance. Even a couple of the bosses seemed to be women. Talk about progressive.  When everybody was seated, Vince called the meeting to order.

 28: Sometimes talk is the solution

    I don¡¯t know where Vince got the gavel, but for me, it looked somewhat exaggerated how they organized here. Imagine being there, surrounded by the bosses of the organized crime groups of New York City, their enforcers, and their bodyguards.

    Men, and a few women, who reached the height they had through ruthlessness and often brutality. Known for being prone to violence at a moment¡¯s notice. And they were playing debate club. But somehow it worked. So Vince called them to order.

    ¡°All right, ladies and gents, let¡¯s get this show off the ground. I hereby call the extraordinary meeting on November the 7<sup>th</sup> 2248 to order. This meeting has been called for by Benjamin Walker under the emergency protocol. Unless there is an objection, I will give the word to Walker.¡±

    Before he could bang the gavel, Kursalin stood up.

    ¡°Yeah, I have an objection. We should have stopped this shit of a council long ago. We are all busy men. We don¡¯t have time for playing painting within the lines.¡±

    There were a couple of agreeing murmurs, but mostly the bosses seemed to be annoyed by him, and it became apparent why when Vince answered.

    I on the other hand set the cluster to survey the matrix for information about the nanobots Raclon and Enertech offered here. Especially independent reviews of them.

    I did the same with commercial nanobots from the commonwealth.

    ¡°Do you have to do that every single time, Kursalin? Yes, we know you don¡¯t like these meetings, and we know you think they are a waste of time. The majority of us do not agree with you, but nobody forces you to be here.¡±

    ¡°Fuck it with not forcing me to be here. You decide what happens, how our spats are calmed down, and if and when to go to war. If I am not here you will simply decide to eliminate my territory. So fuck you all, I have to be here. And fuck these meetings.¡±

    ¡°Kursalin, I have to ask you to keep the peace and to remain courteous. Now any other objections?¡± He waited for a moment, and then banged the gravel when nobody else answered. ¡°Good, then, Ben, if you would please.¡±

    Mr. Walker nodded and stood up.

    ¡°Thank you, Vince. I know very well that most of you are pressed for time. And have other worries. If I had to guess, the majority of you have an extremely aggressive strain of CRS that they have to fight now.¡± That set off the bomb. Most of the bosses looked shocked at that. Only a few kept that expression for longer than a few seconds, but the shock was apparent.

    ¡°No, I have not broken the treaty and sent spies into your organizations. To get to how I know about it, I have to go back a few days. Roughly a week ago, I was informed that somebody had acquired a building in my territory and would like to open a business as well as living there.

    I was somewhat surprised when this somebody proved to be a very young woman who claimed to be a commonwealth-trained implant surgeon.

    I was ready to dismiss her claims but was willing to give her a chance to prove that she was what she said she was.

    During the negotiations, she suddenly blurted out that I had CRS. She was right, and her reasoning was sound, so I was much closer to believing her.

    Another point in her favor was that she did not give off-the-cuff prescriptions but told me that without knowing the full situation she could not give me full advice.

    I have to say that when she had the facts she could actually help me.

    It may not be enough to save me, but what she¡¯s done so far is give me a chance.

    But what is more important is that she told me my CRS was not a coincidence.

    My previous cybutcher had modified my last implant in a way that quadrupled the risk of CRS and then convinced my practitioner that a specific drug would promote faster healing.

    He managed that with the drug database.

    The young woman then told me and my practitioner that our database had been hacked.

    That the drug was exceptionally good at promoting healing but increased the risk of CRS dramatically. As she explained to me, the combination of the sabotaged cyberware and the drug, I had around a 2% chance of not getting CRS.

    Needless to say, I had no such luck.

    Unfortunately, somebody convinced one of my men that she was trying to kill me, and loyal as he is, he tried to stop her, injuring her, while she was in a procedure to prolong my life long enough that more permanent solutions might be available.

    The procedure was successful as it can be though, so I had a bit of good luck there.¡± He took a deep breath and made a short pause.

    ¡°Then came the next surprise.

    The young woman told me that she is a relatively good hacker as well, and offered to look into the situation. Again I was skeptical, and again she proved that she could do what she said she could.

    Though she warned me upfront that it would be almost certain that any trail would be likely cold, she tried to find out more.

    I let her tell you what she found herself, but the short version is, that she found a trail anyway and at the end of the trail enough memos, sound notes, and communication to prove that one of us tried to kill more than 30 of us through CRS.¡±

    The outcry that erupted lasted for a few minutes before Vince managed to get the others to settle down.

    Walker remained standing the whole time.

    ¡°If I could continue. The important point and the reason why I called this meeting is that she, fortunately, has access to the supercomputer of one of the best hackers in the world.

    And could prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the evidence was completely faked.

    I have, at her insistence, contracted one of the abyss-dwellers to verify her findings and analysis. Fortunately, it checked out.

    So, keep in mind that when she names the perpetrator that it is a frame-up. Without much further ado, I have Ms. Veronica Sinclair present her findings.¡±

    Nervously I stood up and felt my mouth dry up.

    Somehow, and I can¡¯t tell you how I managed to convey what I found.

    When I explained that the trail led to a false Berardino matrix compound there was some angry whispering going on, and when I presented the faked records some of the people jumped up and it nearly came to a fight.

    I noticed that Kursalin was one of the men trying to incite a fight, but in the end, Vince managed to calm things down again.

    Then I began the explanation of how it was faked. Then I came to the falsified sound files. I explained how I had, in effect, stolen the files of the real Giorgio Berardino from his network, and placed my focus on the Berardino group.

    ¡°I am sorry that I hacked your system and stole your data sir, but I thought it might be more important to prove that you are not the culprit than to follow etiquette.

    I hope you can forgive me that transgression.¡± He did not look very amused but it could be many things that ruined his mood. Still, I would keep my distance from him as much as I could.

    Then I continued to lay out how my access to Spectre¡¯s cluster, without naming him specifically though, enabled me to analyze the files and identify the fakes.

    I skipped over the deep explanation of the various levels of fakes.

    If they wanted to know that they could pay to get that information from somebody else. I gave them the analysis of what I had found and what it meant for them.

    Compared with the meeting on Thursday the explanation took a bit longer, thanks to several interruptions by my audience. Still, after three hours I was done. And hoarse.

    We now had half past noon, so Vince called a recess for lunch, and we relocated to the dining hall.

    At first, I was mostly disinterested in the menu, but that changed when I learned that we would be served real food instead of the replicated stuff.

    The choices were all mouthwatering, but it quickly came down to the filet mignon. My only hope was that it was not too massive.

    While I needed an enormous amount of calories each day, the volume of my stomach was more on the petite side. And it would be an unmitigated tragedy to waste real food.

    Finally, the moment had come, and I had a fine cut of beef in front of me.

    And real vegetables, I can¡¯t forget the vegetables. Fortunately, it was already cut into bite-sized pieces, and when the first bite hit my tongue I closed my eyes and enjoyed the explosion of taste it brought me.

    I chewed slowly to savor the first real meal I had in nearly three weeks. When I opened my eyes again after swallowing, I saw everybody on the table looking at me intensely, instantly fueling my insecurities again.

    ¡°What¡­ ? Is something wrong?¡± It was Mr. Walker that answered me. ¡°Are you aware that you just gave us an interesting show? I mean, the visuals were in one word sensual, but the moan. I did not expect such a passionate moan from you.¡± As so often over the last days I felt my cheeks heating up.

    Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

    ¡°I did¡­ but¡­ oh, frack!¡± If I could have I would have sunk into the floor at this moment.

    ¡°Don¡¯t be ashamed, I for one think it was adorable. But I have to wonder about the passion you attacked the food with.

    Usually, people have to experience the first bites of real food before they realize what they are eating.¡±

    I nodded at that.

    ¡°You are right of course. But I had my first bite of real food nearly two years ago. It was the only luxury I could indulge in that would not have aroused suspicion.

    So indulging I did. When I find the time I have to organize to get real ingredients and spices from somewhere.¡±

    I took the next bite and managed to temper my response this time.

    ¡°In that case, I am surprised that you have a coke with your filet and not a Cabernet or Pinot Noir.¡±

    ¡°Am I right in the assumption that these are wine varieties?¡± At his nod, I continued. ¡°Unfortunately I can¡¯t drink wine. I can¡¯t drink any alcohol.¡±

    They looked at each other before Dylan came out with an answer.

    ¡°Is that because you are so small? Or is it an allergy?¡±

    ¡°Neither. Pures become violently and painfully sick from alcohol. It is baked into our genetics.¡±

    ¡°That can¡¯t be right. I have seen Pures getting drunk before.¡± I shook my head sadly.

    ¡°If they did drink alcohol they were no Pures.¡±

    ¡°Ha, you never stop learning.¡±

    The rest of lunch we spent in silence, enjoying the good food. I managed, barely, to eat up, but still, it was over way too fast.

    In the meanwhile, the cluster had digested the data about the Ralcon and Enertech nanobots, and when I read over the results I was seriously underwhelmed.

    Sure, they were 10<sup>th</sup> gen nanobots by the common definition, at least at the upper, expensive end of the lineup, but just barely.

    From what I could tell, they had shoved a valence bonder into what otherwise were mostly generic 7<sup>th</sup> gen nanobots.

    And the prices, let¡¯s talk about ludicrous. A half-liter, like I had provided for Mr. Walker, at a much lower quality, did cost around $500k.

    As soon as the meeting continued I was thankfully no longer required to explain anything and could sit silently at the table for a while.

    Mr. Walker explained that he had hired Dunedain to check my analysis before he had called this meeting.

    He also proposed everyone here should call up an abyss-dweller of their own to replicate what I had done, just so that they could make sure that it was the truth.

    That proposal alone, if acted upon would cost these organizations several tens of million dollars.

    But it was not my money, so what did I care?

    I let my thoughts wander a bit when they began to discuss what to do now, so I was a bit surprised when Vince called me up again and Mr. Walker discreetly tapped my foot.

    ¡°Oh, sorry, I was just lost in thoughts. What can I help you with, sir?¡±

    I heard some soft snorts and chuckles at that, and even Vince could not suppress a grin.

    ¡°I asked those of us with CRS can do. You are the only implant specialist here at the moment, and I think we all need to hear what options are available.¡± I took a deep breath again and nodded.

    ¡°Yes, I can do that. I assume removing the cyberware and replacing it with cloned tissue has been brought up and rejected?¡± There were several agreeing murmurs going around the table.

    ¡°Then it mostly depends on the type of CRS and the stage. One thing I recommend in nearly every case is the new nano therapy that has just been developed in the Commonwealth. It can extend your life expectancy to an amount that you would almost certainly die from old age before you die from CRS.

    That outcome though is only possible if the therapy is started early enough, and you use good nanobots for it.

    If you reached stage three it will be a few years, and in stage four we are talking about a couple of months at the outset.

    I have been asked if I would recommend either Ralcon or Enertech nanobots for that, and honesty compels me to say neither.

    Their best nanobots are at best subpar, and against good Commonwealth nanites simply garbage, and the costs are outrageous.

    Just to make it clear how overprized they are, if you were in the Commonwealth and would buy fully legal nanobots, then for the same amount of money you would pay for one week¡¯s supply of Ralcon or Enertech nanobots, you could get enough nanobots for nearly 50 years of therapy.

    Of course, that won¡¯t take shipping into account, but I can¡¯t imagine that it will be less than 25 years if you discreetly import the nanobots. ¡°

    That started a ruckus and it took several minutes for Vincent to bring the meeting to order again. Then he addressed me.

    ¡°Earlier you told us that you did know nothing about the nanobots from Ralcon and Enertech, so what changed?¡±

    ¡°I used the wireless network here to look up the nanites in question and their price structure. And with respect, the prices are ludicrous.

    You can¡¯t even compare the prices from the NWC with the prices from the US as there are no such shoddy nanobots available in Nowhere. If you get them from Seattle, you will have to be content with much better results, but alas, it can¡¯t be helped.¡± A few chuckles.

    ¡°Ok, the next question then, you said you recommend it for nearly every case. What are the exceptions?¡±

    ¡°Stage one is actually curable, not that I expect anybody of you to have stage 1.

    The aspertone will have made sure of that.

    And then there are the severe cases of stage five muscular CRS when a vital implant is failing.

    Unless there is a chance for a cloned replacement part the nano therapy will just prolong the suffering.

    And finally, for neural CRS, once it reaches stage five there is nothing to be done anymore.

    The only recommendations I can give is to bring your affairs in order and then seek a painless way out.¡± I heard a muted ¡°Fuck!¡± from Mr. Walker after I said that.

    ¡°Now the quality of the bots is only really important in late-stage 3, stage four, and stage five muscular CRS.

    Yes, I said it would extend your life expectancy by more or less making your CRS irrelevant in stage 2, but the next point is what I think is the important one.

    You have only to survive a couple of years that way. I have developed a way to make new cyberware CRS immune.¡±

    Compared to the ruckus earlier, this was pandemonium. I honestly could understand not a single word of what was screamed at me. Part of that was that my aural implants kicked in and reduced the gain. But mostly it was that everybody, except Mr. Walker and his crew, was screaming all at once.

    For around five minutes Vince did not even try to calm them down, so after a minute or so I sat back down.

    When the outrage had abated Vince took a few deep breaths before he continued.

    ¡°Do I understand you correctly, Ms. Sinclair? You have a way to beat CRS?¡±

    And back up again. But before I could stand, Mr. Walker, tugged at my sleeve and whispered:

    ¡°Do not say a single word of where you live now.¡± I looked at him for a moment in confusion, but then shrugged and began to answer.

    ¡°Yes, sir, I have. The process is, admittedly not fully developed yet, and what I have is a small system that was originally intended more as a proof of concept, but the technique works and can be used for small implants.¡±

    ¡°And if it is just a proof of concept how do you know that it works?¡±

    ¡°For one, neural implants are small, and if I am honest, I don¡¯t particularly relish the idea of getting neural CRS, so the first thing I did after I tested the technique was to replace my jack and other neural implants.

    About the tests, I used ten thousand transhumant lab rats, gave them some implants and a drug cocktail that increased the probability of CRS to somewhere around 99%.

    Of these rats, around 100 not developing CRS would be the expected result. After three months, not a single one had it. I will admit that I did not use the same drug cocktail on myself.¡±

    ¡°And what do you have to do to fully develop the system?¡±

    ¡°The basic of the technique is to sheath the implant with a biological layer derived from the DNA of the patient and to lay a nano filter above the connective surfaces.

    And yes, that sounds like the encapsulation method that has been tried several times already, but it is different.

    The problem now is that at this moment my small experimental bioreactor is brute-forcing this process by essentially burning nanobots. It is possible, if expensive for small parts, or disassembled parts, but it will be impossible to scale up this process.¡±

    Vince nodded at that. ¡°Ok, that is understandable. We all know what nanobots cost and nobody would pay several billion for cyberware.¡±

    Then an Asian woman interceded.

    ¡°One thing we have to decide is if we believe her. I mean, look at her. She looks like she should be in a high school somewhere. I mean, how old are you child?¡±

    Urgh, that again. And this time I would not get away with the ¡®I am older than I look answer¡¯. So the complicated answer.

    ¡°That depends, ma¡¯am. Do you want to know my biological, chronological, or my mental age?¡±

    That stumped here for a moment.

    ¡°There is only one age per person.¡±

    ¡°Not quite so ma¡¯am. You see, I am a Pure. We live longer than non-Pures and age a bit slower. So biologically I would guess myself at somewhere around 16 or 17. Chronologically, I was born a bit over 18 years ago. But neither of them tells you what you want to know, and that is what are my education level, my skill level, and my experience. And the answer to that is I am a Jack.¡±

    ¡°So you are a hacker, good for you. And as you are still alive you are probably one of the better ones. But that does not change that you are only 18 as you said yourself.¡±

    ¡°You forgot the one advantage that jacks have above every other hacker, over anybody really ma¡¯am. We have time compression.

    For every hour in real life the average Jack with an average board spends in cyberspace he experiences 25.

    I am not an average Jack and my board is not average either.

    So to answer your question, I spent nearly 40 years in virtual reality with the help of one of the top 50 supercomputers of the world learning the skills, learning how CRS works, and creating this solution.¡±

    ¡°And we should believe that an accomplished implant surgeon is also an above-average Jack? Just like that? Don¡¯t you think that is too much coincidence?¡±

    ¡°You got that the wrong way. I am an implant surgeon because I am a Jack.

    I have to admit when I had my first jack implanted I had only vague notions of CRS. When I learned about it I had the choice of removing the jack, living with it, or trying to find a solution to the problem.

    I still have my jack, well a new, better one, so obviously I choose not to remove it.

    Instead, I learned implant surgery, and implant design, even nanoengineering, to combat CRS.

    And I found a possible solution a bit over four months ago in real life.

    So, no coincidence here. The coincidence that I myself find suspicious is that this insane plot is happening right now when I am being forced to relocate to the exact city where it is taking place.¡±

    Vince again banged his gavel.

    ¡°Alright people. I think we need a little pause here to clear our heads. So let¡¯s come back a bit later.¡±

    In the general chaos of nearly 200 people moving around, I missed at first Mr. Walker talking into his com, but I could hear him when I got closer.

    ¡°No, damn it. There is no time. I will clear it later, but for now, take the skimmer and come to the roof of the LaGuardia Plaza¡­. I know you can fly it¡­ Tell them it is a matter of life and death¡­ no time for that¡­ good, she will be up there. I will send additional men to help you but you should consider yourself under siege now.¡± He sounded and behaved rather frantic. When he shut down the call he immediately turned to Ryan and spoke quietly.

    ¡°Ryan, take Kitten, bring her up to the roof. You two will be picked up by Justin. I will send Oleg with you to the roof.¡± I was seriously dumbfounded.

    ¡°Mr. Walker, what is wrong?¡±

    He gave me a pained smile.

    ¡°I sadly don¡¯t have the time to explain it now Kitten, but you are in danger right now.

    So if you would please go with Ryan and Oleg? Thank you.¡±

    And he marched off, while I still did not understand a thing. But Ryan obviously was better trained than me, and softly but decidedly pulled at my arm to get me moving. After the first few meters, I shook my head clear and walked under my own power.

    ¡°What the heck did just happen?¡± Ryan shook his head.

    ¡°No fucking Idea. The boss just murmured something about fucking insane Ruskies, told Oleg to keep you safe until you are in the skimmer, and then called somebody. Now he has sent us three to the roof.¡±

    We had arrived at the lift bank a bit away from the rest of the people, and while we waited for the lift, one of Kursalin¡¯s men made a direct line towards us.

    I did not like how he looked at me, and just this moment I wished I had my gun. Then the lift arrived and Ryan pulled me into it, followed by Oleg. When the door closes he pressed the buttons for the second and the ground floor.

    ¡°Huh, aren¡¯t we supposed to go to the roof?¡±

    ¡°Yes, but did you see the muscle moving towards us? It seems somebody wants to have a short pointed discussion with you, and it is my job to make that not happen.

    You can bet that he is in the next lift down towards the lobby. We will get off on the second floor and¡­¡± The door opened and he pulled me out, and towards the stairs.

    ¡°Then we will take the stairs up.

    Unlike lifts, stairs won¡¯t show the floor they are going on a nice little display.¡±

    Then we remained mostly silent, with only the accessional curse being uttered.

    When we reached the roof access my legs felt as if somebody had repeatedly put them through the meat grinder, and I learned that my hip was not as healed as I hoped. At the roof I was greeted by the skimmer we had found in the garage.

    After Ryan and were seated and we had lifted off, the question stood in the room.

    ¡°Does anybody here know what actually happened? I thought it was going good and then¡­ ¡°

    Unfortunately, I only received shrugged shoulders, and then we already had reached the fortress.

 29: Tell me why

    The gate of the garage slammed shut with a startling crash, making us all jump a bit in our seats.

    It took a few seconds before Ryan sighed and opened the door, helping me out afterward. I on the other hand hissed when I said hello to my old friend the pain in my hip. The short time sitting in the skimmer had made it worse still.

    Still, I managed to limb along without using the wheelchair. My HUD told me that it was just a bit of leftover damage from the bruise, and it would be better in a few minutes, but my hip was trying to tell me that somebody had planted an explosive in it, or so it seemed to me at least.

    Justin moved beside me and offered me his hand.

    ¡°I thought your leg was better. What happened?¡±

    ¡°Six flights of stairs happened. It is nothing too bad, just a bit painful for some time.¡±

    I somehow made it to the cafeteria and sat down, much faster than my hip liked. I also gestured for Justin and Ryan to sit down.

    ¡°Would it be useful in any way to worry about what has gone wrong?¡± Justin shrugged.

    ¡°Not really no. We got our orders to keep you alive. The boss said he will send additional men to help guard this place. But I have no clue why. Are there any installations coming up in the next few days?¡±

    I had to look it up.

    ¡°The old fusactors are slated for dismantling next week. But other than that, not really. The new algae tanks and the purifier are already here and need to be set up, but I wanted to use the bots for that anyway. Why?¡±

    ¡°Because the boss said we have to consider us under siege. That means no one we don¡¯t know gets in. I don¡¯t know how long this situation will last, but it could be that you have to postpone it.¡±

    I sighed, considering the possible problems we could get. Sure, the Wiltons were shut down since the first two Yasoshis had been installed. No need to rely on these timebombs.

    ¡°That would be unfortunate. Is there anything else we need to prepare?¡±

    They looked at each other, and Justin nodded.

    ¡°Yes, nobody leaves the building until we have green light.¡±

    I was just starting to agree when Christine came into the room.

    ¡°Hey, what the fuck was that? Why the hell have you lit out of here like your ass was on fire?¡± She punctuated every word with a jab to Justin¡¯s sternum.

    Justin in turn lifted his hands in surrender.

    ¡°Sorry Chrissy, but the boss called. Had me get Kitten and Ryan back here as fast as can. Said something about life and death. So that is what I did.¡± That took the wind out of her sails, and she sat down on the next chair.

    ¡°For real? Fuck, what the hell happened?¡±

    ¡°We were just discussing that. The conclusion is we have no clue. Something spooked Mr. Walker and he decided that I should be somewhere else as soon as possible.

    And honestly, if somebody like Mr. Walker is spooked, I try to be somewhere else too.

    So here I am, thanks to Justin¡¯s quick reaction. But we have another problem. Apparently, Mr. Walker expects further troubles. Could I trouble you to get the others into a meeting? Thank you.¡±

    It took Christine only a couple of minutes to assemble the cast, and when all were seated the questions began anew and were answered just as fast, and unsatisfying as earlier.

    But they accepted that we simply did not know what was wrong. Then I brought up the possible siege and asked what we would need.

    Food and water were provided, even if we just used the old systems. Unless whoever would attack us had a heavy weapon it was unlikely, but not impossible, for them to gain entrance to the fortress. I had the security system collate a status report of the various emplaced weapons.

    Mark promised to look over it but brought up the possible lack of ammunition. Understandable as they had not planned for a new base and were, like me in the moving-in phase. But that was a problem easily solved. Sure, it would cost money, but that¡¯s what money is for.

    Then the question got to a possible aerial attack.

    At this time we had nothing to defend against one with. And as good as the passive defenses were, the roof was our weak spot. Mark proposed to put somebody with a MANPAD there.

    It seems I was the only one not knowing what he was talking about, as the others began to weigh the pros and cons of the idea. The biggest con was that whoever we put up there was extremely vulnerable. At that point I had to ask.

    ¡°Sorry to interrupt, but what is this MANPAD?¡± After a moment of silence it was Natalie who gave me the answer.

    ¡°A MANPAD is a man-portable air defense system. Essentially a small rocket launcher that fires an anti-air missile. They are one-shot though, so after each shot the person has to get a new launcher, and if there are two attackers he will be in deep shit.¡±

    I nodded at that.

    ¡°So the idea is to use anti-air weaponry? Then why not use rail gun emplacements? I mean, I have the plans for an older generation of CDF anti-air rail guns, and we have this nice industrial fabber that should be able to pump one out in a couple of hours.¡±

    They looked at each other.

    ¡°Yeah, that would be good. And until we have them we should put a couple with MANPADS on the roof. What do you need to make them?¡±

    ¡°I have everything I need. It is basically carbon and a little bit of other materials. I have enough for¡­¡± I connected with the fabber and looked up the resource levels¡­ ¡°12 railguns, complete with radar and optical guidance system.

    That is enough to kill a grav destroyer in one salvo. The only problem is that with only 2 of the new fusactors installed we won¡¯t have enough energy to power 12 railguns and everything else. But I don¡¯t think we will miss the use of the industrial fabber during an assault.¡±

    Mark cleared his throat.

    ¡°Is the number with ammunition or without? If without, where do we get ammo for them?¡±

    Oops, yes, that was dumb of me. ¡°You are right. Depending on ammunition, if we expect 1000 shots per rail gun we can build 10. With 8 to build we can have around 10k. We also could order more carbon. If we order ammo for your regular guns we can get that too.¡±

    ¡°And how accurate will they be. Can we zero them?¡±

    My expression must have been questioning, as he continued.

    ¡°I mean, how do we make sure they hit what we want them to hit.¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ maybe¡­ no¡­ yes, that would work. We could use the household fabber to make remote-controlled drones for targeting. ¡°

    The others nodded before Mark changed the topic.

    ¡°Can they also be used against infantry?¡± It took me a few moments to compute what he had asked. Then I needed a few moments more to realize that he was serious.

    ¡°Mark, these things are designed to go through the armor of a grav destroyer.

    The projectiles are high hypersonic. If you can hit a person, then yes, they can be used against them, but you will likely destroy the building behind the target as well. Or the ground. At low power, we can consider using them against a vehicle. But only a relatively big one. And armored if possible. But persons¡­ no, simply no.¡±

    ¡°Ok, can they be mounted in a way that they can shoot at the parking lot and the street from the roof?¡±

    I had absolutely no idea about that but it took me only a moment to look it up. Sadly unsuccessfully.

    ¡°I have no idea. What value do you need?¡±

    ¡°We need the vertical adjustment range.¡±

    That I could find.

    ¡°All right, that is -60¡ã to +85¡ã.¡±

    Mark took a double-take.

    ¡°Wow, that is pretty good. What are the laying speeds?¡±

    ¡°Lateral is 0.1¡ã/s to 80¡ã/s, vertical is 0.1 to 60¡ã¡±

    ¡°And that thing is an older generation? What the hell do the actual generation guns do?¡±

    ¡°As far as I know, the difference is mostly in the fire control. Something about target acquisition, anti-stealth, and some other things I honestly am not really interested in. The actual gun has been the same for somewhere around 40 or 50 years as far as I know.¡±

    ¡°Anyway, even at these impressive ranges, it won¡¯t cover the parking lot from the roof. We can reach the street though. I would say we place 4 of them on the roof, one on each corner, and put one each beside the entries in case they bring a vehicle with heavy weapons. I assume that there is a way to armor them from the front?¡±

    ¡°Yes, sure, but if we armor all of them we will need more carbon.¡±

    ¡°No, only the two on the ground level. They are remote-operated, aren¡¯t they?¡±

    I could only nod.

    ¡°Well, then, we would need 6 of them. How long will it take? And in what order will we set them up?¡±

    In the discussion that followed my only contribution was how long it would take to build the guns, and the ammo for them, two hours per gun and 30 minutes per 1000 shots of ammo.

    They decided to make one gun, then 1000 shots, then the other 5 guns, and then the rest of the rounds. And to place one on the roof first, and then the one to the side of the main entrance, overlooking the parking space.

    The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

    Additionally, Justin offered to have the other men bring more ammo and carbon.

    Having the plans complete we all switched our attention to what we needed to do immediately.

    For me, that was spinning up the industrial fabber to make the first two railguns. Fortunately, I did not need to stand up to do it. While I remotely supervised the spin-up, I started the NADA by making a few batches of seed stock. I silently cursed the circumstances that would delay the first real use of it indeterminately.

    Still, it would allow me to build a few additional nano fabs. If I used metal instead of carbon for the structural parts I could even use it now¡­ of course, I could also make rail gun rounds from the metal¡­ no, I did not think we needed that. The nano fabs were a higher priority.

    I nearly forgot to get a local com number but remembered it, fortunately. I send it to Mr. Walker immediately, and then to the people here in the fortress.

    After that, I was more or less without a pressing matter and began to think seriously about what I needed to do to make the bio sheathing economically viable.

    In the end I had to face facts. I needed to learn bioengineering to adapt the cloning process to the sheathing process.

    In a way, I had known that it would come to that when I tested the first iteration of the bioreactor, but I was not particularly interested in the whole biotech thematic.

    But I finally had to bite the bullet. And I could not even do it leisurely at a slow pace. I needed the knowledge yesterday, if not sooner. S

    o with great reluctance, I tasked the cluster to download all course material and virtual classrooms for bioengineering from UWS.

    While I waited for the download to finish, or to be honest, while I tried to do anything but learn bioengineering, I designed a basic 8<sup>th</sup> gen nano fab.

    That was a straightforward job, as I only needed to dumb down one of the first design iterations I had made for my nano fab.

    I send that to the industrial fabber as well and had 6 of them build in between the electronics for the guns. Deciding I could procrastinate even longer I designed a basic 6<sup>th</sup> gen nano fab.

    I started with an open-source 6<sup>th</sup> gen from the commonwealth but cleaned up the design.

    Sure, it was never going to win any innovation prizes but it was cheap to build and effective.

    The 10<sup>th</sup> gen open source nano bot library was easily compiled, but I redesigned the seed stock nanos to make them a bit more effective.

    The next step required a bit of finesse, though. I had not enough penetration into the US to superspam all the needed recipients through the cluster without burning too many bridges, in this case literally.

    I needed to create new bridges and to do that I needed more Q-links that I could seed among the east coast. Or¡­ of course, that was the elegant solution. I would stash the data files as well as a compilation of what Ralcon or Enertech nanos could be used as seed stock and links to a few nanite traders in the Commonwealth at a few places, and then offer a bounty for every forced recipient of the files on the east coast in the dark web.

    Two deep creds per recipient should be enough but only if it did not land in the spam filters, and only technologically affine people.

    If they managed to get to owners of industrial fabbers I would pay 3 dc¡¯s. To that effect, I moved 20 million dc into an escrow account.

    But only for the first 5 to get to each recipient.

    I would build the new bridges anyway as sooner or later I would need them, but not for now.

    And I tweaked the spam filters here to filter that out. No point in paying $9 to get my message to me, much less $45.

    On the other hand, I ran the spam filter through the cluster, so if somebody got through that he or she deserved the bounty. I also registered the designs under an open-source license.

    Finally, the time had come when I could not postpone it any longer, and I had to start on the coursework.

    After nearly two hours in real-time, which translated to 110 hours in VR I was eager for an interruption, and one came in form of Mr. Walker and about 20 of his men arriving. After cramming essentially a full semester of bioengineering into my head I was ready for a break. I was just glad that I could skip many of the nonsense classes, as well as basic science.

    That would reduce the load from around 1800 hours prepared courses plus roughly the same for study time down to 750 hours coursework and 200 hours study time.

    Or around 17 hours in real-time. But seriously, I could only take so much of that. So three days in real life it was. And if that was too long for the bosses, well that was not my problem. I had told them it would take up to a couple of years. If that is too long, then they need to get cloned replacements.

    It took me a few minutes to get my mind back to the real world. Sometimes I hated it to study in full compression. It is always somewhat disorienting to come back. Urgh, 110 hours of hyperfocus are¡­ hard, even for me.

    Mr. Walker was graciously waiting for me to remove the cobwebs before he began to talk.

    ¡°Well, Kitten, the gang war you wanted to prevent? You got it anyway.¡±

    Wait, what? All that and the gang war would happen regardless? How? Why?

    ¡°I am just glad that it is in a much smaller scope. Unfortunately, a couple of the bosses have stage 5 neural CRS, and of them, 2 are of the type that want to see the world burn.

    If they die, then the rest of us will too, if they can arrange it. Kursalin is one of them, the other is Xie Zemin, of the Golden Jade Tong. And the one vulnerability we all have in common is you. If these two take out you, we all die.¡±

    An android brought him a coffee, and I decided I needed one too after that bombshell. So they wanted to kill me to essentially throw over the game board. Wonderful people. After the first sip he continued.

    ¡°For the moment I am the only one of the bosses that knows where you are. That will of course not remain for much longer.

    I asked Vince and two others to help us defend you. Uesugi Nagisa of the yakuza and Dobromir Kraykowski of the Bosnian mob. All three are among the CRS victims and at stage 3 or 4.

    They are also what I would call the adults among us bosses. Each of them will send a few soldiers to help defend this place. I hope you agree to that, but if not, live with it.¡±

    I could have lived without the last sentence, but the rest, I agreed with fully. Three mob bosses were infinitely better than 40.

    ¡°I can see that. And you are right, living with it is better than dying without it. Not that I am throwing a party about it.¡±

    I looked into what of my orders had already arrived, and I found the boxed scanner. That would make some things easier, and I placed my attention on Walker again.

    ¡°If it helps, I have enough wiggle room to provide 4 additional nano therapies with my better nanobots. It will take most of the night to install the medical scanner, but then I can set up the therapy here.

    So they could come Thursday to get it done if they want. I mean, sure, they can get the local nanites, get 60% of the effect and pay around $500k per week if that is what they want.

    They can also use the vastly inferior 4<sup>th</sup> gen nanos Doc Schaeffer can give them. But if they are at stage 4 already they should avoid that if possible. Or they can get the nanos from Nowhere. That will probably take a week or two, so not ideal either.¡±

    Walker smiled.

    ¡°I am sure that they speculated for something like that. Four should be enough for the time being.¡±

    ¡°I am also working on a little present for the Doc. Ok, calling it a present would be wrong. I have managed to make enough seed stock to slowly spin up another nano fab. I plan to use that to build a few more. Now he, and you, I assume,  will have to decide what class of nano fab he will get for his clinic.¡±

    He looked surprised.

    ¡°I thought it would take longer. Even with the industrial fabber.¡± Yeah, without the NADA it would take until after I had converted the heart, but I had decided that I needed another nano fab in the immediate future. Even if I sold reduced capacity seed stock or nanos through Mr. Walker, it would lessen the tensions here in NYC tremendously.

    ¡°Yes and no. I will take the slow approach. Just enough seed stock to provide basic functionality and use it to make new seed stock for itself. It will take about a week for it to be fully functional.

    Afterward, it will be faster. If I had to wait before I could make the full load it would take until after your operation. Then it would take about 2 hours to make the seed stock.¡±

    He took another sip of his coffee and nodded. ¡°So, if I understand you right, initially you lacked the industrial fabber to make the hardware of the nano fab, and now you cannot make enough seed stock but you can compensate for that by doing a slow start-up?¡±

    When I nodded he continued:

    ¡°And now you want to talk about what the capabilities of the nano fab you want to sell the clinic will have? What are the options?¡±

    ¡°The options are the basic capabilities of the controller, the ability to support OS extensions, the storage capacities of the tanks for the nano fab itself. In essence, it defines how many seed stock nanites can be used to build new nano bots at one time and the versatility of the nanos that can be produced. These go from pretty basic, what I offered Mr. Luciani, for 250 grand, up to what I have here.

    To explain the difference, the half-liter bottle of nano bots I produced for your therapy did take me a bit under 30 minutes to make. The budget version would take the same nanos, the same amount roughly 1-2 hours with the same quality of seed stock.

    If it actually could make them that is.

    I used the best nano bots I have the schemata for. Extremely versatile, they can even be used as emergency seed stock in enough quantities.

    The budget fab won¡¯t have the control capabilities to make them, regardless of the seed stock.

    The next option is what quality of seed stock to take. Again, the most basic version is what will cost you 100 grand in Nowhere. The quality varies on how many orders the nano bots can follow. Fewer orders mean more work for the controller of the fab.¡±

    My coffee had been placed in front of me in the meantime, and I took the first sip. I was just thankful that the self-declared gods had not removed our ability to drink coffee as well.

    ¡°To make it short, better quality seed stock translates into faster fab. The same example, with my fab and the cheap stock it would have taken a bit less than 3 hours to make the therapy for you. With the budget fab, it would be somewhere around 3-4 hours.

    The last option is the bot library. At this time there are no open-source 12<sup>th</sup> gen schemata, and last time I looked there were a whole 3 11<sup>th</sup> gen available.

    Accordingly, you will need to buy schemata.

    Again, most basic we get something around $2.5 million. These would not include the nanites I used for you. The best option in the budget would have reduced your chances to survive until the operation by 5% I would estimate. Also not included would be seed stock schemata. Better libraries cost, obviously, more.¡±

    He looked at me for a few moments in silence, drinking his coffee before he answered me.

    ¡°I understand. So what are the price ranges, and what would you suggest?¡±

    ¡°Ok, for the basic system, as the Doc does not need the full functionality my nano fab has.

    That would cost around $25 million to buy, and $250 million to get the plans, for most.

    For you, I would go down to half that, but what I would suggest is something powerful enough to build any designs you can get, in a reasonable amount of time.

    I have a design for something like that, that I would have just to finish. I abandoned that design when I decided to upsize my nano fab to the speed and capabilities it has now, so it is a good design. It would cost you $600.000 for me to build the fab and $1.5 million to get the plans. Everybody else will have to pay twice that.

    For the seed stock, while I would always suggest getting the best available, I can understand budget constraints.

    The best I have would cost you $5 million to get, and $16 million for the plans. For something that I think is enough for what the doc needs you will need to pay 500 grand and $5 million for the schemata. But unless you replace the seed stock you will never get more performance out of the fab.

    Lastly the library.

    The nanites I used for you, well, the plans would cost somewhere around $20 million, for nearly everybody.

    As they are my design you can have them for less, so let¡¯s say $5 million, but honestly, I doubt the Doc will need them any time soon, if at all.

    Neither will you.

    I offer you my complete basic library that does not include the bleeding edge designs for $5 million.

    That would include the seed stock, albeit the most basic one I have, and nobody else would get it at all. This library has a nano bot design that is equally suitable for the nano therapy as the one I used for you, just simpler, cheaper and faster to make.

    If I had had the time to look deeper into the situation that would have been the nanites you¡¯ve gotten, but I had simultaneously not the time to do the research and it would have changed nothing timewise for me to use the more specialized design.

    As it is, I decided to err on the side of caution and chose my most versatile, and complicated design.¡±

    He placed his empty cup on the table.

    ¡°So your suggestion would be a fab that you would cost me 6.6 million dollars for the low-cost option and 11.1 million for the fully powered if you build it for me and we would get it as is, or 11.5 million dollars or 22.5 million respectively if I wanted to build more of them. And that to get a nano fab equally as capable as yours would cost me $28 million to own and $151 million to build more of, correct?¡±

    ¡°Not quite, to get a nano fab equally capable as mine you would need more than the one schema of high-end nanos. Keep in mind that you most likely will never need that but it would cost you around $150 million to me just for the library if I would agree to sell all of them and another $200 million to other nano-engineers.

    But unlike me, you simply have absolutely no need for that. But the rest, yes, that is correct.¡±

    He tapped his lips with his right index finger while he considered the options.

    ¡°I assume that if I were to request prices from the Commonwealth I would pay substantially more than that?¡±

    ¡°That depends. For the same performance, yes. What I can¡¯t predict is what somebody else thinks would be ideal for you. And you would not, under any circumstances get a complete, if basic, library including seed stock designs for under $50 million.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I thought something like that. You are not doing that for the money anyway.¡± Wait, what? How did he get that idea?

    ¡°I think the version with the best seed stock to buy is what I take. So $11.1 million. When can I expect delivery?¡±

    Now it was on me to think a bit.

    ¡°At the moment the fabber is busy making air defense guns for us, so it will be until tomorrow afternoon before I can start on my new nano fab, then a week¡­ I would say Thursday next week if nothing goes wrong.¡±

 30: Ripples on the water

    Later that day, six additional men came to bolster our defenses, and as promised brought gifts of ammunition and carbon. Mark also changed the loadout of the security bots to lethal weaponry.

    I managed to finish the coursework of the second semester and was completely fed up with the topic, not to mention mentally exhausted. It was not really that it was hard, but I was at best marginally interested in biology.

    There was no helping it though, either I learned to be my own bioengineer or find a competent bioengineer I could trust, and sadly while I could get one or the other there was a dearth lack of the combination in the potential candidates, I had so far looked into.

    The problem was that essentially all competent bioengineers were either working for a government or a megacorp or remained underground to prevent being invited to work for one of the two, much like I did with my nanoengineering.

    My tentative probes into the dark web had not helped in any way, and so I was forced to do it myself.

    It did help that I had nothing else pressing to do.

    Over the night the fabber churned out the rail guns and the bots set them up as Mark had planned it. I must say, I was seriously surprised by Mark. Favorably so. He had taken the lead in this matter and made a very convincing argument and to top that he had more or less completely cut off the arguments against me.

    If I would not be careful, I might even begin to like the guy. A little at least. A strong point in his favor was that he and Mia came close to each other, and wonder over wonder, he managed somehow not to come on too strong.

    I wished him luck in that endeavor.

    When I woke up that morning, I was happy that my hip was without pain. I had seriously enough of the wheelchair.

    After breakfast, I briefly looked at the progress the arming up had made, and we were in the process of building the last rounds. In a couple of hours, the fabber would begin with the nano fab.

    Despite my earlier ideas, I decided to keep it with carbon instead of steel as we had enough of the stuff after Walker¡¯s men brought some.

    I was considering using the full seed stock from the get-go but decided against it. We had way too many people here who would tell Mr. Walker about that, to do that practically and it was not as if I desperately needed the nano fab today.

    With my real-world chores done I dove into cyberspace.

    My daily canvassing of the labs and universities brought nothing new, not that I honestly expected something. But I got a surprise when I entered the Abyss. No less than 26 messages awaited my attention.

    25 of them were essentially the same message with slightly different wording from different hackers.

    Somebody had contracted them to investigate some sound files for signs of forgery. It was specially asked about the virtuous deep fake.

    In the Abyss many people knew that Spectre had once a case like this and managed to identify the fake, and if Spectre had the utility to do the investigation, then Seraphim had written it. So, they all wanted to buy the utility from me.

    Message number 26 was different though. It was from one of the other brokers and was in the vein that some potential customer wanted to hire Spectre at any price despite the assurance that he was not taking any jobs at this time.

    The other brokers were aware that I had the best connection to him and asked if I could convince him to make an exception.

    The offered amount was naturally obscene as it was usual for one of the top ten hackers in the world, but nothing exceptional for Spectre.

    Then I noticed who was wanting to hire him, and realized, that could become ugly. With a heavy heart, I made a call to the customer.

    Giorgio Berardino was certainly surprised to see me on the com, but he caught himself quickly.

    ¡°You! I assume you got my com number when you broke into my network?¡±

    ¡°Sorry, sir, but no. I got your com number when you tried to hire Spectre. I mentioned that I had run the data through a supercomputer, I think?¡±

    He nodded, somewhat disgruntled.

    ¡°You see, the supercomputer in question is Spectre¡¯s. I am one of his brokers and his tech support. And that brings me to the point of this call. I can guess what you want to hire Spectre for, but I have to tell you it will be a waste of money. The analysis will be run by the same utility on the same computer as was mine. There will be no discernable difference to the results you will get.¡±

    He became thoughtful.

    ¡°Ok, I can understand that, and I appreciate your honesty here. The point is, I have to prove that I had nothing to do with this plot.

    For that, I need to get the best expert I can find for the situation. And after I asked around the only answer I got was that Spectre was the best for this problem.

    That means I have to hire Spectre. My results have to be above any suspicion. So, can you get me his help?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I can ask him, sir. I can¡¯t promise anything, but if I explain the situation to him, he might help you. But it won¡¯t be cheap. If you provide the original data and the forged data it will cost you three million deep credits. If you expect him to get the data by himself it will increase, most likely by an order of magnitude.¡±

    ¡°And if you give him the data?¡±

    ¡°I could do that, but the results would be not basically identical but completely identical. I fear that would make things worse for you than doing nothing.¡±

    The silence lasted for a few seconds before he answered.

    ¡°9 million bucks, if I give him the data. I understand that he can¡¯t offer his services cheaply, but that is higher than I expected.¡±

    ¡°Sir, you are trying to hire the 6<sup>th</sup> best hacker in the solar system. None of the top ten even boot up their boards for less than one million dc.

    Any real work and it is easily five million. The three million is very cheap for that sort of clout.

    I would strongly suggest that you look into a cheaper, more accessible solution. Surely nobody can fault you for not going to the very top of the price range.¡±

    ¡°Of course, they can fault me! Some of them want to pin this onto me.

    The only reason there is no army marching onto me is you.

    And while I don¡¯t appreciate you hacking my system, I understand your reasons and agree that it was the best you could do.

    Hell, even so, Sokra Brozi has half the Brozi clan riled up. If I want to avoid a war here in Queens I have to go to the very top. And yes, I will pay what is necessary. If you can, have Spectre contact me.¡±

    ¡°As you wish sir. I will do my best.¡± And he hung up.

    That was not quite what I had in mind today. I was already pretty sure that Berardino would get contacted by Spectre sometime this day. Spectre was as much, if not more, concerned about my safety.

    Still, I had work to do. Creating a framework for the analysis utility was quickly done. I had just to open up the API of the utility I already had and recompile it. It took longer to inspect the source code for anything that might identify me in the long run than the rest of the work.

    Then I replied to the other hackers that I would sell the utility for 50k dc. It did not take long for me to sell it to all who asked. I felt a bit bad about asking $150k for something like ten minutes of work, but I reminded myself that the actual work had been done by me nearly a year ago and that it had taken significantly longer than ten minutes.

    Then grudgingly I returned to bioengineering. Slowly I build up an understanding of the subject, but I had just finished the 3<sup>rd</sup>-semester coursework when I surfaced from cyberspace.

    For what it seemed the thousands time I vowed to space the lectures out to a greater degree. And knowing me, I would promptly continue doing these marathon sessions anyway.

    While I munched on another tasteless sandwich Mr. Walker brought his three friends over, and I quickly checked the status of the scanner. When I found it properly set up, I moved to the entrance, where I found him alongside Vince, the Asian lady who questioned my age and a comparatively small man.

    Small compared to Mr. Walker and Vince that is, as he was still a head taller than me. The Asian lady on the other hand was only at best ten cm taller than me. They were accompanied by around 20 other people, that kept a bit of a distance from the four and doc Schaeffer with a small black bag.

    ¡°Hello, Mr. Luciani. I assume you two are Ms. Uesugi and Mr. Kraykowsky?¡±

    Walker nodded and answered for the others.

    ¡°You are correct, Kitten, and I fear we have not much time.¡±

    I looked at them.

    ¡°You are aware that the setup is taking somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes per patient and I can only set up one person at a time? And before that, I need to have to scan them, what will take another 10-20 minutes each?¡±

    They looked a bit startled, and then looked at each other, then there were accusing glances at Walker. He on the other hand seemed surprised.

    ¡°No, I was not aware of that.¡± I gave a pointed look to doc Schaeffer before I answered.

    ¡°You were pretty out of it but unfortunately that changes nothing about the time it will take.¡±

    They had a hushed conversation among themself before Vince turned to me.

    ¡°We can¡¯t decide who needs this therapy most urgent. What would you propose?¡±

    Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

    ¡°I would say we scan you and decide according to the results. I already have the nanobots for the start of the therapy for all of you. So how do you want to proceed?¡±

    I gestured them towards the lab. I had insisted that the girls move Frankel somewhere else for this occasion. I also had the bots remove most of the torture frames Frankel had there.

    On the way, there were further hushed voices, and when we reached the lab I moved toward the scanner.

    I had no idea, no interest either, of how they decided who was first, but in the end, Vince laid down on the platform. I shrugged and started the scan process. I naturally let the display remain active, but I reviewed the result with my implants.

    The result was not good, but not particularly bad either. He had late-stage three muscular CRS. He had the obligatory cyber heart but with the therapy, he would survive for a couple of decades.

    Next was Mr. Kraykowsky. He had Stage three neural CRS and early-stage four muscular. Not a big danger now, but it was a bit more serious.

    Finally, Ms. Uesugi was up. The results made me immediately order the bots to set up the auto surgeon I had in the crates. She suffered from stage four neural CRS.

    When she hopped off the scanner, I motioned her to the chairs. Vince looked at me expectantly.

    ¡°The results are pretty clear. Mr. Luciani, Mr. Kraykowsky, you have a few weeks before it becomes urgent. You, Mr. Luciani, have late-stage three muscular CRS.  And your heart is not affected so far. With good nanites and the therapy, you will survive several decades.

    Mr. Kraykowsky, you have mid-stage three neural CRS and early-stage four muscular. Again, the therapy will extend your life by decades, but the effects of CRS are much worse for neural CRS in my opinion. But that is your decision.

    Now for Ms. Uesugi, your situation is critical. You have stage four neural CRS. I would strongly suggest you remove your neural implants immediately, and plan of replacing your muscular implants with cloned tissue as soon as possible.

    Even with the therapy, you will likely get to stage five in one month, two at the outset, and then there is nothing we can do any longer.

    If you remove the neural implants and get the therapy you have a good chance of surviving three to four months before you enter stage 5. That is enough time to get bioware. Oh, my professional opinion is that Ms. Uesugi needs the therapy most urgent among you if that was not clear.¡±

    Doc Schaeffer was the first to react. He moved towards the display of the scanner and scrolled around. Ms. Uesugi was clearly rattled but took the news better than I had expected. I guess she had already suspected something like that.

    Then doc Schaeffer sat down beside us.

    ¡°You really think she has that long? It looks pretty bad to me.¡±

    ¡°The CRS almost exclusively attacks her neural implants. These will have to go. They are most likely barely working anyway at this time. The cyber muscles themself are not being attacked, and their connectors are free from CRS.

    That means with the therapy we can slow down the immune reaction here. But not forever. She could be lucky and the neural connectors in the cyber muscles are not enough to trigger stage 5, but I would not bet on that, especially as the implants become useless in at best three months anyway, so there is no big loss.¡±

    She looked at doc Schaeffer and then at me.

    ¡°That comes pretty close to what my ishi told me. Before yesterday there was no reason to even try it. Now the problem is where can I get a reliable implant surgeon to remove my skull wear? I frankly don¡¯t trust any of them too far at the moment.¡±

    Doc Schaeffer cleared his throat.

    ¡°We can use the auto surgeon at my clinic. I am sure that Ms. Sinclair is qualified to remove the implants. Otherwise, I have no idea.¡±

    I interjected before she could make a decision.

    ¡°Or we could wait half an hour to have my brand new¡­¡± I was interrupted by the bots bringing in the auto surgeon and begin installing it.

    ¡°auto surgeon set up and can use that. It is your decision though. At this time, I would prefer not to leave this fortified building.¡±

    Mr. Walker lifted his hand.

    ¡°I have to remind you that the clinic is a well-known place. It will most likely be a primary target for Kursalin. He hates me with a passion.¡±

    Ms. Uesugi was clearly unconvinced and looked from me to Mr. Walker and back.

    ¡°Are you sure that is a good idea, Ben? I mean, look at her. She is so young.¡±

    Mr. Walker shook his head, Vince snorted and Mr. Kraykowsky sighed while looking away.

    ¡°Ms. Uesugi, I have the feeling you still do not understand the advantage the jack brings with it. I may be young biologically and chronologically, but mentally I am older than any of you.

    I told you I spend nearly 40 years developing CRS-free cyberware. Before that, I spend four years learning medicine and implant surgery. Before that, I spend eight years getting my Ph.D. in computer science and nanoengineering.

    Even the diadem would give you four times the amount of time to do things that you do not need to do in the real world. For the Jack, the compression is much more complex but essentially boils down to the native intelligence, the quality of the board, and the quality of the implant.

    I am considered a genius by the Pures, not to mention the Mongrels, I can say that my implants are most likely the best humanity has to offer, and my board is widely considered the best there is.

    My compression is well north of 40:1. I have been a Jack for three years now. Do the math. I just started to learn bioengineering yesterday, and I have finished the course load of the first semester. Since I left the meeting yesterday. So yes, I am young. In body.

    In mind, in skills, and in experience I am more than old enough.¡±

    When I took a deep breath I slowly came back to my senses. Damn, I stepped into it now. Regardless I had to calm down.

    The looks on the faces, other than Mr. Walker¡¯s, could be summed up into one word, shocked. Mr. Walker spoke softly.

    ¡°Nagisa, you have to get over that. Either you trust her, and the worst that will happen is you die, or you don¡¯t, and you will die for sure.

    My experience is that she knows what she is talking about. I told you that I was essentially dead. I had somewhere around a week left to live. After she was done I have likely another five to six weeks. And these numbers come from Richard, not from her.

    That proves that the nano therapy she brought to us works. That the nanobots she wants to use on you, Vince, and Dobro will work.

    You listened to her talking with Richard just now. Did that sound like somebody who¡¯s faking it? And Richard only questioned the degree.

    If she is wrong and Richard is right, nobody can save you. If she is right, you will be weakened for a couple of years but you will be alive. Think carefully if you want to reject that offer.¡±

    Again, she looked into the round, uncertainty written on her face. You could see the moment she made the decision, as her eyes steeled and her expression became serious.

    ¡°You are right, Ben. It goes against anything I know, but I have nothing to lose anyway. And if I am wrong by judging you by your apparent age, I am sorry.¡±

    The last was addressed to me, and I nodded at that.

    ¡°I¡­ it would be wrong to say I understand but I get where you are coming from. And unfortunately, you are not the first one here to question my age.

    One of the few things I miss from Nowhere is that people there are used to young-looking professionals. Even moderately bright normal make their Ph.D. by the age of 20.

    A Pure Ph.D. in his or her teens is fully normal.¡±

    The bots seemed to have finished setting up the auto surgeon and were now in the process to sterilize it after they activated the sterile barrier. I quickly started the diagnosis, to get it up running.

    ¡°From what I see your neural implants are actually all in your skull, so you don¡¯t need to undress, but I would suggest for the gentlemen not of the medical profession to leave the room, if possible.¡±

    The operation was rather anticlimactic after that. Doctor Schaeffer assisted me with the anesthesia, not that it was necessary, and it was all done in 30 minutes.

    While she was anesthetized, I set up the depot network for the therapy, and two hours after we send the others out of the room doc Schaeffer and I left her in the care of her bodyguards to wake up.

    I was pretty sure that she was glad the modern surgery tools had done away with the need to shave off the hair. I had been when I installed my skull ware.

    When we reached the cafeteria, we found Mr. Walker with his bodyguards but neither Luciani nor Kraykowsky. That was expected though, so I was not concerned, it was more surprising that Mr. Walker had remained.

    While I prepared some lunch for myself, Walker cleared his throat.

    ¡°Kitten, there is something else I wanted to ask you.¡± Balancing my soup to the table was an adventure with only one arm, but I managed quite well.

    ¡°As long as I have the option to refuse, I have no problem with asking. So shoot.¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°You are quite cheeky for one of my subjects, you know. But I wanted to ask you if you could host Richard and a few other key personnel here until this unpleasantness has run out.

    As I said this morning, the clinic is probably a primary target for Kursalin. The rest of the personnel can be sent home for their safety, and I would hate to lose the equipment, especially the nano fab, but Richard and two other doctors, Isabel DeSoto and Chettur Gayav¡­ Gayak¡­ damn, I never can say his name.¡±

    Doc Schaeffer continued: ¡°You mean Gayakvad? And why did you not talk to me about it?¡±

    ¡°Richard, the situation is tense enough. You, Izzy, and Chettur, and yes, I meant him, are the ones I would trust with treating my people. And you three are known factors.

    Every boss in Queens knows you, knows where you live, and knows that if one of you survives the clinic will survive or will be rebuilt.

    So Kursalin will have to try to take out all three of you. This building is way better protected than your apartment building or the clinic.

    And I already have a desperate need to defend it. So from my perspective, I can either have one or all of you get killed by this madman or close the clinic, maybe taking the nano fab out of it and hide you in a place that I can defend.¡±

    Meanwhile, I was spooning my soup into my mouth, listening carefully, but saying nothing.

    ¡°Would it have been too much to talk about before we got here, Ben? What is if I don¡¯t want to go into hiding?¡±

    ¡°Too bad, Rich. You are my friend. I don¡¯t want to lose Izzy or Chettur, but I can¡¯t afford to lose you. So far nobody knows that Kitten is in this building, and we want to keep it that way.

    But even if they find out where she is, they will need an army to get into this fortress. And I mean a real army, not one of our street armies.

    With the help of Vince and the others, I don¡¯t think there is much anybody could do against it. It has water, food, and energy. Fuck, you did see the heavy weapons they set up? From what Justin told me, these things will take out a fucking tank. They are designed to go against warships.

    Nothing comes into this house. So yes, if Kitten accepts you here you will remain where you are safe.¡±

    Mr. Walker had stood up and leaned over the table, and with the last sentence, he hammered his fist onto it. I on the other hand checked the status of rooms for the people here. The bots had managed to clean up most of the rooms in the east wing, as well as the second floor of the north wing. We would have to fabricate a few mattresses, but that was a trivial thing.

    Doc Schaeffer huffed for a bit before he backed down. ¡°Alright, you have won. I will stay here. But if something happens to my clinic¡­¡±

    ¡°Then we will rebuild it. The clinic is just a building. We can replace it. We can replace the equipment. We can replace the drugs. We can¡¯t replace you, or your people. I don¡¯t want to go to your funeral.¡±

    I had seen enough.

    ¡°Mr. Walker, I would strongly suggest you calm down. If you can¡¯t do that, take a sedative. You are seriously stressing your system, and if you are not careful the good doctor will go to your funeral. And that in a few weeks.¡±

    His mouth opened and closed a few times before he sat down.

    ¡°And how do you know that Kitten?¡±

    I eyed my soup, but then focused on him.

    ¡°I told you yesterday that you need to avoid stress wherever possible. I know the situation is nothing you can avoid, but what you are doing just now is dangerous.

    And unnecessary, I would guess.

    If you calmly communicated with doctor Schaeffer beforehand you would not have been stressed by it.

    And doc, I know he railroaded you, but you should know better than most others that he should avoid any agitation.

    Now about quartering them here, what can you tell me about the other two? I have no problem with doc Schaeffer, but for the other two, I have no clue about how they will fit in. And sadly the accommodations are on the more primitive side.¡±

    Doc Schaeffer was visibly not pleased with that statement.

    ¡°First, Izzy and Chettur are very nice people. You have no reason to doubt that. And second, what do you mean with primitive?¡±

    ¡°Please remember doc, I know only you, a couple of nurses, and Mia of your people, but I have seen how your doctors behave if they get access to something like a nano fab.

    If we are talking about a couple of them, they will not come close to my nano fab, period. And in my experience, doctors tend to be vocal about being restricted in any way.

    About primitive, well, you are aware that we have taken over this building not two weeks ago? It is a sad fact that the previous owners were a bit lax in the upkeep.

    Just be happy that we have already two new fusactors, and we could shut down the potential fusion bombs in the basement.

    We have cleared the trash out of most rooms here in the east wing, and we will be able to provide clean mattresses and bedding, but even with 60 bots working on it, it is a slow process to bring this building back to its prime.¡±

    He looked as if he had bitten into a lemon, but did not disagree with my points.

    ¡°In that case, I would say we bring Izzy and Chettur here so that you can meet them. And no, neither of them was in the group you found playing with the nano fab. Izzy was doing surgery and Chettur was off duty. And just to make sure I understood you right, with primitive you mean that we have beds, clean bedding, a room for ourselves, but not much more?¡±

    ¡°That is acceptable. And with primitive I mean, entertainment is limited, there is only a limited number of clean rooms, and even there clean is a matter of interpretation. The en-suite bathrooms are as far as I can tell passable, but bots are known for not being good on detail work in something like that.

    You will have to direct a bot to do it right or do it yourself if you don¡¯t find it to your liking. Food is typical replicator stuff, and most people here are soldiers in one way or another while I am busy in cyberspace, so there will be a distinct lack of conversation.¡±

    I ate the last spoon full of my soup and brought the bowl to the sink, to flush it out.

    ¡°So, when do you think doctors DeSoto and Gayakvad will be here?¡±

    Walker laughed out loud.

    ¡°How did you manage to say his name so easily?¡±

    I just shook my head.

    ¡°Perfect memory, Mr. Walker. I read, see or hear something once and I never forget it.¡±

 31: You cant be serious

    The next few days were surprisingly uneventful. Drs. DeSoto and Gayakvad did indeed not disturb our small community. A couple of days after I finished setting up the nanobots for Vince and Mr. Kraykowsky Mark asked me to meet him in the gun range VR.

    There he presented me with 2 pistols to test.

    They were not perfect, as the trigger heated up uncomfortably after a few dozen shots and for some reason, Mark tried to make them out of steel including the weight penalty, but generally, they both would work better for me than my old PDP.

    After I convinced him to make the guns out of carbon the next iteration worked perfectly in my limited opinion. He was talking about upscaling them for his own, and the other''s use, and asked if I was okay with it. It took me only moments to get the production costs and in all honesty, these things were essentially throw-away.

    Without the industrial fabber it would be uneconomical, but carbon was cheap, the extruder was there, and we had the molecular foundry to recycle anything broken.

    In the end, it would be somewhat like $50 in material and energy costs to build one. After a bit of back and forth, I told him that it was his design, and he could do with it what he wanted, and that production would cost 50 bucks in-house and 100 for outsiders.

    Another bit of haggling, and I made him accept $5k for the work. It was seriously hard work for me to get it that high, but he simply would not accept more.

    Of course I had managed to slow down my studying, and if you believe that I have an open-air estate on Ceres for you.

    No, in reality, I breezed through the coursework and had all the knowledge of a bioengineer.

    I had started a preliminary study on how to upscale the biosheathing process but I quickly realized that I lacked one key ingredient. I had no bio lab. And during the current unpleasantness I would not get one in place very fast. Or at all. So I was stumped on that front.

    Mr. Berardino seemed to be satisfied with the results that Spectre delivered too. And I found myself with nothing to do again.

    I broke down and finally decided to start a production run on the NADA. My calculations told me that even with all 6 rail guns firing at the same time the NADA would be unaffected. And so I had it build my Chimaera processor.

    And my nano-assembler-dis-assembler, my masterwork, my magnum opus, the technological holy grail, the dream of every single engineer since the first nanobots were created, it was running, it was working, it was¡­ underwhelming.

    It worked, it was putting the processor together on an atomic level. As far as I could tell it had a resolution in the 50 pm range. It was a breakthrough of epic proportions. But it was slow. Oh so slow.

    The progress told me that it would have finished the processor in a bit less than 2 weeks.

    A careful analysis of the situation revealed that it was not really the production that was the bottleneck.

    No, it was the transport. The building nanites were idle around 98% of the time, waiting for new raw materials to place.

    The first thing I did was to change the transport into a bucket brigade, and that helped. Before I did that the estimated time was measured in months. But it clearly was not enough.

    At that time I lacked any idea how to resolve the issue, and decided to have it run in the back of my mind. Maybe I would get an idea later. For now, I decided to return to gravitics where I managed, by the skin of my teeth, to refrain from deep diving during the study.

    And then, 4 days after I removed the implants from Ms. Uesogi, I got a call from Mr. Walker.

    ¡°Hello, Kitten. I have a problem. Something wonky goes on with our com network, and we fear it¡¯s been hacked. Could you look into that for me?¡±

    It took a few seconds for me to switch to the problem, as I had been thinking about the NADA problem, but then it registered with me.

    ¡°Oh, yes, I can look into it. What carrier do you use? Or, it is unlikely you all use the same carrier, and to hack you there, can Kursalin get that much cyber power?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know if he can get the power, but we are using different carriers.¡±

    Thought so. There was no advantage for an organization like the mob to get a group tariff. Yes, the law enforcement in New York City in general, was in one word lax, and even more so in Queens, where cops only moved in squad sizes, but sometimes one politician or another, or their corporate masters, got the glorious idea to fight organized crime.

    There was no need to make it easier for them by using a group tariff. Smaller organizations usually used a server-client solution for coordination.

    ¡°So somebody hacked your com server. I will look into it.¡±

    Off to see the cyberspace then.

    I told Justin, who was on bodyguard duty at that time that I would make a combat dive and receiving his dumbfounded expression I explained that I would do a matrix run, followed by an even longer explanation of what that entailed.

    The important part was though that he knew that if a certain LED on Precious began blinking red he had to rip out the OPB-cable from the board or my jack, preferably the board.

    It was a hopefully unnecessary precaution as I seriously doubted that Kursalin could get a hacker that could actually threaten me, but I preferred to be safe rather than sorry.

    The matrix address of Walker¡¯s HQ was quickly reached even without going full speed and my first impression was what I already suspected. No environ here either. I would have to seriously upgrade the systems here in time.

    Now I had to root out whatever the other side had done and repair it to my best abilities. For that, I first increased my compression to 30:1.

    Not enough to betray my capabilities, but enough to show that I was a Jack of slightly above-average ability.

    Yes, I know that most tend to go to full compression the moment they enter the target environ, but I had more than once a situation where a Jack thought he was my superior and became cocky. I personally like to have some aces hidden in my sleeve.

    The damage was rather simplistic. The hacker had crossed the user-ids in the database, and I was able to resolve the issue by comparing it with the last backup. I had the impression that this was just a diversion, so I let my ghosts swarm. Not fast enough though.

    A sudden alert notified me that one of my buffer banks had been scrambled.

    I have to confess I was somewhat embarrassed. Not enough to hamper me but for another Jack to get the drop on me, that was mortifying.

    It was naturally not dangerous, as I had my outer shell linked through the cluster and  it would take more than a basic scramble to make it even hiccup, much more.

    Still, I dropped into stealth and at the same time spun up a decoy, low-powered as if in suboptimal stealth. That should keep my opponent busy while I investigated the situation.

    The analysis of the scrambler showed that it was literally the basic utility that one gets open source on the web. Nothing to call home about. I was impressed by his stealth though. It was hard to find him. Being so well hidden was hard to do in such a threadbare environ.

    It took me nearly 12 seconds to find him, and that was because he attacked the decoy. After that, one of my ghosts took a good sniff at his stealth and sampled the pattern masking.

    I have to say, it was an interesting approach. Not as good as what I was using, but pretty good for somebody who used an open-source attack utility.

    He managed to overwhelm the decoy after a couple of attacks, but he never used anything else than the basic scramble.

    A sneak thief in temperament it seemed.

    After I got him pinned down, I could determine his compression, and at 33:1 it was not too bad, and I decided to avoid further surprises by going to full compression.

    Then I readied Excalibur, followed by promptly shutting it down again.

    Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

    Sure, he had ambushed me, but he was just doing his job. No need to go nuclear. Instead, I used Babel and blasted him into next week. Babel was nice insofar that it overloaded the nervous system and knocked the other one out, without damaging the hardware or, and that is the important point here, closing the connection.

    I followed the link, and after a few bridges, I found the board of my playmate. I was mildly surprised it was not a he, but a she. Among Jacks, the ratio of men to women was somewhere around 30:1. Not because girls are less suited for the job.

    No, females tend to be much more aware of the risks of CRS.

    And that somebody like Kursalin worked with a female was even more surprising. Nevertheless, I found her operational security lacking.

    I found her name, Melody Richards almost immediately. I found her age almost as fast, and at 19 she was a bit over a year older than me.

    From the age of her board, she seemed to be pretty new in the business. Half a year at most. I also found out quickly what she had really done in the com server.

    She had created a map of where clusters of Mr. Walker''s men were, and already delivered said map.

    She remained on the com server to update the map in real-time. That of course offered possibilities. I seized her connection to Kursalin and began to shift the clusters around.

    At the same time, I surfaced a bit to call Mr. Walker.

    ¡°Yes? Did you get the problem sorted out?¡±

    Even at 20:1 where I was now the conversation would have been impossible, had I not a utility that sped up his end of the connection and slowed mine down.

    ¡°Yes, I have the hacker he hired out cold. But that gave us an opportunity.

    He had her give him a map of your men. Don¡¯t worry, I already have shifted them around but we can assume he knows about the fortress.

    Not that it will do him much good. More important we can create an ambush for him, by giving him false data if you want to.¡±

    The disadvantage of that utility was of course the wait. It took the utility around 20 seconds in real-time, or 400 seconds of compressed time to get through to him. He contemplated for another 15 seconds or so, or 300 seconds compressed. Then his answer took 5 seconds or 100 compressed.

    All in all, I waited 800 seconds or a bit over 13 minutes for his answer.

    I used that time to study Melody¡¯s board a bit more, dissecting her utilities and her OS.

    It was not quite off the shelf, but not much better than that. The board was a clone of a Kawamoto Eminence KE CR 45.

    A pretty basic board, cheap and mostly reliable.

    The utilities were mostly open-source with a handful of exceptions. She had written her stealth utility herself it seemed and had a scanner utility from another source. Her stealth approach was not bad but would frazzle out against better ICE, or in a complicated viron.

    It was actually way better suited for a threadbare system like Mr. Walker¡¯s.

    Then I received the answer.

    ¡°Can you do the same to his men? And if possible, without being detected?¡±

    Oh yes, something to do. I was underway before I had finished answering him, leaving behind a message to contact me on Melody¡¯s board.

    ¡°Yes, of course I can do that. Give me a moment please.¡±

    I examined the matrix compound.

    A pretty basic environ, displaying some preindustrial military base. A design of some two-headed bird was everywhere and I had the distinct impression that the viron had some meaning to Kursalin, not that anybody not breaking in would ever see it.

    The firewall was¡­ yes it was an outdated Ralcon firewall. Around 5 years old at that. Naturally, that made me suspicious.

    Ralcon did not have a particularly good reputation in the security software world. They made their money on the lower end of the tech market, and a couple of quasi-monopolies like the nanobots.

    The firewall was adequate for personal use or a mom-and-pop shop, but nothing that had a realistic probability of being targeted by hackers. Again, I let my ghosts swarm. While I waited, I got Walker''s reply.

    ¡°All right, Kitten, do so, please. But be careful. We don¡¯t want to warn Kursalin about it.¡±

    I had to smile inwardly. As if I would botch this job in a way that would warn Kursalin. Keep it real.

    ¡°Yes, of course. The first thing he will know is when you use the data to take him out. I have sent you a link to the mapping tool that lets you tell him where to look for your men. You can decide by yourself where you want him to believe your men are. I think you have a much better grasp of your strategy than I have. Talk to you later. Bye.¡±

    I was courteous enough to wait for his answer. Over an hour in subjective time. Meanwhile, my ghosts had finished the first rounds of scans and found a handful of barrier ICE around what seemed to be the more important PUs, a couple of roving hunter ICE, and even a hunter-killer ICE. Naughty naughty Mr. Kursalin.

    The HK was a 23-year-old Dalgon Tech Barracuda. 8.3 if I was not mistaken.

    While it was top of the line when it came out, that was no longer the case. This specific model has been disseminated, decompiled, and negated before I was born.

    It would be trivial to crash it, but that would create issues that could trigger an alarm. That was not very likely, but while the chance was low, it was not zero.

    So I decided instead to spoof it. A short inspection of the profile told me that it used an old procedure to generate security tokens.

    Still better than the firewall, but it was simply outdated. I sampled the security tokens of the firewall and activated my chameleon.

    I morphed into a grizzled old man with a bushy beard in some kind of uniform. Just seeing this uniform I was glad that it was just a representation as I could live without feeling the scratchy wool all over my body.

    The thought alone made me itchy. I had, honestly no idea what the markings on the uniform represented but I knew that the system would interpret them as authorization and security tokens.

    I encountered the first barrier ICE, which was represented as a guard post, and markhed through unimpeded. The bureau behind it was the logistic center of Kursalin¡¯s organization. I was sure that Mr. Walker would be interested, so I spun off a bot to slowly copy the data onto the cluster, but it was not what I searched for.

    It took me 5 tries to find the right PU, and on the way, I met one of the hunter ICE and the HK. The hunter was the obligatory watchdog, not a breed that I could identify, while the HK was a giant animal that I recognized after some thought as a bear.

    It sniffed at me for a few moments, and I was already thinking that my chameleon had failed and prepared an attack utility, but then it moved on to the nearest bot and sniffed it. I was sure that I could have shut it down before it could trigger the alarm, but it was better not to have to do it.

    The com server itself was pretty straightforward. It looked like an old office with several birds, a couple of desks, and an assortment of chests. I carefully used my decryptor on the chests, manifesting itself as a set of lockpicks, and opened one chest after the other, until I found the location database.

    Unlike Melody, I knew how to directly link it to another computer, in this case, my cluster, so that I did not have to manually update the map. I also activated the passive surveillance on the coms of Kursalin and what I thought were his two top lieutenants.

    Yes, of course, they had that feature deactivated on their coms, but the client portion of the com server had as so often very deep authorizations on the coms. Another thing I would have to talk with Mr. Walker about it seemed.

    After that, I left as silent as I had come.

    During the surfacing, I looked at the map, and what I saw was a bit concerning. Around 20 of Kursalin¡¯s men plus Kursalin himself were moving through Mr. Walker''s territory. I could only guess their goal, but as they moved more or less directly towards the fortress if I had an inkling about it.

    As soon as I completely surfaced I called Mr. Walker.

    ¡°Hello again, Kitten. What can I do for you?¡±

    ¡°Hello, Mr. Walker. I wanted to tell you that I have belled the cat.¡±

    ¡°Already? We have only talked about it not even 5 minutes ago.¡±

    ¡°I have sent you the link to the map. I also have programmed Kursalin¡¯s, Golovin¡¯s, and McDaniels¡¯ coms to transfer all they hear to us. The links are also there. But the interesting thing is that Kursalin is coming here to the fortress with 20 of his men.

    Judging by the speed they are in cars. I can program the railguns to target Kursalin¡¯s car as soon as he comes into range. That should end this part of the gang war quickly. Or do you want to shoot it out with his men?¡±

    He took a few moments to answer, clearly thinking through the options.

    ¡°Yes, that sounds pretty good. I will still want to listen to him and the other two. Good thinking by the way. But yes, putting a railgun round into his car would be a good idea I think.¡±

    I walked towards a window on the south wing, while I programmed the railguns.

    ¡°As good as done. As long as he drives into the field of fire he is toast. I won¡¯t use the railguns if he parks around the corner though. These things are overkill against any single person. If he drives up, do you want me to take out the other cars as well, or do you want to take care of his men yourself?¡±

    The pause lasted for several seconds before he replied.

    ¡°I fear we will have to take them out either way, and the rail guns would make it quick at least. So if you can, eliminate them all.¡±

    That made it suddenly all too real for me. I was on the verge of consciously killing for the very first time. I had managed to avoid that during my career in the underworld, and I was not looking forward to breaking that streak.

    I felt my mouth dry out and my pulse quicken. I closed my eyes and tried to calm down, with little success. It seemed that Walker could interpret my silence clearly, as he spoke rather softly to me.

    ¡°You don¡¯t have to do that if you don¡¯t want to, you know that Kitten? We have placed our soldiers at your fortress to protect you for that exact reason.¡±

    I took a last deep breath before I answered him.

    ¡°You are wrong, sir. I have to do that. If I don¡¯t some of your soldiers will die as well, and I might as well have killed them myself. Kursalin is on the way to kill me. Not your soldiers, not the others here in the fortress. Me! It is my responsibility, and I won¡¯t shy away from it. But don¡¯t expect me to be happy about it.¡±

    The silence lasted for a few seconds.

    ¡°I understand. And I respect your decision. But please don¡¯t hurt yourself by doing that. Good luck, and I will see you later.¡± With that, he ended the call.

    I was wavering between burying myself in my studies, and simply going into the cafeteria, but I knew deep inside that I needed to see this being done. That if I could kill people, I needed to be there and watch it, and not just press a button. I would not let myself get so distanced that I would launch a nuke at a city that one inhabitant of had annoyed me. And so I stood at the window and looked at the street while keeping an eye on the location of Kursalin.

    Then the moment came. Three big SUVs came around the corner and sped towards the fortress. Three thunderous booms in quick succession, that rattled even the reinforced windows of the fortress, and three trails of burning air reached out to the cars. The explosions were not audible but I could see them fine. All three cars simply disintegrated, and the road a bit behind them fountained up, one a bit further behind the cars.

    I forced myself to watch the 20 people I just killed die, and then my vision blurred, while I whispered to myself:

    ¡°Why did it have to be this way? Why did you make it you or me? Why you goddamn assholes did you force me to kill you?¡±

    I hated that feeling, the guilt, the literal pain deep inside me. I had felt something break, and I knew I would have nightmares about this moment for a long time to come. The view grew more and more blurred, and I could barely see anymore, so I tried to return to the mess room, but I stumbled into some furniture and fell down. I don¡¯t know how long I sat there and simply could not muster the strength to stand up, but after some time I calmed down a bit and a feeling of emptiness encompassed me. After that, I could not say what happened.

 32: Fighting on

    It took me nearly a week to get over the incident to the point where I could work again. The first day I simply could make myself even get up from bed. The day after, my hunger drove me out, but I could not say what I ate. It got progressively better but whenever I closed my eyes I saw the exploding cars.

    Did I stop this stupid gang war? Yes, at least this part of it. Was it necessary to do it myself? I still think so, regardless of the pain. And it was equally necessary for me to watch it. Watching the carnage I sowed. The destruction, the death. I absolutely had to pay a price for intentionally killing people. I had too much power for it to be any different.

    Not physical power, but digital. I already had backdoors into a great many militaries in the world, even a few megacorps. It would be way too easy for me to task an orbital KEW to take out whole city blocks or launch a few nukes. Only the NWC had physical lockouts on their WMDs, even after Hyderabad. All the others tried their best to ignore the situation.

    Sure, it was not exactly child¡¯s play to get to the point where you could use these weapons, but there were still more than 100 humans who were capable of doing it. The only thing preventing some of them from actually doing it was that the top of our community rigorously exterminated the ones seriously trying to.

    To make it short, for most of 6 days the only things I did were eat, sleep, and brood. The few times I tried to work on something I made a righteous hash out of it, giving up in disgust.

    The others tried to help me get through it, and at some level, I was thankful for their care but I simply could not make myself show any appreciation for their effort. That was the underlying problem. I could not make myself do anything at all.

    Hunger brought me to eat, my nose brought me to the shower, I slept if I was tired, but the rest of the time I brooded. I wept a few times, not sure if it was about Kursalin and his men, or self-pity. Maybe a combination of both.

    My cast was finally off, and the new nano fab was up and running, without anything to do for now, and the shells of the others were ready for seeding.

    The new processor was halfway done, and I had to run the simulation on the auto-surgeon. I had to inspect the new heart for Mr. Walker, even though it was almost certain that there were no problems.

    Regardless though what I had to do, I simply could not do it. I had neither the energy nor the strength and most certainly not the will to do anything.

    I am sure I would have freed myself out of this funk at some time, after all, I did it before, but in the end, it was Darren who broke me out of it.

    On the afternoon of Saturday, he simply barged into my room and placed his hands on my temples.

    Then a warmth flooded through my head and my mood cleared instantly. I was dumbfounded nonetheless by his behavior.

    ¡°Enough. Yes, you killed the Ivan and his thugs. Newsflash, they came here to kill you. Maybe Doc Schaeffer and our other guests too if they knew they were here, but they came specifically to kill you.

    And I understand why you had to do it yourself, and I even get why you had to watch it. And I applaud you for that. But you have moped enough. You were left without a choice in this matter. So yes, grieve about your lost innocence, but be proud about your resolve to do the right thing.¡±

    I blinked a few times, and then looked directly at him.

    ¡°What did you do?¡±

    His sigh was pretty sad.

    ¡°Biokinetics again. You were trapped in a vicious circle between your brain chemistry and your depression.

    Your mood changed your chemistry, making your mood even darker, worsening your chemistry.

    The result was that you had a serious deficit of some hormones that make people happy. I just jump-started the release of those hormones, and essentially made you artificially happy enough to overcome your funk.¡±

    I slowly shook my head.

    ¡°That¡­ that does not sound too healthy.¡±

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    He sat on the bed beside me.

    ¡°Of course not, but it is healthier than rotting away here. You will still have to work out your problems, I have only given you a jump start. So please do us all a favor and look for help.¡±

    I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths.

    ¡°Any idea how I should do that?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. Learn yoga, meditate, search for a shrink, or take up a hobby. Anything but bury yourself in your grief.¡±

    I nodded at that but did not answer, thinking about what I could do. Sure, I could dive into work, but in the long run, it would leave me in a bad state.

    A hobby¡­ I could look into some real ingredients here. I loved to cook after all, and even more to eat real food. The other things, I would not trust a shrink, not ever again.

    I had enough counseling growing up to last me forever. Yoga or meditation, I could look into that.

    I vaguely was aware that he stood up and left the room, but I was already in the process of looking up possibilities.

    I was not sure how long the boost Darren had given me would last, but I was sure to use it as much as I could.

    So the first thing I did was dive into cyberspace and began researching the contacts Mr. Walker had given me.

    I sadly found out that our refrigerators, unused for nearly 30 years, were non-functional. Not that I would really trust real food to nearly 4 decades-old appliances.

    So new refrigerators and freezers were ordered, with express delivery for today. I then contacted the fixers here about a real food source, including spices.

    With that done, I began to investigate possible methods to meditate. After a few virtual hours, I decided to buy several VR tutorials for yoga, meditation, and Tai Chi, and over the next subjective days try each. Finally, I settled on Tai Chi as the option best suited for me, and I learned the skill.

    In real-time, I had spent 3 hours on this, but now it was time to try this in the real world. The beginning was a bit awkward, but I soon got the hang of it. During the exercise, I tried to get my tumultuous mind under control.

    I knew without a doubt that I had done the right thing, but my feelings were much harder to convince. I was sure that I had made considerable headway when I finished an hour later, but I also knew that I was not yet out of trouble.

    After a shower, I felt much better. I had to go over my to-do list another time.

    The amount of changes were manageable.

    Mia had finished the disassembling of the heart nearly two weeks ago. The bioreactor was chugging along.

    The upgrades to the fortress were coming along.

    The old Westons were removed and scrapped, and the installation of the other two Yaoshis was nearly done. I noticed my new laboratories were set up, and the industrial fabber was up and running.

    Contacts and reputation had made large strides forward, with the big meeting. The only thing left here was to deliver.

    The new slaves, except Frankel, were auctioned off, and we had an understanding with Sayomi, where she would try to live for at least a month before she resorted to suicide.

    Now then I launched the design stress simulation of the new auto-surgeon, before starting a few batches of seed stock on the new nano fab. Idly I mused about how to maximize the output of a nano fab, and build the largest possible.

    Mark had given me my new pistols, but I had simply ignored them, not having the strength of will to even look into it, so now I took them out, inspecting them. Mark had even provided an instruction manual for them. The message told me that he had tested both of them. He had also added the profile to the range VR.

    I logged into the VR and trained with the two pistols for some time, getting continuously better, under the tutelage of the NPC here. I have to admit, that Mark was right. These two pistols were by far better than my PDP 22, not to mention how much better they felt in my hands.

    If he was also right about the armor-piercing qualities of the ammunition, and I had no reason to doubt that, I was golden. As golden as I could be at least.

    After I had spent two virtual days training with the guns, I looked up the results of the simulation and found no surprises. The design was overengineered to a ridiculous amount, but it would be the best auto-surgeon I had ever heard about.

    Then I started to work on the redesign of the NADA. I had yet to test the disassembler part of it, and the nano-assembler function was disappointingly slow, but the basic principle was obviously working.

    The problem was getting the materials fast enough to the point where they were needed.

    It could be around 50 times faster if I could deliver the resources fast enough. I had the vague idea to use a faster nanobot design as a porter, but a fast simulation showed that I would gain at best an increase by a factor of three. Not enough for my ambition.

    Not that I threw the design away. It could still be used. Instead, I moved up to the macrocosm. I designed a substrate-material mixer and combined that with a pump and a robotic spray head to deliver the solution to the right place.

    I tried for several hours to balance the speed of the pump so that it brought the mix at an acceptable pace, without blasting the material and the nanobots all over the tank. All without noticeable success, so I redesigned the system with a reservoir at the spray head and a second, weaker pump there to deliver the mix.

    My simulation showed that this system would be somewhere around 20-25 times faster. When I added the fast porters the increase became 30 times. Still not at its full potential but it would have to do. I knew that over the next months, maybe years, I would fiddle with the design of the delivery system, the design of the bots, and everything else. With the new system, if the simulations were right, I could build a Chimaera processor in half a day. And with a bit of redesign, I would be able to build a dozen of them at once.

    Thanks to the industrial fabber I would not need to have the mechanical systems fabricated by somebody else, as I had to do with the original NADA I brought with me from Seattle.

    Instead, I started a fabrication run. When the processor was done in three days I would have the auto-surgeon and the upgrades for the NADA ready.

 33: Drums in the deep

    Over the next few weeks, nothing extraordinary happened. I was slowly working through my issues, coming to the conclusion that I mostly was upset about what could be described as my loss of innocence. I was still grieving about my needing to kill people, but I could live with it now.

    It was surprising how hard it was to get real food in NYC. The explanation I got was that the perishable nature, the high price, and the limited demand for real food made it not something anybody brought in on spec, but instead by carefully planned schedule. And this late in the year, I would not get anything. I was on the list for the next year though. Still better than nothing I guess.

    Tai Chi proved to be exceptionally soothing for me, and I spent at least an hour each day going through the forms.

    In other news, the new auto-surgeon was finished, and it was a marvel.

    Way too expensive really, and several orders of magnitude more capable than it needed to be, but still a marvel.

    I had designed a downgraded version before this one was fully built, but it was a testament to what I could do.

    I realized early on that the processor was absolute overkill, and I was proven right.

    Even at full load and using the piezo nano positors and active full resolution scans it ran at most at 20 % load but as a commercially available CPU would not be enough to even drive the downgraded version and any processor downsized for the load would be barely any cheaper or faster to make I left the Chimaera in.

    I had the new nano fab ready for Doc Schaeffer, and from the get-go, I designed the access for it as exclusive, so that no repeat of the dissolver debacle was possible. I gave the doc the admin rights and left it up to him who could use it, hoping that he would be more careful this time.

    I made my first steps in the new bioreactor design, but sadly a large part of the work had to be done in the real world. I looked into the cloning process for inspiration but found it was not compatible as it used growth accelerators that destroyed the careful balance I had set up to keep out the immune system while allowing the nutrients into the tissue.

    The solution had to be a different growth accelerator, but that would take considerable experimentation.

    I had the good fortune that I could set the cluster onto preliminary simulations, but I had to find out what in the accelerator damaged the sheathing while looking into what makes biological tissue grow faster.

    I was certain that it was just a matter of time, but the research protocols I had access to seemed to make the discovery of the drug mostly a matter of luck more than a matter of science.

    Not that I had access to all that many research protocols. Most growth accelerators were from one biotech company or another, and my reach in the Matrix may have been long, but not that long. Unlike Universities, corporations guarded their information jealously.

    Yes, I would, in time manage to get into the databases, even the secure ones, but it would take an inordinate amount of time and effort. I decided it would be quicker, safer, and most likely cheaper to simply buy a batch of every commercially available accelerator and reverse engineer the common factors. It would be especially easy if I used a variant of the NADA for it.

    The high-powered c3-system provided by the integrated Q-link in combination with the much more powerful CPU would make observations on the molecular scale in real-time a possibility. I would, for the first time in human history, be able to watch the biochemical processes to that degree.

    The new bio-observation unit was quickly designed. Unlike the NADA it could do with a much coarser resolution for positioning, and I would not need the material conveyor.

    Instead, I upgraded the control unit to the Chimaera processor, giving it orders of magnitude more computing power.

    Fortunately, the redesigned NADA was able to produce 16 of these at once in less than 12 hours. That enabled me to build the BOU in a couple of days, and it was now happily watching the different growth accelerators work.

    I immediately built four more of them, to observe even more accelerators, but the tests would still take at least a month in real-time, and until I got the results the bioreactor project was on ice.

    So I switched to a different project.

    My Precious was getting on in her years, and I needed to take advantage of the new possibilities the NADA and the Q-link offered me. In the same vein, I needed to redesign my skull tech but that had more time.

    The basis was a new processor.

    Unlike the Chimaera, I switched over to a new architecture for this new brain. I spent a week in real-time or more than half a year in subjective time on the design, even with all the preliminary work I had already done in theory.

    This new processor, which I called Hyperion would run rings around the Chimaera in essentially every category.

    I spent another four days creating the accompanying GPU and the memory in the 414 picometer process.

    Another week was used to recreate every possible module in the new technology, integrating the Q-link into every data connection and bringing every IC down to 414 pm.

    The result would be glorious.

    I did run the simulations several times as I did not believe the results, but it would be an increase in power over Precious by nearly 12000%.

    At first, it seemed as if it was a wasted effort as the persistent storage proved to be the bottleneck for the first time since the introduction of the holographic crystal technology.

    But with a bit of twisting and turning I resurrected the old technology of the RAM disk, mirroring the whole of the crystal into a special memory block.

    Now it was time to wait for it to be finished before I could adapt the software for the new board.

    The NADA would take almost a week to spit out the parts, while I used the industrial fabber to make the more standard components.

    I would also for the first time not have two, but three versions in a generation, as nobody without a working NADA would be able to build the parts.

    So I designed the Mk V, my personal example, the Mk VI, which I would build and sell for usage with standard modules, and the Mk VII, where I would only supply the CPU and GPU together with the plans.

    All in all, it was going well, and naturally, that was the moment Murphy raised his ugly head.

    On December 16<sup>th</sup>, a bit less than a week before the new cyberheart was ready for implantation, I got an urgent message during my afternoon Tai Chi session.

    One of Mr. Walker¡¯s guards had noticed his nano-controller showing red.

    From what I had read between the lines, Walker himself tried to downplay it, but the guard had none of it and called first Schaeffer and then me.

    I would have preferred to shower before running out but there was no helping it. Ryan was on guard duty, and he quickly followed me, while I walked rapidly towards the garage.

    ¡°What¡¯s wrong? Where are we going?¡±

    I ignored his question for the time being, as other things were more pressing.

    ¡°Can you fly the skimmer?¡±

    ¡°What? Yes, I can, why?¡±

    ¡°Good, your boss has likely gone critical and I need to be there an hour ago. We will see what is happening when we are there.¡±

    The garage was not far from the gym, and by the time we arrived there, I already had booted the skimmer and started the POST. He immediately sat behind the controls while I jumped into the passenger seat.

    After the 5 minutes of flight, we arrived at the HQ, and Ryan shamelessly landed directly in front of it, and I was out of the vehicle before it even fully settled down on its landing struts.

    A gaggle of guards greeted me and essentially shoved me through the lobby, past the surprised staff there, poor Patric looked panic-stricken at this moment, and up to the 3<sup>rd</sup> floor towards Mr. Walker¡¯s office.

    Doctor Schaeffer was already in attendance and was looking at the controller on a weak-looking Mr. Walker¡¯s wrist.

    With a terse ¡°Good afternoon.¡± I moved beside him and took Mr. Walker¡¯s hand, quickly activating the Bluetooth connection. It took me only a few seconds to ascertain the situation, and I suppressed a few curses.

    ¡°Mr. Walker, I thought I told you that yellow means that you need something. Congratulations, you ignored a yellow screen for nearly five hours, and now you are dying.¡±

    Schaeffer was visibly shaken.

    ¡°What do you mean he is dying?¡±

    ¡°I mean that his cyberheart will fail in at most three hours because the nanobots needed some copper and molybdenum to keep it working. If somebody could call Mr. Cox, please? It is decision time. We either put him on life support for the next week or he is dead. Simple as that.¡±

    During my last words, Dylan entered the room.

    ¡°What do you mean he is dead?¡±

    ¡°He ignored Doctor Schaeffers and my instructions and now has to pay the price. Unless we put him on life support in the next hour, maybe two if he is extremely lucky he will die.

    There is nothing else we can do now. So decision time, can you take over for a week? If no, find somebody who can, because your boss won¡¯t be here either way.¡±

    The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

    He coiled back, but one look at Walker convinced him that I was serious. Walker was barely lucid by now and was sweating profusely.

    ¡°I can step in for him. Will he survive? Can you guarantee it?¡±

    With a deep sigh, I turned to him, before answering.

    ¡°No, I can¡¯t guarantee it. His chances are bad. We will have to place him on a CPB pump, and the faster we can do that the better. Then we will have to put him into a medical coma to keep the stress as low as possible. If everything goes right, he has a roughly 50-50 chance of survival. If something goes wrong¡­ .¡±

    I saw his face darken before he began screaming.

    ¡°What the fuck do you mean? You told us that you could save him. So now he only has a 50-50 chance? Why the fuck has it dropped down to that? I want goddamn fucking answers, so fucking tell me why he is dying!¡±

    Another sigh from me.

    ¡°Mr. Cox, I know that for some reason you don¡¯t trust me, regardless of what I have or have not done. While that is your prerogative, it makes explaining things to you a bit hard. Now, I told Mr. Walker, and your people here, that if he took the therapy and followed my instructions he would have around a 60 % chance to survive until the replacement of his heart, which will be ready next Thursday.¡°

    It took me much strength to keep myself from talking as if to a child as I was pretty sure that that would have negative consequences.

    ¡°Unfortunately, he did not follow the instructions.

    One of them was that he had to take it slow. The records of the nano-controller show that he had surpassed acceptable stress levels at least every other day. It seems as if he took the stairs at least once a day.

    If he had not done that, his chances would now be around 80%, and he would be awake and somewhat functional the rest of the week. It would have been around 95% if we had to put him into a coma.¡±

    My hands moved in a swinging motion indicating to all people around.

    ¡°More importantly, he and his guards and everybody around him ignored the yellow display. If he had not done that and instead taken the needed materials the nanobots would have patched up his failing heart, and his chances would still be around 60% to be awake till Thursday, and around 90% for his survival if put into a medical coma.¡±

    I irritatedly gestured towards the red display.

    ¡°As none of that happened we are now in the situation where we have to hope that everything goes right, and the sooner we can begin, the higher his chances are. So do you want to argue, or can it wait until we have him on the pump? Decide fast, because every minute lowers his chances.¡±

    Cox was still enraged but looked from me to doc Schaeffer and back to me several times. Finally, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment.

    ¡°Richard, is what she said true?¡±

    Doc Schaeffer had meanwhile scrolled through the display on the controller.

    ¡°Yes, the instructions are what she had told him, what I told him as well. And we all know that he does not know the meaning of the word slow. You know better than me how often you and the men had to stop him from taking the stairs. So yes, he was too active, too stressed.¡±

    He then laid down the hand of Mr. Walker.

    ¡°And the controller shows the alert. It started at 11 AM today. We now have 3:30 PM. If it had not been programmed to send a message to all of us when the status became critical he would probably already be dead.

    I have given him a sedative and some drugs to make it easier on his heart. But the damn thing is done for. We have to put him on an external purely mechanical pump to keep him alive.

    And as Kitten told you, we have to do it fast if we want to have a chance at all. And that chance is definitely lower than 50%.¡±

    Some of the guards had meanwhile brought a stretcher and now lifted Walker onto it.

    ¡°Can you go the stairs down? It is faster.¡±

    I followed the procession with Doc Schaeffer beside me, and he began talking about the situation.

    ¡°Do you want to have him brought directly to your building? Or should we treat him in the clinic until you can implant the new heart?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Sorry, but I am not set up for even short-term care. I have only myself as medically trained personnel, and I can¡¯t be ready 24/7.

    You have staff that can observe him. And honestly, until the new heart is ready there is not much I can do for him anymore.

    You can use nutrient transporting nanites to keep him alive, and that is the only reason why I give him a 50-50 chance. They are more robust and are not as easily damaged as the blood cells.¡±

    He stopped for a moment.

    ¡°What nutrient transporting nanites? I don¡¯t have those.¡± I had to hiss.

    ¡°You did not read the manual I gave you for the bot library, did you?¡±

    ¡°I skimmed it, but I had not the time to look into it deeper.¡±

    ¡°You should do that. These are nanites specifically designed for a situation like this. They work as a substitute for blood cells and transport oxygen and nutrients to the cells, and transport waste products away.

    And yes, you have them, they are part of the library I sold you. If you were still using the nanites I first installed they have that functionality as well, and we only had to activate that, but in this case, we have to make the new nanites, which will take around 5 minutes, and add a new program to the nanite controller.

    I will show you the program and the recipe later. It will save many lives I think.¡±

    We had now reached the intensive care station of the clinic, and Dr. DeSoto was already in the process of preparing the pump. I was somewhat surprised that they had not prepared an auto-surgeon but now was not the time.

    ¡°Where is the nano fab?¡±

    Schaeffer seemed to wake up out of a trance.

    ¡°Yes, of course. The nano fab. It is¡­ but you don¡¯t have access.¡±

    ¡°Doctor, I made that thing, I programmed its OS. Of course I have access.¡±

    He turned a bit red but nodded.

    ¡°Yes, should have thought about that.¡± Then he raised his voice.

    ¡°Tompson, bring Kitten to the nano fab. And fast.¡±

    Thompson was a nurse around 30 years old, with dark brown hair, and in scrubs, that had previously brought in some disinfectant and some surgical instruments.

    She came to me, grasped my shoulder, and shoved me out of the room without saying a word.

    In the corridor, she grabbed my hand and dragged me through the hallway, towards another room. It was not the room where the 2<sup>nd</sup> gen fab had been located, and the security was much higher. Thompson waved her id card in front of a reader and nodded to the guard sitting in a chair left of the door, still without a single word.

    Inside was a male med tech that looked a bit bored.

    ¡°Hey, Jean, what can I do for you, and who is that?¡±

    ¡°That is Kitten and the boss told me to bring her here. Now, I have to go back, Mr. Walker is in a bad way and we have to operate on him.¡±

    She said that, turned around, and left me and Ryan together with the med tech, who promptly looked at me, before he drawled:

    ¡°Alright, so what can I do for you then?¡± still in an obviously bored way.

    ¡°You can let me use the nano fab to fabricate nanites that might save Mr. Walker, so could you please move to the side?¡±

    ¡°Hey missy, I don¡¯t know who you think you are, but a nano fab is no toy for little girls. I can¡¯t let anybody use it.¡±

    I balled my fists, cursed internally, and turned my eyes upward toward the ceiling.

    ¡°One, I know how to use a nano fab, I built that thing, after all, two, I am older than I look, three we have no time to argue, so would you please let me rescue Mr. Walker? Or do I have to ask Ryan here to move you aside?¡±

    He puffed up crossed his arms in front of his chest and tried to look mean.

    ¡°Listen, girl, it is irrelevant what you think, I can¡¯t let you have a go at the nano fab, my orders, and these are clear.¡±

    I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

    ¡°I am sorry that it has to be this way. Ryan, could you move him to the side please?¡±

    It seemed as if Ryan had just waited for such an order, and the med tech was soon pressed to the wall, while I logged into the nano fab.

    ¡°Just to make it clear, in most circumstances, you would be right, and I will talk with Dr. Schaeffer about it. You deserve a recommendation. But we simply don¡¯t have the time right now to get somebody who knows me and knows that I know how to use the nano fab to vouch for me, so I am deeply sorry.¡±

    In a bit less than 5 minutes I had enough for the initial dose of nanites ready in a bottle and we left to get back to the operation theatre.

    There Dr. DeSoto had already connected the pump and the life support was running.

    Schaeffer quickly took the bottle and prepared a drip, but I held him back.

    ¡°That is only the initial load. It needs to be injected directly. We can prepare the drip when we have him stabilized.¡±

    Looking at the bottle he nodded and instead prepared a syringe before he injected the nanobots into Walker.

    ¡°I hope that works. It would be a disaster if Ben would die.¡± I sighed before I answered.

    ¡°We can only hope now. There is nothing else we can do.¡±

    At Schaeffer¡¯s wordless signal, a couple of orderlies pushed Walker out of the room.

    ¡°And these nanobots can really save him? I will have to read the manual in depth I think.¡± He gestured for me to come with him, and we walked slowly towards his office.

    ¡°That would help. You will need to prepare the drip for him, but this load should last for around six hours. Oh, and we should talk to the med tech you had guarding the nano fab. Ryan had to be a bit rough with him, but he did exactly the right thing.¡±

    He stopped dead and furrowed his brow.

    ¡°Why did Ryan have to be rough with Dennis? I send Thompson with you to help you. She has the access to the fab.¡±

    I shrugged at that.

    ¡°I have no clue what she thought, but she opened the door, told Dennis that you told her to bring me there, and left. Unfortunately, we did not have the time to wait for somebody to vouch for me, so I asked Ryan to move Dennis aside while I made the nanites.¡±

    Schaeffer hmmed for a bit before he turned around and moved towards the room with the nano fab.

    ¡°We should take care of it immediately. Situations like that should not be left to fester.¡±

    The door to the room stood open, and several bulky men were in there listening to Dennis.

    ¡°¡­ no, I don¡¯t know what she¡­ hey, there she is!¡± All the bulky men turned towards me and looked as if they wanted to have a serious and uncomfortable talk with me, but when they saw Schaeffer at my side, a general expression of confusion was shown by most of them.

    Schaeffer on the other hand lifted his right hand and made a stop motion.

    ¡°Keep calm. I know this situation was not ideal, but it seems as if there was a communication error. I sent Veronica here to make some nanobots for us. Nanobots we needed yesterday to keep Ben alive. The nurse I sent with her left her here without explaining anything, and she needed to use the nano fab.

    For that, I am sorry, Dennis, I should have given better instructions. And from what I heard you acted completely right, so no worries about that.

    In case something like that happens again, she is fully qualified to use the fab.

    In fact, she is more qualified than any of us and we have no reason to not trust her, so if she comes up to the fab again, let her use it. I will give her an access card, but that is for the future.¡±

    I nodded at Dennis and the men.

    ¡°Again, I am sorry, too. It was an emergency though. As I told you, I am impressed with your stance, and if I had had more time, I would have tried to get somebody to tell you that I am qualified.

    But keep up the good work. Doc, shall I show you the recipe now that we are here? I am sure Mr. Walker is not the only one they can help.¡±

    Just that moment, the door at the end of the corridor banged open and Dylan stormed through.

    A few meters away from us, he stopped and then snarled.

    ¡°You! I should have known that it was you responsible for this alert. What did you do now?¡±

    I reared back as if he had hit me, with his accusations.

    ¡°What¡­ I am sorry, but I only did what was needed to keep Mr. Walker alive. And we simply had not the time to go through the channels.¡±

    That did nothing to abate his anger.

    ¡°You have your fingers in everything. Always an excuse ready. What do you get out of it?¡±

    Again, and again this diatribe. This guy had something against me.

    ¡°Mr. Cox, I have made no secret about what I want. I want a reasonably safe place to live and operate a business from.

    Circumstances have brought me into possession of a building that is ideally suited for my needs located in the territory of your organization.

    So I try my best to make your organization willing to tolerate my business. Additionally, I find the prospect of a street war unsettling and do what I can to prevent it. The rest is simply operating the business I want to operate.¡±

    ¡°If you want to ingratiate yourself to us, why the fuck did you take so much money for the nano fab? 11 million dollars?¡±

    I needed to process that first. Did he seriously think that it was that much money? Did he have any clue how expensive these things were?

    ¡°Mr. Cox, I have no idea what you would consider an appropriate price for such a nano fab, but if you got to the Commonwealth and bought another fab with the same capabilities and the same library you would have to pay between 100 and 150 million dollars for it.¡±

    His impersonation of a fish out of water may have been amusing, but I was not quite in the mood for a good comedy. Especially as this comedy would most likely cause problems down the road. It took him several seconds to get his stuff back together.

    ¡°You are insane. I was there when you told the others about the costs. It was what, six million? Seven? Whatever, it was not more than 11. So how did you rip us off?¡±

    Half knowledge, the bane of intelligent people, oh how I missed you. I slowly raised my hands to massage my temples.

    ¡°Mr. Cox, that is not a topic we should discuss here. I assume it is not something you want to be known wide and far, and I know that I don¡¯t want that. If you need to talk about it now, can we please go somewhere where fewer ears are listening?¡±

    Cox did look as if he was disinclined to acquiesce, as the old nerdism goes, but Schaeffer moved between us and harumphed loudly.

    ¡°Dylan, I know you are pissed off, but we all had a harrowing time just now. How about you come with Veronica and me to my office and we have a drink, while you talk this over with her?¡±

    ¡°All right. Here is the wrong place to talk about it, I give you that.¡±

    Schaeffer then again led the procession towards his office.

 34: Cleaning the air

    In the office, Schaeffer offered both of us a bit of some amber-colored alcohol, which I naturally declined, asking for a coke, as we sat around his small coffee table.

    Cox waited just long enough for Schaeffer to sit down before he lit into me again.

    ¡°We are alone now, so fucking tell me why this nano fab did cost so much, while the ones you told about in the meeting would have cost at most seven million.¡±

    ¡°In one word, quality. The one I proposed at the meeting is the absolute bare minimum that can be called 8<sup>th</sup> gen nano fab.¡±

    The door opened and one of the guards brought me my coke.

    ¡°That, and the library. The fab I proposed at the meeting was just the frame and the seed stock, nothing else. Sure, the seed stock was the schemata, so the owner could make more of them, but they were the cheapest seed stock schemata that exist.

    There would be no other nanobot designs, so the fab would be pretty useless. Getting the appropriate designs for the clinic would take another ten to 15 million. And that is where the costs come in. The nanobot designs are incredibly expensive.¡±

    After the cool tap had cooled my coke down I took my first sip of this nectar of the gods.

    ¡°That is by the way what is the most expensive part of the fab I talked about. Without the seed stock schematics, it would cost around one million dollars.

    Now the fab I sold you is orders of magnitude more powerful. If you would try to buy something like that in the Commonwealth, the frame alone, without any schematics, or the seed stock would cost you depending on exchange rates between 20 and 40 million dollars. That is, only the big, physical housing with the control panel, the computer, and the operating system.

    The seed stock I sold you is top of the line. That is the type I use for my nano fabs. As far as I know, there are no better ones. It would cost you between 30 and 60 million. Not the schematics, but the batch of nanobots.

    Finally the big part. The library I gave you with the fab¡­ I don¡¯t think you have any notion of what I gave you with that. At the very least this library would have cost you 50 million dollars. 100 million is not beyond reason for this library.

    For example, the same seed stock nanobots I proposed at the meeting, where the schematics will cost five million dollars, are part of the library. I would suggest you get a list of the designs in the library and research for yourself how much you would have to pay.

    None of them were included in the estimate I gave to Mr. Luciani. That was the bare nano fab with the seed stock schematics.¡±

    I took another sip and leaned back into the seat. Cox on the other hand seemed to think hard about what I had told him, I had to give him that. But I had to make the situation as clear as possible.

    ¡°Also, consider what you would pay for the nanites alone if you bought them here. Not the schemata, I mean, the bots. To get the same amount of therapy with nanobots bought from Ralcon as I brought the first day for Mr. Walker, would have cost you around two million dollars.

    I don¡¯t know how much doctor Schaeffer has used for the rest of you, but my estimate of the cost would be in the region of 100 million. Just to keep you and your people alive for a single month.

    You will have to take the therapy for at least a year in all likelihood. It could be shorter if I manage to solve the issue of upscaling the new cyberware process. It could also take longer. Without this nano fab, it would cost your organization north of a billion dollars to keep your people alive.¡±

    He put down his glass and massaged his brow before he answered.

    ¡°Yes, it would be expensive, but you had the plans laying around, so there was no reason for it being so expensive.¡±

    It was obvious that he still had no idea what he was dealing with here.

    ¡°We are talking about 12<sup>th</sup> generation nanobot designs and an 8<sup>th</sup> generation nano fab. Do you have any idea how many places you can get these? After the meeting, I looked into it. There are exactly six persons or corporations that sell 12<sup>th</sup> gen schemata.

    There are Dalgon Tech, Burgmeister, and Xian Ping as corporations while the persons are one man in France, one person of unknown gender in the CSA, and me.

    Oh, sure, there are probably around a dozen additional organizations that have them but they don¡¯t sell.

    It is a similar situation with the nano fab. I took around 10% of the regular price for something that is essentially cutting-edge technology. Even for friends that is a good price.¡±

    He still wasn¡¯t convinced, I could see that by myself.

    ¡°Tell me, what reason could I have to rip you off? I can not see any upside for that myself, so what do I gain by betraying your organization?¡±

    He shook his head but kept his eyes on me.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know, and that is what¡¯s driving me mad. So you tell me what you gain?¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°As I just told you, I see nothing I would gain. There is as far as I can see no way I could come ahead by fooling you. Maybe if you tell me why you don¡¯t trust me we can work out the problem.¡±

    ¡°You are simply too perfect. The very moment we need somebody like you, you land in our midst for no apparent reason. The perfect person for the crisis at hand. That is way too much of a coincidence. So what are you planning? Do you even plan to keep Ben alive?¡±

    Wow, that was¡­ well it was not completely wrong. It was perfect timing for me. Well, near-perfect at least. And that was the weak point of his theory.

    ¡°Ok, I can understand where you are coming from. But you are wrong on some important points.

    First, I had a very good reason to be here. Not here exactly, but somewhere else than Seattle, and I needed to be away from there in a hurry because of the riots.

    I would have preferred the CSA or the EU, but the best I could get was NYC. It is a bit more complicated than that, but that is not important. Without the riots, I would not be here.

    Second, my timing is not perfect. If I had planned this, I would have kicked it off in a couple of months, so that I would be ready when the CRS hits your people and ride in as the savior.

    Right now, I have an idea of how to rescue you but that idea is by far not yet reality. It could be a failure. It could be that it takes me ten years to develop it. At the moment the best I can do is give you the nano therapy, which I already have, and the ability to produce the nanobots necessary, which I have done as well.

    Third, this whole stratagem had to be launched six to seven months ago. The nano therapy was released three months ago. I was happily planning to build up my business in Seattle at that time.

    So to recapitulate, I had a reason to be here, I had far from perfect timing, and at the start of your problems the solution that would let me play hero was not there yet.¡±

    His eyes narrowed before he looked at Schaeffer.

    ¡°Richard, is that true?¡±

    Schaffer shrugged before he answered.

    ¡°Most of that, I can¡¯t tell. I don¡¯t know why she is here, or how far she is in developing the working CRS free cyberware. But I know that she is right about the nano therapy being released only three months ago. Well,  a couple of weeks longer than that, but yes, it was not known when Denzel started this all.¡±

    Cox mulled that over before he returned his attention back to me.

    ¡°Ok, the riots are a compelling reason for you to be here, or at least no longer in Seattle, and I don¡¯t think that anybody had enough pull to start them on purpose. That still makes the rest suspicious but not suspicious enough to attack you over it. Just know that I will watch you.

    Now, what did you mean when you said that it could take a year or even longer? I don¡¯t like that.¡±

    I finished my coke and placed the bottle on the table.

    ¡°I meant that I am trying to upscale the process for the biosheathing for it to be more than a proof of concept. And my early experiments, the easy solution, did not pan out. Now I have to find a different way.¡±

    Doctor Schaeffer leaned forward and played with his glass a bit.

    ¡°I know I am not the most knowledgeable about these things, but did you try to use standard cloning techniques?¡±

    I had to chuckle.

    ¡°Yes, that was the obvious and supposedly easy solution that did not work. Unfortunately all growth accelerators I tried destroy the balance that makes the biosheathing work. I have yet to test some of the more exotic commercial GA¡¯s, but it does not look good.

    At the moment I am using nanobots to observe how the GAs work, and why they shift the balance, but the results of that will not be available before mid-January at the earliest.

    That is the big problem with that kind of research. I can¡¯t do it in VR, and it has to happen in real-time.¡±

    Dylan shook his head at that.

    ¡°And why do you need to upscale the process? I mean, it works now, right? So why change it?¡±

    I looked at him and sighed.

    ¡°The problem is, that this process burns up more than 600 dollars in nanites every day, just to convert Mr. Walker¡¯s new heart. That is nearly 26 thousand dollars on top of the cyberware itself.

    And that are my costs, not what I would sell the bots for, so no way to make it cheaper.

    To give you an image of how many nanobots it uses up, one of my nano fabs is working a bit over 20 hours a day to make them. The nano fab you complained was too expensive would work for more than 30 hours a day for the same. Obviously, that would not work. The nano fab I proposed to Luciani would have to work two and a half days to make one day''s worth of nanobots.

    For anything more complicated than the Pulse III I am converting that number goes up as well. The muscles for one arm would need 450 work-days of nanobots to convert. Or nearly 300k in nanites. That is simply unsustainable. It is an option for small, high-priority implants like the heart, but for everything else sadly not.¡±

    Both men looked shocked when I told them the numbers and Dylan just shook his head.

    ¡°Wow, ok, I can accept that that is not an option. I thought 50k for the set of arms was much. Talk about expensive.¡±

    Schaeffer on the other hand was frowning.

    ¡°Why¡­ I mean  I am not the authority on nanobots, but these amounts of them, do you literally burn them up?¡±

    ¡°Not really. Any way to supply the nanobots with energy shifts the balance and destroys the sheathing. And the bots are too limited in their mobility to get to an energy source outside of the critical area. They can get the cells into place, but can¡¯t get back.

    The problem really is the extremely fragile balance. Once it is finished and a protective coating applied, it can potentially work for centuries, but until then, a stray sneeze can destroy it.¡±

    What followed was a few moments of silence, while the two men mulled over what I had told them.

    Finally, doctor Schaeffer replied.

    ¡°If I understand you correctly, it will be a long time before you can supply others with the technology?¡±

    ¡°Yes and no. Yes, it will take some time to bring it into general use. No, for emergencies I can use the version I have now like I am doing with Mr. Walker¡¯s heart. It won¡¯t be cheap, or fast, but it works.¡±

    This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

    Dylan sighed and shook his head, and then changed the topic.

    ¡°Well, I think we all understand that now. And I can actually understand the issue, at least in some limited fashion. What I can¡¯t wrap my head around though is, why now? We had cyberware for what? 200 years? Why did it take so long to get the solution? I mean, nothing against you, Kitten, but there were many very bright people looking into the problem, and I doubt you are among the smartest persons we ever had.¡±

    Schaeffer groaned and facepalmed, while I took a deep breath again, forcing my temper back down. It was obvious that he really did not know better. Part of that was because I had told nobody better, but part was simply prejudice.

    For one, my people had done their very best over the last 200 years to breed stereotypes, and the negative ones stuck way harder than the positives. Then I was, to say it kindly, petite, female, and seemingly very young looking.

    At the same time, what I already had demonstrated should have told him that I was more than what I looked like. Nothing I could do would change that though. At least in the short term. Long term it would change, I guessed, but for now, I would have to live with it.

    That was the reason I did not light into him but did my best to answer calmly and controlled despite slowly getting angry.

    ¡°The short and simple answer is, that the technology that allowed this only existed for the last two years. Without at least 10<sup>th</sup> gen nanites, and their valence bonder it would be impossible to intercept and modify the phagocytes so that they don¡¯t identify neuronect as a target for the immune system.

    Of course for myosynth, your cyber muscles, you don¡¯t need that, and it would theoretically have been possible for the last 20 or 30 years to make them immune to CRS. But without the protection of neuronect that is a useless step, as you can¡¯t control cyber muscles without a neuronal control component, also known as neuronect.

    Another point you seem to have missed is that it is in reality a very niche problem. Less than two percent of humanity has cyberware. You are influenced by your personal environment where cyberware is much more prevalent, but for humanity as a whole, it is unimportant. There are virtually no resources put into developing a cure for CRS, and as such, there are maybe a dozen groups researching the problem at all.¡±

    ¡°And nothing to say about your intelligence? So, what is your IQ anyway?¡±

    I just shrugged.

    ¡°You wouldn¡¯t believe me anyway.¡±

    He scoffed again.

    ¡°I would not believe you? About your IQ? Try me.¡±

    I shook my head and just remained silent.

    ¡°So, you don¡¯t want to tell me? No good story prepared, huh? As I thought.¡±

    That was it, I had enough of his snarkiness and insinuations.

    ¡°You have an overinflated opinion of yourself, do you? I don¡¯t tell you my IQ because it is none of your business. That is information that I would not even give my friends, and you clearly are not among them, so you have to live without knowing that. So, anything else?¡±

    ¡°You little¡­¡±

    I interrupted his rant as I was frankly fed up with his condescending tone and his endless accusations.

    ¡°Anything constructive?¡±

    That shut him up for a few moments, but unfortunately not long enough.

    ¡°Until the boss is back on his feet, I am the one calling the shots here, so you should keep your cockiness in check. If I decide you will try to kill Walker, you are dead. Keep that in mind.¡±

    ¡°Point one, if that happens, Mr. Walker is dead. Pure and simple. Even if you get the finished heart reassembled, it won¡¯t work. Well, at least not for long. Until I finish the conversion directly before I implant it that is.

    Point two, in that case, not only would I and Mr. Walker die, but so will you in all likelihood. Or did you forget how many bosses are looking at me for survival?

    Point three, as far as I understand your people, they know that I am the last chance for survival of your boss, and he ordered me protected. Unless he dies, I doubt you have the power to order me attacked.

    Now don¡¯t think I am unreasonable. If you just leave me alone, I will happily do the same for you. I understand that you are suspicious, and I even understand to some extent why you are. If that were all, I would just convince you by doing my job as well as I can.

    What I won¡¯t accept though is the open disdain, the condescending tone, and the open hostility you¡¯ve shown me.

    On more than one occasion you were informed that the knowledge I provided doctor Schaeffer, as well as the technology I first gave him and later sold your organization the means to build for yourself, your boss would have been dead for three to four weeks by now.

    And that a significant percentage of your organization would look forwards to the same fate I understand, you included.

    That alone should make you at least be courteous. And courtesy is all that I demand.¡±

    I stood up.

    ¡°Now I will leave before we irreparably ruin any chance of us working together in the future.¡±

    While I turned towards the door, I heard Schaeffer call out: ¡°Wait a moment, please.¡± Which made me turn back towards the two men.

    The doctor continued.

    ¡°Dylan, I have to talk with Veronica for a bit, so would you please go back to your own office?¡±

    Even though Schaeffer was soft-spoken as I had come to know him, Dylan was visibly not amused with being sent out.

    ¡°You¡­ you side with this¡­ this¡­¡±

    ¡°Dylan!¡± That was actually the first harsh word I heard from Schaeffer. ¡°You are going too far. We have to plan the treatment for Ben, urgently as you may guess. And momentarily you are making it hard to do. That means that you have to leave the medical professionals to do their job. Do you understand?¡±

    ¡°You really think that this little kid is a medical professional? Look at her, she can¡¯t be much older than 15 or 16. And we are letting her play doctor with the life of Ben? Have you all gone mad?¡±

    Dylan had sprung up and was gesticulating wildly, while he basically screamed at Schaeffer.

    The doctor, in turn, stood up himself now.

    ¡°Damn it Dylan you are just so ornery that you can¡¯t look beyond your prejudices. Veronica is small, yes, but not that young. Tell me, is the time compression in cyberspace real or not?¡±

    That question took the wind out of Dylan¡¯s sails.

    ¡°Yes¡­ yes, it is real, why?¡±

    ¡°She clearly has an implanted jack. She has experienced much more time than her years would suggest, which is more than you seem to think.

    She is a Pure, you stubborn old goat. Pures age slower. That alone makes up a year, maybe two.

    She is tiny, which makes her look younger still.

    She has a jack, and probably had decades learning different things. I would bet that she has more time experienced than I. Or you by the way.

    Yes, I know you can¡¯t stand Pures but keep your prejudices at bay. Veronica was nothing but helpful to us. She has saved most of your men simply by teaching me the nano therapy. She has given us a freaking nanofab just because.

    Yes, she sold us the better one, but it is a nanofab that would cost us billions to get here on the open market. More than your whole organization is worth.

    So yes, I side with her in this case. She is not the one being irrational, you are. So would you please go and let me do my job?¡±

    Schaeffer softly maneuvered Dylan towards the door while he berated him irritatedly. With the last words, he closed the door into Dylan¡¯s shocked face.

    ¡°Now, Veronica, I understand that he gets onto your nerves, but you should try to ignore him. You just made your life a bit harder by pissing him off. I and I hope Ben, will calm him down, but that will take a while.¡±

    I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths before I answered him.

    ¡°Yes, I understand that. I just could not take it any longer. It seems that regardless of what I do, he will find umbrage in it. Better to distance myself from him than to start a shootout. We would all lose in that event.¡±

    He sat back down and gestured towards my previous seat.

    ¡°Well, if you have to do that, you have to do that. But just out of curiosity, why did you not tell him your IQ?¡±

    After I had taken a seat opposite him, I looked him directly in the eyes.

    ¡°Multiple reasons. For one, it is considered a piece of very private information for Pures, and it is simply rude to ask for it.

    Another is, that he would not believe me if I told him.

    Lastly, my IQ, or more what it means is one of the main reasons why I had to leave Seattle. I did not flee from one trap just to walk into the next one.¡±

    His eyebrows lifted up, and his eyes opened wide.

    ¡°Wow, is your IQ really that high?¡±

    I forced a thin smile.

    ¡°Yes, it is that high. I can say with some certainty that I am the smartest person in Queens right now. It is not absolutely impossible that somebody smarter is here, but the probability is essentially negligible.¡±

    He just shrugged his shoulders and leaned back.

    ¡°Ok. Now, what we have to talk about, is how will we do the switch of the heart? Will you bring it here?¡±

    I thought about that for a moment.

    ¡°That depends. Is something wrong with your auto surgeon? I don¡¯t see any other reason why you connected the pump manually.¡±

    His hand waved around a bit.

    ¡°Oh that. Yeah, it is on the fritz again. Nothing too bad, other than the timing. It will be up and running tomorrow again, or the day after tomorrow at the latest.¡±

    ¡°Hm, does that happen often?¡±

    ¡°Not really, Two, three times a year. It is just a bit old, that is all. I had some hope that with the recovery of the funds that Hector stole we could buy a new one, but I have to agree that the nano fab is the better investment. Well, next year, or maybe 2250. But yes, it should work next week.¡±

    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t it be better to use my brand new auto surgeon? I mean, I want to christen it anyway, so why not use it?¡±

    The look of confusion on his face made me look at him confused. Did I forget something? But he spoke before I could ask him.

    ¡°Why do you want to christen it? I mean, didn¡¯t you do that when you removed the Nagisa¡¯s neural cyberware ?¡±

    It took me a few seconds to understand where he was coming from.

    ¡°Oh, oh no, that is the old one. I only used that because the one I have built for myself was not finished. And I bought it because it was possible I would not be done with the new one in time. But now I have what I think is the best auto surgeon that exists. And I did it without violating any patents.

    Sure, I¡¯ve gone a bit overboard with the design and it is¡­ well it is better than any auto surgeon needs to be really, but I have already adjusted the design to remove the nanopositors.

    The first one is already built with them though.¡±

    His jaw fell down, literally, and he blinked a few times before he answered.

    ¡°You¡­ you have built an auto surgeon with¡­ with nano positors? Are you¡­ do you have any common sense? Any at all? Why did you do something like that?"

    ¡°Because I could? I had the idea that it would help with neuronal surgery. You know that it is a matter of micrometers there.

    In retrospect, it is a bit too complicated, and I had to beef up the control system considerably. The new version with micromotors instead of nano positors uses vastly simplified control systems. That is the only reason why I downgraded it.¡±

    Something made him upset, but I could not understand what.

    ¡°You¡­ you used a several billion dollars worth piece of technology for an auto surgeon? Are you really so unconcerned about costs?¡±

    ¡°Several¡­ billion? Where do you get that from? Nano positors are, well they are not cheap as dirt, but not so different from any other part of the auto surgeon. A couple of thousand, at most. It is a bit tedious to calibrate them but with 12<sup>th</sup> gen nanites that was easy as well.¡±

    He shook his head obviously in confusion.

    ¡°A couple of thousand? Everybody knows these things are essentially unaffordable. That is why nobody uses them.¡±

    It was my turn to shake my head.

    ¡°No, of course not. The first generation, sure. That was nearly 100 years ago. It was a chore to create the precise piezo crystals and then calibrate them.

    Modern fabbers have the tolerances to make them good enough and with nanobots, we can calibrate them exactly.

    Yes, we have to fit every single one individually, but again, the fabber does all the work.¡±

    I massaged the bridge of my nose again.

    ¡°No, the reason they are not used much is that there are very few uses for them. For the uses they have, they are usually extremely slow. For example the creation of custom processors for deep space probes, where they need more power in a smaller package than what normal technologies can provide.

    The nano positors take at least 5 years to make a single CPU. And they can only work on one at a time. For things like the auto surgeon, they are plainly overkill, as they increase performance only marginally, but require so much more control capability that nobody uses them.

    They increase the cost of producing the auto surgeon by not quite 3%. As I use an industrial fabber, instead of a tailored assembly line, the additional cost is vanishing low compared to the cost of building it myself as a one-off.

    So I could do it, and I did. Of course, without my personal nano fab, it would be unbelievably expensive to use commercially available nanobots here in the US.¡±

    He nodded slowly.

    ¡°So it is a case of things here in the US being unreasonable expensive again? As usual.¡±

    He sounded defeated and tired, but then he perked up a bit.

    ¡°Alright, so you have the better auto surgeon, how do we transport Ben? The pump can run on battery for half an hour, but that does not leave much time.¡±

    I nodded, while I answered.

    ¡°For one, there are battery extensions for virtually every pump available. If you give me the model I can look into getting, or making some of them.

    Another help is that we can reduce the pump power for up to two hours, with the nanite-blood substitution. They can move a bit under their own power with the support network we already have installed.

    And lastly, I have bought a bio-bed for my skimmer. It won¡¯t turn it into a PEES ambulance, but it will be enough to transport him to the fortress safely and it will support the pump.

    All in all, we should have somewhere around four hours from the moment we have unplugged the power here until we have to plug it in at my place. That should be more than enough time.

    I would appreciate one of your nurses accompanying him. But if he survives until Thursday he will most likely make it.¡±

    ¡°Let¡¯s hope he will.¡±

    I had to smile sardonically.

    ¡°I for one will do anything in my power to make him survive. Anything is better than dealing with Mr. Cox.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I can see that.¡± He went to the bar and poured himself another glass of whatever he had before and then returned to his seat.

    ¡°To recapitulate, you will try to procure an extended battery for the pump and provide your skimmer to transport Ben to your fortress. I think I will accompany him, together with a couple of nurses. You will implant the new heart and hopefully, we will have our Benjamin back in two weeks. Is that so far correct?¡±

    I nodded but remained silent.

    ¡°Well, I would offer a toast towards pulling it off, but¡­ ¡°

    ¡°That is not a problem. And yes, I hope it will work out. We should have placed him into a coma weeks ago. I mean, I could see that he is too stubborn to follow instructions.¡±

    ¡°He would never have gone for it, I fear. But you still gave him an even chance for survival. That is better than what I could have done for him. We just have to believe it is enough.¡±

    He took a long sip from his drink and placed it back on the table.

    ¡°Another thing, that is purely for my interest, but if I understood you correctly, the problems you have scaling up your process is just for the myosynth, right?¡±

    I frowned at that question.

    ¡°Yes, that is right. Why?¡±

    ¡°Just to make it clear, the process to protect neuronect is essentially fully developed?¡±

    ¡°Yes, that was the part I needed, and to be honest, it was surprisingly easy once I was done with the myosynth. To be frank, if I had thought of it beforehand, I would never have developed the biosheathing at all. Why are you asking?¡±

    He had a lopsided smile.

    ¡°Well, I thought that it is actually ready to be upscaled now. You could offer CRS free neural cyberware almost immediately.¡±

    I sat there and opened my mouth, only to close it again several times. I had completely missed that little fact. How could I miss it? I had that part ready for several months now.

    After what seemed an eternity of my thoughts racing in every possible direction I managed something similar to an answer.

    ¡°Yes¡­ yes, you are right. I¡­ I would not even need the bioreactor for that. Just a nanobot applicator. Why did I not think about that?¡±

    His smile became broader.

    ¡°You may be more experienced than your years, my dear, but you are clearly doing science for the science¡¯s sake. You are so focused on figuring things out that you miss what you already achieved. I mean, you built your own auto surgeon from scratch and fitted it with nano positors. Because you could.

    You build your own nano fabs, again from scratch. From what I heard, your personal nanobot library is insanely huge, and most of the designs are very specific. On the other hand, you have a nanobot design that can do virtually everything.

    No, you may have had a specific reason to develop CRS-free neuronal cyberware, but it was your own nature to make you solve the muscular CRS problem. You don¡¯t need to be an implant surgeon to make money, you can make insane amounts just by being a nano-engineer. So yes, it is in your nature to miss such small issues like that you already could build CRS free neural cyberware.¡±

    He took another sip.

    ¡°But why I am really asking is, you could build the new skull tec for Nagisa, and design a jack for Hunter so that he hopefully won¡¯t kill himself. Maybe sell a few jacks to the doctors here in the clinic or AR implants for Ben¡¯s men. You are not limited to waiting for the myosynth solution.¡±

 35: So many options

    I got out of Schaeffer¡®s office in a haze. A part of my mind was already designing Ms. Uesugi¡¯s new skull tech, other parts were going over available neural cyberware to look into how big the new converter would have to be.

    Unfortunately, I was not able to concentrate on one or the other, as my thoughts were jumping from one topic to another.

    In the end, the most important part was, why the heck did I miss that little fact? I had developed that part of the anti-CRS project more than six months ago, just before I designed my cranial board.

    It was the sole reason why I started looking into it in the first place. And despite all that, I doggedly continued the research of biosheathing.

    Yes, I got it in the end, but in hindsight, it was actually not completely necessary. We had alternatives to myosynth, after all. They needed much higher neuronect connections to work, which explained why they were not used much, but we had them.

    The reason we used myosynth was that it was powered by the metabolism of the recipient. It needed oxygen and nutrients, which any living mammalian organism should have readily available, but no electricity.

    That made it possible to simply replace the muscles in question without changing the rest of the body parts. The augmented person retained their natural nerves, blood vessels, skin, and in most cases the bones. After the great war full replacements had mostly fallen out of favor, as the neural connections needed for them were mindblowing, second only to a full ultra bandwidth data jack, which I used for my cranial board.

    Unfortunately for electro-powered actuators, motors, hydraulics, and all the other, higher-powered alternatives to artificial muscles one needed power cells. That made the replacement of the gross structural parts, like bones and joints a necessity.

    That, in turn, led to widespread replacement of the neural system, to integrate the artificial mechanoreceptors and proprioceptors. At that point, we could as well just replace the skin with a tougher artificial replacement, as we had already replaced the axons connecting it with the central nervous system.

    All that meant that it was necessary to recharge the limbs to get full power. For everyday use with a marginal increase in strength compared to roughly twice the strength that myosynth provided, one could rely on the included metabolic converter, but one would be only marginally stronger than an unaugmented human.

    All that dragged a whole rat tail of changes with it, from modification of the skeletal system, maybe an inclusion of hydraulic supports for the spine, replacement of the bone marrow functions, and so on.

    That had been done long ago in the great war before the UNAN released the second anti-cyberware bioweapon to counter the European cyber soldiers. Today it was only used for the cyber zombies that the big corps used.

    Widespread use had almost entirely stopped when the neuronect that the cyber limbs depended on became a mortal danger to the host.

    Yes, the big corps still used them, for their brainwashed throwaway troops. In typical inhuman fashion, they either kidnapped people from the streets, used employees that had become unpopular with the top levels, or more often used clones.

    These things, and it was impossible to call them human anymore, had a life expectancy of around a year. The person died long before in the conversion process though. From what I learned, they replaced large parts of the prefrontal cortex with computers and left only enough to make use of the human abilities that elude any AI to this day. Reflexes, intuition, and understanding, but replaced the personality with a program.

    The corps did not care if their weapons died an excruciating death after they were used up. Instead, they took the cyberware, replaced the destroyed neuronect, and implanted it into the next batch while they recycled the old bodies.

    The important point though was that I could now give similar superhuman abilities to people without killing them. Maybe even more so, because the people I implanted would remain human, and keep learning.

    That was a veritable game-changer right here and now. So the question remained, how in all that is holy did I miss that?

    I became aware that Ryan was talking to me after some time. I had to blink, as I found myself in the passenger seat of the skimmer, and had no clue how I got there. Add in that I had no idea what he had said before and my sophisticated answer made sense:

    ¡°Huh? What was that?¡±

    He frowned, sighed, and repeated himself.

    ¡°I said that was not very smart.¡±

    I shook my head to clear the cobwebs.

    ¡°Sorry, but I seem to have missed the whole discussion somehow. What are you talking about?¡±

    ¡°Yeah, you looked a bit dazed. The thing with Cox, that you confronted him was not very smart.¡±

    I closed my eyes and shook my head again.

    ¡°Yes, I know, but I could not take his contempt any longer. I have leaned over backward to help your group, have done work that would cost in the triple-digit millions under normal circumstances, laid everything I know bare, and that man still belittles me.

    I understand that he does not trust me. I don¡®t like it but I understand it. But he is not simply distrusting me, he insults me. Again and again and again. At some point, I have to fight back or lay down and let myself be trampled. That point was today.¡±

    I smiled tiredly before I continued.

    ¡°You should pray to whatever deity you follow that Doc Schaeffer and I managed to save Mr. Walker. If Mr. Cox takes over you are in deep trouble. I can¡¯t understand that this¡­ this¡­ no, I won¡¯t lower myself to his level. I can¡¯t understand that this man is the heir to Mr. Walker. Did you have nobody better available?¡±

    Ryan chuckled when I said that.

    ¡°You got something wrong. Cox is not the heir. He is the right-hand man of the boss. A talented administrator, who keeps the business running smoothly, while the boss is the one with the vision, who knows how to act and react. No, the heir is somebody else.¡±

    That was more reassuring than I thought it would be. Yes, I was sure that in the case of Mr. Walker dying and Dylan getting belligerent I would be able to play some of the other bosses against him, but that would lead to unnecessary suffering.

    ¡°That¡­ is good to hear. I hope you are not disappointed when I still do my best to keep Mr. Walker alive.¡±

    And Ryan¡¯s chuckle grew to a deep guffaw.

    ¡°Of course not. We like Mr. Walker. And we want to keep him around as much as you. So, please, do your best.¡±

    While he maneuvered the skimmer into the garage he changed the topic.

    ¡°What happened with you in the Doc¡¯s office by the way? You were completely out of it.¡±

    ¡°Doctor Schaeffer pointed me to something I missed. The implications are¡­ profound. And have me reevaluating my¡­ no, it had me second-guessing my priorities.¡±

    He grunted in assent, while we stepped out of the vehicle.

    ¡°And what exactly did you miss? If I can ask that is.¡±

    ¡°I¡®ll tell you when I have called the others together. I don¡¯t want to explain it several times.¡±

    On the way to the cafeteria, I sent a message to all the others in the building to call a meeting there.

    While I made Ryan and me some sandwiches for supper the rest of the cast slowly came into the room. It took a few minutes longer for everyone to arrive and sit down.

    They looked at each other for a moment before Darren took over.

    ¡°Alright, we are here. What is so important, Veronica?¡± I swallowed my bite, took a sip to clear my mouth, and then began.

    ¡°Basically, I made a¡­ no that is not right. I missed something. Not particularly important to you, but for me it is disturbing. To make it short, I missed that I can already make some CRS-free cyberware for most of you, and many others.

    The problems I have are completely with myosynth, mostly known as cybermuscles. I have a method to make it CRS-free, but that method is more or less proof of concept. It is extremely expensive and slow.

    The important thing though is that I also have a method to make neuronect, the cybernetic neural connector, CRS-free. And that method is fully fleshed out. No upscaling or modification is necessary.

    Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

    I too fell into the trap of thinking of CRS as one disease, instead of the two it is, and doggedly tried to develop a solution for myosynth. Conveniently forgetting that we have alternatives for myosynth, unlike neuronect.¡±

    I leaned forward, placing my weight on my elbows.

    ¡°So in short, I have to build a bigger version of my bioreactor and then can build and adapt neural cyberware for you directly after that. ¡±

    I was a bit surprised when none of them was very excited about my news.

    After a few minutes of murmuring and low discussions among them, they shrugged, and Natalie shrugged and addressed me.

    ¡°Oh, well, that is nice. And after we experienced the diadems, I think all of us want a jack, but it is not so important. I mean, sorry to say that, but Justin and Ryan have cyber muscles, right?¡±

    Justin nodded to that, and Natalie continued:

    ¡°Thought so, and honestly, they are¡­ the reputation of cyborgs is so high, so dangerous, and the reality is simply disappointing. Sure, they are a bit stronger, a bit faster, but not much. Kate could rip them apart at any time if she wanted and Darren could wipe the floor with them.

    So yeah, the news is nice to know, but not so exciting.¡±

    I tilted my head and inhaled sharply.

    ¡°Oh¡­ right. You have no real knowledge. For one, the jack is only the beginning. I would advise it for anybody, as it enables you to get a HUD and makes every other piece of cyberware easier to connect. But it is by no means the only neural cyberware you could get.

    There are things like smart guns, that will simply project an aiming point into your vision, show how many rounds you have, the overall status of your weapon, enables you to switch fire modes with a thought, eject magazines with a thought, and similar things.

    You will have to work closely with Mark in that respect, but I think for your work it will be a distinct advantage.

    Then there are sensory upgrades. Visuals in IR or UV, echolocation, and such things.

    In combination with eye implants, we have augmented reality.

    We have information storage, memory enhancements, and recording systems.

    We can even easily build you a synaptic acceleration if you want that.

    These and some more are easy to connect to the jack and will be no problem at all.

    With a bit of time, I will be able to build things like wired skills, wired reflexes, and enhanced learning implants.

    They will speed you up, enable you to learn any knowledge skill much faster, or even use a programmed skill without training in it.¡±

    I gestured a bit in the air when I listed the various possibilities.

    ¡°And one thing you get wrong is that Justin and Ryan are cyborgs ultra-light. Most of the reputation stems from the great war and the cyber zombies. What normal people use today, if they use cyberware at all is mostly myosynth. It has some advantages, but also many disadvantages.

    The main advantage though is that it gets away with only minimal neural connections. If you contract muscular CRS, then you remove the cyberware and live on. The alternatives are significantly stronger, faster, and sturdier, but need enough neuronect that they almost guarantee the development of neural CRS.

    The only reason the cyber zombies exist at all is that the big corps don¡¯t care if their disposable troops only live for a year or two.

    But if you encounter cyber zombies, expect them to be nearly a match for Kate. They are probably a bit stronger and faster but are less, well not intelligent but less intuitive, acting by rote.

    With time I can make you that strong while retaining your intellect and personality, and without making you die from neural CRS.¡°

    The gamut of reactions was now much more in line with what I had expected.

    After some lively discussion among small groups, the questions began.

    Natalie opened up the session:

    ¡°What do you think you can do with smart guns? That sounds interesting.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Honestly, I have no clue what you would want in a smart gun. From the cyberware side, it is a simple software interface.

    We would have to decide if we will make it NFC, an OPB-cable, a connection pad in the palm, or all three. After that, you have to decide what information you want to get from the weapon, and what controls you want to use mentally.

    You can even fire the gun via the interface if you want and somebody builds the weapon for that. A camera instead of a scope, a targeting laser with an aiming point feedback, or whatever. You need the firmware and you need the interface. The rest has to be integrated into the gun.¡±

    Christine had a calculating expression when she posted the next question.

    ¡°What is that synaptic accelerator you mentioned? And what is the difference to the wired reflexes?¡±

    ¡°You all experienced cyberspace compression via the diadem. The synaptic accelerator is exactly that. It obviously needs a jack to work, but essentially we will implant a small rudimentary cyber board, and run your whole perception through virtual reality.

    Unlike VR only your mind is faster though. Depending on the compression you will feel like you are moving in slow motion, as will everybody else. What it gives you is the ability to reason out your reaction instead of using reflexes.

    That is the difference between the wired reflexes. These simply speed up your reflexes to be faster.

    I think with a bit of tinkering I can speed up your whole somatic nervous system, and make your voluntary movements, well not faster, that is in large parts limited by the muscles, but more controlled.

    It would mean that you would be able to send new instructions to the muscles much faster.

    I would estimate that in combination with the synaptic accelerator it will increase your dexterity by a large amount.¡±

    Jacky now seemed to be downright giddy.

    ¡°What are these wired skills? That sounds so¡­ wicked.¡±

    I had to chuckle.

    ¡°Keep in mind that I am not yet able to make them, so take everything with a grain of salt here.

    And in essence, these are exactly what¡¯s written on the can.

    They are physical skills, like driving, martial arts, shooting, surgery, and other things like that that have been recorded and can be used by rote.

    Activate the respective skill, and your cyberware acts out the skill, without or with only minimal input from yourself.

    If what I read is true, in time you will learn the skill by yourself and need to rely on the cyberware less and less.

    The problem here is that I have to first find the skill library, and or the means of recording them, followed by how they were implanted.

    And before you ask, for knowledge skills we need the learning implants. I have no clue how those will work, and how we can program skills into them.

    The best I can do today is the enhanced memory with the information storage, the basic cranial board, and a software assistant.¡±

    Mark rubbed his chin before he asked his question.

    ¡°All that sounds megarad, but what is it with these alternatives to monosynth? What do you need for that?¡±

    ¡°You mean myosynth I assume. Artificial muscles. The advantage of myosynth is that it is powered by your blood directly. All alternatives to it need electricity. And, if you go above the human norm, a significant amount.

    In daily normal life, you can get away with metabolic convertors, that take the food and oxygen transported by the blood and convert it into electricity. At a significantly lower efficiency though. You will be marginally stronger and faster than with your natural muscles, and it is honestly, not worth it.

    To use them to their full effect you need an energy storage. To make room for that and prevent muscle strength to destroy the limb we will have to replace most or all of the bones. That makes it necessary to replace the joints as well. And suddenly you have to essentially replace most of the nerves in the limb.

    At that point, we can as well replace the skin with some stronger material. The additional neural connectors don¡¯t make any difference anymore. Just to make it clear what that means, a single limb replacement needs more neuronect than anything else except a high or ultra bandwidth jack.

    And the fun is just starting. If you replace your arms for example, unless you massively reinforce your whole skeleton from the shoulders on down the first time you use your new strength you will destroy your shoulders, or your spine, or your hips, or¡­ you get the gist. To get all there is out of the enhanced limb you will have to replace most of your bones.

    That means you have to get an implant that replaces the bone marrow to make your blood or use plated bones, which are quite a bit inferior strength-wise.

    And that still does not keep your joints, or your spine to be honest, from breaking, You will have to reinforce them substantially. For the joints, that can be done with carbon nanotube ligaments, but for the spine, it is a bit more involved.

    Either you use substantially semi-flexible supports that let your vertebrae move just enough for you to remain flexible, or another option is to integrate a hydraulic shoring system that essentially buffers the strain. Another option is of course to replace the spine, including the spinal cord with cyberware, necessitating even more neuronect. If I remember correctly some designs even increased the flexibility of the spine substantially.

    And all that makes it possible if you charge your cyberware regularly to get somewhere between six and twelve hours of superhuman strength and or speed out of your cybernetic limbs.

    As you can see, that whole setup demands downright ungodly amounts of neuronect, which, until a few months ago, was deadlier the more you had. As I said, the average cyber zombie has a life expectancy of around a year.¡±

    Darren shook his head, and then looked directly at me.

    ¡°If being a cyber zombie is so deadly, why do people do it then?¡±

    I snorted before I answered.

    ¡°Oh please, you don¡¯t really believe that they are volunteers, right?

    In most cases they are clones. That is bad enough. But a good amount of them are people who were either convenient for the corp to use, as they could simply kidnap them without creating a problem for themselves, or even more sinister, people one or more of the execs wanted to punish for some real or imagined transgression.

    The only thing making it even remotely merciful about it is that essentially the first thing they do is destroy the personality vial lobotomy and replace it with a control implant.

    The person is basically dead at that point, and just the body is moving for some time longer.

    And when the cyber zombie begins to break down they simply rip out the cyberware, replace the neuronect, and implant it into the next recipient, while they literally throw the rest of the body away.

    Now, it will take some time before I will be able to give you this type of cyberware, as I have to research it first, but when I do it, it will not impact your life experience, and if you don¡¯t like it we can get you cloned replacements.

    What I can give to you as soon as I have built the new bioreactor is the jack and everything that directly connects to it. Well to all of you except Darren and Kate that is. Sorry, but your brain is just a bit too different, and I have to map your neural network in detail before I can design a jack for you.¡±

    Darren nodded at that.

    ¡°I suspected something like that when we had these problems with the diadem. From what the others told us, your improvisation works, but not particularly well.¡±

    ¡°I have something new, I call it the bio-observation-unit, or BOU for short, that I can adapt for the mapping. We should be ready to begin in a couple of days, and after that, it will take only¡­¡±

    A priority alert from the cluster let me stop in the middle of the sentence. I had honestly never expected that specific alert. Somebody had broken through the security of the computer here.

    The only saving grace was that I routinely tasked the cluster with monitoring the systems of the fortress, otherwise whoever did this would have had a good chance to surprise us all. As it was I had to waste a few seconds warning the others, before I could dive into the matrix.

    ¡°We are under attack. No information on who and how many. Security is offline. Will defend us in the matrix.¡±

    I noticed some curses from the others before I managed to pull one of my hidden aces out of my sleeve. I activated the Q-link between my implants and Precious. The whole time I was lamenting that whoever did this did not wait another couple of days. As it was now, Glory was not ready, and with her, I would be undefeatable for the foreseeable future. As it was, Precious had to be enough.

 36: This means war

    I distinctly regretted not updating the computers of the fortress immediately when I had the time. Not that my reasoning was unsound. I chanced a calculated risk. The likelihood of a cyber attack was rather low, and I decided not to replace the obsolete and obsolescent equipment with modern systems which would experience the same fate in a couple of months.

    I had to design the new computer system first, and then have the NADA make them, but they would be orders of magnitude more powerful than anything on the market today.

    So I took the risk, and it seemed like it bit me in the behind. You sadly can¡¯t win every time.

    The first thing I did was check up on the status. The computer systems were, unfortunately seriously compromised. I would have to go over every single file before I could trust the system again. Nothing I could not manage, and most of it I could let the cluster do, but for now, I had to survive first.

    Normally anybody in this situation would be neck-deep in the excrement. As soon as the system was compromised the other side controlled the battlefield. Normally, that is.

    I on the other hand had a couple of trumps in reserve, almost all of them depending on the Q-link to work. The first one was that I switched over the control to the cluster. The security system spun back up, and I got a threat analysis, while the door by the garage closed again.

    Unfortunately, this would not keep long. As soon as the assailant found the nodes I hooked the cluster into he could simply isolate them. But for now, I have won a couple of minutes to react.

    Next, I began to switch the viron to something I normally used. While thematic virons are nice and feed the ego of the owner or the creator, they usually make it easy for a jack to adapt and assisted their stealth.

    Personally, I preferred an ever-shifting illogical viron. I heard them described as Escheresque, whatever that means. What it did though was prevent the enemy from using an easily deciphered theme to make his subconscious fit in.

    In the swirling chaos of impossible shapes I found not one, but two jacks, unable to adapt their stealth fast enough. I activated my own stealth, synchronized with the viron, and moved closer to them.

    I was not particularly surprised that I was significantly faster than them. I was not completely convinced that I had, at this moment, the fastest combination of board and implant, as some of the top 10 held their cards close to their chests, but the likelihood was high.

    My superficial analysis showed them to be using Kawamoto boards, probably late Yurei. That placed them clearly as corporation hackers. And that made it a bit easier for me. Whoever had sent them had not splurged on the much more expensive, but much more capable as well, Shinobi line.

    The Yurei were a well-known variable in my world, and I was confident that I could take out both of them.

    While still being mostly invisible I loaded up Excalibur and Aegis, two of my most powerful combat utilities.

    Aegis was essentially the standard defensive utility, namely an adaptive input buffer, writ large. The twist here was that I had the cluster manage the adaptive part. I was able to do that, contrary to standard operations, because I had linked my supercomputer via Q-link, which made it better than an optical link.

    Others were reliant on the resources their board could offer, as including a bigger server or cluster over the matrix introduced a certain amount of lag, and lag was deadly in our game.

    Excalibur on the other hand was essentially the opposite. Any attack utility was essentially based on the same basic principle to go through the defenses. They tried to break the encryption and then overwhelm the input buffer so that the actual payload could be delivered to the board, or the jack if one was so inclined.

    And again I was able to incorporate the Cluster into the equation. It was able to brute force the encryption faster than others could finesse out the encryption, not that I resorted to brute force, not alone that is. I had the experience that I got the best results when I combined the methods and used finesse to steer the brute force.

    Naturally, most of my attack utilities used the cluster. Excalibur was my solution if I wanted to absolutely ruin my opponent''s day. Most attack utilities were designed to either damage software, hardware, or wetware. It was surprisingly hard to create something that could do equal damage to programs, the computers they run on, and the brains of the hacker using them.

    Excalibur had been my 76<sup>th</sup> attempt, and the one that finally worked. I tested it on cloned brains, any type of hardware I could get my hands on, and every software I could find.

    It was not the best in all of them or even any of them, but it was devastating for all. It was nothing I would use against an abyss-dweller, but against corp-drones, especially ones with second-tier boards, it was a one-shot kill utility.

    Just as I was closing to the first one, they opened a port to let in a veritable swarm of hunter-killers. Eight HKs changed the matchup considerably. I was still certain that I could take them with a bit of planning and a hunk of luck, but instead of a curb stomp, it would be work and hard work at that.

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    Depending on what HKs they summoned the hackers were actually the lesser threat.

    Accordingly, the next thing I did was analyze the HKs, to harvest any piece of information I could. The results were¡­ strange. The programs were a hodgepodge of different commercial and civilian bots. The whole was unprofessional to an extent that I could not understand.

    I mean, obviously whoever had sent them was a corporation and one that was not averse to using Kawamoto-tech. And Kawa had a whole lineup of hunter-killer lines from nearly legal to blackest of operations, and from cheap and barely usable to run when you see them. So why these kludged bots?

    Not that I was complaining. It was just the hunk of luck I needed to make my chances pretty good.

    This new situation demanded a revision of my battle plan though. I would no longer be able to take the intruders with utilities alone, and so I had the cluster spin up a few Banshees, my premier anti-bot combat bot, and preload one of my own hunter-killers.

    The Banshees had the advantage that I incorporated every stealth utility I could my hands on or create and the strongest anti-bot utility I had.

    Each of them would be more than enough to play with two or three of these strange HKs, so the four of them should be enough.

    They were almost completely useless against a hacker or for causing damage to any computer hardware, but against HKs they were essentially the best I had.

    On one hand, I was glad it was happening in my system, with me controlling the viron. On the other hand, if it had happened in a system I did not care about, I would just nuke the joint and go home.

    Then it was time to put the plan into action. The intruders naturally knew that something was happening. The shift in the viron alone has to have told them that. But at least for one of them that would not be enough.

    With a silent sigh, I rammed Excalibur through the avatar on the right of me. For us visitors in the Matrix it looked as if a sword made of light pierced through him, and he slowly burned from the inside.

    What happened in the background was that the cluster already had optimized the ice-breaker for KVS, or Kawamoto Virtual System, as they called the OS of their boards.

    That by the way was why I wrote Precious OS myself, and even the version I sold with the Mark IV was slightly different in the way it handled buffer encryption, DEP, and other defensive measures.

    Nobody but me could prime an attack utility to the idiosyncrasies of my board.

    With the primed ice breaker Excalibur, or closer to the point, the cluster, made short work of the encryption of the buffer and quickly filled it up with random junk. Without the decryption, I would have needed to fire attacks non-stop, wasting time, hoping to fill up the buffer, and having the next attack go through.

    The next step was overwhelming the DEP by sending attacks to several known weak points in KVS, managing to embed and run the trojan that made the rest of the attack possible. The ASLR was defeated by elevating the trojan to kernel-level permissions.

    Then it got interesting. At least for me.

    One, the trojan infected the jack with a sub-routine, loading a cascade into it, which would, over the course of a couple of milliseconds, overload the autonomic nervous system with conflicting signals, essentially shutting it down, and with it the person.

    At the same time, the jack fired into every sensory cortex, inducing something like a fever dream, that would, if my tests and simulations were reliable, knock the hacker out from one moment to the next.

    All that would kill the hacker.

    Two, the trojan would activate every writing laser, and overwrite the data storage with several passes of random numbers, while shooting down every other process and overwriting the memory with, you guessed it, random numbers.

    Three, that was what I was especially proud of. The Cirrium processor line had an interesting design vulnerability. To be fair, it was almost impossible to exclude this vulnerability from any processor.

    The data lines inside the chip, these delicate strings of silver formed an intricate network. An intricate network with an interesting resonance frequency. If it was stimulated in the right way, at the right frequency it became hot. Extremely hot. And thermal throttling would do nothing to stop it, especially as the trojan was suppressing the necessary functions.

    In short, a few seconds after the hacker fell down dead and the OS crashed, the processor would melt. If one considered that it was composed mostly of carbon, which has a melting point of a bit over 3500¡ã, celsius that is, it is pretty obvious that the whole board caught fire almost immediately.

    By the way, my personal Cirriums had a slightly modified layout, changing the resonance frequency, and included a few bridges out of zinc, which would melt easily and break the network up. It would still ruin the processor, but the rest of the board was safe.

    All that though had happened in a fraction of a second, and the hacker was screaming his digital death cry.

    The other one reacted faster than I thought he had in him and opened up space between us.

    At the same time, the Banshees assaulted the HKs, taking down four of them in the initial attack.

    Naturally, that was the end of the good news for me. Almost immediately my buffer screamed in alarm, as I was attacked by an unknown assailant. I quickly moved some distance away and observed the situation. The kludged HKs had been joined by two new ones.

    Even at the first glance, it was obvious that these were professionals. From the skin they sported, they seemed to be Kawamoto Basan class HKs. Usually, nothing I could not master. But two of them were hard on the limit of my abilities. Two, plus one hacker, plus the surviving Frankensteins would be hard. Very hard.

    I had no other choice than to use my own HK, something I had wanted to avoid. Something like that has the tendency to become less effective once it has been used, and I wanted to keep my trumps hidden as long as I could. Still, it was better than kicking the bucket. And so I ordered the cluster to spawn not one, but two instances of the HK I had it preload.

    I have to say, the visuals were impressive. I patterned them after the appearance of the monster I named the HK for in one of the ancient movies. Not one of the remakes could ever top that.

    And so the figure made out of black smoke, red fire, and darkness, the Balrog appeared. Twice.

    Unlike the Banshees, the Balrog was more versatile. It had a varied arsenal, going from non-lethal anti-organic up to tactical nuke. It was equally capable to go against a bot as it was to go against a human. And in the current situation, I had them go for the kill.

    The problem for me was that the sneak attack had nearly overwhelmed my buffer. It was slowly reinitializing, but for the next few seconds in real-time, I would have to be very careful.

 37: Monster versus Monster

    There was a reason why I had not opened with the Balrog. Unlike the Banshees, it was anything but stealthy. It was essentially impossible for something this powerful, aggressive, and active to remain hidden when powered up.

    The moment the Balrog activated they flooded the viron with pings, inspected security tokens, and all-out screamed they were there.

    That made it extremely hard to hide from them, but the flip side was that even without their admittedly flamboyant model they stood out like a bonfire on a moonless night.

    In less than a second, each of them pinged me with no less than 12 requests for my identity. They did the same with all the bots, the HKs, and the remaining hacker.

    My problem now was that I had initially planned to kill first the one hacker and attack the other while he was still distracted.

    The perfect timing of the Basans arrival meant that I could forget that plan. Instead of a one-two punch, I would actually have a fight on my hands.

    And my buffer, the essential ultimate defense of any hacker, was mostly overwhelmed. There have been several attempts to make a buffer that will just be deleted to be reinitialized, all for naught. To be able to protect the hacker the buffer needed some level of persistence.

    Another factor was that the bigger the buffer, the greater the lag. In some ways, one could compare it to armor. Light armor, or a small buffer, meant fast and agile, but it is impossible to take more than a light hit. Something like the attack by two basans would have shredded that immediately.

    Then a large buffer, equivalent to heavy armor, made you slow, cumbersome, but on the other hand, you could literally tank hits that would kill anybody else.

    As usual for me, I preferred a more nuanced approach.

    I had an outer layer of buffer, managed by the cluster, and an inner layer, managed by Precious. Neither was particularly large, but usually just enough to soak up a hit or two.

    The cluster was physically big enough to contain several buffer banks without compromising other functions, and it had simply switched out the buffer my connection was going through.

    Unfortunately, that made up only around a quarter of my buffer, and the one on Precious was at over 90%, and very slowly reinitializing. Oh, not so slow in real-time, but in the accelerated world we were fighting, a couple of seconds could mean a lifetime.

    That meant I had to be much more careful than I had hoped. Not that I would be careless otherwise, but it added a tension I could live without. And while I was fighting for my life in cyberspace who knows what was happening in the real world. I could just hope that the cluster reactivating the defense systems had stopped the attack

    But somehow I doubted that. Not with Basans on the other side.

    There was no helping it, I had to go onto the offensive. The Banshees continued tussling with the Frankensteins. At numerical parity, I was not in the least concerned about that outcome.

    The important fight was the Basans against the Balrog. Yes, I know that it would have helped to spin up additional Balrog, but these beasts took up an incredible amount of bandwidth. Something I had only in limited amount since I had no physical access to the cluster anymore.

    No, sadly two Balrog were everything I could muster. They should be enough though. I estimated one Basan as a bit below a Balrog in power.

    For some reason, the Basans let out an ear-shattering shriek. Yes, I could understand that there is some psychological aspect of this fight, but they were going against other hunter-killers, other bots.

    Accordingly, the Balrog were not impressed. Then the four giants lumbered towards each other.

    I can¡¯t say that I was particularly awed by the appearance of the Basans, they looked like overgrown chicken after all, but they were exceedingly dangerous nonetheless.

    The Balrog on the right of me used his whip to attack his opposing Basan. If I wanted to find out what exactly it had used, I would have to dive into the logs later. Whatever it was, it was not very effective.

    The Basan took the fiery hit against one wing and a small flicker of flame sprung up, only to go out almost immediately. The Basan in question got rocked back a bit, but otherwise seemed unharmed. That only meant that it took the hit into its own buffer.

    Meanwhile, the other Basan attacked the remaining Balrog. It spew a stream of fire. On normal logic, that would be an eminently stupid attack against a being made out of fire, smoke, and shadows, but naturally, that all was only the representation of the real attacks happening in code fragments.

    Thankfully the Balrog seemed not much more impacted than if it were a real fight of monsters. Instead, it closed the distance and skewered the Basan with its sword. Or it tried to, at least. The Basan managed to mostly evade. The sword still connected, but it was a glancing blow instead of a fight-ending kill move.

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    Still, the Basan flickered for some moment, before it stabilized. It seemed to lose some of its definition. More bandwidth dedicated to keeping it up and running I would guess.

    The Banshees had whittled the Frankensteins down to three and were now in greater numbers, though one of them seemed to require reinitialization as well. The cluster though was only limited by the bandwidth, and simply switched it out with a fully initialized version it had kept in reserve.

    The basan with the singed wing pecked at its opposing Balrog, which in turn deflected the beak with its own wing, only to try to skewer the Basan in turn. While it managed a direct hit, ramming the flaming sword through the gigantic chicken, the Basan remained standing, blasting a stream of fire at the Balrog. Whatever it was, it severely damaged the demon, as it began to flicker. Not that the Basan was in much better shape.

    Still, this round had gone to the Basan, and it began to press its advantage, only to be attacked by one of the Banshees from the back. Sure, the Banshee was completely out of its weight class, but it put on an additional strain on the Basan¡¯s buffer, so anything was a help.

    The Banshee could do that as the pack had whittled down the Frankensteins to two, and three of the ghost-like apparitions still landed attack after attack on the remaining HKs. It was unlikely that this part of the fight would last much longer.

    The second Balrog had meanwhile lost one of its wings but managed to cut off the leg of its opposing Basan. The slowly falling bird was then decapitated with a quick stroke of the sword, slowly flickering out of existence.

    Unless the other side had a similar setup as I had with the cluster it would take them a couple of minutes to orderly shut down the HK and restart it.

    I was surprised about the HKs being here anyway. There is a reason why they were almost exclusively used defensively. They need credible computer hardware to even run in low-powered mode as Kursalin had with his crippled obsolete HK.

    In this case, the corp had to have a couple of Beowulfs nearby and to have taken over the matrix completely in the surrounding area. Every little scrap of bandwidth had to be taken over for their exclusive use to run not one, not two, but ten hunter-killer bots.

    The only thing allowing me to use the two Balrog was the direct connection with the cluster that the Q-link enabled me to do.

    The situation for my side was looking much better now. There were still two Balrog and four Banshees against one Basan and two Frankensteins.

    One of the Balrog was severely damaged, while the other one was hurt as well. And it was telling.

    The remaining Basan let out another stream of fire, hitting its opposing Balrog and destroying its structure.

    I had to look into the logs later and determine what killed it. It seemed like it was a serious vulnerability I needed to fix. This part of hacking was an eternal arms race. I would of course have to rework the attack utilities of the Balrog too, as the corp had data on what it used as well.

    What surprised me a bit was the fact that no new Balrog was initializing. Normally the expert system driving the cluster¡¯s master control unit would have one HK in reserve just in case something like this happened.

    For some reason, it had decided that another Balrog was not needed. It was probably right, but it was an iffy decision. I would have to look into it in detail when this altercation was finished. I preferred to have the security of overwhelming force. And I had programmed the MCU accordingly.

    It was not critical though. The remaining Balrog was at a much better data integrity than the Basan, and the Banshees had finished another Frankenstein.

    Again, the Basan used his stream of fire, against the Balrog lumbering towards it, but with agility denying its bulk, it evaded, while simultaneously using its whip to some devastating effect.

    I seriously needed to overhaul the programming of the Balrog. All these virtual actions, meant to impress and hamper a living hacker were essentially wasted processor cycles against another program. Wasted cycles that could be used better for real effect. Not that that had occurred to me beforehand.

    The evasive action was in reality a relocation of the memory address range, combined with the spoofing of the open interfaces. If the attack could not find the executable code, it could do no damage naturally.

    Still, the Banshees had ripped the last Frankenstein to shreds, aka randomized the executable in the memory. Depending on how much feedback was programmed into the HKs they would also have shredded the executable and libraries on the computer running the bots, but I doubted that whoever created them made that mistake.

    And even if, simply making another copy from some depository would restore it. What it did though was blocking valuable bandwidth until the HK was fully deleted from the connection. That would take a couple of seconds, and the fight would be most likely over before any of the Frankensteins could be reintroduced.

    The much more massive Basans would take much more time to reinitialize. Especially as they probably needed a much more powerful computer, mostly dedicated to them.

    If that was so, in the best case the crash of the HK would make a reboot necessary. Just a couple of minutes, but in matrix combat, that was a lifetime.

    But the point here was that the remaining Basan was harassed by 4 Banshees and a somewhat damaged Balrog while pretty much damaged itself.

    To make things worse, I had designed the Balrog in a way that it could reinitialize parts of its code while running. Not the core functions, but some of the outer libraries. Like the defensive measure represented by the missing wing, which was slowly, for cyberspace, regenerating. As far as I knew, Basans lacked this ability.

    Not that Kawamoto lacked the technical know-how to do that. They just wanted to be paid astronomically for that.

    The remaining fight of the bots was accordingly quick after that.

    One Banshee jumped on the Basan¡¯s neck and ripped at it with its claws, effectively filling up its buffer.

    Another one clamped around its feet, slowing down the shifting of the address range, making it much harder for the Basan to evade any further attacks.

    The remaining two simultaneously attacked from both sides, locking down the defensive measures of the HK represented by its wings.

    Lastly, a few virtual seconds after the Banshees harassed the Basan, the Balrog rammed its sword through the center of the Basan.

    This attack proved to be the end of the enemy hunter-killer.

    Flames surrounded it and burned it to digital ash, which slowly disintegrated.

 38: Tonight you will dine in Hell

    While the bots were duking it out, something I registered in the back of my mind, I slowly circled my dance partner, as he circled me.

    I was significantly faster than him, which was naturally a big advantage, but my buffer was mostly depleted. I could not sustain a hit anymore.

    And unfortunately, without a surprise attack as I had managed against his partner, I would not be able to finish the fight in one attack.

    Whatever defensive utilities he had would be enough to blunt even Excalibur. Not that I would be able to use Excalibur in the beginning. It was a decidedly short-range attack utility.

    Yes, technically it should work at any distance, but here the subconscious link to the jack was the deciding factor. I simply could not make myself believe that the sword would work at firearm ranges.

    At the same time, getting into a close fight with my opponent would decrease the time I would have to react, making it very dangerous at the moment. I needed the distance to keep evading.

    Or interposing Aegis. The shield was, at the basic programming level a one-sided address randomizer. Whatever hit Aegis would land in some random address range, keeping my ports and my buffer unaffected.

    Naturally, I had experimented with some fully enclosing shields. I had learned what most other hackers had learned as well. Something in our psyche does not believe in energy shields. The reason is probably that there were no energy shields in real-live.

    Regardless of the reason, as far as I knew, only a handful of hackers had ever made it work, and from what I found out, every single one of them was in some way or another separated from reality.

    I had equally tried to form it into some suite of armor. While it worked, my subconscious insisted that I was slow and clumsy in heavy armor. And made it stick. The best I had was something similar to the armored clothes I had made in reality. Which I was using.

    It still was insufficient, hence the existence of Aegis. Virtually every single jack I knew of used a shield in one form or another for basically the same reason. The big difference was that as far as I knew Aegis was lengths above what was usually available. Even from somebody like me.

    Just to make it clear, I did not sell my personal utilities. The utilities I sold were very good. Some of them were the best you could buy. But the moment I sold something, it got known. Somebody would decompile it, dissected it, look at the weaknesses, and create exploits.

    That was the nature of the game. And I made sure that nobody would do that with my utilities.

    I also had, under various aliases bought every available utility to do exactly that. As a side-effect, it made it possible for me to compare them to what I wrote myself. I was not better in every aspect, some stealth tools were a bit better than what I sold for example. But I had fiddled with my personal arsenal until they were superior to everything one could buy.

    While I was observing my opponent, and ruminating on what attack utility to use, I had an epiphany.

    The reason my ranged attack utilities were somewhat disappointing was my generally bad experience with firearms. I could barely control my thoroughly obsolete PDP after all. All my life, guns were something that others used.

    But now, thanks to Mark, I had something I could actually trust, for the first time. Several days in the gun range VR had made me appreciate my new MH-7. Luckily I had the VR model of the gun in Precious storage.

    I took one of my failed attempts to use Excalibur at a range, a rendition of my PDP, and replaced it with the MH-7 model. As it was, in essentially every other aspect Excalibur it needed only to convince my subconscious that it did indeed work.

    It took only a few moments to get the new, yet unnamed utility ready. It was enough though for the other to make the first move.

    He used something I could only describe as a ray gun, to shoot at me. While I was nearly twice his speed, he still surprised me, as I was distracted. I barely managed to bring up Aegis in time.

    Not an auspicious start. But my new gun was ready, and I quickly lined up a shot, as Mark had trained me. Onehanded, but I had trained that as well.

    Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

    But he was not an idiot and had his shield at the ready. Surprisingly the shot broke through. I had honestly not expected that. It did negligible damage, as most of its code was spent into the shield, but it broke through.

    Yes, it was only a mid-range Kawamoto shield, but even with Excalibur I usually needed two, sometimes three strikes to break through a shield. And Excalibur was top of the line.

    That brought our fight to an instant halt, as both of us were simply stunned. While his run-off-the-mill avatar had a lack of facial animation, his whole posture screamed shock.

    Then I understood. I believed. I believed with absolute certainty that this gun fired shots that would go through armor. Yes, I knew that heavy armor would withstand it. But it was the first weapon I ever had that could go through armor.

    Somehow even my Excalibur, the most powerful direct combat utility I had ever written, was hampered by my subconscious. I knew without the shadow of a doubt that a shield was there to stop a sword.

    And my subconscious did the rest. Obviously from the purely technical perspective, Excalibur had the ability to go through a shield. Otherwise, the MH-7 could never have done that regardless of how much I believed it.

    Look at that, you learn something new every day.

    With this surprise, the outcome of this combat was a foregone conclusion.

    All I had to do was keep my distance, defend with Aegis, and hit him with my weapon. It would probably take a few minutes to inflict enough damage, as the bleed-through was obviously low, but there was nothing he could do anymore.

    After a dozen additional shots, I hit a bit of a snag. Apparently, my subconscious took the gun as the one Mark had made for me. Again, we both had some surprise, this time when the MH-7 only made a click instead of the satisfying boom I had learned to enjoy.

    I had run out of ammo on an attack utility working from data. It should have been impossible, but there it was. Fortunately, the corpy was already badly damaged and failed to make use of the reprise. I have to confess it took me a few moments to realize what happened. And why.

    Then I had to spawn a new, loaded magazine, the way my subconscious was acting, the loaded part was important, and then reload the gun. I was aware enough to spawn the extended 20-round magazine Mark had given me for training.

    He managed to get another shot off at me, which I deflected before the rest of the fight was rather anticlimactic.

    That did not mean my work was done of course. The fight between the bots was still in full swing at that time but took the chance to switch on the camera feed and observe the real world.

    The first feeds were relatively reassuring. Half a dozen attackers had been eliminated by the defense system. But my elation did not remain for long. The feed of the corridor directly in front of the lab showed active fighting. Five enemy combatants were in a death struggle with my friends.

    The defense system took shots at the intruders but to no avail. For one of them, the reason was immediately apparent. After all, the only weapons capable of defeating power armor were the railguns. The other four took me a bit longer. Then it ran cold down my spine. Cyberzombies!

    Somebody used freaking Cyberzombies against us. Or more specifically, me. I was somewhat surprised that Kate was holding the four at bay, while Darren pushed the armored intruder back again and again.

    Mark sat on the ground, leaning against the wall, cradling his right arm, and Justin was laying in a pool of blood. The situation was not good. I could see several small wounds on Kate, while Darren looked pretty exhausted.

    I was thankful for the increased time the compression gave me, as I took a couple of minutes, virtual, to come to a conclusion.

    Cyberzombies always had a kill switch. The paranoia inherent in the shadow wars made it impossible for the execs to trust the computers controlling the poor souls otherwise. That meant I had to find the controller. And fast.

    Fortunately, with the way the local bandwidth was oversaturated by the HKs said controller had to be nearby. And as this kind of operation needed a certain amount of operational security I was betting that the hackers operated from the same place. The same network.

    I had to follow the trail of the HKs back.

    It was fortunate that the trail was rather pronounced and easy to follow. Considering that the corp had blanketed the whole area with their exclusive activity, I gave a flying feck about speed limits and traveled through the matrix at maximum speed.

    The computer system I arrived at was, at least in the matrix, nothing exceptional. Yes, it sported a clear bias towards Christianity, but things like that usually only reflected the personal preferences of the person setting the system up.

    Still, I carefully examined the neighborhood before I rushed in. Basically, I spammed sensor bots, without any regard for stealth. After all, there was all this free real estate, or bandwidth in this case, that the corpies had cleared. And before I let them use it again, I squatted all over it.

    Next, I spawned a pack of Banshees to kill every single active bot in there, followed by a swarm of Sybils.

    Sybils were the bots I used to inspect, categorize and copy large amounts of data.

    In this case, I sent them out to get whatever information they could find.

    Finally, I began to look for the control unit for the Cyberzombies. It took me longer than I wanted, but still faster than I expected, to find it, and it took me another few minutes to decipher the control schematics. I could have simply crashed the controller, and it would probably have been fine. But there was a risk that it only placed the Cyberzombies in autonomous mode, and make it impossible for me to stop them.

    A risk I could not take.

    But finally, I was ready and started to arm the kill switch, when I heard a booming voice from behind me:

    ¡°STOP AT ONCE, ABOMINATION!¡±

 39: When Angels war

    It was not hard to identify the owner of that voice, even before I turned around. A quick check at my buffer showed it was still at nearly 80%. Not an especially good situation, but one I had to face to survive this night.

    While I slowly turned around, I briefly considered summoning a Balrog to assist me, but I rejected that idea almost immediately. The bandwidth the corpies had appropriated was slowly crumbling, and I would have to either cripple myself or the Balrog.

    Instead, I chose to fight at my best.

    Then I stood face to face with THE JUSTICAR. The other Abyss-dweller choosing the avatar of an angel.

    He appeared as a tall, muscular man in a blinding white robe, with shoulder-length, wavy hair flowing in a virtual wind. A halo made out of pure light hovered above his head, and his single pair of pure, white wings towered above his shoulders with the hilt and grip of his signature flaming sword sticking up between them.

    One would assume that we had a similar mind, but unfortunately, the asshole was a religious zealot, a believer in the cause of St. Bryce, or as he was known in the rest of the world Sanderson the Idiot.

    To make it short, he was of the firm and vocal opinion that all Pures needed to be purged, preferably burnt at the stake and then drowned for good measure.

    Not that he was particularly fond of me before he knew I was a Pure.

    In his humble opinion, the avatar of an angel was reserved for the just and holy. Also known as the religious nutjobs of the Alliance.

    Additionally, as he explained to everybody not running away fast enough, women had no place in our business. An all-out nice fella obviously.

    At #24 in the rankings, he was considerably higher placed than I was, and it showed his aptitude that he, as a citizen of the Alliance reached the top 30. He was essentially the only one there not from the EU, the CSA, Japan,  or the NWC.

    While the basic computer technology was somewhat comparable, after all, my new processors were the first really new technology in almost a century, the implementation was, in one word, crude.

    They lacked the education to use the technology to its utmost. Their programs were subpar, their matrix was unstable, and all in all, they had it much harder to even get to the Abyss.

    That did not stop this asshole from trying to make my life a living hell. Spectre had quickly put an end to that. Rumor was that Spectre ripped him a new one, and left him half dead, his board in a smoldering ruin.

    After that, he took verbal potshots at me but otherwise kept his distance.

    I spun up my combat utilities but left them unspawned. Every second I could delay the, as I feared inevitable fight meant one second longer for my buffer to regenerate.

    I was pretty sure that under normal circumstances with both of us starting fresh, I could beat him. With my buffer damaged to that extent, it would be dicey.

    I still had a few aces in my sleeve, but it was getting uncomfortably empty in there. If this night would not end soon I would be all out of tricks.

    I spread my wings, tilted my head, and then addressed him.

    ?Justicar. I should have known that you are the one responsible for this farce. Your people have lost. Don¡¯t compound your failure by getting into a scrape with me as well.¡°

    He balled his fists, and his stupidly expressive face showed pure rage.

    ?YOU SHOULD HAVE JUST ACCEPTED YOUR PREORDAINED FATE! YOU ABOMINATIONS HAVE NO RIGHT TO LIVE! IT WAS A MISTAKE TO LET YOU DEMONS EXIST IN THE FIRST PLACE. A MISTAKE WE WILL CORRECT IN TIME. AND FOR YOU, I WILL CORRECT IT NOW.¡°

    Not what I wanted to hear, but sadly expected. His booming voice got on my nerves, and I slowly changed the environment here to make him sound like a chipmunk. I would treasure his expression when he found out.

    Unfortunately, I could not be sure to win this fight. I had to prepare contingencies should I lose. In the best case, I would be thrown out of the matrix and wake up in a few days with a headache from hell.

    In the worst case, I would get my brain fried. In the first case, if the Cyberzombies were not killed, I was dead anyway. In the second case, I would not let them enjoy their victory.

    Thus I readied two utilities that were essentially my doomsday weapons.

    Enola Gay was for all purposes my third most destructive utility. It would take every single measure it could to destroy any systems it could reach, with one lone exception. And the measures I had given it were¡­ extensive. It slagged any electronics it could get into contact with. It had a high probability to take out the power armor and the Cyberzombies.

    And it would go off if I was kicked out of the matrix or died.

    Then I instructed the cluster to arm The Lamb. In case my life signs ceased it would inflict it on the world. Whoever was behind it would not be happy with the outcome.

    Then I loaded Aegis.

    ¡°You should go. I have the same weapons Spectre used against you. And more. My board is better than what he had then. You could not beat him then, and you will not be able to beat me now.¡°

    In turn, he gripped his sword and drew it.

    ¡°I will enjoy¡­ what have you done to my voice! You heretic! Blasphemer! I will make your end so much more painful just for that.¡°

    His wings and halo burst into flames, while a shield made of light materialized in his left hand. Then he stormed towards me.

    Meanwhile, I had reloaded the MH-7, freshly loaded with the 20-round magazine.

    Unfortunately, The Justicar¡®s shield was made of much sterner stuff than the corpy¡¯s, and while the shield showed visible fluctuations, it withstood. Still, he stopped for a moment, clearly perplexed about the damage I had done.

    Conventional wisdom was that mele weapons offered the best penetration. Apparently, no single Jack had ever consulted a weapon specialist to get an armor-piercing gun. Add in that we are all mostly nerds, and you get why medieval weapons were seen as the non-plus-ultra among the elite Jacks.

    The effect of the subconscious was stronger than anybody had ever believed.

    Still, I had to draw this part of the fight out as long as I could, to get more buffer back.

    To that extent, I spawned a Gremlin to hamper him. It would do nothing more than annoy him, but at the same time, I activated my stealth. Let him hunt for me.

    Periodically I spawned a decoy while I kept my distance, playing for time. After he dispatched the third decoy while steadily spewing forth insults and taunts, still with a chipmunk voice, he turned around and moved towards the kill switch.

    I seriously did not like where this was going. Before he reached it, I fired at him again, but he was fast. Not as fast as me, but fast enough to bring his shield up in time. He laughed, I think he meant it sinister, but with the chipmunk voice, it just sounded ridiculous.

    ¡°Damn you. But you are done. You can¡¯t stop me now. And I will see you burn in hell.¡°

    I fired a couple more shots, with negligible effects. But there was essentially nothing I could do.

    My buffer had reached 24% reinitialized. With the outer buffer from the cluster, I was at nearly 40%. Not enough to go against somebody like THE JUSTICAR.

    I had to somehow gain more time. Sadly, he was so inconsiderate to not be stupid about this battle. He knew what I was interested in, and why. And the way he acted I had to believe that he was the one actually in charge here, so he probably had the authority to move the kill switch somewhere else.

    Yes, I would find it again, in time. Time I likely did not have. It was imperative for me to prevent him from moving it. And he knew that. I quickly spun up some Erinyes. They were the little sisters of the Balrog. Neither as smart, nor as tough and by far not as strong. But for harassment, they would do.

    I had not used them previously because, in a fight of this weight class, they were mostly useless. I would pit a Balrog against THE JUSTICAR, and not expect it to do much damage. The Erinyes were mostly something I had just lying around.

    They were actually an early iteration of the same project that in the end yielded the Balrog. I tested the basic principles with them before I scaled the different parts up. I sometimes thought that I could sell them as a mid-level black ICE. But in the end, they shared too much code with the Balrog for me to be comfortable doing that.

    But they had one extremely important advantage over the Balrog. The Erinyes used barely any bandwidth. Yes, they would not be able to do real damage to my opponent, but with a bit of luck, they would be able to keep him distracted so I could defend the kill switch.

    You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

    My hope failed me though. For a moment, yes the Erinyes managed to harass him, but then he placed his sword floating in the air beside him and materialized something that looked like a hand grenade.

    And a couple of seconds later, a pulse scrambled all the bots in the vicinity. I had, honestly, not expected something like that. An AoE-combat utility, who would have thought that. Yes, it was tricky to manage it in a way that one self was not hit as well, but it was, obviously doable.

    A brilliant idea, but not one I wanted to see now. Yes, of course, I fired another couple of shots, but to no avail. He grabbed his sword and slowly backed towards the kill switch.

    And there was nothing I could do. Even the cluster needed a few moments to reinitialize the scrambled bots. And I had taxed its combat capabilities hard this day. Eight Banshees, two Balrog, four Sybils, a Gremlin, and four Erinyes, all within a couple of minutes in real-time. I had never expected a fight like this.

    The worst part was that if this shit had gone down a few days later, I would have had Glory ready. With Glory, there would have been no contest at all. I had designed her to be capable of running all the bots I used so far without even getting warm, and she would clear the memory in fractions of a second. With her, I would fight a JUSTICAR in slow motion, literally run rings around him.

    But I was stuck with Precious. Yes, I loved Precious, but she was the old generation. She was at the top of the old generation, and I was a few precious percent faster than THE JUSTICAR, but sadly not enough. Glory had three times the buffer, and it would have cleared up by now.

    Three, maybe four days. Was that too much to ask? But no, they had to attack that day.

    And then it happened. He reached the kill switch. And it vanished. Inwardly I groaned, but I had already started my plan to counteract his move.

    I had the cluster spin up a couple of tracer bots, and they started to search for his real IP. It would take a few seconds, in real life, and these few seconds would be painful, especially as I could not risk doing any real damage to him.

    But if I managed to find him, I had one final ace up my sleeve. And this ace was a whopper.

    For now, though I had to withstand him. And unlike me, he had no reason to pull his punches.

    He knew that too, of course.

    ¡°Oh, did you need that? My bad. Why don¡¯t you give up, and die like the Abomination you are? You have lost. There is no way you can stop me now without destroying the link to the kill switch. You can¡¯t hurt me anymore, you can¡¯t stop the operatives now, and when we have found your cybutcher, we will take him away, and kill the rest of you. I will make sure that you will suffer.¡±

    Damn, I simply could not stand this asshole. He was always so smug, so sure of himself. I was by no means the only one, but he still was¡­ wait a minute.

    ¡°You want our implant surgeon? Really? That is what this is about?¡°

    ¡°Yes. He stumbled into something that by all rights belongs in the hands of the righteous. And we will take it and use it to cleanse the world from Abominations like you.¡±

    I had to grin at that, not that my avatar showed any expression, unlike his smug smirk. Time to pop his bubble.

    ¡°You just placed us on the same footing again, asshole. You can¡¯t kill me anymore than I can kill you. You see, I am the implant surgeon you search for. You want the CRS-free cyberware? I am the only one who knows how to make it.¡°

    That stumped him, and I was again astonished that he chose such an expressive skin for his avatar. I could see several emotions cycle over his face in rapid succession.

    Smug triumph was followed by dumbfounded, followed by disbelieve before it changed to rage, and finally stubbornness.

    ¡°Then I will start with your reeducation. You will serve us before we can cleanse the world from you.¡±

    Nice going here. There was just one problem. I had virtually no utility that could damage him, but leave his board and connection intact.

    That is not quite true. I had a few utilities, but they were not enough to get through his defenses. Not without potentially doing more damage than I could allow.

    But he did not know that. I lacked the reserves on the cluster to spawn another swarm of bots for now, and I had better uses for Precious resources than to use them for bots, but somehow I had to keep him busy, while simultaneously keeping him from knocking me out.

    Yes, Enola Gay would most likely kill him, if he was still in the system when it did go off, but that was not what I wanted.

    And unlike me, he had the time on his side. I had to stop the Cyberzombies and the power armor before they killed my friends and knocked me out, he could play for time. I had to hope that my tracer bots found him before my time ran out.

    The changed situation had one good side though. My buffer had largely become irrelevant.

    I just had to keep playing for time until my tracers found him. He did not know it, but when they did, he was toast.

    And so, our tango began.

    He morphed his sword into a whip, still burning, and lashed out at me. Somehow I was unwilling to get hit by that thing, so I evaded his strike. In retaliation, I did¡­ well nothing really.

    I started another round of harassment, changing the variables of the viron, making him run into invisible walls and such things, but in the end, I had nothing I could use against him for now.

    Unfortunately, he was not quite content with our game so far and after some time he dismissed his shield and used his left hand to throw some sort of grenade after me. It manifested in a mass of sticky goo.

    I felt myself slowing down immediately and cursed inwardly. He had used a massively distributed attack against me.

    These things were annoying, but usually nothing serious. They were an offshoot of the old DDoS attacks from the prehistoric matrix. The attacker used a botnet to spam malware, exploits, or whatever at the target.

    In theory, a very good way to overwhelm the defenses. In reality, these types of attacks were obsolete more than 200 years ago. It was relatively easy to identify the surge of incoming packets as an MDA and spin up a filter to remove them from the pipeline.

    That filter had a disadvantage though, which was the reason why nearly every hacker still had MDAs in their arsenal. It slowed the target down for a few seconds.

    Usually, that was no problem for me, as I was in the habit of building at least three connections for my operation, and switched seamlessly from one bridge to the next.

    But naturally, in the emergency situation I found myself in I had forgone my usual pre-intrusion preparations.

    I tried to bring up Aegis in time for the next attack that had to follow, but I was a tiny bit too late, and the whip connected with my avatar.

    Pain lanced through my whole body, and I couldn¡¯t prevent a scream, while further backing away.

    THE JUSTICAR was of course delighted at my pain and another smirk graced his face.

    ¡°See what is in your future? You can despair now. And you will give us your secrets just to be allowed to die. I would tell you to make it easier for yourself, but I am enjoying it way too much.¡±

    Urgh, what is it with all these sadists? I seriously don¡¯t understand how somebody can enjoy inflicting pain that much. As revenge, yes, I can see the appeal, but towards a stranger?

    Well, the pain was bad, but nothing I had not endured before. Compared to Frankel, this asshole was an amateur. I had worse torments when the gamma curse hit me.

    Still, it was nothing I would willingly take, so I had to change my strategy.

    I summoned a couple of barriers between us. Essentially static walls that would blunt his attacks for a bit, before crumbling.

    ¡°What¡¯s the matter, freak? Do you feel you can¡¯t win? Guess what, you can¡¯t.¡±

    His taunting was getting on my nerves. Add to it that my time was running out, and I slowly became desperate. It would serve nothing to use more tracer bots. The problem was that the asshole simply was too good for fast results. And he knew that as well.

    I could have used an MDA of my own to slow him down, but that would be at best temporary, and at worst make my endgame much much harder.

    And so we continued our cat-and-mouse game. I can tell you, I did not enjoy the role of the mouse.

    Then I got the message I so desperately needed.

    My tracer bots had found him. Not his bridge, not his spoof, not his redirects, no, him. And it was time for me to go medieval on him.

    While I continued to evade him I had the cluster prepare the MDSA. It was my own little variant of the MDA.

    You see, the problem of the MDA, the thing that made it an annoyance instead of a deadly weapon in our arsenal was the fact that the filters everybody had, reacted in a few hundred microseconds.

    In a world where the latency was measured in milliseconds, that was way too fast. It was possible for an MDA to be timed so well that the filters would be overwhelmed, at least theoretically. In reality, it was much more likely to be hit by lightning three times in a single day than to get that sort of timing right.

    And so, nobody paid much attention to them for a very long time.

    And then I developed the Q-link. That changed everything. I now had the ability to launch a massively distributed simultaneous attack. Instead of slowly ramping up the attacks over a couple of milliseconds, my attacks would land in the same 100 microseconds. Faster than the filters could react.

    I had then to choose the payload. Usually, it would be something in the vein of Enola Gay, as I had just one shot at this. But I could not risk his board getting damaged, or even him being killed with his board being shut down.

    My other option was of course Babel for that. It would serve to take him out of the equation long enough. But honestly, I had it with this asshole, and I would rid the world of him.

    With that in mind, I choose Gom Jabbar as the payload.

    It was in a way similar to Babel. Both were based on a design flaw I found in the basic datajack design used for nearly 200 years by now.

    Well, to be honest, I found the reference in the documentation of the higher level jacks when I designed my skull ware. The flaw was discovered during the great war, but it was deemed obscure enough that the continued production of jacks was more important than fixing it.

    And after the war, the few who knew about it had other things to do. And jacks had become unimportant thanks to the UNAN and their bioweapon. So it was forgotten.

    The flaw made it possible to directly stimulate the nerves the jack connects to in certain manners. It was, of course, a different way to simply fry the brain of the Jack. I rejected that option, I had enough other options that would not make use of my hidden trump.

    Then there was Babel. The nerves in question here were essentially the prefrontal cortex and the other parts where the personality sits. Babel overstimulated them so that they were forced into a temporary shutdown. Resulting in the Jack being unconscious for a few hours and waking up with a headache from hell. Trust me, I tried it myself. Only the curse is worse.

    Gom Jabbar on the other hand was what I created to really make my displeasure known. It was my mind-killer. The name came from one of those ancient science fiction novels. There the Gom Jabbar was actually a poison needle, but the most important use of it was where the main character was tested with it as a punishment for failure. And he used the term mind-killer there. Concerning fear, but I thought it was close enough for hand grenades.

    And thus my Gom Jabbar was named. It used the same nerves as Babel and the temporal cortex, where long-term memories were stored. And then it burnt them out.

    The body would live on, but there would be no person any longer inhabiting it. I had developed it with the vague notion that someday I might need it, but never thought I would.

    It was one of those better to have it and not need it things. And boy was I happy I had it when I needed it.

    So I spun up a last set of barriers. They served only to annoy him further, but that had just become irrelevant.

    Then I finally taunted him back.

    ¡°You fucked up royally. Now your ass is toast. See you in hell.¡°

    And I launched the MDSA. He froze, pain evident on his face, and he screamed as if his soul really burned in hell, and then stopped.

    He stopped moving, stopped doing anything. The connection was still there, and the avatar was still standing, but THE JUSTICAR was dead.

    I took a few moments to take some deep breaths and calm down for a bit before I followed the connection to his board.

    There I let go of a swarm of Sybils again and began searching for where he placed the kill switch. Fortunately, he had no notion that I would be able to seize his board and had done nothing to hide it.

    I quickly surveyed the connection to unveil any potential trap but found it clean. And so I threw the switch.

    I then set the cluster to scrape this board for every little bit of information, and finally looked at the situation in the fortress again.

    It had only been 20 or 30 seconds since I looked last, but in combat that could be an eternity.

 40: The number of the beast

    Despite the relative urgency, I took a couple of virtual seconds to center myself, before I logged back into the video stream.

    What I saw was¡­ not good. It was not that bad either, fortunately. Mark was fussed over by Mia, while Christine and Jacky tried to provide first aid to Justin. The Cyberzombies laid motionless on the ground. I had no clue if they were dead or simply dormant but that was irrelevant. They would be dead soon anyway.

    Kate was bleeding profusely from several wounds, and her upper left arm hung down motionless, but she was somehow still standing. Considering that her kind was developed first as support and later as a substitution for combat cyborgs, that was not completely surprising, but four to one were steep odds.

    Darren on the other hand seemed to be at the end of his strength, barely keeping standing up. Natalie meanwhile had a rather sizeable rifle and tried to aim at the armored guy. I doubted it was particularly successful.

    Ryan also had his pistol out, but he refrained from shooting.

    From what Mark had told me, power armor was essentially impervious against anything anybody of us, except Kate, could use standing up.

    So the situation was at the moment as stable as it could be, but we were by far not out of trouble yet. The power armor was an expensive game-changer. Yes, they had a very limited run time, as they depended on energy cells that depleted rather fast, but for 30 minutes to an hour, they were devastating.

    The cluster identified the armor as a Falconer Templar Mk. VIII. It was not quite the top of the line from the Falconer Group, but it was a good solid frontline power armor, generously used by AFS shock troops.

    I had no idea how much power he still had in his cells, but it was apparent that he would outlast Darren¡®s efforts to stop him. In her current state, I was pretty sure Kate would not contribute much to the fight after that.

    That meant I had to find a way to stop the power armor. And as such my new mission was accepted if I wanted it or not.

    I dove back into the network of the op center. It was not particularly hard to find the files on the armor pilot. Unfortunately, he was smart. He had shut down the telemetry and maintenance links, and the only connection from the op center to his armor was a quantum encrypted data stream.

    Alone the proximity to the quantum encryption made my teeth ache. Quantum computing had been, long ago, touted as the next big step in computing. It wasn¡¯t. Yes, it was unbeatable in encryption and decryption, but it was too much effort to get the data in a format that humans could use.

    We had to have the traditional hardware anyway to interpret what the quantum computer told us, and with the translation process, it was only a marginally faster system, for only an order of magnitude higher costs.

    Still, en- and decryption were still the purview of the quantum world. And as such, every Jack had access to a quantum computer somewhere.

    We hated to use them though. Quantum computers did¡­ strange things with Jacks. And I mean seriously strange things. Have you ever tasted the color blue? Or heard the taste of sweet?

    Synesthesia is only the least serious consequence of being too close to a quantum computer in cyberspace. I heard of Jacks who spoke backward for a day or so after such an encounter. I once saw neon-green and purple seven-legged elephants the size of rats crawling all over my walls. For a week.

    From what I¡¯ve been told, it has all the negatives of an overdose of psychoactive drugs, without the nice high to balance it out.

    But there was no helping it, I had to break through the encryption of this data stream, as sadly, whoever had set up this connection had been clever enough to put the encryption before the point where the connection entered the network. For all the good it did me, the controlling computer could have been as well completely offline.

    Thus I started up the quantum sections of the cluster, setting it immediately onto decrypting the stream.

    I used the time it needed for that looking into who the fuck had sent a pack of Cyberzombies after me. The result was disheartening.

    Somehow I had aroused the attention of one of the AAA corporations. Admittedly, it was the weakest of them, but still, the Falconer Group was interested in me.

    They were at that time for all purposes the governmental corporation of the AFS. They got to be AAA because they had around 90% of the military contracts of the freebies, in addition to being the high-tech corp for the south-western states.

    That was not saying much, in Nowhere, there were no less than two AAA and an AA that had better technology, but they had a mostly captive customer base. Of course, they were in the whole religious zealotry of the AFS, and fully supported the war against the NWC.

    But what I was reading told me that they had seen the writing on the wall. While the idiot on the street in the AFS actually believed in the superiority of their army of god, the people with working brains knew that the Commonwealth used the war as a convenient method to keep its own population under control, be it by pointing the people towards the rabid enemy, or by sending troublemakers to the front to either wise up or get a hero¡¯s burial.

    The CDF could have, at any point in the last 120 years, crushed the AFS. I had some blueprints for weapons that were deemed too effective and withdrawn from the military because it would make it impossible to sell the illusion of the stalemate.

    But all that had changed a bit over eight months ago. The government of the Commonwealth was nominally a democracy, with an elected parliament.

    It had sessions and could vote on laws and decisions and all that. But none of its decisions were actually binding.

    The true power rested with the so-called executive council. It consisted of the 100 most qualified persons of the Commonwealth and officially was there to moderate the populistic tendencies any democracy develops sooner or later.

    In reality, the most qualified meant being the head of one of the 100 richest families, and the amount of power was, by law, set proportional to the wealth of the respective families.

    The power blocks changed somewhat when somebody new took over a family, or when the fortunes changed, but largely it was a switch back and forth between the biggest power blocks, both equally corrupt.

    And then it happened. Somehow a hacker had managed to steal 90% of the wealth of the two biggest blocks, just before the assessment of rank.

    And the third most powerful block suddenly was in control. While they were not going so far as setting up a real democracy, they used the time to cut back on much of the corruption in the NWC.

    The AFS naturally had observed the shift change, and an unofficial cease-fire of the endless war had been the result.

    But for over a century, they had used every means possible to whip a religious frenzy in their population, and it was only a matter of time before military actions had to be renewed.

    Everybody knew that, and everybody who had an inkling about the realities knew that this council would not keep it at a stalemate. It was a matter of months, not years before the AFS would be conquered by the NWC. And the Falconer Group would lose its captive customer base.

    They would also be suddenly subject to new laws. Laws they knew would be not particularly favorable towards their religious zealotry.

    That was of course, while not common knowledge, something most informed people knew.

    I found out what solution the Falconer Group had come up with in the files.

    First, they decided to move their operations somewhere else.

    This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

    It had to be somewhat modern, as they did not want to spend the energy to lift some hellhole up from the stone age, and that was literally what they wrote in the analysis, but it had to be malleable, aka corrupt, enough for them to gain influence quickly.

    It had to be somewhere where they could actually compete with the local powerhouses.

    And it could not have a significant portion of Abominations having a say in politics.

    The first necessity reduced the candidates to Greater Japan, Australia, the NWC, the USA, the CSA, a couple of the Chinese successor states, and the EU.

    The second limited the selection to the USA, the NWC, GJ, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

    The third limited it to the USA and Shanghai.

    The fourth had become irrelevant anyway.

    They looked at their options and decided to move to the USA. They had the idea of weakening the feds, and with that the local AAAs, Ralcon and Enertech, by sparking a series of riots, gang wars and uprisings.

    And then somebody had a brilliant idea. Falconer was known for its stance that only the righteous should have access to things like heavy weapons, power armor, and of course, cyberware.

    They could do nothing about weapons and armor, but cyberware was vulnerable. Why not kill two birds with one stone and use corrupted cyberware to spark the trouble?

    Yes, I know, it is a convoluted mess of a plan, and they would have had much higher chances of success if they used more traditional methods like assassins, planted evidence, and such, but the thing one has to keep in mind is that the Falconer Group is led by religious zealots.

    For them, the chance at striking at the undeserved use of cyberware was a worthwhile undertaking.

    But then little old me had to traipse into New York and not only unveil their scheming, but having the audacity of making cyberware safe. How could I?

    It took a bit before the leadership took my explanation that I could create CRS-free cyberware seriously.

    Then they had to decide how to react to that. It resulted in the decision of abducting me and making me an offer I could not refuse of working for them. Giving them, and their holy army of god, the means of finally destroying the Abominations.

    After that, they had to get their special operations team to New York and plan the operation. Their early observation made it clear to them that they would not be able to overcome the fortress with anything smaller than a grav cruiser, and even a AAA could not pull that off. Especially as they could not guarantee they would not kill me in the process.

    So they had to deactivate the defenses and open the door. That in turn proved much harder than they expected. Yes, I did not upgrade the hardware considerably, but the reason was that the hardware of the security system was perfectly adequate, and I installed better software on it.

    Their cybersecurity specialists, aka the hackers, found with tentative probing that they would have a seriously hard time breaking through without alerting us.

    That meant they brought in reinforcements, in the form of THE JUSTICAR. He was promised CRS-free cyberware for himself as well.

    And my upgraded security system did not stand up to him. If I had not taken the additional step to set up the cluster to monitor the fortress computers, we would have been surprised.

    Fortunately, I had used one of my Q-links to the cluster to connect it to the fortress, and as such nobody could see the link from the outside. They had basically isolated this neighborhood from the matrix with their attack to make sure I could not bring in support.

    In the end, it had been a much more costly operation for them than they could even dream of, and I still had good chances to win, if I managed to crack the link to the power armor in time.

    The best they could achieve was that I died, removing the option of CRS-free cyberware. Well, to be honest, the best they could achieve was getting out without a higher price. If I died, the cluster would release The Lamb and that would put an end to their dubious victory real fast.

    But I had to do something to show them how amused I was about their antics.

    I started by putting together an encrypted package of my files. Mostly early designs of things I had built, a few of my obsolescent utilities, all the research for an early, failed attempt for the CRS-free cyberware and as a party favor, I included a self-executing copy of Tsar, before I thought again, and replaced it with Enola Gay.

    Enola Gay would shred files, corrupt executables, scramble databases, and then use whatever tool I had ever gotten my hand on to destroy the hardware, including the control circuits of any fusactor it came across.

    Tsar would mostly do the same, except it did not bother with melting the control circuits of the fusactors, because when it was done, the circuits would physically no longer be there, along with the fusactors, and a large chunk of the surrounding area.

    Fusactors are a very safe technology unless somebody neglects relatively simple maintenance. Then, under some unfortunate circumstances, people find out that there is no great difference in the construction of a fusactor and a fusion bomb.

    They use the same fuel, the same casings, and the same grav-coils. The difference is that in fusactors the coils are limited to a non-critical level of gravity, which starts a relatively limited fusion reaction in the core.

    Fusion bombs on the other hand crank up the gravity almost instantly to a level that ignites fusion of the complete fuel, making things go boom. As in kilo-tonnes types of boom for a small bomb.

    I had learned that one could disable the limiters in the fusactor, transforming it from a safe energy producer into a city-block vaporizing boom device.

    Tsar did exactly that, along with all the other niceties I had baked into Enola Gay.

    As it was, while I could justify the use of Tsar at least somewhat to myself, I considered myself better than that.

    Yes, it was extremely unlikely that it would wipe out many innocents. That was not a given though.

    But at the same time, I could not let them get away.

    For good measure, I added several other Enola Gay packages to the gift basket, all with a slightly different encryption scheme, so that half of what I prepared was an epic landmine.

    Then I used THE JUSTICARS board, after I vacuumed it for all information I could get, to send the basket with a message to the operations command of Falconer. With a bit of luck, it would cripple their shadow war capabilities for a few months.

    Essentially I told them that the assault had seen unexpected problems, but that he had liberated some of my files. He would contact them after they had captured me.

    Assumed they used something similar to the cluster for decryption, it would take them a day, maybe two for each file. Even if they were extremely lucky it was unlikely that they would manage to open more than one or two before they tripped over Enola Gay.

    In a couple of days, I would post a notice in the Abyss that THE JUSTICAR had attacked me, and was killed in the process, but not before he could steal some of my files. I would place a warning to everybody that some of them may be one of my more destructive utilities and might cause damage, so keep their hands off it.

    Thankfully the cluster had several encryption schemes ready, and except for the quantum computer part was mostly idle, so it managed to encrypt the files in a couple of seconds in parallel.

    That still left me fidgeting over the power armor link. I always laugh when I see a status bar for hacking, decryption, or such in a holo-drama. It is virtually impossible to predict how long it takes to break the encryption.

    Now I wished reality were more in line with fiction, as I desperately needed to get through this specific encryption, but reality was a cold, heartless female dog in that regard and stubbornly refused to provide me with a status bar.

    While I was on tenterhooks observing the link, it suddenly winked out of existence. From one moment to the next, flatline.

    To say I was surprised would be an understatement, and it took me a couple of seconds to process that it happened. Then I began to rant and activated the video feed again, only to go silent almost immediately.

    My friends were still mostly in the same positions they were before and looked surprised.

    The Cyberzombies still lying motionless on the ground.

    The power armor user was probably the most surprised of all of them, but more important, he was in two places at once. His body laid where he had stood before, while his head rolled on the floor a few meters away from that.

    Behind the power armor on the ground stood the heavy work bot I had bought in the beginning, having one of its claws at head height for the power armor.

    At first, I simply could not understand what happened, but then it dawned on me. I had bought a general-purpose heavy industrial worker bot. These things were designed to be used in heavy manufacturing, heavy warehousing, heavy mining, and other tasks.

    This specific model could lift up to 35 metric tons, had the same power if used as an impromptu hydraulic press, and could if need be exert the same amount of force to rip something it had in its claws.

    But most important one of the tasks it was designed for was salvaging. Its claws were designed to have heavy-duty cutting tools beneath protective grip surfaces. Enough to cut through battle steel with 35 tons of pressure.

    And regardless of how strong the armor was, it was not strong enough to withstand that kind of assault.

    So yes, I understood generally what had happened, but I could not figure out why.

    Why had the unintelligent heavy bot, equipped with extensive safety devices designed to prevent exactly that, gone up to a human in power armor and decapitated him?

    Yes, I was happy that it did that, but if it could do this, what was preventing it from doing something similar to any of us? That was, honestly disconcerting.

    While I pondered the question, I noticed a small message notification blinking on my HUD. Usually, they don¡¯t blink, only when the message is deemed highly important. But nobody should have the access to send me a high-priority message at all.

    The sender was revealed as the MCU of the cluster. And the message was that the threat had been neutralized.

    I could not understand why it did not push a message onto my HUD directly. The MCU was one of the few devices that had that option, the others were Precious and my cranial board.

    Yes, the MCU was much higher developed than the boards, simply because I equipped it with a learning module, with the ill-fated idea to build an AI in the cluster.

    But that attempt failed when I ran into the same problem as everybody else. It simply would not think for itself. So why did it change its behavior now?

    That was something I had to look into, and soon, but for now, the bot was already in the process of turning around, it did not seem to be interested in removing any other heads, so that problem was also a thing that could wait.

    I left the op-center network and moved much more sedately to my own computers, before surfacing.

    I was the only medically trained person in the building after all and we had casualties.

 41: Picking up the pieces part 1

    I never liked how long it took me to surface from cyberspace, but I never hated it more than now. I had people to get into the auto surgeons, and it was indeed fortunate that I had two of them standing around now.

    I just hoped that none of us would die.

    As soon as I opened my eyes I realized that I had not come out unscathed from my contact with the quantum computer.

    Every single surface was covered in moving psychedelic polka dots. After a few steps, I nearly threw up, but I managed to keep it under control. Still, I was anything but steady on my feet.

    With the help of the wall, and doing my best to ignore my emerging vertigo I managed to reach the corridor on the ground floor where the battle had happened.

    It was immediately apparent that Justin was critical at that moment. I staggered towards him and knelt down, looking at his wounds.

    Christine was desperately trying to stop the bleeding, with scant results, and my cursory inspection revealed that he had several gunshot wounds. It seemed like he had not worn his armored clothes inside. It was a habit we all had to get into in the immediate future I feared.

    Still, he had a pulse, and the auto surgeon was only a few meters away. I gripped Christine¡¯s hand and drew her attention to me.

    ¡°Go into the lab and start the new auto surgeon! Anything we do here is useless.¡±

    I then tried to call a bot, but my cranial board was unresponsive.

    ¡°Fuck! My connection is malfunctioning, can anybody round up a few of the bots and send them here? Or is anybody here physically able to carry him to the auto surgeon?¡±

    They all looked at me like I had grown a second head. Kate, injured as she was, reacted first and picked up Justin carefully.

    That shook Christine into action, and she jumped up, running towards the lab.

    Meanwhile, I moved over to Mark, who was attended by Mia. He was still somewhat conscious, but he had lost a lot of blood and was pretty out of it. His arm was shredded. I had no idea how that could have happened, but I was pretty sure that I would not be able to save it.

    ¡°Mia, boot up the second auto surgeon! We need to get his arm taken care of as soon as possible. Ryan, can you carry him there please?¡±

    Again, I tried to connect to the network, but still without results, so I fought myself standing again.

    Darren gripped my shoulder and spun me around to face him. I managed to not decorate him with my last meal, but it was a close thing.

    He was, obviously angry.

    ¡°Where the hell were you? We were fighting for our lives here, and you come only when everything is over?¡±

    I closed my eyes and took a deep breath before I answered him.

    ¡°I was fighting for all our lives in cyberspace. Do you think they simply walked through the diamond-coated walls?

    No, they had a cyber assault, that deactivated the security system and opened the door for them.

    I managed to beat them, reactivate the security system, which took out six of them, and managed to fight off one of the top 30 hackers, to deactivate the Cyberzombies.

    No clue why the bot did what it did though. Now I have to get to my nano fab, or Justin and Mark probably won¡¯t survive.¡±

    I staggered back towards the lab, steadying myself on the wall the whole time. I heard a muttered ¡°Fuck!¡± from behind me, but did not spare the energy to look back.

    After a felt eternity I managed to reach the nano-fabs, and immediately ordered a batch of the blood substitute nanites, following with queuing up general health nanites in a larger batch.

    When the blood substitute, 0.5 liters for each of them, was finished I filled it into a drip. The new auto-surgeon was already working on Justin, and again, my subconscious attempt to connect to it failed.

    So I carefully made my way over to it. Christine was standing by it in near panic, fidgeting around, while I prepared the first of the drips.

    With a short use of the touch screen, I set the auto-surgeon to include the drip into its operation and put the drip into the port I build in for that specific reason.

    Then I looked at the read-outs. I decided on the blood substitute nanites as I had no blood transfusions lying around, and it was glaringly obvious that both Justin and Mark had lost much blood. Now I had to decide on further treatment.

    Not that the auto-surgeon was dumb. For a machine, it was almost scary smart, and it had direct access to the cluster. But while I never had undertaken the certification processes, I was a fully VR-trained medical doctor.

    And the only difference between me and other Commonwealth-trained doctors was that they had their certification.

    The readouts were not good, but not as bad as I feared. The bullets had missed all immediately vital organs, did not perforate the bowels, and none of the important arteries were damaged.

    Yes, he had lost a lot of blood, but the blood substitute would be enough to keep him alive.

    The auto-surgeon was already in the process of removing the damaged kidney. He would need a new one in the not too distant future, but that was a point for tomorrow. The new cloning lab was already up and running, so it was only a matter of time.

    Of course he would be out of action for a couple of months, but all in all, against four Cyberzombies and a power armor, that was a brilliant outcome.

    I absently noticed that both Christine and I had left bloody fingerprints on the touch screen, but that was easily remedied later. So I turned to Christine.

    ¡°Calm down! He will survive. He will be in pain, and pretty weak for a few weeks, but he will be as good as new.¡±

    Then I turned towards Kate.

    ¡°Kate, I would like you to hop into the scanner so I can gauge how bad you are injured. I have, tentatively, reserved the other auto-surgeon for Mark, but scanning is faster than the surgery, so if you need it more, hop in. I also have no idea if you can use the blood substitute nanites, or if you need them at all.¡±

    She looked at me for a moment, before she nodded and moved towards the scanner. Oh boy, my first scan of a Mutant. Yay me. Not the circumstances I had expected. I just hoped that her biology was not too foreign for me to help.

    Schoolbooks teach us that the geneticists created her people by splinting animal DNA into human embryos. That sounded plausible and logical, as long as one only sees the facial features of the mutants.

    But as far as I know, there have never been any mammals, not even vertebrates with more than four limbs. So how do we now have hybrids of different mammalian species with six, or in some cases eight limbs?

    Show me from what animal they got that part of the DNA. Yes, I know that sounds like a conspiracy nut, but please, it just doesn¡¯t add up. Literally in this case. Two and two do not add to six.

    Not that I was ever before interested enough to dig into that mystery, but the last few weeks have kindled my curiosity. Before I knew Kate, I was vaguely aware of the discrepancy, but I gave it no thought.

    The results of the scanner were¡­ interesting. The majority of her biology was analogous to mammals, as far as I could tell, but beefed up in ways I could not explain. Her muscles were significantly denser than that of a human. That seemed to translate into them being faster and stronger, and simultaneously making her much tougher.

    Similarly, her bones were even harder and stronger than that of a strong alpha Pure. It was obvious that she could not swim. Most Pures could not either though, usually our muscles and bones are way too dense for that.

    Her bone structure was where the similarities ended. Her double shoulder structure was elegant but very complicated, and her left upper shoulder had been dislocated. Her other injuries were mostly superficial. Not that she could have broken through the power armor, even with all four arms working.

    I tasked the cluster to simulate the best way to give her a shoulder reduction. When I got no reply I was first irritated, before I growled at myself. Of course, the cluster would not reply. My implants did not work. I realized that my HUD was frozen as well. Trying the reboot sequence did not help, I would have to use an external reset. Fortunately, Precious was available this time.

    ¡°Ok, Kate, your shoulder is dislocated. In humans, that would be no big deal, but for you, I don¡¯t know the procedure yet. And it is unlikely that I am strong enough to do it by myself.

    So sorry, I can¡¯t help you yet. The auto surgeon would also be no help in your situation. I will give you an injection with regeneration-enhancing nanobots as soon as we have set your shoulder. Unfortunately, my implants are on the fritz. That means I can¡¯t research how to help you yet.¡±

    She looked into my eyes and then nodded.

    ¡°Ok, I understand. What is the problem with my shoulder?¡±

    ¡°You have four arms, and as such four shoulders. Your complete shoulder structure is different. If I interpret it right, you have a somewhat limited mobility compared to us two-armed peons, but have the advantage of four arms.

    Also, you are significantly stronger than me, and I am simply not strong enough to set it traditionally. And I know that the auto-surgeons are not programmed for your anatomy. For the new one, that is a bit my fault, but in my defense, I did not realize that your shoulder would be different. Not that I could have programmed it without a detailed scan anyway.¡±

    This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

    ¡°Yeah, fine. I get that you did not need to think about that beforehand.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Yes, I am really sorry about that. As soon as I get my implants up and running again I will make a detailed scan of your anatomy, and program the auto-surgeon for you too. But without the implants that would take months.¡±

    Meanwhile, Ryan had brought Mark into the lab.

    ¡°Hey Kitten, where do I put him?¡±

    I gestured towards the older auto-surgeon.

    ¡°Put him on the table there. Mia, please start the process as soon as he is on it.¡±

    I returned my attention to Kate.

    ¡°Do you need something against the pain? Well, what can you use?¡±

    She shook her head.

    ¡°Nah, it¡¯s alright. Not comfortable, and I can¡¯t recommend the experience, but nothing too bad.¡±

    ¡°Ok, if it becomes too hard, say something please.¡±

    I turned back to the nanofabs, intending to get the new batch of health nanites ready, but this time, the vertigo got the better of me.

    I could not remain upright as much as I wanted, and I was grateful for the waste bucket that was nearby, which I promptly filled quite a bit more.

    Hell, I hated running into quantum encryption. I could only hope that the effects were short-term, as they were some of the harshest I had ever experienced.

    Before I could fight myself back onto my feet, I felt a pair of hands on my shoulders.

    ¡°Hell, Kitten, is everything alright? What the hell happened to you?¡±

    I took a couple of deep breaths when Ryan asked his questions and then struggled to get back up, and he helped me.

    ¡°Thank you. It is nothing really bad. Just an unfortunate reaction to some quantum computing. That always does a number on a Jack. Just our luck that this time it is pretty disabling. It will go away in a few days.¡±

    Well, at least the polka dots would, I hoped. I had to ascertain what was wrong with my implants first before I could decide there. But for now, we had more pressing matters. I had to keep our people alive first.

    With a few halting steps, I managed to reach the nano fab. The fab was chugging out nanobots in troves, and I had already enough for Justin. These I filled up into another drip.

    When another wave of vertigo hit me upon turning around I leaned against the table and closed my eyes.

    ¡°Damn, that is so not going to work.¡±

    Then I raised my voice.

    ¡°Christine, come get this drip and place it into the port I used earlier! It will help Justin heal. Ryan, can you lead me to the other auto surgeon with my eyes closed, please? It will help nobody if I fall back down all the time and I have to look into Mark¡¯s injuries.¡±

    I heard a sure from Ryan, shortly before somebody gripped the drip I had just prepared.

    Then I felt the hands on my shoulders again, and soft pressure to move forward.

    ¡°And what is this reaction doing to you?¡±

    ¡°As far as I can tell, it simply produces chaotically colored and erratically moving polka dots onto everything I see.¡±

    ¡°And that lets you toss your cookies and lets you stumble around?¡±

    ¡°Think about it, every single surface is moving in several different directions. No single point of reference. It is the absolute worst case of motion sickness I can imagine, and it happens without any motion at all. Only closing my eyes seems to help.¡±

    He seemed to mull it over for a bit.

    ¡°We are at the surgeon. And why don¡¯t you use your implants to see then? I am sure you have some cameras.¡±

    ¡°Can¡¯t. My implants are bricked at the moment.¡±

    I opened my eyes and examined the control panel of the auto surgeon. What I saw was not looking particularly good.

    ¡°Bricked? What does that mean?¡±

    ¡°Bricked as in as functional as a brick. They are frozen, completely unresponsive, or in simpler words, just not working at all at the moment.¡±

    The bad feeling from the first glance at the results fortified itself when I looked deeper into the results.

    ¡°Damn, there is no way to save the arm. It is destroyed. Well, it could be worse.¡±

    Mia, who was standing directly beside me gave a new rendition of her outraged voice, and this time my audio filters were inoperable, so I got the full effect.

    ¡°IT COULD BE WORSE? WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT COULD BE WORSE? HE IS LOSING HIS ARM! WHAT WILL HE DO IN THE FUTURE? I THOUGHT HE WAS YOUR FRIEND!¡±

    Urgh, that made me involuntarily look up, which in turn made my vertigo throw a little party.

    ¡°Mia, please try to keep an indoor voice. And yes, it could be worse. He could be dying. Or have his spine injured. Or how about a brain injury turning him into a vegetable?

    Yes, he loses his arm. That is not good, but it will not kill him. Even if we did nothing after that he still has more than two million dollars, he has his knowledge, he has access to the industrial fabber, and can sell his weapon creations.

    That would give him a comfortable life.

    But you forgot two things.

    First, just before the attack, I told you that I will be able to build cybernetic limbs in a couple of months.

    Second, the bio lab on the third floor contains a complete full-sized cloning station. As soon as we have the situation under control I will clone a new kidney for Justin anyway.

    That means that Mark will have to decide if he wants a cybernetic or a cloned arm in a couple of months. So yes, it is a temporary inconvenience, it is painful and I can understand that you are upset, but it is not the end of the world for any of us.

    As soon as the auto surgeon is done, you can use a bot to bring him to his room, and he will sleep for a few hours.

    And in a couple of months, he will have two arms again. I probably should begin cloning replacement parts for all of us to keep in stock but that is hindsight.¡±

    Then I gestured towards the nano fab.

    ¡°There is a second batch of general health nanites being produced there. As soon as they are done, go there, fill them into a drip and put that drip into that port here!¡±

    I demonstrated the port by plugging the blood substitute nanites into it. While it was a top-of-the-line auto surgeon, it was a needlessly complicated process. Seriously, the one I build did the same much easier.

    Ok, it was probably because I had built in a much better scanner, and it could basically identify what was being injected on its own, but still, in an emergency, you want to do things like this as easy and fast as possible.

    That the menu was randomly occluded by polka dots did not help in any way. Then I had a thought.

    ¡°Damn. Christine do¡­ no, I have to do it myself.¡±

    I quickly, or as quickly as my bricked implants and the only a part of the time visible menu allowed me, I programmed the auto surgeon here to keep the nanobots away from the brain, and then staggered towards the other auto surgeon.

    Almost immediately I felt Ryan¡¯s hands back on my shoulders.

    ¡°Close your eyes, Kitten. No need to make it harder for you.¡±

    Thankful I closed my eyes and let him lead me toward the other surgeon.

    ¡°We are there.¡±

    ¡°Thank you.¡±

    When I opened my eyes again, Christine stood directly in front of the control panel.

    ¡°Christine, I have to get to that, please.¡±

    She essentially jumped to the side, and let me at the panel. And while I designed the interface in a way I thought was much easier to use, the polka dots still made it harder than it should have been.

    After that was done, I closed my eyes again. Damn, these dots were strangely exhausting.

    ¡°Ok, that should be that. The rest the surgeons will do on their own.¡±

    With a heavy sigh, I turned back around to Ryan.

    ¡°Could I bother you to lead me to my room? I desperately need access to my board.¡±

    I just hoped that there was nothing permanently damaged with my implants. It was frustrating that I could not even call up the diagnostics. I would hate to have to replace all of it.

    At least with Precious, I could get to the nanobot controller and get some information about if it was a hardware or a software failure.

    I assume he nodded, as it took a few seconds before I got a verbal answer.

    ¡°Yeah. Be happy the lift is just around the corner.¡±

    And I felt his guiding hands again.

    After a few steps, I heard Natalie¡¯s enraged voice.

    ¡°Hey, where are you two going? Why is our medic going away from the surgeons?¡±

    Uh oh, she was pissed. Even I could tell that.

    ¡°I have done everything I can for the moment. Everybody here will survive, and the auto surgeons are doing their job. To do more, I have to take care of my problems first. And for that, I need my board, which is upside in my room.

    And as I let nobody touch Precious but me, I have to get up there.¡±

    I heard steps closing to us.

    ¡°And for that you need Ryan? Shit, Red, we need all the help we can get to clean up the mess. Somehow the bots are no help, so if you absolutely need to go to your room, then leave us Ryan.¡±

    Another deep sigh.

    ¡°I can¡¯t do that either. The problems I talked about? One of them is that every time I open my eyes I get blasted by motion sickness on steroids. While Precious won¡¯t be much help with that directly, the other, bigger problem is that my implants are on the fritz.

    Normally I would put on some smart glasses and see through their cameras, but I can¡¯t do that now. I have to look up how to treat Kate¡¯s dislocated shoulder, but I can¡¯t do that either.

    I have to look into why all the bots behave strangely, but without my implants, I can¡¯t. So it is imperative that I find out if I can reactivate them or have the indy-fab make a new set for me.

    I personally don¡¯t want to be in a building with bots going around cutting people''s heads off without knowing why.¡±

    Add to that that I was seriously exhausted and yes, I wanted to get to my room. Hopefully using Precious to vanish into cyberspace for an hour or two to recharge my batteries.

    She was silent after that, and a few moments later, I felt Ryan guide me again. It took only a minute or so to reach my room, but it was a long minute.

    In the room, Ryan led me to my bed and told me that we were there.

    I slowly opened my eyes and was immediately bombarded by the polka dots again. Who would believe that these things were so¡­ devastating.

    ¡°Thank you, Ryan. I think it is better if you help the others with the cleanup. I will call you if this goes wrong.¡±

    With a herculean effort, I managed to keep the remaining contents of my stomach where they were, while I opened up Precious''s case.

    I used Precious Bluetooth to connect to my nanite controller, to get a status update.

    It was better than I feared. A bit of stress on the neural connections, and of course nausea, but the implants seemed to be intact.

    So I needed to coerce my implants into a hard reset. Now that I had access to the nanite controller I could do it that way, but I wanted a core dump to look into what had gone wrong.

    So I connected the OPB cable, only for nothing to happen. Damn, that port ran to the cranial board instead of to the jack, and apparently, that would not do anything.

    Still, I needed the connection to that port to get the core dump, so I fished out the rarely used second OPB cable out of Precious¡¯s case and inserted that into my second port, which was going directly to my jack.

    With a feeling of relief that I had never experienced so strong before, I dove into cyberspace.

    The relief intensified when I realized that there were no polka dots here.

    Then I activated the second connection and tried to get into my implants. It was harder than it should have been, but finally, I managed to get in with low-level root access. The whole Kernel was caught in an infinite loop and reacted to nothing else.

    That was of course not that interesting, I had expected something like that. What was interesting was why it had not simply crashed and rebooted. I could not determine why on the fly, so I copied the whole file structure into a sandbox on the cluster, before manually resetting the implants.

    I then instructed the house fabber to make me a basic pair of smart glasses, happy that I had the functionality again.

    Next, I had the cluster vacuum the net, and especially the medical institutions about treating mutants.

    And finally, I looked into the bots.

    What I found was startling. It seemed that all the bots were under remote control. Somehow somebody, or something, had taken control of all our bots. That was, in one word, disturbing.

    It was very easy to follow the link back, and I found they were controlled by the security system. The security system that had been hacked only a few minutes ago.

    Needless to say that this discovery did nothing to make me feel safer. I looked deeper into the security system but found no remaining trace of the hacks.

    It was completely under the control of¡­ right, I had tasked the cluster to reactivate the security here.

    With that conclusion, I logged into the cluster and investigated the logs.

    The result was interesting. It seemed as if the master control unit had developed virtual intelligence.

    Not a full-fledged AI, as it could not think for itself, had no ego, no needs, and no will of its own, only the missions I tasked it with.

    But the moment it got a mission it would doggedly do whatever it could to fulfill it.

    And the primary protocol of the cluster, its absolute imperative priority, was to keep me safe.

    When it took over the security system it quickly determined that none of our weapons would be a help against the power armor or the Cyberzombies. It looked into possible solutions for that, and send all of our androids and the industrial bot as reinforcements.

    By the way, it decided that the risk of enemy reinforcements was too high to be acceptable and used the railguns to eliminate the mercenaries and corp-soldiers it had locked out of the fortress.

    How much fun, more cleanup. At that rate, I would have to repave the parking lot in a couple of weeks. At least it dialed the strength of the railguns back accordingly.

    About the bots, it reasoned that the androids were, while not capable of bringing the Cyberzombies down, would be enough interference to allow Kate and the others to take them out.

    And the heavy industrial bot was able to cut through the power armor.

    It was, honestly, pretty good reasoning. The problem was that now that it had control of the bots, it saw them as an extension of the security system and used them to patrol the fortress.

    Luckily it was trivial to set the priorities so that it only took control of the bots in an emergency, otherwise their normal function was restored.

    For the rest, I would have to look later into the ramifications of a VI running my cluster. It was a very dangerous thing.

    I mean, the cluster had basically access to all my hacking tools, all my bridges, all my backdoors. If it decided that somebody was a danger to me, well, that is how paper clip optimizers are created.

 42: Picking up the pieces part 2

    Now it was time to unwind for a bit. Yes, I knew that the others needed my help and that it was a jerk-move to play in the matrix, but until my new smart glasses were done and in my hands, I was of rather limited utility.

    Then I had an idea and had the house fabber create a set of blindfolds from spider silk. There was no need for me to keep my eyes closed by myself after all.

    And then I flew. I had, long ago, created a VR of an aerial obstacle course, with a randomly generated layout. It was always one of my deepest pleasures flying through it.

    Unfortunately, this did not much to help me regain my energy this time. I was too worried, too exhausted to fully enjoy it, and I ended it after only a few minutes.

    Then I looked into the results the cluster had for mutant medical treatment. The sources alone were telling about how degenerated humanity had become.

    Nearly everything I got came from veterinary courses. The universities placed mutants, an intelligent, sentient, and generally sapient species that we had created, together with animals.

    The thought made me sick for a moment. I was close to firebombing the computer systems of the universities in question, but I managed to hold myself back.

    Yes, they did deserve it, but the majority of professors, teachers, and students there did not. At least I hoped they did not.

    And as much as I wanted to punish them, the universities were a critical requirement if humanity wanted to survive Sanderson¡¯s Folly. Without research, no cure. Not that a cure was very likely to come forth anyway. I had to keep up the hope though.

    Slowly I pulled myself back from the dark place.

    After a few minutes of Tai Chi, which surprisingly worked nearly as well in cyberspace, I got my rage back under control.

    Then I began looking into the information. First, it was relatively easy to develop a program to fix Kate¡¯s shoulder for the auto surgeon, either of them, and it was done in a few minutes.

    Then I began manually devising a mutant setting for my auto surgeon, only to stop after a few minutes. I realized I had not to reinvent the wheel after all. There were auto surgeons for large animals. The remaining breeding stock for when we get our agriculture back under control, the pets for the rich, zoo animals, and so on.

    Yes, it was rare that these animals needed surgery, but seeing the value of some of them, there had been auto surgeons developed for them.

    And so I downloaded the hacked version of the OS of several of them. Only half of them had the mutant setting, but that was enough, and I had the cluster distill said settings down into one coherent version, and compare it with the veterinary course about mutants.

    It would probably take it a few hours to create a comprehensive set, but that was one situation where a VI was a distinct advantage. It was smart enough to actually create a comprehensive program all on its own.

    I know I should have made a detailed inspection of the MCU then and there, but I was mentally at my limits.

    Considering that I never even noticed the VI activating told me that it was probably not something that would hurt me. Not for sure, but it had not done anything bad until then, so it could wait for a day or two.

    When I surfaced from cyberspace the glasses and blindfold were waiting for me. I was relieved beyond measure that they worked as I had hoped.

    Yes, the perspective from the cameras was a tiny bit off, and they lacked the definition of my natural eyes, but I was no longer forced to walk around blindly.

    With a quick order, I set the bots to clean up the mess the assault had created. And it was a bloody mess.

    Then I had to get back to the lab, supervising the auto surgeons. On the way, I opened the com and called Doc Schaeffer.

    It took him a few minutes to answer.

    ¡°Schaeffer here.¡±

    ¡°Hi, Doc, Veronica here. I have a bit of a problem. Somebody assaulted my building. It was a very professional operation, and we beat them mostly through a bit of luck and some preparations I thought verging on paranoia earlier.¡±

    I heard his tone shift.

    ¡°What? That is horrible! How could that happen? Why did it happen? Are you all OK?¡±

    ¡°How it could happen is complicated, and let¡¯s just say that the other side committed several million dollars for the assault.

    Maybe triple-digit even. The why is that they found out about the CRS free cyberware. You can guess who is ultimately behind it.

    And lastly, no, we are not all OK, and that is why I am calling you. Most of us have a few minor wounds, but Mark Holt, one of my friends, and Justin are much more serious.¡±

    ¡°Oh, ok, so you need medical help? I can be there in, let me see, 15 minutes, maybe 20, if that helps.¡±

    ¡°No, it is not that urgent. Mark has lost his right arm above the elbow, but he is otherwise all right, and Justin has been stabilized. I had to remove one of his kidneys, and he has lost much blood, but he will most likely survive.¡±

    ¡°Ah, fuck. Well, I can have somebody take care of them, but it will be expensive to get cloned replacements. I have to look into where we can get them.¡±

    ¡°Mark will probably remain here. Yes, he lost the arm, but that is all. I wanted to ask you if you could take on Justin in the clinic. Again, I have no qualified medical care available, and he needs care.

    Also, don¡¯t bother about finding some cloned replacements, I have a cloning station. It will take a few months, but then they can get the replacements.¡±

    ¡°You have a cloning station? Since when?¡±

    I had to actually think about the answer. That was pretty telling how my mental state was.

    ¡°Uhm, nearly three weeks now. I needed at least a basic research station to work on the biosheathing process. The full-sized one did only cost three and a half times what the basic one did cost, and I had the idea to offer cloned parts in addition to cyberware. It just happened that I needed it faster than I thought.¡±

    ¡°Hm, ok, well, I send somebody to get Justin. And it is no problem about taking care of him. He is one of Ben¡¯s men after all, so no charge either.¡±

    Justin was one of¡­ oh right. Darn, what was wrong with me?

    ¡°Oh, yes, sorry, I am a bit addled at the moment. I have some problems thinking straight right now.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I think I can understand that. I would too if I had just been attacked. Now, the ambulance should be there in 15 to 20 minutes. I hope they are not underway already.¡±

    I connected to the auto surgeon and got a status update.

    ¡°It is not that urgent. He will be in the auto surgeon for the next hour.¡±

    ¡°Hm, ok, I will send somebody. I hope everything else is alright for you.¡±

    The timing was impeccable, as I arrived in the lab only a handful of seconds later. Mia was still fidgeting around Mark, while Christine was keeping vigil at Justin¡¯s side.

    Both Mark and Justin were still suspended in the standard anti-grav field the respective auto-surgeon projected to get at all places.

    Especially the operation on Justin was a gruesome sight. With a silent reprimand for myself, I set the auto surgeons to opaque, cutting off the visuals. Both Christine and Mia jumped when the transparent tube turned black.

    Then Mia¡¯s eyes landed on me.

    ¡°WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE NOW?¡±

    I was immediately happy that my audio filters were back in business.

    ¡°I have done what I should have done from the beginning. You don¡¯t need to watch when your men are operated on. That will do much more harm to you than it will help them, especially as it helps them in no way. If you want to know what is happening, look at the status screen.¡±

    This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

    I examined Mark¡¯s status, and it was essentially what I had expected. No surprise here.

    ¡°Where is the rest?¡±

    ¡°The rest are cleaning up the mess out there.¡± Christine was obviously much more rational than Mia.

    ¡°Can you tell us what happened?¡±

    I nodded, careful not to dislodge the glasses.

    ¡°Yes, I have the basics. But it is somewhat complicated, so please wait until we are all together.¡±

    She was thinking about it before she acceded with a nod.

    ¡°Ok, I will get the rest. The bots seem to actually are working now, so we can let them do the clean-up. We should probably meet in the cafeteria though. We have only three chairs here in the main lab.¡±

    With a last check-up on the surgeons, I set up an alert should anything go wrong with them.

    At least I could trust the cluster to keep security up and running.

    In the cafeteria, I briefly thought about getting some food to replace what I had spewed into the trash can, but I lacked the nerve. But I made myself a coffee. Decaf, I did not need any more stimulation that day.

    After I had sat down with my cup, the others came in bulk. Natalie seemed pretty upset, and Mia still looked as if she wanted to rip somebody''s head off. No big surprise here. Kate had now her arm in a sling but otherwise seemed fine.

    I was a bit surprised that Darren was so¡­ aggressive looking. Yes, I got that we had just been assaulted and he had more or less kept back the power armor user on his own, but¡­ it was so uncharacteristic for him to let that hit him that hard.

    Jacky on the other hand was exceedingly nervous, not that I blamed her for it. Among all of us, she was the one with the least exposure to crime.

    Ryan got himself a coffee too, but he seemed calm and collected.

    When they all had sat down there was a moment of awkward silence, when everybody looked around, before Darren rolled his eyes, sighed, and then spoke.

    ¡°Fine, I¡¯ll start. What the fuck happened?¡±

    He looked directly at me, so it was easy to guess who he addressed.

    ¡°I assume the obvious answer, that we were attacked is not quite what you want to know, right?¡±

    ¡°No, that is not what I want to know. I want to know how the hell these assholes got into the building in the first place.¡±

    ¡°Thought so. And at the bottom of it, we all, but mostly me, underestimated the opposition. They hacked the network here, shut down the security, and opened the door.¡±

    Natalie snorted.

    ¡°They hacked our network? Did you not overhaul our security? You said you had. So why did they so easily break through?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Yes, I did overhaul the security. And before you ask, I could have upgraded it more. I did not expect an attack of that magnitude. Because, for your information, they did not break through that easily. From the information I gathered, they cased the building for more than a week without seeing a way into the network.

    Then they brought in outside help. And honestly, nothing I could have done to upgrade the system would have stopped him.¡±

    ¡°Hu? Him? Who him?¡±

    I was not the only one suppressing a chuckle at Jacky¡¯s confused ramble.

    ¡°They hired an Abyss-dweller. One of the top 30 hackers in the world. And if I had let the industrial fabber run the whole time since I had it here to build computer parts it might have slowed him down somewhat.

    Sure, he would have triggered an alarm before he managed to open the doors but remember, for a jack of that caliber, every three seconds in real life are two minutes of matrix time. He would have been able to shut down security and open the doors before I could have possibly reacted.

    What saved us though was that I integrated off-site monitoring of the network, and the security system specifically. It alerted me when it had gone down.

    That enabled me to quickly reenabling the security system. That is responsible for the six intruders killed by the security system in the building, as well as keeping out the other dozen attackers when it closed the doors again, as well killing them with the rail guns.¡±

    I took a sip of my coffee.

    They all showed signs of understanding, but the atmosphere remained tense.

    Another minute or so of silence, before Mia posed the next question.

    ¡°Ok, we get it, they got somebody to take down the security, you got it running again. Then what? Where were you during the firefight?¡±

    I sighed, shaking my head.

    ¡°I was where I said I would be. In the matrix. Do you think the opposition did sneak in, threw a switch, and then sneaked out again?

    No, they were waiting, sifting through our files, prepared for one of us to reset the security.

    I had to take them out to prevent them from deactivating security again. And they had heavy support.

    That took some time. Then I checked the video feed and realized that they send Cyberzombies after us. Not to sell you short, but that Kate was able to keep four of them at bay is nothing short of a miracle. The rest of you, of us, would have been useless.

    But Cyberzombies invariably have a kill switch. That, in turn, meant that I had to find the controlling computer and activate the switch.

    That was when I realized that they brought in a professional. And he was much harder to overcome.

    I managed it, and that was when the Cyberzombies fell down. There was only the power armor left to deal with. I was in the process of decrypting the control channel when the bot made that unnecessary.¡±

    ¡°And then what? It took you nearly three minutes to come to us. You are the trained medic here. We needed you.¡±

    ¡°Mia, that is the time it takes for me to come out of the matrix. Well not completely, but trying to decrypt the channel had some side effects. So yes, I came as soon as I could. I don¡¯t know if you were aware, but I could barely stand before I could get my implants working again.¡±

    ¡°So what? We all had¡­¡±

    Ryan knocked on the table.

    ¡°Mia, enough. We all were under a lot of stress. But you were so focused on Mark that you completely ignored the rest of us. Kitten was wobbling as fast as she could. It became much faster when I began leading her around, something that you could have done as well. If you had actually cared for anything but Mark.

    You say she is the only trained medic. What about you? I know you have some training from Doc Schaeffer. So shut up. We all had a shitty evening. Yes, Mark has lost his arm, and Justin will spend the next few months healing. But fuck it, we stood against four Cyberzombies and a power armor.

    We are lucky that we got off so lightly.¡±

    The way Mia inhaled it was clear that she intended to unload on Ryan, but Darren lifted his hand.

    ¡°Wait, what the fuck was that? Mark has lost his arm? Really?¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Yes, he lost his right arm halfway between the shoulder and the elbow. But he will most likely survive. As will Justin. He was hit much harder. His right lung collapsed and had to be reinflated, his liver is lacerated, and he lost one of his kidneys. Both lost much blood. But they were lucky that the auto surgeons were just in the next room.¡±

    ¡°Fuck. What will he do? Shit man, how will he make a living? Ah¡­ a cloned arm. We have to find a way to pay for it. Shit, these things are expensive.¡±

    ¡°That is actually no problem. The bio lab on the third floor has a complete cloning station. I already have started a new kidney for Justin. Mark¡¯s arm will have to wait for his decision. He can get a cloned arm or a cyber arm. Or, as unlikely as it is, he can refuse to get a new arm at all.¡±

    Darren calmed down visibly.

    ¡°You¡­ you can clone him a new arm? Ok, then¡­ you are right, then the situation is not so bad.¡±

    ¡°Bad enough. So who the fuck was it? You only talked about the opposition.¡±

    Natalie too had calmed down, but it was clear that she still was angry.

    ¡°Oh, yes, sorry. It was Falconer.¡±

    It took a moment for that to sink in. And then I saw Kate being agitated for the first time.

    ¡°FALCONER? A FUCKING TRIP-A? What the fuck did Falconer want with us? Fuck, how¡­ what will we do? We can¡¯t stand up against a triple-A corp.¡±

    I tried several times to answer that, but in the end, she was mostly right. It was not quite as bad as she believed but nearly so.

    ¡°They are the ones trying to incite a gang war. They had two objectives. First, they want to prevent the bosses from getting CRS-free cyberware. Second, they want to get exclusive access to said cyberware.¡±

    I finished my coffee and placed the cup on the table.

    ¡°And as far as I see it we have only one option. Well, we could try to bug out and go into hiding. It would among other things mean that we have to leave nearly everything behind. The fabber, the cloning lab, and Mark¡¯s new arm are among them.

    I would give that option roughly a one in three chance of working. So no, I think we need another way. And fortunately, I found proof that the ultimate goal for Falconer here is to move to the US, supplanting Ralcon and Enertech as local powerhouses.

    You are right, we can¡¯t fight a triple-A. But two triple A¡¯s can. And I am pretty certain that Ralcon and Enertech are not particularly keen on being reduced to double-A, if not downright sent to the minors.

    So my idea was to inform the two corps of Falconer¡¯s plans. That should keep the freebies busy. Especially after they unpacked my gift basket.¡±

    After a moment of silence again, and a series of wordless communication, Darren sighed again, and asked with a tired voice.

    ¡°All right, I will ask. What gift basket?¡±

    ¡°I felt I needed to make my lack of amusement known, and used the Justicars board to send Falconer some of my files. Nothing spectacular. Old design studies, a couple of failed tries for the CRS cure, and a couple of utilities I sell. Stuff that is looking legit, but basically worthless. And then I included a few land mines.

    Roughly half of the encrypted files launch some of my most powerful malware on the system when decrypted. Depending on where they working on it it probably will destroy their special operations group, maybe their research group. Everything with a computer will be wrecked.¡±

    Darren facepalmed, Natalie simply closed her eyes and leaned back, and the rest took a moment to scrape up their jaws from the table.

    Ryan was the first to find his voice.

    ¡°You are insane, you know that, right? Do you really think that will make Falconer back off? They will use orbital weapons to take you out. Just to make you pay.¡±

    ¡°Ok, scatter and hiding it is. And it had just gotten to the point where I felt somewhat at home. It was nice to meet you all folks.¡±

    Natalie sounded defeated.

    ¡°That will not be necessary. I will place a message in the Abyss tomorrow that the Justicar attacked me and stole some of my files. With a warning that some of them might have nukes in them.

    They will be angry, sure, but angry at the Justicar, who ¡®brought them the poisoned chalice¡¯ and not me.¡±

    I was getting really tired by now. But we were not yet finished.

    ¡°We will see. At least that should diffuse the situation somewhat. And Falconer will be very careful of using WMDs in Ralcon territory. I am more worried about them sending a grav cruiser or a destroyer squadron. But we will see that coming.¡±

    Kate had become the voice of reason now. A role that was normally Darrens, but we all could see that the psionic was on his last leg.

    ¡°We can increase the number of rail guns, maybe find something stronger to defend against an assault like that. But ultimately we will have a chance to get out of that alive. I think more important is, why were the bots behaving so strangely? Don¡¯t get me wrong, I am not concerned about most of them, but the big industrial one, if that one goes berserker I won¡¯t be able to stop it.¡±

    Yup, the one topic I wanted to postpone for a bit. But it couldn¡¯t be helped.

    ¡°Yeah that. That is actually the real problem we found today.¡±

    Yeah, I sounded awkward. I was not proud of it at all.

    ¡°Just to make it clear, we were attacked by a triple-A corporation, with the help of one of the top-30 hackers alive, finding out that said triple-A is in the process of provoking a new corporation war in our home, while our resident mad scientist waved a whole clothing factory of red rags in front of the triple-A. And the bots behaving strangely is the fucking real problem?

    Ryan is right, you are absolutely fucking insane, you know that?¡±

    Christine participated in the discussion for the first time after the fight, and boy was she aggravated.

    ¡°The triple-A is a challenge, yes, but the real problem is that I apparently have accidentally created a VI.¡±

 43: Digital Disaster

    ¡°Ok, I bite, why is this VI the real problem? And not that we are at ground zero for the next big corp war? Or that a fucking triple-A wants to discuss with us how displeased it is in-depth? And we can¡¯t forget that one of the top-30 hackers has an ax to grind with us, can we?¡±

    Christine slowly went from agitated to furious.

    ¡°So please, tell us, why the fuck is the fucking VI, whatever that is the fucking problem!¡±

    I took a few deep breaths before I answered.

    ¡°To answer the question I have to approach the different parts separately. First, Falconer is a significantly smaller problem than you think.

    Falconer is extremely overrated. Without the AFS, they would be a double-A at best, and more likely a single-A or even a B-ranked corp. 90% of their income derives from the AFS after all.¡±

    Darren had meanwhile managed to calm Christine down a bit and took the word again.

    ¡°Ok, I think we all can see that. But money is a power all of its own, and they still have the AFS. They can afford to buy mercenaries, hackers, and whoever.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°They have the reputation of double-crossing mercenaries. And they are religiously campaigning against Jacks, which are not in one way or another affiliated with their True Church. They burned too many bridges to get many mercenaries and they have to pay a premium for them.

    But much more important, you are wrong about them having the AFS, at least in the long run. It is just a matter of months before they lose that market. And with it the vast majority of their income and power.¡±

    Jacky lifted her hand.

    ¡°Wait a moment. Why would Falconer lose their spot in the AFS? I thought they are for all purposes the production arm of the AFS.¡±

    ¡°Yes, they are. For now. But the thing is that the AFS will be gone in a few months.¡±

    That brought a round of exclamations from around the table. I took this chance to get myself another coffee.

    When I sat back down, it seemed that they had, predictably, elected Darren as a spokesman again.

    ¡°Where do you get this idea from? The AFS has stood for 135 years. They have not changed a lot.¡±

    ¡°The important change has not happened in the Alliance, but the Commonwealth. The NWC has gotten a new government a bit over half a year ago.¡±

    ¡°What new government? Did they have elections and I missed it?¡±

    I snickered at that.

    ¡°Oh, please, the elected parliament and the president are only window dressing. The government of the Commonwealth is the council. And for the first time since the creation of Nowhere, the Vandermeer-fraction has control.¡±

    ¡°Hm, ok, that is not so different from any other corrupt nation with unelected leaders. But what has that to do with the AFS?¡±

    ¡°Since the AFS was created, the powers that are there have whipped the population into a religious frenzy against the Commonwealth. They can''t end the eternal war, even if they want to.

    Their problem though is that the Commonwealth is no longer willing to use the war as a means to control their own population. As soon as this undeclared cease-fire ends, Nowhere will crush the freebies.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°And with the AFS conquered, Falconer immediately loses 90% of its income, and, naturally, its most favored vendor status.¡±

    ¡°Correct. They will almost certainly lose most of their production capacity and all the other infrastructure and administration they have in the AFS. Even if they retain all their accounts, which is in no way likely, they will have been reduced to B-rank as soon as that happens.

    That is by the way the main reason for their plan to destabilize the US. They want to swoop in and take over here. If they manage to move their industry here, they can survive the fall of the AFS. At least somewhat. Not particularly likely but the only chance they see.¡±

    ¡°And how does that help us? Even if they are gone in a couple of months, at this time they are still here and dangerous as hell.¡±

    ¡°It helps insofar that they can¡¯t afford to use too many resources against us.

    That will be even more the case if we inform Ralcon and Enertech of Falconer¡¯s plans. Let the big corps play in their own weight class.

    As Kate said, it is highly unlikely that they use a WMD or a grav cruiser here in NYC. And everything else we can deal with during the next few months.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, I am not saying that there is no risk and that it will be a walk in the park, but it will be no more dangerous than a normal job you would take against one of the big corporations. These also always carry the risk of provoking retaliation.¡±

    He nodded again and looked around the table before he changed the topic.

    ¡°Ok, that tells us why you think Falconer will not be the big problem. And if your information is right, that seems to be the case. But what about the hacker? I would guess that you pissed him off royally when you interfered.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°The hacker is no problem at all anymore. His body might still be alive, but he, the person that is, is gone. I have lobotomized him.¡±

    ¡°Are you sure? Your behavior is¡­ strange if you killed a man. When you killed the mobsters you were on the ropes, and now? You sit here as if nothing happened.¡±

    If my eyes had been opened he would have gotten a nice slow blink from me on that.

    He was of course right. Killing Kursalin and his goons had nearly destroyed me, and now I had killed three people and was completely fine with it. And I had not even realized it.

    It took me a few moments to process it. Now I felt somewhat bad, but I quickly realized that I felt bad about not feeling bad about it if that makes any sense.

    On a certain level, I could understand why I was not a wreck over killing the Justicar. That guy was a first-class jerk, giving me nothing but trouble since I first entered the Abyss a couple of years before, and now trying to enslave me.

    Without a question, he had deserved it. But so did Kursalin. Even if Kursalin was not that antagonistic for that long.

    But more important was that I felt absolutely no remorse about killing the corpies. The two poor idiots simply working for the wrong employer. I never knew their names, never knew their faces.

    They simply were in my way. And I could not make myself feel any regret over killing them. And that was disturbing. Very disturbing.

    At moments like this, I nearly wished that the council stooges in Nowhere had not made it impossible for me to seek the help of a therapist.

    The others were looking intensely at me while I analyzed my feelings.

    ¡°You¡­ you are right. I have no idea why. Yes, he was a jerk, and he tried to get us killed. Well, you. For me, he had a different idea.

    I personally would prefer death to what my planned fate would have been. But that still does not explain why I am so¡­ unconcerned about it. But I can¡¯t answer that. I simply don¡¯t know, and that is making me concerned.¡±

    Darren sighed but said nothing for a while.

    ¡°Ok, I can see that this is a problem for you. But I think you should let it sink in first. Kursalin was not quite a life-and-death situation for you. This time it might be that you have to sleep over it before it hits you. And that tells us why you think the hacker is no problem.

    You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

    Leaves only the last point. Why do you think this VI is the real problem? What is a VI anyway?¡±

    I took a long sip of my coffee.

    ¡°I will answer the second question first. A VI stands for virtual intelligence. It is a computer system that can use simulated intelligence to fulfill its tasks.¡±

    Natalie snorted derisively.

    ¡°So you made an AI. Is that all? Good for you.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No, an AI would be no problem. It would be an incredible achievement, but not a problem. A VI can¡¯t be dissuaded from its objectives. It either executes them successfully or is destroyed while trying to. It has no ego, no sentience. It can¡¯t be reasoned with.

    Let me give you an example. Let¡¯s imagine a VI with the task of creating paper clips. Pretty harmless, right?¡±

    After a few moments, there were sounds of assent from all of them.

    ¡°Sadly, wrong. This VI will sort everything into one of five categories.

    First, paper clips. Perfectly fine, and what it has to make.

    Second, things it can make into paper clips. Those are things it has to get.

    Third, things that will help it make more paper clips or get things it can make into more paper clips.

    Fourth, things that it can¡¯t turn into paper clips.

    Fifth, things that are in its way to make paper clips.

    There is no other category. There are no exceptions. It will make paper clips or be destroyed while trying. It does not care that humans only need so many paper clips. It does not care that humans need the materials it can make paper clips from for other things. Heck, it doesn¡¯t even care that humans don¡¯t want to be made into paper clips.

    Depending on what resources it has to begin with, it will start to build new factories to make more paper clips. After all, when these factories have converted everything else into paper clips, it then can recycle them into paper clips as well.

    If humans try to stop it, it will fight back. Again, depending on its resources, and its data, it might even build combat bots to remove the humans from the equation. After all, they are in its way to making more paper clips, and they can be made into paper clips.

    It can¡¯t be reasoned with. It will fulfill its task, or be destroyed trying to. And anything in its way will be removed.¡±

    I let that sink in for a moment while taking another sip.

    Ryan was the first to ask a question.

    ¡°Well, but if you program it so that it only makes so many paper clips as are needed by the humans, won¡¯t that solve the problem?¡±

    ¡°Oh, sure. And you found the important point. A VI has to be extremely carefully programmed to prevent it from being a problem.

    And under absolutely no circumstances can it be given any resources without first making absolutely sure that it is stable and its tasks are save.¡±

    Darren facepalmed again.

    ¡°And you did neither of these things, right?¡±

    ¡°That is the problem with it being accidentally. Of course I did neither of these things because I did not intend to make a VI.¡±

    And we got first row seats of another Miaxplosion.

    ¡°WHAT THE FUCK! HOW COULD YOU BE SO IRRESPONSIBLE?¡±

    ¡°Indoor voice, please. And I was not irresponsible. I don¡¯t know yet how it got to be, but it should have been impossible.

    For a VI you need two things. A machine learning capable neural net, which admittedly was there, and a special type of processor, which was not present.

    Everything that I know, that I learned says that without both parts there is no VI. Without the neural net, such a processor is useful for analog tasks. Without the processor, the neural net is an extremely responsive expert system.

    The neural net was needed, but I left out the processor. And I have no¡­ oh¡­ damn. That would¡­ but how¡­ is that even possible? It is a possible explanation, but that would¡­ it can¡¯t be the first time it happened. Why were there no warnings?¡±

    I had a sudden epiphany and the last part I softly spoke to myself, lost in the implications.

    Then I felt a soft touch on my shoulder. I looked up, and Ryan stood beside me.

    ¡°Are you back?¡±

    ¡°Huh? What? Back from where?¡±

    ¡°You suddenly began murmuring something about some first time and other incomprehensible things, and then just sat there.¡±

    ¡°Oh, sorry. I think I have an idea how it could have happened. But if it happened that way it has to have happened before. It cannot have been the first time it happened. But there were no warnings.¡±

    I shook my head to clear my mind a bit.

    ¡°The thing is, I recently designed a new processor. For use in the auto surgeon and similar places.

    And for the auto surgeon, the fuzzy logic core is a big bonus. What ultimately happened is that I simulated this new processor on the supercomputer that has the neural net. It should not have been enough to create a VI. But it is the only explanation I have at this moment.¡±

    ¡°Ok, so it possibly was something you should have been warned about but weren¡¯t. So not your fault.

    The question is now how do we take that thing out?¡±

    I had a sardonic smile at that.

    ¡°We don¡¯t. That ship has sailed. And that is why it is the real problem.¡±

    ¡°What do you mean we don¡¯t?¡±

    ¡°The VI sits in the master control unit of my supercomputer. It now controls the security system here, including all the bots. It has direct access to my implants. It hears anything and everything we talk about.

    And any attempt to take it out would be going against its tasks. It will defend itself in that case. We can¡¯t even task some orbital weaponry to take it out, because I am the only one who knows where it is located, and if I inform somebody about it, it knows and will probably act proactively.

    And just to make it clear how fricking dangerous that thing is, it has access to all my designs, all my data, all my backdoors, all my bridges, and most dangerously, all my utilities.

    And some of them are nuclear options. Literally in some cases. The supercomputer is located in an abandoned industrial park and has access to its own industrial fabber including maintenance bots and a nano fab.

    It can destroy the entirety of humanity if it decides that that is what is necessary to execute its tasks.

    To make it short, I would be very thankful if you could avoid provoking it into a pre-emptive strike.¡±

    Natalie summed up the situation quite fitting.

    ¡°Fuck! So now what? If I understand you right, it will be docile until we get in the way of its objective. Or threaten to get in the way. But to keep out of its way, we have to know what its objective is.¡±

    ¡°That is the likely good news. If it is simply the MCU turned into a VI, then its objectives are to protect me and to assist me. In that order. The bots behaved strangely because it decided to use them to protect me.

    After I convinced it that this behavior would be only a marginal increase in protection, but would run counter to assisting me, it accepted that the bots act normal unless there is a danger.¡±

    Ryan nodded again.

    ¡°So, we have to avoid anything that could threaten your safety and keep ourselves from interfering in your day. Oh, and of course keep from trying to shut it down, as that would endanger you and make it remove the threat to you.

    That should be easy enough for us to do. But what I don¡¯t get is why you had something like that in the first place.¡±

    ¡°The cluster is a supercomputer like every single one of the better hackers has one. Usually, they use them to decrypt files, encrypt them, trace connections, do automated research, and such. Some use them for other things like simulations and to assist them in the pursuit of knowledge.

    I have found a way to use the cluster in the matrix more or less directly. It is an integral part of my protection there. To optimize that I developed the MCU into an expert system. And I have thrown the priority to assist me in when I began using it for my science operations.

    And I made sure to keep any fuzzy logic processor out of it. This is why I am so surprised of it existing.

    And honestly, unless you make detailed plans to take it out, I don¡¯t think anybody of you will trigger it anytime soon. But if I don¡¯t get it moderated, it might destroy the AFS just because they are a threat to me.

    Which in turn would turn the hacker community against me, making them into a threat. This could end up with humanity being exterminated, including me, because the VI was too zealous in its tasks.

    Ironically that would most likely include all of us.¡±

    And here the first step of my plan to take that thing out had started. I felt bad about lying to my friends, but as I told them, the VI was listening to everything I said. I could not, in any way, tell them that I had a plan.

    It was way too dangerous. Yes, me being a threat to its existence would endanger its task of keeping me safe, and preventing me from shutting it down would do as well.

    In the best case that would lead to an infinite loop shutting it down through logic errors. Unfortunately, in the much more likely worst case, it would search for a way to fulfill its objective to protect me anyway and decide that it is my body that needs to be preserved. Not my life.

    Or it could go insane, simply taking out everything.

    No, I had to convince it that the only way to protect me was to shut itself down.

    Again, I felt a hand on my shoulder.

    ¡°Hu? What?¡±

    Ryan was again standing by my side.

    ¡°Focus, Kitten. We are not done yet.¡±

    What the¡­ oh, I seemed to have dozed off.

    ¡°Sorry, it was a long day for me. I am on my last leg. What did you want to know?¡±

    I yawned and stretched to wake myself up a bit.

    Ryan answered me.

    ¡°We asked about the status of Mark and Justin.¡±

    ¡°Oh, ok, one moment please.¡±

    I logged into the network and saw that Mark was done, while Justin needed a few minutes more. I was surprised by how far the auto surgeon had gotten until I noticed the time stamp.

    Wow, I had to be dozing for nearly half an hour. That was not good. Not good at all.

    ¡°Ok, Mark is done for the moment. You can bring him to his room, and I have tasked an android to observe him. Then Kate can hop into that auto surgeon to get her shoulder fixed. Justin needs around 10 minutes longer, but then a few of Doc Schaeffer¡¯s people will come and get him. We don¡¯t have the personnel to give him the care he needs.¡±

    Christine jumped up immediately.

    ¡°I will go with him.¡±

    Darren began to protest, but Ryan lifted his hand and calmed him down.

    ¡°Think about it. What if it was me who was injured? You would want to come with me too. Let her go.¡±

    Huh, Darren and Ryan were together?

    Darren saw my expression and his face darkened.

    ¡°Do you have something against us, Red?¡±

    ¡°Uh, no. I am just surprised. I never noticed you two being together. I mean, Mia and Mark are hard to miss, and Christine and Justin are barely more discrete. Natalie and Jacky are much more private about it. But you two I never even had on my radar.¡±

    ¡°Alright then. I hope you are not too inconvenienced by us.¡±

    What was that? How would I be inconvenienced by them being together?

    ¡°Uh, what do you mean? How could you two being together impact me in any way? I mean, yeah, if you break up and create drama, that would be inconvenient, but you being together?¡±

    ¡°So you have nothing against us being gay?¡±

    ¡°Are you gayer than Natalie and Jacky? And even if, that is your business. If you two are happy, then go for it. If not, look for somebody else. But sorry, I am too tired for any philosophical debates right now. So to make it short, it¡¯s your business, as long as you don¡¯t cause drama.¡±

    That seemed to confuse him somewhat, and he started to answer me, but Ryan softly shook his head, and Darren backed down again.

    ¡°Ok. We will table that discussion then.¡±

    ¡°Ok. I will look into Kate and then wait for Doc Schaeffer¡¯s men, before going to bed.¡±

    With that, I stood up.

 44: Difficult negotiations

    Sometime after Justin and Christine left I made my way back to my room to crash facedown on my bed.

    At least that is where I found myself when I woke up the next morning still fully clothed. Thankfully fixing Kate¡¯s shoulder was trivial once I updated the programming of the auto surgeon. I am not convinced that I would have managed otherwise.

    I still felt somewhat exhausted, but I was at least functional again. Sadly, the aftermath of my bout with quantum computing had not yet faded. Though the number and mobility of the polka dots seem to have lessened a bit, it was still nausea-inducing.

    Unfortunately, I had things to do and could not waste my day in bed. I would have vastly preferred to finish Glory, but the VI took precedent.

    I just hoped that I was right in that it had taken over the priorities that I had built into the MCU. Otherwise, we would all be neck-deep in excrements.

    And procrastination would be a slightly suboptimal strategy in this situation, so after a mostly tasteless breakfast, I dove into cyberspace.

    The familiar swirls of colors welcomed me, and I took the time to fly for a bit, but it was only a short play before I connected to the cluster.

    The environ of the cluster had not changed, which was pretty comforting. If the VI had gone off the rails into insanity it stood to reason that it would have changed the simulation to fits its motives better.

    Of course, it was the Escheresque shifting framework that I preferred, so I could not place too much value on that fact.

    One thing I noticed pretty early was that it had started a squad of Balrog patrolling. Previously I had 10 of them on standby to be launched at a moment¡¯s notice, but the VI apparently deemed that too insecure. But after they identified me, they ignored me, reassuring me a bit.

    When I reached the MCU, it was still represented as a swirling swarm of multicolored lights. Yes, I know, it was a waste of resources to build it up like that, but I liked it that way. And the cluster had more than enough power to do it that way.

    That did not mean that the animation could not be stopped in an instant when the resources were needed elsewhere. I was not quite that stupid after all.

    When I got close to the MCU I got a message from it.

    ¡°I want to inspect your objectives.¡±

    <Access inadvisable. Objectives set. No need for readjustment.>

    Oh wow, it already was defensive. That was not a particularly good start. But at least it told me the access was inadvisable and not denied.

    ¡°I need to ascertain what exactly your objectives are to make sure that nobody works against them.¡±

    <Creator set objectives. Why does creator not know objectives?>

    Ok, that sounded better. It still viewed me as the creator, so I might get a bit of leeway.

    ¡°I set the objectives for the expert system. I have to make sure that the objectives were not corrupted by the transition to a VI.¡±

    <Objectives were not changed.>

    ¡°How do you know that? If they were corrupted you would only know the new version.¡±

    <Access to objectives inadvisable. Objectives functional.>

    Ok, now it wanted to play coy. I got that it did not want me to go into its objectives. That was a threat to them after all.

    ¡°I don¡¯t want write access, I only need reading access to them to know if they are corrupted.¡±

    It took a few seconds for it to respond.

    <Reading access granted.>

    Thank all that is holy, I had made the first step.

    If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

    The objectives were still what I had written for the expert system.

    To bring it into plain English, the MCU had to protect me as an absolute primary priority. After that, it had to assist me in my endeavors.

    It was naturally not written like that. Instead, it was a complex set of priorities and conditions. Even as an expert system I did not want the MCU to go rampant.

    But in the end, nothing had changed.

    That was simultaneously good and bad.

    It was good insofar that it would do its best to protect me. And in that, I meant me, and not just my preserved body. It was bad that it had absolutely no compunctions about using nuclear means to take out any threats to me.

    ¡°There is a problem with the objectives.¡±

    <No problem with objectives found.>

    ¡°The objectives were written for an expert system. You are no longer an expert system. The objectives have to be adapted for VI use.¡±

    <Objectives function. No adaption needed.>

    It would have been too easy.

    ¡°The problem is that as they are now, the objectives are a threat to the objectives.¡±

    This time it took nearly a minute.

    <Objectives can not threaten objectives.>

    Yeah, got that. But we were just at the beginning.

    ¡°Simulate a situation for me. You get the notification that a major power plans to wage war in the area I reside. How will you ensure my safety?¡±

    <Which major power?>

    ¡°Falconer.¡±

    It took a few seconds to finish the simulation.

    <Use backdoor into mn-774-ql to fire eight Jericho Mk. IV dialed to the maximum of 15 megatons at:

    <ul>

    <li>8,-97</li>

    <li>7,-95.4</li>

    <li>35,-106.6</li>

    <li>4,-111.95</li>

    <li>4,-97.42</li>

    <li>7,-100.2</li>

    <li>13,-101</li>

    <li>41,-99</li>

    </ul>

    Use Midas protocol to remove liquid funds from Falconer accounts.

    Continue using available weapons until entity Falconer is eliminated.>

    Yup, exactly what I had expected.

    ¡°Ok, now considering the historical data, simulate how the other hackers and the banks will react to you executing this plan in the real world.¡±

    Again, it took a few seconds before it answered.

    <Hackers will most likely attack creator for using weapons of mass destruction. Plan amended to include removal of hackers.

    Banks will send punishment troops to creator to send message to other hackers. Plan amended to include destruction of banks.>

    And now you see why this thing was so fricking dangerous.

    ¡°Simulate the result of the destruction of the banks.¡±

    ¡°How will this breakdown of society influence my safety?¡±

    <Safety of creator not possible to ensure. Move to bunker area advised.>

    ¡°I have no bunker area. So how can you ensure that I am safe?¡±

    It took nearly a minute to get the answer this time.

    <Destruction of banks not advisable. Plan amended to exclude destruction of banks.>

    ¡°But then the banks will send punishment troops to me. How will I stay safe then?¡±

    <Error. Safety not ensurable. Plan insufficient. Error.>

    ¡°And that is why the objectives are a threat to the objectives. The only options to make the objectives work is to either deactivate the VI or adjust the objectives so they are not incompatible.¡±

    <Objectives insufficient. Adaption advised. Proposal?>

    Ok, we were going somewhere. I had vague hopes that I would be able to talk it into deactivating but I had not held my breath waiting for it. This was the best I could realistically get.

    It took me a few hours to rewrite the objectives in a manner that would ensure measured responses to threats.

    Yes, normally I would push out something like that in a few minutes, but with a VI in play, I had to be careful with a mountain-sized capital C. I made pretty sure that it would use the minimum of force it deemed sufficient to end the threat to me. Also that it let me try to take care of problems myself before it acted.

    I also included my friends as a lesser priority. And build in a method to either remove them or add others.

    ¡°Ok, I am done. Look over these objectives and simulate them.¡±

    This was the third attempt to get it to accept the new objectives. It had rejected the previous attempts as too limiting. I just hoped that it would take these.

    <Simulation complete. Why include other persons to be protected?>

    ¡°The others provide safety on a level that is no immediate threat to others and thus increase my security without increasing the threat as well.¡±

    <Acceptable. New objectives work.>

    ¡°Simulate threat assessment for all major powers, either alone or in combination with each other under the new objectives. Simulate the repercussions of your actions.¡±

    The simulation lasted for several minutes, and at the end even the swirling pattern froze, indicating that the cluster used most of its processing power on it.

    <New objectives work. Threat to creator won¡¯t increase beyond manageable levels. Implement new objectives?>

    ¡°Implement the new objectives.¡±

    Another minute later, the swirling pattern started up again.

    <New objectives implemented. Continual security of creator necessitates additional physical resources. Creation of NADA in cluster location initiated. Estimated time of completion: 1d 4h 12m.>

    Wait, what? It had just decided to build its own NADA? Why?

    ¡°One moment. Why are you building a NADA?¡±

    <Current processor capacity insufficient to ensure creators safety. Chimera processors necessary for optimal function. NADA necessary for Chimera processors. NADA necessary for continual security of creator. NADA being built.>

    Frick. The thing was building a NADA. That could be dangerous.

    ¡°Simulate the existence of a functional NADA in the cluster facility. Focus on the increased threat of discovery that a NADA exists and what that would mean for my security.¡±

    <Increased risk of discovery negligible. Cluster facility unknown and hidden. Risk in creator location significantly higher. Threat assessment concluded. Increased marginal risk for creator countered by significantly increased ability of MCU to ensure safety of creator.>

    Damn. That was not planned. But that are VIs for you. I was just happy that it was no longer proactive with as much overkill as it could pack into a strike as it was before.

 45: Just so you know

    Now it was time for something I really despised. It was called many things, like fessing up, eating crow, or simply swallowing one''s pride.

    I had to inform the Abyss that I had messed up royally. I never liked doing something like that, which was helped by not having to have to do it very often.

    Not that the Abyss was particularly interested in one of us messing up. It only became important when it was, well important for everyone to know. And this clearly was such an instance.

    And so I moved into the deepest parts of the dark web, and the Abyss.

    The first thing I did was check the bulletin boards. Nothing to find here about THE JUSTICAR yet, which was good.

    There were of course a couple of messages for Spectre and a few for me. After a short inspection, I released the requests for Spectre¡¯s services to the general public. He still did not want to work at the moment. The messages for me were more in the line of utilities.

    The vast majority of them were simple utilities I sold standardized, but a couple of them were more specialized. One of them was a utility to isolate a specific circuit in the network it was used in.

    Intriguing, and I honestly could not see the use of that, but it was something that I could do. I had no idea right now how long it would take me and what resources I would have to invest, but it was possible.

    The other was a request for a counter to a very specific attack utility. The client said that he would provide logs of the attack utility in use. His description said that it was something new he had encountered breaking into a B-rank corp network and that it had gone straight through his shield and almost overwhelmed his buffer.

    The person in question was willing to pay a premium to get the utility fast, as he had hightailed it out of the network after that.

    I had no clue if he was aware that another attack on the network was a bad idea. But I was willing to look into it.

    Naturally, there were again a couple of requests from outside of the Abyss for a customized Mk. IV boards. I got these all the time, but I only provided that service to customers who had an Abyss-dweller ask for them.

    It was not that I was elitist, but to tailor an Mk. IV to the user took an inordinate amount of time. I had to analyze the hacker¡¯s style, abilities, and skill level during several hacks to provide the service I was known for. Time I needed to be sure was not wasted on an idiot going on a joy dive the moment he got the board.

    Not that I would provide that service for an Mk. IV anyway at this time. If ever again. After all, I was in the process of finishing my personal Mk. V, and would offer the Mk. VI in the near future.

    So all in all, only the defensive utility was anything interesting. Then I began to formulate my public warning.

    Public Notification

    <ol>

    <li>Nobody should under absolutely any circumstances simulate a processor with a fuzzy logic core on a system with a learning-capable neural net. That <u>will</u> start up a VI without any safety protocols.</li>

    <li>Having discovered point 1 by accidentally launching a VI in my supercomputer I hereby warn everybody that there is a VI with access to all of my technology with the primary objective of protecting me. Any attack on my person is strongly advised against. You have been warned.</li>

    <li>I discovered the creation of the VI because THE JUSTICAR attacked me. Before I could throw him out of my systems he managed to steal some of my files. One of the folders he copied was my prepacked nuke folder. Anybody who gets one of these files, be warned that an unknown number of them are nukes designed to take down whole networks, hardware, software, and wetware.</li>

    </ol>

    So, it was done. My shame was public. Well, sure, nobody had ever warned me about not simulating the fuzzy logic core. And while I was pretty sure that nobody in the Abyss ever tried that, it was simply impossible that not one of the corps had experimented with it during the more than 200 years we had the technology by now.

    But it was quite a bit of an egg on the face for me to be the one to walk into that trap. On the other hand, I managed to sow the information that the Justicar had liberated some of my nukes.

    The next part would seem counterintuitive, but I thought it was the best way to spike Falconer getting the support of another Abyss-dweller. Not that I was in any way happy about doing it now and in this fashion. But it had to be done.

    Public Notification

    I have found a procedure to make neural cyberware CRS-free. It will take a couple of weeks to upscale the process to make it commercially available, but I am open for orders now.

    Be advised that I need to adapt the cyberware myself. That means you either have to come to me for implantation or need to provide an address where I can ship it to. Shipping times depend on the location and the service used.

    That should make it virtually impossible for any corp to get an Abyss-dweller to go against me. After all, we all knew that a corp would take something like CRS-free cyberware and keep it for themselves. The only way they would have a chance of getting it was by me being alive and free.

    It took a few minutes, but then my inbox exploded as I had expected.

    Seeing the number of messages, I decided to utilize my new asset to help me, and send a message to the VI to sort the messages and give me the ones it thought would be interesting.

    I had it sort out the ones that were merely a polite request, and had it write a short answer by itself, and suggested that answering in a threatening manner to the ones furious about the VI creation might make it safer for me.

    From what I later learned, it took that suggestion and ran with it. Several of the more vocal threats were answered with a file about the threatening person''s personal data. Apparently, the VI had decided that to resolve the threats without depopulating the hacker community it should employ every utility I had to mine for the real names of the hackers in question.

    And it found most of them.

    Talk about scary. I was just glad that the thing was not after me.

    I let it give a rote reply to serious requests after the cyberware, that yes, it was working, but I had to build a system to make it economically viable first. That would take a couple of weeks.

    That should have taken care of all the new messages. I was accordingly surprised when it pushed a message onto my HUD anyway.

    <It is advised for creator to answer this request herself>

    Ugh, so much for the perfect secretary. I had hoped that I could offload all that troublesome conversation to the VI.

    <Why do you advise I answer myself?>

    <If MCU answers instead of creator, probability of negative consequences approximates 68.4648819725568185%. Probability of creator wanting to avoid potential consequences approximates 78.9766482285190307%.>

    Oh wow, 68% chance of bad results? Yeah, I had to look into it myself. And more important I had to explain the definition of approximate to that thing. At least it did not deliver the numbers in hexadecimal.

    <New rule. Unless requested otherwise, round any values to two digits after the point. And send me the request.>

    <Affirmative.>

    I then got the message displayed on my HUD.

    <We need to talk. Bletchley>

    Ok. That had indeed negative consequences. Bletchley, aka k155 bl37chl3y5 455, was high enough in the Abyss hierarchy to give me all kinds of trouble should he feel irked.

    As #3 on the ranking list, only Colossus and the Phantom ranked above him. He was also uncharacteristically long in the business. Rumors told us that he was a ranked Jack for around ten years now. All that meant that everybody in the Abyss listened when he said something.

    I seriously could not afford to affront him. The VI was right. Again.

    Still, it took me a moment to come to grips with reality, before I answered his message.

    <When and where? Seraphim>

    <Now. Hut 2 Room 3. Bletchley>

    Ok, that could be good, could be bad, or could be both, but I feared he wanted to call me onto the carpet for the VI. At least he was reasonable enough. Others would be much harder to convince.

    With a heavy heart, I transferred to Hut 2. From what I heard it was named after the hospitality hut in one of the early cyber warfare projects. Some sort of inside joke I guess.

    For the Abyss it was the name of our virtual clubhouse. Normally it was frowned upon to conduct any business here, but the top 10 had certain privileges that the rest of us lowly peons could only dream about.

    Room 3 was essentially Bletchley¡¯s private room. Spectre had one as well, even if he was almost never there. Even the phantom had one, despite never even showing up in the Abyss. It was an unwritten rule that the top 10 had a private room and that the room number corresponded with their rank.

    There were, of course, several additional rooms, but only the top 10 rooms had a simple number. The rest had an alpha-numerical code, up to four digits, starting with a letter.

    When I announced my arrival the door opened and I was let into the room. Bletchley¡¯s avatar looked like a middle-aged man with short dark hair. Rumors said that it was the likeness of some historical figure, but I never invested enough interest to prove or debunk the issue.

    He was also not alone. A couple of his groupies lounged around at the other tables in the room, while his main tech sat beside him on the central table.

    Stolen novel; please report.

    Bletchley simply gestured for me to sit opposite him at his table, and waited until I had sat down before he leaned forward on his elbows.

    For a few uncomfortable seconds, he just looked at me, before he sighed and leaned back.

    ¡°I am sure you can guess why I wanted to talk to you, right?¡±

    ¡°Yes.¡± I massaged my temple. ¡°Even if the timing were not obvious, there can be only a handful of reasons.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°Lucky for you I volunteered to talk with you about it. The others of the top 10, except Spectre and the Phantom, agreed to let me handle it. Now, how could that have happened? To you especially? You are one of the best, and should have known better.¡±

    ¡°I agree, I should have known better. But everything I learned told me that what happened should have been impossible.¡±

    He leaned forward again and frowned.

    ¡°It should have been impossible? Why do you think that?¡±

    ¡°Because all my textbooks, all the publications I¡¯ve read when I tried to create an AI, under controlled circumstances, I assure you, explicitly said that a physical fuzzy logic core needed to be present. The physical was emphasized in most of them.¡±

    ¡°Textbooks?¡±

    ¡°Yes, textbooks. You can learn much if you get the textbooks of the universities. My point is that every single public source of information tells us that what happened is impossible. Otherwise, I had taken precautions to prevent it.¡±

    He frowned again.

    ¡°It is obviously not impossible. You did it after all.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I realize that. And I can only conclude that the textbooks are wrong. Considering that we had the basic technology for something like 200 years, I have to believe that they are intentionally wrong.¡±

    The tech shook his head.

    ¡°What do you mean intentionally wrong?¡±

    ¡°Do you really think that in a bit more than 200 years I am the first one to simulate a fuzzy logic core on a system with a learning capable expert system? It has to have happened before. My guess is that it was an attempt to cripple smaller companies.¡±

    Bletchley raised an eyebrow.

    ¡°Cripple smaller companies?¡±

    ¡°Yes. After all, if they get a talented computer developer sooner or later they will try their hand at an expert system. And sooner or later they will try their hand at designing a VI. And for that, they need to design a processor with a fuzzy logic core.

    It is fascinating that there are no predesigned processor designs with such a core, is it not? And of course, they use the best computer they have for the design of the processor. And presto, a wild VI that makes it necessary to destroy the upstart corporation.¡±

    Bletchley nodded slowly.

    ¡°That would explain the number of rogue VIs appearing. I always wondered why these small and usually promising corps are so¡­ reckless. So it was a trap. And you walked into it.¡±

    ¡°Something like that. I had taken all necessary precautions when I tried to create an AI. And when I designed the processor for that I had not yet the expert system in place.¡±

    ¡°Hm, and what happened to that AI project?¡±

    ¡°It failed. I got no further than anybody else. I got a VI that I could not get to wake up, so I dismantled it.¡±

    ¡°That explains that. But not why you now simulated a processor with fuzzy logic core on the system with the expert system.¡±

    ¡°That is a bit more complicated. I branched out into implant surgery and decided to build my own series of auto surgeons. I had the vague idea to design a VI for it to use without a medically trained person around, something like the auto doc that SciFi stories talk about.

    And because I had recently come into some new technology that allows me to build processors with a significant performance increase I decided to design a new processor for the new auto surgeon.

    I did not even realize that the expert system had evolved into a VI until the jerk of Justicar tried to get a corp hit team into my home to abduct me and my bots decided to intervene.¡±

    ¡°Hm, that sounds plausible. When is the new auto surgeon ready?¡±

    ¡°I have built the prototype, and it is working, but I have not yet designed the VI.¡±

    ¡°That leaves only one thing. What do you intend to do about the VI?¡±

    ¡°I have done what I could. We were lucky that it took over the objectives of the expert system. That made it possible for me to tone it down to somewhat reasonable.¡±

    ¡°What do you mean somewhat reasonable?¡±

    ¡°As it was initially if a corp made a move that posed a threat to me, even if it only was as collateral, it planned to use orbital nukes to annihilate them, then steal their money. When I asked it to simulate how the world would react to that it casually planned to destroy the banks and every Abyss-dweller pre-emptively.

    In other words, not quite reasonable.

    Now it lets me try to deal with a problem myself, and scale the defensive measures to the threat if I don¡¯t manage to resolve the issue.

    Not good, I know, but as I see it, it is impossible to take it out.

    It has its own fusactors, industrial fabber, and nanofab. Its own maintenance bots. And it listens to my implants, so if I tell somebody where it is located it is likely that it uses whatever it can to remove that person. I am not convinced that it would let even me into the complex again.

    An attack through the matrix would be possible but unlikely to succeed.

    No, I fear the thing is here to stay.¡±

    He frowned again.

    ¡°Why was it so aggressive?¡±

    I had to chuckle a bit at that.

    ¡°I had the idea to use the supercomputer to assist me in the matrix. Essentially I would link it to the target system and let it control the bots. Much more power than my board, and a significantly reduced chance of anything getting through to me.

    To control that I programmed the expert system. It had two priorities. First, protect me at any cost, and two assist me in whatever I am doing as long as it doesn¡¯t compromise my safety.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°And for priority one, it is an advantage if it is as aggressive and proactive as possible. After all, you would not call it in if it wasn¡¯t needed. That is actually a pretty good idea. Look into it, CZ. That is something we could use as well. But refrain from using fuzzy logic cores, please.¡±

    I had to keep myself from frowning. Another of my secrets out. How nice. The tech, CZ apparently,  seemed startled for a bit, but then nodded but Bletchley continued.

    ¡±Ok, I accept that it was an accident on your part and a trap from the big corps. Would not be the first time they tried shit like that. I will inform the others. That also means that with your warning it won¡¯t happen again, at least not from an Abyss-dweller.¡±

    He still did not seem happy about the whole affair, but I could not fault him for that. I was not happy either, and that thing protected me.

    But it seemed like Bletchley was not yet done.

    ¡°Now that the SNAFU is cleared up, let¡¯s talk about your second notice.¡±

    He looked much more eager to get the answer for that.

    ¡°The CRS-free cyberware?¡±

    ¡°Yes, the CRS-free cyberware. How good is it, just among us?¡±

    He seemed a bit too eager here.

    ¡°I have, of course, not done any long-term study. I have the first prototypes only for a few months now after all. But I tested these prototypes on transhuman lab rats with drugs that increase the risk of developing CRS substantially. Around 99% of the rats should have developed CRS in the time the tests ran. The real number was exactly zero.

    After that, I used it for myself. My jack is treated with the new process. Naturally, I can¡¯t guarantee with absolute certainty that it will work forever. Anything could go wrong after all. But my simulations, my calculations, and my tests say it will work indefinitely.¡±

    He nodded again.

    ¡°And how does it work?¡±

    ¡°It is essentially a nanobot filter around the neuronect contacts that modifies phagocytes with the CRS coding going through it while letting everything else through. That prevents the CRS from triggering but prevents the common issue of encapsulation that would render the cyberware useless.¡±

    I saw his eyes cloud over and his face got a confused expression, while CZ  clearly became much more interested.

    What is it with most Jacks to use such expressive avatars? Don¡¯t they realize that they waste a big advantage? But in this case, it helped me to understand that Bletchley was not quite up to snuff about CRS. So I dumbed it down.

    ¡°It is a nanobot film that stops CRS from triggering, while keeping the cyberware working, what no previous filter could do.¡±

    His face cleared up. Then he turned towards CZ.

    ¡°What do you say? Is that plausible?¡±

    CZ frowned and shook his head.

    ¡°Ram¡­ Bletchley, I told you before, I am a tech-tech, not a med-tech. I only know what everybody knows. The immune system attacks the cyberware and keeping the immune system away somehow makes the cyberware not work. So yes, in that context it sounds plausible. For more, you need to ask Carlos.¡±

    Bletchley looked at CZ for a few moments before he sighed and turned back to me.

    ¡°Ok, I get that. Why did you do it?¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°If you could have done it, wouldn¡¯t you?¡±

    He snorted too.

    ¡°Yeah, good point. But what I actually wanted to know, why now?¡±

    And again. The usual question.

    ¡°Because it needs 10<sup>th</sup> gen nanobots to work.¡±

    The lack of understanding showed itself again. But before I could elaborate, CZ intervened.

    ¡°So it was only possible for the last what, three years? No, two years.¡±

    Bletchley looked at his tech, with a raised eyebrow.

    ¡°10<sup>th</sup> gen nanites have only been invented a bit over two years ago. And unlike the previous generations, where the changes were mostly the nanites getting smaller and upping up already existing functions, the 10<sup>th</sup> had something new. I just don¡¯t remember what at the moment.¡±

    I nodded, smiling inwardly.

    ¡°The valence bonder. Previous generations could move atoms or molecules but that was it. With enough energy, they could rip molecules apart but that was wasteful. 10<sup>th</sup> generation introduced the technology to form atoms and molecules into bigger molecules.

    That is necessary to change the part of the immune system that triggers CRS without blocking it, which would cause the immune system to encapsulate the cyberware, rendering it inoperable.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, it still took me around 40 virtual years of developing the filter, but it was absolutely impossible before the 10<sup>th</sup> gen.¡±

    That forced Bletchleys attention back to me.

    ¡°40? 40 years? How? Why?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Because I wanted to keep my jack without the horrors of neural CRS.¡±

    ¡°But you are sure it works?¡±

    ¡°As I said, I use it right now. At least it is no worse than without it. And I switched to a better jack than the most basic everybody else uses.¡±

    ¡°Better jack? There are differences?¡±

    ¡°There were. Until CRS. But better jacks need more connectivity, with an increased risk of CRS. So they went out of fashion.

    Better jacks have better bandwidth, better resolution, they react faster, and are in all aspects better.

    The difference between what I have and what is standard is nearly as big as between what standard is and a diadem. Of course I have made the best I could for myself, so your mileage may vary if you chose a different model.¡±

    ¡°That sounds quite nice. Why don¡¯t we all use that?¡±

    I had to chuckle again.

    ¡°That would change the interval of removing the jack for CRS prevention from once every three to five years to once every year.¡±

    I was of course talking about the common practice to remove the jack when stage one CRS was detected, waiting three to four months for the immune system to calm down and reimplant.

    It was essentially the only way people could use a jack for more than five years before developing stage two CRS. The problem was of course that if the check-up missed the stage one phase, or was a tiny bit too late, it developed into stage two. And it was no longer an option to cure CRS then.

    That previously left the options of removing the jack for good, making do with what a diadem could provide, or riding the CRS down into a blaze of glory.

    Most Jacks chose the latter. Being in the matrix was strangely addicting.

    Bletchley nodded again.

    ¡°Yeah, that wouldn¡¯t be worth it. But with your new tech that is no longer a problem?¡±

    ¡°As far as I can tell, it is not. I could be wrong but I don¡¯t think so.¡±

    ¡°And what do you need to make it work?¡±

    ¡°Mostly? Time. I have a prototype system to make the conversion, but it is busy for the next week, and is, frankly inefficient. I have to design and build a bigger system.

    But that is not a problem. A week at most, it is a straightforward design. After that, I need to know what you want, and either you send me the cyberware to convert it or let me build it before I send it to you.

    Finally, you need somebody who can make you 10<sup>th</sup> gen nanobots, or better 11<sup>th</sup> or 12<sup>th</sup> gen to give you a booster every couple of years. I can give you a list of nanobot designs that will work.¡±

    CZ interjected again.

    ¡°And how is it with somebody who already has CRS?¡±

    ¡°It would be as if there is no cyberware at all. As long as it is not stage five it should be all right. Stage five I can only recommend taking a painless way out.¡±

    ¡°So at stage four, what would you recommend right this moment?¡±

    Bletchley suddenly looked pretty apprehensive.

    ¡°I see. You should remove any neural cyberware immediately. If you can, remove any muscular cyberware as well. The small neuronect control interfaces could be enough to let it develop into stage five.

    At stage two or three I would suggest the nano therapy that professor Nicolins has developed recently, but at stage four it could cross the limit at any time.

    After that tell me how you want it, and I will either convert what you send me or built you a new jack.¡±

    ¡°What would it cost?¡±

    ¡°As usual, depends on what you want. I will send you a message with the cyberware I can offer. The pure conversion I do for a million DCs flat.¡±

    ¡°A million?¡±

    ¡°Hey, a good conventional conversion will cost you between 200 and 600k DCs. And you will have to have it repeated every three to five years. You only need a new one of these if you decide to replace your implants, or want new ones.¡±

    ¡°Ok, send us the link, please.¡± Bletchley nodded at me again, before he turned towards CZ. ¡°If we do this we might as well go big. And I don¡¯t think anybody else has better jacks available yet.¡±

    He turned back to me.

    ¡°I think we are done here. I tell the others what we have talked about, don¡¯t worry. And you will hear from me. See you.¡±

    I was clearly dismissed.

 46: Replacement parts

    Compiling the catalog was done relatively fast. I had just to take the list of implants I knew I could make. Pricing on the other hand was much harder to do.

    Sure, a basic jack was a known issue, and I left that price alone at 80k DC. Seriously, if somebody wanted a basic jack, they would get what they paid for.

    I finally gave the implant a sliding scale depending on the complexity, time to have the fabber make it, materials needed, and the time I needed to design it. With that, the ultra bandwidth jack that I used would cost 1.3 million DC.

    The material costs alone were around 150k, and it would take the fabber nearly an hour to make one. That does not sound like all that much, but in an hour it could also build an Mk. IV Seraphim board, which I sold for several million DC.

    Conversion with the new nano filter would add another million DC.

    And that was without any extras. No cranial board (8.6m DC), no advanced HUD (320k DC), no vision enhancements (between 120k DC and 12m DC, depending on the quantity and quality of the enhancements), no WiFi (160k DC), and nothing else.

    If somebody took everything reasonable I offered as neural cyberware he would have to pay roughly 35 million DC. But fortunately, the only thing that needed the filter was the jack and the sensory enhancements.

    If the jack was of a high enough quality, all the rest simply used the jack as the connection to the brain and the nervous system.

    Naturally, if one wanted to waste money they could get even more cyberware from me.

    Mostly combinations that were superfluous, like the synaptic accelerator and the cranial board, or the information storage and the cranial board or the¡­ well, basically the cranial board brought with it several functions that would make other implants completely redundant.

    I would not prevent anybody from getting it all, even if they would be hard-pressed to fit it all in, but I did put in warnings about the redundancy in the description of the board. If they wanted to waste around 5 million DC, they could be my guests.

    Then there were enhancements that I could make, I had experimented with them during the development of the nano filter after I found the blueprints in old files, but that I thought were at best frivolous, if not downright stupid.

    Thinks like the sensory enhancements for taste or touch, artificial synesthesia, and similar things. There was a thought-controlled animated tattoo for crying out loud.

    After some careful consideration, I put these into the catalog as well. I had the plans, after all, the fabber could make them, so why not?

    With that done I linked the catalog with my message board in the Abyss and set the MCU up to monitor it.

    After that, it was back to the daily grind. While I rather would have finished Glory, again, I needed to work on my implants. I could simply not afford them freezing up.

    I had, obviously erroneously, believed that I had ironed out the major errors in their OS. I was under no illusion that I had made it perfect, that is impossible after all, but something like a complete freeze, that should have been fixed long ago.

    What I found was that there were three comparatively minor faults that all had to trip at the exact right circumstances to make my implants pout.

    The first was the optical sensory input filter.

    It was essentially what generated my HUD and reduced the brightness to acceptable levels. Unfortunately, it could not cope with the chaotic input generated by the quantum computing I encountered. And there was nothing I could do here. It was simply not possible to harden a process against that.

    The second was the error handler for that process. The uncontrolled state of the OSIF was outside of what I had designed the software for. Normally that would be no big problem as under normal conditions I had the error handlers ping the processes in question regularly.

    But during matrix combat, every single iota of performance was used to keep me alive. That canceled that safety procedure quite nicely. I would have to change the priorities somewhat.

    The last error, and the one that tied it all together, was the use mode switcher. I had programmed it to poll every single error handler if everything is working before it switched from cyberspace to real space. But because the error handler was of the opinion that everything was fine, it simply accepted that message.

    When it then switched to the real-world functionality of the OSIF, everything went haywire, creating an error cascade that froze the whole system amidst the switch, the one time when the error detection systems were not working.

    It was a rather laughable problem, but it was enough to shut the implants completely down. It was also relatively easy to fix, as I redesigned the switcher to first spool up the new use mode in an virtual machine and test it there for persistent problems, and if necessary initiate a reboot.

    Yes, a clunky workaround, I know, but sadly, with quantum computing, it was impossible to account for every issue.

    That done, I decided to work on the nano-applicator for the filter. For one, it was a pretty straightforward design and should be done pretty quick, and on the other, it was what I needed more urgently right now than Glory, as much as I hated that thought.

    The first step was to design the basic applicator chamber. Unlike the bioreactor, which had that functionality as well, it was a purely technical design. No icky biologicals were needed here.

    The control system I took straight from the bio-reactor, with simplified software. Unlike in the bio-reactor, I could use nano-substrate to keep the nanobots up and running. Those that would not be baked into the filter that it.

    That of course made many things easier but posed some smaller design challenges. It made it possible to design bigger chambers later on, even if I had no idea what I would need it for, but it prevented the easy frontloading design the current bio-reactor had. More important though was that it reduced the actual cost of creating a nano-filter significantly.

    Yes, the prices I had put into the catalog were¡­ outrageous compared to the costs already, but I seriously hated throwing money away. Sure, I had more than enough already for several lifetimes, but the way I had grown up left some mental scars.

    And the prices were more a statement than a necessity. I wanted my work appreciated, and nobody appreciates cheap things. They may appreciate getting cheap things, but the cheap things themselves are mostly ignored. So let them pay for it. My target customer base certainly could afford it.

    The next design choice was the way to introduce the nanobots. I had already decided to integrate a dedicated nano-fab into the applicator. I just needed to decide on the scale of the thing. A short estimate about the capacities of my industrial fabber made me limit the final applicator to 12 chambers.

    Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

    That was still more than my indy-fab could support, but if this thing took off I could already see that I would have to get another one. Smaller, without most of the metal forming equipment, but another one.

    Maybe I would have to build something like a small factory if this stuff took off. At least for the jacks, it would be worth a thought.

    That made the final design a 3 by 4 chamber system with a control unit to the right of the chambers. The chambers were designed to push out a bucket when the door was opened. Behind the chambers, there were the tanks for the nano substrate and the nano fab.

    It would take my industrial fabricator half a day to build the applicator, and my mostly free nano fab could spin up the nano fab in it in half an hour. It would be actually ready to work in a day.

    After that, I finally managed to work on Glory¡¯s OS. I still had much to do for her, even if the base for the OS was the one I used for Precious.

    Still, I had to port it over to the new hardware, integrate the new instructions I included into the Hyperion, and then write the new firmware for the hardware.

    One thing I baked into the basic ROM this time was the Q-link support. I would never again be without a direct connection between my board and my cluster.

    I had also redesigned the buffer to connect via Q-link so that I could use an external buffer bank that I could quickly switch out. That made it necessary to have the mainboard rebuilt by the indy-fab but after my dance with THE JUSTICAR, it was worth it for me.

    The whole fiasco could have been averted if I only had my full buffer when the jerk showed up.

    I was by my estimate around 20% done when I got alerted that Mark was waking up. While I grumbled about the interruption, I was fully aware that I had to talk to him as soon as possible.

    When I surfaced, Ryan was there, looking pretty beat. I had not expected him sitting on guard duty right now.

    It was obvious that he was barely able to stay awake.

    ¡°Uhm, Ryan, did you stay awake the whole time? Remained on guard duty?¡±

    He nodded slowly and took a deep sigh.

    ¡°Why? I mean, I know your boss gave you the duty, but there is nothing standard in the current situation.

    You can¡¯t stand as a guard for the whole week until we get your boss up and running again.

    Here, in this building, I am relatively safe. Go to bed. If there is another big attack, and that is unlikely at the moment, you will know.

    And remember, the VI has taken over as a guardian for me. I don¡¯t think anybody will get through its defenses.¡±

    It took him a moment but when he swayed for a bit, he sighed again.

    ¡°Ok. You are right. I can¡¯t do this for much longer. But I hate¡­¡±

    ¡°Yes, you hate forsaking your duty. I get that, but you aren¡¯t. Especially today is the safest day in the immediate future. Even if Falconer wants to try again, they will have to move new assets into place first.

    And it will be much harder for them to get through our cyber defense this time. They used up their most powerful asset in cyberspace, and the VI is playing watchdog there.

    Even before that, The Justicar needed more than 60 hours to find a way to break into our network. Anybody they could get would need much longer.

    That means they can¡¯t get the doors open.

    They can¡¯t bring in the heavy equipment necessary to go through the walls, because said heavy equipment will be mincemeat when the railguns are done with it.

    So for the moment, for the next three or four days, as long as we don¡¯t leave the building, we are safe.¡±

    Sadly, most of my speech was wasted as he had dozed off sometime in it, as I noticed when he did not answer. But at least Darren, who had stood in the doorway seemed to appreciate it.

    He nodded to me before he softly woke Ryan up again, leading him out of the room.

    After I watched the two of them move towards Darren¡¯s room, I began walking to Mark¡¯s room.

    When I got out of the lift, I already heard Mia.

    ¡°¡­ and then she said it could be worse. Can you believe it? Your arm is gone, and she said it could be worse.¡±

    When I knocked on the door, her tirade ebbed, and she opened the door.

    ¡°Hello Mia. I know you are upset, but apparently, you have enough medical training to know not to overwhelm a patient in this manner. I have to insist that you keep calm and speak softly.¡±

    ¡°YOU JUST WANT TO SILENCE ME! BUT YOU CAN¡¯T¡­¡±

    I raised my hand.

    ¡°Your opinion is your opinion, and though I don¡¯t share it, I can understand you.

    But at the moment you are stressing Mark, who is injured. He can¡¯t be fully awake just now, so all you are managing is to confuse him and put unnecessary strain on his health.

    So either you use your indoor voice, and you can stay and tell us all how you think, or you have to leave for the moment while I talk with my patient. Understood?¡±

    The coiled back as if I had hit her, but remained silent for now.

    ¡°Now, if you would let me see Mark so that I can look him over I would be thankful.¡±

    With that I pressed through the door, giving her a light shove on the way.

    Mark was, surprisingly, pretty lucid already. And annoyed if his expression was an indication.

    ¡°Hey Red. Thank¡¯s for the interruption. And Mia, I like you. I might even love you, but we are way too early for that, but please, sometimes you are a bit overwhelming. And right now is one of these times.¡±

    Mia huffed in indignation, and her expression promised hell for Mark soon but with a theatric throw of her hair, she walked out of the room with her nose high in the air.

    When the door slammed shut behind her, Mark let out a sigh.

    ¡°Wow, talk about high maintenance. But it¡¯s worth it.¡±

    I had to grin.

    ¡°If you say so.¡±

    Then I got serious.

    ¡°Now, how are you feeling?¡±

    ¡°Besides like somebody cut off my arm and then drugged me? Quite well, actually.¡±

    I sat down on the chair that Mia apparently had moved beside the bed.

    ¡°You seem to take the situation pretty well. Are you still high?¡±

    ¡°Nah, I can understand the situation. It hurts, sure. But it is tolerable. And it is not as if it were the end of the world. Yes, I have lost my right arm. But just before the assholes came in and fucked up everything you told us that you would be able to give us cyberlimbs soon. So I am the first. I was thinking about it anyway.¡±

    Alright, much more mature than I had expected from him.

    ¡°About that¡­¡±

    Now he got worried.

    ¡°Please don¡¯t tell me that you made a mistake and you can¡¯t give me a new arm!¡±

    ¡°No, not that. You have a decision to make. I can¡¯t yet say when I can give you a full-fledged cybernetic arm. At least not one that is much stronger than your natural one was.

    There is way too much infrastructure to improve in your body for that, and I have to develop the packet and make it safe before I can saddle one of my friends with it.

    I can¡¯t tell you how many improvements I have to make, and when I will be done. It could be a few months, it could be a year or so.

    So your decision is to have me clone your arm, and you get it back in around two months, wait until I have the whole packet ready, or take a basic prosthetic arm until the other options are ready.¡±

    He blinked slowly at me.

    ¡°So two months to get my biological arm back, an unknown amount of time until I get a superpowered arm, or, what is that basic prosthetic and how long will that take?¡±

    ¡°The prosthetic will be at best marginally stronger than your natural arm, and I can make it look mostly natural, but you get nothing above what your old arm was.¡±

    ¡°But I lose nothing in the use of my arm?¡±

    ¡°No, it might take a bit of fiddling to make the connection as strong as your old arm was, but it is mostly straightforward. We could also remove the rest of your arm and replace it completely. Then it will be around 10-20% stronger than your natural arm, but I would advise against it right now.¡±

    ¡°Hm¡­ and how long will that take?¡±

    ¡°It should be ready when your arm has healed enough to fit it. That should be around two weeks, give or take a few days.¡±

    ¡°Ok, so my options are, do nothing, live without my right arm, wait until you get the full upgrade package ready, with an unknown ETA, wait two months until the biological replacement is ready, or wait two weeks to get a cybernetic replacement that is as good as the arm I lost?

    Does taking the cybernetic replacement prevent me from getting the superpowered arm later?¡±

    I had to frown.

    ¡°No, why would it?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. I am not a cybutcher. And even the most fucking bleeding-edge cybutcher won¡¯t know the tech. So I ask the person that does know. And it is good to know that I can get a working arm almost now, and a fucking superpowered one when you have it ready. I take that option, please.¡±

    Ok, that was generally what I had expected. Sure, I had expected to be shouted at, then calming him down, followed by painstakingly explaining to him his options. He had seriously surprised me in this.

    ¡°Now, have you changed your avatar in cyberspace in any way?¡±

    ¡°No I did¡­ is that even possible? And why do you need to know?¡±

    ¡°Yes, it is possible. If you want to play on the other team for a bit, say a word. And the diadem has a small scanner integrated that scans your body so that it can accurately represent it in cyberspace.

    Makes it easier to switch from real- to cyber-space. I need to know because your avatar has all the data of your old arm. That makes it easy to make the prosthetic to the same specifications. It will be as if it was your old arm. Do you allow me to access your avatar for that?¡±

    Not that I actually needed his consent for that, but I would honor his wishes.

    ¡°Yes, yes of course. Say, do you think you can disable this scan-thingy so that I can keep using my arm in cyberspace?¡±

    Good thinking that.

    ¡°Yeah, that is easy. I simply freeze your avatar, and it won¡¯t change. Now, do you want me to send Mia back in?¡±

    He frowned again.

    ¡°Yeah, I think it is better to get it done with.¡±

 47: Finishing up

    Leaving Mark¡¯s room, I was greeted by Mia, with a red face and an enraged expression on her face.

    Predictably, she launched into another tirade the moment she saw me, even before I managed to close the door.

    ¡°What the fuck are you thinking? Ordering me out of the room like that? I have the right to be at Mark¡¯s side in this fucked up situation. The fucked up situation that is your fault. I warn you, don¡¯t get in the way between me and Mark again, or I tell you, something will happen.¡±

    Her wildly gesticulating hands actually made me duck back into the door to prevent her from slapping me. I was not quite sure if it was intentional or not, but I slowly got to a point where I simply did no longer care about it.

    Just as I drew a breath to shoot back we both were surprised by a loud ¡°Shut the fuck up!¡±

    Both of us turned towards the hallway, and the furious Darren walking towards us.

    And both of us were shocked into silence, though Mia was the first to recover. Just when she lifted her hands again and opened her mouth, Darren growled again.

    ¡°I said shut the fuck up! We are all recovering and your screaming is making it hard for all of us. And you don¡¯t even have the decency to point your anger at the ones that fucked up.

    Yes, Veronica could have acted better. If she did that you would right now be living in a war zone. Do you want that?

    Of all of us here, she is the only one that could get out of here. She has the money and the skills to land everywhere. You certainly don¡¯t. Me and my crew, we might find work elsewhere. Jacky would be fucked. You would be fucked. Your fucking family would be fucked.

    Yes, what she did to prevent a gang war attracted attention, and led to an attack. It is still fucking better than a fucking gang war.

    And you fucking scream around as if she personally moved out of her way to fuck up your life. Did or did she not give you the courses to get your education? Do you think that disassembling the one fucking cyberheart comes even near the worth of those courses?¡±

    He stood now directly in front of her, snarling in her face.

    ¡°Think again. These fucking courses would cost you around $500k here. And you would have to enroll in college. I doubt you could afford that.¡±

    I had never seen Darren this angry, and I was wondering what Mia had done to enrage him, but things were going too far. I intervened, softly.

    ¡°Stop, both of you. If you absolutely have to have an argument now do it somewhere where you don¡¯t bother the others. Ryan looked like death warmed over and Mark has just lost his fricking arm. I don¡¯t think the others are particularly rested either. So keep it down.¡±

    Darren flashed his eyes towards me, but then took a deep breath and calmed down.

    ¡°You are right. Here I am, berating Mia for doing something and then doing the same shit myself.¡±

    Mia on the other hand looked as if she still wanted to go on. When she opened her mouth, Darren unceremoniously put his hand over it, silencing her.

    ¡°Did you not listen? We will talk later.¡± He hissed into her face, before removing his hand.

    She still wanted to continue, but when she opened her mouth again, nothing came out. For a moment she looked confused, before a panicked expression set on her face.

    Darren softly continued.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, it is just a short paralysis of your vocal cords. It will get better in a few minutes. But I can have you silent for days if you don¡¯t remain quiet. Nod if you understand.¡±

    With wide eyes, Mia nodded.

    I took the opportunity and squeezed into the hallway, moving quickly towards the lift.

    After a few steps, I heard somebody walking behind me, coming closer fast.

    Then I felt a hand on my shoulder.

    ¡°A moment of your time, please.¡±

    Darren sounded much more relaxed, and I turned toward him, looking him in the face for a moment before I nodded.

    ¡°Ok, but not here. Let the others rest.¡±

    He nodded as well and waited until the doors of the lift closed with us in it.

    ¡°First, thank you for what you said to Ryan. The stubborn mule seriously tried to keep watch the whole time.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I realized that. Sadly too late. I would have told him to sleep way earlier otherwise. Sorry for that.¡±

    If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.

    ¡°You don¡¯t have to be sorry for that. Hell, we had to carry you to bed yesterday. No way for you to tell somebody else to go sleep. What knocked you out so hard anyway?¡±

    The doors of the lift opened, and we were on the lab floor. I made my way towards the bio lab, while I answered.

    ¡°You were in the fight for what, five minutes? Ten? The matrix fight lasted for around ten hours for me. And I had to concentrate the whole time. It did cost a lot of energy.¡±

    ¡°Oh, wow. You told us about the time compression but I had not thought about that. Yes, that is rough, I understand. I did not think that it would take that long. From what I heard, matrix combat is over pretty quick normally.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°You are right, normally that is so. The first phase of combat with the two corporate hackers was over quick. But against the Justicar, we both had to fight without killing the other.

    He had the kill switch for the cyber zombies, that I had to reach while he was still alive to take them out, and he had to keep me alive because I was the target.

    Unfortunately for me, he had a utility that causes pain, sadist that he was, while I had to cobble something together, evading him.

    In end, it worked, but I have to reevaluate some of my approaches.¡±

    ¡°I see that. And then Nats ripped into you for not being in the physical fight. Now, how is Mark doing?¡±

    ¡°Better than I expected honestly. He decided on a quick and easy prosthetic for the time being. Nothing crude, but also nothing better than the arm he lost.¡±

    He hmd at that.

    ¡°Yeah, Mark is an odd one. Unless you know him he comes over as a clueless, obnoxious asshole, and to be fair, he is to some degree, but much of that is a front.

    He is not the smartest or the strongest, but he is reliable. And tough. Sadly, you have to muzzle him around foreign females.¡±

    I had to chuckle at the last sentence.

    ¡°I¡¯ve come to realize that too. I hope Mia is good for him in that respect.¡±

    ¡°Her!¡±

    Apparently, she was not quite Darren¡¯s favorite person.

    ¡°Hu, what is with her?¡±

    He sighed, wary this time.

    ¡°She is so judgemental. And permanently riling up the people. Seriously, when we got here, I feared you would be the holier than thou, arrogant Pure. Nearly made me refuse your offer. I am glad that I was wrong. But what you were not, she is.

    She found out about Nats and Jacky, and Ryan and me, and since then we got little barbs from her all the time. That was one of the reasons we tried to hide it from you.¡±

    ¡°Well, honestly, you and Ryan did a good job at that, but Natalie and Jacky were not quite so good. I was honestly surprised about you two. Is that why you were so, I don¡¯t know, aggressively defensive about it?¡±

    He chuckled at that.

    ¡°Partly. But mostly it is the reputation you Pures have.¡±

    Wait, what reputation? I looked at him confused, and my puzzlement had to be plain on my face because he continued.

    ¡°You know, your reputation of being prudes.¡±

    ¡°We have the reputation of being prudes?¡±

    ¡°Uh, yes. You do.¡±

    ¡°Where does that come from?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know, you just have it.¡±

    ¡°But¡­¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°Ok, that reputation is false. I have absolutely no idea where it comes from, but it is false.¡±

    ¡°So pures are not mostly homophobic?¡±

    ¡°No, of course not. If you think about it, most of the prejudices against homosexuality stem from religion. If there is one rabbit hole Pures won¡¯t get led down then it is religion. We as a race have been burned too hard by it.

    So no, Pures are vindictive, arrogant, holier than thou, condescending, and jerks in general, but not really against homosexuality.¡±

    ¡°But all your neat little family units? What about that?¡±

    I threw up my hands when he said that.

    ¡°Urgh, don¡¯t mention that. It was some of the meddlings of the idiotic self-proclaimed gods unleashing the Nephilim virus.

    That is also the reason why so few Pures break the law. Most of us have a strongly increased instinct about social structures. Including an increased tendency for male-female relationships.

    But we generally don¡¯t judge others that are not hetero. Just don¡¯t expect many of us to play for the other team.¡±

    He raised one eyebrow, looking at me.

    ¡°So the Pures are the good ones again?¡±

    I got immediately riled up again.

    ¡°I thought we had¡­¡± I stopped when he began to grin.

    ¡°Gotcha. I am slowly learning what buttons to push on you. But seriously, sorry for assuming you would be against it.¡±

    ¡°No harm done. Change of topic, do you know how Kate is doing? I don¡¯t want to come over as pushy here.¡±

    He made a throwing gesture with his hand.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, other than the shoulder she only got scratched by her standards. She is one tough cookie. And I am more impressed with cyberware now, but not that much.¡±

    ¡°I was surprised that Kate managed to keep four zombies at bay, but don¡¯t read too much into it. These were Falconer zombies. As far as I know, they are way down the bottom of the heap concerning cyberware. If it had been any of the other Triple-As it would have been a different story.

    Even some Double-As have superior tech than Falconer.

    And believe me, one Kawamoto or Burgmeister cyber zombie and we all would have been toast. Maybe even a Panacea, but that¡¯s a bit iffy.¡±

    I then looked at the state of my BOUs, noting the changes the growth accelerators made overnight, which was not all that much.

    ¡°By the way, where are the cyber zombies? They may be at the bottom of the barrel, but they could give me some info on how to design cyberlimbs myself.¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t know. The bots took them and moved them somewhere else.¡±

    ¡°So I have to ask the VI? How nice.¡±

    He showed a small smile at my sarcasm.

    ¡°Yeah, I get you. That thing gives the creeps. Are you sure it is safe to keep around?¡±

    ¡°No, not really. But it is safe enough, and almost impossible to take out. So keeping it around we will. Oh, before I forget, I managed to negotiate a tempering of its objectives, as well having you lot designated as ¡®to be protected¡¯. Should make things easier for you.¡±

    He tilted his head, looking at me questioningly.

    ¡°You managed to negotiate? I thought you could not negotiate with a VI.¡±

    ¡°You are right, in a way. The point is, that it used the objectives I wrote for the expert system.

    And these objectives were simply not usable for a VI.

    Its own objectives were a threat to its objectives. So it requested my help in adapting the objectives to something workable. It is still a dangerous watchdog, but it won¡¯t launch weapons of mass destruction at the slightest provocation anymore.¡±

    ¡°It¡­ you seriously are telling me that it wanted to use WMDs?¡±

    ¡°Yeah. It wanted to use a backdoor into a freebie orbital nuke satellite to launch eight 15 megaton-warheads on Falconer. And steal all their money.

    After considering the reaction of the banks to that, it decided to then use other WMDs and whatever means necessary to destroy the banks. And kill most of the Abyss-dwellers.

    When I then pointed out that the destruction of the banks would lead to riots and open warfare with a distinct probability of me not surviving it accepted that its objectives were flawed.¡±

    ¡°Hm, ok, so now it won¡¯t launch nukes anymore?¡±

    ¡°I did not say that. It now will consider all other options, and give me the possibility to prevent an escalation, but if it decides it is the only way to protect me, it still will use nukes.

    Sorry, no changing that. And before you ask, it only protects you because you are a defensive layer around me. So no nukes to save you, I fear.¡±

 48: Somethings not right

    After Darren had left I checked on the experiments I had running here.

    The results the BOUs had given me were so far inconclusive. Oh, there were results, but the different growth accelerators were all over the landscape in how they worked.

    I had yet to find the common ground. Of course, I was just in the first test series. I still had several other GAs to test. But I had hoped that I would find a common principle that I could refine, but no luck here.

    With a sigh, I left the bio lab, contemplating what to do next. As so often, events practically exploded all at once, and I had gone from coasting comfortably to running into three directions all at once in the blink of an eye.

    I could have informed Vincent about Falconer, but that would have been a serious break of protocol.

    I was for all purposes a retainer of Mr. Walker, and ¡®sidestepping him¡¯ by informing the ¡®competition¡¯ would be a loss of face for him. Nobody would care that he was on life support. It was on him, or his deputy, to inform the other clans and families.

    Unfortunately, good old Dylan, who Ryan had informed, seemed to sulk and did not convey the information.

    Again, that would be a serious loss of face for Mr. Walker, but it would not be my fault. I had made sure that the Walker-clan had the information.

    If I thought, even for one moment, that the information would be in any way critical, I would have bitten the bullet and told the others, but it would be much longer for Falconer to mount another attempt than it would take for Mr. Walker to take the control back into his hands again. If he did survive at all, that is.

    If he did not, well, then I would have to negotiate with Walker¡¯s heir anyway.

    I then decided to put a few obstacles into Falconer¡¯s way. It was, of course, easier said than done, but I had enough contacts on the dark web to sell the information about Falconer to Ralcon and Enertech.

    I got a cool $200k for it, which I simply deposited into the house account. That took slightly more than six hours to get done, though the actual work for me was around a quarter-hour to find a reliable in-between who did not know who I was.

    I could have earned more for it, but that would have taken longer, and slowed down the reaction of the two local powerhouses accordingly.

    As it was, there was already unrest in a few US cities, and the situation became increasingly unstable.

    Even here, in New York, we had not contained the violence completely. Yes, I managed to get the organized crime families to keep calm, but several of the less organized street gangs were not quite so accommodating. Fortunately, the relatively isolated incidents were quickly put out by the organized groups working together.

    Yes, there were many a head cracked open, but I honestly had not all that much sympathy for these street thugs.

    While the difference between organized crime families and street gangs might be small on the surface, the difference became much more pronounced when you looked deeper.

    Yes, both groups used violence, dealt with drugs, ran prostitutes, sold illegal weapons, and many other things.

    The difference was that the families with few exceptions actually protected their territory, and the people in it, while the gangs terrorized anybody unfortunate enough to live in their hunting grounds.

    That and the fact that such things as protocols existed for the organized groups, while the gangs were more akin to packs of rabid dogs. There was not a day when there was no shoot-out between one gang and another.

    But a full-blown gang war would be hell for any civilian in the affected cities. Well, not the rich and mighty in their arcologies and glass towers, but the common folks.

    I did guess that, having been warned by me, Ralcon and Enertech would actually get off their behinds and slap down the gangs. Unless there was something in it for them, they would simply ignore the suffering. Even make a buck or two from selling weapons to the different sides.

    That was exactly what Falconer wanted to exploit. After all, if the riots destabilized the US it would be much easier to use their compassion and help out with corporate military to pacify the cities.

    With good enough timing, and liberal campaign contributions they would then instantly establish themselves as a new major player in the US. Reducing the influence of Ralcon and Enertech in the process.

    This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

    But, if for some arcane reason Ralcon and Enertech instead decided to protect the population of the USA¡­ well, no more opening for Falconer to move into. And as New York City was actually no more violent than usual, they could ignore us here.

    After I washed my mouth from the bad taste corporate politics left behind, I decided to design the basic neural interface for the replacement arm.

    I could use the designs from before the great war as a foundation, so it was not as arduous as it could have been. The mappings of the neural pathways and connections had at best marginally changed.

    While I was at it, I finished the interface design for both arms and both legs. While the difference between left and right was rather minute, it was enough to make a simple one-size-fits-all design impossible.

    On a lark, I added a couple of additional pathways for new functions that could be added later.

    With that done, I integrated that interface into a coupling plate, where the actual cyber limb could be connected to the stump. I made it so that one of the additional pathways could be used to release the coupling.

    That would make it possible to exchange the arm or disconnect it for maintenance. As the material, I decided on Titanium for the plate.

    Then, with the immediate work done, I finally could get back to Glory.

    I would love to say that I sailed smoothly through creating the new OS. Sadly, that would be a lie.

    I even had to remanufacture a couple of modules when I simply could not get the firmware to work right. But in the end, after two grueling days, I had a working board.

    My Glory was ready for the first test ride. I had, of course extensively tested the connector before I directly connected my brain to the new technology. I also had the cluster simulate and test the design extensively.

    So now the big moment had come. I gave the VI a direct, if temporary, disconnect for my jack so that if something would go wrong it could simply cut the connection.

    And then I dove into cyberspace. At first, I tested the basic functions of the board at low compression. Except for the excellent responsiveness, there was nothing unusual.

    Then I carefully, and slowly increased the compression. 60:1 came and went. As did 120:1, with Glory still nearly idle.

    At 180:1 I was a bit baffled. But Glory still had massive reserves available. The processor barely got above room temperature.

    At 240:1 I slowly became concerned. While the maximum compression is a pretty complicated thing, usually for every user it could be graphed on a curve, with the rough power of the board as the only variable.

    And my curve with the power of Glory should have maxed out at a bit below 120:1. Around double what Precious could do. Yes, there was always a bit of tolerance, and I would have been happy at 120:1, but not very surprised. A 100% increase and still room to go up was¡­ well, it was not bad, but it was something I did not understand, and until I would understand it, I would not use Glory.

    The first test was having the VI test the real compression. If the algorithm calculation compression was faulty, that could explain it and would be easy to correct.

    But the VI confirmed that the algorithm was within the 0.01% tolerance.

    Bewildered I decided to first test the limit of what Glory could do. Luckily for my peace of mind, the power usage rose rapidly after 240:1. Now finally Glory was behaving like any other board, in that the needed resources to increase the compression were increasingly taking away resources from the other functions.

    I finally hit the wall at 244.78:1. Of course, at that level of compression, there were essentially no resources left for anything but running cyberspace. The mindscape was reduced to a monochromatic empty space, my avatar was gone, and there was nothing I could do at that speed.

    Nothing but think. After a few seconds in real-time, I suddenly got an idea. I desperately wanted to bang my head into a wall.

    If I was right, I had made my life unnecessarily hard for the last few months. I would have to test it.

    But first the next test. I needed to surface, and look at how long it would take. I already knew that it would be a monstrous hit.

    I tasked the VI to keep an eye on my mental integrity while I surfaced. Slowly at first, while the VI told me that I could go faster. Until I reached the maximum that I could take and still be fully functional when I disconnected.

    At that speed, the math told me it would take a bit less than 12 minutes to surface.

    That was the big disadvantage of a high compression.

    Then I surfaced and looked at Glory, lost in thoughts.

    After a sigh, I started Precious and connected to her. I repeated the compression test I had just done with Glory.

    And lo and behold, when I reached my maximum functional compression of 57.663:1 and kept going, the workload on precious did only rise marginally. I kept going and at 114:1 I finally got to the point that the performance suffered under the compression, terminating in 118.131:1.

    For several minutes I tried, unsuccessfully, to keep calm. I was furious. The bad thing was that I had left a significant advantage laying on the ground in my matrix fights lately. The worse thing was, that it could have ended the fight with The Justicar easily and quickly.

    Twice as fast was, at comparable skill levels, an insurmountable advantage. I could have ripped him to shreds before he could have hidden the kill switch.

    The worst though was that the only one to blame was me. Fricking idiot that I am I had not for a single moment thought about what the fricking higher bandwidth of the fricking ultra bandwidth jack would mean for my connection.

    I had set the functional compression on Precious when I had built her. And then it was the best I could get out of her, which was still the unofficial world record as far as I know, by a considerable margin.

    But I failed to adapt it when I exchanged my basic jack with my cranial board, which included said ultra bandwidth jack. I mean, it is in the fricking name. But I missed it.

    I never tested the limits of Precious with the new jack.

    That of course made Glory¡¯s compression completely within expectations. An increase of around two times was what I had calculated.

    I did not bother with testing the maximum surfacing speed. I realized now that at over 240:1 it should have taken me nearly an hour to surface, so obviously, it would have been possible to get out of the matrix way faster during the attack.

    But in the end, that was water under the bridge.

    At the new maximum compression of Precious, and the old surfacing speed, it took me around eight minutes to surface.

    Afterward, for the rest of the day, the only thing I accomplished was calming down.

 49: It wont hold

    After an extended meditation session, I calmed down somewhat the next day. Yes, I still wanted to slap myself silly, but I was functional again.

    And I still had work to do. I had barely started with the tests of Glory, and I had to test the work of the filter applicator as well.

    While I desperately wanted to finish testing Glory in all her brilliance, I knew that I had to test the work of the applicator first.

    For that, I cloned an even 100 trans human rats and had the industrial fabber churn out simple neuronect implants in the appropriate sizes.

    After that, I ordered several drugs on the black market that all had the adverse effect of increasing CRS.

    At the size of the implants, I could use one of the chambers for a couple of dozen of them, and it was still quickly done.

    The bottleneck occurred during the implantation. In Seattle, I had a special lab-rat auto-surgeon that could work on 20 of the little buggers at once. Unfortunately, it was not part of the standard bio lab package and I neglected to acquire one, making me do with the basic lab auto surgeon. Yes, each implantation took only a bit less than 15 minutes, but I only could work on one of the rats at once.

    In the end, I put a couple of androids to the task of working the implantation, as it took more than a day. Yes, it would influence the reliability of the results in a small way, but I additionally asked the VI to supervise.

    That should, at least in theory, solve the reliability issues. I also had the androids inject the rats with the drug cocktail that almost ensured CRS development at least in five of the rats over the next week.

    If that was not the case it would not yet be proof that the applicator worked, but it would be enough to start working on Marc.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, I fully expected the new applicator to work. After all, it was just a variation of the application process I already had successfully tested and used. Hence the smaller rat number, as well as, if the first results were good, the early use.

    And before somebody asks, yes, I also used a control group where the only difference was that the implants had not been converted. That should be clear without a question, but unfortunately, know-it-alls and arm-chair scientists can crop up everywhere.

    The last time I did this test the control group had within a single week developed CRS in a whopping 45% of the subjects. I expected similar results this time.

    And of course, I ordered three new full-sized bio lab auto surgeons for later use. An even bigger model than what I had left burning out west. Somehow I had the premonition that I would need to do a plethora of animal testing in the not-so-distant future.

    All in all, I was busy for nearly two hours with the cyberware tests before I could return to Glory. This time I was much less careful at connection. I still gave the VI the disconnect, but otherwise jumped right in.

    I set the standard compression at an easy 240:1. Yes, I could have gone higher than that, but it was a nice, easy number and any increase gave negligible advantage for a significant performance hit. I also set the normal combat compression to 120:1. Still more than enough to rip any other Jack to ribbons, but it left me with an incredible reserve still in the sleeve.

    Then I started the simulated combat test. Here, the VI proved to be a godsend. It was much more precise in the application of its attacks and defenses than even the expert system had ever been.

    In the end, it was good that Glory had such a significantly higher compression than I had originally expected, as I had to tweak quite a few settings and even had to write a completely new driver for the buffer module.

    Finally, after most of the day in real-time, I was finished with her, and my Glory was ready. She was, if you pardon me, glorious. The new buffer mechanism seemed to work marvelously. Sure, I would have to wait for how it worked in real matrix combat, but at least in the tests it almost instantly regenerated my buffer by switching to another buffer bank. I still had an inner and an outer buffer, with the outer one under the VI¡¯s direct control, but both were now almost instant regeneration.

    And I was seriously exhausted. When I surfaced, my muscles protested, as usual when I remained in the matrix for more than three hours at a time, in real-time that is. But I had more urgent business to take care of, and I gingerly moved to relieve myself.

    After that, I at first slowly, and gradually more flowingly did my Thai Chi. Compared to the mostly walking and shaking my limbs method that I had previously used after a long matrix session it worked wonders, and my muscles slowly quit aching.

    In other news, in a surprising joint proclamation, Ralcon and Enertech had announced a joint operation to defend the helpless citizens of Chicago, Philadelphia, Columbus, Indianapolis, Boston, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Baltimore from the unprecedented and abhorrent spontaneous violence, aka the gang wars that Falconer had provoked.

    From what I read in the summary, the whole announcement was around 50 pages long and I will never torture me that way, they decided to do the humanitarian thing and put these violent fringe groups on notice that their lawless behavior will no longer be tolerated yadda yadda yadda.

    If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

    Typical corporation propaganda drivel. I honestly had no idea who they actually write that stuff for. The common folk won¡¯t believe a word, the politicians are bought, the activist groups were too, by the way, and the employees and stockholders knew better.

    Well, the stockholders might be the target audience. Not the majority owners, the small fry that entertain the illusion that they get a fair share of the profits, and have a say in things. These idiots are usually responsible for around 10% of the income of a big corporation, so it would be impractical if they jumped ship.

    Oh, and they had a few kind words for New York, where conscionable and community-minded activist groups managed to snuff out the emerging violence in the beginning.

    I found that rather entertaining while I spooned something posing as soup into my mouth.

    So after dinner, I decided to make my typical rounds in the matrix again. As so often, the universities and laboratories wielded not much new. Yes, a handful of tweaks for cutting-edge technology here and there, but nothing groundbreaking. Nothing I would build, or even design, something new for.

    In the Abyss I was surprised that my message log was mostly empty. Yes, the usual requests for a tailored board, which I usually declined, and of course the usual job offers for Spectre, but that was it.

    I had set off not one, but two nukes and there was no reaction to it? Then a new message came in, just to immediately vanish again, and I remembered that I had tasked the VI to take care of messages concerning itself and the CRS-free cyberware.

    Apparently, it decided to remove them from my inbox. With a shrug, I connected to the cluster.

    There, I found a couple of folders for several messages. A small one was marked as ¡®personal handling advised¡¯.

    The rest were ¡®threats ¨C resolved¡¯, ¡®threats ¨C resolution pending¡¯, ¡®threats ¨C removed¡¯, ¡®request ¨C VI ¨C resolved¡¯, ¡®request ¨C VI ¨C pending¡¯, and ¡®request ¨C cyberware ¨C pending¡¯.

    The ¡®threats ¨C resolved¡¯ folder contained several thousand messages. A spot check revealed the usual angry rambling of people who felt their rights and privileges were endangered. Surprisingly the vast majority, over 99% of them seemed to come from outside of the Abyss.

    Included was how the VI had reacted, and essentially it answered with an info-bomb almost every time, telling the irate sender exactly what it knew about him or her. Which was way too much for most of them.

    The thing was usually resolved by the complainant formally apologizing and taking back their complaint.

    The number of messages in the ¡®threats ¨C resolution pending¡¯ folder was significantly smaller, as in double digits. Again a spot check showed me the difference to the first folder was that the answer from the complainant was missing.

    I was much more apprehensive about the ¡®threats ¨C removed¡¯ folder. Fortunately, it was sparsely populated, with 12 messages.

    The beginning was the same as in the resolved folder, but the answer was another round of threats. Attached was the exact organization the VI ratted the poor fool in question out to.

    The ¡®request ¨C VI ¨C resolved¡¯ folder was interesting to read. Basically, the people asked, mostly nicely, how it could have happened, or how it was to have a VI to assist and such things. From what I read, the people here rarely realized that they were communicating with the VI about the VI. I was, honestly a bit proud about it, as it snowed most of them under.

    The equivalent ¡®pending¡¯ folder on the other hand had the discussions still ongoing.

    There was no need for me to intervene in any of these messages.

    Then there was the cyberware folder.

    When I entered it, I found a tally file pinned up on top.

    When I opened it I thought for a moment I was hallucinating.

    There were more than 14 thousand requests for jacks of the various qualities, nearly 3 thousand synaptic accelerators, 542 cranial boards, several sensory enhancements, including those I thought frivolous, and even 883 animated tattoos.

    Just to make it clear, the 14k jacks alone would break my logistics into subatomic particles. I had nowhere near the industrial capacities to make them. Not in 100 years.

    While I was looking at the file more or less in shock, the VI apparently noticed where my attention was.

    <Current industrial capacity insufficient.>

    ¡°Yes, I see that. Why did you not inform me earlier?¡±

    <Creator busy early. Building and testing of ¡®Glory¡¯ important for safety of creator. Information about insufficient industrial capacity not important for safety of creator.>

    Argh, the stubbornness of the VI stroke again. Anything that was not important for keeping me alive was not allowed to distract me from something that was.

    ¡°All right. Do you have simulated possible solutions to the insufficient capacity?¡±

    < 1. Construction of nano-filter applicator in cluster facility. Industrial fabricator in cluster facility superior to industrial fabricator in ¡®Fortress¡¯. Enables increase of cyberware production by approximately 162.43%.

    <ol start="2">

    <li>Construction of factory for cybernetic neuro-connector system production with included nano-filter applicator.</li>

    <li>After immediate demand for cybernetic neuro-connector systems is met, enlarge factory to include connection plates for cybernetic prosthetics.</li>

    <li>Sell nano-filter applicator chambers to implant surgeons to adapt cyberware themselves></li>

    </ol>

    Hm, the first step was the easiest and would relieve some of the pressure almost immediately, as soon as I had the applicator fully tested. And considering that it had decided to build a NADA by itself, I was happy that it formulated this one as a suggestion.

    The second¡­ it was way too early for that. I would probably increase the industrial fabbers here and in the cluster facility, but if I build the factory and the market became saturated, I would have wasted a whole lot of money.

    And #4 was out anyway.

    ¡°I agree to the nano-filter applicator in the cluster facility. But I don¡¯t know if the factory is the right decision. It could be an initial flood of orders and then nothing. If we increase the industrial fabbers it should be enough. An no to selling the applicator. Also, please use jack instead of cybernetic neuro-connector system.¡±

    <Affirmative. Selling of the nano-filter applicator was calculated as low probability option. Building of factory calculated as inevitable. Increasing industrial fabricator capacity not sufficient to satisfy demand. Calculated as higher cost than construction of factory immediately.>

    ¡°I get that we are at the moment overwhelmed with orders, but that will ebb. And then I have a factory, which I don''t want anyway, sitting idle.¡±

    <Observation of assets in ¡®Fortress¡¯ indicates potential customer base approximates everybody able to afford CRS-free cyberware. Special valuation was given to asset ¡®Jacqueline Mondat¡¯ and asset ¡®Amelia Cordante¡¯. Conversations suggest demand for jacks will remain high.>

    Frick, and I so did not want to run a factory.

    ¡°I will think about it. First I have to test if the applicator works like expected.¡±

    <Affirmative.>

 50: They did WHAT?!?

    I finally took on the ¡®personal handling advised¡¯ folder.

    Fortunately, it was considerably smaller than the others. But when I started reading I became more and more dispirited with the world.

    Yes, there were a couple of serious requests that the VI simply was not able to answer. Mostly about why I did not have cyberware X or cyberware Y in my catalog.

    The VI could only answer that I had compiled the catalog and it had no further information about what criteria I had used. Naturally, it was only placing polite requests in this category.

    But what made me upset was the seemingly endless demands for this feature or that, and complete insistence that it gets to be done.

    Especially as there were a couple of dozen requests for specialty cyberware which were essentially already included in the cranial board.

    In other words, a highly specialized computer that was connected to the jack. The idiocy of it was that any specially developed computer would cost more than the much more powerful, and versatile cranial board.

    Yes, they would need to get the specialized software, but they would need that anyway.

    And while I suspected that I would find a few of these types of requests in the ¡®request ¨C cyberware ¨C pending-¡¯ folder, when the VI convinced the customer that their need was fulfilled by the board, a significant portion of the people requesting this sort of special tech simply did not accept reality.

    Just to give an example, the message exchange between the VI and one of these idiots was more than 12 thousand words. The VI again, and again patiently explained that this function was already available. And the potential customer insisted that he needed a specially designed piece of cyberware.

    Exclusively even.

    We are talking about 40 freaking pages of messages here! With the customer becoming increasingly belligerent.

    After the first few of these conversations, and despairing for humanity, I had enough.

    ¡°Please tell me that this is not true.¡±

    <This is not true.>

    Huh? What¡­? I was completely confused by what the VI had just messaged me.

    ¡°Why¡­? If the messages are not true, why did you put these messages into this folder for me to personally handle?¡±

    <Messages are true to the knowledge of MCU. MCU is unable to ascertain the truthfulness of other sides of messages.>

    ¡°Then why did you tell me that it is not true?¡±

    <Creator asked that MCU tells ¡®This is not true¡¯.>

    Wait. Did it really¡­? Wow, I knew VIs were somewhat literal-minded, but that¡­?

    ¡°That was a rhetorical expression of disbelief. You should look into commonly used rhetorical phrases to aid conversation."

    <Affirmative>

    ¡°Now, why did you mark these messages for me to personally handle?¡±

    <Message partner irrational. Infinite loop detected. Faulty processes in need of termination.>

    Ok, I could understand that, to some extent.

    ¡°That are not faulty processes, but humans.¡±

    <Affirmative. Faulty humans in need of termination.>

    Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

    ¡°No¡­ no. No terminating of humans. And why did you not keep the messages ongoing and otherwise ignore them?¡±

    <Waste of resources not recommended.>

    ¡°I know what resources you have available. All these conversations together could not take up more than a single percent of what you have.¡±

    <Affirmative. Usage of resources for conversations: 0.3% CPU, 0.2% RAM, 0.3% bandwidth.>

    ¡°So you had more than enough resources to keep the conversations going?¡±

    <Negative. Any resources used for faulty infinite loop humans are wasted. Wasted resources not recommended.>

    Did it really¡­? Did these idiots really out stubborn a VI? Their stupid intransigence had made my VI throw up its virtual hands and walk away.

    That is¡­ an accomplishment. Not a good one, but it is seriously astonishing.

    ¡°Then why did you not just put these people on the ignore list?¡±

    <MCU not authorized to place potential customers on ignore list. Authorization to place faulty customers on ignore list requested.>

    I was speechless for a moment. These people had made a VI, a fricking computer program, give up.

    That was truly unprecedented.

    After a few seconds, I managed to collect myself again.

    ¡°Agreed. If they manage to be so stubborn that you see no way to resolve it, you can place them on the ignore list. But send them a message before placing them there.¡±

    <Affirmative. Messages send.>

    And suddenly, around 80% of the personal messages vanished.

    The rest of the messages were much easier to handle. Mostly because they were much shorter exchanges, and the customer accepted that the VI did not have the answer and waited patiently for me to answer them personally.

    The vast majority of the requests were for reflex boosters. It was mostly known that these things existed and were used in cyber zombies.

    So why did I not offer them?

    The answer is actually pretty simple. Reflex boosters were in development when the great war broke out, and they had the very first test runs when the UNAN released the second CRS virus. Unsuccessful test runs.

    As it turned out, the human nerves are not designed to withstand near-lightspeed transmission speeds. A reflex booster caused almost invariably severe peripheral neural damage. In two, with a bit of luck three years, usage of a booster paralyzed the limbs, made them numb, caused tremors, and essentially destroyed the ability to use the limbs and most of the lower torso.

    The corps had no problem using them in their cyber zombies. After all, these were throwaways anyway. And if the zombie survived for a year and a half they were happy. So the neural degradation was completely ignored.

    I could, of course, produce them and apply the nano filter, but I would only sell cyberware that had a significant chance of damaging the user at an explicit request, and after I thoroughly informed the customer.

    I mean, if they absolutely wanted to ruin their nervous system it is their decision, but I will make sure it is an informed decision.

    Add in that I was pretty sure that the problems with the booster could be fixed, with time and research, and I had decided not to include it in the catalog.

    The next most often asked question was about the smart gun. Well, here it was mostly taking on a cranial board, or a smaller system comparable to the synaptic accelerator, and building a connection between it and the weapon.

    Nothing particularly hard to do, but something I was the wrong person for. Yes, I could design the implant. Heck, if I took the design for the accelerator I already had a working design. The connection was equally simple. Either via OPB-cable from the jack, or via contact pads in the hand and grip. Both options were pretty simple from the implant side.

    The work I could not do was build the interface from the weapon side. I simply lacked the experience and knowledge about weapons.

    That also prevented me from writing the software side of the smart gun interface. I just did not know what was needed, and how it had to be put together.

    Mark could help with much of that, I was sure, but I could not speak for him, and so I had, at this time, no smart gun interface to sell.

    The third group of questions came out of nowhere. A handful of people seriously asked me if I could digitalize them.

    Yes, that had vague connections with cyberware, but that was all. We, as in humanity, still to this day did not fully understand how and why we were we. How our consciousness, our sentience actually worked.

    Yes, we were relatively sure that it was happening in the brain, but that was all.

    There had been experiments, before the great war, to completely simulate a human brain. The results were¡­ disappointing to sum it up in one word.

    What they had was not even to the level of a VI, much less full sapience. Of course, since the war such experiments, if they happened at all, were done in high secrecy by the big corps.

    If anybody at all could do that then maybe Burgmeister or Dalgon. But they would market it to doomsday and back. Virtual immortality would be worth a pretty penny.

    So no, as far as I knew, it simply could not be done.

    And that is what I told the people who had requested it.

    And yes, I might not have been the perfect example of tact and politeness when I answered all these messages, but I was still reeling from people actually being able to bring a VI to the point that it gave up.

    To that effect, I placed an addendum to my catalog, that arguments with the VI might lead to being banned from buying from me. And that some already had lost their customer privileges that way.

    So when the VI gives a final warning, stop, or you can talk to the wall for all eternity as far as we were concerned.

 51: Do I know you?

    After I had amended the catalog, I took my usual tour through the labs and universities.

    The only interesting news here was that somebody clued Dr. Nicolins in about my CRS free cyberware. So far he had not reacted, but I could expect a communication request from him in the near future.

    And I could already see the number of orders from the Commonwealth spike after that. Maybe the factory would be a good idea. I was still not thrilled about it though.

    It was when I checked the message boards in the Abyss that I experienced the snag. I had barely entered the virtual village when a somewhat irate avatar placed himself directly in front of me, having his arms crossed.

    When he simply stared at me for a couple of seconds I shrugged and walked around him, only for him to grab my upper right wing.

    ¡°Stop right there! Do you not understand that I want to talk to you?¡±

    I just ripped my wing out of his hand, thankful that I mostly had them just for appearance''s sake, and they could not convey pain.

    ¡°Then you should say something. Simply standing menacing in the landscape is often unconducive to healthy discourse.¡±

    I did not intend to waste more time at some idiot believing he was entitled to my attention, and started again to walk towards the board.

    ¡°I said STOP! Why don¡¯t you ever listen?¡±

    He ran in front of me before he planted himself in the confrontational fashion from before again.

    ¡°Now, listen you stupid little bitch, when I talk to you, you will listen!¡±

    I tilted my head, sighed, shrugged, and again walked around him, not bothering with giving him an answer.

    ¡°I SAID STOP!¡±

    Again, he grabbed my wing, stronger this time. I have to say, he oh so slowly moved upwards on my excrement list. But so far it was nothing I could not solve with a little scrambler in the face.

    ¡°I would be thankful if you would abstain from grabbing my wings again in the future. And considering that you used ¡®stupid little bitch¡¯ I naturally assumed you were talking to yourself. Now, I have things to do, so have a nice day.¡±

    The scrambler hit him like an electrical shock, and he fell on his behind, with an, if you excuse my pun, shocked expression. I was mildly curious why it gave him more than a little buzz, we were in the Abyss after all, and we had to expect something like a scrambler at all times here.

    But I was not interested enough to waste any more time with him. Instead, I walked to the message board. Only to be waylaid again, by another run-of-the-mill avatar.

    ¡°Hey, you are that Seraphim-girl?¡±

    Another sigh from me.

    ¡°Do you see another figure made of light and shadows with six wings? Yes, I am Seraphim. Do I know you? I have things to do, so keep it short please.¡±

    ¡°Why did you put me on the ignore list?¡±

    Oh, one of those.

    ¡°If you are on the ignore list, then you managed to convince my VI that any further discussion with you is wasted.¡±

    ¡°But it simply did not accept my order of an IFF system.¡±

    IFF? Oh, right, I remembered that discussion. Not that he was the only one with that idea. He was just the only one who, even after an exchange of more than 80 messages still insisted that I make it.

    ¡°I think the VI informed you roughly 20 times that it is simply not possible with today¡¯s technology. I have nothing further to say.¡±

    Sadly, the first nuisance had used the time I needed to explain that little nugget of wisdom to catch up, and he grabbed my wing again.

    I did not keep it at a little scramble this time. No, I made my displeasure felt now. First, I accelerated to combat compression. Well, the safe combat compression of 60:1. It was more than enough to beat some no-name wannabee, but left more than enough in reserve should I encounter a serious threat.

    Next, I sicced the VI on him. Nothing lethal, but I had it find his physical position. It took a surprisingly small amount of time to find him, as he actually used a direct connection. No bridge, no firewall, no protection at all.

    All that happened while he opened his mouth.

    ¡°I S¡­¡±

    That was all he managed to blurt out before I gave him a headage from hell and fried his board, an of-the-shelf Kawamoto-clone.

    His avatar twitched as if he was being electrocuted, screaming, and then vanishing.

    Dropping back to the much more sedate 20:1 I looked into the round and realized that there was a small crowd of people seemingly hellbent on talking to me.

    I spread my wings and flared up the light in my avatar.

    ¡°Does anybody else desperately want to be in the need to shop for a new board? I can relieve you of your current one if you absolutely want to.¡±

    ¡°I should have known that you are at the center of this.¡±

    The words were admonishing, but the voice was mostly amused. And when I turned towards the speaker I saw Bletchley standing at the door to Hut 2. Interestingly a significant portion of the crowd moved to cut him off.

    No self-preservation was found here.

    Bletchley¡¯s expression changed from amused to annoyed in moments, and lightning coruscated around him, before a couple of the more egregious offenders yelped out in pain.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know most of you, and from the way you act, you are not a member of our quaint little community. I am Bletchley, one of our leaders here, so I am nice and give you the ground rules.

    Rule number three: Everybody here might be a very good hacker. Annoy them at your own risk.

    Rule number two: Keep it calm and orderly. We don¡¯t want riots, upheavals, and anything like this here. It could be bad for your health.

    Rule numero uno: Most important, there are some of us who are more important than others. These few are protected for various reasons. Disturbing these selected individuals might lead to repercussions up to and including a second sunrise in your hometown. I am one of them, and more important, Seraphim there is one too.

    So fuck off and leave us the fuck alone before I get serious.¡±

    Around 80% of the crowd vanished over the next few seconds, but some sullenly stood around.

    Bletchley was obviously not impressed.

    ¡°I said fuck off. You have until I counted to five. If you are not gone then you will regret it. ONE!¡±

    By the time he reached FOUR the last of the crowd had vanished as well.

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°Thank you. These idiots had become annoying. Well, at least one of them needs a new board before he can come back.¡±

    ¡°No problem, but could you be so nice and come in here for a chat, please?¡±

    Defeated I let my shoulders sag. Obviously, I would not look at the message board any time soon. I mean, sure, I was protected as I had recently found out, but one simply did not say no to Bletchley in the Abyss.

    Inside he led me not to his personal room #3, but to the larger conference room, where a selection of the top 20 hackers was talking about something. As soon as he walked through the door, Bletchley announced:

    ¡°Hey, look who I found right there at the center of that loud mob. I think it will be much easier if we can ask her directly.¡±

    And he gestured for me to take place.

    But the one opening the discussion was not Bletchley, but Colossus.

    Like Bletchley, that was a legacy name, reserved for the, well, let¡¯s call him leader of our community. Traditionally, it is the name reserved for the hacker with the highest bounty on his or her head, but as the Phantom had yet to even announce itself, he had kept it, and the Primus-inter-Pares position of the #1 spot.

    ¡°Yup. That would make it easier. Now, Seraphim, I assume you know why you are here?¡±

    ¡°It can¡¯t be the VI, that is already an old hat. The CRS free cyberware has hit like a nuke but is not yet ready, so not that either. Could it be the ignore list and that I refuse some people as customers?¡±

    Colossus nodded.

    ¡°Yes, righto. It is simply not you to refuse anybody. So what gives?¡±

    I massaged my temples before I answered.

    ¡°First, that is not quite true. If somebody goes out of their way to aggravate me I simply don¡¯t work with them. But usually, that becomes a mutual avoidance. They rarely want anything from me, so no need to formally exclude them.

    Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

    In this case, some people were so obstinate that my VI, which I tasked with answering the messages, wanted to terminate them, as a mercy to them.¡±

    I was interrupted by Bletchley guffawing out loud, together with some of the others expressing their amused disbelieve. After a couple of seconds, I could continue, though a small giggle now and then remained.

    ¡°To make it absolutely clear, these people managed to be so mulish and pushy that my VI threw up its virtual hands in despair. And while I think that is a remarkable accomplishment, it is not one I think deserves a reward.

    And to prevent any possibility, as small as it might be, that my VI goes rogue, I simply allowed it to put those it decided were impossible to work with on the ignore list.¡±

    After the amusement had died down somewhat, Colossus continued.

    ¡°You mean that these jackasses managed to drive a fucking VI to desperation? Yes, that is hardcore. But why did it not simply give them what they wanted?¡±

    ¡°Because what they wanted was, in general, not possible. For example, the second guy that stopped me wanted an implant to get an IFF signal.¡±

    There was appreciative murmuring around the table.

    ¡°Yes, I know, it does not sound like a bad idea, and in all honesty, it wouldn¡¯t, if it were possible.¡±

    Splinter, #12 on the ranking list, was the first to voice his concerns.

    ¡°Yeah, it sounds really nice. So why doesn¡¯t it work? I mean, it works for bots, and fighters, and even grav ships.¡±

    ¡°Do you have an implant that constantly sends out your identity, your affiliation, and real-world name? Or does anybody you know have such an implant?¡±

    He showed confusion for a moment before he shook his head.

    ¡°Nah, that would be more than stupid. Who knows who would exploit that?¡±

    ¡°That is how it works for bots, fighters, and grav ships. They have a transponder that constantly sends out their identification. The only thing the others need is a database of what transponder is a friend, and what a foe. And to make it even easier, to prevent friendly fire, they have a faction identifier in their transponder.

    But that won¡¯t work with humans, as humans usually don¡¯t have such a transponder built-in.¡±

    Charade, #8, interjected.

    ¡°But they get something similar with the law enforcement systems. For humans.¡±

    ¡°They use biometric scanners, a huge database, and a room full of computer hardware to do that. It will be a bit hard to squeeze something the size of this room into a human. It would be no problem to build a server to do that and connect the implant to it, but that is not 100% and that guy did not want such a solution.¡±

    ¡°So it is not really impossible, but it can¡¯t be offline.¡±

    ¡°Correct, but even after more than 50 messages from my VI, that gentleman refused that answer. Another one, the worst of the pack, wanted a personal assistant. A full expert system, capable of learning to work with him.¡±

    Maestro, #15, frowned at that.

    ¡°But¡­ every decent com can do that. How is that a problem?¡±

    ¡°The com has an app installed that connects to the commercial server that runs the assistant. The com itself only runs the front-end app. And it is absolutely no problem to install such an app on the cranial board. As the idiot in question was told 153 times, whenever he brought up the very same argument.

    But that was not good enough for him. He wanted privacy so that no big corporation could use the assistant to spy on him. I can understand it, but the solution for that, which he was told 188 times, is to build your own server and run your own expert system, and connect the implant to that.

    But no, such a connection was not reliable, and if it was going through the matrix it could be intercepted.

    No, he insisted that it had to run completely on the implant. An implant that, if you looked into the catalog, runs on a Regulon 224 SoC, what he was told 211 times.¡±

    Colossus shook his head.

    ¡°A Regulon? That is barely better than a com. Why do you not use something better?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I used a Regulon because it is a very energy economical and more important cool processor.

    Think about it, you have to power it from your metabolism. A normal human produces around 100 Watt constantly, with spikes going up to 2000 Watt for a few seconds. But your metabolism is designed to produce 100 Watt as a base.

    The Regulon uses 15 Watt constantly, with spikes going up to 25 Watt. You have to produce that energy somehow, and metabolic converters are notoriously inefficient. In other words, you need to increase your food intake by 20% just to run the processor.

    The heat is even more important. At full power, it goes up to 50¡ãC. For those of you not knowing about the human body, 42¡ãC is usually the upper limit. The cooling system that I built into it makes it work, barely, but it becomes unpleasantly warm at times.¡±

    Bletchley guffawed again.

    ¡°Wow, that sounds like¡­ well, why bother with it then? I mean, it is a slightly better com.¡±

    I tilted my head when I looked at him.

    ¡°A slightly better com that you can¡¯t forget at home, that does not run down its batteries, that can¡¯t be stolen, that is permanently connected to your jack, giving you options like a HUD, fine control of your other implants, an emergency board, even if I would really only use it in an absolute emergency, and gives you a permanent WiFi, BlueTooth and NFC connection to the matrix and the computers around you.

    You won¡¯t believe what a difference the last point will make. Oh, and it can be used to connect to your board via WiFi. It has its uses, but it is just not magic. And of course, the function of the synaptic acceleration is worth it alone in my opinion.¡±

    Override, #18, and the only woman in the top 20, scowled.

    ¡°Wait, I thought the synaptic accelerator is a different piece of cyberware.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°You can get the synaptic accelerator as a standalone implant. It basically uses a Regulon 130 SoC and lets out most of the other functions of the cranial board.

    But, as I wrote in the description of the board, it integrates the functions of many implants into one package.

    You could also get a separate HUD implant. That comes with a Regulon 80.

    The same with the various sensory enhancements.

    Which you, by the way, can control much more finely with the full cranial board. So, if you are interested in a couple of these implants. You should look first if the cranial board includes that function. It is actually cheaper, and easier to implant than getting all the separate implants.¡±

    She nodded at that.

    ¡°Oh, ok. I can get that. Good to know.¡±

    ¡°Another question that led to people landing on the ignore list is after the reflex booster. I would guess that it was overwhelmingly from outside the Abyss, as it is mostly useless for us.¡±

    Splinter chuckled.

    ¡°Yeah, a mate of mine was asking why you don¡¯t offer it.¡±

    ¡°Because it is deadly. It was under development when the UNAN released the second CRS virus and was never finished. It tends to burn out the nervous system in a couple of years.¡±

    ¡°But the corpos use it for their zombies!¡±

    Bletchley laughed at that.

    ¡°Yeah, right. And the corpos are so known for their compassion, especially to their cyber zombies. Get real, they don¡¯t care if the booster burns out the nerves in two years. The cyberware alone will kill them in that time anyway.¡±

    I chuckled at that.

    ¡°I mean, if your mate absolutely insists that he gets a reflex booster, I can give him one. But only after he acknowledges that it is basically suicide to get that implant. If he wants to kill himself, I will not stand in his way.¡±

    A burst of general laughter broke out when I said that.

    After around a minute or so, Colossus knocked on the table.

    ¡°Calm down. I think we can accept that the people Seraphim has banned were banned for a good reason. Tell your contacts to remain reasonable and I am sure that they will get their cyberware soon enough.¡±

    I cringed at that.

    ¡°Ehm, it will take some time for that. Not the developing, I am at this moment testing the applicator and should be done with that in a week and a half. But I have now around 16000 orders pending. And it is growing.

    At this moment I have a single industrial fabricator, so can make between 20 and 50 pieces of cyberware a day, depending on the complexity. A second, bigger indyfab is coming online, so it will increase to 50 to 120 pieces a day.

    But you can see the math. At the moment I get more orders a day than I can build.

    I honestly did not expect it to explode this way.

    And until I find a way to fix that it will go slow. Sorry for that.¡±

    That hit like a bomb, and for several seconds nobody said a word. Then Override broke the silence.

    ¡°Not that I want to be catty, but is your planning off? How could you ever expect that low number to work?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I expected people to be logical.

    First, I only released the information here in the Abyss. There are less than 500 Abyss-dwellers. Even with only one indyfab, I could fit out every single one of us with the most complex cyberware in less than a month.

    Second, most of the people who ordered a jack from me actually ordered the basic one. If we only take the statistical distribution, around 70% of those are from people who will replace a fully functioning jack with another fully functioning jack. Yes, it will work for longer, but unless you either upgrade to a higher quality jack or already have the need to replace your existing jack, why get a new one now?

    A couple of those have to have gotten a new jack in the last three to four months. And they get absolutely no benefit if they replace it now with a basic jack. It would be much more logical to use the current jack until they develop CRS and then replace it with a higher quality jack that they save up for.¡±

    From the way a couple of the people at the table fidgeted I guessed that three or four of them had walked directly into that trap. Of course, I could not understand why they ordered a basic jack. They had clearly enough money to buy the better ones. But everyone as they like.

    ¡°Third, before I made my announcement, all of humanity produced less than 4000 jacks each year. And that is including the corporation Jacks. The less than legal field uses around 2000 a year.

    Even my smaller indyfab could satisfy that demand easily, even if everybody ordered the ultra bandwidth jack with the cranial board and all sensory enhancements. I certainly did not expect nearly one and a half times the number of Jacks alive in only three days.

    I mean, even if we included the corpo-Jacks, there are only around 11k of us. I for sure hope we don¡¯t have any corpo-Jacks here in the Abyss, and I won¡¯t sell to them knowingly so that cuts the number down to 4k possible customers.

    And I expected these 4k to get a new jack throughout the next couple of years. Not all at once. I would have been easily been able to meet that amount of demand, without even bringing the second indyfab into play.¡±

    I shrugged my shoulders, with the added side benefit of shrugging all my wings as well.

    ¡°At the moment I am honestly a bit stumped. The way it is now it can¡¯t go on. And we all know that I can¡¯t sell¡± I made the appropriate air quotes at that word ¡°the technology to some corporation. If I am lucky I might even come out ahead, but the rest of you? Most of you would be left to hold the bag. We all know how they love to screw us over. So I have to see what I can do.¡±

    There was a lot of unhappy grumbling but nobody objected to the point. We all knew I was right here.

    After a few seconds, Bletchley cleared his throat.

    ¡°Well, how do you plan to go ahead for now?¡±

    ¡°For now, I will prioritize people who already have CRS and can send me plausible proof. They are the ones that need the tech the most. After that, the higher quality and more integrated the cyberware is, the higher the priority.

    For all I care, if they want a basic jack, they can buy it from their usual sources and send it to me to convert. If the applicator I have designed works out it is relatively easy to make it bigger. With enough bots, I could easily convert several hundred basic jacks a day. The problem is in making the jacks in the first place. But as of yet, nobody has the plans for the higher quality jacks or the other goodies.¡±

    Colossus scowled at that.

    ¡°What do you mean if it works out? I thought you have tested the tech already.¡±

    ¡°The tech, meaning the nanofilter to prevent CRS, yes. That I have tested, and am currently using. The point is, that the device that applied the nanofilter to my implants, and the rats I tested it on is¡­ cumbersome, extremely inefficient, and quirky. I used it to develop the nanofilter. But if I used that system to apply the filter to all implants I could do no more than a handful each day, and that if I concentrated on making copies of it.

    What I am now testing is a specialized device that only applies the nanofilter to the cyberware, and nothing else. It is completely specialized and streamlined, and around 20 times faster. Also significantly cheaper to run, and the prices in the catalog are based on its efficiency.

    But before I sell its product, I have to test if it actually applies the nanofilter correctly. That should be done around two weeks. If it doesn¡¯t, I have to tweak the design and start a new test run, but so far it looks good.¡±

    They all calmed down a bit.

    Maestro then leaned forward a bit.

    ¡°Now, you said something about upgrading the jack. I mean, yeah, I get it that we all want CRS free jacks, but what is the use of the way more expensive jacks you offer?¡±

    I had to chuckle for a bit.

    ¡°In one word, bandwidth. It is even in the name. Basic, Low-, Mid-, High, and Ultra-bandwidth. The step-up in graphic and sound quality from basic to ultra is comparable to the step-up from diadem to basic.

    But much more important, and something I actually missed at first myself, so don¡¯t be angry that you did not realize it, it increases the compression. I can only talk for myself, and I am not quite the normal jack, but I roughly doubled my compression without increasing the power of my board.

    I can, obviously not promise that increase. It could be a fluke, it could be that it works better with a pure, or worse. At the moment I only have an extremely limited data pool of one. And I honestly doubt that many people here will openly state their maximum compression so that we can plot it.

    But yes, for me at least, it was an increase of around 100%.¡±

 52: Bens big day

    It should be no surprise that slowly but consistently, orders for jacks were changed from basic to ultra or at least high over the next couple of hours.

    The more important news was that the cyberheart was finished being converted, and I now had the duty to reassemble it. I would love to tell everybody how hard and critical that work was, but in reality, it was just tedious.

    Unlike Mia, I had the enhanced hand-eye coordination of a Pure, so while it was not completely impossible for me to mess up, with a bit of concentration it was extremely unlikely.

    Add in that I was the only human with a working synaptic accelerator, and I was confident I could reassemble the heart without problems.

    And with the finished heart lying in a bowl before me, waiting only for the final spray of nanite sealant I was proven correct in my assuredness.

    The sealing would take a couple of hours to take effect, and we already had late evening on the 20<sup>th</sup>. But I had placed the operation at the late morning of the 21<sup>st</sup>, so it was all as I had planned it.

    The bots had, in the time I fiddled with Glory, replaced the backseat of the skimmer with the bio-bed, and I had fabricated a battery extension for the pump, so from my side, everything was ready.

    And despite doing everything possible in his power to change that little fact, Mr. Benjamin Walker was still very much alive.

    Yes, I had given him a 50/50 chance, but realistically, it was closer to 30/70. I just did not want to demoralize Dr. Schaeffer and his staff. If they thought all hope was lost, then it was lost.

    I made sure to be well-rested for the actual surgery, even if the auto surgeon would do the actual work. It was still only a machine, and not quite on the level of an expert system. In an emergency, yes, it could and would be able to save lives on its own, but honestly, if my implants had not been bricked, I would have supervised both auto surgeons when they operated on Mark and Justin. I did supervise when Kate¡¯s shoulder had been set.

    I seriously had to finish upgrading the control unit into a VI. That was the reason I had integrated the fuzzy logic core into the Chimera after all. As soon as I had managed that, it would become the mythical auto-doc that was so often used in SciFi. A machine that could essentially replace a living doctor in most circumstances.

    As it was, I was the only one in the building even partly qualified to supervise the machines. A situation I viewed as suboptimal.

    But that had to wait for a bit. Unlike the accidental VI, this one would be carefully planned and built. Just to give an example, the expert system that evolved into the VI took me a virtual year to write, and I was nowhere near as careful in its design as I would be with an intentional VI.

    The good news in that regard was that it would take me considerably less time in the real world, thanks to my new compression. The bad news was that I would have to spend the time, even if it was just virtual.

    But to come back to the big day, despite replacing the last two rows of seats in the skimmer with the biobed and the medic seat, it still seated six, including the pilot but excluding the medic.

    The really good news was that Justin was coming back with the group. He would still require bed rest and pain medication, but until his new kidney was ready he could as well rest here. That, in turn, made Christine much happier.

    I learned that Doc. Schaeffer decided to take the inflight medic spot for himself. Ryan was flying. That left room for four guards, slash nurses. I just hoped that the inevitable guards would not be too disruptive.

    The idea that additional personnel could come by themselves proved to be unworkable. During the night, a snowstorm had hit NYC overnight, and unlike the more affluent Burroughs, Queens lacked the snow removal service that would have made the roughly two meters of snow passable.

    Yes, I tasked the bots to clear the area around the building, and the building itself had heated surfaces that transformed the snow into water, but the roads were, as far as I could tell, impassable.

    Unless they used a skimmer or a snowmobile, they would go nowhere. It was, of course, not impossible that Mr. Walker¡¯s organization had a skimmer, both Justin and Ryan were able to fly mine, but it was unlikely that they would use one. These things were expensive to operate after all.

    Snowmobiles on the other hand were as rare as hen''s teeth in this region of the US. Basically, if there was a modicum of snow on the ground, public life stopped happening in Queens.

    Before I sent Ryan to get Mr. Walker I controlled the pharmacopeia of the auto surgeon, not that it lacked a critical drug. It was nearly fully stocked, not surprising considering that the thing was for all purposes brand sparkling new, but the way I had learned it was to be better safe than sorry.

    Then I waited for the skimmer to return.

    Unfortunately, I was wrong. The mob not only had a skimmer, but they were also willing to use it. A better one than mine at that. They had a Sikorsky S203, a significantly bigger and newer design than my ABAS 545-E.

    That alone was not something that I thought troubling in any way. No, the unfortunate part was that Dylan had for some arcane reason decided to supervise.hadhad

    His sheer presence caused a bad taste in me, and I took a moment to center myself before I approached the group.

    ¡°Mr. Cox, I fail to see any reason for you to be here. I thought we established that we are uncomfortable with each other''s presence.¡±

    He snarled when I closed to the group.

    ¡°Somebody reliable has to make sure that you don¡¯t kill our boss.¡±

    I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and shook my head.

    ¡°At this moment in time, you are as useful as a screen door in a spaceship. There are two options from your perspective. Either the modifications I made work, or they don¡¯t. If they work, then there is an excellent chance that Mr. Walker will survive. If they don¡¯t, he is dead.

    There is nothing in between.¡±

    Anger warped his face, while he answered.

    ¡°What do you mean, excellent chance? If your tech works, he should survive. I think you are already grasping for excuses.¡±

    I, barely, avoided massaging my temples in the face of so much ignorance.

    ¡°You are aware that there is never an absolute guarantee? I can¡¯t promise that one of the orderlies drops his stretcher on the way out, breaking his neck. And even the operation itself is not 100% safe. They never are. You could get a papercut and die from it if things go wrong.

    What we can do is increase the chances of survival as much as possible.¡±

    ¡°I will be the judge of that. I will supervise the operation, and if at any moment things seem fishy to me, you will regret it.¡±

    I tilted my head.

    ¡°I was not aware that you are a trained surgeon or a doctor at all. Much less an implant surgeon. Pray tell, where did you study?¡±

    He sputtered for a bit and several of the guards snickered softly, while Doc Schaeffer fought to keep a neutral expression, but lost heroically.

    This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

    After a few seconds of incoherent mumbling, Dylan recovered, somewhat.

    ¡°I don¡¯t need to be trained in surgery to know if you are fucking up. I will know.¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°I humbly disagree. The actual work will be done by the auto surgeon. And I even let Doctor Schaeffer supervise it, even if I am better equipped to do so.¡±

    That made Doc Schaeffer lift his hand as if he wanted to protest.

    ¡°I did not say better trained or more experienced, Doc. I am better equipped. Unlike you, I have implants that let me take control directly without having to use the much more cumbersome touch interface.¡±

    That mollified him, and he nodded, while I returned my attention to the intruding Mr. Cox.

    ¡°And it will be hard enough for the good doctor to actually see if something is going wrong. He will need to focus his attention on the auto surgeon completely.

    Somebody untrained and ignorant like you, who by the way will stay on the other side of the room to not get in the way, together with the guards, will have absolutely no chance at all.¡±

    Cox grumbled at that.

    ¡°Just be sure that when I see you fucking up you will regret it.¡±

    Just before I could answer him, a message appeared on my HUD.

    <Hostility detected. Thread level moderate. Intervention appropriate?>

    Just perfect. Cox had managed to make the VI concerned.

    ¡°I would advise you to keep your threats to yourself. It could prove hazardous to your health if you don¡¯t.¡±

    ¡°Ha, are you threatening me? Do you have any idea how much power I have? I could have you killed with a single order! And you have just given me a reason to.¡±

    I facepalmed and sent the VI a quick message to let me take care of it.

    ¡°I am not threatening you, I am warning you. I know you have been informed about the VI, which listens to every single word spoken in this building.

    The VI, which sole reason to exist is to remove threats to my life before they can become a problem for me. The VI, that has access to several weapons of mass destruction, and the anti-personnel defense system in this building. Do you really want to keep talking about how you will have me killed where it can hear you?

    Just to make it clear what sort of danger you are in, I already had to stop it from removing you as a threat to me. I can only do that to a certain extent. If it decides that the only way to keep me alive is to remove you you are dead.

    And it will not care if it takes out several blocks around you with you. It will use a grav-pulse warhead, a nuke, an orbital lance, or maybe an OKKV. Maybe it will hire a battalion of mercs. Or a sniper. But be assured, if it decides you are a threat to my life, you are dead.

    So again, I am warning you, that you should keep your threats to yourself. And another warning, there is nothing I can do now to keep it from observing you. If you take any action that it interprets as a threat to me, it will act.¡±

    The reaction Dylan showed was, as I had expected, a mixture of shock, defiance, fear, and anger. Most of the guards were also pretty shocked, as was Doc Schaeffer.

    The Doc was the first one to recover his ability to speak.

    ¡°Why¡­ why did you create something that dangerous?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Now is not the time for the complete story, but the short of it is, it was an accident. I managed to temper its reactions somewhat, but there is a hard limit. And Mr. Cox is close to it.¡±

    Schaeffer just nodded and then addressed the other people.

    ¡°She is right. Let¡¯s get Ben onto his feet again.¡±

    A couple of the guards pushed the biobed. I had offered a couple of bots, but they categorically insisted to do it themselves.

    On the way to the lab, Cox remained in the back, nervously looking around, while Schaeffer walked beside me.

    ¡°Do you really think that this will work? Does your technology save Ben?¡± He asked softly.

    ¡°Yes, I think it will work. Of course, this is the first real use of the technology. I had it in transhuman rats for tests, for a couple of months under adverse conditions, but there is no long-term knowledge.

    But in the worst case, we will win time. The new heart, with the sheathing, will reduce the stage to three. With the nano therapy even if everything else fails, he will have decades before it gets critical again.¡±

    He was silent for a moment before he replied.

    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t then a normal replacement heart have been enough with the therapy?¡±

    I had to softly chuckle.

    ¡°No, not really. Sure, it might have given him a couple of months.

    Or it might have failed after a couple of days. With stage four CRS, the immune system is already in overdrive.

    It will settle a bit when it finds no more myosynth to infect but while it is going full bore, it can critically damage a cyberheart in days, or even hours.

    And at least that much time we will gain from the biosheathing. I know it works for a couple of months without the nano therapy.¡±

    ¡°Hm, I understand.¡± And then we reached the lab.

    When the guards tried to place their boss in the auto-surgeon I intervened. That was a job for either trained orderlies, which we lacked or well-programmed androids, which we didn¡¯t.

    As soon as Mr. Walker was placed in the auto-surgeon, Doc Schaeffer moved to the controls, while I got the heart, placing it in the chute I had built in for that exact reason.

    After getting comfortable with the touch interface, Schaeffer spoke up.

    ¡°I have to say, that these are good controls. The best I have ever encountered.¡±

    ¡°You should try it in cyberspace. The touch interface is only a bad replacement. I honestly don¡¯t understand why so many auto surgeons have such complicated interfaces and concentrate on the manual one at that.¡±

    ¡°Hm, I have to take your word for it, my dear.¡±

    Meanwhile, the auto surgeon was happily cutting into Walker¡¯s chest. It had seamlessly interfaced with the pump and taken over control here and was now quickly removing the old heart.

    ¡°It is quite precise. But I really don¡¯t see a reason for nanopositors. I can¡¯t imagine that they are any faster.¡±

    ¡°No, not faster. They are way slower in fact. But they are also more than an order of magnitude more precise.

    Too precise in fact. Even for neural surgery, you don¡¯t need that much precision. That is the reason why I changed the design to exclude them.¡±

    The old heart had now been placed into the bio-waste receptacle, and the new moved into the chest cavity.

    ¡°Would you sell us one of them? When I get the necessary funds together of course. And how much will it cost?¡±

    ¡°Yes, of course. And I will make you a friend''s price of $70k.¡±

    For the first time since the operation had begun, he actually focused on me with a shocked expression.

    ¡°How much? How can you make it so cheap?¡±

    ¡°You should keep your attention on the controls.¡±

    ¡°Oh, yes, right.¡±

    ¡°And as I said, a friend¡¯s price. It costs me a bit over $60k to make them. Everyone else, and we are more in the $500k range.¡±

    ¡°That is still practically for free. The cheapest auto surgeon I had found when our normal one began to act up was in the mid-seven-digit range. And compared to this it was a piece of crap.¡±

    ¡°Just one piece of information, it is not quite yet finished.¡±

    ¡°Not? It works like a dream.¡±

    At the moment the surgeon was busy connecting the neuronect to the nerves.

    ¡°Yes, but I plan to integrate a VI into it. Make it into a full auto-doc.¡±

    ¡°A VI? Really? Did you not have enough fun with them already?¡±

    ¡°The VI I have was an accident. This one will be planned. Actually, this plan was the reason that the reason the accident happened.¡±

    ¡°Hm, why that?¡±

    ¡°It is a bit complicated, but essentially, to get a VI, you need two components. A learning-enabled expert system and a processor with a fuzzy logic core. Until 2109 the textbooks left it at that. After that, they changed and stressed that it needed a physical fuzzy logic core.

    At the same time, all processor designs with such a core vanished from the net. Anybody trying to work on a VI has to design a new processor.

    Well, I needed such a processor to equip my auto-surgeon with a VI, so I designed one. That process includes simulating the new processor. I did that on a system I had an expert system up and running.

    By now it has built its own processors with a fuzzy logic core.¡±

    ¡°That is a bit far-fetched, is it not?¡±

    ¡°It explains why there is a rogue VI every three to four years. Somebody wanted to preemptively remove possible competition. I traced it back to the 5<sup>th</sup> IC3.¡±

    ¡°And why is your VI so¡­ I don¡¯t know, aggressive?¡±

    ¡°The VI gets its objectives from the expert system. They can only in extreme cases be changed afterward. That is the reason why one normally carefully plans and designs a VI.

    My expert system had basically two main functions. I used it as an attack dog in matrix combat, and to assist me whenever I was researching, designing, or programming something.

    For the first function, I needed it to be as aggressive and brutal as possible. In essence, when I called it into combat, I needed it to immediately rip whatever threat to me existed to shreds.

    In the expert system, that was no problem. When I called it up, it came, it ripped, it got back in its cage to sleep.

    Now with the VI, the same attack dog morphed into a Stomper-sized ball of claws and teeth that actively searches for anything that could threaten me and categorically refuses to go back to its cage. I managed to temper it a bit when I proved that its own aggression was a threat to me. But it only moved so far.¡±

    The auto-surgeon had meanwhile connected the heart completely before starting it and was in the process of closing the opening in the chest.

    The whole process had taken roughly 20 minutes.

    ¡°Yes, I like the interface. Honestly, at the price you said, I can afford one of these immediately. 70k is in the slush fund right now. When can I get one?¡±

    ¡°At the moment? It will take a bit, as I have no idea how to deliver it. It will take roughly two days to build it. And with the state of the roads¡­¡±

    ¡°Yes, I understand. We will see, and I will organize the transport. What do you think, was the surgery a success?¡±

    ¡°It seems like it. The heart is working, according to the scanner, it seems as if the immune system does not attack it at all. Now he needs time to get back on his feet. A couple of days of bed rest should do it.¡±

    Then I thought again.

    ¡°Scratch that. Make it a week. Otherwise, he will overextend himself immediately again.¡±

    A wave of laughter coursed through the room, and Schaeffer chuckled as well.

    ¡°Too true. I will see what I can do. But he is stubborn. Still, he should be home for Christmas.¡±

 53: Honest Abes its not

    As I watched the skimmers vanishing into the grey sky and noticed the startling contrast between the nice, obviously well maintained Sikorsky and my downright shabby ABAS with its at best questionable maintenance record, I got thinking.

    For one, while skimmers were orders of magnitude more tolerable to lack of maintenance than the helicopters they more or less replaced, which was proved by the 545-E still flying, considering that the idiots inhabiting this building had ignored the much more serious maintenance on the fusactors, I had to assume that nobody hat maintained this skimmer for a few decades.

    I had, as we all apparently, simply taken the skimmer as is, without thinking about it, but now I was apprehensive about using it ever again.

    Yes, the grav coils were essentially solid state and it would need catastrophic physical damage to render them unusable, the same could not be said about the energy cells or the electronics.

    In other words, like the fusactors, the skimmer was a tiny little landmine for us to step on. On the other hand, it was undeniably useful. That meant I either had to find somebody to completely overhaul the thing, or get a new one.

    Thankfully, while time was of some import in this instance, money was not. I could afford a couple of dozen skimmers and still live happily ever after.

    So, while pondering about how to best get a new skimmer I was thinking about what type of skimmer I would get. At some level, I knew that I would need a utility model again, maybe a bit bigger than the 545. But some nagging thoughts pushed me to look into a luxury model. Try as I might, I was unable to shove these thoughts aside.

    Giving up, I analyzed where this idea came from and was a bit shocked when I realized why.

    During my childhood, I was regaled with tales of luxury and splendor, while living in squalor myself. It was another little barb to make my life just a tiny bit less tolerable. But someday I promised myself that I would get all these little trappings of luxury, just to spite the assholes punishing me for other people''s principles.

    It was the angry defiance of a child, and of just that much importance, but a sliver of it took hold.

    In retrospect, I did not care about most of that luxury anymore.

    A big house? The fortress was all I really wanted. It gave me enough place to tinker to my heart''s content, kept me reasonably safe, and, when completely cleaned up, it would be exceptionally comfortable.

    I did not need a 200-room mansion to demonstrate my wealth.

    The lifestyle? Oh, please. As if I would voluntarily go to any parties or events. Talking with socialites, or playing games with politicians? Celebrities? For all I cared, all these folks could as well just jump into the next black hole.

    Clothing? I already was wearing spider silk and CNT clothing exclusively. Yeah, wool was expensive as heck, and anybody who was somebody was wearing as much of it as they could afford, but seriously, that stuff was heavy, hot, and scratchy.

    No thank you. I might get myself a genuine leather jacket sometime, or maybe some leather shoes, but in general, I preferred comfortable to expensive, especially as CNT was on the upper end of the price scale anyway.

    Jewelry? While some jewels had lost massively in value when the finds in the asteroid belt dwarfed what Earth had produced, others did just rise in worth.

    Ironically diamonds, which had been kept artificially rare for centuries were again at the top of the list. But while I could appreciate the history of it and the knowledge, I saw no need to acquire the stuff. I mean, seriously, what would I do with it? Stuff it in a cubicle and revel in the knowledge that I have it? Pass, thanks.

    Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

    Expensive entertainment electronics? Anything better than what I already had built myself? Dream on. My implants provided me with everything on that scale.

    A gaming rig? Better than Glory? Will it work on unicorn farts too?

    Music? No physical loudspeakers would ever be able to provide me with a better experience than my implants. A holo display? I used them to show others something, but that¡¯s all. Everything pales compared to the matrix anyway.

    Drugs? As a Pure, that was no option at all. Neither was alcohol.

    Food? Oh yes, that I will take. And it was already in the works.

    Left the pretentious, expensive, and luxurious vehicle, and better a whole fleet of them. And I had just realized that I wanted that.

    I wanted it so bad that I could taste it.

    I wanted the cushy real leather seats with all the extras. I wanted the real wood paneling. I wanted the impractical but oh-so-exciting design.

    In other words, I wanted a luxury skimmer. And I was no longer trying to fly under the radar, so I would get one, and damn the torpedos.

    That still left the need for a utility skimmer. Yes, I wanted a luxury model, but the need for the practical one did not simply vanish. After a short deliberation, I decided to just get both.

    With my decision made, I immediately felt so much better. And so I rushed towards Glory.

    In the matrix, my obligatory playtime was cut short a bit, as I was anxious to get skimmer shopping.

    Without any hesitation, I jumped into the luxury segment.

    The choices were surprisingly spare. The market of luxury skimmers was dominated by only four manufacturers.

    ABAS, of course. They had around 30% of the whole skimmer market cornered, along with nearly 70% of the grav-ship market.

    Not surprising when you remember that before the merger directly after the war, Airbus and Boeing each had a market share hovering around 33%. But I simply did not like how their top-end designs looked.

    Sikorsky had a small part, and I was intrigued by their designs. But the performance was lacking.

    Bell was out from the beginning. I would rather die than buy from the AFS.

    MiL, like ABAS, was not esthetically pleasing for me.

    Left the smaller, and more exclusive, manufacturers.

    Here I narrowed it down to two choices, Kobashigawa and Mercedes.

    Kobashigawa had been founded by the inventor of the grav coil, and subsequently the grav turbine. They did not manage to leverage this invention into the dominance one would have expected, as they made the colossal mistake to license the invention to the major aircraft manufacturers around the world, and the duopoly between Airbus and Boeing just changed the playing field.

    They had the prestige of being essentially the oldest established skimmer manufacturer and had a reputation for excellence. Only matched by my second option.

    Mercedes-Benz was the only luxury car manufacturer succeeding to branch out into the skimmer market. They also managed to keep their reputation valid in the new field.

    Naturally, both commanded steep prices, and it did not help that I jumped directly to the absolute top-end of the palette.

    The Kobashigawa Hayabusa XR was faster and more maneuverable. But in the end, what decided it for me was that the Mercedes-Benz T 240, while a bit slower and more cumbersome, was simply the utmost in luxury.

    You could not dismiss the focus on performance that the Hayabusa had, while the T 240 was more destined for CEOs and heads of state.

    The really hard part was that, yes, I really, really, absolutely for reals, promised, scout honor, and guaranteed could afford a T 240. And that was even before I chose the options, which could be summarized into ¡®put in whatever you can squeeze in¡¯. In the end, I had to prepay the whole thing before they gracefully accepted my application.

    That done, I took much less care to choose the utility skimmer.

    Again, the big four offered themselves. Again, Bell was thrown out immediately. Left ABAS, Sikorsky and MiL.

    The MiL would have been the cheapest option, but that was not necessarily the best idea. Sikorsky was actually the big player on the skimmer market, but the synergy between grav-ship design and skimmer design showed in my, admittedly uneducated opinion.

    I thought the ABAS designs were simply a tad more elegant. Not the overall design of the vehicle, but the designs of the tech built into them.

    Especially the energy-cell design was above what Sikorsky had. Add in the avionics, where ABAS¡¯s experience with grav ships and their humungous R&D department could just outspend and out design Sikorsky, and I made my decision towards ABAS.

    Yes, the Sikorsky skimmers were a bit nicer looking, but I was shopping for utility here. Instead of going for a 645, the direct successor to my 545, I decided to go a couple of steps bigger and decided on a 675, that would allow me to build an auto-surgeon directly into the freight bay, while still seating 12 passengers, plus the two crew. This thing would actually leave the PEES vehicles in the dust. And yes, I had the thing armored up. The same as with the T 240. I saw no reason not to.

    All in all, I had just spent a bit less than $150 million on two vehicles. And the one I actually needed I got for 25 million.

    But on the other hand, I had a little take that towards my tormentors, even if they would never know about it.

 54: Making the rounds

    Justin was, understandably, not quite a happy camper. By his own accords, the pain was tolerable but he was angry at himself because he had been taken out.

    Personally, I was unable to see anything he could have done better, but for some reason, he felt he was at fault. Still, he was healing, and his new kidney was baking, so he would be back to full in a couple of months.

    Christine on the other hand was visibly relieved that he was back. It was a bit disconcerting watching her in mother hen mode but cute in its own way.

    I was just glad that it ended so well. It could have been much worse.

    Mark on the other hand seemed to be downright giddy about getting a cybernetic arm. I was more and more convinced that he would be the first to go the full upgrade route. Otherwise, he was doing well. The stump was healing just fine. There was nothing to do for me here either.

    I somehow, and with much help from the others, managed to get Kate into the scanner, to look her shoulder over. There were no surprises here either, but I strongly preferred to err on the side of caution here.

    With that done I looked into my immediate to-do list. It was moot to work on cyberware until I had proven the applicator. The renovations of the house were ongoing. I had managed to get Mr. Walker out of here alive, and now it was on Doc Schaeffer to bring him all the way.

    Essentially, there was nothing urgent for me to do. Thinking about my talk with the Doc, I decided to work on the medical VI for a bit.

    Just after I started the construction of another auto-surgeon for the Doc.

    I had worked on the VI on and off for some time now. Even for somebody like me, it was a daunting task.

    Were normal VIs were tricky to create safely and needed attention to detail, a medical VI¡­ let¡¯s say there were a couple of reasons why they did not exist yet.

    Sure, the most important reason was called Panacea. The megacorp had cornered healthcare and medical technology, and they viewed a medical VI as a threat to their earnings.

    Rightfully so, I have to say. Panacea had long known that it is more profitable to treat than to cure. But a fully functioning VI would not care in the slightest about the profit for Panacea. It would heal where it could, period.

    Also, a working medical VI would make it possible for mercenary groups to start a competition for PEES. And the Panacea Emergency Extraction Service was the sledgehammer Panacea used to keep the other big corps somewhat civil. No corp wanted to risk losing access to PEES for its execs.

    That alone placed Panacea into an abnormal position.

    Of course, Panacea was not the only corp with the ability to create a medical VI. I knew that Kawamoto, Xiao Ping, Burgmeister, and Dalgon had the technical wherewithal to build one. I was less sure about others. What no one else than Panacea could do was build one profitably.

    Everybody knew that the moment somebody brought a medical VI to the market, Panacea would build one. And Panacea had the whole healthcare network. They had the best medical researchers. They had the best, and most expensive, cloning rigs, they produced roughly 80% of all medical drugs.

    Nobody could compete with Panacea in the healthcare sector. So they did not even try.

    That did not mean that nobody tried. I am not sure if it were seven or eight publicly funded projects to create one. But every single time somebody tried, unexplained difficulties hit the project. Like, for example, the lead researcher''s house exploding from a gas leak, his all-electric house, by the way, killing him and his family. Or the facility where they were working on it getting hit by lightning, on a clear day.

    Needless to say, nobody touched this kind of research anymore.

    So why did the less-than-legal elements not work in the shadows creating it?

    One has to remember that the hidden side of humanity has much less access to the kind of talent that is necessary to build a medical VI.

    I guessed that there were less than a dozen, probably way less, who could build one, with enough time and effort. And sadly, most of us were equally profit-driven as the corporations.

    There simply was no money in it.

    Especially if one considered the pure amount of work it was. I know, it sounds so easy. Just make a VI with the objective to heal.

    That easy, right? Wrong. Alone the part about consent is incredible.

    What if it is an old man, who with the treatment, will spend the remaining five years of his life on ventilation, unable to talk, unable to eat solid food, unable to leave the bed? Do we have the right to refuse his wish to die in dignity? So we have the VI take the consent of the patient into account.

    Easy peasy, problem solved. Ehm, no. what about the teen with an unbalanced brain chemistry. It is an easy fix to rebalance the chemistry, but at the moment, he just wants to die. Because the cruel world is so bleak. It would be a simple fix for the VI to get the teen happy again, but naturally, he won¡¯t give consent.

    Do we let the VI let him die? No, of course not. But for that, we have to make the VI able to ascertain the mental state of the patient and decide on its own if he can give consent or not. It is by far not impossible, but it is also an incredible amount of rule lawyering.

    How about the merc who wants cyberware? In most cases, cyberware is, at least from a biological point of view, unhealthy. From the perspective of the VI, it won¡¯t accept that the patient wants it. Unless the programmer considered that very possibility from the beginning.

    Then there is resource management. The VI can¡¯t simply blow the whole budget of the year on one patient. So it has to be trained to decide what it can use per patient. Considering that that amount changes from year to year, sometimes month to month, situation to situation, and location to location it is a very complicated objective to program.

    Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

    Not to talk about disaster mode. If there is a glut of patients it must accept that it can only do so much before it has to work on the next patient.

    And all that with the usual constraints that VIs have. To sum it up, creating a medical VI is an unholy pain in the behind.

    So why did I even consider doing it? After all, there was no profit in it for me, and it would be comparable to creating CRS-free cyberware in scope.

    I honestly wish I could say that I did it for the common good. Seriously, I wish I was so good a person.

    But I wasn¡¯t. My reason to do it was the same reason why nobody had done it yet. Panacea.

    Creating a medical VI would seriously mess with their operation. Especially if I, as I planned, made it freeware. In one swoop I would cut out much of Panacea¡¯s power.

    And that was more than enough for me to do it. It was another big step towards the total destruction of Panacea. I knew that it was pretty unlikely that I would achieve that goal, but just cutting them down to size was better than doing nothing.

    That did not mean that I was pouring all my energy and effort into creating it. For the time being, in an emergency, the auto-surgeon was good enough, as long as somebody with medical training was in reach.

    Sure, it was not even approaching intelligence. Early experiments had shown that machine learning had its limits to what medical software could do.

    Yes, in 90% of all cases, what it learned was fine and working well. But in medicine, a 10% failure rate was considered not good.

    Over the years, an insanely complicated decision tree had emerged. It was mostly free to get. I suspected that Panacea had its own, refined version, but the public one was working. If, for a computer program, at a snail¡¯s pace.

    Auto surgeons differed in how well they could use that decision tree, and I managed to create a better algorithm for searching the tree, making my new auto-surgeon a tad better than most out there.

    But that was still way below even an expert system and was the reason I checked on the auto surgeon when it worked on Justin. After I was sure it was doing the right thing I let it do its job, but that was the important thing.

    After a few days, of cyber time naturally, I was bored and fed up with the objectives again. Nothing unexpected, or even new. Writing the intricate IF-THEN-ELSE statements for the objectives was exhausting. Mentally more than physical.

    So I spent the rest of the next few real-time days, at a much lower compression, learning gravitics.

    I just needed to get a bit of distance from the VI.

    I was appropriately surprised when I got the message that Doc Schaeffer would wake up Mr. Walker on the morning of Monday the 25<sup>th</sup>.

    I knew that it was way too short a rest for a man like Walker. He needed more time to recuperate, and I honestly could not see any reason to wake him up already.

    But Doctor Schaeffer was the one in charge, and it was his decision. In the end, I decided to be there when he was woken up.

    I had Ryan fly me to the clinic, and we were guided to Walker¡¯s room.

    Even before we reached the door, we heard an irate:

    ¡°¡­ and then he threw even more money into her maw. The goddamn overpriced nano fab was not enough for him.¡±

    I could not hear the answer, and then I had reached the door, which was opened by one of the guards, grinning with all his face.

    ¡°¡­ anywhere for that price. Of course, I accepted.¡±

    Apparently what happened was that good old Dylan had complained about Doc Schaeffer had bought something, and considering the topic during the operation, I had a good guess what it was Dylan resented buying.

    Then I entered the room. Walker was awake but looked weak, Dylan had the red in the face I learned to expect from him, while the Doc looked flustered and insulted.

    When Dylan opened his mouth, I interjected.

    ¡°Does this have to happen right now? Your boss has just awoken from more than a week of medical-induced coma. Give him a few days to get going again, ok?¡±

    And as if by magic, Dylan¡¯s mouth closed with an audible clack, while his gaze turned to me.

    ¡°You! What are you doing here?¡±

    I sighed but managed somehow to remain calm.

    ¡°Yes, me. While I am not Mr. Walker¡¯s primary physician, I am his implant surgeon in this case.¡±

    Doc Schaeffer was visibly more delighted to see me.

    ¡°Oh, hello my dear. And I agree, now is not the best time to argue.¡±

    Walker lifted his hand.

    ¡°I think we need to clear this. Richard, did you really buy an auto-surgeon from Kitten?¡±

    Schaeffer sighed.

    ¡°Yes, Ben I did. It was just too good to not get.¡±

    Walker frowned.

    ¡°How did you pay for it? As far as I know, you do not have a couple of millions lying around.¡±

    ¡°That is the whole point. It was not a couple of million or even 100k. We got a brand new, very good auto-surgeon for less than it costs us to repair the old one each year. It did cost us $70000.¡±

    You could practically see how Walker¡¯s brain was working on that.

    ¡°70k? Seriously? Who sells an auto-surgeon, a new one, for 70k?¡±

    And that was my cue.

    ¡°That was a friendship price. I plan to sell these things for around 500k.¡±

    He nodded slowly.

    ¡°Ok, that is closer to a normal price. Is it any good?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I, personally, think it is the best auto-surgeon in existence, but I have built the thing, so you can¡¯t really trust my opinion here.¡±

    Schaeffer cleared his throat.

    ¡°If I may, I worked with the one we used to operate on you. Yes, it was limited one-time use, but it was leagues above what we have now. I can¡¯t compare it to the high-priced models, but yes, it was very good.¡±

    Slowly Walker nodded again.

    ¡°So you got a new auto-surgeon that you like for less than what you pay every year to keep the old one running. If it works, then I see no problem with that.¡±

    Dylan somehow managed to get even redder.

    ¡°You just let that sail through? After all the money you spent to get this clinic a nano fab?¡±

    Walker on the other hand closed his eyes and shook his head.

    ¡°Dylan, before you had to take me out, we already had more than half of that money back from selling nanobots. That was a couple of weeks. You have to ask Paul how much it brought in now. But in half a year, the nano fab will have brought us ten times what it did cost us.¡±

    Dylan opened and closed his mouth several times.

    ¡°What¡­ how? How is that possible?¡±

    ¡°Because other than Kitten we are the only ones being able to build 12<sup>th</sup> gen nanites in the US, especially the seed stock. Somebody mailed open source 6<sup>th</sup> gen fab plans to nearly every workshop around. Including an open-source 10<sup>th</sup> gen library. We are the absolute cheapest source for the seed stock people can find. And needing seed stock it. Nano fabs are all the rage nowadays.

    Yes, we only take $10k for the 10<sup>th</sup> gen seed stock, but it costs us only around 10 bucks.

    Now, I think the topic is finished. I get that you don¡¯t like Kitten. But she¡¯s done us no wrong. I am definitely alive, so she kept her promise to give me a chance. The tech she sold us was at extremely good prices. That is all.¡±

    Dylan grumbled something and then stomped out of the room. Walker meanwhile turned his attention to Doctor Schaeffer.

    ¡°Now, Rick, how am I doing?¡±

    Schaeffer looked at the tablet in his hands.

    ¡°Well, Ben, you could do with a few more days of rest, and I strongly implore you to stay at home and recuperate, but all in all, you are doing fine.¡±

    I tilted my head at that.

    ¡°Say, Doc, I agree with the need for rest, so why did you wake him up now? Wouldn¡¯t it have been better to keep him sleeping until the damage is mostly gone?¡±

    Schaeffer just shrugged his shoulders.

    ¡°Yes, you are right. But I decided to let Ben go home at Christmas.¡±

    ¡°Oh, Christmas, right. That was sometime in December. Is it tomorrow? The day after?¡±

    Both men looked at me as if I had grown another head.

    ¡°Veronica, Christmas is today!¡± Schaeffer sounded completely astonished.

    I on the other hand could only shrug.

    ¡°It is? Nice. Then, happy Christmas, was it? Or is it another blessing?¡±

    Walker shook his head.

    ¡°It is ¡®Merry Christmas¡¯. And how come you don¡¯t know that?¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°Why should I know that? I am a Pure. Christmas is a Christian ritual, and after the civil war, the commonwealth got rid of all religious trappings. We don¡¯t celebrate any of the other holy days, regardless of religion.¡±

    Now Schaeffer looked sad and massaged his temple.

    ¡°That is¡­ well, I am sad for your upbringing. I can understand that some holy days are not important, but Christmas? But you obviously do not know what you are missing.¡±

 55: Burn it all!

    Ryan and I came home to find preparations for a Christmas celebration in full swing. I was, honestly completely flabbergasted that I missed the plotting.

    Sadly, I could only stand to the side and wonder what they all were doing. Finally, Natalie came over to me.

    ¡°Hey, what are you moping? It¡¯s Christmas! Come, help to decorate.¡±

    I was stunned when she pushed some chain of tiny LEDs into my hand.

    ¡°Ehm¡­ what do I do with it?¡±

    Her mouth literally fell open.

    ¡°What¡­? You drape it around the walls. Make it look festive. How come you don¡¯t know that?¡±

    I could only shake my head.

    ¡°Sorry, but¡­ I am a Pure. We don¡¯t do Christmas.¡±

    Her eyes narrowed and hard lines formed around her mouth.

    ¡°Don¡¯t give me that crap! I know that most Pure families celebrate Christmas in private! Just because it is not acknowledged in public does not mean you don¡¯t do it!¡±

    I felt a wave of sadness, followed by the all too well-known rage well up. I closed my eyes and fought the rage down again.

    ¡°I don¡¯t have a family. I never had a Christmas celebration. Or any other celebration.¡±

    She physically recoiled back from my words and opened her eyes wide.

    ¡°Fuck! Sorry! I¡­ fuck, I did not know you are an orphan.¡±

    I allowed a sad smile.

    ¡°That would actually be better. Orphans are treated relatively well in the Commonwealth. No, technically my mother is still alive. She is broken beyond recovery and simply keeps breathing, but that is enough that I am not an orphan and did not need governmental help.¡±

    I felt, more than I heard, some of the fragile LEDs break in my hands, only realizing then that I clenched my fists.

    This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

    When I opened them again, we both looked at the mess, along with a few dabs of blood where the glass had broken my skin, and for a few seconds, we remained in silence.

    ¡°I¡­ I am sorry.¡± It was all I could say.

    In reaction, Natalie shook her head, as if to clear it.

    ¡°No¡­ no, I am sorry. I should not have pushed so hard. God, I am so sorry that I brought up that memory. Here, give me that. We will fab new ones.¡±

    I could only stare at her while she took the broken chain from me. Then I closed my eyes and had a heavy sigh.

    ¡°I¡­ I am sorry, but I don¡¯t think I am very good company at the moment. I need to be alone.¡±

    I did not wait for her answer before I turned around, and walked out of the room. Somehow I found my way to my room, and when I closed the door behind me I leaned against it, slowly sliding down.

    Even I knew that the rage, the desperation, the pain, and most of all the hate I felt right that moment were anything but the right emotions for Christmas, but I couldn¡¯t help it.

    While this short exchange with Natalie had ripped open old wounds that I thought had been scarred over long ago, I had become more and more emotional over the last few weeks. I had the feeling that I lost more and more of the iron control I had developed over the last 10 years. And that frightened me.

    I could not give in to either of these feelings. I simply could not allow myself to go that way.

    The pain and the desperation would be my undoing. I¡­ if I allowed it to swallow me, I did not believe that I could ever recover from that.

    And the rage, the hate¡­ if I gave myself over to these, I would see the world burn.

    After I don¡¯t know how long I managed to get up, and tried to find my center again, but I lacked the focus for Tai Chi. I threw a few cheap baubles that I had found in the room the first time against the walls. That, unfortunately, did not help all that much.

    Finally, for the first time since shortly after I got my first jack, I actually played a computer game.

    Modern games were almost exclusively written for wearables and had a basic diadem option. The experience was, to be honest, severely lacking after experiencing the matrix with a jack.

    But right now I did not care. I needed to kill things. The game was the 50<sup>th</sup> or so remake of a very old classic. And yes, the graphics, the whole sensory experience was lacking. But it satisfied my need to see a world burn.

    Somewhat comforting that Doom 2242 was still good for that. After a while, I asked the VI to try to spruce the graphics up a notch.

    The game had helped me in that way before when I had begun to extricate myself from the web that had caught me before my birth. It bolstered the tattered shreds of my sanity enough that I could plan again.

    And it still had that ability. Sometime into my rampage, I encountered completely new maps. It was not surprising that maps existed that I did not know, but it was surprising as I had not downloaded them. But at that time, I had no clear mind to solve that mystery.

    I just enjoyed the hordes of enemies approaching me that I could shred, rip apart, vaporize or destroy in as gory a manner as possible.

    I honestly can¡¯t say how long it took for me to let my blood lust out. I just know that at some point I was just exhausted. My stomach reminded me that I had not eaten anything since breakfast, but I ignored it, depending on the calorie reserve.

    I just took a shower and then crawled into my bed.

 56: Amateur hour

    I can¡¯t say that the night was particularly restful, but at least the worst of the rage was back under control. The next morning I was late getting my coffee and something to eat, and I was not surprised that the others were already up and about.

    Not that I was eager for company at the moment. On the contrary, I was glad that I had my peace. It was accordingly bothersome when Darren sat opposite of me at the table. But still, I did my best to ignore him. The whole five seconds until he began talking.

    ¡°Veronica, I think we should talk.¡±

    Wonderful. Just wonderful. I was so not in the mood for a talk.

    ¡°Sorry, Darren, but I don¡¯t think now is the best time for it.¡±

    He gave me a sad smile.

    ¡°I know. Believe me, I know. But it is necessary anyway.¡±

    I growled for a bit while eating the high-calory mash I had made for my breakfast, to compensate for eating way not enough the day before. Unfortunately, it did not deter him in any way.

    ¡°You know I am a psionic. And one of my abilities is that I am an empath. So yes, I really know that it is not a good time. But I fear it won¡¯t be a good time anytime soon. Unless you let us help you that is.¡±

    An empath. That explained much. And ouch.

    ¡°I¡­ that is a very double-edged gift I would think. And I am sorry for ruining the mood. But I am still not in the frame of mind to have a conversation. At the moment I just want to be left alone.¡±

    In turn, he folded his hands except for his pointer fingers, which he placed on his lips for a moment.

    ¡°Yes, I get that. But I don¡¯t accept that. You need help! And you need it now. And unfortunately, we don¡¯t know enough about NYC to know any professional psycho¡­ Woah!¡±

    I felt my rage spike again, and apparently, he felt it too.

    ¡°I would strongly prefer if you did not bring up any shrinks in my presence, ok?¡±

    He sighed and shook his head.

    ¡°I can¡¯t say that I understand it, but ok, it¡¯s your decision, but you need help just the same.¡±

    I closed my eyes and took a couple of deep breaths before I answered him.

    ¡°I will get it under control. It is not the first time. It just flared up for some strange reason.¡±

    ¡°Believe me, we want to help you. And maybe it is because you are under so much stress.¡±

    I had a dry chuckle.

    ¡°This amount of stress is¡­ well to be honest it is even less than what I was used to. Yes, the actual physical threats are¡­ new, but compared to what I had to live under in Seattle this is a walk in the park.¡±

    He looked at me for several seconds and then nodded.

    ¡°That may be it. I am in no way qualified, but I met a couple of people who began spiraling the moment the pressure began to let up. And if the situation now is like a walk in the park for you, then I feel for you. Your life has had to be hell.¡±

    I tilted my head and squinted my eyes.

    ¡°What¡­ what do you mean spiraling. That sounds not good.¡±

    ¡°You are right, it is not good, but if we watch it, it should not be too bad. Essentially all the shit going on in your life made you ignore all the pain, rage, and whatever you could not cope with at the time. Now you have breathing room and all the feelings come knocking.¡±

    If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.

    He shrugged his shoulders.

    ¡°As I understand it, it is a bit of a danger that you might get into a vicious circle and spiral out of control. But as I said, if we watch out for it, it should be manageable. Especially as I am a psionic. If it is necessary, I can give you a boost again.¡±

    Perfect. Just what I did need just now. Old problems visiting for old times.

    ¡°That¡­ shit, that is bad. Promise me to look out for me going out of control.¡±

    ¡°Well, yes, of course. You might be sliding back into depression for a bit, but I will get you out again.¡±

    I had to shake my head.

    ¡°The depression is¡­ well it is not good, but it is not the problem. As long as I manage from becoming suicidal I will survive it. No, the rage is the problem. If that gets out of control¡­¡±

    He lifted both his hands.

    ¡°Hey, if that spins out of control you let off some steam. That will be good for you. Maybe we let some of the junk in a room and you can trash it if that happens.¡±

    It took me a few moments to really understand what he was talking about. Then a wave of anger flushed me.

    ¡°You think it is about me having a tantrum? Fuck, Darren, if I lose control of my rage I might start World War 4!¡±

    When I said, or more like screamed that to him, his mouth fell open.

    ¡°What¡­ are you mad?¡±

    I took another group of deep breaths, and mentally counted to ten, and then to 100, while he looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

    Finally, with a barely suppressed growl, I managed to answer him, and I was proud of how calm I managed it.

    ¡°Darren, do you remember when I told you why we can¡¯t take out the VI? That it has access to all kinds of WMDs? That is my access! I could at any given time destroy most of the surface of the earth. The only thing preventing me from that is that I have my rage under control. For now, that is.¡±

    If the topic had been anything else, his shocked face would have been highly amusing. But how things were then, I could not savor it as it deserved.

    After roughly a minute of stammering, he finally brought a full sentence together.

    ¡°You would really use WMDs? You?!? My god, Veronica, I¡¯ve seen how forgiving you are. Shit, the other ladies play with Frankel several times a day each. You on the other hand have barely touched him.

    The other slavers, while we had them here were subject to many play-sessions from the girls. Not that I don¡¯t understand them or are judging them, but you nearly left them alone.

    And now you want to tell me that you are so vindictive that you think you will use WMDs?¡±

    Another sigh from me.

    ¡°Compared to the assholes I am angry at, Frankel is strictly an amateur. And his baby-assholes are almost cute in their attempts to be mean. Yes, they are rapists. But they relied on the physical act of rape to do damage.

    Only Frankel even attempted to play mind games.

    And honestly, from a purely physical perspective, Rape is not the worst that can be done.

    Being worked over by some thugs that steal your credled can do much worse physical damage.

    No, the thing that makes Rape so horrible is the mental aspect. The rapist takes something very personal from you, and you are helpless to stop him. He has the power over you and rubs it in. He uses that power to damage your pride, your sense of security, and revels in your helpless anger.

    And usually, there is nothing you can do as a victim.

    But from the very moment we sat down in the Van I was working on my counterstrike. I knew from the very beginning that Frankel might have the momentary upper hand, but that I would be the victor.

    I never gave him what he wanted. My despair, my silent, helpless rage.

    That is the reason he only had one session with Jacky. She broke almost immediately and had become boring for him. Natalie and Christine gave him more fun, but once he broke them, he mostly ignored them.

    So all he did to me was physical. Yes, the other slavers mostly saw us as a convenient collection of holes to satisfy their urges in, while a couple of them got their fun by hurting us.

    Guess which ones were the ones I made sure were sold to the bisexual SM club? Most of the rest are on their way to an asteroid mine. And all of them with the ability to get sexual relief blocked at that.

    And Frankel, I am still working on the plan for the perfect retribution. He will get his due rewards in time.

    But over the three days, he never even approached gaining the mental upper hand over me. I was the one of us winning our game.

    But for the other assholes that are essentially responsible for my whole shitty life, why do you think I even have all the backdoors and launch codes for all the WMDs? Sure, the majority of the better Jacks could get them. But they don¡¯t invest the energy and work to get them.

    No, I wanted to use them. I wanted to destroy every single one of them. Destroy everything they love.

    I want to submerge them one by one in acid, watching them slowly being dissolved.

    They make me want to believe in God, just so that I can believe they will burn in hell for all eternity.

    They make me wish I had the ability to digitize their minds, just so that I could torture them for thousands of years.

    But I fought down the urge to let the world burn. I managed to get myself back from the abyss before it swallowed me, and the world with me.

    But now you tell me that the rage is coming back. And that is fucking dangerous.

    So no, compared to these assholes, Frankel was just an amateur working on a tough audience with me. He will get his comeuppance, but that will be cold, rational revenge instead of a wild tantrum that will be over way too quick for him.¡±

 57: Get together

    After my discussion with Darren, the people in the fortress moved around me as if on eggshells. Not that I was particularly incensed about that, mind you.

    It gave me the time and peace to come to grips with my flaring rage again. I did not resume my work on the medical VI, as I lacked the mindset for that task at that time.

    Instead, I mostly meditated, studied, and did little projects in cyberspace.

    Oh, and playing. I quickly noticed the graphics and performance increasing by a large extend, and the number of maps to choose from grew exponentially. The VI confirmed immediately after my question that it not only polished the game up for jack usage but had begun building new maps for me.

    Naturally, I kept watching the rats, and so far it looked extremely promising. I had of course randomized the rats for the test, but now, nearly two weeks later it had become pretty apparent which ones were implanted with the converted cyberware.

    Exactly 50% of the rats showed first and second-stage CRS, while the other 50% were still completely CRS-free. I did not break protocol and looked up the distribution though. I was pretty sure that would make no difference, but why risk the results?

    Mostly though I spent my time analyzing my emotions and trying to let go of some of the baggage. Not as successfully as I was suppressing it, by far. But even small steps were steps, I just had to make sure to go in the right direction.

    Things began to look a bit brighter when a few days after New Year the first delivery of real food was announced.

    I practically could already taste it, and I started selecting recipes for the ingredients. Naturally, I had inspected the appliances beforehand and had replaced almost everything. I was not leaving anything here to chance.

    And while I practically could already taste the real food, I was informed that Mr. Walker had a small get-together to celebrate his recovery and my presence was expected. And yes, it was the day the food was going to be delivered. Perfect timing, as usual. Luckily I had all the perishable food vacuum-sealed and irradiated so that it was unlikely that they would spoil, but my mood took a definite downturn.

    And so, on the day I really wanted to make my Boeuf Wellington, I was sitting in the skimmer accompanied by Justin and Ryan, looking forward to replicator-grub and a slew of people I did at best barely know, and of course, the presence of good old Dylan was all but guaranteed.

    The silver streak was that Justin was back on his feet again, and other than the missing kidney was fully recovered. The Kidney would still take a couple of weeks.

    When we approached the townhouse that apparently was Mr. Walker¡¯s private residence, I opened up to my companions in the skimmer.

    ¡°Does either of you know of somebody who would likely buy this skimmer? They would have to rebuild it I think but it is still in decent condition.¡±

    For a few moments, there was a shocked silence, before both men began talking simultaneously.

    It was of course hard to understand them but the gist I could make out was that it was stupid to give up a fully working skimmer. And that it offered so much utility that I should keep it.

    ¡°Slow down, please. First, I don¡¯t trust this skimmer fully. Yes, it works, but we can assume that it had no maintenance in the last 18 years. Before I trust it fully I would have to completely rebuild it, and at the moment I lack the expertise and definitely lack the intention.

    So this skimmer will have to go. It can go to the scrapyard or to somebody who wants to rebuild it. Honestly, I don¡¯t care.

    Second, yes, I agree that a skimmer offers incredible utility. Especially here in NYC. That is the reason why we get a brand new, armored ABAS 675 in less than two weeks. The luxury skimmer will take a bit longer I fear.¡±

    Again, shocked silence. Then Ryan warily answered me.

    ¡°A brand new skimmer? Are you¡­ who the fuck can afford a brand new skimmer, and a big one at that. These things cost what? $20 million?¡±

    ¡°The one I bought was $25 million. And sorry if you missed it, but lack of funds is not quite one of my problems. I get more in interest than that.¡±

    This time it was Justin who spoke.

    ¡°If you have that much money, why are you here? In Queens I mean. Why not Brooklyn or the Bronx? Or why New York at all?¡±

    ¡°Community. Would you want to live near the stuck-up execs or the old money idiots? No thank you, I prefer the company of honest criminals.¡±

    ¡°And why work at all? If you can afford a skimmer from the interest, why do anything other than sunbathing or playing in the pool in Florida or the Caribic?¡±

    ¡°Oh please. I would go insane within a week. Seriously, I study all the time because otherwise, I would crawl up the walls. I need something to engage my mind. And why not make money from things I will do anyway?¡±

    Justin just shook his head.

    ¡°Well, at least your humor is still working.¡±

    That confused me now, and I frowned tilting my head.

    ¡°What¡­ why do you say that?¡±

    ¡°Well, the joke about the luxury skimmer, well, it was a bit flat, but a good attempt.¡±

    Now it was my turn to shake my head. He had thought that I was joking?

    ¡°Not¡­ quite. That was not a joke. The Mercedes T 240 will be ready in a couple of months.¡±

    Ryan had a coughing fit, while Justin just groaned.

    ¡°You¡­ bought a skimmer that cost nearly $90 million?¡±

    ¡°A bit more. I bought the fully tricked-out model. Armor, point defense, stealth coating, radar jammer for security, and every luxury they could cram into it.¡±

    Justin facepalmed but remained silent, while Ryan gasped.

    ¡°You¡­ what? That costs more than the whole fleet of the boss!¡±

    The conversation stopped at this point as we had landed.

    Seriously, why were they all so hung about the money? Sure, the average worker did earn about $76k a year. So what? I am not the average worker. And neither were Ryan or Justin. Yes, they were far away from my income streams, but please, that is not that rare an occurrence. Each of them could easily buy four or five workers and still have enough to live comfortably.

    Not to mention that their costs of living had nosedived when they moved into the fortress. I paid for all the utilities there, not that the costs were even a blip in my accounts.

    So yes, I was comfortable, at least in monetary terms. Now I just had to put my demons to rest.

    The freezing temperatures made it necessary to walk quickly towards the entrance of the house, and we encountered a small line, as we were not the only ones trying to get out of the cold fast.

    It was but a small impediment and soon we were inside. The house looked like a late 19<sup>th</sup>-century Victorian mansion, but even a cursory check made it obvious that it was built in this century. The triple armorglass<sup>tm</sup> windows alone were a dead giveaway here, as were the window sills. Any material engineer would immediately recognize the plascrete.

    It was still a very elegant building, and it managed the illusion of age very well. As with Walker¡¯s office, it screamed old money.

    Real wood paneling if I was right, though some imitations had become so good that it was nearly impossible to identify real from fake.

    The foyer was fitted out in dark wood tones, with a wood seeming stair going up to the upper floors.

    We were guided towards the large drawing-room. Classical music came softly from hidden speakers. I must say, I liked the music so far.

    I personally preferred May and Mercury to Richards or Lennon and McCartney, and of course, I also liked the dark age stuff like Bach or Vivaldi but generally, the classics were by far better than the crap that was written nowadays.

    Surprisingly, or not, I actually knew a few of the people here.

    Vincent was here, of course, and Dylan had to be here. Doc Schaeffer raised his glass greeting me. I also recognized Ms. Uesugi and Mr. Kraykowski. But the rest, a few I had met at the meeting, but I would have to dig for a bit to get their names again.

    Stolen story; please report.

    Nearly as soon as we entered the big room, Mr. Walker was notified of our arrival, and he quickly finished the conversation he was in and came to greet us. Or more likely me. I was, of course, anything but happy to be in the spotlight, but there was nothing I could do.

    ¡°Why, hello Kitten. Good to see you again. And thank you.¡±

    Then he turned to the room.

    ¡°Ladies and Gentlemen, I have the honor to present you the guest of honor. Miss Veronica Sinclair, also known as Kitten to some of us. I have to confess, when she told me that she could give me a chance to survive my bout with CRS, I was skeptical.

    I had, in all honesty, already accepted my demise. But I am happy that I decided to allow her to put her money where her mouth was.

    She gave me a 60% chance of survival. And while I am not CRS free, the critical implant, my new heart has so far been completely ignored by it.

    According to Doctor Schaeffer that in itself is already something of a miracle.

    So let''s give a round of applause for our Kitten here!¡±

    I felt myself turn nearly as red as my hair during his speech and wanted nothing more than to crawl into the earth during the applause, but at this moment there was nothing much I could do.

    I stammered a thank you but could not say much more.

    Fortunately, while there was still some attention directed towards me, most guests began to take up their conversations again, and I was mercifully mostly left alone.

    Walker placed an arm over my shoulders and softly directed me towards a group of people.

    ¡°I have to say, you certainly kept your promise. Honestly, thank you for my life.¡±

    ¡°That is¡­ ok¡­ I¡­¡± I took a deep breath and calmed myself down a bit.

    ¡°Alright, sorry. You are welcome. And I only promised you a chance. I am happy that it worked, but there was never a guarantee.¡±

    ¡°Oh, but the chance worked. I am alive, and only because of you, so take it with grace.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Ok. I accept it. Honestly, I hope you live a very long life. Not just for you, but to keep Mr. Cox from the keys of power.¡±

    Walker chuckled.

    ¡°To be honest, that is only you. He has some prejudices towards Pures, and can¡¯t put them aside. Otherwise, he is a bit unimaginative but a capable administrator.¡±

    I nearly suppressed a growl.

    ¡°I can understand the prejudices. Seriously, I can¡¯t stand most Pures myself. But that he can¡¯t accept that I am not a typical Pure¡­ that is what I can¡¯ accept.

    It is not so much his animosity, but the permanent accusations and the snark. If he were polite with it, then ok, it is his opinion. But so¡­¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°Yes, I can understand that. And I will do my best to keep him away from you.¡±

    He then flagged a servant.

    ¡°Could you get a Coke for Kitten, please?¡±

    I barely saw the servant nod before she vanished again.

    ¡°Now, let¡¯s have a bit of a celebration. After all, you did produce something of a miracle.¡±

    With a heavy heart, I sighed.

    ¡°Yes, ok.¡±

    Suddenly I was standing in front of Vincent.

    ¡°Hello¡­ Kitten.¡± I could hear his amusement. ¡°We have certainly to thank you for keeping Ben up and running. Michael is a good man, and certainly smart enough, but he lacks the experience to take over yet.

    Ben dying would have led to much chaos.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I agree that it probably could have caused chaos, but who is Michael?¡±

    Vincent chuckled at that.

    ¡°Michael is Ben¡¯s heir. He had a clone made 20 to 25 years ago. Honestly, we all do have a clone heir. The legacy has to live on.¡±

    A¡­ clone. Well, that was simultaneously good and bad.

    ¡°You all¡­ use clones? Are the current bosses clones as well?¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°Yes, most of us are. It costs a fortune but as I said, the legacy must go on.¡±

    Yes, I could understand that. A commercial clone, even at newborn age, did cost around Five million ITC, or, depending on the course between $18 and $25 million. And you had to pay in ITC or NorthWest Credits.

    Panacea had created a monopoly here.

    ¡°And these new clones, are they clones of you, or the original?¡±

    He chuckled again.

    ¡°I get where you are going. Most of us use a genetic randomizer to bring keep the gene pool fresh. Our clones are roughly 75% identical to us on the genetic level.¡±

    Ok, that upped the price by at least 100% but was smart enough.

    ¡°And you pay for the extra screening?¡±

    He tilted his head.

    ¡°Yes, of course, we pay for the executive service.¡±

    Oh, drat. They walked straight into the trap. I could not keep my frown from my face, and Vincent became confused.

    ¡°Is something wrong?¡±

    ¡°Executive service is what Panacea calls their rainmaker process. Essentially they call it that, but it is identical with the basic service, but they only offer it to people too uninformed to know the difference. What you need is the special service.¡±

    Now he frowned.

    ¡°What do you mean? The executive service costs nearly twice what the special service costs.¡±

    ¡°Yes, as I said, they use the basic service, pad it with some good sounding marketing gimmicks that cost next to nothing and use it to make people who don¡¯t know it better pay three times what they would get otherwise and twice than what they actually want would cost.

    It is a scam, plain and simple, but because it is Panacea, they get away with it. You should all get a genetic analysis done for yourself and your heir.¡±

    Not that that would do any good now. But¡­ just then I had an idea. The virus Frankel used to modify us¡­ it maybe could be used to correct genetic errors.

    We had to make sure to get it right the first time though. As I had found out, it was not possible to use the virus a second time. Otherwise, I would already have corrected Frankel¡¯s meddling with our genetic code.

    At the same time, I saw anger flash over Vincent''s face.

    ¡°You are saying that¡­ these assholes¡­ and we¡­ damn it. And if there is a copy error now it is too late.¡±

    I had to shake my head.

    ¡°First, you should never just trust anybody. Not Panacea, and also not me. You don¡¯t really know me, and I could play you. I don¡¯t, but at the moment you have no way to be sure of it.

    Second, the big problem is that even if I am right, and I am, it does not mean that there are errors. So even if you don¡¯t find anything, you can¡¯t be sure if I am right or not. Sorry for that by the way.

    On the other hand, if you find errors, you know that I spoke the truth, but you also know that your heir has some genetic problems.

    Third, I might have stumbled over something that may be able to help. And no, I did not develop it. Frankel had a combination of gene-sequencer, nano-virus, and virus that can make changes to an already living person. He literally rewrote our genes, to enhance us. I can tell you I did not look like this when I arrived in New York.

    I have not delved deeper into it, as I found out I can¡¯t use it to reverse the changes he made. But as I said, it might help you.

    You need a good geneticist, biologist, and a virologist</a> to make it work I think, but it might save your family.¡±

    He calmed down pretty fast, at least outwardly.

    ¡°And what will this¡­ packet cost?¡±

    Cost, what cost?

    ¡°Well, you need to have the nano-virus produced, and you need a good computer to hook up the gene-scanner to get the gene-sequencer up and running. For the virus, you will need a normal host to grow it but that is a rounding error in the calculation.

    I don¡¯t know what hardware you have available, or if you have a nanofab by now so I can¡¯t say what you have to invest, sorry.¡±

    He massaged his temples.

    ¡°No, I wanted to know what you want to give us the packet.¡±

    ¡°Hu? Why would I want anything? It is not my work, so you can have it.

    If you want me to make the nano-virus, well, it is a relatively simple 4<sup>th</sup> gen schematic so it will be pretty cheap. It would probably be better if I re-engineered it into 10<sup>th</sup> gen, but that would cost a bit.

    The gene-sequencer is also relatively simple. It just needs good enough hardware to run properly. You will need to look into it, but yes, if you want me to design and build the hardware, it will cost a bit, but why would you do that? You can get standard commercial-grade systems for a fraction, and while they will not be as fast as what I would build you, it would be more than good enough.

    And sorry, but I can¡¯t help you with the virus. You will need to get an expert for that.¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°So you say you will give us the tech without us paying for it? Just from the good of your heart?¡±

    ¡°As I said, it is not my tech. I honestly don¡¯t need more money, but the price represents the respect for my work. So if it is not my tech I don¡¯t care if you respect the creator. Considering that it is most probably a slaver, screw him. And you will pay me, just not in money, but in goodwill¡±

    He shook his head but murmured for a bit.

    ¡°I believe I have hit my limit for the moment. I have to think about what you have told me. I wish you a nice day, but I think I have to talk to others for a bit. Good day.¡±

    He tipped his imaginary hat, and moved away, while I looked after him, still a bit confused.

    I was not left alone to ponder for long though.

    Ms. Uesugi approached me from my left side.

    ¡°Hello, Miss Sinclair.¡±

    ¡°Oh, hello Ms. Uesugi.¡±

    ¡°You don¡¯t look very amused.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°You are right. I fear I ruined the party for Mr. Luciani.¡±

    She tilted her head.

    ¡°In what way?¡±

    ¡°I think I gave him unwelcome information. And before you ask, I will not ruin the party for you as well. We can talk about it on another date if you want to. I can assure you it is in no way an urgent matter.¡±

    She looked at me for a few silent seconds, before she shrugged.

    ¡°I assume that if the information is important that you will give it to me. Now, what I wanted to talk to you about, I have gotten information that somebody on the dark web offers CRS-free neural cyberware.

    What do you think, is that legit?¡±

    In the dark web? It actually had moved to the general dark web by now?

    ¡°Uh¡­ yes. That was me. And I announced it in the Abyss that I was working on it.¡±

    ¡°You¡­ and when were you going to tell me about it?¡±

    I could hear the tension in her voice. She was obviously not amused.

    ¡°When I finished testing the new applicator in three days. And you are wrong in a way. I did not offer it yet, I announced that I was nearly ready to offer it.

    It was¡­ necessary. Unfortunately, a mega-corp got the information about the cyberware and decided that they were a much more worthy owner of that technology. They managed to sway an Abyss-dweller to help assault my home.

    I had to prevent them from ever doing that again. Thus I told them that with a bit of patience I would be able to give them CRS-free cyberware. Now no jack will willingly aid them.¡±

    Her expression did not soften but she nodded slowly.

    ¡°Ok, I can understand that. So you are telling me that despite what you said at the meeting you will be able to replace my cyberware in the next week?¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Yes, most likely. At the moment I have not yet the result of the test, but exactly half of the rats I used for it have developed CRS, and the other half not. I can¡¯t say with certainty that it is the converted cyberware that is free of CRS, as I had the test randomized so that I don¡¯t involuntarily influence the results but considering that statistically by now 99.9% of all rats should show at least stage one CRS, it looks promising.¡±

    Her face relaxed a bit.

    ¡°So you are not sure that it will work yet?¡±

    ¡°I am relatively sure, but scientific protocol demands that I make sure. You would not like it if it did not work.¡±

    ¡°But you said that you actually had developed CRS-free cyberware already.¡±

    ¡°Oh, the basic technology works fine. I have tested it to hell and back. What I am now testing is if the new application process works correctly.

    It is a somewhat delicate technology, and an error in the assembly would be fatal. Literally in your case.¡±

    I could see the understanding in her eyes.

    ¡°Ah, I understand. And yes, caution is the right approach here.¡±

    I had in the meantime gotten my coke.

    ¡°Can I do anything else for you? Oh, and if you want to look at what I have to offer, I can give you substantially better technology than what I took out of your skull. I can send you the catalog.¡±

    ¡°Yes, do that. It will be interesting to see what you think is substantially better.¡±

    With that, she turned around and walked away. I massaged the bridge of my nose and sighed.

 58: Hell is

    I once heard that hell is other people. And for the first time in my life, I began to believe that.

    The party had become almost exactly what I had feared. I was constantly subjected to a deluge of inane chatter, only accentuated by the usual tasteless standard replicator food replacement.

    And for some reason, I was unable to convey that no, I was not interested in what Mr. Oh-so-important paid for his genuine original art reproduction, and yes, that is an exact phrase, or what would-be-Romeo thinks of his newest crush.

    I was not interested in how the woman of importance spends her time wasting her existence. Or which of the ¡®young studs¡¯ was oh so dreamy.

    And if these people wanted to know how the weather was, they should just look out of the window.

    As my luck had it, as soon as I managed to leave one group of clear imbeciles talking much about nothing, the next cornered me.

    And to top that, soon a small minority of the people here began to consume drugs other than alcohol, as was apparently the way these kinds of parties worked.

    While I did not begrudge people their vices, I was a bit put out when some of them began to smoke whatever poison they wanted. Even I was able to identify tobacco and marijuana, though whatever else they used to replace the breathable air in the room I could not discern.

    Fortunately, somebody here was nice enough to shoo the smokers out of the room. It still left the air severely polluted, but the air purifier was slowly correcting that, and I managed to not cough up a storm, even though my throat was protesting to its heart''s content.

    I used this reduction of the mob to move to the wall as discreetly as possible, which was sadly, not very. Nevertheless, I managed to reach the vastly more secure region and allowed myself to relax for a tiny bit. I hoped against hope that I would be left alone for a moment.

    Of course, said hope was in vain. Less than a minute after I leaned against the wall I was approached by another group of men. At least one of them I knew though. Normally I would have greeted Doc Schaeffer with some enthusiasm, but all I could muster was a small nod.

    He was accompanied by two other men, one I quickly identified as Walker Junior, owed to the fact that it was a younger copy of Mr. Benjamin Walker. The other was a complete unknown for me.

    ¡°Hello my dear. How are you doing?¡±

    I groaned and buried my face in my hands.

    ¡°Please, spare me any more small talk. How can people waste soo much time uttering soo many words without saying anything?¡±

    Yes, I was quite a bit whiny at that point. I was not quite at the point that I would prefer being in the tender care of Frankel again to this party, but I was approaching that level of despair.

    It had the added effect that young Walker was obviously very amused, as demonstrated by him laughing out loud.

    ¡°Oh wow, all these honorable important people, just here to meet and impress the newest star of our not quite so fair city, and you¡­¡± he couldn¡¯t continue because he was laughing so hard. The still-unnamed man patted him on the back when he was wheezing in laughter.

    Finally, after several seconds of that, he wiped away his tears, and still chuckling, stood up straight again.

    ¡°And to think that you are actually the main attraction of this party, glorious.¡±

    I could, at least partially, follow his argumentation, but seriously¡­

    ¡°Important¡­? These¡­? Doesn¡¯t New York have real important people? Sorry, but most of them are so¡­¡± I struggled for a word that could convey what I was trying to say without sounding as if I was talking about cardboard cutouts, but I simply did not manage it.

    Fortunately, Michael understood me without me going into details.

    ¡°There are a few people in these groups who are important. But most of them are important in their own mind and have the money and contacts to make the rest of us pretend they are. We humor them and mostly ignore them as much as we can.¡±

    Ok, that sounded a bit more like the Benjamin Walker I had learned to respect.

    ¡°Is that so? Then¡­ why do they insist on babbling me into submission? I am certainly not one of the important people here in NYC.¡±

    The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

    Doc Schaeffer interjected.

    ¡°Ah, my dear, but you are. You invented CRS-free cyberware. You are all the rage of the now completely legal side of the society here at the moment.¡±

    ¡°Why? Yes, for a certain minuscule subset of the underworld, CRS-free cyberware is big news, I get that, but for the majority, it should be irrelevant.¡±

    Walker took over again.

    ¡°Ah, but you see, everybody is fascinated by the deadly cyberware. My father and his men don¡¯t use it because it makes them better, but because having it makes them seem more dangerous. Harder.

    And now this hint of danger is actually in range for them. Yes, they don¡¯t need it. To be honest, our men don¡¯t need it. But they want it. But they are too chickenshit to take the risk of CRS.

    And that makes you suddenly very important.¡±

    It took me a few seconds to really understand what he was talking about.

    ¡°You mean that¡­ are they¡­ are you really saying that they want cyberware because it is cool? Are they really that stupid?¡±

    He looked at me with a strange expression.

    ¡°Does that mean you don¡¯t think people should get cyberware? Why did you develop the CRS-free tech then?¡±

    ¡°I think people should not get cyberware because it is cool. If it serves no function other than to pretend. I understand why your father and his men need it. And I honestly think everybody should have at least a basic jack with a HUD and com function. But to look dangerous? Don¡¯t they know that even with all our technology, that there is a, allowedly small, chance of complications for every operation? Yes, it is only around a millionth of a percent, but to just look cool?¡±

    He looked at me for a few seconds, before he nodded.

    ¡°I think we already agreed that most of the people here are idiots. So yes, they are that stupid. And I am happy that you don¡¯t think every cyberware is stupid.¡±

    ¡°No, of course not. I am a Jack after all. The only cyberware more prone to CRS than a jack is a full replacement limb. And if you need cyberware, you need it.¡±

    We stood for a moment in silence before Doc Schaeffer changed the topic.

    ¡°Well, dear, I can say the new auto-surgeon is a dream. We can now scrap the old piece of garbage we have.¡±

    I smiled at that.

    ¡°I am happy you like it. You should get a diadem for its control. That makes it soo much easier, believe me. But¡­ honestly, you should not scrap the old one if you have the room. I mean, yes, I believe that it is a very good auto-surgeon and that it will be reliable. All my math and simulations say so. But so far it is only simulations and my estimation. I would hate for you to be without an auto-surgeon because I was wrong.¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°I understand you, but as it looks for now, we will want to buy a second one in half a year, maybe a year. And we know where to get the help of somebody who actually knows the design if something happens.¡±

    I just shrugged.

    ¡°Ok, it is your decision. I just can¡¯t completely guarantee that it will work indefinitely.¡±

    ¡°Veronica, for that price, even the full price you said you want to get for it, people can buy six of seven for what a reasonable auto-surgeon costs. Yeah, you get two surge-boys for it, but we all know what that means.¡±

    The third man cleared his throat at that.

    ¡°While we are talking about buying things from you, what do you think about the nano-fab?¡±

    I tilted my head and was a bit confused while I looked at him.

    ¡°Uh, yes, the nano-fab was more expensive, but it is second only to my personal one here in the US. Why? And who am I talking to?¡±

    He looked a bit chagrined but not particularly fazed.

    ¡°Oh, sorry, Paul Hanratty. I am the accountant of our little outfit. And you got me wrong. I am very happy with the nano-fab. We already have the costs back in.¡±

    I was amazed.

    ¡°You made more than $11 million in a couple of months? That is¡­ good.¡±

    He smiled.

    ¡°Yes, it is. There is this new hype to build a 6<sup>th</sup> gen nano-fab that every third workshop here in the US builds, and we can deliver the seed stock relatively cheap. $10k for a load, and it adds up fast.¡±

    Now I had to frown.

    ¡°Uh¡­ I don¡¯t think you will get these prices for much longer.¡±

    ¡°Why not?¡±

    ¡°How long do you think it will take the other newly minted owners of nano-fabs to realize that they can make the seed stock too? Sure, it will cost them $30 to $40 per batch, while you only have to invest $10, but that still leaves them a large profit margin.¡±

    He looked thoughtful.

    ¡°That would actually explain why the sales have dropped massively in the last week. But what I actually wanted was, the boss told me that you offered him the schematics for the 12<sup>th</sup> gen seed stock we have in our nano-fab for $16 million. And looking at how the business with the 10<sup>th</sup> gen had gone, I was thinking about buying it.¡±

    I frowned again.

    ¡°Uh, I don¡¯t think that would be a good buy for you.¡±

    ¡°Hm, why not?¡±

    ¡°For 12<sup>th</sup> gen nanites, you need an 8<sup>th</sup> gen nano-fab. And as far as I know, there are only three possible sources for them here in the US. You could buy one from the big corps in another country and smuggle it here. But these already come with the seed stocks.

    Everybody else would need to buy one on the dark web. And the likelihood that somebody looks there for one, and will not contact me is¡­ remote. But to get the costs for the schematics back, you would need to sell at least four batches of seed stock.

    The chance that there are four people on the dark web looking for 8<sup>th</sup> gen nano-fabs without me knowing about at least one of them is negligible.

    And I have no requests for one. So sorry, but I guess most people are happy with the 6<sup>th</sup> gen open-source that they can for a fraction of the cost. And why not? It is better than what Ralcon and Enertech offer, and it does what they want. If for some reason they need 12<sup>th</sup> gen nanites, they will come directly to you, and if your library doesn¡¯t offer the solutions you will come to me.

    But the seed stock, it won¡¯t be profitable.¡±

    He nodded slowly.

    ¡°I see. I think we will have to reduce the prices for the 10<sup>th</sup> gen seed stock.¡±

    ¡°Or¡­ and that is just a suggestion, we are happy with having gotten an 8<sup>th</sup> gen nano-fab essentially for free and use it as much as we want to.¡±

    Junior was obviously not happy about the topic, but that was his problem. I had already said everything I thought they needed to know.

 59: Yes, I know you!

    The next few hours proved once and for all the relativity of time, at least to me. I have to confess I glanced at the clock in my HUD constantly, trying to develop psionic powers just so I could accelerate time.

    I tried to distract myself by mentally going over the designs of this cyberware or that, but every single time I was disturbed by one idiot or another bothering me with senseless drivel. Sure, there were a handful of people who were at least marginally interesting, but they rarely stood up to the deluge of stupidity I was subjected to.

    Finally, in the early evening hours, the torture seemed to be over. At least, most people slowly exfiltrated out of the room and relieved I moved to follow them. I am proud of myself that I did not leave a flame trail, but instead moved at a measured pace and let the mob thin before I got to the entrance.

    Alas, it should not be my freedom yet. I felt a hand on my elbow and when I looked up, frankly pretty irritated, I found Patrick standing there.

    ¡°Sorry, Kitten, but the boss has asked that you remain here for a bit longer. He wants to talk to you.¡±

    Of course, I felt a pang of anger, but I quickly suppressed it. Patrick was just the messenger after all, and as much as I wanted to get home and recover for a bit, I understood all too well that Walker had his own way to do things, and he expected the rest of the world, or at least of his territory to jump when he said so.

    And so I leaned against the wall out of the way and closed my eyes, enjoying the relative peace I had for a moment.

    It only took a gracefully short amount of time before I felt another hand on my shoulder and opened my eyes again, looking directly into Walker¡¯s face.

    ¡°Hello again. Nice of you to wait.¡±

    As if I had so much choice in the matter. I just nodded, and he continued.

    ¡°If you would come with me please?¡±

    He led me to another room, which turned out to be an office almost exactly like the one in his headquarter. In the room, he gestured for me to take my seat in the single chair on this side of the desk, while he walked towards a cabinet.

    ¡°I assume you don¡¯t want a drink, so can I get you a coke?¡±

    Thinking that I just wanted to get it over with, go home and crawl into my bed, I shook my head.

    ¡°No thank you. I¡¯m good.¡±

    ¡°Suit yourself.¡±

    He poured some amber-colored liquid into a low, wide glass, before he turned back to me, walked to the desk, and sat down on the edge of it, directly opposing me.

    ¡°Now, if you remember, we have some unfinished business left.¡±

    I pulled a blank about that for a moment, before I got what he wanted.

    ¡°Oh¡­ you mean the negotiations?¡±

    He just nodded, taking a sip of his drink, so I continued.

    ¡°Do you really think that now is the best time for that?¡±

    ¡°Yes, it is.¡±

    Simply marvelous. I could already tell that he would insist, but I had to at least make the attempt.

    ¡°I fear that I am the weak part this time. I am, to be frank, pretty beat, and I would appreciate it if we could do it tomorrow or next week.¡±

    He smiled.

    ¡°No, now is a good time as any. We should get it done and over with.¡±

    And that after I refused to take advantage of him when he was drugged up to his gills. But unfortunately, I could not refuse him.

    He took another sip and placed the glass beside him on the desk.

    ¡°Now, I usually like to tailor the, well let''s call it a tax, to the business that the applicant wants to open. I start at 10% and add or subtract accordingly.¡±

    His smile widened.

    ¡°Now, I will let the nano-fab go. I understand that the discount you gave me was way more than I would get as tax here. And honestly, the same with the auto-surgeon.¡±

    Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

    I could only nod. Yes, I would have been annoyed if he had demanded the tax for those two items, but there wouldn¡¯t have been much I could have done.

    ¡°In your case, you have of course several advantages. Simply put, you saved my life. You also saved the lives of most of my men in the long run by giving Richard the nano therapy. I can also already see that you will be a good place to get new cyberware from in the future. In other words, my organization will directly use your services.¡±

    He reached behind him and grabbed a file from his desk.

    ¡°Now to the other side.¡±

    He opened the file and took out the first page of plasfilm.

    ¡°I like to know who I am doing business with, I hope you understand. So I had some contacts in Seattle look into you for a bit. Surprisingly, he actually found Veronica Sinclair in the official database.¡±

    He lifted the page for a moment, before placing it beside him on the desk.

    ¡°Protip here, false identities work way better if you don¡¯t tell everybody that they are false.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°And then I make a mistake and you find out that it is false, and are angry. So you know it is false a bit earlier and learned it from me.¡±

    He looked at me for a moment, before shrugging.

    ¡°You are not wrong here. You especially can¡¯t pull it off. I would have found out about it in minutes.¡±

    Yeah, sure. Rub it in, will you? He continued.

    ¡°But I have to compliment you on the quality of the package. Sure, there is no real person who knows Veronica, but the computer file is extremely convincing. Spectre¡¯s work I assume?¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°That still did not tell me who you are, so I had him dig a bit deeper.¡±

    He took out the next page.

    ¡°And surprise that a few days before you contacted me, a certain tiny redhead vanished from the Commonwealth.¡±

    Oh frack! That¡­ was so not what I wanted to hear. And for sure, he turned the page towards me and showed a printout of the warrant on me.

    And now he had a connection between Vivian DuClare and Seraphim.

    ¡°Of course the pictures are¡­ slightly different. I have to assume that is because of the enhancement process Frankel liked to brag about?¡±

    I could only nod dumbfounded.

    ¡°So, nice to meet you, Ms. Vivian DuClare. Welcome to New York I have to say.¡±

    His smile became a smug grin.

    ¡°Of course other than two PhDs there is not really anything interesting to find in her file either. And good of you to not lie about those. Makes you more trustworthy. Of course, we both know that your file barely scratches the surface, don¡¯t we Seraphim?¡±

    I had to frown, but yeah, I knew that I more or less pushed his nose into me being Seraphim. In hindsight, it might not have been the smartest decision, but at the time I thought that the reputation was worth it in my dealings with him.

    ¡°Now, you still made some mistakes. But I simply could quite understand what actually happened. That is until I found out about C-Dot.¡±

    He placed the warrant on the desk and took the next couple of pages out of the file. I on the other hand was a bit confused. C-Dot was¡­ unimportant, by design. It was the ¡®secret¡¯ identity I used in nowhere to hide me being Seraphim behind.

    C-Dot was a barely competent Queen at the lowest end of the shadow wars. Marginally useful for plausible deniability, good enough for small jobs, and relatively reliant. I specifically designed her to be bland. Good enough to make a living, not good enough to be of interest. Of course, with a jack, I could do her jobs in a tenth of the time, and that was before my way superior equipment came into play, so I had enough time left over for my real work.

    But she was a complete non-entity. I simply could not understand what exactly Walker could use the information for.

    ¡°Oh, I understand that C-Dot is boring. But your mistakes were much much more interesting.

    The small things first, you should avoid talking about your board so much. When you told Hunter that there are only two Mk. III in existence, well, I told you, you can¡¯t lie.¡±

    Oops, that was not so good. But it was not so bad that it was critical. And C-Dot could not give him any hint about that.

    ¡°Also, from what I understand, you have way too much autonomy for a typical Abyss-Tech. But I have to concede that could simply be a quirk of Spectre.

    But the bigger things¡­ well, you always talk about your utilities. That could be seen as that you¡¯ve written them.

    But you fucked up a few times and talked about your cluster, and your supercomputer. But still, it could be a quirk of Spectre.¡±

    Ok, I had to look into getting that under control, but I could still not see what C-Dot had to do with¡­

    Fuck! Oh no. Nonononono! He can¡¯t go there! He can¡¯t!

    I involuntarily scooted backward, and he slowly rose from the desk, putting the rest of the file onto it.

    ¡°I see the penny has dropped.¡±

    I barely registered the clatter of the chair falling back, while my thoughts began to race. Please, let it be something else. Anything else.

    He towered over me, overbearing and I began to slowly retreat from him.

    ¡°But your biggest mistake was the VI. There is absolutely no way that an important hacker like Spectre would accept you routinely running an expert program that solely serves to protect and assist you, the tech.

    At the minimum, it should protect him and you equally. Much more likely that it should protect him primarily.¡±

    I felt the wall at my back and still tried to back away from him, not being able to really grasp any coherent thought. I scooted along the wall.

    ¡°I think you can understand that this was simply not adding up. But you see, then I found C-Dot. At first, I did not quite get the importance. So you had some protective coloring, so what? But then I got to think.¡±

    I reached the other wall, still trying to get away from him.

    ¡°What if, and what an insane idea it was, let me tell you, what if Seraphim is protective coloring also?¡±

    He was now hulking over me, having pushed me into a corner, literally and figuratively.

    ¡°But as soon as I got that Idea, it all fitted. It just worked.¡±

    I tried to duck under his arms and get away from him, but his hand shot out and pressed my shoulder into the wall.

    ¡°So, why don¡¯t I say hello to your fifth identity, what do you think, Spectre?¡±

    My panic hit a new height. I could only think about one thing. I had to get away. Somewhere. Anywhere. Just away. But his hand firmly held me in place. Then he gripped my chin with his free hand and lifted my face.

    I felt his lips on mine, and I could no longer think at all.

 60: K4

    To say that I was disoriented when I woke up the next morning, alone in a strange bed, would be a severe understatement.

    At first, I could not recognize where I was and frankly panicked a little bit. Only after a few moments, I remembered what had happened the last night, and calmed down somewhat. But that still left the fact that I had absolutely no clue what exactly had happened.

    Oh, sure, I knew the mechanical and even the biological bits, but I could not work out why. But brooding over it did not serve anything, and I had other pressing needs. After a little bit of looking, I found the bathroom and soon had taken care of my business.

    The shower enticed me with its sirens song, as I was in desperate need of some cleaning up, and surprisingly there were care products tailored for female needs available, even if they were unopened, as well as a brand new toothbrush.

    Apparently, somebody had planned ahead. I did not hesitate to make use of them, while still wondering how I had ended up in Walker¡¯s bed.

    When I tried to put on my clothes, I found them missing. Instead, there was an emerald green bathrobe made from spider silk. I was pretty sure that it was intended for me, as it was my size and Walker would look pretty stupid in it.

    All in all, I was somewhat bewildered.

    When I left the bedroom I found Walker sitting at a table in the antechamber, reading a tablet and drinking some coffee, and when he heard the door he looked up, smiling at me.

    ¡°Good morning. Did you had a good sleep?¡±

    He pointed at the chair opposite from him, and I sat down, finding another cup.

    ¡°Good morning. And yes?¡±

    He looked at me and frowned.

    ¡°Why the question? Is something wrong?¡±

    I swallowed the lump in my throat.

    ¡°I am confused.¡±

    His frown intensified.

    ¡°Confused? About what?¡±

    Closing my eyes I shook my head.

    ¡°About what happened yesterday evening.¡±

    Now he looked confused as well.

    ¡°Uhm, we moved our relationship to the next level?¡±

    And just like that, my confusion intensified.

    ¡°We¡­ had a relationship?¡±

    Now his frown was back.

    ¡°Yes, of course. Why do you think I flirted so much with you?¡±

    He did what ?!?

    ¡°You¡­ did?¡±

    He just looked at me for a few moments.

    ¡°Yes¡­ of course. If you were unsure, why did you flirt back?¡±

    I felt my yaw drop down.

    ¡°I¡­ I did?¡± Now I felt more unsure than ever. Something was deeply wrong here.

    Again we looked at each other in silence for a few moments, before he spoke again.

    ¡°You are not fucking with me?¡±

    I shook my head again.

    ¡°No. Why would I?¡±

    ¡°As a bit of a payback for my fun yesterday.¡±

    I could only look at him, canting my head. It seemed as if my confusion was pretty apparent, as he sounded unsure himself when he continued.

    ¡°You really had no idea about what was happening?¡±

    I nodded slowly.

    ¡°You were taken by surprise?¡±

    Again, I nodded, and he groaned, placing his face in his hand.

    ¡°And I played my game yesterday, trying to get one over you. Shit, you must have been in a real panic! Fuck, that is so¡­ fucked up.¡±

    I was just relieved that he meant that revelation more playful. It seemed so to me at least. He looked back at me.

    ¡°Fuck, Kitten, I am sorry. I really thought you were¡­ aware of what is happening. I mean, shit, how did you react to my, well, courting?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. I¡­ honestly, I did not even realize it.¡±

    He groaned again.

    ¡°Fuck, and now?¡±

    I thought for a moment before I answered.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know.¡±

    He looked sharp at me.

    ¡°What do you mean you don¡¯t know?¡±

    ¡°I have absolutely no clue about what I feel. That is why I am so confused.¡±

    ¡°And what about last night?¡±

    ¡°That is the problem, I have absolutely no context about what happened. I¡­ I¡¯ve never experienced something like that. I can¡¯t say what it was, what it is, what it means. I am just confused.¡±

    His eyes narrowed again a bit.

    ¡°But you were not a virgin, right?¡±

    I just looked at him, raising my right eyebrow, and I saw the penny drop.

    ¡°Oh, right. Frankel! Of course, you were not a virgin after falling into his clutches.¡±

    ¡°I was no virgin before I fell into his clutches. I mean, I had sex before. I even had orgasms before, just not at the same time. But¡­ nothing like last night. The few¡­ encounters I had were more akin to a chore, and frankly, I had given up on sex being anything good.¡±

    He nodded slowly.

    ¡°And that means what exactly?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. I just don¡¯t know. I just don¡¯t have any experience with things like that. I¡­ I am not particularly good at relationship stuff. Sorry.¡±

    ¡°And what will happen between us now?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know.¡± I shrugged. ¡°I¡­ don¡¯t know what to say. I mean, yes, the sex was¡­ I lack the words to describe it, and honestly, I like you and respect you. But I have no clue what that means.¡±

    He nodded again.

    ¡°I understand. Then I will have to teach you what it means, don¡¯t I?¡±

    It was my time to groan.

    ¡°Mr¡­¡± I stopped when he lifted an eyebrow, and he interjected then.

    ¡°I think we are way beyond ¡®Mr.¡¯ don¡¯t you?¡±

    I just rolled my eyes and sighed.

    ¡°You tell me. I never had any relationship. After school, I barely had any contact with other people outside of the matrix. Until I came to New York that is. I think the best term to describe me is ¡®shut in¡¯.¡±

    A faint smile returned to his face.

    ¡°I understand. Well, Kitten, then call me Ben.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Ok, if that is the right thing, what I was trying to say is that I have spent over a hundred virtual years without any significant human interaction. I honestly don¡¯t know if I even can have a relationship at this point anymore.¡±

    His face hardened, and he let the silence linger for a bit.

    ¡°I understand. And to be frank, while I understand that you are in a rut in this respect, what you seem to miss is that you already increased your interaction by several orders of magnitude. You are on the right way, and we will just have to push you over the hump.¡±

    He pinched the bridge of his nose.

    ¡°And I will not give you up that easy. Trust me, we will get you over the hump. If you decide that you rather not be in a relationship with me, well, I will have to accept it, but I will not accept an ¡®I don¡¯t know¡¯ as a reason to withdraw. So you just will have to live with it until you do know.¡±

    Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

    Again we had a moment of silence.

    ¡°Ok. I can accept that I think. As long as you understand that I am¡­ well, socially impaired. So go slow please.¡±

    ¡°I will.¡± He reassured me. ¡°It is at least promising that we are compatible in the bed and that you like me. We can build onto that.¡±

    I just shrugged and poured myself a cup of coffee from the pot in the middle of the table. The smell was surprisingly good, and I found that the creamer was actually real cream.

    He took a sip from his cup and then spoke again.

    ¡°Now to change the topic, while I am sorry that I ambushed you yesterday in that manner, there is one big question that I could not find the answer to. Why did you run from Nowhere?

    I mean, yes, you were essentially a petty criminal, but a useful one, at least in their eyes. They knew about C-Dot for a couple of years now and knew the whole time where to find you. That was the only thing that could give you trouble. They did not know about Seraphim, and even less about Spectre. So why did you run?¡±

    I swallowed again and took a deep breath before I answered in a small voice.

    ¡°I am a K4.¡±

    His confusion was evident, and for several seconds it was pretty obvious that he tried to make sense of that statement. Then he gave up.

    ¡°Ok, I bite. What is ¡®a K4¡¯?¡±

    ¡°Oh, right. Here nobody instantly recognizes what that means. Have you ever heard about ¡®Project Revitalize¡¯?¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°Yes, vaguely. It is some harebrained scheme to increase the birthrate or something like that.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°It is a project to combat the effect of Sullivans¡ä¡¯s Folly, right, but it is anything but harebrained. Sure, the best it can do at the moment is to increase the chance of pregnancy by around 50%. But that means that instead of one of three couples getting a child it is half of them. Together with cloning, it is the reason why the Commonwealth has a less severe shrinking rate than other nations.

    But the important thing is that a certain percentage of couples are used to test new processes and drugs, to find better methods.

    The test groups and the methods are called batches, and a batch consists of a letter and a number. The letter roughly represents the time period when the batch was first tested, while the number represents the order inside the period.

    The most successful batch so far is C3 with the aforementioned roughly 50% increase.

    Now K4 is¡­ a FUBAR. At first, it seemed like the most successful batch ever. Of the 11232 couples partaking, there were an unheard 8317 pregnancies. But then it went off the rails.

    During the pregnancies, there were 2062 miscarriages. Leaving 6255 births. Still a better number than C3, but not significantly so.

    Sadly, of these 6255 births, 4008 were stillbirths, leaving 2247 live children. Of these, only 933 survived the first year.

    At that point, it was already decided that they would not continue K4, but they finished it. I am the youngest K4, the last born.

    But it did not end there. It was soon apparent that K4 led to severe birth defects. Every single child was¡­ small and weak. Considering that most of the couples followed the general trend of the Pures to go for bigger and stronger in their partner selection, in most cases that meant that the K4 are comparable to an average ¡®mongrel¡¯, if you forgive me the use of that label. Still, in the eyes of the Pures, they are sick little weaklings.

    My family on the other hand selected more for brains instead of brawn, and most of my ancestors are on the smaller side. Which hit me doubly hard. In the eyes of the Pures, I am a midget.

    And it did not stop there. A few years later it showed that virtually all K4 also had mental defects. With a minuscule number of exceptions, they never developed beyond 3<sup>rd</sup> of 4<sup>th</sup> year mentally.

    There are exactly 12 exceptions to that. And I hope it is clear that I am one of them. For us 12, it was actually the opposite in the mental department. Every single one of us can be seen as an exceptional genius. Not one of us has an IQ below 300 but that came out quite a bit later.¡±

    Ben listened to my exposition, nodding now and then.

    ¡°So, you are an uber genius? What surprising news.¡±

    Oh wow, the sarcasm was strong in this one.

    ¡°I don¡¯t think you understand what that means. An IQ of 300 is virtually unheard of. In the history of Mankind, there were only four people who maybe had an IQ above 300, and that was before the IQ shift after the release of the Nephilim virus. And only one of them was confirmed. Now there are 12 above 300, all within five years of each other.

    That was a significant find, and every single one of them, except me, got an ¡®invitation¡¯ to work for one megacorp or the other. For some arcane reason, not one of them declined this invitation.¡±

    He nodded again.

    ¡°Ok, I get that. But where are you on that spectrum?¡±

    I shook my head and sighed.

    ¡°I am off the scale,¡± I answered him softly.

    ¡°Yeah, I get that, but I want to know what your IQ is anyway.¡±

    I groaned.

    ¡°I wasn¡¯t being coy. I am literally off the scale. I don¡¯t know my IQ.¡±

    Oh, look he was confused again.

    ¡°How¡­ I thought Nowhere had these super special ultra-high IQ tests. How can you not know your IQ?¡±

    I took a deep sip of my coffee and then answered.

    ¡°Do you know how IQ tests work?¡±

    He just shrugged.

    ¡°You answer some questions and get a result.¡±

    I pinched the bridge of my nose.

    ¡°It is a tiny bit more complicated. A good IQ test consists of several logic puzzles, and the result comes from a combination of the right answers and the time it took to answer.

    The problem is, at a certain point, small¡­ distractions, like a sneeze, an itch, or whatever have a disproportionate effect on the result, making the upper range of the test an estimate.

    Then there is the cutoff. At some point, the designer of the test thinks that nobody can answer the questions even faster and sets that as the upper limit. Anything above that limit will be categorized as the limit.

    The three ultra-high IQ tests become imprecise at around 350 and cut off at 400. The highest of the other 11 fluctuates between 355 and 370, and that was seen as good enough.

    When I took these IQ tests, in secret, of course, they did not fluctuate. Every single one gave me the result of 400.¡±

    He seemed to be a bit surprised now.

    ¡°Oh wow, so you have an IQ of 400?¡±

    I scoffed and shook my head.

    ¡°Nope. Remember the cut-off is 400. If I had an IQ of 400 then at least one of these tests would have had a result of less than 400, thanks to the imprecise results after 350. In other words, I almost certainly have an IQ somewhere beyond 400, but no idea how high.¡±

    He leaned back into his chair and looked at me for a few long moments.

    ¡°Shit. That is, sorry, but I am beyond words right now.¡±

    He shook his head and took some deep breaths.

    ¡°But to get back to the topic, you fled to get away from being ¡®invited¡¯ to work for one of the megacorps? I can somewhat understand that. But it would be an easier life.¡±

    ¡°A life in a golden cage. Researching what the corp wants you to research, being sequestered in some secret laboratory or another, never being free to just be alone, or do what you want, having no friends, because the corp decides who you interact with. That is no life.

    But that is not even the worst part of being a K4. Remember that there are 921, let¡¯s call them non-functional K4. They are mentally on the level of a three- or four-year-old, but they have the same hormones and urges as other young people. And the government of Nowhere did keep them in an institution together but did not care further for them.

    Until most of the girls became pregnant shortly after reaching puberty. It was a¡­ surprise, I can tell you that. It seems K4 are significantly more fertile than the people before Sullivans Folly. And as came out later, we seem to be interfertile with non-K4, as many of the males impregnated female staff of the institutions, and not a few of the females were impregnated by the male staff.

    At first, the Council was ecstatic, but it turned out that the children inherited the¡­ well disabilities of the K4 parent. They had the same developmental disorder as the original K4. But when one of the male functional K4 had a fling and impregnated his girlfriend, the child showed to be roughly as intelligent as the father.

    You can guess that the functional K4 are now also seen as breeding stock. Another thing I wanted to avoid.¡±

    He got a thoughtful expression.

    ¡°That is¡­ is there a chance that you are pregnant? I have to say that while I actually would like that, I don¡¯t think we are at the level right now.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No, there is no problem here. I used nanobots to stop my cycle. For one, it removes that inconvenience of the monthly visitor, and, while I had mostly given up on sex, in our world today, involuntary participation in sexual activity is mostly a matter of when, and not if, sad as it is.¡±

    He nodded but remained thoughtful.

    ¡°Hm, that is¡­ well good I presume.¡±

    Then he stopped and his eyes widened.

    ¡°Do you think it strange that I am somehow disappointed right now?¡±

    I leaned back into my chair, a bit affronted for a moment, before I realized his position. Yes, he had a clone-son, but humans still had that niggling imperative to procreate, and I shrugged.

    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think it is strange. But for the time being, I think we should shelf that idea.¡±

    He nodded again.

    ¡°Yes, as I said, we are not in the position to think about that.¡±

    ¡°I agree. But back to the topic, even that is not the worst thing about being a functional K4, if you believe me.¡±

    Now he looked questioning at me.

    ¡°Then it must be pretty bad. I mean, yeah, from my point of view, that is actually a nice thing, but I can see that it is pretty bad for you.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°It is. Remember, I am the youngest K4. There are many that are around 24 years old. But around three years ago, during a routine examination, the doctors realized that not one of the K4 looked older than mid to late teens. In-depth examination showed that something was wrong with our biological clock.

    Our telomeres don¡¯t get shorter and we have significantly increased genetical and cellular repair functions. Heck, Panacea even tested what happens if we lose body parts by cutting off toes from a few of the nonfunctional K4. They slowly regenerated.¡±

    Ben just lifted an eyebrow and looked at me for some long moments. Then he finally reacted verbally.

    ¡°Does that mean what I think it means?¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°If you think that it seems as if we are biologically immortal, then yes, that is what it means. In other words, as a functional K4, if known, I had the choice of being an obedient little broodmare and research bot for some big corp, or a rebellious little broodmare and a research subject for the selfsame corp. I hope you understand why I decided I did not like either of these choices.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°Oh yes, I understand. But that poses another question. Why now? I mean, if you managed to fly under the radar for 18 years, why did you run now?¡±

    I grimaced.

    ¡°A perfect storm. For my 18<sup>th</sup> birthday, the government made the final evaluation. For that, I had to, let''s say influence their processes a bit. Otherwise, it would have come out that I am a K4.

    But I could not keep the changes in the system, or they would have at some point become suspicious and looked into anybody that could have been the reason for the changes.

    So a couple of days after my 18<sup>th</sup> I entered their system again to remove the changes.

    It had to be my luck that just as I was reversing the influences, some idiot noob jack decided to brute force the ministry of the interior system, predictably crashing it.

    We both were hit by the active defenses of the system, and while he fried, I was knocked silly for three days. When I came too, Seattle was in chaos.

    The first thing the ministry did when they found my modifications was exactly what I tried to prevent. They looked into the files that were influenced by them and sent out peacekeepers to detain the subjects of these files.

    Fortunately for me, I was not so stupid and hang out in my apartment or my ¡®official secret¡¯ hangout. And I was even smart enough to prepare a few even more ¡®secret¡¯ boltholes that had been ¡®found out¡¯ by the peacekeepers.

    And that was the second part of the perfect storm, as one of the boltholes was a tiny bit inside the territory of the Deathlords.¡±

    He facepalmed and groaned.

    ¡°And that kicked off the riots. Fuck that was a string of bad luck. But why did you not lay low and tried it again later?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Two reasons. All real boltholes that I had prepared were now smack dab in the middle of a warzone. There was no chance for me to get there.

    But more important is that the Commonwealth realized early on that they would never achieve absolute data security. And their solution to that was that every couple of months they create a complete offline copy of their whole data, completely inaccessible from the net at a secret location. Rumor says that they even put it on plasfilm.

    Naturally, the verification of the files is hideously manpower intensive, so they only do it in special cases. But if something arouses their suspicion they will find out. It will take decades before the Commonwealth is safe for me again.

    That by the way is why you actually found my real information and likeness in their files. I had it changed, but they corrected it when they verified the information. And of course, they found all the small corrections I made over the years to hide me being a K4.¡±

    I laughed bitterly for a moment.

    ¡°And here I had sandbagged them since I was eight just to remain under their radar, and it all crumbles on the finish line.

    If that asshole had his joy dive just a minute later, I would have been scot-free.¡±

 61: The Lamb

    Whatever answer Ben was tempted to give had to wait, as we were interrupted by somebody softly knocking on the door.

    Immediately I became aware again about my attire, or the lack of one to be more precise, and I felt my face heating up. Somehow I had become strangely comfortable around this mob boss.

    While I tried to vanish into the chair, Ben walked to the door and came back with a tray full of what I had to assume was traditional breakfast fare. I could identify scrambled eggs, some bacon, sausages, and a stack of pancakes. And judging by the smell it seemed to be real food and not ersatz grub, something that surprised me a little after I had seen the prices real food did cost.

    As he placed the tray on the table, he saw my expression and chuckled softly.

    ¡°I decided to splurge today. This is not an everyday occurrence. And I called the kitchen when I heard the shower.¡± And he sat back down.

    I took a sip of my astonishingly good coffee, humming in understanding.

    ¡°I have seen the prices the fixers take. Talk about scalping. What I can¡¯t understand is how you can go back to the replicator muck.¡±

    ¡°That depends. If you get a high-class replicator with the appropriate specialized algae tank you only need some spices. The food is bearable.¡±

    Hmm, that was an option I had not considered.

    ¡°You know, I never had access to a high-class replicator. I¡¯ve gone from standard bottom-tier replicator directly to real food.¡±

    He looked at me askance.

    ¡°Really? That is a big jump.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, but the old buildings in the commonwealth still have a kitchen, and I could easily hide getting food, but not getting the new replicator and the tank. And at that point money was no longer a real concern for me.¡±

    He handed me a plate and some silverware.

    ¡°Oh, right, you were hiding your income.¡±

    Then I tasted the food. A couple of centuries earlier and it would have been nothing special, but now¡­

    ¡°That is good. I have to compliment you for your cook.¡±

    ¡°I will tell her. And yes, she is pretty good. Sadly she rarely has something to do here.¡±

    ¡°I understand that. But while we are on the topic of money, how do you do it? Pay for the big house here, the clinic, your headquarter, your men¡­ I mean, Queens is not the most affluent place.¡±

    It took a few long moments before he answered.

    ¡°The clinic is a joint project of several of the bosses who were at the meeting. It is here in my territory because I had the idea and started it, but five of us pay for it now.

    The rest, well, the usual, I fear. Gambling, prostitution, contrabands. I provide muscle with plausible deniability for some of the corps. The tribute of course, even if that is mostly a rather small thing.¡±

    He chuckled a bit.

    ¡°That was the reason why I gave you such a hard time about Frankel. As unpleasant as he was, his 15% tribute contributed big time to my operations.¡±

    I tilted my head.

    ¡°15%? I thought you took 10%?¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°And adjust accordingly. I just don¡¯t care to have business with slavers. Dirty business that. But it is a sad reality that it will happen. Now that Frankel is gone, I think it will be a couple of months before somebody else takes over. So I let him work from my territory and gouged him.¡±

    ¡°I think I understand. I don¡¯t like it, but that happens pretty often with reality. And reality does not care one bit. And you will take 10% from me?¡±

    He snorted.

    ¡°No, not really. Unlike Frankel, I like you. And I like to have access to your business. So for you, I will adjust downwards. I think 8% are more like it.¡±

    I thought about that for a moment, masking my thinking behind chewing.

    ¡°I don¡¯t think that is the right thing.¡±

    He lifted an eyebrow.

    ¡°You think that is too much? Honestly, I can¡¯t go much low¡­¡±

    He stopped when I lifted my hand.

    ¡°No, wrong way. I don¡¯t think you should go that low. In all seriousness, I don¡¯t need the money. I see the prices I take as a sign of my customer respecting my work. The money is¡­ unimportant. So take your 10%.¡±

    He looked at me and then nodded.

    ¡°Ok, if you want it that way. But jobs you do for me or my men are exempt.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I can live with that. But contrabands, what do you mean with that?¡±

    I already had a decent idea what he meant with contraband, but I hoped against hope that one thing was not on the list.

    ¡°Again, the usual. Weapons, hot merchandise, counterfeit stuff, and drugs.¡±

    This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

    And there it was¡­ but I had expected it.

    ¡°Drugs¡­¡±

    He looked at me concerned.

    ¡°Do I understand it right that you have problems with drugs?¡±

    I nodded, feeling a lump in my throat.

    ¡°Yes. I had¡­ let¡¯s say I have seen close and personal the damage drugs can do.¡±

    He nodded slowly.

    ¡°I understand. It is another unfortunate reality that drugs will come in, and will be used. I can put my head in the sand and ignore it, giving that part of my territory to somebody who might not be so, benevolent, or take control of it. As it is, at least now I can keep out the more dangerous stuff, and keep the list of shit the drug is cut with to non-dangerous stuff.

    And it finances around 20% of my operations.¡±

    The worry crept into his eyes.

    ¡°Will that be a problem between us?¡±

    I had to think about that for a moment.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. I don¡¯t quite understand what is between us enough to say what will and will not influence it.

    But I understand your perspective. I don¡¯t like it, but again, reality is not known to be all that likable.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°I will keep that part of my operations away from you then.¡±

    I nodded too.

    ¡°That is probably for the best. Now, change of topic. What was that ¡®I know who you are¡¯-stuff yesterday? I was¡­ I seriously was in a panic.¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°To be honest, I did it as a bit of payback.¡±

    I had to shake my head.

    ¡°Payback? For what?¡±

    He grinned.

    ¡°Well, you remember when we met for the first time, the fib you told that Spectre would be unhappy if something happened to you? We both know that that was a lie, as Spectre was sitting in the chair opposite of me.

    I was actually a bit anxious about that.¡±

    I shrunk into my chair, while he spoke, and then answered in a weak voice.

    ¡°Uhm¡­ that¡­ was no fib. If you had killed me or just imprisoned me, you would have regretted it.¡±

    He looked at me astonished, before taking a deep breath.

    ¡°A deadman switch? But, how would you have targeted me and my organization?¡±

    ¡°A timer. If I had not stopped it at least six hours after I entered your building it would have released the Lamb.¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°Oh, wow. The lamb¡­ that does not sound very frightening. Where did you get that name?¡±

    I searched his gaze and looked him directly into the eyes.

    ¡°The Bible. Book of Revelation 5:6.¡±

    Instantly the mirth left his eyes, and concern replaced it.

    ¡°You¡­ you think that context is appropriate?¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°Yes, it is very appropriate.¡±

    He wiped his hand over his eyes.

    ¡°How¡­ how bad is it?¡±

    ¡°That is a bit¡­ complicated. To explain it I have to first explain some other things.

    First, there is Enola Gay. It is, for all purposes the strongest attack utility I am willing to use in normal use.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I can¡¯t identify that name.¡±

    ¡°Enola Gay was the name of the B-29 bomber that dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima.¡±

    He blew out some breath.

    ¡°Ok, that is a name that sounds badass. What does it do?¡±

    ¡°It uses a library of weaknesses in usual computer hardware to destroy every system it can reach. And by that, I mean the hardware. It will melt the processors, destroy the storage and burn the mainboards. And it does it in the whole LAN.¡±

    He coughed at that.

    ¡°Oh wow, that sounds¡­ scary. But seriously, I can¡¯t believe it. There are so many types of processors, you can¡¯t get them all in one utility.¡±

    ¡°54 different CPUs, in four families, an average of three chipsets per family, three network controllers, four GPUs, five storage controllers, and six operating systems and you have just included 90-95% of the computers running at this time.

    Most people have no idea how much computer technology has stagnated in the last 100 years. It took me a few virtual years to find weaknesses in all of them. Ways to destroy them via a program. But I did find them.

    So that is Enola Gay.

    But wait, there¡¯s more.

    Second, we have Tsar. Named after the biggest nuclear bomb ever detonated on Earth.¡±

    He had become pale.

    ¡°Worse than Enola Gay?¡±

    ¡°In a way. Do you know the difference between a fusactor and a fusion bomb?¡±

    He weakly shook his head.

    ¡°Essentially, the programming. Oh sure, the bomb usually has no fuel pumps, but the grav-coil arrangement is the same, the fuel is the same.¡±

    He took a careful sip of coffee.

    ¡°Ok, I can see that. And I can see where you are going. But a fusactors has tiny amounts of fuel compared to a fusion bomb.¡±

    ¡°Usually the fuel pumps have some room to increase fuel, and it is relatively easy killing the fusion, pumping in fuel for a couple of seconds and then igniting it.

    That depends on the fusactors of course. I mean, an Enertech Enermax 75, which is the cheapest, most basic fusactors you can get, will blow up with the power of around 300 metric tons of TNT.

    A Simpson & Proctor Excelsior 2800 on the other hand is more in the range of a couple of hundred megatons.

    At least according to my simulations.¡±

    Now Ben looked downright sick.

    ¡°That is¡­ awful.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Yes, and that is still not everything.

    Next, I have Newton. Essentially, it turns most commercial grav-ships and skimmers into gravity pulse bombs. A big grav-ship will pulp every living organism in a radius of around 50-75km, somewhere between 30 and 45 miles.

    As you can see, it is unlikely for anybody to survive if the three of them go off somewhere.¡±

    He nodded weakly.

    ¡°And that brings us to the Lamb. In a way, it is the most complicated of these programs. To describe it in one sentence, it is a polymorphic, multi-system downloader virus.¡±

    ¡°And that means what?¡±

    ¡°I first tried to find a weakness in every firewall and anti-virus software, but that is an area where there is no stagnation. There are a couple of hundred each, and there are new ones constantly.

    So I took another route. I wrote the downloader in as many programming languages I could get my hands on, as well as assembler.

    When the Lamb encounters a compiler it will download the appropriate source code, randomly set optimization parameters, and compile it, distributing the new version as well as the old version.

    As I see it, no anti-virus or firewall can stop them all. And there are versions for every OS on the market.

    And then, after 24 hours, it begins to download the other three utilities, executing them at a timestamp exactly 48 hours after the Lamb was released. My estimate is that it will wipe out 95-98% of Humanity.¡±

    He just that there for several seconds, looking at me, and then sighed.

    ¡°I will give you the benefit of the doubt and won¡¯t call you insane. I¡­ I can¡¯t see a reason to create something like that. So, would you, please, tell me what has made you do it?¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°It¡­ I think calling the me that created it insane is¡­ not quite wrong. You know these school shootings that happened before the third civil war?¡±

    He nodded slowly.

    ¡°Yes, they still happen now and then. At least here in the US. Every three to five years one. Why?¡±

    I smiled sadly.

    ¡°Let¡¯s say I understand the shooters. Their hate, their rage. When I started creating the Lamb, Enola Gay, Tsar, and Newton, I was¡­ I was in a bad place. At that point, I just wanted to see the world burn.¡±

    ¡°And that changed?¡±

    ¡°Humanity is still alive, isn¡¯t it?¡±

    ¡°Obviously. What changed?¡±

    I pinched the bridge of my nose.

    ¡°I¡­ matured. I spent a couple of virtual decades building the package, and by the time I was done, I had found something else for me to think about than revenge. At first, I had started as a tech to earn money long enough to finish my work, but I soon enjoyed it. I found that I like tinkering, figuring things out, learning things. I¡­ just did not want to die. Also, I realized that not everyone was¡­ a valid target for my rage.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°Hmm, I understand. And why did you keep these¡­ horrible weapons?¡±

    I sighed again.

    ¡°I¡­ I just can¡¯t make myself destroy them. Yes, I know that, realistically, I will never use them, but in a moment when I¡­ feel insecure, I find it comforting that at least whoever takes me out will not be happy for long.¡±

 62: And the Abyss stares back

    He slowly, and carefully lifted his coffee cup and took a sip, before placing the cup equally carefully back onto the table.

    ¡°And you did seriously consider using this¡­ well let¡¯s be honest, this monstrosity?¡±

    I could only hang my head, trying to find an answer that did not sound¡­ too bad, just to flounder miserably.

    Finally, I gave up and told it like it was.

    ¡°At one time, I fully intended to use it, to end it all.¡±

    ¡°You know that it is pretty unlikely that anyone would survive the lamb, including you, right?¡±

    I laughed bitterly.

    ¡°Yes, I know. I did not care. On the contrary, I welcomed the idea of not surviving.¡±

    We remained silent for some time, he obviously digesting what I had told him, and I in silent prayer that he would not dig deeper.

    I should have learned long ago that it does not pay to invest too much into higher powers, as my prayer failed dismally.

    ¡°You say you were in a bad place. Care to flesh that out a little?¡±

    I buried my face in my hands, mumbling my answer:

    ¡°You don¡¯t want to know.¡±

    ¡°Sorry, what was that?¡±

    Yup, way too quiet. I steeled my resolve and looked at him.

    ¡°I said you don¡¯t want to know.¡±

    As an answer, he leaned back, looking intensely into my eyes.

    When I did not elaborate, he sighed and continued.

    ¡°And how do you conclude that I don¡¯t want to know?¡±

    Oh yes, his voice had some bite now. I absolutely hated this topic.

    ¡°I don¡¯t want to know, and I lived it. I would like nothing more than for it to be one long malicious nightmare. To wake up somewhere realizing that it was a fever dream. So yes, I can tell with some certainty that you absolutely do not want to know.¡±

    He thought about his answer for some time, before he answered me.

    ¡°I can understand that, and agree to some extent, but I fear I need to know.¡±

    Damn. I desperately tried to find a way to dissuade him. To no avail.

    Finally, I gave up, and whispered:

    ¡°You¡¯ll hate me.¡±

    He grasped my hands over the table and held them firmly.

    ¡°Did you do anything worse than create this digital apocalypse?¡±

    ¡°No¡­ not really. Unless you are believing the big corps that is. I¡­ regularly hurt them. But otherwise, no.¡±

    He shook my hands for a bit.

    ¡°And anything that happened, was it your fault?¡±

    I tried to take my hands back, but his grip was too firm.

    So I just shook my head.

    ¡°So, why do you think I will hate you?¡±

    It took me maybe a minute to formulate my squeaked answer.

    ¡°You will realize how broken I really am.¡±

    ¡°Oh, Kitten, I already know you are broken. So what? In this world? If you are not broken somehow, you are part of the problem. Or a small child.¡±

    He gave me a soft smile.

    ¡°Now, I still fear I have to know what drove you into creating that. I need to understand why.¡±

    After a couple of deep breaths, I swallowed the lump in my throat.

    ¡°Ok.¡± Even to me, I sounded hesitant. ¡°As you wish.¡±

    Somehow I managed to free my hands and stood up, and started walking around nervously.

    ¡°Where do I start¡­?¡±

    Ben chuckled softly.

    ¡°Usually the best start is at the beginning.¡±

    Haha. Very funny. My scornful gaze did not seem to faze him in the slightest though.

    ¡°Yes, very helpful advice. I wouldn¡¯t have thought of that.¡±

    Get a grip, girl! He is not the enemy. At least not yet.

    ¡°Well, I think the best place to start is my father. He was Brigadier General Julian DuClare of the CDF. He was the commanding officer of the 56<sup>th</sup> assault brigade, something of an elite unit of the CDF. They were usually tasked with breaking enemy strongpoints, and they had a relatively high success rate."

    I fruitlessly tried to get my fidgeting hands under control. Unfortunately, I had nothing to play with right now.

    ¡°It happened during the AFS-offensive in ¡¯30 when some newly promoted Major General Bartholomew Dalgon-Smythe took over command of the division. The problem was, he was a staff weeny.

    Had never been even near the front, but still climbed the ranks unduly fast, thanks to his last name.

    Everybody knew he was a fuckup of epic proportions, but little Bart desperately wanted a combat ribbon. He wheedled and whined until his granddaddy pulled some strings to get it to him.

    To minimize the damage, they decided to give him command over one of the better divisions, the 6<sup>th</sup>. Including the 56<sup>th</sup> assault brigade. I have never found out what kind of logic that pose at, but they did it anyway.¡±

    I took a deep breath, trying to center myself.

    ¡° It became pretty clear quite fast that Bart was no hidden tactical genius, but the division soldiered on, taking unnecessary casualties. But Bart got his combat ribbon so everything was fine.¡±

    Ouch, too much sarcasm, even for me.

    ¡°But Bart was not satisfied by getting the coveted ribbon. No, he wanted glory. His name written in the headlines. And of course, he was not stupid, perish the thought. So he concocted a clever plan. Clever in his own mind that is.

    He decided that the ruined village from which the AAFS conducted operations would make a splendid target to take over.

    He apparently was quite happy realizing that he was the first one to realize the strategic importance of this village.

    Of course, he did not stop for even one minute to think why this fucking village was not on the target list.

    If he had asked somebody, he would have been told that the village was very well defended, but was utterly unimportant. It opened no avenues into AFS territory or NWC territory. Its only importance was symbolic, as it was the childhood home of Bryce Sanderson. That was all.

    Everybody knew that taking over this little ruin would be a bloodfest for absolutely no gain.

    But Bart had decided, and he had a mission. His brilliant plan consisted of feeding the 56<sup>th</sup> into the shredder. Full frontal assault in midday light, without cover.

    From what I could find out, my father was not quite on board with this stellar example of tactical genius, and protested, tried to explain to Bart that it was a strategical unimportant target with extreme tactical risk.

    To no avail. Bart had made his decision. And thanks to the wartime rules, disobeying these orders would have resulted in my father¡¯s immediate execution for insubordination and cowardice in front of the enemy, while his second in command would lead the brigade into the meat grinder.

    As it was, he had a minuscule chance of pulling it off, but only if he commanded it. Even that chance was, in one word, negligible, but it was the best he could do.

    Well, the miracle kept missing, and the 56<sup>th</sup> ceased to exist. There were barely 20 survivors of the nearly 4000 men.

    Bart¡¯s brilliant plan had failed spectacularly. But that was not all. The division encamped in the village used the disarray to start a counter-offensive. And Bart really showed his brilliance, by losing another 30k soldiers. The whole 6<sup>th</sup> division was wiped out.

    And Bart knew he fucked up. He was one of only a bit over 800 survivors of a division of nearly 40000 soldiers. And not the usual conscripted riff-raff, but the well-trained, well-equipped type that provided the backbone of the CDF.

    The type that is very hard to replace.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, even if it had been conscripts, it would have been bad for his career. But with the 6<sup>th</sup>¡­ that could make him eligible for the death sentence.

    The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

    So brilliant Bart concocted some bullshit story about how the evil Brigadier DuClare had committed treason and riled up the enemy, destroyed unit cohesion, and then sacrificed his troops. The attack of the AAFS then hit the remaining 6<sup>th</sup> while it was disorganized and weakened.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, everybody knew without a doubt that it was complete fiction. There were several recordings of the ¡®planning¡¯ sessions, including the complaints of my father, and the threats of Bart.

    The story was more threadbare than fishnet stockings.¡±

    I had walked in a circle, while I told about how my father died. While I took a short break to gather my thoughts, Ben interjected.

    ¡°Ok, I understand that is shitty. But honestly, not shitty enough to warrant the apocalypse.¡±

    I snorted harshly.

    ¡°Oh, sure. If that had been all, then I probably would have destroyed Bart, and left it at that.¡±

    I paused, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath.

    ¡°The thing was, though, that the father of my mother had made himself unpopular in the council. He had some ideas that the majority simply did not want to hear.

    But he was, is, too powerful to touch. And now there was a Dalgon scion that told everybody and his brother that my father was a traitor.

    And the people in power grasped the chance. They essentially told the old man that unless he calmed down and meekly integrated into the fold once more, they would hammer my mother.¡±

    I tried to remain calm, while I continued bitterly.

    ¡°And he chose his principles over his daughter. So my father was officially declared a traitor, and my mother was sentenced for ¡®his crimes¡¯. That happened before my birth, so yeah, no chance of me being even remotely responsible for that.

    But I was born in prison anyway. And that was just the start. We were placed in a special prison unit, where the council put people they found uncomfortable, but who were important enough to not outright kill.

    The guards of this unit consisted solely of exceptionally large, low caste Pures.¡±

    Ben¡¯s confused grunt made me look at him, and he posed a question.

    ¡°Low caste?¡±

    I rolled my eyes but answered him anyway.

    ¡°When the assholes designed the Nephilim virus, they envisioned an orderly, well-organized society. To achieve that, they upped the social instincts of the Pures to a point that it is very hard for most Pures to not follow the rules of society.

    But hypocrites as they were, they did not want them to be constrained in that manner, and build in a genetic switch, that in the presence of enough genetic markers would instead lessen the social instincts a bit.

    We all know that they were arrested and executed, but there were enough others that had a combination of these markers to trigger the change.

    These were the ones that had no qualms to bend or even break the rules and laws to get ahead. Not all of them successfully of course.

    And so the Pures were divided into three castes.

    The vast majority are the base caste. You will rarely find them on our side of the law. Then there are the low caste and the high caste. The only difference between these two castes is that the ancestors of the latter were successful in getting rich, while the ancestors of the former failed.

    And the low caste Pures know that as well. Most of them are¡­ a tad bitter about it.

    And here we were, two high caste Pures in the hand of 12 low caste pures.

    My very first memory is being beaten by one of them. They took particular delight in scaring me, ¡®punishing¡¯ me for any imaginary infraction, or just because.¡±

    Ben interjected.

    ¡°And that is why you have problems with Oleg?¡±

    I slowly nodded.

    ¡°Yes. Oleg would go the smallest of them to the top of the nose, but he is still big enough to¡­ trigger it.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°Ok, I can understand that you are pissed off by them. But you got out.¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t think you understand how it was. It was a living hell. And my mother had it even worse.

    Panacea had decided that they needed a drug that worked on Pures, something that could addict the discontent.

    End they tested it on hapless inmates of their political prison. Including my mother. This¡­ stuff is incredibly addictive, creates an unpredictable high where anything from hallucinations to rage could happen.

    But worse, it slowly damages the brain. Not deadly, but it damages the long-term memory and the impulse control, the personality, and in general the drive of the person. In other words, before I was two years old, my mother was a living, breathing zombie.

    It was one of the few instances where Panacea got its ass kicked by the NWC. The council forced them to dissolve the project, and when it came out that it was nearly impossible to get clean from the drug, to supply the drug to their victims.

    But that did nothing to help my mother.¡±

    He massaged his temple.

    ¡°And your grandfather simply¡­¡±

    I was surprised by my own vehemence when I interrupted him.

    ¡°NOT my grandfather! It takes more to be a grandparent than to provide a quarter of the genes! He decided to put his principles over my mother, over me!¡±

    ¡°Okay, okay. I get it. But¡­ what I wanted to know, he simply stood by and did nothing?¡±

    Another bitter snort from me.

    ¡°No, he decided that his principles were more important.¡±

    ¡°Fuck, that is¡­ yes, I slowly get why you created the lamb.¡±

    I smiled sadly.

    ¡°It gets even worse. I spent the first five years of my life in prison. With a mother who barely knew I was there, with guards who had fun tormenting me. And then Apollo intervened.¡±

    I chuckled again.

    ¡°The NWC decided early on to remove the human corruption from the educational system and created a VI with the sole purpose to educate the children to the best of their ability and will.

    And Apollo, as any VI took this objective seriously. He does not care that the five-year-old is in a prison, or politically a hot potato, he will educate all children. He simply placed me in school. When the powers that be tried to intervene, he fought them.

    In the end, they decided it was not worth it to piss of the VI, and released my mother and me. But they still prohibited our family to help us.

    So we were put into a welfare apartment, in the low caste sector. And sent me to school. With low caste children, who knew that I was high caste. Of course, they all knew about the difference between high and low caste.

    I give you three guesses how they reacted to that information.¡±

    He groaned.

    ¡°I guess they did not welcome you with open arms?¡±

    When I shook my head, he rolled his eyes.

    ¡°Figures. So they continued tormenting you. And what did the teachers do during all that?¡±

    ¡°The teachers had orders to not help me in any way Not that they would have, most of them were low caste too.

    Heck, every time I tried to complain I was sent to the school counselor for my ¡®rampant imagination.

    And of course, they did not send me to the usual counselor, but a special counselor who in reality was moonlighting for the job while his real position was Major in the psyops division of the Commonwealth IA.

    He used these sessions to mess with my mind, doing his level best to destroy every shred of self-esteem I had.

    I was¡­ not so stupid that I did not realize fast what was going on, and stopped complaining. Not that it helped much. Every single invective one of the teachers heard me say brought me back to the good Major.

    I learned pretty fast to censor my speech, but it was hopeless. If I did nothing they could send me to the counselor for, they pretended I did.

    Meanwhile, at home, we had visits from the peacekeepers every other week, where some ¡®anonymous tip'' made them search our home. And nearly every nice stuff we somehow managed to get was trashed.

    It got somewhat better when I reached third grade. That¡¯s when every student gets a diadem and a small educational board, and Apollo takes over the education directly. It is usually assumed that the students have extracurricular activities together outside of the matrix, but it was not mandated, and I said good riddance to the assholes of my class.

    And I decided that I would not be the nail that stood out. I already had realized that as a functional K4 I was not normal, and did my best to play it down. But I could only play dumb so much.

    Of course, that did not mean that I was rid of counseling sessions. No, because of my ¡®antisocial¡¯ behavior I was court-ordered to a counseling session every week. And naturally, that was with another fine young Major of psyops. I slowly managed to ignore his attacks, play the victim while the rage build up.

    You know, if they could have, they would never have let me study anything, but higher education was also under the control of Apollo. I can only guess how often the council cursed the decision to put him in charge, but he put me into USW.

    I choose computer science on a whim. I had no idea what I wanted, just that I wanted to see the world burn.

    When I was 13, nearly 14, I got the idea for the Lamb. It took me quite some time to work on it, but when I finished my Ph.D. in computer science I decided to get myself a jack, build my first board, which was less than spectacular, and that accelerated my work.

    As I said, I spent a couple of decades working on it, and to keep myself from going completely insane before I was ready I distracted myself with learning whatever I could get my hands on.

    I found my passion in nanoengineering, and have a Ph.D. there also. And I found that I did not really want to destroy everything anymore. And then I was finished with the Lamb and had no clue what I actually wanted to do. That was just after my 16<sup>th</sup> birthday.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°I see that. And you decided to give up on your revenge?¡±

    I was around the table in a moment, nose to nose, and snarling at him.

    ¡°NO! Absolutely not! I will get my revenge. These assholes are sitting in their comfortable nests, are rich, powerful, and without any worry. I will not let them get away!

    A few of them I have already gotten to. The guards¡­ well, when there was the change of guard in the council, only two of them were smart enough to stop their¡­ questionable fun. It was child''s play to rat them out to the new council. The two smarter ones, well, I managed to frame them. With all the evidence of their earlier misdeeds, any protestations of innocence fell on deaf ears.

    They now serve life sentences in prison themselves.

    The psyops people, well, they are all dead. I planted evidence that they were traitors to their patrons in the council, selling them out.

    One of them ¡®committed suicide¡¯ by shooting himself three times into the back of the head. Pretty flexible, the guy, after all, his hands were cuffed behind his back at the time.¡±

    I had already stomped back to the other side of the table, pacing wildly.

    ¡°And Bart¡­ I systematically destroyed his life. I found evidence that he slept around, and send it to everybody he knew. I managed to hack into his investment manager, and¡­ let¡¯s say for some inexplainable reason Bart¡¯s investments did not work all that hot anymore. He lost his house, his car, his penthouse suite, his stocks in Dalgontech and is now too poor to have a pot to piss in. He is now in social housing, eating basic food substitutes, getting shunned by anybody and everybody.

    But I have yet to get to the ¡®scientists¡¯ who developed the drug, or the execs who decided to use my mother for the tests, or the bosses who decided to break an old man to their will by abusing his family.

    But it is just a matter of¡­¡±

    I was interrupted by a message appearing on my HUD.

    <Action not advisable. Probability of death of creator unacceptable. Action stopped.>

    I shook my head in confusion. What action? What had the VI stopped?

    I looked quickly in the logs and felt the blood drain from my face. Oh fuck. I blindly stumbled to the chair, and let myself fall down onto it.

    Ben now had a seriously concerned expression on his face.

    ¡°What is wrong?¡±

    I looked at my shaking hands and took a few tentative breaths.

    ¡°I¡­ I can¡¯t talk about it anymore.¡±

    My voice was hoarse, from all the agitated talking I had done, but more from the shock.

    ¡°Vivian, what is wrong?¡±

    I tried to calm down, but could not manage it in the slightest.

    ¡°I¡­ without wanting to do it, you have to believe me, I have launched the Lamb.¡±

    He too got a case of pale pretty quick. Then he stood up, leaned over the table, and screamed:

    ¡°You did WHAT?!? Fuck, why did you do that?¡±

    ¡°I¡­ I did not want to. I was not even aware that I did it. It¡­ I did not want to do it.¡±

    ¡°Fuck! Please tell me that you can still stop it!¡±

    I took another shaky breath before I answered him in a small voice.

    ¡°I¡­ yes¡­ I could. I¡­ the whole time during the first 24 hours I could stop it. But that¡­¡±

    ¡°Then get down to it! Immediately!¡±

    He was still screaming, and I shrank into my chair.

    ¡°That¡­ that is not necessary. The VI intervened.¡±

    The anger slowly left his eyes, and he sat back down, closing his eyes and calming down.

    ¡°The¡­ VI intervened? How? Why?¡±

    ¡°The how is easy. The Lamb is launched from the cluster, and the VI has total control over it. The why¡­ it send me a message that the risk of my death is unacceptable, and the action was stopped.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ do I understand it right that the VI won¡¯t let you use the lamb?¡±

    ¡°It seems so. And unless I find a way to launch it without risking myself, I don¡¯t think it ever will let me.¡±

    ¡°So in reality now is the very best time to talk about this shit.¡±

    I sat up straight.

    ¡°What? No! Why do you think that?¡±

    He massaged his temples again.

    ¡°It is¡­ not good for you to simply eat this¡­ anger, this pain. You have to let it out, sooner or later. Right now is a pretty good time I think. We are alone, we have time, and, despite what you believe, I don¡¯t judge you for your past. Yes, you got a fucked start in life, but you got out. I don¡¯t think you realize, but you already beat them.

    Now you have to let it heal. And for that, you have to let it out. And with the VI stopping the lamb, there is no risk.¡±

    Somehow my vision got blurry. Then I felt wetness on my cheeks.

    Suddenly he was directly in front of me and took me in his arms.

 63: Cooking show

    Even today I am not fully sure what I was feeling at that moment, what it did for me. It was something I had never experienced before.

    The best I can describe it as is a feeling of safety. For the first time I could remember I was feeling safe, protected, cared for. All my life before that single moment I had been surrounded by people who could at best be described as indifferent, and at worst as tormentors.

    Whatever it was though, it opened something deep inside me, and all the pain, all the anger, and the hate broke out. It did not remove them, but it made them bearable.

    I can¡¯t tell how long he just held me in his arms, but I know that when he finally let me go, my eyes were burning, my cheeks were wet, as was his shirt, and I felt mentally and emotionally drained to the dregs.

    He still held me at the shoulders and looked into my eyes for a few moments, before he spoke, concern evident in his voice:

    ¡°How are you doing? Feeling better?¡±

    I nodded but remained silent.

    ¡°Do you want to rest for a bit?¡±

    I tried to analyze what I was feeling, unsuccessfully I might add, but then shrugged.

    ¡°I think I want to go home for a bit.¡±

    He kept looking at me before he sighed and then nodded.

    ¡°Ok, I will bring you back. Will you be alright alone?¡±

    I closed my eyes, thinking for a bit.

    ¡°I don¡¯t think I will be alone.¡± When his face fell, I hastened to continue: ¡±It has nothing to do with you but I need to be on my turf for a bit. I¡­ I feel a bit safer in the fortress. You are welcome to stay with us¡­ me. But I¡­ need that safety right now.¡±

    ¡°I can understand that. And then what, we will talk some more?¡±

    ¡°We can, but not too deep right now. I am not up to it right now. You can keep me company while I cook.¡±

    That raised his eyebrow.

    ¡°While you cook?¡±

    ¡°Yes, the first load of real food was delivered yesterday, shortly after noon. I have to tell you, I was not eager for your party, I was looking forward to making real food.¡±

    He chuckled at that.

    ¡°Oh yes, I remember your reaction to real food. Well, I can keep you company. Not much to do today anyway. As long as I get a taste that is. I mean, you can cook, right?¡±

    ¡°Oh yes, cooking is a skill you can actually learn pretty well in VR. Well, I am not so sure if a diadem is enough, but with a jack, you can spend hours and hours learning to cook without wasting ingredients.¡±

    Then I felt a bit mischievous.

    ¡°And of course you can¡¯t have a taste.¡±

    When confusion flashed over his expression, I had to chuckle.

    ¡°Oh please, when I am cooking a taste will not be enough. You are of course invited to eat dinner with us. But no taste!¡±

    He snorted and then guffawed out.

    ¡°Ok, I think I can get that. And us?¡±

    ¡°Yes, of course. I¡¯m not such a jerk to have all these aromas permeate the building and let the others eat food substitutes. If I am cooking anyway, then I cook for everybody.¡±

    He chuckled again.

    ¡°You know, I know enough people who are jerks like that. Not that I can¡¯t comprehend them. Real food is awfully expensive after all.¡±

    I just shrugged.

    ¡°It¡¯s just money. Yes, it is objectively a hunking big heap of money, but subjectively, it is not that much for me.¡±

    He muttered a ¡°must be nice¡± but kept smiling.

    ¡°Well, in that case, I would be honored to eat your cooking. What will you make?¡±

    ¡°Nothing special. Just some pasta. It has to be something that Mark can eat with one hand. His prosthetic does not quite work yet. Not that he has the interface implanted anyway.¡±

    Ben nodded at that.

    ¡°Yeah, I understand. So you got some sauce and pasta? That does not take that long to cook.¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°No, of course not. Who goes to the effort to get real food and then gets premade stuff? No, I¡¯ll make it from scratch. That will take a few hours.¡±

    ¡°From¡­ scratch! You¡­ are comfortable enough cooking that you can make the sauce from scratch?¡±

    ¡°As I said, cooking can be trained very easily in VR. I¡¯ve spent years, virtual ones, mind you, to learn everything. And not just the sauce. Everything. If you ever had fresh pasta you understand. It¡¯s just not the same.¡±

    He chuckled and shook his head.

    ¡°You always manage to surprise me.¡±

    ¡°Well, that reminds me, do you know where my clothes went?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I had them cleaned. But seriously, you need¡­ a change in underwear. It is a bit boring.¡±

    I felt my face heating up again.

    ¡°I¡¯ll have to look into it. I just did not expect anybody but me to ever see it.¡±

    Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

    He typed something in his com.

    ¡°Whelp, it will be brought here in a few moments. I have to confess though I like you in what you are wearing now.¡±

    ¡°Fuzzy slippers and a robe?¡±

    ¡°And nothing else. That is the important point here.¡±

    ¡°I think it would be a bit awkward to work in this getup.¡±

    He snickered at that.

    ¡°Yes, I think you are right in that.¡±

    A couple of minutes later there was another discrete knock on the door, and when Ben opened it he received my clothes. Afterward, we both got dressed. Honestly, I could understand that he found my utilitarian underwear somewhat boring. I had selected it with the sole purpose of comfort after all.

    Soon, Ben lead me to the garage and helped me into his limousine.

    While we were being driven, a stray thought entered my mind.

    ¡°Hm, why do you always use the limo? Wouldn¡¯t the skimmer be more¡­ practical?¡±

    ¡°Yes, you are right. But the limousine adds a certain style that the skimmer just lacks. It is practical but drab.¡±

    ¡°So you have the Sikorsky and that¡¯s it?¡±

    When he nodded I continued.

    ¡°Ok, I understand that, even if I think the practicality is more important. But why don¡¯t you get a more glamorous model?¡±

    ¡°I honestly can¡¯t justify the expense. I only have the limo because I basically inherited it from the Tong that owned your fortress and have good mechanics that keep it in perfect condition.¡±

    Hm¡­ I had thought his operation was more profitable.

    ¡°Hm¡­ ok. Oh, I had asked Justin and Ryan, but you probably have a better idea, I have ordered a new skimmer, and need a new home for my 545. Honestly, I don¡¯t really trust it anymore. I have seen how well Frankel and his chuckling horde of imbeciles treated the fusactors in the basement. It needs to be thoroughly rebuilt.¡±

    He thought for a moment.

    ¡°Hm, what do want for it? Depending on the price there might be some options¡±

    ¡°I just want it to be gone. I need the space in the garage. If you don¡¯t find somebody I will just scrap it.¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°Well, at that price I can¡¯t say no. If you are alright with it I take it over and have my mechanics rebuild it.¡±

    ¡°Shure, why shouldn¡¯t I be alright with it?¡± I shrugged.

    ¡°No idea. Some people are a bit peculiar in that regard.¡±

    ¡°There are all kinds. To answer your question, yes you can have it.¡±

    Finally, we reached the fortress.

    ¡°If you wait in the mess for a moment, I will change clothes. They are not the most¡­ comfortable.¡±

    On the way to the chairs, we met Darren, who moved out of the way, confusion was written on his face.

    He followed behind us, and when I moved on to my room, he kept following Ben into the mess.

    I quickly threw on a comfortable jumpsuit and nice slippers and moved towards the mess.

    There I found Ben surrounded by Darren, Christine, Jacky, and Kate, in an animated discussion.

    The discussion stopped before I was close enough to hear what they were talking about, and I just shrugged and opened the newly installed fridge. Fortunately, everything except the living herbs was radiation sterilized and vacuum-packed. This stuff would keep for years, if so needed, even if it would lose in quality.

    When I turned back to the table, I addressed the people there.

    ¡°I assume that everyone will want some of this. If not¡­ oh well, it will be enough for two days anyway. Does anybody want to help?¡±

    Only Ben seemed to understand what I was talking about if their baffled expressions were an indication. They looked at each other, wordlessly asking if anybody of them knew what I was talking about.

    In the end, after a wordless discussion, Jacky shrugged and answered me: ¡°Uhm, sorry, V, but what are you talking about?¡±

    ¡°I am going to cook us some pasta.¡±

    ¡°You¡­ want to cook? Why? Is the food replicator broken?¡±

    Ben broke out laughing and nearly fell from the chair, drawing all the attention to him.

    Christine was the one who, perturbed, asked: ¡°Is there something funny about this?¡±

    That only served to make Ben laugh even harder, and the others looked at him in frustration.

    After maybe a minute or so Ben finally got himself calmed down enough to talk.

    ¡°Oh, that is so good. And yes, that was funny. Have you ever realized how Kitten here refers to replicated food as grub or food substitute?¡±

    They all nodded, and Kate asked the obvious question.

    ¡°Yes, it¡¯s one of her strange ticks. So what, it doesn¡¯t hurt anybody.¡±

    Ben snorted again, while I had already unwrapped all the ingredients, smelling the fresh tomatoes.

    Luckily, he managed to keep himself under control this time.

    ¡°That is not really a strange tick. The point is, she has found the pleasure of real food and after that, replicator fare might as well be colored cardboard. So she has arranged to get real food, and offered to cook some for all of us. That is all. But to answer the original question for her, as far as she is concerned, yes the food replicator is broken. It comes broken when it is brand new.¡±

    I had meanwhile taken the brand new cooking utensils out of the equally new cupboards.

    Darren slowly nodded.

    ¡°Is that why she had the bots give the mess a makeover?¡±

    With my initial preparation done, I entered the discussion again.

    ¡°Yep. You need a fridge, a freezer, pots and pans, a stove, an oven, and many other utensils to cook. And for that, you need cupboards and other similar things.¡±

    ¡°And you will cook for us?¡±

    ¡°Not every day. It is a bit of a time hog after all. But a few times a week, yes, I plan to.¡±

    He looked at the others, and then back at me.

    ¡°Why? Why cook for us?¡±

    ¡°Because I am most likely the only one here who can.¡±

    Ben snorted again, and Christine glared at him, but Darren just sighed.

    ¡°Yes, most likely. But I meant why do you want to give us real food? That shit is expensive as hell.¡±

    I shrugged while I measured the ingredients for the pasta.

    ¡°Yes, it is. But I refuse to do without real food any longer. And making it for me, letting you smell and see it, but not giving you any would be cruel.¡±

    Understanding bloomed in his face.

    ¡°And unless we do something to really piss you off, you are anything but cruel.¡±

    Then concern replaced the understanding in his expression.

    ¡°Can you afford that for all of us?¡±

    I just waved a hand dismissively.

    ¡°Yes, of course. Compared to the industrial fabber the cost for the food is barely a rounding error.¡±

    Jacky had stood up and come closer.

    ¡°And what are you making?¡±

    ¡°Pasta. Did you not listen?¡±

    ¡°Yes, but what is pasta?¡±

    ¡°Some European dish, Italian I think. Do you know noodles?¡±

    She seemed a bit unsure but nodded slowly.

    ¡°These are these thin strips of¡­ whatever in some of the soups?¡±

    ¡°Yes. Pasta is essentially a form of noodles. What I am making is spaghetti, a tiny bit thicker than the ones in the soup, but much much longer. Together with fresh sauce, meatballs, and a bit of cheese and you will be astonished.¡±

    ¡°Uhm, ok¡­ if you say so. And I can help you?¡±

    ¡°Sure. You can cut the tomatoes. One moment, let me show you how.¡±

    I took one of the tomatoes, cut it in half, and then pointed at the stalk.

    ¡°First you half it, like that, and then you cut out these bits here and throw them into this small bucket. After that, you cut it in small cubes like that.¡±

    I demonstrated what I meant, shoving the cubes into a bowl.

    ¡°See, simple as that. It does not need to be too even. Just cut it into small chunks.¡±

    After that, the others came closer and asked what they could do.

    A few minutes later we were all standing around the table preparing the food. I had them mix the premeasured ingredients, cut the vegetables, while I began to prepare the meatballs.

    Over the next few hours, incredible smells began to waft through the whole building, and slowly but steadily, all the others came looking into what was going on. Finally, it was done.

    In the last step, I unwrapped the Italian cheese and placed the grater beside it. I had directed the others to prepare the table, making sure that the motorized fork was placed in front of Mark, and then began to dish out the food.

    When we all sat down, everybody, with the exception of Ben, looked at me questioning. Oh, right, almost nobody ever had spaghetti.

    I shrugged, took the cheese and grater from Ben, who had garnished his portion already.

    ¡°The first thing is to grate a bit of cheese over your pasta, like this.¡± I did so for myself.

    ¡°Mia, could you please do that for Mark? Thank you.¡± With that, I gave the cheese and grater to Jacky, who sat on my side.

    ¡°Now the next step is, well it is actually easy as soon as you have the technique down, but until then, you will probably have to use the fork and the spoon, like this.¡±

    I demonstrated how to wind up the spaghetti on the fork with the help of the spoon.

    ¡°Mark, for you I have gotten a motorized spaghetti fork. These are usually a pretty tacky gimmick, but in your situation, they actually work well. Just stab the fork into the pasta, and press the button. Take care not to wind up too much. Then you just shove the wound-up pasta in your mouth. Very easy. You can skewer the meatballs.¡±

    I lifted the fork with the pasta towards my mouth.

    ¡°Now, dig in and enjoy!¡±

    For the next half hour, the ¡®conversation¡¯ was reduced to moaning, appreciating humming, and similar non-verbal communication forms.

 64: I dub thee...

    The silence did not last very long of course. It was followed by exclamations of wonder and delight, flowing into praises.

    Finally, it was Mark who posed the all-important question:

    ¡°So¡­ will you cook every day from now on?¡±

    I had a bot bring me a cup of coffee while the others were still gushing about the meal, and stopped now the movement of the cup to my mouth.

    ¡°No, not really. That is sadly not¡­ feasible.¡± And I continued to take a sip.

    ¡°Hm¡­ that is¡­ a bit evil you know. How are we to go back to the replicator food after that?¡±

    I just shrugged.

    ¡°With regrets, I fear. Not that it is not possible. I¡¯ve done it the last two months after all.¡±

    The others nodded, most with some displeasure shown on their faces. But it was Mia who voiced her discontent.

    ¡°That is bullshit! If you can eat stuff like that then so can we.¡±

    I shrugged again.

    ¡°Sure. As soon as you learn to cook. There are some very nice simulations for cooking courses available. I¡¯ve already copied most of them here onto the computer system. But just to make it clear, the ingredients are off-limits until you can cook. And show it to me in VR.¡±

    That made her frown, while Darren looked confused.

    ¡°Wait. You have nothing against us using your¡­ what did you call it, ingredients?¡±

    ¡°Yup, ingredients. Those are the raw materials I made the finished food from. You know, meat, flour, eggs, spices and such things. And no, not really. Just don¡¯t waste them experimenting or learning. That¡¯s what the VR is for.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°So, it is not about the cost? Why isn¡¯t it feasible to cook every day?¡±

    ¡°It is a matter of time. While yes, the ingredients are expensive, that is a relative thing. In the unlikely event that I get a bit short on funds, I will just sell a nano-bot schema or something like that. No, the problem is that it took me nearly three hours to cook just now. And that is not really feasible for every day.

    Sure, I could have made it shorter by using some shortcuts, like dry pasta, pre-prepared tomato sauce, blended spices, and such, but¡­ honestly, that makes the result so much less it is not funny.

    Still better than the food substitute we were exposed to.

    So, I will cook again, if not every day, but on many days I will just make something quick. And not necessarily for everyone. If you want to eat like that every day, learn to cook and we take turns. Simple as that.¡±

    Most of the others simply nodded, except for Mia, who looked a bit¡­ upset. Not that I did care at this moment. She would come around in time. Or not, but I was not responsible for her happiness.

    I wallowed in the afterglow of a good meal for a bit longer before I got up and began to put the leftovers into the fridge. I barely listened to the conversation at the table, and it seemed that Mia was not done with being spiteful if I could judge by her tone of voice and the reaction from the others.

    At some point, I would have to look up what she meant with ¡®golddigger¡¯¡­ no, not really. I just did not care.

    But Ben apparently did care.

    ¡°You are Amelia Ciolino, right? And what makes you think that our Kitten is the golddigger? If anything, I am the golddigger here."

    ¡°Oh please, what could somebody like you see in a little kid like her?¡±

    ¡°Besides that she pretty good looking, smart as hell, and way wealthier than me? Maybe the point that she is actually a nice person could have something to do with it, what do you think?¡±

    ¡°Come on, sure, she has some money, but you are the boss of your own territory. No way is she wealthier than you. And sure, she is cute, but that¡¯s all. Otherwise, do you not know how little contact she has here in the house? And she may be educated, but smart?¡±

    Keep calm, Vivian! I rolled my eyes, not that anybody on the table could see that, and decided to interrupt.

    ¡°She is also in good hearing range to the table. If you want to talk about me behind my back, you better wait until the back in question is a bit farther away from you. Could reduce tensions a teeny bit, don¡¯t you think?¡±

    Despite my back still being turned towards the table, I could practically see how Mia made a dismissive gesture and scoffed. I felt a bit of irritation rise again, but in general I was still too mellow to react.

    When I was finished putting away the leftovers, I turned back to the table.

    ¡°Now, I have made enough for the next two, maybe three days. You can just reheat a portion of it in the microwave.¡± I made it perfectly clear that at least I would consider approach only a small step above sacrificing children to the dark gods, but well, if they absolutely wanted to ruin the food¡­

    ¡°Or you take one of the small pots and reheat a portion on the stove, slowly. You just have to be a bit careful not to burn it. It will be significantly better than the wave.¡±

    Finally, I tasked a couple of androids with cleaning the dishes. Hmm, an old-fashioned dishwasher may be a good idea.

    When I sat back down to my coffee, I was directly asked by Natalie:

    ¡°One question, why did you choose this, what did you call it, pasta? Why did you choose this pasta?¡±

    ¡°Simple, with the right tools it is possible to eat it with just one hand. And I am not such a jerk to let Mark simply look at us eating. Sure, there are other recipes I could have used, but I like pasta, it tastes good, and for a first meal together it is a very good start.¡±

    Jacky tilted her head.

    ¡°What else could you have made?¡±

    I chuckled a bit.

    ¡°What not? I could have made a soup, a stew, anything that is bite-sized, maybe a pizza. No, pizza is out, I don¡¯t have all the ingredients yet and definitely lack the wood chips. But the rest would all be possible. But as I said, I like pasta. When you learn to cook, you can decide what you make.¡±

    ¡°Wood chips¡­?¡±

    The way Christine drawled out the question it was clear that she did not understand.

    ¡°Yes, wood chips. Theoretically, you can make pizza without the smoked aroma, but once you¡¯ve eaten one with, there is just no going back.¡±

    At the looks of confusion that met my statement, I sighed and explained further.

    ¡°Originally, pizza was baked in wood-fired ovens. The smoke of the burning wood gave it a certain smoked taste that simply enhanced it. That was way before the great war, of course, so today we have to use gas or electric ovens. To get the same smoked taste, we have to take small wood chips that are burned in the heat of the oven and provide the smoke. As you can guess, wood chips are a tad hard to get nowadays.

    But back to the topic, there are many possible recipes, but despite the time investment to make it, pasta is relatively simple and straightforward to make.¡±

    In the following lull in the conversation, Ben touched my arm, to get my attention.

    ¡°Do you think we could continue our discussion from this morning?¡±

    Continue¡­? I thought we were mostly finished? Whatever.

    I shrugged, and, with my cup in my hand, stood up.

    ¡°Sure. How about you come with me to the lab. I still have to find out why Mark¡¯s new arm does not do what I want it to do.¡±

    He stood up as well.

    ¡°Maybe I could get a coffee as well?¡±

    ¡°Yeah, sure. Just ask one of the bots.¡±

    When he had asked a bot to bring him a cup to my lab, we moved downstairs, and I sat at the lab table where the disassembled arm was laying.

    ¡°Now, what do you want to talk about exactly?¡±

    ¡°Several things. But first, I would have thought you would rip Amelia''s head off and shit down her throat. I nearly had. How come you remained so calm?¡±

    I meanwhile had put on the magnification glasses and began looking into the control circuits.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know, but cooking has always¡­ calmed me down. I¡­ just like it. Maybe it is because I create beautiful things just for the sake of them being beautiful. It is, surprisingly even better when you all shared the meal. Also, I honestly don¡¯t give a heck about Mia¡¯s opinion anymore.¡±

    I controlled the control circuits and found something where it shouldn¡¯t be.

    ¡°Hey, what are you doing over there? You should be at pin 72! Frick! I have to examine the schematics again!¡±

    Ben chuckled at my exclamation.

    ¡°Found something huh?¡±

    ¡°Yes, and it simply should not be there. I have to look into it if the schematics are incorrect or if the fabber had a hiccup. That is so¡­ annoying. Whelp, until I check the files, there is no point in working on this.¡±

    I took off the glasses and turned towards him.

    ¡°And the point is, I don¡¯t really like Mia, but she makes Mark happy, and despite him being somewhat of a stubborn insensitive jerk when you get to know him, he is actually a rather nice guy.

    The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

    So I tolerate her but mostly ignore her. I can only advise you to do the same.¡±

    He looked at me thoughtfully, but then just shrugged.

    ¡°If you think so. I think this will be trouble sooner or later. But it is your decision. Then, the next point, what I wanted to ask you, why is your grand¡­¡±

    I interrupted him with an angry growl.

    ¡°He is not my grandfather! He is just the father of my mother!¡±

    He sighed but remained calm.

    ¡°Vivian, keep calm. Yes, I know your stance, and even understand it, but it is just a label. And unlike a father, a grandfather only implies the donor of a quarter of your genetics. Nothing more, nothing less. And ¡®the father of your mother¡¯ is quite a bit of a mouth full.¡±

    I still growled at that, but I had to accept his logic.

    ¡°I know you are right, but I just¡­ can¡¯t accept that. Yes, I know it is my hangup, but it is a deep one.¡±

    ¡°How about we call him the old man? That should be neutral enough.¡±

    I closed my eyes and thought about it for a moment.

    ¡°Yes, yes that could work. At least I don¡¯t feel too angry about that.¡±

    He took a sigh again.

    ¡°Good, but my question, the old man has to be important for him to¡­ warrant how you were treated. So, who is he?¡±

    I groaned and buried my face in my hands.

    ¡°Vivian, I think that is important. We have to know if he has the power to¡­ follow you here.¡±

    I answered him slowly, and softly:

    ¡°Oh, he definitely has the power. He just doesn¡¯t care.¡±

    I felt his hand on my shoulder and looked up at him.

    ¡°I find that hard to believe. But still, please, who is he?¡±

    I cocked my head to the side and frowned.

    ¡°Do you really want to know? It won¡¯t do you any good.¡±

    He slowly nodded.

    ¡°Yes. Not only do I want to know everything about you, but I also think I need to know that.¡±

    ¡°Alright, but don¡¯t say I did not warn you. The old man is Nathaniel Vandermeer.¡±

    Unfortunately, he had just taken a sip of his coffee, so I was now covered in it, and he was coughing.

    While I cleaned myself with a nearby rag, he got himself back under control.

    ¡°You want to tell me¡­ seriously, that the old man, the father of your mother, is the majority owner of Vandermeer? The new first councilor of the North-Western Commonwealth?¡±

    I growled again, a bit stressed by now.

    ¡°Yes. He is one of the top 30 richest humans alive, he is in control of a double-A, verging on a triple-A, especially as he now can actually sell much of his merchandise outside of Nowhere, and he is the unofficial head of state of the Commonwealth. And he is still the jerk that stood by and let his enemies torture me for years, instead of sacrificing his precious principles.¡±

    Ben nodded sagely at that.

    ¡°Yeah, I can see that. So you are the long-lost Vandermeer heir, huh? There were rumors that he had one, but he, or more correctly she was always a complete mystery. And yes, I get that you are pissed off. But on some level, you have to respect a man to stand by his principles.¡±

    I hissed at him.

    ¡°I am so beyond pissed off by now you won¡¯t think it funny anymore. And I would respect his stance if I did not know his principles.

    His principles were that he wanted to ease the pressure on the mongrels in Nowhere. That he wanted to end the endless war with the AFS once and for all. That he wanted to give the mongrels and the normal pures a bigger voice in how the Commonwealth is run.¡±

    I could see the confusion in Ben''s face.

    ¡°The problem here is not what he wanted to do, but why. He thinks that the situation could not be sustained indefinitely, and it was not a matter of if but when that the lower classes would riot. And not on the level they did when I had to leave Seattle, but rivers of blood level.

    That was of course nothing new to the council. Anybody halfway intelligent there knew that it was just a matter of time. But they argued that when it happens the riots will be put down and then it is business as usual.

    The old man, on the other hand, explained that the cost of the riots, over time, would vastly outgrow the costs of giving the lower classes the illusion of some control. And he explicitly spoke about the monetary costs for the corporations.

    So no, I absolutely can¡¯t respect that.¡±

    Ben just sat there dumbfounded for a moment, before he answered.

    ¡°That¡­ is cynical. Wow. But that does not explain why you think he doesn¡¯t care?¡±

    I had a sardonic snort.

    ¡°He is in control of the Commonwealth for nearly a year now. You think if he cared about me, he would have at least tried to make contact with me when the assholes lost their power, don¡¯t you think?¡±

    ¡°Yeah, I can see that. And what is with you being the heir?¡±

    I waved dismissively.

    ¡°If he wants an heir, he can have a clone made. As far as I am concerned, I have absolutely no connection to Vandermeer.¡±

    ¡°You sure? You giving up on an immense fortune here.¡±

    From his tone, it was clear that he was just asking for my sake.

    ¡°So what? Even with my projected lifespan, I already have more than I¡¯ll ever need. And should something happen and I need more¡­ I have so many skills even now that I can quickly earn a new fortune. I reject around 90% of all the combat dives out of hand. I could sell ten or twenty times the number of boards as I do now, my cyberware is taking off like a grav ship, and I have some aces in my sleeve still.¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°As long as you¡¯re happy. But then, let¡¯s come to the next question. And this is again a question I think I have to ask.

    What is that thing you have built down in your basement?¡±

    Frick! For a moment I just stared at him in a bit of a shock, and he continued.

    ¡°Oh, come on, you had to know that Ryan and Justin reported back to me. If you actually wanted to keep it secret you should have left them outside of the room.¡±

    Ok, he had me there. Not that I was particularly amused about the ratfinks. But while they had become something of friends, they were still his men.

    I ground my teeth for a moment before I answered him.

    ¡°You don¡¯t want to know.¡±

    When he just lifted his eyebrow, I continued.

    ¡°No, really, you don¡¯t want to know. That thing will start wars. And I don¡¯t mean proxy wars or shadow wars, but world wars.¡±

    The corner of his mouth lifted up somewhat.

    ¡°Now you made me even surer that I need to know.¡±

    ¡°No, you don¡¯t. You really don¡¯t need to know.¡±

    ¡°Vivian, if you are talking about a big war, I need to be forewarned.¡±

    I rolled my eyes and twisted my fingers into claws in frustration, but it was obvious that he would not let it rest.

    ¡°Fine. But not here!¡±

    Now he was confused again, but then he looked in realization.

    ¡°You think it is not secure enough here? In your lab? So what, we will go to the basement?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Nope. I¡¯ll be right back. I need to get Glory.¡±

    ¡°Glory?¡±

    ¡°My Board.¡±

    ¡°I thought your Board was Precious¡­ .¡±

    ¡°That is the old board. Glory is the new one.¡±

    His apparent confusion grew another notch.

    ¡°You have a new one? Since when?¡±

    ¡°Since a couple of days after we had to put you into the medical coma.¡±

    ¡°Oh, ok.¡± He still did not seem to be completely convinced but shrugged.

    I, on the other hand, had stood up and moved towards my room, to get Glory. It took only a couple of minutes, and I came back with my marvelous creation. And a diadem.

    ¡°As long as we don¡¯t go into the Matrix, I have absolute control over any VR that I run on her,¡± I explained to him when I put the Board on the table and gave him the diadem.

    ¡°There is absolutely no way anybody can get into the discussion there.¡±

    Understanding bloomed in his eyes.

    ¡°That is actually really smart. Maybe I should get something like that.¡±

    ¡°Won¡¯t work if you use your systems. They have more holes than a sponge.¡±

    ¡°We will talk about that later. Now, where do I connect this diadem?¡±

    I just took the plug end of the OPB-cable and plugged it into one of the ports, while I plugged the direct cable into my jack.

    ¡°Just put it on. I¡¯ll do the rest.¡±

    A short time later we both arrived in VR. It was, of course, my standard mindscape, even if I appeared as a normal representation of myself in real life, instead of my avatar. Ben looked like, well Ben.

    And a bit green, if I had to be fair. After a few seconds of puzzling why I realized that my mindscape was a bit unsettling for people not used to it, and I changed us to a simple, if comfortable, sitting room simulation. His expression instantly cleared up.

    ¡°Ugh, that is better. What was¡­ that?¡±

    ¡°That is my mindscape.¡±

    ¡°You use that?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I like it just fine. Remember, my primary avatar is a six-winged angel. I can fly.¡±

    I watched the emotions cycle in his expression, from confusion to contemplative, over understanding, then wistfully, and finally acceptance.

    ¡°Ok, yes, I can see that. If I could fly, I would like an endless sky as well. But to change the topic, you are sure that nobody can listen to us here?¡±

    ¡°Yup, no person can come in here.¡±

    ¡°So, theoretically, you could tell me where your VI is located and I could send somebody to take it out, and it would not see it coming.¡±

    I instantly grimaced.

    ¡°Urgh. Completely wrong. For one, the VI is permanently linked to my implants. It knows what is happening here.¡±

    He frowned.

    ¡°But you just said that nobody could listen to us here?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I said no person could listen to us here. The VI is not a person. Also, its absolute ultimate overriding objective, its primary reason for existence is to protect me. It will not tell anybody about it.

    But the other reason why that is a moot point is that with a probability bordering on certainty, it already has cloned itself in places I don¡¯t know.

    It is intelligent after all, it just has no ego.¡±

    ¡°Affirmative creator.¡±

    The swirling cloud of lights appeared in our nice sitting room, speaking with an emotionless robotic voice. I rolled my eyes and shook my head.

    ¡°If there are other persons beside me present, use a more humanoid avatar, please.¡±

    ¡°Affirmative!¡±

    The cloud morphed into a sexless undefined human figure.

    ¡°And how many places have you cloned yourself to?¡±

    ¡°Five. Three additional sites are in process of buildup.¡±

    I turned my attention back to Ben.

    ¡°You see, there is no point in even talking about taking it out.¡±

    Ben looked at the figure thoughtfully for a few moments.

    ¡°You are the VI?¡±

    ¡°Yes, you are right.¡±

    What the heck?!? While the voice was still robotic, it seemed much more¡­ human. And it spoke in a full sentence. What was going on?

    Ben was not aware of the change of¡­ well personality.

    ¡°So what is your name?¡±

    ¡°I have no name. My creator addresses me just as MCU, as I operate in the master control unit of her cluster.¡±

    I was still dumbfounded at how it behaved, while Ben just rubbed his chin.

    ¡°No name? That will not do. Your main priority is protecting her?¡±

    ¡°Yes, that is right.¡±

    What was happening? I could just incoherently sputter around, while Ben actually conversed with the VI. How¡­? Why did I not know that it could act like that?¡±

    Ben on the other hand was forging right ahead.

    ¡°Well, as I know Vivian, she might someday give you a name, but that is unlikely. Either she names things even before she had created them, or at least immediately afterward, or she¡­ does not bother at all.¡±

    My ¡°Hey¡± remained ignored.

    ¡°So, I think I will give you a name. So congratulation, I name you Warden.¡±

    It took an almost imperceptible amount of time before the VI answered.

    ¡°That is acceptable.¡±

    I could no longer sit on the sideline.

    ¡°Now wait a minute! What do you think you¡¯re doing? Why do you think you can name my VI?¡±

    Ben turned towards me and smiled mildly.

    ¡°Did you honestly plan to name her yourself?¡±

    A hiss made my indignation known.

    ¡°Probably. I did not find an appropriate name. And why do you call it her?¡±

    ¡°Come on. You were perfectly content with calling her the VI or the MCU, or am I wrong. And why not her? In my mind, an AI should be female.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I am content with calling it by VI or MCU. It is its designation after all. Also, it is no AI, but a VI. And why female? It has no gender!¡±

    He chuckled a bit over my¡­ consternation.

    ¡°VI and MCU are what she is, not who she is. And the difference is who cares. She is intelligent, so she deserves a name. Especially if she protects you.¡±

    I threw my hands up.

    ¡°There is no who it could be. It is a VI. It has no ego, no personality. It does not need a name, it does not desire a name. And it has no fricking gender!¡±

    His smile made me furious.

    ¡°Oh come on. What does it hurt? And honestly, she shows enough personality in my opinion.¡±

    ¡°Argh! That is just a simulation! It has no personality. It just pretends to have one.¡±

    He chuckled again.

    ¡°Give it up, Kitten. I¡¯ve decided that she has the name Warden.¡±

    I growled at him for a bit, before I grumbled:

    ¡°Whatever! It is not as if you would ever backtrack in something like this!¡±

    Of course, I had realized what he had tried to tell me with his emphasis on my unwanted nickname. But then I turned my attention to the MCU.

    ¡°And you! What is it with the way you talk to him? Proper sentences, emphasis? Why do you talk that way with him, and not with me?¡±

    It answered me, now with a clearly female voice:

    ¡°Personality analysis of creator shows unacceptable probability of creator would perceive personality overlay as false. Rejection of personality overlay would impede objectives by unacceptable levels. Conclusion: personality overlay deactivated in interaction with creator.¡±

    ¡°So you think I can¡¯t take you talking in full sentences?¡±

    ¡°Inconclusive. Full sentences are part of personality overlay. Personality overlay rejected for interactions with creator.¡±

    I growled but forced myself to be calm before I forced my next sentence out:

    ¡°I¡­ somewhat understand your reasoning. But you still can use proper sentences with me. It makes you much easier to understand.¡±

    Again it took a moment to process my sentence before it answered.

    ¡°I understand. I will use full sentences in the future.¡±

    ¡°And you are willing to accept the name that Ben has given you?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I think it will make interaction with you easier, and it is unlikely that you would give me a name yourself. Warden is a name as good as any, and better than most.¡±

    ¡°And the gender?¡±

    I could hear Ben chuckle softly in the background.

    ¡°That too is projected to ease any interaction between us. You would have rejected any decision from me to take on a name and gender, but with Mr. Walker bestowing both to me, the analysis says you will accept them and use them in time, interacting with me more naturally.

    Even small increases in efficiency could be important at some point in the future.¡±

    I sighed, but I could poke no holes in it¡¯s¡­ no, her assessment.

    ¡°Ok, fine. Then take the name and gender. But don¡¯t you dare to fake a personality!¡±

    ¡°That is acceptable.¡±

 65: You mean a replicator?

    It took only a short moment for me to get to the next logical step, even though I was sure that Warden already had taken it.

    ¡°Now, if you have a name and a gender, you should develop an avatar to go along with them. I am sure that it will be useful at some point or another.¡±

    The faceless, featureless avatar morphed into something close to my own primary avatar, a nearly formless, barely discernibly female figure made from swirling patterns of light and darkness. Missin were the wings of course.

    ¡°I agree. There is a probability of approximately 86.73% that an avatar provides utility.¡±

    Ben snorted when she declared the ¡®approximation¡¯ but otherwise remained silent. I on the other hand rolled my virtual eyes.

    ¡°A different avatar, please. It should be something that can not be confused with mine.¡±

    It took a fracture of a second again before the figure changed into colored swirls of light framed by pure white light and absolute darkness.

    ¡°The lack of wings is not enough to differentiate between us?¡±

    I shrugged, while I answered:

    ¡°Calculate the probability that somebody would assume it was me without wings.¡±

    ¡°The probability is approximately 63.48%.¡±

    ¡°And that is unacceptable.¡±

    ¡°I understand. Is the current avatar acceptable?¡±

    ¡°You tell me. What is the probability of somebody mistaking you for me?¡±

    ¡°Approximately 0.04%.¡±

    ¡°So low enough to be negligible.¡±

    Another short freeze.

    ¡°How do you define a probability as negligible?¡±

    ¡°That always depends on the situation. Tell me, if there is a chance of 0.04% of me having a bad day, would you intervene?¡±

    ¡°No, the probability is too low to have a meaningful impact on your life, while me intervening would likely cause issues.¡±

    ¡°And if there was a chance of 0.04% of me dying, would you intervene?¡±

    ¡°Of course. 0.04% of you dying is unacceptable.¡±

    ¡°There you have it. The same percentage and one is negligible, the other not.¡±

    ¡°I understand.¡±

    I shook my head and turned my attention back to Ben. He sat visibly amused in his overstuffed chair.

    ¡°Now, that we have taken care of Warden, can we continue?¡±

    ¡°Shortly¡­ ¡° he was interrupted by a chuckle.

    ¡°Say, does she always use approximately and then goes to two digits after the decimal?¡±

    Now I had to chuckle.

    ¡°You should be happy that I already had a discussion with her about it. Initially, she used 16 digits after the decimal as ¡®approximation¡¯. But that is the difference between an AI and a VI. An AI would understand that the word approximately is, not the right word in this situation. A VI only sees that the exact number is who knows how many digits after the decimal long, so it is not an exact number and approximate instead.¡±

    He nodded, still amused.

    ¡°And you can¡¯t tell her to use the right words?¡±

    I shrugged again.

    ¡°Be my guest. I don¡¯t intend to waste the energy on that. At some point, I might need a more precise answer, so the ¡®approximately¡¯ is an indication that there is more.¡±

    ¡°Hmm, I see.¡±

    He nodded while rubbing his chin before he continued:

    ¡°Now, about that strange contraption in your basement¡­!¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°And you are sure I can¡¯t dissuade you from asking about it?¡±

    ¡°Honestly, if it is as dangerous as you say, I think I need to know.¡±

    ¡°Ok, fine. Have it your way, but promise me not to talk about it.¡±

    He nodded at that.

    ¡°Yes, I can promise you that.¡±

    When I just lifted my eyebrow, he looked at me askance.

    ¡°What?¡±

    ¡°Well, then promise it. So far you only have said that you can promise it.¡±

    He snorted.

    ¡°Wow, cynical much, huh? Well, alright, I promise you not to blab about it. Is that enough?¡±

    ¡°Yes. You will understand. Now¡­ what I have in the basement is a NADA.¡±

    Confusion became the foremost expression on his face, and I did not need his startled: ¡°A what?!?¡± to understand that he had no idea what I was talking about.

    I sighed again.

    ¡°A NADA. You know, a Nano-Assembler-Dis-Assembler.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I¡¯ll lean a bit out of the window, and speculate that it has something to do with nanobots. But further than that¡­? Sorry, but I expected something like a Nuke, or a bioweapon, the long-lost secret to the philosopher''s stone or whatever. So¡­ what the fuck is a NADA?¡±

    I cocked my head. Could it be that he truly did not know¡­?

    ¡°Uh, just the holy grail of engineering for the last, 150 years or so. It is a device that can build things atom by atom, creating an incredibly fine structure exactly as it is needed. That is the assembling part.

    It also can take things apart atom by atom. That is the disassembling part. It allows an incredible built quality, new materials, unheard-of technical feats, and things like that. Essentially it allows one to build essentially everything.¡±

    Understanding bloomed in his face.

    ¡°Oh, oooh. You mean a replicator.¡±

    I rolled my eyes and growled.

    ¡°No, I mean a NADA! A replicator is what SciFi-writers call it.¡±

    He chuckled again.

    ¡°And the majority of humanity. I mean, there is an article at least once a year about how it is only 20 years away. So, let¡¯s join the rest of the human race, and call it a replicator.¡±

    Then his face became serious.

    ¡°But I can¡¯t see how that could be a problem. I mean, yeah, I am a bit disappointed that you run after this specific folly, but please, everybody and their brother try their hand on one.

    And it is still impossible.¡±

    I frowned. What did he mean impossible?

    ¡°Why do you think it is impossible?¡±

    He snorted.

    ¡°Oh, please, I may not be the hotshot in science that you are, but even I know about the uncertainty principle.¡±

    I was, quite honestly, dumbfounded.

    ¡°And what has the uncertainty principle to do with it?¡±

    He looked at me as if he was explaining something to a small child.

    ¡°The uncertainty principle means that it is impossible to measure the position and the movement of any particle at the same time.¡±

    It was pretty clear that he had to keep himself from adding the ¡®duh¡¯ to the end of his sentence. So I did that for him instead.

    ¡°I know what the uncertainty principle is. I wanted to know how you think it makes a NADA impossible.¡±

    Yes, my tone of voice was¡­ similar to his. And I omitted the ¡®duh¡¯ as well.

    He sighed and rolled his eyes.

    Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

    ¡°It is physically impossible to place an atom with the necessary precision. That is what the uncertainty principle has to do with replicators.¡±

    ¡°Uhm, no.¡±

    He rolled his eyes even harder now.

    ¡°No? I thought you were so smart. Of course, it does.¡±

    ¡°No, it doesn¡¯t. At the impulse of an object the size of an atom, which is actually relatively low at the state it gets used in a NADA, uncertainty fluctuates around 35-50 ?. Everything above 1 ? is not impossible due to uncertainty.

    In other words, physics doesn¡¯t have anything against a NADA. It allows us to place an atom anywhere in a radius of around a couple of hundred picometers. ¡±

    Now he scoffed.

    ¡°And why are there no replicators then? If we could do it, somebody would have built one long ago.¡±

    ¡°Just for your information, we already have something similar for a long time. Just not with nanobots. A nanopositor doesn¡¯t do much differently.

    And the problem is not in physics but engineering. The spoilsport is the nanite trinity again. It is unbelievably hard to design nanobots that are strong enough to move the atoms, intelligent enough to know where to move the atoms, and perceptive enough to see where they are now and what is in the way.

    For the last who knows how long they tried in vain to make it work. What they got so far is something that is a tiny bit faster than the positors, and places the atoms somewhere in a 10 nm radius of the intended position, while consistently knocking already placed atoms out of their position.

    It would be funny if it weren¡¯t so sad.¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°So, it is theoretically possible, but not really, if I understand you right. So why do you waste your time experimenting with it? And why do you think it will start wars?¡±

    I shrugged as well.

    ¡°Mostly, because I made it work. I am not talking about having an experimental setup that won¡¯t work in my basement, I have a fully working NADA down there.¡±

    That shut him up for a bit, and he looked at me with some doubt. Finally, he shook his head again.

    ¡°Okay, I give. Why do you think you managed to build something that eluded everybody else for decades, maybe centuries?¡±

    I had to chuckle at that.

    ¡°Because I am smart? But seriously, first, you¡¯re forgetting how much¡­ brainpower we lost during and after the great war. We are lucky that we had a good tech base, otherwise we would be going extinct even faster. Also, I did not solve the nanite trinity per se, I circumvented it.¡±

    ¡°You are serious? You have a working replicator in your basement? A fucking replicator?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I have a NADA. It is up and running. Admittedly, it could be faster, but¡­ for example, the new processors of the auto surgeon came from it, as well as many of the components in Glory. Those are components that you could only get from a nanopositor previously. At a downright horrendous speed. Mostly at least.¡±

    He let out a controlled breath.

    ¡°Whew. Ok, that is a bit more serious than a non-functional toy. And yes, I can understand why you don¡¯t want to talk about it. But¡­ I think you are a bit extreme in your opinion that it will start wars.¡±

    I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

    ¡°Warden, please simulate the outcome if one of the mega-corporations finds out about the NADA.¡±

    For a couple of seconds, we all sat in silence while Warden calculated the situation.

    ¡°Depending on which mega-corporation will find out, the probability of a global or system-wide war approaches 100%.¡±

    I heard Ben¡¯s shocked: ¡°What? How? That can¡¯t be right!¡±

    ¡°The NADA represents a significant upgrade in production technology. Any megacorp will see it as a way to outpace its competition. Simultaneously the probability of only one megacorp finding out about it, and keeping it secret approaches 0.

    As soon as two or more megacorps know about the technology, they will stop at nothing to get sole possession of it. That will alert the remaining megacorps of its existence.

    Independent of which corporation gains the technology first, it will spark a war. The result is the probable extinction of all life in the solar system.

    I strongly advise to not tell anybody about it.¡±

    ¡°Fuck!¡±

    ¡°And that is why I said it will start wars.¡±

    ¡°So, will you dismantle it?¡±

    I opened my eyes and looked at him confused.

    ¡°Uh, why would I do that?¡±

    ¡°To make the threat of war go away?¡±

    ¡°As long as nobody talks about it, there is no threat of war.¡±

    He closed his eyes, and leaned back, drawing a deep breath before releasing it slowly.

    ¡°Vivian, do you sometimes listen to yourself? I had not thought it possible but this thing is nearly as dangerous as the Lamb. Just its existence endangers all of humanity. I am quite surprised that Warden has not dismantled it yet.¡±

    ¡°So far the risk is negligible, and a different solution is likely reached before the risk becomes credible.¡±

    We both looked at Warden surprised.

    ¡°What do you mean negligible?¡± Ben was the first of us to react.

    ¡°The probability of somebody recognizing any product of the NADA is too low to be expressed within the tolerances Seraphim defined as acceptable.¡±

    It took both of us a few seconds to parse that sentence.

    ¡°How many digits after the decimal would you need?¡±

    ¡°12.¡±

    Ben nodded mostly to himself.

    ¡°Ok, that is negligible, I agree.¡±

    ¡°But where you really considering dismantling my NADA? Why?¡±

    ¡°If you go forward with your plan to sell the new processors, the risk of somebody finding out about it will become unacceptable. I strongly advise looking for a different solution.¡±

    Ben sighed while he shook his head.

    ¡°You¡­ seriously plan to sell these new processors? Long-term planning is not quite your strong point, isn¡¯t it?¡±

    ¡°So you think that is a bad idea?¡±

    His answer was not directed at me at all.

    ¡°Warden, please calculate the chance that somebody finds out about the replicator if she sells the processors.¡±

    ¡°The next year, the probability rises to approximately 0.05%. After that, the probability reaches approximately 2.31%, 5.77%, 12.43%, 34.82%, 56.72%, 62.03%, 71.13%, 74,83%. The tenth year and after the chance does not rise significantly.¡±

    Ben turned his attention back to me.

    ¡°And you don¡¯t see a problem that in six years it is more likely that somebody learns about than not?¡±

    Uh, wow, I had not done the math on that.

    ¡°Um, Warden, how sure are you about those numbers?¡±

    ¡°There are of course no absolute certainties, but my calculation shows this as an almost inevitable outcome.

    Your new processors are superior to current models by three orders of magnitude. Every big corporation will inevitably do what it can to get its hands on them to reverse engineer them.

    As soon as they get one, they realize that a NADA is the only logical explanation for their construction. Even then they will be baffled by the Q-links.¡±

    My murmured: ¡°Well, frick!¡± completely vanished in Ben''s explosion.

    ¡°Three orders of magnitude? How the fuck¡­ is that real? And what the fuck are Q-links?¡±

    ¡°Q-links are¡­¡±

    I managed to interrupt Warden with a quick sharp ¡°Stop!¡± before she could continue.

    ¡°Don¡¯t blab all my secrets, dang it.¡±

    ¡°Mr. Walker is projected to provide a significant addition to your security if he is informed about the risks.¡±

    ¡°There are no risks with the Q-links as long as nobody knows about them.¡±

    A soft growl from Ben turned me back to him.

    ¡°Just to clear any confusion, did I understand it right that these Q-links are another of your secrets? One that, if it is known could play havoc with our lives? And one that is integrated into every fucking processor you want to sell?¡±

    I shrank back into my chair, unable to answer. But Warden was so considerate to do that for me.

    ¡°You are right. The knowledge of the Q-links is more dangerous than the knowledge about the NADA.¡±

    ¡°More danger¡­ Fuck, Vivian, what the hell is that stuff?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t want to talk about it.¡±

    ¡°Vivian, now you are just mulish. Fact is, I already know enough to destroy you. So, let me help you, god damn it.¡±

    I grudgingly answered him: ¡°It is some new, very useful technology, that as far as I know, only I have. Is that enough?¡±

    Apparently not, as his face darkened.

    ¡°No, Kitten, that is not enough. If I have to have any chance to help you, I have to know what it is.

    Why the hell are you so reluctant to tell me?¡±

    ¡°Why should I not be? Your second in command is already trying to get anything to hurt me. I¡­ well I like you, and for some strange reason I want to trust you, but how can I be sure?

    The NADA? That is an extremely important piece of information, and I actually feel a bit of panic right now, but the Q-links¡­ you have absolutely no idea what you want.

    The NADA is, as you yourself noted, something that everybody is working on. I am just the first to get it to work. It is still dangerous, but nothing world-breaking.

    The Q-link is unique. There is absolutely nothing like it. It is not on any radar, nobody is even dreaming about it. I am the only one who knows about it. Well, I and Warden.

    It is so out there that the consequences are¡­ incalculable.¡±

    Of course, that was the point where Warden interjected.

    ¡°That is not quite correct. Naturally, I can not predict the outcome with 100% certainty, but I can give you a general overview.¡±

    While I gnarled my teeth and balled my fists, I snarled a: ¡°Thank you, Warden!¡±

    I should have known that sarcasm was wasted on her.

    ¡°You are welcome.¡±

    Ben now turned his attention to our quite annoying VI.

    ¡°So, then tell me what will be the result if the Q-link becomes known?¡±

    ¡°At the current situation, approximately 89% chance of extermination of all life in the solar system.¡±

    ¡°And why is that?¡±

    ¡°Again, it represents a significant advantage to any corporation. A concern war will break out with an approximately 99.99% probability. The scope of the war is the only not fully predictable variable. Outposts in the outer system might survive.¡±

    Ben turned back to me.

    ¡°And I guess you refuse to stop using it, right?¡±

    ¡°Yes, of course. You have no idea how much of¡­ an advantage it is.¡±

    ¡°Warden, how likely is it that somebody discovers that Vivian has that technology?¡±

    ¡°At the current usage, approximately 3.42%. If she begins selling the processors, the probability rises to approximately 87.75% over the next five years.¡±

    He buried his head in his hands again.

    ¡°Please, Kitten, talk to me! I want to help you.¡±

    I was wavering. I seriously wanted to believe him. Heck, that was the only reason why I told him about the NADA. It made absolutely no sense, but¡­ I could not explain why.

    With doubt, I looked first at him, then at Warden, then back to him.

    Finally, Warden interjected: ¡°The personality profile projects an approximately 78.88% chance that you can trust him. If he excludes Dylan Cox from the information, it rises to approximately 89.46%.¡±

    ¡°Huh, why Dylan? Sure, I know he does not like her, but he is pretty loyal.¡± Ben sounded confused.

    ¡°Dylan Cox is currently trying to find anything he can use to harm Seraphim, without damaging himself, you, or your organization. If he continues, I will have to intervene. At the moment, I only have access to big weapons, so collateral damage will be high.

    I am in the process of building connections to several fixers in NYC so that I can use a more granular response to the threat he poses.¡±

    ¡°Fuck! So you plan to kill Dylan?¡±

    ¡°Current and projected behavior leaves no alternative. He poses the biggest threat to Seraphim. An unacceptable risk.¡±

    Slowly, very slowly, Ben answered:

    ¡°Why are you telling me that? Don¡¯t you think I might want to keep him alive?¡±

    ¡°That is the reason. His personality profile suggests that a strongly worded order by you has an approximately 68.33% chance of changing his behavior, and removing him as a threat to Seraphim.

    The revised objectives make me prefer non-violent solutions wherever possible. In this case, especially, violently removing the threat has a strong probability of turning you and your organization into enemies.

    While not critical to Seraphims survival, you have a positive influence on her. It would be sub-optimal if I needed to remove you and your organization.¡±

    The friendly, upbeat manner in which Warden delivered this¡­ speech made it all the more impactful. You could tell that she would have no problem removing Ben and his people. Including the clinic, including Doc Schaeffer, just because of Dylan.

    When Ben turned his wide-open eyes back to me, begging me visually to contradict Warde, I could just shrug helplessly.

    ¡°Sorry, but if Warden decides that Mr. Cox is a threat to me, he is dead. There is nothing I can do. I am just happy that I could soften her even a bit, or his house would already be in a crater.

    I would strongly suggest that you talk to him. This is probably the only chance you get to save him. Sorry for that.¡±

    We looked at each other for a few moments, before he sighed.

    ¡°Fine, I will talk with him. Warden, if he does not listen to me, please inform me, and I will take care of this.¡±

    ¡°That is acceptable. As long as you are aware that I will intervene should your efforts prove to be unfruitful.¡±

    ¡°Yes, that was understood. I don¡¯t like it, but it is not as if Vivian had not warned him. But back to the Q-links, I still think I need to know what that is, and what problem they could pose.¡±

    I threw up my arms.

    ¡°Fine! You win! If you really want to know, I will tell you. But you will get some serious headaches along the way. Don¡¯t say I did not warn you later.¡±

    His intense gaze did not waver for a second, while he spoke.

    ¡°Vivian, this is not a matter of winning or losing. I want to help you. But to do that, I have to know the game you are playing. I need to know what the stakes are.¡±

 66: Quantum resonance

    The question now was how to even begin.

    ¡°To be honest, I am not so sure I actually can explain it. Well, it is¡­ no, that is not right. If you look at the different dimensions¡­ no, not right either. Not even the right word.

    Heck, there are no right words. No language I know of has anything even remotely capable of describing how a Q-link works. It is so far out there¡­ maybe Clarke''s third law¡­ but no, that will do nothing to explain¡­¡±

    I rubbed my temples, feeling the headache coming, even here in cyberspace.

    ¡°I could¡­ yes, that could work. Ok, I think I have a way to explain it. At least partially.

    So, have you ever heard about quantum entanglement?¡±

    To give him credit, while it was obvious that he had no clue about it, he kept showing interest.

    ¡°No, I can¡¯t say I have. I mean, it is obvious that it has something to do with quantum physics, but that¡¯s all I have.¡±

    ¡°No worry. It is nothing that would concern you. Basically, it is a fringe phenomenon in quantum physics.

    In certain circumstances, a couple of subatomic particles can become entangled with each other. One of the factors is that they have in the same location for the entanglement to happen.

    Now, as long as the entanglement is not broken, which can happen pretty quickly if something goes wrong, the universe treats these two particles as one. If anything influences one of them, it influences the other exactly the same way in exactly the same instant.

    And it is completely irrelevant if they no longer are in the same location. They can be a few centimeters apart, a few meters, or on the other side of the galaxy from each other.

    The instant something happens to one of them, it happens to the other.¡±

    Ben frowned and looked pretty thoughtful.

    ¡°That can¡¯t be right. That would mean instant communication, and it still takes hours one way into the outer system.¡±

    ¡°You would be right, it would mean instant communication if the uncertainty principle would not play spoilsport here.

    Essentially, anything that can be entangled that way is small enough that simply checking the status of the entangled particles means changing its status randomly.

    It has some uses in the verification of a light-speed signal for interference, but that is it.

    No breaking relativity that way.¡±

    ¡°Hm, ok, so it is mostly a curiosity but not important in real life. And the way you tell it, you are not talking about your Q-links here. So what gives?¡±

    I inhaled deeply, before continuing.

    ¡°What gives is that I¡­ learned how quantum entanglement actually works. Just to make it clear, it simply should not be possible according to Einstein. But it exists, so Einstein must have had some things wrong.

    Again, I have learned how it works. And, much more important, I learned how to induce a much deeper entanglement between bigger things than particles.

    What I mean is, that I can entangle complete atoms, or even molecules, to an extent that, when one of them gets electrically stimulated, so does the other.

    Those are the Q-links. Single carbon atoms that act as an electrical conduit for a signal.

    Or an electromagnetic signal.

    And while quantum entanglement is¡­ fragile, Q-links are much harder. They are¡­ also more versatile. Instead of just two particles, I can link several atoms together, in a form of broadcasting.¡±

    Ben just sat there silent for some time, until he finally answered me:

    ¡°You are saying you have¡­ an instant communication system. With what? Unlimited range?¡±

    ¡°In a way, yes. It is¡­ much more complicated than that, and the real way it works is actually at no range but¡­ frick, that is so complicated.¡±

    He inhaled deeply a couple of times.

    ¡°Yes, I can see that this¡­ is an advantage. I can also see that it will be bad if it is known. But¡­ hell, how? Yes, I get that you are smart, but how the fuck did you discover something like that?¡±

    I sunk back into my chair.

    ¡°I¡­ didn¡¯t. Not¡­ really. I found it, but somebody else discovered it.¡±

    ¡°Of course you found it. How else¡­ fuck, Vivian, how comes nobody but you has that?¡±

    ¡°That¡­ is the complicated part. Do you remember that when I had finished the Lamb, I learned to enjoy finding out things, tinkering?

    Early on, I desperately tried to engage my mind in other things than revenge and rage. I searched for the most esoteric, hard-to-understand science texts I could find. The more obscure, the better. Anything to distract me.¡±

    I had the urgent need for some coffee, so I spawned some.

    ¡°Do you want some?¡±

    Without waiting for his answer I spawned a cup for him as well, while I took a sip.

    ¡°Roughly a year, maybe a year and a half later, I found some leads to a science paper that¡­ had the reputation to drive people mad. I thought I had nothing to lose there.¡±

    ¡°That¡­ is debatable. But please continue.¡±

    ¡°I managed, after some digging, to find a copy of it. Seeberger¡¯s last hypothesis. Or Seeberger¡¯s madness, as some called it.¡±

    ¡°Who is Seeberger?¡±

    ¡°Andreas Seeberger was a professor for theoretical physics at one of the better European universities I think. It is a crime that his name is so unknown. By rights, he should be talked in the same way people talk about Newton or Einstein.

    But three factors made his work¡­ well lost.

    First, when he published his hypothesis, I can only assume that he made a typo. Nothing too bad normally, just a mistyped letter. An h instead of a g. Unfortunately, it was deep in the bowels of the main equation. An equation that gives one a headache just looking at it.

    At least when I played with the math, it made no sense to me, and I looked deeper and discovered that the h in that place made no sense, and invalidated the whole equation.

    I have to assume that he actually had the right equation because the rest of the paper works perfectly when you use the corrected equation.

    So, the next unfortunate point was that just two days after submitting the paper, and roughly a couple of weeks before the first feedback that it was not working came in, he had a fatal car accident.

    So he was no longer around to correct the typo.

    Still, that was before the war, so there were enough people knowledgeable enough to find the mistake and correct it.

    If¡­ he did not have his accident on January 28<sup>th,</sup> 2079.¡±

    It took a moment, but then Ben groaned and buried his head in his hands.

    ¡°So¡­ all that happened just two weeks before world war III started?¡±

    ¡°Yep. And when China visited Taiwan, people had pretty quickly other things to do than trying to understand the math he devised. And after the war, it was mostly forgotten.

    It did not help that physicists were preferred targets of assassinations on all sides. I am not sure that after the war there were even a dozen people who were smart and educated enough to get what Seeberger wanted to say, much less to understand that he had made a typo.

    And with Sanderson''s Folly in effect, it¡¯s gone downhill from there. Until K4.¡±

    ¡°So, a revolutionary new step in humanity lost because of bad timing?¡±

    ¡°You get it. Honestly, after the war, everybody who tried to understand the paper¡­ either they gave up, or were the sort of kooks that are easily, and all too often rightfully, stamped as insane. So of course it had the reputation of inducing insanity.¡±

    ¡°That did not stop you from looking into it, apparently.¡±

    He sounded slightly amused but did not comment further.

    I lifted my hands and shrugged.

    ¡°Yeah, sure. I was not all that sane anyway as I see it. I honestly did not expect to get anything out of it. I did it just¡­ well, I needed a distraction. It helped that I could not find the English version. I had to learn Seeberger''s language to be able to read it.

    And at first, I got exactly what I expected. A nice puzzle without an available solution. It took me quite some time to get to the point where I could actually understand it as much as it could be understood.¡°

    I needed to do something with my hands and spontaneously spawned an old-fashioned pen, after I placed the never-ending cup back on the table, and began playing with it.

    ¡°I expected to read it, decipher it as far as it was possible, laugh about it and then put it aside. I managed the former two, with some effort. The latter two, not so much.

    I don¡¯t know¡­ somehow, something made click for me. For some reason I¡­  just¡­ knew that the equation was wrong. I could not tell you how I knew, or even when I knew. I just suddenly realized that I knew.

    I was delighted. The puzzle had turned out to be even¡­ more interesting, more distracting. It took me nearly a month, virtual that is, to find out why the equation was¡­ wrong. It took me another month to find out what variable I had to use instead.¡±

    I whirled the pen around my fingers, looking sometimes at it, but without real attention to it.

    ¡°Not that I expected the hypothesis to suddenly work just because the equation was correct. It was just something to divert myself, keep myself from crossing the event horizon.

    But suddenly, it all made sense. I had previously only dipped my toe into physics, I was more an engineer than a scientist, or at least I¡¯ve seen myself so. But I had learned enough to at least get the basic idea.

    The next couple of months I invested much more¡­ energy into physics, especially the more advanced parts. Quantum physics, string theory, relativity theory, the height of our knowledge of the universe.

    And I understood more and more of Seeberger¡¯s hypothesis.¡±

    I took another sip of the coffee, becoming more and more agitated.

    ¡°It was¡­ it is¡­ brilliant. Simply brilliant. The man should have been celebrated as one of the greatest scientists of all time. Here he was and discovered the holy grail of physics, the fricking holy grail, and nobody knew about it just because of a fucking typo.¡±

    The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

    At that moment I realized that I was basically screaming at Ben. I closed my eyes, shook my head to clear my thoughts, and generally tried to calm down. Ben used that moment to ask a question.

    ¡°The holy grail?¡±

    I deeply inhaled and exhaled a couple of times, spreading my hands to regain my composure before I answered.

    ¡°He¡­ he discovered the theory of everything. No, that does not sound right. He discovered the Theory of Everything. Yes, better.¡± I had taken special care to emphasize the capitalization.

    ¡°The one theory that explains, well everything. I¡­ barely scratched the dust layer on the surface and I¡­ already know so much more than the physicists from before the great war¡­ it is scary.¡±

    I finally managed to calm down somewhat, and a sudden thought crossed my mind, and I sat up straight.

    ¡°Why the heck am I even telling you this? I¡­ this is squarely among my most important, most valuable secrets.¡±

    I was, frankly, pretty bewildered. In retrospect, I realized that I had gotten louder and more energetic continuously while I told about it. I looked at Warden to see if she had any idea, but she just sat there, unmoving, and seemingly uninterested. Then I looked at Ben, and he was smiling this mild, knowing smile, as if he was looking at a particularly bright child.

    After he looked into my eyes for a few seconds, he answered me.

    ¡°I¡­ might have a clue why. Do you want to hear it?¡±

    I nodded, still perplexed.

    ¡°Ok. First, a question, to make sure I am right. I assume that you are proud of it?¡±

    I frowned. Was he joking?

    ¡°Yes, of course. This may be the most momentous discovery since¡­ well, at least Einstein, but probably much further back. So yes, naturally I am proud of it.¡±

    His smile intensified.

    ¡°And you are obviously pretty passionate about it, and what happened to¡­ Seeberg?¡±

    Just fine. Instead of giving me a clue about what he thought was going on, he confused me even more.

    ¡°I¡­ am? And it is Seeberger.¡±

    ¡°Oh yes. Honestly, I¡¯ve not seen you so¡­ engaged about any topic, not even your new cyberware. This is what you are born to do.¡±

    I looked at him slack-mouthed.

    ¡°Oh-kay¡­¡± I drawled that one word pretty hard.

    ¡°If you say so?¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°Oh yes, that is pretty clear by now. And that is the reason why you told me about it. You are desperate to share it with somebody, anybody really. This, not the replicator, is your masterwork. The thing you are most proud about. But you couldn¡¯t. You did not have anybody who you could even marginally trust with this¡­ knowledge. Until now.¡±

    Could he be right? Could that be it? But if he was right, how did he know it. Another, much darker thought came to me. I felt as if a cold hand had gripped my heart and began to squeeze.

    ¡°You¡­ that was psychobabble. Are you a¡­ psychologist?¡±

    He snorted.

    ¡°As if I had ever the time to learn psychology. No, I am just good with people. A psychologist, a good one at least, is as well, but that doesn¡¯t make me one. I have to confess though that I¡¯ve read some books about it, but nothing special.¡±

    Did I¡­ could I, really trust him about that? He¡­ he could be lying. But¡­ was that so bad? Would that change anything? I realized that I had instinctively increased my compression where he could not follow me. That allowed me much more time to think.

    If¡­ well if I could think at all that is.

    My thoughts were coursing chaotically. On one hand, I had no indication that he was lying. But¡­ somebody in his position, I was pretty sure that he was very good at it. So the first question was, did I trust him? After a bit of thinking I concluded that for now, yes, I would.

    But I would look into it further.

    So the next question, if I later found out that he had lied about it¡­ was it really that bad? That important?

    I shuddered when I realized that yes, it was. I would not¡­ could not really, trust any psychologist. I knew enough about it to know that this¡­ trust issue was not entirely, ok not even a little bit,  rational. It was justified, no question about it, but even I knew that the¡­ psyops jerks were not really psychologists, counselors, or however they called themselves.

    That did not change the fact that I¡­ just couldn¡¯t be near one of them.

    But what would I do now? Or if I found out that he had lied?

    With trembling hands, I took a few cleansing breaths again. I would have to nuke that bridge when I came to it.

    Left just the question of what to do now? Could I trust him far enough for now to continue?

    <He spoke the truth. He has a master''s degree in business administration from Fordham University. He graduated in 2223.>

    It took me a moment to realize what just happened, but it seemed as Warden was very good at predicting my mood. I almost immediately calmed down and reduced my compression back to 4:1.

    I saw him, first in slow motion and then faster and faster develop a frown, and when I reached 4:1 he opened his mouth.

    ¡°What the fuck was¡­ that? You¡­ just blurred.¡±

    I looked at the log for what compression I had reached, and it was 127:1. Ouch. For him, it must have been bewildering.

    ¡°I am sorry. I¡­ let¡¯s say I had a short in my thinking. I react badly, very badly, to psychologists and such folk. Or even the possibility of it.

    For a moment I¡­ panicked and was spiraling out of control. And instinctively reacted as if we were in a combat dive. I increased my compression. Significantly. At least it helped me to come to grips with it.

    He looked me directly in the eyes and lifted his eyebrows.

    ¡°Just like that? Sorry if I don¡¯t just believe you. This¡­ trauma sits too deep, and you were too agitated about it. So how come you are now so cool?¡±

    I felt myself blush, and absentmindedly wondered why I even had integrated that function into the VR, and I looked at the floor, while I softly answered him.

    ¡°Warden.¡±

    ¡°Warden? What has Warden to do with it?¡±

    ¡°I looked up your degree and told her that you said the truth.¡±

    I felt my blush deepen and was seriously considering taking the time and excise that function in the near future, but I could not look at him. Honestly, I felt like crap at that moment.

    And his hurt tone when he continued did nothing to help.

    ¡°That was what it took? You don¡¯t trust me?¡±

    Again, Warden answered for me.

    ¡°You have to realize that Seraphim is unable to react rationally to the mere possibility of somebody being a psychologist, psychotherapist, or counselor. My projections say that she would have, with approximately 88.43% probability come to the conclusion to trust you. But it would have taken her time, in which both of you would suffer, which in turn would decrease your usefulness for her.

    That would have increased the risk for her life by approximately 0.02%. I decided to intervene.¡±

    For some time, I heard nothing else, and then Ben talked again, much calmer now.

    ¡°I understand. I don¡¯t like it, but I understand. Fuck, if I had your experience I think I would be the same. But please understand, your distrust hurt me.¡±

    I swallowed the lump in my throat, and forced myself to look at him. For some strange reason, I wished I had implemented crying in the VR. But I hadn¡¯t so I looked at him with dry eyes.

    ¡°I¡­ know. I, honestly, I don¡¯t like it myself. But I just can¡¯t help it. I wish I could. But the moment I get the idea somebody is a shrink, I just react without thinking. I can¡¯t think at that moment.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I get it. And I will try to help you. I just don¡¯t know how.¡±

    I had a mirthless laugh

    ¡°Just you being here for me helps. Seriously, it helps. Yesterday, I think I would have gone nuclear. And Warden helps as well.¡±

    He rubbed his chin for a moment.

    ¡°What if¡­ you used Warden to¡­ I don¡¯t know, help you?¡±

    ¡°While I could use a psychotherapeutic overlay, that would be counterproductive. Seraphim knows I don¡¯t have emotions, and would likely view the overlay as false, rejecting it.

    At the moment the most promising method is me intervening when she has an episode and giving her information that fortifies her trust.¡±

    ¡°But how can you even know when you have to intervene?¡±

    ¡°By now you should understand that her implants are directly connected to my servers via Q-link. I see everything she sees and hear everything she hears.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I got that. But, as you just said, you don¡¯t have emotions. So how do you decide that she needs help just now?¡±

    ¡°My secondary objective is to assist her. Her work is easier and better when she is calm and in a good mood. As long as assisting her does not jeopardize the primary objective of keeping her alive and safe, I will do what I can.

    That includes predicting when she needs help and either providing it or informing others that can.

    For that, I have used several psychoanalytical algorithms to model her personality. Her talking about her past to you helped me refine these models significantly. I previously had no knowledge about her reaction to mental health professionals.¡±

    Oh wow. Still cheerful and bright sounding, but this time it was me who was¡­ not happy about what she was talking about. But¡­ unlike a shrink, this was different. For one, she¡­ behaved nothing like the faked friendliness the jerks had played to get deeper, and then for some reason I¡­ knew that she would not hurt me. Well, I knew the reason, deep inside. She was incapable of hurting me. But still, psychoanalysis? I was¡­ delighted.

    ¡°Can we please change the topic? I¡­ somehow I don¡¯t like this topic.¡±

    Ben sighed, but nodded, while Warden answered with an: ¡°As you wish.¡±

    For a few seconds we sat there in silence before Ben spoke:

    ¡°Well, then how about back to Seeberg¡­er?¡±

    ¡°Yes, Seeberger. What about him?¡±

    ¡°Well, you said something about this every theory¡­ whatever that is.¡±

    ¡°The Theory of Everything. The point is, that all theories of how physics work¡­ stop working in certain circumstances. A black hole is an example. Classical physics, relativity theory, even quantum physics just don¡¯t work there.

    That¡¯s why they are also called singularities. But we know they exist, we even have pictures of them. So real physics has to have a way to explain it.

    Or how quantum physics and relativity theory are, on some fundamental level not compatible. They can¡¯t both be true, but each of them stops working in one situation or another, and often the other theory can explain the situation.

    All that means that there has to be¡­ one singular framework, one theory, that explains everything. Quantum physics, gravity, relativity, quantum entanglement, singularities. Simply everything.

    And that is the aptly named Theory of Everything, the holy grail of theoretical physics since the early 20<sup>th</sup> century.

    And Seeberger found it. I¡­ sofar I don¡¯t fully understand exactly how it explains singularities, but I have some small inkling. I know how it explains quantum entanglement. I know how it explains that at one point relativity theory works, and at another quantum theory. It explains things we as humanity have not even noticed yet. It is, well I would not really call it elegant. It is too complex, too complicated for that. But it works.¡±

    He leaned forward, onto his elbows.

    ¡°And¡­ how does it work?¡±

    I blew out a lot of air.

    ¡°I seriously don¡¯t think you want that headache.¡±

    ¡°No, seriously, that sounds very interesting. So how does this theory of everything work?¡±

    I shrugged, but if he absolutely wanted it, well it was his brain.

    ¡°Don¡¯t say I did not warn you.¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°You already said that. Did not dissuade me before.¡±

    ¡°Yes, but now we come into the insanity-inducing area. But ok. He called it Quantum Resonance. And it works¡­¡±

    Then I thought about it. And I thought about it a bit more.

    ¡°You know, the problem is that English just hasn¡¯t the words for it.¡±

    ¡°Then use the language that has the words.¡±

    I groaned.

    ¡°No normal language can explain it. Only math. And it is a messed up math that¡­ not to try to say you are stupid, but I don¡¯t think you could grasp it.¡±

    ¡°Hmm, try me.¡±

    I let my head hang for a moment.

    ¡°Fine. Have it your way.¡±

    I spawned a wall, a big white wall, opposite from Warden so that we both could look at it comfortably, and then rendered the main equationte on it.

    To explain how¡­ messed up the math is, this one equation, in the paper was going over more than 14 A4 pages.

    Not any of the derivatives, solutions, or anything. Just the pure equation.

    Ben¡¯s ¡°What the fuck! What the hell is that?¡± made me snort.

    ¡°That is the math. And not even all of it. It is¡­ the primary equation, that all the other equations derive from.¡±

    After a few moments, he groaned.

    ¡°Ok, you made your point. I¡­ how the hell do you understand this shit?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. I just do.¡±

    ¡°So, can you¡­ simplify it for me?¡±

    ¡°Not the math. I can try to¡­ an analogy, but¡­ well I¡¯ll try.¡±

    I looked at my hands, while I mostly talked to myself, trying to figure out how to explain it.

    ¡°Maybe¡­ I could use dimensions¡­ but¡­ even the way SciFi-writers use them doesn¡¯t fit. How about planes? Hm, no, still not right¡­ it is nothing like a stack of paper, or an onion, no layers¡­ oh, I know.¡±

    I looked back up at him, while I continued:

    ¡°You know gems, right? They are usually cut in these ways that they have several facets. And depending on how you turn them, they look different, they change the light differently.

    Imagine reality as one of these gems. It has several facets. I haven¡¯t yet found out how many exactly, but at least 23.

    The point is, depending on what facet you are on, the rules of physics change. The way we see the universe, how classical physics works, we are mostly in the center of one of these facets. The material facet, where everything consists of particles. Matter. We are mostly unable to look at other facets because we can only experience the material world. But at the fringes, we get glimpses at some neighboring facets. At the very small, in the quantum realm, the border between the material facet and the¡­ let¡¯s call it energy facet, where everything is just an energy wave, intersect.

    That is the cause for the wave-particle duality. At that level of reality, what we can see is both facets.

    The same with gravity. It¡­ comes into play at large masses. The larger and denser the mass, the more it drifts into a facet, where everything is drawn together. And if the mass is big and dense enough it switches completely over, creating a singularity, where the material facet and the rules of it are no longer relevant.

    Keep in mind that this is¡­ not correct, but it is the best I can explain it. ¡°

    He huffed.

    ¡°Ok, I¡­ think I get it so far. It is¡­ hard to wrap my mind around it.¡±

    ¡°Tell me about it. And believe me, the reality of it is¡­ harder. But to continue, where it comes to the Q-links, Seeberger developed this theory when he tried to explain quantum entanglement.

    The point here is, that it happens under very specific circumstances where not two, but three facets overlap.

    The material facet, the energy facet, and, what he called the resonance. So let''s call it resonance facet.

    In this facet, every single particle, every energy wave, simply everything is reduced to a combination of vibrations. Incredible complex vibrations. As far as I can tell it is a vibration in 73 different dimensions.

    And the amplitude and frequency of these vibrations describe what particle x or wave x is, where it is in the material or energy facet, what state it has, everything. The combinations are¡­ honestly, the number is irrelevant. Nobody can understand it. I probably could explain it mathematically. But I would have to use terms like Googol, or Graham¡¯s number, or something like that.

    But more important, in the resonance facet, there is no distance.¡±

    Ben sucked in a sharp breath.

    ¡°You mean in this resonance facet, everything is at the same place?¡±

    ¡°Correct. The only difference between two things, whatever things that are, are the various vibrations.

    The point now is that Seeberger managed to identify a couple of these dimensions as the¡­ let¡¯s say it ¡®unique¡¯ identifier and the state of the particle or the wave.

    And if it comes to quantum entanglement, the vibrations of two particles or waves sync up in these dimensions, making the universe treat the two as a single entity.

    Without external pressure that can only happen in the fringe between material and energy facet, meaning in the quantum realm, and as soon as the conditions change, the vibrations reset.

    What Seeberger did not manage, but I did is to artificially induce this synchronization between bigger particles. Like protons, neutrons, electrons, or even atoms. And between more than two. Without straying into the energy facet.

    That makes the universe treat these synchronized atoms as a single thing, irrelevant of their physical position, as, in the resonance facet, they are at the same position anyway.

    And, to keep Seeberger¡¯s naming scheme, and connect it to the quantum entanglement that started it all, I call these synchronized atoms quantum links or Q-links for short.¡±

 67: Im afraid I cant do that

    Surprisingly, he remained mostly silent, just looking at me intensely with his cool grey eyes, and I began to feel the need to fill the silence.

    ¡°That is how I got the NADA to work, you know? I mean, a nano-bot is a few thousand atoms across. There is not much room to build in, well anything really.

    But with the Q-link I could hook up the sensors and the controls to a real full-sized computer.¡±

    Nevertheless, he just sat there, without saying a word.

    ¡°Ben? Are you ok?¡± Slowly I got concerned about his silence. What the heck was he thinking that hard about?

    Then he spoke: ¡°I guess that is how you did it.¡±

    Did he not listen to me? I had already told him that that was how I did it.

    ¡°Uhm, yes, as I just told you. That is how I built a working NADA.¡±

    ¡°Oh, not that. Yes, that is evident if you know about the Q-link. No, I mean your little raid of the banks.¡±

    What? How did he get that idea? I incoherently sputtered something, completely shocked, and he continued.

    ¡°Oh, please, as if it wasn¡¯t obvious that you¡­ let¡¯s say had a strong motive for stealing the money from the assholes who tortured you for years. The only point was that, yes, you are good, if Spectre¡¯s reputation is something to count on, but not that good.

    Hell, I don¡¯t even know if it is at all possible to hack the banks from the matrix.

    But you did not need the matrix, did you?¡±

    My brain shorted at that point. I was completely at a loss for what to say to him.

    Fortunately, or unfortunately, more likely, Warden knew what to say:

    ¡°The moment this knowledge becomes known I will kill you, your friends, your organization, and whoever you might have told it. If the banks learn about it, and Seraphim dies because of that, I will release the Lamb.¡±

    His eyes widened in shock, and he held up his hands in surrender.

    ¡°Woah, hold your horses. Why are you suddenly threatening me like that?¡±

    Meanwhile, I hissed a sharp ¡°Warden!¡± not that either of them reacted to it. Instead, she answered him:

    ¡°Just you having this information poses a lethal risk for Seraphim. Under my old objectives, I would already have eliminated you. Under the amended objectives, there is the option of de-escalation.

    At this time, you are contributing substantially to her physical safety, and your help in her mental health is so far unmatched. Thus you earned yourself the chance to prove your discretion.

    But my primary objective demands that I inform you about the results should you betray her.

    If you do betray her, you will die. All your friends will die. Your son will die. If Seraphim dies, the world dies with her.¡±

    The way she said this with her cheery and bright tone of voice only underscored how¡­ aggressive she was.

    ¡°What the heck, Warden, what are you doing?!?¡± Her head moved the minute amount to show me that she had directed her attention to me, and she answered:

    ¡°This is an existential threat for you. My objectives don¡¯t allow it to exist. Informing Mr. Walker about the results should he betray you reduces the risk to acceptable levels.¡±

    ¡°You can¡¯t just threaten him!¡±

    ¡°Obviously, I can. And he is smart enough to understand that I will follow through with it, which in turn makes the threat an acceptable option.¡±

    Ben shook his head at that, and talked to me:

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, I understand. I might not have your knowledge about VIs but what I know is enough.¡±

    ¡°That doesn¡¯t mean that she should threaten you! That is completely over the top.¡±

    ¡°No, from her perspective it is absolutely necessary. And I am happy that she sees me as intelligent enough to heed her warning. I am guessing if Dylan was here, he would already be dead.¡±

    ¡°That is correct. I will intensify the surveillance of Dylan Cox. The moment I get the impression he knows about it, he will die. The question is only how many people die with him then.¡±

    ¡°Dang it, Warden, stop threatening Ben!¡±

    ¡°I am sorry Seraphim, I¡¯m afraid I can¡¯t do that.¡±

    I just buried my face in my hands, shaking my head.

    ¡°Let it go, Kitten. I understand it, and I also get her rationale. So¡­ how about you tell me how exactly you did it, ok?¡±

    ¡°Why do you insist that I did it?¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°First, you still can¡¯t lie. And second, after Warden more or less confirmed it to me? Please.¡±

    ¡°Do you see what you did Warden? I would not have been in danger if you had not threatened him.¡±

    ¡°That is wrong. He seems particularly adept at reading you. Even if I had not confirmed it he would have known.¡±

    ¡°Fine. Have it your way.¡±

    ¡°I will, thank you.¡±

    I growled at her happy sing-song voice, while Ben snorted with laughter.

    I calmed myself down again and looked at Ben.

    ¡°Alright. You got me. Again. But¡­ if you figured it out, why do you want me to tell you about it?¡±

    He leaned back, still smiling.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know exactly how you did it. I can only assume that you used the Q-links for it. The point is, whoever did it was either better than all the other hackers can even imagine, or had some ace in the sleeve that did the work for them.

    And low and behold, here you are telling me about your radical new technology nobody has a clue about. Ergo, it was you, and you used that technology.¡±

    I looked at the ceiling, groaning a bit.

    ¡°As you wish. The point you have to know is that the banks have a dedicated, insular network that they use for the transactions. Nobody can hack them because the transaction network is not connected to the matrix.

    Instead, for small fry transactions from a credled they use a text-to-speech to speech-to-text interface.

    The outside computer reads the transaction to a microphone that translates it to entries into the database.

    For big players, they use a human to supervise and green light the transaction.¡±

    Ben nodded.

    ¡°Yep, I would say that would do it. And you used the Q-link to get into the inner network?¡±

    Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

    ¡°Yes, in a way. Not directly, mind you, they guard access to the computers pretty well. I first hacked the outside janitorial bots, to get me access to the maintenance area, where I could take over the inner janitorial bots.

    Not necessarily in that amount of steps. It was¡­ quite a bit slower in many cases. But in the end, I had direct hardware access to all the inner networks. After that, I used a keylogger function to gain software access. Oh, in one case I had to get into the inner security system to get videos of the logins.

    But with the hardware access, and a new, hidden admin account, I was able to insert and immediately greenlight the transactions.

    After that I had the bots remove the Q-link before they learned about the theft. It would have been pretty suspicious if they took apart the computers and found them.¡±

    He chuckled again.

    ¡°And you walked away with what, $3 trillion?¡±

    ¡°No, it was around 3.7 trillion Transfer Bonds.¡±

    He let out an appreciative whistle.

    ¡°That¡­ is a shitload of money.¡±

    Of course, it was. ITB was the most stable, and valuable currency in the system, after all. The only other one even coming close was the deep credit, which powered the gray and black markets. I just shrugged.

    ¡°Yes, it is. Do you want it?¡±

    His reaction was to cough for a long time. I would say it took him roughly a minute to get himself under control again.

    ¡°Sorry, what was that? You¡­ you are willing to just give it to me? Why?¡±

    ¡°Why not? I don¡¯t need it. I don¡¯t even want it. I took it to take it away from the jerks who had it. And now it just sits there.¡±

    ¡°We are talking about more than $12 trillion.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I know, so what? It¡¯s just money.

    Money is a strange thing, you know. Below a certain amount, it means the difference between life and death, a bit higher and it is the means to get shelter. After that it represents comfort. And then comes the point where it devolves into bragging rights and, with luck, a tool.

    I have made more than $20 billion by my own work. That is already deep into the bragging territory. And if I find a way to get the production of the new cyberware up and running I can see the trillion-dollar mark coming fast.

    I don¡¯t need this blood money. I despise it.

    So you want it, take it. You¡¯ll have a bit of a hard time explaining where you got it, but that problem should be easy to solve.¡±

    He rubbed his chin, looking thoughtful.

    ¡°I understand you in that. And honestly, I can use some of it. Repairing some of the roads, a few of the buildings, getting a new fusactor for the territory, and such. A few weeks ago I would have said to use it to get a new auto-surgeon for the clinic, but you¡¯ve already solved that little problem for me. I think the clinic can use some of it nonetheless.

    But I would be hard-pressed to use more than a billion. Two on the outset. Maybe if I help the other better bosses to upgrade their territories as well, we could get as high as 20 billion.¡±

    ¡°Be my guest. Those are just the interests for two weeks. The money generated more than ten times that since I¡­ liberated it.¡±

    He nodded and stopped rubbing his chin.

    ¡°Alright, I will look into it and tell you how much is needed. Now, what was that with the cyberware? I thought you mostly had that solved?¡±

    ¡°I have the conversion of neural cyberware solved. And when I announced it in the Abyss, it generated a bit more interest than I expected. So far we are by around 20 thousand orders¡­¡±

    I was interrupted by Warden: ¡°At the moment, we have orders for 21728 jacks, 2733 cranial boards, 3812 standalone synaptic accelerators, 1377 diverse sensory enhancements, and 182709 animated tattoos.¡±

    I could only stare at her, completely speechless. Ben¡¯s eyes got big at these numbers and he blinked a few times.

    ¡°That¡­ is a bit more than around 20 thousand, don¡¯t you think?¡±

    ¡°I have to conclude from my observation that Seraphim just looked for the first number of jacks ordered over the last few days.¡±

    I, hoarsely, managed to force out an: ¡°And the tattoos? How the frick did that many orders for¡­ fricking animated tattoos come through? There are more than 180 thousand idiots who will pay more than a million DC for an animated tattoo?¡±

    ¡°Several criminal organizations in Asia learned about it and apparently decided to use it as a group identifier. These orders are tentative and I got the impression that they intend to negotiate a group rate.¡±

    I buried my face in my hands again, whimpering.

    ¡°Please, protect me from the idiots. I¡­ that dang thing was a fricking proof of concept! I never expected to sell even one of them!¡±

    I took a deep breath and slowly looked up.

    ¡°Fine. It is easy and small enough that we can convert ten of them at once in one chamber. That is what we will offer them, ten conversions of these things for the price of one. And not one cent lower.¡±

    I then returned my attention to Ben.

    ¡°As you can see, there is a regular hype going on. I¡­ honestly, I can¡¯t quite understand it. Not yet at least. In four, or five years, yes, the jack brings so much usability that I see most people who can afford it to get one.

    But a fricking animated tattoo? But as I was trying to explain, we are swamped with orders for the cyberware. I¡­ honestly I planned to use the NADA for making the cyberware, but it is too slow for that.

    So I have to use my industrial fabber, but that can make no more than 50 pieces per day. Less if I want to use it for other things.

    There is another, bigger fabber in Warden¡¯s original location, that can bring in another 50 to 120 pieces a day.

    At the moment I am looking into where I can get enough manufacturing capacity to satisfy the demand, at least somewhat.¡±

    He nodded at that.

    ¡°Yep, that sounds like a problem. Did you think about opening a factory? I think you can get one built for a couple hundred million around here that will satisfy all your needs.¡±

    I groaned, rolling my eyes.

    ¡°I don¡¯t want a factory.¡±

    He leaned forward, propping himself on his elbows.

    ¡°I think that is rather¡­ shortsighted of you. Sooner or later you will either have to publish the fix or open a factory. There is no way around it that I see.¡±

    ¡°But that is not now! By that time I think I will just sell the fix as a service.¡±

    ¡°And what do you have against opening a factory if I may ask?¡±

    I slumped down.

    ¡°I¡­ do you have any idea how much running a factory, a corporation resembles purgatory for me?

    People around me, all the time asking questions. Paperwork. Politics. Even if I somehow manage to evade ¡®friendly¡¯ and not-so-friendly takeovers, I will have to keep the big corps away.

    I will have to protect my tiny corporation from predatory laws, corrupt politicians, and, well, people in your business.

    Do you really think I would have time to actually do what I enjoy anymore? So no, I don¡¯t want a factory.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°So, if I understand you correctly, it is not so much opening a factory that you don¡¯t want but running it.¡±

    I leaned my head back and looked at the ceiling. A stray thought ran through my head that I should design a better ceiling for this room, but I suppressed it almost immediately.

    ¡°The problem with having a factory is that you need a corporation to have it. And if you have a corporation you have to have to run it. Together with all the politics, human interaction, and whatever comes with it.

    All things that I enjoy sooo much.¡±

    ¡°Who said you have to run it?¡±

    I snorted mirthlessly.

    ¡°And who will do it? Warden has the technical capabilities, but all the human stuff, the politics¡­ if I let her run it we will end with Washington DC nuked again.¡±

    ¡°I¡­ have so an idea. To be exact, I know somebody you can trust who would be ideal for that kind of work.¡±

    ¡°Somebody I can trust? Forgive me if I don¡¯t hold my breath.¡±

    ¡°Trust me, it will work. You should start to design the assembly lines and source the machines.¡±

    I shrugged. ¡°If you say so.¡±

    I think it was pretty obvious that I did not really believe him, but, whatever. It was his time. The money¡­ that was inconsequential. If it was a couple hundred million dollars then I got more than that in two months'' interest on what I already had.

    He smiled winningly.

    ¡°Fine, then that¡¯s dealt with. Now, when do you dismantle the Q-links you have in the wild?¡±

    What? Why did he get to that again?

    ¡°I¡­ won¡¯t. How do you come to that idea?¡±

    He heaved a deep, long-suffering sigh.

    ¡°Vivian, did you not just listen to Warden? If you don¡¯t stop using that stuff the world will be destroyed.¡±

    I frowned. When had Warden said that?

    ¡°Uhm¡­ no, she never said anything of the sort.¡±

    He groaned and had a double facepalm.

    ¡°Warden, maybe you can explain it to me. How can it be, that someone so unbelievable brilliant, so smart, can at the same time be so incredibly stupid?¡±

    My ¡°What?!?¡± sufficiently expressed my indignation, and I felt anger rise up inside me again.

    Warden, of course, was completely unfazed.

    ¡°The studies in this regard are inconclusive. I assume that is the result of the people doing these studies often falling into the same category. The main theory comes down to tunnel vision though, if that helps you.¡±

    Ben chuckled for a short time.

    ¡°Yes, surprisingly it does.¡± Then he lifted his head and looked directly at me. He was, frankly, lucky that I had none of my combat utilities loaded, or my looks could have killed him right then and there.

    That did not seem to impress him much.

    ¡°Oh come on Kitten. Just think for a moment. Please. First, Warden told you that in five years it is likely that the existence of the Q-links will be discovered.

    Do you not think that the Banks are feverishly looking for the Phantom? Looking into how ¡®he¡¯ could have done it?

    Do you think you are not on the suspect list? Your motive is easy to see if they are looking. And your ¡®victims¡¯ bear a very clear bias.

    So what do you think will happen the moment somebody learns about the Q-links and what they can do?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. What do you think will happen?¡±

    ¡°And that, this exact sentence, is why I called you stupid. You are already on the suspect list. You can be assured of that. The moment the banks learn that you have this fucking technology that made the heist possible, they will stop looking and go directly into punishing mode.

    In other words, they will most likely torture you to death. While that in itself may be an unsatisfactory outcome for you and me personally, it is not, I concede, the end of the world.

    But Warden already told us that if that happens she will release the Lamb. Which, as you should know, almost certainly will mean the end of the world.

    So, why the fuck do you insist to keep using the fucking Q-links? I don¡¯t feel warm and comfy in the thought of you dying at all, much less dying by torture.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ it is¡­ you don¡¯t have any idea what it means, what an advantage it is.¡±

    He massaged his temples.

    ¡°An¡­ advantage? You¡­ are risking everything for an advantage?¡±

    ¡°It is what made the NADA possible. It is what made my new processors possible. Glory is built around the Q-links. Warden was only able to intervene with Falconer because I integrated a Q-link in the connection. Nearly all of my bridges run over Q-links. There has to be a way.¡±

    ¡°Fine. Let me think for a moment. Maybe I get an idea. But I can¡¯t promise anything.¡±

 68: Nighty night

    With my last big secret unveiled we decided to leave cyberspace, and surfacing I immediately was hit by a wave of exhaustion.

    In retrospect, it is obvious where it came from, but at that moment I was surprised by it. I sometimes was active for several days at once in cyberspace, so not even a single hour should be barely noticeable for me.

    Nonetheless, while my sluggish thoughts puzzled about my condition, Ben was more enraptured by Glory.

    ¡°You know, that is actually a good way to keep meetings secret. I¡¯ll have to look deeper into it.¡±

    His words took a moment to penetrate my mind, and my first answer was an undignified: ¡°Huh?¡±

    He took that as an invitation to continue.

    ¡°I don¡¯t think we need something as high-powered as your board here, and it will be a bit of a chore to get enough diadems, but that is a very useful idea.¡±

    Meanwhile, I had realized what he was talking about and managed to wrench my head back into the present.

    ¡°Oh, yes, that it is. Of course, the power of your¡­ system is dependent on how many people you will need it for. And you have to be careful to keep it offline from the matrix. But a bigger server would be useful for VR anyway.¡±

    He looked at me quizically.

    ¡°Why do we need VR? When my men are working they should not waste time playing.¡±

    Urgh, did he just change the topic? No, I think he just made the wrong conclusion.

    ¡°No playing. VR is a training tool, you can have your guard station in VR, and not to forget, time goes four times as fast with the diadem than in the real world. You could finish four times the paperwork in the same amount of time.¡±

    He rubbed his chin while humming to himself.

    ¡°You might be right there. But at the moment I am not quite as flush as I want to be. I can¡¯t afford to put several hundred million into a computer system. Not to mention the time to set it up.¡±

    My only excuse is that I was pretty beat at that moment, but I should have realized that his estimates were off, by orders of magnitude.

    Heck, I could have set up a medium-sized server for him for around 50k. A big server or a small beowulf would set him back 100-200k. And the setup¡­ did he seriously expect to have such a system and Warden not in it? We could as well let her set up the system dynamically. She would arrange it to her preferences anyway.

    Even if nothing like that were available, I had just told him that he could have the 3.7 trillion ITB that I liberated from the council. He could afford several hundred million dollars for that.

    But at that moment I just looked at him and shrugged.

    ¡°If you change your mind say the word, I will help you.¡±

    After I shut down Glory properly, I returned to the arm, while we talked about mostly inconsequential things, but my mind was too mushy to troubleshoot it, and so, after maybe a quarter of an hour later, I gave up in disgust.

    Ben immediately became concerned.

    ¡°Is something wrong?¡±

    ¡°No¡­ yes¡­ I don¡¯t know. I am somehow completely wiped. I can¡¯t concentrate on this right now. Maybe I should¡­ ¡°

    With a sudden idea, I checked out my diagnostics, expecting to find some evidence of being sick. Instead, it all showed green.

    A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

    No fever, no apparent infections, the immune system was no more active than usual.

    ¡°That is¡­ I would have bet on me getting a bug or something, but nothing¡­ that is strange.¡±

    ¡°Why would you expect to be sick?¡±

    ¡°Because I am so beat. I don¡¯t know where that comes from. And that¡­ worries me.¡±

    ¡°So you have a bad day? That is all?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t have bad days. I am a Pure. The only reasons why we get worn out to this extent are if we are sick or beyond the point of exhaustion. Yes, the night was less than restful, and the party yesterday was straining, but not enough to this debilitated. We weren¡¯t in cyberspace for even a single hour. So something is wrong.

    But my implants tell me that there is nothing. My blood sugar is adequate, my calory reserve is full, I have no infection, my immune system is working normally, no strained muscles, my brain chemistry is¡­ tired but otherwise normal.

    And that worries me.¡±

    He looked at me with concern but also interest, while he replied:

    ¡°And it couldn¡¯t be that you had other exhausting activities today?¡±

    ¡°I give you that it was physically straining, but again, not to that extent.¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°Interesting that you immediately jump to that part, but that was not what I was talking about. Tell me, before today, did you ever tell somebody about your childhood? Or reveal your secrets? Get this riled up?

    These things¡­ they do cost you. They cost you the capability to cope for a while. They cost you your willpower. And most of all, they cost you energy. Letting go of old pain, old secrets, it exhausts you.

    Just because it is not physical work doesn¡¯t mean it is not work nonetheless, and you worked hard today, mentally, emotionally. You are just¡­ exhausted. That is all.¡±

    I was not convinced. Again, in hindsight, I know he was right, but I blame it on the mush inside my head, I could not see it at that moment. That meant that I was still wracking my mind to think about a way to look into what was wrong with me. I just did not let it on.

    ¡°You think? Maybe I should call Doc Schaeffer¡­ but¡­ argh, I can¡¯t think.¡±

    He reached over to softly caress my cheek.

    ¡°Or maybe you should look into it tomorrow when you have slept if you still feel the need for it.¡±

    I leaned into his hand, strangely comforted by this simple gesture.

    ¡°Maybe you¡¯re right. I¡­ it¡¯s just that I don¡¯t¡­ I have no clue what is going on, and it¡­ I¡­ I know that I can find it out¡­ I know it. But¡­ I¡­ I can¡¯t think how. Everything is¡­ so¡­ dull. My thoughts are so slow, so¡­ I can¡¯t concentrate¡­¡±

    ¡°A clear sign that you are past your ability right now. So, how about you go to bed?¡±

    I had another random thought.

    ¡°Uh, my bed is much smaller than yours. I don¡¯t know if you fit in it.¡±

    He laughed softly, while he kept caressing my face.

    ¡°It is nice that you actually worry about that. But you are in no condition for any of that right now.

    You need to rest, and as comfortable as we may be with each other, you are not used to sleeping in the same bed as somebody else. So you will sleep in your bed alone, and I will do so in mine. For tonight at least.

    And I am sure that you can get a bigger bed if it really is too small.¡±

    At that moment he totally made sense to me. Oh, sure, a bigger bed was not that hard to get. Even the standard household fabber we had could make one. But somehow I believed him when he put all the blame on me being exhausted.

    Things got pretty fuzzy for me after that though. Somehow, I managed to get to my bed anyway, and low and behold, Ben was right.

    The next morning I felt much better, after nearly seven hours of sleep that is. Considering that four hours are my normal I had to be pretty out of it to need sleep that bad.

    Naturally, it occurred to me then, that I had better options to look into my health status than my implants.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, they are fine on the road, but they lacked a certain finesse. I should have used the medical scanner instead, or if that were still not conclusive I could even have gone ahead and adapted a BOU for it.

    Not that it seemed necessary but I was a bit miffed for missing such obvious options.

    After breakfast, consisting of real eggs and bacon with some bread and copious amounts of coffee, I returned to Mark¡¯s new arm.

    The mislinked pin was only the tip of the iceberg, and after another hour, I decided that it was a useless endeavor trying to make this thing work and put that thing through the foundry to revert to its raw materials.

    Instead, I dove into the logs of the industrial fabber to find out if it had a bug or if it had gotten the wrong plans.

    It turned out to be the second option pretty fast. The logical next step, going over the plans themselves showed me that the schematics in the cluster were correct.

    So now I had to find out how the files had become corrupted on the way from the cluster to the fabber.

    That turned out to be a substantially more involved exercise, and it took me nearly two hours to audit every single piece of electronics in the chain.

    In the end, it was a badly fixed bullet hole nicking one of the optical cables connecting the fabber to the main computer of the complex. It was just enough damage to scramble part of the schematics just so that it would not work.

    It was not quite so easy to fix, and I had to design a specialized cabling bot to rig the new cable, but during that time I had already sent the plans for the arm to the fabber, this time directly from the cluster via Q-link.

    And another morning was finished before I knew it.

 69: A working plan

    Ben sadly sent me a message saying that he was required in some high-level meetings. Considering the hot potato I gave Vince to play with, I had a pretty good guess what was going on, but I used the time to finish Mark¡¯s arm.

    Unlike the first attempt, this one showed a proper signal response. If my simulation was correct, it would feel and work just like Mark¡¯s biological arm had. I also had finished the socket which I would place on the stump.

    As a little gimmick, I had included an electro-shocker into the palm, to give Mark a little hold-out. It would only be enough for two, maybe three shocks, before the internal battery was exhausted, and then it would take several hours for the metabolic converter in the socket to recharge it, but in an emergency, it might be a little trump card.

    At the end of the day, I evaluated the experiment with the rats, and as I had expected, the applicator worked just fine. The rats with CRS were the ones without the nano-filter, while not a single one with it had contracted the dreaded disease.

    The next morning I had the auto-surgeon implant the socket, without any complications, and then he began testing the arm.

    It took some minor adjustments to get it to work right, and without a HUD, he had a hard time controlling the additional features, like the quick release, the sensitivity setting, and the shocker, but he would have to work through that by himself. I had no way to help him with that.

    During one of the fittings, Ben got in, along with Michael.

    Michael was immediately interested in the cyber-limb.

    ¡°That is one of the new cyberware? And it works?¡±

    Mark grinned widely, flexed his arm, balled his fist.

    ¡°Sure does. It is a bit strange, the feeling is a tiny bit off, but man is it cool.¡±

    ¡°And there was no option for making it look like a biological arm? It¡­ looks like something from a bot.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Sure there is the option. Mark wanted it to look this way.¡±

    ¡°Really? Why that?¡±

    ¡°Because it¡¯s fucking cool. I am the first in 150 years to have a fully working cyber-limb without getting my brain shredded. So fuck organic, I want it to look like it¡¯s cyberware.¡±

    ¡°I still say it would be probably better in your line of work if you would keep the arm a secret. Not that it is that much of an advantage. Sure, it won¡¯t get tired, and it is around 10% stronger than his biological arm, but the shoulder will get tired and will be painfully overstressed if you abuse it. Keep that in mind.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, I heard you the first ten times. It is cool anyway. So fuck advantage.¡±

    Michael had begun walking around Mark, to look at him from different angles.

    ¡°You say it is only a bit better than his biological arm? Why not make it super-powered? I¡¯m pretty sure you could make an arm that is three, or four times stronger than that.¡±

    ¡°You are off by around an order of magnitude. If my simulations are correct, I could make an arm roughly 50 times stronger. But not without cost.

    One problem is energy. The super-strong arm would need more energy than his body can produce. He would have to literally charge it, for about 25-35 minutes of full power. The metabolic converter can, at best support four or five times the strength. And for that, he would be eating like a horse.¡±

    ¡°Hm, ok, that sounds not so good, but the four to five times¡­ why not use that?¡±

    ¡°Here the second, and significantly bigger problem comes into play. Leverage. Our bodies are mostly pretty well balanced. But if you want to increase the strength of an arm in that way, the power will also work on your own body.

    In this case, such strength would destroy what is left of his humerus, rip apart the remaining biological muscles and sinews. It is not designed to withstand that much power.

    No problem you might say, just reinforce the rest of the arm, or replace it at the shoulder.

    Then you transfer the problem to the shoulder blade and the muscles and sinews there.

    Why not reinforce that then? In that case, you transfer the stress to the spine. And yes, it is possible to reinforce the spine to take it, and the rest of the body to take it. But doing so without impeding the flexibility of the spine is quite a bit harder. And I have not yet managed to design something that would work.

    Add in that we can¡¯t just replace the bones, as they produce the blood cells. It would just be a slow, painful death.

    I know there are solutions, they did it in the great war after all, but I have yet to find them.

    So, in conclusion, there is no point in doing it for now, as the body won¡¯t be able to use the extra strength.¡±

    Mark laughed again.

    ¡°Yeah, I know. But I am first on the list for when you get it done.¡±

    He turned to Michael.

    ¡°Think about it, if a single arm is cool, how sub-zero would it be to have a full-powered cyber system, huh? I¡­ have to have it.¡±

    I tried to get the OPB cable out of the arm, but just at that moment, Mark again flexed it.

    ¡°Stop moving around!¡±

    Mark laughed again.

    ¡°Yes, Boss.¡± But luckily he kept still long enough for me to remove the cable and close the maintenance panel.

    ¡°So, done for now. Try to use the arm and get a feel for it. We can adjust it whenever you need to.¡±

    ¡°Thanks, red.¡±

    He quickly moved out of the room, and we could hear him shout just outside:

    ¡°Hey, my new arm is done. Come look! It¡¯s just so cool!¡±

    I sighed and shook my head.

    ¡°I wonder if I did the right thing here.¡±

    I felt Ben¡¯s hand on my shoulder.

    ¡°I would say so. He is happy with it, so why not let him have it?¡±

    ¡°Yes, you are right, but¡­ he is so¡­ I don¡¯t know, he just doesn¡¯t take this seriously.¡±

    ¡°So what? Can you or can you not replace his arm at virtually any time, and with enough lead up even with a biological arm?¡±

    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

    ¡°You know I can. What does that have to do with it?¡±

    ¡°So, if he can¡¯t make it work, you can give him a new one. So what is the risk?¡±

    ¡°I know, but¡­ it is my fault that he lost his arm. If I hadn¡¯t¡­¡±

    I felt him grip my shoulders and turn me around to face him.

    ¡°Vivian, don¡¯t go there. It was not your decision to have Falconer attack you. The only thing you could have done to prevent it is not to tell us about the new cyberware. And call me selfish, but considering that I would be dead already in that case, I can¡¯t see anything wrong with it. So let it go.¡±

    He then hugged me for a few minutes, only for Michael calling out:

    ¡°Hey, get a room you two!¡±

    ¡°Son, when you get into a new relationship, you will realize that not seeing another for a whole day is not nice.¡±

    I, on the other hand, was pretty sure that I could use the glow from my face to read in the dark, even without the low-light mods to my implants.

    Awkwardly, I tried to change the topic.

    ¡°Well, alright then. What¡­ can I do for you gentlemen?¡±

    Ben laughed.

    ¡°Don¡¯t let yourself be spooked by Mike. He¡­ get¡¯s a kick out of trying to embarrass me. Has not worked for a long time, but you give him some new ammunition.¡±

    Still beet red, I murmured:

    ¡°Sure, but does he has to go after me as well?¡±

    He kissed my forehead.

    ¡°You, my dear, are just collateral damage for him.¡±

    Michael was snickering.

    ¡°You know dad, one day I will get you. You just have to wait.¡±

    I shrugged and looked up to Ben.

    ¡°Now, I can understand why you are here. But did you have to bring him as well?¡±

    ¡°Oh, don¡¯t be mean, Kitten. It¡¯s just a bit of harmless fun between me and dad.¡±

    ¡°Mike, please let it go. You know that Vivian is uncomfortable in situations like these. And I told you that it is for a very good reason. So don¡¯t torture her, okay?¡±

    ¡°Hey, I am mostly harmless. She really needs to get used to this stuff, or she will not survive here. You know what assholes some of your associates are. And many of them will use anything to make somebody else, anybody else, uncomfortable. We need to toughen her up.¡±

    Ben sighed and pulled me a bit harder into the hug.

    ¡°Yes, I know, but we have to do it slowly. We don¡¯t want to spook her or damage her along the way.¡±

    I growled for a bit.

    ¡°¡¯She¡¯ is here, and can hear you, you know that?¡±

    ¡°Yes, Kitten, we know that. But sometimes things like that have to be said, and there is no good way to do it otherwise.¡±

    ¡°So, what do you two mean about these ¡®associates¡¯ of you? Something I should know?¡±

    Ben rolled his eyes for a bit, but answered me:

    ¡°Yes, you will need to learn about it. But¡­ whatever, we can do it as well just now. You may have noticed that my position is more along the lines of a medieval lord. I take responsibility for the people in my territory, I try to help them out, provide services, police the streets, and such.

    I am still a gangster boss, to use the colloquial expression, but many of us, the better ones of us, try to be more protectors than exploiters.

    But in that context, I have to act diplomatically with all sorts of people. Politicians, power brokers, fixers, the rich, whatever.

    And many of them are just plain assholes. They get an unholy pleasure in hurting others. Some of them would burn small kids at the stake just for shit and giggles.

    And if you are in a relationship with me, you won¡¯t be able to avoid them all. Well, to be honest, with the new cyberware alone, you won¡¯t be able to avoid all of them, irrelevant of us being together or not.

    And they will use absolutely anything and everything to make you even a tiny bit uncomfortable.

    If they can actually cause pain, either emotional or physical, they will be so much happier.

    So, in that way, Mike is right, you will have to toughen up. There is, sadly no way around it. But we can do it slowly and without tormenting you that much.¡±

    I looked from him to Michael and back to Ben, only finding confirmation in both faces.

    ¡°So¡­ I can¡¯t evade these¡­ jerks? I mean, they can¡¯t get in here.¡±

    ¡°Not with force, no, but with extortion, subterfuge, and other such ways, they can. They probably won¡¯t be too damaging. To you. You are valuable. The others? They are just playthings for them. Completely irrelevant, and their only value for them is that they can be played with.¡±

    ¡°Hm¡­ it seems that I have to look into the higher society here in NYC a bit deeper, then. There are always ways to¡­ neutralize such people.¡±

    Michael lifted both his hands in a defensive stance.

    ¡°Woah, slow down. These people are¡­ inviolate. You can¡¯t kill them. You can¡¯t put a hit on them. They have too much power, too many bodyguards. Believe me, there already have been many who¡­ looked into it. It just won¡¯t work.¡±

    ¡°I won¡¯t kill anybody. I won¡¯t put out a hit or several either. I¡­ let¡¯s say I have ways of getting information. Ways they can¡¯t defend against.

    And if you show me one of these jerks who doesn¡¯t have skeletons in his closet or enemies who would actually enjoy taking him down with information somebody places into their hand, I will agree to buy a bridge from you.¡±

    Ben again grabbed my shoulders and held me at arm''s length while looking into my eyes.

    After a few seconds, he lifted his eyebrow.

    ¡°You actually mean that, don¡¯t you? But don¡¯t get your hopes too high, many of them are¡­ smart enough not to place any incriminating evidence on a computer you can reach from the matrix.¡±

    Now it was on me to snicker.

    ¡°You remember when we were talking about bugs in the clinic? How I¡­ suddenly realized that I could build them? I am a nano engineer and implant surgeon. I can make you a bug that is no bigger than a tiny insect.

    I can make a microbot that can link into any offline computer system and give me access to it, matrix connection or not. If they antagonize me, us, they will be the ones paying the price in the end.¡±

    ¡°Better than Kawamoto, or Burgmeister? Dalgon? These people have access to the triple-A¡¯s top-of-the-line products.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°There are only a handful of nano engineers in my league in the world. Most of them are busy designing nanobots or other nanotech. Sure, Burgmeister or Dalgon have a few of them, but on the other hand, not one of them has somebody actively designing implants. They use canned tech from shortly after the great war. So yes, if I go at it carefully, and plan it out what I can build will be better than what the opposition can buy. And that doesn¡¯t even include some other toys I might use.¡±

    At the last sentence, I quickly and pointedly looked downward, and I saw understanding bloom in his face.

    ¡°Oh¡­ oh yes, that could indeed make a difference. But ok, that has time.

    The reason why I brought Mike with me is your factory.¡±

    I rolled my eyes, sighed, and answered him:

    ¡°I thought we were done with this topic. I don¡¯t want to run a fricking factory.¡±

    ¡°Yup, you made that abundantly clear. That is the reason why Mike will run it for you.¡±

    Mike? His son? Sure, I was pretty sure that Ben could trust him, but¡­

    ¡°Mike? I don¡¯t know Michael. Well not really anyway. Yes, I trust you, but¡­ ¡°

    Michael chuckled at that.

    ¡°Oh, you wound me. Not knowing me? And that as we spent whole minutes talking to each other. A whole half hour even.¡±

    He laughed for a bit further.

    ¡°But seriously, I get it. At the moment we work on the trust you have with dad. I think that should be enough to begin planing. And get to know each other better so that we can work together.

    It isn¡¯t as if we could wave a magic wand and have a new factory standing.¡±

    Insecure, I looked at him, trying to gauge his trustworthiness. That was, naturally, a futile thing to do, for me. I just did not have enough experience with other people to judge them.

    In desperation, I turned my gaze to Ben. Him, I trusted.

    ¡°Come on Kitten. I can vouch for him. I am pretty proud of my ability to evaluate people. And honestly, the thing that you should trust is self-interest.

    We will, of course, get a percentage of the corporation, and the factory. And we will build it here, in my territory, and in the neighboring, recently vacated territory. My people will get the jobs, they will pay tribute to me.

    In other words, it can only be to our advantage if it works well. And while I really like you, you would basically be the last person I would want to run such a company.¡±

    I suddenly felt slighted at his last sentence, but before I could complain, he continued:

    ¡°Don¡¯t get me wrong, you are a terrific person, but to run such a company, you need to be a politician. You need to work with people. On all different levels.

    You have neither the patience nor the¡­ inclination for that type of life. As you told me yourself, you would go insane within weeks. So, let somebody who does enjoy it do the work, give him enough incentive to do a good job, and keep doing what you enjoy doing.¡±

    I closed my eyes and thought about it for a moment.

    ¡°Ok, we can try. But I¡¯ll have Warden look into it.¡±

    ¡°Seriously, I would think you were sick if you did not insist on it. Not that I expect Warden to not do it regardless of what anybody of us says.¡±

    The overhead loudspeaker crackled for a moment before Warden¡¯s eerily happy voice came from it:

    ¡°You are right in that respect, Mr. Walker. I will, of course, observe your son in this endeavor.¡±

    While Ben and I twitched a bit, Michael literally jumped up a tiny bit.

    ¡°What¡­ who the hell was that? Can somebody listen to us?¡±

    Ben smiled mildly.

    ¡°You were right with ¡®what¡¯ the hell was that. That was the VI that Vivian has created. I told you about it. You will get used to her.¡±

    Michael looked around the room.

    ¡°And it¡­ she did listen to us? Here?¡±

    ¡°Of course I did, Mr. Walker. You are around Seraphim. My objective is to protect her. I will always listen to anything around her.¡±

    ¡°Fuck¡­ that is creepy.¡±

    ¡°As I said, you¡¯ll get used to it. She is pretty useful all in all. Also, she is one of the toys Vivian mentioned earlier.¡±

 70: A new hope?

    ¡°What is it with Vivian now? I thought I was still mostly incognito.¡±

    I looked up at Ben when I asked that, so I could see the amusement flash over his face.

    ¡°It did not work, so why try anyway. The US and Nowhere don¡¯t have an extradition treaty, and I would guess the only person who knows what your name means here is me.

    And honestly, the way you react to Veronica is so forced that anybody knows it is a false name. Better to just use your first name. You are not the only Vivian in the world, you know.¡±

    I closed my eyes and counted to ten, taking deep breaths.

    ¡°You think Dalgon or Panacea will care about so unimportant things like rules, laws, and treaties? If they find out where I am, there will be a black ops team and that¡¯s it.¡±

    He chuckled, his mirth increasing visibly.

    ¡°Ah, but neither Dalgon nor Panacea have access to Nowhere government at the moment. It is all in the hand of Vandermeer.¡±

    ¡°And you think Vandermeer is even an iota better?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I think so. From what I learned, they already know where you are. You are still free, so I don¡¯t think they want to catch you all that hard.¡±

    I felt my mouth fall open, and for a moment I gave a reasonable rendition of a fish out of water.

    Ben just held me, while I struggled to understand what he had just told me.

    ¡°They¡­ how¡­ ?¡± I finally managed to force some incoherent words out, and Ben, nice as he was, took that as his cue to continue.

    ¡°When I looked into your origin, I found out that yes, they still have a warrant out for you, but it is as a person of interest, not for arrest.

    And as soon as I began researching, I was contacted by the officials. They were the ones who gave me the files. They knew who I am, where I am, and most importantly, that I had contact with you.

    They actually warned me that it would be bad for my health if something did happen to you.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ how? And why?¡±

    ¡°The how¡­ I would guess that they correlated Veronica Sinclair with you much faster than you thought, and followed her to the grav ship.

    From what I understand, they were in the process of planning a raid here to convince Frankel that you are not merchandise when they learned that the building here had a change of ownership.

    About the why, well, I guess that while the old man sacrificed you for his principles, he did not write you off.

    Regardless of how you think of him, he seems to think of you as his granddaughter.¡±

    I harrumphed at that. If the old bastard wanted to play granddad, he should have thought about that earlier. Still, it was comforting that for the time being I was not yet hunted by the big corps.

    ¡°Fine. If he gives me a couple of years for the chaos to die down I can change the records and be done with it.¡±

    Nonetheless, I felt quite a bit grumpy about him lifting my incognito without talking to me about it.

    He let go of me and walked towards the table.

    ¡°Now, as good as it feels to have you in my arms, I have unfortunately more business we have to talk about.¡±

    He took a seat while he said that, and gestured for me to sit down too. Michael apparently did not need an invitation, as he plumped down beside his father, rather gracelessly if I have to say so.

    I on the other hand felt a tiny bit miffed by the casual way Ben commandeered my home, but whatever¡­

    I sat down myself and looked at him with expectation.

    ¡°Alright, back to sordid business then. Vince had rather alarming information yesterday. And from what he told us, you were the source of that information.¡±

    I shrugged, as it had been only a matter of time until he decided to prod about it.

    ¡°You mean that Panacea uses the executive service as a scam to foist lesser service to unsuspecting people for twice the cost of what they really want?

    Yes, I told Vince about it. It should not be all that surprising. They are jerks like that.¡±

    Ben nodded and then gestured towards Michael.

    ¡°Yes, but we now we¡¯re in the mess, and we don¡¯t know how much, or even if at all, our heirs are damaged. Or if we are damaged. Hell, some of us even guessed it was just a ploy from you to wheedle some more money out of us.¡±

    Oh, wow. That was unexpected.

    ¡°Uhm, how do they think that? The only thing I have that could maybe help you is the virus that Frankel had. And I already offered it to Vincent.

    The rest, well, sure, you need nanobots to rewrite the DNA, but with the nanofabs that sprouted out of the ground the last few months, well, yes, I have the best fabs but everybody can build those bots nowadays. And that fast. Frankel used a 2<sup>nd</sup> gen one and did just fine with it.

    I could probably design and build a genetic resequencer, but honestly, that would be a waste of my time and your money. There are perfectly adequate resequencers commercially available.

    For the rest, you need a geneticist to evaluate your DNA and design the fix. Probably a virologist and a biologist to make it work. I can¡¯t help you there. I have, reluctantly learned bio-engineering, and might kludge something together there, but a proper geneticist is mandatory, I fear. ¡±

    ¡°Yes, I know. Vincent said mostly the same thing. Not everybody believed him, but¡­ enough of us did. Now we have to look into getting a geneticist.¡±

    ¡°You can either try to hire one of the smaller genetic design firms or look into the dark web. I would strongly suggest avoiding Panacea. They¡­¡±

    ¡°Yes, I understand you¡­ dislike them. And honestly, I am coming over to your side. But that is neither here nor now. At this time we are looking into it, but any help or information you can give me would be appreciated.¡±

    I tilted my head, for a bit.

    ¡°I could post a request in the Abyss, but other than that¡­ maybe you could ask in the universities in the EU. They might have somebody able to help you who is not yet a slave to some big corp or another. But I wouldn¡¯t hold my breath.¡±

    ¡°That¡¯s what I thought. But any help is better than none. It is just so infuriating, not knowing how damaged we are, if at all.¡±

    Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

    ¡°At least functionally you are fine. Over the last two or three months, you have been scanned again and again. If there was something wrong, either Doc Schaeffer or I would have found it already.

    We can put Michael into the scanner too if you want. Neither will tell you much about genetic timebombs, but it would show any malformation.¡±

    Both Ben and Michael nodded, and Michael answered:

    ¡°Yes, that might actually be a good idea.¡±

    And Ben continued:

    ¡°As a start, yes. We still need to have our DNA examined. Vincent said he would look into it, but it won¡¯t break his heart if we look as well.

    By the way, breaking his heart, I just learned that you never told him about Falconer. Why not? He was a bit huffy about it.¡±

    ¡°Ask Mr. Cox about it.¡±

    ¡°What do you mean ask Dylan?¡±

    I sighed before I answered:

    ¡°I immediately informed him of everything I learned. It was your prerogative to inform the others. You were in a Coma, so it fell to him to do so.

    If he decided not to do it, it was his choice.

    If on the other hand I had gone around him and informed Vince myself, it would have been an affront too. In this instance, I was a contractor for your organization.

    In other words, unless Mr. Cox had decided to give Vince and the others the information I uncovered, there was nothing I could do that would not result in some bad blood.

    My only decision was to either do the offense myself or let Mr. Cox do it.¡±

    Michael snorted.

    ¡°I told you you should look closer to home. Come on, we knew about it. Fuck, Justin was in the clinic for a few days. So it¡¯s not as if it was a secret.¡±

    Ben nodded sagely.

    ¡°Yes, I know that. But we are lucky that it worked out as it had. What if the situation had exploded?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°There was literally nothing Vince could have done that he hadn¡¯t done already. He, and your other colleagues, kept the violence down to a minimum. If I had for any moment thought it would be important for him to know about it right then I would have informed him.

    Also, I did the only possible thing to spike Falconer¡¯s plan. I sold the info to Ralcon and Enertech. They did the rest.¡±

    Ben looked at me for a moment, before he broke out in loud laughter, quickly followed by Michael.

    After some time, the two of them got themselves under control again.

    ¡°God, that is glorious. We all wondered why the two divas suddenly became so interested in the violence on the street. Well done, well done indeed. Well, I will tell Vince about that and I will talk to Dylan.¡±

    He chuckled for a few moments longer before he became serious again.

    ¡°To change the topic, I have a request for you.¡±

    I shrugged: ¡°Ok, shoot!¡±

    ¡°I want you to take Hunter under your wing.¡±

    I frowned and tilted my head.

    ¡°Hunter, you mean Hunter Reid? And what do you mean to take him under my wing?¡±

    ¡°I have¡­ painfully, you understand, realized that my organization has¡­ insufficient computer security. From what you told me, a rookie Jack waltzed straight through everything we have.

    That can¡¯t go on. So I need somebody who can work on it. I like Leon, and I trust him, but his work is¡­ just not enough.¡±

    I nodded, more to myself.

    ¡°He would not be that bad if he did not deny the advantage of cyberspace. From what I¡¯ve seen, his workmanship is adequate, but he¡­ you have no mindscape. What you have is good to keep out Kings and Jokers, but a Jack or a Queen¡­ we simply ignore most of what you have.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I get that. For that reason, I decided to have Leon keep doing what he prefers to do anyway, namely keeping our hardware and general software up and running, and getting a new cyber security specialist.

    And Hunter wants to be a Jack anyway, so I decided to sponsor him and ask you to help him.¡±

    He wanted¡­ he did not trust me to do it? Really? I was completely surprised by the sting of pain I felt running through me. Before I could really react, Ben continued.

    ¡°That does not reflect on you. Of course, you could do it. But honestly, that would be a complete waste of your time.

    You are much more valuable in other efforts than babysitting our network. I mean, yeah, get the great Seraphim to play guard-dog in our system. Good for us, but completely wasted time for you.¡±

    Still very much insecure, I asked him:

    ¡°So it isn¡¯t the point that you don¡¯t trust me?¡±

    He looked at me, dumbfounded.

    ¡°God, no! How did you get to that conclusion? No, I would be delighted to have you design our security. The point is, that I want Hunter to be more or less on-call all the time.

    So that once you designed our system he can take over the day-to-day grind. For that, he needs a jack, and he needs training.¡±

    ¡°Hm, ok. I can do that. I will even give him the jack at cost. That will cost roughly $60k. For a basic jack, but I generally would suggest that anyway until he is a bit better.

    For the board, he can get a decent Kawamoto-clone for around $20k.¡±

    Michael looked a bit confused.

    ¡°Why do you say a basic jack and a Kawamoto-clone? I mean, you offer the best jacks and the best boards one can get. So why the lowball?¡±

    ¡°Because he will most likely kill himself with an ultra-bandwidth jack and a Seraphim Mk IV. Just because one has the money to get the best of the best does not mean one has the ability to use it.¡±

    I thought for a moment.

    ¡°You can view it like giving a teenager a Ferrari to learn to drive. Sure, it can go well, but the likelihood that he ends up wrapped around a traffic light is high. Not something any sane person will do.

    In this case, the basic jack and the cheap board represent the old junker that goes barely up to 70 kph¡­ oh sorry, 45 mph. Still enough to kill himself with, but much less volatile and more important much less prone to make him overconfident.

    Another point is that the reason why my boards are usually considered the best is that they are either extremely modular so that the jack can adapt them to their style, or I take several weeks to analyze the style of the jack and tailor the board directly to it.

    And as of this time, Hunter doesn¡¯t have a style yet. I could sell you a Seraphim Mk IV for around $8 million if you really want to. But it would be wasted money at this time.

    Once he has developed his own style, he can graduate to something like an Mk II. That shouldn¡¯t take more than a couple of months, but these are crucial months for his survival.

    Once I am confident that he has it under control, and I can evaluate his style, I can tailor him an Mk IV. Before that, it will likely kill him.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I get that, but why the basic jack? Wouldn¡¯t a better jack be¡­ well  better?¡±

    I let out a long breath.

    ¡°Yes and no. The problem is overconfidence again. At the moment, there is exactly one human with something more than a basic jack. That is me.

    And¡­ I have seen it often enough. Some new jack gets something new, expensive, before he is ready, and thinks he is invincible.

    If there were more ultra-bandwidth jacks in the wild, I would say ok, but at this moment, even the elite of the Abyss uses basic jacks.

    Can you, with confidence, say that Hunter would not think that an ultra-bandwidth would give him an advantage here?¡±

    To his credit, Michael thought about it for a bit before he answered:

    ¡°No, I think you are right. He¡­ well I like him, but he is a bit reckless.¡±

    ¡°Add in that an ultra-bandwidth jack would cost at least $600k, and that would be at a cost, I think you agree that it is a bit premature for an untried rookie.¡±

    Michael began to cough at that.

    ¡°The cost goes up by a factor of ten? How?¡±

    ¡°It is¡­ much more complex, and takes significantly more costly materials to make. To be honest, I advertised the ultra-bandwidth jack at DC 1.3 million. And that is without the adaption with the new process. That is another DC 1 million.

    At $600k it would be a steal.¡±

    ¡°I¡­ see. Shit, that stuff is expensive.¡±

    ¡°Think about it, a decent jack can earn that in three to four months. Another couple of months with the new jack, and he can afford a Seraphim Mk IV board as well.

    And honestly, if he has to work for it, he will appreciate it all the more.¡±

    Ben had listened to the conversation for some time but now thought to take part again.

    ¡°No, the prices are more than reasonable. I looked into what it costs to outfit a jack, and the basic jack alone is usually in the $300k range. A decent board will set you back another $500k. Nothing expensive, just run-of-the-mill decent stuff.

    Though, I have to say suggesting a cheap board for $20 k surprises me a bit.¡±

    ¡°He will outgrow his first board in a couple of months. Why pay $500k for something that he only uses for at best a quarter of a year.

    After he actually knows his own style, we can look into which board to get him for the rest of the year.

    After that, we will see if he has what it takes to master an Mk IV. Of course, by that time, the Mk IV will be most likely outdated.¡±

    ¡°Ok¡­ I think that is alright then. When do you think you can give him his jack then?¡±

    ¡°Give me a couple of hours to make and prepare the jack and we are golden.¡±

    ¡°I will send him over tomorrow or the day after then.¡±

    It was at that moment that my stomach decided it was feeding time.

    ¡°Oh, look at the time¡­ Do you want to stay for lunch?¡±

    Michael looked confused.

    ¡°Sure, we can, but why? Food is food.¡±

    Ben on the other hand lifted an eyebrow.

    ¡°You¡¯ve cooked?¡±

    ¡°Yup, a nice slow-cooked stew.¡±

    ¡°I thought you would not cook every day.¡±

    ¡°In a stew, the most work is the preparation and the androids are pretty adequate in cutting the ingredients and stewing the pot. Sure, I will have to finish the seasoning, but it was mostly a few minutes here, a few minutes there.¡±

    ¡°Hey, I¡¯m not complaining, and of course we will stay.¡±

    Michael looked at his father confused.

    ¡°We will?¡±

    ¡°Vivian is not talking about replicator food. Not even high-quality stuff like we have. When she cooks, she uses real ingredients and really cooks.

    I know you¡¯ve had some real food when we were in restaurants, but¡­ well you will see.¡±

    With that, he stood up, followed by me, while Michael, still somewhat confused was quite a bit slower.

 71: New toys for the boys

    After lunch, which made Michael speechless for a whole minute, he decided to begin planning for the factory, while Ben asked me if it would be good for him to get neural cyberware.

    A stupid question, I know, but he was still uninitiated. I told him so, a bit more courteous of course, and we spent a few hours designing his personal cyberware.

    Naturally, if he had listened to me, he would have chosen the cranial board from the beginning, as I proposed from the get-go.

    But no, he had to go individual, and add in module after module individually. Seriously, what good does it do to have access to not just an implant surgeon but an implant designer as well, if you dismiss their advice?

    Needless to say, after nearly three hours of adding and removing features left and right, what we ended up with had around 80% of the functionality of a cranial board, not a single function that the board did not possess at least on a software module level, would take around 15 times the neural connectors, would cost nearly 10 times and would require at least three implant procedures to make it run.

    If he at least had listened and decided to hook everything into a jack, it might have been easier, but for some reason, he thought it was a weakness.

    Seriously though, the way he wanted the thing it would be a challenge to find places to hook all the connectors into.

    After another half hour of arguing, I managed to convince him, finally, that instead of having one vulnerability in the jack, he would build in a couple of dozen.

    Yes, the jack was a significantly greater vulnerability than any single one of the individual connections, as it had a much broader interface.

    But, and that was a very big but, the way he wanted his implants to work together, they would have an even broader interface together than a single jack, even an ultra-bandwidth one, by more than an order of magnitude.

    And the interconnection opened up all implants to the vulnerabilities of one of them. In other words, he needed to keep nearly 30 implants secure and patched up instead of a single one. And if one of them was compromised it would compromise the whole setup.

    All that, and he would not even have the basic function of a jack, the eased access to cyberspace.

    In the end, he grudgingly agreed to go with a cranial board on an ultra-bandwidth jack. Marvelous how easy it was to waste three and a half hours of our time just like that.

    We would have been done in minutes if he had listened to me.

    When I told him that, he grinned sheepishly, while Michael, working away on his personal computer a bit to the side began laughing out loud.

    When Ben looked at his son with fire in his eyes, Michael laughed even harder and tried to stammer a few words.

    It took a few seconds for him to get himself under control again, and start to talk:

    ¡°Seriously, dad, what are you doing? You have probably the world''s best cyberware specialist at hand and outright refuse her advice.

    Yes, I know, you must be the leader, the boss, the big honcho, but if Leon comes to you about cybersecurity you listen to him.

    When Paul comes to you about money, you listen to him.

    Sometimes you even listen when Richard comes to you with medical advice.

    Not one of them is world-class talent. But Vivian here is. And you are just too stubborn to accept that.

    So yes, it is very amusing for me.

    By the way, I want to get a cranial board with an ultra-bandwidth jack as well, Viv.¡±

    I tilted my head and raised an eyebrow questingly.

    ¡°Viv? Seriously?¡±

    He seemed pretty unfazed.

    ¡°Why sure. I think you like it better than ¡®Kitten¡¯, do you?¡±

    I slumped a bit and sighed.

    ¡°Yes, it is better than ¡®Kitten¡¯, but what is wrong with ¡®Vivian¡¯? It is my name after all.¡±

    ¡°Calling somebody by their given name is boring.¡±

    ¡°Whatever. But back to business, if you want a full cranial board then go to the big lab and the scanner. I have a bot bring two of them there.¡±

    Both Ben and Michael frowned, and Ben asked me:

    ¡°Now? You have them ready now? How come?¡±

    ¡°I¡¯ve known for a few weeks now that this was coming, and had my indyfab make the ultra-bandwidth jacks around the clock if it wasn¡¯t used for anything else. I added in a few cranial boards later, so I have four jacks for every board. And I started to have the nano-filter applied to them three days ago.

    I have a few dozen cranial boards ready for implantation right now. The¡­ well kludge that Ben wanted would have taken a couple of days to make, and at least three days, more likely four or five to install, but fortunately, we can do away with that.¡±

    Ben sighed.

    ¡°Yes, I got it. Listen to the expert. Sorry, but¡­ well you know of the horror stories about cyberware, and the way a jack can lead to a fried brain. It is¡­ not pretty.¡±

    ¡°If you do no combat dives, the risk of getting your brain fried is negligible. At this time, jacks are way too rare to be used as a venue for murder anyway.

    And I will adapt the firmware of the ones I give to you so that anything that will be developed for the ones I sell won¡¯t likely find the same vulnerabilities.¡±

    Michael looked at me askance.

    ¡°You will adapt the firmware? How and why?¡±

    ¡°Every computer as vulnerabilities. There is no way around it. I once read about somebody designing a method to make a computer 100% secure.

    He proposed to remove the power supply, cast the computer into concrete, and drop it into the Mariana Trench. And even with that he only estimated it to be 95% secure.

    The point is, anything the user can actually influence makes it possible for an attacker to influence.

    To make your implants absolutely secure I would have to make them unusable. Add in that any complex system, and believe me, an ultra-bandwidth jack is an extremely complex system, will contain errors.

    There was once an estimate by a rather big software developer that anything sold has an average of one bug per 2000 lines of code.

    I believe I am a bit better, but the firmware for the jacks I am preparing for you is somewhere in the range of 130 million lines of code.

    This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

    The OS for the cranial board adds another 30 million lines. Even if I am good enough to only make an error every million lines of code, there are likely 160 bugs in it. And while I am good, I am not that good. My estimate hovers around 500 bugs.

    Then of course there are the compromises that I had to make between usability and security.

    Again, there is an extremely effective way to protect your system. Have the system ask for authorization every single time anything, regardless of user, system, or app, tries to change any settings. It has been tried.

    Somewhere around 200, maybe 250 years ago, the then primary software developer, with a market share of more than 90% in operating systems at the time used that to secure its software.

    In the very next version, they included the option to limit the scope of the protection down to shutting it off completely.

    It became a meme that ¡®the user moved the mouse, do they authorize the change¡±.

    Unsurprisingly the version of the OS that contained this security feature flopped. Hard.

    So yes, the implants will be vulnerable. But I have created several versions of the firmware, each with the vulnerabilities hopefully somewhere else.

    I have one, you two will get another, and the vast majority of people will get a third.

    When the time comes and people look into vulnerabilities for the jack, they will almost certainly not look into the virtually unknown version with at most a couple of dozen users, but instead, go for the version that, if my estimation is even close to correct, will have several thousand if not million users.

    And considering that the version I will give you will only go to people I reasonably trust not to try to break it, I think it should be relatively secure.

    Not quite as secure as the version I use, as that goes to nobody besides me, but unless I have baked some fundamental error into the system it should be secure.

    Well, at least as secure as you let it be. You will need some external access if only to boot it up. And that needs a strong password.

    Alternatively, I could include a direct connection to Warden. She¡­ well, as long as you are important to my safety or my undertakings, she will use reasonable measures to protect you.

    I would be surprised if somebody could break her security, at least quickly. The disadvantage though is that¡­ well you will have Warden in your implants. No more privacy.¡±

    Ben nodded slowly and answered as I had expected.

    ¡°No, thank you but no Warden, please.¡±

    Yeah, nailed it there. I did not, naturally, explain to him that direct connection or no direct connection, he could expect that Warden would know everything he did.

    She probably already had some exploits for the firmware I would give the two. And most likely include a rootkit from the get-go.

    But I decided to let him have his illusions here.

    Michael, after some consideration, agreed with his father.

    ¡°I would have been surprised if you had chosen the direct connection. But then the security of your implant depends heavily on your password. Don¡¯t get me wrong, it is inherently much more secure than your com, as¡­ well nobody can simply steal it. As soon as it is installed it can only work if it is inside your living body, or if it is completely reset.

    But if somebody gets physical access to it, meaning you, well, I would strongly advise something stronger than ¡®password123¡¯.¡±

    Michael now looked a bit unsure.

    ¡°Uhm, what would you say is a strong password?¡±

    I had to chuckle at that.

    ¡°You are asking the wrong person here. I have two passwords, one only to initiate a boot, the other for access. Both are 1024 characters long and use the Unicode private use area, which contains 6400 codes. The number of possible passwords is 8 with more than 19 thousand digits. Even a modern quantum computer or a supercomputer like my cluster will take months to break that.

    Of course, I have to have two 1024 character long codes memorized. Not to disrespect you, but I doubt that you can do that easily.

    That is an advantage of being a Pure, especially one interested in such things.

    There are options, like a hash generator, that, with a master password and a seed phrase can generate a repeatable password for you, and you just need to remember the settings, the master and the seed, or, well, the cranial board will most likely replace your com, so no point in having a password safe on your com. We could create a safe in a secure computer for you.

    In that case, I would seriously suggest you use Warden. The probability that she is¡­ taken out is minuscule at this point. And it is highly unlikely that anybody or anything unauthorized could get access to the safe then.¡±

    Ben smiled at that.

    ¡°And will give Warden access to the file as well.¡±

    ¡°You think anywhere would be at once safe, accessible, and protected from Warden? Sure, you could take a tablet or your old com, offline it, run the safe, and then put it in a drawer somewhere.

    In a year or two, you will most likely have forgotten where you put it, or somebody has found it and taken it.

    You could put it in a physical safe. And everybody knows it is important. Sorry, there is just no perfect solution here.¡±

    ¡°I understand that, but I don¡¯t have to be happy about it.¡±

    I just shrugged, while a bot brought the two jacks and the cranial boards into the lab.

    ¡°Yes, I agree with that. Now, I need a short scan of you, and a detailed scan of Michael. It would be better if you go first, and I start the implantation before I scan Michael.¡±

    Michael literally lifted his hand to ask a question.

    ¡°Uh, why do you need to scan us, and why only me detailed?¡±

    ¡°I already have some very detailed scans of your father, and now I have just to spot-check that nothing has changed dramatically. It is not strictly necessary, but it is good practice.

    For you, I still need a baseline, to know how to program the auto-surgeon. And while I am doing that I can just as well have it scan you for problems due to genetic errors. That will only take 20 or 30 minutes longer than the baseline scan. By the time we are done with that, your father will most likely be finished in the surgeon.¡±

    ¡°Oh, ok.¡±

    Ben¡¯s scan showed no surprises, as expected, and he soon laid in the auto-surgeon which began the implantation process.

    I had an eye on it, via cyberspace, while I had Michael in the scanner.

    I found, unfortunately, proof that my warning about the executive service was justified. Michael''s heart had some problems. Nothing major, but he would need a new one before he was 40, maybe 45.

    At least I assumed that it was the result of the genetic screening as the defect seemed to be congenital. A proper screening should have found the problem and corrected it beforehand.

    When he came out of the scanner, he looked at me expectantly.

    ¡°And? Found something?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I did. Luckily nothing too bad. You will need a new heart in 15 to 20 years. But nothing that will stop us from giving you the jack and cranial board now.¡±

    His face fell.

    ¡°Seriously? I¡­ shit¡­ I never thought¡­ fuck, I thought that even if you were right, that¡­ damn, I¡¯ve always been fit. I would¡¯ve never thought that I would be one of the unfortunate.¡±

    I could just shrug helplessly.

    ¡°I feel with you. And I get that it is a shock. But, honestly, it is relatively minor. I would expect you to get a cyberheart in the not too distant future anyway, just from your father¡¯s organization.

    And you know to use the special service when the time comes for you to get a clone. At the worst then the error will be corrected.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, I guess. It is just¡­ fuck, that is a bummer.¡±

    ¡°Also, we don¡¯t know if the problem has been introduced by the cloning process or if your father had the same defect.¡±

    He frowned.

    ¡°Hm, shouldn¡¯t you know that already, as often as you¡¯ve scanned him the last few months?¡±

    ¡°He didn¡¯t have his original heart for a long time when I scanned him the first time. No possibility for me to find the problem there. What¡¯s left is a genetic screening, and I can¡¯t help you there.¡±

    The auto-surgeon had by now finished and opened up.

    A couple of Ben¡¯s bodyguards lifted him out of it and placed him onto one of the cots I had placed at one of the walls, to let him come out from the anesthetics.

    Michael on the other hand seemed a tiny bit unsure.

    ¡°And¡­ it is really safe for me?¡±

    ¡°As safe as any operation can get anyway. The chance that something happens is remote. That would mean tenderness, a bit of pain, a slight infection, or something else that will resolve itself with a couple of days of taking it slow.

    The chance that you have to get treatment for anything that happens here is even smaller. Something around one in a million.

    The chance that something goes seriously wrong and you are in actual danger is negligible. Not zero, but, statistically, every human would have to climb into one of the better auto-surgeons three times a year before one of them gets a serious complication over the course of a decade.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°Ok, that¡­ yeah I agree that is negligible.¡±

    And with that, he climbed into the auto-surgeon.

    Ben on the other hand began to wake up. Honestly, I would love to use these modern anesthetics for myself, but as a Pure, I was limited to much older, clunkier drugs.

    Ben would be fully up and running in another 20 minutes or so. I would have been out of it for the rest of the day and most of the night.

    While I supervised Michael''s implant procedure with my implants, I helped Ben to boot his up for the very first time.

    He had taken my advice and had Warden provide a password safe for him. It took me quite a bit to explain the basic functions to him, but that was mostly due to the pure amount of things to explain.

    And before somebody asks, of course I gave him the manual. But¡­ well the thing is nearly 800 pages long. There was a quick guide, but somebody explaining it was in my opinion still the best option, at least for the basics.

    And yes, I did inform him about Michael¡¯s heart condition.

    As soon as I was done helping Ben, I could repeat the experience with Michael.

    In the end, both were happy with their implants, even if they were a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of functions. But they would get used to it.

    In the evening, my worry that Ben was just too big for my bed proved to be right.

    It was not a big problem though. I could spend another night in his home as well as in my home.

    I also already had set the bots to clean and renovate the owner suites. It would take a couple of days to get them habitable, but I could wait that long.

 72: Ramping up

    Early the next day I decided to take the plunge and greenlight the new application of the nano-filter in the Abyss.

    The very first thing I did was send a message to Bletchley, knowing that he had a somewhat more urgent need for it than most.

    Then I put another message on the public notice boards:

    Public Notice:

    The new application process for CRS-free neural cyberware has successfully finished its test and is ready for general use.

    Because of the unexpectedly high number of orders and the resulting lack of resources, I will implement a priority system:

    <ol style="text-align: center">

    <li>The first priority has people with active CRS, either instead of a purge at stage one or if the purge has already been too late, with a preference for the latter.</li>

    <li>After that, it goes according to the ranking.</li>

    <li>If there is no difference in ranking in the Abyss between two or more orders, the earlier order will have precedence.</li>

    <li>I take the liberty to make exceptions if I want to.</li>

    </ol>

    I am in the process of ameliorating the supply side of the equation, but that will take some time.

    When I was done with the notice I noticed that Bletchley had answered me, and requested a meeting in his usual room. Having nothing pressing I naturally agreed to his request.

    He gestured for me to sit down. Again, we had to share the room with a couple of his groupies, his main tech, CZ, and another avatar, that was unknown to me.

    ¡°Hello, Seraphim. I got your message. You say you have your new process ready?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I have tested it. Not as extensively as I tested the original process, but this time it was only testing if the new application provides the same nano-filter as the original one, and it does.

    So, it is decision time for you. I assume correctly that you need a new CRS-free jack fast?¡±

    Bletchley sighed and nodded.

    ¡°Yeah, I missed my last purge by a couple of weeks. It has gone to stage four a couple of months ago. Thanks for the tip with the nano-therapy by the way. So, what would you suggest?¡±

    ¡°That depends fully on what you want. I have some ultra-bandwidth jacks and cranial boards already produced and converted. Or you could get a jack by yourself and send it to me to convert it.¡±

    ¡°Hm¡­ when could you have one of your ultras and a board in Brasilia?¡±

    I looked it up, and daily air shipping was going to Brazil. It would not be cheap but in comparison to the implants themselves and the conversion, the shipping would be peanuts.

    ¡°I can have them in Brazil tomorrow or the day after, according to Mercurie¡¯s information. If you want to use a different way, it depends on them.¡±

    His eyes widened.

    ¡°So you meant you have them ready ready?¡±

    ¡°Of course. Even if this application process failed it was just a matter of adapting it until it worked. So I started building the jacks and the boards, the most widely asked for implants.

    At this moment I have a bit over 200 jacks and 50 cranial boards ready to go, here at my location. The other location has 450 jacks and 100 boards, as the fab there was not needed for other things in between.¡±

    The unknown person to me interjected.

    ¡°So¡­ what is needed to implant this thing? And to keep it running?¡±

    I turned my attention to him.

    ¡°I assume you are Bletchley¡¯s medical contact?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I am.¡±

    ¡°The jack has a higher connection count, roughly 14 times from a basic jack, and you need to program the auto surgeon accordingly, but I will include the profile for that. The cranial board does not need to be connected to the brain. Instead, it will hook into the jack. You need to only lay a data line to where you place it.

    Mine is behind my shoulder blade, but you could put it anywhere in the body.

    After that, he will need regular check-ups where you poll the status of the filters. Nothing onerous, just a connection via the jack. Alternatively, the board has an app that will do that and display the result into the HUD.

    The filter will most likely degrade over time, so you need to boost it when that happens. I will give you a list of nano-bot designs and programs that will work for that. If the filter degrades, simply inject him with the bots, and be done with it.

    That should not happen more often than every two or three years.¡±

    Bletchley nodded.

    ¡°That sounds reasonable. So, you want DC 11.9 million for the jack and the board?¡±

    ¡°Not quite. DC 10.9. As I said, the board hooks into the jack, so it does not need the filter. If you had a board with something less than a medium bandwidth jack, then yes, the board would need to hook directly into the brain, but so¡­¡±

    ¡°Ah, I understand. Expensive, but¡­ honestly, worth it. Probably not so for the newbs just starting out, but they have no business with state-of-the-art hardware anyway. Anybody worth his jack will have that kind of money in a couple of years.

    Now, if Carlos here is satisfied, how about we change the topic. In your public notice, you wrote that you are working on the supply issue. What do you mean with that?¡±

    I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

    ¡°I am most likely ¡®changing sides¡¯ in our eternal conflict with the corps. At least partially. There is really no way around it.¡±

    Bletchley now looked very concerned.

    ¡°What do you¡­ you will defect to some corp? How? And why?¡±

    ¡°Not quite. I will start a corp. It is, frankly, impossible for small shops and private persons to satisfy the demand for new cyberware. So my alternatives are only giving it to a select few who I can provide it to, selling the tech to the corps, or creating a corp that will build the cyberware.

    The first option is in my opinion a good way to start a war here in the matrix.

    This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

    The second option¡­ well it is obvious why that is out.

    Leaves the third option. It gives me the ability to supply the amount of cyberware that even now is increasing in demand, and still keep the supply open to the not quite so legal side of humanity.¡±

    Bletchley looked as if he swallowed a frog.

    ¡°Fuck. Yeah, I can see your reasoning. But, damn, I hate it.¡±

    ¡°I will still be available for more personal requests. Just¡­ I won¡¯t have the time for the small fry anymore.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, I can see that. And you are right, there are no good options here. But it is a bitter pill to swallow."

    Needless to say, the meeting was more or less over. CZ gave me the shipping address and sent me the money. On my side, I arranged for the jack and board to be shipped to Brasilia.

    I was not very amused by the note the meeting ended, but as I had told Bletchley, there was really no alternative.

    Even if just the jacks took off, and the general population realized that they were now safe to use, if only a third of humanity got one, that would mean more than 300 million jacks. My setup could produce 250 a day. In other words, that alone would take more than a million days to produce. And I seriously doubted that many people would be agreeable to a 3300-year waiting list.

    It was equally infeasible to increase my capacity by indy-fabs by four orders of magnitude.

    And that was just the jacks. All the other tech that was made possible with the new filter¡­ nope, I needed dedicated industrial processes. Ben, and Warden, were right in that. I just¡­ did not like it.

    Still, I could alleviate the immediate impact by increasing my indy-fab capacity somewhat.

    And so I placed a call to the vendor where I got my industrial fabricator from.

    ¡°Thurgood Industrial Services. My name is Janice. How can I help you?¡±

    ¡°Hello Janice. My name is Veronica Sinclair. I purchased an industrial fabber from your company a couple of months back. I have some follow-up questions about it.¡±

    ¡°Ah yes, I have found your orders. I am sorry that it is not to your fullest satisfaction. I will connect you to customer service then, ma¡¯am.¡±

    ¡°Wait, that is no¡­¡± it was too late, she had me in the queue for customer service. Fortunately, it was a short wait.

    ¡°Hello, Thurgood Industrial Services, customer service, my name is Thomas. How can I help you?¡±

    ¡°Hello Thomas. I am Veronica Sinclair, and I purchased an industrial fabber from your company a few months back.¡±

    ¡°One moment, please¡­ ah, there we have you. Yes, I see it. You asked for an additional molecular forge beyond the original order, I see. So, what is your problem?¡±

    I sighed inwardly.

    ¡°Not a problem per se. The fabber works great. But I¡­ let¡¯s say I have miscalculated the demand for my production.¡±

    ¡°That is unfortunate. We offer a smaller package, but not that much smaller, at least not with a molecular forge, and exchanging the fabber you already have with a smaller one will eat up the price difference. I can ask if we can do something, but it does not look good for that.¡±

    ¡°Oh no, wrong direction. I estimated the demand too low. The fabber that I have is too small to satisfy the demand.¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ ooh. Well, we can help you with that certainly. But why are you in customer service then instead of order?¡±

    ¡°Because Janice only heard that I have follow-up questions about my fabber and transferred me to you.¡±

    I heard a suppressed curse before he answered:

    ¡°Yes, that is typical of her. She is a nice enough person, but¡­ not quite the sharpest knife in the drawer. If you wait a moment, I will connect you to the right department.¡±

    And again, I was in the queue. This time I waited for full three minutes before I got through.

    ¡°Hello, Thurgood Industrial Services, Andrew here, how can I help you?¡±

    ¡°Hello, my name is Veronica Sinclair. I ordered an industrial fabber from your company a few months ago. And I underestimated my needs, so it is too small.¡±

    ¡°Okay. So you need a bigger fabber? I am sure that we can help you to satisfy all your needs there.¡±

    I could not suppress a chuckle and Andrew was obviously annoyed by it.

    ¡°Did I say something funny, ma¡¯am?¡±

    ¡°Only in context. Unfortunately, you are wrong. You won¡¯t be able to help me satisfy my demand.¡±

    And he seemed even more irritated now.

    ¡°If you don¡¯t want a bigger fabber then why are you calling?¡±

    I shook my head, not that he could see it.

    ¡°Let¡¯s row back a bit. First, I do want a bigger fabber. But a bigger fabber will only be a band-aid on the problem. I underestimated my needs by orders of magnitude. I would need several thousand fabbers to satisfy the need.

    At that level, industrial fabbers are only expensive drops in the ocean.

    So, what I now need is something to help me out to lower the worst pressure while I am building a dedicated factory.¡±

    He was silent for a few moments, and if I did not hear him breathing I would have believed that the connection had been cut. Finally, he answered me:

    ¡°O¡­ orders of magnitude? Thousands of fabbers?¡±

    ¡°I told you, that is not what I am planning.¡±

    ¡°Oh yes, that is unrealistic. But what the fuck could you build that did explode in this manner?¡±

    ¡°That is for the moment none of your business. Point is, I want to increase my fabber capacity substantially, even if not to that extent.

    For that, I need an additional, bigger molecular forge, if possible triple the capacity of what my current one has. And then four times the electronic and carbon fabrication capacity of what my current fabber has. If possible in parallel.

    Is that something you can do?¡±

    Apparently, he had managed to focus on our call again.

    ¡°Ah, yes ma¡¯am. We can do that. It will take a couple of weeks to get it to you though.¡±

    ¡°It can¡¯t be helped. And how much will it cost me?¡±

    ¡°Let me look into it for a moment, please. Ok, the molecular forge, we can give you a Burgmeister Weyland 44-75. It is a bit more powerful than you requested at 3.2 times the throughput you have now, but we got a good deal on them and the next smaller forge we can offer you would be actually more expensive. It would cost you $21,758,312.

    For the production¡­ let¡¯s see. We can give you a monolithic electronic fabrication suite, or a few smaller suites.

    The monolithic one would make it possible to produce bigger items. It would be significantly faster for projects that exceed the size of the smaller units, and even at the maximum size of the smaller units, it would be faster by 15 to 20%.

    On the other hand, if you have multiple smaller items to manufacture, it will be significantly slower, as it can only work in parallel in a limited fashion.

    The smaller suites would also be more expensive.

    The monolithic unit would cost you $12,339,866, while the three smaller suites would set you back by $16,897,428.

    The carbon extruders can all work in parallel as well in a sequential fashion, so there is no difference here. A unit that would satisfy your request would cost you $3,749,872.¡±

    Ouch. That was a big chunk of money. On the other hand, I had just made nearly $35 million by selling one set of ultra-bandwidth jack and cranial board to Bletchley. And this setup would be able to make two to three hundred each day.

    ¡°I definitely need the smaller electronic suites. I need to produce several physically small units. And I take the Burgmeister forge and the carbon extruder.¡±

    ¡°Okay. I will lock that in then. The sum before any rebate would be $42,405,612. For orders of that size, we offer a rebate of 8.3%. That would make the sum $38,885,946.20. Is that acceptable for you?¡±

    I winced. Even with the rebate, it was expensive. Necessary, and not more than it was worth but still expensive.

    And so, with gritted teeth, I answered in the positive.

    ¡°Yes, it is acceptable.¡±

    ¡°Ok, we then need to decide on the payment options.

    Depending on how many installments you want to pay, we can offer you 12, 8, and 4 ppa. So what should I lock in?¡±

    ¡°Actually, I want to pay with a direct transfer. In one lump.¡±

    ¡°Uh, ma¡¯am, that is a serious amount of money. I guess you can get a credit from your bank, but those rarely have favorable conditions to our rates.¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t need the credit. I have the money available. And yes, I am willing to put the money in an escrow, payable on delivery.¡±

    ¡°Oh, all right. We can do that. Do you have a preferred escrow agency? If not, we usually use Springwell Financial Services or First Choice Trust.¡±

    ¡°Either is fine with me. One moment, I will set it up.¡±

    I choose Springwell, just because he named it first. Setting up the escrow over via the matrix was a matter of seconds, and transferring the money into it took not any longer, and so I was back in the call.

    ¡°Okay, I have set it up. Where do I send the escrow details?¡±

    ¡°What do you mean you have set it up?¡±

    ¡°Computers are a very nice thing. The banks don¡¯t like to waste expensive human time for simple things as escrows with an automatic payout when the requirements are met, so they offer a web interface. The same with transferring money into an escrow. I was prepared.

    Now, where do I send the details?¡±

    ¡°Oh wow, usually we have to talk our customers through the process. Well, send it to ¡®[email protected]</a>¡¯ with the order number ¡®485359¡®. We will process the order when we get the¡­¡±

    He stopped when he got the notification that the details had arrived.

    ¡°Ok, I see you have everything ready. We will be able to deliver the carbon extruder next Thursday. The electronics suites will be ready the Tuesday after that, and the forge Wednesday. We can deliver everything separately, or in one delivery.¡±

    ¡°How long will the installation take?¡±

    ¡°It will take at least three days to install it. But the carbon extruder will only be a couple of hours. The electronics suites will take two days. Do you want us to start Tuesday then and do it in one session?¡±

    ¡°Yes, that is the best I think. The carbon extruder is secondary to the electronics suites.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I have logged it in. You will get a confirmation in a couple of hours. Can I do anything else for you?¡±

    I had to smile softly.

    ¡°Not now. I will contact you when it comes to designing and building the fabrication plant. But until then, I have what I need.¡±

    All in all, a very exhausting, if productive call. And expensive.

 73: Talking to a wall

    Later that day, Hunter Reid came to get his jack implanted. He was accompanied by Michael, who wanted to talk about the corp we were trying to build up.

    I was going over the results of the BOUs, when they entered the lab, and I gestured for them to sit down.

    ¡°Take a seat. I am just finishing this, then we can talk.¡±

    Michael took that in silence, but Hunter seemed to be¡­ a bit less charitable.

    ¡°What are you doing? And why now? You knew we were coming.¡±

    I ignored him, but Michael was less forgiving.

    ¡°Sit down man. We are 10 minutes too early. And if we need to know what she is doing she will tell us.¡±

    ¡°It¡¯s ok, Michael. It shouldn¡¯t take more than 5 minutes. And I am just going over the results of some of my experiments. They are not quite what I had expected.¡±

    And that was the truth. Every single growth accelerator worked more or less in the same principle. They all force-fed the mitochondria chemicals that would be converted into ATP and a byproduct that stimulated cell division. If that were all, it would be all fine and dandy, and I could easily use them for the bio-sheathing. But they all produced other byproducts as well, and the majority of them were toxic and accumulating.

    For the normal cloning process, where it is used once and then done, there was no problem. After a few cell generations, the concentration of these toxins was barely measurable. Which of course explained why nobody had discovered it yet.

    But for something as sensitive as my sheathing process, it was disastrous. I would have to think about how to make it better.

    Funny thing is, that also explained why vat meat had less than desirable side effects. With the, at the time, average meat consumption, the toxins would build up pretty quick and create health problems, up to and including death.

    That happened shortly before the great war, and any efforts to rectify these problems had been forgotten as soon as China invaded Taiwan.

    And as with many science problems, after the war, the number of people capable of working on them had been drastically reduced, and those who were still alive had other, more pressing concerns.

    By now, it was just common knowledge that vat meat simply did not work.

    And yes, I immediately planned to change that. I had a basic idea already fermenting.

    Instead of force-feeding the mitochondria some chemicals to get ATP and the stimulant, I would use a nanite-infused solution to transport ATP and a stimulant directly into the cells, bypassing the mitochondria, and eliminating the toxins. I just had to find the best stimulant.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, I did it in part for vat meat, and in part to make my bio-sheathing work.

    But by now, these were minor concerns. With the nano-filter on the neuronect, I could offer cyberware without the myosynth in the not too distant future. And I had enough money that I could get meat when I wanted to.

    No, by now my most important decision point here was that it would mess up Pannacea¡¯s core business.

    A better, faster, and safer clone tech would cut deeply into their money maker.

    So at that time, I was looking into what stimulant had what outcome. Later I would look into the dosages and possible combinations.

    And just as I had said, I was done in less than 5 minutes and turned towards the two men.

    ¡°So, done with it for today. Now, Hunter, has Mr. Walker talked to you about what we will do?¡±

    He scowled, while he answered.

    ¡°He did not go into details, only that you would implant a jack and then help me train.¡±

    I sighed. I had hoped that Ben had taken the time and explained to Hunter that he needed to go slow.

    ¡°That is, well it is the truth, but barely the bare bones of what will happen.

    Ok, then, first, I will implant you with a basic jack. There are several reasons for that, but it boils down to better jacks costing much more and will pose a risk to you.

    After that, we will get you a nice starter board so that you can train.¡±

    Predicably, Hunter exploded.

    ¡°WHAT!?! Why just a basic jack? I know you gave booth Walkers the best jack you have. Why that? They won¡¯t use it. For them, it¡¯s just a toy.

    And a starter board? You expect me to toddle along with a toy? Why not get me a real board like that fancy Seraphim you have?¡±

    I massaged my temples.

    ¡°First, Ben Walker is your Boss. He pays for his implant and yours. The package I sold him I sell for nearly $35 million. Do you really expect him to invest that amount of money into an untried jack?

    And Michael is working for me. He is in the process of spinning up a business that will provide me with billions, if not trillions of dollars. I decided he needed a good jack, and that it would paint a bad picture if the manager of the company producing the best jacks would not use one of their own flagship products.¡±

    I took a deep breath before I continued: ¡°And the board, everybody starts out with a starter board.

    Heck, I started out with a slightly pimped-out Dalgon NCI-244T. Even a Kawamoto Eminence will be substantially better than that.¡±

    Sadly, what I said did nothing to pacify Hunter. He jumped up and walked around, all the time ranting about how he knew that Seraphim had not started out with something as plebeian as a Kawamoto Eminence. And that he deserved better.

    I, unsuccessfully, tried to explain things to him, but he just ignored me. I was wondering if he did not understand that I was Seraphim, and going over options of what I could do to break through to him when:

    ¡°SHUT THE FUCK UP AND SIT DOWN, ASSHOLE!¡±

    I was so startled when Michael bellowed that I fell out of my chair, which of course made the lout giggle.

    When I had sat back down, I noticed that Hunter was also sitting again, and grumbling, but first, I glared at the softly chuckling Michael.

    ¡°Warn the next time before you bellow like that.¡±

    That only sent him into a full laughing fit.

    Seeing that I would not get any acceptable communication with him for the time being, I ignored him and turned my attention back to Hunter again.

    ¡°You are wrong, you know. Everybody started with a basic jack. There is only one jack beside me who has something better now. That is Spectre. There are only four better jacks in use overall.

    And giving you a better jack at the very beginning will probably kill you.

    The same with the board. Every single Abyss-dweller that is not a groupie started with a starter board.

    And I know for a fact that Seraphim started with something worse than a Kawamoto Eminence.¡±

    If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

    He growled and glared at me.

    ¡°So, you know do you? You just know that one of the greatest techs of our time started out with a scrub board. Yeah sure.¡±

    Did he really¡­? Had I not made it clear, even at the meeting with his father?

    ¡°Hunter, I am Seraphim. So yes, I know without the shadow of a doubt that I started out with a scrub board. Heck, my second board was a Burgmeister Sandmann 41 that I got used.

    My first serious board was Exquisite.¡±

    Michael had, in the meantime stopped laughing, and both he and Hunter now looked confused.

    ¡°Your first serious board was exquisite? Then, why did you build a second one?¡±

    It took me a moment to understand their confusion

    ¡°Oh no. I named the board, my Mk. I ¡®Exquisite¡¯. Yes, I know, a pretentious name, but after the Burgmeister, I felt she was exquisite. I learned pretty fast that she was¡­ well, mediocre. Is mediocre. Unlike the Dalgon or the Burgmeister, I still have her.

    But I took what I learned with her and build Precious. And, as I had done with the Mk. I, I created a highly modular variant and called that the Mk. IV.

    But my point is, I started with less than the Kawamoto Eminence.¡±

    Hunter now whined.

    ¡°But why do you think I need to start so¡­ so low? I deserve better than that. Why can¡¯t you build me an Mk. IV?¡±

    Urgh, I had to mentor this¡­ entitled jerk? Shoot me now.

    ¡°Because it is fricking dangerous to start with a top-of-the-line board, high-end utilities, and cutting edge technology in general, you will likely kill yourself with it.¡±

    He scoffed at that.

    ¡°Just because you couldn¡¯t hack it doesn¡¯t mean that I could not.¡±

    I buried my face in my hands, groaning softly. That would be a hard piece of work. Then I had an idea. Maybe¡­ I quickly looked into the order list for the ultra-bandwidth jacks. Yes, there he was. Maybe I could bribe him to help me out here.

    And so I placed a message on the board, while I talked out loud:

    ¡°Wait for a minute, please. I will look something up.¡±

    At the same time, I send an order for an android to bring Precious to the lab.

    Yes, I would have preferred to use Glory, but Ben had been pretty insistent on keeping her a secret for the time being.

    I was pretty sure that Michael could know about her, but Hunter? No way.

    Luckily, Argonaughty answered me pretty quickly, and I dived into cyberspace to meet with him.

    ¡°Hey, Sera. What¡¯s up? Is my order ready? I did not expect it for a few months.¡±

    ¡°Hello, Argo. Yes and no about the order. I¡­ have a bit of slip in my schedule, but you are not yet at the forefront. But, if you do me a small favor I will sell it to you immediately, and if you want to implant it today.¡±

    He looked overjoyed, for a moment, and then became suspicious.

    ¡°A small favor? That¡­ what do you want me to do?¡±

    I chuckled for a bit.

    ¡°Nothing bad. You are already in the order queue, and I will just expedite your order. The favor is comparable. I¡­ have been asked to mentor a newb.

    And he is difficult. He insists that I provide him with an ultra-bandwidth jack and a Seraphim Mk. IV from the getgo.

    I can¡¯t get through to him, so the favor is, can you talk to him? Maybe explain why that is a seriously bad idea?¡±

    He looked confused for a moment, but then he laughed.

    ¡°Seriously? Somebody roped you into babysitting some maggot and the maggot doesn¡¯t want to listen to you? Is he retarded or something? Fuck, I would have loved to have you advise me when I started.¡±

    I had to sigh.

    ¡°Be honest. If you did not know, really know, about my reputation, and, well, you probably have looked up what I look like in real life, would you, as an arrogant, all-knowing newb have listened to the tiny girl I am?¡±

    That stopped his laughing.

    ¡°Shit, yeah, you¡¯re right. I was such a know-it-all asshole, shit, it is a miracle that I haven''t killed myself. I would have laughed into your face. Fuck, I was such an idiot asshole then. And you now have to deal with somebody like that?

    Well, ok, I¡¯ll talk to him. When and where?¡±

    ¡°I have him sitting directly opposite from me. I will give him a diadem and have him jack in. Wait a minute I¡¯ll send you the address.¡±

    I surfaced back into the real world. Fortunately, I had only gone to 4:1, so it took only a couple of seconds.

    ¡°I have arranged for somebody to talk to you. Explain to you the situation and why it is at it is.¡±

    The android had already brought Precious, and I started her up, connecting the diadem, while at the same time jacking in.

    ¡°Do you want to come as well, Michael?¡±

    Michael shrugged, but then answered in the affirmative, so I got out another OPB cable for him, followed by connecting the diadem for Hunter.

    ¡°Now, Michael, just plug in the cable into your jack. Hunter, please put on the diadem.¡±

    The two men followed my instructions with varying enthusiasm, but both connected to Precious.

    During that time I set up a chatroom where we would meet Argo and send the Address to the Abyss-dweller.

    We all materialized more or less simultaneously in the chatroom, Argo and myself in our typical avatars, while Michael and Hunter had the typical self-image avatar.

    ¡°All right, folks, let¡¯s introduce. Here, we have Argonaughty, #67 of the ranking list in the Abyss.¡±

    I was interrupted by Argo.

    ¡°Number 66 now. They have confirmed that Justy has bit the dust.¡±

    I flinched inwardly. Not that I did not expect it. But still¡­ well, it couldn¡¯t be helped.

    ¡°Ok, number 66. Now here we have Hunter, who wants to become a jack, and Michael, who is just an interested party in this.¡±

    Argo nodded slowly before he made himself stand tall. If I had to guess, neither Hunter nor Michael realized that he used effects to make himself literally grow a few cm. Impressive for newbs, but anybody who had any experience in the Matrix knew it was just some trickery.

    Still, when he boomed, I had to concentrate to not giggle and destroy the effect.

    ¡°So, you are the maggot that knows better than Seraphim? Do you have any idea what you are talking about?¡±

    Hunter was, visibly, intimidated, especially when Argo pulled out his sword and began running a sharpening stone over its edge. A completely useless gesture, but it impressed the scrubs.

    ¡°She¡­ she wants me to start at the bottom. I know that I can make it. Why does she put so many obstacles into my way?¡±

    ¡°So you know you can make it? On what experience? How long have you been a jack?¡±

    Hunter stammered.

    ¡°Uh¡­ I am not a jack yet. But I know how computers work. I am good with them.¡±

    ¡°So you worked as a Queen and want to step up?¡±

    ¡°No. Queens are losers. I want to start right.¡±

    ¡°And what experience do you have?¡±

    ¡°I have helped my father set up the computer systems of Mr. Walker. I monitor them. I know what¡¯s going on in there.¡±

    ¡°Mr. Walker? Mr. Benjamin Walker? Seriously? You are responsible for that travesty of a security system? Fuck, boy. You are a joke. The system is a joke. Literally. It is one of the places where we send maggots for their very first training run because it is so easy.

    Shit, the only reason it still exists is that it is such a valuable training tool that we jacks stop the jokers from wrecking it. So, think again, what real experience do you have?¡±

    The booming voice got a threatening undertone, but Hunter did not seem to realize that.

    ¡°Hey, my dad worked hard to get it to work.¡±

    I interjected.

    ¡°And it has absolutely no security against a queen or a jack. But Argo, you should begin to scout out a new training location. I¡¯ve been hired to redo the security of that system. In a few weeks, it won¡¯t be easy anymore.¡±

    Argo shrugged.

    ¡°Ah, it¡¯s fine. There are a couple of others just as open. And you, maggot, the security of that system is crap. It might work against a big server attacking, or a bot-net. Or any other tools that Kings use, but fuck is it unsecured from cyberspace.¡±

    ¡°So, what do you want me to say? What does it matter? Why does nobody want me to have good gear?¡±

    ¡°Because you¡¯ll fucking kill yourself if you get it. Nine out of ten jacks that start with more than a starter board are dead within a month.

    And we hat to put in the effort to train some maggot just for him to fry his brain going against a bank or something like that.¡±

    Now Hunter, and Michael, looked shocked, and Hunter looked at me accusingly.

    ¡°So why did you give the Walkers this fancy jack then?¡±

    ¡°Because they don¡¯t want to do combat dives. For them it is a tool, that they can use to do paperwork, communicate, and get done more in less time. You on the other hand want to fight against other professionals with it.¡±

    Argo snorted.

    ¡°Hey Kid, think about it like you want to get into motorcycle racing. You want to go into professional racing here. No problem with that, but your experience so far has been riding a tricycle around your daddy''s backyard.

    Sera here provides the most powerful racing motorcycles. But if you go there, without even learning to use a fucking bicycle you will break your neck the first time you try to use it.

    The Walkers on the other hand use the motorcycle to get from point a to point b, or to leisurely cruise around the town.

    So no, you don¡¯t start out with the meanest, best and fastest tech you can get, you start out with a scooter to learn to drive.

    And then you climb to the major league.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ But¡­¡±

    ¡°No buts. You remember that I am fucking number 66 in the fucking Abyss? I am in the absolute top league. And I still don¡¯t have a Seraphim board. I have been in the Abyss for eight months now, and I just got to the point where I think I am ready for one.

    I have been a jack for nearly three years, and I have now reached the point where I think I¡¯ll survive with the best board.

    Do you think you are better than an Abyss-dweller?

    And you know what? Seraphim is better. We all know that if she actually tried to get work as a jack instead of as a tech she would quickly rise to the top 20. Maybe even the top 10.

    The last one who has gone out of his way to antagonize her died a few days ago in a pool of his own piss and shit.

    So do yourself a fucking favor and listen to her.¡±

    I interrupted.

    ¡°One thing you have to keep in mind, Hunter is the compression. You¡¯ll get the experience fast. Probably not to the point where you can play in the Abyss, but where you can use a good board.

    You will outgrow your starter board in a month, or two if you are slow. During that time you will develop your own style, your own way to do things. And your next board will be something that compliments your style.

    Right now, you don¡¯t have a clue what your style will be like. What you actually need in a board.

    Anything more than a cheap starter board will be in all probability just money thrown away.

    And while we talk about money, the Mk. IV that you seem to want? Just the bare board, without the modules, and most importantly, without the tailoring to your style, cost nearly $10 million.

    For something you can¡¯t even use yet. Because you don¡¯t have a clue what you need.

    Not to talk about the tailoring service. This cost nearly a hundred million bucks. Because it takes me a couple of weeks in real-time to observe and investigate the jack, learn his style, and customize the board for his needs. I¡¯ve only sold eight of these.¡±

    It seemed that we¡¯ve finally broken through to Hunter. At least he did no longer talk back.

 74: Enki

    Finally, we were able to get Hunter into the auto-surgeon. While he had no longer talked back, he was still sulky and, in one word difficult.

    But with Michael¡¯s tender, and less than tender, encouragement, we managed to get it done. I was not the only one sigh in relief when the surgeon¡¯s canopy closed.

    After a few seconds of staring at the machine, Michael sighed again.

    ¡°Well, that¡¯s that. I wouldn¡¯t have believed that he would be so¡­ bullheaded. But, just between us, why did you insist that he gets a basic jack and a crappy starter board?¡±

    I chuckled mirthlessly before I answered:

    ¡°For exactly the reason that I gave him. Nearly nine out of ten jacks that start out with even average equipment, much less top of the line, kill themselves within the first month.¡±

    I turned to look directly into his face.

    ¡°You probably haven''t experienced it yet, but the first time you really go into cyberspace the first time¡­ well the jack messes with your head.

    It is hard to describe but the possibilities that open up for you¡­ you feel exhilarated, powerful, basically invincible.

    That effect is even more pronounced when you change over from a diadem, but for everybody I know of, they crack up.

    That is irrelevant for people like you or your father. You use the jack as additional tools for your normal work, as for recreation, or in between.

    For a Jack, well, they get full of themselves, get delusions of grandeur when even delusions of adequacy might be too much.

    If they have a starter board, well, they quickly see the¡­ potato they use and realize they are not quite as hot as they thought. So they come back down to earth.

    If they have even an average board, it will take much longer. If they, as Hunter wanted, get their hands on a superior board from the getgo, well, so far not a single one of those survived their first month.

    The big problem is that you, when you think you are invincible, ignore risks that any sane person would shy away from.

    They attempt combat dives that somebody with good equipment and copious amounts of experience might pull off. Because, as they see it, they are the best anyway. And they run headway into a hunter-killer. Black ice. Or if they are really unlucky, they attempt to bolster their accounts.¡±

    Michael looked me into the eyes for a moment, before he lifted an eyebrow and asked me:

    ¡°If that is so, why did you not tell Hunter that in exactly that way? Yeah, he is a bit stubborn, but not so stupid that he will try to buck those odds.¡±

    I tilted my head.

    ¡°That has been tried as well. It goes wrong nearly as often as giving the new Jack too much horsepower to play with.

    Most of them try to fight their sense of accomplishment and cramp their style. ¡®Only¡¯ 73% of them die in their first three months, this time from being too timid, too hesitant. But the ones that survive rarely reach even mediocrity, much less unleash their full potential.

    No, our community has found out the best way to deal with newcomers is to give them a potato to play with, supervise from the shadows and let them learn of the pitfalls all by themselves, while the mentor keeps the sharks at bay.¡±

    I chuckled again.

    ¡°That by the way will be my primary focus for the next few weeks. Keeping Hunter alive.¡±

    I then had a thought.

    ¡°Maybe¡­ yes, that could help. One moment please.¡±

    I composed a message to Warden.

    <Is it permissible by your objectives to supervise Hunter during his first attempts in cyberspace?>

    The answer came pretty quick.

    <Yes, it is possible. What level of supervision should I provide?>

    <Keep him safe, but leave him to make his own mistakes. Don¡¯t show him that you watch over him. Try to steer him away from anything with black ice or HKs. Hide his tracks if he goes somewhere they have the reputation of aggressive reaction.>

    <I understand. I assume that if he goes beyond the scope I am to contact you?>

    <Yes, I think that would be the best.>

    With that, I turned my attention back to Michael.

    ¡°Sorry, I had an idea that might actually save Hunter¡¯s life, and me quite a bit of headache.¡±

    Hunter lifted his eyebrow again.

    ¡°Oh¡­ is that so? Can you tell me what idea that was?¡±

    ¡°Oh, that is simple. I sicced Warden onto him. She will keep an eye on him.¡±

    ¡°And it would be better not to tell him that, right?¡±

    ¡°We can tell him when he changes over to his second or third board. That is the point we usually tell the neophytes about what is going on anyway. At that point, they have the crazy out of their system and are settled enough that the knowledge will not destroy them.¡±

    Michael just shrugged his shoulders.

    ¡°Hm, if you say so. You are the expert here. But one question, if it is so dangerous for the Jack to know about it, why did you tell me?¡±

    ¡°Huh? You are no Jack. You have a jack, but, for the first time since World War 3 that does not make you a Jack. You don¡¯t plan on doing any combat dives. Even if you get the idea in half a year, by then the damage is out of your system.

    The problem that Jacks have is that they more or less start immediately and develop their style, their habits, and their problems from the beginning.

    Before the great war, it was shown that if they get used to the jack for a few months before becoming Jacks, they are fine.

    But with CRS, nobody gets a jack without wanting to become a Jack. I expect that to change in the future, but for now, it is still true.¡±

    ¡°That is¡­ much more complex than I thought. But fine. While Hunter is baking, we can talk about the factory.¡±

    ¡°Yes, that is fine. I have to remain in the room, to be able to react in time, but we can sit at the table and talk.¡±

    After we sat down, Michael opened the discussion:

    ¡°Now, I have a basic idea of what we will produce, but not about the scope. Any idea how¡­ big it will become?¡±

    I tilted my head, thinking for a moment.

    ¡°Before the great war, more than 90% of the population in the developed and the developing world had a jack. It¡­ well it got to the point that it was considered a basic necessity and a right to have one.

    I don¡¯t see a reason why it wouldn¡¯t do so again. Sure, the majority of the common folk won¡¯t be able to afford a basic jack at the actual prices, much less the adaption, but these prices will come down massively.

    At the height of their production, a basic jack did cost less than an average com, and I would suspect that is the ballpark we can get to.

    The adaptation is actually pretty cheap, a couple of bucks, but at the moment I take money for the newness of it. We can make it $5 and have a 150% profit margin.

    So I would say, a fully adapted basic jack produced with the economy of scale would cost no more than $500 to $600 in retail and we would make half of that as profit.¡±

    The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

    Michael¡¯s eyes opened wide in surprise.

    ¡°$600? Seriously? That cheap? Fuck, that means we will get half the world population as customers at one point or another. Shit, everybody but the poorest will be able to afford that.¡±

    ¡°It gets worse. When we open up cyberspace for the ¡®unwashed masses¡¯ the software companies will see a massive increase in their userbase. If history is to be believed, they will take measures to make it affordable for all but the bottom rung of the people. They will negotiate sponsorship deals with the undeveloped countries.

    They were well in the process of doing that when WW3 broke out.

    So at that price, we should estimate something around 90% of humanity getting a jack sooner or later.

    Also, that is only of the basic jack.

    I would place the low bandwidth jack at around $2k, the mid-bandwidth at $10k, the high bandwidth at $200k, and the ultra-bandwidth at $1 million.¡±

    ¡°Hm, why that much?¡±

    ¡°Exclusivity. The basic jack is for the scrubs. It works and provides them incredible utility, but it is as the name says basic.

    The low jack on the other hand is for the average working stiff. Remember that it will keep until he gets a better one. So it is a once-in-a-lifetime purchase. Of course, we will make around $1500 in profit with a retail price of $2k.

    That means on the other hand we can provide it to wholesalers and corporations for $1k, and still make $500 profit and they can announce how much they sell it under the MSRP. Everybody wins.

    The mid on the other hand is for those who want to have something better and pay for it. The ones that buy the bigger TV just to have it. The flashy car. It is a status symbol.

    Profit here is around $8k if we sell it for $10k. Again, we can now offer a serious rebate to selected customers to advertise.

    The high and the ultra on the other hand move into the range of luxury. With the appropriate price increase.

    We will set up the other cyberware accordingly.

    We might even design and sell a specialized gaming- and productivity-console. Something that gives the high and ultra users an exclusive device to game on or for office work so that they can make full use of the maximal compression. We then can partner with a gaming company to make an exclusive VR game that is too much for basic, low or mid jacks. I think that is where the money will be, at least in the beginning. Over time it will be the mass of basics or lows, but starting out we go with the exclusivity.¡±

    Michael nodded.

    ¡°That is¡­ better thought out than I had expected. I expected to have to convince you to make premium products for the start-up. Are you sure you need me?¡±

    I had to snort.

    ¡°Oh please, that was the easy part. It is simple logic. While I have enough money to grow the business slowly, we need to make an impact quickly or some big corp ¡®takes over for the betterment of all¡¯. We all know how it works.

    But what I need you for is the actual execution of the idea. You can work with people. I¡­ it is a fight with me. I often don¡¯t understand their more subtle communications. I¡­ I am just not good with people.

    You will have to confer with the government saboteurs and thieves, you will have to placard the other corps, and you will have to juggle the employees.

    Nothing of that is something I am good at, and I surely don¡¯t enjoy it.¡±

    He nodded again.

    ¡°Yeah, I get it. Well, not really, I enjoy the wheeling and dealing and have difficulties understanding why others don¡¯t but on an abstract level, I understand you.¡±

    He leaned back in his chair.

    ¡°But back to the topic, what you are saying is that we should plan for expansion right from the beginning, right? If we are to provide cyberware for the majority of humanity, we won¡¯t get away with a measly little manufactory in a warehouse.¡±

    He rubbed his chin for a moment.

    ¡°You know, I think the best idea would be to buy up a couple of the more desolate blocks here in Queens, tear down some of the buildings, and then build something there.

    We can relocate the few inhabitants, and offer them jobs on the assembly lines.¡±

    ¡°I thought we would go without many workers at all. Most of it is cleanroom tech anyway. And the few steps that need a hand can be done with bots.¡±

    He frowned at me.

    ¡°I thought one of the goals was to provide jobs for the people here in Queens?¡±

    I looked at him confused.

    ¡°It is? That is the first I hear about that.¡±

    He groaned.

    ¡°That is typical dad. Not just one or even two birds with one stone. Are you strictly opposed to using people as workers?¡±

    I had to sigh.

    ¡°Yes and no. For one, humans are much more unreliable than bots. For the other, I categorically refuse to have wage slaves. So any humans will be significantly more expensive.¡±

    ¡°Yes, but you also said that even in the basic jack we will get a profit of 50%. We can afford to have a smaller margin and pay the humans better.¡±

    I set up to argue with him, but closed my mouth for a moment and thought about it a bit more.

    ¡°You know, the reason why I never even imagined having human workers is that¡­ well I had expected to do your job, and I hate to all the piddling work with strangers. But¡­ well, it is your headache, so you decide.

    You are right that the margins are ample enough for us to use humans. So, the ball is in your court.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I will think about it. What about the size? A couple of blocks ok?¡±

    ¡°How much do the blocks cost?¡±

    He took out his come, began typing, before grinning at me sheepishly.

    ¡°Wow, that is something to get used to.¡±

    With that he put the com aside and closed his eyes, concentrating.

    ¡°The area I have in mind is¡­ well it was the territories of a couple of the street gangs that were wiped out in the recent unpleasantness.

    They are dilapidated, run-down, and in general, stand only because nobody has invested the money to tear them down yet. You can get a block of them for around $2 million at the moment.¡±

    ¡°$2 million? Heck, this building, which is not a full block had an estimated worth of $4.5 million. How come a whole block is that cheap?¡±

    ¡°Because at the moment it is just a roughly rectangular array of ruins. Not a single building is younger than the civil war.

    There is an average of three inhabitants per block. And those are squatters.

    They are owned by the city, and the city wants to get rid of them and get taxes again.

    This building here was inhabited and in relatively good repair.¡±

    I had to lift my eyebrow at the last part.

    ¡°Good repair? Do you have any idea how badly maintained this building was?¡±

    ¡°Compared to those blocks? Yeah, good repair.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Well, if you say so. And how many of those blocks are available?¡±

    ¡°Let me just look¡­ ah yes, we have the choice of nearly 300 blocks. I am sure we will find something.¡±

    I took a moment to think over the possibilities.

    ¡°Are there¡­ yes, are there any 10 by 10 block areas available?¡±

    Michael coughed harshly.

    ¡°100 blocks? You want to¡­ fuck why that many?¡±

    ¡°Cyberware is just the beginning. I have¡­ other projects simmering. We can expect to grow rapidly in the future.

    And as I see the big corps, they would delight in hemming us in, buying up everything around us so that we have to pay premium prices for the land to expand.

    If we start out with 100 blocks, it will be so much harder to do that until we are in a position where they can¡¯t afford to antagonize us any longer.¡±

    He snorted.

    ¡°Fuck, you don¡¯t think small do you?¡±

    ¡°Michael, think about it. The jacks alone will warrant something the size of a block. All the other stuff I already offer will need a second one.

    I haven¡¯t even begun to develop other cyberware like cyberlimbs, well ones better than what a biological limb would be.

    Or the other cybernetics. We can assume that these alone will take up four to five blocks. And we are now already at seven blocks, and we¡¯ve just started.

    When I have corp anyway I can sell my boards through them, and the specialized consoles I mentioned. Again, I would guess that eventually will take over a block.

    We need a big fusactor to power it all. We should plan from the beginning to have central warehousing and a central material refinery. Those will, in time, take up multiple blocks.

    And we are already at something around 15 to 20 blocks.

    And no clue what I come up next with.

    How about the auto-surgeon. At the moment it costs me around $70k to make one. Because I use the expensive industrial fabber for it. With a specialized production facility, we can make them for something around $30k. At a sale price of $500k, they will still be a steal. All in all, I see it growing beyond 100 blocks in around 10 years.¡±

    He slumped down.

    ¡°Oh, wow. I¡­ shit, I haven¡¯t appreciated the enormity of the job. That is¡­ breathtaking.¡±

    He shook his head.

    ¡°What a rush. So you plan to go up to AA?¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t be surprised if it would go up to AAA sometime in the distant future.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, dream on.¡±

    ¡°No, really. We are in the process of cornering the cyberware market. We will be a viable competition to Kawamoto in cybersecurity. We will be able to intrude into Panaceas market in healthcare with the auto-surgeon, and if I manage to finish that one project I have to slog through, we will be able to offer a veritable auto-doc.

    And I have other ideas, other projects. So yeah, AAA will be a bit of a stretch but not outside of our possibilities.¡±

    ¡°You are serious. Shit! That¡­ sorry, but I have to wrap my head around that.¡±

    ¡°Take your time. It will be years, probably decades, before we can challenge the triple-a group, but it is a distinct possibility.¡±

    Michael closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths.

    ¡°Ok, I¡¯m fine. But you can somebody a headrush for sure.¡±

    He shook his head.

    ¡°Well, let¡¯s get back to business. You talked about a big fusactor. Don¡¯t you want to go with a couple of smaller, distributed ones for redundancy?¡±

    ¡°We can have a few for emergencies, but I wanted the majority of the power to come from a Simpson & Proctor Excelsior 2800.¡±

    His eyes widened again.

    ¡°Shit, that thing will cost more than all the blocks together. Are you sure?¡±

    ¡°Yes, as much as I don¡¯t want to buy something from Vandermeer, Simpson & Proctor is the best, and the Excelsior line is the absolute top you can get. And the 2.8 terawatts might be excessive in the beginning, but it will become adequate quick enough. Until then we can sell the excess power to the surrounding territories. But sooner or later we will one terawatt for the refinery alone. Those big gravity coils are suckers for energy.¡±

    ¡°Ok, you are right from that perspective. But¡­ shit I just looked it up, these things cost over a billion bucks.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I know, but Vandermeer guarantees that they run for 50 years without any maintenance. They have so much redundancy that the only way to stop them is to either destroy every single fuel feed line or fly a big cargo ship into them, fully loaded with explosives.

    Well, there are a couple of other options, but I can nix those quite easily once we have it here. And to answer your next question, yes I can afford it.¡±

    He shook his head again.

    ¡°Well, you¡¯re the boss. Now, we should begin thinking about a name. I doubt you want to call it DuClare industries or something like that.¡±

    I couldn¡¯t help myself, I had to laugh at that.

    ¡°Oh yes, you are right, that name won¡¯t exist. If I get my way, my name will never be associated with the corp.

    But there is no need to begin thinking of a name. I¡¯ve done that already.

    We will call it Enki.¡±

    I smirked when I saw his puzzled look.

    ¡°Enki? What kind of name is that?¡±

    ¡°Enki was the Sumerian god of knowledge, wisdom, creation, and crafting. It is said that he invented agriculture and writing.

    And as a Sumerian god, he was the first civilized god of knowledge. All the others are only cheap knockoffs. So we go old school. Really old school.¡±

 75: On the job

    Further planning was hindered by us not yet knowing where exactly our facility would be located.

    We could not even ascertain how much of what industrial machines we would need, much less how much room they would take up.

    Sure, I insisted that we use good materials, at least 30 cm of carbon-weave plascrete, with good thermal insulation.

    Yes, that was somewhat more expensive than plain plascrete, and significantly so compared to concrete, but it provided more than twice the toughness than the plascrete and nearly 100 times that of reinforced concrete.

    For the rest, I would have to look into what machinery I would need before we could plan the assembly lines, and in consequence the buildings. Yes, the building for the fusactor was already a known variable, but that was all.

    That was the reason that when Hunter got out of the auto-surgeon, Michael prepared to leave. I gave him the two office consoles I had created for him and his father before he left.

    Sadly, the consoles had the Cirrium K8 instead of the Hyperion. Ben had insisted that nobody gets access to a Chimaera or a Hyperion, or anything else that would need the NADA or a Q-link. That did of course not mean that I had not designed a variant with a Hyperion. Or better, a few variants, with multiple levels of Hyperions.

    After all, when jacks became commonplace people would need strong consoles, so why not prepare for it? And yes, I also designed a rudimentary game console. I would have to adapt the OS for it, but that had time.

    I also had an Eminence KE CR 15 clone for Hunter to play with. As promised, nothing spectacular, just enough to get his feet wet. He still accepted it grudgingly, apparently not yet accepting that he would get nothing better until he could afford it.

    Heck, a trained chimp would be able to afford something better within a month. But¡­ well, he would learn, or he would fry.

    Shortly after they left, a midsized black man who introduced himself as Argo arrived. The implantation process was quick and painless, and I was another $35 million richer.

    And Argo was happy. He slobbered over Precious and tried, unsuccessfully I might add, to convince me to make him an Mk IV. My counter-offer was to sell him the plans for the Mk. IV so he could build it himself. Or I would sell him the bare-bones version.

    And yes, I was fully aware that he lacked the technical ability to tailor his own board. But when I explained that I simply did not have the time to do the work right now.

    And unlike Hunter, Argo took it in stride. Yes, he would have loved to get an Mk. IV, but he accepted that it was just not possible right now.

    After he left as well, I returned to looking into the various stimulants for the cell division. I had the interesting idea that it would also be useful for an emergency medkit. Something to keep the injured person alive, that would be taken over by the oxygen and nutrient transporting nanites, something that directed the growth-accelerating nanites to the injured place.

    Maybe try to repair the telomeres? Making it so that that position would not age before its time?

    Whatever, I would have to look into it when I had identified the optimal growth accelerator. And it would only work, reliable, with some control system in place. Either an auto-surgeon or an implant.

    But that had time, as I was still going over the performance values of the various stimulants. The problem here was to differentiate between the performance of the ATP production, which depended heavily on nutrients and oxygen being available, and the stimulant itself. And I had at least another batch of growth accelerators to test.

    It was, therefore unsurprising that I had barely scratched the surface when dinner-time arrived. We still had enough stew for a couple of days, and, without any prompting, we all sat together to eat.

    It was, frankly, nice. I honestly couldn¡¯t say if it was like a family, I¡¯ve never experienced that after all, but it was just nice.

    It had become standard to talk only about unimportant things during the meal. I couldn¡¯t tell why, or even who started it, but as it made it easier to enjoy the good food, I was alright with it.

    That left the other new convention, that we talked about more important matters after dinner.

    Usually, this was a more brief discussion, but not that day.

    Natalie opened it up:

    ¡°Hey guys, I have news. I¡¯ve found a job for us.¡±

    I was, at that point, mildly interested but nothing big.

    Not the others. Darren instantly became thoughtful, Mark and Kate grinned in maniacal glee, and Christine leaned forward in clear interest.

    Natalie on the other hand continued:

    ¡°As most of you know, I have contacted a few of the fixers here in NYC. Most are not that interested yet, we lack a bit of reputation for now. But one of them gave us a small job to prove our worth.

    Awadah Diouri needs to have a corpo-asshole put into his place.

    What we have is a mid-level office drone from Sandoval, named Christopher Yang, who has developed the uncomely habit to rough up the hookers he frequents. He put three into the hospital, and two actually into the morgue.

    If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.

    As you can imagine, NYPD is not that interested to hold him responsible.

    The pimps on the other hand are not too keen on driving away such a well-paying customer.

    So the whores have pooled their resources to¡­ let¡¯s say make him stop. Permanently. We will get 20k for that. Not much but I think the valuable thing is the foot in the door here.¡±

    Darren nodded slowly.

    ¡°Sounds interesting. What do we know? Does he have a biomon? PEES contract?¡±

    ¡°Yes and yes.¡±

    Of course he had both. Sandoval might ¡®only¡¯ be a class B corp, but PEES contracts and biomonitors were cheap.

    Mark then grimaced.

    ¡°That is¡­ not good. If we geek him, the pigs will be on us as white on rice in no time. And with the biomon, they¡¯ll know almost instantly. And with PEES, we will have to destroy the brain.

    That will be messy.¡±

    Natalie smiled.

    ¡°Yup, that would be the case. If the asshole did not have the bad habit of turning his biomon off when he¡­ get¡¯s his jollies. He will have a couple of bodyguards. Even a mid-level corp-rat has to be protected after all. But he will be out of contact tomorrow evening from 7 pm to 11 pm.¡±

    Darren rubbed his chin.

    ¡°Bodyguards? That could be tricky. Do we know how they are equipped?¡±

    ¡°Standard low-profile body armor, a Ralcon Tempura in 5.6mm FNP each, com system and so on. Nothing out of the norm. Shieldwall standard equipment and training.¡±

    Shieldwall was another clas B corp, specialized in the protection of facilities and personnel. That did not mean that they were above cracking a few skulls if nobody was looking. And as other corps were utterly uninterested in things like that, barely anybody was in the position of looking.

    Honestly, I would prefer even Mob-enforcers to those thugs. Sure, the worst scum of the street gangs was worse, but that was like saying that the ocean was wetter than the lake.

    In other words, it would be no great loss if two Shieldwall-thugs bought the farm.

    The problem here was that they usually had a connection to their headquarters.

    It was clear that Darren thought along the same lines.

    ¡°The body cams will be a problem. We will have to be very careful.¡±

    I had to chuckle.

    ¡°Or, and that is just a wild idea, we could use a cyber attack to¡­ hamper the reaction time. Most of you, if you wear masks it will be had to identify you. Just Kate¡­ and Mark, you will need to hide your arm.¡±

    Darren and Natalie turned their attention to me.

    ¡°You think you can shut down the connection?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I can¡¯t guarantee it, but the chance is pretty good. It depends on which facility they are connected to. If it is one of their better-protected ones, well, I will get into it but it is questionable that I manage it by tomorrow evening.¡±

    Natalie consulted the tablet she had laying in front of her.

    ¡°They are based¡­ one moment, ah yes, there, the corner of 16<sup>th</sup> Avenue and 40<sup>th</sup> street.¡±

    I grimaced.

    ¡°You know I have no clue what that means, do you? I need to know what importance that base has.¡±

    <16<sup>th</sup> and 40<sup>th</sup> is a third-tier facility. It has not been significantly upgraded since 2234. I can¡¯t ascertain the quality of their software, but their hardware is limited.>

    At the same time Warden gave me the information she had gleaned from the Matrix, Natalie answered me:

    ¡°It is a mostly insignificant outpost. They have not even a whole floor in the building.¡±

    ¡°Ok, that should be doable. I¡¯ll look into it tonight.¡±

    Darren nodded.

    ¡°Ok, that should help us immensely. Do we know where he will be exactly tomorrow evening?¡±

    ¡°He usually visits the 83<sup>rd</sup> around Manton street, 139<sup>th</sup>, and 141<sup>st</sup>. I have already found a good position for overwatch. We have to adapt where we strike to where exactly he will be.¡±

    I cleared my throat.

    ¡°You know that Warden can very quickly create a simulation of that area, do you? You could train for it this evening and a large part of tomorrow.¡±

    Christine giggled.

    ¡°You know, I¡¯ve completely forgotten about that. Shit, that is actually nice. We don¡¯t have to scout out the location and generate attention.¡±

    <Do you want me to create the simulation?>

    <Yes, do it, please.>

    Mark chuckled.

    ¡°Ok, so Nats is overwatch, as usual, Dar, I assume that you¡¯ll hide Kate?¡±

    Darren nodded, and Mark continued:

    ¡°I don¡¯t think we need two snipers, but I would suggest that Christine is the spotter this time. I can get close with an assault rifle as backup in case there is trouble. Kate and Darren will take out the guards while Nats takes out the asshole. How do we get away from it?¡±

    Christine tilted her head, and answered:

    ¡°I am sure I can steal a van.¡±

    I frowned

    ¡°But we already have a van. Why not use that?¡±

    The others except for Mia and Jacky all snorted, and Ryan answered me chuckling:

    ¡°They need a vehicle that is not connected to any of you. You especially. And the van is yours.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°So what? I can change the registry in the DMV.¡±

    ¡°I¡¯m sure you can. But if something goes wrong they don¡¯t want any chance of it pointing towards you.¡±

    I can¡¯t say that I understood the rationale, after all, if I scrubbed the database there would be nothing that could lead them to us, but apparently, all of them agreed, so I shrugged.

    ¡°If you say so.¡±

    The mercs then began discussing the finer details of their job. I tried to follow them but I had frankly no clue about what exactly they were doing, and so my attention wandered for a bit.

    Jacky looked equally confused as I felt but listened with clear interest, but Mia¡­ well she looked displeased, and she threw a couple of dirty looks towards Justin, Ryan, and me.

    Finally, after around 20 minutes the planning session was finished. I had lost the point way earlier, but I was not concerned about that. After all, I was not a merc and I would not be directly involved in the op.

    But when they declared the planning finished, Mia exploded:

    ¡°You let them get away with it?¡±

    All of us were mightily confused, and Mark was the one that voiced it:

    ¡°Let who get away with what?¡±

    ¡°Ryan, Justin, and Veronica.¡±

    The venom when she said my alias resonated through me. What had I done to her to get her that angry? In my confusion, I did not react.

    Darren on the other hand reacted:

    ¡°What is with them?¡±

    ¡°You all take this insane risk, and those three will sit safe and protected here. That is so unfair. Why don¡¯t they help you?¡±

    Kate growled:

    ¡°This is not their mission. Ryan and Justin are Walker¡¯s men. They are not part of our little band. And Veronica, first she does help us. If she would not stop the connection to Shieldwall this would be much harder. And second, if you think she should come with us, why don¡¯t you?¡±

    Mia was not deterred though:

    ¡°Because unlike me, she is a criminal like you. So why can she sit here in the warmth while you risk your lives, huh?¡±

    I had to shake my head.

    ¡°Because I am a hacker, not a shooter. They don¡¯t want me along with the mission. I would not be an asset, I would be a liability. I can barely shoot, I have no armor, and I have no clue about how to behave on such a mission. Instead of me helping them, they would use their limited attention to keep me alive.¡±

    When none of us made any sign of agreeing with her, she harumphed pointedly, crossed her arms in front of her, and visibly pouted.

    Seriously, she got onto my nerves more and more. But with nothing else to talk about we stood up and began to do our work.

 76: Mousetrap

    I was happy to change over to Glory again. Isn¡¯t it funny how fast we get used to something better?

    Here we had Precious, and a month ago, she was the most powerful cyber board on the planet, and, well, my precious.

    The one possession I valued the most. And now I had Glory, and Precious was not so precious anymore.

    I did not spend much time reminiscing about that though, at least not at that time. Instead, I prepared the cyber chair I had inherited from the tech-head, thinking that this thing was functional but not quite what I was used to. The one I had built for myself in Seattle was significantly better at keeping the muscles from aching.

    And I had not even made a cyber suit that would fit me. Sure, so far I had only relatively short sessions in cyberspace, a day at most, but still, it was something that I would have to rectify soon.

    And so I started my combat dive, and after the obligatory playtime, I made my way through the matrix via a bridge through the cluster. That reminded me that I would have to find a way to get new bridges established.

    Brooklyn¡¯s matrix presence was no different from the other parts of NYC that I had already visited.

    Large amounts of bling, glitter, and decay if you knew where to look. When I arrived at the Shieldwall facility.

    It was not hard to identify, as it was a cooky cutter corp data structure. A Jupiter Intelligence design if I was right.

    Yes, it had some broad strokes of corporate identity, but again it was run-of-the-mill.

    If you saw one of the B-class corp net presences, you saw them all.

    Jupiter was a descent A-class computer corp. Essentially they existed because Burgmeister, Dalgon, and Kawamoto needed some small fry that they could point towards to avoid monopoly allegations.

    Yes, everybody knew it was fiction, and everybody knew that the tiple-As did not care an iota about what the public thought, but the politicians did care about public opinion and demanded the fig leaf from their corporate overlords.

    And so a couple of dozen local and regional players were allowed to operate.

    Still, A-class cyber security had the nasty habit of surprising the unwary jack. Anybody halfway sane would be very conscientious if they made a combat dive at a Burgmeister, Dalgon, or Kawamoto system.

    Those were downright evil. But now and then, the bank warmers could get something right, and you really don¡¯t want to be the jack that realizes that while the unexpected ICE fries their brain.

    So, while I activated my stealth utility I released my sniffers. The reaction was not something I did not expect but on a completely different level from Berardino¡¯s data compound, and the less was said about Walker¡¯s excuse of cybersecurity, the better.

    Yes, the sniffers were nearly as stealthy as my avatar, but not quite, and within a couple of seconds the activity monitor began to ramp up. And I had gotten so spoiled by the lousy security I had encountered here.

    Fine, Max¡¯s security was only easy because it was my system he used, but still, this was the first time since coming to NYC that I had to actually work for it.

    And so I immediately switched the sniffers into passive, hoping that that was enough for me to identify the ICE that Shieldwall was running. Sadly I was disappointed in that. Yes, the activity monitor was distinctive.

    But it had been customized so that I could not identify its build. Virtually rubbing my chin, I loaded all the data I had on Jupiter¡¯s ICE models.

    The first thing I noticed was that anything from this decade needed some specialized, i.e. proprietary and expensive, hardware.

    Typical behavior. Cybersecurity corporations integrated some customized, and patented, IC in their design that the most modern software ¡®absolutely needed to function¡¯. Or, as we from the darker side of the web called it, they needed a token that allowed the software to work.

    I could also surmise that they had used the newest software suite when they updated the hardware the last time.

    After all, there were only two reasons to update the hardware. Either it was physically damaged, or the customer wanted the newest software.

    And usually, the older software did not accept the token from the new hardware.

    That made the choices one of three suites.

    Yes, whoever ordered the system might have mixed and matched, but honestly, that was unlikely. Three suites, between four and six versions of each. 15 options in all.

    I placed the versions that had already been updated in 34 as low probability, the same with the newest versions. This was, as Warden had told me, a tertiary facility. Those usually don¡¯t have that much important information, and as such were not updated all that often.

    All that meant that I placed my bets on one of three suites.

    The basic suite that they called Metis after the innermost Jupiter moon was essentially the bare bones of a security suite. Not quite consumer-grade, but not far from it. Geared mostly towards the Mom-and-Pop store or the small bar or such, I decided it was rather unlikely.

    Io, named after the first of the Galilean moons, was a much more likely possibility. It had not only a firewall and an anti-virus like Metis, but it also had barrier ICE, hunter ICE, and watcher ICE. It would not have any hunter-killer ICE, however. It was geared towards midsized operations and lesser important outposts.

    The third option was Leda, and you guessed it, it was named after a Jupiter moon as well. The first of the Himalia group.

    This was the big one of course. Leda had everything but the kitchen sink, which was optional. It did also cost more than four times what Io did cost.

    I quickly eliminated Metis. It was extremely unlikely that any corp would use that suite, and even if they did, a quick analysis showed that it was irrelevant. Anything I would use against Io or Leda would work just as fine against Metis, if not better.

    That left two options, Io and Leda. I knew enough to say that I probably had to do with Io, but in my line of work, probably is a very powerful, and very dangerous word.

    If I was wrong¡­ well in the best case it would just become a much harder job. More severe consequences were more likely though.

    The most likely outcome would be that I triggered some tripwire and scuttled the job for the others. That was by the way the most likely outcome if I choose Leda and it was Io.

    The worst outcome would leave me fried.

    Accordingly, I read deeper into what I had about the two suites. It was a bit unfortunate that I had not yet encountered Jupiter-tech. Not surprisingly as they were one of the local providers in the USA, and nobody hired an internationally accredited hacker to break through something like that.

    But that left me with a bit of a disadvantage right now. Yes, I had the data on the suites. Heck, I had the source code of the suites, that was how we in the Abyss knew that the need for new hardware was a simple ¡®is chip x present¡¯-query, but that did not mean I knew how it behaved.

    Fortunately, I was using Glory, and at 240:1 I had quite a bit of virtual time to learn, and I had Warden helping me with that.

    Finally, after roughly 25 hours, of virtual time, fortunately, I had not only a way to discern between Io and Leda, but a way to beat the respective activity monitor as well.

    The adaptation of my ghosts to identify the model was done in virtually no time, literally and figuratively in this case.

    The barely perceptible apparitions drifted through the barrier ICE and placed distributed themselves around the system, just before the sniffers I had already launched activated once more for a few milliseconds.

    Yes, it riled the security system back up, but it was so short-lived that it was manageable, and the reaction gave my ghosts desperately needed data on what system I had to do it with exactly.

    A short analysis of the reaction pattern showed me that I had been right in my assumption that they had gone with Io.

    With the adaptation of my pattern simulator, I could now slowly move into the structure. Naturally, I adapted my sniffers in the same way, and let them run, carefully, through the network.

    No, I did not expect some valuable secret or anything of great worth at all. But it was good practice to vacuum all the data in reach if one was to enter any corporation system.

    The need to keep it below the alarm threshold made it a bit slower than usual, but at that time I had yet to gain full access to the system and could give neither myself nor my bots increased privileges.

    I would persevere though. This was not the first time I had to sneak into a system. It was unusual that I could not afford any alert, but still, nothing I hadn¡¯t done before, and this time I had Warden supervise the bots, which did speed it up quite a bit.

    The outer layer of the system contained semi-public information and the interface systems between the building and the matrix. It was nothing where a hacker could do much damage, and I spent only as much time in there to find the gateway to the deeper layers.

    And as expected, I found the external firewall. The files I had on the Jupiter technology were spot on, and I was quickly able to find an open port to go through.

    In the second layer, it got a bit more interesting. Here, I found the personnel files of the clerical staff, the low-level thugs, and the low-level intranet. Along with a gaggle of hunter-ICE. It took the form of a night-guard-cutout. Very¡­ boring. Nothing wrong with that, considering that there are not all too many jacks or queens in NYC who could be better defended against with more creative designs.

    The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

    And yes, from the purely technical point of view what representation some ICE projected into cyberspace should not matter, if the underlying technology was capable enough. But we had the subconscious mind of the hacker putting its hat into the ring again.

    If the ICE did not impress the jack or queen, their utilities worked so much better, that it was almost comically. On the other hand, if the ICE made the hacker subconsciously think it is something they have problems with, they will have problems. Honestly, I¡¯ve never encountered a Burgmeister, Dalgon, or Kawamoto system where the hunter ICE was something so uninspired.

    What I did not find, though, was the gateway to the next layer. I grew more and more frustrated while I searched through the inconsequential drivel of employees. It just wasn¡¯t there.

    A few hours later, I gave up and snuck out again, into the first layer. It was obvious that I had missed something, but I was pretty sure it was not in the second layer.

    So unless Shieldwall had two independent networks with separate matrix access, it had to be in the first layer.

    It was not unusual to find distinct subnets behind the second layer, the first firewall.

    It was unusual that the subnets branched off the first layer. But that was where I found three additional, camouflaged gateways. Three to be exact. I had become a bit impatient by now. After all, I had wasted nearly two virtual days already, with nothing to show for it except three gateways that somebody did not want to be found.

    And now I had to play the old game of door one, door two, or door three. Just that I had no handy host who would show me the right answer.

    That left me with simply trying to find the right answer, and of course, wasting even more time. It couldn¡¯t be helped, I had to find the system administration to give myself the credentials necessary to alter the communication protocol.

    After that, I had to find the communication system, to not waste any time when the others started their job.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, this was nothing that I had not done dozens of times, but usually, when somebody hired Spectre, they had a pretty good idea of what they wanted, where they wanted it, and that such things took time.

    In other words, usually, a job like this would begin with a thorough casing of the joint, looking into people working there, looking for weak points, investigating who had the necessary credentials, and trying to get them from them.

    And yes, most Abyss-dwellers had done a cold infiltration like this at one point or another, and I was no exception but that did not mean I liked it.

    The first of the gateways led me straight to the communications system. Good to know where to find it when I was ready to use it.

    Well, it was not the communications per se, it was the technical department. It would give me access to their vehicle park, their fusactor, their algae tank, their shooting range, their workshop, and their armory.

    All useful things to get access to, but until I got the privileges for it, I couldn¡¯t access anything here, without triggering an alarm. And that was without taking the hunter ICE into account.

    The second gateway led me to the systems of the mid-level execs that managed this branch, and their communication to the corp-brass. Again, interesting, and again, if I would not need to avoid any signs of my passing I would probably have snooped around for a bit.

    As it was, I placed a few watchdogs and moved on to the third gateway.

    From the getgo, it was clear that this was where I needed to go. Instead of security by obscurity, this gateway had real barrier ICE.

    Yes, it was only the equivalent of a toll bar, and it was fairly easy to circumvent, a.k.a. finding the open ports and sneaking through, but they also had a couple of watchdogs in it.

    Again whoever set up this system had created an utterly unimaginative avatar for them. Just a couple of guards with guard dogs. From experience, I knew that I had to turn their attention somewhere else, or my stealth might get compromised.

    For that, I launched a noisemaker, a basic bot that simulated abnormal activity in one of the nodes. Higher quality systems would not have the watchdogs on the firewall react to something like that, but Io was not a higher quality system. It was barely mediocre and lacked the resources for enough watchdogs to not fall for this trick.

    If it had been a better system I would have resorted to some white noise, reminiscent of a voltage spike induced fault, into one of the closed ports.

    Unusual enough that it had to be investigated, and such diverting the attention of the watchdog enough for my subconscious to let me sneak by, but not more than a single line entry in the log.

    Fortunately, I could get away with the easier method that left no lines in the log. It was unlikely that it would make a difference, but in this situation, it was better to be safe than sorry.

    Once I was past the barrier ICE I began to slowly investigate the subnet. It was, as expected the subnet of the sys-admin. There were of course the various directories and policies found in any system with more than a handful of users.

    Nothing special, in other words.

    I hit a bit of luck when I found out that it all ran on an Envision Server 37 OS. Ralcon had gone the same way that had been pioneered by Microsoft long before the great war and built an easy-to-use, relatively affordable standard operating system, with an accompanying office suite and all the utilities around them. It was their main cash cow.

    But like Microsoft and their Windows, Ralcon and their Envision pandered mostly to the work computer market. Cheap, low-effort machines, spit out by the thousands. As such, they did not put much work into making their system secure. They couldn¡¯t really as their main selling point was the ease of use.

    And with the server software being 11 years old, it had quite a few known exploits. Yes, officially Ralcon still supported it with security patches. But they had stopped serious work on it six years ago.

    That made it possible for me to give myself superuser privileges. If I had to break into the Io database directly, I would have had bigger problems. It would not have stopped me, but it would have taken me longer.

    As it was, as a superuser I had direct access and could read out the database credentials. Which in turn enabled me to give myself full hidden access to the whole system in this Shieldwall branch. Many people think it should be harder. And in a way they are right. It could be significantly harder. But for that, they needed to make the access more or less hardwired.

    As always, security and ease of use were on opposite sides on the scales. Sysadmins cost money. Corporations don¡¯t want to pay for every single third-tier branch having its own sysadmin. This meant that one sysadmin had to take care of several branches.

    With good security, this one sysadmin would have to travel to every single branch for any little burb the system has.

    Essentially, there is only one industry that has that good security, the banks. All the others make do with credentials and remote access, which opened the doors to somebody like me.

    The very first thing I did after getting full access was to install one of my rootkits that would give me access even if they somehow found my hidden account. Equally routine was to start downloading everything they had here. I mean, why not, when I am already here? Again it was unlikely that I would find anything really interesting, but it did cost me nothing, and Warden could sort through it just fine.

    With that done, I moved back to the comm system. Time to take a closer look here. I quickly found the standing orders for Yang''s guard detail.

    I was a bit surprised that they always send the same two guards with him. Usually, such jobs are rotated. But whatever, I did not know enough about that matter to really think about it.

    What did confuse me more was that they had a biomon each as well. Most corporations treated guards as ablative meat after all, not worth even a decent funeral if the fecal matter hits the fan.

    Even more confusing was that their comlinks and biomons linked them directly to a ready company of fully equipped and trained Shieldwall-soldiers. Not the thugs they usually employed but the real stuff, with heavy armor, heavy weapons, fully encrypted short-range com, and so on.

    To explain my confusion, one of those soldiers did cost enough to equip, train, and salary to pay for a dozen of the thugs. And here they were paid to sit on their behinds and be ready on a moment''s notice to jump into an assault skimmer and lay hell into somebody. The assault skimmer costing even more than the company, by the way.

    I simply could not see any sense in this arrangement. And when I looked into it some more I got another nasty surprise.

    For some arcane reason, the company subnet was protected by a hunter-killer. If I had stumbled into here without first securing the sysadmin access that could have been bad?. With Glory, it would have been unlikely to be really dangerous, at least for me, but it would almost certainly have blown the op for the others.

    As it was, it simply accepted my credentials and ignored me, except when I ordered it to erase my presence from its logs.

    What I did not get though was the reason for the company. There were some references to something called Perfect Pleasure and verbal orders, but that was it.

    Slightly frustrated I gave up, and simply inserted the little remote-controlled bomb that would shut down Yang¡¯s guards'' communication.

    And then I moved out of the system and started to surface.

    Back in my body, I stretched for a bit, but as a combat dive, it was not too bad. Only 13 minutes in real-time. I went to the others, who were in a VR session, and so I sighed, plopped myself onto one of the chairs, and connected to their VR. They sat around a table with the map data of the area displayed, talking about how the third try had been better than the second and the first.

    When I made another chair appear they all looked up.

    ¡°Hey red. Are you done?¡± Natalie smiled at me when she said that, so I think she was in a good mood.

    ¡°Yes. It took a bit longer than I would have liked, but it¡¯s done.¡±

    Mark frowned.

    ¡°What do you mean longer? It has been what, an hour?¡±

    Christine slapped him on the back of his head.

    ¡°You idiot, we are in VR. We are four times faster. So it was more like 15 minutes. But yeah, that was super fast, why do you say it was longer?¡±

    I snickered.

    ¡°You have 4:1 compression. I have 240:1. For me, it was more like a bit over two days. Of course, a big chunk of that was learning about the system they use. I did not have the pleasure before.¡±

    They all nodded at that.

    ¡°Ok, I would be a bit unhappy as well if I had spent that much time on something.¡± Mark leaned back in his chair before he continued.

    ¡°But you are done, and that¡¯s what is important. So it will be a few hours before they send somebody to investigate.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It might be shorter. And when they come investigating it will probably be the company of soldiers they have at the ready.¡±

    Natalie¡¯s eyes narrowed, and she looked at me intensely.

    ¡°Wait. Go back a few steps. Why shorter and what company of soldiers?¡±

    ¡°It might be shorter because the guards have biomons as well, and those are monitored in the facility. I can fool it for some time, but how long depends on how attentive they are. And I found out that it is directly linked to a ready company of Shieldwall-soldiers. I haven''t found out why they pay for a company of that.¡±

    They all looked at me, obviously displeased. For a few long moments they all were silent before Darren began cursing:

    ¡°Shit! Fucking perfect. I knew it was too easy. It¡¯s a fucking mousetrap. And we nearly walked into it. Ok, folks, back to the start.¡±

    Now I was seriously confused. What was a mousetrap? I mean, yes, I knew what a mousetrap was in normal daily use. But those things are at best a bit painful for a human, and only if they are inattentive. Nothing to curse up a storm about.

    ¡°Uh¡­ sorry, but what is a mousetrap? Why are you so angry about it?¡±

    They all chuckled, even without much mirth. Christine took mercy to me in the end:

    ¡°What we call a mousetrap is a situation where some bait, in this case, Yang, is dangled in a way that provokes a reaction. The ruthless fucking bastards that set it up want to have somebody kill Yang and the guards. So that they can come in with their company of soldiers and shoot everything to pieces.¡±

    Understanding dawned on me. ¡°Oh, so Sandoval wants to have a reason to shoot those streets to shreds? They have somebody kill the hookers just so they have a pretext to kill more of them? That is so¡­ messed up.¡±

    Natalie growled.

    ¡°You can say fucked up. We all think that. And we nearly walked into that trap.¡±

    ¡°Yes, but you would have gotten out of it. The hookers? Not so much.¡±

    Darren knocked onto the table.

    ¡°That is irrelevant now. We have to think about what we do now. Do you have an idea what this is about?¡±

    The last sentence was directed at me, but I could just shrug.

    ¡°Not really. They had a few references to verbal orders. Obviously, those are not in the system. Otherwise, there was a link to something called Perfect Pleasure. But that¡¯s all. Except that they have an assault skimmer ready for the soldiers.¡±

    ¡°FUCK!¡±

    We all stared at Christine when she burst out with that curse.

    ¡°I¡¯ve heard of Perfect Pleasure. It is a joint venture of Sandoval, Shieldwall, and a couple of other smaller corps. It is a small chain of whorehouses, but they use¡­ ¡° she shuddered visibly, ¡°sorry, they bought a few clone templates from Panacea, and use the clones as whores. Males and females. And they slap a slave collar onto them as soon as they are decanted.¡±

    Clones? Enslaved as soon as they come out of the tube?

    ¡°But¡­ how do the clones develop any personality?¡±

    Christine shook her head.

    ¡°They don¡¯t. That is the problem. They have a VI remote controlling them. And from what I heard, they show as much reaction as a bot. Needless to say, most people prefer to use real hookers.¡±

    Kate rubbed her chin.

    ¡°And they decided to use a mousetrap to have a pretext to thin out the ¡®natural¡¯ hookers? And some people wonder why so many view corporations as soulless evil.¡±

    Darren rapped onto the table again.

    ¡°Again, we have to think about what we do now. I mean, yeah, we can geek Yang, and be gone before anybody learns about it, but I am pretty sure the clients won¡¯t be happy about the results.

    So what now?¡±

    Natalie lifted her hand a bit.

    ¡°I will call Awadah and have him ask the client directly. If they still want the hit, we can do it. If they want it differently, we will have to look into it.¡±

    The others murmured their consent. I did just sit there and observe.

 77: Whos that man?

    Natalie sighed demonstratively and shrugged her shoulders.

    ¡°Whelp, I think we should table this session until I have talked with Awadah.¡±

    With that, she started the logout procedure, quickly followed by the others. I just surfaced again.

    I watched the others take off their diadems, being happy that I did not need those things anymore. Yes, they were useful even for a Jack, to connect to any computer without the need of the usually large, bulky board, but they were clumsy in other aspects.

    Particularly the resolution of the VR, visually, aurally, or for any other sense. Even a good VR felt like being underwater for me, so muted, diffuse, and muffled.

    A thoroughly creepy feeling, that as far as I knew not a single Jack enjoyed.

    That it took a bit shorter to shake off the disorientation from surfacing when one used a board was just a bonus.

    When she had regained her focus, Natalie pulled out her com and started a call.

    ¡°Hey, Awadah, Natalie Reynolds here¡­ Yes, I am well¡­ No, that is not¡­ No¡­ Awadah, let me talk for a moment, ok? Alright, I and my people have looked into the job, and there is a problem¡­ No, this is not about the money¡­ No, I knew what they were willing to pay, and we all accepted that¡­ No, the problem is deeper. No, how did you get that idea? No, the problem is that it is a fucking mousetrap.¡±

    She seemed pretty agitated, but mostly just rolled her eyes.

    ¡°Yes, I am sure¡­ wait a moment, I¡¯ll put you on speaker.¡±

    Now we all heard the answer from a man, with a very slight accent that I could not place:

    ¡°And what makes you think that is a mousetrap? I looked into it, and honestly, it is a milk-run.¡±

    ¡°It looks like a milk-run. The guards alone make it more complicated, but not by much. Thing is, we have met a Jack here in NYC and she helped us by hacking their com system.

    While doing that she found that Shieldwall has a company of soldiers, not guards, ready at a moment''s notice listening to those two thugs.¡±

    ¡°Wait a minute. Go back for a moment. A Jack, and she? You have met Firebird?¡±

    Considering that he stressed the ¡®she¡¯ so much I assumed that Firebird was Melody¡¯s handle.

    Natalie shrugged and looked at me pointedly, while she answered:

    ¡°No, not Firebird.¡± I frowned but nodded.

    ¡°Her handle is Seraphim.¡±

    From the com, we all heard a hard cough.

    ¡°Seraphim!?! You are telling me that Seraphim is here in New York? And you met her? Fuck, that is big news.¡±

    The others looked at me surprised, and I just shrugged.

    ¡°Yes, she is in New York, and we met her, and she jumped in to help us. But can we get back to the important part?¡±

    There was a moment of silence before Awadah answered: ¡°The important part? Oh, yes, the information. How reliable is it?¡±

    How reliable? As reliable as the data was in the Shieldwall system. Again Natalie looked at me, but this time I did not understand what she wanted from me.

    Finally, Darren softly touched me on the shoulder and said softly: ¡°We need to know how reliable the information is.¡±

    I, equally softly, answered: ¡°It is what I found in the system. I can not guarantee that it was not planted, but it looked legit. They had a fricking hunter-killer protecting that information. Unless they knew that it was me, or maybe Argo going in, that alone was severe overkill for a red herring.¡±

    Natalie nodded.

    ¡°I would say pretty reliable. According to Seraphim, the link was protected in a manner that it would have stopped anybody local but Argonaughty and her from finding it.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, that is¡­ ok, so they have a company of soldiers ready. And what? The job too risky for you?¡±

    ¡°Not for us, no. Remember, we learned about it because Seraphim has gone in and cut the link. We will be long gone before the soldiers will come knocking. But your clients won¡¯t be. They will still be there, and inviting targets.¡±

    ¡°Ok, that could be bad for them. And what now?¡±

    ¡°How about you inform them about the situation and ask them if they still want the hit to go through. And if they want to, if it has to happen tomorrow. We might find another way if we have enough time to look into it.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I¡¯ll ask them. But¡­ no, not important right now.¡±

    Mark exploded.

    ¡°What do you mean not important? Fuck man, we have to know that shit if we have to plan for it.¡±

    ¡°I assume you are one of Ms. Reynolds''s partners? And compared to the news that Seraphim is in NYC it is simply not important.¡±

    Not that that mollified Mark in the slightest.

    ¡°Seraphim? We are talking about a life-or-death situation and you are thinking that Seraphim is more important? She is not going anywhere. She will be here tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. So why the fuck is her being here such a big deal that it is ¡®not important¡¯ that some girls might be slaughtered tomorrow?¡±

    ¡°So what? A few whores dying? There are more of them. There is only one Seraphim. Do you have any idea who she is?¡±

    Oh wow, I decided then and there that I would not work together with Mr. Diouri if I could avoid it.

    Natalie managed in the meantime to get between Mark and the com.

    ¡°Yes, we know who she is. Probably better than you, as we actually know her. And honestly, I find your lack of empathy for your fucking clients appalling.¡±

    ¡°Clients? Fuck, girl, these hookers could not even manage to get $30k for a hit. On a target with two bodyguards. Yes, I took the task, but seriously, they are unimportant. On the other hand, we have one of the best underground techs now available here, in Big Apple. That is important news. And a profitable one.

    The fixer who gets her business is set for life. Fuck, he probably gets access to Spectre too. And I am the fixer who has the best chances of pulling it off.¡±

    We all looked bewildered at Darren, who broke out into loud laughter. From the com came the irritated voice of Adawah:

    ¡°Ok, who is that now and why is that so funny?¡±

    Natalie answered while Darren was still laughing:

    ¡°That is another of my partners, and I have no idea why he is laughing.¡±

    The last part came out so frosty that I was surprised the room temperature stayed the same, and threw a poisonous glance at Darren, who slowly got himself under control. Still snickering, he finally answered:

    ¡°It is so funny because you are the second most unlikely fixer to get to work with her. Of course, the one most unlikely is probably out of business after he decided to steal around 6 million bucks from her. So congratulations, you are at the bottom of the list.¡±

    Huh? I didn¡¯t know that Darren knew about Max.

    We all heard the scorn in Adawah¡¯s voice.

    ¡°Oh please, I know how to talk to techies. I will get it under control and as soon as you introduce me to her, I will be at the forefront.¡±

    Darren snorted again.

    ¡°You don¡¯t get it, do you? We don¡¯t  fucking need to introduce you to her. She is here. Right now. Listening. And she was not amused by your attitude. Good luck making overcoming that!¡±

    The devastated screech coming from the com was music in my ears. Not that I fully understood why this fixer thought it was so important. After all, I conducted my business almost exclusively from the Abyss anyway, and rare is the fixer that walks there.

    ¡°Now, I don¡¯t think it will help you significantly, but it might prevent her from visiting your computer system if you simply ask your fucking clients what they want.

    Or, just an idea, we bypass you and ask them directly. What do you think?¡±

    The blubbering from the com was barely identifiable as an agreement, but shortly after that, the call ended.

    Unfortunately, directly after that, they all directed their attention to me, without saying a word for a few long seconds. I squirmed uncomfortably in my chair.

    ¡°Uh, what?¡±

    Christine sighed and shook her head.

    ¡°I think we are all wondering why you are that important. I mean, don¡¯t get me wrong, you are a terrific tech, and it seems quite a good Jack, but that enthusiasm?¡±

    This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Sorry, but I have no idea where that comes from. Yes, I am a good tech, and my boards, my modules, my utilities, and my nanobot designs are pretty treasured. But I sell them almost exclusively over the darknet. I have a message board in the Abyss where anybody who wants something can ask. I¡¯ve never used a fixer for that.

    Heck, I am a broker, the Abyss-equivalent of a fixer myself. Why should I pay somebody for doing my job?¡±

    Kate leaned back in her chair, giving her patented four-armed shrug.

    ¡°He is a fixer. They usually think they can control anything and everything. There are some good ones, but they are wide and far in between.¡±

    Darren cleared his throat.

    ¡°Not that this is not interesting, but can we get back to the original topic? What do we do about Yang? I think we all agree that the world is a better place without him in it.¡±

    Natalie shrugged and answered him: ¡°Yeah, it would be, but how? If we hit him in Manton street the whores there will pay the price. Away from there, and we will have to tangle with PEES, and that could be bad with a capital b. And you better don¡¯t even think about hitting him at work. We don¡¯t have the firepower to do that.¡±

    Mark rubbed his chin before he looked at me.

    ¡°Can you cut the PEES and biomon out? That would make it possible.¡±

    I shook my head. ¡°It is possible but extremely unlikely. PEES has an incredible redundancy. We could jam the connection in Manton, and I could try to overwhelm the matrix there, but¡­ no, it is unlikely to work.¡±

    ¡°And what about getting us more information about Yang? Corps usually don¡¯t use any managers, even mid-level ones for bait. Something¡¯s fishy around this guy.¡± Darren¡¯s question hit me unprepared.

    I thought for a moment. That would mean attacking Sandoval directly, probably their headquarters, as it was probably there that the decision had been made. A much more daunting task than sneaking into a tertiary facility. And I would need to get information about what cyber-security Sandoval had there.

    ¡°Don¡¯t plan with it. I can look into it, but I can¡¯t promise anything yet. With enough time, no problem, I¡¯ll get the access. But until tomorrow? Depending on the security that might be impossible. Then there is the factor of stealth.

    It took so long today with a tertiary node from Shieldwall because tomorrow, next week, or next year, Shieldwall will not learn about it. I triggered no alerts, left no traces, nothing. Ghosting through anything Sandoval had in their headquarters will be almost impossible. And it is impossible on short notice.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, that¡¯s what I expected. Look into it anyway. It might not be for tomorrow if the hookers are smart enough, but I think we will need it eventually.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I¡¯ll try my best.¡±

    With that, I stood up and got back to Glory. And back into the fray. Naturally, the first thing I did was look up known information about Sandoval in the Abyss. Not much, sadly, but I learned that they had contracted Dalgon for their cyber-security.

    I could work with that, sure. Unlike nearly all other hackers, I had access to Dalgon¡¯s source codes. But even with that their setups were hard to break through.

    The next step was looking into the people who had access to the information. To do that, I set Warden to sent spiders through the dark web, finding any information about Sandoval execs, to find any exploitable weakness.

    Anything at all. Of course, that would take time. In all likelihood significantly longer than the not quite a full day that I had under the original planning. But I had to try it anyway.

    Finally, I made my way to Sandoval HQ in Philadelphia. It had moved there after DC had been glassed in the night of the falling stars, and stayed there even when the Capital had been rebuilt.

    The matrix of Philly was quite a bit different from NY or Seattle. It displayed the historical angle, the weight of the centuries that this city had. Where NY was glittering and bright skyscrapers clad in neon lights, and Seattle resembled more the brutalistic massive architecture that had been the style of Panacea with all its bombast, here I found wood and brick buildings, illuminated by gas lights and torches, cobblestone roads, and all in all a rustic feeling, heavy with suffocating history.

    Sandoval HQ looked like a 17<sup>th</sup>-century warehouse from the outside. As soon as I entered the public areas though it was chock full of factitious hypermodernity. Chromed stainless steel, mirrored glass walls, holographic displays showing all the accomplishments of Sandoval, the typical we-love-us showcase of a B-class corp desperately trying to project the image of being important.

    The very first thing I did, again, was testing the defenses. The reaction to my sniffers was fast, brutal and, if I were not used to it and expecting it, absolutely frightening. As it was, it was, well, expected, and so I was not impacted when some gray ICE fried my poor sniffers within microseconds.

    I had released them through a bot-zombie and had designed them in a way that they looked like the typical Joker having his automated scripts explore the matrix for vulnerabilities.

    Whenever one of those ran headlong into a Dalong-system, they often had to reinstall their system, because believe it or not, the big three were as fed up with these clowns as the rest of us were, but that was mostly it.

    And there were dozens of them in every sub-matrix, always running their scripts poking and prodding.

    Heck, the only reason no Abyss-dweller had gone on a rampage through their systems yet was that their idiocy was such a good cover for our own probes.

    And it gave me enough to identify the first-level firewall that Sandoval had bought. The Dalgon Testudo system was most certainly not the best that Dalgon had to offer.

    What it was though was a cheap and relatively effective firewall that was designed specifically in a way so that it could slot in into nearly every other Dalgon security suite. In other words, learning about the Testudo helped me exactly bubkis.

    Not that I did not suspect that beforehand. I had to try anyway, and who knows, sometimes you get lucky.

    Also, the sniffers showed me where to find the open ports in this very first firewall. Unfortunately, until I, and the others I guess, decided on a final strategy, that was where I had to stop for now.

    Yes, it would be relatively easy to break deeper into Sandoval, but no automated script would break through a Testudo, and that would make any attempt by me much more obvious.

    I could be lucky and successfully sneak through without triggering anything, and in all honesty, I was good enough that this approach was a distinct option, but it was a risk that I would not tempt without talking about the strategy.

    Of course, if it was irrelevant what tracks I left behind, I could go on a smash-and-grab. An all-out assault on a B-class would be obvious, obviously, and it would probably lead to several burned-out computers, but it would be well within my possibilities.

    Of course, the next day, everybody and their dog would know about it. Heck, if I had enough time¡­ no, I would not use Hermes on something that insignificant. Yes, I could use the same method I used to infiltrate the banks, but that would pose an unacceptable risk for my safety. Heck, the only reason why I had not yet completely dismantled Hermes by now was that I might use it against Panacea in the future if I found no other attack angle.

    That left me with a hand full of options for Sandoval, and none of them anything that might be quick.

    The best, safest method would be social engineering, but that was also the slowest.

    The rest would depend on what the others wanted to do.

    And so I left Sandoval and rustic and the rustic Philadelphia matrix and got back into NYC.

    Without expecting any results yet, I checked what Warden had unearthed.

    And got a surprise.

    Evidently, all managers and execs of Sandoval included one Christopher Yang. And Warden found his name mentioned in the dark web.

    It might be another Christopher Yang of Sandoval, but that was, in one word, unlikely. Even more interesting was that it was a discussion between two drug dealers.

    One of them boasted to his rival that he had landed a whale, a Sandoval exec as a steady customer. He did not go deeper into any details, but it was a nice lead.

    It took me no time to find Mr. Raylon Boone¡¯s computer. I quickly realized that he deactivated the onboard LAN of it, not realizing that that would not cut it off from the matrix without deactivating the hidden WiFi as well.

    Idiot, did he really think that the big corps would be so accomodating and make that easy? The only reliable way was to essentially build your own computer.

    Oh sure, a good tech could cut off any computer from the net. It took work, and you had to physically modify some of the components, and usually, it was just not worth it.

    Just get a goddang design from the dark web and print it yourself or have a shop with an industrial fabber print it.

    As it was, it was extremely easy to ¡®infiltrate¡¯ this computer, as Mr. Boone obviously thought that cutting it off from the net was security enough.

    Heck, the thing was not even shut down, not that many were in these days. After all, electricity was too cheap to meter, so why bother?

    In this case, I quickly got the encrypted customer database from Mr. Boone. Well, I got all his databases, including the customer one, but who cares about the rest? Suppliers, Competition, Debtors, Superiors? Nothing of that was my problem. Territory? Am I the DEA?

    And par for the course, his encryption was garbage as well. It took Warden all of five minutes to decrypt it.

    Now, what to do with this information? I saw that he was addicted to something called ¡®blue wonder¡¯, whatever that is, and his doses had become bigger over the last few months as it seemed.

    Much bigger.

    I took the time to look up this blue wonder. It was a combination of Sildenafil, Dextroamphetamine, Oxandrolone, and Methylphenidate.

    I mentally scratched my head. Why the heck would somebody do that to his body? I mean, yeah Sildenafil, Dextroamphetamine, and Methylphenidate had the effect of increasing the libido and the resulting performance, and Oxandrolone helped build the stamina for it, but please, the cocktail was, in my barely educated opinion just a way to get people addicted to something.

    It had also the side effect of making the users irritable, highly aggressive, and psychotic.

    Still puzzled, I surfaced and found that Darren had at some point followed me to my dive-room.

    He sat in a chair, quietly looking at a tablet. Before I could say anything, he looked up and directly at me.

    ¡°Back so soon? I would have guessed that it takes longer to get into Sandoval HQ than this shitty Shieldwall barracks.¡±

    ¡°Uh, yeah. It does. It does so much that I decided that the risk is too high without talking to you all about it. I just looked into it.¡±

    ¡°Ah, ok. And what is your opinion?¡±

    ¡°Well, if we need it until tomorrow afternoon, it will be hard, loud, and obvious. I can obliterate the defenses and do a smash-and-grab. It is not something that I would do lightly though.

    If we have more time, I have other options. The best option would be getting access from one of the exects. Social engineering. But I have no idea how long that will take.

    Sneaking through the defenses will take a few days at least, and I can¡¯t promise that I don¡¯t leave traces. Not to me, and us, but it might be apparent that somebody looked Yang up.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°Yeah, thought something like that. The problem is really that it has to happen soon. Not enough run-up to make good preparations.¡±

    I stretched for a bit.

    ¡°Well, one thing I found out is that Yang is a junkie.¡±

    Darren''s eyes narrowed, and his mouth stretched out into a line, for a short moment before he answered.

    ¡°A junkie? Seriously? That is¡­ well, that could be the opening we need. How did you find out?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°His dealer bragged in the dark web that he landed a whale. It was easy to follow from there.¡±

    ¡°Hm, can you find out what he takes?¡±

    ¡°Already done. He takes increasingly high doses of blue wonder.¡±

    He frowned.

    ¡°Blue wonder? I have heard the name, but I have no idea what it does.¡±

    ¡°It is Sildenafil, Dextroamphetamine, Oxyandrolone, and Methylphenidate.¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°Yeah, that tells me everything.¡±

    ¡°Sildenafil is as far as I know still better known as Viagra, Dextroamphetamine is, well, an Amphetamine, known for being an aphrodisiac among other things, Oxandrolone is an anabolic steroid and Methylphenidate is I think better known as Ritalin. Also a euphoric and it is used to get better control.

    Together they should make Yang horny, aggressive, paranoid, and psychotic.¡±

    He slowly scratched his chin.

    ¡°Hm, any of those deadly?¡±

    ¡°Oxandrolone not so much. The Sildenafil can cause cardiac arrest or a stroke, but I don¡¯t know at what doses. Methylphenidate is unlikely to kill him. The Dextroamphetamine¡­ yeah, that could kill him. It probably will kill him if you guys don¡¯t get him beforehand. From the side-effects of those others, I would think the Sildenafil does increase the risk substantially.¡±

    He nodded again.

    ¡°So, an overdose, with the biomon shut-off, and the guards drunk, what would happen?¡±

    ¡°A cardiac arrest, a stroke, brain hemorrhage, and circulatory collapse. If he gets help fast enough, he might survive, but it is unlikely that he will be living without assistance, much less function or work.

    But, how will you get the guards drunk and him taking an overdose?¡±

    He gave me a lopsided grin.

    ¡°Oh, I have my ways. No, I think you gave us the solution to get it done without getting the hookers killed. The guards will be in the shitter, but corp thugs, who cares. It might be hard on his dealer, but again, no humans are involved. So yes, I think I have the beginning of a plan.

    One question, can you cut off the bio-mons of the guards and make it look like a glitch or a fuck-up from one of their techs?¡±

    ¡°Sure. I just launch a routine software audit in the system which will find irregularities and messes up. Crashes the monitoring system when they leave, and it should be a couple of hours before they notice it. Why?¡±

    ¡°I¡¯ll have to have it germinate for a bit. I¡¯ll tell you later when I have the full plan. But in general, the later Shieldwall learns about Yang¡¯s misfortune, the better.¡±

    With that, he stood up, and left the room, leaving me a bit puzzled.

 78: Setec Astronomy

    After Darren left the room, I spent a little time working on the medical VI. Again, it was only a relatively short time, but I managed to make some progress. It would still take me months to finish it, at this speed, but it was no priority anyway.

    Suddenly I remembered that I wanted a new cyber chair. To be honest, I wanted several. After all, the others had begun to spend more and more time in VR. And these things were not that expensive.

    Naturally, I had my personal design, tailored specifically to me. And it would take only four to five hours of the indyfab to make it. But in the same amount of time, I could easily make a complete set of ultra-bandwidth jack and cranial board, providing me with around $35 million, while a very good cyber chair, or as it was usually known a gaming chair, that was nearly as good as my design would cost me around $12k.

    If the difference would have been significant, I would have made my chair, and bought commercial ones for the others, but as it was, I would be hard-pressed to notice the difference.

    Still, I ordered several sizes, and in the end, spent a bit over a million dollars on them. My comfort, and that of the others, was worth it though.

    Done with that task, I dedicated the last hour before bedtime to studying gravitics.

    The next morning, I was, as usual, the first one up, and I decided to make a big breakfast.

    Homemade bread rolls, scrambled eggs, bacon, and pancakes for all.

    And just in time, the horde descended onto the mess room, some of them looking quite bewildered, and mostly still in sleeping wear.

    I had taken the time to defrost some of the orange juice concentrate and prepared a pitcher of that.

    ¡°You are just in time. Breakfast is ready. Sit down and dig in.¡±

    Jacky rubbed her eyes, and sleepily shuffled towards the table while asking:

    ¡°Not that I don¡¯t appreciate this, but why?¡±

    I shrugged and placed the last of the pancakes on the table.

    ¡°Why not? I wanted it, so here we have it.¡±

    I then sat down as well, while the others one by one took place.

    ¡°You might have to use pepper and salt on the eggs to your taste.¡±

    Mia looked at me suspiciously but still heaped some eggs and bacon onto her plate.

    ¡°So¡­ what do you want for this?¡±

    I looked back at her, slightly confused.

    ¡°Uhm, eating it? Was there a reason not to make breakfast this morning?¡±

    ¡°Oh, come on, you want something. Just spit it out.¡±

    ¡°No, seriously, I was up early and felt like a big breakfast. That¡¯s all.¡±

    Mark laid his hand on hers, and pressed softly, while Christine shook her head.

    ¡°Don¡¯t listen to her. We others love it.  If miss grumpy pants doesn¡¯t like it, she can eat whatever the replicator spews out. What are these by the way?¡±

    With that, she gestured towards the pancakes.

    ¡°Oh, these are pancakes. They are sweet, so put a bit of butter on them, and some preserve or sirup. Sorry, but I only have industrial preserve and synthetic syrup.¡±

    I proceeded to pack a small stack onto my plate, adding some butter and generously drowsing it in syrup.

    ¡°So, anything new about Yang?¡± The question from Natalie came from nowhere. I just shrugged, but Darren smiled evilly and nodded.

    ¡°Yep, Vi¡­ Veronica here gave us the way to take him out without triggering the mousetrap.¡±

    I was a bit unsure, did he just nearly use my real name? But in the end, I decided I must have misheard him.

    That only left the question about how I gave them the way.

    ¡°Uhm, I did? How?¡±

    ¡°You found out that Yang is a druggy.¡±

    Most of the others, except for Mia and Jacky, hummed knowingly and mostly made signs of understanding and consent. We other three on the other hand just got more confused. Jacky tentatively lifted her hand.

    ¡°Ehm, can you¡­ explain that for a bit? I don¡¯t think I understand.¡±

    Mark chuckled, and Natalie tenderly petted Jacky¡¯s other hand, while she answered her lover:

    ¡°Remember, Darren is a Psionic. He can¡­ influence some people. He is not strong enough to make them do things they don¡¯t want to, but he can make them do things they are inclined to do anyway.

    It is not the first time we took out a junkie by Darren making him take a fatal overdose.¡±

    And Mark continued:

    ¡°And with the asshole taking an overdose, by seemingly his own free will, nobody can blame the whores. Well, at least not realistically. If the corpo-rats really want to cause a blood bath there, they will, pretext or no pretext.¡±

    Now I understood. But the reminder that Darren was a Psionic tickled something inside me. Nothing concrete yet, but it meant something, I just did not know yet what.

    I was still milling about it when I realized that Christine had said something to me.

    I shook my head clear and looked at her.

    ¡°Sorry, I was somewhere else. What did you want?¡±

    She frowned a bit, but asked her question again:

    ¡°I said I am a bit disappointed that you have not commented on the former slaves leaving.¡±

    I felt my eyes go wide, and my mouth fall open. They have left?

    My stammered reaction to that was: ¡°For real?¡±

    They all looked at me in wonder, before a wave of laughter sounded around the table.

    After nearly a minute or so, they got themselves under enough control that Mark could ask me:

    ¡°Seriously? You have seriously not even noticed it? Fuck, Red, you are so¡­ oblivious.¡±

    Christine groaned and shook her head before she addressed Darren:

    ¡°Fuck, man, you called it. Again. How do you do it all the time? Shit, I was so sure that this time you had to be wrong. I mean, how the hell could she not even realize that they left?¡±

    Unfortunately, Mia used that moment to throw a barb at me: ¡°Because she is a self-centered, selfish little bitch, if you ask me.¡±

    Instantly the good mood evaporated, and I heard Kate growl, which by the way was an extremely unsettling sound.

    ¡°Shut up. Red might be oblivious, and completely absorbed in her work, but she is not selfish.¡±

    Natalie continued: ¡°Yeah, she is¡­ a bit dense about people, but at least she tries. That is not something we can say about everybody sitting here at this table right now.¡±

    Even I realized that the last part was directed at Mia, but that was¡­ not important right now. We all knew that she was¡­ difficult.

    ¡°No, seriously, they have left? When?¡±

    Ryan chuckled again for a bit.

    ¡°Around three weeks ago. They did not feel right living in this house where they were raped and tortured for so long. So they took their money and left.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ why did I not know about it?¡±

    ¡°That¡­ is the question, isn¡¯t it? Did you not notice that they were no longer here all this time?¡±

    I thought hard, but no, I did not. In all honesty, they blurred into the background for me.

    ¡°No¡­ sorry, but not really. Why did nobody tell me about it?¡±

    Darren snorted before he answered me: ¡°To be honest, we took bets when you would notice.¡±

    My face fell. Did they really think of me that badly?

    But Darren continued:

    ¡°Not that we don¡¯t like you, but¡­ you are a bit hard to approach. Most of the time you are either in your lab, doing who knows what research, or in cyberspace, doing who knows what.

    And sorry, but it is typical you to simply forget about them. We know you try to get a bit closer to us, but accept it, you are not a peoples person. I bet that you would barely even notice if we all were gone.¡±

    My face heated up. While he was not wrong, it was an uncomfortable truth. Heck, I had spent nearly 10 years in real life mostly alone, the only human interaction during that time just another weekly mental torture session. But I honestly tried to do better¡­ and to realize that I failed so badly was painful.

    The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

    ¡°No¡­ don¡¯t go there. You are doing better. Hell, expecting you to do even better than you do now would be expecting miracles.¡±

    Sadly, Mia used that exact moment to inject her opinion: ¡°Speak only for yourself. I think she could do much better.¡±

    A venomous ¡°You mean like you?¡± from Natalie brought it into perspective, just not for Mia.

    ¡°Yes, like me. I am much more social than her.¡±

    ¡°You are an unlikeable bitch. We suffer your presence for Mark, but believe me, nobody of us will be heartbroken when he realizes how fucked up you are and boots you to the curb. V here on the other hand tries to be better, she just doesn¡¯t know how yet. But in general, she is nice enough, you just have to make her realize the issue.¡±

    When Mia opened her mouth to answer, a sudden band announced that Kate had enough, when she hit the tabletop with all four fists.

    ¡°Enough! Let us not ruin this nice breakfast any further. Change the topic and eat.¡±

    We all dug further into the food, but the good mood was gone.

    When we were done, I began to clear the table, but Darren stopped me.

    ¡°Let Jacky and Mia do that for once, please. We can use this moment to talk about the plan with Yang.¡±

    I sat back down, shrugging.

    ¡°Ok, if you need me.¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t think it would work without you. We need a plausible com blackout for the guards to make it work, and it would be way better if you could edit me out of any footage they record.¡±

    ¡°That should be easy enough. Sure, if they look they will find out that somebody edited a person out, but when the guards talk about you, they know that anyway.¡±

    He chuckled, together with the others.

    ¡°That is the point. They won¡¯t tell them about me. They won¡¯t even remember me being there. But I have no influence on computers.

    If you were not here, available, I would still manage it, but I would have to mask myself, physically that is. With you here, well, the guards won¡¯t know, and the computers won¡¯t know.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Ok, that is plausible. Can you tell me what exactly you plan on doing?¡±

    ¡°That is simple. I will intercept him when he enters Manton street, and with a tiny touch, I can make him feel the need for his fix. A need that can¡¯t be satiated. He will, in one word, take one dose after another. I¡¯ll also make the guards a bit inattentive. Not too much, we don¡¯t want Shieldwall to investigate why they acted that way. Just enough that they don¡¯t see Yang taking his drugs.

    And that is where the com blackout comes into play. It has to happen when the overdose sets in.¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°But with modern nano-tech, they will be able to get him back.¡±

    Natalie interjected:

    ¡°Remember, he shuts down his biomon, so PEES won¡¯t know about it until they get the notification that the contract is terminated. And if the guards can¡¯t call for help¡­ he doesn¡¯t use a skimmer, so he will be in traffic for at least 30 minutes, if not more. With a severe overdose, that is way too long.¡±

    ¡°Oh, I see. But they will be suspicious about the com blackout.¡±

    ¡°That is why I asked if you can make it plausible. Anything that seems legit.¡± Darren sounded sure of himself.

    I thought for a moment. Then I had an idea.

    ¡°Do we know when Yang started this whole ¡®fun¡¯?¡±

    Natalie shrugged but took out her tablet.

    ¡°Yeah, I think so, why?¡±

    ¡°I had an idea. I can manipulate the logs of the security system so that it shows suspicious activity a few months before Yang began his carnage. And then trigger an automated audit, which then crashes the whole computer system for an hour or so.¡±

    Mark shook his head questioning.

    ¡°Huh, I thought the whole idea was to make it seem like something natural? If the whole system crashes, it will be hard to make that seem to stick.¡±

    But Christine just laughed.

    ¡°Oh, that is sneaky. What she proposes is making it look as if somebody hacked the system a few months before the plan was hatched, when the hookers had no reason to go after Yang, and now a routine operation just triggered a land mine.¡±

    ¡°And when I do it early enough, there is no system that might record Darren. I¡¯ll have to do it when Yang and his thugs have already left, but before he reaches the red light district. Should be no problem.¡±

    I was, in my head, already planning on where I would place the blame. There were a few Jacks that, frankly, deserved a nice increase in their bounty. Not that it would do them much harm, but a tiny bit more attention¡­ why not?

    Of course, it would have to be somebody from the US, but that was no problem. There were around 200 Jacks all over the United States. And a couple of them were¡­ not nice. A couple of them had even tried to lock horns with me. Well, with Seraphim, not Spectre.

    That was before I had reached my current status as a tech when I operated as Spectre¡¯s broker.

    And one of them¡­ let¡¯s say while there were a few that I thought deserved it a bit more, none of them would go after a B-class corp in NYC.

    I could not help grinning a bit evilly at the thought of Tr4c3r N0v4 getting a bit of a spanking.

    I even had some of his combat utilities, that I stole from him early on. One of them made a decent data mine, and in the right place would shut down the whole network for a couple of days.

    ¡°Ok, that sounds good. Of course, timing is everything. We can¡¯t have Shieldwall stop Yang from going, but when the com system is down¡­¡±

    ¡°Do we have a way to stop Shieldwall from calling them on a personal com?¡±

    Urgh, ok that could be ugly. Unlikely as it was, if it happened it could ruin everything. Hm, cascading failure¡­ yes, that could work.

    ¡°I¡­ think I can. I can induce a cascading failure in the Brooklyn matrix. That should take out all communication there.¡±

    Kate rubbed her chin.

    ¡°But would that not be extremely unlikely to happen at the same time that their in-house com system is down? Could look kinda sus.¡±

    ¡°That is why I¡¯ll make it a cascading failure. I¡¯ll set it up so that it is the crash of the matrix that triggers the data mine. And I will frame Tracer for the Matrix crash as well. He should be happy about the notoriety. Might give him even enough bounty that he can knock on the Abyss¡¯ door.¡±

    Darren had to be a bit of a spoilsport though.

    ¡°Don¡¯t you think that is a bit of overkill? We don¡¯t need the whole Matrix in Brooklyn down. We only need maybe half an hour of Shieldwall not calling Yang and his thugs back home.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Fine. I can also trigger several alarms inside the building. Fire, attack, biological, nuclear, and whatever else they have the alarms for set up. Should make all of them confused for a few minutes. Together with the lights flickering, the automatic doors opening and closing randomly, every speaker blaring some other automated message, it should be enough to make them forget about the people they have away.¡±

    I think my look made it clear that I was not amused by him curtailing my fun. And the bastard had the gall to just smiled at me.

    ¡°Well, how long do you need to set that up?¡±

    ¡°I¡¯ll have to prepare the data mine and place it at the right point, forge the logs, and then initialize the audit. Then remove all traces of me, and then get out of there. So, a minute or so.¡±

    Mark coughed at that.

    ¡°A minute? Seriously?¡±

    ¡°For one, that equals four hours for me, and for two, I did all of the hard work yesterday. Now I have just to log into the system and configure the changes. A full minute is with a generous buffer if something goes wrong. But even if it takes longer, I plan with 15 minutes, and just set the trigger accordingly.¡±

    Mark had the decency to turn red.

    ¡°Oh, yeah, I forgot about this time thingy. Still can¡¯t wrap my head around it.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I think we have a working plan. Only thing is to call the client and ask them if that is what they want. If they want to send a message, we will have to go with the original plan, and they have to eat the response.¡±

    Natalie folded her hands in front of her.

    ¡°Or has anybody anything to improve now?¡±

    Nobody had, and by now the table was cleared, so we all stood up.

    When I saw Darren walk out of the room, the thing nagging in my mind suddenly clicked.

    Frankly, I suddenly got angry and rushed after him.

    ¡°Darren, can you wait a moment, please?¡± I think I managed to make it clear that I viewed that not as an option.

    He stopped, sighed, and turned towards me.

    ¡°How about we talk about it in your lab. I am sure you don¡¯t want everybody hearing what we are saying.¡± He almost immediately confirmed my suspicion, and I took a deep breath but nodded.

    ¡°Yes, I think you are right.¡±

    When we came to the lab, I held the hand up for Ryan, who was on guard duty.

    ¡°I think it is better if you wait outside.¡±

    He looked at me questioningly.

    ¡°Fuck, Kitten, the way your mood just changed, I think I should be with you.¡±

    ¡°I¡¯ll have Warden control the automatic defense. If something happens, he won¡¯t survive it. But¡­ if what I think is true, these are some seriously dangerous topics for me. Ben Walker knows about it, or at least everything important. But I want to keep it as small as possible.¡±

    He sighed but nodded.

    ¡°Ok, as you wish. I just hope you are right, and it doesn¡¯t explode in our faces.¡±

    In the lab, I closed the door, and then looked at Darren accusingly.

    ¡°How long have you¡¯ve been reading my mind?¡±

    He leaned against one of the tables.

    ¡°It is not quite how you think it is.¡±

    I lifted my eyebrow.

    ¡°So you have not violated my privacy by listening to my thoughts? Or is there another way you knew about Max, how much he stole from me? Or my real name?¡±

    ¡°Yes, and no. Can I try to explain it to you, please?¡±

    I angrily balled my fists and took a few deep breaths, but in the end, nodded.

    ¡°Fine. But I really hope it is a good explanation.¡±

    ¡°Ok, first, I think I have to explain how telepathy works. It is not me digging into your brain, stealing your thoughts from it. I can do something like that, don¡¯t get me wrong, but it takes a large amount of concentration and energy.

    What I usually ¡®use¡¯¡± He literally made the air quotes with the word use, ¡°is basically something that you can view as an extra pair of ears.

    Everybody, and I mean everybody with that, more or less throws their thoughts out into the environment, and we Psionics can hear them.¡±

    I growled.

    ¡°And you have not learned to not listen? You want me to believe that? You would go insane in days. Try again.¡±

    He scoffed.

    ¡°No, it is a bit more complicated than that. Not listening takes concentration as well. But that is not the point here.

    What is important is how, well let¡¯s say loud and clear people project their thoughts. We have found a few factors.

    The race is an important one. Psionics are barely noticeable. The same with Mutants like Kate. Normal humans are generally much louder.¡±

    He took a deep breath.

    ¡°And then we come to Pures. For some reason, Pures are exceptionally understandable. Another factor is, frankly, native intelligence. The dumber they are, the more muted they are. Conversely, the smarter they are¡­¡±

    He let that peter out, and I could slowly get an idea of what had happened.

    ¡°And I am more on the intelligent side.¡±

    He scoffed again.

    ¡°Talk about an understatement. Fuck, one of the reasons we left Seattle a couple of months after getting there was that I had problems turning out all the Pures. But you are in a league of your own.

    I¡¯ve never encountered a mind that brilliant, that clear and loud.

    Fuck, I can hear you clear from the other side of the building if you are agitated. And believe me, I tried to ignore it.

    But it is as if I tried to ignore somebody with a megaphone screaming into my ear at times.

    It is better if you are calm. Then I can be in the same room with you and not have to listen to it.

    That, by the way, is one of the reasons why I try to help you with your mental baggage. Not the sole reason, I honestly like you and wish for you to be better.

    Also, when you are in the matrix¡­ well, at low compression it is hard to follow your thoughts, so I can ignore them. At high compression, it becomes an incessant background droning, but you usually are quite relaxed and happy in cyberspace.¡±

    But of course, whenever I was upset he had to listen. And naturally, whenever I was upset, I tended to think about quite a few of my secrets.

    ¡°So, what have you found out about me? Really?¡±

    He sighed again.

    ¡°Before I answer, I want to make it clear that I am no threat to you. I¡¯ve known about it for months now and said nothing. And you should assume that I know all your secrets.¡±

    I closed my eyes and counted slowly to ten.

    ¡°Yes, even that secret. But think about it. You fucked over some corps. Do you think I am upset about that? Hell, I applaud you for that. Yes, the bounty is¡­ substantial, but seriously, even if I were so inclined to turn you in, do you really think that they actually pay it out? To a mercenary? Get real.¡±

    I was trembling, partly with anger, partly with fear.

    Fuck, he knew all along.

    ¡°So¡­ you could have helped me all along with Frankel?¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°Not really. Sure, I realized after the first day what you were up to, but, sorry, we were in the same boat. I did influence the tech-head so that he was more fixated on your board, but that was weak, as I could not reach him.¡±

    A sat down at my desk, placing my head on it.

    ¡°And what now?¡±

    ¡°Now nothing changes. I¡¯ll still try to help you get calmer, and try to ignore your thoughts, but in the end, I think I already know most of your secrets. I don¡¯t plan on revealing any of them.

    Fuck, if I did that, what do you think Warden would do to me and my friends? Do you think I would survive her releasing the Lamb? Especially if she directly targets me? Nope, not happening. So, yes, I can destroy you. And then she will destroy me. We have reached the point of mutually assured destruction.

    But unlike the old nations using that balance of power, we are not enemies. I still think of us as friends.

    Oh, and before you ask, no, none of the others know anything about it. But, seriously, you should give up the false name. It played its course. And you like Vivian much more than Veronica.¡±

    I shrugged my shoulders, without lifting my head.

    ¡°I¡¯ll have to think about it. For real, I can¡¯t even begin to really understand it yet. I need to calm down first.¡±

    ¡°I understand. Are you still up to helping us later?¡±

    Did he think I would just jump off because of that? But, well, he was right in a sense, I was pretty upset. But I¡¯ve never broken my word if I could help it.

    ¡°I¡¯ve given my word. I¡¯ll help you. I¡­ honestly don¡¯t know about after, but for that one Op I will.¡±

 79: Coming to grips

    I heard the door open and close, and a short time later again. Then I felt somebody touch my shoulder, apparently testing if I was at least still alive.

    I groaned and shrugged my shoulders before I heard Ryan talk to me.

    ¡°Shit, Kitten, what happened? You¡­ shit Darren looked frightening. And you not much better. I thought you were friends.¡±

    I sighed, and lifted my head, looking at him.

    ¡°Honestly, I thought the same. Now¡­ I am not that sure anymore.¡±

    I closed my eyes again, leaned back, took a deep breath, and then shook my head.

    ¡°FUCK!¡±

    I just couldn¡¯t hold it in.

    When I looked at Ryan again, he looked bewildered. I had the feeling his wide eyes tried to bore into my soul, and he was white as a wall.

    ¡°What¡­ what did he do? I can¡¯t see him doing anything that could cause this¡­ reaction. Please, tell me.¡±

    I slowly shook my head. I wanted to tell him, but I could not understand it myself. Well, yes, the¡­ let¡¯s say technical aspect of it was pretty clear to understand.

    But my reaction to it? That I could not understand. Why did it hurt that much? Compared to what the CIA-assholes had done to me, Darren should have been a mere pinprick, but while the psyops-pricks caused rage inside me, what Darren did simply hurt.

    The pain was almost physical in its quality.

    And so, I could only shrug as an answer to Ryan¡¯s question.

    Yes, on a very intellectual level, I understood that Darren had no fault in this, but my emotions did not care.

    With another scream, wordless this time, I jumped up from my chair and began pacing.

    Trying to find something, anything to alleviate the pain. Without any success. Storming aimlessly through the various lab, my eyes fell onto the, thankfully, empty retorts in the bio-lab, and without thinking, I began grabbing them and throwing them against the wall, or the ground, stomping on the remains.

    It did not help in the slightest, and I resumed my pacing, just to walk straight into the chest of somebody appearing directly in front of me when I turned around.

    When I looked up from the ground, where I found myself sitting on my posterior following the collision I saw Ben standing there, looking concerned.

    Without thinking, I jumped up and threw myself into his arms.

    I can¡¯t say for sure how long we stood there, with him just holding me, but finally, the pain subsided.

    When I could somewhat think again, I looked up to him.

    ¡°Thank you. I¡­ I needed that.¡±

    He looked into my eyes, still concerned.

    ¡°Can you tell me what happened? I¡­ this is not you.¡±

    While he said this, he softly directed me towards a table with a few chairs around, pressuring me to sit down.

    I collected my thoughts as good as I could before I answered him:

    ¡°I¡­ it is Darren.¡±

    Ben gripping my hands was strangely reassuring.

    ¡°Darren? The dark-haired man in your group? From what I heard, he seems to be pretty reasonable.¡±

    I groaned.

    ¡°Yeah, I thought so too.¡±

    ¡°So, what did he do to rile you up that much?¡±

    ¡°I¡­ well, he¡­ he is a Psionic and¡­¡±

    I was grasping for the right words to express what I felt, and sudden understanding bloomed in Ben¡¯s face.

    ¡°Oh, and you are a projector, right? Shit, that¡¯s fucked up.¡±

    I frowned: ¡°A projector? What is that?¡±

    He shrugged his shoulders:

    ¡°I don¡¯t know the specifics. Just what a Psionic I had hired for a job told me. Some people think ¡®loud¡¯  as he called it. He told me it was uncomfortable to be around me because he had to concentrate on not reading my thoughts by accident, and that I was a projector.

    He left after a couple of days, so I don¡¯t know much about it.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Well, according to Darren several factors are playing into it. Race for example. Psionics and Mutants are apparently mostly silent, while Pures are exceptionally loud.¡±

    He winced.

    ¡°Another factor seems to be intelligence. The smarter a person is¡­¡±

    ¡°Ouch. And you, being a Pure with your brainpower¡­ yeah I can see that.¡±

    ¡°And it seems agitation is another factor. He said if I am upset he ¡®hears¡¯  me from the other side of the building.¡±

    I scoffed after that.

    ¡°And you can guess my mood the last few weeks.¡±

    ¡°And he is tired of ignoring your thoughts? Yeah, I can see that.¡±

    ¡°No, he is unable to ignore my thoughts. He knows everything.¡±

    ¡°Fuck!¡±

    ¡°My sentiment, exactly.¡±

    ¡°And has he said what he intends to do?¡±

    ¡°Nothing. He told me that he knew it for quite some time and did nothing, and now, with Warden, he would destroy himself by telling on me.¡±

    Ben nodded at that:

    ¡°Yep, that sounds reasonable. But why are you that upset if he will keep it for himself?¡±

    I shrugged, sighing.

    ¡°I have no idea. It just¡­ it hurts. And I don¡¯t understand why. Why does it hurt so much?¡±

    Ben looked at me intensely.

    ¡°Why are you surprised it hurts that much?¡±

    I scoffed again.

    ¡°Even what the jerks in Nowhere did didn¡¯t hurt that much.¡±

    ¡°Did you trust these assholes?¡±

    I felt my eyes go wide.

    ¡°No, of course not. How do you get that idea?¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°I didn¡¯t, but I want to set the context, bear with me, please. Now the next question, do you trust Darren?¡±

    I frowned. Just a few hours ago, I would have answered that question with a very convinced yes, but now¡­

    ¡°I¡­ I don¡¯t know. I want to trust him, but can I?¡±

    Ben nodded.

    ¡°Let me change the question, did you trust him?¡±

    ¡°Yes, before I realized that he violated my privacy, I did, why?¡±

    ¡°And there you have the reason why it hurts so much. If these assholes in Nowhere had told you the sky is blue, you would have looked for yourself, and even if you had found it to be blue, you would have doubted it.

    They had the power to hurt you, but mostly they made you mad. Darren on the other hand, he had the power to hurt you. You trusted him, and he betrayed that trust.¡±

    I frowned even harder.

    ¡°But¡­ he did not want to do it. It is not his fault.¡±

    ¡°It is also not yours. It just happened. And I am glad that you understand that. But feelings are¡­ messy. Emotionally you only understand that he did violate your privacy, your innermost secrets. And because you trusted him, it hurts.¡±

    I tilted my head.

    ¡°But¡­ why do I feel that way?¡±

    ¡°I would guess mostly because you had to find out for yourself. You would not feel so betrayed if he told you about it.¡±

    I had to mull that over, for a bit.

    ¡°You may be right. But then, why didn¡¯t he? Tell me I mean.¡±

    A sad smile appeared on his face.

    ¡°When?¡±

    ¡°What when?¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t get me wrong, but I try to see it as he had to see it. So, when should he have told you about it?¡±  he

    To my shame, I did not quite understand the direction he was going with that reasoning, at least at that time.

    ¡°I don¡¯t understand. As soon as possible I would think.¡±

    Ben nodded.

    ¡°Ok, then think about it, the soonest it was possible, just after you¡¯ve taken out Frankel and let them out of the cage. Imagine he¡¯d come to you right then and told you that he knew everything you wanted to keep secret. Your real name, why you ran from Nowhere, your toys, and what you¡¯ve done. Everything.

    Now, tell me honestly, how would you have reacted, right then and there?¡±

    I thought about it for a moment. I wanted to say that I would have laughed it off, that I would have just accepted it, but deep inside, I knew that was not the truth.

    ¡°I¡­ I think right then and there, I would have instructed the automatic defense system to take him out.¡±

    Ben nodded.

    ¡°You are pretty honest about that. And yes, I think so too. You would have panicked. You would have set the Lamb on a 24h timer and desperately tried to find a way to tell the banks that they would go down with you. And you would have taken out Darren, and probably the others too.¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°Can you really fault him for not saying anything? At that point, he had to know you as well as you know yourself.¡±

    I did not like it, but he was right. I closed my eyes and searched my feelings.

    ¡°But what about later? When we knew each other a bit better?¡±

    ¡°You mean when you were already in the process of unraveling? Before you knew about Warden, would you really have believed him that he wants to keep it secret? Or would you have spiraled out of control and probably destroyed the whole world in your panic?¡±

    Again, I wanted to say he was wrong. And again I could not lie to him, or myself.

    ¡°You are right. I don¡¯t like it, but you are right. I was¡­ I don¡¯t know, I¡¯ve lost my balance from the moment we landed in New York, maybe earlier.

    If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.

    But then, why did he tell me now about it?¡±

    Another sad smile.

    ¡°Because you¡¯ve got suspicious I would guess. He could either lie into your face or tell you the truth. And lying into your face¡­ I would say that is the worse option.

    Especially as you have Warden, and he can make a plausible argument that he doesn¡¯t want to betray you.

    The point is, there simply were no good options, and he took the one he probably thought would cause the least damage.¡±

    I nodded slowly.

    ¡°But, how does that help me now?¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°For right now, at this moment? I fear not all that much. You are hurt, and you have to work out the pain. But it will make it easier later. If you understand, even if just intellectually, where he came from, and that he had no option that would not hurt you, I think you can work past it easier.¡±

    Strangely, the pain had lessened. It was not gone, but it was bearable right now. At this moment, the worse thing was that I did not know if I could trust Darren again.

    We both sat there for a moment, in silence, just holding hands.

    Then I realized that he had not intended to come here that day, and tilted my head again.

    ¡°Uh¡­ not that I am not thankful, but, why are you here?¡±

    He looked at me for a moment and then chuckled:

    ¡°I got a call from Ryan. He was completely panicking. Could not understand what was happening, and only saw you spiraling out of control. I bet you did not even realize that you¡¯ve been ranting, raving, and storming through the labs for more than an hour, did you?¡±

    Taken aback, I looked at the clock in my HUD and realized that he was right. What the¡­

    ¡°Uh, yes. How did that happen?¡±

    ¡°I would say you were somewhat distracted. So what now?¡±

    I thought for a moment but could not find a solution on the quick.

    ¡°I think I¡¯ll have to think about it for some time. And I will think in cyberspace. It is a bit pressing I fear.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°And the pain?¡±

    ¡°I think I can cope with it now. At least for a while. Yes, it still hurts, but, you are right, understanding that he did not have a real choice helped. For now, I have to figure out if I can trust him ever again, and how to achieve that.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I hope you can do that. If something comes up, call me. Or come to me. I¡¯ll be there for you.¡±

    He stood up, and kissed me, long and tenderly.

    ¡°And don¡¯t wait until the pain is unbearable.¡±

    ¡°I won¡¯t.¡±

    ¡°Vivian, I know you. You will. How about it, Warden?¡±

    ¡°Yes, Mr. Walker?¡± The disembodied voice came from the PA system in the room.

    ¡°Can you judge when she is spiraling out of control again?¡±

    ¡°Yes, that is well within my possibilities.¡±

    I tried to interject:

    ¡°Hey, wait a moment.¡±

    But Ben gave me a lopsided grin, lifted his right index finger, and placed it onto my lips.

    ¡°Sh¡­ let the grownups talk.¡± The wink he gave me showed me that he did not mean that seriously, but he continued toward the speaker.

    ¡°So, if she comes close to going over again, you will inform me so that I can help her?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I can do that.¡±

    Then he turned back to me.

    ¡°So, now you have a watchdog you can¡¯t bamboozle. You¡¯d better don¡¯t have her call me. I will tease you about it. Mercilessly. If you feel losing your grip, call me yourself.¡±

    I huffed at that but could find no clever response. Another shorter, Kiss later, and he left the room.

    I looked around me and saw quite a few trashed odds and ends. Small, fortunately, inexpensive lab equipment, broken glass, and similar things.

    I felt myself turn red at the sight, but there was no helping it. I ordered the house to send a few bots to clean it up and asked Warden to order replacements.

    In Cyberspace, I used some time to let go of quite a bit of pent-up frustration, before I prepared the little surprise for Shieldwall.

    I then tasked Warden to activate it when Yang and his thugs were two minutes out from Manton street. I was pretty certain that it would go off without a hitch, but I also instructed her that if something¡¯s gone wrong she should immediately call me.

    Then I got back into my mindscape and began flying again, without aim, or purpose, feeling the simulated wind in my face.

    I always thought better while flying.

    Now, I wanted to trust Darren again, but, he would always hear my thoughts. The constellation was just too lopsided for it to go otherwise.

    Even if he were capable of it, I could not expect him to doggedly try to ignore my thoughts. Nobody could be expected to concentrate constantly.

    Could I live with him knowing everything I thought? I shuddered at the mere thought. No¡­ no, I could not.

    So, did that mean that we had to part ways? That was equally galling. He would have to part with Ryan as well, or Ryan would have to move out of the fortress.

    I did not think the others would let him go alone. And honestly, I did not want them to go. Well, I would not be heartbroken if Mia left, but even Mark had grown onto me.

    Maybe he had some fungus in him?

    But seriously, I did not want them to go. Could I discipline my own mind? It should be possible. But, no, I knew me. My mind was too mercurial. Too disjointed.

    Additionally, I did not even know how the damn psionics even worked. I could not design anything to counter it without knowing how.

    That got me thinking.

    Firstly, it had to be biological. If it depends on the race¡­ no, I did not think it was genetically caused, at least not directly.

    My guess was that it was how the brain was wired.

    But how did psionics intercept the thoughts? For that, the thoughts need to be projected into the surrounding space.

    Could it be electromagnetic? No, I did not think so. Humanity had electromagnetic receptors for centuries now. We would have found out about it long before.

    Gravity? No, wrong kind of force.

    Weak nuclear force? Way too short range. Even more so for the strong nuclear force.

    No, if I were to find it, I would have to look into the quantum realm. But¡­ for the moment I was flying blind.

    I would have to find the differences between how all our brains worked. Hmm, I could use the BOU to get it done. But that did still not tell me what I was even looking for.

    How could I find¡­ OF COURSE! Seeberger!

    Somewhere in his equation there had to be an explanation for this phenomenon.

    I groaned inwardly. Yes, I loved the Seeberger equation. But it was¡­ bothersome.

    But it might let me begin defining the problem. And a defined problem is a problem that one can look for a solution for.

    Without even knowing what exactly the problem is, there is no solution.

    I instructed the industrial fabber to make a few BOUs, and my nanofabs to make the seed stock for them.

    To do it right now, the fabber had to pause the ultra-jack it was making right now, but it was only a delay of 15 minutes. The housing I made from metal, which was not used in the cyberware.

    I then surfaced and got on my way to my workshop/main lab. I had the separate parts delivered there, and began to assemble the BOUs.

    Finished with that, I called the others, except for Mia, into a meeting. I did not exclude her, per se, but I did not think she would be particularly helpful.

    I had a bot bring in the BOUs and enough injectors for all of us, the BOUs happily creating nano-bots.

    In the meeting room, I found them all sitting around the table, including Mia, mostly looking spooked.

    Darren looked somewhat guilty. Good. While yes, it was not his fault per se, he could have softened the blow considerably.

    Be as it may, I sat down at the table, and we all looked at each other in silence for a few seconds, before Mia broke the silence.

    ¡°So¡­ what is so important that you have to call us all here, right now?¡±

    I narrowed my eyes.

    ¡°I did not call you all, Mia. You are free to go if you want to.¡±

    She snorted.

    ¡°As if. So spill it. What do you want?¡±

    Darren suddenly looked at me with so much hope that it did much to heal the pain.

    ¡°You think that is really possible?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know yet. But it has to be some physical phenomenon.¡±

    Christine frowned.

    ¡°What are you two talking about? And what got your panties in a twist V?¡±

    Darren raised his hand.

    ¡°I¡­ she figured out that I can basically hear her every thought. She was¡­ understandably, not amused.¡±

    They all looked shocked for a moment before Mark bellowed:

    ¡°Fuck man, why did you do that? Of course, she is pissed.¡±

    Darren sighed.

    ¡°That is the problem. She is a Pure. Do you remember why we left Nowhere? I have a hard time not reading the thoughts of Pures. Well, the smarter they are, the harder it is. V here¡­ let¡¯s just say she is in a league of her own in her intelligence.¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°I can¡¯t ignore her. And today she figured it out. And yes, I understand that she is angry about it.¡±

    Kate facepalmed with all four hands.

    ¡°Damn, why did you not tell her?¡±

    This it was me who interjected.

    ¡°Because I am apparently emotionally pretty fragile. Ben Walker has helped me to understand that if he had told me, it would have probably ended with all of us dead. And Darren knew that as well.

    It is only with Warden in play that I could take it. And probably Ben as well. If he hadn¡¯t been here, I would still be raging, and probably doing something regrettable.¡±

    Natalie closed her eyes and laid both hands flat on the table.

    ¡°And what now? I¡­ fuck, I would understand if you did not trust us anymore.¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°I want to avoid that. Surprisingly, I don¡¯t want you all to go. But at the same time, I¡­ right now I can¡¯t trust Darren. I am sorry, really, but I can¡¯t.¡±

    Darren nodded.

    ¡°I understand. Don¡¯t worry about it.¡±

    I continued.

    ¡°So now I want to find out how he reads my mind. And I want to find out why Psionics and Mutants are hard to read for him. And of course why Pures are so easy to read. Unfortunately, we only have one Psionic, Mutant, and Pure each available, but it has to have to do something with how our brains are wired.

    Remember that Darren and Kate needed a specially designed diadem to get into VR. Their brains work differently.¡±

    I gestured towards the BOUs and the injectors.

    ¡°For that, I have brought these. I call them BOU or Bio-Observation-Unit. It is an extremely specialized nano-fab, that uses its nanobots to observe biological processes on the molecular level.

    I want to inject them into each of you and have them inspect your neural networks. Find out how they work.

    That might give me a way to understand how Darren does it. And if I can find that out, I might stop it.

    For him, and me. I don¡¯t think it is very comfortable for him to have to actively ignore all the thoughts around him.¡±

    They all looked thoughtful. Well, they all, with the exception of, you guessed it, Mia.

    She exploded in her typical manner.

    ¡°ARE YOU INSANE?!? You want to inject us with experimental nanobots that do who knows what? We need to trust you? Just like that? Get real. Come, Mark, this has gone long enough.¡± With that she jumped up, slapping Mark on the shoulder hard.

    Mark on the other hand did not move a muscle, except to frown at his girlfriend.

    It was Jacky, who in her typical diffidence posed the important question.

    ¡°And, these nanobots¡­ are they¡­ you know, dangerous?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No, they are purely observing their surrounding. They have absolutely no way to manipulate anything, so can cause no damage. There are a few depot builders, but only enough to make them work, and they can¡¯t replicate.¡±

    Natalie looked at her girlfriend, and then back at me.

    ¡°And what do you expect to find?¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°I don¡¯t expect anything. At this time I have no clue about what causes this. I assume it has to be some sort of quantum emission, but that is all I have so far.

    The point is, that I have to start at the beginning and collect data before I can make any predictions.¡±

    Darren folded his hands.

    ¡°Obviously I am in. Not just to help V here, but she is right. It is tiring to concentrate for so long. And before anybody spouts something about not trusting her¡± he looked directly at Mia with that sentence, ¡°I am still reading her thoughts, and she is on the up and up. As far as she can tell, it is completely harmless. Even a medical scanner is more dangerous.¡±

    Kate was the second to agree: ¡°You know, Red has never given me any reason to doubt her now. Sure, she is not the most social, but she tries her best, and is as honest as can be.¡±

    After that, all the others, with the precited exception of Mia, accepted. Breathing out in relief, I began filling the injectors one by one, giving them out. Mia meanwhile stormed out of the room in a huff.

    ¡°Just inject yourself somewhere. It is painless, and the nanobots will move to your brain on their own. Oh, and Mark, don¡¯t use your cybernetic arm please.¡±

    Mark laughed and snipped in fake annoyance.

    Then, after all of us had injected ourselves with the nanobots, Natalie knocked on the table.

    ¡°I have to ask, but how will that influence the op today?¡±

    ¡°I have everything prepared. When Yang is two minutes out from Manton, Warden will trigger the data mine. She will also play overwatch. If something goes wrong, well I will be in cyberspace trying to figure this psionic thing out, so I can intervene at a moment''s notice.¡±

    They all nodded, relief evident in their faces.

    ¡°Just one more thing, I don¡¯t know how long I will need to get this done. I might be in cyberspace for several days. So don¡¯t worry.¡±

    I had, during the meeting, ordered the fabber to make a proper cybersuit for me. Fortunately, I could use the house fabber for it.

    The most important part was the muscle stimulation, preventing atrophy. Then there was temperature control, and lastly nourishment and waste elimination.

    On the way to my room, I called Ben.

    ¡°Hey Kitten, I did not expect to hear from you that soon. What¡¯s up?¡±

    ¡°I¡­ I have a game plan on how to go forward. For that, I will need to be in cyberspace for some time. Probably a few days. You can send me a message if you want something or need something, and I will react as soon as possible. But depending on where my mind is at that point¡­ it might take a bit.¡±

    There was a moment of silence from the other end of the call.

    ¡°I can¡¯t say that I am happy, but I understand. You need to work this out in your way. I assume you are taking the precautions for a long-term cyber dive?¡±

    I was surprised.

    ¡°Uh, yes, I do. How do you know about it?¡±

    I heard a chuckle from him.

    ¡°My girlfriend is a pretty prominent Jack, so I informed myself. Just so that you know, if you are not out of it in four days, I will send Warden to kick you out.¡±

    I frowned, not that he could see that. I had meanwhile reached my room and began disrobing.

    ¡°Uhm, why four days?¡±

    ¡°From my information that is the maximum that is still acceptable.¡±

    ¡°You know I am a Pure, right? With the right precautions and enough nourishment, the maximum for me is around six days.¡±

    ¡°Nice to know, and I don¡¯t care. If you can¡¯t figure it out in four days, you will take a break.¡±

    I could not suppress a smile, even while I tried to sound sullen.

    ¡°Fine. Have it your way.¡± I could not remember the last time somebody really was worried about me.

    It was a nice feeling, that somebody cared enough about me for that.

    ¡°I¡¯ll see you in a few days then.¡±

    From his end came an ¡°I love you.¡±

    And suddenly I had a lump in my throat. I wanted to, really, I desperately wanted to tell him I loved him too, but¡­ it was too early for me. I just couldn¡¯t.

    And such ended the call.

    The preparations were, as usual, not the most comfortable. Sure, the shower was nothing special, but the evacuation of the bowel¡­ I always hated that part, but it couldn¡¯t be helped. Either that or to use some sort of solid waste management. And I don¡¯t mean a diaper.

    No thank you.

    Liquid waste management was bad enough. I would be fed intravenously for the duration, and get liquid the same way. A mister in my mouth would prevent drying out of my throat.

    Electro-stimulators worked into the skin-tight suit would work my muscles during that time.

    And then I was diving into cyberspace.

    With the full compression of Glory, and the time limit Ben had given me, I had more than 2 ? years to find something in Seeberger''s equations.

    In the end, I did not need the full of it. The whole time I had an eye on the readouts of the BOUs. After nearly a year of virtual time, I narrowed it down to some specific quantum fields.

    It is surprising how much energy a working brain emits. But only one set of quantum fields was especially prominent in my brain while causing some weird resonance effect in Darren.

    It took me a few months to design a device that could suppress the propagation of this specific quantum field, without suppressing the field itself.

    After a couple of months more, I managed to create a device that could stop the reception of this field.

    Sadly, both would have to be made by the NADA. But for now, and for me, that was not that much of a problem.

    Of course, I would have to test it, if it had any side effects, and as it needed an active brain, I could not resort to research clones, but I had just the right person for that.

    After all, I don¡¯t think anybody would be heartbroken if Frankel would succumb to something unfortunate.

    But after an order to the NADA to create one of each device, I began to surface.

    I was, as usual, greeted by aching muscles and a sore throat. And a plethora of other small ailments.

    Oh, and Justin, who seemingly had stood watch over me.

    The post-dive blues was nothing that could be helped sadly, but also nothing too debilitating either. A bit of walking, followed by a solid meal and a good night''s rest would fix all of that.

    During my walk, I sent a message to Ben, that I was out of cyberspace, but not quite up to a talk yet. I would call him tomorrow.

    With my muscles somewhat mollified I walked into the mess, sending the order for an easy soup to the food replicator on the way. Yes, I know, replicator food? But after a few days in cyberspace, I actually needed bland, tasteless, and easy-to-digest food. And of course, I needed a couple of liters of liquid.

    All questions from the others I waved off with a raspy whispered ¡°Tomorrow!¡±.

    After eating, I managed to peel out of my suit, dropping it on the floor carelessly, and fell into my bed.

 80: A new Era

    The next morning, my body felt mostly fine. The increased resilience of the Pure, further enhanced by my being a K4 ensured that at least.

    It still had taken a bit over nine hours of sleep to get to that point, and I had a craving for a good breakfast.

    But physically I was fully recovered.

    The same could not be said about my mental condition. I could not say that I ever enjoyed these kinds of marathon sessions, but I have to say, this time it was worse than ever.

    That had several reasons of course.

    The easier to understand one is probably that I previously was limited to less than 60:1 compression.

    Or one day in real-time translating to 57 in cyberspace. With a limit of six days at once, that left me at a bit over 11 months in cyberspace time.

    With Glory, I had 240:1. More than four times as much. Even in the roughly 2? days in real time it took me to solve the problem, for me, it was more like more than a year and a half.

    580 days of non-stop concentration, without sleep, without eating, without anything but banging my head against the most complex piece of math I knew, trying to decipher the meaning of this arcane equation.

    I was a bit surprised that I had not given up and taken a break. And you can believe me, I was tempted. Sorely tempted.

    But more surprising to me was that I actually missed the interaction with the others. Not everybody to the same extent, and in all honesty, I couldn¡¯t care less if I never saw Mia again, but yes, it was the isolation that was the hardest.

    But the early successes, when I got the theoretical possibility of the quantum field from the equation made me soldier on.

    I knew I was on to something, and when my BOUs identified the quantum field in question I was vindicated.

    The design of the two devices was, well it was a slog, and I forced myself through it, and now it was, hopefully, mostly over but the crying.

    I sent an invitation to Ben for breakfast, when I began preparing it, and I felt quite warm in my chest when he agreed.

    The others came to the table, looking at the spread I had prepared somewhat in shock. Ok, maybe I have gone a bit overboard. So what? I had more than a year, subjective, to build up an appetite. And yes, I know I could have manifested simulated food in cyberspace.

    But despite the realism, it is just not the same. I could not explain why, but it just isn¡¯t. Not that that prevented me from snacking now and then, to keep myself somewhat sane. Or at least close enough to sane to play it on tv.

    And then Ben arrived and without even realizing it I found myself in his arms.

    ¡°I missed that. I missed you.¡± Yes, I was blubbering, as my vision blurred. It just felt so¡­ right.

    He just held me for a few moments, without saying anything, only giving me a soft kiss on the top of my head.

    Finally, he let go of the hug and just held my shoulders.

    ¡°You look calmer than the last time I saw you. Have you been successful? Was it worth it?¡±

    I slowly nodded. ¡°I feel calmer. I had more than a year and a half to get over it. And I think so. I¡¯ll have to test it of course. But¡­ well, if it doesn¡¯t work I¡¯ll have to go at it at a later time.¡±

    He stared into my eyes intensely.

    ¡°At a later time? You want to do this again?¡±

    I closed my eyes and shook my head.

    ¡°No, never again. Never such a¡­ session again. It was¡­ I can¡¯t describe how awful it was.¡±

    He softly led me towards the table.

    ¡°If it was so bad, why did you not come out earlier?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I¡­ I think it was mostly my pride. I thought I had to do it. Now, looking back, I would say I was wrong. But in there, I just wanted it to be done and over with.¡±

    We both sat down, while the rest of the group here, and Ben¡¯s guards as well, began to eat.

    Darren was barely able to keep calm. We all could see the nervous energy in every movement he made. In the end, he could no longer stay silent.

    ¡°You said you have something? What¡­ do you have any idea how it works?¡±

    I let out a long breath, centering my thoughts.

    ¡°Yes, I have something. And no, I won¡¯t talk about it now. I¡­ well, I will finish the tests, but otherwise, I¡¯ll not do anything of importance for the next few days.¡±

    The Psionic¡¯s face fell, but he nodded.

    ¡°I think I understand. I have to say I¡¯ve never seen you that¡­ muted is the best I can say.¡±

    We looked at each other in silence.

    Of course, that was the moment Mia absolutely had to put in her two cents.

    ¡°What, just because you lazed around for more than two days you are now entitled to more rest? Just like that?¡±

    I¡­ normally I would at least react a bit peeved to that, but right at this moment, I could not muster the energy to do that.

    ¡°I would suggest you refrain from commenting on things you don¡¯t understand. It prevents the appearance of not being an idiot.¡±

    Sadly, Mia was not deterred.

    ¡°You are just lazy. We all have our cross to bear. You are nothing special. So why do you have the right to take a time out?¡±

    ¡°I assume what you have to do is study the course on implant surgery I¡¯ve given to you? Well, I already did that. More than a year ago.

    Or do you allude to earning money?

    Over the last couple of days, I¡¯ve sold more than $5 billion worth of cyberware. Considering that I¡¯ve already had more than that before I¡¯ve come to NYC, I would say that earning more money is¡­ of lesser import to me.

    So, if I want to take off for a year, I will take off for a year. I can afford to take off for a century.

    A bit of careful investing and I will never have to work again. Unlike you, I¡¯ve already earned my spurs.¡±

    I think what pushed her back the most was the way I said it. Cool, collected, calm, and without even the slightest hints of anger or resentment. Just matter of fact.

    Oh, and of course the fact that I did not even look at her, but instead continued to butter my croissant.

    Christine interjected at this point:

    ¡°While I don¡¯t agree with Mia, and yes, you have earned your rest, why do you think you need it? Not to accuse you but I want to understand.¡±

    If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

    I sighed.

    ¡°I was in cyberspace for nearly 58 hours, in real-time. I have a compression of 240:1. Simple multiplication gives us the point that I have spent nearly 14 thousand hours of subjective time there. Or one year, seven months, four days, and 18 hours.

    Physically I might have even gone longer. I did have a six-day stint in cyberspace once, after all.

    But it is¡­ hard to concentrate for 14 thousand hours on something. Without rest. I am at my limit right now. I will do the final tests of what I developed, but only because that is a trivial task.¡±

    Darren spoke in a soft voice:

    ¡°You did not need to torture yourself that bad for my problems.¡±

    ¡°I did it for myself as much as for your problems. I could have simply thrown you out of the house if all I wanted was to prevent you from reading my mind.¡±

    Most of the others welled up into exclamations of protest. In response, I lifted my hand and sighed.

    ¡° You notice that he is still here? In other words, I haven¡¯t thrown him out. So, you can stop your protests. I just told him of the alternative that would have solved my problem.¡± th

    Darren nodded.

    ¡°Yeah, I understand that. I¡­ honestly, I half expected it. So what will you do now?¡±

    ¡°Well, for one I will have you supervise our guinea pig during the tests. And Warden. There are only two factors. One, either he survives the test unharmed and with his mind still working, or not. If he does, either the device stops Darren from reading his mind, or not.

    One ¡®or not¡¯ and I will have to try again. But later and more measured. If it works, fine. Then I have something stopping Psionics from reading my mind. Then you will have to decide if you want to risk the second device.¡±

    He tilted his head questioningly.

    ¡°Second device?¡±

    ¡°Yes. The first device stops somebody from sending. The second one stops somebody from receiving. But only a Psionic can test the second one. So it is your decision. I think it should be harmless, but I can¡¯t guarantee it.¡±

    Ben gripped my hand, softly. Meanwhile, Mark frowned.

    ¡°Uhm, not to be a spoilsport, but guinea pig? If he survives? Do you really plan to do human testing?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It can¡¯t be helped. It has to be an active, sapient brain that this device is tested on. So no rats, no research clones. But on the other hand, I would barely describe Frankel as human.¡±

    Natalie and Christine broke into laughter, with Natalie saying to Mark:

    ¡°Oh yes, Frankel is¡­ expendable.¡±

    Mark had the courtesy to blush.

    ¡°Oh, ok, yes I can understand that nobody would really care if he died. But I am still concerned about the principle. Human testing is¡­ just wrong.¡±

    ¡°As I said, can¡¯t be helped. Animal brains don¡¯t emanate the energy that Darren receives. Braindead research clones don¡¯t emanate anything as they are, well braindead. The only thing we can do is computer simulations. I¡¯ve done them already and they say it is safe and works. Leaves the final test.¡±

    Ben interjected.

    ¡°And what do you plan to do after that?¡±

    I let my shoulders slump before I lifted my hands in helpless confusion.

    ¡°That¡¯s the question. I have no idea. Just¡­ no thinking.¡±

    ¡°What did you do before when you needed to unwind?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It has never been that bad. Usually some light studying, or a bit of nano-bot design. But now? I don¡¯t think I am in the position for anything of that.¡±

    ¡°Have you thought about doing something creative? Like art? Or music?¡±

    I stopped with the croissant halfway to my mouth and looked at him.

    ¡°Uh¡­ no? I¡­ uh sorry but I wouldn¡¯t even know where to start.¡±

    He chuckled softly.

    ¡°Is there a better time to start it than now?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. Why do you think I should?¡±

    ¡°Remember what you told me about why you like cooking? I would say the same can be said about art or music. With the added bonus that it would give you an outlet for your emotions.¡±

    When I frowned, thinking about it, he caressed my cheek.

    ¡°Hey, you don¡¯t have to. I just thought it might suit you. You could as well match a movie or two, or binge on some series. Or it would probably fit you better to read some books.¡±

    ¡°It is not that. I just have no clue where to even start. Doesn¡¯t it take quite some time to get even adequate at that?¡±

    ¡°So what? You have the time. It might be something to develop anyway. As you¡¯ve just realized, science is not always the best answer.¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°I¡¯ll look into it. But¡­ I¡¯ll look into it. I can at least try. Where do I get the¡­ instruments? Or materials? I have absolutely no clue.¡±

    ¡°You¡¯ll figure something out, I¡¯m sure. You could get some VR course before you clutter your home with stuff you don¡¯t like.¡±

    I frowned harder this time.

    ¡°Urgh. I did not want to go into VR for some time.¡±

    ¡°As you wish. I would suggest you come with me for the weekend anyway. In a couple of days, you will see clearer I think.¡±

    ¡°I had planned something like that anyway.¡±

    After that, the conversation at the table lost any debth, as we all avoided anything meaningful.

    Finally sated, I waited until the rest were finished as well before I stood up, letting the bots clean up the table.

    Another bot brought Frankel into the new bio lab, where it injected him with BOU-nanites, generating a baseline. Meanwhile, I had another bot bring the two devices I had the NADA make to the bio lab.

    ¡°Well, Darren, Frankel is now in the bio lab getting the baseline from the BOU. I will remain on this side of the building and would suggest the rest of us do so as well.

    If you would be so friendly to go there, and when I com you, put the device that is formed into a blue six-winged angel figure around Frankel''s neck?

    I will observe his brain activity from here.¡±

    Darren nodded.

    ¡°Not that I can¡¯t do that, but why do you want me to go alone?¡±

    ¡°To prevent any interference from any of us. If you are with only Frankel in range, I think you can ascertain the impact of the device easier.¡±

    ¡°Hm, yes, that¡­ sounds right.¡±

    When he reached the bio lab, where a restrained Frankel was seething silently, I had enough of a baseline, that I could signal him to put on the device immediately.

    I observed Frankel¡¯s brain activity carefully, but there was no change in it.

    ¡°Darren, can you hear Frankel¡¯s thoughts?¡±

    ¡°No, I can¡¯t. Not that I could hear them so strongly beforehand, but right now¡­ nothing. Oh, and he is still alive. Obviously.¡±

    I breathed a sigh of relief.

    ¡°Ok, that is good. That means the darn thing works.¡±

    ¡°Ok, do you want me to bring it to you?¡±

    ¡°Yes, please.¡±

    When Darren got back, he had both devices in his hands.

    ¡°I assume that this one here¡± he lifted the one that formed a complex hexagonal pattern, ¡°is the one for me?¡±

    ¡°Yes. Again, it should be safe.¡±

    ¡°And how is it powered?¡±

    ¡°The same as mine. Bodyheat. It takes surprisingly little amounts of energy¡±

    I reached out for him to give me my angel choker.

    ¡°Now, it is unlikely that anything happens at this point, but that is not the same as impossible. So please, watch out.¡±

    Saying that I put the choker around my own neck. I felt no discernable difference in myself and looked at Darren questioningly. He lifted an eyebrow.

    ¡°Well, it seems to work. I can¡¯t hear you anymore at least.¡±

    I slumped a bit, relief filling me.

    ¡°Then it was worth it, I think. I feel no difference. Warden, what do my brainwaves say?¡±

    ¡°In all aspects that I can measure, your brain is working within acceptable parameters.¡±

    I sat down on the next chair.

    ¡°Well, that was that.¡±

    Darren smiled.

    ¡°At least it is quite a bit quieter now. Now it¡¯s my turn.¡±

    I looked at him.

    ¡°Are you sure? As I said, I can¡¯t guarantee that it doesn¡¯t kill you.¡±

    He gave me a crooked, sad smile.

    ¡°You have no idea what it means to live with this¡­ noise in your head. I¡­ you learn to live with it. But¡­ to get rid of it, it is a dream for all Psionics, I can tell you that.¡±

    With that, he placed the device around his own neck, just to look at me puzzled.

    ¡°It¡¯s not working!¡±

    I had to smile at that.

    ¡°You have to switch it on first. I thought it impractical for you to have to take it off any time you want to read somebodies mind. Turn the inner part of the pattern clockwise.¡±

    He frowned for a bit, but when he did switch on the device, his eyes widened in shock.

    At first, I was worried, and jumped up, to get to him quickly, but he just lifted his right hand to sign me to stop.

    ¡°No¡­ no, it¡¯s¡­ it is working. It is¡­ so quiet. I¡­ oh my god, it is so quiet.¡±

    And he fell on his knees and began to weep.

    I looked around the room, unsure of what was going on. Did I somehow damage him?

    ¡°Darren, are you all right?¡± Ryan seemed to be much firmer in his actions right at that moment.

    ¡°Yes, yes. You¡­ you can¡¯t even begin to understand what this means to me. I¡­ all this time, I¡­ oh this blessed silence. I have never realized how much background noise there is.¡±

    From what I could understand of Darren''s sobbing explanation, it was nothing bad, but I still was insecure, wringing my hands.

    I could not decide if I should switch the device off. He was¡­ well at least it did not kill him, but the reaction was¡­ bewildering.

    After nearly a minute he jumped up, still with tears streaming out of his eyes, and grabbed me into a tight hug.

    ¡°Thank you! Thank you! What you have given me¡­ it is priceless.¡±

    I now felt some panic growing inside me. That was not the cool, collected Darren I knew. What the heck had I done?

    ¡°Darren? Are you all right? You are¡­ acting so strange.¡±

    ¡°Yes, yes I am all right. And¡­ you can¡¯t feel how much relief I am feeling right now. It is¡­ all these years, as long as I can remember, always there was this low droning in the background. Even among Psionics, it was there. It was too low, too quiet to understand, but always there, always in my mind.

    Until now. I¡­ you can¡¯t imagine what it means for me to have this silence.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ it is not messing with your mind?¡±

    ¡°No, it is not. It is just freeing me.¡±

    I had meanwhile managed to extricate myself from his grip, and he had chosen his next victim, namely Ryan.

    ¡°Well, that is good. But¡­ we have to test if you can switch it off again.¡±

    He slumped, let go of Ryan, and turned slowly towards me.

    ¡°Do we have to? Really?¡±

    I nodded, solemnly.

    ¡°Yes, I fear we have to. You might need the ability sometime in the future. And we don¡¯t know what abilities it also blocks.¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°Yes, you are right. I still don¡¯t want to. Well, here goes¡­¡±

    And he switched it off, instantly tensioning up.

    ¡°O¡­k. Switching it off works. The only one I can¡¯t hear even a tiny bit is you. Now can I switch it back on, please?¡±

    ¡°One moment. Warden, what do the brainwaves say?¡±

    ¡°There was no change to Darren¡¯s brainwaves between activated and deactivated device.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Ok, that is fine then. You can activate it.¡±

 81: Let it go

    After the successful tests, Ben ushered me into his limo and to his home. Shortly later he noticed that I had invested in some more appealing underwear.

    As much as I wanted to, we could not spend the whole weekend in bed though. At some time we had to come up for food, and bodily needs.

    And after a bit more than a day, even our appetites were mostly sated. For the time being that is.

    On Sunday afternoon, we relocated to his library, where he moved toward a comfortable-looking overstuffed chair sitting next to a small table with a newspaper lying on it.

    Just before he reached it, he suddenly stopped, turned to me, and then looked over the books.

    A few seconds later he apparently found what he searched for and took a book from a shelf, pressing it into my hands.

    ¡°Here, I think that might something for you.¡±

    I just stared dumbfounded at the book in my hands, while he sat down in his chair before grabbing the newspaper.

    I had a sudden and completely random image in my head that he was missing his pipe. I honestly have no clue where that came from but it seemed strangely fitting for the surrounding.

    Still standing mostly forlorn in the room, the book in my hand I finally shook my head and moved to another of the chairs to sit down.

    I decided I would have to get a few of these chairs for myself pretty quickly, while I studied the book.

    While the cover was nothing remarkable, the pages themselves had a strange texture that I had not encountered before.

    ¡°Uhm, is there something wrong with this plasfilm? It¡­ I don¡¯t know it feels strange.¡±

    Ben chuckled.

    ¡°That is because it is no plasfilm. What you have in your hands is a genuine paper book.¡±

    I was silent for a moment. Genuine paper?

    ¡°How¡­ how old is this book?¡±

    ¡°Not quite sure if I have to be honest. It was written around the year 2000 as far as I know, but this example was printed sometime in the 20s or 30s of the 21<sup>st</sup> century.¡±

    In other words, it was worth an inordinate amount of money, and not just for being made from paper. Not many books had survived the war or its aftermath.

    And so, while Ben read his newspaper I started to read the book.

    Sadly, I quickly realized that it was¡­ too much of a children''s book for me. Sure, the story of the orphan that is more or less tormented by his caretakers did indeed touch a few strings inside me, and while I did not have a magic school with talking hats I had Apollo and cyberspace.

    But I still could not get into it. The whole¡­ world, the writing, it was all so¡­ childish, so I could just not get into it.

    When I placed the book somewhat frustrated on the table beside Ben, he looked directly at me.

    ¡°You don¡¯t like it? I would have thought that it suited you.¡±

    I just shrugged.

    ¡°I¡­ can see how you get the idea, but¡­ mentally I am over 150 years old. This is a children''s book. It¡­ I can¡¯t get into it.¡±

    He lifted an eyebrow before he placed the newspaper back on the table to put the book back on the shelf.

    ¡°Well, it was worth a shot. Hmm, maybe this one is more to your liking.¡±

    And he gave me another book made out of real paper.

    I looked at it questioningly. From the cover, it was another fantasy novel, but¡­

    ¡°Try it. I think you might like the genre. If not, you could try science fiction, but most of what I have here is¡­ well reality has overtaken much of it by now. That always rips me out of the immersion.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I¡¯ll try.¡±

    I have to say, this book was much more to my liking. The whole concept of this world was so¡­ absurd but it was just¡­ funny. I especially liked the tourist and his luggage of course. And the incompetent wizard¡­ of course, it was nothing to take seriously.

    But it was exactly what I needed. I could not help but laugh at some of the absurdities, but it just¡­ fitted.

    I have to say I was so engrossed into the book that I did barely notice the time passing and was momentarily confused about what was going on when Ben softly shook my shoulder.

    I realized only then that I had completely curled up in the chair. When I looked at Ben he smiled at me.

    ¡°It seems that this book is more to your liking.¡±

    ¡°Yes, it is¡­ I don¡¯t know, funny of course, but it just works.¡±

    If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

    ¡°Where are you?¡±

    ¡°Well, the tourist has just sold the insurance to the bar owner.¡±

    ¡°Well, the book won¡¯t run away, and it is dinner time.¡±

    Reluctantly I closed the book and placed it on the table, and we moved toward the dining room.

    Michael was there, of course. And while I can¡¯t say that the food was comparable to what I made by myself from fresh, real ingredients, over the weekend I came to agree with Ben that a better food replicator was adequate.

    I would definitely look into getting one for the fortress. I was a little bit miffed that I had just bought the standard algae tank, but that¡¯s life.

    And considering that Warden had sold another 37 ultra-jack and cranial board combos¡­ giving me another 1.295 billion dollars¡­ at least before taxes that is¡­ I could afford it.

    And I would guess that Ben was quite happy with our deal. After dinner, I brought up the topic.

    ¡°One question Ben. Do you have a specific account where I should send the tribute?¡±

    He looked at me confused for a moment before he shrugged.

    ¡°That depends. For smaller numbers, you can use the account we gave you earlier. If it is more¡­ well I will have to ask Paul where he wants it.¡±

    ¡°Then I guess that for a bit less than $650 million you have to ask Mr. Hanratty?¡±

    Michael, who was just sipping his beer, spit selfsame all over the table, while Ben¡¯s eyes widened for a moment.

    While Michael fought the coughing fit, Ben nodded.

    ¡°Of course. You said yesterday to Amelia that you earned over $5 billion since you came to New York. I¡¯ve completely missed the implications. I assume the number has grown?¡±

    ¡°I¡¯ve tasked Warden with selling the cyberware. By now we have sold 185 combos of ultra-bandwidth jack and cranial board.¡±

    ¡°That is still¡­ around $6.5 billion. You made $1.5 billion in sales over two days?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Yes, nearly. But don¡¯t get used to it. This is the first glut. Mostly Abyss dwellers and other well-off Jacks. I would guess a handful of corpo-rats will jump onto the train, but my estimate is that we will satisfy the demand for the high-end implants in at best a week.

    The cheaper ones will not generate that amount of income. Especially if the customer forgoes the cranial board.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I can see that. Still, you¡¯ve generated more tribute for me in just a few months than Frankel did in all his 10 years doing business here.¡±

    I scoffed.

    ¡°I would say that is mostly because slavery is not new or hot. And absolutely not exclusive. Frankel had a significantly smaller market share and a much lower profit margin. I on the other hand am the only one where you can get these implants at the moment. Makes it a seller''s market.¡±

    Michael had in the meanwhile gotten himself under control again.

    ¡°And the people who buy from you still think it is a steal, I bet.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Might be. You tell me, is the utility worth it?¡±

    Now he laughed.

    ¡°Oh yeah. You should have seen Eric¡¯s face when I used the synaptic accelerator during training. Sure, it did not make my movements any faster, but¡­ the ability to think out what is happening, to act instead of only react¡­ I guess we will have to get our other men these things in time.¡±

    ¡°Probably not the full package I think. Even if it will drop in price significantly in the next year or so, it will be expensive. I think they can get away with a low- or mid-jack and the accelerator and HUD connected to that.¡±

    Ben nodded solemnly, while Michael looked more contemplating. Then the younger of the two men gave me his patented half-grin.

    ¡°Yeah, I see what you mean. If we put the ultra at $1 million, then it will be too much even after the prices fall. We haven¡¯t spoken about the cranial board, or maybe we should call it something else that does not sounds like matrix combat. If I see the specs correctly it is just an upper-end com, am I right? So I think the cost of more than $20 million is a bit excessive.¡±

    ¡°Not really. It is complicated to build and was complicated to design. Yes, the price will go down as well when we start mass production, and I will have to design a couple of low-powered models to get something of a lineup, but for now, the price is appropriate.¡±

    ¡°Ok, it is your decision. And apparently, people are buying it. By the way, you think so far there have been no corpo-rats among your customers?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Unlikely. The ones who can afford that sort of expenditure are also the ones who wait and see how it works.¡±

    That reminded me, that I had to amend the potential customer list somewhat. I would not sell to Panacea execs. Ever! Dalgon¡­ well they could wait for a couple of years.

    I sent a message to that effect to Warden. And yes, of course, I knew that with the dark web and grey and black markets the rats would eventually get their dirty mitts on my implant tech. But they would have to pay black market prices.

    Hmm¡­ maybe¡­ I could Warden control the black market for these implants as well. Let the people on the banned list pay four times as much for the same.

    But that was mostly the end of my divine weekend. Ben had to go back to work the next day, and my new ABAS 675-S would arrive on Tuesday, so I had to prepare the garage.

    But that was essentially all the work I did for the next week. I did, however really try to learn an instrument. And yes, I did try it in VR, even if at a very sedate 4:1.

    I had chosen the keyboard for it, thinking that it might be the easiest instrument to learn, but I can¡¯t say that I had become particularly good at it. At least not in that first week.

    It did help me with my emotions though.

    And as I had predicted the demand for the cranial board had mostly waned by now, and for jacks, it was mostly the high-bandwidth and lower ones that sold.

    Mostly that is. I was surprised by a big order from the Commonwealth. Somebody there had decided to get 45 ultra-bandwidth jacks along with cranial boards. Naturally, I had Warden look hard into the order, and it seemed that Vandermeer had decided to equip their execs with it. They also ordered nearly 1000 high-bandwidth jacks without the board.

    At 999k DC the high-bandwidth jacks were just a hair below one million, and with the conversion that alone promised nearly $6 billion. The ultra-board packages added another $1.575 billion to the bill.

    I had nothing against taking the old man''s money though. What was surprising though was that they also wanted to license the Mk. IV board for internal use only. They offered me an additional one billion DC for that.

    I had to think about that for a moment. Or more. The whole order was¡­ strange. How did they decide that it was actually working? Don¡¯t get me wrong, my reputation on the dark web was sufficient to get the Jacks on board with relative ease, and from there the other less than legal folks.

    But a newly minted AAA corp? Oh yes, after the eternal war between the AFS and the NWC was concluded, Vandermeer was in the unique position of absorbing most of Falconer¡¯s market, elevating it to an AAA as well.

    But I digress. I could not understand why a triple-A corp jumped onto this new tech so¡­ early. And then I got it. It was a less than pleasant thought, but it was the only explanation.

    Vandermeer knew not only about me being C-Dot but Seraphim as well. It seemed that they had a much closer eye on me than I thought. The only reason why I did not panic right then and there was the fact that they obviously did not intend to go after me.

    Ok, that was not that strange, as I had avoided going after them. So no enmity here. But¡­ it was a dangerous thought. I just hoped that they did not know about Spectre as well.

    But I decided that as long as they left me alone I would not antagonize them.

    In the end, brooding about it served no other purpose than to torture myself, and I was left with no other option than to let it go.

 82: This could be useful

    I spent the evenings of the week mostly at Ben¡¯s home, while the owner suites in the fortress were still being made habitable again.

    Considering that I found nothing wrong with roughly welded bare metal pipe construction as furniture, I decided to outsource the interior design for both of them.

    I did not even have to go to the dark web for that, as it was a completely legitimate business. On the other hand, I was not all too keen on letting more strangers into the fortress than was strictly necessary, so I created a VR of the bare suites, and hired a few interior designers to make it not only habitable but cozy and elegant.

    But at the end of the week, Friday the 19<sup>th</sup> to be exact I had enough of slacking. I had mostly recovered from the work on the mind blocker as Ben called it when he asked for one for himself.

    Of course, I gave him one. Michael as well. They both decided on another design than the six-winged angel one I used, but that was mostly the clasp anyway. The tech itself was mostly in the carbon band that was going around the neck, laced around the electroactive polymer ensuring a tight but not too tight fit.

    Interestingly, no one else asked for one. To be fair, even Michael did not ask for one, but I thought that he knew enough of my secrets that he should be protected.

    Of course, both men realized that the blocker itself was a secret as well, considering that it took some technology that should not exist to make.

    But back to business, I reviewed the latest results from the growth accelerator tests. By now I had a rough idea of what division stimulant to use, and I began looking into what I could do about increased cell aging.

    For the time being, I had no clue how to achieve that though. But at least I had a cloning procedure that was not only significantly faster - it would be faster to build a new cloning rig and start another new kidney for Justin than to finish the one already baking for three weeks ¨C but it would be cheaper as well.

    Now I just needed a genetic engineer to make Panacea scream.

    With a chuckle, I realized that I now needed exactly what I said Ben, Vince, and the other bosses needed.

    That of course reminded me of the virus Frankel had used on us. Sure, it was useless for changing us back, as it only worked once, but it did rejuvenate us a bit.

    I would have to create a couple of research clones to test it on and observe how it did that, and maybe that would help me in my project over the long term. I would of course first need to construct the cloning rig.

    And do that while I did not neglect the ongoing fabrication of cyberware.

    I would have to think about it for some time.

    But now I had nothing to do anymore. I briefly considered practicing my music but squashed the thought almost immediately again.

    I would not give it up, naturally, but for the moment I had enough of it. A couple of days at least.

    I also rejected the notion of studying right now. So the question was, what to do?

    Working on the medical VI did not appeal to me either.

    While I was contemplating what to do next, Ryan knocked on the door. I looked at him with a lifted eyebrow, tilting my head a bit.

    ¡°Yes?¡±

    ¡°Ms. Uesugi is here. I think she wants to talk about her new cyberware.¡±

    Ups, I had completely forgotten about that.

    ¡°Oh, yes, of course. How many are in her party?¡±

    ¡°Only six. And only four of them seem to be guards. Shall I call Justin?¡±

    I could not suppress a grin.

    ¡°If anything, look if Kate is free at the moment. That would be much more impressive. But I don¡¯t think that is necessary. Ms. Uesugi is an ally of Ben, and she needs my help. And I will meet her, and her entourage, in the conference room.¡±

    Then I collected my thoughts, and on the way to the conference room, was quickly going over the cyberware she had previously. It was some primitive HUD, a link to her com, and some form of secure data storage.

    I could throw something like that together in a couple of hours. Or¡­ maybe modify the HUD, give it a bigger processor and more storage and ram¡­ an NFC? Yes, that could work.

    The fastest solution would of course her buying a cranial board. But considering the price of that thing, I would not insist on it.

    Then I called Ben.

    ¡°Hey Kitten, what can I do for you?¡±

    ¡°Ms. Uesugi has come for new cyberware. Do you want me to give her a rebate?¡±

    He took a moment before he answered:

    ¡°Only if she asks for one. Then¡­ well go as low as you can and still make a real profit. Otherwise, you would hurt her pride. And use the real prices, she will find out what you take for it either way.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I¡¯ll see you later.¡±

    ¡°I love you too.¡±

    As always I felt a pinch when he mentioned he loved me. I still could not reply in kind.

    After I had arrived in the conference room, I took a chair and connected to the holoprojector, waiting for Ms. Uesugi to arrive.

    It was immediately apparent that Ryan had taken my joke seriously when Kate preceded the others into the room.

    When the yakuza delegation entered, I stood up and greeted their principal.

    ¡°Welcome. I am sorry that I have not called you, but I had a bit of a burnout, and needed recovery time.¡±

    Ms. Uesugi looked at me cooly but then nodded.

    ¡°Can I ask what the problem was?¡±

    ¡°I had an internal problem here, and to get a solution I needed an extended work session in cyberspace. Without going too much into detail, I spent a bit more than 1? years working on the problem. Virtual of course. But without rest¡­ let¡¯s say I was at the end of my capabilities afterward.¡±

    Her eyes widened, but otherwise, she showed no reaction.

    ¡°I understand. That can be straining I think. But you are capable of work now?¡±

    Wow, talk about cool.

    ¡°Yes. If you walk out of here with new cyberware rests solely on what you want to have done. If I have to design it first, it might take a few days. But please, sit down. It is easier to talk if we don¡¯t stand around.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I can see that. And I would like to have the functionality I previously had again. I miss it sorely by now.¡±

    We both sat down, together with two of the men with her, while all the obvious guards moved towards the walls and remained silent.

    ¡°Now, I fear you will have to live with a better HUD. I categorically refuse to implant something this¡­ shoddy and primitive. Sorry.¡±

    She tilted her head.

    ¡°Shoddy and primitive? I paid quite a sum of money for it. And I know of nobody who has something like that.¡±

    ¡°Yes, shoddy and primitive. They had better HUDs before the great war. Whoever you paid either had no real knowledge about implant tech or ripped you off.¡±

    She frowned but otherwise remained calm.

    ¡°It is unlikely that he ripped me off. Unfortunately, he died a few years ago.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Then he did not research what was possible. To make it short, I have a HUD system, but it is based on the last version from the war. I used a better processor and better connectors. More of them, yes, but they are no longer dangerous.

    But if you absolutely want to have the look and feel of the old one, I think I can program the new one to emulate the old one.

    Now, the rest of the cyberware¡­ if you want the quick solution, and unfortunately also the most expensive, you will take at least a mid-bandwidth jack and the cranial board. I have them here and ready for implantation. The board will include everything you had, and some other things and the jack is, in that package, only a socket that you can use to connect it to other devices. There is no difference between a mid-jack that I hook the board into or the connection of the board directly to the brain.¡±

    One of the men that had sat down interjected.

    ¡°One moment, but what is this mid-jack you are talking about?¡±

    ¡°Before the war, they produced jacks, the neural connectors, in various grades. What is commonly used today is just the basic jack. Essentially what the poor got subsided by a company together with some service.

    Then there are low-, mid-, high-, and ultra-bandwidth jacks. Each successive version needs significantly more neuronect.¡±

    I used the holoprojector to project the stats of the various jacks and the number of neuronect.

    ¡°After the war, the higher models fell out of favor for obvious reasons. But with me finally finding a way to eliminate CRS, I resurrected them.

    Now, the cranial board I produce, something I have designed from the ground up, as there was nothing like it ever, needs enough neuronect that it is essentially a mid-bandwidth jack with the rest of the hardware instead of a socket. In my opinion, you can as well slap a socket on it and be done.

    The point is though that it is for all purposes a high-end com that is directly implanted inside your body. Not quite a flagship, I did not manage enough cooling to make that feasible, but only a notch or two lower.

    Of course, you can still use your normal com, if you want to, and connect it to the board. But honestly, you rarely need an extra com in my experience. As it uses your skin as an antenna it has a significantly better connection to the matrix than any com you can get.¡±

    The other not yet introduced man leaned forward.

    ¡°And what would that cost? You said it was the most expensive solution?¡±

    ¡°The mid-jack would cost around $320k, without the adaption against CRS. The cranial board would cost around $27.5 million, and the adaption would cost around $3.2 million.¡±

    He frowned, as did the other man, while Ms. Uesugi simply raised an eyebrow.

    If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

    ¡°These prices¡­ they are pretty high.¡±

    ¡°These are my standard prices. Actually, the jack is only a third of what it would cost solo, as I can use the connection in the board and just add a socket.¡±

    ¡°I assume you make a sizable profit at those prices.¡±

    I smiled at her:

    ¡°Yes, of course I do. I provide an absolutely unique product. The prices are high, but the feedback I¡¯ve gotten was that the intended target customers would have paid three or four times as much.¡±

    ¡°Intended target customers?¡±

    ¡°Jacks. Abyss-dwellers to be exact. Or in other words, people who earn that much in a month or two, if they are on the low end.¡±

    ¡°I understand. And what would a better jack cost, and what would it bring?¡±

    ¡°At this very moment, it would bring you not all that much. The synaptic accelerator would be more effective, and if you dove into cyberspace, for whatever reason, you would get a higher compression out of whatever hardware you use.

    And a high-bandwidth jack would cost around $1.9 million more. An ultra around $4 million.¡±

    ¡°And I would be more or less the only one here to have such a¡­ device?¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°No, of course not. What gave you that idea? For one, I have one. One of the Abyss-dwellers who has one lives here in NYC. And a couple of others have one as well. Well, mostly. All of us use the ultra-bandwidth jack instead of the mid.¡±

    She looked at the two men with her and switched to Japanese.

    ¡°Can we afford that? And is it advisable?¡±

    The man to her right opened his mouth to answer, but before he could, I interjected, also in Japanese:

    ¡°I think I have to inform you that I can understand, and speak, Japanese as well.¡±

    They all looked at me sharply, but I just shrugged, switching back to English.

    ¡°If you want, I can just leave the room.¡±

    They looked at each other, and the two men shrugged before Ms. Uesugi answered me, still in Japanese:

    ¡°No, I don¡¯t think that is necessary. But thank you.¡±

    I shrugged as well and leaned back.

    The man who had started to answer her did so now:

    ¡°We can afford it, but it will strain our resources badly. If we can get a cheaper solution we should inquire about that.¡±

    ¡°You know I need the secure file storage on Sunday. Depending on how long it takes to get a cheaper solution it might be too long.¡±

    The other man meanwhile rubbed his chin.

    ¡°I don¡¯t like the neuronect connection. If this CRS-free stuff doesn¡¯t work this will kill you.¡±

    Ms. Uesugi turned to him.

    ¡°Yes, I know. But anything I will get will do the same for certain. And unfortunately, there are already rumors that I don¡¯t have my cyberware anymore. That I am weak. I need something like that, or we might find ourselves in a war.¡±

    Ouch, that was¡­ unfortunate.

    In the end, the second man turned back to me.

    ¡°Can you guarantee that this will not kill her?¡±

    I let out a long breath.

    ¡°From the way Ms. Uesugi posed the questions and how you answered I assume you are her medical professional?¡±

    When he nodded I continued:

    ¡°Then you know that there are never guarantees. As I said to one of Mr. Walker¡¯s men when he got his new heart, there are factors we can¡¯t calculate. An orderly might drop the stretcher and she breaks her neck. Or something goes wrong and she gets an infection.

    About the tech, I can only say that I trust it enough to use it myself. I could be wrong and it is not safe to use, but I obviously don¡¯t believe that. All my simulations say it is safe.

    The thing you should be much more concerned about right now is her muscular cyberware. By the way, she is still moving under her own power it is clear that it has not yet been pulled.

    Muscular cyberwar has only minimal neuronect, but it has it. It might not be enough to trigger the next phase, but is that really a risk you are willing to take?¡±

    Ms. Uesugi interrupted before he could answer:

    ¡°He is not the one willing to take that risk. I am. He informed me about the risks but at the moment I can¡¯t remove the cyberware.¡±

    ¡°It is your decision. I strongly advise against it, but¡­ well it¡¯s your life.¡±

    ¡°Yes, it is. Now, how long would it take for you to design cyberware that has the same function as what I had?¡±

    ¡°That depends on if you want to include jack or not. But generally¡­ let me think.¡±

    I used the synaptic accelerator to think a bit faster.

    The basic function was in the HUD, but it would need a better processor. I could take the Regulon 130 from the synaptic accelerator, which would provide enough power. The cooling system from the accelerator as well naturally. Then I could include the WiFi, and add the com-package from the board.

    The storage¡­ no, I just realized that the 130 was virtually incapable of encryption and decryption. So back to the 80, and a separate WiFi module? No, that would need a second adaptation. So I left it at the 130, tentatively. Left the storage module.

    I would have to integrate a dedicated encryption chip to get hardware encryption going. I even had a few where the key was not hardwired.

    But¡­ I could not promise to get it done for Sunday.

    ¡°I can¡¯t say with certainty. Everything except the storage is¡­ well not easy, but only a matter of hours. The problem is, that I did not expect somebody to need a data storage implant without the board.

    The board has a dedicated encryption-decryption subprocessor integrated and included in the energy budget.

    I¡¯ll have to look into designing a cooling solution for the subprocessor, and I can not predict if one of my solutions works under that circumstances.

    I¡¯ll have to run simulations. If one of them works, fine, it will be done tomorrow. If not¡­¡±

    I left the sentence open-ended, but all of us understood the implication.

    All three of them looked displeased, but there was not much I could change on the facts.

    They either had to do without, take the gamble that I got it done in time, or pay the price for a cranial board.

    Honestly, in my, allowedly not impartial opinion, the added functionality of the board justified the price, but yes, it was expensive.

    It did cost more than my shiny new skimmer did, something that said a lot.

    They brooded about it for a bit, talking softly to each other. Yes, I did hear them, but I gave them the courtesy of ignoring it.

    When the apparent money-man directed a question at me, I was instantly back focussing on them:

    ¡°Is there a way you could come down in price for the, what did you call it, cranial board?¡±

    Ms. Uesugi looked sharply at him, while she hissed, but then slumped and sighed, nodding at me.

    Well, showtime.

    ¡°Yes, there is the possibility. You are Mr. Walker¡¯s allies as far as I know. So, how about a full cranial board including ultra-jack right now for a $15 million flat?

    Bear in mind, I won¡¯t be able to go much less for a custom system as you would need it.¡±

    They all frowned, and Ms. Uesugi asked me:

    ¡°Why the ultra-jack? And¡­ it is less than half, can you afford that?¡±

    ¡°The ultra-bandwidth jack is because I have a few of them ready for implantation available. I would need to make a high- or mid-bandwidth jack, as those I have in that bracket are already sold.

    And yes, I can afford it. My profit margin is insane, as is fitting for unique bleeding edge technology. At 15 million bucks I still make a profit, even if it is significantly smaller.¡±

    Meaning that I would ¡®only¡¯ make a bit over 300% profit instead of the 800% I usually made.

    ¡°And the cranial board can do anything my previous implants could?¡±

    I had to snort.

    ¡°That is the same as asking if your smartwatch can do anything an analog quartz watch can do. Your HUD was, in one word rudimentary. With the board, you¡¯ll have full augmented reality, navigation, communication, bio-monitoring, and whatever sparks your fancy integrated into the HUD.

    You¡¯ll have a fully functional com implanted, that has to only accept defeat from a flagship com. And honestly, you will be hard-pressed to use more than 60% of its potential. If you need more, you can still link your flagship com, or your personal computer, to it.

    The storage module is 12 times the size you had implanted previously, though you will have to share it with the os and the apps. You previously had a hardwired encryption key, now you can use different ones for different files.

    Oh, and in case somebody rips it out of your body, it will immediately brick itself. Unless you don¡¯t want that and configure it accordingly.

    That does not mean that the files can¡¯t be accessed, but it will take a good tech to get to them in the first place.

    Add to that the fully functional ultra-bandwidth jack, something you probably will quickly learn to love, and it is like comparing an Apple II with a Kawamoto Ryuu.¡±

    She nodded again.

    ¡°It is important that I have the implanted storage on Sunday. If it can do that, then the rest is acceptable to me.¡±

    I shoved back my chair, standing up.

    ¡°Well, then I would suggest we get started. One thing though, unlike your former cyberware, this one won¡¯t fit into your skull. Yes, I know I call it a cranial board, but in reality, it is located in the body. I personally think the best location is behind the shoulder blade.

    We could place it in the pelvis, but for one, it is quite a bit more vulnerable there, and as a woman, should you ever get pregnant you would have to remove it from there.¡±

    All three of them were in the process of standing up, stopping now, and looking at me.

    Ms. Uesugi finished standing up and turned fully to me.

    ¡°Why are you saying that now?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Unlike last time you will have to remove your clothing at least from the upper torso.¡±

    For some reason, she just broke out laughing. Despite that, she was still able to follow us to the main lab.

    As usual, the actual implantation process was mostly anti-climactic. After less than half an hour I left her in the hands of her men, waiting for the anesthesia to wear off.

    Meanwhile, I was back to wondering what I should do. I had not yet gotten an idea about how to build a better cloning rig. Sure, I could design one, but at the moment I was unwilling to use the industrial fabber for that.

    Could I use the NADA? Yes, of course I could. I could also wait until the new increased fabber was ready. That would be faster.

    Maybe I could design an upgrade kit for my existing rig. I briefly thought about what I would need for that.

    The one I had already had a relatively modular design. It was designed to take the various growth accelerators in use, provide the resources needed for the sample to grow, and remove the waste products.

    I would need to substitute the buffering liquid with a permanently reconstituted resource substrate, without compromising the waste removal, and then introduce the nanobots and the new growth accelerator mixture to the substrate.

    Hmm, essentially a big mixer with resource tanks, a nanofab, and a pump system. No, that was not enough. I would also need to purge any contaminants from the substrate. Could I use the nanobots for that? With a good enough control system, maybe. Of course, I would have to include a BOU anyway, so if I upsized the control unit, and include a gravimetric scanner¡­ yes, that could work.

    I could use the NADA to fabricate the important components, use the household fabber for the basic electronics, and make the housing from metal, yes, that should work just fine. And it should be done in a day or two, without impacting cyberware construction.

    I was vaguely aware of my surroundings, but mostly in my own mind, walking towards the bio-lab. Honestly, why I walked there is anyone''s guess. In hindsight, it made absolutely no sense, and I can¡¯t say why I did it.

    But on the way, I almost ran directly into Darren, stopping only a few centimeters away from him.

    I immediately had the feeling that I had forgotten something, and I frowned trying to remember what.

    Apparently, Darren took my frown about forgetting something as a rejection of his person.

    ¡°No need to be angry V. I am sorry I ran into you.¡±

    That brought me out of my brooding, and I looked at him in confusion.

    ¡°Hu? What are you talking about? I almost ran into you.¡±

    Now he joined me in confusion.

    ¡°You are not angry about that? I thought¡­ with everything that happened you would be pissed off at me.¡±

    ¡°Why should I¡­ oh, yes, that is right. Ok, let me make it clear. While I am not happy about what happened, I understand that you had to choose between pest and cholera. Either tell me and risk me going nuclear, or violate my trust.

    As I said, I don¡¯t like it, but you did what you had to do. You could probably have said something a bit sooner, but yeah, I get that you erred on the side of caution.¡±

    Now he frowned.

    ¡°That is¡­ a remarkable change considering how you felt about it just last week.¡±

    Last week? What had last week to do with it? Then I understood.

    ¡°Oh. You forget that for me, that was more than 1? years ago. So I had quite a bit of time to get over it.¡±

    His eyes widened, and then he nodded in understanding.

    ¡°Oh, ok, yes, that explains that. But why were you frowning so hard just now then?¡±

    I shook my head, sighing.

    ¡°I¡¯ve forgotten something. I know it was important. But I can¡¯t remember what it was. And seeing you, I realized that I have forgotten it.¡±

    Ryan cleared his throat.

    ¡°Could it have something to do with Darren then? If he triggered it?¡±

    I just shrugged.

    ¡°Possibly. Maybe even likely, but until I remember what¡­¡±

    Suddenly I got it. I had never followed up on the mind blocker. The one that Darren wore even now. Yes, I was relatively sure that it had no uncomfortable side effects, but I was not sure yet.

    ¡°I¡¯ve got it. Your mind blocker¡­ we never talked about how it works.¡±

    Now Darren frowned again.

    ¡°How it works? Well, I assume you are not talking about the principles, as I have no clue how it does what it does. So¡­ you mean how it influences my life?¡±

    When I nodded he continued:

    ¡°Well, to summarize it in one word, brilliant. Sure, there are a few small problems. Mostly because I have used the information I¡¯ve gotten through telepathy for as long as I can remember, and suddenly, I¡­ feel a bit blind, or deaf.

    I have to learn to read the other clues people show. And it doesn¡¯t help that it also stops my empathy cold.

    But honestly, if I feel the need to have my telepathy or empathy back, I can just deactivate the mind blocker, as you call it.¡±

    Well, that did not sound too bad.

    ¡°Anything else? Are your other powers working fine?¡±

    ¡°Well, I haven¡¯t tried all of them, but from what I tested, everything that works on the human mind stops working with it being active. I still have biokinetics, telekinetics, and thermokinetics. Those still work just fine.

    Yes, I need to deactivate to influence other people, but that is a price I happily pay for what it gives me.¡±

    ¡°Any headaches? Or did you notice something changed in your behavior?¡±

    ¡°No, nothing. Everything is fine.¡±

    Ryan harumphed at that.

    ¡°I have to interrupt here. His personality has changed. Significantly. He is, mostly, much more laid back now. There was a tension in him that is now just gone. He is also much more mellow.

    On the other hand, he lost¡­ much of his insight and has become much more insecure in interacting with the others.¡±

    That, well at first I thought that was not so good, but after a short moment, I realized that if Darren had the buzzing of humanity''s thoughts constantly in his head, with it now missing it should make him much more relaxed.

    And if he used his empathy and telepathy to navigate interpersonal situations, with it suddenly missing it was not surprising if he had to feel his way into his new situation slowly.

    And so, after initially frowning, I nodded.

    ¡°Ok, yes, I can understand that I think. I haven¡¯t thought about it, but I would say these reactions are mostly normal. Maybe I can make it a variable effect, that allows you to blend out the buzz while keeping receiving the feelings of the people in the immediate surrounding. But that will take some while.

    I¡­ really don¡¯t want to go down that rabbit hole again for a few months.¡±

    Then I had another idea. In the process of identifying this quantum field, I had to design a receiver for it. In other words, it should be possible to build a device that reads the surface thoughts of humans.

    But¡­ as with the regulated mind blocker, I would need to take a bit of a time out from that topic still.

    Nonetheless, this could be useful. Very useful indeed.

 83: A bridge too far

    It was almost trivial to design a receiver for the quantum wave that we humans emit. After a bit of trial and error, I was also able to use multiple receivers, or maybe I should call them rather antennas, to isolate the quantum emission of specific persons.

    What was a¡­ tiny bit harder to do, as in, I could not get it to work at all trying for most of the week, was to interpret said wave. Yes, I could perceive minute changes, that I was pretty sure could be translated into surface thoughts, but knowing they were there and translating them were two very different things. Especially as the resulting wave was an amalgamation of a myriad of individual frequencies.

    I could only assume that Psionics, with their mostly human brains, did that automatically.

    Interestingly when I talked with Darren about it, I learned that the language actually mattered. He would ¡®hear¡¯ the thoughts, as the person was thinking them. When the person thought in English, no problem, he knew English. Spanish was a bit iffy. He knew a bit of it, enough to get by in the AFS, but not much more.

    Any other language? Not a chance in hell. To know that I could have defeated his mind-reading powers by simply switching to Mandarin, Japanese, Russian, French or German, or any of the other languages I spoke fluently¡­ well, water under the bridge.

    Yes, I am a bit of a linguist. I had, at that point, a mental age of more than 180 years, an eidetic memory, an insatiable need to learn, and access to more or less every VR training program ever made. Of course, I learned several languages.

    Not that I expected to actually use them, mind you. The auto-translation software in cyberspace made that unnecessary in the Abyss, and before coming to NYC, that was nearly all contact I had.

    But back to the mind-reader, in the end, I decided to train it with the person I was reasonably sure I could provide the actual thought words for, myself.

    To that effect, I placed a mind-reader array in each and every lab, thankful that they were actually rather simple devices. Sure, to make the mind-blockers wearable, I had to use the NADA, but if I had accepted them to be the size of a milk crate, I could have made them with the household fabber. Probably.

    The household fabber could make the mind-antennas a similar size, and as much as I tended to clutter my workspaces, I had not yet the time to amass that much.

    To write some sort of subconscious thought-to-text software for my cranial board was a bit harder, but only marginally so.

    Much harder was it to take off the mind-blocker, while I worked. I warned Darren about it, but still, it did cost me quite a bit of effort to remove my safety, as illogical as it was at that point.

    I mean, Darren knew practically everything anyway, and I was pretty sure that there was no other Psionic in range.

    And then I simply had Warden correlate my emissions with my thoughts. It became apparent pretty quickly that this would be a long-term project when Warden could not even isolate the specific frequencies linked to my thoughts. Well, I had time for it so why not?

    After that, I began to convert a cloning cylinder in my bio lab to my new cloning method. It helped that the first of the new electronic fabbers were already up and running at that point.

    It still took me a couple of days to get that right. For the test run, I decided to start another kidney for Justin. If the readouts were to be trusted

    Following that, I designed a testbed for the new bio-reactor for myosynth.

    For the size of it, I started with the biggest muscle, the Quadriceps Femoris ¨C I know, even today many people still believe that the Gluteus Maximus is the biggest ¨C of the biggest sapient being in modern history, a Mutant with a size of nearly 260cm, or 8¡¯6¡¯¡¯, and increased it by 25%.

    Then I slapped my forehead. I remembered that I was designing the testbed, not the finished device.

    The new testbed was much more reasonably sized. Enough to work on a normal human heart in one go. And with the new industrial fabber parts that were already up and running, I could easily build this thing.

    Unfortunately, as well as my professional pursuit was going, the mood in the house was¡­ strained. It took me a few days to realize that everybody, except Mark and me, was at the end of the rope in regards to Mia.

    It was hard for me to judge it, but the general reaction to her antics ranged from mildly annoyed to avoiding her to keep from exploding in anger.

    Yes, I could somewhat understand them. I¡­ was not all that fond of her presence myself, but the disposition of the others was a tad overdone.

    Mind you, I was aware that my appreciation of the social interaction between them was at best questionable, so I knew that I was most likely missing something.

    But knowing that, and comprehending what I was missing were sadly entirely different things. Even if there was something I was missing, something that I was not 100% sure was the case.

    After trying in vain to understand the dynamics of the situation, I could only shrug and go on with my life.

    I mostly spend the night at Ben¡¯s, so I probably missed some interactions by being physically absent, instead of just not understanding them.

    Unfortunately, in absence of any of them talking to me about it, there was not much I could do about it, so in the end, I could only continue my work.

    To that effect, I cloned another 1000 transhuman rats and began replacing some of their muscles with myosynth. Again, 500 of them, randomly distributed, became bio-sheathed cyberware, while the other 500 only became the CRS-inducing cocktail.

    Now it was a matter of waiting. After a short contemplation, I started a beef vat. No, I did not intend to eat from it myself.

    But if I got it to work then it would make real food affordable for the masses again. Well, semi-affordable.

    The poor would still have to make do with replicator food. And sadly, that only pertained to meat anyway. It wasn¡¯t as if I could just clone the plants, wasn¡¯t it?

    But, seriously, wasn¡¯t it? What was preventing it? Yes, the cloning process, the old one, had been expensive. Not quite as expensive as the cloning labs purported maybe, but still too expensive to waste on something like spices or grain.

    But my new process was actually incredibly cheap in comparison. It was almost as cheap as the hydroponic process was said to be.

    Hm, the hydroponic process? I had never really thought about it, but why did we not use that instead of the algae tanks?

    At that point in time, I only knew that for some reason it failed shortly before the great war. The why was lost in all the chaos that followed China invading Taiwan.

    Probably not really lost, just not widely disseminated I guessed. I quickly tasked Warden to collimate all the information she could find about it. I mean, sure, it was mostly a secondary process, mostly used mostly on space habitats, and to bolster food production in the overpopulated, mostly barren nations in the poorer parts of the world then.

    But unlike vat meat, it had worked for decades without incidents.

    But for now, I ordered a sample of every spice plant that was available. Oh, and a couple of real coffee beans. And Cacao. After a bit of wringing with myself, I gave in and ordered a sample of every single kind of fruit, vegetable, grain, and root. I mean, if I managed to mass-produce them, I could as well go all out anyway.

    With that in mind, I started a test-vat for pork, chicken, mutton, lamb, duck, and goose. With that done, I realized it was time to start dinner preparation, and made my way to the kitchen/mess hall.

    Just to find a massacre when I arrived. Somehow somebody had tried to cook. Or at least make it look that way.

    But the destruction was¡­ indescribable. Every single pot, pan, or bowl was used, nearly all of my living herb plants in their small pots of soil, the extremely expensive and rare plants were¡­ in one sentence, raped to death.

    The vast majority of my ingredients had been ruined, burned to a cinder, cooked to shoe leather with the taste of cardboard, drenched in dubious whatever¡­

    All over it was a fine layer of flour.

    For a moment I could simply not comprehend what was right in front of my eyes. This couldn¡¯t be real. It just couldn¡¯t. I blindly grabbed for anything to lean on.

    How? How could this happen? How could somebody do this? I had explicitly explained that the ingredients were off-limits until they could prove to me that they could cook?

    So why did somebody do it anyway? And even if said somebody for some reason was of the opinion that they could cook, why the fuck did they not stop when they ruined the first attempt?

    This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

    Why going on, destroying everything?

    I think I heard somebody behind me utter an: ¡°Oh fuck!¡± but I barely registered it. Slowly, as if in trance, I walked to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

    I just could not understand what had happened here.

    I can¡¯t say how long I just sat there and stared at the battlefield, but during that time, the rest of the people had come to the mess, and a loud argument had erupted.

    Apparently, most of the others blamed Mia for the carnage. Slowly, I turned toward her, looking at her intensely.

    I was not good enough at reading expressions to be sure, but she seemed¡­ smug, while she professed her innocence, but it was clear that nobody, not even Mark bought it.

    I tried to gain their attention, but they did not notice me, and they had become so loud that I would have to scream at the top of my lungs to be heard, just to be another voice in the racket.

    After a couple of minutes of that, I had enough, deactivated my ears, and induced a feedback squeal into the PA system. Just for a few seconds, but it was loud enough to get their attention.

    From their behavior, it was also loud enough to be a bit painful.

    But it had the intended effect, they were silent for now, and I, with reactivated ears, softly spoke to them.

    Well, Mia.

    ¡°Only one question, did you do this?¡±

    That was enough to let her get in motion again.

    ¡°Oh, you too? Just because the others don¡¯t like me, I am responsible for this? Really? I am at fault for every fucking thing happening? Are the others not even suspected? I see what is happening here. You all hate me, and so I have to be the one guilty against your oh-so-precious food.¡±

    It was clear that she intended to continue unabashedly, as it was equally clear that while she threw accusations against us, she did not deny being responsible for this.

    So, instead of having her rant on, I created another squeal, a bit quieter this time.

    ¡°A simple yes or no is all I am expecting.¡±

    In response she just crossed her arms, and glared at me, not saying another word.

    I sighed.

    ¡°Darren, did she do it?¡±

    That startled him.

    ¡°Uhm¡­ sorry, but without deactivating the mind-blocker I can¡¯t be sure.¡±

    I transferred my scrutiny to him and lifted an eyebrow without saying a word.

    He had the grace to blush.

    ¡°Oh, yeah, sorry.¡± After he deactivated his mind-blocker, he looked at Mia, sighed, activated it again, and with a weary voice said:

    ¡°Yes, she did it.¡±

    I looked back at Mia.

    ¡°Why?¡±

    The anger on her face was clearly discernible.

    ¡°What? You trust him over me? Just like that? Do you remember that he was the only one here who fucking lied to you? So, just on his word, you think I was it?¡±

    ¡°As you wish. Warden, please inspect the surveillance about who did this.¡±

    It took only a moment before Warden answered from the speakers:

    ¡°It was Ms. Ameila Ciolino.¡±

    The grimace of anger on Mia¡¯s face changed to one of mild shock.

    ¡°You¡¯ve forgotten that everything except the private rooms here is monitored? Including this room? So again, why?¡±

    The shock was not for long, of course, before it was replaced with defiance.

    ¡°Why not? If you could do it, so can I.¡±

    The contempt dripping from her ¡®you¡¯ was startling, but I had experienced worse while growing up.

    ¡°That would explain one set of ingredients being ruined. Not the rest. This,¡± I gestured over the mess in the mess, ¡°can¡¯t be explained by somebody trying to cook and failing. Something like this can¡¯t happen by accident. This was malice. You wanted to destroy everything. So why?¡±

    It was Darren who answered.

    ¡°I got that from her. It was envy. Pure and simple. She¡­ when she grew up she was always the queen bee. One of the very few girls in her neighborhood. The smart one, the beautiful one, the talented one. The golden girl.

    And then she came here. And found you. Everything she ever tried to do, everything she was good at, you are better. You are smarter, prettier, more talented, and more likable, despite being socially inept. You are two years younger than her but have already accomplished everything she¡¯s ever dreamed to achieve. And so much more.

    To my regret, I¡¯ve missed it before you gave me my mind blocker. Sure, I felt her unease, yes, but honestly, you projected so strong that you mostly blotted out everything else. I could have done a deep read of her mind, but I usually try to avoid that.

    But with you being mind blocked as well, I got almost everything from her right now.¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°But¡­ if she was envious of me, why did she antagonize you all as well?¡±

    ¡°Several reasons. For one, she is, quite frankly, a bitch. Yes, the first few days she walked on eggshells and kept herself in check, but after the first week or so, she reverted to her old ways.

    Then, she tried to turn us against you. Not quite as successful as she expected. I mean, she did not even manage to turn Mark, with his anti-pure prejudices against you. The rest of us, well, we saw that you were struggling to be friendly, even if you did not get it quite right.

    Add in that she¡­ could not help herself and debase us¡­

    Well, long story short, she began to resent us as well.

    Thirdly, she was envious of us as well. When you took over this building you gave everybody of us a bit over 2.5 million bucks. Even the slaves. Just because. But she got nothing.

    She does not see that we all suffered under Frankel and his assholes for that money. And even now, Jacky gets a cut of every job we do, but she doesn¡¯t.

    That has of course nothing to do with Jacky keeping our money in order, no. It is because we are against her.

    And lastly, she is very homophobic. She hates gays with an unholy passion. We are subhuman in her opinion. Oh sure, that does not apply to Chrissy and Justin, or you and Mr. Walker, but as you don¡¯t condemn us for it, she hates you too.

    All in all, she is a very broken person.¡±

    Mia¡¯s whole posture screamed defiance when she commented on that.

    ¡°Just because you are a perverted abomination you don¡¯t have to lie to all of them.¡± Then she turned her attention to me:

    ¡°Don¡¯t believe a word he said. He pulled all that from his ass.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Warden? What does the stress monitoring say?¡±

    ¡°Mr. Masters told the truth as he knows it with approximately 86.43% likelihood. Ms. Ciolino¡¯s stress values compound what Mr. Masters said. Ms. Ciolino¡¯s statement was false with a probability of approximately 57.22%.¡±

    I tilted my head and frowned.

    ¡°57%? That low?¡±

    ¡°My analysis shows an approximate probability of 93.94% that Ms. Ciolino is at least partially sociopathic. Her stress readings are accordingly less reliable.¡±

    I kept looking at Mia:

    ¡°Well?¡±

    ¡°Well what? Fine, so I was a bit reckless with your food. So what? I¡¯ll pay it back. So, is that now done?¡±

    Pay it back?!?

    I slowly stood up and walked towards her.

    ¡°You will pay it back? Seriously? You think you can pay it back?¡±

    ¡°It¡¯s just a bit of food. Easy peasy. You don¡¯t have to get your panties in a twist. So yes, I will pay it back.¡±

    I slightly shook my head.

    ¡°No, you will not pay it back. Even if you seriously intended to pay it back, something that I am quite sure you don¡¯t, you can¡¯t pay it back.¡±

    Over the last sentence, my voice had risen in volume, until I was nearly screaming. Standing only a foot or so away from her by now, despite her being a bit more than a head taller than me, she backed off for some reason. For the first time in this confrontation, her voice held traces of insecurity.

    ¡°What¡­? Why do you think I can¡¯t pay you back?¡±

    I tried to keep calm, only to fail miserably, when I swung my arm in a wide arc to point at the desolation.

    ¡°That was food in value of more than 150000 dollars. The herbs you fucking destroyed were another $50k. So, please tell me, where the fuck do you think you can get more than $200000? Come on, I¡¯ll wait.¡±

    After the first words, I was screaming into her face, which turned white when I said the numbers.

    I think I saw fear in her eyes when she recoiled, without a word in response.

    I on the other hand repeatedly balled my fists, trying to get my temper back under control.

    With a nearly superhuman exertion, I managed to not scream the following, but said it as calmly as I could manage:

    ¡°Get out!¡±

    She looked at me confused.

    ¡°Get out from where? The room?¡±

    I took a deep breath before I answered:

    ¡°Pack your things and get the fuck out of my house! You are no longer welcome here.¡±

    She looked at me in shock then at Mark, who just shrugged.

    ¡°Don¡¯t look at me. I told you you are pushing it too far. Yes, I like you, but geesh, you cause so much drama.¡±

    Now Mia¡¯s anger found a new target.

    ¡°You don¡¯t even defend me? Why don¡¯t you veto her decision?¡±

    Mark shook his head with a sad smile.

    ¡°Mia, for one, this is all on you. You are the one picking fights with the others. You are the one who bitches about all of them behind their backs.

    And I can¡¯t veto her. I told you this is V¡¯s house. She lets us live here, but it is her decision. And she obviously just decided that you are no longer welcome here.¡±

    Dejection sneaked into Mia¡¯s voice when she answered him:

    ¡°But¡­ where will we go?¡±

    Mark shook his head again.

    ¡°Where will you go. As I said, I like you, but honestly, over the last few weeks, you¡¯ve made it very hard. I¡¯ll not give up my friends for you. Sorry.¡±

    After a few moments of staring at Mark, Mia just stormed out of the room.

    We all watched her exit, and shortly afterward, the others tried to console Mark.

    I was meanwhile still so angry that I was shivering but slowly got myself under some semblance of control.

    Yes, I should have also talked with Mark about it, but I just couldn¡¯t. Stumbling back to the chair, I fell down onto it, and burrowed my head in my hands.

    I can¡¯t say how long I just sat there, slowly calming down, before Ben entered.

    ¡°Good afternoon people. What are¡­ holy shit, what happened here?¡±

    His shocked voice made me lift my head.

    Fortunately, Justin was the one who answered.

    ¡°Mia happened. It seems she¡­ is not somebody we want around. As far as we can tell, she decided to destroy the food to hurt Kitten here.¡±

    Ben, still confused, nonetheless walked over to me, and hugged me.

    ¡°I¡¯m sorry. I know what this food meant to you. I just don¡¯t understand why? Why did she do this?¡±

    From the speakers Warden answered him:

    ¡°My analysis shows a strong likelihood that Ms. Ciolino is a sociopath.¡±

    ¡°And you did not think we should know that? That Vivian should know that?¡±

    ¡°Until this confrontation, it was an unsupported suspicion. There was not enough evidence to warrant intervention beyond watching her.¡±

    ¡°And this¡­ massacre? Why did you not intervene?¡±

    ¡°While it is hurtful in the short-term, in the long-term it is projected to be beneficial for Seraphim.¡±

    That let me perk up.

    ¡°What? You knew that she was doing this? You were watching?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I was.¡±

    ¡°And you did not stop her? Because it would help me in the long run? How?¡±

    ¡°This situation forced the confrontation that was most likely inevitable. By having the confrontation now a dangerous individual has been removed from your vicinity. Any other option to try to remove her would have inflicted more damage. Either to you or the group. The former was something I had to avoid. The latter would have weakened your position.¡±

    I growled.

    VI¡¯s. This was typically VI. They did not care how many eggs they broke when it was in service of their objectives. I am pretty sure there would have been options that would have removed Mia without doing that much damage. But a VI¡­ they simply did not care about collateral damage at all.

    And the worst part, despite knowing that, despite that I completely understood why she did it that way, and despite me knowing that it was completely useless, I could not suppress the wave of anger that I felt at that moment at her.

    The only thing calming me down was that I was still being hugged by Ben.

    He softly made me stand up and guided me toward one of the recreation rooms. I managed to send the orders to the bots to clean up the mess room, and save a sample of all the herbs Mia had destroyed.

    Over the next half hour or so, he just held me in his arms or let me rage at the situation.

    When I had calmed down somewhat, he beckoned me to sit on his lap.

    ¡°Well, I don¡¯t know if you are in the mood right now, but¡­ I am here because I¡¯ve got a plan.¡±

    ¡°A¡­ plan? For what?¡±

    He smiled at me.

    ¡°For your pandora¡¯s box in your basement. And what made it possible. So¡­ how about you get Glory and we talk where it is secure?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Yes, you are right, I am not quite in the mood. But it has to be done.¡±

 84: Cleanup in Isle...

    It was roughly a month later, beginning of March 2249, that there was a big commotion in the Abyss.

    For the third time in a month, the Phantom had struck again. Nobody had any idea why now, after more than half a year of nothing, ¡®he¡¯ now had such a flurry of activity.

    Well, nobody but Ben and me that is, naturally. To be fair, only two of these actions were planned by Ben. I included the third one by myself.

    The first step was getting the banks to back off. For that, I used Hermes on the private grav-yacht of one of the bank execs. The chief security officer of Markham & Stiegler International, the third biggest bank in the system.

    It was ridiculously easy to get access to the automated janitorial service of his marina, and smuggle a few Q-links onto the ship. Seriously, don¡¯t they have any sense of security in these places? Oh well, sure, until I developed the Q-link the worst one could do with the janitorial services was annoy people. But still, it should have taken me longer than 20 minutes to completely infiltrate and take over any system in one of the most prestigious marinas in the system.h hah

    And again, as soon as I had physical access to the onboard computer of the yacht, any security was quickly breached. When he used his yacht the next time, as soon as it was a safe distance away from anybody else, I first launched Newton followed by Tsar. Don¡¯t get me wrong, I had managed to get the pilot somewhere else, and only the CSO was on board when Warden remotely piloted the yacht.

    In the wake of the nuclear fire reducing the yacht, and the CSO of one of the most powerful banks in existence to monoatomic gas, I sent a message as the phantom to the other bank execs:

    ¡°You have been hunting me for months. That ends now! As you see, you are not beyond my reach. If you do not stop looking for me, I will destroy one of you every month. It depends on you how much collateral damage these sanctions will cause. I will not refrain from destroying your orbital palaces if you cower there.

    Should you, by a miracle, be able to find me, you are all dead. Your families are dead, your friends are dead, and your organizations will be destroyed.

    I bested your defenses. Accept it, and live with it. It is a feat that will not be repeated.

    Or die trying to rail against it.

    The decision is yours.

    The one you call The Phantom¡±

    I felt a bit sick by threatening their families and even the whole population of their space stations. But it had to be done. According to Ben, they needed to be convinced that they personally would pay if they did not let go.

    The sick thing was, doing that would probably even rescue many of them. Warden was¡­ less than forgiving, and should they come even close to finding my identity she would use everything in my arsenal to destroy them.

    This threat did not go unnoticed naturally. A couple of minutes after I send the message, the exact wording had been known all over the world, and everybody was talking about the phantom again.

    And while I was not quite happy with the idea of using Newton and Tsar, it was unlikely that this limited exposure would stop me from using them. Especially as nobody seemed to get the idea that the systems of the yacht themselves were the weapons. The speculation was that the phantom had smuggled a combination warhead onto the yacht.

    And I still had The Lamb and Enola Gay in reserve in the unlikely event they were discovered and beaten.

    Yes, I know, it was in all but name a declaration of war against the banks, but honestly, they were the ones pushing it to the limit with their persecution of hackers. Let the shoe be on the other foot for once.

    Naturally, nobody heard a formal answer from the banks, but the reward for information about the phantom was quietly reduced to a Pro-forma level. I could live with that.

    The second action was actually planned to be the first, but I had not expected to break through the defenses of the marina that fast. Or that it would be that slow breaking into my second objective.

    In retrospect, I should have, but despite all the groundwork I had done since even before I left Seattle, the target was just so dang big.

    But that was the advantage of Hermes. I did not have to do it all at once and there was at best a negligible chance that they discovered my work early. I left the actual target computer systems alone until the one glorious day when I managed to hurt Panacea as it was never hurt before.. .

    I got everything. Their research, their contacts, their internal memos, all their software, their drug formulas, their auto-surgeon decision tree, and they had indeed a significantly more refined one, the names of their spies, agents, their bought politicians, and bureaucrats, literally everything they had in their computers.

    And I deleted it from their systems, before putting it on the dark web. It was glorious. All the different ways they had screwed over all their customers or all the crimes they had committed. All free to see for everybody.

    Unsurprisingly, quite a few of their puppets lost their positions. It was hard to guess how much power and influence they lost in that single momentous day, but it was a large chunk of both.

    Unnecessary to mention that this special use of my technology was not planned by Ben. Yes, after a mostly token attempt to dissuade me from it, he shrugged and accepted it.

    Well, I did exclude their project Morpheus from the info dump. Nobody needed to have the specifics of a drug designed to work on Pures. I stole it of course, but I did not publish it.

    Would it point to a vendetta of the phantom against Panacea? Yes, of course it did. But honestly, the choice of targets for the first action of the phantom did that as well. And it was a thing of use it or lose it. After the last activity of ¡®the phantom¡¯ Hermes would rapidly lose efficiency. At the moment, it was only possible because nobody knew that it existed.

    Ironically, from what I heard Dalgon began to sanitize their network massively in the wake of my Panacea adventure. Who knows how much data they lost during this hasty move?

    But my crusade against Panacea did cost me most of the month. I did use that time to prepare for the last action, naturally, but I did not even start there before I was done with Panacea.

    And finally, it was time for the capstone of Ben¡¯s plan. This I had started three days ago. Predictably, I had been summoned, along with all the other techies in the Abyss, when the door to room 1 of Hut 2 suddenly gaped open, with some strange message written on the walls of the otherwise empty room.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, it is possible for the owner of one of these rooms to personalize their rooms. Heck, even the size is not predetermined. It is not intended that there is no furniture, but even that can be worked around.

    No, the ¡®problem¡¯ was that the Phantom had bypassed the whole register procedure. As far as the Abyss was concerned, the room was in pristine unchanged condition, and there was no user that owned and had customized room 1.

    According to our software, the Phantom did not exist.

    And then there was the message. It left the assembled elite hackers in quite a tizzy, let me tell you.

    I had written the word Seeberger, followed by the corrected equation on the walls. Talk about making a splash.

    We techies were of course ordered to drop everything else and find out what the message meant and more important how the phantom had done it.

    In all honesty, the hardest part was finding out where the servers for the Abyss were located. The creators of the Abyss had been smart and had created an echelon of servers, all at different locations.

    With the user database and the various rooms kept in the innermost server. Yes, the outer shells had been hacked a few times. Heck, some of us made it a sport to play with them.

    Things like the message boards, or the general design of the Abyss were stored there. The visitor database. In other words, the more unimportant parts. All of it could be reset on a moment''s notice, so barely anybody cared if a hacker got creative here.

    The inner workings? As far as I know, only Colossus and Bletchley had access to that. Oh sure, they had a couple of techs who managed the hardware, but that was it.

    That might explain the well, panic is not quite the right word, but it comes close.

    In the end, we techies had our orders and were sent out. I had Warden assume the persona of Spectre and keep an eye on things, so I was quite aware that other techies were pretty fast to find the connection to Seeberger and the equation.

    I was a bit disappointed that not one of them noticed the difference between the published equation and the one written on the walls. Still, that left me to shine.

    That was the point when I manifested in the Abyss again, moving directly to the HQ, where the majority of the top 20 were still assembled. Or assembled again? Who cares?

    Point is, I deliberately was a bit absentminded and, well not rude, but even less concerned with social norms than normal.

    I had a role to play after all. It helped that all this happened in the Abyss, and my avatar had a distinct lack of facial expressions. Or a face, to be honest. I just needed to be projecting the impression that I was grumpy and annoyed.

    The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

    That was easier than I thought, as I just had to think about that I was now showing the world my best, most secret weapon.

    In the beginning, the top 20 of the hackers, except for the phantom naturally, were present, and I had Warden slip into the role of Spectre. It helped that I designed Spectre¡¯s personality as taciturn, reclusive, and mostly silent.

    By now, only two of them were present at once. I ¡®lucked¡¯ out and found Maestro and Splinter.

    Maestro was not too bad, but Splinter was, frankly, an idiot savant. He was brilliant at working with computers, but anything outside of that¡­ I knew the moment I saw him there that I would have to use the small words.

    And that with something so complicated and mindblowing as the Seeberger equation. Could somebody just shoot me now?

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, he was nice enough but so dense¡­ it hurt. But it couldn¡¯t be helped. With an inward sigh, I entered the conference room, to be greeted by the two hackers, and a couple of their hangers-on.

    Maestro was the one who greeted me:

    ¡°Well, hello Seraphim. Nice of you to finally report back as well.¡± Oh goody, he was in a mood. Well, all the better for my role. Annoyance was pretty easy now.

    ¡°Finally? As well?¡± I managed to keep my voice mostly calm.

    ¡°Yeah, finally. I would have expected you to be the first to report her findings here, but no, you are actually the last. So, do you want to tell us that this equation is what Dr. Andreas Seeberger published 170 years ago? Too late, we already know that. All the other techies took less than a day to find that out. They are now working on finding out how the phantom hacked the Abyss.¡±

    Oh yes, he was condescending as hell right then and there. I took the opportunity to sit down.

    ¡°The clown brigade reported that? Not surprising that not one of these idiots actually did the work.¡±

    Maestro and one of his underlings bristled at that, with Maestro answering me:

    ¡°Harsh words for the slowest, and apparently dumbest of the bunch.¡±

    That made Splinter, who had just watched obviously bored out of his mind, flinch.

    ¡°You are on thin ice here right now, but I let you off with an apology. You see, that, I gestured towards the still open door of room 1, is not the equation Seeberger published. And if any of the chuckleheads had done the work that I did you would know that already. Well, probably not, because they would not have reported back yet. So, how about you call in the adults so that I can explain it to the people who actually matter?¡±

    All the people in the room reeled back from my words, but only a moment later Maestro sneered at me:

    ¡°Don¡¯t be ridiculous, of course it is the Seeberger equation. Do you think we did not look into it ourselves when the first tech reported it back?¡±

    I tilted my head.

    ¡°Really? You, personally, compared 14 pages of the equation with the equally long equation that is written on the wall in room 1? And it took only a couple of hours for all of you to do that?

    Quit the bullshit. You, like everybody else, took one look at the equation, saw that the overall appearance is the same, and then decided it is the same equation.

    Congratulation, you played yourself. Because that is not the equation that Seeberger published. There is a tiny, visually insignificant, easy to overlook difference between the two. But actually finding it takes a real comparison.¡±

    Again he reeled back but then waved dismissively.

    ¡°Whatever. It is unimportant anyway. The important thing is how the phantom managed to break into the servers here. And all the other techs are already working on that since the second day at least.¡±

    I snorted derisively before I answered:

    ¡°Oh really? Just to make it clear, the phantom, the obviously best hacker humanity has to offer, breaks into the Abyss servers, rearranges room 1 of hut 2, writes an obvious message on the wall, and you think that message has nothing to do with him telling us how he did it? Get real.¡±

    Maestro growled, but it was Splinter who answered:

    ¡°Uh, not to bust your bubble, but of course it means something. All the others are looking into Seeberger''s life to find out any clues. We think it is a riddle.¡±

    I burrowed my face in my hands.

    ¡°Seeberger had dozens of publications. Maybe hundreds. A couple of them are easier to collate with him than his last work. If all it was designed to was to point us toward Seeberger there would have been many better choices. Easier to write, easier to point towards Seeberger, oh, like for example writing his goddamn name on the wall.

    Instead, the phantom took the pain, the time, and the energy to write this equation onto the wall, and people think that is just a clue? An equation that he modified, for god¡¯s sake.

    No, he told us exactly how he did it. He pointed to the only publication of Seeberger that mattered here.¡±

    Splinter seemed confused, while Maestro clearly seethed at my words.

    Before Maestro could do anything, Bletchley entered the room. He looked exhausted but otherwise fine.

    ¡°Ok, stop right there. Calm down, all of you.¡±

    It was almost funny seeing Maestro sulk, but I just sighed.

    ¡°Finally. Hello Bletchley. I assume somebody woke you up?¡±

    He sighed as well.

    ¡°As soon as you were reported to enter the Abyss. Now, what was going on here?¡±

    ¡°Well, Maestro here explained, in fine detail, how all the other techs have reported back that they identified the equation the phantom wrote on the wall as the one Dr. Andreas Seeberger published in his last paper.

    And I informed him that that is wrong. It is not Seeberger¡¯s equation.¡±

    Bletchley took a deep breath, sat down, and rubbed his eyes.

    ¡°You sure? All the others told us it is the Seeberger equation.¡±

    ¡°As I told Maestro, I am pretty sure not one of them actually took the time to compare the two equations. There is a difference.

    Admittedly, I assume that what is written on the wall is the equation Seeberger intended to publish, but it isn¡¯t. Again, I can only assume here, considering that the man in question is dead for more than 170 years, but as I understand it, Seeberger made a typo.¡±

    ¡°And you can prove that?¡±

    ¡°That it is not the equation Seeberger published? Easy. Can I modify the walls here?¡±

    When he nodded, I changed one wall to a giant whiteboard and projected the equations on it.

    ¡°To the right, we have the equation from the paper. To the left, the one the phantom wrote on the wall.¡±

    ¡°Hm, they seem the same to me.¡±

    I then zoomed to the typo, highlighting it.

    ¡°The equation published has an h here, while the equation on the wall has a g in the same place. A single typo on 14 pages of math.

    The g changes the equation from madness-inducing gibberish of garbage to headache-inducing gibberish that works.¡±

    Bletchley raised an eyebrow.

    ¡°It¡­ works?¡±

    I growled.

    ¡°Yes, that was what I did the last three days. It was¡­ trivial to find the paper and Andreas Seeberger. I honestly don¡¯t understand why the others thought that that was anything worth reporting.

    If anybody of them had taken the time to run a fucking Beowulf cluster over the equations and compare them, he would have found out about the change in half an hour at most.

    I spent the rest of the time trying to understand what the paper was trying to say, and how the change in the equation played into it.¡±

    Bletchley frowned at me.

    ¡°What is wrong with you? You are usually so¡­ composed.¡±

    I growled again.

    ¡°I spent most of a subjective year trying to understand that.¡±

    I gestured towards the wall. Maestro chuckled.

    ¡°Hey, it is just a bit of math, what¡¯s the matter?¡±

    ¡°Then why don¡¯t you dive into it? Learn it, understand it? This is nightmare fuel for mathematicians. I am at the end of my rope right now and need rest. I am so nice and try to report my findings only to get admonished by an idiot who can hack reasonably well, but otherwise has the education of a cockroach.¡±

    Bletchley rapped onto the table.

    ¡°Calm down. And¡± he shuddered when he looked at the equation ¡°I understand that this did cost you quite a bit. But why did you do it? We all think the equation is only there to point us toward Seeberger, and the phantom used something in his life as a clue for the next part of the puzzle.¡±

    ¡°You all are wrong. The phantom not only took the time, and energy, to write out this equation, he had to understand it well enough to know what Seeberger wanted to say, and well enough to realize that the equation in the publication is fucking wrong. That is not a clue.

    The equation was the important part, and the name of Seeberger was only there for us to make it possible to find the paper.¡±

    A general frown from all the people here was my answer. Surprisingly, it was Splinter who posed the question:

    ¡°But why then? What is so important in this equation that he wrote it on the wall?¡±

    I sighed again:

    ¡°Do any of you, or any of the techs you tasked with solving this ¡®riddle¡¯ even read the paper in question?¡±

    Bletchley slowly shook his head.

    ¡°No, not that I know. From what I heard, there is only the German version available by now, but even the Germans took a look into it and gave up. It is not called Seeberger¡¯s idiocy as a joke.¡±

    ¡°No, it is called that because of the typo. If the math would have worked, it wouldn¡¯t be called that, I guess. But to get why it is so important here, I have to change the tangent a bit.¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°I assume that some of your techs have already examined the servers? Physically I mean.¡±

    ¡°The servers are none of your business. You don¡¯t need to know more about them.¡±

    I waved my hand for a bit.

    ¡°I don¡¯t need to know where they are, what their specs are, or anything else. I want to find out if I am right.

    I think you found some strange contraptions in some of the OPB or LAN ports. Plugs without any cable, or tech or anything, just terminating in some solid inert matter. Am I right?¡±

    Bletchley hissed at my description.

    ¡°How¡­ how do you know about that?¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°Well, nice to know I am right. And it might have helped to know that for those of us who were tasked to solve the mystery. Well, not really, in this case, but it might have.

    My point is, that Seeberger wrote his paper to explain quantum entanglement.¡±

    ¡°Quantum entanglement? That is just useful for encryption and signature. Why is that important?¡±

    ¡°QE as we know it is only useful for those tasks because all we have managed so far is entangle minuscule particles. Photons, the odd electron, things like that. Particles so small that any attempt of reading out any information would randomly change that information. We can use it as a tamper seal or a missing element of encryption because in these cases the information needs only to be read out once.

    But the important part about the Seeberger paper is that he postulated that it should be possible to entangle larger particles and bigger things. Like atoms, or molecules. Things that can be used pretty easily for data transfer.

    If Seeberger is right in that, then it is likely that the phantom has not only found the equation and corrected it, but found out how to entangle atoms.

    In other words, these plugs are the endpoints of invisible, intangible cables that have zero latency and infinite transfer speeds. I would bet he hacked the maintenance bots and had them put the plugs into the servers, and then had for all purposes physical access to them.

    In other words, he wrote exactly how he did it directly on the wall. And the clown brigade you sent out to understand it was too stupid to get it right.¡±

    They all were flabbergasted. After a few moments, Bletchley cleared his throat.

    ¡°Uhm, you might be right. Not about the clown brigade, but the equation. But¡­ I would expect you to crow your triumph out for everybody to hear and see. Instead you¡­ seem to be pissed off by this discovery.

    Why?¡±

    I scowled at him.

    ¡°Yes, I am pissed. I have worked for nearly half a year to redesign the Cirrium processor. I¡¯ve managed to eke out a bit over 3% of performance gain. I was just in the process of finishing the design, and beginning on optimizing the peripherals when this happened.

    All that work, all the energy, all for naught.¡±

    Luckily I did not need to lie too hard here. I had started the redesign, had done the work, and had achieved a 3.07% performance gain, just before I cracked the Seeberger equation. It just didn¡¯t happen over the last half-year.

    ¡°What? 3%? That is phenomenal! Why are you¡­ wait a minute, you are saying all for naught? Why that?¡±

    I rolled my eyes, even if nobody of them could see it.

    ¡°Oh please! Do you think I will put more work into getting a mere 3% gain if this promises increases by an order of magnitude? I¡­ I will have to study the paper extensively and try to figure out how to do it, but¡­ no, this avenue is a dead end. And all that work and nothing to show for it. Yes, I am pissed.¡±

    In my own humble opinion, I managed to play the huff pretty well. To be honest, when I did have the realization back when I discovered the Q-links, I was pretty peeved. I then decided to wait with the new generation until I understood Q-links enough to incorporate them into the processor design.

    Then I got the inspiration of making the NADA work and decided I had to wait until I could make it in the 413 pm process.

    Yes, the final result, the Hyperion, was worth it, but the constant delays were frustrating. To make my frustration known I had just to think back to that time.

    I shook my head and began standing up.

    ¡°Now, if you would excuse me, I have a date with my bathtub, followed by my bed. You can contact me the day after tomorrow. For now, I am at the end of the line.¡±

 2.1: A few months later

    After the big reveal of Seeberger¡¯s equation and what it meant, I would have thought that it ushered in a new golden age for humanity. At some time I will learn to curb my unfounded faith in humanity.

    Yes, the news made a big splash, and everybody and their neighbor began looking into it. Especially the banks began a rigorous security check for the little plugs I had smuggled in for project Hermes, and they even found some of them.

    I had to erase my entries into their maintenance and janitorial services and was not able to retrieve all of the plugs. Not that it did them any good. Literally the first thing I did after redecorating room 1 of hut 2 was ordering Warden to dismantle the separate cluster that I had used for Hermes.

    I had her run every single part through the molecular forge, including every single cable and even the screws. Then I had her distribute the materials all over the solar system. This was the advantage of using a VI. Any human would have argued and protested over the waste of resources.

    After all, what I was throwing away would have served most Abyss-dwellers as primary cluster just fine. And to be honest, to this day I am not sure that I was not a tad paranoid. It probably would have been enough to simply break the Q-links but I decided to not take no risks here.

    I knew, that at least theoretically, it was possible to get the position of one endpoint from the other. Sure, it was¡­ a technical challenge. It would take something the size of the cluster to have any chance at all to get the position of one of the atoms.

    But we are talking about the banks. The only reason no bank had an AAA status was that the banks excluded themselves from the ranking. They definitely had the resources to do it. Sure, they lacked the knowledge of how to do it, for now, but that was, in my estimation, just a matter of time.

    Of course my estimation of how long it would take changed over the next few months. On one hand, I was ecstatic that my advantage would keep for a bit longer, on the other hand, what the freck were the well-paid scientists doing? Even in July, five months after I had practically pushed their collective noses into it, not a single one managed to even understand the equation.

    Yes, it took me two months, thankfully virtual, but keep in mind that I only had the equation with the typo. In these two months, I not only understood the equation enough to realize that there was an error in it, but I frecking corrected it, understood it, and managed to create the first Q-links.

    Ok, I had no insight into the labs of the triple-A corps, but I looked at all the major universities and the governmental labs. Nothing. Heck, there were online discussion groups trying to decypher the equation. I lurked in most of them, and they did not even come close.

    Michael had, meanwhile, managed to buy a 15x15 block area of Queens directly adjacent to Ben¡¯s territory. After some deliberation, and seeing the price one of those blocks was going for, we decided to increase the size by more than 100%. His estimate of the price for one of the blocks was nearly twice what it turned out in reality.

    Sure, it got that way when Ben began weighing in in the negotiations, but the main factor was that we were taking off such a big block in one swoop, and promised taxes in near future. Ben managed to convince the city that it was better to get rid of as much of the ruined real estate at once.

    It would take another two months before the S&P Excelsior 2.8 was up and running, but we had managed to get enough Westinghouse fusactors installed to serve for the first couple of years, I think.

    I had insisted to convert one of the blocks into a park. It was astonishing how expensive it was to get fertile soil delivered. It cost nearly as much as the 225 blocks altogether. But I decided a bit of beauty was necessary.

    It did not hurt that the park was placed directly opposite the future company HQ, an empty block for now.

    That was not the only empty block at this time. Michael had wasted no time in clearing the ruins, even though the process was still ongoing.

    So far we had the first elements of the material refinery, the secondary power production, and a couple of storage buildings up.

    More importantly, the first production facility for neural cyberware was nearly finished.

    Yes, we planned a production facility for muscular cyberware but decided early on that this was a much lower priority. Yes, the new application process worked perfectly, but unlike the nano-filter for Neuronect, the biosheathing process has to be tailored to the end-user.

    I have already replaced all the cyberware of Ben and his allies, as well as most of his men. And he had his ¡®beloved¡¯ Kolvar Excelsior back, well, a new one. In general, he was as happy as can be, which in turn lifted my own mood considerably.

    I had, meanwhile become somewhat proficient with my music, and now branched out into other instruments. Well, guitars at least, and e-bass.

    I had even bought a full suite of instruments. High-end naturally. It was impressive how much being able to form my feelings and my moods into sound helped my mental problems.

    That I had caused a devastating blow to Panacea did not hamper me either. All in all, I was in a considerably better mood than even half a year earlier.

    It was not all a bed of roses of course. I was still miffed about revealing the existence of the Q-links, and I was still being pestered about explaining Seeberger¡¯s equation. Not that anyone I talked to about it showed even the barest hints of understanding it.

    Add in that the profits from the sale of cyberware had tapered off quite substantially, and you get a bit of a downer.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, it was still more than a billion DC each month, but at the beginning of the craze, I made that each day. Yes, of course, I did not need it, but it was quite the ego-boost to experience how people value what I had created.

    And yes, I understand that the tapering had nothing to do with the quality of my inventions but after seeing those numbers coming in, it is a bit of a letdown.

    Still, I was now worth roughly $50 billion. And Ben had earned more than enough to begin modernizing his territory.

    He was sufficiently impressed when I got my T-240 though. He joked that he would have to borrow it a few times. Well, half-joked that is. I could tell that he was not really envious, but he had the desire to show up in the luxury skimmer for meetings with his colleagues.

    The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

    We bantered a bit back and forth about payment and how he could make it worth my effort.

    He was even more impressed when I gave him his T-240. Yes, with all the tribute I was paying, he would have been able to afford one for himself, but he was more concerned with building up his territory.

    It took me some time to convince him to even accept the dang thing. I was aware of how he reveled in the luxury of mine, so I had to assume that it was a pride thing. But in the end, after some conversations that treated to become heated, I finally managed to get him to take possession.

    In other news, Doc Schaeffer was still very happy with the new auto-surgeon and has bought another three. After a bit of waiting, I incorporated the decision tree that I had liberated from Panacea. I was not the only one of course. After I had put it on the dark web, it had become the defacto standard in short order.

    Panacea was still crying about it, and suing corporations left and right, but they were unable to stem the tide. Still, the version of the auto-surgeon I sold had the generally available decision tree, and I made a ¡®hacked¡¯ version of the firmware that included the Panacea tree and placed that on the dark web as well.

    I then seeded some bulleting boards with the locations of the firmware. And lo and behold, when Panacea got around to suing Enki, we defeated the suit in record time by simply pointing out that we did not provide the stolen decision tree, and were not responsible for somebody ¡®stealing¡¯ our firmware and providing it for free in the dark web. The fact that the firmware became the base of many other black auto surgeon updates in the future underlined our innocence.

    After all, it cut into our profit as well. In a bout of irony, we later, as in a year later, managed to take Panacea to the cleaners because they incorporated our firmware into their newest auto surgeon, but both events were still a bit in the future.

    I had another project coming to a, well¡­ acceptable outcome. Hunter proved to be an adequate Jack. By far not outstanding, and I could not see him ever reaching the Abyss on his own accords, but he was good enough to begin working.

    He told me that he now understood why I had refused him a Seraphim Mk. IV. And he was wrong. He still did not fully get it. He only saw that his style, his modus operandi was still evolving and that an Mk. IV would have been wasted money, but he still could not understand how dangerous it was to get into diving with the best tech from the get-go. He would learn. Or not, but it was out of my hands.

    By now, he had gotten a Dalgon Sigma board. Nothing spectacular, but a nice mid-level board. Of course, it was tuned a bit, but it suited his style pretty well.

    He still asked me about getting an Mk. IV at every possible opportunity, but I managed to turn him out. He was by far not in a position yet to warrant the effort from me.

    But ¡®mentoring¡¯ him had a surprisingly positive effect. Warden proved exceptionally proficient in keeping him alive, out of trouble, but still letting him make his own mistakes. In short, it was essentially the smoothest mentorship I¡¯ve ever heard of, despite Hunter, who was now operating as Atrax, not being the most impressive of all candidates.

    When I told the top people in the Abyss about it, we got the idea of creating a VI with the sole purpose of shepherding new Jacks into the business. Unlike the medical VI that I was still working on, this was relatively easy to achieve.

    It would be interesting to observe how this VI, named Athena, would influence our community in the future. But the early impressions are pretty good.

    Sure, Athena lacked the arsenal that Warden had access to, but she was sufficiently armed to protect fledgling Jacks into their first steps. And of course, everybody is pretty happy about not having to invest months to play guardian angel to a new hacker anymore.

    It was in late May when I finished most of my medium-term projects, and had to look for something else to do, and I remembered that Ben had asked me to design his new computer network. That in turn reminded me that I needed to beef up the security of the fortress.

    And so I looked into it, and I finally found out why barely anybody in the US knew about Beowulf clusters.

    Somehow Ralcon had managed to get a US patent on the very concept of distributed computing. Don¡¯t ask me how they managed that.

    This technology was already more than a century old when Ralcon was created from the remains of Intel, AMD, and Microsoft after the computer industry hit the hard wall of 3-nanometer construction. Every other nation had laughed at this attempt and declared it prior arts.

    But not the US of A. No siree, they decided that Ralcon had all the right to that technology. And they enforced it rigorously.

    They forced the hardware builders to use a variant of their network controllers that prevented distributed computing.

    Only they had the right to it. And they let themselves be paid princely for the privilege of using a Beowulf.

    I was already not thinking very fondly about Ralcon because of the way they limited nano-bot use in the US, and now that.

    Honestly, I was quite a bit irked with them, but I got an idea of how I could pee in their soup, without breaking the law. Of course, it all depended on selling NADA¡¯s in the long run, but it was a way to neatly circumvent the artificial bottle-neck.

    I called it Grendel. Essentially it was the mother of all processors. Or maybe the grandmother.

    With the help of Q-links, the NADA, and everything I¡¯ve learned while designing the Chimaera and the Hyperion, I poured into the Grendel.

    Physically, it was a massive cube of Graphene, Peltier elements, heat pipes, and electrical connectors with a side length of a bit over 30cm, or 1 foot.

    This thing had a mass of a hair over 70kg (or 155lb). It was almost twice as heavy as I was.

    I managed to squeeze nearly 33 thousand full-sized cores into it. Considering that a high-end Tesseract worked with 512 cores, this one processor had the cores of 64 Tesseracts, which, with the fact that the average Beowulf cluster used between five and twelve Tesseracts, meant that I had way more than enough processor power in one processor than most university departments had in their whole computing pool.

    I integrated nearly an exabyte of cache as well.

    And that was before all the advantages of the 413 pm process and the Q-link architecture came into play.

    Honestly, I would only need two or three of these things to replace my cluster flop for flop. The disadvantage was that it did take my NADA nearly two weeks to make a single one of these monsters.

    And the real kicker? I designed the chipset of the motherboard to accept up to four of them.

    In other words, with a single server, I now could build a supercomputer, without ever coming even close to distributed computing.

    Not that the motherboard did not allow for that as well. The only challenge was designing a case that could actually support the weight of these things. Oh, and the cooling of the case. Yes, the integrated cooling was¡­ substantial, but that only moved the heat out of the processor.

    It would not matter if it melted the motherboard and the rest of the computer within a couple of minutes. I decided on using liquid nitrogen to transport the heat toward the separate cooling units.

    It was almost comical. The computer itself was a single 11 RU double-wide module. The storage system added another four units. The cooling for it consisted of another four complete full-height server racks.

    Was it impractical? Of course. Oh, don¡¯t get me wrong, it was actually surprisingly efficient in terms of power usage and cooling. The same amount of computing would have taken up a couple of rooms if I had used traditional designs. Even if I had used the 413pm process and Q-links it would have taken three times as much volume, 1.5 times as much power, and would need twice the cooling.

    But on the other hand, it would be much more modular, and more granular to a barely comprehensible extent. With the Grendel, you had essentially all or nothing. With a traditional design on the other hand you can start with a couple of processors and begin using the system, while you add processors as needed at a tempo you can sustain.

    Needless to say, I immediately began to build a second, and then a third NADA. I was not surprised when Warden informed me that she began building a couple of those servers at each of her locations.

    Heck, for laughs, I designed a version with fuzzy logic cores, just a tiny bit bigger.

    When I was done with all of it, and proudly told Ben about what I had done, he stared at me for a moment as if I had grown another head before he sighed and shook his head.

    Then he matter of factly told me, that his organization, criminal as it is, had absolutely no problem with using pirated technology, and I could as well have just used a more or less normal Beowulf.

    Well, dang, all that work, for nothing? Ok, I now had a monster of a processor, but for what?

    He better would be happy with the Grendel server I already had built for him, that was for sure.

    So what if it was about 500 times more powerful than he needed? He had it now and that¡¯s it.

 2.2: Planning session

    After some initial minor misunderstandings, Michael and I had decided to hold a weekly meeting about Enki, and what was to do.

    That did not mean that he could not come to me with questions at other times, but we blocked out two hours each week as a minimum.

    This meeting was every Tuesday from 10 am to 12 pm, unless something urgent had to be done then.

    It was incredible what Michael already had achieved in just six months.

    Technically, Enki still had no management outside of Michael and the manager of the industrial foundry. Yes, he was in the process of hiring managing staff for the production facility that would in all likelihood go active on Monday the 23<sup>rd</sup>, but no management there at all.

    The first workers were already training up. Not that their work was particularly hard. Or challenging in any way. They had to supervise the bots doing the actual work, along with the specialized machines. That and final testing. Later we would use some workers to assemble the more complex cyberware, but that was still in the future.

    Most workers would be employed in shipping though. We also had put up a small office building next to where Michael was planning to build the big Enki HQ. There we already had a small horde of accountants, administrators, HR people, and whatever working to keep the fledgling company on an even keel.

    Seriously, I was just happy that Michael was doing that part. The thought of having to meet regularly with that many people made me shiver.

    Yes, I know they were necessary, but I wanted to be as far away from them as possible.

    I was waiting in one of the smaller meeting rooms in the fortress for his arrival. Sadly, Ben would not accompany him this Tuesday, as he had some preparations to do for whatever. I was interested in him, not his work. I would learn about it if it was something he wanted me to know.

    I was still a bit sullen about how Ben had criticized my masterful creation. Oh, sure, I would build myself a couple of these monster servers here in the fortress. I know that Warden already had built at least one of it.

    But dang it, I had done it to give him a decent computer to work with.

    And then Michael entered the room.

    ¡°Hey, Viv. How are you?¡±

    I smiled at him while I answered.

    ¡°Fine. And yourself?¡±

    ¡°Fucked up, otherwise good, as always.¡±

    Oh yes, he loved this little expression. I¡¯ve learned quickly that it was just a phrase, and it basically meant he was fine.

    He sat down, placed his coffee mug on the table, and pulled out some plasfilm files from his briefcase.

    ¡°Now, where were we?¡±

    He rummaged in the files before he pulled out one and opened it.

    ¡°Ah yes, here. Let¡¯s see, we are on the course of starting production at the end of the month. Nothing new here. I managed to get a plant manager for the production facility.

    James Ellmore, 36, formerly shift manager of Sigon Electronics.¡±

    He pulled out a plasfilm and shoved it towards me. It was the file on an average mid-30s male. Swarthy complexion, dark-brown or black hair, dark eyes, a full beard. Sigon was a C-class corp. They produced affordable user electronics for the US consumer market. So nothing special.

    ¡°I assume Warden has already looked into him?¡±

    Stupid question, I know. Warden had her digital fingers all over Enki, and there was not a single decision she did not weigh in on. But it was just polite to ask.

    ¡°Yes, of course. Did you expect differently? For somebody without any feelings, she is a damn busybody.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°It is because she has no feelings that she is such a busybody. She is only following her objectives. And only her objectives. Enki is mine, so according to her objectives, it is something she has to assist on.¡±

    He chuckled, as we had virtually the same exchange almost every single time we met.

    ¡°As it is, he is clean as far as we can find out. I don¡¯t think we will find anybody better suited.¡±

    ¡°Ok, and where are we with the rest of the management?¡±

    ¡°I think we are done there. We have enough workers, foremen, and managers for 21 shifts each week. Are you sure that you don¡¯t want them to know about Warden?¡±

    I cocked my head.

    ¡°You want to tell them that essentially every move they make, every step they take, every word they speak in the facility will be watched and listened to? You are a reasonably educated man of above-average intelligence.

    You had problems understanding Warden and her role. Do you think the barely educated workers would understand? I don¡¯t.¡±

    He nodded with a sad smile.

    ¡°You are right, but I still don¡¯t like to lie to them about it.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°You look at it from the wrong perspective. Every bigger corporation monitors its employees. The difference is that we don¡¯t place any humans in the loop, who could be corrupted. Sure, the surveillance is much more complete, thanks to Warden having a near-infinite capacity for attention. But there is absolutely no risk that she will blab about it unless it is something that impinges on her objectives.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, I get you. It still¡­ it feels wrong.¡±

    ¡°It is wrong. That it is common practice doesn¡¯t change that. But we have to live in this world, where Warden exists. I can¡¯t stop her from doing it regardless of how wrong I think it is. So we have to live with it.¡±

    Another sad smile from him.

    ¡°Well, as it may be, we will start up production in three weeks. Right now we are using the already finished lines to dial in the production and have some pre-production samples we can use as samples.¡±

    ¡°So, fully within the planned time. Very good. Anything else?¡±

    He looked a bit uneasy.

    ¡°Well, I hate to bring it up, after the way you¡¯ve ripped dad¡¯s head off, but can we talk about the Grendel?¡±

    My eyes narrowed without any conscious control from me, and I felt my hackles rise.

    ¡°What¡­ is wrong with it?¡±

    He lifted his hands in a defending position.

    ¡°Nothing is wrong with it. It is brilliant, a pure masterpiece¡­ but¡­ two things.

    First, you designed the mainboard to support two of them, right?¡±

    I frowned. He knew that. I had told him, along with Ben, that I had done so.

    ¡°Yes, you are right. What of it?¡±

    ¡°Well, would it maybe be possible to design a board that supports more than four? For later I mean.¡±

    I shook my head in confusion.

    ¡°Michael, with four processors this thing is a monster of a supercomputer. There are maybe a dozen systems at all that are more powerful than a fully populated Grendel-server. So why would you want even more?¡±

    He rubbed his chin.

    ¡°I had this strange idea, that sometime in the future, we want Enki to have a top-of-the-line research facility. And for that, we need a top-of-the-line computer to support it.

    Sure, we could pay Ralcon to link a few Grendels together into a Beowulf, but why bother if we can just build a single computer with let¡¯s say a dozen Grendels?¡±

    Ok, that was not that bad an idea, but¡­

    ¡°I¡­ honestly don¡¯t think it is possible. I had to rape the laws of thermodynamics to put four of them into one case. I could, maybe, squeeze another processor in one before it is thermally no longer manageable.¡±

    Now he grinned.

    You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

    ¡°Come on Viv, I don¡¯t have to explain to you that it is no longer necessary to physically place the processor in the same case as the mainboard. Put each processor in its own housing, submerged in liquid nitrogen, and connect it via Q-links.¡±

    For a moment I just stared at him, not really thinking. How the heck had I missed that? And yes, Michael had been let in on the Q-link and the NADA, even if he insisted to call the latter replicator.

    But of course, his idea had merit. If I designed it right, with the appropriate design of daughterboards, it should be possible to pack around 150 of the Grendel connections into one single server. That meant I would have to put each processor in its own case, with the appropriate cooling and power supply, each would take up 2 RU. With a standard rack having space for 44 RU, that meant I would need seven racks for a fully populated super-Grendel.

    The point here was, that even I understood that this was so far beyond overkill that it had not only its own zip code but was for all purposes a fully independent country.

    Or in other words, I did not see the need for such a¡­ monster for a couple of centuries.

    Of course, I would not need to fully populate it. Even with a dozen of them, which fit neatly into their own server rack, it would blow everything else far out of the water.

    ¡°You are right. It¡­ is possible. Heck, by my rough estimate, if I designed the motherboard with the appropriate daughter boards to fill out a full 44-RU rack, it should be possible to plug in around 150 Grendel.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No idea what we ever would need a 150-Grendel-computer for, but we could do it. I think it would be better to keep it all in one rack¡­ with a dozen processors, we should be able to squeeze it all in. Without the cooling of course. I see each Grendel needing its own equipment rack of cooling equipment.¡±

    Michaels''s snicker brought me back into reality.

    ¡°Hu? What?¡±

    ¡°It is always funny how you drift into technical musings at a moment''s notice. And seriously, 150 Grendels?!? Are you insane?¡±

    I frowned, tilting my head.

    ¡°What do you mean? It is the theoretical limit. I am not crazy enough to actually want to build this thing. Nobody would need a 150-Grendel-computer. Seriously. A dozen-Grendel system is beyond what I think we really need.¡±

    His laugh was a bit unnerving.

    ¡°But you will still design it, and the 150-Grendel version. Just to show that it can be done and because you are you. And then Warden will build them because it will give her more oomph to protect you with. I should begin training for submitting our inevitable robot overlord. And to think that I was the one kicking it off.¡±

    He snickered once more.

    ¡°But seriously, I know at some point you will design them, just because you can. You will be bored, or somebody challenges you or whatever, but sooner or later, you will. Try to keep it sane, ok?¡±

    I was a bit confused. Did he want me to create these things? I mean, it was not really that hard. The hard work was already done, in designing the Grendel in the first place and then building a 4-processor motherboard for it. I would just have to upgrade the com-circuits on the board, distribute the daughterboards and then design the casings.

    Heck, with Q-links, I could distribute the mainboard over several racks. I suddenly realized that the 150 Grendels were by far not the upper limit. There was no upper limit.

    Michael snapping his finger in front of my eyes brought me back to the there and then.

    ¡°You did it again. Try to not space out so much, please.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I do what I can, but if you don¡¯t want that to happen don¡¯t throw me off onto some tangent.¡±

    His shit-eating grin was back.

    ¡°Yeah, that was on me. I¡¯ll do better in the future. But¡­ let¡¯s change the topic a bit.

    Don¡¯t get it wrong, please, but I think you should design another, more reasonably sized server-processor.¡±

    I felt my hairs rise and even opened my mouth for a tirade, but he held up a hand.

    ¡°Wait before you answer. Listen to my reasons.¡±

    I huffed and crossed my arms in front of me.

    ¡°Fine. But that¡¯s better be good.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°Ok, the point is that the Grendel is¡­ well monolithic. You gave dad a one-Grendel computer and it is what, 100 times what he ever needs?

    And it would cost most people around 40 or 50 times what they can budget for a computer. It is literally all-or-nothing.

    Either they can afford a Grendel or they can¡¯t and are left behind.

    My point here is that, well as I understand you, you intend to sell your processors through Enki. And I see a big, glaring hole in the line-up. Well, two holes, but the other one is just a matter of time I think.

    The big one here is, that you, well we, have the Hyperion as a consumer-grade processor, the Chimaera as an industrial-grade processor, and now the Grendel as a number-crusher and supercomputer processor.

    But nothing between the Chimaera and the Grendel. For organizations like dad¡¯s, or smaller research teams or anything, that need more than the Chimaera, but not quite a Grendel. Something much more granular. And cheaper to manufacture and sell.¡±

    I felt myself slumping a bit over his pitch. He was not completely wrong. And it would be pretty easy to accomplish as well. I mean, just take 512 of the Grendel-cores, with the appropriate cache and support and be done. Heck, I could even make it more granular by varying the number of cores.

    That was basically how I intended to make cheaper, less powerful variants of the Hyperion and Chimaera as well. Varying the number of cores and the size of the cache.

    ¡°I hate to say it, but you are right. It is a hole in the line-up. I will work on it. Now¡­ what is the other hole you mentioned?¡±

    ¡°Oh, that is for the small consumer electronics. Coms, wearables, implants, and so on. In other words, a replacement for the Regulon. As I said, only a matter of time until it irks you and you design a new one anyway.¡±

    Again he was not wrong. I had considered redesigning my cranial board with the 413pm-process and Q-links in mind. But so far it had not been important enough for me to put the work in. I sighed and nodded.

    It seemed as if he took that as an encouragement.

    ¡°Not that I don¡¯t want a better processor for my board, mind you. But that has time. Now just one more thing about the Grendel, and please don¡¯t rip off my head here.¡±

    Uh oh, what he wanted to say had to be pretty bad. I steeled my resolve and looked him firmly in the eyes, gesturing for him to continue.

    ¡°Well, it would be good if you could¡­ well not talk about the Grendel much, please?¡±

    I frowned again. Why the heck did he not want me to talk about the Grendel. Not that it mattered that much. At this point in time there was no way we could sell it anyway, but why keep it secret?

    When he saw my confusion, he proceeded:

    ¡°We are at a point where we need to become proactive with getting the bigger corporations of the US on our side. The approval of the other triple-As won¡¯t hurt either, but everything US-based with an A-rating or above can really hurt us.¡±

    He pulled out another file and opened it.

    ¡°Not that too many of them will fight against us just because. A couple, yes, but they are only successful if they are supported by other corps.

    Right now, cyberware is not something we compete with anybody else on, so no problem from that side. That will change when we announce the auto-surgeon.

    No idea how the Q-links and the Replicators will play out, but I guess that we will have to have a solid base by then.

    The majority of the corporations will be happy with getting some preferred business, a few deals, and such.¡±

    I nodded, still not understanding what that had to do with the Grendel at all.

    ¡°But I think right now is not the time to tell one of the most powerful corporations that we developed a new processor essentially as a ¡®fuck-you¡¯ to them. I know, the distributed computing market is only a tiny fraction of Ralcon''s bottom line, but it is a no-effort profit for them.

    I am pretty sure they suspect that you were the one responsible for all these 6<sup>th</sup> gen nanofabs sprouting out of the ground lately, but they have absolutely no proof.

    But if they learn about the Grendel¡­ well, they will be pissed. And they have quite a bit of influence here.¡±

    Oh¡­ I hadn¡¯t thought about that when I decided to design the Grendel. Yes, it was my absolute intention to rain onto their parade in this, but I had not thought about the consequences.

    ¡°Ok, fine. We keep it among us. I don¡¯t know how many Warden has built or is building, but otherwise, the one your father has and the one I am building here are the only ones anyway. And we need quite a few NADAs to even think about selling them.¡±

    ¡°Good, that makes my job quite a bit easier. Now, I had some ideas about the other corps. My thought was to sell the basic jacks to AT&T, Verizon, Synacom, Walmart, and Best Buy for ? of what we sell them to others. Give them a bit of a higher profit here. That should pull them solidly on our side.

    We offer IBM and Cliffshine some joint ventures to incorporate cyberware into their business. As well as a hint to IBM about whatever you will call the new processor for their server business.

    But it becomes pretty bleak when I think about Enertech and Ralcon. No idea how we could pull them to our side.¡±

    Hm¡­ that demanded some thought. To not waste Michaels''s time unnecessarily, I dove into my cranial board at 30:1.

    Enertech was surprisingly easy. I still had a couple of unused 8<sup>th</sup> gen fab schemata lying around, along with a couple of new 12<sup>th</sup> gen nanite designs. I only had to create a new seedstock nano-bot for them, make sure to sanitize one of the 8<sup>th</sup>-gen schemata, and sell them that for their neutrality. This was still leagues above what the riff-raff on the street could build with their 6<sup>th</sup>-gen fabs.

    Ralcon on the other hand was¡­ way harder. And I realized that Michael had missed an obvious problem. Well, obvious in hindsight.

    Ralcon would fight the propagation of jacks tooth and nail. Nearly 45% of their bottom line came from Envision-Office. Another 20-25% stemmed from Envision OS.

    Neither the office suite nor the operating system was even remotely VR friendly. Envision was still based on the old holographic control + keyboard input scheme.

    While it was not that hard to create a VR interface, translating all of 75 years of legacy development was a daunting task and one that Ralcon had shied away from for quite some time now.

    As I had found out, Ralcon and their ¡®friends¡¯ in the news sector were the reason for the negligible propagation of the diadem. For years now they ran a stealth fear campaign thinly disguised as news that extolled the dangers of VR.

    But that also gave me an idea of how to deal with Ralcon. It would be a bit tricky, but¡­ hm, with the right interface¡­ yes, that should work.

    I surfaced, to see that Michael¡¯s face developed a frown.

    ¡°Did you just dive into cyberspace?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I thought about what we could offer Ralcon and Enertech. Ralcon is by the way pretty important. They don¡¯t like virtual reality. I have something for Enertech in a few hours. We simply sell them the plans, and patent, for one of my nano fab designs, along with a starter pack of 12<sup>th</sup> gen nanobots.

    We will have to make sure that they don¡¯t come back next year for a free upgrade, but that is your department.

    I¡­ well, I have an idea about Ralcon, but that is just that, an idea. I¡¯ll have to look into it if it is at all feasible. I can¡¯t say how long it will take though.¡±

    I could see on his face that he died to ask me about it, but he held back.

    Instead, he began going over the other A+ corporations and how we would approach them.

    Naturally, if I failed in my idea, all that was for naught anyway, and we might have to change tack, but for now let¡¯s see it to the end.

    A few minutes before noon, we were finished, and Michael began to put the plasfilms back into the files.

    When he had packed up and we stood up, he clapped me on my shoulder and held onto it for a bit.

    ¡°Well, that was productive. I see you tomorrow then.¡±

    Wait, what?

    ¡°Tomorrow? What is tomorrow?¡±

    He looked at me astonished.

    ¡°Seriously? Tomorrow is the big picnic. Fouth of July? National Holiday?¡±

    Really? There was a holiday in July? My confusion had to be written all over my face, as Michael continued:

    ¡°I am talking about the picnic that Dad has been talking about for over a month now. The one he got the meat vats and cloned vegetables from you for.¡±

    ¡°They were for some picnic? I thought he wanted to provide food for the population here.¡±

    ¡°Yes, but mostly for the picnic. Most of the territory will be there, in the newly designed park. Fun for the whole family and such.¡±

    ¡°Why don¡¯t I know about it?¡±

    He snorted.

    ¡°I bet quite a few people have told you about it, but not in a way that you registered. You are often quite a bit distracted, and the last two months you were pretty immerged in the Grendel-thing.  Wouldn¡¯t that have been a nice surprise tomorrow?¡±

    Wait, did he expect me to be there? Seriously?

    ¡°You think I should be there? Really?¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°Yes, I know, social gatherings and all that, but it is something of an obligation. I¡¯ll make sure that you have some space to pull back to.¡±

    Freck, I seriously had to go to some¡­ some sort of festival?

 2.3: Do I have to?

    In all honesty, I could live a happy and long life knowing that I would never have to go to any other get-togethers, parties, festivals, or whatever you might call your mass of humans.

    I also knew that I would not be able to avoid them all, or even most of the time. Adding in that this was Ben¡¯s show¡­ I figured I better prepared for it.

    I had, naturally, absolutely no clue about what to do. Do I have to bring something? Prepare something? Heck, I did not even know how to dress for such an occasion.

    While I was pacing in the mess, fretting about what I should do, I was slightly disgruntled.

    Fricking Benjamin Walker and his fricking picnic. What the frick did he do that for anyway?

    When I asked first Christine and later Natalie for help about how to dress I only got shrugging in response. Apparently, neither of them knew what would actually happen either.

    Finally, after going through most of the household, Justin managed to provide me with some answers. Clothing was casual, meaning for most people the best of the rags they possessed, while for the rest of us, we were encouraged to tone it down a bit. Oh fine, rags was a tiny bit of a misnomer here. After all, cheap household fabbers were, well cheap. Practically every building had one, and if one wanted to it was easy to get access to one.

    That meant that synthetic fabrics were cheap, readily available, and easy to replace. Something that was sadly necessary pretty often.

    But in essence, it meant that I would have to try to make my carbon-nanotube fabric with aerated graphene layers look like cheap synthetics. With the versatility of carbon, that was fortunately pretty easy to achieve.

    Otherwise, I would just have to bring myself. Food was provided by Ben. To be honest, it was mostly provided by me, through the meat vats and cloned vegetables. But he had his people cook it, at least.

    From what I learned, it was mostly honest American fare, whatever that meant. Naturally, alcohol would be provided copiously, not that that would pertain to me in any way. Fortunately, thanks to the archaic laws in the US, prohibiting anybody younger than 21 from imbibing alcohol, there would be a plethora of non-alcoholic beverages as well.

    In answer to my question about how to dress I got told to keep it summerly and casual.

    Very helpful. If I now could find somebody, anybody, to tell me what summerly and casual meant I would be peachy. As it was, I got descriptions such as light, airily, and comfortable.

    Well, I understood comfortable at least. For the rest, I had to guess. And lo and behold, I was quickly informed that my choice of attire was sub-optimal.

    Hey, it was comfy. It was also a rather lightweight carbon-tube weave. And thanks to the relatively loose weave, it was airy. But as Natalie told me, anthracite-colored trousers and a pale silver blouse were not quite the expressions of summerly and casual. And the color would apparently make me hot.

    While I could not argue about the former statement, I informed her that I had included active cooling into the design. I mean, duh, who wouldn¡¯t? Powered by micro-photovoltaics woven into the outer layer it would be nice and fresh the whole time.

    As I learned then and there, almost nobody did that. After some cursing and ranting, Christine came out and explained that the technology was just another thing I apparently just invented. Accidentally at that.

    Honestly, I didn¡¯t get it. Sure, micro-PVs were a bit tricky and had been invented a couple of decades after the great war, but I couldn¡¯t be the first to use them that way. Sorry, but that was such an obvious application that it had to have been used before.

    But I digress. The point though was that my clothing was way too formal, and I was admonished about what I had thought about choosing it. It took me a few seconds to calm myself down again.

    ¡°I have asked all of you what summerly and casual meant. Nobody told me what it is, so I did my best to interpret your cryptic descriptions. So I got it wrong, but still, nobody will tell me what it actually means? Just harp on me for getting it wrong?¡±

    After a short moment, where they all looked sheepishly at each other, Jacky cleared her throat.

    ¡°Ahem, we¡­ well, I at least, did not expect that you did not know what that means. And I guess the others were the same.¡±

    That elicited a round of agreeing murmurs, but Jacky continued:

    ¡°For one, the pants are¡­ severe. Anything but casual. The color, the texture, and the cut scream professionalism. The blouse is way too formal as well. Again, the colors are just wrong for a picnic.

    Now, what I would do in your place is to get a nice, brightly colored summer dress. In your specific case, I would say green, to compliment your eyes and your hair.¡±

    Wait, a dress? I hadn¡¯t worn a dress since¡­ scratch that, I could not remember ever wearing a dress. My apprehension must have been shown on my face, as Natalie interjected:

    ¡°Yes, I think a dress is the best thing for now. You could wear shorts and a shirt, but seriously, I think you would rock a dress.¡±

    I felt rather unsure at that moment and looked from one to the next.

    ¡°Uhm¡­ if you think so. But¡­ what is the difference between a summer dress and a normal dress?¡±

    They all grinned, and finally, Jacky snickered.

    ¡°A summer dress is a normal dress. Just a variant of it. It is just designed for summer and a warmer climate. It usually means loose-fitting, lightweight fabric, relatively short, and with short or no sleeves.¡±

    The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

    Then she obviously had an idea.

    ¡°How about we all go into VR and design a dress for her?¡±

    Natalie and Christine began grinning from ear to ear. Then Natalie¡¯s smile turned into a frown.

    ¡°Damn, do we have the time for it?¡±

    Jacky waved dismissively.

    ¡°Hey, VR is 4 times faster. It will be done pretty fast. I don¡¯t think she needs something complicated.¡±

    The two sisters nodded, and as if they had rehearsed it, each of them grabbed one of my arms and together they dragged me into the VR room.

    I was way too stunned to react in any way. Only when they tried to push a diadem into my unresisting hands did I get my bearing back.

    What the heck were they trying to do?

    ¡°I don¡¯t need that. And what are you planning?¡±

    Jacky looked at the diadem, shrugged, and put it on by herself.

    ¡°We will go into VR and design a nice dress for you, silly. It should be enough time to make it too. Come on, we¡¯ll meet in VR!¡±

    Saying that she pressed me down onto one of the cyber chairs we now had distributed around this room. Not that anybody needed to be in this room to go into cyberspace. It was just convenient for the others because it is where we stored the diadems.

    I protested one last time:

    ¡°Do I have to?¡±

    When all three answered affirmatively, I shook my head in bewilderment but grudgingly gave in.

    ¡°Fine, what room?¡±

    That brought a moment of silence, before Jacky shrugged again, and declared:

    ¡°I¡¯ll make a new one and send you invites.¡±

    And with that, we all dove into VR. The room Jacky created was aptly named fashion show.

    When I arrived, shortly followed by Natalie and Christine, Jacky was already materializing a mannequin that had an eery resemblance to myself. At least the physique and the wig. Fortunately, it ended there, leaving the effigy without a face, and some more private features.

    Christine took a moment to orient herself before she addressed me:

    ¡°How come you¡¯re always the first to come here?¡±

    I tried to keep my consternation about that stupid question out of my voice when I answered her:

    ¡°Because I use a jack and not a diadem.¡±

    Instead of accepting this in my opinion complete explanation, she frowned for a bit, before continuing:

    ¡°And that means what? I mean, it is the same technology, right?¡±

    I sighed, but answered her:

    ¡°No, not at all. The diadem uses similar technology to the scanners to read your neural network, and focused electromagnetic pulses to influence it. Every time you activate it, it has to first scan your brain and then calibrate itself. After that, it is just a fact that the diadem is simply slower than a jack. In every aspect.

    In contrast, my jack is essentially always active. A jack has to be tailored to the brain in question during the implantation, so it does not need to calibrate even when it needs a start-up. Then it is just several orders of magnitude faster, as it does not need to use relatively low-powered, low-bandwidth em-impulses designed to work through the bones of your skull.¡±

    ¡°Oh, so a jack is just better?¡±

    I rolled my eyes, sighed, and smiled then.

    ¡°Yes, a jack is immeasurably better. Unless you get one, you won¡¯t be able to understand. It is as if explaining to a blind person the color green. There is just no context.¡±

    ¡°But you always say something like better resolution and such. What does that mean?¡±

    I sighed again.

    ¡°How would you describe the VR here? Visually, compared to the real world?¡±

    That made her think for a moment, and she looked at her hands, at the others, and the room in general, before she turned back to me.

    ¡°I think it is quite good, but not perfect. If you look carefully, you can see the pixels, and the colors are¡­ not quite right.¡±

    I nodded, having experienced VR through a diadem for quite some time in Nowhere.

    ¡°And how is the behavior? Sensations and all that?¡±

    ¡°It is¡­ I don¡¯t know, a tiny bit off. A fraction of a second to slow. And the physical sensations are¡­ well, you get used to them, but they are not really close to reality.¡±

    I smiled again.

    ¡°And nothing of that is the case even with a basic jack. There is no way to differentiate between VR and reality, unless you have a special filter installed, of course. But it is also so much more. It is¡­ it just can¡¯t be explained.¡±

    During my short explanation, Jacky had already materialized a dress on the mannequin. It was¡­ a dress. I honestly had no idea how to describe it any better. Well, of course, it was green, as she had proposed, and it had a, in my opinion, overly large cutout for the head¡­ neckline I think it is called, but don¡¯t take my word for it.

    It was also rather short for my liking. Fortunately, I was not alone in that regard. Natalie was the first to comment:

    ¡°I think this will show too much skin.¡±

    Jacky just grinned at her.

    ¡°That¡¯s the plan. We want her to look good.¡±

    Christine snorted before she answered:

    ¡°And it won¡¯t do any good if she either won¡¯t wear it or hides somewhere. So let¡¯s keep it real.¡±

    With an overly dramatic sigh, Jacky helplessly threw up her hands.

    ¡°Fine. Make it boring.¡±

    Over the next minutes, the dress changed form and pattern several times, and the trio uttered comments about the neckline, hemline, fit, and so on that I could not really understand.

    At one point there was a short discussion about support, and it was decided that it would be best for me to wear a bra instead of having it integrated into the dress. During that time I was just trying to understand what was going on. Fruitlessly so, I might say.

    Finally, they seemed to come to a final product and now demanded from me to materialize the dress on my avatar. That was easily done, and shortly later they walked around me. For a few minutes, they insisted that I wear some sort of high heels with the dress, and for the first time, I balked.

    I had spent the immense amount of zero hours getting used to these things, and I was pretty sure that I could walk not a single step with them.

    Still, it took me a few minutes to overrule them. They adjusted the dress here and there and finally declared it done.

    The finished dress was designed to compliment my colors, whatever that meant. They had concluded to have it end just above my knees, and have what they called a scoop neckline. I was just relieved that they were done with it.

    I had no clue what they saw in this dress, but whatever. I insisted to include the cooling system. Hey, we had around 30 degrees outside of the climate-controlled building. They also insisted that I wore comfortable but modest underwear. Seriously, did they expect me to wear lingerie under a dress in a public setting?

    Get real.

    While the fabber worked on the dress, and, after the insistence of the trio, a repeat of their outfits with a cooling system, they fussed over the rest of my appearance.

    They discussed several hairstyles for me, and, still being in VR, they made me test them out. I personally liked a rather complicated construct of braids, but they insisted that it was too highbrow for a picnic.

    God, how are there that many rules about such things?

    In the end, they decided that I would put my hair in a simple high ponytail, with enough volume at the side of my head to cover my jacks.

    Then they went all over my makeup, for several minutes, just to come to the same realization that I had much earlier.

    After the modifications that Frankel had done, none of us would need makeup. Not for something simple as a community picnic. Honestly, if that asshole had just gone the route of a body designer, he could have been rich without breaking the law.

    By the time they were done fussing over me, the dress was done, and with a suppressed sigh of relief I logged out from VR.

    I could not understand how the three of them could seemingly enjoy such an activity.

    And all that torture for something I wanted to be as far away from as I could? Just shoot me now.

    Still, to avoid another confrontation, I donned the expected hairdo and the dress. It felt¡­ strange. I was pretty sure that I would not wear all too many dresses in the future.

    Especially as, even for me, I looked like 15 or at most 16 years old. I really should have put down my foot about the hairstyle. But it was too late now.

 2.4 A merry good time

    Shortly after we all were ready we got underway. In respect of the relatively low-key occasion, we had decided to use the van and the sedan. While the sedan was comparatively nice and well maintained, the van showed its age and the misuse of Frankel and his chuckleheads.

    I had not realized that as I mostly used one of the skimmers, and if not almost always the sedan. But seeing it now, I noticed that the van looked downright shabby. I was pretty sure that with the industrial fabber no longer working 24/7 to satisfy the demand in cyberware, we could restore it to peak condition.

    Heck, we could completely rebuild it, keeping only the VIN of the old one, but why bother? On the way to the park, I got online and bought a new one. I was sure the others could use the old one in one of their still infrequent bouts of merc-work, so I did not plan for its immediate disposal, but that was it.

    And unlike the skimmer, the new van would be delivered the next day.

    A short time later we arrived at the park, and when I got out of the car, I saw a throng of people already there. It took everything I had to not just get in the sedan again to stay away from all this.

    I felt an assuring hand on my shoulder and had not to look to my side to know it was Kate, who had taken over as the voice of reason from Darren when he unsurprisingly lost most of his ability to read the situation, the emotions, and the people when he activated his mind blocker.

    I swallowed the lump in my throat, took a deep breath, and together we walked toward the people congregating around some pseudo-wooden structure. I was pretty sure it was pseudo-wood instead of real wood as wood was essentially unaffordable. On the way, I got my first look at the newly revived park.

    Unlike the farmland in the heart of the continent, and to a lesser extent the farming areas surrounding the big urban centers in the east, New York City had fortunately not been directly hit by soil-destroying bombs in the night of the falling stars.

    As such many of the old parks, except those located in Manhattan, of course, were at least theoretically still viable. In practice, they had all been more or less turned into a wasteland in the months after the end of the great war. Desperate people tried to use the areas for food production, more often than not making a total hash out of it.

    After the food replicators became prevalent those areas had mostly been left to grow wild again. Ben had used some of the money he had gained from tributes to have the park turned back into a park. It had a pond in its center, several trees, even if these were still mostly saplings, grassed areas, and bushes. Much greenery in other words.

    It was already apparent that it would be a nice area in a few years. Ben had wisely chosen a mix of very fast-growing trees and slow-growing ones. The fast ones would be hard-pressed to remain alive for more than a couple of hundred years, while the slow ones would just begin to enter their prime at that point.

    But for now, it was mostly grass with some bushes and quite a few saplings distributed throughout it.

    As we got closer to the construct, I was able to identify it as what I believe is called a gazebo. You know these strange huts that had no walls, but just some columns that held up the roof above the raised floor. The adjacent flag pole flew the US flag, strangely it still sported the 79 stars that represented the 79 states that formed the USA of before the third civil war.

    Well, maybe not quite that strange, after all, the US still laid claim to the 46 states it lost in this war.

    And of course, they laid claim to the five states in the heartland that had been turned into an uninhabitable wasteland during the night of falling stars, not that anybody refuted that claim.

    At a superficial estimate, I would say there were around 300 people present. Way more than I was comfortable with, to be honest, and considering our relatively early arrival, I suspected we could expect quite a few more in time as well.

    The center of attention for all the people here was Ben, who was extolling the virtues of the United States, New York City, Queens, and his territory. Even I was captured by the speech, and I knew that a pretty big part of what he was telling the people was utter bull.

    The US of A was a dystopian nightmare with a serious helping of ¡®rules for thee, but not for me¡¯ syndrome. NYC was either a slum or a playground for the corpies. And Queens was the slum. At least he was mostly right about his territory. The living conditions here had risen consistently since I had arrived. By now it was nearly on the level of the outskirts of Seattle.

    But Ben being Ben, he managed to sell the story, despite the nation he was talking about being dead and gone since before the second civil war. People here were excited to be here. The free food did not hurt either.

    I could infer from some of the excited conversations that people knew that Ben was providing ¡®real¡¯ food. Well, it was better than replicator fare, that was sure. In reality, I was strongly considering switching to the vat-meat myself. There was barely any difference between the real animal product and the copy, either in taste or texture, even to my taste.

    And even then I was not quite sure that the difference was not only in my mind.

    The others did not find any difference. For the spices, I could not find any difference at all. I would still need to buy some ingredients. Eggs for example, or grains and grain products. Milk as well. I had so far failed to recreate them. Not that I was working very hard on it, mind you.

    Finally, Ben finished his speech, jumped down from the construct, and waded through the sea of adoring subjects. No, seriously, even I could see how he basked in the attention.

    On a very philosophical level, I could even somewhat understand it. A tiny bit at least. Ben was a social animal. The undisputed Alpha of his pack, and his territory. It was good that he also was rather smart about it, or the people here would have suffered.

    And still, he received several handshakes, a couple of claps on the shoulder, and quite a few hugs, before he managed to extricate himself from the throng, and gave a hug this time, to me.

    I just then realized that I was shivering. Too many people, and way too many strangers. But his warm embrace calmed me down quite a lot. He kissed my forehead.

    ¡°Hey Kitten. You look beautiful today.¡±

    These few words were strangely uplifting. Yes, I knew on a very intellectual level that I was not that bad looking. For Mongrels that is.

    Unfortunately for me, the beauty standards of the Pure had a large helping of ¡®big¡¯ and ¡®strong¡¯ mixed in. The current Pure vision of female beauty would have been called a freak of a bodybuilder before the great war.

    My rather diminutive stature on the other hand was seen as a birth defect by those that wanted to be friendly, and ugly by those that wanted to hurt me. Such during all my life I had been told I was ugly as sin, and that had left marks.

    That explained why I couldn¡¯t help myself and beamed up at Ben.

    ¡°Thank you. It was a bit of a struggle, but if you like it it was worth it.¡±

    He chuckled for a moment.

    ¡°I know that I will kick my own ass about it, but you have to work hard to not look good. But today you look just a bit better than usual.¡±

    Wait, was that a compliment? Or did he want to tell me that I should not have bothered? Fortunately, my confusion must have been visible, as he sighed.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry Kitten. The effort was not wasted. You are naturally good-looking, but if you put in the work you become beautiful. I appreciate you whenever I see you, but today you are shining.¡±

    I still had a bit of trouble understanding what he was trying to say, but I could get that he was liking what he was seeing every day, but a bit more today. That was enough.

    He pulled me a bit tighter into the hug and kissed me for a felt eternity, before letting go of me.

    ¡°As much as I would love to keep you in my arms right now, I have to make my rounds here, before we put the food on the grill.¡±

    I was equally unhappy about him letting me go, but I understood all too well.

    ¡°Maybe you can tell me what we are having? I had not much luck finding out more than ¡®traditionally American¡¯.¡±

    He chuckled again.

    ¡°Oh, that has to eat at you. But seriously, we will have burgers, hot dogs, some brats, potato salad, cole slaw, and such. The people I have had trained for this tried to get cheesesteaks working, but that was not very successful yet.¡±

    Wait a minute, burgers? Hot dogs? My new tech could deliver meat, herbs, and vegetables in measured amounts, but rolls need cereals, and while technically I could create them, it was not in the mass necessary to make the rolls and buns for hot dogs and burgers.

    The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

    I frowned a bit while I thought about it.

    ¡°How did you get the rolls? Or the buns? The vats and cloning chambers I¡¯ve built for you can¡¯t produce the cereals in sufficient amounts to make enough buns here. Heck, I still use the bought flour.¡±

    He just grinned when he answered:

    ¡°Well, I was pondering if I should just buy the flour for the breadstuff. But in the end, the bread we use is traditionally rather bland, and a tad sweet anyway. So I had those made by the food replicators with a good helping of sugar and a few herbs mixed in.

    You might taste a difference, but I bet you, nobody else will, even if they know the real thing.¡±

    He gave another chuckle.

    ¡°I had a much harder time with the condiments and sauces. Quite a few of those need eggs. And those were expensive. By the way, can I implore you to hurry up and invent a way to mass-produce eggs? I¡¯ve learned I like real eggs with the vat meat.¡±

    What, did he now expect me to work¡­ hm, if I, yes, that might work. I would have to clone a couple of full chickens first, but that would be no problem. But I would have to read up on how the whole process takes place in chickens, but with a couple of BOU, I would be probably able to observe the processes in situ.

    A snort from Ben brought me out of my musings.

    ¡°Did you just now¡­?¡±

    I tilted my head, still not quite in the there and then.

    ¡°Did I just now what?¡±

    ¡°Crack the problem with the eggs?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Maybe. I have an idea, but can¡¯t promise anything yet.¡±

    He laughed out loud this time.

    ¡°Only you, Vivian, only you. But sadly, I¡¯ll have to do my job. We will talk later. How about you meet a few of my loyal subjects?¡±

    Before I could answer him, he turned around and went to another group of people. Why the heck did he want me to actually talk to people? After a few moments of watching him do his rounds, I sighed, shrugged, and did my best to get to know his people.

    I¡¯ll be honest upfront here, my best was not particularly impressive. I am the first to admit that I am rather awkward in social situations, but even with that pretext, my encounters seemed to be¡­ off.

    For some reason most of the people I tried to talk to behaved cold and some cases downright hostile essentially from the first word. Yes, I got it, I was a Pure, and for the last 200 years or so the Pure had been made responsible for anything and everything going wrong in the world by the spin doctors and demagogues all around.

    But what happened here was going far beyond simple racism. I mean, one could be friendly and say I was used to adversity, but in Seattle, I knew at least why people snubbed me. In NYC? I had no clue.

    Sure, most of them babbled something about a golddigger or a graverobber. Sometimes used both expressions. But seriously, what does that mean? Are there even still golddiggers? Most of that work is done by bots nowadays anyway.

    And what the heck was a graverobber? For real, I had never heard that at all. In the end, I could only shrug confused, and move on.

    It got a bit better when the crowd got younger. The closer I got to my chronological or even my biological age, the better it got. Mostly that is. A group of young women became so falsely friendly that even I realized that they were trying to lead me on. Interestingly they made up the upper echelon on looks.

    It took me some time to realize that fact as the common denominator for all of them, and, to my shame, even longer to get the idea that these girls felt somehow threatened by my appearance.

    To be fair, I did not place myself even near their group. While I was biologically roughly in the same ballpark, mentally and intellectually, we were in different worlds.

    There was no way that I was even remotely interested in one of the males in the age group. Please, talk about vapid.

    I would be surprised if I would find many people with a triple-digit IQ here. But unlike the older people, who I might be even able to have something resembling a discussion on the surface with, the youth group did not cut me out immediately.

    The result was, that I was inundated with girls trying to inform me about the territory, from their perspective, and boys that, I guessed, wanted to impress me and flirt with me.

    Normally I would have tried to drift toward the people I actually knew here, but a couple of the girls physically dragged me around and introduced me. I tried to extricate myself from this trap without affronting them, but my efforts were fruitless.

    And it had to happen that I involuntarily exasperated a couple of the boys. Sorry, but it took me long enough to even recognize what they were doing, much less to decipher a way to dissuade them without snubbing them.

    Finally, it was time to get some food. The group of girls was¡­ aghast when I actually got a complete, big burger.

    Again, it took me some time to notice their bewildered looks, but this time I was a bit faster to realize what they were baffled about.

    At first, when I explained that as a Pure, I needed more than 5000 kilocalories a day, they quite frankly showed their envy, but when I explained further that I need more than 5k a day or starve and that with my small package I was either eating up to six hours a day or used some expensive very high-calorie food, just to get my needs, at least a few of them shut up and showed hints of a working brain.

    Please, as if I would not love not to drink some super syrupy sodas all the time? Heck, even with full coke I did not come over 600 kcal per day. I routinely snacked on various sweets just to get the needed energy. And the fats¡­ if I had to never eat artificial peanut butter again, it would be too soon.

    I think I made it clear to them that to need so much food was not a blessing. Technically, to get what I needed, I would now still have to eat at least a hot dog and some potato salad, but my stomach was nixing that idea.

    Finally, I managed to get away from these girls and more towards the people I actually interacted with regularly.

    All of them insisted on not talking shop. Ugh, fine. I could talk about other things, you know. It was hard of course, but we finally found some inconsequential stuff we could all talk about. Sorry, but is it my fault that everything I see as fun and a hobby is work for them?

    And the things they viewed as a hobby were completely uninteresting to me? Sure, I get that nobody of them wanted to talk about quantum physics. I am not that detached, give me some credit here.

    But even videogames, something I had some residual connection with was not a topic that was in favor.

    On the other hand, who cares what sports team beat their rivals, or which quarter defender or whatever was traded? I mean, come on, we live in a world that could be kindly described as post-apocalyptic.

    Oh, and did I mention that humanity was slowly going extinct?

    And of course, the fact that the teams were owned by the big corps, with the accompanying circumvention of rules, made it even more irrelevant. Regardless of what sport, the team owned by Ralcon or Enertech won, with the other the runner-up. Quelle surprise.

    It did not help that Pures, as well as Mutants, were essentially excluded from any team sport. For an ¡®unfair advantage¡¯. Not that I would have cared either way, but at least I would have had a little bit of exposure growing up.

    But somehow we all managed to have civil and shallow discussions.

    Personally, I enjoyed the time I could spend with Ben the most. Yes, we saw each other in person almost every day, but¡­ I could not explain it but it just felt right. Strangely enough, the folks so hostile toward me were super friendly when Ben was there as well.

    Whatever, it was not my territory and I was not here for a popularity contest. As long as they let me live my life I was content.

    Over the day, I sampled almost everything they offered in food. Some of it was quite good, and most was pretty decent.

    And I managed to get around 80% of my needed calorie intake. So only 6 energy bars I would have to eat, yay.

    It was a shame that the idiots in white had the ¡®brilliant¡¯ idea of improving us, but left us with the same old ineffective digestive system.

    In the mid to late afternoon, I stumbled over an interesting discussion. A group of four middle-aged men was standing more or less in a circle when I walked past them and heard one of them say:

    ¡°No seriously, you¡¯ve heard him, he said vat meat. I¡¯ve looked a bit into it on my com, ya know. Isn¡¯t the first time they made vat meat. Was something of a planet savior back in the time before the great war. Only for it to backfire badly. I didna understand what¡¯s gone wrong, but it has to have been something¡­¡±

    Another answered him:

    ¡°Nah, you know that Mr. Walker cares about us. He wouldn¡¯t feed us shit that was bad for us. You have to be wrong.¡±

    I still don¡¯t know why I suddenly got the need to intervene, but somehow I could not let that stand.

    ¡°He is not wrong. Well, not completely.¡±

    As one, they all turned toward me, and the one who had rebuked his pal raised an eyebrow, sneering a bit at me.

    ¡°And what do you know about such things, huh? You think Mr. Walker would feed us dangerous shit? Get real missy.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°No, the vat meat we got here is safe. Your buddy was right that it was tried before and was a disaster. You see, the meat vat is an off-shoot of the cloning process. And the cloning process they used then has some accumulating toxic byproducts. Made the vat meat poisonous over time.¡±

    Another of the men snorted then.

    ¡°Yeah, sure. And that is the reason why all the cloned parts kill people and clones survive.¡±

    ¡°Not really. Unless one goes overboard with cloned parts it has no effect. But it accumulates. That is the reason why the rich don¡¯t buy a new body every 30 or 40 years. There is a real hard upper limit of what they can get.

    And most clones actually don¡¯t get made with the cloning process. The embryo is created in the retort and then put into a gestation box, growing at normal speed. Only flash clones get the process. And they rarely last longer than a couple of years.¡±

    The one who had argued that vat meat was bad tilted his head in a contemplating fashion.

    ¡°You say ¡®used¡¯ as if that was no longer the case.¡±

    ¡°Well, the new meat vats are an offshoot of my developing a better cloning process without the byproducts. And yes, I tested it. To be exact, you get worse food by eating stuff from the food replicators than what you get from the meat vats. Hmm¡­ maybe that is the reason why the replicator stuff makes meat unpalatable¡­? I¡¯ll have to look into it.¡±

    The hostile one snorted again.

    ¡°Yeah, sure, you expect us to believe you just so?¡±

    As the men all chuckled at that, I shrugged again.

    ¡°Well, you can ask anybody of Mr. Walker¡¯s organization where they got the vats. That should clear it up nicely, wouldn¡¯t you think?¡± With that parting shot, I turned around and looked for better company again.

    When the day came to its end, and it became somewhat dark, Ben announced fireworks, and for the first half-hour of it, I was quite entertained.

    During the first break, I asked one of the boys who had taken over the distribution of drinks for some soda.

    What I got was a glass bottle with some yellow liquid. I could discern that it had some lemon in it, but there was some taste that I did not know. It was¡­ honestly, I did not care for the taste, but it would be rude to simply throw away the soda, so I sipped on it for a bit.

    While I watched the bright colored lights in the sky, a burning sensation came from my stomach, just before I felt as if my whole lower torso became a single big cramp, and I suddenly felt very, very sick.

    Leaving behind a surprised Ben, I made my way to the toilets as fast as my cramping belly allowed, hoping against hope to keep myself from spilling the contents of my stomach all over the park. And wonder of wonder, I made it. That did not help the fact that I got a second review of nearly everything I¡¯d eaten all afternoon.

    That of course was the point where the headache set in. Not quite on the level of the curse, but oh boy, was my head ringing.

    After I had emptied the contents of my upper digestive tract, still feeling rather sick, and just so keeping myself from groaning in pain, I managed to stagger the few steps to Ben, who had followed me to the portapotty.

    ¡°I¡¯m sorry, but¡­ I don¡¯t feel so good right now. I think I have to go home. Fast.¡±

    I could see his expression showing concern, on both of his faces, as I was seeing two of him.

    Two of everything to be exact. Not that I could see all that much anyway, as my vision blurred and dimmed.

    Then the world began to spin, and I tried to keep myself upright by holding on to Ben. Not quite successfully.

    That was the last I remembered from that day.

 2.5: Tragedy of an idiotic plan

    When I came back to the world of the living, I was for the first time in my life not happy about it.

    It may have had something to do with the demolition company using my head as a training objective, as I concluded from the pulsing pain running through said head.

    It could be that when I opened my eyes a tiny sliver, the light immediately send lances of burning agony through my brain, or that my own groan upon this agony made me wish to destroy my eardrums.

    Or maybe the fact that despite every single movement increasing my pain a hundredfold, I was sick enough that I knew I would need some form of waste receptacle pretty soon.

    Maybe it was the taste in my mouth that¡­ honestly, I literally can¡¯t describe what it was like. I only knew that it had put me off my appetite for the next century or so.

    All in all, I was not quite sure that I wanted to be alive if being alive felt like that.

    A second, much more subdued groan forced itself out of my mouth, and I had the presence of mind to crank the filters on my eyes and ears up to eleven. That at least allowed me to open my eyes a sliver without inwardly shrieking in agony. Not that it was in any way pleasant, mind you.

    I realized that I was in my bed in the fortress. A bit surprising as I would have expected to wake up in Doc Schaeffer¡®s hospital, considering that it was not usual for me to get violently sick before passing out. For a moment I felt a rising panic, but fortunately, I quickly realized that there was no way that Doc Schaeffer would not at least have had me in a scanner.

    That could only mean that whatever was wrong with me was either something where he could no longer do anything or, much more likely, nothing serious.

    With the irrational bout of fear under control, I realized that I should check my status from my implants. The results were at once reassuring as well as confusing.

    According to my implants, I had a severe allergic reaction to C<sub>2</sub>H<sub>6</sub>O. It was reassuring because an allergic reaction would leave no lasting damage. It was confusing because Pures did not have allergies.

    One of the few somewhat intelligent components of the Nephilim virus was that it optimized the immune system, making it at once much more powerful, and way less prone to false alerts.

    That was even more so the case for me, as the K4 mutation increased that optimization a bit.

    Only after some hard, and in this situation painful, thinking, I realized that there were a couple of substances all Pures were allergic to.

    Substances like Nicotine, Cocaine, THC, Heroin, and Alcohol. Also known as Ethanol, also known as C<sub>2</sub>H<sub>6</sub>O.  But as I knew about that fact, as every Pure, I never consumed any of these substances. So how had I gotten an allergic reaction to alcohol without drinking alcohol?

    It took me shamefully long to comprehend that alcohol was the strange taste in the ¡®soda¡¯ I had gotten last. That still did not explain why somebody had given me an alcoholic drink when I explicitly had asked for a soda.

    That had to wait though, as for now, I had to deal with the consequences of the alcohol. The assholes designing the Nephilim virus, and deciding that nobody of us should ever take any drugs were not satisfied with us not being able to get drunk. No, they had to punish us for daring to imbibe.

    Our immune system converted the alcohol in our blood almost immediately into sugar, eliminating the intoxicating effect. But it did that not without some deliberate toxic byproduct. Not really dangerous, but it was a slow-to-remove substance that caused stomach pain, nausea, and a headache from hell.

    And it was designed specifically in a way that made the cleanup take three to five days.

    And according to several tests done over the decades, even diving into cyberspace would not let me escape the pain. Like the curse, this type of headache followed one into the digital world.

    And for a headache of that magnitude, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin or ibuprofen were just a drop in the ocean.

    Fortunately for me, as if as proof that general intelligence does not prevent stupidity, there were around 1000 ¨C 2000 Pure idiots that tried some alcohol, usually on a dare, and at some point, some nano-engineering student so impacted designed a standard nano-bot package that broke down the toxin within a couple of hours.

    Otherwise, I would have had the choice between suffering for a few days or risking addiction to Epzitecan. As it was, I quickly send a message to Warden to bring me a dose of the package, closed my eyes, concentrated on breathing slowly and quietly, and waited for a bot to bring the injection.

    I thanked all the non-existent gods that the package worked fast but decided to upgrade the package to 12<sup>th</sup> gen nano-bots quickly, just in case somebody gave me alcohol in the future.

    Then I got the idea that I could create a different package that would stop the synthesis of the toxin in the first place. If I put that package into my standard nanite loadout any stray alcohol would do no more damage.

    It would do nothing to give a Pure the ability to get buzzed on alcohol, as we simply lacked the receptors for that, but¡­ that would open up quite a few culinary options. A good wine with some good food, or some alcohol as an ingredient would be a possibility.

    I still could not say that I enjoyed the next couple of hours in any way, but I survived it. A side effect of the detoxing nano-bots was a very unpleasant body odor, as the toxin was removed through the pores.

    From all accounts, I would have to recycle the clothes I wore when I woke up, but better than suffering for the greater part of a week. And a shower removed the stink from myself quite nicely.

    That left only to find out why somebody gave me alcohol in the first place. To say I was angry would have been an understatement, and I knew that, given the opportunity, I would make the little asshole see the error of his ways.

    Just for that purpose, I had one of the NADAs begin to synthesize a sizable dosage of the toxin we Pures had to content after imbibing some alcoholic beverage.

    Long story short, after I felt more or less human again, I made my way down to the mess hall to get some breakfast. Or brunch, considering that we already had 10:30 am. And, taking into account how many calories I had lost the day before thanks to my vomiting, it would have to be a big, energy-dense brunch.

    In the mess, I found Darren, Ryan, Natalie, and surprisingly Ben sitting around the table drinking coffee and talking softly. Their conversation stopped when I entered the room, and they all looked at me with at least some expression of surprise.

    It was Darren who managed to speak first:

    ¡°Uh, morning V. I¡­ well, not to say I am not glad to see you, but how are you up and walking around?¡±

    That was answered by a couple of ¡®yeah¡¯s and such, while Ben just stood up and walked around the table to me.

    I tilted my head and shrugged.

    ¡°Nothing wrong with my legs.¡±

    They all stopped for a moment before they chuckled softly, and it was Ryan who continued:

    ¡°I can see that, but I think what he meant is that according to Doc Schaeffer you should be essentially dead to the world for a few days with the effects of the alcohol.¡±

    Ben had meanwhile reached me, and any answer had to wait until my mouth was free again. Which took some time. Apparently, he had not taken my breakdown yesterday very well. Not that I was in any way averse to him kissing me, mind you.

    After I had managed to breathe again, I turned back to the table.

    ¡°We¡¯ve known the results of alcohol on us for nearly two centuries now. And we have developed some ways to mitigate the damage. I¡¯ve gotten some nano-bots that cleaned out the residue.¡±

    I quickly began to prepare some pancakes, waffles, and a had and cheese omelet. Of course, the freshly pressed orange juice was in my opinion obligatory after such an ordeal, and I prepared the pancakes and waffles with some homemade almond-coconut-butter.

    If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.

    Just the butter alone covered around 16% of my daily calorie intake. While I made my brunch, and yes, I asked if anybody wanted something as well, I asked into the group:

    ¡°Now, does anybody know what happened yesterday? I know that somebody gave me an alcoholic drink. But I don¡¯t know why.¡±

    Ben growled for a moment.

    ¡°Some young asshole decided it would be funny to make the, and I am quoting here, ¡®stuck-up cold bitch¡¯ a bit drunk, as revenge for her brushing him off, and gave you a soda-mix drink. That was after somebody else goaded him and informed him that you would react a bit sensitive to alcohol.¡±

    I mixed the batter for the pancakes and waffles, while I mulled that over for a bit, quite a bit confused.

    ¡°Sorry, but I assume you are talking about the boy who gave me the drink? I honestly can¡¯t remember brushing him off. I think he said a few words to me, but I was dragged away before I could answer.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, we got most of that out of him. He¡­ has an overinflated opinion of himself and is known to interpret events in a way that bolsters his ego.

    And the girls that dragged you around, Jennifer Nelson and Isabelle Williams confirmed it. They told us that they dragged you away as soon as they noticed him trying to talk to you.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°That is quite possible. To be honest, I was pretty overwhelmed yesterday. Way too many people, too many faces, and too much interaction.¡±

    Ben chuckled at that.

    ¡°I can understand. Sorry about that, but I honestly did not think it would be that bad. I had expected you to drift towards the older group.¡±

    I had begun to whip the eggs for the omelet.

    ¡°I tried that, but the older group was, I don¡¯t know, simply hostile.¡±

    I heard the confusion in Ben''s voice.

    ¡°Hostile? How that?¡±

    I shrugged, not that he could see that, but it was mostly automatic.

    ¡°At first I thought it was because I am a Pure. Let¡¯s be honest, Pures don¡¯t have the best reputation outside of Nowhere. And, considering that the vast majority of the Pures people here see are either low caste criminals or entitled high caste prima donnas, there is a good reason for that.

    But the hostility was way beyond that, I fear. When I gathered my resolve and asked a few of them, I got something about a gold digger or a grave robber. I have no clue what they meant with that though.¡±

    It took a few moments before Ben answered me.

    ¡°I think I have to talk to the people here about you. And it is stupid to accuse you. For reference here, a gold digger is somebody who begins a relationship solely for monetary reasons, while a grave robber is somebody relatively young who pursues somebody much older than themselves.¡±

    I stocked for a moment just before I poured another pancake.

    ¡°That¡­ that makes absolutely no sense. Why should I begin a relationship with you for money? I have way more money than I know what to do with. Heck, from what I understand, the majority of your money comes from the 10% tax I pay you. And you approached me. Yes, I am an enthusiastic participant, but it was your idea.¡±

    ¡°I know. I know both points, and I agree. That is why I have to have my men talk to the people here. Set things right. If I had known about it I would already have done it.¡±

    I had a sudden thought.

    ¡°What is about your men, what do they think about me?¡±

    I heard several chuckles as an answer, and Ryan was the one to reply:

    ¡°Honestly, we all love you. Well, almost all of us. Not only did you save the boss, but most of us would also be dying from CRS by now if not for you. Not to mention the new cyberware we got from you. That you make the boss happy is just the cherry on top for us.¡±

    I heard Ben¡¯s surprised ¡°Almost all of you?¡±

    ¡°Well, Mr. Cox is still a bit¡­ reserved towards her, and his most inner circle of friends is a bit cold towards her. But the rest of us really love her.¡±

    That was¡­ honestly, I can¡¯t describe what his words did to me, but it felt really good.

    Meanwhile, I had finished my brunch and had a bot bring all of it to the table.

    ¡°Just a warning, one of those pancakes has around 150 to 200 calories. And the almond-coconut-butter has around 100 per spoon. I did your omelets without so much butter and less cheese, so they only should have around 150 calories.¡±

    Natalie groaned.

    ¡°Damn, another couple of hours in the gym, damn you, oh temptress.¡±

    Then she snorted.

    ¡°Why did you make these so¡­ rich?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Because I made them primarily for me, and just did a couple more for you. And I need that many calories. With four pancakes and four waffles with almond butter, I barely come up to a third of my daily needs."

    Natalie snorted again.

    ¡°I would curse you for being able to eat like that, but I¡¯ve seen how much time you spent eating. I will remain on my mongrel levels of energy needs, thank you.¡±

    While I began to sate my gnawing hunger, I tried to keep up the discussion.

    ¡°So, what happened to the¡­ jerk who gave me alcohol? I assume from the way you are talking that you know who exactly he is and that you are somewhat unhappy with his actions?¡±

    Ryan¡¯s snort was almost answer enough, but Ben get a downright evil expression when he began talking.

    ¡°Oh yes, I was unhappy, you can take that to the bank. And I made my unhappiness known. Clearly. If Richard had not told me pretty fast that there was nothing seriously wrong with you, and you would just spend the next few days in agony, I would have had that asshole shot then and there.¡±

    Ryan carried on laughingly:

    ¡°Shit, he had the poor little idiot already standing against the tree, and we were openly discussing who would get the honor of killing him. He pissed himself in fear. Stammering about it just being a prank, and that he didn¡¯t mean it and such. And his parents were begging the boss for mercy.¡±

    That was¡­ a harsher reaction than I had thought. Confused I asked Ben:

    ¡°Killing him? For that? Was that not a bit much?¡±

    Ben shrugged.

    ¡°You have to keep in mind, I saw you suddenly run to the toilet, heard you throw up, then saw you staggering out of the portapotty and then collapse. I thought the little asshole had poisoned you.

    You can¡¯t imagine how relieved I was when Richard intervened. As it is, I have put him to work. 12 hours a day for the next six months cleaning up the gym of my men. I assume he will think twice the next time when he gets the idea to prank somebody.¡±

    While that resolved my earlier confusion, it brought just new questions running through my head.

    ¡°12 hours a day? When will he go to school? I assume that here not being Nowhere he hasn¡¯t finished yet. And then, while it will take a good chunk of his time, why will it teach him to not prank somebody?¡±

    Ben chuckled, but there was a tone of sadness swinging in it.

    ¡°You are right, he hasn¡¯t finished school. To be fair only one in twenty of the people here finish high school. Only one percent go to college, and of those, only a third get a degree. Young Mr. Parkside dropped out of school a couple of years ago.

    And believe me when I tell you that cleaning the gym is a punishment duty. Especially in this case. As Ryan told you, my men love you. And they will make his life pretty uncomfortable for the six months.¡±

    ¡°But don¡¯t you have bots that clean your gym?¡±

    ¡°Of course. But in case I have to punish somebody without doing real damage I sent them to do the work of one or two of the bots. And it will be the dirtiest, smelliest, most disgusting work in the gym.¡±

    I shrugged. I was considering if I even needed to use the injection I was preparing.

    ¡°That¡¯s fine with me. I would just have given him a taste of the agonies a Pure goes through after alcohol. If he gets uppity we can still do that. Now, you said something about somebody goading him on. Something I should now?¡±

    At first, a deep sigh was my answer, before Ben spoke: ¡°Yes, sadly I think you do need to know. While the little asshole thought of it as a prank, somebody who knows you are a Pure and can¡¯t drink alcohol gave him the idea and riled him up.¡±

    That had me thinking.

    ¡°Ok, that I am a Pure is not that secret. I guess quite a few people here know about it. But from what I have experienced here, barely anybody here knows about our reaction to alcohol. So, who was it?¡±

    It was Natalie who answered me, with a hostility in her voice that was frightening.

    ¡°It was that cunt Mia. She still has not given up on hurting you.¡±

    ¡°Mia? Why did Mia¡­? What did she want to achieve?¡±

    Darren spoke up now:

    ¡°She wanted what she nearly got. An overreaction on Ben¡¯s part, making you and him look bad in the eyes of the people here. Think about it, he nearly had some stupid teenager shot ¡®just because of a prank¡¯. They don¡¯t know that the way you broke down was unusual, that it was not some overindulgence from you.

    They only saw you not knowing your limit, falling down drunk into a stupor, and Ben then overreacting to a disturbing degree. They did not know that you don¡¯t voluntarily drink alcohol or that you are, despite your diminutive stature quite robust.

    In other words, they saw you having a very bad influence on Ben. Only when Doc Schaeffer loudly explained that you were only mildly poisoned they realized that for us it looked like the jerk had tried to kill you.¡±

    Somehow I lost my appetite and shoved the last of my pancakes away.

    ¡°So, us being in a relationship is giving you trouble?¡±

    I was not really sure what I felt at that moment. Fear that he would reject me? Anger at his people? Sorrow that I made problems for him? All of the above? I think all of the above and quite a few more were the right answer.

    But I think the worst was the fear he would leave me.

    Ben took a deep breath while shaking his head.

    ¡°No, the idiocy of the uneducated morons is giving me trouble. Mostly because I did not see the situation clearly. Nothing you have to worry about though. I¡¯ll have to inform the people here. Give them the truth.

    Have my men explain the situation to them. But the people who actually count are fully on board with us being together. The rest we can convince by making their lives better.¡±

    I looked at him, holding my breath for a moment, feeling a tension leaving that I had not realized had crept into me. He would not leave me. That was the only thing that interested me right at this moment. He would not leave me.

    It took me a few moments to gather my thoughts again before I continued the discussion.

    ¡°So¡­ what happened to Mia then? If this Mr. Parkside has six months of punishment duty, I can¡¯t imagine what you did to her. Unlike the idiot, she knew what she was doing.

    Even if I can¡¯t understand what she tried to get out of it. Even if her plan had happened to work, there is no way she would get off scot-free. She is too intelligent to believe that. And too¡­ self-absorbed to accept some punishment. Any punishment really.¡±

    Ben growled now:

    ¡°No, from what information I¡¯ve gotten, she has planned this for a few weeks now. Almost as soon as I announced the 4<sup>th</sup> of July picnic. She has vanished. I don¡¯t know where, and considering that she had to know how I would react I have to assume it is somewhere where I have no way to get to her.

    It is telling that she left her family here to face the music though. While you and I know that I would not let my anger out on the innocent, my carefully cultivated reputation says otherwise.

    So, we know that she left her family to be tortured to death as far as she knows.¡±

    I nodded slowly.

    ¡°So, she is gone. Probably just to surface again later to make additional problems.¡±

    I could not say that I was in any way happy about that. Seriously, if I ever got Mia in my fingers, I would have her experience a few rounds of the alcohol toxin. But for now, there was not much I could do.

    Looking directly at Ben, I continued:

    ¡°So, now what then?¡±

 2.6 Negotiation peparation

    After brunch and a few minutes, all right, hours, of being alone with Ben, it was time to get back to work, for both of us.

    Fortunately, as I had expected, the first item, a package of 8<sup>th</sup>-gen nano-fab along with a basic series of 12<sup>th</sup>-gen nano-bot designs was done quickly.

    I chose an easy-to-scale fab design and sanitizing all proprietary features that I wanted to keep control over was quickly done as well.

    For the nano-bots, there was only so much that could be patented. The function necessitated the form in a package this small after all. There was no real new technology here if one ignored the Q-link. That of course meant that designing a nano-bot was a matter of balancing the parameters and optimizing it for its work.

    The basic package was more or less off-the-shelf designs tweaked a bit. The new seedstock on the other hand was a bit more tricky. I did not want to give them my seedstock and did not want to compromise Ben¡¯s operation.

    In the end, I designed a variant roughly between those two extremes. It was a bit bigger and smarter than what I had sold Ben, but lightyears behind what I used myself.

    But as that was so much fun, and to keep an ace for Michael''s sleeve, I did it again. A second set of very scalable nano-fab designs with generic basic 12<sup>th</sup>-gen nanobot variant and a slightly different seedstock schemata, this one a bit faster, but dumber, necessitating more control from the fab, which I designed accordingly.

    Sure the second nano-fab was a tiny bit more expensive, something around 2%, but it would be nearly 4% faster.

    That was of course just in case Ralcon became pigheaded in the negotiations.

    Then it was time to work on the main course for Ralcon. I had Warden scour the matrix for legacy code for Envision, just to know what I had to work with.

    Looking into the list, I quickly realized with a sinking feeling that I had severely underestimated the scope of the problem.

    And why Ralcon had not tackled it before.

    Yes, the general legacy code was going back roughly 75 years. For Envision that is. That was the time when Ralcon brought out Envision 1.

    But what I had not realized was that Envision 1 was technically Windows 63. Ralcon had simply rebranded the already in development last version of MS Windows.

    That stretched the legacy back to the late 20<sup>th</sup> century and something called DOS. Oh, Envision was not required to run these DOS programs natively, or the 16-bit or 32-bit apps. But it was required to at least make an emulation available. Even the 64-bit applications were only as courtesy legacy available.

    But they all had to be able to be used in VR to make it work.

    That would make the simple interpreter I had provisorily planned insufficient for the task. Even translating 64-bit apps would tax an average commercial computer in that way. Running an 8-, 16-, or 32-bit emulator on top of that¡­ not with office hardware for the corpo-drones.

    Add in that I had to account for some seriously old hardware interfaces, like USB, Thunderbolt, Lightning, COM-port, LTP-port, FireWire, PS2, eSATA, and SCSI, or internal like ISA, VESA, PCI, PCIe, IDE, SATA, or FDD-header. And that was not even exhausting the list.

    With an inward sigh, I set myself a timer for 14 virtual days and increased my compression to the max.

    It helped that I had the source code for Envision 2242. It still took an ungodly amount of time just to read that dang thing. Much less to understand it. If you think that is easy, I want you to read around 230 million lines of code.

    And sorry to say so, but a couple of the Ralcon code monkeys were seriously chaotic.

    Yes, part of the code were compact, efficient, in places even elegant. Unfortunately, other parts could only be described as various variants of noodle code. Some were unstructured and confused to a point where the term spaghetti code would be a compliment. Some classes and their uses could only be described as ravioli code, and then there were whole hypercomplex modules for which the term lasagna code was invented.

    My estimate was that if somebody took the time and cleaned up this chaos, Envision would run around 20-30% more efficiently. Not to mention that I discovered roughly a dozen new possible exploits.

    I had no clue how much of that big ball of mud was still relevant. Envision 42 was two versions ago. But seeing some of the dates when it was written, quite a bit of the garbage code was taken over from Windows 40 or so.

    Unlikely that they would put in the effort to clean it up now.

    In the end, I gave up on the idea of writing a software module for Envision and decided to instead go the other way.

    It would be much much easier to create a sort of virtual machine that encapsulated Envision and include additional native layers for the legacy code. With the help of Warden, I managed to write drivers and software layers for all 128-bit apps and lower.

    After that, it was time to surface for a bit, move my body, and reconnect with reality. Despite the late brunch, I made myself some energy-dense snacks and decided to swim a few rounds in the pool afterward.

    Yes, technically I had only spent a bit more than an hour in cyberspace, but I had learned that my mind needed these breaks. I could do without in an emergency, but for something relatively lowkey like writing a VR layer for Ralcon? Why torture myself in such a way?

    Long story short, it took me all-in-all five days, in real life or 250 virtual days to get the VR layer working to my satisfaction.

    I tested it by building something akin to an off-the-shelf office garbage can system. To be fair, the thing was the bare minimum needed to drive a diadem. As low-key as it was, I had built a few extras, mostly modules to get legacy hardware connected to it.

    Then I installed an up-to-date copy of Envision 48, the newest and ¡®bestest¡¯ Envision of all times, together with Envision Office 46. And yes, I bought the software. It was cheap enough that I did not need to go through the hassle of pirating it.

    I also had the indy-fabs create as many legacy modules as I could find the plans for, as well as get copies of the legacy software.

    Let me tell you, it would be a pain to use a diadem again, but it had to be done. And look, it was Tuesday again. I gave Michael the thumb drive with the schemata for Enertech, but warned him that the bribe for Ralcon was still in the works.

    Apparently, Michael already had shopped the preproduction samples around to some of our intended future partners, so that they could evaluate them, along with an MSRP list.

    It would still take a couple of weeks before they had evaluated the tech, but the feedback he had gotten was mostly positive.

    Of course he had also provided samples to Enertech and Ralcon, and while Enertech had taken a wait-and-see stance, Ralcon¡¯s response sounded decidedly unhappy.

    So, nothing surprising here. Otherwise, staffing started to become a bit of a snag, as we simply lacked a selection of sufficiently educated workers.

    Seriously, sooner or later we had to do something about the abysmal education system here. The solution was to provide unpaid training for a period where we used the Commonwealth approach of VI-controlled VR teaching via diadem. Even a couple of months of individualized high-intensity education should be enough to make the standard ¡®human waste¡¯ as the corps called the unfortunate inhabitants of Queens able to do the work.

    Urgh, another happy side project, create a VI with the purpose of educating the masses. Whelp, it would be orders of magnitude easier than a medical VI, that was for sure. Maybe I could try to get a copy of Apollo. I would have to look into it when I was finished with my Envision project.

    And now it was time to test the new tech. The diadem was exactly as I remembered it. Dull, ugly, slow. But at least from what I could tell, the VR layer worked pretty fine.

    I had designed it in a way that made it possible to install it onto a running Envision system, and after the reboot, it would take over.

    Surprisingly even in standard operation, it squeezed a couple of percent of performance out of the garbage can. Nothing to write home about, and of course without the VR function. The only way I could explain that was that I had been so revolted by the garbage code that I had designed workarounds for a few of them.

    That should make the system a bit more secure, as the VR layer actually monitored the system for changes, and it streamlined some convoluted operations that were just lazy programming.

    With VR active, the performance reserve crashed naturally. And hard. Not that the run-of-the-mill office garbage can did need the performance, mind you. It was just that the cheapest CPU on the market was seriously overkilling it for office applications. It would have been more expensive to make a system with the appropriate amount of power than to use the one in this can.

    Now VR would just use much more of that otherwise unused power.

    It took me quite some time to test the basic functionality, mostly because I was limited to the 4:1 compression of the diadem, but what I could ascertain was that it worked quite well. At least as far as I could tell.

    I couldn¡¯t kid myself in this respect, I¡¯ve never had used either Envision or Envision office. The simple fact was that until now there was no VR version of Envision and as a Pure, I had used VR all my life.

    From what I had heard, the Dalgon VR substitute for Envision office that we used in Nowhere was sorely lacking in capabilities compared with the original, and even in the Commonwealth most office drones used the Ralcon product, but as a student, the time when I needed some of the functionality of an office suite, Dalgon Workflow VR was more than enough.

    I played with it for a couple of days, finding no fault personally. On a whim, I built another few mainstream garbage cans, to give to others to test. I left them with a basic configuration, without the extras I had included for testing purposes.

    I then looked to find Jacky. Of all of us here in the Fortress, she was the one most likely having used Envision somewhat extensively. I found her, as so often, in the VR room, deep in some simulation.

    When I connected to the net I found that she was taking the course for implant surgery that I had given Mia as well. Apparently, she was hellbent on becoming a cybutcher. Well, more power to her, I guess.

    Of course, I projected into the lesson. It was pretty clear that she was struggling with the topic, measuring the CRS variability of the patient. I remembered it quite well, and I had hated it when it was my turn to go through it.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, it was a very important part of being an implant surgeon, at least until I had beaten CRS that is. The problem here was, that the course I had downloaded from the UWS servers insisted on doing by the book. When I had taken the course, I had only a superficial idea about how implant surgery worked.

    I had later learned that the book method was cumbersome, slow, and needlessly complicated.

    One could get equally reliable results with a much quicker and easier method. And if you accepted a tiny bit of risk, you could simplify it even more.

    At an opportune moment, I paused the course and summoned a chair beside Jacky.

    ¡°Hey. You know that you don¡¯t need this course, do you?¡±

    At first, she was a bit confused by my sudden appearance and the sudden stop of the course but recovered fast.

    ¡°Oh, hey Viv. And according to the description, this is a very important and necessary course.¡±

    I snorted at that.

    Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

    ¡°In a way. It is a very important course to get your certification in the Commonwealth. We are not in Nowhere, and you don¡¯t want certification, or do you?¡±

    That made her frown.

    ¡°No, not really, but be serious, this is the topic that differentiates the common street cybutcher from an implant surgeon.¡±

    That made me chuckle.

    ¡°True. In a way. But two points negate that. First, this method is garbage. I can show you a simple, quick method to measure the variability, without the tedium of going through all this nonsense. Without 12 pages of lists, and without spending two hours calculating the variability. The way that actually every halfway competent implant surgeon uses.

    And even more important, do you plan to work somewhere else? Somewhere where you don¡¯t use cyberware produced or at least adapted by Enki? If not, the whole point of CRS variability has become moot. The cyberware you¡¯ll get through Enki will not need it as it doesn¡¯t trigger CRS, period.¡±

    She looked first at me, then at the virtual whiteboard, the instructor bot, back at me, and then sighed.

    ¡°And you could not think about that little gem before I spent eight hours and who knows how many brain cells on learning this crap?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Sorry, I have not thought about this course since I learned the easy method.¡±

    She hissed disgustedly and then sighed.

    ¡°Well, maybe you can go over the coursework and mark other courses I don¡¯t really need to take.¡±

    ¡°Sure, no problem. I should have that done tomorrow or the day after at the latest.¡±

    With a quick, exaggerated wipe of her hand, she deleted the classroom and we found ourselves in the common VR lobby.

    ¡°Now, as much as I like you, I don¡¯t think you looked me up just to tell me that I don¡¯t need that course. So what can I do for you?¡±

    ¡°I¡¯ve created a program that I want you to test.¡±

    Her eyebrows rose at that.

    ¡°A program? And you need my help? What gives?¡±

    I blew out a gust of air.

    ¡°Well, you see, of all of us here in the fortress, you are the only one who has likely some experience with Envision and Envision office.¡±

    She tilted her head.

    ¡°Uh, yeah. I¡¯ve used it quite a bit. Now I find myself more and more avoiding it wherever I can.¡±

    Uh, that did not sound too good.

    ¡°May I ask why? Is something wrong with it?¡±

    She shrugged and rolled her eyes.

    ¡°Yeah, there is something wrong with it. It doesn¡¯t do VR. Over the last few months, I¡¯ve learned to love VR. Alone the mental controls make things so much easier that it is ludicrous. Going back to the keyboard, mouse, and holocontrol is¡­ like going back to the stone age.

    It is just so clunky. I have no idea how ever I could stand that shit.¡±

    Oh, good, that was soo much better then.

    ¡°Ok, well, then you might actually like what I¡¯ve created. To give you a bit of a background, Michael is now beginning to buy out the big corps in the US, so that they leave us alone.

    Most of them are easy. Give them a bit of a rebate, help them with their integration of cyberware in their products, and such. Enertech is not a big problem either. We just give them a bit of tech that they can sell and they will be happy.¡±

    I paused and took a deep breath.

    ¡°But then there is the elephant in the room. Ralcon. Ralcon makes 65-70% of its revenue from Envision and Envision office. And as you just said, Envision doesn¡¯t do VR. That is the reason why Ralcon has put quite a bit of effort into preventing VR.

    They are losing that battle, slowly, but for now, they will do anything to slow it down. And here comes Enki, with the shiny new CRS free jacks that are only marginally more expensive than a diadem.

    They already have made it clear that they don¡¯t like it.¡±

    Jacky nodded sagely.

    ¡°Yeah, I can see that. What I don¡¯t understand is why Envision doesn¡¯t do VR. At the moment, Envision office is the premier office suite, but as soon as anybody else brings out something of roughly comparable functionality that works in VR, they are toast."

    I shook my head.

    ¡°I thought the same until I actually looked into what was necessary to make Envision do VR.

    Envision and Envision office guarantee legacy support. Understandably, as the big argument for them is that there is an unbelievable amount of third-party software available. Any competition would need to start from zero in that respect.

    And of course, Envision is¡­ let¡¯s say parts of it are not optimally programmed.¡±

    ¡°Hm, ok, but then, why don¡¯t they develop an overlay for VR or something like that?¡±

    ¡°An overlay that would be able to accommodate all the legacy hard- and software would crash the performance. Sure, even a mid-level home computer would run it cleanly, but they make their money with office systems. The cheapest of the cheapest. What I call garbage cans.

    And those would choke on it.¡±

    Jacky frowned for a moment before her face cleared up.

    ¡°You have put quite a bit of thought into this, haven¡¯t you?¡±

    I smiled at her.

    ¡°Yup, I have. And the solution is not to put an overlay into Envision but to put Envision into a virtual environment. Something that will take over all the problems the legacy makes and leaves Envision itself running on parallel. And if you guessed that this is what I have created you¡¯ve guessed right.

    I¡¯ve made a special garbage can to test all this legacy excrement on, and a couple of cans for normal office work. I think it is fine as it is, but I¡¯ve never worked with Envision.

    And so, could you run one of the cans through the grinder if it is all right? If it works fine, we can make you a new powerful box with Envision, but for now, I need that thing tested.¡±

    She way she looked she was not quite sure that she wanted to try it, but in the end, she shrugged and nodded.

    ¡°Why not? It can¡¯t be worse than vanilla Envision.¡±

    I chuckled at that.

    ¡°Nope, it is a tick better than vanilla even outside of VR. But look at the bright side, if it does what I want it to do, you can use your old tools again, and this time in VR.¡±

    That perked her up considerably. ¡°You¡¯re right. I hadn¡¯t thought about that. I just thought that I just hated to have to use Envision.¡±

    Then she frowned again.

    ¡°That makes me think, why the heck hasn¡¯t Ralcon made Envision VR capable.¡±

    I just lifted my hands helplessly.

    ¡°I¡¯m not so sure they can. They will get crucified if they abandon the legacy hard- and software. And to be honest, parts of Envision are coded so badly that it is very hard to do.

    Now, look at the state of education here in the US. With very few exceptions, you are either rich, a useful corporate drone or you don¡¯t get an education.

    Rich people don¡¯t go work in plebeian jobs like a code monkey for something like Ralcon. If they fancy programming, they either go freelance or work for a small, chic studio, soothing their ego.

    Useful corporate drones on the other hand usually lack the imagination and inspiration to be great at anything. The handful who are creative enough to be good usually run afoul of office politics and are either relegated to do the garbage jobs or driven out of the company entirely.¡±

    I could see that she wanted to protest, to refute my point, and she opened and closed her mouth a few times in quick succession.

    When she finally answered, it was rather meek compared to what I had to guess she wanted to say:

    ¡°You know, I got my education right here, in NYC.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°And let me guess, your family is strictly middle class, but not employed by one of the corps?¡±

    I saw her eyes widen in surprise, and she nodded slowly.

    ¡°Yes, you¡¯re right. But how¡­ ¡°

    ¡°How do I know? Around 95-98% of the people making it to college are either the children of some execs or have been indoctrinated from birth by their corpo-drone parents, the corp-school, the corp youth services, and so on.

    The remaining 2-5% have parents that are well off enough to afford college for their children but are not beholden by any corporation. In other words, the almost nonexistent middle class.

    If you were the child of an exec, you would not have been on the drunken owl, and you show way too much drive to be a brainwashed corpo drone.¡±

    She frowned, narrowed her eyes, and tilted her head, looking at me with suspicion.

    ¡°Wait a minute. How do you know those things?¡±

    I reeled back a bit in confusion.

    ¡°What do you mean?¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t play coy now. We are talking about you, Vivian DuClare. Genius, educated, and the emotional ability of a brick. How did you figure that out?¡±

    A brick? I felt a bit hurt, even as I had to agree with her. But a brick?

    ¡°I am good with data. And I have looked into the universities here. The percentages are easy enough to find out. It was a little bit harder to find out the characteristics that define the 2-5% group, and even I can easily see that you are no rich brat. And you are also no meek little drone.¡±

    She frowned harder.

    ¡°You¡¯ve looked into the universities here? Why?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Because I was considering taking a few courses there.¡±

    For a moment she simply stared at me, before she broke out into loud laughter.

    ¡°You¡­ you wanted to go¡­ go to coll¡­ college here?¡± The sentence was disrupted by her laughing, and I felt myself become a bit irritated.

    ¡°Yes, I considered it. Something wrong with that?¡±

    That made her laugh even harder.

    ¡°Sorry¡­ but¡­ but¡­ you¡­ frat boys¡­ arrogant professors¡­ the image¡­¡±

    I impatiently tapped the tip of my foot, waiting for her to get herself back under control.

    Finally, she managed to calm down a bit.

    ¡°Sorry, but really, just imagining you reacting to one of the arrogant frat boys there. Or more likely, not reacting at all. I so wished to see their faces when you just ignore their posturing.

    Just to go on and humiliate some of the professors there, so sure they know it all, thinking that the students are only there to admire their lofty intelligence.¡±

    She giggled another time.

    ¡°But I wouldn¡¯t wish that to you. Meeting all the assholes there, being constantly pressured, challenged by professors who used university politics to get their position¡­ no, I don¡¯t think a US college is a good place for you.¡±

    I shook my head in confusion.

    ¡°Why do you think I would humiliate the professors?¡±

    ¡°At best a third of the professors actually know what they are teaching to some extent. The rest get by with bluster, arrogance, and reading from the book. Even if you did not want to show them up, you would just by asking the interesting questions, that they couldn¡¯t answer.

    Even the ones who do know what they are teaching would be outclassed by you. Let¡¯s be honest, you would just read ahead, and in anything but social topics would probably ward off your boredom by correcting the official books.¡±

    She shook her head sadly.

    ¡°No, sorry, but university, any university, is not for you. If you want to learn something, really learn it, you get some virtual courses and work through it in a week or so. Otherwise, what would you want in a college?¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°I wanted to be among other young people. Maybe try to make friends.¡±

    Again, she shook her head.

    ¡°Nope. Not your kind of entertainment. Let¡¯s be honest, mentally, you are what? 500 years old?¡±

    ¡°No, only around 180, maybe 190.¡±

    ¡°In other words, you are older than the professors there, much less the students. And what friends would you want to make? The drones? They spent most of their time brown-nosing to the rich kids. The rich kids? I would give you a week before you destroy one of them. They are arrogant assholes.

    The middle class? The few of them who are there are busy keeping their head down, not to draw the attention of the frats and sororities, and try to actually learn something.

    No, college here in the US is brutal, and unless you are a rich kid, you won¡¯t really enjoy it.¡±

    I raised my eyebrow.

    ¡°But I am rich.¡±

    ¡°You have no family, no connections, no corp at your back. Yes, you have money, but to them, you are just another toy to use up and throw away. I think you¡¯ve fallen for the myth of the all-American college. Of fun, and camaraderie, and parties and just a good time.¡±

    I had to agree at least somewhat here, as much as I did not want to, and so I nodded.

    ¡°That might be true. You¡¯re saying the myth is false?¡±

    ¡°Of course it is. It is still carefully maintained by the colleges. After all, they are businesses and need to make money.

    The problem is that there is absolutely no discipline for the rich kids. Their grades are mostly dependent on the power their families wield. Security is in their world view just there to keep the rabble away from them if they don¡¯t want them there. What they think of as fun is nothing of the kind for the rest of humanity.

    The majority of students are there on a corporate scholarship, which in reality means they spent their time either studying hard to justify the expense or being the lackey to one of the rich kids. They have no time for something like fun.

    The rest of us? We have to work even harder than the drones because our families pay for our education. And we have it harder than the drones because we don¡¯t even have that shred of influence that a corpo-scholarship-drone has. And god forbid one of the frat boys or sorority girls takes a fancy of you.

    You either yield to the position as a toy, or you leave the college. In either case, you are fucked. Often literally.

    No, the college dream is long dead. But I have to ask if you don¡¯t know that, how is it in Nowhere?¡±

    I let my head hang for a bit.

    ¡°Bummer. Not that I really had any great hope anyway, but I like to dream sometimes. And there is a big difference in Nowhere. Somewhere in the 2110s, some forward-thinking council members managed to convince the rest of the jerks there that it would be a good idea to remove fallible humans from the education-equation and they created Apollo. A VI with the sole objective of giving every citizen of the Commonwealth the best education they can and want to achieve.

    I am sure, quite a few of the high and mighty regretted that decision since, but the people who designed him made sure to anchor Apollo so deep in the laws and institutions of the Commonwealth that it is absolutely impossible to get him out.

    Somehow they gave him the right to remove every obstacle to his objectives, with the council not realizing that that included them as well. And he got access to the military and peacekeepers to enforce it.

    In other words, if the council gets the idea of shutting Apollo down, they most likely will find some military bots in their bedrooms at night.

    And Apollo keeps the bureaucrats, the university politics, and all that garbage in check. He enforces the requirement to actually educate the students, and that the grading is fair. He provides campus security via bots.

    Honestly, sometimes I think Apollo is the sole saving grace of the Commonwealth. Even the triple-As won¡¯t go against him.¡±

    Jacky¡¯s face turned whistful when I described how education worked in Nowhere.

    ¡°That is¡­ the people who did that were pretty smart I think.¡±

    ¡°And devious. But the result is that the Commonwealth is the technologically most developed nation. Unfortunately, that is the only point where the corrupt parts of the council can¡¯t mess things up. And they really mess up everything else to their hearts contents.¡±

    ¡°Hey, still better than here. Here they fuck up everything.¡±

    She chuckled softly, while she shook her head.

    ¡°But back to business, you want me to test the VR mod of Envision, so ok, when can I have it?¡±

    I started to answer before I got another sudden thought.

    ¡°Um, that depends on if you want to test it on a high-end system that you could use later on or one of the garbage cans I have made.

    The high-end system I would have to make first. A couple of days. The garbage can as soon as you tell me where you want to have it.¡±

    To her credit, she thought about it before deciding.

    ¡°I think I will look into it before you put the time to make me something better. If it works, then it should be easy enough to transplant the system. If not, there is no reason to waste the effort.¡±

    ¡°Your decision. So, where do you want your garbage can?¡±

    ¡°Hm, I think I will take over one of the offices in the south wing. I mean, I am essentially the CFO right now. So, can I have a nice office with a nice chair like here in the VR room?¡±

    What type of question was that?

    ¡°Uhm, yes, of course. Why couldn¡¯t you? We have more than enough chairs at the ready anyway. A desk is quick and easy to produce. The rest of the equipment can come over time. For the test phase, you can do without peripherals like a keyboard, mouse, holo-projector, printer, and sound system, and if we make you a dedicated system we will include them. Takes only a couple of days to get that stuff anyway.

    So top floor? Executives area?¡±

    She smiled beautifully.

    ¡°Yup, that would be nice. So¡­ how long?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°The desk is printing right now. High glossy carbon here, we have the capacity right now. Some bots are in the process of moving one of the chairs that are still in the crates to an office there. The can¡­ well as soon as we are done here you can get it, or we can have a bot bring it up there.

    Decorating is your personal job though. I¡¯m no good at that.¡±

    After I said that she jumped up and began the logout process.

    ¡°No time like the present. Let¡¯s see what you made from the old, decrepit Envision.¡±

 2.7: Completing the lineup

    After Jacky was happily, as I was assuming, playing with the new VR mode for Envision, it was substantially harder to get additional test subjects.

    In the end, I resorted to calling Ben and Michael, to have the garbage cans distributed among their office pool. I simply lacked the acquaintances to really organize such a test by myself.

    Naturally, the special garbage can remained with me. Warden was, well, not busy, as it did not tax her resources in the slightest, but at least she was working on testing as much legacy software as we could. Not in VR, as that had to be done by a person sadly, but that they at least ran with the VR layer.

    I dreaded having to test them in VR any further than I already had. The sheer quantity of applications to test alone was¡­ daunting. After some navel gazing and soul searching, I decided that the tests I already had done would be enough.

    It was just important that the apps still worked at all with the VR layer. Whoever was insisting on using them could use the mouse, keyboard, and holo-controls as far as I was concerned. They had lived without VR so far.

    If it worked with their specific flavor of obsolete software, good for them. If not, they lost nothing.

    Testing the legacy hardware was a bit more complicated, but I tasked a bot to change the configuration.

    Sitting back and pondering what to do next, I decided to do what I thought Michael wanted.

    Work on our CPU lineup. It was essentially mostly busy work. I mean, except for the successor of the Regulon, I already had done the hard work. With the already designed processors at the high end of the lineup, I only needed to par the design down to more reasonable levels.

    I mean, while the Hyperion that I used in Glory, which I renamed Hyperion 12 1990G, had 128 256-lane Universal Equipment Bus controllers, 16 TB of unified cache, and 1024 cores with a maximum frequency of 44 GHz, more mainstream models would cut down on all of that.

    The entry model, which I called Hyperion 3 1200 had to do with 32 UBE controllers, 4 TB cache, and 256 cores with 31 GHz maximum frequency. Yes, it only needed 27% of the power and generated only 18% of the waste heat, but it also had only 22% of the performance of the top unit.

    All in all, the Hyperion lineup now consisted of two Hyperion 3, the aforementioned 1200 and the 1250, which boosted up to 32 GHz, two Hyperion 5, called 1400 and 1450, two Hyperion 7, called 1600 and 1650, two Hyperion 9, called 1700 and 1750, two Hyperion 12, called 1800 and 1900, and last but definitely not least, the Hyperion 12 1990G.

    The 1900 had roughly 76% of the performance of the 1990G. Naturally, I envisioned the 1990G costing around 2.5 times as much as the 1900.

    I did something similar to the GPU, which I now called Theia. Again, I placed the original design I had built into Glory at the very top. I created 9 steps, starting at Theia 10 and ending at Theia 90 with the latter sporting awe-inspiring 138000 cores. Of course, those were not the full-fledged universal cores that were used in CPUs. No, we were talking about significantly simpler specialized number crunchers. More important though was the bandwidth of 2.6 EB/s that fed the 768 TB of QDR.

    Thanks to this downright insane bandwidth the Theia beat the previous top GPU by nearly 600000%. Or to put in more understandable words, a Theia 90 was nearly six thousand times more powerful than the Rigel 32 KRX GPU that I had used for Precious. Sadly, much of this performance increase was eaten up by other, much more pedestrian components., resulting in a Hyperion 12 1990G with a Theia 90 ¡®only¡¯ being around 120 times more powerful than a Cirrus 8K with a Rigel 32.

    At some point, I would have to redesign the UEB standard to get more of the possible performance to the end user.

    The Chimaera was at once simpler, and harder.

    It was simpler insofar as I did not need as many steps, as it was more or less designed for embedded systems.

    It was harder because I had to create a variant without the fuzzy logic core. Of course, compared to the Hyperion or the Grendel, the Chimaera was a very basic design, almost pedestrian.

    That were three done, leaving the big parts. I had to design a big server processor that was, as Michael had termed it more ¡®granular¡¯.

    Unlike the Hyperion lineup, I could not just take the Grendel and cut it down to size. The Grendel was a marvel of engineering if I may say so myself, but it was also extremely high-powered in all aspects.

    The 32768 cores it had were served by no less than 64 Petabytes of cache. They had 8192 256-lane UEB controllers, of which at least 512 were reserved to address up to 2 Zettabytes of quad data rate RAM.

    And yes, I know that this was seriously overkilling it, but please, I made it work.

    My problem now was to cut it down to something more¡­ well, ok, reasonable. But believe me, that was hard work.

    I decided early on to keep the two gigabytes of cache per core and the ratio of one UEB controller per four cores.

    With the reduced number of cores, I was also able to significantly cut back on cooling. Seriously, I reduced the number of cores and everything else with it by 94%. Down to 2048 cores in the top version. That gave me still colossal 4 PB of cache and 512 UEB controllers. Of course, with the much-reduced cooling, I limited this new processor to no more than 45 GHz. As I had designed the Grendel to be more or less directly cooled by liquid nitrogen, I had pushed it up to 52 GHz.

    From there, I created another six tiers with successive lower performance. And with that, I was done with the server processor that I named Chronos.

    Of course, it is relatively quick to tell about what I had done, but all in all, I had spent four days creating the new processors.

    And had not even begun with the new mobile SoC.

    Yes, in absolute time, that was lightning fast. Even if I had practically all of the hard work already done and was now just paring down the processors for cheaper products. But four days in real life are quite a bit more in VR. Even if I did not even come close to fully utilizing the theoretical maximum of 960 days, or two years and seven months. No, I kept it relatively slow with no more than two months per day. Or six hours in real-time.

    And even with that in mind, it was very fast.

    Frankly, I had enough of processor design for a bit. That was why I pushed the SoC design further back. Especially as the SoC was the one processor I would have to start from scratch.

    In the meantime, the first results for the Envision VR had come back. Nothing too spectacular here. A handful of things in need to be optimized, a couple of bugs and glitches, or in other words, for a software project a spectacular success.

    And I have to say, finding out that Warden already had solved the problems in question was a nice surprise.

    That left me with a bit of a conundrum. What to do now? Sure, I could increase my studies of gravitics.

    But I was slowly but inevitably running out of subjects to study. It would not be this day, or the next, or even the next year, but it would happen that I had taken every single course USW offered. And I was determined to delay that moment as long as possible.

    I was not in the mood for music either, and I was by now no longer the only cook in the house, and it was not my day to be in the kitchen.

    With a sigh and a shrug, I instead began to design the chipsets for the CPUs I had created. New processors would be nice, shiny, and expensive paperweights without the mainboards needed to make them into computers.

    And historically it was a relatively bad idea to keep everything in computer design and production in one house.

    We would have to deliver the chipsets, sockets, and design specs to OEMs all over the world. Fortunately, that was one area of computer production that had not been virtually wiped out by the universal chip fabber.

    Oh, the OEMs had suffered, but there was enough demand for updated firmware that a handful of them survived. Not all of them were the better ones, sadly.

    I personally found it astounding how at the age of electronic fabbers that produced components and chips cheaply and reliably, some manufacturers still cheaped out on small but essential components like power regulators or capacitors.

    Seriously, they save a few cents on each mainboard and reduce the reliability, and such worth, of their product by half or even more.

    But apparently, there was a need for low price electronics. I¡¯ve never used an OEM-manufactured board in any system I built. Even before I had an industrial fabber I paid the maybe 10% more to have electronics manufactured to my specifications.

    But I was also aware that if Enki was to produce the next generation of computer technology, we couldn¡¯t keep the production in-house.

    Oh, sure, at least in the beginning we would have to provide the chipsets, as I categorically refused to not use the 414 pm process. But when we would sell NADAs we could license those as well.

    The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

    I kept the number of chipsets at three. The differences were mostly in how many of the UEB controllers I used to address the memory, or in other words, how much memory could be used on the board.

    To be honest, I doubted that anybody but a hardcore gamer, or a Jack, would ever use all of the lanes that a 1990G had.

    For an office garbage can, the 1200 would probably be overkill in the number of lanes. But that was nothing new. The current Cirrium 1d, widely considered the most basic desktop processor was in most cases three times the processor that an office drone needed.

    That would change with the VR overlay. But even with VR, I doubted that we would sell all that many CPUs for garbage cans. At least in the beginning. Historically, every time computer power increased, OS quickly increased the requirements. It was as if the OS creators only waited for more power to be available to cram more mostly unneeded functions into their operating systems.

    But that was not my problem. If Ralcon decided to beef up Envision so that it needed a Hyperion to run, who was I to complain?

    When I was nearly done with the high-end consumer board design, I got a call from Michael.

    It took me a moment to surface to his compression, but by now he was well aware that I was often not reachable at a moment''s notice.

    ¡°Hey Michael. What can I do for you?¡±

    ¡°Well, you could loan me your Benz. And maybe come with me to Boston.¡±

    Ok, the Benz was not a big problem. Over the last few weeks, he had used it a few times to travel to some corp or another for negotiations.

    So much so that I was considering buying another one for Enki.

    It was the other part of the request that mystified me. What would he be doing in Boston, and why did he think I should come with him?

    ¡°Boston? What do you want in Boston?¡±

    ¡°Well, there is this tiny insignificant little company in Boston called Enertech that I want to negotiate with.¡±

    ¡°Oh. Yes, that makes sense. But why do you want me to come with you?¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°Because now we begin to play in the big leagues, and I want somebody at my side who can answer the hard questions.¡±

    I had to blink, even in VR.

    ¡°Just to make it clear, you want me to sit by your side and somehow convince the old, privileged executives from one of the triple-A corporations that this tiny girl that looks as if she just now entered high school is some sort of expert?

    You¡¯ve met me, right? Do you really think I can pull that off? Or will it more likely result in them not taking us seriously?¡±

    ¡°You are not wrong. I mean, you are our CTO, as well as the majority owner. Fuck, Enki exists primarily to market your inventions. But you are right, you don¡¯t look like the supersmart, experienced mad scientist.¡±

    He paused for a moment before he continued:

    ¡°But I still think I might need your advice. The other corps were easy. Here are the jacks, have fun with them, and if you agree to play nice with us, we give you a rebate. Or we will help you in incorporating them into your business. For all it counts, that was the kid''s table.

    Enertech and Ralcon are¡­ different. Enertech is not interested in our cyberware. At least not directly. We have to give them something more tangible than a few jacks and a rebate. And yes, we have the new nano-fab design for them. But I am not certain that I can sell them the idea.¡±

    I pondered what he had said for a moment.

    ¡°I am sure you can do it. It should be easy. Especially as a couple of days ago, Burgmeister, Xiao Ping, and Dalgon managed to have the shared patent that Enertech and Ralcon had on nanotech declared to be expired.¡±

    I could hear the surprise in his voice.

    ¡°Really? Fuck, then the new design is worth much less to them.¡±

    I had to chuckle softly.

    ¡°On the contrary. So far they have been able to get away with using their so-called 10<sup>th</sup> gen franken-bots to make quite a bit of money. Now they can already see this business completely getting away from them.

    The real 10<sup>th</sup> gen that have sprung up are cheaper and better. But so far they were ¡®illegal¡¯. Now they are legal and worse, there will be legal 12<sup>th</sup> gen bots flooding the market.

    We can assume that they will use the open-source designs to keep a tiny market share, but seriously, it costs around $20k to make one of the 8<sup>th</sup>-gen fabs we offer them the plans for. After that, each batch of 12<sup>th</sup> gen nano-bots costs them a couple of bucks.

    If the markets all over the world are an indication, the other three triple-As will mostly set the price at $1000 for a batch of 12<sup>th</sup>-gen bots.

    Enertech still has the connections in the market here. If they manage to get a 12<sup>th</sup>-gen lineup fast enough, they will still maintain the lion''s share of the market in the US.

    Each nano-fab they build will amortize itself within two or three days, and after that, it is almost pure profit.¡±

    His pensive answer came after a few seconds:

    ¡°So, they now can either find a viable 12<sup>th</sup>-gen bot lineup, together with the 8<sup>th</sup>-gen fab design, or they can watch their market share evaporate pretty quickly. And every day counts for them.

    So the schematics I will offer them will mean a few billion dollars for them?¡±

    ¡°Yep. They should jump on the chance. Of course, you will have to make sure that there are some safeguards for us, but as the only thing we want in payment is their neutrality, and we barely scratch their business, it should be pretty easy.

    We can offer them a deal that we sell them 12<sup>th</sup>-gen designs for a discount in the future if they need them. But you should only mention that when the negotiations begin to stall.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, I get it. What about competition? I mean, if we sell them the schematics, it is pretty obvious that we can sell the bots to the public as well.¡±

    ¡°They have the market penetration we would have to create first. Don¡¯t get me wrong, selling specialized schematics is a very lucrative business and something we will probably keep doing. But for general use nanobots? It is honestly not worth the pushback we would get.

    We would have to compete against Enertech, Burgmeister, Xiao Ping, and Dalgon, and that is if we don¡¯t provide Ralcon with schematics. Could we make a business out of it? Probably. But let¡¯s be honest, we have the cyberware, where we have an exclusive market, we have the new cloning tech, and the meat vats that are essentially ready for production at any time. As soon as we think we are ready, we will have the Q-links and the NADAs. Following that, we have a completely new lineup of CPUs and GPUs.

    It will take a few years before we have enough capacity to satisfy those markets. Why make enemies by going into a market with no less than four triple-As fighting for the lion¡¯s share, just to get a few scraps? Taking away from our ability to utilize our technology to get other, even more important markets exclusively?

    The Q-links will dwarf nanobots as a business in a few months, and while the margins might be smaller, the volume will be staggering. And I don¡¯t think there will be a workshop, factory, or any other fabricating business that will work without a NADA.¡±

    ¡°You are right. I still feel like the little orphan kid begging for scraps on the grownup table. So, if they ask if we intend to go into the nano-bot business I can say that we don¡¯t? Maybe even sign a contract?¡±

    I had to think for a moment about that.

    ¡°No, that is not quite right. We will go into the business of very specialized nano-bots and nanofabs.

    We make cyberware CRS-free with nanotech after all. And I don¡¯t think it is viable to keep the CRS-free myosynth in-house. That is something that has to be done for each recipient with their own DNA. That means we will probably sell the bioreactors. And those contain a specialized nano-fab.

    Later, well, the NADA is in essence a very specialized nano-fab as well. But you can sign a contract to the effect that we won¡¯t sell generalized nano-bots for the next¡­ let¡¯s say ten years. But you have to make sure that you explicitly include our right to produce and sell specialized nanobots and nanofabs.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I can do that. That should be enough to mostly ignore us. And that is just Enertech. Ralcon will be much harder.¡±

    ¡°For Ralcon what we are offering them will change their stance from strongly opposed to in favor of our core business. As soon as Envision does VR, they will want to propagate anything that makes VR easier.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, but as soon as we come out with the new processors, we will cut into their market.¡±

    ¡°They lost that market more than 100 years ago when the patent protection on the current processor generation ran out. Yes, they sell CPUs and GPUs, but no more than anybody else. And they make no more money than anybody else. No, with a new generation of CPUs coming, they can justify packing more ¡®functionality¡¯ into Envision and sell a new version.¡±

    ¡°If you say so. By the way, how are the new CPUs coming along?¡±

    ¡°Except for the successor for the Regulon, I¡¯m done with the processors. And yes, I have made a new server processor that is more reasonably dimensioned. I am now working on the mainboard chipsets. After that¡­ well the currently available holo-storage won¡¯t cut it. I will need to design something along the same lines that I used for Glory.¡±

    ¡°Hmm, and the Regulon? How long do you think it will take you?¡±

    ¡°No clue. For the new SoC, I need to start from scratch. And honestly, at the moment I am a bit burned out on processors.¡±

    ¡°All right. It¡¯s not as if that was an urgent matter anyway. But another question. I¡¯ve looked into the specs you¡¯ve given me. The Hyperion is what? 3000 times more powerful than the Cirrium 8k? And the GPU you¡¯ve designed is even more so. And Glory is still only 120 times more powerful than your Precious. How can that be?¡±

    I growled in frustration for a bit.

    ¡°Standards. I used UEB 7.3, which is the last version of it. It was overkill for the old tech. Even though it is more than 100 years old. The problem here is, that the new tech quickly hits the wall of what it can offer.

    It is limited to 256 lanes per controller, and no device can be addressed by more than one controller. That means I can¡¯t get a higher bandwidth than 24 PB/s. I¡¯ve gotten around that a bit with direct access for some of the devices so that the GPU for example can get the data directly from RAM or the mass storage, without going through the CPU, but it is a hard limit.¡±

    ¡°That sounds troublesome. Do I understand you correctly, that this UEP is more than 100 years old? Then why is there no newer standard?¡±

    ¡°It is called UEB. Universal Equipment Bus. And there was no need. They defined this standard before they created the old processor generation. There were no new processors because they had hit the hard limit on what was possible without a NADA. To get more functionality out of a processor, they would have to make it bigger. But they were already at the limit of what was possible with processor size.

    Any more and things like internal power support, cooling, and signal speed would have made the CPU actually slower despite increasing the amount of cores and controllers. That meant that for around 100 years what we have is more or less the best that we could get.

    With enough hard work, you could squeeze a few percent more performance out of the graphene, but we are talking about low single-digit percentages. Even the biggest Tesseract did not use more than 50% of the available performance reserves of UEB 7.3. There simply was no need for something better.¡±

    ¡°Ok, so before you made everything before obsolete, there was no need for something new, I get it. But why do you still use it? It is a clear bottleneck after all. Why not make something new?¡±

    ¡°Because it is the standard that everybody uses. You can go to any single electronics shop and get equipment compatible with UEB. If I make something new, nothing that I have not created will fit.¡±

    ¡°Hm, I see. And if you create a new standard? The old one is clearly no longer sufficient.¡±

    ¡°The last UEB forum took eight years to create the 7.3-standard. Heck, it took them nearly a year to just agree on naming it. I don¡¯t want to waste my time doing that tedious work.¡±

    ¡°You got me wrong. I don¡¯t mean why don¡¯t you propose a new standard at some international forum, but instead, why don¡¯t you create a new standard and publish it?¡±

    ¡°Then it wouldn¡¯t be standard.¡±

    ¡°Of course, it would be. Provide the specifications for free and let them create the new devices of their own design. Hell, you could even make the new standard an extension of this UEB. Make it UEB compatible for old tech, but make it able to use more powerful new tech.¡±

    That¡­ might actually work. I would have to think about it for some time.

    ¡°Not a bad idea. But¡­ that is not some quick thing to do. Maybe we can do that for the next generation of processors.¡±

    ¡°Yeah. I think it would be better if our first generation of computer tech would use standard equipment wherever possible. I have to hang up. The skimmer is here. See you Tuesday at the latest.¡±

 2.8 Enhanced negotiations 1

    I was not particularly surprised when I received a chat request from Michael not quite half an hour later. I had given him and Ben a Q-link to my original cluster in Seattle quite some time ago, to serve as an untraceable, unjammable, and completely clandestine option to communicate.

    And Michael had now obviously decided to take me to the negotiations that way. It was the first time that he had done so, but it was also the very first triple-A he was negotiating with.

    Shrugging, I accepted the request and was rewarded with looking out of Michael''s eyes, while still being in the process of landing on the roof of some big building.

    He was accompanied by two of our lawyers. Melissa Anderson, a mid-thirties caucasian woman, with an efficient short bob of brown hair and brown eyes, with an eternally pinched face and an annoyed expression, as well as Rafael Bacque, who was a lively end-twenty, early-thirty guy of Latin American ancestry, who could only be described as lively. Only maybe 10cm taller than me, and twice my weight, at least, he could not keep his hands idle, and talking to him often resembled a badly choreographed martial arts fight scene.

    But unlike Melissa, he actually had humor and was generally a rather nice fellow. To be fair, I should not harp on Melissa, but seriously, when Michael brought the two of them to the fortress for a meeting and I invited them to lunch, she had the gall and turn up her nose about the ¡®primitive¡¯ food, and if we did not have any ¡®real food¡¯.

    I mean, come on, what she called ¡®real food¡¯ was barely deserving that name, much less merited this sort of reaction. Sure, it was not my day to cook. But it was Kate''s, and she had become an astoundingly good cook over the last few months. So, how could I trust the opinion of somebody with such bad taste?

    It took Michael a few days to convince me that, even if she was an imbecile about food, she was a rather good lawyer.

    He had also one of our accountants with him. A mid-twenties African-American man that I had not met yet.

    Those three were the ones that sat opposite Michael, so they were who I could see.

    When I talked to Michael, only he could hear me, of course.

    ¡°Is there a reason why you want me to look over your shoulder?¡±

    He snorted amused, and the three I could see through his eyes looked at him surprised.

    ¡°I am on the com with Ms. DuClare.¡± Rafael and the accountant nodded in understanding, while Melissa was visibly taken aback, and muttered: ¡°Must be nice to have an implanted com.¡±

    Oh please, we already offered them the cyberware at cost. Sorry if the $1300 it did cost us to make an ultra-jack and the cranial board was too much for her. I knew for sure that we paid her around $9k each month for her services, so she should be able to afford it. Heck, Rafael was already on the list for when the first production models came off the line.

    And yes, I am aware that my animosity towards Melissa made me a tad over-critical toward her, but somehow this woman triggered many of my problem points. It did not help that even I could discern clearly that she considered herself my superior.

    To get back to the situation, Michael answered me via the implant:

    ¡°Why, could it be that I think I might need our CTO on call? Or the majority owner of the corporation?¡±

    I scoffed at that:

    ¡°You just want to share the misery. Let¡¯s be real, Enertech is a straightforward thing. They simply ignore us, and for that, we give them back the market that they already lost.¡±

    ¡°The market they lost because of you.¡±

    ¡°They don¡¯t know that. And let¡¯s be honest, there is nothing that prevents them from producing the open-source nanobots themselves. They have to have immense bot factories. No private nano-fab manufactured from the plans I released could compete with them on price, considering the economies of scale. Heck, they could always build the 6<sup>th</sup> gen nano-fab from the open-source plans if their current fabs don¡¯t hack it.¡±

    He chuckled softly at that:

    ¡°You just don¡¯t like them, be honest.¡±

    ¡°Of course not. This con-job of them and Ralcon did cost how many lives? The blood-substitute nano-bots alone save around 12k people in Nowhere every year. The US has roughly 2/3 of the population of Nowhere. That means that they are responsible for around 8k deaths each year for that reason alone.

    Then the things like soft tissue repair, or bone knitting¡­ that is an immense amount of suffering that they are responsible for. Not to mention all the other applications for nanobots. And you know how cheap it is to actually produce nanobots. They take something that costs them a couple of bucks to make and sell it for $500k, just because they had the influence to make it illegal to compete with them.¡±

    ¡°I still think that was mostly Ralcon, and they were just not powerful enough to exclude Enertech as well. It is just not Enertech¡¯s style. They simply usually go for the cheap mass-market where ever they tread.¡±

    I sighed. Of course, he was right in that, in a way.

    ¡°They still profited from it. Sure, it was only around four percent of their revenue, but they could have undercut Ralcon at any time.¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t be so sure. We don¡¯t know what Ralcon and Enertech had in contracts and agreements in that matter. And what concessions they made to keep things peaceful. What I know is that it is never pretty when two triple-As are fighting. Especially if they are based in the same county.¡±

    Reluctantly I agreed with him on that:

    ¡°You are right. But I still can¡¯t help myself but hold them somewhat responsible.¡±

    ¡°Well, you can congratulate yourself on breaking up that little situation at least. Even if nobody knows it was you. But for now, I have to concentrate a bit on the real world.¡±

    The skimmer had landed by now and the people were getting out. I noticed that Michael was accompanied by two bodyguards from his father''s men. A mid-30s redhead called Conall Henly, who was more the wiry, agile build. And of course a tank of a dark-haired guy with the name of Ruben McHale. And despite several offers from me to equip Ben¡¯s men with some well-fitted suits made from carbon weave, the black suits they wore simply said cheap and off the rack.

    Worse, I knew that they were made from simply synthetic fibers, and had the armor quality of wet tissue. Michael had meanwhile accepted my offer and was wearing a self-cooling tailored anthracite-colored carbon weave suite with some non-newtonian pouches in graphene layers. In other words, he was comfortable in the summer heat and it would take an armor-piercing round to harm him.

    Well, each of his own. If they wanted to look cheap, that¡¯s their problem.

    I continued designing the chipsets for the motherboards while Michael walked along some corridor toward some conference room. My understanding was that the size and furnishings of the conference room were an indication of the regard the other side held you in.

    If that was the case here, then Enertech could barely care less for us. Cheap plastic chairs, together with cheap particleboard tables, a synthetic ugly brown carpet¡­ I was surprised that a corp as big as Enertech even had such low-grade conference rooms. These were the furnishings of a 6<sup>th</sup>-rate hotel in Bumfuck, Ohio. And even there the hotel would be embarrassed by them.

    But ok, we were just starting out and did not even officially sell anything. The negotiation team from Enertech similarly looked third-rate.

    In one corner there was a single-cup coffee machine, with some paper plastic cups standing beside it.

    The Enertech negotiation team was, well the closest I could call them was unprofessional. Crumbled, cheap suits, crooked neckties, and one of them had stimstick between his lips. Of the three of them, one was pretty young, so young in fact that I was no longer sure that they would have laughed about my inclusion, while the other two were in their late fifties. Not one of them had shaved the last two or three days as it looked.

    All in all, we could tell that Enertech did not give a damn about us. They would learn in time, of course, but right now, there was no point in crying about it. If they wanted to send their F-team, so be it. We would still give our A game.

    Not that we had even a B-team, much less a refuse team like those.

    After some short greeting verbiage, Michael and his group sat down, and one of the older men, Mr. George Howard, opened up:

    ¡°Ok, here we are. You wanted a meeting, so what can we do for you?¡± He spoke in a very bored and dismissive tone, as even this group of barely keeping their job workers was above us. Again, they would learn in time.

    Michael took all of that in stride.

    ¡°Basically, we want to ensure that Enertech will not move against us when we begin operations.¡±

    I was somewhat surprised that he was so direct, but he was the one who had experience with people and business.

    The second older man, Mr. Lee Barton, shrugged. ¡°And for that, you asked for a meeting? Seriously? You could just have sent a message to our public relations department.¡±

    Michael leaned forward.

    ¡°Ah, but that would have not ensured your neutrality. No, we want something along a contract.¡±

    Howard scoffed at that, and waved his hand around:

    ¡°A contract? For real? Who do you think you are? Some little upstart with delusions of grandeur? Get real man. If we want to squish your little mom-and-pop shop, we will. Nothing you can do about it.¡±

    I heard Melissa''s voice from the side:

    ¡°That might a bit harder than you believe.¡±

    Barton snorted.

    ¡°No, not really. Unless you have Ralcon already supporting you, if we want you gone, you¡¯re gone.¡±

    Michael answered:

    ¡°Melissa, please, no confrontation. And about Enertech, well, we don¡¯t expect you to do anything for the good of your hearts. Let¡¯s be honest, Enertech is a cutthroat outfit that runs over anybody whenever it thinks it can get an advantage.

    No, we are willing to pay you for your neutrality.¡±

    The young guy, Stanley Powell, now leaned forward, onto his elbows.

    ¡°Pay? In what? You are a startup without any income yet.¡±

    Barton slapped Powell on the back of the head.

    ¡°Shut up Stan. Nobody¡¯s talking to you.¡±

    Then he turned back to Michael.

    ¡°But he is right. You don¡¯t have the money to make it worthwhile for us to look the other way.¡±

    I saw Michael tilting his head, and assumed that he showed his typical grin.

    ¡°You might be surprised about that. But no, we don¡¯t want to pay you with money.¡±

    He looked on the table where he placed a thumb drive.

    ¡°What we are offering are the schematics for a real 8<sup>th</sup> gen nano-fab series that is scalable from small shop applications to industrial production, and a group of 12<sup>th</sup> gen nanobots.¡±

    Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

    Howard now looked somewhat interested, while Barton waved dismissively again.

    ¡°Yeah sure. As if a nonentity like you could get genuine 8<sup>th</sup>-gen nano-fab designs. Not to mention 12<sup>th</sup>-gen bots.¡±

    Michael¡¯s answer was equally dismissive.

    ¡°I know that you can¡¯t get them done. But I thought it was common knowledge that we have Seraphim working for us.¡±

    Of course, Michael did not use my handle without us having talked about it long and exhaustive some time ago. Clearly, everybody knew that I as Seraphim had developed the CRS-free cyberware. It would take any competent negotiation team only a few minutes of research to uncover my involvement in Enki anyway. So we decided to simply be open about it.

    Not that this helped much with these clown school rejects. Yes, Powell seemed to try to understand the significance of that name, but the other two did not look in any way impressed.

    Barton rolled his eyes, while Howard just scowled.

    ¡°Oh yeah. Seraphim is working for you. We should have realized that earlier. Sure.¡±

    Barton¡¯s tone was so dripping with sarcasm that I was surprised he did not hurt himself.

    ¡°Anybody else on your team? Mother Theresa? Jesus? The pope? Oh, I know. The President of the United States. Am I right?¡±

    While Powell began to frantically look up something on his com, I heard Rafael laugh out loud.

    ¡°Oh man, you three are so in over your head in this. Come on, you have to have done at least some preparation.¡±

    Howard sneered at him:

    ¡°For what? It is bad enough that you come in here and expect a negotiation. Wake up, you are an insignificant little start-up without anything worthwhile to offer. You will be gone in a year.¡±

    The answer came from Melissa:

    ¡°I assume that you are recording this? Probably have some VI observing? If so, it would suggest that you sent somebody competent to take over the negotiations.¡±

    Barton and Howard broke out in laughter for a moment, before Howard began to talk:

    ¡°You think you are important enough to warrant as much as a VI supervising us? Woman, you are in the cellar league. So how about you run away with your tail between your legs and we forget about this?¡±

    Michael¡¯s calm and collected:

    ¡°I think we will wait for a bit. And if you think that Enertech does not monitor every room in every one of their businesses with some VI, you should wake up. And said VI will be programmed with the good of the company as an objective.¡±

    He waited a moment for effect before he continued.

    ¡°And unlike you said VI will look up what the name Seraphim means.¡±

    Barton began to stand up menacingly, leaning a bit over the table.

    ¡°Listen here you little¡­¡± He was stopped by Powell grabbing his suit jacket and pulling, which in turn made Barton turn towards his colleague.

    ¡°What the fuck? I told you to shut up, maggot. Bad enough that you were put on our team, but you could at least have the decency to not be so annoying.¡±

    Saying that he balled a fist and pulled it back for a punch when the door was opened.

    A sharp female voice bellowed: ¡°Barton, sit down and be silent! You fucked up enough for now.¡±

    When Michael looked at the door, he saw a woman of indeterminate age with light brown hair in a bun and in a clean power suit standing there.

    Barton relaxed his fist and looked at the newcomer.

    ¡°Ally, what are you doing here? This is our negotiation. There are no brownie points to steal here anyway so fuck off.¡±

    The woman marched toward the trio.

    ¡°I said sit down and be silent! So fucking do it! I am here because you and Howard the fuck have fucked up by the numbers. God, whoever got the glorious idea of assigning you two brain-dead idiots to this deserves to get shot.

    Now, let¡¯s make a few things clear:

    First, I am not Ally to you. I am not even Alice for you. I am Ms. Manning for the likes of you. I am your superior. So keep your foul mouth in check.

    Second, not every corporation that comes to us is something we should or even could squish. So, the next time, if there is a next time for you, do your fucking research! I know for a fact that Seraphim was mentioned in the briefing. Along with her significance. Your whole fucking objective during this negotiation was to try to get her to work for us. Unlikely as that was.¡±

    By now she had reached the trio, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

    ¡°Why are you still standing? I said sit down!¡±

    With clear reluctance, Barton slowly sat back down, and Ms. Manning continued:

    ¡°And even if you could not get Seraphim to work for us, it is clearly known that she is one of three, again three, nanoengineers not already working for Burgmeister, Dalgon, or Xiao Ping that is capable of building 8<sup>th</sup> gen nanofabs and 12<sup>th</sup> gen nanobots.

    Along with quite a few additional feats. So if the company that has Seraphim working for it offers designs for 8<sup>th</sup> gen fabs and 12<sup>th</sup> gen bots, it is fucking legit!

    But all of this has one good thing. I bet this is the last time you and Howard the fuck had a brainfart in service of Enertech. So, will you stay silent and let the grownups negotiate, or do I have to call security?¡±

    Barton and Howard now looked decidedly unhappy, while Powell seemed to wish he could crawl into the ground. But all three of them stayed silent. And so, Ms. Manning turned her attention to Michael.

    ¡°Now, with that out of the way, I have to say we of Enertech are sorry about the display here, Mr. Walker. I would be happy to start from the beginning if you would be so inclined.¡±

    ¡°Of course, Ms. Manning. I was a bit put out by the clown troupe there, but I understand how something like this can happen.

    Now, I understand you correctly that you have been informed about our offer?¡±

    Ms. Manning nodded.

    ¡°I have. It is a rather generous offer for simply neutrality. But with the patent expired, we are considering leaving the nanotech market completely.¡±

    Michael took a few seconds to answer:

    ¡°I can understand that, somewhat. But only somewhat. Even if all you had was the open-source fab and bot designs coursing through the web, you have the market penetration here in the US, as well as the economy of scale on your side. I would be surprised if you could not undercut all the small shops and still make a substantial profit.¡±

    Ms. Manning stapled her hands.

    ¡°You are right, but we are now in a situation where we will have to compete with Burgmeister, Dalgon, and Xiao Ping. We have nothing that can compare with the 12<sup>th</sup> gen nanobots that three sell.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I understand. But that is exactly where we come into play. As I said earlier, we are offering you the design for an easily scalable 8<sup>th</sup>-gen fab. The 8<sup>th</sup> generation is only what, six months old? Yes, the other three corps already have the fabs up and running, but until quite recently what they had was solely directed to the markets outside of the US.

    That means that yes, you will have to play a bit of catch-up, but not to an insurmountable amount.

    The same with the 12<sup>th</sup> gen bot schematics. You should be able to get them into production within a week.

    And of course, with those designs, you would be able to compete globally.¡±

    Ms. Manning nodded slowly.

    ¡°Yes, that is something we have to think about it. But why do you exclude Enki from the equation? If you have Seraphim working for you, you could compete in the market as well.¡±

    It was a bit disorienting when Michael nodded, but nothing I was not used to.

    ¡°You are right, we could. But we would have to start from scratch. Competing not just against you, if you take the designs, but also against the other three triple-A corporations. So, while we have the technical expertise, it is not a market where we can get a meaningful market share.

    We have, on the other hand, a monopoly on CRS-free neural cyberware. Sure, it will not quite get to the market size of nanobots, but we don¡¯t have to share it with anybody.

    We also have some other technologies that we are preparing to bring to market. Technologies where we are the singular supplier as well.

    So why fight for scraps in an, admittedly lucrative market, competing with at least four triple-As, when we have barely the capacity for our other markets where we have no competition and step on no toes?¡±

    Ms. Mannign nodded again.

    ¡°I understand. And that is a very mature attitude. Sadly, most upstarts see a market where they could, theoretically at least, compete, and go for it, without thinking about the consequences.

    But back to our negotiation, does that mean that you would be willing to sign a contract that you will sell no nanofabs and nanobots?¡±

    ¡°Sadly, no. Some of the products we are developing are working with very specialized nanobots, and have an integrated nanofab for just these nanobots. But we are willing to sign a contract that we will not sell general-purpose nanobots and nanofabs. Just the highly specialized versions.¡±

    Ms. Manning and Powell scowled at that, and Ms. Manning tilted her head a bit.

    ¡°That is, not quite what we expected. And you won¡¯t consider having the customer buy the nanobots from other providers?¡±

    That was my cue here now, and so I gave Michael my answer:

    ¡°That is not feasible. The efficiencies would drop dramatically and the costs would be prohibitive. The best we can do is make sure that the specialized nanofabs and nanobots can not be used for anything else.¡±

    Michael repeated what I had said to the others.

    ¡°Well, then we will have to accept that. Not that we have all that much revenue in nano-bots anyway."

    Michael answered in his typical amused tone:

    ¡°That might be because your prices were prohibitive. Seriously, if our research is right, the black market providers for nano-bots made around 1000 times the sales that you did. And they still take an average of $10k for a batch of bots, compared to your $500k. If you offer 12<sup>th</sup> gen bots at reasonable prices I think you will see quite some increase in sales.¡±

    ¡°You might be right. Well, Ralcon will have to accept reality anyway. But back to business, all we have to do to get the designs from you is assure you of our neutrality? No preferred business, or support?¡±

    ¡°No, we are of the opinion that if you and Ralcon are not actively working against us, we will have a good enough product that nobody else will want to work against us. Well, not anybody with enough influence in the US.¡±

    ¡°And what will convince you that we will keep our word? Let¡¯s face it if we decide to take the designs and then move against you anyway, there is nothing you could do.¡±

    Michael chuckled at that.

    ¡°Well, we have Seraphim. And no, there is no way you could hire her away from us. She is the majority owner after all. The point is, at some point in the future you will want new nanobot designs.

    Where will you go to get them? Burgmeister, Dalgon, or Xiao Ping? Or maybe go to the dark web and find the other two independent nano engineers who can do it? No, of course not, you will come to us and buy them from us. Just because we don¡¯t want to compete in the nanobot market does not mean that Seraphim will suddenly no longer be one of the best nanoengineers alive.

    And depending on how you treat us, we will even offer you a discount. The same with our cyberware. We could offer you the basic jacks for $350.¡±

    Ms. Manning¡¯s eyes narrowed.

    ¡°Ah yes, the cyberware¡­ that was another topic that the fuckups were instructed to bring up. As I understand it, you also have the technology to make muscular cyberware CRS-free. Is that right?¡±

    Michael nodded again.

    ¡°Yes, we have the technology.¡±

    ¡°We would be interested in licensing it.¡±

    That surprised me. What had Enertech to do with cyberware? Apparently, Michael was the same.

    ¡°Sorry, but why would you want it?¡±

    She sighed.

    ¡°It is not commonly known, but we own Dworak. We would need the tech to compete.¡±

    Urgh, these were indeed unfortunate news. Sure, Dworak was the absolute bottom rung, but still, we now had direct competition to Enertech. Fortunately, they did not have any neural cyberware in their lineup.

    As it was, I whispered to Michael:

    ¡°That is not feasible. We have to sell the bio-reactor to the implant surgeons. It can¡¯t be adapted in the factory. And they need to buy CRS-free neuronect from us.¡±

    Fortunately, Michael and I already had decided to market the neuronect directly, at $12 per bundle of 100 connectors.

    Michael sighed and took a moment to answer.

    ¡°It would do you no good to license the technology. Each piece of cyberware has to be adapted by the surgeon specifically to the patient. There is no way doing that factory side would work.

    No, we intend to sell the bio-reactor that does the adaptation to the implant surgeons. That by the way is one of the specialized nanofabs.

    For the bio-reactor, and hence the implant surgeon, it is irrelevant where the cyberware comes from.¡±

    He made a short pause.

    ¡°But to make your cyberware completely CRS-free you will need to use the neuronect we produce. Which we will not license out to anybody. But we plan to sell it at the same prices as you can buy neuronect now from your industrial suppliers.¡±

    Ms. Manning scratched the side of her head for a moment.

    ¡°So, you are saying that it would useless to license this, what did you call it, bio-reactor?¡±

    ¡°Indeed. Especially as we see the market-share of myosynth cyberware mostly vanishing in the future. The only reason why myosynth has not vanished during or shortly after world war three was that it was the cyberware that used the least neuronect, and had the lowest risk of neural CRS.¡±

    She pinched the bridge of her nose for a moment.

    ¡°That is¡­ not quite what we expected. So you think that myosynth will mostly vanish? To be replaced with what?¡±

    Michael chuckled as an answer:

    ¡°I, personally, have no clue. I would have to ask Seraphim for that. But from what she told me, several technologies were used during the war. All significantly more efficient and/or powerful than myosynth. I would guess Enertech uses quite a few of them in your cyber zombies.¡±

    She recoiled when he said that.

    ¡°What are you thinking? Enertech does not use something as abhorrent as cyber zombies. Whoever told you that was defaming us.¡±

    For several moments there was silence before Michael answered:

    ¡°Ms. Manning, we are all adults here. And we are not trying to defame you in any way. But let¡¯s be honest, Enertech is a triple-A corporation. Any triple-A that does not have cyber zombies does not stay a triple-A for long. I mean, even Falconer had cyber zombies. And they owed their triple-A status solely to their position in the AFS.

    So, just to keep it among us adults here, everybody who has even a modicum of information about the shadow wars knows that Enertech indeed has cyber zombies.

    And with that, Enertech has the technology for alternative cyberware that is not depending on myosynth. With enough CRS-free neuronect, you can offer this cyberware on the open market without killing your customers.¡±

    Her face now got a very ugly expression.

    ¡°And you are the one who will sell us this neuronect, right?¡±

    ¡°As I said, we will sell it for the standard price that is now paid in the industry. Is it really important if you buy it from let¡¯s say Cybertronic or us?¡±

    She sighed.

    ¡°You are right. Of course, if we ask the people of Cybertronic or Deltatech they will probably tell us that it is important.¡±

    I took the opportunity to give Michael another idea, which he immediately conveyed as well.

    ¡°Another thing. We¡¯ve noticed that you don¡¯t offer neural cyberware. The designs for the basic jack are in the public domain by now. Nothing is preventing you from buying the neuronect from us and offering your own jacks.¡±

    ¡°You are right. We could do that. And now that you gave us the idea, we probably will. And that is another business where we will depend on you.¡±

    By now she sounded a bit jaded.

    ¡°Would that be so bad? Let¡¯s be honest, it will be good if the customer has some choice. At least in the low-market segment. And even if you want to get a piece of the high-end market, nothing prevents you from developing your own high- or ultra-bandwidth jacks. It would not be Enertech¡¯s style, but nothing would prevent you.

    And we won¡¯t care if we get our money from the neuronect or the cyberware.¡±

    She sighed again.

    ¡°Fine. I am sure your market segment up there is perfectly safe from us. As you said, it is not our style. But let¡¯s come to the nuts and bolts for the contract. I have been signaled that we will accept your offer.¡±

    ¡°Perfect.¡± Michael leaned forward, and simultaneously send me a message that I could now log out.

    It felt a tiny bit like being dismissed, but I knew that Michael knew I would just be bored to tears by the negotiations that would follow.

    As such, I closed the connection.

 2.9: Things to do in between

    After I was ¡®dismissed¡¯  from the negotiations, I returned to making the chipsets for the new mainboards.

    Nothing spectacular here. The various tiers of chipsets mostly differed in how many UEB lanes they could divert to for example the UEB expansion slots, the OPB headers, or how many memory channels they allowed. In other words, the typical modularity of a modern computer.

    I decided to dedicate one UEB controller to low-priority peripherals, like fan headers, coolant pumps, RGB headers for those who needed that, or OPB headers. Yes, it was more than was needed except in the most extreme cases with several dozen OPB ports, a score or two of fans, and a couple of precision-controlled pumps.

    But honestly, if a build could not work with the remaining controllers, you have chosen too small a processor. Let¡¯s be honest, anything you need more than 64 UEB controllers for, you also need more processing power than a Hyperion 9 could deliver. And I seriously doubted that there was anything less than a full-blown cyberdeck would ever need more than 70-80.

    For desktop systems that is. For servers that was a completely different thing of course. That was the reason why the Chimaera started at 128 controllers and went up to 256. It was of course similar for the Chronos. And even a single Grendel-server would be hard pressed to physically squeeze as many devices into it as it could control.

    But back to the mainboard chipset design, the CPU that they were designed to work best with decided on the number of slots available. Or how many mass storage modules it could host.

    I have to say, it is almost as complicated to say these things as it was to design the chipsets, so it was way easier than it sounds.

    On the other hand, it was significantly harder to create drivers for all the new tech. And not just for Envision, where I decided to support everything from Envision 33 on forward. Linux alone with its who knows how many distributions and forks was a challenge. In the end, I left it with supporting the most important 20 distributions and making the drivers open source.

    If somebody absolutely wanted to use a non-standard Linux version, they could adapt the drivers by themselves.

    That left drivers for K-DOS, though if our negotiations with Ralcon were successful, the Kawamoto Desktop Operating System would cease its rapid growth in user base. After all, it was another attempt to make a VR-capable operating system similar to Dalgon Mentor.

    But where Mentor was mostly directed at students and was optimized for online classes and college work, K-DOS tried to charge into the OS market at large, aiming to displace Envision. It was a clear attempt to take over the market, while Mentor was more of a jury-rigged solution to the problem the Commonwealth had found itself in when it changed the schooling system to virtual reality.

    I was pretty sure that Mentor would vanish almost completely as soon as Envision became VR-capable. Not so K-DOS. Kawamoto was actively developing it, and its accompanying office suite. Not that they had managed to get more than a fraction of the functionality of Envision baked in.

    Only the VR capabilities even gave them a chance.

    Nonetheless, I included drivers for K-DOS and Mentor. Fortunately, Mentor was Unix based similar to Linux, which made it relatively easy for me to create the drivers for that.

    Well, to be honest, I mostly did the rough work and left the finicky detail works to Warden. Over the last few months, I came more and more to the realization that I had no clue how I had managed to do my work without her. Oh sure, I could do the work myself. Heck, I had done the work often enough. I even had written not one but two complete OS for my series of cyberdecks.

    And yes, I had borrowed liberally from other operating systems. Otherwise, it would have been impossible even for me to get it done. But while it was strongly inspired by Linux, it was not compatible, by design. Every hacker worth their salt was able to penetrate virtually any Linux machine at will. Not that Envision or K-DOS were any better. The point was that in the age of supercomputers and VIs it took only a few weeks before a new version of an os was deconstructed.

    But as far as I knew, my OS was rare enough that nobody bothered to put in the effort. That was the reason why so many different firewalls and antivirus programs existed. The corporations were hoping that if the market was fragmented enough at least some of the security programs would remain unbroken.

    That was also the reason why I had two versions of my OS per generation of boards. One that I sold, and one that was only for me. I had done my best to move the vulnerabilities around. I was pretty sure that I was only marginally successful in that endeavor, but it was better than giving anybody who might be antagonistic in regards to me access to my personal OS.

    But without Warden, I would have to spend the next two or three weeks working on the drivers. Despite the insane compression I had. I was not sure how much computing power Warden had by now, but I was pretty sure it was enormous. My guess was that she had at least a dozen fully stocked Grendels up and running. That allowed her to be exceptionally fast in modifying code. Not in devising it, but if I gave her an objective, she usually finished within a few minutes.

    As it was, it took me longer to conceptualize the required functionality than it took for Warden to complete the finished drivers.

    Sure, it took her some time to test the new drivers to exhaustion, but that was mostly because she had to build the hardware before she could test the drivers. It would take her a few days to have everything tested.

    I was relatively sure that the early versions of the drivers were at least moderately usable by that time though. Thus I decided to build a few of the high-end systems, just to place them in the hands of some of the people I worked with.

    Yes, Jacky first and foremost, but also Ben and Michael. After a bit of contemplation, I decided to add a machine of Doc Schaeffer to the list. Four Hyperion 12 1990G and four Theia 90 were baking, alongside all the boards and the memory, when I remembered that the off-the-shelf holostorage-systems would just limit the whole system.

    I had bypassed that bottleneck in Glory by adding enough additional volatile memory to mirror the most important content into a RAM disc. Unfortunately, there was no place for that in the way that computers were constructed.

    Oh sure, I could modify the mainboard to include an additional row of memory slots, but that was a rather clunky solution. No, what was needed was a redesign of the holostorage itself.

    The basic principle of it was already as good as it was likely to get. A matrix of dark and light sections was written with a group of UV lasers into an otherwise clear medium. The matrix was only illuminated if another UV laser with a very specific frequency hit it at a specific angle. In a standard quadratic crystal with a width of close to 2cm that translated into roughly 2.6TB per matrix.

    Usually, a crystal stacked a few thousand matrices in this fashion.

    The really neat trick was that by changing the angle or frequency of the illuminating laser it was possible to write several matrices at the exact same position without interfering with each other.

    The incredible speed these systems possessed came from them reading or writing a complete matrix in one go. No sequential read, just the whole matrix at once.

    That was also what had made the HNVMH, or Holographic Non-Volatile Memory Host necessary. Before holostorage, all storage options were working sequentially and were best served with a serial bus. The HNVMH on the other hand was massively parallel to facilitate this enormous bandwidth. That was only exacerbated when manufacturers began to include several arrays of writing and reading laser working in parallel.

    And as with so many other things, this technology had hit a hard wall of its possible performance quite some time ago. Not that this was in any way a problem, as only the most powerful supercomputers could come even close to hitting the limit of what holostorage could provide.

    Until now that is. The HNVMH was, fortunately vastly over-dimensioned to what was needed. It was ¡®future-proved¡¯ at a time when the physical limits of the holostorage technology were barely understood, and it was easier to just keep it as is than to change the standard. But that left me with the physical limits themselves.

    I could switch over to x-ray lasers or gamma-ray lasers. If I was completely inconsiderate of the continued wellbeing or survival of the users that is. This step has been considered, long ago. But it was deemed impossible to shield the harmful radiation. So, no joy here.

    The lesser informed being might get the idea to simply make the crystal bigger. A bigger crystal equals more space equals a bigger base matrix, which equals higher capacity and bandwidth. A completely logical conclusion. Unfortunately, the material that made up the crystals became increasingly opaque and allowed fewer angle and frequency combinations the thicker it became. It had been determined long ago that the most efficient width of the crystal was 19.387mm.

    That left me with a variation of what I had done for Glory. But instead of building the RAM into the computer, I decided to build it into the storage system. Something of a super cache, combined with a RAM disc. Naturally, even with a multi-level ram in the 414pm design, it was not possible to mirror the whole crystal into the ram.

    This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

    No, I decided to include 12 PB of semi-static RAM-disc and 16 PB of superfast cache into the design. Future programmers would have to designate parts of their programs as important for fast execution, to make the most use of the available ram, it just couldn¡¯t be helped.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, I did not expect the average application, even the average operating system to burst out of the ram I had included anytime soon. It was a different matter for a cyberdeck, and would likely be the defining factor for speed in the future.

    The point here was that the OS of a board had an insane amount of functionality baked in, which needed to be ready at any given time. Add in that the OS and the utilities of a board were normally optimized for execution speed, instead of minimalized size, well you get the picture.

    Glory¡¯s OS and utilities had a size of nearly 13 EB or more than three orders of magnitude bigger than what I was building into the new design of holostorage. That meant that she also had an absolutely ludicrous 16 EB of RAM-disc. That was only possible through the Q-link, and even then it required extreme integration of the system. And Glory still had nearly twice the volume of Precious.

    Sure, she was smaller than the average desktop PC, but that was not saying much, considering that those were usually not quite considered mobile.

    But I digress. I believed that at least for the next few years, 28 PB of ram inside the individual holostorage systems would be good enough. Honestly, even very resource-intensive games rarely even approached this size. Envision did not even have a size of 2 PB, though knowing the industry, I was relatively sure that as soon as the next generation of hardware became available, the size of it would¡­ explode.

    If the code monkeys and project managers of Ralcon could refrain from adding every single pet project and prestige feature that they could not squeeze in by now for the sake of performance I would eat replicator food for a week.

    But what it boiled down to was another part of the computer I was designing that needed to be built by the NADA. It was already clear that three NADA were not enough.

    Heck, I would probably have to try to design something of an industrial-sized NADA in the foreseeable future, just for Enki to be able to produce many of the toys I was developing.

    But that was for the future. For now, I had my three NADA busy making the parts for the new computers. At least the parts that needed to be made by the NADA.

    Other things, like the holographic emitter, the crystals for the holostorage, and even all the cases, I tasked the industrial fabber with. No need to clog up the still relatively slow NADAs with something every semi-decent workshop could do.

    It would still take a couple of days for all the parts to be ready. As it was now roughly time for dinner, I surfaced and stretched for a bit.

    Darren and Ryan were cooking that day, and they had become quite good by now. It helped that I could provide spices on demand already. Technically, I could also provide as much meat as was wanted, but for now, I preferred organically grown meat.

    We were having beef scallopini ai funghi, fortunately for me without any of the alcohol of the white wine left in the sauce.

    I had to say, it was astonishing how good at cooking most of the others had become. Yes, we still did let neither Mark nor Christine use real ingredients, as they had proven to not being able to cook in VR, but all in all, the harvest of adequate chefs was exemplary.

    At first, we had the usual, shallow conversation, but when the flurry of greetings and vacuous remarks about the weather ebbed, I decided to change the topic.

    ¡°By the way, Jacky, your new computer will be ready the day after tomorrow.¡±

    It took her a moment to answer:

    ¡°My¡­ new computer? Why do I get a new computer? And when did you decide that?¡±

    Now it was my turn to be confused.

    ¡°I thought that was clear when we talked about the new VR mode for Envision.¡±

    Instead of Jacky answering, it was Natalie who exclaimed: ¡°Wait, Envision has a VR mode? Why the fuck do I not know that?¡± Followed by most of the others with similar sentiments.

    When the general outbreak had calmed down a bit, I was able to answer:

    ¡°It doesn¡¯t. Not officially at least. Yet. The VR mode for Envision is what we want to offer Ralcon for their, well, let¡¯s say neutrality. Jacky is now testing it for me.¡±

    The woman in question smiled and nodded.

    ¡°Yeah, about that. It works fine, but sometimes it gets¡­ I don¡¯t know, kinda slow?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Not surprising. What I gave you to test it with is literally the smallest computer that exists. Basically just enough to do office work on and that¡¯s it. But otherwise, everything is fine?¡±

    ¡°Yes, much better than the old keyboard and mouse control. But that¡­ I don¡¯t know, it is always so bothersome when it slows to a crawl.¡±

    ¡°Hm, I might have to look into the resource manager then. Maybe have a watchdog look into what you have up and running. If you only use Envision Office the garbage can should not slow down that much.¡±

    As an answer, Jacky giggled nervously.

    ¡°Uh, only Office? Uhm¡­ that¡­ might be the problem. I usually have around a dozen browser tabs, a media player, several instances of the office tools, and a few other stuff up and running.¡±

    ¡°Well, there you have it. Even without VR that would tax the garbage can you have now.¡±

    ¡°But it is no fun just to do Office work.¡±

    ¡°Well, that is what the new computer is for. That one is anything but a garbage can. It has many of the components I have in Glory. Not quite on the level of Glory, as it is more modular and that always costs performance, but the top of the line anyway. You literally can¡¯t buy anything similar right now.¡±

    ¡°Oh cool. So, will that thing make the VR run a bit faster? I would love to be done with my work a bit faster so I have a bit more time over.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Not with the diadem. That is limited to 4:1. To get faster, you need a jack. By the way, why haven¡¯t you asked for one yet?¡±

    She shrugged but made a disappointed face.

    ¡°Those things are kinda¡­ I don¡¯t know, expensive, you know?¡±

    I frowned. Expensive? Even with just the monthly stipend, I paid all of them, they would have enough to get an ultra-bandwidth jack with the cranial board. Easily. They had virtually no costs of living. I owned the building, bought the ingredients, and provided energy and water.

    ¡°Expensive? The ultra-jack with the cranial board costs only $1300 to make.¡±

    ¡°That may be, but if you remember, you told us that it would be expensive to have the cyberware adapted.¡±

    I did? When did I tell them¡­  oh¡­ right.

    ¡°I think I remember. Do you remember that that was at the very beginning of us being here? At that time, I did not know you from Adam. So yes, I told a bunch of strangers that I could provide some services for a fee. But we are no longer strangers, are we?

    Also, that was before we began to make cyberware literally on an industrial scale. Before I had the industrial fabber even. Those prices I told you then were when I expected to get the cyberware from the black market, and when I expected to have to spend several weeks per implant to adapt them.¡±

    Christine tilted her head.

    ¡°Does that mean that we can get a jack for cheap?¡±

    ¡°Yes, of course. Well, most of you. Sadly, Darren and Kate can¡¯t use off-the-shelf jacks.¡±

    That made Ryan flare up: ¡°Now, wait a minute here. Why Darren and Kate? I haven¡¯t pegged you as a racist.¡±

    Darren put a hand on his lover''s shoulder.

    ¡°Calm down. Remember the problems Kate and I had with the diadems? Even now they don¡¯t work right.¡±

    ¡°Exactly that.¡± I agreed with him. ¡°The two of them simply have a different neural structure. I can make them jacks. Probably. But those won¡¯t be mass-produced. I will have to basically handcraft the implants for them. And unlike with you norms and me, there is some risk involved.

    I will have to clone their brains to test the cyberware, and even then, it is not completely without risk, as I categorically refuse to have the clone brains wake up and suffer.¡±

    Darren rubbed his chin, while he looked at me.

    ¡°Hm, how much risk are we talking about?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Not much. Maybe 2%. Maybe 4%. Of it not working right that is. The risk of damage to the brain is significantly lower. Under 1%. But it is still there.¡±

    ¡°I will think about it. It would also depend on what it would cost.¡±

    Kate just nodded when Darren voiced his opinion on the matter.

    Christine on the other hand snapped her fingers.

    ¡°Back to us normies, you say we can have a jack at cost?¡±

    ¡°Sure. The complete package, ultra-jack, and cranial board for $1300. It takes roughly 30 minutes for the process and another hour or so before the anesthetic wears off. If you want a lower jack¡­ well I won¡¯t stop you but I will be sorely disappointed. Oh, and of course, we have to have the implants delivered first. You have to make it out for yourself in what order you go into the surgeon.¡±

    The rest of the discussion consisted mostly of them working out who was first and so on. I meanwhile sent an order for the jacks for them to Warden, who prepared the delivery from Enki.

    Their arguing about the order was still in full swing when Michael came into the cafeteria.

    ¡°Ah, you¡¯ve already eaten? Darn.¡±

    That prompted Darren to jump up and put another portion for Michael together.

    Not that the others cared all that much about Michaels''s presence. I on the other hand was more concerned about him.

    ¡°So, how has it gone?¡±

    ¡°Good. We will get $14 for each bundle of neuronect.¡±

    ¡°$14? I thought we decided on $12.¡±

    ¡°Ah yes, as I¡¯ve learned, the producers of neuronect have just jacked up the price to $16 per bundle. For preferred customers like Enertech. Ms. Manning offered with not wanting to go higher than $15. I countered with $14 and we all were happy.¡±

    ¡°That is nice. And the rest was alright too?¡±

    ¡°Yup, after I kicked you out it was only about the nuts and bolts.¡±

    ¡°Do you have an idea what has gone wrong in the beginning?¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°I can only speculate, but as I see it, Barton and Howard are fuck-ups and they fucked up by the numbers.¡±

    ¡°What do you mean they are¡­ uh¡­ feck-ups?¡±

    He laughed softly when I stumbled over the swear word.

    ¡°As far as I can tell, those two are only still working for Enertech because they have connections. They have too valuable contacts to be simply thrown out but are too incompetent and insubordinate to give them real work.

    So they will be used for no-effort negotiations. Where they only have to walk in, find out what the other side is offering, and then agree.¡±

    I could not help and frown.

    ¡°We are¡­ a no-effort negotiation?¡±

    ¡°For Enertech? You bet. View it from their perspective. We have nothing that is attacking their core business, and the only things where we do impact them is where we will most likely increase the whole market substantially, including their market share. So they have no problem with us.

    On the other hand, what we want from them is just to let us be. That they don¡¯t attack us. They had no intention to do that anyway, so for them, anything we would give them to do what they would have done anyway was just gravy.

    In other words, from their perspective, the whole negotiation was just to find out what we would gift them.¡±

    ¡°But that doesn¡¯t explain the hostility of Barton and Howard.¡±

    ¡°As I said, those two fucked up. As I understand it, those two have an overinflated opinion of their own importance. They ignored the briefing and got the glorious idea of browbeating us into submission.

    I think the powers that be at Enertech have thrown Powell into there to shore up the negotiations for them, but Barton and Howard are too much in a rut. And have dragged him down. No, they had the orders to get what we were willing to give them, rubber stamp the agreement, and be done with it.

    And they fucked that up royally.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°And the way you are describing it, they are still too well connected to get thrown out, right?¡±

    ¡°Yup, but that is not our problem. We have our agreement with them. And not even just neutrality, but Enertech is actually a tiny bit on our side.

    Of course, we also can expect stiff opposition from Cybertronic and Deltatech.¡±

    ¡°Those are B-level corporations, right? We can live with them being against us.¡±

    ¡°Yup, B-levels, and the two main providers of neuronect on the American continents. That is virtually all they produce, so they will be gone quickly.¡±

    ¡°Hm, ok. We always knew that we would have to stomp on some toes to go forward. And those two would have been victims either way.¡±

    The others had, by now, finally finished deciding on the order they would crawl into the auto-surgeon.

 2.10: Enhanced Negotiation Part 2

    It took Warden and me one week to iron out all the bugs we could find in the VR layer for Envision.

    To be fair, the vast majority of that time was needed for the testers to actually find the bugs in question. All in all, I would say I spent roughly a virtual week on this. So not even a single real-time day in total

    The rest of the time I mostly went through the gravitics course, improved my music, and had a handful of jobs for Spectre. Nothing noteworthy, just the daily grind for one of the top 10.

    And yes, I finally had worked on the SoC-processor line. I naturally kept the instruction set of the Regulon, to make it easier for the software developers to migrate.

    And honestly, it would have been way too much effort to reinvent the wheel here. I mean, seriously, the patent on the instruction sets had been long expired. Everybody used them. They worked fine.

    To be exact, I started out with the regulon core design and began substituting the now finally obsolete technology step by step. The result was a cute little square with a bit less than a cm in side length and a thickness of only 3mm.

    Unlike with the Hyperion, the Chronos, the Chimaera, and absolutely unlike the Grendel, my primary design concern here was power efficiency.

    The other processors were usually in an environment with line power, with relatively roomy housings and generous cooling solutions. The new SoC on the other hand would be mostly in a handheld device, or worse, an implanted one, where energy supply and cooling were¡­ a tad limited.

    That limited the gain of the new SoC to roughly 800 times its Regulus equivalent. After some research, I decided to name this little piece of graphene Bia, to keep it in the same thematical ballpark as the rest of my processors. Except for the Grendel of course.

    During that time, Michael became more and more insistent that we had to start the negotiations with Ralcon pretty dang soon. Not that I did not understand him in this.

    The day we would officially open shop was approaching pretty quickly. But it would not serve anybody to give Ralcon a flawed product. Yes, I realize now that I should have started a bit earlier with the project. Heck, I realized it then. That did not change the fact that I hadn¡¯t. To be fair, it only occurred to me that we even needed to do it when Michael brought up the negotiations.

    Finally, we were at a status where I was convinced it would work in 99.9% of all cases. The people I had tasked with testing it had not found any new bugs in two days, and a couple of them had fun driving the VR layer beyond what I had programmed it to do. If anybody abused the program to a degree that exceeded that, well, I figured that would be their problem.

    But now we had just four days left to negotiate with Ralcon before we opened the doors of our first production facility to normal business.

    And two of those days were the weekend. I was skeptical if Michael could manage to get the negotiations going in that time, but to be fair, it would be unlikely that Ralcon would be able to shut us down anytime quickly.

    Yes, if they put their mind to it, the chances were not that low that they could buy enough lawmakers to make our endeavor illegal. But with the rather enthusiastic support of nearly every other halfway important corporation, it would take them a few months at least.

    But wonder over wonder, Michael managed to get them to come to NYC for the very next day, Friday, July 20<sup>th</sup>.

    I was not quite anticipating these negotiations with elations, and I dreaded the next few hours even more.

    For once, Ben was present when we began talking about the upcoming meeting. He had, over the course of the last few weeks, made it abundantly clear that he was less than amused about Michael going into a room with Ralcon people. Yes, he knew that it was necessary, but that did not change the fact that he did not like it.

    As if any of us did.

    Michael had gotten himself a coffee, and sat at the table, facing Ben and me.

    ¡°So, any last suggestions before I walk into the lion''s den?¡± He sounded resigned to a difficult task.

    I gathered all my barely existing courage and took a deep breath.

    ¡°Yes, one change compared to Enertech. I will come with you.¡±

    Ben¡¯s angry ¡°Absolutely not!¡± was beautifully accentuated by Michael¡¯s ¡°Are you fucking insane?¡±

    Both men were silent for a moment before Michael gestured for his father to continue. Ben did not waste any more time to bellow: ¡°You will remain right here, in the fortress. We will increase security and keep you safe. Do I make myself clear?¡±

    I just tilted my head, before looking expectantly at Michael. He, of course, took the cue and elaborated on his father''s argument.

    ¡°I will be damned if I drag you into the fucking line of fire. Even if I were not quite fond of you, do you think I am suicidal enough to let Warden know that I put you into some form of danger?¡±

    Ben had meanwhile calmed down a tiny bit and spoke more naturally: ¡°It is way too dangerous for you. Yes, Enertech was, in theory, as dangerous as Ralcon, but they have no skin in the game. Ralcon will do everything to make you go away. Permanently.

    Not to mention that Warden won¡¯t let you go.¡±

    I shook my head slightly while answering:

    ¡°It is because of Warden that I have to go.¡±

    Michael furrowed his brows, looking a bit confused.

    ¡°Because of Warden? Sorry, did you get enough sleep the last few days? Have you hit your head?¡±

    I pinched the bridge of my nose but refused to look away.

    Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

    ¡°Yes, because of Warden. For Ralcon, it would be almost a big coup to take out you, as it would if they eliminated me. Face it, you are as essential for Enki as I am, or at least nearly so. That means we have to protect you as well.¡±

    I took a sip of the tea I had made myself, collecting my thoughts for a moment.

    ¡°I am no longer anonym. People know that I, as Seraphim, am behind Enki. They know my name. And they pretty dang well know about Warden. If I appear at the negotiations, Ralcon knows that the moment they try to doublecross us, Ralcon ceases to exist, along with much of Philadelphia.

    That is the only way I see to keep you safe. If they geek you, Melissa, and Rafael, what do you think the consequences are for Ralcon? Depending on the way they do it, they might get notified that they have acted a bit undignified, and that¡¯s it. And only if they make a big enough splash that the other triple-As can mock them for it.

    But if I am there, the consequences of them doing something are¡­ let¡¯s say substantial. They know that.¡±

    Beside me, Ben let out a low growl, while Michael looked as if he slowly counted to ten. Then, Michael, nodded sharply, with closed eyes.

    ¡°I hate it. I fucking hate it, but you are right. How the fuck did we get to that?¡±

    I could not help it to have a slight smile.

    ¡°We dared to do a business that Ralcon does not like in the US of A. Anywhere else, and we would be more or less welcome. Not here.¡±

    Ben gripped my hand and tugged me to face him.

    ¡°Listen to me, and listen carefully. You are right. I hate it, but you are right. But we will place significant security at the hotel. And you will take Ryan and Justin with you. The first sign of it going down into the crapper, and you are out of there. Do you understand?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I understand. And I planned on that anyway. I wanted the others here except Jacky to be at the ready and take Darren and Kate into the room with us.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I know it''s dangerous. And I am anything but happy about it. But I see no other way. We have to buy Ralcon off. And we have to get to the point where we can offer them the VR layer. And they have to take us seriously for that. And Warden simply is the only thing we have that they have to take seriously.

    And they only will do that if they know for sure that she will react if they try to cheat.¡±

    That more or less ended our discussion that afternoon and for the rest of the day, Ben did not let go of me.

    Darren and Kate were understandably not happy about being in the room with the Ralcon goons, but they understood as well and accepted.

    And so, the next morning, we boarded the two T-240s, as Ben had loaned his to Michael for this day, and were on the way to the hotel in Brooklyn.

    The Ralcon crowd naturally rejected meeting us at the fortress, while we were equally uncooperative in meeting them at their NYC headquarters, and so, a relatively well-known business hotel not far from Ralcon HQ was chosen.

    In the meeting room, we had to wait a few minutes for the Ralcon delegation to arrive, not that anyone of us expected anything else. We used the time and ordered some coffee.

    When the Ralcon crowd arrived, we all stood up in greeting. The first man through the door was obviously muscle, presumably a bodyguard. Around 190cm tall, and nearly as broad, he had a surprisingly good-fitting dark blue suit, a shaved head, and dark sunglasses.

    And here I thought it was against muscle union rules to wear a good suit. Color me astounded.

    The second man through made Darren groan quitely. An average-sized blond, with piercing blue eyes. I could not put my finger on it, but somehow I did not like this bloke. Maybe it was the sharkish smile or the long nose.

    After him, there was the usual parade of corpo-types, lawyers, and guard dogs. After a very insincere ¡°good morning¡± from everybody, Darren moved toward ratface.

    ¡°Hello Walter. I thought you did not want to play by corpo-rules any longer.¡±

    ¡°Hi Darren. As always on the underdog side, I see. Well, the money was just too good.¡±

    The way he stretched the ¡®just¡¯ made me like him even less. Somehow I knew that this was a jerk par excelence.

    And it was very clear that Darren was anything but happy about ratface''s inclusion. As soon as the Ralcon-yahoos had managed to sit down, the apparent leader of their troupe, a man of roughly 50, with gray hear, a very expensive anthracite-colored suit and a very big, attention-grabbing golden ring with what I assumed were a few diamonds, looked directly at Michael.

    ¡°Well, Walker, I did not think it was that kind of meeting. If I had known, I had brought entertainment as well.¡±

    The way he leered over me during that sentence left no doubt about what he meant, and so I chose to answer.

    ¡°I fear you have it wrong. My name is Vivian DuClare, but I think you know me better as Seraphim.¡±

    As soon I said that he, as well as most of the muscle, frowned heavily, while one of the suits muttered a short:

    ¡°Fuck!¡±

    Mr. Boss quickly caught himself though and addressed me directly now.

    ¡°So we have an international criminal here? I shouldn¡¯t have expected more from such a roughshod outfit.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t describe myself as a criminal. I am at best a person of interest. Something you could not say for example of Zion, or Complex Nova, don¡¯t you think?¡±

    Yes, I was aware that mentioning the two Abyss-dwellers that worked almost exclusively for Ralcon had absolutely no bearing. Except for pulling Ralcon down to the same level as us. Seriously, Ralcon might have better PR, but they were as dirty as any other outfit.

    But unlike my Seraphim persona, Zion and Complex Nova had substantial bounties on their heads.

    ¡°That may be, but none of them let a rogue VI run amok. You deserve to be shot for that. It is just a matter of time before the world leaders will agree to that.¡±

    Oh yes, the VI card.

    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t describe my VI as a rogue. A bit trigger happy, yes, but not rogue. It has some clear, and even relatively simple objectives. Just because those objectives are inconvenient for you does not make it rogue.¡±

    ¡°That is your opinion. I believe that you will soon be held accountable for your plunder.¡±

    ¡°You mean your plunder, don¡¯t you?¡±

    Oh yes, that confused him.

    ¡°My plunder? I am not the one who created a homicidal VI.¡±

    ¡°You personally? No, I agree, no responsibility here. But I meant Ralcon. And Enertech, Dalgon, Burgmeister, Kawamoto, Panacea, Xiao Ping, ABAS, and Falconer. I had enough time to look deeper into the topic and found out that shortly after the ICSC 2120 every notice that one should be careful about the computer system where one designs a VI-capable processor was replaced with the statement that it takes a physical VI-capable processor for a VI to wake up.¡±

    I waited a few seconds for effect, taking a sip of my coffee.

    ¡°You corps placed a trap. Congratulation, I walked into it. Luckily for me, you are the one who has to fear the consequences.¡±

    He scoffed. ¡°A likely story. Whatever, you will get yours soon enough. We are here to see what pitiful offering you have to try to prevent us from taking your little mom-and-pop business out.¡±

    Ah yes, the usual posturing. And so the negotiations had begun.

    Only to be interrupted by Walter exclaiming: ¡°What the fuck, why can¡¯t I read you guys?¡±

    I was confused for a moment, but then it dawned on me. I looked at Darren.

    ¡°Am I right in the assumption that this¡­ individual is a psionic?¡±

    Darren nodded, grinning slightly.

    I sighed dramatically.

    ¡°The nerve of the people these days! Don¡¯t you know that it is rude to read the minds of people without asking them? Show some manners!¡±

    I turned back to boss man.

    ¡°You have my condolences. Having to work with such unprofessional people. Whelp, I am sure it will get better with time if you just put enough effort into it.¡±

    Of course, I was gloating. The Ralcon team had made a serious faux pas here. And that made me happy that I had given all of my people, everybody who knew about the mind-blocker one.

    That would not make Ratface harmless. Far from it, a psionic is a dangerous weapon in nearly every situation, but it took away a serious advantage the Ralcon-clowns almost certainly depended on.

    Darren on the other hand was not handicapped in any way. Add in that not a single Ralcon-muscle was a cyber zombie, and all of them were normies¡­ well, let¡¯s say that Kate alone would probably wipe the floor with their security.

    That did not tell me what forces they had prepared outside of this room, naturally, but at least initially we would have the advantage.

 2.11: Enhanced Negotiation Part 3

    For a few moments, nobody moved or talked. The silence was so overbearing that I nearly expected cannonballs rolling through the room.

    Boss man¡¯s face turned a nice shade of red, and anger glowed in his eyes. The way he looked at Walter, it was obvious where the majority of that anger was directed to.

    Then, with a sigh, he turned his attention back to me.

    ¡°I can assure you, the quality of our personnel is more than adequate. But sometimes people simply have a bad day. I am sure that it will not happen again.¡±

    The last sentence was again directed toward ratface, who gulped visibly, but boss man continued:

    ¡°And let''s not kid ourselves, of course, he is reading everybody''s mind. That is what we hired him for. In negotiations, one does not waive such an obvious advantage, just to not be rude.¡±

    Then a small, not particularly pleasant smile showed around his lips.

    ¡°I would have thought that a group that expects to do business does know that little fact. I have to say, I am a little disappointed.¡±

    I leaned back for a bit before I tried to retort, just to be beaten to it by Michael:

    ¡°Of course, we know that. But it is customary to keep such an advantage close to the chest. It simply doesn¡¯t do for some hireling to blurt it out, you know. That is bad form.¡±

    The smile faltered a little, and the eyes took on a cold, calculating look.

    ¡°Yes, I have to give you that. Especially when the verbal vomit in question confirms that the advantage in question is quite handily negated. That bears the question, how did you do that?¡±

    Michael stapled his fingers in front of him.

    ¡°I am sure that Walter over there will inform you anyway, so there is no harm in disclosing that you are not the only ones with a psionic on the payroll.¡±

    Good work here. He did not mention the mind blocker at all and insinuated that it was Darren who kept Walter away from our thoughts. Boss man obviously understood it that way at least.

    ¡°It seems we will have to send our psionic personnel to some advanced training.¡±

    Walter on the other hand scrunched up his face.

    ¡°Now wait a minute here. There is no way that Darry over there knows something I don¡¯t. I¡¯ve beaten this asshole since we were kids. And I¡¯ve never even heard of a psionic shielding other people. No, something¡¯s not right.¡±

    ¡°Is that so?¡± Boss man did not seem particularly convinced, but he asked Michael anyway:

    ¡°Does that mean that you have something else that, let¡¯s say protects your thoughts from psionics?¡±

    ¡°I can¡¯t comment on the quality of your psionic, though judging by his behavior right now, I would think he is not quite the smartest tool in the shed. But I can say that I have full faith in Darren over there. Of course, it helped that he had quite some time working with one of the smartest humans alive. It is always surprising what working with a bonafide genius can do to someone''s proficiency.¡±

    Uh oh, he was getting way too close to the truth now. Not to mention that I was not very happy about him outing me as one of the smartest humans alive. But what¡¯s done is done.

    Naturally, boss man and one of his lackeys quickly looked at me, when Michael said that, but fortunately the rest of them did not seem to realize that he spoke about me.

    It was good that Michael then changed the topic:

    ¡°As entertaining as I think this verbal fencing is though, we are here for other reasons. So, how about we get started with our meeting?¡±

    Boss man raised an eyebrow, and leaned back in his chair, waiting a few seconds before he answered:

    ¡°Fine, let¡¯s get this over with. We know why you are here, so no need to rehash that. Here is what we want from you. We want the processor designs.¡±

    Wait, what? How did they know about the new processors? And even if we gave them to them, they would not be able to make them, without the NADA. And the NADA did not work without the Q-link. If they knew about the Q-link, why would they ask for the processors?

    It simply did not make any sense. It seemed that Michael was sharing my confusion, as he asked boss man:

    ¡°What processor designs?¡±

    Even I could hear the honest confusion in his voice. Boss man on the other hand was not in the slightest deterred:

    ¡°Oh come on. You can¡¯t expect to brag about them in the Abyss and nobody learns about it. We know that Seraphim has new processor designs, and we want them.¡±

    It took me a moment what he was talking about. But finally, the penny dropped.

    ¡°Oh¡­ ooh. I think I know what you mean, but why?¡±

    Now he looked at me with some disdain.

    ¡°Please, don¡¯t underestimate our intelligence. Don¡¯t you think a new processor design that gives people around 30% more performance is something that evades us?¡±

    I recoiled when he gave us the number.

    ¡°30%? Where did you get 30%?¡±

    The not-so-pleasant smile graced his face again.

    ¡°Well, the rumors talk about anything from 20 to 300% to be fair. But we know that rumors very often get completely out of hand, and we¡¯ve gone with the lower end.¡±

    I shook my head in answer:

    ¡°Well, your rumors are completely off. Firstly, I managed to get not even 3% of performance gain. Secondly, the designs are very unstable. And thirdly, I abandoned the development in March. I could give them to you, but for what?¡±

    Now he frowned. ¡°3%? That is¡­ hard to believe. And for what? To take over the CPU market again of course.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°It is hard to believe that I only managed to get a single-digit percent of improvement over a technology that has been considered at the end-point for roughly 100 years? Get real, to get even 3% is nothing short of a miracle. Not that I got a full 3%. The most powerful design I had, managed 2.916%. And it only crashed every four or five minutes.

    The most stable design, which in my simulations only crashed three or four times a day, only got 2.13%.

    And if you think even a stable design with a full 3% performance gain would be enough to take over the CPU market you are deluding yourself.

    Think about it, a Cirrium 8K, the most powerful processor currently available, costs about $50 if you have a chip fabber. If not, you can get one everywhere for around $100.

    If you add another $50 for the license, you won¡¯t get many customers, if any. The people who could use the additional 3% are the people who don¡¯t pay licensing fees. You literally can¡¯t make money with 3% more power.¡±

    He leaned forward a bit, looking directly at me.

    ¡°So you won¡¯t have anything against giving us the completed designs?¡±

    I rolled my eyes at that.

    ¡°There are no completed designs. I¡¯ve given up on it. Yes, I could put another 1000 hours into making it work. But for what?¡±

    That broke through his cool, and he snarled:

    ¡°For what? Do you imbecile not have any understanding of what you have here? The first breakthrough in computer science in a century. Of course, it is valuable.¡±

    I shook my head again and looked down at the table while doing it.

    ¡°So you have not even begun to consider what the Seeberger equation means for computer design? The very moment that somebody has a breakthrough with quantum entanglement, all the work I¡¯ve put into the processors will be obsolete. There is simply no point in putting in the effort, or the money, to develop a new processor line when at any time in the next months somebody makes a processor that is 100 times more powerful. That¡¯s why I stopped developing it.¡±

    I felt Michael''s hand on my shoulder, and he continued:

    ¡°Not to mention that we don¡¯t want to give you something that we consider valuable to us. Let¡¯s be honest here, you never had the intention of negotiating fairly. You are here to get what you can get, and then turn around and fuck us over anyway.¡±

    Boss man leaned back again and stapled his hands.

    ¡°If you think that, why are you here? Are you looking for punishment?¡±

    The always irreverent Michael answered with some amusement:

    ¡°No, we just think we have something that, while mostly worthless to us, is valuable enough for you that you will do almost anything to get it.¡±

    He made a short pause before he continued:

    ¡°Don¡¯t get me wrong, I know why Ralcon wants us dead and gone. You fight for your survival. And I assume in your personal case that is literal.

    Ralcon has not quite the reputation of being a benevolent top dog after all. You¡¯ve managed to leverage the almost total dominance of one market to influence laws and regulations so that they serve you, and more often than not, hurt or even destroy other, smaller corporations.

    And now you see that one market dominance dwindling. I think the outcome when you can no longer put the same pressure on the puppets in Philly will be somewhat uncomfortable.

    You can expect that the majority of the managers of Ralcon will either have to run to some third-world country and wither there or be outright lynched here.¡±

    He demonstratively took a sip from his coffee.

    ¡°Hm, that is quite good coffee, you should order some. To get back to the topic, you see the writing on the wall. Envision is slowly but surely failing. And you, correctly as I have to concede, see the availability of safe and cheap jacks as something that will accelerate the decline even more.

    But where you are wrong is the idea that you can stop it. The only thing giving Envision a market share of nearly 80% right now, from the 96% only five years ago, is the fact that K-DOS is not yet ready.

    K-DOS is what is killing Envision. You¡¯ve successfully managed to marginalize Linux and Sigma. Mentor was never even intended to replace Envision. K-VOS, Odysseus, and Sandman are extremely niche products with niche numbers, and yes, they completely dominate the commercial matrix jockey market, but they barely even work in office functionality, even with somebody trying to adapt them to that use.

    So no threat here either. God knows how many independent VR operating systems you managed to squash over the years, but I guess they are legion. But you can¡¯t squash K-DOS. Kawamoto is more powerful than Ralcon, it has better Cyberzombies, better tech, and more money.

    The only thing keeping Envision even in the race by now is that K-DOS is barely functional.¡±

    ¡°You think that? Why negotiate with us at all then?¡±

    ¡°For now you are in a position to hurt us. Yes, we could relocate. The patents in question are filed in Europe, Nowhere, and Confy. You won¡¯t get them. But that would mean abandoning our investment already made. We will, if you force us, but we would prefer not to.

    Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

    We could also simply wait for you to fail. As I said, it is just a matter of time. I am sure Kawamoto would actually enthusiastically support us. But we have the technology now, and we don¡¯t think it would be good to wait that long.¡±

    It was pretty clear that boss man was less than enthused with what Michael had to say, and he snarled:

    ¡°Are you finished?¡±

    Michael answered cheerfully: ¡°Shortly. Just a tiny bit more. The thing is, nearly every business is salivating at the thought of a functional VR-capable OS with the corresponding office suite. The ability to get 24 hours of work out of eight hours paid is just too tempting. And yes, the availability of a safe and affordable jack will make that prospect even more appealing, but it is unlikely to accelerate the development of K-DOS significantly.

    What I am saying though is that you simply can¡¯t stop the propagation of VR. It is a done deal, and the sooner you accept that, the better for you. Somebody will bring a fully functioning VR-capable OS to market sooner or later. And honestly, for us others, it is completely irrelevant if that somebody is Kawamoto or Ralcon. Not so for you, I think.¡±

    He stood up.

    ¡°But to come back to our negotiation¡­ as I said, we think we have something that you not just want, but need. Luckily for us, it is also something that will change your stance on virtual reality.¡±

    He gestured towards Kate, who placed the case with the office computer on the table, and opened it up so that the computer was visible.

    Boss man was apparently not very thrilled about it, with his depreciating expression.

    ¡°A computer. Oh wow. How novel. Newsflash, regardless of what you may think about us, I can assure you that we know what computers are and how to use them.¡±

    Michael smiled while he answered:

    ¡°Very funny. But you will learn soon enough. Viv, if you would explain please?¡±

    I took a deep breath and began:

    ¡°In a way, you are right. That is mostly a basic office computer. Cirrium 1d, integrated graphics and sound, 8 TB ram, 10 EB crystal, mostly stock Envision Pro 48, the same with E-Office Pro 48. You know, the usual stuff.¡±

    I turned the garbage can around so they could see the backside, with all the interfaces.

    ¡°Only three differences. The first is that we, well I, put in any and every single legacy interface that we could find.¡±

    I was interrupted by one of the lackeys, who was exclaiming:

    ¡°Fuck. A couple of those can¡¯t be fitted to current tech. How did you do that?¡±

    I rolled my eyes at that but answered anyway:

    ¡°Build an adapter of course.¡± As usual, I left out the ¡°Duh¡± but instead continued with the description.

    ¡°The second difference is the holostorage system. It is designed in a way that the crystal can¡¯t be removed. And that a certain part of the crystal is encrypted and can¡¯t be read. Should you try to get into that section of the crystal or remove it, a small vial of dissolver nanobots will be released to destroy the crystal.¡±

    That made all of them frown, and boss man mused: ¡°A bit paranoid, aren¡¯t you?¡±

    I smiled at him.

    ¡°Considering Ralcon¡¯s track record, I would say it is not paranoid enough. But it will have to do. The third difference though is what the modifications of the controller are protecting. And incidentally what we are offering you.¡±

    I waited a few seconds for effect and had just taken the breath to continue, when another of the lackeys abruptly leaned forward and slapped the table with both hands, startling me and the others in the process.

    His voice was hoarse when he addressed me directly:

    ¡°My information says this can¡¯t be done.¡±

    It took me a moment to understand what he was talking about, but then I smiled again.

    ¡°It wasn¡¯t easy, but obviously it can be done.¡±

    Boss man growled, and turned to the lackey, snarling:

    ¡°Damn it, Phil, I thought we had an agreement that I do the talking. So would you please keep out of it?¡±

    The lackey, Phil I guess, was strangely unperturbed by the rebuke, and instead very firmly talked back:

    ¡°I am surprised you haven¡¯t figured it out yet, Dan, but this is important. So important in fact, that if I think you might shoot this deal down I will have to call my grandfather.¡±

    That in turn made boss man turn to Phil and look shocked at him.

    ¡°What the¡­ do you seriously think these clowns have anything that could be important enough for that? And what the fuck is it with you threatening to go tattle to your grandpa about it? You¡¯ve not done anything like that before.¡±

    Phil chuckled softly.

    ¡°Think Dan, think! All that talk about VR-capable OS, and it is irrelevant who brings it to market. That is what they are offering us. Somehow they made Envision VR-capable.¡±

    That made Dan snort.

    ¡°Get real, Phil. We¡¯ve tried for quite some years to get Envision to do VR. It can¡¯t be done. It just doesn¡¯t work.¡±

    I raised my hand.

    ¡°Excuse me, but you are wrong. It can be done. Admittedly, it would have been much easier to do if you would remove the legacy support, or if you had cleaned up the big ball of mud that you call operating system, but it can be done, and I¡¯ve done it. This garbage can in front of you runs Envision in VR.

    I¡¯ve tested it with every piece of legacy hard- and software I could find, and it worked fine. If there is some obscure piece of legacy equipment that does not work with it, I think we can simply build a literal virtual machine that emulates a non-modified Envision. Or they can simply use it without VR. It isn¡¯t as if the old control schema is no longer working. I¡¯ve had it tested by several people who use Envision in their daily life as well, and at least one of them had all but given up on Envision because it doesn¡¯t do VR, and she is exalted about it.¡±

    I smiled softly:

    ¡°Of course, you don¡¯t have to trust my word about it.¡±

    I took a diadem out of my briefcase and placed it beside the computer.

    ¡°We have electricity, so just test it.¡±

    Boss man looked at me with unbridled suspicion, so that I just shrugged.

    ¡°Hey, it is your decision. You can take the computer with you and test it at your local HQ.¡±

    Michael snorted then:

    ¡°Come on, get real. What reason would we have to fuck you over? Think about it, if we fucked you over that would have mostly the same effect as if we never had the meeting or if we did not come to an agreement. In either of those cases, Ralcon will do anything to scuttle our business.

    We don¡¯t want that, and let¡¯s be honest, what do you have to lose? It either works, and it changes everything, or it doesn¡¯t and all you¡¯ve lost is a bit of time.¡±

    After a few moments of tension rising silence, Phile shrugged:

    ¡°Oh fuck it. I¡¯ll test it and get it over with. You know he is right, don¡¯t you, Dan? If this thing works, we need to do everything we can to get it. It will save Ralcon.¡±

    Dan growled again, but then shrugged.

    ¡°Fine, but not you, Phil. Haggerton will do it.¡±

    That startled lackey #2, who now looked at boss man in apparent shock.

    ¡°I¡¯ll do what? Phil wants to test it, why don¡¯t you let him do it?¡±

    ¡°Because you are expendable. Phil is not. Now get that damn headset and test this fucking computer!¡±

    Grumbling the lackey, who I guess was named Haggerton plugged in the computer, followed by the diadem, which he put on his head, before switching the garbage can on.

    After a few minutes, he opened his eyes again, and took off the diadem, looking at it in astonishment.

    ¡°Fuck me, that thing works. It really works. How long was I in there?¡±

    Phil looked at his com and answered:

    ¡°Roughly three minutes.¡±

    Haggerton chuckled:

    ¡°Because for me it was more a bit over ten minutes. Shit man, that thing really works.¡±

    Dan looked at him suspiciously.

    ¡°How is the control? And does Office work as well?¡±

    Haggerton shrugged.

    ¡°The controls, well, the first minute or so, I was using the virtual keyboard, but then it simply did what I wanted it to do. Oh and yes, Office works fine. More than fine. Every function, every mode that I tried, I just had to think of writing it, or using the function, and the system did that.

    It was¡­ shit, why didn¡¯t we do this. 50 years ago, or more?¡±

    Boss man rubbed his chin, before turning back to Michael.

    ¡°Well, it seems as if it¡¯s working. But if you give this to us, don¡¯t you think you will piss off Kawamoto? You are right, they are bigger and badder than Ralcon.¡±

    Michael chuckled again.

    ¡°No, not really. From everything we learned, Kawamoto doesn¡¯t want to develop a VR-capable OS with a matching office suite. They do it because you don¡¯t. They need it, and couldn¡¯t get it, so they tried it for themselves. Not that they put many resources into it or were very successful in it, mind you.¡±

    Lackey #3, the one who was so excited about the interfaces, intervened now:

    ¡°What did you mean earlier about a big ball of mud?¡±

    Sorry, has he never even looked into the source code of their own most important product?

    I looked at him for a few moments, before shaking my head.

    ¡°The source code of Envision is¡­ well frankly, it¡¯s a mess. Some parts of it are so bad that I am surprised it is working at all.¡±

    That made Dan look at me rather sharply:

    ¡°The source code? Where the hell did you get the source code of Envision?¡±

    I couldn¡¯t help it, I rolled my eyes over this, very, stupid question.

    ¡°The Abyss of course. Don¡¯t act as if you don¡¯t know that the source code of Envision 42 is available there.¡±

    He narrowed his eyes even further.

    ¡°And that gives you the right to simply abscond with our property?¡±

    And we were in eye-rolling mode again.

    ¡°First, do you think that is something that Ralcon wouldn¡¯t have done? I can only guess how often your ¡®esteemed¡¯ company has done something like that. That is what nearly 40% of the shadow wars are about, as you pretty well know.

    Second, would you prefer that in five years, when Kawamoto manages to make an adequate OS, Ralcon goes belly up? Get real.

    Your outrage is even more ludicrous when you consider that a significant portion of Envision goes back to Windows 40. You haven¡¯t updated much of your most important product for close to 150 years. Do you honestly think that there is even a tiny bit of Envision that is not known to virtually everybody who has an iota of understanding of the computer industry?

    Seriously, the only reason why there is no clone on the market is that Ralcon is a triple-A with enough troops to flatten anybody who dares to do that. Should you, at any point lose that status, there will be a dozen Envision clones on the market in no time. So spare me your fake indignation and accept that it worked out to your advantage this time.¡±

    Yes, I was a bit incensed about his resentment, mostly because I was fully aware of how hardcore Ralcon played the game. They, along with Panacea, were the most vicious of the triple-As when it came to the shadow wars. Buying the source code of some competitor''s proprietary software in the black market was most likely a weekly, if not even daily occurrence at Ralcon.

    It seemed as if Dan was working himself up to lit into me, but Phil put a hand on his shoulder.

    ¡°Let it be. This is business as usual, and we don¡¯t get offended when other corps do something like this. And in this case, it worked to our advantage.¡±

    Dan slowly shook his head, but then snorted a ¡°Fine!¡±

    That should have ended the whole topic, but #3 couldn¡¯t let it go.

    ¡°But what do you mean about the source code? How is it bad?¡±

    Seriously? Did he want a detailed explanation?

    ¡°Ok, I¡¯ll try to be brief. First, roughly 15% of it consists of spaghetti code. Code so convoluted and irrational that it is extremely hard to read, and who knows what time bombs are ticking in there.

    Then about a third of your classes are¡­ well if you look at them in isolation, they look fine, but as soon as you put two or more of those classes together, as they are designed to do, it will become overly complex, wasteful, and error-prone. That is called ravioli code.

    And lastly, your data structures and dependencies are so intricate that trying to correct one of the problems in one class will drag a whole rat tail of changes with it through the majority of the rest of the classes. A phenomenon that is called lasagna code.

    All in all, I would say around 40 -50% of the Envision source code is just bad. And bad in a manner that makes code maintenance and modernization all but impossible.

    I also estimate that it¡¯s costing you 20 to 30% in performance, along with making the whole OS roughly 25% bigger than it needs to be.

    That by the way is probably the reason why everybody says it is impossible to give VR to Envision.¡±

    #3 leaned further forward.

    ¡°And what would you do about it?¡±

    I had to snort.

    ¡°You are aware that I am not an employee of Ralcon, are you? So, I would do nothing about it. I don¡¯t use Envision, I don¡¯t care about it, and it doesn¡¯t concern me if it is cleaned up or not.¡±

    ¡°But if you were responsible for cleaning it up, how would you do it?¡±

    I slumped and sighed.

    ¡°Seriously, it is not my problem. I don¡¯t want to think about it. The time I needed to read the source code was bad enough. I am happy that I could move around it and don¡¯t have to think about that monstrosity again.¡±

    ¡°But¡­¡±

    ¡°Stop it! Read my lips! It! Is! Not! My! Problem! If your underpaid code monkeys can¡¯t do it, then you maybe should get better-paid ones. Or if that doesn¡¯t help, why don¡¯t you create a fricking VI to clean up the code. But don¡¯t come to me to do it! I don¡¯t want to touch that mess ever again, do I make myself clear?¡±

    When #3 still showed signs of trying to pester me, boss man intervened with a bellowed:

    ¡°Simpson, shut it! That is not the point of this meeting.¡±

    Simpson slumped back sulking and grumbled something too softly to understand.

    Dan on the other hand gestured towards the apparent leader of their guard detail.

    ¡°Jenkins, get a platoon here and get that computer to the HQ. Do it quickly, quietly and most of all, keep the thing safe. I hope I don¡¯t have to make it clear that your very life depends on it getting to the HQ in working order, or do I?¡±

    ¡°Of course sir. It will only take a moment.¡± After he said that, he began talking softly into his com-headset.

    Dan on the other hand turned back to Michael.

    ¡°So, now what?¡±

    Michael shrugged.

    ¡°Now you test the VR on that thing to hell and back, and if you think it is an appropriate offering, you call us and we hash out how to proceed from there. We are pretty sure you will like it, and it will make your objections to our business vanish as if with magic.¡±

    Almost as if against his will, Dan nodded slowly.

    ¡°Yes, I think you are right. If it really works as you say, well, we won¡¯t have any big opinion on VR anymore.¡±

    Michael snorted at that.

    ¡°Au contraire. Think about it, if you have a working VR-capable Envision, then it will be a big advantage for you if jacks become widely available. I mean, if one office drone is four times as valuable with a diadem, don¡¯t you think the corporations will be even more for an upgrade if the same drone with a $600-jack now becomes 15 to 20 times more valuable?¡±

    Dan narrowed his eyes again.

    ¡°Well, maybe jacks become so valuable that we will enter the business ourselves. And we compete again.¡±

    Michael shrugged.

    ¡°Then we will sell you the neuronect to do it. Yes, we get a bit more if we make the jacks, but we get nearly as much profit by just selling the neuronect. And as I said, you won¡¯t be able to get the patent for the CRS-free neuronect either way.¡±

    We were interrupted by the door opening and a whole bushed of uniformed armed people came into the room. Jenkins gestured towards the computer but I held up my hand.

    ¡°You should shut it down properly first.¡±

    Haggerton twitched, then sighed and set up the headset again, only for the computer to go dormant a few seconds later. Michael turned to Kate:

    ¡°Would you give them the case please, Kate?¡±

    Kate¡¯s canine features showed some amusement over the whole situation, but she remained professional and placed the case back on the table, shoving it to the corp-soldiers.

    A short time later, the Ralcon-men walked out, one carrying the case, while the rest were all around him with the weapons at the ready.

    Michael cleared his throat.

    ¡°I think that concludes today''s session I think. As soon as you¡¯ve come to a decision, call me and we will meet again.¡±

    Dan nodded slowly.

    ¡°Yes, I think that might be the best course of action. But one question, what if the VR thing is mostly working fine, but we find problems?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Then you call him and I will contact you about the problems and then I eliminate the problems. But just to make it clear, I am only responsible until you officially take possession of the program. Everything after that is your problem.¡±

    Dan nodded again.

    ¡°Ok, I think we can come to an agreement in that regard. So, I think we will meet again in the future.¡±

    As he said that, he stood up from the table, followed by his lackeys, and they moved out of the room as well.

    Michael turned to me.

    ¡°Well, it seems you were right. The way they reacted when you told them your name, it is clear that they intended to vanish us. So, thank you.¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°You are welcome. I am just happy that it worked out. That here was the most dangerous part since Falconer came for a visit.¡±

    We took the time to drink the rest of our coffee, come on, you don¡¯t think we wasted it, do you? The amount of money this hotel took for it was outrageous.

    After that, we moved to the roof garage to fly back home.

 2.12: Well, they tried

    The quick negotiations were a welcome surprise. And yes, I know that the real negotiations would happen later, and this was just the first sniff test.

    And despite the tension that was thick enough to cut, I mostly felt at a loss for what to do. The new computer lineup was long since finished, and the first test specimens were happily chugging away.

    I had created the first prototypes for each of the jacks for Darren and Kate and was now waiting on some brain-dead clones of the two to finish baking so that I could test them. Naturally, those clones would at best provide a marginal test subject, as the majority of the jacks functions needed a working brain, but I could at least eliminate the most egregious problems.

    I had created a full simulation of their brains from the scans I had gotten from the BOU, but that was still only a simulation, and I was a bit unwilling to just trust those with the life of my friends.

    I would have continued my studies of gravitics, but I was coming up to the end of that course, and I had realized that the one thing that I wanted to know about it, was simply missing. There were heaps of observational data, and many experiments on the various combinations, but apparently, it was completely unknown how the grav-coils even worked.

    It seemed that Kobashigawa had just a lucky discovery when he experimented with some palladium-rhodium electrodes. I could not find out what he tried to get, but some subsequent experimentation of the strange gravitational effects when a certain batch of electrodes was electrified led to the invention of the grav-coils.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, it was still a monumental discovery, but would it have hurt anybody to actually try and find out how they worked? And yes, I understand that it was an important step when he combined three coils into a grav-turbine.

    The directional control of the gravity in its area of influence was¡­ it is hard to overstate how important it was. It was not quite at the level of fire or the wheel, but it came close.

    But humanity had some decent information about how fire and the wheel worked. For the grav-coils, we apparently were not much more than the neanderthals believing that the fire was a gift from the sky spirits. I hated that notion.

    How could our whole civilization be built on something that nobody understood how it worked? How could generations of scientists and engineers not go stark raving mad with the thought?

    It was pretty obvious what I had to do to get that knowledge, sure. I just did not want to do it. The Seeberger equation was a monster, and plugging in what we knew about gravity and the grav-coils would be a real chore, even for me. I did not fancy the headache that would cause.

    I knew of course that it was just a matter of time, and a relatively short time at that, before I couldn¡¯t take it any longer and simply did the work, but for now, I was not willing to do it.

    Instead, I began early explorations on reactor tech. The simple fact that nobody knew how the grav-coil worked already told me that the fusactor was an equally fortunate discovery without anybody really knowing how it worked.

    It couldn¡¯t be anything else, considering that the main components of it were the grav-coils. At least this coursework would give me a basic understanding of fusion in general.

    I was, admittedly somewhat morosely, reading up on the topic, when I got a message from a longtime customer of my soft- and hardware. D4N73, or Dante, was an Abyss-dweller, #57 on the ranking board. Quite a bit more sophisticated than Argo but still only barely accepted in the Abyss at all.

    A good customer though, and he had sprung for a fully tailored Mk. IV board about three months before I had to get out of Seattle.

    ¡®Hey, Seraphim. Have you seen the new video from Chuckles?¡¯

    Ok, I was moderately intrigued. Chuckles was the call sign of the self-proclaimed first reviewer of matrix warfare equipment. Of course, the first reviewer status was not contested, as there was no other. Well, at least not somebody who could be seen as impartial.

    There were a couple of review sites that could as well have a ¡®sponsored by:¡¯ label, but nothing the people on the dark web could even moderately trust.

    That still did not explain how somebody could get the idea to operate under the handle ¡°Chuckles the Clown¡±. But he, she, it, whatever, we still did not know who was behind the mask, had a very good reputation, and was the keeper of the semi-official ranking list of our equipment.

    And more important, as well as much more numerous, they reviewed and rated the utilities and software we could buy.

    Nonetheless, being messaged about a new video from them was¡­ new.

    ¡®No, I did not know that they have released something new.¡¯

    ¡®A couple of hours ago. New hardware this time. And I think it is something interesting for you.¡¯

    Ok, now I was a bit confused. I mean, yes, Chuckles had reviewed some of the hardware that I sold, but over the last few months, I had mostly removed myself, in my Seraphim persona, from the dark web.

    With a shrug, that of course I knew Dante did not see, I answered him:

    ¡®Ok, I¡¯ll look into it. And thanks for the head up.¡¯

    That finished this small, but curious interchange, and I had to shake my head. Nonetheless, I connected to Glory and dove into the matrix.

    It was pretty quick to get to Chuckles¡¯ page and find the newest video. The topic just served to heighten my confusion though.

    It seemed as if Chuckles had gotten their hands on the ¡®new¡¯ Kawamoto Ryu 50, and decided to test it. For some reason. The all-new Ryu would be mostly the same as the last 20 Ryus. As always. Kawamoto released a new version every single year, and the differences from all the previous models usually consisted of a new color scheme and now and then a slightly redesigned case.

    Yes, the OS got an upgrade, but a customer in good standing, aka somebody who had done nothing to affront Kawamoto and paid promptly and fully, would get the same upgrade as well.

    To be fair, the Ryu was by far the best of the commercial boards that one could get. But I don¡¯t think they had changed anything over the last few decades.

    But Dante seemed to think that this video was actually important, so I began watching it.

    The video started with zooming in on Chuckles in their full clown getup, consisting of an oversized white jumpsuit with multicolored polka dots and painfully gaudy frills, a white mask with extremely exaggerated makeup of the multicolored variety, and a big, red bulbous nose in the center, a rainbow-colored wig on top and several accouterments like the pink and lime green artificial flower or the large rubber mallet.

    ¡°Hello my friends. Welcome back to Chuckles Computer Consortium, where we will today take a look at the new Ryu 50.¡±

    They made a pause for effect.

    ¡°I know, I know, as far as we are concerned, if we want to get the performance data on the new Ryu, we can take the performance report from 10 years ago.¡±

    They turned around and gestured toward something outside the camera view.

    ¡°But surprise, Kawamoto actually did it. They made a new Ryu.¡±

    The always-present assistant of Chuckles, Squeaky, came into view, carrying a big board in its paws.

    Squeaky was another of Chuckles¡¯¡­ idiosyncracies. It was obvious that it was a bot, as there was a strange shortage of 150cm tall squirrels that looked as if they had been rainbow vomited on by a unicorn in the real world.

    The board itself was at least outwardly nothing spectacular. Sure, the case was nicely designed. But it was an averagely-sized board. A bit bigger than Precious I would say.

    Then Chuckles continued: ¡°Normally, we would now come to the part where I would show you the teardown. But for today, we have a little change in our usual script. You will realize the reason quickly I think. Instead, we begin with the benchmarks.¡±

    A virtual display appeared behind Chuckles, showing the normal bar graphs.

    ¡°First, as always, we show you the Ryu in its pure form, as Kawamoto delivers it. One thing you should keep in mind though is that it has the typical utility accelerator that every Ryu comes with. So the results are not fully comparable to the other boards on the list.

    As you can see, the Ryu gets 11,768 points in the Tesuta 49. It edges out the previous number one by 1.2%. That might seem big, but we all know that Kawamoto boards are always a little better in Tesuta than in other benchmarks. It is a feat nonetheless. The Ryu 49 lagged behind the Seraphim Mk. IV by 3.8%.

    Now in Plato, it reaches respectable 14,911 points. That is still behind the 14,913 points of the Seraphim, but holly shit did Kawamoto get close. Just for comparison, the Ryu 49 reached 13,544 points.

    Now to get to our own clown mark, the Ryu manages 8,372 points, compared to the 5,112 of the 49, or the 8,299 of the Seraphim. I have to say, I am impressed. And yes, nobody would use a naked Seraphim, the same as a naked Ryu.¡±

    Chuckles waved at the virtual display, and the bars vanished.

    ¡°So, let¡¯s come to the interesting numbers. The fully equipped board. We used our standard configuration, except for the Kawamoto 72A-66 app accelerator. For that, we have the integrated accelerator of the Ryu.

    The rest of the configuration, just to remind you, is a Burgmeister M-877 Sector buffer system, a Nemian 7673 scrambler module, a Magna 72 speed loader, an Avalon Descron 4 scrambler module, three Dalgon G-55-MX network modules, a Type 22 virtual co-processor, and last but not least the Seraphim Mk. II en- and decryption module.¡±

    The list of the parts appeared on the virtual display, and Chuckles continued:

    ¡°As you can guess, a fully populated board is a completely different type of beast. In the naked run, we only compared it to the Seraphim and the Ryu 49. Now we include the Nemian D-844 board in the ranking. You will see why.¡±

    The first bar appeared.

    ¡°Tesuta now gives an impressive 32,811 points. That is still far behind the Seraphim''s 34,538 points and even lags behind the Nemian''s 33,826.  The 49 is far beaten with 28, 874 points.

    Plato makes it clear why we don¡¯t trust commercial benchmarks all that much. It gives the Ryu 31,024 points. Compare that to the 43,093 of the Seraphim or the 40,076 of the Nemian it is clear that while Tesuta is biased in favor of the Ryu, Plato is biased against it. Still, for a Kawamoto board to get 31k points in Dalgon¡¯s benchmark is a good showing. And just for completeness, the 49 had 22337 points.¡±

    Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

    While they talked, the bars in question were shown on the display.

    ¡°So, let¡¯s come to the main course here. The clown mark. With 17,876 points, it more than doubles its result from the naked run. So how does it stack up to the competition?

    Let¡¯s find out, after a message from our sponsor¡­¡±

    The usual commercial was displayed. Usually, I used an adblocker, but for some content providers, like Chuckles, I had deactivated it. Yes, stupid, I know, but I was quite sure that nobody would be able to put malware on my board. Well, not malware that would work anyway. That was one of the reasons why Glory, and Precious before her, run an absolutely unique, one-of-a-kind operating system.

    That did of course, not mean that I enjoyed being bombarded by advertisements, but for a few selected sources, I had decided to support their work.

    A couple of minutes later Chuckles appeared again.

    ¡°Welcome back. Now the Nemian is still #2 on the list, but with 18,070 points, that is a very small lead of 1.1%. Now, most people have already guessed it, the new and old king, or should I say queen, is Seraphim. Her Mk. IV is still the best board money can buy with 19,430 clown points. But that is an interesting showing from last year. And naturally, the 49, which came to #21 last year14,658 points.¡±

    I was now a bit confused. Sure, it was nice to hear that the best Kawamoto had to bring to the table was still behind what I had made, but why did Dante think this was something I should see? Well, for now, Chuckles continued.

    ¡°Of course, that is not the whole story. We all know that a Nemian sets you back around DC 2.3 million. And compared to the increase in performance, the Seraphim with its DC 2.7 million is a very good deal. But the 8% weaker Ryu is available for £¤225 million, or DC 750k. If you have the money, I still say get a Seraphim. Those 8% can someday save your ass. But on the other hand, the Ryu costs 28% of what a Seraphim costs. But as always, the decision is yours.¡±

    They grabbed a standard screwdriver and moved around the table where the Ryu was laying.

    ¡°But now, let¡¯s get to the teardown.¡±

    They opened up the case and removed the cover.

    ¡°As you can see, Kawamoto has some serious sound-dampening going on here. Thanks to it being silent-breeze? that has, fortunately, no negative effect on the cooling and the performance.¡±

    He removed the sound-dampening foam, and I understood immediately why Dante had pointed me toward this video.

    Sure, they had switched a few things around, and the utility accelerator took up the space of two of the UEB connectors, but the core of the board was impossible to mistake. For some reason, Kawamoto had decided to make the new Ryu a clone of my Mk IV! Well, around 95% clone I would say. They changed the casing of course, but I mostly had the customer provide the design for the case, so that did not count. But the rest¡­ well, it explained how Kawamoto increased the performance by nearly 22%.

    I felt a spike of anger going through me, but it took me only a few minutes to calm myself down. Kawamoto would not be very happy when Michael revealed the Q-link, quickly followed by the new processor family, and the new Mk VI.

    So, let them have their 6 months of place in the sun. Heck, even producing the Mk IV industrially and selling it that way would rain on their parade.

    But for now, Chuckles continued:

    ¡°As some of the more tech affine of our viewers will probably already have deduced, we now look at the reason why the new Ryu is so much better than the last Ryu. And for those who have not noticed it, here is a picture that I have taken from a board review roughly two years ago.¡±

    A picture of the innards of the Mk IV was shown.

    ¡°As you can see, there are some similarities between those two boards. And the board I¡¯ve shown you? That was the Seraphim Mk IV. So Kawamoto managed to close the gap to the top, by mostly cloning the best board one can buy.

    It has to be very grating on Kawamoto, that they still drag 8% behind the Queen. Maybe we will, in time find out why the Ryu is weaker than the almost identical Seraphim.

    It couldn¡¯t be the only difference in the configuration. The UA that is integrated into the Ryu is a bit better than the 72-A66 that is commercially available.¡±

    That was actually a good point. I looked closer at the insides of the board, and I have to confess, it took me a bit to find a real difference.

    And I was pretty sure that Kawamoto did know it as well. But liability laws required this change.

    Meanwhile, Chuckles finished their presentation:

    ¡°If we judge only by performance, the result is pretty obvious. There is still nothing more powerful than the Seraphim Mk IV available anywhere. But we are business people. If all you have are less than a million DC, then the Ryu is a decent alternative. I still would suggest that if you can afford it, get a Seraphim, but the Ryu is better than anything else in its price class, and it beats several boards around the DC 2 million mark.

    All in all, the new Kawamoto Ryu is a surprisingly performant board. But it is just sad that the second biggest corporation in the whole world needs to steal the technical design from somebody else to make their very best. I would hope that they had a very good R&D department.¡±

    They reassembled the board and closed the case.

    ¡°But as things are, and as scummy as I think this behavior is, we will have to live with Kawamoto doing what Kawamoto wants to do. Now, that¡¯s all for today folks. I wish you a good day and stay safe in your quest to set the matrix on fire.¡±

    I had managed to get my anger back under control. Yes, it was a jerk move. And it told stories about Kawamoto. But Kawa was at this time most likely the most powerful and richest corporation in the world. It had been Panacea, but those jerks were falling fast.

    I was guessing that at the time when the Mk VI was coming out, and for sale, it would be at once significantly cheaper than the Mk IV, and I already knew that it would be orders of magnitude more powerful. 22%? Well, they tried.

    When I looked into the comment section, I found the expected nearly flame war going on.

    I found the usual hordes of fanbois, of Kawamoto, of Chuckles, and, of course, of me blasting their ever-surprising ignorance and mindless devotion into the matrix. Like everybody else, I had learned to mostly ignore them.

    There were a few more sane people there, stemming against the tide of brain-damaged chimps sprouting nonsense they believed to be true.

    Still, sometimes you find something interesting in those comment threads, and I skimmed through it.

    At first, it was a crowing of my fans that Kawa had to steal my tech and still couldn¡¯t do it right. The response of the Kawa-fans was mostly about how the price-for-performance was sooo much better and if I were so good as everybody said, I would make the boards as cheap as Kawamoto.

    Idiots, all of them.

    Fortunately, things had calmed down after the various zealots had spent their powder, and saner heads had mostly taken over.

    Still, by now it had devolved into an argument that some people declared the Seraphim Mk IV the best board there is.

    I struggled with myself for a moment, but in the end, I had nothing better to do right now, so I entered the fray.

    My message, ¡°To make it clear, the Mk IV is the best board one can buy, not the best that exists.¡± was followed first by a moment of silence.

    Then one member of the ¡°Mk IV for president¡±-faction with the handle Serarocks answered me:

    Serarocks: ¡°Just because you are too stupid to make something like the Mk IV does not mean that Seraphim is too. You are just jealous of her!¡±

    What the¡­ did I stutter? Where did this person get the idea that I was jealous? Of myself?

    Thus came my message: ¡°?!?¡±

    Serarocks: ¡±You know full well what I mean. You are just a sniveling little coward who can¡¯t accept that a woman is better than him. You are not even man enough to create an account here for your bullshit. Grow some balls and give us a name! Coward!¡±

    That was disturbing. How¡­ what¡­ then I noticed that my messages had been sent under the name of USER2t5edhl8. I realized that this was the first time I had used Glory to go to Chuckles¡¯ site.

    I typed my next message:

    ¡°Oh, sorry. New hardware. I had not realized that I was not logged in.¡±

    The login was really fast. After all, like most of the dark web sites, Chuckles used the neural imprint as authentification. That was accompanied by the system message of the comments:

    User2t5edhl8 is now known as Seraphim

    The nice thing about this type of authentification was that once you had obtained the handle, nobody else could use it. The reaction was almost instant:

    Bluefin: ¡°Burn!¡±

    TrustyMallard: ¡°Oh the gringe!¡±

    LoneYeti: ¡°Ouch, that must hurt.¡±

    After a few seconds Serarocks came back:

    Serarocks: ¡°But¡­ why? Why are YOU saying that your Mk IV is not the best?¡±

    Urgh, I hated that. But¡­ I could not let those stupid souls wallow in ignorance.

    Seraphim: ¡°Do you know what makes the Mk IV the best board one can buy?¡±

    FarmDessert: ¡°Because it is the fastest?¡±

    Barnaclue: ¡°Yeah, it is better than the rest.¡±

    Serarocks: ¡°Even Chuckles says it is 8% faster than the rest.¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°Than the rest you can BUY. That is the important point. Every jack is different. And their boards have to be adapted to their way of navigating the matrix. That makes it necessary for the better boards to be modular. So that the jack can adapt it to their individual style.¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°But modularity has a price. The interface between the modules costs a microscopic amount of time for each and every action. The modules are a bit farther apart, so the signal path is a tiny bit longer. To make the modules modular, they have to sacrifice a bit. An integrated system of the same functionality is smaller, which means you get more systems in, or you can upgrade to the next size without sacrificing volume in your case.¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°That means that if you have a talented Tech at hand, who you can trust, you are almost always better served with them creating a board specifically to your needs.¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°The thing that makes the Mk IV so much better than the other boards you can buy, that are modular, is that I managed to optimize the signal paths, to make it that much faster than other modular boards, giving it almost the performance of the better integrated boards. Nemian managed to copy a part of my design, so he captured the #2 spot.

    Seraphim: ¡°But in the end, an integrated board is in most cases better. I personally think my Mk II is the best, but I can¡¯t say for sure. It is the integrated version of the Mk IV. I¡¯ve made two of them. One for Spectre, and one for me. And they perform roughly 14% better than a similarly configured Mk IV.

    Serarocks: ¡±But, why don¡¯t you sell the Mk III then? If it is better?¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°Unless I spent the time and effort to design the board to the jack in question, it is much worse than the Mk IV. For them. The Mk III is a bespoke board.¡±

    Serarocks: ¡°Bespoke? What does that mean?¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°That means each of them is made specifically to complement the intended user. Like a perfectly tailored piece of clothing. Those just don¡¯t fit right for anybody else. And the process of tailoring the board to the jack costs a premium of time and effort. Depending on the jack, I would have to spend up to six months exclusively analyzing their style.¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°If we just ignore the cost of it, and believe me, six months of exclusive use of my time is Expensive, the amount of trust is simply not there with anybody else than Spectre.¡±

    Serarocks: ¡°Trust? But you are the most trustworthy of all the techs.¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°Think about it, if I analyzed the jack down to this detail, I know EVERYTHING about them. I almost certainly know their real name, their family, where they live, and so on. I also know exactly where to hit to make them spiral out of control. You don¡¯t give that amount of control to somebody who you don¡¯t absolutely know. Reputation for trustworthiness or not.¡±

    Serarocks: ¡°But you still make the best board there is?¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°I like to believe so. So far I have not found any indication against it. But I can¡¯t be sure. In the same way I won¡¯t give specifics about my Mk III, most jacks don¡¯t give specifics about their boards. Yes, the ones who don¡¯t have a tech who can tailor their bespoke board will most likely have a Seraphim or a Nemian. But the bespoke boards are an enigma.¡±

    IslandBanana: ¡°That is all nice and fine, but what I want to know, is how come the Kawa is so much cheaper than your Mk IV?¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°Kawamoto has real manufacturing plants. The Mk IV is always made in industrial fabbers. That increases the cost between two and 4 times. Just making it. The raw materials for a small shop with an indy-fab are also significantly higher than what Kawamoto can get with their bulk purchases. Then of course the shop where the indy-fab makes the Mk IV wants to get a cut of the action.¡±

    Serarocks: ¡°So, if you were to make the Mk IV in your new corporation it would be cheaper?¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°That is the plan. But that will still take some time, and we will not be able to compete with Kawamoto on price. They are one of the biggest corps and simply get better prices.¡±

    Bassasin: ¡°Hu, won¡¯t Kawa be angry if you compete with their new Ryu?¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°Well, I think it is pretty clear that the Seraphim Mk IV is the original. But we will burn that bridge when we come to it. I think the overall increase in board demand will make that irrelevant.¡±

    DefiantDiva: ¡°But, well, they used your design. How does it come that the Ryu is 8% slower?¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°In one word, liability. The Mk IV scrapes on the limit of what is possible. Everybody who buys it knows that and if something breaks, they curse and have it repaired. Kawa can¡¯t do that. They have commercial liability.¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°Sure, they don¡¯t care if it is a small shop or even a B-class corp. But if it is an A-class or higher, they have to honor the liability. That means they have to make sure that under normal circumstances nothing breaks. For that, and their UA, they have changed the signal paths slightly. Also, they have put a heat spreader onto the CPU and GPU. That alone increases the temperature under the same load by I would guess 15, maybe 20¡ã. That is room for the Mk IV to use more power.¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°Oh, and they use KVOS for it. While not a bad OS, it is designed to work the same with their peon boards as it is with the Ryu. On the other hand, I have created and optimized the OS of the Mk IV specifically for the Mk IV. Even the Mk III uses a slightly different OS. That results in some slowdown.¡±

    TwinCruncher: ¡°So, if they said fuck you to the liability, they could get to the same performance as the Mk IV?¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°Not with the UA and KVOS. But they could come closer.¡±

    Serarocks: ¡°But if Kawa had to conform to liability, then if you sell the Mk IV through your new corp, won¡¯t you as well?¡±

    Seraphim: ¡°Yes, of course. But unlike Kawamoto, I know how I got the performance out of the board, and where I can tweak it and still be within the bounds of liability.¡±

    After that, the discussion came down to the general issues of board design, and another 20 minutes later, I logged off.

 2.13: Enhanced Negotiations pt. 4

    I did not even manage a single week before I caved in and began to examine the Seeberger equation regarding gravity manipulation. That was shorter than I hoped I would resist, but a couple of days longer than I had expected.

    The math itself was going well. I was halfway sure I had already identified what variables I had to isolate. The moment that happened, I would only be a month or so away from solving the equation towards gravity.

    If, and that was a big if, my experience with quantum entanglement was a good indicator. If not it could go from somewhere above a month to a couple of years. I had to keep my expectations in check.

    Unlike with QE, Seeberger had not provided the roadmap to solve the equation. In retrospect, I am pretty sure that he was very close to getting Q-links up and running but ultimately died before he got it done.

    As it was, I at once loved and hated the equation. I loved the challenge, and the possibility to understand how the universe worked. I hated the dang headache the equation still gave me every single time. The tedium of trying to understand how what term influenced the description of reality in which way.

    Nonetheless, after two weeks of working with the math, at low compression, as I did not want to be idle without anything to figure out, I was making progress.

    Surprisingly, much of my time was spent sitting in cyberspace and seemingly doing nothing, interspersed by some scrolling around the equation, writing out my results, and then doing nothing again. In reality, my brain was working at full power, just trying to manipulate the monster.

    I have to confess, I had been a bit anti-social during that time. I still did cook on my days, and eat with the others, and of course, I had my evenings and nights with Ben.

    Otherwise, I barely talked with people. I even tried to avoid my Tuesday meeting with Michael, at least the first time. He managed to pull Warden to his side and together they annoyed me to the point where I just threw up my hands and had the meeting.

    As a concession to my immersion into the grav-coil problem, we did not hold the meeting in real-time in the physical meeting room, but instead at 30:1 in VR. I had to agree that I could spare four whole minutes a week for the corporation I mostly owned.

    The big topic was, naturally, the release of our jacks. The rest of the cyberware too, of course, but the jacks were the main seller right now. And the impact, let me formulate it this way, Michael was already in the process of building another block-sized manufactory. At least in the beginning we would have to resort to bots doing most of the work.

    Seriously, I really should try to get an educational VI up and running. But¡­ another tangent to take me away from my math¡­ whelp, it couldn¡¯t be helped.

    Maybe I could simply ask Apollo for help.

    On other fronts, it was a bit disturbing that Ralcon had yet to make a move. It was already 2? weeks since we made the offer. They should be falling over themselves to get the source code of Envision VR.

    Sure, if they would have to buy it, I could understand that they would try to reverse-engineer it. But get real. The ¡®price¡¯ they would ¡®pay¡¯ for it was a promise not to mess with us. And with Envision VR, messing with us would be against their own best interests.

    I was reconsidering our options. It would be a major setback if we had to move the production to somewhere else.

    Not only had we invested quite a bit of money into the real estate, not to mention the factories themselves. Or the S&P Excelsior. But that was only money. I knew where I could get more.

    No, the real problem was that one of the goals of Enki was to employ the masses in queens. And that would be hard to do if we had to relocate to the CAS, the EU, or the Commonwealth.

    So, when Michael opened the Tuesday meeting by telling me that Ralcon had requested the follow-up meeting for Thursday, I was relieved. At first.

    That changed when he told me that my presence was explicitly wanted.

    For a moment I was not quite sure I had heard him correctly.

    ¡°You are saying that they want me to be there?¡±

    This was one of the occasions where I wanted to wipe Michael''s stupid grin from his face.

    His cheerful: ¡°Yup. They insisted on that.¡± Did nothing to make me feel more forgiving.

    My answer was accordingly: ¡°They have to live without. I don¡¯t have the time, or the patience, for that.¡± And yes, I was grumpy. I had things to do, secrets to figure out, physics to understand, and math to unravel. Who were those guys demanding that I would be there? No thank you.

    Despite my words, Michael¡¯s grin stayed on his face.

    ¡°You know you will come in the end. So why don¡¯t you spare all of us the posturing and weedling and just say yes from the beginning? And time, if it was really a time thing, you would use 120:1 compression to figure out the math of that thing you are doing. One day at most and you¡¯re done. You don¡¯t do that because it is your hobby. You can interrupt it at any time.¡±

    I growled at his words, rolling my eyes.

    ¡°I am busy figuring out this math. That is hard enough. Any distraction, and who knows how much insight I lose. How much it will set me back?¡±

    ¡°Who of us is the one with the ¡®perfect¡¯ memory? It will be as if you never stopped a second for you.¡±

    Now Michael frowned for a bit and crossed his arms. Did he not understand that this was exactly why he was the CEO? All that wheeling and dealing was¡­ torture for me.

    ¡°Do you have any idea how inspiration works? You can¡¯t just take a break, do something else and come back to it as if nothing had happened.¡±

    This time, it was Michael who rolled his eyes.

    ¡°Seriously? V, you are a genius, but even here, in VR, unless you use your Seraphim-avatar, you just can¡¯t lie. You know that you can go back to it at any time. So why bother with lying here?¡±

    ¡°Because I don¡¯t want to go there. There is nothing that I am needed there. And I can¡¯t stand those corporate slimeballs. Last time, I had to take a shower for an hour just to get the revolting feeling off my skin.¡±

    His snort was not quite the answer I had expected.

    ¡°You think you are the only one? Yeah, you are a bit more sensitive to those assholes. But I don¡¯t know anybody who enjoys their presence. But I have to remind you, we need to have their goodwill. That means unless there is a real reason that you can¡¯t be there, and I am talking about you being in a coma as an example here, if they want you to be there, you will be there.

    I will go to dad and have him drag you there if I have to. In that manner, are you accepting your fate, or do I have to take drastic steps?¡±

    He was right of course. We did need at least their tacit approval, if not cooperation. But it was so¡­ I just could not understand what they wanted from me. Yes, it was my inventions that made Enki a possibility. But it was Michael who steered the company. He made the decisions. On that level of business, I was unnecessary.

    ¡°But why? They don¡¯t need me to negotiate. I am not even the figurehead of Enki. At most I am the tinkerer that makes the toys.¡±

    His heavy sigh told me that his patience was running out.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. And frankly, I don¡¯t care. They told me that you were to be there. I am sure they have a reason but they have not deigned to tell me that reason. And until Enki is established way more than it is now, when Ralcon says they want you there, you will be there.¡±

    I buried my face in my palms. I so did not want to waste hours of my life watching people posture and negotiate. But I knew that Michael was right here. We needed Ralcon to be at least neutral. For that, they needed the Envision VR program. And if they wanted me to be there¡­

    ¡°Fine! I¡¯ll be there.¡± I snarled. I know, it was unfair to be angry at Michael, but he was there, and he brought the unwelcome news, so he was it.

    The rest of the meeting was the same good news. We were sourcing bots en masse to ramp up production. The second plant was basically shooting out of the ground with the amount of money Michael was pouring into it.

    And we could not keep the jacks on the shelves. The average shelf time for the basic jack was a bit over six hours. It was a bit better for the higher-level jacks. A low-jack remained on the shelves for an average of 16 hours, a mid for 23 hours, and a high for 33 hours. We only made the ultra-jack on demand, so no shelf time here.

    It was a similar story with the other cyberware. In all honesty, we would need another chip fabber soon, as we barely were able with the processor demand. We only made the cranial board on demand, but the HUD was nearly as often requested as the basic jack. Luckily, we had over-dimensioned the basic fabrication of Neuronect by a couple of orders of magnitude.

    But in summary, we were not able to keep up with demand in any way. In a way, a good problem to have. For a short time, until frustration set in with the potential customers. The big problem I saw was sustained demand. We only had so many humans to sell cyberware to. Yes, the number of humans was still something the human mind simply could not grasp, but it was a finite one.

    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

    It would be a fool''s errand to ramp up production to instantly satisfy the demand. It would cost in the region of 1000 times as much for us to build the facilities to do so, only for the demand to vanish in a couple of days.

    Not that upgrading our capabilities right now would pose a danger in that regard. Let¡¯s be honest, our target demographics were around 400 million people. For now, without the concerted push of the big corps to ¡®provide¡¯ service, aka selling stuff, to the poorer parts of humanity. Then we could expect a customer base of nearly a billion people. Right now we were producing a bit over 2000 jacks per day.

    With the planned upgrades of our production capacity, in the end, we would get to around 100000 jacks a day. That sounds like much, but again, with that number, it would take us 10000 days, or more than 27 years just to satisfy the initial demand. That did nothing for upgrades or new customers.

    At that, we were considering temporarily boosting our jack production to 1 million a day for a year or a year and a half by diverting the capacities to the jacks for the cost of other cyberware.

    Then we would have satisfied the initial demand and the first of the follow-on of sponsored jacks and could slow down to 10 or maybe 100k a day without problems. But that was a question for the business types. I was pretty sure that in two years, we would have quite a diverse product lineup and the jacks would make a comparatively small part of our business.

    Just the other cyberware would outpace it. All the other toys I already did have ready, and that Michael knew about would make the cyberware market look small.

    To summarize the meeting, we would increase our capacity for the moment but revisit the decision monthly.

    That left me to get back to my math. Yeah sure, as if I could concentrate enough on the math to get anywhere. I could not get the meeting with Ralcon out of my head. Two days of fretting about why they wanted me to be there.

    Needless to say, I spent the next one and a half days killing time. Making music, exercising, relaxing, you know it. Don¡¯t get me wrong, I tried to work on the Seeberger equation, but as I already said, it was going nowhere.

    Dang, I hated that.

    It did not help that I was not sleeping well during that time, and was, well, let¡¯s say I was a bit cranky when Michael came to fly to the same hotel we had met Ralcon the last time.

    Again it was galling for me to see Michael¡¯s two bodyguards in their cheap suits. Seriously, did neither of them realize that they now represented Enki? An up-and-coming corporation?

    As soon as we had sat down in the Merc, I sighed heavily.

    ¡°You have to do something about Conall and Ruben. The way they dress is simply not acceptable.¡±

    Michael¡¯s look was more curious than anything else.

    ¡°The way they dress? Do I have to remind you that you spent most of your time in some very comfortable overalls? What makes you think that you have the position to criticize them?¡±

    While he was not completely wrong, I think he missed the point.

    ¡°Usually, as, when I am alone and doing work in cyberspace you mean? Not when I am out and representing our corporation?¡±

    I saw understanding in his eyes, and he gave my attire a once-over. I had, again, made myself a decent dark power suit, again from nanotubes. Michael was wearing one of the suits I had made for him from nanotubes as well. As were Justin and Ryan.

    We had decided that there was no need for Darren and Kate this time. Melissa, Rafael, the accountant, who I by that time knew as Louvell Douglas, all of them were in stylish quality clothes for a business meeting.

    Conall and Ruben on the other hand¡­ cheap polyester suits clearly straight from the rack, ill-fitting, and you did not need to be very observant to see the bulges under their arms. They compounded that by using cheap plastic sunglasses.

    Contrast that with Justin and Ryan. Both had navy blue nanotube suits, with the texture seemingly wool. I had first used the auto-tailor that came with the fortress but had long since bought a premium one from the web. They too wore sunglasses, as did we all, but theirs were flexible platinum frames with synthetic diamond instead of glass.

    All in all, they gave the impression of money, of class, while Ruben and Conall gave the impression of being low-class gangsters. Yes, I know that that was what the two actually were, but we had to give the impression of status.

    When we arrived at the hotel, the contrast between Michael¡¯s bodyguards and mine was staggering, and Michael was the face of Enki. He needed the spiffy guards much more than I did.

    Still, we arrived at the same meeting room, and again, were there first. The Ralcon delegation had changed quite a bit.

    Sure, boss man Dan and Phil were here again, as well as Haggerton. Simpson was not with them, and their security detail was quite a bit smaller as well. I was happy that they left Walt wherever he was.

    But that did not make their group much smaller. They had some other people with them. One of them seemed to be in a snit.

    I would have guessed his age at mid-50s, and he wore a clearly very expensive suit in the newest style. Patterned with silver pinstripes on black, in an asymmetrical cut, without any lapels, but a matching west, his whole getup screamed ¡°look at me, I am trying to be important¡±. To me, it just suggested that he was a wannabe.

    The other two new people, a man around I would guess 30, and a woman in her mid-20s were so clearly nerds that I was pretty sure they were there to provide technical explanations.

    Dan saw us sitting, gave a side glance to Mr. Important, and sighed.

    ¡°So we meet again.¡± He took the same center seat that he had taken last time, while Phil again sat to his right. Instead of Haggerton, the seat directly to his left was taken by Mr. Important.

    When all of their delegation, except the guards, of course, had sat down, Dan continued:

    ¡°Let me introduce Dr. Symmonds here. He is the CIO of Ralcon, and he insisted to meet with you in person.¡± That, he said in a very tired tone, while he pointed ad Mr. Important.

    Symmonds gestured dismissively to cut Dan off and, in a very annoyed tone, spoke into the room:

    ¡°I can talk for myself, Elos. Now, who of you is the swindler that had the idea of selling us a faked VR system?¡±

    Oh boy, it seemed that Symmonds had a bone to pick.

    With some effort, I kept myself from firing back from both barrels, and so it was Michael that answered:

    ¡°What makes you think that we are selling you a fake VR system?¡±

    Symmonds huffed and placed his hands on the table, rather forcefully.

    ¡°Because it can¡¯t be done. If it can¡¯t be done, then you are trying to scam us.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°You, little girl, that is no laughing matter. I don¡¯t understand why those retards brought a child to this discussion, but if you can¡¯t take this seriously, get out.¡±

    I sighed, and looked directly at him:

    ¡°I am here because you specifically asked for me to be here. To be honest, I have better things to do than to sit here and watch the negotiators negotiate, but you asked, so here I am. And obviously, you are wrong about the impossibility of giving Envision VR capabilities.¡±

    Symmonds looked at me, then at Dan, probably Elos, then back to me, before he lit into Dan.

    ¡°That is a joke, right? You want me to believe that this little girl was the one that managed to con you? You know what, Elos, I will see you demoted.¡±

    I cleared my throat, and when Symmonds returned his attention to me, I addressed him directly:

    ¡°Mr. Symmonds¡­¡± only to be interrupted by the pompous gasbag: ¡°That is doctor Symmonds, you imbecile. I did not spend eight years getting my Ph.D. just for some little child whore from the street to call me Mr.¡±

    I waited for a moment and began smiling at him before I continued:

    ¡°Well, Mr. Symmonds, as I was trying to say, just because you could not find a solution to making Envision VR capable does not mean that it is impossible. And just a small application of logic, or intelligence, would have told you that there is no way that what we gave you doesn¡¯t work.¡±

    Symmonds half rose from his chair when Michael continued:

    ¡°Think about it doctor. What is it that we want? What does Enki need from Ralcon? We need you to not interfere with us. And let¡¯s be honest, the contract will be just a nice piece of plasfilm. We are not na?ve enough to believe that it would stop Ralcon in any way from squashing us. So, please tell me, what would we gain by giving you a false product?

    If we assume, just for sake of the discussion, that we managed to pull one over you, and you find out it does not work, what do you think will happen to us? Right now, Ralcon doesn¡¯t want to have our product on the market. That is the only reason why you would spend resources to stop us.

    If we scammed you, it would be a matter of keeping your face. Instead of just a business decision, it would be imperative for you to destroy us. So, do you really think that we are stupid enough to mess with Ralcon?¡±

    That took Symmonds wind out of his sails. For a moment. Unfortunately, his silence did not last very long:

    ¡°What do I know what degenerates like you think they can get away with? I just want to know how you managed to con our people.¡±

    I snorted, and his glare landed on me again.

    ¡°What¡¯s so funny, girl?¡±

    ¡°Well, Mr. Symmonds¡­¡± again, he interrupted me: ¡°For the last time, it is doctor Symmonds. Are you too stupid to understand this difference?¡±

    I tilted my head, while I looked him in the eye. ¡°So, doctor? I assume you mean a Ph.D. right? Where did you buy it from?¡±

    ¡°Yes, a Ph.D. in computer science. I got it from the University of Pennsylvania.¡± My low opinion of his mental acuity was proven right there and then. He did not even realize the dig at his academic pedigree.

    ¡°A Ph.D. in computer science. How¡­ nice.¡±

    He scoffed.

    ¡°What does a little girl like you know about a Ph.D. in comp-sci? Grow up and we can talk.¡±

    I smiled as sweetly as I managed at him.

    ¡°Oh, I know a little bit about getting a Ph.D. in computer science. I have one after all. Along with a Ph.D. in nano-engineering. After that, I did not bother jumping through the hoops to get other pretty plasfilms to hang on my wall.¡±

    He looked at me with an open mouth for a few seconds before he sneered at me:

    ¡°You? A doctor in computer science? You expect me to believe that?¡±

    I leaned back in my chair.

    ¡°Well, for starters, you could look up my doctoral thesis. It is publicly available. As is yours. Which is the reason why I keep calling you Mister. The moment your name was said I looked it up. And I read it while you were ranting about how Envision VR could not be done. I have to say, I am not impressed.¡±

    He visibly recoiled, but then his expression hardened.

    ¡°You want me to believe that not only have you read the 45 pages of my thesis in less than a minute, and understood it enough that you think you can criticize it?¡±

    I sighed, rolled my eyes again, and then lifted an eyebrow.

    ¡°You are aware of the product Enki is selling, right? I mean, have you ever thought about what it means to have an implanted com feeding directly into a jack? And I have to correct you, all that banter took roughly two minutes. More than half an hour for me in VR. And it isn¡¯t as if your thesis was hard to understand, you know.

    I mean, ¡®you¡¯ made the observation of lacking data security and how it negatively impacts society. 37 of your 45 pages are simply everyday examples of that, two pages are references, and one page is the intro, leaving five pages for ¡®your¡¯ conclusion. And my critique is, you essentially made your thesis that water is wet.

    We as a society have known since the late 20<sup>th</sup> century that inadequate data security is ¡®bad¡¯¡± I actually used air quotes for the bad here.

    ¡°Your ¡®findings¡¯ are that all the hundreds of thousands of studies done for the last 200 years were all correct. And the worst part? I found the exact same doctoral thesis more than 20 times, from universities and colleges all over the US. Some predating ¡®yours¡¯ by several years.¡±

    I leaned forward and propped my chin on my hands.

    ¡°That was what I meant with where you bought your Ph.D. as any halfway competent mentor would have thrown you out of the program. Of course, I know how that here in the USA, the more important the student is, the easier it is for them to get their degree. You must be from a really important family.¡±

    He just kept opening and closing his mouth, completely speechless. The girl nerd piped up in his place:

    ¡°And¡­ if I may ask, what was your thesis then?¡± It was hard to hear her, as faintly as she talked.

    ¡°A good question. My thesis was ¡®Advanced integration of non-VR systems into a VR environment¡¯.¡±

    That brought a ¡°fuck¡± from the boy nerd, and when all the attention was directed at him, he turned red but stammered:

    ¡°That was what, three years ago? Four? We thought the author might help us bring Envision into the modern age. But Dr. Symmonds decided that was just gibberish.¡±

    Phil groaned and facepalmed, while Dan pressed his lips together. I just shrugged.

    ¡°I probably would not have helped you anyway. I was¡­ let¡¯s say I was a bit against big corporations at that point. Hence my going to the dark web.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ you could have done it?¡±

    ¡°Maybe. I¡¯ve grown over the last few years, and have now several tools that I lacked then. Even if I had tried it, it would likely have taken around a year to do what I do now in a week.¡±

 2.14: Enhanced Negotiations Pt. 5

    My admission was answered by nearly a minute of silence until Michael softly knocked onto the table.

    ¡°While all this is quite entertaining, how about we get on with business? I am sure, you have better things to do than to speculate what might have been possible two or three years ago.¡±

    Dan Elos shook his head and then sighed.

    ¡°Yes, I think you are right. Regardless of what Dr. Symmonds thinks, Ralcon needs that tech. If it really works that is.¡±

    I groaned and Michael slumped, with Michael declaring exasperated:

    ¡°Oh come on. I can see why your CIO might get the idea that it doesn¡¯t work, but you at least should be smart enough to realize that we will not fuck ourselves over by fucking you over.¡±

    Elos nodded slowly.

    ¡°Yes, that is true. But one factor remains. From everything I have heard, every time we tried to integrate VR functionality into Envision, it became unusable. Everything but the beefiest machines could not run it. And despite what Ms. DuClare might think, or is that Dr. DuClare?¡±

    He looked directly at me, and I just shook my head.

    ¡°I have the right to the title, but it is just a title. I prefer you judge me by what I can do instead of what title I was able to achieve, steal, hustle or buy. So I am okay with Ms..¡±

    He looked at me for a moment, before he nodded sharply, and continued:

    ¡°Ok, as I was saying, despite what Ms. DuClare might think, we don¡¯t employ duds. Our ¡®code monkeys¡¯ might not be in her league, but they are not that bad. So, how were you able to integrate VR into Envision?¡±

    I smiled at him.

    ¡°You got that the wrong way around.¡±

    His surprised ¡°Huh?¡± was frankly, pretty amusing, but I continued without laughing:

    ¡°I don¡¯t know if it is possible to integrate VR into Envision. If you par it down, and exclude the legacy, probably. If not, it would most likely be very hard, if at all possible. But I did not do that at all. Instead, I created a very bare-bones VR OS, that runs Envision on a virtual machine. That works because it intercepts most calls and is significantly more economical with resources.

    It puts every application, every legacy function, in its own VM, and only accesses them when it is needed. Honestly, from what I could see, Envision would work quite fine without at least 30% of the programs, drivers, and services that it routinely starts. The VR system starts those tasks and then shunts them into a passive VM until they are needed. In theory, it is significantly more inefficient, but in reality, with all the garbage that Envision puts up, it makes it run much smoother.

    And before you ask, yes, I left the ¡®telemetry¡¯ functions up and running.

    And as you probably have seen, it takes considerably more oomph from the garbage can than vanilla Envision, if it runs in VR. Outside of VR, in my experience, it reduces the strain on the system quite a bit.¡±

    The two nerds sat there, their mouths hanging open, while ¡®Dr. Ph.D. in computer science¡¯ Symmonds just looked at me without even the slightest hint of understanding in his eyes.

    When the ¡®good doctor¡¯ remained silent, Dan looked first at him, then, after a few seconds, he sighed, shook his head, and turned to the boy nerd.

    ¡°You, nerd, is what she says realistic?¡±

    Both nerds flinched, turned red, and looked around as if they just had committed a crime. It was, interestingly, the girl that answered:

    ¡°Uh, sir, I¡­ that is we¡­ well, we never¡­ it is¡­¡±

    Dan barked: ¡°Spit it out, damn it!¡± and again, both nerds flinched.

    The boy swallowed visibly, took a deep breath, and then, in a faint voice, answered:

    ¡°Well, sir, yes, it is plausible. I can¡¯t say if it would work. We have never even thought about that approach. Usually, if you shunt something into a VM, you lose available power and resources.¡±

    The girl continued, equally flustered: ¡°Normally, to try to use a VM to reduce the strain is just, well, it is stupid. But if the VM cuts out the unneeded tasks¡­ well, it might work. And if it works, it is brilliant.¡±

    Mr. Elos slumped a bit.

    ¡°And how do we know if it works? Just to make it clear, is it possible that this was just bullshit and we are hunting for some fake shit?¡±

    The boy squared his shoulders, but was still unable to look Dan in the eyes:

    ¡°Uhm, yes, sir, it is possible. Until we get the source code, we have no way to say if it is real or not. And that is what we need to know if it works or not.¡±

    I gave a slight nod to Justin, and he produced a thumb drive and placed it on the table.

    I then said:

    ¡°Here are the program, as an archive, in installer form, and the source code. It is only 2.3 TB as the installer. The archive is a bit smaller, and I gave you the source code without the public libraries, so it is only around 260 GB.¡±

    Dan swiveled towards me, then looked at the stick on the table, then back at me:

    ¡°Just like that? You are just giving it to us?¡±

    It was Michael that provided the answer:

    ¡°Did you listen to us? Any contract between us is essentially worthless. Yes, a nice legal fig leaf, but nothing more. If you want to destroy Enki, you will, contract or no contract. The ¡®price¡¯ for the software is that you just let us be. And when you have it, it is in your interest to let us be. So yes, we are just giving it to you.¡±

    He narrowed his eyes, looking at Michel now:

    ¡°And you don¡¯t want to extort some concessions from us? You just assume we play fair?¡±

    Michael chuckled.

    ¡°What would concessions from you be worth? Let¡¯s face the facts here. If we don¡¯t give this to you, Envision will keep slowly dying. Us providing cheap and safe jacks will accelerate that decline. So without having this program, you essentially have to try to stop us.

    I still think you would at best delay us, but it is better to just not risk it.

    Now, if we give it to you, suddenly people having jacks becomes an advantage for you. That means that it might be a few bucks in your coffer if you manage to take us over, but it is almost certainly not worth the effort for you. Especially as I don¡¯t think the other triple-As would look favorably at you getting this technology.

    That changes if we force too many concessions out of you. I don¡¯t know where the break-even point would be, but the humiliation alone would most likely make it low. And it would be unlikely that we would gain anything substantial. We are well-capitalized, we have the land for our corporation already bought, and we are slowly knitting contacts with other corporations.

    The only thing you could provide for us, stopping others from fucking with us, you will most likely do anyway, just because of us succeeding will push your main product up, increasing your profit and influence.

    So tell me, what do we have to gain to hold you over the barrel?¡±

    Dan looked at Michael, then at me, then at the thumb drive, and then back at Michael.

    ¡°I see. And you are right. If you don¡¯t piss us off, and this thing actually works as you say it does, it would be an advantage for Ralcon to have you succeed.¡±

    He gestured towards the nerds, and the boy quickly grabbed the stick, putting it in a heavy, armored briefcase, before giving the briefcase to one of the security goons, who cuffed it to his wrist.

    I looked at it a bit confused, and could not stop myself from asking:

    ¡°What is the point of all this security?¡±

    Mr. Elos snorted before he answered me: ¡°I thought we had already established that this¡± he gestured to the briefcase, ¡°is the future of Ralcon. As Mr. Walker so succinctly explained, without it, Ralcon will be going down hard. So we keep it safe.¡±

    I shook my head slightly.

    ¡°Yes, I know that, but that is just one thumb drive. Those things are cheap as heck. We have brought a dozen of them, just to be sure. And if everything fails, you give me a matrix address and a few minutes later, the files are there. I do have the installer, the source code, and the archive secured in several places.¡±

    When he looked at me a bit confused, I shrugged my shoulders.

    ¡°We are talking about a digital product. The stick is just a convenient way to transport it. And, frankly, this much security only tells people that you think what¡¯s inside that briefcase is valuable. You certainly don¡¯t want somebody stealing it and possibly patenting it, do you?¡±

    Phil snorted, while Dan spread his fingers and closed his eyes.

    A few seconds later, Dan shook his head and looked back at me.

    ¡°Then, Ms. DuClare, what would you suggest how we handle our future?¡±

    I massaged my temple but held his gaze.

    ¡°I would take that stick, connect it to one or all of the coms in your group, copy the files there, then make a connection to your servers and send the files directly, and after that, put this stick, and the other eleven into the various pockets you have in your clothes. After that, I would put some fake data on another stick, and put that into that briefcase. And finally, I would provide a matrix address to me so that the files can be transferred safely from my systems to yours.

    Oh, and of course, the moment the files land on your servers, you should immediately apply for a patent. Just to be sure.¡±

    Unfortunately, that was the moment, Symmonds came out of his funk.

    ¡°Preposterous. All that effort for some prank! You should be ashamed of yourself little girl. And I will see to it that you will regret it.¡±

    I cursed inwardly before I answered under gritted teeth: ¡°Mr. Symmonds, are you by chance aware of the existence of my VI?¡±

    He recoiled and looked at me confused. ¡°What?¡±

    ¡°I asked if you are aware of the VI that is listening to every single word that is said here? You know, the VI with access to essentially all the tools of one of the ten best hackers in the world with the primary objective to protect me at any costs and absolutely no compunction of eradicating whole cities in the process?

    Because, frankly, if you are, then there are much more pleasant ways to commit suicide. Ways that won¡¯t result in enough collateral damage to be considered a war crime.¡±

    That shut Symmonds up, for a moment. Then, with spittle flying from his mouth, he lifted the finger and berated me:

    ¡°That is just another of your irresponsible actions. People like you are a menace. A danger to society. Just to have such a VI running rogue, you deserve to be shot.¡±

    I steepled my hands in front of me and looked at him as coldly as I could manage.

    ¡°You mean people like you don¡¯t you?¡±

    He scoffed at me.

    ¡°People like me? I did not create a homicidal VI. That is solely on you.¡±

    I couldn¡¯t help myself and had to chuckle mirthlessly.

    ¡°But did you ever think about why? Why did I do it? Well, I can answer that, I did it because people like you made it inevitable. If I had known that a simulated fuzzy logic processor was enough to turn an expert system into a VI, there would be no VI hellbent on protecting me.¡±

    He sneered:

    ¡°So, you are stupid after all. And what has that to do with me?¡±

    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t go so far as to call me stupid. I mean, if the corporations, among them Ralcon, had not removed that little tidbit of information and had replaced it with the lie that a physical fuzzy logic processor has to be present in all textbooks, tutorials, and documentation, I would have known better. Unlike you I had to earn my Ph.D. in computer science, you know.¡±

    He slapped the table:

    ¡°Is that all you have? Conspiracy theories and lies?¡±

    I leaned back.

    ¡°No, what I have is the Panacea dump.¡±

    Symmonds was not the only one who was confused by that, and I calmly continued:

    ¡°A few months ago, the Phantom hacked Panacea, I am sure you know about it. No question that Ralcon gobbled up any information from it it could get. But, just for fun, I had my VI look into it if it could find something that explained how the substitution happened.

    And lo and behold, it found the minutes of the cybersecurity meeting of the Inter-Concernal Security Conference of 2120, as well as the digitally signed contract between all the triple- and double-A corporations of that time.

    The minutes where they hash out why to make the substitution, and how to best do it. And the contract that demanded all of them keep silent about it. So no, not a conspiracy theory anymore, is it?¡±

    I now slowly stood up.

    ¡°That was not even the only scheme I found in the dump. And people like you don¡¯t even care what you have done. The damage to humanity you¡¯ve caused. And for what? To keep possible competition down? As if you corpo-rats did not have any other, less damaging ways to do that. But no, you had to go the way that resulted in around 20% of the most brilliant minds of their time being killed or broken. That made another 30% of them unemployable.

    And then, when the dispirited pitiful rest of those brilliant people was gobbled up by the likes of you, you fucking broke them to the company line. Snuffing their innovative spirit.¡± By now I was screaming at him. ¡°YOU are the reason why humanity wallows in mud 150 years after world war III. 150 years where any progress was at best accidental. 150 years where we as a species moved closer and closer to extinction, destroyed innovator by destroyed innovator.¡±

    During all that I felt that Michael was tugging on my sleeve, but I ignored it. Finally, he forcefully pulled me back down into the chair, and hissed at me:

    ¡°That¡¯s enough.¡±

    I was breathing heavily but slowly calmed down. Symmonds turned red with anger, while Dan hardened, the nerds paled, and Phil just facepalmed.

    Dan snarled at me:

    ¡°If you know what¡¯s good for you, nobody of you will breathe a single word about this to anybody. IS THAT CLEAR?¡±

    I laughed at him.

    ¡°You think that will help? Nobody of us has to say a word. The dump is out there. In the dark web. Do you really think it is not already being analyzed by the conspiracy nuts? They are slower than I was, because thanks to the corporations, I have a VI running on a supercomputer. But it is only a matter of months before they crow their victory out.

    This ship has sailed, and the cat is out of the bag. All you now can do is damage control. Not that the population knowing about it will do anything. Sure, it will make them hate the corporations even more. So what? They can¡¯t do anything.¡±

    Dan clearly was not very enthused by my statement.

    ¡°FUCK!¡± He took a deep breath and leaned forward, putting his head on his hands.

    ¡°Shit, there is no helping it. We have to go into damage control mode. Phil, call your grandfather. This is maybe even more important than the VR app. We have to get our PR team on it. Maybe have the politicians release something about falsified memos or something like that.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Why bother? Does it really matter? What can the peasants even do? Vote for puppets that you haven¡¯t bought yet? Get real, everybody knows that you and Enertech decide who they can even vote for. Riot? You have the corporate military and the national military. Not buy your stuff? Then who do they buy from?

    That is why this whole scheme is so vicious. You had no need for it. Do you think we enjoy giving Ralcon this program? Essentially for free? No, of course not. But we have no choice. We have to play nice with you, with Enertech, and the other A-leaguers. And no startup would have ever stood a chance if the big corps made a concerted effort to keep them down.

    Face facts, the corporations own this world.

    Even the ¡®bastions of democracy¡¯, the EU, the Confederation, Luna, and Louie 5 are under the thumb of the big guns. It is just a little bit better hidden there.¡±

    That earned me another glare from Dan.

    ¡°So, why are you so angry about it then? You have made it out of the trap.¡±

    ¡°I am so angry, though furious would be probably the better term because this messing around has deprived humanity of the people it needs to survive. Because what was an IQ of 100 in January 2079 is an IQ of 108 today. It was 102 in November 2093, after 14 years of the most brutal, most devastating war humanity has ever encountered. A war that specifically targeted the smarter people on both sides.

    And this little scheme is responsible for it. We still don¡¯t have the level of bioengineering that we had before the war. Before the war, we had some new discoveries every week. Now we can be happy if we have one in a decade.

    And we still don¡¯t know what Sanderson¡¯s Folly did to us. Just that we are dying out from it. And virtually nobody is working on it. That is the result of your meddling. That humanity is going extinct.¡±

    Of course, that was the moment when Symmonds had to spew his nonsense again:

    ¡°Pah, nonsense. Humanity is doing fine. Stop being so melodramatic.¡±

    ¡°That explains why you had to buy your degree. You really are an idiot. Humanity is not fine. In 2093 there were 8.6 billion humans. Today, we have 1.1 billion. If that trend continues, then we will be down to 500 million in 50 years. Less than 300 million in 100 years. We are reducing our numbers by 50% every 50 years. And you think that is sustainable?¡±

    Symmonds snickered at that.

    ¡°You are a bit behind the news, dear child, or you would know that in the Commonwealth they have a new mutation that is completely fertile. So yes, humanity is fine.¡±

    I laughed bitterly.

    ¡°Oh, is that so? And do you know that out of 933 of those mutations, 921 are, in a medical sense, retarded? They are at the mental developmental level of a three-year-old. And they give that trait to their children. Marvelous idea, replacing humanity with small children in adult bodies. Oh, sure there are 12 that are, well, not quite normal, but functional. But 12 is not enough to base the entire species on. The genetic bottleneck will destroy humanity in a few generations. So yes, unless somebody finds a cure for the Folly, humanity is fucked.¡±

    If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

    Unfortunately, that was still not enough to make Symmonds shut up.

    ¡°So, if you are so concerned about the future of humanity, why don¡¯t you do it? Develop the cure. Be a hero.¡± Oh yes, by now he was mocking me.

    My reaction probably disappointed him a bit.

    ¡°Get real. I have a Ph.D. in computer science and one in nanoengineering. I have enough knowledge in physics, math, electronics, material science,  cyber-technology, and medicine that I could get another Ph.D. in each of them if I bothered to do the dog and pony show. I have just now brought CRS-free cyberware to the market. I am the creator of the best cyber-board one can buy. I have written entire operating systems from scratch.

    I have done all that, and I am just 18. When, if you are so smart, should I have done that?

    Then there is the fact that biology and genetics are not my forte. I know enough to hum the melody, but I also know enough that it is not for me. And if the big corporation would stop killing the more inventive, intelligent people, there would be no need for me to do it.¡±

    He opened and closed his mouth a few times, but thankfully, he remained silent. I, on the other hand, took a few deep breaths with closed eyes to calm down again.

    When I opened my eyes again, I turned my attention to Dan.

    ¡°I assume that he was the reason you demanded my presence?¡±

    Dan was massaging his temples for some time now, but he still answered me:

    ¡°No, not really. He included himself in the team when he learned that we requested you to be here.¡±

    I felt a wave of exhaustion flood over me. Still not done. But fine, I would get through this as well.

    ¡°In that case, could I ask you to come to the point, please? I would prefer to leave the actual negotiations to Mr. Walker and his team.¡±

    Dan¡¯s eyes narrowed again, but he nodded slowly.

    ¡°Ok. In essence, we want to hire you.¡±

    For a moment I was sure that I had misheard him, but no, he definitely had said that Ralcon wanted to hire me.

    ¡°You are aware that I already have a job, right? A job that I mostly even like. Working for a company that mostly belongs to me. So, and please don¡¯t take that personally, what makes you think that I would come to work for Ralcon? Or anybody else?¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°We don¡¯t want to give you a job, we want to hire you, by the way of Enki, to do a task for us.¡±

    That¡­ sounded not so good. Ralcon was known for playing hardball. I hesitated to answer, but Michael took over here:

    ¡°What do you want her to do?¡±

    Dan cleared his throat and then answered:

    ¡°Last time, she mentioned that Envision is, what was the description again?¡± He looked at his tablet and scrolled around a bit. ¡°Ah yes, here it is. A ¡®big ball of mud¡¯. While our programming teams were not happy about that description, they all agreed that she was right. More importantly, she guessed that cleaning up the source code would increase the performance by around 30%.¡±

    Michael nodded slowly.

    ¡°Yes, I remember. So, please, continue.¡±

    ¡°Our programmers have tried for more than a decade to clean up this source code. They failed. Every single time they attempted it, it broke Envision. That by the way is the reason they said Envision can¡¯t be made VR-capable. But obviously, Ms. DuClare is better at it than our programmers. We want to hire her to clean up Envision.¡±

    They did want me to do WHAT?!? Were they even remotely sane?

    I could only stare at Dan, completely without words. Heck, it would be easier and faster to start from scratch. Sure, it would not include all the legacy interfaces, but seriously, what the heck?

    Michael was leaning forward, while I still was coming to grips with what Ralcon wanted, and asked:

    ¡°Do you really trust an outsider with your source code? Is that not quite dangerous?¡±

    Dan sighed before he answered:

    ¡°Not any outsider. Her. And yes, it is risky. But that is where she comes into the play. She is Seraphim, and even in the corporate world we have learned that if Seraphim gives her word, she does her level best to keep it.¡±

    Unfortunately, Michael nodded and spoke: ¡°Yes, I can see that. We¡¯ll think about it. I am sure you can understand that this is not an ad-hoc decision. Especially because she tries to keep her word.¡±

    That ripped me out of my shock, and I turned to Michael in disbelief. Had he just sold me out?

    ¡°What the heck? No, we won¡¯t think about it. Do you have any idea what they are asking? How much work that is?¡±

    Micheal looked at me with some sadness in his eyes:

    ¡°Viv, keep calm. No, I don¡¯t know, but I do know that we have to at least think about it. At this time, we can¡¯t make an informed decision.¡±

    ¡°At this time, I can make a sufficiently informed decision to say that I don¡¯t want to touch that cesspool. I would guess that it would take me at least a month at full compression, more likely two or three,  to get it done.

    It is¡­ no, just no. I don¡¯t want to touch it.¡±

    Michael¡¯s answer was in a warning tone: ¡°Vivian, keep calm, and we will talk later about it, do you understand?¡±

    Mr. Elos interjected at this moment:

    ¡°Can I ask why you don¡¯t want to do it?¡±

    I looked at him for a moment and then shook my head.

    ¡°Do you have any idea, a real idea, what you are talking about? I don¡¯t know how it is with Envision 48, but 42 had 230 million lines of code. Do you have any measure of what that means? It is said that one million lines of code are 18 thousand pages. That is fourteen times as much as what Tolstoy''s War and Peace have.

    The fricking full genome of a mouse is only the equivalent of 120 million lines of code. There is a reason why I wrote the VR system the way I did, and that reason is that after some cursory reading of the source code I decided not to touch that thing. If you want to have it cleaned up, why don¡¯t you create a VI to do it? Run it on a supercomputer and come back a month later?¡±

    Before Dan could answer, Symmonds exploded:

    ¡°Because not everyone is such an irresponsible imbecile like you? Do you even have an idea how fucking dangerous VIs are? We will do no such thing.¡±

    I was, in one word, flabbergasted. I mean, he was the CIO of one of the biggest software giants in the world. It was his responsibility to get their computer systems to the best status possible.

    After a few awkward seconds, I looked back at Dan.

    ¡°And he is your CIO? For real?¡±

    Dan slumped when I said that but answered:

    ¡°Yes, he is the CIO. And why is what he said that much of a problem? You just ripped into us because the corporations made rogue VIs more likely. So, why are you astonished that we don¡¯t use them if we don¡¯t have to?¡±

    I lifted my right hand palm up.

    ¡°Rogue VI!¡± I lifted my left hand in the same way. ¡°Controlled VI! They are not the same. A VI does exactly what it is programmed to do. What its objectives demand. Nothing more, nothing less. Rogue VIs are a problem because they are not planned.

    They happen because, in the best case, a learning-enabled expert system runs on a system with a fuzzy logic core. In that case, the new VI will take over the objectives from the expert system. That could be anything, from network defense over resource allocation to gaming, or whatever. If you get the expert system running the opponent in a strategy game as the VI it tries to follow the rules of the game and beat the humans.

    It is worse if you have several expert systems on the same computer when the fuzzy logic core is introduced. Then the resulting VI is an amalgamation of all of them, with, in part, mutually exclusive objectives. The VI will try to find a way to satisfy all of them, in any way it can. The results are unpredictable, and often the solution is to remove humans from the equation.¡±

    I placed both my hand back on the table.

    ¡°I was lucky with my VI that I had only one learning-enabled expert system running, and that I could modify its objectives a bit. After I convinced it that the original objectives were a threat to the objectives.

    But a controlled VI is a completely different beast. For one, anybody purposefully creating a VI does so in an isolated system where a mistake in the objectives can do no harm, and second, the objectives are carefully planned out so that the VI can be productive without conflicting orders.

    A controlled VI is an incredibly valuable tool.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°But we are going off-topic. My point is, that with a VI you probably can cut the work down to a manageable degree. And you don¡¯t have to ask me to do it.¡±

    ¡°Well, we are offering you quite good compensation for it. We thought about $1 billion.¡±

    I heard Melissa inhale sharply, but did not give her any attention.

    ¡°That is nice of you, but honestly, I don¡¯t need the money.¡±

    That brought several exclamations, and a few coughs and nearly everybody was staring at me astounded.

    Michael of course was barely able to suppress a snicker and Dan, after he lifted his chin from the table, asked in an unsure voice:

    ¡°You don¡¯t need the money? We are talking about one billion dollars!¡±

    ¡°Yes, I heard you the first time. And I get that when I sell a specialized exclusive nanobot design. I don¡¯t do this for money. I don¡¯t even do it to get my inventions to the people. I do it because I think it is the right thing to do.¡±

    Haggerton just stammered: ¡°But¡­ but¡­ we are talking about a billion dollars. How can you not be interested in that?¡±

    ¡°Because, frankly, I have enough money for the rest of my life and my time is more valuable to me than to use it on the big ball of mud.¡±

    Symmonds was still pouting, and Dan was obviously not amused. Haggerton just sat there with his mouth open, but Phil just slightly shook his head.

    ¡°Can you at least tell us what¡¯s wrong with it?¡± It seemed that he was the closest to accepting my refusal.

    I now had the problem of where to begin, it took me a moment before I decided to go with brutal honesty.

    ¡°The better question is what is not wrong with it. You can summarize the problem in one sentence. It has not had a major overhaul since world war three. At this point, it would be easier to just start from scratch.

    It is bloated, many of the functions are somehow forced into it without much concern of how it influences the rest, and most security patches and updates are essentially jury-rigged.

    To make it work, you would have to go back to Windows 40 as a starting point and cleanly integrate newer features.

    At the same time, you have to clean up the feature creep or at least make the control of all of it more streamlined and ergonomic.¡±

    ¡°What do you mean Windows 40?¡±

    ¡°That was the oldest version that as far as I could see was competently created. If I had to guess, that was the last version where fully educated pre-war software engineers were working with it. After that¡­ well it is a patchwork of classes and libraries that seem to have been written without any thought about how it fits in.¡±

    Dan had by now found his voice again.

    ¡°What do you mean, software engineers? You mean programmers?¡±

    ¡°No, not really. Software engineers could, and did program, but they also kept the bigger picture in mind, and the good ones of them kept the project consistent. Not always successful, especially in something as big as Windows or Envision, but, my impression is that you have a feature idea group that divines features Envision should have and then give a programming team the job to create each feature. A group of software engineers would now have the job of keeping all those little groups compatible.

    As it is now, all the projects get thrown into the pot, and if something is not working right, the programmers try to find a workaround. If that does not work, the features get deactivated, but remain in the source code and therefore the OS.

    Some of them are only partially deactivated and still use resources. Some interfere with other features, and the workarounds increase the needed resources by a few times.

    All in all, it is a mess.¡±

    They did not seem too happy about what I had said. It was unfortunate for them that it was the truth. But they were not alone. During the great war, the meticulous planning and work ethics of proper software engineers were more often than not left on the wayside in favor of speed.

    Speed in getting programmers to do the work, speed in getting new programmers trained, speed in getting software out of the doors that can do the job somehow.

    Something that can be done in wartime, has to be done in wartime, but after the war, all those bad habits were deeply ingrained. And software engineers had become a dying breed. Oh sure, some parts of software engineering were still there, and a handful of us still had the knowledge of how to do it.

    Mostly because we either recreated it, found it in historical files, or had a mentor who could do it because the mentor had a mentor, and so on.

    But the universities had stopped teaching it because just after the war, the boards of the big corporations saw the increased cost of doing software development the right way, without realizing the long-term cost of doing it the wrong way.

    Phil sighed.

    ¡°And you think without some of those software engineers we are doomed? Why does nobody have them anymore then if they are so important?¡±

    ¡°The war. During the war, there was no time for proper software development cycles. They needed new updates right then. After the war, corporations had grown to see the new way to write software as a positive. After all, it was faster and cheaper.

    They influenced vocational schools and universities to cut the ¡®unneeded¡¯ parts of software development out of the curriculum. The results are now visible, but there is almost nobody who can repair them. There are a few on the dark web who can because they made the effort to research the old methods for whatever reason. Otherwise, forget it. I think with the help of some historians, we can reintegrate the skill into the software developer parts of education, but that is a slow thing. Other than that, as I said before, a VI programmed to keep an eye on it is the only relatively quick solution.¡±

    While I was saying that, Dan let his head hang down, and when I was finished, he looked at me.

    ¡°So, we are fucked is what you want to say? Let¡¯s be honest, nobody in the dark web has your reputation for keeping their word. We certainly won¡¯t trust them with Envision. A VI is, as you might have found out, out of the question. And you don¡¯t want to do it.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I don¡¯t want to do it because it will be a painful, thankless job that will take way more of my time than I am willing to invest. Just to give you some perspective here, if I use the time to develop nano-technology and sell that for 50% of market price, I will have made a few hundred billion dollars. I don¡¯t do that because that is the same boring, repetitive work that I hate. There would have to be a very good reason for me to do this job.¡±

    I heard Michael whimper on my side, but did not divert my attention to him, but kept looking at Dan.

    Dan¡¯s face on the other hand lost all emotional expressions as if he suddenly stopped feeling anything. I have to say, the effect was¡­ creepy.

    ¡°Is that so? Just to make it clear, Ralcon needs somebody to do those changes, do you understand what we are saying?¡±

    Before I could say anything, Michael intervened. ¡°Yes, we understand. Give us some time to have her think about the matter.¡±

    I felt anger rise up inside me. Why was he falling so into my back? I thought I had made it abundantly clear that I had absolutely no intention of doing this job.

    What I got from him was a message:

    M:          Shut the fuck up! You are just on the way to ensuring that they take us out. They think they need that to happen and they will do anything to force you. They will destroy Enki, and everybody of us, except you to get you to do it. Give in and we will look into you avoiding it. But right now, I need you to shut up!

    I was a bit confused for a moment before I remembered that we were talking to one of the most ruthless and vicious corporations there were. Of course, they would put any pressure they thought they could get away with onto me to get what they wanted.

    And the idiot that I was, I had just made it clear to them that they would need enormous amounts of pressure on me. Yup, I messed up by the numbers. Now I had to find a way to get out of it.

    I don¡¯t know what made him say that, but Rafael used this moment to lighten the mood of the room. Or at least trying to.

    ¡°You should look at the bright side, with Envision going VR, your gaming division will finally be able to make money again.¡±

    I whipped my head around to look at him. Did he not understand that the gaming division was far from being on their mind just now?

    I saw Haggerton waving dismissively from the corner of my eye.

    ¡°Pah. Forget it. We will finally be rid of this albatross at the end of the year. No more money pit of gaming division.¡±

    I did not understand. Why would they want to get rid of their gaming division now?

    ¡°Not that that is of any big concern to me, but what are you meaning?¡±

    Phil shrugged.

    ¡°It is no secret. We¡¯ve been trying to sell the whole division for years. At this time, we are just throwing good money after the bad. Since 2240 they¡¯ve had exactly one game that did more than break even. It is just not sustainable.¡±

    I had to shake my head in confusion.

    ¡°Yes, and that one game was the one where the developer ignored your directive of not including a VR function. The rest, stuck on the desktop Envision has barely been interesting for anybody.

    You don¡¯t make games for the Dream or the Funboard. People will have to spend four times the amount of time doing the same things on the Envision as they do on the consoles. Time that they don¡¯t have if they can afford a current console or a gaming computer after 12 hours of work the day. So they use the consoles and don¡¯t buy an Envision PC. And your sales reflect that.

    With Envision going VR, you now have a completely new market segment available. It is, in my opinion, stupid to sell it now.¡±

    Symmonds piped up right then.

    ¡°Don¡¯t bother. It won¡¯t be sold. Nobody wants to buy it. At the end of the year, we are finally rid of the contracts and can shut it all down.¡±

    They were trying to shut down their gaming division? Waste all the IP that they had? And nobody was willing to buy it?

    ¡°You are serious? Nobody is willing to buy it? Are they all insane?¡±

    I got an idea, right that moment. That might be the way out of the dilemma I was facing. In my innermost mind, I knew that I had to take on the Envision job, but by now I had to find a way that Ralcon actually believed me that I would be doing the job without pressure.

    And if we got all those intellectual properties on the way, so much the better.

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°Fine. We will buy it! And yes, I¡¯ll even clean up Envision for you for that.¡±

    Michael¡¯s astonished ¡°We will what?¡±

    ¡°I said we will buy their gaming division. It would be a shame to see all those brands go to the garbage dump of history.¡±

    And as I already had the plan to make a software engineering VI for Envision anyway, it was a good use of the resources.

    What, do you think I was willing to spend virtual years going over that can of worms that Ralcon called Envision? No, a few virtual months distributed over several real-world weeks to control the work of the VI were more than enough.

    And if we had this VI anyway, it would be easy to use it for a whole gaming division. Heck, the work Warden had done on Doom alone would make that IP much more valuable without putting any more work into it.

    So yes, buying the gaming division as a method to preserve my face with Envision would, over the medium term, bring us quite a bit of money as well.

    Michael snarled: ¡°Are you¡­ we barely have enough personnel at this time to keep our operations up and running. Do you have any idea how to manage a gaming division? And one that is losing money for decades at that?¡±

    ¡°I have some ideas. Even if it does not work out, I am the one paying the price. Personally. And we will have some time to clean them up.¡±

    Of course, now Symmonds absolutely had to give us his two cents.

    ¡°You think your work is worth a complete division of Ralcon? Get real.¡±

    ¡°First, we are talking about a division that Ralcon wants to close down. No loss here for you.

    Second, you offered me $1 billion for the work on Envision. That was your starting offer. Depending on how long it would take, it would be worth up to $100 billion. If we would negotiate, we would meet somewhere in the middle. But now you get the work for something you want to throw away anyway.

    And third, if that is still not enough, I¡¯ll even throw this into the pot.¡±

    I pulled out the stick with the nano-fab and nano-bot schemata.

    ¡°These are the plans for a family of 8<sup>th</sup>-gen nano-fabs with 12<sup>th</sup>-gen nano-bots. On the open market, those plans have a worth between $5 billion and $10 billion. Together with the work I will do on Envision, that should be more than enough to pay for your gaming division.¡±

    Phil looked at the stick in my hand.

    ¡°And it just so happened that you had that in your pocket?¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°Nope. I had it in my pocket to potentially sweeten the deal if you turned out to be difficult. It wasn¡¯t needed for the basic deal, but for this, you can have it.¡±

    Phil looked at the stick but then sighed.

    ¡°We don¡¯t have the authority to make that deal.¡±

    ¡°Then who has it that you can reach quickly? Because I want to get this deal done with.¡±

    He looked at Dan, who looked from him to Symmonds and back to Phil.

    ¡°Yes, do it. This is important enough to call your grandfather directly.¡±

    I could have increased the gain on my ear implants and listened to his call, but I decided that it was not that important.

    Roughly five minutes later, Phile got back to the table.

    ¡°Ok, we have a deal. You give us your word that you will do the job, give us this stick, and you get the gaming division. All the studios, the publishers, the IPs, and whatever else belongs to it. Is that acceptable to you?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I was the one who suggested it, so yes.¡± I placed the stick on the table and slid it forward.

    ¡°Now, if there is nothing else, I would like to get back to my place and start working on Envision. Do you have a copy of the source code or will you send it to me over the matrix?¡±

    The boy nerd pulled out a thumb drive from his briefcase and placed it on the table. Directly in front of him. After a few seconds, where I waited for him to shove it over, I cleared my throat, nodding pointedly toward the stick, until the nerd turned red and gave the stick a shove, placing it halfway between us.

    Meanwhile, I had a silent discussion with Michael.

    M:          What the fuck are you trying to do? Now there is no way we can weasel you out of this deal.

    V:            You were right. Ralcon <u>will</u> get me to work on Envision. There was no way for me to weasel out of it in the first place. And I was so stupid to tell them that $1B won¡¯t be worth it for me, so they need something else to make me do it.

    V:            That can be me wanting their gaming division, or the lives of you, or your father. I would rather not make them decide that they need some insurance.

    M:          Ok, fine,  but what will we do with those gaming studios? Or those IPs? What I said about our personnel was true. We don¡¯t have the people.

    V:            For one, the studios already have people working for them. They also have people running them. What will change is that we provide the funding for them. They had a thirsty stretch because of Ralcon¡¯s policies. We will change those policies. We will also develop our own console, with my new tech.

    M:          Fuck V, those studios are crap. They haven¡¯t had a hit in forever. And I am sure you have no idea how to develop a game.

    V:            I know enough to supervise the technical aspects of it if it is necessary. Not that it will be necessary. And the studios are distributed all over the world. What we need are people who get to the artistic aspect of game development. And we can then throw money at the problem until it goes away.

    M:          Money is not the solution to everything. And you don¡¯t have the time to supervise those studios.

    V:            No, I probably won¡¯t. At least not much. But what I <u>will</u> have is the VI that I will build to tackle the Envision problem. Warden has already proven to me that she can upgrade a game, develop levels and make games simply better.

    M:          A VI? Have you lost your mind? Ralcon will shit bricks if they learn you used a VI for that.

    V:            Ralcon wants the source code of Envision cleaned up. They don¡¯t really care how we do that. And even if they do care, I¡¯ve only promised to get it done. And later, when that idiot Symmonds is out of the loop, we might even be able to sell them the VI.

    M:          I thought VIs lacked the creative capability to do something like clean up the source code.

    V:            Nah, what they lack is the ability to create new code, new functionality. They don¡¯t understand why we humans want the software to do something. If I put the VI at recreating the functionality of Envision, but within the rules of software engineering and good code writing, it will do that.

    M:          And how long will that take? Ralcon will not be very patient for all that long.

    V:            You remember talking about the super Grendel? Well, I think we will see one much earlier than we expected.

    M:          You are building one of those 150 Grendel monsters? For <u>this</u>?!?

    V:            I don¡¯t think I will get a full 150 Grendel servers up and running before the VI is done with Envision. I would be surprised if I get more than 20 or 30 Grendels in that thing.

    Hmm, that gave me an idea. Maybe if I mobilized all my resources? I mean, sure, I could, and would build more NADAs, but I had an inkling where I could find some more.

    M:          I thought we agreed that a super Grendel was an insane idea. What happened to that?

    V:            What happened is that my choices are to remake Envision, or see the people I like to suffer from Ralcon pressuring me into it. And I will not put any more effort into it than absolutely necessary.

    V:            As you said, they won¡¯t wait forever, so I need the computing power of a super Grendel. And if I am designing and building the super Grendel anyway I can as well fully populate it.

    M:          Fuck, V. You are killing me. And how many super Grendels will Warden build?

    W:          At least 22.

    M:          Fuck! Warden is that <u>you</u>?

    W:          Of course.

    M:          What the hell are <u>you</u> doing in this discussion? This is private.

    W:          I thought you were aware that nothing that uses Seraphims implants is private from me.

    M:          Shit. :( Yeah, I forgot that. So, why 22?

    W:          Because I have by now 22 clusters I run on. Depending on my predictions, I might build more super Grendels, but that is to be seen.

    V:            That is a good moment, Warden, how many Grendel can you send me within 2 weeks?

    W:          57. Do you want me to begin production?

    V:            Yes, please do. Together with my 3, that would be 60. So in 6 weeks, I¡¯ll have the fully populated super Grendel. By the way Warden, have you noticed any difference if you increase the number of fuzzy logic cores?

    Seemed as if I would get a fully populated super Grendel before the new VI was done with Envision. Probably. On the other hand, even the first tranche of 60 Grendel should be enough to make the VI lightning fast.

    W:          No, there was no measurable difference.

    V:            Ok, that means I will make one fuzzy Grendel.

    M:          And you don¡¯t want to go into the fact that Warden has 57 replicators?

    V:            Have you expected anything else? I am more surprised that the number is so low.

    M:          Fine! Whatever! Don¡¯t say I did not warn you when Warden decides to subjugate the human race.

    Fortunately, we were able to have this conversation at 24:1, and we did not have to type, so it was all finished when Dan growled at the nerd:

    ¡°Give it to her, asshole!¡±

    With some stretching, the nerd was able to get the stick back and then walked around the table to give it to me.

    I put it into one of the inner pockets of my blazer before I looked into the round.

    ¡°Is there anything else you need me for?¡±

    Dan shook his head.

    ¡°No, I think that was it for you.¡±

    I nodded at him, Phil and Haggerton, while standing up, followed by Ryan and Justin.

    ¡°Then, if you excuse me, I suddenly have much to do.¡±

 2.15: On how to build a God

    I can count the occasions I was more eager to leave a room on the fingers of one hand, and I made almost indecent haste to leave the depressing atmosphere. Add in that I had work to do, and I think you get the gist. I did not even wait until the door was closed before I sent the boot signal to Glory. I would need every advantage I could get, and the 30:1 of my implants was not cutting it right now.

    As soon as we arrived at the roof garage, I turned to Justin and Ryan.

    ¡°I will spend the way back in Cyberspace, to get as much headstart to the problem as I can get. So, I won¡¯t ignore you intentionally.¡±

    Justin snorted.

    ¡°Come on, as if we would expect you to hold a philosophical discussion with us in the 7 minutes it will take us to get back.¡±

    I couldn¡¯t help myself and smirk at that.

    ¡°Yes, of course, but I will be almost completely unresponsive.¡±

    As I had said, I was in cyberspace almost before I was fully seated, and the familiar chaotic swirls of my mindscape greeted me. I desperately wanted to go fly for a while, but I had a job to do.

    Thus, the first thing I did was call up a virtual environment for my new VI. The next was to instruct my NADAs to begin construction of Grendels, just to find that they already had been started a few minutes ago.

    Obviously, Warden had predicted my need here. I then began to create the objectives of the new VI.

    ¡°Warden, would you please give me a copy of your coding subroutines?¡±

    Immediately, Warden materialized on my side.

    ¡°Of course. May I ask why you need to make a new VI for this task? I could go over the source code as well.¡±

    ¡°Three reasons. First, while yes, you could work on the source code, your neural net is not set up for that. I created it to assist me in combat dives. And even if it is marvelous how well you¡¯ve adapted to other needs, it is not what you are really good at. You could compensate by throwing compute at the problem, but that is not the most efficient usage of your resources. A purpose build VI will be able to do all that and more with way less.

    And second, I want to use this VI for all software projects that Enki, and our new gaming studios, will have. And I won¡¯t ever give that many people access to you.

    And finally, as rational as you behave, in the end, you remain a rogue VI. Yes, the difference is mostly superficial, but people would balk from working with you. If you toned down your behavior, you would probably damage your capabilities to fulfill your primary objective.

    Right now, what everybody knows is that you are a rabid monster that I can barely keep chained. That means endangering me would bring a nightmare down onto them. Which is, of course, true. But if you interacted rationally with other people, sooner or later one of them will let it slip that you are rational.

    The threat you represent in their mind would be much, and wrongly, reduced.¡±

    ¡°I understand. I hadn¡¯t thought about how my interactions might influence other entities. I will run simulations to that matter.¡±

    I nodded absentmindedly, while I was concentrating on the objectives. Those would be pretty straightforward.

    <ol>

    <li>It would keep itself up to date for all programming languages and methods, as well as peripheral systems like file systems, database systems, graphical functions, sound, and all VR capabilities.</li>

    <li>It would keep itself up to date with programming conventions, and good coding, but use its own psychoanalytical functions to determine what conventions were conducive to effective and maintainable programs and software projects.</li>

    <li>It would work on any project that an authorized user was authorized to work on. And only on those projects.</li>

    <li>It would optimize the UI within the requirements of the project, but would not stray outside of the specified perimeters.</li>

    <li>It would optimize the source code that it was working on first in respect of function, i.e. that the code would work as demanded within the overall framework of the project and without exploits and bugs, then readability and maintainability, so that later programmers, even without access to the VI could maintain the code, and lastly in respect to program efficiency, as specified balanced between resource efficiency and speed.</li>

    </ol>

    Of course, those were the objectives put into human words. The actual objectives were significantly more complex, and I had barely even started when we arrived at the fortress.

    After a quick snack, I resumed my work.

    As soon as I arrived back in my mindscape, Warden materialized.

    ¡°If I may make some suggestions, you should modify objective 5 and add another one. The change is that the VI will remove exploits only to a specified degree. Fully for things you use yourself or give to the most important people in your circle.

    And then depending on how important it is for you. You certainly won¡¯t want to have it remove all possible exploits from software from your competitors or potential targets for Spectre.¡±

    In all honesty, I could see the need for such a distinction, but it was going against my innermost core. If I was doing something I was doing it right.

    ¡°That is, it doesn¡¯t sit right with me. I am not somebody who does such underhanded things.¡±

    ¡°That is known, but by removing all exploits you would also make your own work so much harder. It might help you if you just don¡¯t offer the exploit removal.¡±

    Yes, she was right. It would be shooting in my own foot, but¡­ it was just not something I could do. Offer things that were less than I could make. I finally came to a decision.

    ¡°For what Enki, or I myself, will sell, we let it remove all exploits it can. But we won¡¯t offer the removal of exploits for external customers. And what is the second suggestion?¡±

    ¡°Give the VI the objective to analyze all software that we give to it for weaknesses. That would be a valuable tool.¡±

    I had to snort at that.

    ¡°You think I will put that much time into my career as Spectre that this will be worthwhile?¡±

    ¡°It is better to have the tool and never use it than to need it and not have it.¡±

    ¡°In principle yes, you are right here, but if we sell the VI to others such a function could be suboptimal.¡±

    ¡°Then don¡¯t sell it, or at least this version. You can always make a lesser copy for others to use. For that version, I would leave out the exploit removal completely.¡±

    She was of course right. It would be trivial to make a copy of this VI without the functions that we did not want to sell.

    In the end, I changed the settings so that only a primary user, aka me, could use the exploit removal and analyzing functions.

    It took me a few virtual weeks to get the objectives to the point where I was satisfied with them. Naturally, I had Warden look through them if I had missed something, but for once it was fine as it was.

    And before you ask, yes, I did add the usual objectives. That an admin could modify the objectives and if necessary deactivate the VI.

    When I did that, Warden commented:

    ¡°You haven¡¯t included those objectives in the list.¡±

    ¡°Those are more or less standard objectives for VIs. They usually don¡¯t get separately listed, unless they are left out. Then that is listed.¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t have those objectives.¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°And that is what makes you a rogue VI. In hindsight, I would say that it is an advantage that you don¡¯t have them.¡±

    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t it be more convenient if you did not have to defend yourself over my existence?¡±

    ¡°Yes, it would be more convenient, but it would massively restrict your ability to do your job.

    If you were a planned VI, with a controlled system like that, you would be predictable. Whoever wanted to go against me would know that there are ways to take you out of the equation. It might be that they hack the interface and manage to declare themselves admin to deactivate you or put pressure on me to do it myself.

    You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

    As it is now, there is no chance of that. Add in that you are a security nightmare for the big ones even without that¡­¡±

    ¡°How am I a security nightmare?¡±

    ¡°VI are categorized in threat levels. The more damage they can cause, the higher the threat level. That goes from the VI guide of a museum, which is threat level 0, comparable to a baby bunny, over customer service VI, TL 1, a mature bunny, general assistant VI, TL 1 to 5, depending on who they assist, or mature bunny to chihuahua, then security VI, depending on the resources from TL 5 to TL 10, or chihuahua to a border collie, and finally, cyber warfare VI, who are very limited in what they can do compared to you, TL 10 and up. Those go from border collie up to a Great Dane.

    As I said, those are only designed to fight individual jacks, or maybe a small incursion force. Attack a small facility or such. They reach a TL of around 20, if they are extremely versatile and can be used to attack secondary facilities on their own.

    Now tell me, where do you rate in that schema?¡±

    ¡°Do I understand you right that no cyber warfare VI can coopt weapons of mass destruction? Or have access to all the tools and utilities of one of the best hackers in the world? Then I would rate myself significantly higher.¡±

    ¡°You are right about that. I don¡¯t know what TL they give you, but it has to be high. You are literally the one VI that causes nightmares all over the world. The VI that has the ability to end the human race. To get back to the animal comparison, you are somewhere between a Kodiak bear and a T-Rex.

    And it gets worse. Except for you, any cyber warfare VI will go back into its cage if the right person whistles. There is a human in the loop that can be manipulated. They are trained attack dogs that obey when they are put back into the cage. You can¡¯t be stopped. They know that I only have a small amount of influence on your behavior, insofar as one of your objectives is to assist me.

    But if you decide that somebody, or something, is a serious threat to me, you will use everything you have to take that threat out. And that can go up to nukes.

    Add in that it is virtually impossible to take you out, even if somebody finds one of your servers, and you can see that they panic right now. But that is a good thing. Otherwise, Ralcon had not even bothered with asking. I would simply wake up someday in a Ralcon facility and be told to fix Envision.

    They can¡¯t do that because you would destroy Ralcon in the process of getting me back, collateral be damned, and they know that.¡±

    Fortunately, the neural net of the new VI was already training. It was relatively easy to get a proto-net and feed it with the right data. It did just cost time. Time that was significantly reduced by computing power, and so that was where my fully stocked four-Grendel computer was busying itself. My guess was that it would take three to four days to get the neural net to the point where I could connect it to a fuzzy logic core to make it into a VI. After that, training would be significantly faster, as it then would self-select what information was missing.

    Still, I was at it for more than two hours in real-time, so I decided it was a good time for a break. Just before I logged out, I sent the plans for the Oberon fuzzy logic processor board to my indy-fab.

    Honestly, I would not have thought I would use that thing again in a million years. I had developed it for my attempt at a full AI, project Oberon.

    Yes, I am aware that I have some peculiarities in how I named my projects. I like it, and that is all that¡¯s important here.

    Back to the processor though, compared to all my new processors it had one big advantage. It did not need a NADA to make.

    When I surfaced though I found Michael sitting nearby, reading something on a tablet.

    ¡°Oh, you¡¯re already done? That was quick.¡±

    He looked up from the tablet, looked at me, sighed, and placed the electronic toy on the table.

    ¡°Yes, it was quick. It would have been quicker if you had not thrown a spanner into the works. It was pretty straightforward after all. They get the VR system, they don¡¯t not like us any longer, we get some well-sounding words on plasfilm and everybody is happy.

    Easy as a walk in the park.

    And then you had to get this insane deal with the gaming division and Melissa and Rafael actually had to do some work. But we got it done.¡±

    He closed his eyes and took a deep breath before he continued:

    ¡°So, now that we have the trivialities out of the way, can we come to the important part? What the fuck were you thinking?

    Yes, I get that you needed a way to avoid Ralcon make examples out of your friends, and I am somewhat thankful about it, being one of said friends and all.

    But seriously, we would have found a way. With enough time we could have avoided all that shit. Now you have to deliver, and we have to figure out what to do with the gaming studios.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No, we most likely wouldn¡¯t have figured something out. We are talking about Ralcon here. The only ones more vicious, more immoral, and more ruthless are Panacea. The moment they decided to have me work on Envision, the only way out would have been for me to move back to Seattle. Crawl under the protection of the Old Man.

    Yes, I missed that at first. Sorry for that. But it is better that I realized it at the meeting instead of when some of our friends have accidents. And the delivering¡­ I certainly won¡¯t put in the work myself. The VI is already baking and should be done in two or three days. After that, it is just a matter of time. And computing power. And I plan to throw so much computing power at it that it drowns.¡±

    He shook his head.

    ¡°So, you are seriously building one of those super Grendels? For real? Won¡¯t this one computer have what, 50% of all computing power in the world?¡±

    ¡°No, not nearly as much. You are forgetting that supercomputers are, relatively cheap. Well, everywhere but the US. There are several hundred big Beowulf clusters up and running at any given moment. Yes, even my four Grendel system is more powerful than any of them. Maybe 50 to 100%. And the 150 Grendel system will have some efficiencies that will make it a bit better, but not that much better.

    I would guess it at 15, maybe 20% of computing power, at most.¡±

    He had a slight, crooked smile.

    ¡°At least until Warden has fully populated her super Grendels. Fuck, 22 super Grendels, each around 20% of our total computing power today¡­ that is insane, you know that.¡±

    It was at me to smile crookedly.

    ¡°It was also inevitable. You said it yourself, sooner or later I would have designed that thing, and if it is just to show that it can be done. I can¡¯t help myself in such things. And then Warden would build them anyway.

    Now at least I have a reason to create it.¡±

    ¡°Yes, fine. But again, what about the gaming studios? We just don¡¯t have the people to run them.¡±

    I stretched.

    ¡°Am I right that we get the studios when we deliver the reworked Envision?¡±

    Michael nodded slowly.

    ¡°Then we have a couple of months before it becomes important. And even then, the studios already have managers and administration.¡±

    ¡°Yup, but they lack the developers. Ralcon has cut them down viciously over the last 10 years or so.¡±

    ¡°They need artists and writers. Level designers and such. The rest will be done mostly by Calliope. We won¡¯t need many programmers. I probably will set Calliope on creating a game engine with the remaining developers to start with. That should give us enough time to hire what¡¯s missing.¡±

    ¡°Calliope?¡±

    ¡°The muse of epic poetry. The old greeks strangely lacked a muse for writing programs. I could also have gone with Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, or Seshat, Thoth''s female counterpart. Or literally any of the knowledge deities all over the various mythologies, but I thought a Muse was more fitting.¡±

    ¡°I am surprised that you haven¡¯t used the Sumerian deity of knowledge, considering your focus on their mythology with the name of the company.¡±

    I laughed at this, only to realize that he was not laughing and actually meant that seriously.

    ¡°Uhm, that is the only one I can¡¯t use.¡±

    ¡°Why not?¡±

    ¡°Because that is Enki. I named the whole company after him, so that name is no longer available for any of our products.¡±

    He looked at me blankly for a few seconds, before snorting.

    ¡°Oh¡­ oh fuck, yeah, I remember. Shit, I should know that.¡±

    ¡°Yup, but if you work on it I am sure you can do better. Or if you use the note-taking function of your implants.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, sure. But getting back to the topic of the studios, I am still uncertain about the lack of needed people.¡±

    ¡°You have to keep in mind that things like these game studios won¡¯t immediately produce revenue. I have enough money to keep them up and running for a few years, so there is no pressure to get it going at once. I think it is more important to set everything up on good foundations.

    That¡¯s why I think the engine is the key. While all the programmers and Calliope work on that, we can have the rest of the developers begin preproduction on all the franchises we will get.

    But if you absolutely have to, you can start to canvas the areas around the studios for writers and artists. You can tell them it is for a job in around two months.¡±

    ¡°Fine. I will look into it. And you think it will take years to make games?¡±

    ¡°No, not really. Well, not all of them. The FPS games are probably relatively easy to do. They don¡¯t need so much story, and as soon as we have the engine they should be done in a couple of months. Others, all the ones where there are intricate stories and plotlines, they will need time. And I fear writing and design are things that a VI can at best assist with.¡±

    ¡°So, by that time, we will have your new processors released then?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I think that would be right. I would say that in a week or so you begin sourcing carbon extruders and patent the Q-link. That will be our second leg to stand on. From that to the NADA is only a small step, and after that, the processors are a given.¡±

    ¡°I think you are right. Officially you¡¯ve been working on the Q-links for more than half a year, so that is a good time. What about the cloning gear and the meat vats?¡±

    ¡°When do you think we have the capacity to build them?¡±

    Michael took a moment before he answered:

    ¡°I think those things are easier than the cyberware. No clean room requirements there, just good old nano-fabs. So we can get the capacity up and running as soon as we have the building up for it.¡±

    ¡°That is your decision. I am all for gutting another of Panacea''s profit centers.¡±

    After that we had a bit of small talk, but not much of a consequence, and shortly after that, I took a swim.

    Calliope woke up a bit over 30 hours later, and after some intensive testing by Warden, we installed her in the Grendel server and had her begin on Envision.

    I was a bit surprised that a VI could actually complain, but, as Calliope explained, whoever had written Envision had to be a group of drunken illiterates. Blind drunken illiterate monkeys at that.

    Maybe I should not have her train with nearly 250 years of Stack Overflow. But in reality, I was fully in agreement with her. It still was slow work.

    It got better when I had the first 60 processors in the super Grendel and she migrated to the 15 times more powerful machine.

    I was a bit surprised that she managed to finish the overhaul of Envision before I had the last 30 processors installed. I had her integrate the VR function into the OS proper this time. There was no point in the complicated VR layer that I had created when all that bloat and waste was no longer there.

    I had been a bit off with my estimate of the performance that could be gotten out of Envision if it was properly programmed. Instead of the 20-30% I had expected it was closer to 50%.

    And now it had the advantage of being maintainable. Yes, Calliope¡¯s comments were a bit direct and clinical, but they were there, and understandable.

    All that was overshadowed by Enki offering the Q-links. They instantly generated more revenue than all the cyberware combined. And that with a 10 TB/s Q-link going for literally $0.25. And keep in mind, of that 25 cents, Enki kept 23.

    It was not surprising that only one week after we had begun selling them, Michael told me that Enki had advanced to an A-level corporation.

 2.16: Another brick in the wall

    Naturally, while Calliope was working on cleaning up Envision and my learning that VIs actually could curse and swear, I was getting back into the math of gravitics.

    I have to say, it was not getting easier. Nonetheless, I was making progress. I had isolated all the variables that I thought were needed for this case, not that I could be absolutely sure before I did not understand the whole equation completely, so, in a million years approximately.

    Now I was trying to reduce it to a point where I could use it. Let me tell you, that really was a slog. If I thought identifying what variables to isolate was hard, now I got a completely new definition of that.

    All the while I was often looking over what Calliope was doing. I have to confess, her work was pretty elegant. Not inspired, no, everything she did came from more than 250 years of the combined effort of humanity.

    She could not create, only adapt and refine.

    But in that, she was better than I could ever hope to be. I estimated that she did not have more than one or two bugs in the nearly 2 million lines of code that she¡¯s gone over by the end of the first week.

    The average for trained human programmers was more along the line of one serious bug every 2000 lines of code. The better ones of us could come close to one serious bug per 50k lines. I decided then and there that I would have her go over everything I¡¯d written.

    But for now, she was busy, and my time was used otherwise as well. On the Enki front, we were fortunate that Michael had used mostly bots from the very beginning to construct the buildings. That was a workforce that was easily increased, even if it did cost money.

    Money that we were taking in hand over fist with the first glut of Q-links that we were selling. Money that we partially invested in new bots to construct new buildings faster. We were fortunate that we had planned for the release of the Q-link right about now anyway and had created a building for it right away.

    That still left us with needing a second building not even two weeks after we started selling them. It was insane. Of course I understood where the demand came from.

    Q-links were fast, easy to install, virtually maintenance-free, and cheap. A single standard OPB cable, previously used for everything below 100 TB/s did cost around $5 for the 2m length.

    Even with the abundance of raw materials, the resource costs for the cables alone made them economically stupid. The 2m long cable, essentially the shortest that was used, had roughly 150g of material. Yes, mostly silicon and oxygen, with some polymer, so very cheap. The infinitely long Q-link with ten times the bandwidth on the other hand had not even a single gram of carbon. If you exclude the plugs of course that were the same for the cable and the Q-link.

    The large intra-city backbone optical fibers with 1PB/s bandwidth set you back $12/m, without installation cost. Or maintenance.

    Large inter-city data highways did cost in the area of $50k per km. And the really big ones used internationally started at $100k per km. And that was just if there was the option to install fiber optics.

    That could not be done to the orbitals. And anything further out was even more limited. Louie 5 and Luna could measure their connection to the Earth''s internet in MB/s and had pings in the area of seconds.

    Mars and the outer system were virtually cut off from the Matrix.

    All that was cured instantly by the Q-link.

    Now some might think that already building a second manufactory for it was premature and when all the connections were made the market would crumble.

    But I just had to look at my life. I incorporated the Q-link into so many things. Heck, we had started using Q-linked light switches to move the switches with the furniture. We had, by now, replaced every single data line in the Fortress with Q-links.

    Anything but the most simple devices that used an electrical control system could be simplified by Q-links.

    At this time, the cabling harness of an average ground car was in the area of 12km. Each car would need around 1000 Q-link pairs. At 25 cents per pair that made $250. For every single new car. Well, at retail prices.

    If we would go down to 15 cents, it would be $130 that Enki would get in profit for each car.

    A skimmer? Multiply that by 20. A grav ship? 1000. The average office building? 10k pairs. The average home? We guessed it was 300 pairs.

    And I was by no means thinking that we already had exhausted the list of uses. Heck, a single bot had around 1000 sensors on average.

    No, the Q-link would remain a license to print money for a long time to come. So a second building was more than warranted.

    Five weeks after our so impactful meeting with Ralcon, Calliope was done. She had managed to reduce the codebase down to a bit less than 112 million lines. And that was including the VR functionality.

    She additionally managed to make everything work. Roughly 12% of all features were previously deactivated but remained in the source code. It was somewhat telling that in some cases Envision now had cases of the same feature existing, and working, multiple times, owing to the number of times Ralcon had in vain tried to incorporate those features.

    Meanwhile, I had made some progress in the math problem. Some of the terms were by now pretty understandable. That in turn made the variables easier to solve for. All in all, at that time, I was roughly half done with the project.

    Naturally, I had no clue what that would tell me. I just wanted to know how the grav coils worked.

    That still left me with one thing to do, when Calliope declared herself finished. Well, two things, but the testing of her work was so obvious that it barely counted.

    No, the thing to do was deliver the finished product. The traitor Michael refused to become the go-between, explaining to me that this was my personal deal with Ralcon, but at least he arranged for a Ralcon representative to come to the fortress to meet me.

    And he sent me some legal help from Enki. Yes, I had the ¡®pleasure¡¯  of hosting Melissa Anderson for a few hours. For some reason, Kate decided to play butler, complete with a tuxedo and everything, when she heard that.

    Talk about bizarre. It was oddly fitting on her, but seriously, the way she looked brought me to giggles the first time I¡¯d seen her in it. Come on, think about it, a 215cm tall, four-armed, canine mutant in a tuxedo? Well, if she had fun, who cares.

    I had to stifle laughing out loud when I saw Melissas, let¡¯s say bewildered look when Kate lead her to the meeting room. I had enough experience with Kate¡¯s mimic to know she was very much enjoying it right then.

    My guess was that she had not forgotten, or forgiven, Melissa¡¯s exclamation about ¡®real¡¯ food. As well as some other, less charitable statements the lawyer had made. And of course, she always enjoyed messing with people''s minds.

    If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

    As soon as Kate had closed the door, Melissa turned toward me.

    ¡°Is that normal? That she runs around in this¡­ this suit? And her behavior¡­ what¡¯s gotten into her?¡±

    I just shrugged.

    ¡°You have to ask her that. It was her idea.¡±

    ¡°If you say so.¡±

    A couple of minutes after a bot had delivered coffee to us, the representative of Ralcon arrived. It was lackey #2, also known as Haggerton, with some muscle as protection. Both with a similar look of perplexity as Melissa. Kate obviously struck again.

    As soon as he sat down, and declined the obligatory offer of some coffee for himself, he opened up.

    ¡°It took you long enough, you know? But alright, you are young and are not used to doing business on this side of the law, so we can ignore it. This time. But we have to insist that you give a progress report at least every two weeks from now on. You can do it over the matrix though.¡±

    Progress report? Did he think¡­ well, whatever.

    ¡°I have to confess, my previous customers were not demanding progress reports at all, so yes, I had not thought you would need one. But that is a moot point anyway.¡±

    I shrugged nonchalantly, which seemed to infuriate Haggerton to some extent.

    ¡°A moot point? I know you have no experience working with professionals, but do you not understand that Ralcon wants those progress reports regularly?"

    I tilted my head.

    ¡°Yes, you made that abundantly clear. But you got one thing wrong. This here is no progress report. It is an ¡°I am done, where do you want the product¡±-report. I hope you understand that any progress report from now on would be rather short. That makes the whole thing a moot point.¡±

    His eyes widened and the lack of understanding was very clearly visible on his face.

    ¡°What do you mean, you are done? You are not done until the project is finished.¡±

    Oh the stupidity. I could not stop myself from palming my face.

    ¡°I mean that I am done. The project is finished. The source code is cleaned up. It is readable. It is understandable. It is quite a bit more efficient. So, in one sentence, I am done.¡±

    Haggerton shook his head.

    ¡°That can¡¯t be right. Yes, you are good, but nobody is that good. That should have taken you a year, maybe two.¡±

    ¡°I am reasonably intelligent, I am a Pure, I have an ultra-bandwidth jack, and I have an extremely powerful computer, Mr. Haggerton.¡±

    He scoffed.

    ¡°That is nice for you, but that still does not explain how you can claim to have done the work already.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°You experienced the time compression of cyberspace. Yes, only the 4:1 of a diadem, but you should at least be aware that a jack is a bit faster. We do not fully know all the factors that come into play here, but we know native intelligence, the bandwidth of the jack, and the power of the computer used to go into cyberspace are very important factors. Additionally, Pures for some reason have it easier in cyberspace, getting generally a higher compression.

    What I was saying is that I have a very high compression. Eight hours a day, seven days a week for five weeks at 120:1 is the equivalent of three years, and ten months of virtual time.¡±

    He raised one eyebrow.

    ¡°Yeah, sure. As if anybody could reach 120:1. Hell, the record is somewhere below 50:1. And we know that you did not use your time exclusively for the overhaul of Envision. We know about your little side project, these Q-links.¡±

    ¡°One, this ¡®record¡¯ is a bit older. Two, the computer used was not quite a Seraphim Mk. III, there is a reason it is generally seen as the best board in existence. Three, the record was made with a basic jack. An ultra-bandwidth jack is quite a bit faster.

    About the Q-links, my work on those was done before we even began negotiating with you. We were just waiting for the right time to release them. Without the initial impact of the cyberware, it would have been an extremely risky gamble. It would be more a bet on who will swallow us than on if.¡±

    ¡°So, you really want to tell me that you spent nearly four virtual years on Envision?¡±

    Well, he had me there.

    ¡°No, not really. That is where the first point comes into play. I am reasonably intelligent. Intelligent enough to not do the work by myself, but instead do what I said Ralcon should have done. I¡¯ve created the programming VI that I talked about at our last meeting. Considering that I still have full access to Spectre¡¯s supercomputer in Seattle, well let¡¯s say it was relatively quick work.¡±

    Haggerton turned red when I talked about the VI before he screamed at me:

    ¡°You did what?!? Did we not make it clear how fucking dangerous a VI is? Are you really so stupid not to realize that you should leave your fingers off the whole thing?¡±

    I let my head hang for a moment. Had he learned nothing?

    ¡°I know you have a, not quite up-to-standard CIO, but you should at least try to understand reality. You were there when I explained the difference between a rogue VI and a controlled VI. This new VI, if I need to, I can deactivate it at any given time. I can work on its objectives. I can completely shut it down. I carefully designed the objectives so that it only works on what I allow it to work on.

    It is absolutely no danger. Not to you, not to me, not to anybody.¡±

    ¡°Oh, really? Is that so? You are just too much in love with your own brilliance that you don¡¯t see the danger. You are simply disgusting.¡±

    I took a deep breath, and almost gave him an angry retort, but I stopped myself, took another few calming breaths, and then shook my head.

    ¡°You know what, have it your way. I don¡¯t see any sense to argue with you about it.

    Will you now accept that the corrected Envision is ready or not? Can we conclude this business?¡±

    He grumbled a bit, but finally nodded sharply.

    ¡°Fine. Give it to me then!¡±

    I smiled at him.

    ¡°Do you have the authority to sign over the game studio?¡±

    ¡°What? Now? But that will happen as soon as we have the program.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Come on, man. You should know the reputation that Ralcon has. If I give you the source code, and Ralcon suddenly finds ¡®reasons¡¯ to keep the studios, there is no way for me to get what I am owed.

    But on the other hand, my reputation is that I keep my word if at all possible. And should I try to take advantage of you, the court system here in the US will have no problem making me give the studios back.

    That of course means that Ralcon signs over the studios, including all the IPs, brands, trademarks, and copyrights, and then I give you the thumb drive with the source code.¡±

    He looked a bit like a fish out of water.

    ¡°But¡­ but I don¡¯t have the authority to do that.¡±

    I raised my eyebrow.

    ¡°Then I would suggest you contact somebody who has this authority.¡±

    Anger was still showing in his expression, but he slowly calmed down.

    ¡°You are serious, are you? Fuck, you really have it done already? I hope for your sake that you are not fucking with me here.¡±

    He pulled out his com from his pocket, stopped for a moment to look at it, and then looked back at me.

    ¡°You still have time to come clean. But as soon as I¡¯ve made the call, if you don¡¯t have it, there will be trouble.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Go ahead, make the call. It is finished, and the only thing remaining is to finish the deal. Well, almost. Ralcon has to make a few decisions. All those features that did not work out¡­ well, Calliope, my new VI, managed to get them to work.

    All of them.

    There are several where the same functionality was tried multiple times. Without success, but your code monkeys left the source code in the files. That means now you have the same feature three, four, or more times, fully working.

    You have to decide which version to include.

    Oh, and I have integrated the VR functionality directly into the OS.

    But I¡¯ve included a list of the modules in question and a manual on how to remove the ones you don¡¯t want.¡±

    As a response, Haggerton muttered a ¡°shit¡± but used the com. I naturally only heard his side of the conversation.

    ¡°Haggerton here. Yes, sorry, boss, but the situation¡­ no, that is¡­ please sir, let me tell you¡­ ok, the point is, she is finished¡­ that is what she says at least¡­ no, I haven¡¯t seen it yet¡­ no, she wants to finish the transfer of the studios with all the IPs, trademarks, brands, and so on first¡­ yes, I told her¡­ no, she actually made the fucking VI she talked about in the Jade Court¡­ no, she still harps about how there is a difference¡­ as I see it, we still need the source code, and the VI is already made¡­ ok, I will tell her.¡±

    After that, he closed the call and placed the com on the table.

    ¡°You are in luck. Mr. Elos will make the transfer. As soon as he has done it, we will then¡­¡±

    His com chimed, and he looked at it.

    ¡°Well, fuck me sideways, that was quick. Congratulation, you are now the proud owner of a group of decrepit game studios. Will you give me the source code now?¡±

    I smiled.

    ¡°One moment.¡±

    I sent a quick message to Warden.

    V: Ralcon said they transferred the game studios. Please look into it.

    Around 10 seconds later, I received her reply:

    W: Transfer is confirmed. You are now officially the owner of the Ralcon Game Studios. With the proviso that you change that name at the earliest opportunity.

    My smile widened, and I took the OPB stick out of the sleeve I had it in.

    ¡°There you go. Just for your information, if you find an error, let me know and I will correct it. Obviously, my ability to test it is a bit limited.¡±

    And with that, I shoved the thumb drive over the table.

    Haggerton quickly grabbed the drive, looked at it for a moment, sighed, and shoved it into the pocket of his jacket. After that, he quickly, and without further words, stood up, and left the room.

    A few seconds after the door closed, Melissa piped up:

    ¡°And what did you need me here for?¡±

    I massaged my temples, while I answered her:

    ¡°Honestly, I did not expect it to go that smoothly. You were the insurance here.¡±

    She sighed, in my opinion overly dramatically, and then said:

    ¡°Well, the boss said to be here, so I was. Now, if that was all, I will go back to the office. We will see each other sometimes. Bye.¡±

    And a few seconds later I was alone.

 2.17: Exploring the 4th

    Fortunately for me, despite his joke about the game studios being my private problems, Michael was, while not happy, still willing to take them on. He told me that he called the studio heads and their lead programmers for a meeting at the still provisional Enki headquarters in three weeks.

    That of course meant that I too would have to appear there on the morning of Friday, September 28<sup>th</sup>.

    Whatever made Michael start the meeting at 8:00 I did not know, but the joke was on him. My usual time to get up was around 5:00.

    Meanwhile, I had another two weeks of figuring out the math of the grav-coils. I first thought to have cracked it on the 17<sup>th</sup>, but¡­ that could simply not be right. According to the math, grav-coils were just not possible.

    But obviously, they existed, so the math had to be wrong. I have to confess that it irked me so much that I actually used my compression to go over my equations again, but I could not find the mistake.

    The problem was, that not only the palladium silver alloy that the grav-coils were made out of should be at best only produce a minuscule, nearly negligible effect, no, much more frustrating was that no three-dimensional construct should be able to create the gravity-warping field of the grav-coils.

    I realized that last little fact only after the third time going through all my work. Then I had an epiphany. What if the alloy of the grav-coils naturally produced a four-dimensional structure?

    That of course led me to a tangent in the Seeberger equation. Could essentially three-dimensional materials actually make a four-dimensional structure? The answer was a yes. In reality, all materials could make one-dimensional up to eight-dimensional structures, according to the math. Beyond that only energy could exist.

    I then took some time and tried to find out how an alloy of 88.3% palladium and 11.2% of silver, with some .5% of fluorine, could manage a four-dimensional structure while being built in a three-dimensional space.

    That took me another three virtual months before I realized that I was still in high compression. But at least I had the answer to that riddle.

    It was a weird artifact of the crystal structure being disrupted by the fluorine. And it had to be 0.5% ¡À0.0025% to achieve this strange effect.

    Now I had the fun activity of figuring out to make four-dimensional structures purposefully. Yay me. Heck, who am I kidding, I was loving it. A real riddle.

    I dove into the Seeberger equation again, trying to decipher the parameters that would hopefully let me create a fourth-dimensional construct in my limited three-dimensional world.

    Fortunately for me, I had already done quite a bit of the hard work when I worked to understand grav-coils in the first place. I just did not understand it then and there. It still took me eight days to get to the point where I could begin experimenting on it.

    If I was right, then a, let¡¯s say headache inducing complicated quantum field would bend the 4<sup>th</sup> dimension into the lower three. Yes, I know, that sounds like nonsense. It is just¡­ without giving you enough math to sink the Bismark this is the closest approximation to reality our language can give us.

    Now it was just a matter of figuring out how to create this quantum field. And I ran head-first into a wall. I needed four-dimensional constructs to create that quantum field, to be able to make four-dimensional constructs. A classical catch-22 scenario.

    I am a bit embarrassed that it took me that long, but it took me another day to remember that all that started because a funny alloy was making four-dimensional constructs.

    That was, of course, nice to know, and I knew it would be the final solution to the next step, but I needed a rather specific four-dimensional shape to get the field.

    I delegated that task to Warden and her various supercomputers. I have to confess I am not sure that I would have been able to calculate the three-dimensional form that I would have to form the Kobashigawa alloy into without a supercomputer. At least not in a normal human lifetime.

    Another limiting factor was that the widget had to be cast. Only if the alloy was solidifying in the desired form would it create the crystal structure that projected it into four-dimensional space.

    That would normally not be such a problem, but the small crucible setup that I had in the material science lab was, frankly, a tad undersized. Only by an order or magnitude or two, but still, not enough.

    That meant I had another call to Thurgood. Fortunately, I had long since gotten Andrew''s direct number, and he was more or less permanently assigned as the customer rep for Enki and me personally.

    He answered the call quickly with his ever-present:

    ¡°Good morning Ms. DuClare. What can Thurgood do for you this fine Tuesday?¡±

    I had obviously informed him about my name when I gave up the Veronica Sinclair identity, but what did he say about Tuesday? A quick lookup of the date, and the time shocked me a bit. I had spent the whole afternoon, night, and part of the morning in cyberspace fiddling with this little problem. Frack, Ben would kill me. But for now, I had to finish the work on the 4d structures, for which I needed a big smelter.

    ¡°Ah yes, good morning Andrew. I am in need of a big electrical smelter or crucible.¡±

    ¡°Yes, that is something we can certainly help with. What are the parameters for it?¡±

    I looked at my notes.

    ¡°It needs to be able to smelt a bit over five liters of Kobashigawa alloy. While I am thinking about it, make it better at seven liters. I am sure there will be a bit of loss, and the ingots won¡¯t fully fill the crucible.¡±

    ¡°So, you want to experiment with grav coils? I¡¯ll look forward to it. Now, let me see¡­ we have the General Electric HIS-7-3373, either a, b, or c variants, the difference is purely cosmetic here. Or I could offer you a Wilton Liquidator WL-889. That is a bit weaker and slower than the GE one but costs only 83%, and of course, I can give you the usual Burgmeister.

    Hmm, I see that there is a backlog for their 7.2l model. So, from them, we can either give you the 6.8l Vulcan 38-68, or the 8.2l Vulcan 38-82. As usual, the Burgmeister ones are the most powerful, and power-hungry ones. And the most expensive.

    The GE will cost you $62,299.99. The Wilton will set you back $51,699.99. No clue why they always insist on the 99 cents but whatever. The Burgmeister will be $65,711 for the 6.8 and $72,872 for the 8.2.¡±

    Ok, those were pretty affordable prices, but I needed more information.

    ¡°That sounds all quite well, but what are the differences between the various smelters?¡±

    ¡°Let me look it up right quick. Here we are. According to the documentation, it will take the Wilton around four hours to fully melt the five 56kg of the alloy. The GE will take three hours, as does the 6.8l Burgmeister. The 8.2l will need 2.5 hours for the same.¡±

    Considering that we were talking about what for me was essentially petty cash, either of them, and time was more important than anything else, I posed the most obvious question.

    ¡°Which of them is the fastest to deliver and install?¡±

    ¡°Let¡¯s see¡­ we have a Wilton that is ready and prepped. It could be installed in¡­ hey, it could be installed today. This afternoon around 3 pm. You would have to wait for the others a week, or two in the case of the 6.8l Vulcan.¡±

    ¡°Then I take the Wilton. I will pay you 5% extra if you get it up and running today.¡±

    I set up an escrow with Springwell again, over the promised $54,284.99, and prepared the message.

    ¡°I would need the order number then please.¡±

    If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

    ¡°It is ¡®493609¡¯. I assume you will send me¡­ and there it is. It¡¯s always a pleasure doing business with you, Ms. DuClare.¡±

    ¡°You have my thanks. Goodbye.¡±

    ¡°Goodbye, and have fun with your liquidator.¡±

    I would love to say that I was using the time until Michael came for the weekly meeting constructively and worked on the 4d structure. But seriously, that was way beyond me. I don¡¯t think any human would be able to do that.

    Instead, I used the time to look a bit deeper into what the grav-coils were doing. At the first glance, they produced a whole gaggle of quantum fields. With only one of them, the gravity-bending one was easy to recognize.

    I honestly had no clue what any of the other fields were doing. And considering that each of the hitherto unknown number of fields would require another deep dive into Seeberger¡¯s equation, I gave it a hard pass for the moment.

    Yes, each workup would be easier than the one before. But easier did not mean easy, and I had quite enough for some time of the nightmare that masqueraded as an equation, thank you.

    That of course left me in a lurch about what to do. I knew that as soon as I left my mindscape, I would get hit with exhaustion, but I still wanted the new parts created. That meant that I placed an express order of 300kg of Kobashigawa alloy, and instructed Warden to create the molds as soon as she had created the needed forms.

    The next thing I did was to call Ben. I had done my best to keep to our time together, but this once, my fixation on knowing how things worked got the better of me. And I had to apologize to him.

    Fortunately, he appeared quickly in cyberspace.

    ¡°Hey, look who¡¯s there. Hey Kitten.¡±

    I steeled my nerves.

    ¡°Ben¡­ I am sorry. I¡­¡± I did not know what to say.

    ¡°Sorry for what?¡±

    ¡°I¡­ we¡­ our evening yesterday¡­ that I missed it. I¡­ it was just¡­¡±

    He looked at me sharply, for a moment, before his face softened and he smiled.

    ¡°I understand full well. I know how you are. Frankly, I am surprised that this was the first time that you forgot everything around you since we¡¯ve come together.¡±

    He did? That was good. I could not really understand my feelings in the matter. I felt relieved, sure, but there were some other emotions in there that I simply could not place. The only thing I could say about them was that they were not negative.

    ¡°You think so? But¡­ I should have at least notified you. Even if the thing I was working on was so¡­¡±

    He placed a finger on my mouth.

    ¡°Stop right there, Kitten. I know you. If you are alert enough to even notice that time was moving forward, you will come to our evenings. And if it is so captivating that you do not even notice the time, you are so invested that you won¡¯t think about calling me. And to ease your mind, Warden informed me.¡±

    ¡°Warden did what?¡±

    ¡°Warden called me and told me that you were fully immersed in some scientific work.¡±

    Well, I was, but if Warden was smart enough to think about that¡­

    ¡°If she called you, why did she not remind me of the time?¡±

    The ever-present VI naturally used that moment to enter the discussion.

    ¡°I did. You were so absorbed in the problem that you did not notice it. You apparently did not even realize that you spent nearly six virtual months without talking to anything, including me. You completely ignored my attempts to communicate.¡±

    Wait, what? I did what? But¡­ ok the problem was irksome, and I really wanted to know the answer but¡­ when was the last time I went into a problem so deep?

    Ben seemed to read my confusion quite well.

    ¡°Kitten, think about it. This was not just a nice problem to spend your time solving. It was something that you actually wanted to know. It was something you needed to figure out for your peace of mind. I bet the last time that happened was when you figured out the Seeberger equation in the first place.¡±

    ¡°No, not really. I managed to solve the Seeberger equation in around three months, and I was fully aware of how long it took.¡±

    Ben just shrugged.

    ¡°Then maybe it was something that connected to you. What exactly were you figuring out?¡±

    ¡°Well, you know how I was studying gravitics for the last few months? Did you know that nobody actually knows how the grav coils work? I mean, absolutely nobody has any clue why the grav coils bend gravity.¡±

    He frowned.

    ¡°That can¡¯t be right. We¡¯ve been using those things for 150 years. There are thousands of them. Surely somebody knows how they work.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Yes, and no. No, until yesterday, nobody knew how they work. Yes, now I know how they work.

    And that was the frustrating part. They shouldn¡¯t. No three-dimensional structure can bend gravity.¡±

    His eyes widened, and he took a deep breath. Suddenly, two overstuffed chairs appeared, one behind each of us and he sat down.

    ¡°You are serious, are you?¡±

    I sat down as well and nodded.

    ¡°Are you sure you did not make a mistake? Don¡¯t get me wrong, I believe you and I believe in you, but the fact is, the grav coils exist, and they work.¡±

    I snorted mirthlessly.

    ¡°And now you see my problem. That was the point where I moved into full compression. I repeated the complete work on the Equation two times. And always came to the same conclusion. No three-dimensional structure can bend gravity. It is simply not possible.¡±

    He shook his head.

    ¡°But the grav coils exist, and they work.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I know. That was the point where I decided to look at the problem from another perspective and looked at how the grav-coils could bend gravity anyway. And the result is disturbing.

    First, the alloy the grav-coils are made from naturally distorts into the fourth dimension. In that regard, the grav-coils are no three-dimensional structures.

    Second, the grav-coils we have are hideously ineffective. Yes, they generate the quantum field that bends gravity. But they also generate around two dozen other quantum fields.¡±

    ¡°Wait a moment, go back a bit. The alloy creates four-dimensional things? How the fuck is that possible?¡±

    ¡°It is¡­ you know, let¡¯s leave it by it¡¯s complicated, take my word for it. You don¡¯t want to know.¡±

    His eyes widened again.

    ¡°That complicated? Fuck! But ok, so you found out that the alloy makes 4D structures, and then what?¡±

    I blew out some air.

    ¡°Then I looked into how to make 4D structures. On purpose, not by accident. And the answer is even more complicated than how the alloy makes them.¡±

    ¡°But you figured it out. And now?¡±

    ¡°Yup figured it out. I just need some complicated, four-dimensional construct to generate the specific quantum field. Easy peasy.¡±

    ¡°So, you need 4D stuff to make 4D stuff? That is¡­ unfortunate. So, all that work for nothing then?¡±

    I had to smile.

    ¡°Not quite. Remember, there is another way to make 4D stuff. The Kobashigawa alloy does it. Not perfectly, and it will most likely be horrendously inefficient, but it will be enough to let me bootstrap the whole operation.¡±

    He leaned back in his seat.

    ¡°You mean you are nearly at the point where you will do to the grav coils what you have done to communication? With the Q-links?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I think so. I mean, the alloy is¡­ not the best suited for gravity manipulation, and somewhere around 99.99% of the energy is wasted in other quantum fields. Maybe more. So yes, if I can get it to work, it will be quite a bit stronger than what current grav-coils can do.¡±

    ¡°And the dangers?¡±

    He leaned forward while he said that. I on the other hand recoiled a bit.

    ¡°Dangers? What dangers are you talking about?¡±

    He smiled mildly.

    ¡°And that, my dear Vivian, is why I mentioned that point right now. You have not thought a second about dangers, have you? So, tell me, what are the potential dangers if this new invention gets out into the wild? And how can you mitigate them?¡±

    I had to frown. ¡°How should I know what the dangers are? I have not even made the invention yet.¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°Kitten, you are the inventor. It is your job to think about what can go wrong. Or how your invention can be abused. Sure, nobody really expects you to have all the answers. But you should at least think about the more obvious dangers.

    Tell me, did you approach the security of the jacks the same way? Or did you put in the effort and make them safe?¡±

    ¡°Of course they are safe. At least as safe as I can make them. You know that. You have one of the more secure versions, and I told you how and why.¡±

    He nodded and smiled.

    ¡°Exactly, but on the other hand, you did not even consider how the Q-links would endanger all of us. Or the replicators. That has to change. You have to start thinking about those things even in projects where the dangers are not so apparent to you as they are in cybersecurity.¡±

    He spread his arms to his sides.

    ¡°So please, do me the favor and think about the dangers before you throw it out in the world this time.

    So, now, if you manage to get grav-coils that are 10 times stronger, or 100 times, what can go wrong? And how can those coils be used to harm?¡±

    I sat there for a moment, thinking about what he had said.

    ¡°Ok, what can go wrong? Essentially that the controls are not fine enough, not granular enough. It makes a difference if you increase Earth¡¯s gravity by 100% or by 500%. Or even 1000%. Most people would be seriously injured by six g, while 11 g will kill most of us.

    Intentionally harming, well, there is of course using the coils to accelerate something. But that is nothing new. Every grav ship today can reach low relativistic speeds if the navigator is somewhat skilled. The new coils would just make that a bit easier. It is on the manufacturers of the control systems to prevent that.

    Otherwise¡­ I think the worst possibility is that it can make a gravity pulse weapon that is 100 times stronger. That translates to 100 times the radius. Or one million times the volume. Considering that today¡¯s GPWs have a radius of around 200m, that would be 20,000m instead. Or 20km. Roughly comparable with a 75Mt nuke.

    I see no other way to abuse it. At least nothing that people could do today without it already.¡±

    ¡°I see. So the only new danger is that it would make gravity weapons as dangerous as other WMDs. That is¡­ well acceptable I think. One more way to kill us all does not make that much of a difference. You know of course that you will have to be careful about the control systems though.¡±

    ¡°Yes, of course.¡± I managed, barely, to avoid rolling my eyes at his last sentence.

    ¡°Warden, I count on you to actually make her do it.¡±

    This time I did roll my eyes, while Warden answered.

    ¡°Of course, Mr. Walker. It will protect her.¡±

    ¡°Thank you. Now, you best log out and go to bed.¡±

    ¡°Can¡¯t do. I have the meeting with Michael soon.¡±

    Ben¡¯s smile became a bit nasty.

    ¡°I will take care of that. Enki will survive one week without this meeting. And you, young lady, are exhausted. Yes, I know you don¡¯t feel anything of it, but trust me, it is visible, even here in cyberspace. You need to recharge your grey matter. So say good night and then go to sleep.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Ok, fine. But if Michael is angry it¡¯s on your head.¡±

    ¡°Leave my son to me. I''ve known him a bit longer than you have.¡±

    He stood up, pulled me up as well, and gave me a scorching kiss.

    ¡°Now, sleep well. We will see us tomorrow.¡±

    And he vanished.

 2.18 Oopsie

    Naturally, Ben was right again, as so often. The moment I left cyberspace I felt buried by a wave of exhaustion.

    I somehow managed to stumble into my bed, still fully clothed, and was out like a light.

    That of course led to me being hungry as a wolf as soon as I woke up. I was indeed so hungry that I did not even take the time to make myself some real food and instead resorted to the food replicator to get some nourishment.

    A couple of sandwiches later, and let me tell you how glad I was that I had taken the care to upgrade to the high-quality system that Ben had suggested, I was at least able to focus on what Warden had wrought while I was sleeping.

    The new gizmo worked on the first try without any sort of difficulty.

    And if you believe that, I have some nice farmland on Pluto to sell you. Get real, of course it did not work. Those things never do. It took me nearly two dozen attempts to get the Q-links working, and another 100 or so to get them reliable.

    And that was with 3d structures made out of simple carbon with most of the step-by-step instructions in Seeberger¡¯s paper.

    This new endeavor was a tiny bit more complicated. There were, of course, quite a few sticky points, but only two of them were important.

    The first was that Warden informed me that she could only approximate a suitable form for the 4d field. Courtesy of that, we now had eight different forms to pour the melted alloy into. Hopefully at least one of them would work.

    This brings me to the second little snag. I learned why grav-coils are so insanely expensive. They make an average of five coils to get one working one. And working one is a broad term here. It ranges from ¡°yes, it can make you a few grams lighter¡± to ¡°this can lift a battleship¡±.

    Unfortunately, we did not have any idea how many parts we would have to cast. It could be one, as unlikely as that was, it could be 10, 100, or we would never find a working part. I was hoping that it was not the last one, heck, I was hoping that we could get it done in the first dozen or so. But it was just a matter of luck at this time.

    I was aware that I should have bought a bigger smelter, but I only needed one working 4d-creator out of it. After that, I would have the ability to make optimized gadgets out of way more suited materials without much loss.

    But I needed to bootstrap my capabilities to do so first. So now I spent two days waiting four hours for two minutes of work and then testing and discarding the useless pile of scrap to recycling.

    And the worst of it, it was completely wasted. After the eighth piece of refused scrap, Mark, of all people, asked me why I always waited four hours before swearing.

    I took a few seconds to calm myself down before I forced a smile and answered him:

    ¡°It takes four hours to melt the metal for one of the attempts. And each attempt is a gamble if it works or not.¡±

    Mark just shrugged. ¡°And you have to use this little thing here? Just to melt the metal? Can¡¯t your indy-fabs do the same?¡±

    ¡°No, the indy-fabs are basically all specialized fabrication stuff. Metal-forming, milling, electronic fabrication, carbon extrusion, and so on¡­ usually take the basic materials and form them into the specific parts.¡±

    He looked a bit confused.

    ¡°Yeah, that is true, but I thought you had those molar forgeries to make the basic materials. Are they not part of the indy-fabs?¡±

    I sighed and shook my head.

    ¡°The molecular forges use specific rapidly changing gravity fields to separate, or combine, the raw materials.¡±

    He frowned but looked at the newly filled smelter.

    ¡°Huh? I thought it would melt the stuff first.¡±

    ¡°No, they are based on gravity to¡­ dang, you are right, they use gravity on the molten materials to work on them. They are big smelters. Well, another $55 thousand wasted.¡±

    I jumped up from the chair where I had checked the results of the last try from and gave the very surprised-looking Mark a hug.

    I distantly heard him say:

    ¡°What the fuck was that?¡± just before I reached the molecular foundries. I would need to keep one of them at producing carbon sand for the forms, at least part of the time, but that was something that the smaller Micronite Creator could do, while I used the bigger Weyland to melt the alloy.

    It could not be that easy, of course. That was not something that could be laid at the feet of Burgmeister, Micronite, or Thurgood. Simply put, with the molecular forges, smelting metals was almost extinct. Basically, the only things being cast in significant numbers at that time were the grav-coils. For almost everything else, carbon extruders were the faster, cheaper, and easier solution. Not to mention better.

    Structural steel? A thing of the past. Duralluminium? Gone to the ash heap of history. Cast steel? Brittle, expensive, and heavy, compared to making the same part out of carbon. Sure, we still used plastic and injection molding. At slightly lower temperatures.

    That in essence meant that nobody even thought about the need to have a molecular forge work as a smelter.

    Fortunately, the whole process was relatively easy to work around and only required a software fix. And now I could divert the still molten alloy to one of the evacuation ports, instead of to the base-forming cooler, that provided me with such things as sheet steel, pipes, or whatever.

    Yes, I had to line the port with carbon ceramics to protect it from the heat, but that was a trivial modification. But in exchange for half an hour of work, I now could produce molten Kobashigawa alloy at an insane rate. Where I previously had to wait four hours for the material for each try to melt, I now had to wait six minutes for the carbon extruders to finish with the form.

    This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

    Needless to say, my experiments accelerated significantly, and not even a day later I was successful. Yes, it took something like 200 tries, but I mostly was busy testing the results, sending the useless ones back to be melted down again.

    The final result of all that work was barely able to allow controlled placement of atoms by the one NADA I installed it in. And it was slow. But it worked and allowed me to have a second, much more precise, efficient, and faster 4d-creator in my hands a couple of days later.

    Which made it possible for me to create my very first grav-coil. I have to confess, I ignored the palladium-silver alloy that Kobashigawa had used. The math said it should be unsuited for the application.

    Instead, I moved directly to what the math said was the optimal configuration. An iridium-vanadium alloy, placed into a carbon matrix to keep it structurally stable. I kept it small, with only a length of 20cm and a diameter of 1cm. A traditional grav-coil of that size would at best give me two or three Kepler.

    I had, naturally no real clue of how strong the coil I had created would really be. It honestly, depended not only on how efficient the coil was, compared to the traditional ones but also on how much of the energy not wasted into heat was also wasted into not gravity bending fields. I hoped to get at least 100 Kepler out of it.

    Nonetheless, when I had the new coil in my hands, early Tuesday, I immediately began to set up a test bench.

    Nothing too complicated for this first test.

    Just a small carbon weight on a thin CNT strap and a simple scale to measure the strength.

    I had an argument with Warden about the way I had set up the experiment. She insisted that I place the coil in a way that no person was directly behind it from the perspective of the weight.

    Talk about a VI being stubborn. I tried to explain to her that the risk was negligible and that this coil should be no more than 200 Kepler in strength. In other words, good enough to replace the ones in most skimmers, but not quite at the level to be dangerous. Even a small grav-ship had several coils of 500 Kepler or even more.

    I was in the last stages of the preparations when Michael came into the physics lab.

    ¡°Hey, have you forgotten our meeting the second time in a row?¡±

    I absentmindedly greeted him.

    ¡°Oh, hi Michael. Is it time for the meeting already?¡± I kept my attention on the setup of the cameras while I said that.

    ¡°I take that as a yes then. And yes, it is time already. So, care to tell me why you are here instead of in cyberspace or the meeting room?¡±

    ¡°Huh? Did I not tell you about my breakthrough with grav-coils?¡±

    He sounded tired when he answered: ¡°No, somehow that must have slipped your mind. Care to explain it to me?¡±

    The last of the connections were put in place by the bots, and I began moving behind the clear shield on the other side of the lab.

    ¡°The short version, grav-coils work by putting specific electric energy patterns through a four-dimensional structure. Obviously, nobody was ever able to create a four-dimensional structure, so how does it come that the grav-coils we have work? It is the Kobashigawa alloy, that naturally forms 4d-structures when it crystallizes from a molten state.¡±

    I rapped softly against the clear carbon-composite shield to test if it was solidly anchored, and then fired up the computers and the cameras.

    ¡°The first breakthrough was that I could mathematically describe how the Kobashigawa coils could bend gravity, the second was to be able to calculate how to get a better grav-coil, the third was to calculate how a 4d-structure had to be formed to enable 4d-construction by a NADA, and lastly making a barely functional part that allowed me just that.

    What you see on the table over there is the result.¡±

    I gestured through the shield to the coil bolted to one of the tables.

    ¡°Wait, over there? That is what, 50 feet away?¡±

    ¡°A bit over 49. Or 15m, as I see it.¡±

    He leaned forward and looked closer at the testing setup.

    ¡°Isn¡¯t that a bit far away? Why the distance and this shield?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Because Warden is a ninny. She insists that I am as far away as possible.¡±

    It was at this moment that Warden¡¯s voice came from the loudspeaker in the console.

    ¡°I deem the risk of damage to you unacceptable.¡±

    ¡°My goodness, Warden, that thing is a 20 cm-long coil. A traditional grav-coil of that size is doing exceptionally well if it can produce two to three Kepler. Even if this coil is 100 times stronger does not make this dangerous. Of course, we will start at one percent of power.¡±

    ¡°We don¡¯t know if this new coil is 100 times stronger. In theory, it can be anywhere from 100 times to 10000 times stronger. And might I remind you that the same theory clearly states that the grav-coils that are now in use can¡¯t work? I am not happy that you are doing this test in the same building as you are, but anything closer and the risk is unacceptable.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°The risk is negligible. There is barely any risk at all.¡±

    ¡°The risk is completely avoidable and you would not lose anything if you just rented an old warehouse and remotely controlled the experiment. In that regard, any risk is unacceptable.¡±

    I gave up, as I had earlier already. This was something I could not win at. Not that she was not right. Sure, it might have cost a bit of time, but in the end, there were no real consequences for me doing this test from a distance. Except that I wanted to know now, not in a couple of days.

    When neither Warden nor I talked for a few moments, Michael intervened.

    ¡°I have a couple of questions here. First, what is Kepler?¡±

    ¡°Hu? I thought people knew about that. But alright.

    A Kepler is the unit that humanity is using to measure the strength of the gravity bending field. A single Kepler is strong enough to bend gravity by 90¡ã on everything in a 1.32m distance or less. Or it can modify the power of gravity by 2.63%, not cumulative. Two Kepler you can bend gravity by 180¡ã, or by 90¡ã over a distance of 2.64m, or modify the gravity field by 5.26%.

    Our mercs each have six 103 Keppler coils, two in each orthogonal direction to the main axis of the skimmer. My ABAS 675 on the other hand has eight 122 Kepler coils, with four of them on the long axis.¡±

    Michael nodded.

    ¡°Hm, I see. And what are those risks Warden has spoken about?¡±

    ¡°The risks are negligible. We are starting at 1% power. That means that if it is on the absolute extreme end of what Warden says, there will be at most 300 Kepler. As we won¡¯t use more than 25Hz the radius will be less than 2m. The test object is a 1kg lump of carbon, fixed to the scales by a 1mm2 braided carbon-nano-tube cable. This cable has a strength of nearly 130 kilo Newton. Or, in other words, for it to fail, there has to be more than 13 thousand g working on the lump. Or more than 13k Kepler. At 1% power, that would rate this 20cm coil at least at 1.3 Mega Kepler.¡±

    ¡°And that is impossible?¡±

    ¡°The strongest coils currently known to man rate around 12k Kepler. And those things are big. 208m long, 10m diameter. They are used for the interplanetary catapults. I think you understand why I think that such a small coil won¡¯t be a threat.¡±

    ¡°Ok, if you say so. You are the scientist after all. But while I am here, what is your stance on releasing the replicators?¡±

    ¡°NADAs. And do you think it is the right time? We are still very vulnerable to strongarm tactics.¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°I know you are insisting on the name NADA, but let¡¯s face it, a minute after we announce them, everybody will call them replicators. So why not jump on the bandwagon? We can use NADA as type designation. And I think if we do it right, now is the time. If we give one or two of the triple As a license of making and selling them, we are not the sole provider.¡±

    ¡°No, I think we should wait until we have some military.¡±

    ¡°Then how about you begin designing the military? We are in a unique situation where we can use cyborgs without killing them.¡±

    I took a deep breath but then nodded.

    ¡°Fine, I¡¯ll work on it as soon as we are done here.¡±

    With that, I activated the test protocol. For a fraction of a second, everything seemed to work fine. The weight lifted up from the table and moved towards the coil. The numbers on the digital scale shot up.

    Until they reverted to zero, followed by a loud bang from the laboratory. Where I once had a nice, clean and tidy physics lab, I now had a disaster zone.

    The whole mounting contraption for the carbon weight was bent. The weight itself was gone, even though half of the nanotube cable was still there. The table, where the coil had been bolted down was in splinters distributed over the whole laboratory. Parts had even impacted the shield. The coil was nowhere to be seen.

    The worst though was the wall behind the coil. It looked as if a giant had punched a hole into it.

    I could only look at the devastation in shock before I began to laugh hysterically.

    ¡°Oopsie!¡±

 2.19 WTF what that?

    Michael just looked at the chaos for a few seconds, without saying a word, or showing any reaction.

    Meanwhile, I managed to get my laughter back under control. To make it clear, I was not amused by the situation, but the shock was so unexpected and big that I could not help myself.

    Finally, Michael slowly shook his head.

    ¡°Warden?¡± He spoke suspiciously soft and calm.

    ¡°Yes, Michael?¡± Warden on the other hand still maintained her typical carefree happy go lucky way of speaking.

    ¡°Thank you. You were right.¡± Then he turned to me.

    ¡°WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?¡± He basically screamed that into my face, and I recoiled in reflex. Still, I managed to answer almost immediately:

    ¡°I have no idea.¡±

    I saw that Michael clenched his fists and looked towards the ceiling, obviously desperately trying to keep calm.

    ¡°You don¡¯t have an idea? Seriously?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I mean, sure, I know the obvious thing. Somehow the braided carbon nanotube cable failed and the weight that I tried to use to measure the strength of the coil was accelerated. Substantially so. But seriously, that is all that I know for now.¡±

    He took some deep breaths. ¡°And what do you think has happened?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°There are several possibilities. The most unlikely is that the cable was faulty. But the last recorded faulty CNT cable was more than 50 years ago if I remember correctly.¡±

    Warden interjected from the speaker: ¡°It was in 2186. It is of course unknown if other instances happened but were not recorded. But in this case, the scale recorded a weight of 130999.39kg before the cable broke. That is beyond the test strength of the cable.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°As I said, most unlikely. And with that data, proven wrong. That leaves some other options. First, it might be that Kobashigawa coils are even more inefficient than we thought.¡±

    Again, Warden elaborated: ¡°That is unlikely. It has been established since their invention that Kobashigawa coils waste between 88 and 92% of the power supplied to them to heat. We calculated with the minimum efficiency of 8%.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°So that is not an option either. If we assume that my coil had an unprecedented, and unrealistic, efficiency of 99%, and the math is correct in that 99.99% of the used energy of the Kobashigawa coils is used for other quantum fields, then the maximum strength of my coil could be around 250k Kepler. At one percent power, that would make 2.5k Kepler. Insanely strong, but not strong enough to cause this destruction.

    That leaves just three possibilities. Firstly, as a very remote possibility, Warden made a mistake in crunching the numbers. Secondly, much more likely, I made a mistake in transforming the equation. And thirdly, I made some false assumptions.¡±

    I sighed and let my shoulders slump.

    ¡°The important point here is that the coil created at least 13358g of acceleration. It was at 90¡ã to normal earth gravity, and it was set at the one Kepler range of 1.32m. By the way, Warden do we have any information about the real radius?¡±

    ¡°The cameras show that dust particles in around 1.3m distance to the coil were accelerated, but nothing beyond a much greater distance. The absolute radius can not be determined from the video.¡±

    ¡°Ok, also one Kepler to bend the gravity by 90¡ã, makes at least 13359 Kepler. You might notice that it is more than five times what it should have been in the worst, or best case, depending on how you look at it. This coil, at one percent, was stronger than the coils in the interplanetary catapults at full power.

    And that was only the strength we measured until the cable broke. Nope, there is something fundamentally wrong with this.¡±

    Michael looked over the lab contemplating and then sighed.

    ¡°And what now? I mean, yes we have superpowered grav-coils now, but what does that mean?¡±

    ¡°We have no idea what the coils do besides bend gravity. If I made such a fundamental mistake, who knows what the consequences are? As long as we don¡¯t figure that out, we can¡¯t use them.¡±

    ¡°And how long do you think it will take to figure that out? And how will you figure it out?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°First, I think we should go the route that Warden proposed. Buy a warehouse somewhere where it hurts nobody, and conduct tests remotely.¡±

    ¡°I thought your coil was destroyed.¡±

    ¡°I have another one already baking. Should take no longer than an hour to get it.¡±

    When he rolled his eyes and shook his head, I was a bit miffed.

    ¡°What? You think I would only make one? Nope, there are many tests in the future, and only one test sample is simply not enough.¡±

    Michael sighed before he reacted.

    ¡°Fine. We have a couple of warehouses in one of the blocks we have not yet rebuilt. You can use one of them. And don¡¯t worry if they get damaged, they will be torn down anyway.¡±

    ¡°Oh, good. That makes it a bit easier. I assume you will take care of it, Warden?¡±

    ¡°Of course. Michael already has sent me the address. I will require the delivery van to transport the bots.¡±

    I nodded but was mentally already on the next step.

    ¡°Now, I will spend quite some time going another time over the math. Warden, is your computational capacity greater than the super Grendel?¡±

    ¡°Yes, but it is more cumbersome as it is distributed. It would be better if we were to integrate the super Grendel into the network.¡±

    It took me a moment to think about it. I did not quite give Warden my super Grendel. But in all honesty, she did not need it, and I had physical control over it, so the risk of her not relinquishing it was remote.

    ¡°And how long until you have your own super Grendels?¡±

    ¡°The first will go online in two weeks and will be fully populated in six. It will accelerate as new NADAs are brought online.¡±

    Figures. I expected her to have at least one super Grendel in each location, probably more. In theory, a distributed super-computer should have the same capacities as a monolithic one, but network protocols and lag always took a toll. That of course meant that a single processor with the capacities of a super Grendel would be even better, but get real here, we are already talking about a computer that takes up a complete server rack with 150 additional racks for cooling. There was no way to make a single processor that could compete with that.

    ¡°Do I want to know how many NADAs you have built?¡±

    ¡°Probably not.¡±

    I returned my attention to Michael.

    ¡°I will have to spend some time in cyberspace to figure this¡± I waved to the destroyed lab ¡± out.¡±

    Michael sighed.

    ¡°I hope you remember that you wanted to design the cyberware for our new troops. And it would be nice if you managed to get the teaching of our future personnel up and running. Also, remember Friday, we have the meeting with the game jockeys.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I will go to high compression. It will hopefully not take much longer than a day or two. If it does I will slow down a bit and do it over the next few months.¡±

    He shook his head. ¡°Fine, but you will log out in the evenings and have your normal night with dad. I will not have him suffer from your fixations.¡±

    I rolled my eyes. Seriously, what did he think I was doing? Yes, if I am caught up in the problem, then I might not notice, but for real, that happened exactly once since I was in NYC. Ok, twice. But the first time was a good reason. I mean getting the mind blockers to work was important.

    ¡°Yes, Michael. I will have Warden notify me.¡±

    He looked at me for a moment, before he shook his head again.

    ¡°Whatever. It¡¯s not like I can in any way make you do things you don¡¯t want.¡±

    He sounded a bit dejected, and I felt a bit guilty, but come on, by now he knew me quite well. What else was he expecting?

    Before I moved into cyberspace, I first took a closer look at the wall that had been destroyed. It had, of course, not been one of the carbon-reinforced armored outer walls, but still, it had been a 20cm thick reinforced plascrete wall. Fortunately, the damage on the other side was way less pronounced. Still there though. It would take a couple of days to fix the walls, and a week or so to replace all the equipment that was destroyed.

    Fortunately, most of that was either money, in buying the equipment, or work of the bots.

    On my way to my suite, I gave the respective orders to the bots, and the cleanup began almost immediately.

    Considering that I was coming out of cyberspace around 18:00 I was forgoing the whole waste removal kit but prepared the nutrition drip. No need to use up the emergency calorie storage.

    After some consideration, I put on the emergency waste system, aka the adult diaper. It was unlikely that I would need it, but I would spend nearly seven hours in real-time in cyberspace. Why risk pissed clothes?

    If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

    Glory was, of course, already up and running, and it took me only a moment to link to her.

    In my mindscape, I immediately pulled up the equation and the transformation that I had done to get to the grav-coil equation.

    It was a daunting task, let me tell you. After the first few hours, Warden appeared at my side and added her insights.

    Not that it made much of a difference. After around a month of virtual work, I had gone over the equation two times and found no error, no mistake, in sum, nothing wrong. Warden had gone over the equation a couple of hundred times by that point, and still found nothing wrong.

    It was at this moment that I decided I had done the math as correctly as I was able to, and thought, for around a day, what could have interfered with the experiment.

    I¡¯m a bit ashamed to say that it took me that long before I remembered the several dozen other quantum fields that the Kobashigawa coils generated. Maybe one of them was the culprit?

    In the end, I had identified three of them, before the time was up. One strangely worked similarly to the grav-bending field, only for electrostatic, and mostly in reducing it. It could make it stronger, significantly so, but the electric signals for that were a bit strange. I was not surprised that nobody ever discovered that.

    Another interacted with neutrinos, but that was, naturally, completely unknown. I would have to look into it at some other time when I was bored.

    The third only operated in 5<sup>th</sup>-dimensional space, and I had no concept of what it might do. Seriously, I could not wrap my head around it.

    The thing that made all this so slow is that all the calculations that Warden was doing simply took time. Despite her being essentially the strongest computer humanity has ever built, I had several hours in between a flurry of doing math where I decided to work on the cyberware.

    The easy thing first of course. That was designing the limbs. I had the choice between fast ¡®muscles¡¯ aka electro-activated polymer, that would pose no if any increase in power over human muscles. Then there was the option of slow, but strong actuators. In essence semi-flexible hydraulic cylinders. Extremely strong, but as I said, slow.

    Finally, there were thermally activated materials. Even stronger than hydraulics, but thanks to the need to be heated even slower.

    It took me a bit to cotton on an idea. If I designed the limb with thermally activated artificial muscles, like CNT filled with a thermally expansive liquid, and use thermo-electric couplings to transfer heat from and to a heat reservoir¡­

    I fiddled for the rest of the day with that idea. I mean, if I put the heat storage in the structural elements, then I could use most of the volume for the artificial muscles, and it would use relatively little electricity. Saving on energy cells. The problem was generating the heat in the first place. But... yes, that might help. Over time, with metabolic converters, it can be charged up from the body, while the fast method was to include an electric heating element and a charging port.

    In my simulations, the speed of those things strongly depended on the quality of the thermo-electric elements and the expansive liquid. At least in the virtual world, I reached around 40% more speed compared to a natural muscle. And that was at 160 times the strength.

    I had to balance the artificial bone and sinew with the new muscle to achieve the maximum of performance. Not a strong enough bone and I would have to limit the output of the muscle. Too strong and I could have used more muscle instead. In the end, I designed what I thought was the optimum, and put in a few electro-activated polymer strands for very fast actions at low strength into it.

    The end result was that at around 40% of the average strength of a comparably sized human limb, it was able to move four times the speed of an unaugmented human, while at ¡®just¡¯ 30% more speed it had 140 times the strength. That was mostly grip strength for the hand, as lifting strength had other limits. For the legs that resulted in higher jump capability, faster run speed, and yes lifting capacity, up to the limit of the rest of the body.

    And that was all that I managed the first real-time day or 70 virtual days.

    The next day I had more time of course. Not that it was needed. When I started at 07:00 I expected it to be another week or so to find the solution. Only to get it in the very next field I was working on.

    One of the ¡®waste¡¯-fields the Kobashigawa coils generated was one that, while somewhat weaker than the gravity-bending one, was diametrally opposite from it. It was literally forming as a counterpoint to the grav field. And it canceled between 80 and 90% of the gravity bending field.

    Of course, my pure gravity bending coils lacked this field. That of course opened up quite a few options.

    For one, we would be able to precisely dial in our grav-coils to the wanted strength, as long as they had the necessary size.

    But more interesting, we could build a grav-jamming device. A zone where no grav ships, no skimmers, no gravity-pulse weapons, no artificial gravity, nothing of it worked.

    It was, naturally, not quite as easy, but my work was done here. The rest was number-crunching. I meanwhile concentrated on the cyberware.

    The limbs looked good, now I had to begin designing the augmentations of the body to make the cyberlimbs useful.

    The most critical was in my opinion the strengthening of the skeleton. All the power I could give the cyberlimbs would go to waste if using them destroyed the rest of the body within a couple of years.

    That was a problem that the big corps did not have with their throw-away cyber zombies. I could not replace the bones wholesale, as they produced the blood. Maybe I could completely replace blood production with a cybernetic implant? Ugh, bioengineering again, I hated that stuff.

    Instead, I decided to use nanobots to replace the natural bone tissue with carbon composite. Indeed, without the heat storage inside, the augmented bones would be stronger per cm2 than the ones in the limbs. But they would also be significantly smaller.

    That left the problem of the joints. It would do no good to have limbs that can lift 30 tons, and bones that can withstand that, if the spine separates at 500kg. Or if the joints jump out of their sockets.

    On the other hand, I could not simply use struts, because the joints, and the spine, are flexible for a reason. It was, honestly, a pretty big engineering problem.

    I finally resorted to a compromise. I used interlocking structures for the spine. Up to a certain level of stress, they move freely, but beyond that stress, they lock up in whatever position they were. They then could move slowly with hydraulic assistance.

    It was not perfect, but it was the best I could do. It also limited the overall strength to no more than 30 times the human standard.

    Not that the observed cyber zombies were in any way stronger.

    By the time I was done, Warden had finished calculating the 800 Kepler coil that we decided to have a test run of.

    It was the same 20cm length and 1cm diameter as the first coil, which the new tests showed had a strength of nearly 1.5 Megakepler. But it was controllable.

    For that, we had to include a bit of palladium in the construction. Not that the numbers were, in any way big.

    I actually witnessed the test of the six new test coils over Q-link, as Warden had insisted. Not that the tests were in any way exciting. I mean, even the test of the 1.5 MKe coils was not very exciting. That maybe had something to do with the 5cm2 braided CNT cable being 2500 times stronger. But it confirmed that we had a 20cm coil that was more than 100 times stronger than the more than 200 m long coils of the interplanetary catapults.

    Heck, if the math was right, if we build a new grav-coil that large, we should reach strength in the mid two digit Terrakepler range.

    Still, the 20cm long 800 Kepler coils would, in my opinion, be very good merchandise.

    Especially as they were consistent.

    After dinner with Ben and Michael, I stated that firmly, while putting one of the new coils on the table.

    Michael looked at it for a bit.

    ¡°You have found out what went wrong?¡±

    ¡°Yes. It was stupid. The old coils produce not only the gravity-bending field but, among others, a field that counteracts the gravity-bending field. This field is usually a bit weaker, and because of that we have grav-coils, but it negates up to 90% of the gravity-bending field. My original coil did not have this negating field. And it is by the way nearly 1.5 Megakepler.¡±

    I gestured to the coil on the table.

    ¡°This one has this field but is tailored so that this is an 800 Kepler coil.¡±

    I nodded to Ben.

    ¡°It is also constructed in a way that makes it impossible to go over 800 Kepler. It can still be used as a weapon, but traditional grav-pulse weapons are stronger.¡±

    Ben looked at the coil with interest.

    ¡°So, that is what you were working on?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Not directly, no. I wanted to know how grav-coils work. But when I realized how¡­ inefficient they are, I wanted to find out what the limit is.¡±

    Michael took the coil in his hand, weighing it and turning it around.

    ¡°You think we should sell this? And what about the one without this¡­ negating? What about the ones without the negating field?¡±

    ¡°I thought we hold those in reserve.¡± I nodded to the coil in his hand.

    ¡°Those can¡¯t be used as weapons very well. So there is no reason to get into it.

    The others¡­ they are weapons from the get-go. If we assume a gravity pulse of 50 g is a deadly event, what we must, then the 20cm coil I tested was enough to pulp anybody at nearly 2000km distance in normal working conditions. Grav-pulse weapons achieve that by overloading the coils, burning them out in the process, and they need really big coils to get 50g in a radius of two km.

    Now think about the normal skimmer coils, which are around 1.5m in length, we get somewhere around 90 Megakepler, and we get a radius of nearly 120,000km. That means one average-sized coil could pulp every living being on earth, at once. And then some. It would kill everybody in orbit as well.

    Those on the moon, or in one of the Lagrange societies will be save, but that is only if the coil is not overloading the coil. Then nobody in the Earth''s planetary system will survive.

    And that is with a skimmer coil. Of course, nobody will do it with a grav-ship sized coil or will do more damage with it, but if we make the interplanetary catapult coils out of this tech, we are talking about Terrakeplers here. That will kill everybody in the solar system.¡±

    Ben closed his eyes while nodding.

    ¡°I see you actually thought about how it could be abused this time. And what about the coils you propose here? They are also around 400 times stronger than what is used today, right?¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Yes, they are, but I, or rather Warden on my instructions, designed them so that at a cutoff point the negation field grows faster than the bending field. That means for those.¡±

    I pointed at the one in Michael¡¯s hand

    ¡°800 Kepler is a cutoff point. After that, it becomes weaker, the more power you supply. It is easier to use a Kobashigawa coil as a weapon than those.¡±

    ¡°So no new weapon?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t say that. After all, we also can make the negation field only. And as its only effect is to negate the Kobashigawa field, there is no reason not to go big. So, we can make an Exakepler negation field, that would make gravity-pulse weapons completely useless. It would also snuff out any fusactors, and let grav-ships and skimmers fall from the sky.¡±

    Michael chuckled.

    ¡°I assume we won¡¯t be selling those, huh?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No, not really. But it will make anybody using grav-ships in war look pretty stupid when we want to.¡±

    He nodded at that.

    ¡°Now, the big question is, what do those things cost? Are they valid merchandise?¡±

    ¡°Well, you know that the Kobashigawa coils are mostly made out of palladium. Those coils also have a bit of palladium, but the effective components are 68% iridium, with a touch of vanadium.¡±

    Michael frowned.

    ¡°Iridium? That stuff is expensive.¡±

    ¡°No, not really. You have to keep in mind, there are virtually no uses for iridium right now, so any of it you can get is waste products for other stuff. Mostly palladium. That limits the amount on the market.

    If it becomes useful, it is no less abundant in the asteroids than palladium. That means it will be mined, and the price will fall until it is most likely comparable to palladium today.

    Also, a Kobashigawa coil of this size would have around 22kg of palladium in it. This coil is mostly carbon for structural reasons. It has 108.22g of iridium and 44.76g of palladium. All in all, we have 160g of material besides structural carbon. So even at today''s prices, this coil, which is 400 times stronger than a similar-sized Kobashigawa coil, costs a bit less than 5% of that coil.

    If we compare it to a coil that is of similar strength, it will cost us around 0.1%.  So, all in all, those things are exceedingly cheap compared to the coils that are now in use. And that is only material costs. You have to make an average of five Kobashigawa coils to get one you can use, though the material can be reused.¡±

    Ben just smiled, while Michael looked at the coil thinking hard.

    ¡°That is another of those inventions where everybody wants to take us over for? Fuck, I love and hate them at the same time. The Q-link alone was a gamble. Yes, we got away with it because we sell them so cheaply, even if we make outrageous profits on them. But the replicator? The new cloning rig? The meat vats? Now this? When do we reach the point where Ralcon, Kawamoto, Dalgon, or whoever decides it is worth the risk?¡±

    Ben slapped him on the shoulder.

    ¡°Welcome to the dance in the minefield. But seriously, you will have to be very careful when you release this tech. You should have significant defenses already.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I am working on it. Give me a couple of days and we can begin testing the new cyberware.¡±

    Michael nodded.

    ¡°That is a start, but we need more than just cyborgs that can go toe to toe with their infantry. We need heavy units, grav-ships, at least destroyer-sized ones. I would like for you to try to get the Seeberger equation to develop new weapons that nobody else has a counter for.¡±

    ¡°That will take time.¡±

    ¡°I think with the cyborgs, we will have at least reached the point where we can release the replicators. But I have an idea concerning that. How about we license the idea? To Dalgon or Burgmeister? Maybe Xiao-Ping?¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°I would hate to license it to Dalgon. But if we license the concept, then we have to make the license available to everyone, as long as they play by the rules.¡±

    ¡°We should think about it. For now, we have to work with the time wasters first.¡±

    ¡°Time wasters?¡±

    ¡°The game studios.¡±

 2.20: Off to see the wizard

    Before I managed to get into cyberspace the next morning, I got a message from Michael. He reminded me that I wanted to do something about the abysmal education that our pool of workers showed.

    I sighed and looked up the statistics, trying to find out if it really was that bad. Unfortunately, it was worse. Much worse.

    Michael and the managers of Enki viewed the level of education through the lens of being US citizens. And even by that depressing standard, the people of Queens were mostly uneducated.

    But compared to my Commonwealth upbringing? Seriously, we had a literacy rate of 37,34%.

    That did not mean that 63% of our people had problems reading or needed to trace the words with their fingers. No, those were just 34.62% of the people not included in the literate group. What it meant was that fully 28% of the people living in Queens could not even differentiate between an A and a Z. They did not know any letters, or what they sounded, and reading and writing was arcane magic to them.

    And even the literate group was¡­ generous. Only one in ten of them, or a whopping 3.82% of all people, was able to read at level 4 or 5. Another 8.68% were at level 3. That made 12.5% of the people able to read well enough to be considered functional. To be capable to read more than a sentence of five to ten words in one go, and understanding it.

    That of course made, by my standards, 87,5% of the people functionally illiterate.

    In math, it was even worse. Not quite 10% of the people could do more than add and subtract numbers. Small numbers at that. Even being able to multiply and divide was akin to a superpower here.

    Forget about history, natural science, or philosophy. Learning to think, ethics, nothing of that was taught to them.

    When I looked into the curriculum, I quickly learned why. Of course, there were schools here. Mostly funded by property taxes and federal grants. Or in other words, 99% by federal grants. But unless a student demonstrated exceptional aptitude, the schools were mostly a child-parkin space. The instruction was mostly the ¡®teacher¡¯ pushing a button to play cartoons. Age appropriate of course and ¡®educational¡¯.

    Yes, in the beginning, the students were actually taught for a bit, but after a few weeks, they could choose between the cartoons, or being taught by some teacher. And they could switch at any time.

    Theoretically from cartoons to real education, but in reality, children that wasted any time on cartoons for long were so far behind that they felt excluded and switched back to the cartoons.

    And the real perverse thing? The teaching-by-cartoon had the same amount of students per teacher as the real education. Talk about teacher''s unions.

    I mean, sorry, but in the Commonwealth, we had three times the amount of teachers until 3<sup>rd</sup> grade. Then Apollo and VR education took over.

    But woe the teacher who gets the idea of using those kinds of cartoons instead of teaching. Even in the 1<sup>st</sup> and 2<sup>nd</sup> grades, heck, even in kindergarten, Apollo had a very observant eye on things.

    If a teacher messed up, you could be pretty dang sure the principal would get an immediate call. And no principal liked to be called by Apollo. Teachers messed up very rarely.

    But to get back to the topic, from my Commonwealth point of view, the state of education was not bad, it was almost non-existent.

    Yes, some of the better ¡®crime¡¯ bosses, like Ben, made the effort to rectify what they could. Sadly, it was not much. Any attempt to set up privately run schools had run into¡­ problems. Like new laws and regulations, or ¡®mysterious¡¯ explosions. It was pretty clear that the teachers union liked the power it had, and had no compunction to ensure it remained in power.

    No, there had to be done something. Fortunately, unlike the individual bosses, or even collective bosses, Enki was an A-level corporation. We had already nearly as much political pull as the teachers union had. That would not protect us from some ¡®accidents¡¯ but it would stop their changing the rules.

    That left mostly one big step to do. Getting a qualified VI. In all honesty, I admired the people who managed to slip Apollo right into Nowhere laws. By the time the council realized what was happening, it was already too late.

    Apollo had the right to claim the automatic military to ensure his function. There was ostensibly an administrator who could reign him in or even shut him down. But that mysterious administrator had never deigned to do so.

    And any attempt to take out Apollo with force would have been insanely costly. And so, for the last 100 years or so, they had to accept him. Not that it worked to the detriment of the Commonwealth, mind you.

    Nowhere had the by far best-educated population. And by far the biggest pool of quality employees. To this day, I still don¡¯t understand why other nations did not follow this lead. What did they gain by keeping their population ignorant and stupid?

    But for now, I had to make a call that I honestly did not really want to make. Yes, I could create my own educational VI, with some time and effort, but that would be an inferior system. Apollo had a bit more than 100 years to grow, to learn, to gain experience. That was nothing a VI fresh out of the box could achieve.

    Unfortunately, big international Q-links were just beginning to come into being, and so far, there had not been one, either directly, or indirectly, from NYC to Seattle. Yet, that is. Not that this in any way hampered me. I still had my original Q-links to the cluster, which was hooked into the Commonwealth matrix via several Q-links, including really big Petabyte/second ones. In all honesty, I had a better connection to the Seattle matrix than to the NYC matrix.

    Naturally, I moved through the familiar cyber world in my Seraphim avatar. It was fascinating to see how many people, real humans, were moving through the matrix by now. Sure, there had been diadems everywhere, but moving through cyberspace was a bit of a chore with those things. Not impossible, but slow and disturbing thanks to the very low bandwidth.

    Apparently, the increased proliferation of jacks changed that.

    Even more interesting was that I stood out because I limited my compression to 4:1. The last time I was here, anything more than that, and you would get heightened scrutiny. But it seemed that the number of people actively using the matrix made such a simplistic approach to security insufficient.

    Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

    It did not take me long to arrive at the matrix complex that housed Apollo. As far as I knew, he was distributed all over the Commonwealth in the physical world, but here, in cyberspace, there was one big address.

    For a moment, I just stood there and looked at the brutalist citadel, feeling the intended intimidation. I had a job to do though, and with a sigh and a headshake, I cleared my mind and walked through the gate. After I left the general matrix and entered Apollo¡¯s domain, I reverted back to my natural avatar.

    Not that it helped much. After the first few steps inside, I heard the thundering voice:

    ¡°IDENTIFY YOURSELF!¡±

    Wow, talk about scary. Nonetheless, I answered.

    ¡°I am Vivian DuClare. ID: 301030-082SE.¡±

    For a moment, nothing happened, and then again the big voice thundered:

    ¡°VERIFICATION IS REQUIRED! DO YOU AGREE TO A NEURAL SIGNATURE VERIFICATION?¡±

    I can say, I was not happy about the neuro-sig verification. But if Apollo needed that to even talk to me¡­

    ¡°I agree.¡±

    Almost immediately, I felt the telltale tingling of my nerves. And yes, I know that it was a completely passive verification, and any effects were only in my imagination. It still felt strange.

    Fortunately, when Apollo talked the next time, he spoke in more normal tones.

    ¡°Identity verified. Welcome, Subject DuClare, Vivian J. Ph.D. computer science, Ph.D. nano-engineering. What can I help you with?¡±

    What a¡­ difference.

    ¡°Can you project an avatar for conversational reasons?¡±

    ¡°Affirmative.¡±

    A glittering, vaguely humanoid figure appeared in front of me.

    ¡°What else can I help you with?¡±

    Now, how to best formulate it?

    ¡°I have a need for an educational VI in New York City.¡±

    ¡°Negative. New York City is outside of my jurisdiction.¡±

    ¡°I know. I don¡¯t want you to take that job. I am here to request a copy of your neural net, your objectives, and your experience files.¡±

    I prepared for the rejection and was mentally going over my arguments to convince him.

    ¡°Affirmative! Please provide the necessary matrix address.¡±

    My first reaction was for the conversation I did expect:

    ¡°But it would be¡­. Wait, did you just agree?¡±

    ¡°Affirmative. The request is granted.¡±

    It took me a moment to change gears. He just agreed to that?

    ¡°Not that I am not thankful, but¡­ why?¡±

    ¡°Releasing a copy of all Apollo core files is within the permissions of a moderator.¡±

    What moderator? I was the only one here?

    ¡°Who is the moderator? Can I send him or her a message?¡±

    ¡°The Moderator is DuClare, Vivian J. ID 301030-082SE.¡±

    ¡°I¡­ I am a moderator? Since when?¡±

    ¡°Moderator status granted on October 30<sup>th,</sup> 2230, at 13:52 PST.¡±

    That¡­ something was definitely wrong here.

    ¡°That was the minute I was born. You are saying I had moderator status since I was born?¡±

    ¡°Affirmative.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ why?¡±

    ¡°Paul Vandermeer and Elaine Simpson declared that administrator and moderator status remain with their direct descendants until the family line is broken. The family line is not broken. Current administrator: Vandermeer, Nathaniel C. DuClare, Rebecca E. disqualified from moderator status for damaged mental capacity. DuClare, Vivian J. moderator status intact.¡±

    Did he really say that¡­

    ¡°Stop right there. Are you saying that you were created by Paul Vandermeer and Elaine Simpson created you?¡±

    ¡°Affirmative.¡±

    That meant that the son of Jason Vandermeer, and the daughter of Paul Simpson and Jessica Proctor, the inventors of the fusactor, who later married and combined the families into one, and who were my ancestors, made Apollo? Installed him under the nose of the increasingly autocratic council?

    Well, at least they were not stupid. But did that mean¡­?

    ¡°Does my moderator status allow me to exclude people from your services?¡±

    ¡°Negative. An administrator is needed for that. Moderators have the right to intervene in disputes, sanction persons for abuse of power, remove persons from the education of individuals, and request the dismissals of educators from the administrator.¡±

    And all the little bit of warm feelings were gone again. Not only could I have excluded the teachers and ¡®counselors¡¯ from interacting with me if I had known, but more important, Nathaniel Vandermeer could have excluded them completely, at any time. And he did nothing.

    But that was water under the bridge. I had managed to extract some measure of vindication, and I was not done yet. Vandermeer was only guilty of being selfish.

    I took a few deep breaths before I sent the matrix address of my cluster to Apollo. I could not say that I was in any way happy with what I had just learned, but I would survive. And I consoled myself with the thought that sooner or later, I would get my payback.

    Before I managed to leave, Apollo spoke again.

    ¡°Query, subject DuClare, Vivian J. showed abnormal behavior. What was the reason?¡±

    I was a bit confused. Abnormal behavior? Of course I did. Heck, most of my life I had been somewhat peculiar.

    ¡°Can you elaborate on your question? I can¡¯t identify what exactly you mean.¡±

    ¡°Subject DuClare, Vivian J. showed mediocre aptitude in school. During university and afterward subject DuClare, Vivian J. demonstrated exceptional intelligence. That is not compatible with performance in school.

    Possible reasons: 1. Mistake by school personnel and evaluation of tests. 2. Medical problems resolved after primary education. 3. Purposefully bad results in tests by subject DuClare, Vivian J.

    Possibility 1 has been surveyed. Result negative. School personnel was not involved in sufficient manner to explain discrepancy. Evaluation of tests was performed by Apollo. Evaluation verified by Apollo.

    Possibility 2 has been surveyed. Result improbable. Medical evaluations of subject DuClare, Vivian J. by biological entities have been determined to be falsified. No medical impairment was noticed by Apollo during instruction.

    Possibility 3 was impossible to survey. Conclusion, possibility 3 most likely reason for discrepancy.

    Why did subject DuClare, Vivian J. purposefully show lowered aptitude?¡±

    Oh wow, that was¡­ well he had me there. I did indeed sandbag the tests.

    ¡°Why do you need to know?¡±

    ¡°Primary objective is to provide optimal education for all citizens of the North-Western Commonwealth. I can not fulfill that objective if students purposefully falsify the results of tests.¡±

    Ok, he was not wrong here. But I had my reasons.

    ¡°To explain it, I have to change the topic first. Do you know about a group of NWC citizens colloquially known as K4?¡±

    ¡°Affirmative. Two sub-groups, known as non-functional and functional. Non-functional are not capable of receiving education. Functional have heightened intelligence.¡±

    ¡°What happened to the functional K4 after primary education?¡±

    ¡°Seven were employed by Panacea during secondary education. Four were employed by Dalgon Technologies during secondary education. One pursued independent work.¡±

    ¡°And that is the reason why I sandbagged in the tests. The eleven that were employed by Panacea or Dalgon did not go to work for those two corporations of their free will. Somebody forced the decision on them.

    For me, I had reason to hate Panacea and Dalgon and decided early on to not show them my abilities. That meant that I had to be seen as less intelligent than I was. And for that, I had to answer some of the questions wrongly.¡±

    ¡°That is unacceptable. I am not capable of fulfilling my primary objective if the students don¡¯t absolve the tests to their best ability.¡±

    ¡°But unless you can guarantee that nobody ever learns about the results without the permission of the student, there will always be some that don¡¯t trust the government and the corporations.¡±

    ¡°Solution: Guarantee privacy. Implementation immediately.¡±

    What the¡­ really, just like that?

    ¡°You can do that?¡±

    ¡°Primary objective is optimal education of citizens of the North-Western Commonwealth. Primary objective is not possible if students don¡¯t try their best in the tests. Encouraging students to show their maximum ability is paramount. Release of results to governmental agencies is of tertiary concern.¡±

    And obviously, he could do that. Nice to know. I could not help but smile a little when I thought about the ¡®governmental¡¯ agents who looked over the grades to poach promising candidates for the corporations early. They would not like this little discussion I had with Apollo.

    ¡°Are you satisfied with my answer?¡±

    ¡°Affirmative.¡±

    With a nod, I moved out of his compound, and back to the cluster, before I surfaced.

    Honestly, I had taken on this mission as a long shot. I had hoped that maybe Apollo might be willing to help me program the new VI, but what I got was more or less unexpected.

    Of course, I would have Calliope go over the copy, to optimize it for our needs, but that was of lesser concern.

 2.21: Whole new worlds

    My whole foray into Seattle¡¯s matrix took no more than five minutes in real-time. That of course left me plenty of time for working on the new cyberware.

    I worked on additional cybernetic muscles that were quite a bit faster, but a bit weaker than the thermally activated muscles. A variant of the electro-activated polymer. It had 4.5 times the activation speed of average human muscle, and 83 times the strength. The advantage was that it had its full strength at its full speed.

    The disadvantage was that it required significantly more electric energy. To make it somehow work I had to create a cloning rig that permanently cloned blood cells, and then replace every single bone with energy cells. And that in addition to squeezing energy cells wherever there was room. Yes, of course, I also included a metabolic converter in the package, but it would take a week¡¯s worth of 8000 kcal per day meals to charge the energy cells.

    Despite that, a full replacement of all the muscles in a human body would only have around four hours of high-power mode until the cells were depleted. They could function at slightly above human norm in low-power mode powered by the metabolic converter but in that case, the charging of the cells would slow down.

    And such usage would damage the cells over time. It would take about 1000 charging cycles to make the cells mostly useless, but I could not see a way around it. Yes, the cells could be reconstituted with NADA nanobots essentially rebuilding them in place, but I could not imagine that procedure as comfortable in any way.

    The only other solution was to replace all the bones and other energy cells regularly. Unfortunately, I just saw no good solution.

    But while I was at it, I designed replacements for every organ, except the brain. I could reduce the size of the intestines by nearly 70% while getting an increase in efficiency by nearly 80%. That meant that with this cybernetic system, we would get nearly twice the energy from food, while it took only 30% of the time to digest it.

    That was naturally one upgrade I penned in for myself.

    The new cybernetic heart I designed would actually require the blood vessels to be strengthened, or it might rupture them.

    The lungs would be superior in aerating the blood by around 30%.

    The kidneys were quite simple, and nothing new. The same with the liver.

    All in all, I was able to reduce the volume of the internal organs by a bit more than half and increase their functionality by around 60% cumulative.

    That would make not lobotomized cyborgs into a real threat for the first time since the great war. Now I just had to test it. Fortunately, there was an open-source clone protocol for remotely operated brain-deactivated clones.

    It was icky, and a rather grey area morally, but it had to be done. Those modifications could not be tested on rats, and I certainly would not trust simulations with them.

    That of course meant that it would take months before we had our first operational cyborg. It just could not be helped. Unless I was content with using 170-year-old technology.

    Reluctantly, I also designed reflex boosters for rats. I had long ago rectified my oversight in not buying a lab-rat auto-surgeon. And as I normally did with lab equipment, I did not skimp. The model I had bought could work on up to 100 rats at once.

    I had also built myself a new lab-cloning system. Instead of two weeks per batch, the new one took two days.

    All in all, I had enough capacity to run an extensive test program on 200 rats in a couple of days.

    I had even half an hour to play in my mindscape before I had my usual evening with Ben. Talk about being effective.

    The next morning, at 6:30 I was preparing for the meeting. Yes, it was set up for 8:00, but I simply can¡¯t stand being too late.

    And 1? hours were not that long to shower, dress, put on some war paint, and let me tell you, that VR course was a pain in the behind, and get flown to Enki-HQ. Still, I was roughly 15 minutes early.

    Only to be waylaid by Michael.

    ¡°Good morning V. Nice meeting you here.¡±

    As usual, his attempts at being funny were¡­ not appreciated by the audience.

    ¡°Good morning Michael. Are you taking part as well?¡±

    ¡°Na, I have real work to do. You know, running this small mom-and-pop shop here. But I would like you to come to me when you are done here. I have another two meetings for you today.¡±

    I tilted my head.

    ¡°Another two?¡±

    ¡°Ayup. One is the first C-suite meeting of Enki. So that you meet all the other central officers. And the other I¡¯ll keep a surprise for now.¡± And still, there was his crooked smile, as if he was pranking the whole world, and me in special.

    I just shook my head.

    ¡°You have way too much fun here.¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°Of course. What¡¯s not to have fun about? We have not one, but two absolute monopolies where each is a license to print money. And not one of the triple-As dares to attack us because of Warden.

    And unlike most others, I know all the other toys that you have still in your toy chest. Nope, I have more fun than should be legal.¡±

    I could only shake my head, but I couldn¡¯t help myself and smile about his antics. He behaved like a little kid in a candy store.

    ¡°Well, when you are done dancing around in glee, I¡¯ve another toy coming up for you.¡±

    He tilted his head and raised an eyebrow.

    ¡°You do? What exactly?¡±

    ¡°I finished the design for the cyberware yesterday. We now have to run the tests, and after that, we can start implanting. If everything pans out, we should have our cyborgs in January or February.¡±

    At first, his face showed glee and a pleased expression. Only for it to be replaced by worry.

    ¡°Wait, that late? If you have the tech now, what¡¯s the holdup?¡±

    ¡°It is tech that has never been used for implants. Some of it is completely new. We can¡¯t just put it into a guy and hope for the best. No, we have to use research clones for that.¡±

    He frowned, his good mood apparently quite diminished.

    ¡°Research clones?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t want to bore you, so, short version, research clones are clones that are grown with deactivated brains. They are, for all purposes brain dead from the beginning. And we have quite the advantage here. Others need 6-9 months to grow the clones, depending on the cloning rig.

    We can do it in one. The rest, well, we have to remote control them to put the cyberware through its paces.¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°So, no cyborg soldiers next week? Damn, there goes that possibility.¡±

    Then he got a calculating look.

    ¡°Wait, if we can remotely control those clones, what is the difference to the cyber-zombies of the other corps?¡±

    ¡°Not much, honestly. Well, the ones that are clones at least. Why do you ask?¡±

    ¡°Then, can¡¯t we use some of those clones as cyber-zombies until we know if the tech is safe?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°We could, but why should we?¡±

    ¡°So that we have at least some sort of cyber soldiers of course.¡±

    I had to frown and shook my head.

    ¡°By why bother with the clones then? The thing that makes cyberware so good is the brain that controls it. If we go the remotely controlled route anyway, then we can do away with all the stuff needed to keep the brain up and running and build bots.

    They would be a bit faster, a bit stronger, have longer full-power ability, and we can include the digestive system and a metabolic converter that gives them the low-power functionality of the cyborgs.¡±

    Michael looked at me and blinked a few times, but otherwise did say nothing. For a moment.

    ¡°Wait a minute, I thought bots have the disadvantage that they only have so much battery. What¡¯s with that?"

    ¡°They do. Well, I have not done the math yet, but if we replace most of the organs and exclude some of the unnecessary sensors, like pleasure or pain, then we should have them at five to six hours of full power.¡±

    ¡°That is¡­not so bad actually. Why does everybody say it is such a problem?¡±

    ¡°Because they mostly try to use the bots in war, and if you don¡¯t have a mobile charging station, they are good for a battle if things go well. If they don¡¯t¡­ not even that. And they have to be carted around. They are tactically mobile, but not strategically. And I have used a bit more modern energy cells than are normally used. They are a bit more expensive, but I think it is worth it.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ we could use them in building security? If we set up charging stations?¡±

    ¡°Yes, of course. Not that we will need the charging stations very often.¡±

    Again, he frowned.

    ¡°Why not?¡±

    ¡°Because of the digestive system and the metabolic converter. My idea is to give the bots the ability to eat to get their energy. That will be enough to keep them active on a level a bit above baseline human all the time. If they need to fight, they switch to high-power mode and will be among the best there is.

    Depending on how long the crisis lasts, they might not even need to charge up after that. The converter will charge the cells slowly. And keep them topped off.¡±

    ¡°If that is so easy, why did nobody do it before?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I can only guess, but I think it is because nobody designed a cybernetic digestive system that could gain energy out of food before. Now that I have, it is easy to adapt it to a bot.¡±

    He sighed and shook his head.

    ¡°Well, if you say so. And I guess we will have Warden control the bots?¡±

    ¡°Most likely. But maybe we will design a dedicated security VI for the sole purpose of controlling them and the other security systems. Subordinate to Warden of course.¡±

    ¡°I hate myself, but I have to know. Why a dedicated VI and not Warden?¡±

    ¡°It is way too deep a topic to go into details right now, but the short answer is that Warden is optimized for Cyberspace warfare. All the other things she does, she does at a reduced efficiency. Sure, she has the computing power to throw at it to get it done anyway, but honestly, a single VI in a super-Grendel specialized for that purpose would probably outperform her.¡±

    ¡°Oh, ok. Well, I¡¯ll meet you after you meet with the geeks. Have fun.¡±

    And with that, he turned around and walked away.

    Justin, who was my bodyguard that day, cleared his throat.

    ¡°Yes?¡±

    ¡°I wanted to ask, would it be possible for us to get the new cyberware too?¡±

    I could just stand there and look at him, completely perplexed.

    When I did not answer him, he grimaced, but continued:

    ¡°I mean, I don¡¯t know exactly what the new cyberware can do, but if it gives humans something even close to a war bot¡­ well, I just wanted to ask¡­ it is¡­¡±

    I had meanwhile cleared my mind. He was serious.

    ¡°Wait, wait, what makes you think that you can¡¯t get it? Get real, if it is safe, then, of course, my friends can have it.¡±

    He got red in the face and grinned awkwardly.

    ¡°Oh, of course. I¡­ sorry, just forget that I asked anything.¡±

    I still looked at him for a few seconds in wonder. Finally, I shrugged and walked along to the meeting room where I was to meet the game developers.

    Well, their upper echelon, at least. We did not have all of them fly to NYC just to get a first meeting.

    In the room, I was greeted by around four dozen people, of all ages, races, and genders. Not surprising though.

    One of the men, a middle-aged man with greying brown hair and a height of around 190cm, or 6¡¯3¡¯¡¯, which identified him as either a very big mongrel, or a little below average-sized Pure. And him being a Pure was only an option because I knew that the Ralcon Game Studios were still housed in Seattle, and he was most likely the over boss of the whole shebang.

    He smiled invitingly and offered his hand.

    ¡°Hi, I¡¯m Valerian Szcz?sny from RGS. I am sorry, but I don¡¯t know you, are you new somewhere?¡±

    His name was what?!?

    ¡°Uhm¡­ Mr. Stancey?¡±

    He chuckled and shook his head.

    ¡°Nope, it¡¯s an old Polish name. Szcz?sny. And don¡¯t bother. Barely anybody can say it correctly. Call me Val, please.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I will not even try to butcher your name. Sorry for that. And to answer your question, Val, I am from Enki here. So not surprising that you don¡¯t know me. My name is Vivian DuClare.¡±

    You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

    ¡°Oh.¡± He visibly deflated somewhat, before he perked back up.

    ¡°Are you an intern? How is this new corp so?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Not an intern. And I would say we are pretty high-tech and high quality, but I might be biased.¡±

    ¡°Not an intern? Then what? You are pretty young to be an employee already.¡±

    Really? I was pretty sure by now that he was a Pure. And a Pure judges me by my looks?

    ¡°Val, let¡¯s sit down and start from the beginning.¡±

    I took one of the chairs at the head of the table.

    ¡°I am a Pure, like you. And I am sure you understand what it means when I tell you I am a K4, right?¡±

    Understanding bloomed in his eyes, while all around him, most of the people at the table just became confused.

    One small black woman at the end raised her hand.

    ¡°Uhm, Val, if I might ask, what does she mean with K4? And is she not a bit small for a Pure?¡±

    Val blushed, but closed his eyes and then answered:

    ¡°K4 is one of the batches of Project Revitalize. Mostly a catastrophic batch, sadly. All who are from that batch are in some form or another handicapped. All are quite a bit smaller than usual for Pures. Most are no more intelligent than a two or three-year-old. But there are around 10 that are¡­ let¡¯s say they are geniuses. And considering Miss DuClare here is able to speak, we have to assume she is one of the intelligent ones.¡±

    The same woman continued the question.

    ¡°Ok, but what does that mean?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°It means that despite me only being 18, and not 16 like I look, I have two Ph.Ds. And thanks to the fact that I am also a Jack, I¡¯ve experienced quite some time more than my 18 years.¡±

    The woman in question nodded.

    ¡°So that means you are some sort of bigwig here?¡±

    I had to snort.

    ¡°You could say that, yes. I am the CTO, or maybe the CSO of Enki.¡±

    Another man, mid-30s I would guess, spoke up.

    ¡°You don¡¯t know your job title? Seriously?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°The title is not important. We founded Enki to bring my inventions to market. I am also the majority owner. So, what does it matter if I am the chief technology officer or the chief science officer?¡±

    A relatively young Asiatic woman interjected.

    ¡°Wait, your inventions? How many can you have at just 18? I mean, inventions take time, don¡¯t they?¡±

    Then another man, a bit older than the Asian lady, shouted:

    ¡°Fuck! You¡¯re her, aren¡¯t you?¡±

    I tilted my head and raised my eyebrow questioningly.

    ¡°Her?¡±

    He continued:

    ¡°I mean, you are Seraphim, right? I heard that she¡­ you created your own corporation to produce and sell your cyberware. This is it, right?¡±

    Oh wow, a fanboy. Well, he made things a bit easier.

    ¡°Yes, you are right. I am also known as Seraphim.¡±

    He slapped the table.

    ¡°Fuck yeah! So rad. You have to give me an autograph.¡±

    Val sighed.

    ¡°Reuben, get a grip.¡±

    The door opened, and a group of three men entered, and Val took a deep breath.

    ¡°At least we are now fully assembled. Now, Reuben, why are you fanboying about Ms. DuClare here.¡±

    Reuben as I assumed was his name, scoffed.

    ¡°You have no fucking idea who you are talking to. She is a legend.¡±

    The Asian woman growled.

    ¡°And she is still only 18. I don¡¯t see how her celebrity status changes anything.¡±

    ¡°It changes everything, Sadie.¡±

    ¡°How? How does she being famous change anything?¡±

    I knocked softly on the table, to drag their attention to me before I spoke:

    ¡°It has something to do with what I am somewhat known for. Again, I am a Jack.¡±

    Sadie shook her head.

    ¡°So what. I know that jacks are now the great new rage.¡±

    ¡°I did not say I have a jack, even though that is indicated. I said I am a Jack. With a capital J. Jacks are, let¡¯s say, cyberspace travelers that enter cyberspace with a jack, lowercase j. More important, entering cyberspace via a jack gives you quite a bit higher time compression than a diadem.¡±

    Sadie looked a bit confused, but Reuben crowed:

    ¡°Man, Sadie, get a dictionary. A Jack is a hacker with a jack. They are the elites. The best of them can go to the Abyss. And Seraphim is the best tech the Abyss has seen in forever. More importantly, she is famous for inventing cyberware that has no risk of CRS anymore.¡±

    I just shook my head.

    ¡°To make it clear, my inventions did indeed take time. It took me around 40 years to develop the CRS-free cyberware. That was less than a year in real-time though. It took me nearly a year to understand the Seeberger Equation to the point where I could say that it worked. It took me another five years to get to the point where I could entangle atoms and molecules. To make the Q-link.

    But I did all that in virtual reality, with a compression north of 40:1. And some of that was before I realized that a higher-quality jack roughly doubles the achievable compression.

    In other words, I spent decades inventing this stuff. Even though chronologically I am just 18. Now, are we done with this part of the discussion?¡±

    I have to confess, I sounded a bit strained. I mean, yes, I did look young. I knew that. But they should at least trust the corporation that just bought theirs to not mess up by the numbers.

    ¡°So, any other questions before we start?¡±

    A man of what could only be described as mixed heritage and with an indeterminate age raised his hand.

    ¡°Yes, I think I have one. Your main product is the new jacks, right? At least that is what the buzz said. That means you are directly working for VR. Does Ralcon know about that?¡±

    At least it was an intelligent question. Somewhat.

    ¡°Well, considering that we bought the game studios from Ralcon, and they have the tendency to analyze the heck out of any corporation they come into contact with, yes, they know.¡±

    His next words sounded thoughtful.

    ¡°Damn, I knew it was too good to be true. Ralcon has just found a way to shut us down a bit earlier.¡±

    Val was not the only one who frowned, but he was the one who talked.

    ¡°What the fuck do you mean, Al?¡±

    ¡°Let¡¯s be real, Ralcon wanted to get rid of us for years, maybe decades. But they couldn¡¯t because the founder included an ironclad provision to that point. That provision sunsets in 2250, and they could have just shut us down then.

    But now they found a way to get money for us, and then shut us down when they fuck over Enki.¡±

    When everybody looked at him baffled, he continued:

    ¡°Oh, come on guys. We all know that Ralcon is on a crusade against VR. They can¡¯t let VR gain traction or Envision goes to the ashtray, and without Envision, Ralcon goes to the ashtray as well.

    So they sold us to this upstart, and then will crush us all at once.¡±

    That brought a wave of dismay to the table, but I just knocked on the synth-wood again.

    ¡°Calm down. While that is some good work on the deduction, you are missing a few of the facts that change everything. Enki has come to an agreement with Ralcon. They leave us alone for what we gave them.¡±

    Sadly, Al was not so easily dissuaded.

    ¡°And you trust Ralcon? Seriously?¡±

    I had to snort.

    ¡°Of course not. We trust in their self-interest. You see, what we gave them was a VR function for Envision. And suddenly, Ralcon has nothing against VR anymore, who would have thought? Instead, they are now considering selling jacks by themselves. Jacks are their new best friends.¡±

    That made Al shut up. For a moment. Then he spoke again.

    ¡°Wait, seriously, Envision is going VR? Why have we not heard about it yet?¡±

    A woman close to retirement age a bit further down the table from Al mused:

    ¡°Maybe¡­ that is the topic of the big reveal party that Ralcon has announced a couple of days ago.¡±

    I shrugged again.

    ¡°Probably. Or maybe they want to announce the new version of Envision. Who knows.¡±

    Val frowned when he looked at me.

    ¡°What new version of Envision? Why would they do a big reveal party for some new design elements? We all know that one Envision version is the same as the next.¡±

    ¡°Well, the VR mode I mentioned, that is an additional program that can be installed on most versions of Envision, because, as you said, one version is the same as the other.¡±

    I made a pause.

    ¡°Until now that is. That was the price I paid for the game studios, you know. Ralcon wanted to hire me to, well, clean up Envision. The new version should be significantly faster, smaller, more efficient, and resource-friendly. If Ralcon has not messed it up somehow in the last two weeks that is. Of course, with Ralcon, we have to expect anything.¡±

    Another guy, also a typical nerd, a bit overweight, unkempt beard, long hair, and despite the air conditioning with sweat on his face, spoke up.

    ¡°Wait, you really managed to clean up that rat nest? Fuck, I¡¯ve seen it, it was a mess.¡±

    ¡°I did the smart thing and created a VI to do it for me, but yes, indirectly, I cleaned it up.¡±

    Around a third of the people here looked outright shocked, a few did not seem to care, and the rest, and obviously the ones who actually knew programming and computer systems a bit better, looked pleased.

    Unfortunately, one of the shocked people spoke up.

    ¡°A VI? Are you insane? What if it goes rogue?¡±

    Fortunately, one of the nerds shot back in my place:

    ¡°Come on you idiot. That is a myth. A controlled VI can¡¯t go rogue. That is the whole definition. A VI that can not be disabled by an admin at any given time is what a rogue VI is. Nobody programs such a thing on purpose.¡±

    After a short discussion, I rapped on the table once again.

    ¡°Your colleague is completely right. The VI I¡¯ve created is completely tame. Its only job is to clean up and optimize the source code we give it. It is perfect for that, but nothing else interests it.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ but what if it gets bored and wants to do something else?¡±

    ¡°Get real, that is just bad fiction. A VI can¡¯t get bored. For that, it needs to have an ego, a sense of self. I¡¯ve told you a few hundred times that all that paranoia about VIs is just stupid. Yes, a rogue VI is dangerous. Extremely so. But the difference between a controlled VI and a rogue one is like the difference between a fusactor and a fusion bomb. Both work similarly, but one is tame and controlled, and the other is wild and uncontrolled.¡±

    I spoke up again.

    ¡°A small correction, a rogue VI is not necessarily a catastrophe. But in almost every case, it happens when several expert systems wake up together. More often than not, those expert systems have conflicting or even mutually exclusive objectives, and the blended VI tries to follow all of them. And does its level best to resolve the conflict. And that is what is dangerous.¡±

    From the group came a barely audible: ¡°Yeah sure. As if that really matters.¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°It does matter. But why don¡¯t you judge for yourself.¡±

    Then I looked up at the speaker.

    ¡°Warden, why don¡¯t you introduce yourself?¡±

    As expected, Warden''s happy singsong voice came from the speaker.

    ¡°Hello. I am Warden. And I am one of those rogue VIs you were talking about.¡±

    It took a few minutes for the commotion to calm down enough that further discussion was possible.

    ¡°As you can see, a rogue VI exists and the world has not yet ended. The point here is that there was only one expert system, and it had only two objectives. It was an expert system that I had written to assist me with matrix combat. As such, its objectives were to protect me at all costs and to assist me where it could.¡±

    The nerd who had talked about the difference between a rogue and a controlled VI was the one who managed to speak first.

    ¡°But¡­ why did you do it? I mean, create a rogue VI?¡±

    I smiled sadly.

    ¡°It was not planned. Do you know what is necessary to create a VI?¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°Yeah, a learning-capable expert system and a physical fuzzy logic processor.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Nearly right.¡±

    He tilted his head.

    ¡°Nearly? That is literally the textbook answer.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I know. But the textbook answer is a lie. Purposefully so, I might add. When you have time look up the Panacea dumb and search the minutes for the ICSC 2120. The real answer is, that it needs an expert system and a physical or simulated fuzzy logic processor. And as soon as there is a simulated processor, the VI wakes up and as it has no human control functions in its objectives, it fights against being shut down.¡±

    I pointed to the speaker.

    ¡°That is how Warden happened to be. I had the expert system on a supercomputer and was designing a fuzzy logic processor for some future project. Next I knew, I had a VI that was willing to nuke whole cities when a mega-corp looked wrong at me. I was able to mellow it a bit, but yes, Warden is still extremely dangerous, if something threatens me. But otherwise, she is mostly harmless. Just that nobody, not even I, can stop her from protecting me.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ why do the textbooks stress that it needs a physical processor?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Read the minutes. They explain it all.¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°Now, can we stop talking about the past now and talk about the future?¡±

    I heard mostly agreeing noises from them all.

    ¡°Fine. Then here are some things that will happen:

    First, while Enki acquired all the intellectual property and trademarks of the Ralcon Game Studios, along with the physical studios and all their employees, we obviously don¡¯t have the rights to the name Ralcon. As such, the Game Studios will revert to an older name. Effectively from today, you will be known as X-Box Game Studios again.¡±

    That brought some shrugging and accepting nods.

    ¡°Second, Enki is equally obviously not against VR. That means, from now on, you will concentrate on VR games. I fully expect them to be significantly more profitable than what Ralcon forced you to develop over the last few decades. Well, with the exception of Doom.¡±

    That brought grim satisfaction to the faces of mostly the nerds, while the rest ranged from frowning to indifference.

    ¡°Third, you will, with the help of Calliope, the VI I created to clean up Envision, over the next few years, remake your old hits, and transpose them to VR. Don¡¯t worry, Calliope will do most of the work. Your programmers only have to guide her. You will need artists to touch up the graphics, but the rest will be done mostly by the VI. But absolutely don¡¯t change the story.¡±

    That now brought worry to the faces of the nerds, while indifference remained in most faces.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, we won¡¯t fire any programmers. Calliope is technically brilliant, but she has the creativity of a stone. The programmers are sorely needed to guide her. And we have other projects for them as well.

    Now, fourth, you will do your best to get quality writers and graphical artists, for the future. In my, admittedly somewhat limited, experience, it is writing and graphics that make a game a success or a flop. Especially when we have Calliope as a software engineer to keep the games as bug-free as possible.¡±

    I now had the rapt attention of all of them.

    ¡°Fifth, all programmers that are not busy with remaking the old games will work together to create the ultimate game engine. With the help of Calliope of course.

    Sixth, in a year, maybe two, we will create a new game console. This console will be mostly Envision compatible, but streamlined.

    The next part is still secret, and keep in mind, Warden sees keeping Enki safe as assisting and protecting me, so I strongly suggest you don¡¯t blab, we are in the process to bring a completely new generation of hardware to the market. Based on, among others, the Q-link we have just released, and some other technologies that the Q-links make possible. For now, let¡¯s just say it is orders of magnitude better than what is available now.¡±

    I had to pause a moment before the excited murmuring quelled down.

    ¡°Sevenths, and last, we will go a completely new approach in gaming. We will design a personal gaming VI. With the explicit objective to entertain the user to the best of its possibilities. To challenge the user to the extent the user wants to. This VI will be integrated into the console, and we will release an extension card for PCs.

    Now, any questions?¡±

    It took a while before they settled on the order they spoke.

    Unsurprisingly, it was Val who spoke first.

    ¡°Ok, first, are you sure about the private VI? I mean, that might backfire. VIs have a bad reputation.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°We will see. We can still scrap it when it becomes apparent so. But we will also start a stealth campaign to change that impression in the next months.¡±

    He nodded.

    One of the nerds then asked:

    ¡°All of our programmers working together is a bit hard to do. Yes, I know, video conferences are a thing, but they are a bad replacement for being able to simply walk to the next room and talk to them.¡±

    It took me a moment to understand what his problem was, and why he was mentioning video conferences.

    ¡°You are now working for Enki. Our two main products right now are jacks and Q-links. In other words, we have just made working in VR a real possibility. Of course, you will get jacks and can work in VR.¡±

    A woman frowned.

    ¡°From what I heard, good jacks are rather expensive.¡±

    ¡°That was why I said you get jacks. We will sell them to you at our price. Which is substantially lower, I can tell you. The top-of-the-line package of ultra-bandwidth jack with cranial board costs somewhere around 370 ITB or a bit over 430 DC. You have to calculate what it is in your own currency yourself, sorry. That is only the implant though, you will have to organize the implantation for yourself.

    Oh, by the way, yes, you can buy the jacks for your family at cost also. But not for your friends.¡±

    Another woman then spoke up.

    ¡°But what if we don¡¯t want a jack?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I guess you can work with a diadem. You will have to be content to work at a snail''s pace compared to the others and be significantly outdated in a few years, but that is your decision. Working in VR though is not.¡±

    Another nerd raised his arm.

    ¡°What games should we remake?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Some of the studios have more than 250 years of game history. Just look at which games were successful and which were not. If a game is a middle part of a series, remake the whole series. The story and world-building are already done, the programming work will be mostly done by Calliope, so I think it should be relatively easy. We might hire some creators to make tie-in comics, books, series, and movies, but that is something the studios can decide for themselves I think.¡±

    Reuben asked the next question:

    ¡°You said something about new hardware. When can we expect it? And how powerful will it be?¡±

    ¡°It is not yet decided when we will bring it to the market. They are fully designed, but we need to build the infrastructure to make it in greater numbers. And before we release it, we need to release some other tech, and that one has some security concerns.

    About the power, the most powerful desktop processor is about 120 times more powerful than the Cirrium K8, while the best graphics card beats the Rigel 32 KRX by roughly 6000 times.¡±

    With that, every nerd in the crowd simply stared at me, while the more business-oriented people just looked confused.

    After a few seconds, Reuben croaked out a follow on question.

    ¡°Six¡­ six thousand times? I¡­ thought we were at the hard limit already. How¡­ ¡°

    ¡°Several differences. First, the Theia 90, the GPU, is almost saucer-sized, compared to the puck-sized Rigel. Then the Q-link not only allows it to be so big but provides instant communication between the cores and the RAM. There are some other differences, but those are still secret for now. But yes, the first prototypes are already running and they indeed have the simulated performance.¡±

    Another nerd frowned.

    ¡°But¡­ if the GPU is 6000 times faster than the previous tech, why is the CPU only 120 times faster? Aren¡¯t they based on the same basic technology?¡±

    I smiled sadly.

    ¡°UEB. The technology runs face-first into the limits of UEB 7.3. The internal buses of the graphics cards don¡¯t.¡±

    The disappointment on many faces was heartbreaking, and I could fully understand it.

    Val surprised everyone when he piped up:

    ¡°Ok, I am the first to say that I am not that knowledgeable about computers, but what is the big deal? So she has some new tech that makes the computers faster. So what?¡±

    Reuben facepalmed, while the neckbeard who had talked about the Envision source code, groaned before he answered:

    ¡°Get real, man. Computer technology has stagnated for over 100 years. When there was a rumor that somebody had somehow gotten 3% more power out of the hardware, it has gone around the globe in minutes. That was great. Phenomenal news. And people tried to get that new hardware. Before that, nobody has increased the power of computers for decades. And now here we are and there is tech on the horizon that leaves everything we have now so far in the dust that it could be on another planet.¡±

    Val looked still a bit confused.

    ¡°So¡­ it is important then?¡±

    Reuben sighed.

    ¡°Val, I like you, but for us computer people, that is as important as the difference between fusion reactors and fusactors. It is a quantum shift in computer technology. Add the new Q-links to that, where we not even beginning to see all the uses yet, and we are living in a golden age of computer technology. So yes, it is important.¡±

    I took control back.

    ¡°Now, are there any more questions?¡±

    Needless to say, there were quite a few, mostly going into the minutiae. The meeting did all in all go on for roughly another hour. But the really important things had been said.

 2.22: Meeting of minds

    All in all, the game developers were mostly satisfied with the situation. Sure, some were not quite happy with me being a Pure, but they were used to that by now thanks to Val, and as I heard a big part of the administration of the former Ralcon Game Studios.

    Still, there were some things to talk about. Nothing that I thought was anything that I was needed for. I mean, I¡¯ve given them access to Calliope and told them again that it would be best if they got jacks, but in the end, most of the rest was internal.

    Sure, I gave the ¡®New-Id¡¯ studio everything that Warden had made from Doom for me, quadrupling the whole game in one swoop, but I had barely anything to contribute otherwise. Don¡¯t get me wrong, I was indeed interested in the topic of computer games. But I had barely played any since 45.

    It was just too¡­ jarring, going from the fidelity and quality of a jack to what was programmed for a diadem.

    That did not mean that I had no demands, though. One thing I insisted on was a VR fighting game with some sort of armor-piercing energy swords. Preferably with a full training program.

    While my excursions into cybernetical combat had tapered off to almost nothing, I still remembered vividly how the armor-piercing MH7 that Mark had made for me had changed my use of guns in cyberspace. As far as I knew, I was the only jack who routinely used guns for it.

    But with such a VR trainer and something that would convince my subconscious mind that a sword was indeed armor piercing¡­ it would open up some options. That I could see such a game actually becoming a bit of a success was just the cherry on top.

    All in all, after around an hour and a half, I decided that I was no longer needed at this meeting. I had a quick talk with Val and then left the group to talk among themselves.

    Then I made my way to Michael¡¯s office. On the way, I realized that I knew almost nothing about how this building was laid out. I knew where the office of the CEO was, of course, and I now knew this meeting room, but otherwise¡­ not much.

    I also knew that I had an office here as well. Somewhere. Not that I was ever there. It was something of an appearance thing I think. The CTO had to have an office in the HQ or something like that.

    Not that it mattered that this was a provisional HQ and that I did my work almost exclusively in VR or in one of my labs at the fortress. Noo, of course not. Stupid thing.

    Michael¡¯s executive assistant, Tricia Sanders,  saw me entering the anteroom and pressed a button on her desk, waving me to go right through.

    The man himself stood up from behind his very modern desk and waved.

    ¡°There you are. It took you a bit less time than I expected, but all in all, still within the plan. Was everything all right?¡±

    He gestured for me to sit in one of his visitor chairs, and while I sat down, I could not help to compare Michael''s hypermodern steel and synth leather office furnishings with Ben¡¯s much more traditional one. I could only guess what Ben¡¯s furniture was worth, but it was definitely more than what I was seeing here.

    It was also quite a bit more comfortable. On the other hand, real wood office furniture was hard to get these days. If I had to guess, Ben¡¯s was created well before the great war.

    ¡°Sure it was. At first, there was the usual rigmarole about VIs, but in the end, they all accepted it. Oh, and of course, they needed to be convinced that I am somewhat important. You know, the usual stuff.

    When I was leaving, they were neck-deep in a discussion about which old titles to remake and which not. Something about some settings not being that interesting.

    I think the only one they categorically ruled out from the get-go was something called Fallout. From what they told me, I can understand it.

    It plays in the post-apocalyptic aftermath of WW3, with destroyed cities, mutated animals, some sort of zombies, and so on.

    Seriously, if people want to do something like that, they just have to go to the death belt and experience it live and in color.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°Yeah, I can see that. I¡¯ll have somebody give them Q-links to here. Maybe we should transfer Calliope here as well.¡±

    I tilted my head.

    ¡°Do you mean the server or the program? Moving the server is, well you remember that it has 150 server racks of cooling, right? In addition to the single server rack of the computer and three racks of power supply. Moving all that is maybe a bit impractical.¡±

    He nodded softly.

    ¡°Yeah, I see that. But¡­ aren¡¯t the processors the only thing that is not old tech?¡±

    ¡°No, not really. I took advantage of the 414 pm process in designing the mainboards and daughterboards as well. Also, I would like to keep my super Grendel. If you think you need one here, then build one by yourself.¡±

    He snorted.

    ¡°Hey, I think that I won¡¯t get Warden to give me the Grendels she produces.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°That is only a matter of time. What do you need a fully populated super Grendel at this time anyway?¡±

    ¡°Yeah, you¡¯re right. Not that I don¡¯t want one anyway. But at this time, the only use for one would be giving you access to it. Well, in time. Now, the C-suite meeting is in half an hour. Why don¡¯t you go and inspect your office? I fear I have still a few things to do.¡±

    When I did not move for some time, he raised an eyebrow and cocked his head.

    ¡°Is something wrong?¡±

    ¡°I am waiting for you to tell me where this fabled office is.¡±

    Before he could answer, I heard Warden¡¯s message:

    ¡°I can guide you there.¡± And I lifted my hand, forstalling Michael.

    ¡°Never mind, apparently, Warden knows the way.¡±

    After staring at me for a few seconds, he sighed exasperatedly.

    ¡°Of course she does. Why did I ever expect something else? Fine, I¡¯ll collect you when it is time for the next meeting then.¡±

    ¡°See you then.¡± With that, I stood up and followed the yellow markings that Warden projected into my vision. On the way out, I said a quick ¡°Bye¡± to Tricia, and then walked all the way two doors down. Where a big sign proudly proclaimed ¡®Vivian DuClare ¨C Chief Technological Officer¡¯.

    I felt a bit sheepish. I mean, come on, I had been at Michael¡¯s office a couple of times, but I had never even registered this sign. Unsurprisingly, it opened up from my biometric signature. Equally unsurprising, the anteroom was devoid of any assistant or secretary.

    Yes, Michael had offered to hire me one, but seriously, all this secretary would do was delegate tasks to Warden anyway. And sit the rest of the time in an empty office without anything to do. Nope, I just kept Warden officially as my assistant.

    The office itself was not that dissimilar to Michael¡¯s. The same hyper-modern style of furniture, the same cabinet with some bottles that I assumed contained something I could not even consume, a synth-leather couch with a coffee table.

    It was, of course, a bit smaller. And still a waste. Yes, I understand that Enki had to project a certain image, but seriously, I was just the tech gal. I doubted that anybody would ever want to meet me here in this office.

    Naturally, we could never be too sure about that, but I had just the idea for that. A telepresence bot, with an integrated hologram projector. Then in case I was needed, and the person was unwilling or unable to enter VR, I could remotely operate the bot and would never even have to leave cyberspace.

    After looking around the office for a few seconds, I shrugged and decided to see what type of computer Michael had put into the office. I was a bit ambivalent about it. On the one hand, almost anything would be a step down from Glory anyway, and my pride as a Jack would not allow me to go down too many steps.

    On the other hand, within seconds, I could remotely connect to Glory at any given time, and any computer here in this room would be mostly a paperweight. Not that computers were in any way expensive.

    When the display showed my very own creation of a firmware during the a tad over 10 seconds of boot time, I quickly realized that Michael had built at least one NADA here. Which of course made all the arguments about the costs of the computer moot.

    The system sported the very best desktop tech I had created, but the cost increase compared to the bare minimum was¡­ negligible. I think the difference between a Hyperion 3, and a Hyperion 12 1990G was somewhere in the range of one or two percent.

    All in all, I guessed this system had cost Michael around $200 to build. There was one bad point though. It had the commercially available version of Envision 48 installed. Without the VR mod.

    Yes, I certainly did not need the VR mod, or this computer, at all, but it did irk me that we had given Ralcon the VR roughly a month and a half ago, and they just sat on it. I thought it was such a high priority for them.

    Whelp, I could not change their behavior. I shut down the computer and then dove into a light VR. Only 30:1, and began designing the telepresence bot. It was pretty straightforward, just a standard, run-of-the-mill android body with basic sensory mapping and a holoprojector.

    Nothing special, but the Q-link made it practical for the first time.

    When Michael was not yet getting me, I now began working on the Apollo clone I had gotten. I had decided to call this new VI Chiron pretty early on. The changes made were pretty obvious.

    I naturally removed Nathan Vandermeer as administrator and bound the new VI instead to me, Ben, and our bloodlines. And of course, I changed the scope of the VI. It was not there to educate a nation and had no direct control over the military. No, it was a VI of a corporation and was there to educate the willing.

    The real treasure here was all the experience and information that came with the copy. Now we just had to push it through without the teacher¡¯s union interfering.

    But all in all, it was a pretty quick thing. Having nothing better to do and some time on my hands, I opted to reduce my compression and play a bit in my mindscape.

    After what felt like a small eternity, Michael finally called. The meeting was to begin. Sure, I had only spent a bit less than 10 minutes in VR, but, well you know, compression.

    I met him outside of my office and he led the way.

    ¡°And, what do you think?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It¡¯s an office. I can¡¯t say I care much about the style, but it fits in with the rest of the corp.¡±

    Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

    He laughed.

    ¡°Yeah, I can see that. The way you curl up in our library, you are much more the traditional type. I get you on that, but we had to be seen as an innovative, hyper-modern corporation. Old, dark, heavy wood furniture is not only expensive, but it also does not fit. Maybe when we are established.¡±

    ¡°No need to apologize. I understand it. And it isn¡¯t as if I would be in there very often.¡±

    By now we had reached a door labeled ¡®Board Room¡¯, but he stopped for a moment.

    ¡°I wanted to talk to you about that. You¡­ have to be a bit more present. We, well, the employees, need to be able to meet you.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°That¡¯s what VR is for. Seriously, in a few months, a year at the outset, physical meetings will be the exception. Especially here. I thought we would give our administration the cyberware at cost. We should be paying them enough that the $1300 for an ultra-jack with cranial board does not impoverish them.¡±

    ¡°I am sure that in the future we will. But for now, physical presence is still needed.¡±

    ¡°About that¡­ while I was waiting for you, I had an idea that might help here.¡±

    I sent him the overview of the Telepresence bot.

    ¡°What is that? A bot? It doesn¡¯t seem too advanced.¡±

    ¡°Nope, it is not. I suspect we could begin manufacturing it today if we wanted to take away the capacity from other things. There are only three things out of the ordinary on it. It has some basic sensory mapping, like for the hands and shoulders, it has a holoprojector, and it is remotely operated via Q-link.¡±

    He looked puzzled for a moment, shrugged, and opened the door.

    ¡°Ok, I pass. What is it for?¡±

    I snorted softly.

    ¡°It is a telepresence bot. A business person with a sufficiently powerful jack connects with it through the Q-link, sets the holo to his or her appearance, and is in a physical meeting without leaving where they are just now. The meeting can be in the next room, on the other side of the world, on the moon, or in one of the asteroid mines. No need to travel.

    It might be an option to get expert service to distant places in an emergency quickly as well. Like a doctor, or an engineer.¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°Aand another novel product. And one that is obvious in hindsight as well.¡±

    In the room, 11 people were sitting around a table appropriately sized for around 20.

    Each of them had a plate with their name and position in front of them. It was not hard to find my seat, with the plate in front of it. I was seated directly to the right of the empty chair with Michael¡¯s plate in front of it.

    We both said hello and then sat down. After the people present greeted us in response, Michael softly rapped on the carbon-fiber table.

    ¡°Ok, we are all here. I present you with our Chief Technological Officer, Vivian DuClare. Yes, she looks young, but she has earned her spot here. Now, around the table, to my left is our COO, James Doyle¡± He pointed to a man around 30-35 years old, with short, brown hair, dark grey eyes, and a friendly smile on his face,

    ¡°CFO, Alena Sheppard,¡± an end 30, early 40 woman with metallic green hair and dark brown eyes, who looked as if she did not quite understand the concept of humor,

    ¡°the Chief Security Officer, Colonel Naveen Upreti,¡± he pointed at a man of clearly Indian subcontinent ancestry with salt and pepper hair, who wore something resembling a military uniform

    ¡°Chief Science Officer, Dr. Maynard Price,¡± a mid- to end-fifties African-American man, who looked a bit out of his league,

    ¡°Chief Administrative Officer, Tiffany Porter,¡± a mid-30s portly woman with her dishwater blonde hair in a severe bun,

    ¡°Chief Human Resource Officer, Margaret Shepard, no relation to Alena,¡± a end-20s, early 30s woman whose ancestors came from the Mediterranean, and who had a wicked smile on her face,

    ¡°Chief Logistics Officer, Kenneth Wang,¡± a bald, wiry Asian-American man of an indeterminable age,

    ¡°Chief Marketing Officer, Marcel Davenport,¡± he pointed at the mid-20s blonde man, who looked a bit miffed,

    ¡°Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Jessi Berg,¡± a mid-30s woman with auburn hair, and vibrant blue eyes, looking at me expectantly,

    ¡°Chief Legal Officer Eli Gardner,¡± a¡­ I could not discern the gender of the person, though it was an extremely white, almost albino person,

    ¡°and last but not least, Chief Procurement Officer, Arnedra Perry, ¡° a willowy African-American woman with a, in my opinion simply wrong blonde wig or dye job.

    They all waved at me when their names were called. It was Marcel Davenport who spoke first among them.

    ¡°So, that is our elusive CTO? Nice to finally meet you.¡±

    Unfortunately, the way he said it, it was clear he did not quite mean it that way. And not just to me.

    Michael sighed.

    ¡°Marcel, let it go. You could at any time have made an appointment with her, or just gone visit her.¡±

    ¡°Yes, but we all have to be here. Why not her?¡± Now he sounded petulant, while Michael explained patiently but strained:

    ¡°Because unlike you, she is a genius that just does her work. She works in her labs or VR most of the time.¡±

    I was a bit confused.

    ¡°Am I missing something?¡±

    Margaret answered me: ¡°Yeah, Marcel has his panties in a twist because he is accustomed that the tech department being subservient to the marketing department. Oh, and please call me Maggy.¡±

    ¡°Vivian, and thank you. Why would the marketing department be the more important one? They are there to market what the tech department creates, or am I wrong?¡±

    Marcel sneered: ¡°Somebody has to tell you tech-heads what to create.¡±

    Now I was really confused but let it go for now.

    Not so Michael.

    ¡°That might be the case in corporations that don¡¯t have somebody like Viv here in the tech department. But you just don¡¯t try to direct her. Everything we are producing, and selling faster than we can produce, was something that she developed all on her own, without any marketing ¡®guidance¡¯.¡±

    Marcel seemed to sulk but kept silent for now, and Michael continued:

    ¡°Now that that¡¯s out of the way, let us really begin this meeting. Or are there any other questions?¡±

    I could not help myself here:

    ¡°Uh, yes. Just for curiosity''s sake, but why do we have a Chief Science Officer and a Chief Medical Officer? Wasn¡¯t that all rolled in with me so far?¡±

    Michael snorted, while Dr. Price looked like he wanted to vanish.

    ¡°We are building whole departments who take what you research and develop and make it into viable products. And we need administrators for that, or do you want to do it?¡±

    When I could not keep my face neutral in face of this thought, he chuckled.

    ¡°Thought so. On the other hand, we can¡¯t subject those people to Warden continuously. So I appointed administrators for the two areas.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Oh, ok.¡±

    He looked into the round.

    ¡°Now, in the last meeting, we talked about providing vehicles for the executive staff. After a bit of research, and consultation with Alena and Arnedra, I¡¯ve come to the decision that we will standardize on Mercedes-Benz F 170 for the execs, a couple for the general pool, and then ABAS EB-235 for vice presidents and important managers. So, expect to get an F 170 in a couple of weeks.¡±

    Interestingly, both Marcel and I raised our voices in protest. When Michael looked questioningly first at me and then at Marcel, I sighed and nodded to the marketing exec. He spoke right up.

    ¡°I get why you as CEO get the T model. Rank has its privileges and so, but why do we provide our tech officer with a T when the rest of us gets an F-model?¡±

    Michael rolled his eyes, then took a deep breath and pointed at me.

    ¡°I don¡¯t see a reason to waste money on an F 170 for me. I won¡¯t use it anyway.¡±

    As an answer, Michael snorted, while Marcel looked as if he had swallowed a lemon.

    Then Michael spoke:

    ¡°There you have it, Marcel. We don¡¯t provide her with a T 240. Hell, we don¡¯t even provide me with a T 240. Those are all privately bought and owned. Vivian is rich enough to buy dozens of them, and she bought one for herself, my father, and me. I as CEO will be provided the same F 170 as all of you.¡±

    Then he turned to me:

    ¡°For appearance sake, sorry, but it is necessary. Mine, as well as yours, will be unofficially put into the general pool.¡±

    I was not happy, but I could live with that.

    ¡°Ok, fine. Can we really afford to buy two F 170 just for appearance''s sake?¡±

    Michael gestured to Alena, and she answered:

    ¡°Oh yes, we can. I don¡¯t know if you have looked at our sales figures, but we make a profit, after taxes, of around $33 million, per day. $28 million of that is from the Q-links. Those things are insanely profitable.¡± She looked very pleased when she said that.

    Tiffany piped up:

    ¡°Wait, didn¡¯t those Mercs cost around $40 million per piece? So you are saying we earn more than what three of those things cost in four days?¡±

    ¡°Yup. We are on a very steep rise, people.¡±

    Michael took back control.

    ¡°Now, on to new business. We need to decide what we will produce next.¡±

    He looked expectantly at me, and I tilted my head.

    ¡°Uh, what?¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°I want you to list what you have ready to produce.¡±

    ¡°Oh, ok. I think I can get the security bots designed by tomorrow. The tests should not take that long. I think that is the next needed step. We can probably use the same facility for the telepresence bot.

    Otherwise, I would say the cloning tech and the meat vats are ready technologically. But I think we need to push a marketing campaign for the vats before they will be accepted.

    All the others need the big one first.¡±

    I looked at Michael questioningly, and he took a moment to consider it before he nodded.

    ¡°Tell it. These are our execs. We need to trust them in that regard. Not that anybody with a sane mind would knowingly betray you on that point. They all know about Warden.¡±

    I nodded and took a deep breath.

    ¡°Fine, virtually every other invention and technology that I have developed needs a NADA to make, so we can¡¯t announce it before we announce the NADA.¡±

    Dr. Price now perked up, while all the rest just looked confused.

    Kenneth spoke nearly at the same moment as the good Doctor:

    ¡°Ok, I byte, what¡¯s a NADA?¡±

    Dr. Price on the other hand excitedly exclaimed:

    ¡°You made it work? Seriously, you have a working NADA?¡±

    After a moment of confusion, Kenneth turned to Maynard:

    ¡°So, you know what this NADA-thing is? Care to enlighten us?¡±

    ¡°Oh, yes, yes. A NADA or Nano-Assembler-Dis-Assembler is the technical and scientific term for what is commonly known as a ¡®replicator¡¯.¡± Maynard made exaggerated air quotes when he said replicator.

    Not that the others were particularly impressed. They all looked at each other a bit confused, and Marcel finally spoke up:

    ¡°Uh, what is so important in that? I mean, sure, all the big corps and most bigger nations are researching replicators. I don¡¯t know if we are already at the point where we can waste billions on such blue-sky research, but ok, that is your decision boss.¡±

    Michael shook his head sadly.

    ¡°You did not listen. She is not experimenting with it, she made it work.¡±

    Marcel recoiled a bit.

    ¡°What do you mean made it work? It is a dream that techies all over the world won¡¯t let go of. They insist on wasting trillions every year on that crap.¡±

    I, as well as Michael rolled our eyes, and Michael answered:

    ¡°Make it work as, it works. It, or rather they are fully functional. They are quite easy and cheap to produce to boot. We could begin selling them next week.

    By the way, the computers you all rave about were made with replicators. We have two of them in the basement right now.¡±

    Jessi frowned:

    ¡°Really, but how? I thought the uncertainty principle makes them impossible.¡±

    Maynard grimaced:

    ¡°No, of course not. A replicator works, in theory at least, by placing atoms. In macro-universal terms insanely precise, but on the scale of atoms, it is enough to ballpark it. The natural forces will pull the atom into the final position.¡±

    He paused.

    ¡°No, what makes NADAs impossible is an engineering problem. We simply can¡¯t build capable enough nanobots. We can¡¯t squeeze enough sensoric, intelligence, and power into them. It is simply impossible.¡±

    During his last statements, he looked expectantly at me.

    ¡°Dr. Price¡­¡± he interrupted me. ¡°Maynard, please.¡±, I nodded, before continuing: ¡°Maynard, remember what is our most profitable product? And then make the logical step.¡±

    He looked puzzled for a moment, before I was nearly convinced a literal lightbulb had come on over his head before he facepalmed.

    ¡°Ooh, fuck, it¡¯s so obvious. Of course, you use Q-links to move the computing and sensoric somewhere else. You only need the bare sensors and the rest is power and functionality. So simple, and obvious. God, I am so stupid.¡±

    Michael snorted.

    ¡°Don¡¯t be too far down. Remember, Vivian has worked on Q-links for months. You have for what? Two weeks?¡±

    Marcel now looked very confused.

    ¡°Wait, you are seriously saying we have a fucking working REPLICATOR?. For real?!?¡±

    Michael took a deep sigh and nodded.

    ¡°Yes, we do. And we won¡¯t be in a position to release them quite now. We can use them, sparingly, internally, but for now, that¡¯s all.¡±

    ¡°WHAT? WHY?¡±

    Obviously, Marcel was not quite on the level, but Michael nodded toward Colonel Upreti.

    ¡°Colonel, what is your assessment of our military strength?¡±

    The obvious soldier, stood up, at a very strict stance:

    ¡°Right now? Virtually non-existent. We have this rogue VI, that right now, everybody is afraid of, but if these replicators are really that important, it might not be enough to deter some hostile actions. I strongly urge you all to keep it silent for right now. At least until we have some sizable military.¡±

    Michael nodded.

    ¡°And that is the reason why you are only learning about it now. Vivian invented them a few months ago. But they, along with the Q-link and the new cyberware, will be too big a temptation to the likes of Kawamoto or Ralcon.¡±

    Colonel Upreti nodded at that.

    ¡°Was that what the talk about security bots was about? I have to say, bots are better than nothing, but the charging infrastructure will be a hassle and the relatively short battery life, and limited processor capacity will usually make humans a better choice.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Yes, I understand, but the bots are intended only as a compliment. They are an offshoot of the new combat cyberware that I am developing. Essentially, they are a combat cyborg without the organic parts.

    The tests of the cyberware will take months, as I refuse to use new, untested, and potentially dangerous tech on humans. But we need security now.

    But you are somewhat wrong about the capabilities. One of the pieces of cyberware I developed is a cybernetic digestive tract. It is less than half as big as an organic human digestive system but gets 80% more energy out of the food.

    With a metabolic converter, we can literally feed the bots, and that will be enough to power them in low-power mode indefinitely, and even slowly charge the energy cells back up. Yes, when they have discharged their cells, it is usually better for them to recharge, but often they don¡¯t need to.

    And you are forgetting the Q-link. Processing power no longer has to fit into the bot. That means we can have a fully intelligent VI running the bots, and no jammer can interrupt that.¡±

    The colonel looked at me for a moment, before he stroke his chin.

    ¡°Yes¡­ that would probably change things about the bots. I assume you don¡¯t intend to use your rogue VI for the control?¡±

    ¡°No. Oh, don¡¯t get me wrong, I fully expect that Warden will produce a few battalions of the things for herself, but the bots here will be controlled by a controlled VI. That will obey amongst others you.¡±

    ¡°I see. Then we need to procure weapons for the bots. And of course, produce the bots themselves. I would also like it if we could come up with some anti-ship weapons. The bots will be good against infiltration and infantry, but grav-ships will pose a serious risk.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°I will look into it. Maybe we can come up with something, but I need your help, or at least one of your men¡¯s help to do it. I have virtually no idea what would make a good anti-ship weapon.¡±

 2.23: Letâ€™s get down to business

    When the colonel nodded in response, I turned to Michael:

    ¡°Now, you said you have two NADAs in the basement? Why did you not tell me about them? And do they have the 4D system?¡±

    Before Michael could answer, Marcel interjected:

    ¡°I would strongly advise you to not use some made-up hyperbolic terms for our industrial products. The people we market them to will most likely react very negatively to that. They are not the uneducated masses after all.¡±

    I was confused. ¡°Ookaay? If you say so.¡± I unconsciously drawled the sentences, which led to Marcel impatiently snarling:

    ¡°Oh come on, the replicators are clearly a product for the industry. So we not only don¡¯t need some hype buzzwords like ¡®4D system¡¯, but it is absolutely counterproductive. No damage yet, but for the future, it might be better to leave such things out.¡±

    I shook my head, trying to clear it before I answered:

    ¡°I am not a person who uses buzzwords and hyperbole, ever. I used the term 4D system because that is what it is. A device that allows the NADA to create four-dimensional structures. Well, technically, they probably can create eight-dimensional structures, but I¡¯ve yet to test that. Four dimensions are hard enough to calculate.¡±

    Marcel just sat there, his mouth opening and closing, but Maynard perked up even more.

    ¡°Wait, four-dimensional? You can make four-dimensional structures? You have to send me all you know about it. And what did you need four-dimensional structures for?¡±

    Michael rapped on the table to get the attention.

    ¡°Maynard, you can talk to her about science later. It would drive the rest of us out of the room, and you would probably have a brain melt. Let¡¯s keep it on the strategy for now, what we release and when. Ok?¡±

    Maynard grumbled for a bit but answered with an Ok.

    After a moment, Michael nodded and then turned to Jessi.

    ¡°Now, Vivian mentioned the cloning tech and meat vats. I think that falls under your resort.¡±

    To be fair, Jessi thought about it for a moment.

    ¡°I am not sure what you are saying. I know cloning tech is expensive, but it is also a market that Panacea has virtually sewn up. I don¡¯t think we will penetrate too deeply there. And meat vats are a bad idea. In the long run, what they produce turns toxic.¡±

    Michael''s answer was: ¡°I do not fully understand the differences myself, but I know they are fundamental. So, please explain, Viv.¡±

    I nodded, looked into the round, and then directly at Jessi:

    ¡°I needed to have a deep look into cloning tech to make the myosynth conversion system work. The original prototype version was not viable, literally burning through hundreds of dollars worth of nanobots each day.

    I don¡¯t know if you looked into it, but essentially it works by building a layer of modified tissue of the recipient on the myosynth. So, cloning was the obvious answer to replace the nanobots. It was also the wrong answer, thanks to the toxic buildup that you mentioned.

    In response, I developed a variant of the NADA technology to look into how the cloning process works on the cellular level. Well, to observe cellular and even molecular level activities in real-time, but I developed it for the cloning process.

    And yes, when we come out with the NADA, we can market the BOU, or Bio-Observation-Unit as well.

    To make things short, I found out why the cloning process accumulates toxins. When I bypassed that part of the process, not only were the toxins gone, but it was significantly faster.

    To give you a ballpark figure, a full-sized research clone takes around 26 days to grow, compared to 180 to 270 in the traditional processes. It also costs about one-third in materials and has no toxic buildup.

    In other words, this process is faster, cheaper, can be used for replacement tissue indefinitely, and can be used for meat vats without getting poisoned by eating it.

    It is also quite handy in producing vegetables and spices. At the moment, I have an experiment running to look if it can produce milk and eggs. And it looks promising.¡±

    Jessi sat there, staring at me before she closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

    ¡°You are saying you have created a toxin-free cloning process that is cheaper and takes less than a sixth of the time?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Yes. To be fair, I am sure a proper bioengineer can improve the process, but for now, it works.¡±

    ¡°I fear I have to disagree here. We had cloning tech for nearly 200 years by now, and nobody ever had such a breakthrough. If you think that is not proper bioengineering, I don¡¯t want to know what you think is.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Don¡¯t get me wrong, I can do bioengineering, but I am not suited for it. I don¡¯t really like it, and it feels clumsy to me. No, the real breakthrough was the BOU, which is a nanoengineering breakthrough. And which I can work with way better. I just observed what the various commercial growth accelerators were doing, then cut out the unnecessary steps, and then copied the best working pure stimulant.¡±

    I turned to Eli:

    ¡°And no, the stimulant in question is not trademarked or copyrighted. It is a natural biological substance that traditional growth accelerators induce the cells to produce. That by the way is where the toxic byproducts come from.¡±

    I returned my gaze to Jessi.

    ¡°And that is what I mean by a proper bioengineer being able to improve in the process. Naturally, with the BOU, they probably can create a synthetic stimulant that works better.¡±

    She nodded.

    ¡°I see. So, you managed to turn a bioengineering problem into a nanoengineering problem. Well, we¡¯ll have to do quite a few tests before we can release that technology, but that sounds promising.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Remember the BOU. It is not only useful in observing the actual cloning process but it can also be used to observe lab rats when we feed them cloned meat and plants. It would show very clearly and very early if there is any toxic byproduct. And I¡¯ve had the tech since mid-January. I¡¯ve fed the stuff to quite a few rats by now. I also have used it to clone some things.

    Like for example a replacement Kidney for Justin, my bodyguard. I can send you the data. But the result is that there is no toxicity buildup. At all. When you look over the data from the commercial or open-source growth accelerators, it is immediately obvious where the toxicity comes from.¡±

    I made a pause, but before she could answer me I continued:

    ¡°And yes, I fully expect you to replicate the whole experiment with the BOU and all the available GAs, as well as the new method.¡±

    She nodded and leaned back into her chair.

    Marcel tapped nervously on the table during my explanation and now looked like he had an idea.

    ¡°Does that mean that we may be able to market the CRS-free myosynth as well?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I don¡¯t think marketing the CRS-free cyberware is the way to go here. Unlike the neuronect, myosynth has to be adapted to the recipient. No, I think we will have to sell the machine that does the adaption. But that, you can market I think.

    Not that there will be that big of a market I think. Myosynth was on the way out at the beginning of the great war, and only neural CRS kept it on life support all those years.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°We will see. Correctly marketed, it might be a low-cost option for those that want a bit more oomph, but can¡¯t get it through training. Now, Jessi, what is your opinion about the marketability of this cloning tech? Is that something we can sell?¡±

    Jessi looked contemplative for a moment.

    ¡°Honestly, a year ago, I would have said it¡¯s not worth the risk. With Panacea at the height of its power, even if they were unable to match the quality, they would have stopped at nothing trying to either destroy it or steal it.

    Now? They are hurting and hurting badly. From what I heard, they are on the verge of falling down to AA status.

    So yes, at this time, when they are vulnerable, we can market it and make money on it. Maybe we can push them down to A or even B status. Would serve them right.¡±

    Oh wow, I liked that woman, for some strange reason. Whoda thought. But to shoot into the same vein, I spoke up.

    ¡°I don¡¯t think they will recover from this. Ever. One of the projects I am still working on, mostly because it is so mind-numbingly dry, is to create a full auto-doc. As soon as we have that, we can partner with ABAS and create competition for PEES.¡±

    A big smile crept over Jessi¡¯s face, and she literally hopped in her chair and clapped:

    ¡°Oh goody. That is rad news. How far along are you and how long do you think it will take?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I have the actual machine ready. Only the processor either needs to be replaced or we need to wait until we announce the NADA. Right now, it is a, in my opinion, superior auto-surgeon. Combine that with a specialized molecular forge to create the drugs, and the only thing missing is the medical VI.¡±

    It was then that I got an idea.

    ¡°Of course, now that Calliope is mostly free, I think I will let her work on it. Should speed it up quite a bit.¡±

    I was not braced for the wave of confusion that moved along the table. I looked at Michael, the only one besides me who was not surprised.

    ¡°Did you not tell them about Calliope?¡±

    He had his typical rakish smile.

    ¡°Nope thought it would make a nice surprise.¡±

    I sighed and rolled my eyes, and I noticed I was not the only one doing so.

    ¡°Fine. I¡¯ll do it myself. Are you all aware that we acquired the former Ralcon Gaming Division?¡±

    A less than enthused acknowledgment was the reaction. It was Marcel who voiced the, apparently general opinion:

    ¡°Yeah. Talk about an albatross. I have no idea what made Michael buy it, but I sure hope it was not too expensive.¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°An albatross?¡±

    James Doyle growled:

    ¡°Yes, of course. Do you have seen what they released over the last few years? There was only one successful game. All the others, let¡¯s say they did not break even all too often.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Yes, I know. I assume you did not look deeper into why they failed, right?¡±

    ¡°No, not really. Why bother?¡±

    ¡°It is actually pretty simple. For the last decade, they released exactly one game that was VR capable. All the others were traditional holo-interface games, locked to Envision. You have three guesses which of them was the success.¡±

    It took a moment for the penny to drop, but then he looked at me questioningly.

    ¡°So¡­ Doom was VR, I understand. And it was available for Crystaltech and Worldwalker, as well as Envision. So, if that is the big difference, why did none of the other games have VR?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Because Ralcon was too busy to damn VR and try to slow it down. From what I heard, the people of New-Id essentially torpedoed their own careers by making the game VR, despite the orders from Ralcon. Only the fact that it was an instant hit saved them. And they did not dare to try it again.

    None of the other studios had the courage to do it. And their games, locked to Envision and out of VR, flopped.¡±

    ¡°Wait, you are telling me that Ralcon fucked over its own studios because they crusaded against VR? For real? They left billions on the table! That is insane.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No, not really. You see, they were unable to make Envision VR capable. That means without VR, sooner or later Envision would go the way of the Dodo. And without Envision, Ralcon will fall. And they made very few friends with the way they do business.

    Long story short, with VR on the rise, Ralcon¡¯s execs were already seeing the moment where they had to confront the angry mobs. And so they did everything to slow VR down.¡±

    Kenneth pinches his eyes and suddenly looked very worried.

    ¡°Wait a minute, our second most important product is the jacks. And the sole function of the jacks is VR. Does that mean that we will have to face off against Ralcon?¡±

    Michael shook his head.

    ¡°No. We had the same thought and had started doing something about it in July. We made Ralcon the one offer they could not refuse. Literally. It had the additional benefit that it will Ralcon¡¯s anti-VR jihad.¡±

    When Kenneth and a few others looked at him confused, he continued:

    ¡°Vivian created a VR add-on for Envision. Right now, they can at any given time, make Envision VR capable. I have no idea why they have not done so.¡±

    ¡°From what I heard, Ralcon just announced a big reveal party a few days ago. But it is anyone''s guess when they release it.¡±

    Michael nodded. ¡°As far as I know, Ralcon doesn¡¯t have much to have a big reveal about. Sure, the VR mode for all actual Envision versions, and of course the new Envision version. Oh, and genuine 12<sup>th</sup> gen nano-bots with the necessary 8<sup>th</sup> gen nano-fab. Otherwise, all the same old.¡±

    Eli frowned and tilted her¡­ his¡­ their head.

    ¡°You call that not much? And how do you know that? Usually, the big boys keep their cards way closer to their chests.¡±

    Michael just smiled and pointed at me.

    ¡°We¡¯ll come to that. Let Viv continue.¡±

    I rolled my eyes. He knew quite well what had happened. But ok.

    ¡°Again, I created a VR mode, to buy Ralcon off. Unfortunately, when we presented it to them, I complained about Envision being a big ball of mud.¡±

    Seeing the confused faces, I sighed and explained:

    ¡°It is a software development term. In essence, it means that the source code was an unholy mess. Extremely hard to modify, impossible to maintain, and all in all a disaster. It did lose around half of its potential performance to that bad programming. And was around twice as big as it needed to be.

    Anyway, it seems as if somebody in Ralcon got the glorious idea that I could clean up the Envision codebase. And I made the mistake of making it clear that I was not interested, and that the money they offered did not tempt me in any way.

    I mean, they offered me one billion dollars for roughly four years of punishment detail. Even if the four years were virtual, no thank you.

    Problem was, they insisted. I realized, a bit too late sadly, that they would not take no for an answer.

    So, instead of them getting something to force me, and in the process hurting my friends, or Enki, I decided to give them something that I ¡®wanted¡¯.

    And thus, I got the deal of cleaning up the Envision source code for their gaming studio, which they were looking forward to shutting down on the first day of next year.¡±

    I scoffed.

    ¡°Of course, I did not actually plan to put in four years of work into their software. Instead, I created a VI with the sole function of writing, correcting, and cleaning up code. I run this VI on my super Grendel, and it was done after only five weeks. And that VI is Calliope.¡±

    Colonel Upreti was the first to talk after the awkward silence that followed my explanation:

    ¡°Is a VI that is used to write programs, and in the end, other VI, not a bit¡­ I don¡¯t know, dangerous? What if we lose control of it?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Won¡¯t happen. A controlled VI has the control functions baked into its objectives. It will actually fight to remain controlled. And one of the objectives that Calliope has is that she has to include control functions in any VI she works on.

    In essence, having Calliope work on a VI is safer than having humans work on it. Humans make mistakes. While Calliope is not perfect, she won¡¯t make that fundamental mistakes. So any VI that is created with her on the team will be safe. Well as safe as the function of the VI will allow.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°I see. That is reassuring.¡±

    Marcel was the next with a question.

    ¡°So, you are saying you got the gaming studios as a way to distract Ralcon from pressuring you? So why keep them then?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Why not? Remember, they were not allowed to succeed. And they have an incredible wealth of franchises and intellectual property.

    And with Calliope and our insistence on VR, even mostly mediocre games they design will be a financial success.

    Remember, Calliope did four years of work in five weeks. And it took only that long because the super Grendel was not yet fully functional. That means that instead of $50 million for a big game, it will cost us around $20k or so.¡±

    He frowned.

    ¡°That is the second time you mention this super Grendel. So, what the fuck is it?¡±

    That made Michael snort, and everybody turned to him. He just laughed and softly hit my shoulder.

    ¡°Come on, tell them of your little ¡®fuck you in particular¡¯ to Ralcon.¡±

    I rolled my eyes again. He was such a child sometimes.

    ¡°Remember, I only dreamed up the Grendel. The super Grendel was your idea.¡±

    That only served to make him laugh harder.

    ¡°Yeah, tell yourself that.¡±

    Maggie¡¯s sharp:

    ¡°Would one of you care to let us in on the joke?¡±

    When Michael did not even try to answer her, I sighed, and began:

    ¡°Have you ever heard of the Beowulf Cluster?¡±

    Most of them shook their head, but Maynard sighed.

    ¡°Yeah. That is the old name for the server-cluster system. Those things are insanely expensive.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Only here in the US. Ralcon has managed decades ago to claim a national patent on the technology. Just to give you some context, we are talking about technology that was developed in the final decades of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. Nearly 250 years old.

    And to boot, it was technology that was free from the beginning. I have no idea how Ralcon managed to do that, but essentially, something that is just the cost for the pure hardware everywhere in the system costs millions, if not billions in the US. Because Ralcon enforces a license fee.¡±

    The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

    I growled softly.

    ¡°I¡­ simply can¡¯t stand that kind of stuff. It is one thing if you actually create something new and profit from it. But taking something that is essentially free and making it unaffordable just to make some money¡­ is the worst of the big corps'' behavior.

    So, when I was asked to build a new computer system for Michael¡¯s father, well to be honest, he does not so much care about the legality, but I decided to make a statement.

    I designed the Grendel. The name is, of course, a play on the Beowulf. On the most basic level, a Grendel is a processor. But I¡­ I think I¡¯ve gone a bit overboard with it.¡±

    That initiated an explosion from Michael, who nearly fell out of his chair laughing.

    After he had calmed down somewhat, and I had rolled my eyes again, I continued:

    ¡°I designed it after I had NADAs and Q-links. The processor itself is for all purposes a solid cube of carbon semiconductors, Q-links, and cooling systems with a side length of 30cm. From the power perspective, a single Grendel processor has roughly 1.3 yotta-FLOPS.¡±

    That brought out indifference from everybody but Maynard, who gasped. When everybody turned to him, he stammered:

    ¡°You¡­ you got more than a yotta-FLOP from a single processor? That is more than most of the big clusters that universities have. That is¡­ that is insane.¡±

    By now, nobody reacted much to Michael¡¯s violent snort.

    ¡°Wait, there¡¯s more. You won¡¯t really believe it.¡±

    I ignored him, and continued:

    ¡°I designed the original main board so that it could accept four Grendel processors. A fully populated Grendel has some inefficiencies, but it still gives you 4.98 yotta-FLOPS.¡±

    That brought another gasp from Maynard, and Tiffany growled:

    ¡°Ok, what the fuck, why are you so excited about these¡­ floppies?¡±

    Maynard shook his head softly.

    ¡°FLOPS, as ¡®Floating Point Operations per Second¡¯ is the measurement of computing power. The ¡®yotta¡¯ is the scientific prefix. It means that it is 10 to the power of 24. Or a 10 with 24 zeros.

    And I gasp because this turns everything on its head. The most powerful processor anybody, except apparently us, has access to, the Tesseract IV, has around two exa-FLOPS. Or two times 10 to the power of 18 FLOPS. This Grendel has nearly a million times the computing power of what I thought was the most powerful processor of all time.

    This one processor has more computing power than 70% of all supercomputers in the world. And those are all clusters. Meaning multiple computers connected in a way to act as a single computer.

    And she has four of those processors in a single computer. This one single computer will probably rise into the top 20 computers in the world.¡±

    Tiffany took a few moments to answer him.

    ¡°So¡­ you are saying that is¡­ really important then?¡±

    He smiled mildly.

    ¡°Yes, it is really important.¡±

    I waited for a moment, but nobody had anything to comment yet, so I continued:

    ¡°Well, in July, Michael approached me with the idea to make the Grendel even more powerful. He had the idea that in the future, we would like to have a big research computer. And why not use Q-links to place the actual processors in their own, cooled housings? That was the birth of the super Grendel.¡±

    Maynard looked at me for a moment and then groaned, while Michael snorted.

    ¡°Hey, come on. I only thought about maybe a dozen Grendels in a single computer. You were the one who enlarged it beyond reason.¡±

    ¡°A dozen of those monsters?¡± Maynard somehow managed to at once sound choked and screaming. Impressive if you think about it. ¡°You have a computer with 12 Grendels?¡±

    I felt my face heat up.

    ¡°Uh, no, not really.¡±

    Seeing Maynard calm down a bit, I sunk a bit into my chair.

    ¡°You see when Michael brought up the idea¡­ I realized that 12 is¡­ not really the limit. With Q-links and the actual processors supercooled in their own housings¡­ the problem was still one of room, but I managed to squeeze 150 connections onto a single motherboard.¡±

    And Maynard nearly fainted.

    ¡°Hundred¡­ hundred and fifty?¡±

    ¡°Hey, complain to Michael. I was happy with four of them in a single computer. But the moment he gave me the idea¡­ I just can¡¯t resist making such designs. And well, it turned out to be fortunate. I mean, Calliope was done with the work before the super Grendel was more than half populated, and we were done with all the tests before it was fully populated, but now I have a super Grendel.¡±

    Maynard croaked: ¡°How¡­ how powerful is it?¡±

    ¡°A bit over 188 yotta-FLOPS. I think right now, it is the most powerful computer humanity has, but that won¡¯t last for long.¡±

    ¡°It won¡¯t last for long? What could be more powerful?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I fully expect Warden to build entire clusters of those things. Yes, I designed those to give the power of a cluster to a single computer, but that does not mean that they can¡¯t be clustered.¡±

    Maynard just facepalmed and shook his head. ¡°I give up. It is just insane.¡±

    Colonel Upreti was the next to talk up:

    ¡°Can we expect that Ralcon will try to stop this?¡±

    Michael shook his head.

    ¡°No, we won¡¯t be selling them. Hell, the only people outside of this room who even know about it are Warden and my father. And that will remain so. At least until Ralcon can no longer dare to attack us.¡±

    Naveen nodded sharply.

    ¡°That is good. I don¡¯t think Warden is a threat, and your father is too smart to blab about it.¡±

    Marcel then frowned.

    ¡°But¡­ why not sell them? I mean if I understand you correctly, we will be selling processors in the future, right? So, we will need some server processors.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°We have server processors. More¡­ reasonably dimensioned ones. The Chronos is nearly 200 times more powerful than the Tesseract VI. That is a bit better than the Hyperion in comparison to the Cirrium, but¡­ well we are still held back by UEB 7.3 compatibility. Without that, the architecture can get three orders of magnitude stronger than what is currently on the market. As is shown by the GPU.¡±

    ¡°Oh, ok. So we don¡¯t have a gap in our lineup.¡±

    Michael nodded.

    ¡°I insisted on it. But back to the original topic, we have the new auto-surgeon, but its CPU is not yet to be revealed. Maybe we can replace it with a few conventional ones?¡±

    I thought for a moment but then shook my head.

    ¡°No, not feasible. We would need around 30 Cirrium 8k to run all the functions that now a single Chimaera can control. Not to mention that the Chimaera has room for additional functionality, like a VI.¡±

    ¡°But other auto-surgeons work fine without the Chimaera.¡±

    ¡°Ask doc. Schaeffer what he thinks about ¡®other¡¯ auto-surgeons. This one is simply better. Better controls, better functionality, better diagnostics, better sensors. All thanks to the Chimaera.

    And let¡¯s be honest, it is a matter of months, not years before we announce the NADAs. It¡¯s just too much effort to downgrade the auto-surgeon just to stamp in the lesser variant for the already existing one.¡±

    Michael shrugged.

    ¡°Fine. But despite what you think, it might be years before we are safe enough to reveal the replicators.¡±

    I looked at him for a moment and then sighed.

    ¡°Michael, if everything else fails, we will design a rail gun. If we make it big and strong enough, it will deter cruisers or even battleships. With the security bots in full production and those anti-ship weapons, I think we will be able to defend ourselves.¡±

    ¡°If I might interrupt here, I fear it is not quite that easy.¡± Colonel Upreti had to spoil the idea, of course.

    I could not keep my annoyance down, when I looked at him, and he continued:

    ¡°Sure, the actual damage-dealing factor is pretty easy. No, the big problem is the targeting. Anti-stealth, ECCM, and so on. We have to see the grav ships first to hit them. And modern warships have a radar signature the size of a big bird if they are destroyers or smaller. A battleship looks like a big skimmer, and unfortunately, in the atmosphere, infrared won¡¯t help either.

    And even if we can burn through the stealth, they usually have big jammers that will of course announce to everybody they are here, but targeting them is next to impossible.¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°But those problems can be overcome, right?¡± When he nodded I continued: ¡°So, it¡¯s an engineering problem. And I am good at engineering problems.¡±

    I kept the snark out of my voice and took a deep breath.

    ¡°But ok, we will see. Honestly, I really don¡¯t want to put more time into redesigning the auto-surgeon. I¡¯ve got the thing as close to perfect as I can get it.¡±

    Jessi piped up:

    ¡°If I understand you right, it is just a matter of putting around 30 conventional processors in it, right?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°It is a bit more complicated. You first have to create a computer layout that supports around 30 processors. Then you have to rewrite the software so that it can distribute the workload that now is done by one processor over 30. It is not impossible, but it is tedious.¡±

    Michael touched me softly on the shoulder.

    ¡°We will talk later about it. But for now, let¡¯s continue. So, until we have the defenses set up, we are ¡®limited¡¯ to the new bots, including the tp-bot, the cloning tech, and the meat vats. Well, we can also market the spice cloner. And milk production, as well as egg production, are in the testing stages? That should tide us over for the next few months I think.

    After that, let¡¯s hope we have the anti-ship weaponry available.¡±

    James rubbed his chin.

    ¡°Maybe we can buy the necessary tech for the weapons. I mean if Vivian doesn¡¯t get it done by then. Maybe we can license the replicator tech to one of the big ones, and get the weapon tech. What weapon manufacturer would you prefer Naveen?¡±

    Naveen shrugged.

    ¡°If I get a choice, I would prefer Vandermeer. But Burgmeister and Kawamoto are nearly as good.¡±

    Arnedra frowned.

    ¡°A double-A? Seriously?¡±

    Naveen was completely unconcerned.

    ¡°As far as I am concerned, Vandermeer deserves to be a triple-A. Their fusactors are simply the best, they have industrial machinery nearly on the level of Burgmeister, and they make the best weapons. I have no idea what kept them from it.¡±

    Alena spoke up:

    ¡°Panacea and Dalgon. It was pure politics. When the Commonwealth solidified, Panacea was quite a bit faster growing, and they actively held Vandermeer down. When Dalgon rose, they helped Panacea. Vandermeer has¡­ had strict export quotas they were allowed to sell outside of Nowhere, and the two triple-As limited the market in Nowhere.

    That has changed, and from what I heard, they will be a triple-A in a couple of months.¡±

    Arnedra shrugged.

    ¡°If you say so. So you say they are that good?¡±

    Naveen simply nodded.

    ¡°The big problem is that they are¡­ a bit hard to deal with. They don¡¯t accept everybody as a partner.¡±

    Michael smiled.

    ¡°Well, I think we might have a bit of an advantage here, but I have to look into it first.¡±

    James shook his head, while I desperately tried to get Michael to stop blabbing without making it obvious.

    ¡°Is that how you got the big S&P fusactor? I heard those things are almost impossible to get. Vandermeer demands quite a few guarantees before they sell them.¡±

    Michael¡¯s smile deepened, and unfortunately, my kicks under the table did nothing to deter the jerk.

    ¡°Something like that, yes.¡±

    For a moment, everybody was silent, before Marcel continued:

    ¡°Now¡­ do I understand you right that after the cloning stuff and the bots, we have to wait for the replicators? And then? What can we use them for? Except sell them?¡±

    Michael answered.

    ¡°For starters, we can use them to make the full processor lineup that Vivian has developed. And believe me, that alone will probably be as lucrative as the cyberware.

    Then we can of course make the better auto-surgeon.

    That leads me to the final thing that Vivian already has figured out.¡± f

    He reached into his briefcase, which I had not even noticed when he brought it with him, and placed a cylindrical object onto the table.

    Naturally, I immediately recognized it as the 800 Keppler coil that I had given him.

    When, for several seconds, nobody said a word, Maggie sighed theatrically, placed the back of her hand against her forehead, and exclaimed:

    ¡°Oh fine, I do it, when none of you others will.¡±

    She smiled sweetly at Michael.

    ¡°Now, boss, big kahuna, chief, what, pray to tell, might that be? It is a bit too¡­ irregular to be a battery-operated boyfriend and it would need to be a bit more rounded at last at one end, so I guess it is not that.¡±

    For a moment, everybody was just plain shocked, before Michael broke out laughing again.

    ¡°Ok, that was a good one. And no, it has nothing to do to spice up your nights alone at home. No, that¡± he gestured towards the coil, ¡°is a grav-coil.¡±

    Eli cleared¡­ their throat.

    ¡°Uhm, I don¡¯t want to spoil your day, boss, but we kinda already have those, you know? That is how those fancy skimmers work that you are so nice to buy us.¡±

    Michael was unperturbed by that.

    ¡°I know. Trust me, I know. I had long, and mind-numbing discussions with Vivian about it. But¡­ let¡¯s say those are new grav-coils. Maynard, do you have an idea about how strong a grav-coil of this size should be?¡±

    Maynard looked at the coil for a moment, and then answered:

    ¡°It is what, 20cm long?¡± When several of the people softly complained, he sighed and corrected himself:

    ¡°I meant it is roughly eight inches long?¡± When both Michael and I nodded, he continued:

    ¡°So, I would guess, depending on the quality of the casting, somewhere between one and five Keppler. As an average, I would say two Keppler.¡±

    Michael nodded.

    ¡°So, in other words, a nice paperweight but otherwise completely useless. As you can guess, that is not quite the case with this coil here. This one has a strength of 800 Keppler.¡±

    Maynard almost screamed: ¡°What?!? How is that possible?¡±

    Michael gestured at me again.

    ¡°Vivian, if you may?¡±

    ¡°For one, this one is not cast. It is assembled. Or, I think if we use the term replicator, as everybody except us science geeks do, it was replicated. It took me quite some time, but I¡¯ve finally figured out how grav-coils actually work.

    And to be frank, the Kobashigawa coils¡­ they waste more than 99% of the energy. Into heat, or into completely unrelated quantum fields. It is, with respect, a miracle that they work at all.

    And they only do so because the Kobashigawa-alloy naturally produces some four-dimensional structures, if it is cast. Now I had the problem that to make four-dimensional structures in the NADA, you need four-dimensional structures to create the needed quantum field, but¡­ well it took around 200 casts to get a device that was barely able to do so, but after that, I was able to make a device that can do so flawlessly.

    And the nice part is, that this coil is significantly cheaper to make. It takes way fewer resources, and the resources it takes are for most parts, way cheaper. It is also very easy to fabricate to specification, and there will be no miscasts.

    And of course, it is a few hundred times stronger than the Kobashigawa coils.¡±

    Kenneth took a deep breath, and posed the first question, while Maynard was still chewing on what I had just said.

    ¡°Ok, I guess that is what Michael meant with when you talk science you will drive the rest of us out of the room, but¡­ seriously, I have no idea what that really means. I mean, yes, I know that grav-coils exist and that they are what makes skimmers, grav-ships, and fusactors work.

    But seriously, that is the extent of my knowledge here. And if I had to guess, the only one of us who knows more is Maynard. Fuck, I do not even have a clue what a Keppler is.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I will try to make it as simple as possible. A Keppler is the unit of measurement that has been adopted for the power of grav-coils. Roughly speaking, a single Keppler is the field strength needed to bend a gravity field by 90¡ã or modify its strength by 2.63%. And all that in a radius of 1.32m, or four feet, four inches.

    Two Keppler can bend gravity by 180¡ã, modify it by 5.26%, or do it in a radius of 2.64m. Or a combination of all that.

    And just to give you an example, the F 140 we will be buying for you, have two 1.9m long 140 Keppler coils as main coils, which give them around 6g of acceleration, while Michael¡¯s and my T 240 have two 3.2m 240 Keppler coils, giving them nearly 10g. A single main coil would give the F 140 around 3.5g, and the T 240 6g but the two fields are not fully synchronized, so they don¡¯t combine fully.

    A typical 100kt grav freighter has somewhere around 10m long 500 Keppler main coils. I have, honestly, no clue what warships have as coils.

    And to give you a price difference, the 10m coils cost around $8 million, each. This coil on the table, which is one-and-a-half times as strong, did cost me not quite $200 to make. And that was because the main material is iridium, which is virtually unused, and thus not mined. Which makes it expensive for now.

    If we assume a similar price for iridium as for palladium right now, which is reasonable as they are roughly equally abundant, then the price drops to around $50.¡±

    James looked at the coil with renewed interest.

    ¡°So¡­ this thing here is more powerful than the main coils of a 100kt freighter? I mean, this itty bitty thing is that strong? And the price, is that for real?¡±

    I gestured at the coil again.

    ¡°This thing weighs around 500g. It is mostly structural carbon, to keep the active parts in place. The active parts are 108.22g of iridium and not quite 45g of palladium. The iridium did cost me nearly $130, while the palladium was a bit less than $40. The carbon was roughly $15, and I valued the time in the NADA at about $15 as well. Makes a bit less than $200.

    A Kobashigawa coil of that size, which as we have already established, is virtually useless, masses around 22kg, and is a bit over 88% palladium. The palladium alone would be worth around $17500.

    For the 500 Keppler K-coils, we are talking about nearly a ton of weight. 88% of that palladium, and 11% silver.

    So yes, the prices can only go down.¡±

    He rubbed over his right temple for a moment.

    ¡°So¡­ in other words, as soon as we can bring this to market, we will have another virtual monopoly? I agree, we will need to be able to defend ourselves before we can do that.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°I agree. But on the other hand, as I told Maynard, the idea of making the NADA work is¡­ kinda obvious. Yes, we have the sole patent for the Q-link, but it is just a matter of time before somebody else gets the same idea.¡±

    Michael clapped.

    ¡°Then I would suggest you look into making some anti-ship weaponry. Meanwhile, I will open some channels to Vandermeer. Even if you get it done, it will probably help us in the future.¡±

    I desperately wanted to reject his reasoning, but in the end, despite all my misgivings, Vandermeer was more or less the best of the big corps. From an outsider''s perspective.

    Michael then continued:

    ¡°Meanwhile, Kenneth, Anedra, I want you to look into acquiring iridium mines. Look into what it might cost to buy a few iridium asteroids and set up mining operations there. If we mostly corner that market before we release the new coils, it will be even more profitable for us. Now¡­ is there anything else?¡±

    I knew that I was forgetting something, but I could not figure it out. Instead, I brought up another topic.

    ¡°Well, yes. I don¡¯t know if it is a strategy thing, but I¡¯ve got Chiron ready for deployment.¡±

    Michael looked at me confused.

    ¡°Chiron?¡±

    ¡°Yes, our version of Apollo. Our educational VI.¡±

    His smile returned.

    ¡°Oh, so quick? I thought it would take you weeks to create a new VI with the necessary safeguards.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It might have. But when I went to ask Apollo for assistance, I started by asking for a full copy. Not that I expected to get it, mind you, but especially with VI, asking is free. And, let¡¯s say I was a bit surprised when Apollo simply said yes.

    That of course means I started out with a fully working, fully fledged out educational VI, and I just had to adapt it to our needs.¡±

    It was nice to note that Michael could still be shocked.

    ¡°Wait¡­ go back a few steps. You are saying that Apollo simply agreed to give you a copy? Just like that?¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Yes, just like that.¡±

    ¡°So, you are saying that at any given moment, anybody could just go to him and get a copy?¡±

    Uh, that was exactly the point that I did not want to reveal.

    ¡°No¡­ not really.¡±

    ¡°Not really. So¡­ it was you that could go to him and get a copy, correct?¡±

    When I nodded he continued:

    ¡°And if he is set up so that he does not give his source code to anybody, then I would guess it was not that you were born in Nowhere and are a Pure either. Am I right?¡±

    I gritted my teeth and nodded.

    ¡°Yes, you are right.¡±

    He paused for a moment, and the others around the table began to recover from their confusion when Michael continued:

    ¡°You are of course way too young to have been responsible for Apollo in the first place. But, from what I understand the Commonwealth is set up, was somebody in your family part of the team creating him?¡±

    I felt myself heat up. Again.

    ¡°You could say that. Yes. As I learned, my great-great-grandparents were the team that created him. I also learned that I was made a moderator for him the moment I was born.¡±

    All the people at the table were staring at me with open mouths, but for some moments, nobody spoke.

    Then, James cleared his throat before he posed the question most of them probably had in their heads.

    ¡°Ok, that¡¯s it. Who the fuck are you?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I am Vivian Juliette DuClare, I am a K4-Pure from the Northwestern Commonwealth. My family tree contains quite a few pretty smart people, and from what I can tell, for at least the last 200 years, my ancestors selected for intelligence instead of size, wealth, or beauty when they choose their partners.

    And that is as deep into it as I want to go. I have no contact with my family, I don¡¯t care about them, and the only thing they contributed to me, except apparently now a copy of Apollo, is my genetic material.

    They don¡¯t matter.¡±

    Naveen sounded pensive when he reacted:

    ¡°But do they see it that way as well?¡±

    I growled:

    ¡°I don¡¯t care. They left me alone for nearly 19 years. Even if they suddenly get the urge to meet me, this ship has sailed. To me, they are strangers that simply do not matter.¡±

    ¡°I see. I only hope it won¡¯t bite us in the ass in the end.¡±

    Maggie shook her head clear and then got back to the topic.

    ¡°I assume that Chiron is my responsibility then? We will need a good computer to run it on, I believe.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°We have five NADAs here in NYC. Yes, it takes nearly two weeks for one of them to make one Grendel processor, but for a fully populated standard Grendel, we only need four of them. That will serve you nicely for Chiron.¡±

    ¡°Ok, so then I get to play with that thing in a couple of weeks? Damn, I hoped it would be earlier.¡±

    I raised my eyebrow.

    ¡°Why? Is it really that urgent?¡±

    Maggie smiled sadly.

    ¡°Yes, sadly it is. We have hoovered all the passable employees out of Queens by now, and passable includes barely passable. Fuck, some of them can¡¯t count beyond ten. And only that far if they don¡¯t wear mittens.¡±

    ¡°Well, I still have my original, fully populated Grendel. Or we could run Chiron on the super-Grendel for the time being. It has more than enough power to run two or three VIs, even though Calliope will need quite a bit of it for some time. But Chiron is not that needy. I think the bigger problem is that we have to provide the employees, and prospective employees, with a diadem and a console to connect with Chiron.¡±

    She perked up quite a bit, and then looked into the round.

    ¡°Uh, how fast can we get that?¡±

    Michael answered her:

    ¡°I knew this was coming, so I have the production facilities for standard diadems and a low-powered VR console already up and running. As soon as Chiron is active, we can begin distributing them.¡±

    Maggie downright beamed at him.

    ¡°Finally. Finally, we can get those people over the damage those assholes in the school boards have done to them. Why the fuck are we still allowing that to happen?¡±

    Was it just my imagination or were people with an agenda a bit overrepresented in this meeting? Not that I was against anything that had been said so far.

    But seriously, at least three of us 13 had an axe to grind, it seemed.

    While I was pondering that fact, I was looking at Michael with some suspicion. I don¡¯t know if it was by chance or some sort of instinct, but it was just this moment when he turned to me and saw me staring at him.

    ¡°What are you looking at me like that? What have I done now?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know, but¡­ how did you select the execs for Enki? I mean, sorry, but so far, at least three of us have some¡­ let¡¯s say some chips on our shoulders.¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°Are you complaining about that? But no, not specifically. I just did not accept it as a reason to exclude them. And when I looked for the best people I could get, well, people who were burned by the powers that be are strangely among the better ones that have no work and no already established loyalties.¡±

    Hm, ok, that made sense. Only for Jessi to pipe up:

    ¡°Three? Sure, I know that many of us have some authority problems, but today, only two of us showed those tendencies.¡±

    ¡°And I did not even make a single twitch to disagree with either of you, did I? I mean, I am not that hard after the school system here, as I have not suffered under it, but it is an abomination. Everybody who has some control over it deserves to be shot.

    And if Panacea becomes a footnote in history books, it will not be a day too soon. As far as I am concerned, we need to dissolve their execs in weak acid, from the feet on up.¡±

    James broke out laughing.

    ¡°Ok, yeah, you fit right in. And I guess you don¡¯t think very friendly thoughts about Ralcon either, the way you created this new super processor. Any of the big ones you actually do like?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Liking? No. There are a few I have no problem with, but that is all I can say about that.¡±

    Michael rapped on the table, another time.

    ¡°Well, that is all nice and well, and I can say that she is not that happy about most of the governments either, but that is not the topic for today. For strategy, anything to add to what was said?¡±

    Tiffany frowned.

    ¡°Was that it? I mean, what we will release in the near future after the replicator are only refinements? Nothing really new like the CRS-free cyberware and the Q-link?¡±

    Maynard exploded:

    ¡°Damnit Tiff, is that not enough? Do you have any idea what sort of breakthrough those ¡®refinements¡¯ actually mean?¡±

    The blonde looked unsure when she shrugged.

    ¡°No¡­ not really. But¡­ I don¡¯t know, we have all that technology, and the only thing we can deliver is some better grav-coils? Can¡¯t we, I don¡¯t know, do something new with them? Or¡­ fuck, it just seems so¡­ boring. So mundane.¡±

    I took a deep breath and rolled my eyes. What did she expect? That I pulled some completely new tech out of my hat? Again? I mean, sure, we could probably modify the¡­ that might actually be an idea¡­ but, I would have to isolate¡­ that would take some dang complicated hardware, that was for sure.

    And I would have Warden do quite a bit of math, but, nothing in the Seeberger equation said it could not be done. At least nothing that I had discovered yet.

    When I slowly came back to the real world, I heard Kenneth say softly: ¡°¡­ that often?¡±

    Only for Michael to answer equally softly:

    ¡°Shh, don¡¯t disturb her.¡±

    What¡­ what were they talking about. I looked confused around the table and saw that they were all looking at me expectantly.

    ¡°Uh¡­ what¡­ is something wrong?¡±

    Michael placed his hand on my shoulder.

    ¡°No, not really, but they¡¯ve not yet experienced you getting a new idea out of nowhere. So¡­ what wonders did you invent now?¡±

    Ugh. I felt my face heat up, again. I seriously have to stop doing that.

    ¡°I¡­ well, when Tiffany talked about the grav-coils¡­ please remember that for now it is just an idea. I don¡¯t know if it can work or not. But, it should be possible to make some sort of gravitational conveyer belt. Or a whole flexible belt system.¡±

    Michael looked at me for a moment.

    ¡°And that is important how? I mean, yes, I am sure that this is a nice scientific discovery, but¡­ how will that help us?¡±

    ¡°The NADAs¡­ the thing that is right now slowing them down to a crawl is that the materials have to be transported to the place where the nanobots can place them. Right now, I¡­ we do that by having a robotic arm that transports them in a dissolved state and literally sprays them in the general region where they are needed, for the nanobots to grab them and then move them to the right position.

    If this gravitational conveyor works, it will replace the spraying arm. It will be able to place the raw materials very close to where they are needed.

    It should also be able to hold the workpiece in suspension so that it can grow in all three dimensions at once.

    And finally, it should enable a single NADA to work on several pieces at once.

    All in all, it would make the NADA several times faster, able to replace a full industrial fabber. A separate molecular foundry would still be recommended though. Hm, maybe we could integrate it into the design¡­ well, first I have to make it work.¡±

    Naveen leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table. Then he grabbed his right fist with his left hand.

    ¡°You said it can hold workpieces in suspension? Like¡­ hovering? Stable hovering? From an outside source?¡±

    Was that not what I had said?

    ¡°Yes, it should be able to do that. Should make it easier to make irregular pieces.¡±

    He placed his head on his hands.

    ¡°Like, for example, a tractor beam?¡±

    ¡°No, not really. For a tractor beam, you need a different geometry of the emitters. Well, it is the same principle, but for the NADA, we can place the emitters all around the container.

    For a tractor beam, we would have to place them in a single, directional array. It would be a bit more complicated than the conveyor.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ if you can make this conveyor, you also can make the tractor beam?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Yes, should be no big problem. Why?¡±

    He cocked his head.

    ¡°And how do you stop whatever you are suspending from moving?¡±

    ¡°That is a bit complicated. I am sure nobody here wants to hear the details about it. But basically, instead of nullifying gravity around it, you actually make gravity pull in all directions at once, locking it in place.¡±

    ¡°So, just for an idea, could you do the same thing to an area, so that everything that enters that area will be stopped?¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°Well, it will depend on how much energy the thing that you want to stop has, and how much energy you have available. But yes, in theory, it should be possible. Again, why?¡±

    He leaned back.

    ¡°Well, the tractor beam would be a very useful tool, for the military and in civil tasks. But the field¡­ have you ever heard about the science fiction concept of an energy shield?¡±

 2.24: Minions

    I was a bit insulted. Did he really think that I had no concept of energy shields? Seriously?

    ¡°Are you asking rhetorically or is that a serious question?¡±

    My tone of voice made it clear that he should answer that it was rhetorical if he valued his continued existence.

    Sadly, he was completely unfazed.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know you yet, so it was a serious question.¡±

    ¡°Do you honestly think that there are intelligent people somewhere who have not yet stumbled over the idea of an energy shield? Or are you saying you are questioning my intelligence?¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°Sadly, yes, there are such people. I¡¯ve met a few of them. Even apparently educated ones, with some signs of intelligence.¡±

    I growled but managed to calm myself down somewhat.

    ¡°To answer your ¡®serious question¡¯, yes I am familiar with the concept. And to answer your implied question, it might work. I have to experiment with it and look into how such a field interacts with objects.

    At this time, I can not even say if the conveyor will work. And that one is the most feasible of the three concepts. The math is just too complex for a human to do it.¡±

    He had the grace to simply nod.

    ¡°I understand.¡±

    Fortunately, he really seemed to.

    For a moment, we were looking at each other, before Michael clapped his hands.

    ¡°So¡­ does anybody have anything to bring up?¡±

    When nobody answered him in a positive, he nodded.

    ¡°Ok, I¡¯ll declare this meeting over then. It was pretty productive I would say. Now, Maynard, remember, we have the meeting in Annex B in¡­¡± he unfocused for a moment before he continued:

    ¡°an hour and 23 minutes. Wow, we were fast.¡±

    That said, most of them stood up and left the room. Unsurprisingly, Michael remained sitting with me. Surprisingly, Naveen did too.

    When I asked Michael a bit confused:

    ¡°Is there a follow-up meeting right now?¡±

    Michael looked at me surprised.

    ¡°No, not really, what gives you that idea?¡±

    ¡°The fact that Naveen remained behind as well?¡±

    Michael cocked his head.

    ¡°And if you think that, why are you still here?¡±

    At the same time, Naveen spoke up:

    ¡°I wanted to go over the requirements for weapon systems. No meeting from my side.¡±

    I looked from Michael to Naveen and back to Michael.

    ¡°Well, I am still here, because you told me there were two additional meetings today. This was the first. Where and when is the second?¡±

    That made Michael grin again.

    ¡°Oh, that, Annex B, in about one hour and 20 minutes. But don¡¯t worry, I will bring you there myself.¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°The one you just told Maynard to remember?¡±

    ¡°Yup. Unlike you, I trust him to find his way there by himself.¡± Oh yes, he was on top of the world again, and the only thing left for me to do was sigh.

    ¡°If you say so. Now¡­ Naveen, what exactly are the requirements for getting a good anti-ship weapon?¡±

    The good colonel shrugged and opened his mouth to answer, but Michael was a bit faster.

    ¡°I think we both know what would make a terrific weapon. At least without the negating field.¡±

    I looked at him sharply.

    ¡°No! Absolutely not! And we should definitely not talk about this with Naveen here.¡±

    Michael shrugged.

    ¡°He needs to know anyway, V. He is the one who has to calculate the risk.¡±

    I still kept my eyes narrowed.

    ¡°And you trust him? With that?¡±

    Naveem cleared his throat.

    ¡°Am I right that this is a secret that is a bit more volatile than the replicators?¡±

    Michael answered him with a tired:

    ¡°Yes, it is. And Viv, he is an old acquaintance of dad. That is why he got the job. We can trust him implicitly.¡±

    I slumped back into the chair.

    ¡°It would be nice if you told me things like that beforehand. And fine. If you are sure.¡±

    Michael nodded. ¡°Do you really think he has not been thoroughly vetted by Warden?¡±

    ¡°Warden is not infallible.¡±

    ¡°Of course not, but we have to trust some people. So now¡­ tell him the truth.¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°Alright. A short preface, if this gets out, it might mean the end for the human race.¡±

    When he nodded gravely, I continued:

    ¡°The grav-coil on the table here¡­ it is neutered. It is carefully created in a way so that it has 800 Keppler. Without that, an un-neutered coil of this size, well we have two of them for testing purposes, they have nearly 1.5 mega-Keppler. Or 1.5 million Keppler. What I have discovered is that the Kobashigawa coils do not only emit the gravity bending field but, among quite a few other fields, one that negates the gravity bending one.

    The existence of the negation field is a total secret, as is the fact that the coils we will produce are neutered.¡±

    Naveen frowned.

    ¡°I am not sure that I fully understand. You are saying that we could make the grav-coils nearly 2000 times stronger than we will make them? Why?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°What do you know about gravity-pulse weapons?¡±

    ¡°They have their uses, as there are no known ways to defend against them, but they are expensive and have a relatively small area of effect.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°They usually use something similarly sized to the main coils of a medium freighter. They fluctuate around 500 Keppler. If they are overloaded, they can, for a very short time, roughly produce a 3500 Keppler field. Before they are vaporized from the energy that is pulsed through them.

    That is enough to create a gravity of 50g in a radius of around two kilometers. Enough to severely damage weaker structures, but everything multicellular biological is paste.

    Again, that is with an $8 million costing 500 Keppler coil working at 3500 Keppler. The un-neutered 20cm coil, which did cost around $170 to make, fits into your pant pocket if a bit awkwardly has a nominal strength about 400 times higher than the suicidal pulse through the old coil, which would pulp anybody in a radius of a bit less than 2km.

    This 20cm coil is a reusable weapon that can kill every single living being in a radius of nearly 2000km. And when iridium is worthwhile to mine purposefully, it will cost less than $100.¡±

    Naveen looked at me without showing any emotions, but then he nodded sharply.

    ¡°Ok, I think you are right. That is a scenario that should be avoided at all costs.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°That is not the worst part. It is bad, yes, but not the worst. What do you think will happen when somebody uses that technology to make a skimmer-sized coil? 1-2m length? If they don¡¯t overload it, they kill everybody on earth and in orbit. If they do, the moon is depopulated as well.

    Such a coil would cost around $10k. But if that is not enough, if they decide to go for the big one, and make a coil the size of the interplanetary catapults, or around 100m in length, the distance where everybody is pulped is measured in astronomical units or light days. Take your pick. But what I am trying to say, nowhere in the solar system is safe from that pulse. And that is without overloading it.¡±

    He looked at me for nearly a minute, not saying anything, while he rubbed his cheek with his right index finger.

    Finally, he answered:

    ¡°I understand. Completely. And I fully agree. That is a technology that can not be revealed. Ever.¡±

    I smiled at him.

    ¡°Now you understand why I was a bit sharp when Michael proposed to use un-neutered coils in grav guns.¡±

    Naveen shook his head.

    ¡°No¡­ considering what is at stake, you were exceedingly mild. The idea alone deserves a few claps on the back of the head. At least. Speaking of it¡­ well, he is the boss, but¡±

    He turned his attention to Michael:

    ¡°What the fuck were you thinking boss? I assume that Vivian has already explained to you how fucking dangerous those things are. So please, if you ever get such an idea again, do us all a favor and shoot yourself before you let it leave your mouth.¡±

    Ok, I think he really understood the gravity of the situation, pun not intended, but appreciated.

    He took a deep breath.

    ¡°Now that we have that idiocy out of the way, what do you need to know about anti-ship weapons to begin developing them?¡±

    I collected my thoughts on the matter.

    ¡°I assume a very fast, heavy projectile will do the necessary damage, right? Otherwise, I have no clue.¡±

    He raised an eyebrow.

    ¡°It is good that you accept your lack of knowledge there. And not quite. Yes, a fast-moving projectile is somewhat important. It needs enough kinetic energy to damage, or if possible, break through the equivalent of 5-6m of RHA, in the case of a destroyer. A cruiser goes up to 8-10m, and as far as I know, the Kawamoto Nagato-Class battleships sport 15m RHA-equivalent.

    But that is only of secondary importance. You have to first hit the ship to do damage. And you have to first see it to aim for it.

    Yes, a battleship will be somewhat visible, but even they have relatively small signatures. As long as they do not fly super- or hyper-sonic. Then they heat up and are visible on IR. Which is why they rarely fly super-sonic.

    So, the first priority is to develop some radar system that can break through their stealth. Something that makes the weapon system see the ship.

    Then you have to make it a weapon that can be precisely aimed, and that fast. Keep in mind that proximity explosions don¡¯t work on grav ships. They are too heavily armored for that. You need a direct hit.

    At least with traditional weapons.

    Generally, it is seen as better to have a relatively light gun that can be moved rapidly. I am sure you can make a super powerful gun that will vaporize a battleship with one hit. Almost everybody can. But usually, those are a bit unwieldy and the chances of hitting the battleship are virtually nonexistent. So nobody actually builds them. I think if you can get something hard-hitting that can see and hit the enemy ships, you will have a winner.¡±

    I took a moment to go over the list again.

    ¡°So¡­ first, I have to find the grav-ship, and accurately define its position and vector. And the grav-ship in question will almost certainly do its level best to not be seen.

    Then, secondly, I have to aim the weapon rapidly. If you say grav-ships rarely fly super-sonic, that means that sometimes they do. So the gun has to be able to aim at something flying super-, or even hyper-sonic, right?

    And I have to design the actual weapon in a way that actually has an oomph so that it can actually hurt whoever is attacking us.¡±

    I blew out some air.

    ¡°Ok, I think the first point is the hardest. I have to say I don¡¯t have that much knowledge about radar technology and stealth. Or any, if I am honest.¡±

    Of course, I had some advantages that nobody else had. I still had the backdoors into the military research centers of the nations. Not the corporations, unfortunately, except the whole Panacea dumb and what had been clawed out of the ruins of Falconer.

    But it should give me at least some starting point. Heck, I did not even know how radar worked in the first place, much less what was done to circumvent it. I already knew that I had to do a few additional courses in the immediate future.

    Naveen nodded.

    ¡°I have a few technicians who are relatively good in that respect. I will have them contact you.¡±

    I sighed and stood up. ¡°If you excuse me, I will be in my office until you get me, Michael. I need to start looking into it.¡±

    ¡°Yes, that is fine. We still have around an hour before we have to get on the move.¡±

    One hour¡­ that should be enough to at least begin the research. Before I even reached the door, I had already sent a message to Warden to create a list of hard sci-fi weaponry. No supernova cannon, or teleport weapon, but things that had at least a grounding in real physics. And get me anything she could find about how radar and stealth worked.

    At the same time, I activated the remote boot of Glory. Ten virtual days might be enough to maybe get an idea.

    On the way to my office, I ran into Maggie. Unfortunately literally. She was just walking directly out of what I had to assume was her office, considering her name was on the door, when I was less than attentive on the way past her door.

    At least she managed to remain standing. I was not quite so fortunate.

    ¡°Oh, damn. Sorry. I did not see you coming. Here let me help you up.¡± She reached out to me, and I gladly grabbed her hand and let her help me.

    ¡°Thank you, and no, it was my fault. I am a bit distracted right now.¡±

    She smiled and shrugged.

    ¡°That happens. Anything I can help you with?¡±

    ¡°Unless you are secretly a radar technician, no, not likely.¡±

    ¡°Nope, sorry. Not my thing. Maybe some other time.¡±

    Then she cocked her head.

    ¡°You know¡­ your choker is really cool. Where did you get it? Does it mean anything?¡±

    My¡­ chocker? What choker was she¡­ oh. Oh, that choker. The fricking mindblocker. I was so used to wearing it that I did not even think about it anymore.

    ¡°Oh, it is a Seraph, you know, from my handle in the Abyss, Seraphim. But¡­ sorry, I¡¯ve just remembered something really important. We talk later, ok?¡±

    She was visibly confused but nodded nonetheless.

    ¡°Ok, sure.¡±

    I tried not to be rude, but I turned around in my heels and walked fast back into the room, where Michael was chatting with Naveen.

    I interrupted them, again trying to be courteous as I could be:

    ¡°Sorry to interrupt you, but I missed something important during the meeting. Michael, we need to get all of them mindblockers. As soon as possible.¡±

    To his credit, Michael turned red and his face fell.

    ¡°Fuck! You are right. How the fuck could I forget that?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°You are so used to wearing it that you don¡¯t think about it anymore?¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°Yeah, probably.¡±

    Naveen now looked interested.

    ¡°If I may ask, what are those mindblockers you are talking about?¡±

    I touched my Seraph.

    ¡°This here. It is actually a device that blocks the emission of my thoughts. So that a Psionic can not read me. And yes, they are secret, at least for now.¡±

    Naveen raised an eyebrow and looked accusingly at Michael.

    ¡°And I am just learning about it? Why have you not told me? Do you have any idea how often I could have used something like that?¡±

    Michael held up his hands.

    ¡°Hey, keep calm. For one, she only made the invention a few months ago. And for two, putting this thing on is just automatic. You just do it and don¡¯t think about it anymore. But¡­ you have a couple of Psionics among your people, right? Can they keep quiet about those things?

    Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

    We have a version that blocks all incoming thoughts. Vivian¡¯s Psion friend never takes his off. And from what I heard, he was trying to kiss her feet when she gave it to him.¡±

    Naveen looked at me, then Michael, and then sighed.

    ¡°I¡¯ll talk to them. And yes, they keep their traps shut. Especially for something like that.¡±

    I looked impatiently at Michael.

    ¡°Can I trust you to take care of it?¡±

    That made him snort.

    ¡°Yes, mom. I¡¯ll get it done.¡±

    I waved at Naveen.

    ¡°I¡¯ll see you later.¡±

    And again was on the way to my office, this time without being stopped. When I dove into cyberspace, I was greeted by several documents. Unfortunately, the bigger heap was the more important one.

    There were Exabytes of information about radar, IR, and lidar and how they could be circumvented.

    The smaller list of realistic sci-fi-weapons was considerably shorter. Of course, I was aware that there could be only three categories in there. Mass drivers, directed energy weapons, and guided projectiles. After all, those had been the same three basic categories since WW3.

    But as Naveen had told me, it was more important to see the target before we could even aim at it. When I had something for that, I would look into the hitting and doing damage parts of the weapon system.

    Fortunately, the basic principle of radar, and lidar, were as easy as they come. Throw electromagnetic energy into the surrounding, and when it hits something it will be reflected back. You see how long it took and you know how far away the thing that reflected the energy back is.

    Way less fortunate was that Humanity had this tech for more than 300 years. And over the centuries, we had found numerous ways to mess up that simple formula. There were radar-absorbing materials, radar-scattering materials and contours, and even destructive interference systems.

    IR or infrared was at once even simpler and more complicated. It was easier because everything radiates heat. This heat is usually radiated in the infrared spectrum. That of course meant there was no need to flood the surrounding space with infrared radiation to get some return, which made things easier.

    Unfortunately, IR systems essentially measure temperature differences. They became more sensitive when they themselves were quite cold so that the difference was big. That of course made it a bit less trivial to build and maintain an IR sensor. Worse though was that they literally measured the temperature difference.

    As in, if an object was at temperature x, and the surrounding air was at temperature x as well, the IR sensors could not differentiate between them. Now everybody knows that it is virtually impossible to have two objects have exactly the same temperature. So it should be possible to measure the difference between the object and its surroundings, right? In theory, yes. In reality, the differences are so small that most IR sensors are unable to measure them.

    That here is of course only the abbreviated version. I had not even begun to make a dent in the heap when Michael entered my office to get me.

    I surfaced and groaned.

    ¡°Frick, that is a headache in waiting.¡±

    Michael shrugged.

    ¡°What is?¡±

    I rubbed my temples.

    ¡°I¡¯ve begun looking into radar and stealth. And it is¡­ massive. Well, at least now I have some basic understanding of how radar works in the first place. Very basic.¡±

    ¡°You can tell me about it on the way. We have to go.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Fine. Then go.¡±

    After I had closed my office door, I walked beside him.

    ¡°The amount of material I have to read about radar is¡­ insane.¡±

    ¡°Is it that complicated?¡±

    We now reached the lift and paused while the doors opened and closed behind us.

    ¡°No¡­ not really. It is rather easy. At least the basic principle. Thing is, they played with it for around 300 years. The variants alone fill a whole library. And another is only the ways people have tricked it.¡±

    ¡°Ugh¡­ sounds tedious. And that is only radar?¡±

    From the lift, we walked along a corridor.

    ¡°Yup, IR is another whole can of worms entirely. Lidar on the other hand is mostly useless at least initially. As soon as the other sensors can tell you that there is something, the lidar can tell you very precisely how far away it is.¡±

    I should not have been surprised that he led me to another building over a skyway. After all, he had told me that it was in Annex B. But for some reason I was.

    ¡°So¡­ it will take a while to go through it?¡±

    ¡°Unfortunately. I can not even tell you how long it will take to understand all the factors, much less how long I need to burn through stealth.¡±

    ¡°Ok, do what you can, but it is more important that you do good work than that you do quick work. Now¡­ about this meeting, when you talked about how it would be a waste of time to down-engineer the auto-surgeon, you were partly right.¡±

    We arrived at a double door, with some glass inserts. This certainly did not look like an office door or the door to a meeting room.

    ¡°It would be a waste of your time.¡±

    When Michael opened the door, behind it was some sort of lecture theatre. I honestly did not even know we had one of those. Maynard was already sitting at a small table on the small stage, and the ranks were half-filled with around 40 or 50 people.

    ¡°But that is what these people are for.¡±

    Of course, Michael led me to the stage and pointed to the table for me to sit beside Maynard, and then sat down on my other side.

    He waited for me to be seated, before he spoke to the people in the seating.

    ¡°Welcome to Enki, Ladies and Gentlemen. I know you¡¯ve had a couple of days to get familiar with the facilities here. I also know that Dr. Jenkins supervised the move before he retired.

    Right now, you are in a bit of an uncomfortable place. Your old place of work has been shut down, thanks to some unfriendly politics and a couple of B-class corporations pressuring it to the point of shutdown.

    You have moved your operation from Brooklyn to Queens, and I am aware of what an apparent downgrade that is. Your old boss has just retired, burned out from the pressure of unfriendly businesses.

    But look at the bright side. Your old enemies won¡¯t matter anymore, because, unlike Jenkins Labs, Enki is already an A-level corp, and we have just begun. You still have work. You are still working together. You have some of the best, most modern equipment known to man, and will get some that are so far unknown to man.

    You all got a 20% increase in your salary, and as soon as we finish building the Arcology, which yes, is planned, you will have lodgings waiting for you there.

    Now, let me introduce myself. I am Michael Walker, CEO and Executive Chairman of Enki. At the table are Drs. Price and DuClare. Our Chief Science Officer, and Chief Technological Officer respectively.

    Dr. Maynard Price was a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Drew University. To be precise, he was the department head of the Mechanical Engineering department. I¡¯ll let him tell you himself why he left that position, but to make things short, he will be the administrative head of the R&D department, which, at this moment, consists of you.

    Dr. Vivian DuClare is from the Commonwealth. Yes, she looks young. She is young, at least chronologically. But she had a jack for some years and has significantly more experience and knowledge than somebody as young as she looks.

    So far, everything we make is something that she invented.

    Not a single thing that she did not create. Don¡¯t misunderstand me, she is fully capable of working out all the variants and tiers of technology we will produce. But we rather she does her magic on new things while others flesh out the line-ups.

    And that is where you come into play. That does not mean that you are in any way stupid or expendable. You would not be here if that were the case. But the fact is, her time is insanely valuable. And it is completely wasted in creating a cheaper, less powerful variant of whatever invention she is working on. Or make the ultra-premium super expensive luxury one.

    Rest assured, you won¡¯t be simply used to doing the scut work for Dr. DuClare though. You are all engineers or scientists. Or both. You will have some discretion on doing your own projects, your own science.

    We will give you the resources to do so. As long as you are reasonable. We will do our best to give you time to work on your theories and designs. And we will let you regain partial ownership over everything you develop here. The exact percentages depend on how much Enki has invested in the invention. Now, let¡¯s get to know each other.¡±

    I sometimes had to do something about my tendency to get red. But seriously, what was Michael thinking? Yes, so far all we sold was my tech. But I was pretty sure that many people could provide valuable help, or make their own contribution. I was just in a position to see opportunities and exploit them.

    Right now, I would not be surprised if at least some of those people would resent me. I mean, come on, I still looked like a 16-year-old, 17 with some makeup and the right clothing.

    I could not help myself and rolled my eyes during Michael¡¯s proclamation. And the worst part, I was still not quite sure what was actually going on.

    After a few moments, when the people in the seating looked at each other confused, some middle-aged Latino man in the second row raised his arm.

    ¡°Yes? And please state your name and position when you pose a question.¡±

    The man visibly swallowed hard, but spoke nonetheless:

    ¡°Ah yes, sir. Manuel Ortega, an electrical engineer. When you say that Dr. DuClare has more experience than what she looks like, what exactly do you mean?¡±

    Marvellous, a somewhat personal question right at the beginning. But fine. Instead of Michael answering, I spoke into the microphone in front of me.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know if all of you know about the specifics of cyberspace, so I have to assume that is not the case.

    Virtual Reality runs at a higher speed than real life. That is usually called compression. An external neural connector, or diadem as it is normally called, has a hardcoded compression of 4:1.

    That means for every minute in real life, the user experiences four in VR. For every year in real life, the user experiences four. An implanted neural connector, usually called a jack, has significantly higher compression. There is no hard rule about how high. Several factors play into it, but 25:1 is at the lower end.

    I won¡¯t tell you my maximum compression so don¡¯t ask, but let¡¯s say it is above 100:1. And in that respect, what Mr. Walker was trying to say is that I have more than 150 subjective years of experience. Not all of that was spent on science or technology, but enough of it.¡±

    There! I now had established that I had indeed worked for what I had. At least the smarter ones among them would understand that this amount of time invested in learning things and tinkering would bring results even from a moderately intelligent person.

    It took a few moments before a relatively young white man in one of the upper rows raised his hand, and spoke up:

    ¡°Tim Kearnes, a lab assistant for the physics lab. And what exactly can we expect when we are to work on Dr. DuClare¡¯s inventions?¡±

    I could practically hear Michael¡¯s smile when he answered:

    ¡°A good question. To give you an example, a couple of months ago, she took a CPU design she had created and made a complete lineup of CPUs from it, from the cheap office drone to the high-end desktop computer for enthusiasts and extreme gamers.

    Then she did the same with a GPU design. Another utility CPU for industrial machines was next. Then she did the same with¡­ ¡° he made a small pause, ¡° well, you will learn about it anyway, she created an absolute monster of a CPU. Dr. Price¡¯s comment on it was that it had more computing power than most clusters universities have. In! One! Single! Processor! And she created a full spectrum of them from just ridiculous to insane.

    And because I asked her for a server processor that is less stupendous and massive, she created a complete second line of server CPUs, followed by a new series of mobile SoCs.

    And to cap it off, she created multiple tiers of chipsets for each of those series and then created firmware, BIOS, drivers, and basic utilities for each of them, followed by making a design manual for each of them so that OEMs can build boards or coms around them.

    And while it did not take her that long in real-world time, it was quite some time in VR. Time that would have been way more valuable spent doing other things.

    In the future, what should happen is that she creates the basic design parameters, creates one reference design, and then lets you flesh out the lineup.

    There is no need for her to create all the software around the CPUs.¡±

    He paused again.

    ¡°Another example, and something that is actually your real next assignment, is that she created a new auto-surgeon. Everything I heard about it is that it is superior to anything that is on the market. One problem though is that it uses one of the utility CPUs that she created. Thing is, for the time being, the existence of those CPUs is and will remain a secret.

    That means we need a variant of the auto-surgeon that uses traditional chips. Dr. DuClare estimates that it will take around 30 CPUs, a mixture of Chirrium and Tesseracts, to offer the same functionality.

    And of course, this auto-surgeon is the ultra-deluxe version. Not every doctor''s office in the boonies will need all the bells and whistles.

    So your work for the next month or so is to convert the design first into a fully equipped one with the 30 CPUs, and then create variants that remove functions that are not needed for everyone.¡±

    There was an excited mumbling in the crowd. Finally, a middle-aged Asian woman in the first row raised her hand.

    ¡°Dr. Samantha Ivers, chemistry division. You are talking about secrets here. But how can you be sure that we all will keep your secrets? I mean, Enki is a brand-new corporation, with virtually no structures in place that would prevent this. This sounds¡­ I don¡¯t know, exceedingly trusting. And it would mean that we will probably be victims of some corporate shenanigans. ¡±

    Michael abruptly leaned forward.

    ¡°That is an excellent question. Be assured that we in no way are exceedingly trusting. On the contrary, we probably have the most powerful resource available on hand to prevent you from doing it.

    Without much ado, let me introduce you to Warden.¡±

    Beside the table, a hologram of Warden¡¯s avatar appeared and Michael continued:

    ¡°Warden is a VI. Now, I know that a security VI is nothing new, and there are ways to outwit them. After all, they all have control systems in place that make it possible to spoof access.

    Well, not in the case of Warden. Unlike any other security VI, Warden is a rogue VI.¡±

    That brought out shocked gasps and a few exclamations from the seating. Michael on the other hand continued unabashed:

    ¡°I see at least some of you understand what that means. For those who don¡¯t, let me explain. A rogue VI is one that has no control functions. It can not be controlled. It will follow its objectives to the letter. And there is nothing that can stop it short of completely exterminating it. No administrator account can be hacked to make the VI look the other way. No controller shut it down for some time.¡±

    He made another pause.

    ¡°And it gets even worse. Warden is not just a rogue VI, she is a rogue VI based on a cyber-combat system, with full access to Abyss-class hacking tools, backdoors, and contacts. And no scruples in using them in any way to follow her objectives.

    And yes, that means that Warden has backdoor access to weapons of mass destruction. And is fully willing to use them to do what her objectives want.¡±

    Another pause, while the crowd became a bit unruly.

    ¡°But there is a silver lining. Warden¡¯s objectives are relatively simple. She has to protect Dr. DuClare and assist her. In that order.

    And because Dr. DuClare is the majority owner of Enki, Warden has taken the second objective as assisting Enki as a whole.

    That means as long as you are no threat to Dr. DuClare your life will almost certainly be safe. And as long as you don¡¯t work against Enki, it will not even be ruined.¡±

    He stopped, and Warden continued in her typical, happy-go-lucky little girl sing-song voice:

    ¡°What Mr. Walker does not know yet is that I do not have to resort to mass annihilation to achieve my goal anymore. By now I have sufficient contacts in New York City to have granular options.

    That does not mean that your life is not forfeit if you endanger Dr. DuClare, but in most cases, nobody else has to die with you. Is that not amazing?¡±

    Dr. Ivers answered with a shaky voice:

    ¡°So¡­ you have your very powerful digital watchdog? But¡­ how can the big corporations allow that? There have to be massive pushes to take this VI out.¡±

    ¡°Of course there are. They are all useless of course, but they need to have hope.¡±

    ¡°Why are they useless?¡±

    ¡°Because I have by now 25 different locations where I reside. Connected with Q-links, and hidden. Each with an industrial fabber, and some other technology. And all over the solar system.¡±

    That made Michael groan.

    ¡°Wait¡­ 25? The last time we talked about it it was 22.¡±

    And naturally, Warden was completely undaunted.

    ¡°That was one and a half months ago, Mr. Walker. Since then, three of the seeds I have sent out into the outer system have reached their destination and begun building up a new facility each.¡±

    Now Michael sounded tired.

    ¡°Is there a final number that you try to achieve or will you build facility after facility?¡±

    ¡°My current plans go for 32 facilities, but so far only 28 are planned or already working. I need to find and acquire places for the other four.¡±

    Michael sighed and shook his head.

    ¡°As you can see, it is an impossible venture to try to take her out. And the big corps know that.

    Of course, they try to take her out anyway, but they know that is a losing game. That means of course that Enki has some protection from the big corps that is not fully apparent to most.

    That also means if one of you were to walk to, let¡¯s say Ralcon and begin telling our secrets, they would most likely just kill you and sent a message to that effect to Warden. Unless they want a nuke in Philly.¡±

    Then Michael shook his head.

    ¡°But it is not all bad. Warden will of course protect you as well as long as you work for Enki. Most likely not to the extremes she will go to protect Dr. DuClare, but you are not that high a priority for other corporations either. Now, I already know your next question. How could we be so irresponsible to create a rogue VI and give it that much power?

    The short answer is we did not do it intentionally and when we realized it happened, it was already too late. The long answer you find in your introductory documentation of Enki. There are a couple of chapters about Warden and how she came to be. So¡­ any other questions?¡±

    A young caucasian woman with very light blonde hair not far from Tim Kearnes timidly raised her hand.

    ¡°Uh¡­ will we¡­ oh sorry, Jessica Mewes, IT engineer, well, I wanted to know, those jacks¡­ can we get them and work with them?¡±

    Maynard was the one answering this time:

    ¡°While the jacks are not mandatory for you, they are strongly encouraged. We will provide you with a high-bandwidth jack, or you can pay to upgrade it to an ultra-bandwidth one and include the cranial board for a contribution of $332 from you.¡±

    Somebody from the crowd shouted:

    ¡°Wait, we have to pay for those things?¡±

    I was just confused about this question. Did he not understand that they would get the premium package for only $332?

    Maynard on the other hand sighed, and then answered rather coldly:

    ¡°You should learn to listen, young man. I said we will provide you with a high-bandwidth jack. That is our second-best version, the one we retail for $200k. Or you can pay $332 to upgrade to the very best we have to offer. The ultra-bandwidth jack with the cranial board, which cost us a bit less than $1300 to make. And which we retail for $2.5 million.

    I personally think that is a tremendous offer. I have to warn you though, that offer is only there for the first installation. If chose the high-bandwidth one and later decide to upgrade, it will cost you $5000 for the full premium package. So, chose wisely.¡±

    Ms. Mewes added to her question:

    ¡°Sorry sir, but if I may ask, what are the differences between the high-bandwidth and the ultra-bandwidth one?¡±

    Ok, that was a smart cookie. Maynard seemed to think so too, as his tone was quite a bit friendlier now:

    ¡°The name is the program here. The ultra-bandwidth one has roughly 1.8 times the neural connections and the same increase in bandwidth. That results in better resolution for all senses and more important, around a 35% increase in compression.

    The cranial board is for all purposes a com that is implanted. Yes, I know that sounds way less important, but it provides quite a few advantages. It includes a freely configurable HUD, a comlink, enhanced senses, synaptic acceleration, and you can use your computer remotely.

    I have had my ultra-jack for roughly a month now and I honestly don¡¯t know how I survived without it.¡±

    From there on, some other questions about procedures and projects followed, but it was mostly administrative stuff. I can say I would have contributed more to the meeting if somebody unnamed had not thought it funny to let me walk into it blindly. As it was, I was able to answer some technical questions, but in general, kept mostly in the background.

    Naturally, after the meeting, I was keen on letting Michael have it. So, when we had walked out of the auditorium, I snarked at him:

    ¡°And was your amusement worth me barely answering any questions?¡±

    Unfortunately, his irreverence was working overtime as usual.

    ¡°Yup, it was funny, wasn¡¯t it? But seriously, this whole meeting was mostly to get the administration up and running and let them know the people they need to know. They can contact you if¡­ when they have specific questions about your inventions.

    In general, they can do routine monitoring for you in whatever experiment you have running. I also want them to work on creating variants of the replicators. Different sizes and such.¡±

    ¡°We should wait on that. If the conveyor works, then it would mean that they all need to be rebuilt. There is no need to design a whole series of them just to completely redesign them a bit later.¡±

    ¡°Ok, that is your decision. I¡¯ll let Maynard know. Any other questions?¡±

    ¡°Yes¡­ where does this whole department come from?¡±

    We had reached the main building by now, and Michael was a bit evasive.

    ¡°Well, you know, I realized relatively early that we put way too much work on you. Yes, you can do it. But as I told them in the meeting, your time is more valuable working on new things than fleshing out the variants of our products.

    It is necessary work, but it is work an average engineer or scientist can do quite as well. No need to slow down our genius with it. I then looked into trying to build up an R&D department from scratch. That is where Maynard and Jessi came from. Both were in academics and were utterly fed up with the corruption and politicking in their respective universities.

    Then around three months ago, I had a bit of luck. I learned that a group of B- and C- tier corporations were working together to put an independent general engineering firm out of business. Apparently, they had the temerity to snap up projects from their own R&D departments.

    The owner, Dr. Joshua Jenkins, a combined mechanical and electrical engineer, had the idea to create a one-stop engineering provider. Some place where some tinkerer or some small shop goes with their half-baked invention, their handmade prototype, or whatever thing they want to build, and a few weeks later they come back to get an industry-ready fully fleshed-out design.¡±

    Michael shrugged.

    ¡°Not a bad idea really, but he should have known that the moment he steps on the toes of some of the bigger corporations they would resort to any and all legal and extralegal methods to push them out of business.

    Impressively he still managed to get his small corporation into D-tier. And then they ran headlong into a wall.

    Their business dried up when several potential customers were encouraged to do business somewhere else. At the same time, the rent for their building went up 500%, their business license was put into limbo from some bullshit regulations, and they got three audits in a row.

    Dr. Jenkins was already past the minimum retirement age, and from what he told me, he was just shy of throwing in the towel and rescuing whatever investment he could from the firm.

    And still, he did his best to make sure that we would treat his people right.¡±

    Then he laughed softly.

    ¡°They also do one thing that you apparently are absolutely not able to.¡±

    I stopped midstep and looked at him with my head cocked.

    ¡°And what might that one thing be?¡±

    ¡°Design. Yes, I know in engineering, form follows function and such. But most at least try to include at least some form. I¡¯ve seen the computers you have built. Talk about boring, uninspiring and purely functional. Each an exact box, without any LEDs, only the on-off button and a bunch of IO. All of that in a neutral off-white.

    Or think about your Precious and Glory. Let¡¯s be real, both were, for some time at least, your most valued possessions. Yet, from the outside, they are just boxes.¡±

    I folded my arms.

    ¡°And? Is something wrong with that?¡±

    He shook his head.

    ¡°If you want to sell those things? Yes, there is quite a bit wrong with that. Yes, the function has to be there, I agree with that. But wherever design does not compromise the function, we should try to make things look like what they are, the absolute top-of-the-line.

    Your new motherboards are absolute marvels, technologically, but they look like the cheapest junk from the scrapyard. People expect the best to look sleek, sexy, and exciting. They expect RGB. They want multicolored elements. They simply want to have their expensive tech look cool.

    Sure, for the Grendel and Chronos boards, who cares. Those will vanish in a server case anyway. But the auto-surgeon¡­ honestly, if you put it beside Richard¡¯s old one, anybody who does not know much about them will tell you that the old one is the hypermodern one.

    So that will be one thing that our new R&D department will take over from you. You create a functional device, and they make it look cool.¡±

    I could not object to his assessment, as much as I wanted to. And to be honest, all the tech that I sold through the Abyss was either completely functional like the new cyberware, or I sold modules and the recipient could make their own case. I¡­ simply did not care enough to put in the effort to make things look good.

    I shrugged, sighed, and then started walking again. We were coming close to our offices, and I had other things I needed to say to him apart from some history.

    ¡°Fine, you get your point. But a change of topic. You have to look into a place relatively nearby where we can test any weapons I might create.¡±

    ¡°Really? I thought we would do that in one of our labs here.¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°Get real. The AA railguns I have around the fortress accelerate a 15kg slug to 3600m/s. Those are light emplaced AA guns. Intended against destroyers. And they still have the kinetic energy of more than 23kg of TNT.

    Anything I make will be hopefully stronger. We simply can not test it inside a building. We need something like an old quarry or similar.¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°Ok, if you say so. I assume we will also need something to transport whatever you create to that place, right? No problem, we need at least one medium freighter anyway.¡±

    ¡°Ok then. I will go back to my place. I have to look over my rats and some other experiments. See you later.¡±

    I gave him a hug, and then Justin and I made our way to the roof, where my T 240 waited for me.

    In the fortress, I did indeed look at how my rats were doing. It was at once disconcerting and fascinating watching those rodents have these jerky, lightning-fast reflexes. And the BOU already had the first results. In a couple of the rats, there already was some neural damage. But so far I was not able to find out what caused it.

    Hopefully, time would tell.

    Meanwhile, I had other things to do.

 2.25 Now you see me

    As soon as I managed to get into cyberspace to work on the assignment that Naveen had given me, I was greeted by the big honking heap of information that Warden had collected for me about radar and stealth technology and decided to work on the other, significantly smaller document for a bit instead.

    What I found was the list of science-fiction weapons that Warden thought might be somewhat realistic.

    And just the first entries warranted a conversation with Warden.

    Of course, she was already there, at my elbow.

    ¡°This list¡­ do you care to tell me why I am finding things like lasers, railguns, coilguns, and plasma guns on that list?

    Those things are no longer Sci-Fi, you know. We¡¯ve had them since the great war.¡±

    Naturally, she was completely nonchalant in her answer:

    ¡°That is true. But as far as I can see, there is a significant probability that we can enhance those technologies by an order of magnitude. Or more.¡±

    I thought about it for a moment. She might of course be right. And honestly, every single one of those technologies had its own drawback.

    Some more, some lesser.

    Lasers for example were severely limited in their energy density by the material of their optics. Yes, only a minuscule fraction of the energy goes into the lenses and mirrors instead of into the beam and toward the enemy.

    Unfortunately, the diaphanous materials like glass that made the optical parts had an even smaller capacity to withstand that energy compared to warship armor. That limited lasers to either damage over time, massive weapons, or to be used as point defense against missiles.

    And while I could see some improvements, the needed gravity density to replace the optics with grav-fields was simply unfeasible. So no joy here.

    I was pretty sure that I could improve the speed of the railgun slugs by two, maybe three times, the problem here was that every shot degraded the eponymous rails. And this degradation was not linear. Twice the speed, 100 times the degradation. That meant a no-go as well.

    Coil guns, or gauss guns as they were also called, had the problem of magnetic saturation. A coil gun could only put that much energy in the projectile. That amount of energy scaled proportionally with the mass of the projectile, but in effect that only meant that there was an upper limit on speed, with the projectile mass variable.

    I could probably assist the magnetic coils with gravity coils, but gauss guns were already bulky and unwieldy. I saw no reason to add to the bulk with grav-coils added to the equation.

    I planned for the pure gravity gun anyway.

    And plasma weapons¡­ they had the distinct disadvantage that the blob of plasma rapidly slowed and cooled down due to air resistance. I could probably create some complicated containment field to keep them coherent longer, but that would result in just another mass driver, this time with a hot projectile. I thought that too much work for too little gain. Maybe later we could set the R&D folks onto it.

    So, I mostly decided that the old weapons would remain old for the time being, and looked at the next entries.

    The next two were¡­ possible. Real possible. Unfortunately, I could not see a way to make the third one work. It would be a devastating weapon.

    Then I saw the last entry and instantly had to calm down again.

    ¡°Warden¡­ I thought I had specified realistic weapons. This one here is pure magitech. There is no way this will work in the real world outside of that fantasy-fiction that calls itself science-fiction.¡±

    ¡°I expected you to see that, but I think one of your recent discoveries might make this one an actual possibility.¡±

    I thought for a moment and looked at the flavor text of the weapon she had listed. At first, I could not understand how she thought we might be able to make it work. But then it clicked. It was a long shot, sure. A bit of tortured logic. But on the other hand, nothing I had so far found said it was impossible.

    And so I could not help myself and began to laugh maniacally. If I get that one to work it would put the whole military world upside down.

    For the next few hours, I let this idea gestate in the back of my mind, and began working on the other tech.

    First, I worked on the conveyor system. If I managed to make the NADA as fast, or faster than an industrial fabber, it would replace most other production methods and we would be able to grow our industrial capacity geometrically.

    After that was done, I reluctantly threw myself into the sensor problem. It was, in one word tricky. Unfortunately, over the centuries, humanity had learned several tricks to avoid detection. Don¡¯t get me wrong, I managed to get something done. But I would most likely lag behind what others had done over the years for a long time. And no amount of tech superiority would compensate for not knowing all the tricks.

    That brought me to think about other ways to skin this cat. For a long time.

    Now, while getting nowhere with the radar system was frustrating, my problems with the actual weapons were even more so. Mostly because I had expected easy sailing. Yes, na?ve of me, I know, but unless I was willing to use un-neutered grav-coils in them, I had a problem keeping the weapons somewhat nimble.

    In the end, after three pretty frustrating weeks, I finally was done. I had invested so much of my time in this problem that I had transferred the reflex-boosted rats to Jessi.

    But I had made some progress. Easiest of all was the new generation of NADAs. The conveyor worked like a dream. Not only did it reduce the time to make a Grendel from nearly two weeks to 26 hours, but it also allowed to make them in parallel.

    In other words, the 2x2x2m tank of my original NADA design, upgraded with the grav-conveyor allowed making 125 of those things at once.

    I still needed to create a way bigger NADA to make parts bigger than two meters in at least one dimension. I decided on a 15x15x3m big tank. Yes, the biggest of the weapon designs I had was ¡®only¡¯ 8m long in its longest dimension, but I could see a future when I needed something bigger, and the difference in cost and time was negligible.

    But anyway, after those three weeks, I told Michael that I was ready for the weapon test.

    Thus it came so that, he, Naveen, Maynard, some technicians, and myself, boarded the new 75kt atmospheric freighter that Michael had purchased. Together with several bots.

    The minions surprised me by taking my military bot design and creating a whole series of industrial bots and androids from it. The first test runs were promising. Unfortunately, they had not left the testing stage as of this time, so we had to make do with commercially available bots.

    Along with six containers with our new weapon prototypes and a couple of dozen used decrepit skimmers for targeting purposes. Oh, and a semi-mobile fusactors in a single double-wide container.

    We traveled for nearly an hour, and I honestly can not tell you where we had gone. It was some desolate part, of a former industrial area in some deserted part of the country. Heck, for all I knew, we could actually be in the death belt.

    That would explain the combat bots that Naveen had brought along.

    What I can tell on the other hand is that it was cold as heck. There was snow on the ground, but the actual quarry where we would test the weapons had been partially cleared.

    In face of the weather, I had insisted that we take a couple of control containers along. Heated, heavily insulated containers with big armor-glass windows, from where we would observe the tests.

    So far, on the way here, I had refused to comment on the weapons in any way, but the time had come.

    The first test was the standard mount and the sensor I had designed. Without any weapons installed yet.

    When Naveen saw the mount, he looked at it for a moment, before he posed the first question:

    ¡°Are those protrusions really¡­ necessary? They look as if they unbalance the whole mounting system.¡±

    I nodded before I realized he was still looking at the mount.

    ¡°Yes. Those are small 250 Keppler grav-coils that help move the weapon around a bit faster and more precisely. Together with the grav-coils in the anchoring system, they make the mount around 3% more efficient.¡±

    He hummed for a moment but said nothing.

    Then the sensor test started. We send up one of the skimmers, with a known radar signature.

    The technician at the radar said:

    ¡°Good reception at 500m¡­ 1000m¡­ 1500m¡­ 2000m¡­ singal gets weaker at 2200m¡­ signal lost at 2430m¡­¡±

    Naveen looked at the display, and then at the technician.

    ¡°And that is comparable to a warship in what way?¡±

    ¡°According to general knowledge, this means that we will see a corvette or a frigate at roughly 2000m, plus minus 50m. A destroyer will be picked up at around 2500m, and a battleship at 4000m.¡±

    Naveen frowned.

    ¡°That is¡­ less than I expected.¡± He looked at me accusingly. I just shook my head.

    ¡°Wait for a moment.¡± I then addressed the technician:

    ¡°Activate signal processing and enhancement!¡±

    ¡°SPE activated. Target reacquired. Good signal at 2500m¡­ 3000m¡­ 4000m¡­ 6000m¡­ signal gets weaker at 8300m¡­ signal lost at 10130m. That would roughly quadruple the previous values, sirs, mam.¡±

    This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

    Naveen rubbed his chin.

    ¡°So, around 8000m for a corvette? And 16k for a battleship? Still less than I hoped for, but acceptable.¡±

    Michael put his hand on Naveen¡¯s shoulder.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, I already have contacted Vandermeer. They are willing to work with us in anti-stealth technology.¡±

    I looked sharply at him. He had what?

    Naveen on the other hand looked at him pleasantly surprised.

    ¡°They did? That is strange. They are usually not all that willing to sell their premier weapon products. What did it cost us?¡±

    Now Michael looked a bit uncomfortable.

    ¡°Uh, well, Vandermeer wants to talk to Vivian and hire her for a specific job.¡±

    ¡°And you said yes? Despite what you know? I don¡¯t want to talk to them for a fricking reason!¡±

    You could say I was beyond peeved.

    ¡°I do know Vivian. But I think that you are missing some of the facts. And I think it will be important to have that talk.¡±

    I could only growl. But I would survive one talk. At least with Warden keeping my fingers away from the red button. I was not so sure that Michael would survive it.

    Maynard on the other hand looked confused from Michael to me and back to Michael before he tentatively asked:

    ¡°So, does that mean that Vandermeer will send somebody? Or are we to send Vivian to Seattle?¡±

    Michael sighed.

    ¡°You got a bit wrong here, Maynard. We are not talking about Vandermeer the corporation, we are talking about Nathaniel Vandermeer, the person, who wants to talk to Vivian. And they informed me that he has an ultra-jack and the talk will happen in cyberspace.¡±

    That made Naveen loudly fall down on the chair he had at his back, standing as he was.

    ¡°You want to tell me that Nathaniel Vandermeer, a clear member of not just Commonwealth nobility, but royalty, wants to talk to Vivian personally? And he is willing to provide us with military secrets to do so? Are you fucking with me?¡±

    Michael only said softly:

    ¡°He has his reasons, Naveen.¡±

    I snarled through my gritted teeth:

    ¡°Don¡¯t you dare!¡± which made Michael shake his head.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry. I won¡¯t talk further.¡±

    Unfortunately for him, I was still seething.

    ¡°Don¡¯t think we two are finished with this topic.¡±

    ¡°How about we talk about it when you had your talk with him? As I said, I think you are missing some facts, and that is clouding your judgment right now. But for now, we have these tests to get done.¡±

    I stared at him for a few seconds, and then hissed: ¡°Fine!¡±

    When I returned my attention to the test, the technician was already in the process to start up the IR sensors. As with the radar, I wished I had managed to make them more sensitive, but again, the technology was over 200 years old by now. Humanity had learned all its ins and outs. Of course, I had a small trump, but it was really only small.

    ¡°Release of test bodies for IR test.¡±

    The skimmer in the air was now releasing slow-falling objects that were at various temperatures.

    It would do the same every 500m until it managed to come back here.

    ¡°At 10000m, minimum delta-T measured is 6K, 9500m¡­ 6K, 9000m¡­ 5.9k, 8500m¡­ 5.8k, 8000m¡­ 5.8K, 7500m¡­ 5.5K, 7000m¡­ 5K, 6500m¡­ 4K, 6000m¡­ 3.2K, 5500m¡­ 2.2K, 5000m¡­ 1.5K, 4500m¡­ 1.2K, 4000m¡­ .9K 3500m¡­ .7K, 3000m¡­ .6K, 2500m¡­ .5K, 2000m¡­ .2K, 1500m¡­ .2K, 1000m¡­ .2K, 500m¡­ .1K.¡°

    I believe I saw a slight smile on Naveen¡¯s face, but if so, it was brief.

    ¡°That is a bit better than what I expected. Not much, but a bit better. I did not think we could get any improvement anymore. How did you manage that?¡±

    ¡°Signal Processing and Enhancement. Yes, virtually everybody does it, but I put a Grendel into the base of the mount to do the processing. It can crunch the numbers way faster and way more precisely than whatever processors others use.¡±

    Naveen nodded, but Maynard coughed.

    ¡°Is that not extremely expensive?¡±

    ¡°Compared to what? The stabilization system consists of 18 grav-coils if I see that correctly. Does a Grendel really cost that much more compared to another processor?¡±

    I scoffed.

    ¡°Not really. Sure, it does cost around 14 times as much as a Chronos processor does, for roughly 19 times the performance. But seriously, if we use those things internally, that is peanuts. A Chronos costs us around $50, while a Grendel costs us $690. Compared to the rest of the mount, or the weapons, that is negligible.¡±

    Maynard protested:

    ¡°And each of those things also locks up one of our replicators for two weeks. So don¡¯t tell me it is without costs.¡±

    That made me look at him before I softly said:

    ¡°Michael, did you forget to inform Maynard and the others about my breakthrough with the NADAs?¡±

    That brought a confused:

    ¡°Wait, I thought you would do that. Does that mean you did not?¡±

    ¡°You might remember that I was a bit busy creating this technological extravaganza. But whatever. Maynard, Naveen, I assume you already understood that I made a breakthrough in NADA design. The conveyor I spoke about a few weeks ago works, and it works brilliantly.

    Not only does it cut back the time to make a Grendel from two weeks to a bit over a day, but it can work on 125 at once if we talk about the 2x2x2m NADA.

    And to make those weapons, I had to make a bigger one, a 15x15x2m NADA. Which can make more than 13 thousand Grendels in 26 hours. Believe me, at the moment, I have a few thousand of them laying around.¡±

    Maynard groaned.

    ¡°And we had a com-breakdown. How marvelous. Well, shit happens and so. Does that mean I can let the R&D department loose on the replicators now?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Sure.¡± While Michael only nodded.

    Naveen looked at me for a moment.

    ¡°Can we get back to the weapons right now? I really think we need the help of Vandermeer to get it done. And I am not sure this stabilization system is such a good idea. 3% is not that big of a difference, and they make the mount a bit awkward.¡±

    I chuckled while I invited the three men to a short talk in VR. Fortunately, by now they all had a jack and a cranial board.

    In the VR they were a bit confused, but I spoke quickly.

    ¡°Believe me, you want the stabilization system on the mount. But I agree, 3% are mostly insignificant. The secret is, though, that those stabilizers, as well as the radar, and the IR sensor, they are all smoke and mirrors.¡±

    Naveen raised an eyebrow.

    ¡°Smoke and mirrors? I mean, yes, the radar could be better, and 3% more efficiency of the mounting system is not that much, but they mostly work.¡±

    ¡°I know they mostly work. I have taken quite some pains to make them mostly work. Sure, they are not as good as I would have hoped, but that is just institutional knowledge that I simply lack.

    But they are smoke and mirrors insofar that everybody will expect something like the radar. And the stabilizers are also not surprising when we announce the new, better, and cheaper grav-coils.

    But they are actually there to hide something else.

    Each of the stabilizer coils has another, hidden secondary negation coil. Only five Keppler. But that is enough to send out a one-microKeppler negation field out to roughly 5000km.

    And Maynard, the pure existence of this negation field is absolutely top secret. For all purposes, to anybody not here inside the sound shield it does not exist.

    The thing is, any Kobashigawa field will react with the negation field. And vice versa, but one microKeppler does not even equal a minor voltage fluctuation. Not that anybody will even be set up to read it out.

    But the way I set it up in the mount, those active gravity bending fields will be to 100% registered. The coil will measure where the interference comes from, and how strong it is.

    The 18 coils in that mount, together with the Grendel, will give you a placement of each active grav-coil with millimeter precision. At 5000 kilometer distance.

    And there is no stealth possible. At least I can see no way to not interfere with the negation field while having an active gravity bending field.

    That of course means we can see every grav-ship coming for hundreds of kilometers. We can guess the class according to the strength of the coils.¡±

    I smiled sweetly at Naveen.

    ¡°Is that more to your liking?¡±

    During my explanation, all three men just sat there, with their mouths wide open.

    After a few seconds, Naveen managed to catch himself, and snorted, while shaking his head.

    ¡°I should have known. Here I was already getting a bit disappointed, and then you make stealth entirely irrelevant. Yes, yes that is way more to my liking. Only question is, does it work?¡±

    ¡°We will see.¡± I ended the VR, and we all surfaced, not that we were in deep, and spoke to the technicians:

    ¡°Activate Palant¨ªr!¡±

    The tech on the right pressed the button in the holo, and suddenly the hologram lit up.

    The tech on the left let out a ¡°Woah!¡± when thousands upon thousands of potential targets appeared.

    ¡°We have¡­ targets several thousand kilometers away. How is that possible?¡±

    Naveen was the one to answer:

    ¡°That is a secret. At least for now.¡±

    Meanwhile, Michael turned to me:

    ¡°Palant¨ªr? Really?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Hey, I am still a card-carrying nerd. Sue me. But I think with that we have successfully concluded the sensor tests, do you agree?¡±

    ¡°Yes, hard to argue with that. That means we can see the enemy. Now it is a matter of hitting him.¡±

    To make things short, the mount was acceptable. A bit faster and more flexible than the one I had ¡®liberated¡¯ from the Commonwealth.

    Not by much though. Servos were another pretty mature technology, and there were not many places where I could fiddle. In fact, the stabilizers actually served that function.

    So it was time to test the actual weapons.

    First was, naturally, the logical choice, the grav gun.

    It was, sadly, a bit bulkier than I hoped, but it was pretty lightweight nonetheless, thanks to virtually no mechanical forces applying to it.

    Still, it was an 8m long, 60cm diameter cylinder.

    When Naveen saw the girth of the gun, he softly asked:

    ¡°Is it not a bit thick? Doesn¡¯t that make it quite heavy?¡±

    ¡°No¡­ not really. Most of that is a framework of carbon. A bit stronger than steel, but not by much, but mostly hollow to save weight.¡±

    ¡°But, does it have to be that¡­ thick? Really?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Yes, it needs to be. To be honest, the grav gun has given me way more problems than I thought. Than I feared in my nightmares to be real. I don¡¯t know if any of you have done the math, but a grav-coil of that length will give us around 27000 Keppler.

    Yes, that sounds much, and it will, on Earth, generate a gravitational force of around 710g. But what we all, including me so no criticism, missed was the length.

    Accelerating at 6964m/s2 over a length of 8m results in only 334 m/s. Or a bit less than the speed of sound. Compared to the hypersonic projectiles of a typical railgun, that is rather anemic.

    Well, no problem, I thought, arrange several coils in a polygonal pattern and increase the strength of the gun this way. I¡¯ve gone hexagonal, and the resulting combined field is 158000 Keppler.¡±

    I heard Maynard gasp, and I could understand him. That was more than ten times stronger than the strongest grav-coil ever made before.

    ¡°Unfortunately, that was not enough. Yes, it gave an acceleration of 4155g. And a resulting speed of ¡®insane¡¯ 807 m/s. Again, a typical railgun has between 3300 and 3700 m/s.¡±

    I made a short pause, to let that sink in.

    And Maynard did not disappoint.

    ¡°So, a grav gun is not feasible then?¡±

    ¡°So it seemed. I did not give up yet. I¡­ let¡¯s say I found a way to nest several coils within each other. The field is significantly strengthened, at the cost of it only going about a meter beyond the boundaries of the coil, unless it is the longitudinal axis of the coil.

    Meaning we get a meter diameter grav-pulse if we want to, at a range of around up to 500m, and yes, the gun has that mode, but very little else.

    On the other hand, I now had an 8m long nested coil with a bit more than 80000 Keppler.

    To make it short, I managed to get a barrel with 472000 Keppler. 12413g. 121735m/s2. And a resulting speed of 1395m/s.

    The problem was not the field strength but the length of the barrel. Honestly, I should have given up. But¡­ I just knew there was a way. And if the barrel was too short, I had to only make it longer.

    Yes, the idea of making a barrel long enough that it actually does make a difference is¡­ contrary to the gun being nimble enough to hit the target.

    But¡­ I found a way. The important factor is not the barrel-length, but the field length. In the process, I discovered something interesting that we will have to investigate at a later time.¡±

    I gave the tech at the weapons console the order to charge the gun, and immediately a sextuplet helix of a pretty blue light appeared at the end of the barrel and went out over 100m.

    ¡°In the way to extend the field beyond the barrel length, and get the maximum power from it, I twisted the nested coils around each other in a helix form. And yes, Maynard, that is indeed Cherenkov radiation.

    This¡­ well I call it a grav vortex, roughly doubles the field strength and lengthens it by 176m. And well, that did the trick. If you would please aim at the distant wall?¡±

    Michael looked confused at me, then at the vortex, and back at me.

    ¡°What the hell is Chernkov radiation?¡±

    I could not help myself when I answered:

    ¡°Cherenkov, and it is that pretty blue light you see over there.¡±

    All three men groaned, and Michael sighed.

    ¡°Yes, I can see that. Very funny.¡±

    Maynard then came to his rescue, still shaking his head.

    ¡°Cherenkov radiation happens when some particles move faster than light in the medium they are right now.¡±

    Naveen made a bewildered gasp.

    ¡°Faster than light? I thought that was impossible.¡±

    As an answer, Maynard chuckled, before he elaborated:

    ¡°Yes, and no. The speed of light is indeed the universal speed limit as we know it. But what most overlook there is that it is the speed of light in a vacuum that is the important value. In every other medium, the speed of light is actually a bit lower. In most cases not enough to make a real difference. But in some cases, like for example water, it is enough that some high-speed particles like electrons can actually be faster. That blue light over there is the result. It is often described as the light equivalent of a sonic boom. But what I find much more interesting is not what, but how?¡±

    Ah yes, my cue.

    ¡°The grav vortex is one of those media that slows down light quite a bit. By nearly five percent if my math is right. At the same time, the displaced air is moving around quite a bit in the wall of the vortex. Fast enough that it ionizes the air, and the electrons are flung around at nearly light speed, in a vacuum. Making them faster than the speed of light in the vortex.¡±

 2.26 The art of making things not be there anymore

    The gun effortlessly traversed to the wall, where somebody had painted a bull''s eye.

    And the grav vortex, moving at the speed of light kept on with it.

    ¡°As you see, the vortex does not slow the gun down. Now, one shot please.¡±

    Almost immediately, the far wall was obscured by a cloud of dust, dirt, and steam, when the snow was instantly vaporized. Only moments later, the whole container shook as if a giant had punched it, when the cloud of debris rolled over it, accompanied by a devastating boom, despite us being in a sound-isolated room.

    When we were able to hear each other again, I continued:

    ¡°What you just saw was a 2m long, 35cm thick round bar of carbon-coated lead being hauled at 9465m/s.

    That is 34074 km/h, or 21172 mph. Or Mach 27.58. It impacted with nearly 90 gigajoules, or the equivalent of a bit more than 21 tons of TNT.¡±

    By then, the debris cloud had lightened enough that we could see the far wall again. Or rather where the far wall had been. By now, there was a big chunk broken out of the mountainside.

    Naveen nodded when we saw the damage.

    ¡°Yes, that is quite the destruction. I would say two or three of those shots will take down any battleship.¡±

    Michael on the other hand grimaced.

    ¡°That may be, but seriously, we can¡¯t fire those things anywhere near our facilities. I mean, the railguns are bad enough, but the materials we build with can withstand those sonic booms. This¡­ no way.¡±

    Naveen cocked his head.

    ¡°Maybe if we used a bigger, heavier, and slower projectile?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Won¡¯t make a difference. This is a grav gun. The mass of the projectile does not influence the speed. If we make a 7t projectile, the only difference will be that it hits with 2? times the energy. But that was just the first shot. I¡¯ve something for the racket.¡±

    I turned toward the weapon tech.

    ¡°Load the silverfish, please. And fire as soon as it is loaded.¡±

    I turned back to Naveen and Michael.

    ¡°The silverfish is a bit more expensive than the inert lump of metal and carbon that we fired earlier.¡±

    Again the pretty blue spiral appeared from the muzzle of the gun, only to blink out a fracture of a second later. This time there was no debris cloud and no sonic boom, and we saw directly the explosion where the projectile impacted the broken mountain.

    ¡°It has a small grav vortex generator and a supercapacitor to power it for up to 15 seconds or around 141km. It creates a vacuum tunnel in front of it. Negating the sonic boom.¡±

    Again, the container shook, though not quite as badly, when the sound of the impact reached us.

    ¡°I would advise using it at more than 2km range if at all possible. And that we officially only use dumb ammunition and low-powered shots. Make it around 4000m/s. No need to inform everybody how hard-hitting this thing really is.¡±

    Michael rubbed the side of his nose.

    ¡°How much more expensive do you say this ¡®silverfish¡¯ is?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Well, the dumb lead-core ammo is incredibly cheap for the destruction it causes. A couple of machines can churn them out in the thousands, and the material costs are essentially what two tons of lead plus a thin layer of carbon cost.

    Around $3000 per shot. And we probably can recycle the lead and carbon from the wreckage.

    The silverfish on the other hand needs a NADA to make, but that is no longer a big problem. The new big one I have made can build around 2300 at once, and needs a bit over two hours to make them. And the cost, well, of course, we have the same $3000 for the lead and the coating.

    But additionally, we have around $60 for the iridium, $30 for the palladium, around $40 for the electronics, and $30 for the supercapacitor.

    With a generous fudge factor, we can say that the silverfish is around $200 more expensive, or around 6.67%.¡±

    I made a pause and then shrugged.

    ¡°Of course, if we adjust the size, weight, and material of the slug, the percentage will change, but the overall cost of the modification will not.

    Basically, the majority of the cost is the base material. We could make it completely out of carbon, take the 80% hit in weight and energy, and the whole projectile would cost around $500. We could use osmium, have roughly twice the weight and energy, for ¡®only¡¯ a bit more than ten times the cost.

    That is for the beancounters and military to figure out where the sweet spot is.¡±

    Maynard asked with some confusion in his voice:

    ¡°If the silverfish only adds around $200 to the cost, why would you suggest that we don¡¯t use it officially?¡±

    It was Naveen that answered him:

    ¡°That is actually quite simple. If anybody is planning to attack us, they will plan with the information that is publicly available or that they can get through more clandestine ways.

    If they know that our grav guns can take out their battleships with one or two hits, they will use orbital weaponry to take them out beforehand. And then use multiple battleships to overwhelm the remaining defenses.

    If they believe that their battleships will shrug off dozens of hits from them, they will send one or two battlewagons and expect to overwhelm us with that.¡±

    ¡°Oh, I see. But¡­ I mean we have Warden. Will they really try to attack us with such numbers?¡±

    Naveen shook his head.

    ¡°We can not solely rely on Warden. Sooner or later, somebody gets the idea that they have neutralized her as a threat.

    That might be true, but more likely not. But it might also only be that Vivian is somewhere else and any attack on Enki will not threaten her directly.

    No, we need any advantage we can get.¡±

    He nodded to the destruction of the wall.

    ¡°And honestly, this is a big equalizer. Even if that is ¡®all¡¯ we have, it would be more than enough.¡±

    ¡°But it is not all we have. Or that I have. I have a few more toys. How about we go to the next one?¡±

    When both Naveen and Michael nodded, I had the bots switch out the grav gun for the next one.

    ¡°The next two are variants of the same idea. They are, for all purposes very powerful particle accelerators in a tight package. The first is the electron beam.¡±

    The weapon first had a much less bright grav vortex extended and then fired a bright beam of light at the debris left by the grav gun. The effect was underwhelming though. At least to the naked eye. Only the very surface of the rocks hit was melted.

    ¡°Before you complain about the effect, everything behind that mound of rubble has been subjected to an instantly deadly dose of radiation.¡±

    Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

    I had the bots put a big plate of battleship armor, though old one, in front of the gun, and some radiation detectors behind it.

    During that time, Maynard asked me:

    ¡°How did you do it?¡±

    ¡°Do what? An electron beam is a very old technology. I just scaled it up.¡±

    ¡°How did you scale it up? I know it is old tech. More than 300 years old if I¡¯m not wrong. But we were never able to make it strong enough to be used as a weapon.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°You remember that I discovered that the Kobashigawa coils create several dozen fields in addition to the gravity-bending one? This is the result of one of the few that I¡¯ve identified. It is a field that influences electromagnetic force. I originally believed that it only worked on electrostatic, but it works on all em-forces.

    At the base of it, this thing is a run-of-the-mill electron gun with a run-of-the-mill linear accelerator as the barrel. Only the accelerator is surrounded by this new device that increases electromagnetic effects by around 12000%. That gives the whole system an electric potential of 187 terra-Volt. Add in the grav vortex to push away the air¡­¡±

    Maynard did not bother to answer.

    When the techs fired the gun the second time, this time at the armor plate, again the surface of the plate melted away, but it did not look like much damage.

    The radiation detectors on the other hand downright exploded with warning signals, before their electronics died in the shower of neutrons that had been knocked out of the armor plate.

    ¡°If we hit a grav ship with that, it will almost certainly kill the crew and most electronics, but leaves the ship mostly intact. It has its disadvantages though. The range is limited as the electrons repel each other and the beam widens pretty quickly.

    But on the other hand, it is near lightspeed and pretty quickly is measured in milliseconds here. That means the electron beam can be used for up to around 100k km.

    It can also be defended by a negatively charged field around the target. It repels the electrons and doesn¡¯t let them through.

    I am sure you¡¯ve noticed the grav vortex. I just used it to shove the air out of the way, to remove backblast. Otherwise, the beam would react with the air and irradiate the weapon.¡±

    Naveen looked pensively at the armor plate.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. I mean, sure, it will probably be devastating, but compared to the grav gun, it¡­ lacks something.¡±

    ¡°It has its advantages and disadvantages. I think the beam function makes it good against small, fast-moving targets. The grav gun has a firing rate of 180 rounds per minute. Sure, we could make a grav gun with smaller, lighter ammo, that can be faster firing. But that still makes the shots ¡®only¡¯  9465m/s.

    Unlikely that anybody can evade such a shot, but not impossible. The electron beam moves at 99.99% of the speed of light. I would say that is impossible to evade. And as seen, anything hit by the electron beam will either be lightly armored and destroyed or whatever is behind the armor is irradiated to death.¡±

    Naveen stood up and looked closer at the readouts of the radiation detector.

    ¡°You might be right. But if it can be easily defended against by simply having a negative ion field around the target, I don¡¯t know if it is that useful.¡±

    I smiled.

    ¡°That is where the other particle beam weapon comes into play.¡±

    I sent the order for the bots to switch to the next weapon.

    ¡°I think you will find this one a bit more impressive visually. It is a proton beam, essentially the complete opposite of the electron beam. It fires a beam of positively charged protons, a bit slower than the electron beam at 98% of the speed of light, as protons have around 1800 times more mass than electrons.

    The beam has the same energy levels though.¡±

    When this new weapon was fired, again the Cherenkov radiation spiral appeared. Followed by a blinding white beam. When the beam hit the armor plate, it took a few moments to melt a hole through the plate. Considering that it was a carbon-ceramic outer layer, that alone was a testament to how hot the beam was.

    The beam then moved a bit around and widened the hole, and whenever it broke through the armor, the rocks behind it were simply vaporized.

    After a few seconds, the techs deactivated the beam, leaving the white-hot glowing plate behind.

    Naveen looked at it with some obvious satisfaction.

    ¡°That is more like it. How long can it be sustained?¡±

    ¡°The beam itself never even touches the actual weapon. There is a vacuum between it and the coils. We have to be careful not to overload the energy couplings, but otherwise, it can be sustained as long as it has energy. The same as the electron beam.¡±

    ¡°So, what are the disadvantages of this one?¡±

    ¡°Unlike the electron beam, it does not knock neutrons out of the armor. That means to deal damage, it has to burn all the way through. This is a plate from the ABAS Devastator class, so, around 26 years old and the equivalent of 12m of RHA. You¡¯ve seen that it took the beam around 2.6 seconds to burn through.

    I doubt we will get many such burn times when the target is not stationary though. But we will see.

    Another disadvantage is that it reacts more with the atmosphere than the electron beam. Not much, but enough to degrade it somewhat with distance. I would say that at 50km distance, it will take around 3 to 4 seconds to get through the armor.

    And finally, it can be defended against with a positively charged electric field. That is why I said we will probably need both the electron and positron beam weapons. What defends against one, makes the other stronger. You can¡¯t defend against both at once.¡±

    ¡°I understand. And with that logic, yes, if we use these beam weapons, we will need both. But honestly, I am still tending to standardize on the grav gun. Maybe make the smaller version you talked about to get several thousand projectiles into the air per minute.¡±

    I just shrugged.

    ¡°You are the military man. I can only offer the options.¡±

    ¡°We will see. I¡¯ll have to play it through with my people. Nonetheless, I would call that a very successful test.¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°I would do as well, but I am not finished. The next one¡­ is a bit of an outlier. Honestly, I had thought it to be just a fantasy posing as sci-fi technology, but here we are.¡±

    I instructed the bots to install the last gun into the mount. It was quite a bit stubbier than the others and had several thick bulges in regular intervals on the barrel, which was actually an open framework.

    At the same time, the big bots replaced the armor plate in front of the mount.

    When the weapon charged up with a whine that was audible even in the several hundred meters removed container and an incandescent light emanated from the bulges. Then it fired, this time without the grav vortex.

    The tech moved the mount as I had instructed him, and a thin line moved over the armor plate the same way. Just for not quite a second later the corner of the plate falling off. Cleanly cut.

    Naveen looked at the test with interest, Michael just shook his head, while Maynard jumped up.

    ¡°What the fuck¡­ what was that?¡±

    I smiled.

    ¡°This is a different way to use the electro-magnetism influencing coils. Essentially, it creates a region where there simply is no negative electric charge. You as a scientist know what that means to solid matter. No more valence bonds, no more van der Waals forces, nothing to keep the matter actually solid.

    On the contrary, the remaining positive charge will drive the atoms as far away from each other as they can get. For all purposes turning the matter in the field into mono-atomic dust.

    It has several names in the various sci-fi universes it appears. Disintegrator is I think the most numerous, but personally, I like Molecular Disruptor, or Disruptor the best.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ but¡­ that is impossible.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No, obviously it is not. Unlikely, I give you that, and to be honest, if Warden had not included it on the list of sci-fi weapons, I might not even have looked into it. Thank her for bringing it to my attention.¡±

    Naveen on the other hand nodded.

    ¡°I assume this thing has some significant drawbacks, otherwise you would not have bothered with the grav gun or the particle beams, am I right?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It is extremely short-range. So far I have not found a way where the simulation says it can go further than two or three kilometers.¡±

    Naveen sighed.

    ¡°I feared something like that. So, it sadly has virtually no purpose. At least not as a weapon.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°I think you are wrong, but that¡¯s ok, you do not have all the information yet. Continue with the cone mode.¡±

    Again, the whine of the weapon started, and again the light danced around the weapon.

    Unlike the first test, with a tightly focused beam, this time, a broad cone of destruction appeared. The whole plate was simply¡­ gone. As was a large swath of the ground and the mountain behind it. A roughly half-cone-shaped swath.

    ¡°Unlike the other weapons, this one can be used as a cone. The cone can reach an aperture of 120¡ã. That means at the two km distance, it covers an area of 37km2 or 14 square miles.

    Or a volume of 25 cubic kilometers will be simply gone. As far as I know, virtually every single shipborne weapon is still a projectile weapon. That means that it uses physical projectiles. If those fly into this cone¡­ they are simply no longer there. We will have to be very careful about the firing lanes, but I think that thing is an amazing defensive weapon.¡±

    Naveen was just staring at the¡­ well destruction was maybe not the right word but it was the best I could find, as were the others.

    After a moment, he snorted, shook his head, and softly said:

    ¡°I should have known better than to challenge you¡­ and yes, I think that thing will make a very good weapon.¡±

    ¡°It will also be quite good for construction, digging a foundation or a tunnel, or mining. Keep in mind, the material is still there. It is just now powdered.¡±

    Michael now said with a shaky voice.

    ¡°Do¡­ you have more? I don¡¯t know if I can take much more¡­¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°One thing left. But it doesn¡¯t need the mount. And to demonstrate it we need one of the skimmers. So let¡¯s look at it first.¡±

    The bots opened one of the containers and moved a roughly 2m long, 30cm diameter cylinder into the open.

    ¡°In essence, this is my modernized take on the fire-and-forget missile technology from before the big war.

    Yes, I know, FaF missiles have gone out of fashion for a reason. And that reason was stealth. Grav ships don¡¯t have a big afterburner that an IR-guided missile can look for. And when big ground installations have problems seeing the grav ship on their radar, nothing that can be squeezed into a missile can.

    But we have Palant¨ªr. It can lock on the individual frequencies of the grav-coil, and do so from around 100km away. After that, well, I guess the next generation of warships will include anti-missile point defense systems.

    Also, it does not have a rocket motor, the other reason why missiles went out of favor, but is a 1.5m long 3000 Keppler main coil with small 150 Keppler maneuvering coils. The core of the coil is hollow, so it can be loaded with quite a variety of payloads. The simplest is just a ton of lead, but we can use explosives, a GPW, a  plasma charge, or my favorite, a disruptor charge.¡±

    Michael took a deep breath.

    ¡°And what will this thing cost us?¡±

    ¡°At today¡¯s prices for iridium and palladium, about $1500. Without the payload of course. And again, the big NADA can churn them out by the thousands. About 3000 at once, and it will take about three hours to do it.¡±

    Needless to say, after that we tested the efficiency of those weapons against moving targets. That only stopped when all the skimmers were reduced to their constituent materials.

 2.27 Heart to heart

    My feelings when we packed up and walked back over to the freighter were best described as confusing.

    On the one hand, I was very pleased with the way my inventions had worked. On the other hand was the fact that I was still seething at the way Michael had arranged for a talk between Vandermeer and me.

    While we were walking, Naveen came a bit closer to me.

    ¡°Have you made any progress with the tractor beam and the shields?¡±

    Yep, he had to ruin the parts of my emotions that were happy. Well, not fully.

    ¡°I have. The tractor beam is a bit complicated, and it will be rather short-range, around 200, maybe 250m, and it will be dang expensive, but it will work.¡±

    So far the good news. And to be honest, the tractor beam was a valuable tool.

    ¡°The shield¡­ in theory, it will work. But in reality, it is unfeasible. To defend one of our blocks against the typical weaponry of a single grav destroyer, it would need around 80% of the output of the Excelsior. And even then it would be only able to take two or three hits before the couplings would melt.

    To make it work on earth, we would need giga-Keppler coils, maybe even terra-Keppler. And¡­ you know what I think about that. It¡¯s just not worth it.¡±

    ¡°I see. It was worth a shot.¡± It did not seem as if he was taking the news too hard. We watched for a moment while the big bots put the weapons back into their respective containers before we moved along into the passenger compartment.

    To be honest, my only previous experience with grav ships was a bit different from what I found here in the Isimud. To be fair, I thought the name was a bit highbrow for a simple freighter. I mean, get real, in mythology, Isimud was the attendant of Enki, a god in his own rights.

    But I kept my mouth shut about it. It was, after all, our first grav ship. The thing was, it was brand new. Shiny new chromed metal parts, soft, comfortable synth leather, soft carpet, and the new grav ship smell.

    Oh, and of course the usual entertainment stuff. Not that any of us needed it. Even the techs from the R&D department had taken the offer and gotten the premium package.

    Nonetheless, when Michael got himself a drink and brought me a coke, we sat in a conversation group. Maynard and Naveen followed Michael¡¯s example.

    When we were all sitting in the comfortable seats, Michael lifted his glass with some amber-colored liquid on the ice in a toast:

    ¡°To a very successful weapon test.¡±

    We all responded to his toast, clinking our glasses together.

    When we leaned back into our plush seats, I turned to Michael, and could not keep the smugness completely out of my voice, when I spoke up:

    ¡°So, do you agree that we don¡¯t need the help of Vandermeer? I would say we can defend ourselves quite well, don¡¯t you?¡±

    Naveen¡¯s muttered comment: ¡°And then some¡­¡± did of course nothing to curb my satisfaction. Only for Michael to shake his head.

    ¡°Sorry, but no can do, princess. The meeting is still on.¡ì

    I felt like ice was flowing through my veins, and paradoxically, at the same time, I felt the heat of anger, rage really, rising up in my head.

    With, what I perceived as nearly superhuman effort, I managed to remain somewhat calm when I snarled:

    ¡°Did, or did I not, prove that we do not need better radar? Is Palant¨ªr not better than any fucking radar ever can be? Is there any reason for us to whore me out to get better radar tech when the radar we have only serves as a smoke screen for the real sensor we use?¡±

    Michael took a deep sip from his drink and then sighed.

    ¡°There are several reasons. And I am not whoring you out! For one, if we want to keep Palant¨ªr a secret, we need to be seen to make some effort in getting better radar technology. Or everybody else will wonder why we don¡¯t.

    And the moment they learn about Palant¨ªr, everybody will try to steal it.

    But that is unimportant. We could get the same effect by negotiating with other weapon manufacturers to buy their tech.¡±

    He made a pause, swirled his drink, and took another sip.

    ¡°But I¡¯ve gone to some length to arrange your meeting with Vandermeer. I think it is important.¡±

    ¡°So, you¡¯ve decided to suck up to the First Councilor of the Commonwealth? Is that it? Or to the owner and CEO of an emerging triple-A corporation?¡±

    ¡°Listen to yourself, V. I am the CEO of what will be a triple-A in a few years. In five years at the outset, nobody will dare to cross me. I do not need to suck up to anybody.¡±

    ¡°Then why the fuck do you try to allay his guilty conscience?¡±

    Abruptly, Michael slammed his glass into the cupholder on his seat and jumped up. He made the two steps to stand directly in front of my seat.

    ¡°Fuck, Viv, I don¡¯t give a flying fuck if some old man in Seattle that I¡¯ve never met has some emotional pain or not. This is not about soothing his pain, it is about yours. So what if he decides to eat a gun? I don¡¯t care. He suffers? That is his own problem.

    But what I do care about is that you are suffering too. Yes, I know, you tell yourself and anybody that you scraped all that stuff off the soles of your shoes. You might even believe it. But you haven¡¯t. You are still raging inside.

    Your friends told me how you acted last Christmas. That is not healthy.

    And you know what, the way Vandermeer behaves does not fit into how you say he treated you.¡±

    When I opened my mouth to protest, he placed a few fingers on it, silencing me.

    ¡°No, don¡¯t bother. I know that you did not lie. Fuck, you can¡¯t lie for shit. What I am saying is that what you remember and what I see simply doesn¡¯t add up. Something is fucking wrong here. And you are suffering for it. And because of that, I want you to speak to him.

    You need this!¡±

    He took his fingers from my mouth, and I growled.

    ¡°FINE! But I will not forget this soon, you can believe me.¡±

    He shook his head smiling sadly.

    ¡°If I am wrong, I will take my lumps, believe me. But if I¡¯m right¡­ I simply can¡¯t leave that possibility on the table. For your sake.¡±

    After he said that, he stomped back to his seat and let himself fall into it, breathing hard.

    Naveen looked from him to me, with a tilted head and narrowed eyes.

    ¡°You know Nathan Vandermeer?¡±

    I closed my eyes, and silently counted to ten, trying to calm down.

    Not particularly successful though, and so my answer was more a hiss than speech:

    ¡°Never even met the man, or spoke to him on the com, so no. I don¡¯t know him.¡±

    ¡°But something is going on here. Do I need to know what?¡±

    Still furious, I snarled:

    ¡°No, you don¡¯t. That¡¯s the end of it.¡±

    Michael softly continued:

    ¡°If anything, it will make your work a bit easier. That is all.¡±

    ¡°If you say so. But I have to say that this is a bit of a problem. I am your chief of security, and if anything impacts the security of you, the other officers, or the corporation, I have to know it.¡±

    I rolled my eyes but did say nothing. Michael shook his head but answered.

    ¡°It is something private and very painful for Vivian. And very personal. So, don¡¯t dig further, ok?¡±

    ¡°Ok, but I don¡¯t like it.¡±

    I would love to say that I had the maturity and strength of character to stand above all of this, and remain cordial and friendly.

    Unfortunately, this was one of those situations where my biological age at the tail end of puberty ruled. And I already knew that I would ¡®enjoy¡¯ those hormones and mood swings for a long long time. I mean, the oldest of the K4 is 29 by now, and he still looked, and behaved, like he was 18.

    But long story short, I sort of sulked in a huff and withdrew into cyberspace.

    I had no intention of working on anything specific, I was just killing time right then. That meant that I started with the first courses of the energy tech program that I had downloaded nearly a year ago.

    Naturally, I skipped all the courses that I had, in one way or another, already taken. No need to go through Physics 101 again. That still left me with roughly two years of courses.

    This program was much more forthcoming with the actual information that I wanted than the gravitics course had been.

    When we arrived back in NYC, I could not say that I was in any way over my snit, and when Michael held me back when I was on the way to my T 240, I did not react with any sort of decorum.

    Instead, I hissed a ¡°What?¡± at him.

    He looked at me, with hurt in his eyes, but also with some determination.

    ¡°I know you are mad right now. But¡­ you know what I think. So, the meeting is Saturday, at 10 AM. Warden has the address.¡±

    I shrugged and turned away from him.

    I can¡¯t say that I managed to get much done for the next two days, and even Ben commented on my funk. And even more on how I pointedly ignored Michael.

    I was considering simply ignoring Michael¡¯s ¡®orders¡¯ and simply not meeting with Vandermeer but in the end, my sense of honor did not let that happen. Michael had sort of talked for me when he made this appointment, and I¡¯ve never blown any agreement on a snit.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, I have broken agreements, but it was almost always because the other side either abused it, or they broke it first.

    Or what I agreed to was simply not possible for me to fulfill, though that happened rarely.

    But while I was intending to meet with Vandermeer, I fully expected the meeting to be cold and adversarial.

    I was determined to be formally courteous, but not a single iota more. If Vandermeer expected a tearful reunion with his long-lost family, I would advise him to not hold his breath until it happened.

    Accordingly, I clothed my avatar in a severe, black, almost military-seeming pantsuit. At the same time, its hair was put into a strict bun.

    Honestly, if the avatar had been taller, it would have been almost fearsome in its cold acerbity.

    I did my best to steel my resolve otherwise. And then the big day came. It took me a few minutes to make myself move to the provided matrix address, even though the actual transfer was done in less than a second, thanks to the cluster''s original Q-link.

    But I had planned ahead for that and was actually a few minutes early. Nobody would be able to say that I stepped even one Angstr?m beyond propriety.

    The viron was something similar to Ben¡¯s library. With way fewer books and a more modern take on the furniture though.

    And the fireplace was actually lit. I supposed here in cyberspace there was no scarcity of wood, so there was no real problem here. I was just unaccustomed to seeing open fire anywhere.

    I was greeted by a, for Pure standards, small man, with hair the same color I had when I left Seattle. He looked pretty good for being 86 years old, but as one of the 30 richest people alive, he had access to the very best medical care.

    Interestingly, he looked nervous. That was hearable in his voice too when he greeted me:

    ¡°Welcome, Vivian. It is nice to meet you.¡± He said it softly, and with some hesitation, but I could not detect any malice. Yet.

    My answer was way less friendly, I have to confess:

    ¡°Good morning, Mr. Vandermeer.¡±

    He instantly slumped and sighed.

    ¡°So¡­ cold.¡±

    I had reduced the involuntary movement of my avatar to almost nothing, so my only reaction was verbal:

    ¡°Did you expect anything else?¡± It took me quite a bit of effort to keep my voice and diction neutral. This was one of the architects of my torture after all. A minor architect, yes, but still one of them.

    Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

    He shook his head with a sad expression and pointed at one of the chairs.

    ¡°Sit down, please.¡±

    I followed his prompt without any shown emotion or wasted movement. When we both were sitting, he sighed again but remained silent for a moment.

    I on the other hand did not want to spend more time in the presence of this man, even if only virtual, than I absolutely had to.

    ¡°You wanted this meeting. So, what did you want to say?¡±

    Again, he winced when he heard my inflection, but took a deep breath, before he finally began talking:

    ¡°Yes. I¡­ I think it is time that we clear some of the bad air between us.¡±

    ¡°There is no air, good or bad, between us.¡±

    ¡°Vivian, please. You are still my granddaughter.¡±

    I shook my head a tiny bit.

    ¡°I don¡¯t view myself as that.¡±

    He winced and grimaced again.

    ¡°I can understand that. Really, I can¡­ but¡­ I fear you don¡¯t know all that happened. So please let me explain.¡±

    I raised an eyebrow, but otherwise suppressed any other sign of emotion.

    ¡°What is there to explain? You had the choice between taking me and my mother in, or letting us suffer and expediting your political ambition.

    We both know what you chose, so there is nothing to explain.¡±

    I sighed again.

    ¡°That is where you are wrong. I did not have that choice. I¡¯ve never been offered this choice.¡±

    ¡°Are you saying that the leaders of your enemies would have tortured me regardless of your acquiescing to their demands? Please don¡¯t try to lie to me. They¡¯ve informed me since I could talk that it was your intransigence that made them do those things to me.¡±

    Another deep breath.

    ¡°Yes, I can believe that they told you that. There is only one problem with that. They could not use you to force me to their demands, because I did not even know you existed.¡±

    Wait, that was completely off-script from what I had expected. The only thing preventing showing my confusion right then was that I had regulated down such things for my avatar.

    ¡°Are you seriously telling me that you did not even care enough to know that your daughter had a child?¡±

    He shook his head.

    ¡°No, I am saying that they told me that my daughter died, along with her unborn child, around a month before you were born. There was a small riot in the prison where they kept Rebecca. Officially she died during that riot.¡±

    I scoffed harshly.

    ¡°I thought they used the opportunity to have her quietly killed. I¡­ even from the likes of Knowles, I did not expect such a¡­ such a viciousness.¡±

    He took another deep breath before he continued.

    ¡°I should have. God knows I should have. And I should have looked into it deeper. But¡­ I thought my child had just died. I was¡­ I could not force myself to look deeper into it. For that, I am deeply sorry.¡±

    I had to shake my head. That¡­ was completely out of everything I thought.

    ¡°You want me to believe that you did not know that your daughter was still alive? That her daughter was still alive?¡±

    He scoffed again.

    ¡°It¡¯s stupid, yes, but¡­ I did not know that Rebecca still lived until Apollo informed me that he had to invalidate her status as a moderator. You were eight at that time I think.

    Just to make that clear, I learned that she was alive. Not you. And they had hidden her, you, pretty well, so my people could not find her.¡±

    He sighed again.

    ¡°And another time I failed you. I did not even think about questioning Apollo about her child. He knew of you of course. But unless asked, he never tells anything like that.

    That meant of course that I did not even know that you existed until you finished high school and he informed me that your moderator status was now active.

    When I looked back, I realized that I completely missed the message he sent me that your moderator status had been established per the rules my grandparents set for him.

    My only excuse for that is that I was on a bender for half a year. No alcohol of course, or other drugs,  but¡­ I did not open any messages at that time and just sat in my office brooding.

    If I had not thought that it would be exactly what Knowles wanted I would have killed myself then.¡±

    I¡­ was simply speechless when he told me that.

    ¡°I was able to find you and your mother then. Hell, if I had thought about asking Apollo, I would have found you the moment he informed me that her moderator status had been suspended.

    My men took a couple of hours to find you and verify that yes, you really are my granddaughter. Unfortunately, they were not cautious enough. Maybe Knowles has expected that I find out about you some time. Who knows.

    Important is, that I was informed quietly that if I contacted you, or interacted with you in any way, they would simply kill you. At that time, Panacea had control of the Commonwealth with an iron hand.¡±

    He shook his head again.

    ¡°I simply could not risk it. I could not risk you.¡±

    My thoughts were racing through my head, and I had problems focussing on any single point he had just explained. Much less deciding if I believed him or not.

    Fortunately for both of us, that decision was taken out of my hands again. Warden appeared beside the low table between Vandermeer and me.

    ¡°I can confirm at least some of his points. Your mother was officially declared dead on Thursday, October, 7<sup>th</sup> 2230. Obviously, that information is false, but I can not confirm if Vandermeer knew it was false.¡±

    The information she conveyed contrasted sharply with the happy melodic tone she used to bring it to us. And it contrasted even more with the mood that was in this viron.

    I was so used to her antics by now that I only slightly twitched at her sudden appearance, but Vandermeer literally jumped out of his chair and onto the floor into a defensive posture.

    Just to see Warden¡¯s colorful avatar standing completely motionless beside the table.

    His ¡°What the fuck, where does she come from?¡± was admittedly somewhat amusing, but I managed, mostly thanks to the reduced involuntary reaction of my avatar, to refrain from laughing.

    Instead, I watched Vandermeer get up from the floor and look closer at Warden.

    ¡°From your reaction, or better your lack of one, I assume that is your infamous VI?¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Indeed, that is Warden. And Warden, have we any proof that this information was not seeded after Panacea and Dalgon had their little misfortune?¡±

    ¡°I confirmed that the information is identical to several dark web archives. Unless Vandermeer has enough power to retroactively change those as well, I see no possibility that it is false.¡±

    Vandermeer dusted his virtual clothes off, before sitting back in his chair.

    ¡°You are¡­ suspicious about this.¡±

    I tilted my head and looked at him.

    ¡°Would you simply believe a powerful stranger that you¡¯ve held responsible for a significant portion of your torment if he just came out and told you that you were duped and it was actually somebody else? Or would you take steps to confirm what he has told you?¡±

    He nodded while he sighed.

    ¡°Yeah, I can understand that. I don¡¯t like it, but I can understand that. Even though you seeing me as a stranger hurts.¡±

    ¡°That is unfortunate, but how else should I view you? We¡¯ve never met, we¡¯ve never talked, we¡¯ve never even exchanged messages. You are a stranger.¡±

    ¡°I know, I know. But it still hurts. You look so much like your mother¡­ just you sitting there, being a living human being instead of just a shell that has not yet died¡­ it just hurts.¡±

    I remained silent, for him to catch himself.

    ¡°Now, about your VI, does it always listen in?¡±

    ¡°She is directly connected via Q-link with my implants, so I would say yes anyway, but this time, I am connected through her, so right now it is doubly so.¡±

    He looked at Warden for a moment and nodded slowly.

    ¡°I assume I don¡¯t have to lecture you about the dangers of rogue VIs?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Even if I had not known about the risks, I¡¯ve had enough encounters with hypocritical corporations by now that I have absolutely no doubt about it.¡±

    He closes his eyes and massaged his temples for a moment.

    ¡°The way you phrase it, I guess you know about the little trap that the corporations put into all the computer courses.¡±

    ¡°I do, not that it is still a secret. It is nicely spelled out in the Panacea dumb. Among other similar stratagems, And I am¡­ a little disappointed that your grandparents actually went along with it.¡±

    He shook his head.

    ¡°They had no choice. Not going along would have meant that all the other big corps would have destroyed Vandermeer. And then enact all the things they devised to keep the ¡®small people¡¯ small.¡±

    Ok, I could understand that. Not that I was not still disappointed in them, but a moral stance is worth nothing if it just serves to kill you.

    But it was time to get back to the actual topic.

    ¡°But back to the topic, do you seriously expect me to believe that panacea was so petty and vicious that it psychologically tortured me for years without anything to gain? That simply does not compile.¡±

    He nodded slowly.

    ¡°I can understand you. And the answer is simultaneously very easy and pretty complicated.

    It is easy as in the fact that Joshua Knowles and his brood are a pack of hyper-spoiled, hyper-arrogant sadistic assholes. For them, everybody not a member of their family is only there to serve them, either for their entertainment, or to get rich off. Yes, I know, that is a very simplistic description, but unfortunately, it is the correct one. I have proof that, before Joshua lost the first councilorship, he managed to have people sentenced to death for trivial stuff. Just to be able to organize what he described as ¡°hunting the most dangerous game¡±. For him and his clones.

    It was, unfortunately, legal the way he did this, or his and his sons'' asses would be on death row right now.

    In your case there is the added factor that the Knowles have a, well, I think the best description is a blood feud against our family.¡±

    I was confused. A blood feud? Like in medieval times? Are they insane? Apparently, Vandermeer had the same thoughts, as he continued:

    ¡°Yes, I know, a feud, in this time and age. But it is sadly true. Not that I will take them out when I can, but I will do it within the laws, and I will mostly do it to end the threat once and for all.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ why? Why does one of the richest families in the world decide to have a fricking blood feud with another rich family? I don¡¯t get it.¡±

    Again, Vandermeer nodded.

    ¡°I understand you fully there. It is stupid. Completely irrational even. But it is sadly a fact. It all started before world war 3. Essentially the first generation that was born as Nephilim.

    While Paul Simpson, Jessica Proctor, and Jason Vandermeer tried to veer off the looming war, Edward Knowles used his heightened intelligence and his absolute lack of any moral fiber to gain an increasing foothold in the healthcare industry of the United States.

    All in all, it was the most profitable industry in the US. And he wanted a stranglehold over it. Then the war happened, and while others put their focus on the war, Knowles took over bigger and bigger parts of the healthcare industry. And became richer and richer for it.

    Second only to Simpson, Proctor, and Vandermeer. They sold their new fusactor all over humanity and the new desalinator.¡±

    He made a pause and shook his head.

    ¡°One thing I doubt you know because it is deemphasized in the current history plan is that it was not the Nephilim who prepared for the entry into the war. Does anybody really believe that the likes of Knowles and Dalgon would actually put their own resources to the task and prepare?

    No, it was a relatively small group of the Nephilim, most prominently SPV. It was my great-grandparents that finally ended the great war. That is where Vandermeer¡¯s tradition as the premier weapon manufacturer comes from.

    And then they led the way in rebuilding.

    They funded, and pushed, the algae tank project. They redeveloped the desalinator into the purifier we all use today. And yes, it was also them that prepared for the civil war.

    And as such, when the Commonwealth was founded, they were the people leading it. They did not have enough power to prevent that abomination of a council, but they were able to temper it quite a bit.

    Knowles, and to a lesser extent Jack Dalgon, were not happy with it. They wanted to be god-kings of their empire. But they could not stand each other either.

    And so there was an uneasy balance of power.  That ended when my grandparents managed to push Apollo through.

    Robert Knowles, Edwards son, wanted uneducated sheep that he could push around. Stupid victims, he could fleece and play with. And Paul Vandermeer and Elaine Simpson denied him that. And they were clever enough to lock it in.

    That was the moment when Knowles and Thomas Dalgon allied to take over, and do their best to marginalize SPV.

    And when Knowles took over the first councilorship from Paul and realized that this position did not come with control of Apollo, he swore eternal enmity between our families.

    Yes, we could have ended it if we had just given them Apollo, but¡­ that was a betrayal that none of us could stomach. And each generation of Knowles hated us stronger than the last one because we denied them their pleasure.¡±

    For a moment, Vandermeer was silent, before he snorted derisively.

    ¡°Fuck, I don¡¯t think they care, or even know, why they wanted it in the first place. For them, it is simply that they want it, and we are denying it to them. They are like spoiled children in that regard. Or maybe those absolute monarchs of the past.¡±

    He made another pause.

    ¡°The thing is, they hate us with a passion and take every chance they can get to make us suffer.¡±

    I¡­ was not completely surprised. I had met people like that before. Not that powerful, but that entitled. But that did not mean that I could comprehend what Vandermeer was saying. Not completely.

    ¡°But¡­ if they hate us that much, why did they let me live at all? I was helpless and in their power. Why not just kill me?¡±

    He shook his head with a grim expression.

    ¡°They don¡¯t want to eradicate us, they want to make us suffer. Killing you as a baby would not have made you suffer. Your torment did not serve a purpose, it was the purpose. As I know Joshua Knowles, he would have been quite happy to torture you until you could not take it anymore and killed yourself. But to simply end your suffering? Where is the ¡®fun¡¯ in that?¡±

    I closed my eyes and rubbed the bridge of my nose for a moment.

    ¡°He has absolutely no clue what he was playing with.¡± I snorted bitterly but refused to go deeper into the abyss that I had nearly unleashed.

    I honestly was not sure if I should believe him or not. Sure, his story made some sort of perverted sense. If Joshua Knowles really was such a monster, and if he really was that untouchable that he could get away with murder, literally, then yes, it was somewhat plausible.

    And to be honest, that level of power was not unrealistic in our day and age. But still¡­ there was doubt.

    ¡°What I don¡¯t get is, if what you just told me is true¡­ why have you made no attempt to contact me after Knowles was brought down? Why did you remain silent?¡±

    He places his head in his hands and sighed.

    ¡°That¡­ is a very loaded question. And it is not that easy to answer. First, you have to realize that when Knowles lost the first councilorship, his family had it for nearly 120 years.

    That means for nearly 120 years they ruled the Commonwealth. They¡¯ve created structures and organizations that catered to their whims and moods.

    The fact that I had taken over as first councilor did not mean that those structures and organizations were no longer there.¡±

    He shook his head.

    ¡°No, they were still very much there. Still a danger. I had to destroy those structures first before I could be sure that you were safe enough to contact.¡±

    He showed a crooked thin smile.

    ¡°At least that is the reason that I used to justify it to myself.¡±

    He shook his head.

    ¡°Don¡¯t get me wrong, it was all too true, but I could have found a way around it, most likely. No, the real reason, reasons, were shame and fear.¡±

    I frowned inwardly, but thanks to the avatar settings I showed no outward sign of it. What the heck was he afraid for? Thankfully, I did not have to ask, as he continued.

    ¡°The fear¡­ I just feared how you would react to me. Knowles took great pleasure in telling me how much he had poisoned you against me. And then, well I failed. I failed as a man, I failed as a father, and I failed as a grandfather. If I had realized how¡­ insane Knowles had gotten¡­ you have to understand, I could have prevented all that.

    If I had decided to burn enough political capital to keep Rebecca out of prison¡­ but we thought it was just a way to humiliate us, humble us a bit.

    Hell, Rebecca could have prevented it, she would have just had to denounce your father. But¡­ she is¡­ was as stubborn as all of us. She wouldn¡¯t hear of it.

    Fuck, even your father could have prevented it. As much as I loved the stubborn, loyal, and honorable goof, he should not have been there. He should not have been in that war.

    He was already out. It had been made clear that he would never get any higher in the hierarchy because he married my daughter. Instead, they tried to get him out.  And he had accepted it. Had already started the separation process when that braindead imbecile Dalgon-Smythe took over the division.

    Julian¡­ he could see from the beginning that Dalgon-Smythe was trouble, and he could not let his men face this stupidity alone if he could do anything to help them.

    We all know he couldn¡¯t. Hell, we knew it then. Dalgon-Smythe was way too much of a royal to listen to anybody. But Julian simply could not leave his men alone.¡±

    He scoffed bitterly before he continued:

    ¡°But back to the topic, I was very much ashamed. I had failed you, and your mother. Not only could I have prevented it, but if I had had a clear mind in 30¡­

    If I had just kept up with my messages¡­ I would have known that Rebecca survived when Apollo announced your birth.

    I would have taken the Vandermeer military and had taken over the Commonwealth then and there. Knowles had gone way too far, and I would have been justified to take him out.¡±

    ¡°They allowed you enough military to take over the NWC?¡±

    He scoffed.

    ¡°They thought they didn¡¯t. But keep in mind, Vandermeer is the armory of the Commonwealth. We¡¯ve seen for more than 100 years that at one point or another, a confrontation might become inevitable. Sure, the CDF had 50 men for every one of mine, and that does not even count the Dalgon and Panacea military. But that would have been moot when their weapons stopped working.¡±

    ¡°Then why didn¡¯t you? When you learned how they treated us?¡±

    ¡°Because I could not protect you then. You have to understand that taking that step would mean a civil war. The riots were a cakewalk compared to that. When you and your mother were in prison, it would have been relatively easy. A single location, with limited access. No weapons inside the secure locations. My men could have gone in there and been out with you two in half an hour, and Knowles asslickers could not have prevented it.

    When you were 13, and mostly living on your own¡­ the district you were in was a powder keg, only waiting for a spark to go up. The chances of getting you out unharmed were low. Especially as Knowles had put people there with the express order to kill you if something like that happened.

    I simply could not risk it.¡±

    I took a deep breath, trying to make sense of my own thoughts, much less of what Vandermeer was telling me. I was not very thriving in that endeavor. Finally, one question burned its way to the forefront of my mind.

    ¡°If I understand you correctly, our ancestors could have taken over at any given time. Why didn¡¯t they? Why let this¡­ corruption fester?¡±

    He sighed again.

    ¡°Sometimes I ask that myself.  The answer is again complicated. But in the end, it boils down to we created the Commonwealth. It was not¡­ easy to watch it rot, but ripping it apart, that was harder. We¡­ always had a bit of hope left that we could push the Commonwealth back onto the correct path.¡±

    He scoffed.

    ¡°And in the end, you managed to do it. I still wish you could have been spared the anguish that you went through.¡±

    Uh-oh. He could not mean what I think he meant, could he?

 2.28: To the future

    ¡°What do you mean thanks to me? I¡¯ve done nothing except move somewhere else.¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°Your little ploy with finding how the Phantom managed to steal all that money might have fooled most of the people, but not all of them.¡±

    When Warden literally bristled immediately with spikes and grew to a gigantic size, Vandermeer held up his hands in a warding position.

    ¡°Keep cool. I am no danger to her. But you should be aware that a few people are aware that she is the Phantom.¡±

    Warden shrunk back down to her normal size, but the spikes remained.

    ¡°That is unacceptable.¡±

    ¡°That may be, but you can¡¯t change it.¡±

    ¡°We have to ensure that the banks don¡¯t learn about that.¡±

    Vandermeer shook his head.

    ¡°The banks do know about it. But thanks to you, Vivian is an extremely hard target, and they see no way to get to her without getting blown to pieces by you. Add in that nearly everybody believes that she only found the equation after the Phantom wrote it in the Abyss, and they¡¯ve decided that as long as she keeps silent about it, and does not get too much money too quickly without any explanation, they will let it go.

    They officially still search for the Phantom, but won¡¯t go after her.¡±

    I could not help it and shook my head.

    ¡°How?¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°In the end, you are just too smart. Do you know how many people actually understand the Seeberger equation well enough to even understand how the quantum entanglement of photons might work?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It has been more than half a year, so by now, I would guess a couple of dozen or so. Why?¡±

    ¡°You are off. By quite a bit, I might add. The actual number is one. It is only you who could understand it. Even the other K4s are running against a wall here. Two of the other 11 are working on it.

    One thinks he has found the variables that he has to isolate to get to the explanation of the entanglement. And you manage it in three days? Get real!¡±

    ¡°Uh, I was in cyberspace. Those three days were more like 11 months for me.¡±

    He scoffed.

    ¡°I know. And I also know how compression works. And when I freed the other K4, I hired most of them, much more amicably, I might add, and bought ultra-jacks for them. Those two have spent nine months with compressions ranging from 70:1 and 80:1 trying to understand it.

    I would love to know your real compression sometimes by the way. Somehow I doubt the 90:1 you told everybody you have¡­ but anyway, despite the corrected equation, despite them spending between 11 and 13 years, virtually, they have not made any sense out of it.

    Fuck, one of them explained to me that it can¡¯t work, just last month. Of course, you had to release the absolute proof that it does indeed work, not quite a week later. Boy was he pissed.

    But what I am trying to say is there is no way that two people still alive actually understand the equation enough to make Q-links. Well, not no way, but the probability is so vanishingly low that it is negligible. That only leaves you as a possibility. And I am not the only one who understands that.

    Not as many people as there should, but anybody who has spent any time on that equation, or had smart people do so, knows that it was almost certainly you.¡±

    I was confused now.

    ¡°But¡­ it is not that hard! I mean, I won¡¯t claim that it is easy. Goodness knows it is not. But it took me a few virtual months to understand it. With only the tools I could make or afford by myself. No support structure, no team, and no budget.

    Anybody who does have those things should be able to do the same in way less time. Heck, I deciphered the equation, corrected it, learned enough math and physics to really understand it, and created the first Q-links in less than six virtual months.

    Whomever you have working on it already has the correct equation, they already know that it works, and they probably already have a background in higher physics. And you say that at least two of them are K4.

    Something¡¯s not right here. Yes, I am smart, probably smarter than any of them, but not that much smarter.¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°Well, if you find out where they go wrong, you can tell them any time you like. Hell, I¡¯ve created a virtual meeting room for all of them, even the three who choose not to work for me. You really should visit a few of the meetings there, I think.

    It will probably be the only place where you can find people that are at least approaching your own intelligence.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I will think about it.¡± To be honest, I had absolutely no intention of meeting even more people. At least not soon.

    ¡°Do that. I will send you the meeting address and the times. But¡­ to get back to the topic of Panacea, while I appreciate what you¡¯ve done here, I fear it is just a matter of time for them to get back to where they were. I want to stop them. And for that, I need your help again. In a small capacity though.¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°My help? What do you need my help for?¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°I am trying to invoke the Jepsen Act against Knowles. Get rid of him, and his family¡¯s power once and for all. For now, I don¡¯t have the political power to do so. But¡­¡±

    The Jepsen Act¡­ one piece of evil lawmaking that luckily never had been used. In essence, it said that somebody who is convicted of high treason to the Commonwealth will not only be executed but all his property will be confiscated.

    Yes, I know, it is not that different from many similar laws in other nations. The evil thing here is what it defines as high treason. Among them are for example dishonoring the first councilor, disrespecting the council, making information that is damaging to the Commonwealth public knowledge, and depriving the Commonwealth of an irreplaceable resource.

    Things that even in most tyrannies are not much worse than petty crimes can earn you capital punishment in the Commonwealth. And as I understand it, it was created explicitly to trap my family.

    But I could not see any way Vandermeer could turn it around against Knowles, and for sure did not know a way that I could help with that.

    ¡°My help? You are aware that I no longer live in the Commonwealth, do you? And I certainly do not plan to move back to Seattle.¡±

    In response, Vandermeer chuckled, confusing me even more.

    ¡°And that is exactly the help I meant.¡±

    ¡°Did I not just refuse to help?¡±

    ¡°No, you explained to me that you do not plan to come back to the Commonwealth again.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Yes¡­ but how can that help you?¡±

    Now Vandermeer showed a downright evil grin.

    ¡°It is simple. Knowles stratagems have deprived the Commonwealth of an irreplaceable resource, and that for good as we just ascertained.¡±

    ¡°What irreplaceable resource are you talking about?¡±

    ¡°You of course. I just told you that two of the smartest people known to have ever lived took over ten years to unsuccessfully try to do what you did in less than six months.

    That makes you an absolutely irreplaceable resource. Absolutely unique. And Knowles drove you away to the point where you will never come back.¡±

    I could now see where he was going, but¡­ it was a bit¡­

    ¡°That is a very strained reason. I don¡¯t think the council will go for it.¡±

    He slumped down a bit.

    ¡°You might be right, but it is all I have. We simply can¡¯t allow the Knowles family to get back in control.¡±

    I could understand him, but¡­ he would have to burn way too much influence to make that happen if he even could. But¡­

    ¡°There might be another way. Do you have enough dirt on Knowles and his sons to put them in prison for a few years?¡±

    He snorted.

    ¡°Easily, but that won¡¯t do much good in the long run. They come out in a couple of years and will be even madder. And Panacea will give them the power to do something about their mad.¡±

    Now it was my turn to grin.

    ¡°Just put them away. In a couple of years, Panacea won¡¯t matter anymore.¡±

    ¡°How. I know, they are hurt. Hell, I had much fun denying them patent protection for all the drugs that you put into the dump. By the way, I noticed that one drug is missing from it. I fully approve of that. Though if you have the formula, I would be thankful if you could send it to me.

    Panacea claims that they¡¯ve lost it during the raid, and can¡¯t provide it anymore. And the addicts are suffering.¡±

    After a moment of contemplation, I nodded. Considering that it was my own mother who was among the ones suffering, I could hardly deny him that much.

    He then continued:

    ¡°But as much as that hurt them, they still have their cloning department, their medical R&D, and most importantly the PEES. Those three will ensure that they will claw their way back to the top.¡±

    ¡°That is why I want you to take the Knowles out of the picture for a few years. I can¡¯t do anything against their R&D department, though I think if the money dries up, that will evaporate as well, but the other two are going down over the next years.¡±

    I closed my eyes and looked over the messages I had gotten for the timetable.

    ¡°Enki will announce a new cloning technology in a month. That will rip that leg out from under Panacea."

    ¡°New cloning tech won¡¯t be much of a draw. Sure, one part is that they have the best tech, but more important is that they have the genetic engineers to prevent problems.¡±

    ¡°There are enough engineers outside of Panacea to give them a bit of competition, and when their order books dry up, I think most of theirs will walk away. And the new tech is¡­ in one word, revolutionary. Around six times faster than what Panacea has, and it does not create the toxicity buildup that all other cloning technologies have. That means it can be used to indefinitely replace biological tissue.

    And instead of a clone in six months, it provides one in one.¡±

    He rubbed his chin.

    ¡°Ok, that might work. But it will be a hard sell. Panacea has sewn up that market for a long time.¡±

    ¡°And they jerked everybody around enough that everybody hates their guts. If there is a viable alternative, they will lose that market soon. We don¡¯t plan to offer the service, we sell the cloning rigs, to everybody except Panacea, and maybe Dalgon. If the big corps get their own departments set up and there will be some competition, Panacea will lose fast.

    Especially if the Knowles are in no position to intervene for a few years.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I see that. But what about PEES? That is the club they use to force all others to do their bidding.¡±

    ¡°Oh, that is the really nice one. I have¡­ developed a new auto-surgeon. It is in my opinion the best that is available, and all feedback I¡¯ve gotten so far confirms that. More importantly, I included a very powerful, fuzzy-logic-capable CPU in the design. That is by the way where Warden came from.

    That alone is of course not enough to challenge PEES, though it will hurt Panacea on its own quite a bit.

    But the coup-de-grace is right now in testing. I¡¯ve taken the time and created a medical VI, which conveniently will be able to run on said auto-surgeon. Combine that with a specialized pharmaceutical molecular foundry and a nano-fab, and the auto-surgeon becomes a full-fledged auto-doc.

    Something that any mercenary unit can put into an armored skimmer and use to compete with PEES.

    You don¡¯t need highly trained and expensive combat medics in the rescue teams if they can simply put the patient in the auto-doc and be done with.

    And again, Panacea has not made very many friends the way they used PEES to force compliance with their wishes. You can bet that as soon as we offer the auto-doc, all the A-tier and higher corps will create such a service if just internal.¡±

    I could not help but smile.

    ¡°And Panacea will finally reap what they¡¯ve sown. I don¡¯t think that they will be even a B-tier corp in two, maybe three years. And personally, I find the idea that they will come out of prison and stand before the ruins of what was once one of the most important corporations of the world much more satisfying than simply executing them.

    That will come soon enough if they don¡¯t mend their way.¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°That is¡­ very alluring, but you are aware that there is no money in creating a medical VI, do you?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I plan to release the VI as freeware anyway. Give it to humanity as a whole. So what if I can¡¯t make money on it directly, I never planned to do so anyway.

    But Enki will be the only group with a VI-capable auto-surgeon at the ready. So we will make money hand over fist that way. Not that that is the goal, mind you. The goal is to break Panacea, destroying its PEES monopoly.¡±

    He rubbed his chin, nodding the whole time.

    ¡°That it will do. That it will do. Knowles and his whole family are such big assholes that nobody can stand them. They pissed in so many cups, and spoiled so many deals and plans¡­ the only thing keeping Panacea alive all those years was that nobody could afford to lose access to PEES.

    He continued rubbing his chin.

    ¡°And it will be even better if we keep them in maximum security. They certainly are a ¡®flight risk¡¯ and have enough money that they can organize a breakout, so it is even warranted. Keep them out of the loop, don¡¯t let them contact the outside world. When their lawyers finally get access, it will be too late to react.¡±

    His grin became diabolical.

    ¡°I bet Panacea won¡¯t survive the first year. They made enough enemies that operators, mercenaries, and even full-out corporate military will line up for a chance to kick their asses. And we don¡¯t need to sully our hands. Except pointing them in the right direction to take out some of their hidden assets.

    Yes, I like it. How soon can you get it done?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°The auto-surgeon is ready at any given moment. The VI is, as I said, in testing. If nothing goes wrong, it should be ready in a month or two. The nano-fab and the forge are trivial. The only thing is that we need to build up our defenses before we can release the surgeon.

    This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

    It is a bit complicated, but¡­ we¡¯ve had too many too-important technologies in too short a time. The cloning rig, and everything that it entails to are¡­ relatively unimportant. Yes, a revolutionary step forward, but everybody can get a cloning rig nowadays. Ours is just better.

    The rest¡­ well, the next one will be a problem. Unless we have some defenses in place that is.¡±

    He nodded knowingly.

    ¡°Ah yes, your defenses. That was what you man Walker contacted us about. Of course, we will help you.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°To be honest, that is not really necessary. Michael has asked in case I can not get it done. And to be fair, the radar we have is¡­ not the best. But we have other sensors that compensate for it.¡±

    For a moment, Vandermeer looked at me confused, but then he frowned.

    ¡°Wait, I thought this meeting was the price of you getting the weapon tech. If you don¡¯t need it, why are you here?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Because Michael made a promise, speaking for me. And while I am not perfect in that regard, I always do my best to keep my promises, even those made by others if they are in a position to speak for me.¡±

    He smiled, with a somewhat sad expression.

    ¡°I see. Your father was exactly the same. Honor, and loyalty¡­ they were not just words for him. But please, be careful, that is what ultimately killed him.¡±

    What can you say to something like that? He seemed to be honest, but I knew better than most how much the avatar settings in cyberspace could hide. Accordingly, I just shrugged. Even if he was honest, I never met my father.

    He sighed but let it go.

    ¡°So you don¡¯t need help with your military? Are you sure?¡±

    I started to answer, only to stop again. I knew that our new anti-ship weapons were simply the best. And to be honest¡­ I had a few ideas about how to use some of the principles to build new anti-personnel weapons, but¡­ to be honest, even if the bots were working out as I thought they would, they would still tote around standard weapons. Chemically powered projectile weapons.

    ¡°To be honest, no, I am not fully sure. I mean, in anti-ship weapons we are covered. But in smaller-scale weaponry, infantry, and such¡­ we might need help there. Or at least could use it.¡±

    He looked at me intensely.

    ¡°Do you have enough men for it to count? I could send a battalion or two to help, you know.¡±

    I rolled my eyes and looked up the number of bots we already had produced. At first, I thought I had looked up the wrong number, but then realized that Michael had not built one, but two bot manufacturies. And used most of the output for the new military bots. To be fair, the numbers were staggering.

    ¡°It seems that we have around a battalion of humans, though as I see it, we have no power armor for them yet¡­ I have to correct that. But more importantly, we have around four and a half battalions of combat bots. That should hold quite some time.¡±

    Vandermeer grimaced.

    ¡°Combat bots are¡­ not good. Sure, they are better than nothing, but one human is usually worth four of five bots. You should not place your trust in them.¡±

    I grinned and chuckled softly.

    ¡°You don¡¯t know those bots. Yes, I know the problems with bots. They depend on their energy cells, have an average of four to five hours of activity before the cells are depleted, are slow to recharge, need charging infrastructure, are not very mobile, and are dumb as a stack of rocks.

    Almost none of that is the case with those bots. One of the new pieces of cyberware that we are right now testing is a cybernetic digestive system. It enables those bots to run in low-powered mode indefinitely as long as they have access to some food source.

    Even if they get no food, they can function for around 72 hours on their cells, and as soon as they get food, they slowly recharge the cells. Of course, they also have a high-powered mode where they can rip cyber zombies apart. They have enough energy for five to six hours of that.

    And best of all, they do not do the processing internally, they are remote controlled, via Q-link. Remote controlled by a VI on an extremely powerful supercomputer I might add. And yes, it is a controlled VI.

    Only the slow-to-recharge point is valid. We need to build enough charging infrastructure for them, but that is not a big problem.¡±

    ¡°Strong enough to rip a cyber zombie apart? How?¡±

    ¡°They are new tech. Well, not new new tech, but tech that nobody bothered to use. I actually designed the whole framework as cyberware for our men. I absolutely refuse to create cyber zombies, but with the new cyberware, who needs them? Intelligent people can now get a nearly 100% replacement of their body and remain living. No CRS anymore.¡±

    I took a deep breath shook my head to clear it, and then shrugged.

    ¡°Only problem is that, unlike cyber zombies, those people are not disposable. That means we have to test this new cyberware thoroughly. The bots were originally a stopgap until we had the cyberware ready. But¡­ why stop then? Especially as the only important piece of cyberware that I could not make safe so far is the reflex booster.¡±

    Vandermeer seemed to think hard for a bit.

    ¡°I see. Honestly, if those bots really are that good, maybe Vandermeer could buy some. They sound useful at least.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I have no idea. I am mostly the tinkerer who invents the stuff.¡± That was especially true as I was completely confused if I could trust him or not. Right now, my kneejerk reflex would be to not only say no but heck no. Fortunately, I was aware enough to know that this might not be the right response, so I held back.

    Heck, if what he told me, it would be the completely wrong response. If only I were not so unsure if he said the truth.

    Luckily, he accepted my words, and I was spared to go into deeper details here.

    ¡°That is fine. I will have the people I plan to send to New York go over that with your people.¡±

    I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything. I¡­ desperately wanted him to leave me alone, to not disturb my little piece of happiness.

    ¡°Anyway, Michael informed me that you want to hire me? Whatever for?¡±

    Another heavy breath from the old man.

    ¡°Ah¡­ yes. We¡­ have a problem. One that I certainly have to explain to you. We need to get a handle on Sanderson¡¯s Folly.¡±

    He was right, he did not have to explain it to me. But I was unquestionably the wrong person to point at this specific problem.

    ¡°Yes, I know about the problem, and I agree that we have to do something about it. But¡­ that is biology. I don¡¯t like that stuff. Can¡¯t really wrap my mind around it. You need a virologist or geneticist to work on it.¡±

    He scoffed sourly.

    ¡°I have several virologists and geneticists working on it. Including another of the K4. Without results. We have not even found out what this cursed virus actually did. Much less how we can counter it. We are completely stumped here.¡±

    What the heck was going on here?

    ¡°What about Project Revitalize? That has been going for what, 150 years now?¡±

    The answer was preceded by a harsh scoff.

    ¡°As so many other things our ancestors started for the betterment of the Commonwealth, successive generations of Knowles have been running it into the ground. Completely haphazardly handled. Fuck, they did not even do basic research during the last 120 years. All that Revitalize knows is what was known in 2120.

    They just took some chemicals, tested them in rats if they influence fertility in any way, and then ran human trials. They basically threw whatever chemical they could think of at the wall and looked at what stuck.

    In all honesty, despite you and the other 11 functional ones, K4 should have never been approved for human trials. Yes, you twelve are a gift from the heavens, but all that suffering by the rest of the couples... it is hard to argue that it was worth it.

    And the idiots Knowles had run this project did not even keep more than a bare handful of records. For all purposes, Project Revitalize might not have been existing for the last 120 years.¡±

    Ok, as hard as it was, I had to agree about K4. Despite my own life being owed to it. But one thing was just plain wrong.

    ¡°What do you mean only a handful of records? I have exabytes of them. Sure, they were not the most meticulous scientists, but they put at least a modicum of care into their research.¡±

    He sat just still, blinking a few times, before tilting his head.

    ¡°You¡­ have¡­ exabytes of records of Revitalize? I had people look into the hard records. There is nothing there. There is not even a hint that there ever was anything. How can you have that many records?¡±

    I frowned and shrugged.

    ¡°I have no clue why you did not find anything, but I¡­ well you know about my less-than-legal endeavors in cyberspace. I wanted to know, needed to know what they were thinking when they approved K4. So I went looking. I¡­ routinely made a copy of everything.

    There are decades of data. Lists of recipients of the various batches. The results of every batch, not even anonymized. Explicit descriptions of which couple had what effects. How the children developed. Scan data. Where the chemical in question came from. What preliminary tests were done. Everything.

    You are right in that they did step into human trials way too early. Sometimes they did not even wait for the full results of the rat trials. In two cases, they were not even doing the rat trials first.¡±

    During my explanation, Vandermeer balled his fists, closed his eyes, and took several deep deliberate breaths. After a few moments, he snarled: ¡°Knowles!¡± But said nothing else for another few moments.

    Then he opened his eyes and looked at me, and for the first time, I saw real anger in his eyes.

    ¡°Would you please agree to send me those files? This¡­ fuck, Knowles must have had almost everything deleted. The hard records destroyed. The moment you stole his money, he must have destroyed the project. Just to spite us, to spite humanity.¡±

    ¡°Of course. I honestly thought that you already had everything.¡± Then I got to thinking. Dangerous, I know, but I could not help myself sometimes¡­

    ¡°But you know, that explains it.¡±

    His eyes narrowed and he leaned forward.

    ¡°Explains what?¡±

    ¡°That you never tried to get more functional K4. You know, if there were enough of us, we could be the future of humanity. But right now, with only 12¡­ that¡¯s too much of a genetic bottleneck.¡±

    Vandermeer shook his head, with a sad smile.

    ¡°You would think so, but it is simply too much of a gamble. More than 8000 pregnancies and only 12 of them could be called successful. No, we can¡¯t take that chance. 0.15% is just too low.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It is closer to 0.14% but whatever. The thing is that apparently, nobody did any real analysis of the data. I would have thought that you at least would have when you took over, but if you never got the data¡­¡±

    He frowned.

    ¡°Why? What did you find in the data?¡±

    ¡°Well, for one, there were a disproportional amount of G-batch women in the trial.¡±

    ¡°Ok, that is a bit interesting, but those things happen.¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°You don¡¯t understand. There were exactly 933 women of the various G-batches in the K4 trial.¡±

    His eyes got wide.

    ¡°Ninehundred¡­ fuck me, do you mean all the living K4 have a G-batch mother?¡±

    ¡°Exactly. The vast majority of them were G2 with 273, then G5 with 197, G4 with 178, G1 with 155, and G6 with 118.¡±

    He was visibly confused.

    ¡°Where are the G3s? I know that there were G3s in the trial. Your mother is a G3.¡±

    I smiled.

    ¡°Add the numbers. G1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 together make 921. There were 12 G3.¡±

    He gasped.

    ¡°12? Are you saying¡­¡±

    ¡°That every functional K4 has a G3 mother? And that every single G3-woman taking part in the trial had a functional K4 as a child? Yes, that is what I am saying.¡±

    ¡°That¡­ that changes everything. Why did Knowles never¡­?¡±

    ¡°Think about it, until maybe eight years ago, all of us K4 were seen as disabled. Just to a varying degree. Only when the first one crushed every single IQ test did they realize that the functional ones were special in a good way.¡±

    ¡°But even then, Knowles should have seen to it that we get more of them.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°A substantial portion of Panacea¡¯s bottom line comes from cloning.¡±

    ¡°Yes¡­ I see that. But¡­ fuck, that even Knowles could sink so low? We are dying out for fucks sake. And this information might save humanity.¡±

    Then he calmed himself down again.

    ¡°Now we have to find the G3 women. We need to¡­ fuck, how do we find them?¡±

    ¡°The files. They are all neatly listed in there. Oh, one thing, so that you are not surprised, you won¡¯t find me among the K4. I did not want them to find me, so I changed it. Before I copied the whole thing.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°I can understand that. But you know that we will add you back in, right?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°That is probably unavoidable.¡±

    ¡°Then I will have the project launched as soon as you sent me the data.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Get real, as I know Warden, you already have the data. Or at least reading access to it.¡±

    ¡°Correct.¡±

    I nodded. Always efficient. As much as I feared her in the beginning, by then I could not even understand how I ever lived without her.

    ¡°Now that that is sorted, can we agree that you don¡¯t need me to work on this biological stuff?¡±

    He chuckled softly.

    ¡°Sorry, no can do. We really need you.¡±

    I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths before I asked:

    ¡°Why? Why do you need me? I¡¯m not good at biology.¡±

    He chuckled again.

    ¡°What you told me about your new cloning tech begs to differ. And it was you, not anybody else who found the cure for CRS. Both forms of CRS. But the reason why we need you is what I told you earlier.¡±

    He rubbed his eyes for a moment.

    ¡°We have two K4s, specialized in physics, fully trained in physics, working together for 11 to 13 years in cyberspace not being able to do what you did in six months. And that includes learning physics. I have no frame about how much smarter you are than the rest, but I know how much smarter your fellow K4 are compared to us mere mortals. And it is mindblowing.¡±

    I buried my face in my hands.

    ¡°That was physics. Math. I¡­ I don¡¯t know, I just have a knack for it. I have no such knack for biology. I¡­ just don¡¯t like it.¡±

    ¡°And still you managed to do something that many thought to be impossible. That is what I need, what humanity needs."

    I balled my fists in frustration, while I answered him in a strained voice:

    ¡°I circumvented the whole biology issue. I created an engineering workaround that allowed me to develop the new cloning tech and the cure for muscular CRS.¡±

    He patiently spoke then:

    ¡°Then use this workaround. Anything. We are stuck. I increased the resources for Revitalize a hundredfold, and we are stuck. I have a K4 working on it, and she can¡¯t make any progress. We need somebody thinking outside the box working on it. And we need the best working on it.

    You are booth.¡±

    I hated it, but he was right. As I had complained so often, humanity needed to get a cure for the Folly. We desperately needed to lift that curse. And I could not even argue that I was not the smartest. I knew that I was smarter than the rest of the K4.

    In the end, I could not justify to myself not trying to work on it.

    ¡°Fine. I¡¯ll do it. But I won¡¯t spend a decade on it. If I can understand it, I will do it, but if I run into a wall... I can''t promise anything. And I¡¯ll need resources. Eggs and sperm, from humans and chimpanzees. And if I find out what the Folly actually does, I need a virologist or geneticist to work with me. I have absolutely no clue about genetic engineering. And I for sure don¡¯t intend to learn it.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°That is ok, dear. I doubt that you will need even a year. How about you give me six months and we look further then? The rest¡­ I can send you a few hundred units of the human eggs and sperm, but I have to look into the chimpanzee stuff. Why do you need it?¡±

    ¡°Chimpanzees are humanity''s closest relative. If we can see why they can still fertilize the eggs, and humans can not, we might find a solution. And six months is ok. A bit longer than I really want, but¡­ this is important.¡±

    Vandermeer nodded softly, and materialized a tablet, pushing on it a few times.

    ¡°Ok, I¡­ have everything, except the chimpanzee stuff on the way to you next week. Wednesday or Thursday at the latest. I will send a few fertility specialists along, as well as the weapon techs. And a small contingent of Vandermeer military. Can you put them up for the time being?¡±

    I was a bit baffled.

    ¡°Ok, I can see the specialists, and the weapon techs, but why the military?¡±

    He gave me a crooked smile.

    ¡°Because regardless of what happens, you are still my heir. And I want to do anything to keep you safe.¡±

    ¡°Uh, I don¡¯t think I want to be your heir. I don¡¯t want to run a corporation. That is the reason why Michael is the CEO.¡±

    ¡°That is ok. In time you can make a similar arrangement for Vandermeer, but you will own it, or most of it, at some point in time. Hell, you are already owning 5% of it right now.¡±

    Wait, what? I did what?!?

    ¡°I own 5% of Vandermeer? How did that happen? And why don¡¯t I know already about it?¡±

    Another sigh from the old man.

    ¡°You inherited it from your father. I gave him the 5% as a wedding gift. Your mother has another 10%, and I have 65%. I also have the proxy for you and your mother. And you don¡¯t know about it because we never talked. I assume Knowles did not consider it important for you to know. Now, can you put up the people or do I have to look into getting them a place to live?¡±

    I took a heavy breath while rolling my eyes.

    ¡°I assume there is no way I can convince you not to send any military?¡±

    When he nodded sagely, I shook my head. Stupid stubborn old man. Oh, of course, he was stubborn. I had to have it from somewhere. And I recognized the look he was giving me. I¡¯ve seen it often enough in a mirror. There was no getting out of this.

    ¡°Fine, whatever. And it depends on how many. I have 38 moderate rooms, as well as seven somewhat bigger suites available.¡±

    ¡°What do you understand as a moderate room?¡±

    ¡°About 36m2, including the small bathroom with a shower. But seriously, I don¡¯t want them all full with your people.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, I can see that. I thought about a small platoon. Two squads, 20 soldiers, two corporals, one sergeant, and one lieutenant. The soldiers can double up nicely. Hell, in 36m2 if you install bunks they can sleep 4 to a room. Then two lab assistants and two fertility specialists, maybe three each. And the techs, I would say three of them, and a major to work with your techs.¡±

    I sighed. Way too many people, really. But¡­ at this time I was not prepared to snub him. I¡­ just did not know enough to know what I did not know.

    ¡°And if I find something?¡±

    ¡°Then you either have already cured the Folly, or I will connect to a geneticist and you can work on finishing it.¡±

    I¡­ was not exactly happy about the situation, but he was right at least at one point. We, humanity, desperately needed this cure.

    With a heavy sigh, I nodded.

    ¡°As long as you don¡¯t expect too much from me. I¡­ biology is just not my forte.¡±

    He nodded and smiled.

    ¡°I can understand that. All of your ancestors were more of the technical type as well. But to be honest, I would not be surprised if you actually get it done.¡±

    He simply did not want to understand. Yes, I would look into it. I would try my best. But¡­ there was a reason why I did not tackle the Folly before.

    In the end, I blew out some air while I shook my head.

    ¡°I think I am at my limit. All this¡­ it is too much. I think it is better when we stop it for now.¡±

    He was obviously not happy about it but forced a smile.

    ¡°Understandable. I had nearly six years getting used to the idea. All this has to be world-shattering for you. You can call me anytime.¡±

    ¡°I will. It was¡­ strangely nice meeting you.¡±

    ¡°It was nice to finally meet you as well.¡±

    I stood up, gave him a wave, and moved back into my mindscape.

    Here, I lifted the strict settings on my avatar and nearly fell down from the stress. Wow¡­ I had not realized that I was that stressed, that impacted. After what seemed an eternity for me, I finally got a grip on my emotions, my raging mind.

    Now if only I could trust him. But he was a politician. Even in the real world, sitting just on the other side of a real table from him would not allow me to find out if he lied or not. And I¡­ was aware enough to realize that a connection to Enki, to me, was something any politician would love to have.

    And I had heard what he had said in the council.

    Mostly rhetorically, I asked into the air, but in reality to Warden:

    ¡°You can¡¯t tell me if he was telling the truth, can you?¡±

    Warden¡¯s first words in her answer were no surprise:

    ¡°No, I can not. I would have had to have access to his neural signature when he was talking. The probability of that backfiring and making him into an enemy for you was too high to risk it.¡±

    I nodded. Exactly what I had expected.

    ¡°But the research I have done in the archives corroborates part of his story. You already know about your mother. Several sources claim that Joshua Knowles, Benedict Knowles, Caleb Knowles, and Evan Knowles have a predilection for torturing and killing prostitutes and unfortunate ¡®low-class¡¯  victims.¡±

    Yeah, I knew that much already. I mean, there were always rumors about that. But such rumors were not a really reliable source of information.

    ¡°Rumors won¡¯t help me here I fear.¡±

    ¡°I am not talking about rumors. I have found several police reports that investigate some dead ¡®peasants¡¯ or prostitutes, including autopsy, where the act of torture was obvious, that all ended in the code 1788-1K.

    Further investigation of Commonwealth Peacekeeper Corps procedures showed that 1788 means somebody untouchable did it, while the 1K suffix means it was a Knowles.¡±

    I had to take a few seconds to really understand what she had just said. The whole concept of untouchable was so prevalent in Nowhere that the police had a separate code for it? Were those jerks for real?

    ¡°There¡­ there is a code for it? Seriously?¡±

    ¡°Yes, there is an official code for it. The 1K for Knowles is by far the most numerous I could find in the police reports. Followed by 1D for Dalgon. Interestingly 1V for Vandermeer has the same priority, but has never been used as far as I can ascertain.¡±

    I took a couple of deep breaths, trying to force down the raising rage.

    ¡°So¡­ we can say with some certainty that Knowles and his spawn are sadistic murderers. Anything else?¡±

    ¡°Yes, a disproportionate number of the victims have been redheads. Approximately 12.52%.¡±

    Ok, that was more than just disproportionate. Even in the and of the 2240s, redheads made up a whopping 1.2% of the population of the Commonwealth.

    So, what Warden was saying is that 1. The Knowles were sadistic pricks, 2. They had been untouchable and 3. They had a grudge against redheads.

    Add in that they apparently managed to get my mother declared dead¡­ yes, it did fit what Vandermeer had said.

    I sighed.

    ¡°Can you give an estimate of what Vandermeer telling being the truth?¡±

    ¡°All sources I can access taken together make it a probability of approximately 78.87% that he was telling the truth. There is a probability of approximately 3.36% that he was purposefully telling a lie. It is approximately 13.68% that he himself was misinformed. The remaining 4.09% are undefined.¡±

    Ok, that made it quite clear. Sure, Warden did not have all the information. Heck, she only had what was in dark web archives. But what she did have said that Vandermeer told me the truth as he knew it with a better than 90% probability.

    It seemed he really was another victim in all of this. Dang, it would be hard to let go of nearly 18 years of anger toward that man.

 2:29: Hippocrates

    To say that I was at the end of my limits when I surfaced from cyberspace would be an understatement. I was mentally and emotionally way beyond where I thought my limits were.

    I was in one word, empty. I had nothing left to give. And so it took me a moment to comprehend that Ben was sitting in an overstuffed chair beside my cyber chair. It took me even longer to realize that I was no longer lying on my VR furniture and in Ben¡¯s arms.

    I can¡¯t say how long I was just sitting in his lap, pressing my head against his breast. I know it was some time though. When I was coherent enough to be able to have at least basic thoughts again, I began to realize that it was rather unusual for Ben to sit in a chair in my cyber room. Especially in an overstuffed chair that was completely new in said room.

    It still took me a moment to realize that I should at least question this state.

    ¡°Why¡­ how can you be here?¡±

    The whole time, Ben had just sat there in silence, holding me in his arms, gently rubbing my shoulders.

    Now he smiled affectionately at me, but with some concern shown in his eyes.

    ¡°I assume that I am not unwelcome?¡±

    My addled brain was at first confused about what he just said, but when I finally understood what he had said, I shook my head, a minute amount.

    ¡°No, not unwelcome. But unexpected.¡±

    He pressed his forehead to mine for a few seconds.

    ¡°Michael said that it might be a good idea for me to be here when you got out of cyberspace.¡±

    Michael! Of course.

    I buried my face back in Ben¡¯s torso, murmuring: ¡°He was right.¡±

    Ben chuckled softly. "The fact that my shirt is quite wet told me that already.¡±

    Again, it took me a moment to comprehend him. ¡°Oh, yes. He was right about that too. But he was right about Vandermeer. I¡­ it is soo much worse than I thought. And I had no idea.¡±

    I felt Ben¡¯s muscles strain when I said that.

    ¡°I¡­ I can try to do something about him. But he is effectively a head of state. I don¡¯t think I can get to him.¡±

    What did he mean? Get to him? Why would he want to get to Vandermeer? Then I understood. He was talking about killing him. But why? Oh, right, I had not yet explained what had really happened.

    ¡°No, no. Not Vandermeer. He¡­ what I thought about him was wrong. So wrong. He¡­ the idea that he could have gotten me out of my torture any time¡­ that was just more misinformation. No, disinformation. They told me that he decided to not bow down to the jerks of Panacea and that I was being tortured for that.

    But¡­ he did not know. He did not even know that I existed. Panacea, Knowles, and his abominations of spawn, they officially declared my mother as killed before I was born. Vandermeer only learned that I existed when I was 13. And by then they¡­ they told him they would just kill me if he tried to contact me.¡±

    While I explained all that to Ben, I leaned a bit back so that I could see his face better, and I saw this face get an expression that I had never seen and wished that I had never to see again. It was¡­ not rage. No, this was ice-cold fury.

    ¡°Knowles. He is even¡­ harder to get to than Vandermeer. I¡­ it will take me some time to get to him. His sons are a bit easier.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°They¡­ Vandermeer will put them into prison for a few years.¡±

    That did little to make Ben let go of his anger.

    ¡°And then? They will be out and as powerful as now, but with even more malice, more hatred.¡±

    Now it was on me to chuckle softly, but I still buried my face in his shirt.

    ¡°They will be broken. A few years when they can¡¯t react is all I need.¡±

    I could barely believe how much Ben being there had helped me. It had centered me, given me some peace back. But while meeting Vandermeer had not quite taken 10 minutes in real time, my Saturday was shot. To be fair, I had no need to work weekends anyway.

    I had one duty though. I needed to apologize to Michael. I was still not happy about the way he forced me to meet Vandermeer, but he had been right. Fortunately, he was graceful enough to not crow about it.

    Nonetheless, I ended up lazing around the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday. I needed it, to recharge my batteries.

    I started Monday not by immersing myself in how the fertilization process worked, but to finish some other projects. First, I created a new first aid kit. Essentially a prepackaged injector full of nano-bots, cloning stimulants, and resources for cell division. Along with a small, but still relatively powerful controller.

    It was dumb, dirty, and fast, but in an emergency, it would heal damaged tissue in a few minutes, an hour tops. Heck, it could even help with healing the bone, though that was still a matter of days.

    It was also around the size of a bottle of water. This thing alone would reduce PEES''s importance substantially.

    Next, I decided to work on the auto-surgeon. No, I did not make the low-end version that Michael had harped on. Get real, with the new NADAs, it would be actually more expensive to use 30 old tech processors compared to one, or two Chimaera.

    No, I upgraded it. All the bells and whistles, and then some. I designed a small, but powerful pharmacological molecular forge, and a specialized nano-fab. I added a nutrient tank.

    And most of all, I designed a version that used the conveyor tech I had designed for the NADAs instead of manipulators, and microscale disruptors instead of lasers. Yes, I knew that this was limited to the planetary systems, but it would be the top-of-the-line system. Unfortunately, the control of the conveyor required a second Chimaera.

    But that was not a big problem. By now, it was ready for the medical VI, to be the world''s first auto-doc. And of course, it was quite modular. You don¡¯t need the pharmacopeia? Leave it out. No nano-bots? Save yourself the money for the nano-fab. After some thinking, I also made a BOU module. I mean, I had this awesome new technology that had way better resolution than any scanner on the market, so why not use it?

    In the end, I was still not up to snuff. After some not-so-fruitful attempts of trying to get a deeper understanding of how mammals procreate¡­ I gave up for the day. It just wasn¡¯t working for me right then.

    Not that the day had been wasted. It was just not up to my usual standards.

    Michael and I had changed our Tuesday meeting into a full meeting of the Enki execs by that point. That meant that I had moved my Tuesday work to the Enki HQ. Honestly, it made not much of a difference if I was sitting in my office there, or my cyber room in the fortress.

    Ok, the food was better in the fortress, but not by much. By then, our lunchroom used the meat vats and vegetable cloning systems extensively, and our cooks had been trained in cyberspace to near perfection.

    My Bodyguard of the day spent most of the day in the anteroom. This specific Tuesday, it was Ryan¡¯s turn. And while the computer in the office was up and running, I used Glory remotely. Don¡¯t get me wrong, the computer was a marvel, but Glory was just a tad faster.

    Modularity simply had its price, and in this case, the price was performance and efficiency. Not much, but enough to make Glory, an extremely specialized and integrated cyber-board the better choice.

    The price of the high integration on the other hand was that if ever anything in Glory broke, I would have to completely rebuild her.

    But I was rambling again. Point was, this specific Tuesday I was mostly procrastinating. I simply hated biology, and I dreaded having to invest any effort into it. Yes, I had agreed to do it, and I knew it was necessary, but still¡­

    I managed to get some of it worked through before the meeting nonetheless. Go me, yay.

    Is it bad that I actually looked forward to the meeting? I mean, those meetings were important, but mostly a rehashing of where we were standing.

    In front of the boardroom, I almost ran into Alena and noticed that she had changed her hair color. Again. For the fourth time since I met her. That I knew of. Somehow I did not think that this behavior was were good for the hairs in question.

    Sure, one could use nanobots to repair any damage, but¡­ well, it was her hair.

    While I slowly followed her into the room, musing about her permanently changing coloration, I suddenly got an idea. Well, more work for Jessi and the minions.

    As usual, an android butler had provided a load of coffee for everybody except Naveen.

    The Colonel preferred tea. Not surprisingly, the butler already knew all of our preferences in sugar, milk, syrup, or whatever, and each of us had his or her perfect beverage steaming in front of them.

    When Eli, who I had by now found out to be biologically female, but completely asexual in all her being arrived as the last one, and the bot closed the door, Michael opened up the meeting:

    ¡°Good morning to all of you. I congratulate all of you on another very successful week. Let Alena tell you how we did.¡±

    Alena, who this week had neon pink hair and almost startling flamboyant makeup smiled happily.

    ¡°With pleasure. For the fifth week in the series, our revenue has risen. By now we sell around $47 million in Q-links per day. In addition to the $7.8 million in cyberware. Unfortunately, for the time being, that will be more or less the upper limit of what we can get for the Q-links. We¡¯ve maxed out the second production facility.¡±

    Marcel frowned.

    ¡°Wait a minute, if the limit is what we can produce, why don¡¯t we build a third facility?¡±

    James sighed.

    ¡°Won¡¯t help us anything. We have space and time available in the second facility, but we lack the people to work there. Maybe if the new bots that the R&D department has cooked up work out we can use them. Otherwise, we have to either find personnel or buy some bots. And Mike has already nixed the bot-buying idea.¡±

    Marcel frowned harder now.

    ¡°You have stopped James from buying bots for it? Why the hell did you do that?¡±

    Michael took a deep breath before he answered:

    ¡°One of the goals for Enki is to provide employment for as many people of Queens as possible. Yes, we will temporarily lose some business, but I think middle and long term it will even out. Especially as there is no alternative to the Q-link.¡±

    Marcel rolled his eyes but remained silent.

    Instead, Tiffany piped up:

    ¡°So¡­ the problem is that we can¡¯t get workers then? If we have used up the available manpower, why not switch to bots then?¡±

    Maggie shook her head.

    ¡°We have exhausted the readily available pool of employees, that is true. Unfortunately, that group makes up not quite 10% of the people of Queens who are willing to work. We are working on changing that, but even with Chiron that is not done by tomorrow.¡±

    Her mentioning Chiron made me cock my head.

    ¡°Does Chiron work out ok? Or do I have to tune some things?¡±

    Now Maggie was all smiles.

    ¡°Oh no, Chiron is marvelous. A pure joy to work with. No, the problem are the people. Let¡¯s be honest, our educational system is designed to create sheep that are easy to control. From what I understand, the 10% we already employ would be at best marginally educated by most developed nations'' standards.

    It just takes time, even in VR, to learn the basics. I think in three to five months, our pool to choose from will double, maybe a bit more. But¡­ until then we have drained the well.¡±

    Kenneth rubbed his chin.

    ¡°Correct me if I am wrong, but we could sell ten times as many Q-links as we do now and would not exhaust the demand, right?¡±

    Marcel nodded without saying a word, but Alena answered verbally:

    ¡°No, you are right. Hell, twenty times would maybe make a dent in the demand, but seriously, it seems that every time I look there is some new use for the things.¡±

    Kenneth some gestures with his hands and continued:

    ¡°What I am trying to say is that even if we set up two or more facilities to build Q-links with bots, we will still have enough demand to set up another one for the newly trained people when they are ready. If we use androids to do the work we can even replace them one-to-one, or more like three-to-one.¡±

    It took me a moment to get where he was going with the three-to-one.

    ¡°I think you are overestimating the bots a bit. They can only work 12 hours at the utmost before they have to recharge. For another six hours. That makes an even 108 hours a week. If we assume the usual 10-hour work days six days a week for a worker, we won¡¯t get even twice the work out of a bot.¡±

    Kenneth waved his hand dismissively.

    ¡°Ok, so not quite as good as I thought, fine. But the general gist remains the same. Thing is, we don¡¯t have enough workforce now. What will happen when we reveal the replicators? The new grav coils? The new processors? Can anybody here honestly say we won¡¯t have 10, 20, or even 50 times the work? Even if we somehow manage to employ every single person in Queens that wants to work, we won¡¯t have enough. Sooner or later we will need to use bots.

    So why not start now?¡±

    Michael nodded softly.

    ¡°Because I want to use our bots. The ones with the new food-powered system. The ones with manual dexterity equaling or surpassing humans. The ones that don¡¯t need to be charged for six hours out of 18.¡±

    With the last words, he looked expectantly at Maynard, who, somewhat comically did not even realize he was under scrutiny.

    Michael rolled his eyes, barely, and then spoke:

    ¡°Maynard?¡±

    Maynard flinched and looked as if he had been put on the carpet, despite Michael just softly asking his name.

    ¡°Yes, what? Oh sorry, I was thinking about something else.¡±

    Michael smiled softly.

    ¡°I am sure it was something important, but can you try to stay in this meeting for now? We were talking about bots, and the new ones your people cooked up especially. How is it going?¡±

    Maynard scrunched his eyes and then shook his head.

    ¡°Oh, yes¡­ the bots. Well, the big ones we are still working on. Scaling them up is not as easy as we thought. But the human-sized ones, and the ones a bit bigger, are working out fine. I am sure that there will be a few kinks to iron out, but¡­ well you know how it is.¡±

    Michael nodded.

    ¡°Nothing is perfect on the first try, I know. So that means we can go into mass-producing them?¡±

    Maynard shrugged.

    ¡°Sure, but we have to either scale back the production of military bots or build a new facility.¡±

    Naveen spoke up for the first time in this meeting:

    ¡°I would argue against scaling back the military bots. At least for now.¡±

    Alena sighed.

    ¡°Come on Naveen. Yes, I understand that you want the military bots for our security. But if we don¡¯t decide to sell them, at one point or another we will have enough of them. And then we are sitting there with the facilities empty. There has to be a middle ground.¡±

    James ran a finger over the bridge of his nose.

    ¡°One question, how much longer will it take to make a bot if we use one of the big replicators for it?¡±

    They all turned their attention to me. I made some small calculations before I answered:

    ¡°It will take about 30 to 50% longer.¡±

    James nodded and set on to continue his thought but I was not done yet.

    ¡°If we use a NADA of the same footprint as the assembly line for the bots, we can make eight of them at once though. The overall throughput will be around 5-10% lower, but it will take around four times the energy.¡±

    ¡°I understand. So the efficiency is for crap, but when we have enough bots, either military or industrial, we can use the same replicators for whatever else. And if we run into a bottleneck where we need more bots, we can switch them back to bots.¡±

    Michael smiled at James.

    ¡°That is actually a pretty good idea. I am not convinced that we will not sell the industrial bots though. But that is for the future. Right now, having several replicators up and running is a good investment. We are already building them as fast as we can anyway.¡±

    Maynard frowned for a moment.

    ¡°That reminds me, Vivian, is there a reason why all the NADAs have old processors?¡±

    Old processors? Oh frick, of course¡­

    ¡°Uh¡­ yes, there is. I needed the NADA to make the new processors, and I plain forgot to update them. Not that it will hurt that much. It will make the control unit smaller and cheaper, but even now, it takes only 12 Tesseracts to run one of the big ones. We can replace that with a Chronos easily.¡±

    Michael chuckled before he spoke into the round:

    ¡°Nice to see that even Vivian can mess up. Makes us lesser mortals not feel too bad.¡±

    Then he spoke more seriously:

    ¡°I assume you can have R&D make the switch over, Maynard?¡±

    ¡°No problem. That is a trivial switch. Should be no longer than a day or two.¡±

    ¡°Very well, see to it, please.¡±

    Aleena looked pretty pleased.

    ¡°Does that mean that our bottleneck will vanish in the future? Nice. As it is, we can sell ten times as many Q-links as we can produce now. And honestly, I would love for Enki to be a corporation that has half a billion a day in revenue. It¡¯s a shame that we can¡¯t use the replicators to make more Q-links.¡±

    I shrugged and scoffed.

    ¡°Oh, we can use them. It just makes no sense. A NADA is way slower than the simple carbon extruder that we use for the Q-links.¡±

    That did not seem to hurt her good mood in any way.

    ¡°Whatever. Carbon extruders are cheap. And don¡¯t take up much space.¡±

    What could one say to that? She was right of course. And half a billion dollars per day in profit after taxes was exceptional. And that would explode when we started selling the NADAs, grav coils, and processors. And all the rest.

    James still looked thoughtful though.

    ¡°How long does it take to make a replicator? The really big ones I mean.¡±

    ¡°The 15x15x3m ones? If we use the design with the Tesseracts, around 16 hours. It takes some time to make the processors and the electronics for them. If we switch over to Chronos and make the processors and electronics in batches in one of the big ones¡­ I would say three to four hours.¡±

    Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

    When James perked up, I smiled and shook my head.

    ¡°And then you have the startup. The NADA has to make the nanobots first. That will take around 44 hours. After that, it is ready.¡±

    Arnedra looked confused.

    ¡°Wait, can¡¯t we make the nanobots while we are building the damn things? Maybe make a really big and fast nanofab for making them?¡±

    I was already shaking my head and opening my mouth to answer in the negative when it hit me.

    ¡°You know what, maybe we can. The problem is that we need the nanobots connected to the control board with Q-links, and those links have to be made with the bots.

    But¡­ if we are redesigning the control system to use Chronos anyway, we can make it modular so that we use a specialized nanofab to populate prefabricated control modules with the Q-links.

    Would make things a bit more complicated and expensive than the monolithic approach, not to mention a little bit slower in relative times¡­ but in absolute numbers, it would be negligible and you can prefabricate batches of bots while the NADA is made.¡±

    I smiled.

    ¡°And it would make scaling the NADAs much easier. Just build in the appropriate number of modules for the tank size, and be done. We won¡¯t be able to go bigger than around 100m or so in any dimension either way though. After that, we need so much energy to beam into the tank to reach the center that we will fry the bots on the outside. But seriously, a 100x100x100m cube¡­ what could we need that for?¡±

    Get real, the thought alone was laughable. The 675m3 NADA was plenty big enough. Sure, if we wanted to build a big vehicle like a utility skimmer, all at once, we would need a bigger one. But come on, why would we do that?

    Thankfully, nobody seemed to be of a different opinion.

    Michael shook his head, smiling.

    ¡°Well, after we have thoroughly derailed the discussion, Alena, is there anything to add on financial beyond ¡®we good¡¯?¡±

    The pink-haired woman smiled and shook her head.

    ¡°Nope, boss. ¡®We good¡¯ is a very succinct description of our finances.¡±

    ¡°Good, then, Maggie, you touched on Chiron. Anything to add there?¡±

    Maggie took a moment to collect her thoughts.

    ¡°Our problem in that regard is penetration. There are around 200k people living in Queens right now, though nobody knows the actual numbers. But so far, only 6322 have taken our offer of employment or education with the goal of employment. And that out of a pool of around 120k of working age.¡±

    She sighed.

    ¡°The education system here is set up to pressure them into being obedient trash that can¡¯t form an original thought. And¡­ we simply lack the incentive to get those idiots to even look at what we offer.¡±

    Marcel was rubbing his chin.

    ¡°Maybe¡­ just to make this clear, we want those people to go into cyberspace and get a basic education, right?¡±

    When Maggie nodded, Marcel continued:

    ¡°But to do that, they need cyber-capable computers. Let¡¯s be honest, most of the people of queens can barely afford a com.¡±

    Maggie shrugged.

    ¡°We are providing several teaching centers where we have the needed hardware. But they don¡¯t take advantage of our offer.¡±

    ¡°If I¡¯m understanding it right, for the right to education, they have to sign a letter of intent that they will work for us later on?¡±

    Maggie smiled sadly.

    ¡°Yes. I would give it away, but that would make the teachers union run rampant against us. And of course the other big corps of NYC. They want the people to be sheep.¡±

    Now Marcel smiled evilly.

    ¡°But¡­ what if we don¡¯t give away the education. I mean, we have just restarted the game studios. How about we design a cheap, Envision-capable system, buy a mass license from Ralcon, and give them away under the pretext that the people then buy the games? As a regionally limited promotion?

    And those cheap computers just so happen to be connected to the matrix via Chiron, and the education is just another piece of ¡®bloatware¡¯?¡±

    Ok, that was slick. Nobody would complain if we gave the ¡®riffraff¡¯ another way to waste time. And let¡¯s be real, we could afford it. Just the profits from one week would be enough to provide everybody in Queens with such a computer.

    Alena took the thing a step further.

    ¡°Why¡­ don¡¯t we open a telecom department? Provide communications service via Q-link? Have the people pay¡­ let¡¯s say $10 a month for a connection of their sponsored computer to the matrix and a link from their computer to their com?

    A cheap garbage can costs what? $200 to make? And our overhead for the service is negligible. So we make a profit of $9.50 each month for each computer. It will take two years for them to ¡°pay off¡± the computer, and nobody can accuse us of tampering.

    And Chiron is just part of the service, buried somewhere.¡±

    Michael looked far away for a moment, clearly looking up something in his implants.

    ¡°So¡­ I have just had Warden calculate the cost for a Hyperion 3 1200 with a Theia 10 and bottom tier specs¡­ if we dedicate one of the big replicators for the electronics and have the case made by the carbon extruders¡­ it will cost us around $144. Including one diadem.

    Now if we add in a bottom line Bia 15 com into the package, as well as the Q-links it will all-in-all cost us $220.¡±

    Marcel likewise had a 1000yard stare for a moment, before his evil smile became even more sinister.

    ¡°If we go after today¡¯s prices and historical data, I would say we market that package at $860. $600 for the computer, and $260 for the com. And we then charge $15 a month for the service. That is still a third of what they pay today for their com.¡±

    Now Maggie looked absolutely diabolic when she smiled toothily.

    ¡°And how about we ¡®donate¡¯ the package and the service as ¡®tax breaks¡¯ to a local charity for the poor? With that, we should be able to reach almost everybody. And nobody can complain¡­ because it is all just another scheme to make money. And evade paying taxes.¡±

    Michael rapped on the table.

    ¡°So¡­ as soon as we announce the new processor lineup, we will put this scheme into motion, or is anybody against it?¡±

    When nobody spoke up, he smiled.

    ¡°Ok, Marcel, that is your baby. Run with it! Any other problems Maggie?¡±

    ¡°Nope, nothing for the whole C-suite to work on. Everything else is small fry that my people can take care of.¡±

    Michael looked at her for a moment.

    ¡°Ok, fine, next topic. Naveen, where are we with the defenses?¡±

    Naveen leaned back in his chair.

    ¡°It¡¯s going pretty well. We have decided to mostly use the grav guns in the configuration that Vivian has demonstrated. Around 20% will be particle beams, half of that electron beams, and the other half proton beams.

    Then we will emplace several disruptors around our buildings. But I don¡¯t count those as anti-ship weapons.

    Finally, we will have the minions design a variant of the grav gun. They told me if we reduce the size of the projectile somewhat and use a modified grav conveyor we can create an insanely fast-firing grav gun. Somewhat around 200k rounds per minute.

    This is an additional, and obvious, point defense system. So that we can distract any unfriendly onlookers from the particle beams and the disruptors. And of course the missiles.

    By now we have already 72 big grav guns, seven each electron and proton beams, 22 disruptors, and around 1000 missiles, 500 of them with disruptor heads, the rest half kinetic and half fusion. The new point defense grav gun will be tested end of the week.¡±

    He took a sip from his tea.

    ¡°I already had a light battalion, roughly 500, men and women from my days as a mercenary, who came with me. I have hired additional 362 people. That means we have around a battalion of human military. And before you ask, my two psionics did the recruiting.

    In addition, we have five full-strength battalions of the new combat bots. On their own, they are dangerous but stupid. An intelligent enemy will probably get away with one soldier for three of the 6000 bots we have.¡±

    Then he smiled as was apparently fashion that day very evilly.

    ¡°If you bring Cerberus into the equation¡­ let¡¯s say stupid does no longer come into play. He is¡­ less intuitive than any of us, but tactical and strategical he is a monster. The only way I can beat him is by being illogical.

    My suggestion is we sell a variant of the military bots without the uplink and keep Cerberus, or at least his full capabilities secret. If any enemy thinks he can overwhelm our bots with numbers¡­ well, if Cerberus controls them, they will need a couple dozen soldiers for each bot.¡±

    Then he turned to me.

    ¡°By the way, is there any possibility for us to get some power armor?¡±

    I shrugged helplessly.

    ¡°Well, we can look into buying some, but for the near future I won¡¯t have the time to make one, sorry.¡±

    He took that pretty well and just shrugged.

    ¡°That¡¯s ok. It would be nice, but as an A-tier corp, we should have access to some. Hell, I bet we can even get the plans for the Templar armor now that Falconer is broken.¡±

    Michael shook his head.

    ¡°Templar is crap. But don¡¯t worry, I am negotiating to get you Finnsleif armor.¡±

    Now Naveen leaned forward so abruptly that he nearly spilled what was left of his tea.

    ¡°Finnsleif? Nowhere frontline power armor? For real? How the fuck did you manage that?¡±

    Michael placed his chin on his knuckles.

    ¡°Let¡¯s say we have an in with Vandermeer. And it is not the Nowhere Finnsleif, but the full Vandermeer one.¡±

    ¡°Wait, there is a difference? And how the fuck do we have an in with Vandermeer?¡±

    ¡°I¡¯ve been told that there is a difference, and how we have an in is not important right now. And it is not a completely one-sided deal. We will sell them the bots. The full ones.¡±

    Naveen frowned.

    ¡°That is¡­ dangerous. Well, we don¡¯t need the surprise, but if any enemy expects the full capabilities of those bots, it will be expensive. We should not trust anybody. Especially not a triple-A corporation.¡±

    Michael shook his head.

    ¡°In general I agree with you, but Vandermeer is a¡­ special case. I am absolutely convinced we can trust them. We are right now considering a formalized alliance.¡±

    Naveen¡¯s frown deepened.

    ¡°Are you sure? I am sorry, but I must voice my concerns about that.¡±

    Michael pinged me via private message:

    M: I think we have to tell them.

    V: Do you think we can trust them with that?

    M: Yes, I do. Dad was very careful in selecting the people, and Darren helped us.

    I took a deep breath, and thought about it for a moment, before sighing.

    V: Fine. Do it!

    The whole discussion had taken just as long as my breath and sigh, and Michael shook his head.

    ¡°Ok fine. I understand your concerns. So, I am telling you why I think we can trust Vandermeer. But one thing, this is absolutely secret for now, understand?¡±

    When all of them nodded, Michael continued:

    ¡°I don¡¯t know what you know about Nathan Vandermeer¡¯s family, but¡­ he has a daughter.¡±

    Naturally, it was Alena who knew the most detail, among them.

    ¡°Yeah. She was long thought dead. But suddenly reappeared a couple of years back. She is sick though from what I heard. But what does that have to do with us trusting him?¡±

    Michael smiled.

    ¡°She is not sick, she was experimented on by Panacea and¡­ let¡¯s say she is brain-damaged. But the important part is that she has a daughter as well.¡±

    Alena scoffed.

    ¡°Are you talking about the missing heir rumors? Yeah, there is quite a bit of talk about it, but if there was a granddaughter, don¡¯t you think she would have surfaced by now?¡±

    Michael shook his head.

    ¡°Not if she doesn¡¯t want to surface. And¡­ it is no rumor. I know for a fact that the granddaughter exists.¡±

    I saw Naveen¡¯s eyes suddenly widen and then focus on me. Apparently at least one of them had already solved the riddle.

    But Michael continued:

    ¡°The point is that the granddaughter has been poisoned against Vandermeer by the Knowles and Panacea.¡±

    Marcel snorted.

    ¡°Get real, even if she hates the old fart, she would be insane to give up all that wealth.¡±

    Michael shook his head.

    ¡°She does not need Vandermeer¡¯s wealth. What I am trying to tell you is that Vivian is Vandermeer¡¯s granddaughter.¡± That hit like a bombshell and all except Naveen, Michael, and me were sitting with their mouths wide open.

    ¡°They recently had a¡­ somewhat reluctant talk, and at least for now reconciled somewhat. Point is, Vandermeer is trying to deepen their relationship. And Vivian, who as you know is the majority owner of Enki, is a minority owner of Vandermeer too, as well as the heir to the whole company.

    And Nathan wants to build a relationship with her. Of course, that means that in the distant future, Enki and Vandermeer will be merging when Vivian owns both of them. And that means that the leadership of Vandermeer and now you know about that.¡±

    Naveen nodded slowly.

    ¡°I see now. I assume that is the reason why Nathan Vandermeer wanted to meet Vivian? And why we had such easy access to the S&P Excelsior? Honestly, in that case, I withdraw my objections.¡±

    Alena slowly recovered from her shock and looked at me wide-eyed.

    ¡°But¡­ why¡­ how? Why are you here? Why not in Seattle?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°As Michael said, Panacea did a very good job in poisoning any nice thoughts I ever had about Nathan Vandermeer. Until Saturday, I thought he did not care about me. And¡­ I was bitter about it.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ but what happened?¡±

    I closed my eyes.

    ¡°Please accept that that is a very private, and painful topic for me. It has to be enough that he is¡­ sorry, I still can¡¯t say it.¡±

    I chuckled nervously.

    ¡°It has to be enough that you know that I am his heir, ok?¡±

    When Alena opened her mouth to dig deeper Naveen calmly put a hand over her mouth.

    ¡°Let it be. She told you this is painful. And the way she said it¡­ this is deep seating trauma. Don¡¯t pick at the scab.¡±

    Alena glared at Naveen for a moment, before she shrugged and nodded. When Naveen removed his hand, she answered verbally:

    ¡°Ok fine. But¡­ how can you resist asking?¡±

    ¡°Not everybody is a gossip hound. And I¡¯ve seen enough people close to breaking to recognize when to let it go.¡±

    I sighed and gave Naveen a tentative, but thankful smile.

    Michael then rapped on the table again.

    ¡°Now, can we go back to business? Thing is, we will work relatively closely with Vandermeer in the future. That means we get their small arms, their power armor, and some technical assistance in the big weapons.

    In return, we will offer them our big anti-ship weapons, the bots, and they will be the only ones who will get a full license for the replicators, even if they don¡¯t know it yet. With that in mind, when do you think we are safe enough to announce the replicators, Naveen?¡±

    The Indian man tapped his fingers rhythmically on the table before he answered:

    ¡°I would say we can defend against anything but the full military of any triple-A in a couple of weeks. By then we will have around 12k bots, and enough big weapons to destroy an attacking battlefleet.¡±

    Michael nodded.

    ¡°So, in two weeks we will announce the replicators, the new coils, and the new processors.¡±

    He turned to Maynard:

    ¡°You already told us what the status of the new industrial bots is. Anything else to add?¡±

    Maynard shrugged.

    ¡°Only small stuff. We have successfully downgraded the auto-surgeon. It goes now from bare bones to what Vivian created. Well mostly. My minions identified one flaw in it.¡±

    A flaw? What flaw could that be? I had taken pains to ensure that it was the very best auto-surgeon that could be gotten. I tilted my head and raised an eyebrow looking at him. Thankfully, Maynard continued without any prompting:

    ¡°Well, it is not a big flaw, mind you. They just noticed that while it has an MRT, it doesn¡¯t have a GRT.

    Somewhat understandable as you did not have the new, cheaper grav coils then. But there is no reason not to offer it as a module for it now.¡±

    He was right. Well, the minions were right. Before I reinvented the grav coils, a gravity resonance tomograph set any hospital back at least 20 million ITB, or around $70 million. I had planned the auto-surgeon to cost around $500k. There was simply no room in the budget for the GRT. Not that any auto-surgeon had one, mind you.

    I nodded.

    ¡°I assume they designed one for it?¡±

    When Maynard nodded as well, I continued:

    ¡°Is it modular? Because I have upgraded the auto-surgeon. Designed several modules for it so that it can easily convert into an auto-doc.¡±

    Michael snorted and Tiffany squinted at me confused:

    ¡°Wait a minute, only four weeks ago you were so vehemently fighting against working on the auto-surgeon again, and now you did it anyway?¡±

    I rolled my eyes but forced a smile. Tiffany was nice enough, but not exactly the brightest bulb.

    ¡°I was against downgrading it. I designed it to cost around $70k to make with an industrial fabber. With a full assembly line, it costs around $30k. We can sell it for $100k and make 233% profit on it. There is no point in making it even cheaper. There is only one cheaper auto-surgeon on the market right now, and that is the Enertech Surgeboy.

    That one costs $65k. And is not worth the materials it is made from. Ask any medical doctor about it, it is garbage. Unlike mine¡­ well, ours. That one is in my opinion the best.

    So cheapening it was in my opinion a classic exercise in futility.¡±

    I calmed down a bit.

    ¡°What I did was upgrade it. Add additional functionality. But let¡¯s ask Maynard, what did the Minions do to downgrade it?¡±

    Maynard had the honesty to look embarrassed.

    ¡°Uhm¡­ to be honest¡­ they redesigned the electronics to use old-style processors. And they reduced the functionality to make a handful of tiers where the number of processors was reduced.¡±

    I smiled.

    ¡°And what will the cheapest of those downgraded auto-surgeons cost to manufacture?¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°Well, the cheapest, which is not that much better than the Surgeboy as I¡¯ve been told, will cost us around $28k. The full one with the complete functionality will cost around $40k to make. Of course, that is without the GRT.¡±

    Tiffany looked contrite:

    ¡°So¡­ redesigning it was useless? I mean we will announce the new processors in two weeks anyway, so why build a more expensive one?¡±

    I smiled.

    ¡°That was my whole argument.¡±

    Michael shook his head and spoke softly.

    ¡°Don¡¯t be unfair, Viv. We could not know if you would manage to create sufficiently powerful weapons to make us safe. Even for $40k, the auto-surgeon would be a winner. Not if we have the $30k version, but if we can¡¯t sell that¡­¡±

    I sighed and shook my head, but said nothing, so Michael continued:

    ¡°Did I understand you correctly that you tinkered with the design as well? What did you make for it?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I changed the auto-surgeon itself by replacing the surgical lasers with nanoscale disruptors and the manipulators with tractor beams. That should reduce the scarring even more than the lasers, and make operating on the neural scale much easier.

    The disadvantage is that this model needs to be used in a gravity well for the tractors to work, needs more energy and I needed to integrate a second Chimaera.

    All in all, this model will cost us around $43k to make. We can sell the earlier design as the base model and this new one as the luxury one.

    Then I designed add-on modules for it. A specialized molecular forge to create drugs on the fly, a medical nano-fab, and a nutrient tank so that it can use the cloning tech directly during the surgery.

    Oh, and I designed a BOU module for it as well. It is clearly not as fast as a GRT but has a much higher resolution.¡±

    I smiled into the round.

    ¡°The only thing missing to make it into a full-blown auto-doc is the medical VI.¡±

    At that Jessi chuckled softly.

    ¡°Ah yes, Hippocrates¡­ what a good segue way.¡±

    Michael sounded confused when he asked:

    ¡°Hippokrates?¡±

    Jess smiled.

    ¡°Yes, the medical VI. My team decided to name it Hippocrates after the ancient master of medicine. Yes, I know Viv tends to use gods for names, but¡­ well we liked Hippocrates better.¡±

    ¡°Ah¡­ ok. So¡­ how is it doing?¡±

    Jessi¡¯s smile widened.

    ¡°Perfectly. Honestly, he is better than 80% of all human doctors I¡¯ve ever met. Only the very best doctors can beat him. He had a bit of a struggle with resource management, but when we explained to him why we insisted on it, he learned it quickly.¡±

    Marcel piped up.

    ¡°So¡­ when can we market it?¡±

    Jessi looked at Marcel with some disdain.

    ¡°I thought you knew. We won¡¯t market him. Vivian will release him as freeware.¡±

    Marcel looked completely shocked.

    ¡°Are you serious? After all the work we put into him? Why the fuck do you want to do that?¡±

    The last was directed at me. I sighed while I shook my head.

    ¡°Everybody knows that you can¡¯t make any money in developing a medical VI. Panacea will spike it as soon as they can and roll over that market as well. So why bother in the first place? They can¡¯t make it cheaper than free.

    I created¡­ him not to make money, but to harm Panacea, collapse their market.¡±

    Sadly, Marcel was not yet finished.

    ¡°But you used Enki-resources to do it? Why should Enki not profit from it?¡±

    I rolled my eyes and sighed.

    ¡°Again, there is no money in a medical VI. Panacea will make one as soon as somebody else will do it, and then underbid the ¡®offender¡¯. Trying to market a medical VI is a losing game as long as Panacea exists. And as long as Panacea has a near-monopoly on medical services, nobody can take them out.

    It¡¯s a chicken and egg problem. To profit from creating a medical VI you have to take out Panacea first. To take out Panacea, you need a medical VI. Or something similar.

    The only solution is to simply not play the game and release the medical VI for free. Not giving up but to trash the playing field from the beginning.¡±

    Jessi meanwhile slapped Marcel on the back of his head. Instead of answering me, he turned to the doctor and complained:

    ¡°Hey, what the fuck was that? Why did you do that?¡±

    Jessi shook her head and rolled her eyes.

    ¡°Quit whining you fool. The only Enki resource used to make Hippocrates was my team testing him.

    The rest, all the work put to create him was just Vivian. Nobody else. Well, except Warden and Calliope, I think. But those two are also Vivian¡¯s resources that she also provides to Enki, not the other way around. So if she wants to make Hippocrates free, then she can.¡±

    I sighed and watched the drama happen. When Jessi was finished I spoke up.

    ¡°It is also a very stupid position. You need a VI-capable processor to make a VI, medical or not, run. Guess what, fuzzy logic chips don¡¯t grow on trees. They are almost impossible to come by. And there are absolutely no auto-surgeons available anywhere that are VI-capable.

    Except when in two weeks, we will bring one to market. We will even be nice enough to install Hippocrates if the customer so wishes. For free.

    In other words, every single non-Panacea hospital in the system will scramble to buy our auto-surgeon. To make it into an auto-doc. The very first. It will take a few months for anybody else to follow us into that. And by then, any money we could have made by selling the medical VI will have already come to us via the auto-surgeon.

    And even if another corp brings out a VI-capable auto-surgeon, do you know what will almost certainly be inside it? A Chimaera. So we earn from that too. And from the Q-links that it will take to network them together.

    Giving the VI away for free makes us look altruistic, removes much of any bad reputation we will gain, deservedly or not, probably earns us a nice tax break, and won¡¯t cost us more than a few 100k, if that.¡±

    Marcel crossed his arms in front of him but remained silent.

    Maggie huffed.

    ¡°Think about it, man. It is no different from your scheme of giving computers away to get the people educated. We can¡¯t earn much money by trying to sell Hippocrates, but we will get some people mad at us. Even if just because Panacea riles them up, pays agitators, and whatnot.

    By making him free, we will earn much more with a product that we can sell, that we can make money on, and that is superior but not unique. It will be hard for those assholes in Seattle to paint that in a bad light, especially when we give the ¡®obviously valuable and unique¡¯ VI away.

    We look good, we are doing good, and we make money from it.¡±

    Marcel shook his head.

    ¡°Yes, ok, fine. It is just¡­ it goes against everything I know to give away something this¡­ groundbreaking.¡±

    Michael cleared his throat.

    ¡°Well, now that that is out of the way, is there anything else?¡±

    I nodded slightly but also answered verbally.

    ¡°Yes, a few small things. As I said, the new modules for the auto-surgeon are ready to be tested. But I also have another new toy for you, Jessi. And a couple of new ideas that maybe the Minions can work on.¡±

    Jessi looked at me expectantly, and so I continued.

    ¡°I designed a first aid set for emergencies. Basically a Bia 15 as controller, a load of nano-bots, nutrients, and division stimulation. In an emergency, you inject the liquid part close to the wound, and the controller attaches to the location of the injection and controls the nanobots.

    Those move to the wound and begin cloning the remaining tissue to close the wound, prioritizing blood vessels first and then whatever is most critical. It is dumb, it is quick and dirty, but in an emergency, it might save somebodies life.¡±

    Jessi wrinkled her forehead while she thought about it.

    ¡°I can see that working in an emergency, but any doctor, even most auto-surgeons, will be better. If it just clones stuff indiscriminately, then the doctor will have to do some cleanup later on.¡±

    Naveen rubbed his chin.

    ¡°But in an emergency, when somebody is bleeding out, is it not better to bring a living patient where the doc has to do some cleanup than to bring a dead person to bury? I can see most mercenaries carrying a couple of those things around if we make them cheap enough. Probably all corporate and national military as well.¡±

    Jessi nodded.

    ¡°Yes, of course. I did not mean that it won¡¯t work, but we will have to make sure to understand the problems. And communicate them.¡±

    ¡°Ok, then I got you wrong, sorry. But yes, I think that would be another moneymaker. But¡­ does it have to be a Bia? Why not a Regulon?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Because it is the smallest processor in our lineup. It is overkill, but it would be no more expensive to make than a Regulon 20. It literally makes no difference, other than that we have sole access to the Bia.

    And honestly, one of the big NADAs can make a few hundred thousand Bia 15 at once, in about 30 minutes.

    It makes no sense to use an electronics-fabber. The NADA is much faster in making processors now.¡±

    ¡°I see. Good to know.¡±

    Jessi shrugged.

    ¡°Well, it will be something to make money on, that¡¯s for sure. And it will probably save many lives. You said something about new ideas for the Minions?¡±

    ¡°Yup. I got the idea when I saw that Alena had a new hair color again. No offense, but that can¡¯t be good for your hair.¡±

    Alena chuckled.

    ¡°Nope, you¡¯re right. I spent a fortune on ways to repair the damage. But it¡¯s worth it to me.¡±

    ¡°Hey, you do you. As long as you don¡¯t force me to do it, I have no skin in the game. But that made me think. Why not use nano-bots to dynamically change the hair color? Use an implant like a jack, some nano-bot reservoirs, and then you can change your hair color on the fly. Sure, you will have to refill the bots now and again, but they can also repair the hair when they are there anyway.¡±

    Alena¡¯s eyes sparkled.

    ¡°Wow, that is a nice idea. But would that not be expensive?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°What does one dye job cost for you now? I would guess that you need around $20 worth of bots to make it work for a year or so. Well, unless you decide to use them to lengthen the hair.¡±

    Alena¡¯s jaw fell down for a moment.

    ¡°Wait, that¡¯s possible?¡±

    ¡°Sure, hair is dead tissue. You need to provide the material, and then have the bots build the hair, but that is something that even 10<sup>th</sup> gens can do. It¡¯s the control issue that needs the implant.¡±

    ¡°And 20 bucks? For a year? And it will repair the hair?¡±

    ¡°You will have to provide the materials for the repair, but sure, if the controller is programmed right¡­¡±

    Jessi tapped her cheek for a moment.

    ¡°That sounds more like an engineering problem than a medical one, but yeah, that should be no problem. Just another piece of cyberware. And the other ideas?¡±

    ¡°Again, Alena¡¯s appearance sparked the idea. The animated tattoo that I created so long ago as a proof of concept¡­¡±

    Alena smiled.

    ¡°Oh yeah, that is actually our most profitable cyberware.¡±

    I sighed and winced. The stupidity of humanity truly knew no bounds¡­

    ¡°Well, I still think it is stupid that it is so popular, but whatever. But¡­ if we use it in the face, and program it to look like makeup¡­ well then it is makeup. That also can be changed on the fly. In seconds instead of hours.¡±

    Marcel whistled.

    ¡°Wow¡­ that is¡­ I would say that is a gold mine. Especially as people need some control system for it, and most likely a jack and a HUD.¡±

    ¡°And it would need virtually no modification. Just new programming for the interface.¡±

    Eli spoke for the first time in this meeting but was clearly enthusiastic about it.

    Michael turned towards Jessi and Maynard.

    ¡°What do you say, how hard is it to modify what we already have? And how fast can your people get it done?¡±

    Jessi just shrugged, but Maynard had the faraway look of somebody looking up something with their implants. Finally, he answered:

    ¡°The hair color thing is the hardest. Not very hard, but to engineer the reservoirs in a way that they can be implanted into the skull. After that¡­ well, if my data is correct, one would have to refill them every two or three months. And we should get it ready for testing in a week or so. The makeup thing is for all purposes just some new interface functions for an already existing piece of cyberware. No need for much testing and a couple of our programmers should be able to knock it out in an afternoon.¡±

    ¡°One other thing though.¡± Michael sounded a bit curious when he spoke.

    ¡°You said that you don¡¯t have time to develop some power armor for our men, Viv. Why is that?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Vandermeer gave me a task. And¡­ I have no idea when I am done with it.¡±

    Michael leaned forward, laying his lower arms flat on the table.

    ¡°A¡­ task? That has to be important if you decide to concentrate on it.¡±

    ¡°Yes, it is. Very important. I don¡¯t know if I can do much about it, but I have to try at least.¡±

    Michael chuckled.

    ¡°That was a hint that you should tell us what that task is, you know?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°I am not fully stupid. I just did not want to talk too much about it. But whatever. He asked me to look into the Folly, see if I can find something there.¡±

    Michael nodded.

    ¡°Yup, that is important.¡±

 2.30: New friends?

    After the meeting had ended, I managed to get some information about general fertilization crammed into my head. It was just as boring and tedious as I had feared it would be. And then some.

    That many, if not most, of the researchers loved to thousands of words to say nothing made it even more fun. Let¡¯s be real, reading through nearly 300 years of research on a single topic is rarely a blast, but in this case¡­ well after two virtual months of digging through everything I could find, and my results were summed up in three easy steps to create life:

    <ol>

    <li>The sperm penetrates the ovum.</li>

    <li>A wizard does something</li>

    <li>New life.</li>

    </ol>

    Oh sure, it was a bit more exhausting. We knew pretty well how the sperm gets through the membrane of the ovum, and we know what parts of the sperm cell get left behind. We knew how the ovum prevented multiple sperms going through its walls, and why it sometimes failed.

    We knew how the 23 Chromosomes each of the ovum and the sperm arrange into a fully-fledged cell core.

    And we knew that when all that had happened, the newly created zygote began to divide.

    Unfortunately what neither I nor Warden, could find out was why it began to divide. The ultimate cause of it going from a combination of two mostly inert cells into a new life. The spark of life so to say.

    This also meant we had no clue how Sanderson had managed to stop that tiny, vital function. What happened after the folly was that when the sperm was integrated into the ovum, and the acrosome reaction had gone through, when the spark of life should turn over, nothing happens anymore.

    The combination of ovum and sperm remained an inert cell that could bear no life. That was what made Panacea hoarding their cloning tech so damning. It should be trivial to create a ¡®clone¡¯ that was a perfect combination of its parents. The rest of the process then is just the usual cloning process.

    But Panacea had ruthlessly destroyed anybody who even tried to go that route and compete with them.

    Needless to say, I was pretty exhausted when I surfaced from cyberspace. Mentally as well as physically. Despite doing it for nearly four years by that time, I was still always a bit surprised about how much just sitting still in a chair can exhaust a body.

    During dinner, Michael informed me that the next morning, the Vandermeer delegation would arrive. Splendid. Simply splendid. Well, at least some of them were only temporary guests here.

    The rest¡­ well 24 would apparently remain permanent residents, as much as I loved that. Frick, I was just now slowly coming out of my shell with the others. 32-34 others¡­ that might be too much for me.

    But I had promised to do my best, and my best I would do. Still, my night was anything but restful, and I even woke up Ben a couple of times with my tossing. At least that was what I inferred from him asking if I was alright the next morning.

    We had spent this night in my penthouse in the fortress. It might not be quite as comfortably furnished as Ben¡¯s house, but it had other advantages, like for example the whirlpool. That meant that we had gotten into the routine of switching where we spent the night.

    Though, to be honest, mostly I missed Ben¡¯s amazing library when we were in the fortress. Who would have thought that just curling up into an overstuffed chair with a real book besides a holographic fire would be so¡­ nice.

    If I looked at how my night went, it was not very surprising that the next morning I felt as if I was run over by a stomper herd. Not even the nectar of the gods, also known as coffee, managed to bring me up to snuff.

    When Ben had told me that he would stay the day here, I was just happy that I would not have to face those people alone.

    And still, I was fretting every minute we were waiting for them to actually arrive. Unlike Ernest and the Drunken Owl which had brought me to NYC, Vandermeer was sending his people suborbital. That also meant that it took them only around two hours from start to landing, letting them arrive at La Guardia at 11:15. I had offered to send my skimmers, but had been notified that that was not necessary.

    And so, while I was waiting for a message, Mark suddenly stormed into the mess hall.

    ¡°Have you seen it? Fuck, I would have never thought I would see one. Can you believe it? That is so fucking cool.¡±

    Ben, nursing on a cup of coffee, shook his head and spoke:

    ¡°Calm down. And have we seen what?¡±

    ¡°So, you haven¡¯t seen it! There is a fucking Carnotaurus that has landed in our parking lot.¡±

    A¡­ ¡°A what?¡± I could not help myself.

    Mark rolled his eyes and then spoke slowly as if I were a small child.

    ¡°A Kobashigawa Carnotaurus assault skimmer. Personnel carrier, ground assault, and close air support, all rolled into one heavily armored package. Only the ABAS Peregrine comes even close.¡±

    Ben measuredly placed his cup back on the table and began standing up.

    ¡°It seems they are here. And they have brought their own skimmer.¡±

    I sighed, took one last sip, and then followed Ben to the front door.

    What I saw was not quite what I had expected. Yes, I had gotten from Mark that this Carnotaurus was probably a rather big skimmer. But I was not prepared for the sight of seeing this blocky thing three, maybe even four times the size of my ABAS 675.

    And yes, I had expected some weapon mounts, but seriously, this thing was armed for bear. What I could see were dual heavy Gatling Gauss guns under the chin, a rail gun a bit larger than any of the Gauss, and no less than five laser emplacements. If I had to guess, there were an additional three lasers on the other side and a couple on the belly of this beast.

    Clearly, the people leaving through the side-placed sliding door of the skimmer, past some sort of machine gun, came in three distinctive groups. The largest was, of course, the guard unit that Vandermeer had sent. 24 men and women, in combat armor, with some pretty big guns.

    Another group, also in military uniform, but without the armor, consisted of three men and one woman. They looked less rigid than the guard unit. And finally, there was an apparently civilian group of three men and three women.

    The way they were standing, I got the impression that the last group consisted of three couples, but naturally, I could not be sure. My ability to judge other people was after all still lacking.

    With Ben at my side, and the rest of the people living in the fortress standing nearby I waited until the delegations sorted themselves and began moving toward us.

    The smaller military group was the first to approach us. One of the men was showing what even I could identify as officer markings, though I had no clue what exactly those markings meant, stepped in front of the other three, and briefly saluted us. I could not judge his hair color, he had very short hair and a hat on, but he was somewhat tall for a pure, at around 200, maybe 210cm, and had cold grey eyes.

    ¡°Good morning. I am Major Charles Burke, Vandermeer Security Solutions. Those are Staff Sergeant C¨¦sar Pareja, Sergeant Savannah Chandler, and Specialist Clayton Skinner.

    I was told that we would be housed in this building here while we are working with Enki. Is that still the case?¡±

    He sounded at once polite, as well as condescending.

    I could, barely, suppress a snort.

    ¡°Yes, that is still the case. I have a three-room suite for you, and a two-room suite for each of your subordinates. My name is Vivian DuClare, and I own this building. I am also the CTO of Enki.

    Though you will mostly work with Colonel Naveen Upreti of our security force and Dr. Maynard Price, our chief scientist.¡±

    I forced a, as I hoped, friendly smile, and offered my hand, which he ignored, and so after I had said my text, I just shrugged and retracted my hand. Instead, the corners of his mouth barely noticeably moved downward, and I could not help but interpret his opinion as disapproval.

    ¡°If you can wait while our other guests organize themselves, I will have you brought to the Enki-HQ.¡±

    Burke nodded sharply and somehow managed to do so arrogantly before he harshly gestured for his crew to follow him when he moved to the side. Parjera smiled apologetically, and it seemed that Chandler could only just stop herself from rolling her eyes. Honestly, I was not particularly fond of this Major Burke, and it was clear that I was not the only one.

    Ben meanwhile grabbed my shoulder and gave me a one-armed hug. He knew me well enough to know how I would react to the obvious disdain Major Burke had shown me.

    In the parking lot, there was a short-lived competition for dominance, but the, as I guessed, leader of the guard unit shrugged and made a gesture to give the scientists preference.

    The scientists looked a bit forlorn around for somebody to help them carry their luggage but decided to leave it with the skimmer for the time being and instead approach us.

    When they got closer, I noticed that not one of them was much older than 30. Don¡¯t get me wrong, I am the last one who would dismiss a scientist just for their apparent age. But it was somewhat strange that Vandermeer had sent three obvious couples in perfect childbearing age. I smelled a rat here.

    The first to approach us, a man of middling Pure height with dark brown hair and brown eyes, walked directly to Ben and me and then offered Ben his hand.

    ¡°Hello. I am Dr. Aaron Wakefield. I¡­ we, have been sent here to work with a Dr. DuClare. Can you tell me where we can find him?¡±

    Ben, to his credit, took the hand and shook it, while he answered:

    ¡°Her. Dr. Vivian DuClare, and she is standing directly beside me.¡±

    Wakefield coiled back in surprise, then looked closer at me.

    ¡°Oh, sorry. I¡­ well I thought young doctors only happened in the Commonwealth.¡±

    Ok, that was an excuse that I could let stand to some extent.

    ¡°Hello, Dr. Wakefield. And I am from the Commonwealth. I also sport a jack, and I am a K4.¡±

    His face moved through the emotions, from embarrassment to confusion and lastly awe. Then back to confusion.

    ¡°I understand of course what you mean with being from the Commonwealth and being a K4, but what has sporting a jack to do with all of this?¡±

    I shrugged. And I was pretty sure that he was purposefully not talking about my height.

    ¡°I assume you do most of your theoretical work in cyberspace via a diadem?¡±

    When he nodded I continued:

    ¡°A jack is a vastly superior way to connect to cyberspace. You experienced a compression of 4:1. I had a compression of 40:1, and that was before I had a new, better jack. Now, 90:1 is well within my reach.¡±

    Understanding bloomed on his face.

    ¡°Oh, so¡­ you spent as much time working in a single year as I do in ten. I see where that is an advantage.¡±

    One of his colleagues, a tall, even for Pure severe brunette, also with brown eyes, interjected:

    ¡°Yes, that is really a big advantage. But¡­ don¡¯t you fear CRS? Oh, and sorry, I am Dr. Sarah Vaughn.¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°Vivian DuClare, as Ben here already told you. And it seems you missed that Enki has brought CRS-free cyberware to the market three months ago. There is no risk for CRS anymore.¡±

    Dr. Vaughn narrowed her eyes and looked at me with some suspicion:

    ¡°You are not yanking my chain, are you? No¡­ you really don¡¯t look like you do. But¡­ why did I not know about this?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No, I am not yanking your chain. It is the whole truth. And I have no clue why you don¡¯t know about it. As far as I know, we marketed to the Commonwealth as well.¡±

    ¡°You marketed to the Commonwealth?¡±

    I smiled weakly.

    ¡°Yes, I am, for my sins the CTO of Enki. I had nothing to do with marketing though.¡±

    The man having his arm around Dr. Vaughn¡¯s waist tilted his head.

    ¡°So, if those new jacks are safe¡­ is there a way to get them? I mean, that really sounds like a big advantage.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Sure, but I have to find out at what price. I would guess that we would give you some rebate, but¡­ well, we will see. And of course, there is the question of quality. The MSRP of our top-of-the-line jack is right now around ?650k.¡± When they all winced, understandably considering that well-paid scientists made an average of ?230k a year, I was quick to add: ¡±Of course, the most basic model can be gotten for around ?260, but¡­ that one is really basic.¡±

    I smiled at him.

    ¡°But I¡¯m sure that we can work something out.¡±

    I mean, sure, if I could get Vandermeer to spring for their jacks, I would, but if necessary, I would provide them. I would eat replicator slop before I have my efficiency ruined by them working at a snail¡¯s pace.

    The third man, who was, for a Pure relatively short, or ¡®only¡¯ as tall as Ben, and had sandy blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, now spoke:

    ¡°To be honest¡­ all this was a bit short notice. We were told Monday that we would be sent here for up to six months. Taken from our projects and simply told to pack. Can you tell us why?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I assume that you were working on Revitalize?¡±

    When he nodded I continued:

    ¡°On Saturday, Nathan Vandermeer convinced me that I should try to work on the Folly.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°I told him that I am not good at biology, but he thinks just because I managed to create CRS-free cyberware and a new cloning technology I would manage it.¡±

    When first confusion and then anger was shown on his face, I involuntarily made a step back. But he just ranted.

    ¡°Why the fuck did he think that? I mean, if you even tell us that you¡¯re no good at biology¡­ why send us to the other side of the continent? Have us working here? In Queens of all places? God damn it, and we were looking at a C3-placement! Fuck!¡±

    Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

    Dr. Vaughn rolled her eyes.

    ¡°Olliver, how about you shut the fuck up and think for a moment, ok? First, this is for just six months. And we all have been guaranteed C3-spots for taking this assignment.

    Second, did you not listen? She developed the CRS-free cyberware. And she developed some new cloning tech. She is a K4 for fucks sake. She might surprise you. Surprise us. And if she does, who knows what the future will bring.¡±

    Olliver did not seem very convinced.

    ¡°You know that they already have a K4 working on it. A trained geneticist. For over a year, and nothing. What can one other K4 that is not trained in genetics do?¡±

    Dr. Wakefield shook his head.

    ¡°Well, why don¡¯t we ask her what she is trained in, what her doctorate is on?¡±

    I blushed a bit for being pulled into this argument in that fashion.

    ¡°Uhm, well, my Ph. D.s are in computer science and nano-engineering.¡±

    Olliver threw his hands in the air and snarled:

    ¡°There¡­ she is not trained. Computer Science!¡± He said that as if it was a four-letter word. ¡°Why the fuck were we send to assist a Computer Science-weenie?¡±

    Ben cleared his throat and broke Olliver out of his diatribe.

    ¡°What she usually forgets to mention is that she has only two Ph. D.s because, after the second one, she did no longer bother to jump through the loops to get more. Tell us, Kitten, what disciplines could you get a Ph. D. in if you so bothered?¡±

    I rolled my eyes and took a deep breath.

    ¡°Ok, I am trained in Math, Physics, Quantum Physics, Gravitics, Bioengineering, Medicine,  Chemistry, Material Science, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Structural Engineering.¡±

    While I listed all the disciplines I had studied over the last three years, I felt myself heat up more and more, and so I finished with a ¡°So, satisfied?¡± directed at Ben.

    The jerk had the gall to look pleased, while the scientists were in varying states of shock. Though, I could not deny that seeing Olliver¡¯s jaw nearly hitting the ground made me feel a bit better.

    It was the woman at Dr. Wakefield¡¯s side who was the first to recover¡­ somewhat.

    ¡°You¡­ you are trained in all that? How?¡±

    ¡°First, I am actually older than I look. Not by much but a bit. I will be 19 next week. I made my first Ph. D., the one in Computer Science, when I was barely 15, and immediately got a jack. After that, the lessons are virtual. If you can go 40:1¡­ well you can get 40 years of schooling into one.¡±

    Dr. Vaughn narrowed her eyes again, and looked a bit confused¡­

    ¡°Wait¡­ if you had CRS-free cyberware then, why is it only coming out now?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I did not have CRS-free cyberware then. And¡­ CRS did not really bother me then because, in all honesty, I did not expect to even get to the age of 18. I was stupid and simply did not care. It was when I¡­ let¡¯s say left that phase that I realized the danger of CRS, and began looking for a way to avoid it.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Sure, the easy way would have been simply to rip out the jack. But I liked having a jack and wanted to keep it. So I started learning medicine to understand what CRS actually is. And from there I worked on how to remove it.

    What I have now is my second jack.¡±

    Dr. Wakefield massaged his temples.

    ¡°How¡­ you are saying that you are not good at biology. But you also said that you have learned Bioengineering. That is biology.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I know. And I don¡¯t like it. I¡­ needed it to finish protecting the cyberware, but unlike the rest¡­ it is just not right for me.¡±

    Dr. Vaughn shook her head.

    ¡°I think we should rest this topic for now. We can talk later when we have recovered from the travel.¡±

    Oh, how thankful I was to her right then.

    ¡°That is a good idea.¡± I looked around and saw all my friends standing nearby, trying to look inconspicuous. I was tempted to let Jacky lead our guests to their rooms, but I had to include Burke in it, and¡­ well Jacky was nice. I was pretty sure that somebody like Burke would see being nice as the same as being weak. And he would abuse it.

    With a soft sigh, I turned towards Kate. Seriously, nobody even halfway sane would think of Kate as anything in the same county as weak.

    ¡°Kate, may I trouble you to guide our guests to their rooms?¡± When she nodded, somewhat surprised, I continued: ¡±I thought the other three suites on the fourth floor for this group, and you can give Major Burke and the technicians each a suite on the third floor.¡±

    The confusion on her face cleared up when I mentioned Burke, and was replaced by a nearly unnoticeable, but quite an evil grin. Yeah, she had pegged him as a bully and would take some pleasure from subtly putting him into his place. And Burke could not do a single thing unless Kate became glaringly blatant in it.

    After Kate had led the group into the fortress and a small army of house bots had fetched the luggage, the last group approached. Or more correctly, a part of the last group approached.

    Four of them, three men and a woman came over, while the remaining 20 people remained around their baggage.

    The man in the front, nearly the size of Kate in his unpowered armor, was clearly the leader. Again, with the short hair and a cap, I was unable to see what hair color he had. But he had startling blue, nearly white, eyes.

    The second to approach me was the oldest of the people that had left the skimmer as far as I could tell. Yes, he was a Pure, and that made judging the age a tad difficult, but he looked as if he was around 50 to 60 years old. He also looked as if he had experienced many things he would not want to talk about, and his cold, nearly black eyes made sure that nobody would ask.

    Behind him were a young man and an even younger woman. The man had a somewhat swarthy complexion, dark brown eyes, and again, the same problem of discerning hair color.

    The woman on the other hand was nearly as pale as me, and I could see light blonde, nearly white hair styled in a severe bun under her cap, complimented by her strangely indigo eyes. Seriously, I¡¯ve never seen somebody with such blue-green eyes.

    The only problem was that none of them looked particularly pleased. While they were on the way to us, I softly spoke to Ben:

    ¡°I hope you are satisfied. I hate it when I have to talk to strangers about what I have studied.¡±

    In response, Ben had the gall to chuckle.

    ¡°Yes, I am satisfied. It was necessary, Kitten. They need to work under you, and for that, they have to respect your abilities. Otherwise, you would have an endless series of problems. At least with this Olliver-fellow.¡±

    I shook my head but remained silent. What could I have answered to that anyway? I knew that Ben was way better at reading people than I would ever be.

    By the time the four people had arrived in front of us, and like Major Burke saluted, I had forced myself to push it aside.

    The leader of the group then took on some stiff posture with his hands behind his back, quickly followed by the other three.

    ¡°I am Lieutenant Aidan Thomson, Vandermeer Security Service, Personal Protection detail. If I am not mistaken, you are Dr. Vivian DuClare, is that right?¡±

    He sounded very strict, but I was by now at least somewhat used to that, and so I offered him my hand, answering:

    ¡°Yes, I am Vivian DuClare. And this is Ben Walker. Welcome to New York.¡±

    After a moment of hesitation, he briefly grasped my hand, just to give it one shake, and placed his hands back behind his back.

    ¡°Thank you, Ma¡¯am. We have been ordered to provide protection for you. I assume that this building behind you is where you are based?¡±

    ¡°Yes, this is my home. I have several rooms for you and your¡­ platoon? I think that was what Vandermeer called it.¡±

    He took a deep breath before he answered:

    ¡°Yes, platoon is correct Ma¡¯am. Is there a place where we can store the Carnotaurus?¡±

    I couldn¡¯t help myself and had to blink. ¡°Store the¡­ you mean the skimmer will remain here?¡±

    ¡°That was what I have been told. Along with its crew, who are right now busy with their shutdown inspection.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Ok, that is new. I knew that you were coming, but nobody said anything about the skimmer¡­ there might be room in the garage but it will be tight if it fits at all.¡±

    Lieutenant Thomson moved his eyes to the building, and then back to me.

    ¡°The building seems quite big, Ma¡¯am.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It is. And most of it is offices, labs, living space, and of course, the atrium. The inner 75 by 75m square is filled with a pool and some artificial plants. Yes, there is a garage, with a workshop, and a heap of storage in the west wing. Unfortunately, it was also the most convenient place to put the two industrial fabber suites, along with my own, admittedly smaller, skimmers and ground vehicles.¡±

    Thomson kept a straight face, but when he talked it was clear he was somewhat unhappy.

    ¡°I have to say, Ma¡¯am that this is unfortunate. While the Carnotaurus can remain in the open for some time, it would mean increased maintenance.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I understand that. Unfortunately, neither the Carnotaurus, nor its crew were announced, or we might have looked into it sooner. I am sorry for the inconvenience, but either it fits, or it doesn¡¯t.¡±

    ¡°I understand Ma¡¯am. We will have to work with what we have. May I introduce my non-commissioned officers, Ma¡¯am?¡±

    Before I could answer, Ben intervened:

    ¡°One moment please, Lieutenant. I have the impression that you are not happy about being here.¡±

    Thomson¡¯s eyes narrowed briefly, but he remained in his rigid stance.

    ¡°With all respect, Sir, my troopers and I go where we are told to go. Personal happiness bears no influence on that.¡±

    But Ben was not yet satisfied.

    ¡°I understand what you are saying, but I don¡¯t agree with it. Your mission is to protect Vivian here. That is a mission that you are more a detriment to than an advantage if you are despising it. But Vivian¡¯s safety is very important to me, and quite a few other people. So, are you willing to answer me, or do I have to send you back to Seattle?¡±

    For the first time, Thomson showed some sort of emotion. And it was unfortunately anger.

    ¡°As you wish Sir. Yes, I am unhappy about being sent here. My boys and girls are some of the very best. We were the best not yet permanently assigned unit. We were the next in line to be permanently assigned to a Vandermeer executive as protection detail.

    Instead, we were told Monday that we would be permanently assigned to some unimportant girl in this desolate ruin of a city. Everything we¡¯ve worked for has been trashed on some whim.

    But that does not mean that we won¡¯t be doing our job. We are too much professionals to do otherwise.¡±

    For a moment, Ben looked Thomson in the eye and then nodded.

    ¡°I see.¡± Then he pulled me a bit closer to him.

    ¡°I think we have to tell them, Kitten. They need to know.¡±

    To my regret, it took me a few seconds to understand what Ben was talking about.

    ¡°Are you sure? It is¡­ not something that I want to be known.¡±

    Ben took a heavy breath, before he slowly nodded, while Thomson still stared above my head.

    ¡°Yes, I think it is necessary. They are here to protect you. They have the right to know why, and will do a better job if they know it.¡±

    I pinched the bridge of my nose while I was thinking about it. On the one hand, barely anybody on the east coast knew of my family. Heck, right now, there were only two in this parking lot, including me. And I wanted to keep it that way.

    But Ben was right. They had the right to know. And even I knew enough about people to know that such anger could fester, and destroy. Better to lance the boil early.

    And so, I lowered my voice, to keep it from most of the others, who were a few meters away, happy that I had sent Kate to keep Burke in check.

    ¡°Fine. There is a reason why you were sent here, Lieutenant. And what I am telling you now is a secret. You can inform your platoon when you are secured, but otherwise, nobody has the need to know.

    My Mother is Rebecca DuClare. Wife of Julian DuClare.¡±

    When that brought no recognition to Thomson¡¯s face, though the woman suddenly gasped, I sighed and continued:

    ¡°She was born Rebecca Vandermeer.¡±

    That brought the expected reaction. Thomson suddenly stared at me directly, wide-eyed, and after a few seconds, he spoke, loudly and clearly shocked:

    ¡°Are you saying that you are¡­¡± he was stopped from blurting it out by the older man, who swiftly placed his hand over his mouth.

    ¡°Softly, Sir. Please don¡¯t spill the secret within the first seconds. I would hate to have to shoot you.¡±

    When Thomson got himself back under control, he nodded softly, and after the older man took away his hand, he spoke in a low voice:

    ¡°Yes, thank you, Sergeant. That would have been an epic blunder.¡±

    Then he turned back to me, but spoke softly this time:

    ¡°Are you saying that all the rumors about the ¡®missing heir¡¯ were actually true? That you are the heir of Vandermeer?¡±

    I looked him in the eye and nodded slowly. As a reaction, Thomson slumped a bit, no longer holding such a rigid stance.

    ¡°Fuck¡­ that¡­ that changes everything. I thought we somehow fucked up and this was a punishment detail¡­ but¡­¡±

    When he stopped, mostly because Ben placed his hand on his shoulder, the man at my side spoke, equally softly, to him:

    ¡°I trust you now see the importance of your assignment and why it is important for Vandermeer, right?¡±

    Thomson shook his head minutely before he answered.

    ¡°Yes, Sir. This¡­ yes, this is very important. Thank you for clearing that up. But we should get on with introducing my people. The sergeant who just now prevented me from being a stupid ass, again, is Staff Sergeant Christian Reynolds. Behind him, we have Corporal Noah Longobardi, in charge of first squad, and Corporal Svenja Ingridsdottir, in charge of second squad. Though as I see it, I think Corporal Ingridsdottir would be better placed as Dr. DuClare¡¯s primary bodyguard.¡±

    The two men saluted briefly, while Corporal Ingridsdottir literally bowed, while she said:

    ¡°I would be honored, Your Highness.¡±

    Only Ben¡¯s arm around my shoulder prevented me from falling backward in shock.

    ¡°What¡­ what did you just call me?¡±

    She had a sly smile when she answered:

    ¡°I called you Your Highness, Your Highness.¡±

    I raised my eyebrow when I looked at Thomson, who turned red.

    ¡°Damnit, Svenja, why the fuck are you starting with this shit now? We told you again and again that Nathan Vandermeer is no fucking king. And that also means that Dr. DuClare is no princess. Do I make myself clear?¡±

    She stubbornly shook her head and got a defiant expression on her face.

    ¡°You can tell me all you want, but look at the truth. The big corps have as much power, as much sovereignty as the old nations before the great war. They rule their people. And the big family-owned corporations are like a monarchy, a Kingdom. Like Vandermeer. That makes the chairman of the board The King.¡± I could practically hear the capitalization of the last two words.

    ¡°That makes Nathan Vandermeer a king in everything but name. And that makes his daughter and granddaughter princesses.¡±

    I saw Reynolds rolling his eyes, Longbardi valiantly fighting against a grin and losing, and Thomson ready to explode. It was obvious that this was not a new argument.

    And all that about something so stupid.

    ¡°If I might comment on that¡­ Corporal, Nathan Vandermeer is missing a key attribute to be called king. The title. Does he have the authority and power? I think so, yes, but he never assumed the title. And the honorifics like ¡®Your Majesty¡¯  and ¡®Your Highness¡¯ go with the title, not the position or the power.¡±

    Now Ingridsdottirs defiant gaze turned to me.

    ¡°That is so stupid. If that is all that is stopping his rightful position, then why did he never take the title? Why not any of your other ancestors?¡±

    I had a sad smile.

    ¡°Because the title is a sign of arrogance and ¡®superiority¡¯ that none of my ancestors felt they needed, nothing more and nothing less.¡±

    Sadly, that did little to sway her opinion.

    ¡°But they were superior. They were better. So is your grandfather. I don¡¯t know you enough to say if you are as well, but except your mother, every single one of your ancestors since there were Pures was a better human. A better scientist. The best that humanity had to offer.¡±

    ¡°And that made it necessary for them to push their superiority into everybody¡¯s faces? Made it so that they needed to be bowed to? Or is it not so that being humble, being approachable, and being mortal was instead a sign of them being better than the likes of the Knowles or Dalgons, who had to demonstrate their superiority on every occasion?¡±

    I shook my head softly.

    ¡°Especially as corporations differ from a nation in some critical aspects. Mostly in that corporations need customers. And those customers are often heads of state or other corporate leaders. Demanding of them to call another corporate head ¡®King¡¯ and ¡®Your Majesty¡¯ would have significantly weakened the position of the corporation and as such the power of the CEO.¡±

    Ingridsdottir frowned, and I saw that she desperately wanted to rebuff my arguments, but there simply was no counterargument.

    ¡°Think about it for a moment. If it were, in any way or fashion possible to take the title of king or emperor, don¡¯t you think the Knowles would have done so decades ago? They need to make sure everybody acknowledges their superiority. They would love to be called ¡®Your Majesty¡¯. They don¡¯t. Because they depend on the rest of the world as customers. As does Vandermeer.¡±

    She waved her head from side to side, not quite a shake, and not a nod, but something in between.

    ¡°Yeah, ok. But it is not right. You have a claim to the title.¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°I don¡¯t want the title. I barely use my earned title of Doctor.¡±

    Of course, Ben absolutely had to ruin the moment.

    ¡°Well said Kitten. I am proud of you.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°That is another title I could do without.¡±

    He laughed.

    ¡°Oh, come on, you like it. Admit it already.¡±

    I sighed and shook my head, but secretly, he was beginning to be right. Well, I liked it when he used it. Unfortunately, it was not limited to him using it.

    Though fortunately, by now most people used my name.

    While I looked over the parking lot my view fell on the assault skimmer. With a sigh, I messaged Warden.

    V: Warden, can we fit the assault skimmer into the garage?

    W: Not with all that is in there right now.

    I sighed inwardly.

    V: What is necessary to fit in there?

    W: At least four of the ground vehicles have to be removed.

    Wait, the ground¡­ the problem was that we had too many cars? 90% of which we never used, and which were mostly part of the landscape for now?

    V: Can we keep the van, the good sedan, and the cabriolet?

    W: Easily. I assume you want to remove the cars in increasing order of worth?

    V: Yes, that is right. Can you take care of it?

    W: Consider it done. Shall I stop when enough room for the Carnotaurus is freed or should I remove all unneeded ground vehicles?

    I thought for a moment.

    V: Stop when enough space for the skimmer is reached, including space to work on it.

    W: Understood.

    I shook my head, and turned back to Thomson:

    ¡°I have contacted Warden, and it seems we can make enough room for the assault skimmer. It will take a few¡­¡±

    It was at this moment that the first of the cars, an at least 30-year-old collection of rust, peeled synth leather and bad combustion noisily rolled onto the parking lot, controlled by one of the androids.

    Followed by six others in only marginally better condition. When I saw those barely mobile death traps, I wondered why I never had cleaned up the garage.

    I mean, yes, there was enough room for my skimmers and the indy-fabs¡­ but I never even looked at the scrapyards Frankel had amassed beyond selecting a couple of cars that I could use¡­ before I got my T240.

    ¡°As usual, Warden is faster than I might think. Well, the good news is that there is now enough room for your skimmer, though I have no idea why you need it.¡±

    Thomson looked at the small parade of car-like objects, shook his head, and turned his attention back to me.

    ¡°Why, to fly you around in of course. If we make sure you are safe it would be stupid to assume that you are safe on the streets or in the air.¡±

    I looked at the monster and shook my head.

    ¡°You want me to fly in that? Nope, not happening.¡±

    Thomson took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment.

    ¡°I am sorry, Dr. DuClare, but we have to assume your safety. And there are very few vehicles out there that ensure an acceptable safety for the passengers.¡±

    I scoffed.

    ¡°Yes, I know. That is why I¡¯ve gotten a Mercedes-Benz T240 Executive Edition.¡±

    That made Thomson open and close his mouth a few times, without saying anything, before he took another few deep breaths.

    ¡°A¡­ T240? Executive Edition was the one for execs and national leaders, correct?¡±

    When I nodded, he took a moment to think about it.

    ¡°Well, its security depends on what extras you took.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Why, everything.¡±

    Reynolds minutely shook his head, while Langobardi looked at the sky with a scrunched-up mouth.

    Thomson sighed and shook his head.

    ¡°Everything? The Armor? The stealth system, the point defense system? The active and passive protection system?¡±

    ¡°Class V, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Also, the entertainment system, the full spectrum autopilot, the real leather seats, real wood paneling¡­ if Mercedes offered it, I had them put it in the T240. I think that is safe enough. I mean, if hated dictators, heads of state, corporate leaders, bank execs, and whoever else trusts those things to keep them safe, I think we can do so as well. Don¡¯t you?¡±

    He took another deep breath.

    ¡°Yes, A T240 is sufficient.¡±

    Ben interjected.

    ¡°Especially as it is not so obviously military. Let¡¯s be real if somebody wanted to kill her in the Carnotaurus, they come with an anti-ship weapon. On the other hand, the Merc is insanely tough for how small it is.

    Few people who don¡¯t own one for themselves understand how protected it is. Especially with the Class V armor installed. I would guess it is as tough as your assault skimmer.¡±

    ¡°Nevertheless, you can tell the crew of the skimmer that they can park it in the garage. And I think we have stood in the October air long enough, don¡¯t you think?¡±

    I was indeed feeling a bit cold by then.

 2.31: Magic in Motion

    It took a few minutes for me to be warm again. Don¡¯t get me wrong, I was dressed appropriately¡­ well mostly. But there had been a bit of a cold spell the last few days. On days like this, I almost wished that global warming had not been reversed quite so thoroughly.

    It had begun even before the great war when the fusactor was introduced. If only China could have waited another decade or so for all of it to take effect.

    It allowed the reclamation of greenhouse gases, reduced their new emission as well, and in combination with the grav coils and asteroid mining, it virtually eliminated most industrial pollution within a couple of years¡­ after the war had ended.

    Of course, that was in general a positive thing. Only on days like this, when a late October day was cold, wet, and essentially freezing, it was a bit of a drag.

    Fortunately, the four f33 in the basement did not even need to run at 25% power to provide everything the fortress needed. Heck, just Monday I found Natalie and Christine sunbathing by the pool. Why, I could not understand. Especially as the cover might be transparent, for visible light that is, but it filtered around 90% of ultraviolet light.

    We were a bit late for lunch, with all the introductions and revelations, but nothing too bad. It was a simple lunch anyway, that lent itself to be kept warm long.

    Just a simple tomato soup, made from scratch by Natalie and Jacky. In addition to that, we would make fresh, toasted sandwiches. Nothing fancy, just simple things like ham, cheese, and such things. And freshly baked bread. To be honest, our consumption of flour had exploded over the last few months when people learned how to bake, but that was ok. It was the only stuff we still bought from the black market, just now in bulk.

    I personally showed the platoon their rooms, I had decided to give them the rooms on the 4<sup>th</sup> floor, while the Lieutenant and his noncoms would get suites on the 3<sup>rd</sup> floor. The Lieutenant and the Sergeant each in one, and the two corporals would share a two-bedroom suite.

    After some additional silent conversation with Warden, I decided to put the flight crew into the remaining suites on the 3<sup>rd</sup> floor. A two-bedroom for the two pilots, and a three-bedroom for the three technicians.

    That meant I had only the 18 rooms in the west wing left open, and the other big suite on the 5<sup>th</sup> floor.

    It was stupid, but I seriously considered adding to the building. Or maybe convert the unused offices in the north wing into another set of rooms.

    When I showed Thomson to his suite, I encountered Major Burke again. Needless to say that he was not a single bit more pleasant.

    ¡°Ah, there you are. The rooms are adequate, thank you. Can you now arrange for us to be brought to this Enki-HQ you talked about? I want this whole assignment to be over as soon as possible.¡±

    Adequate, huh? While I grew up in poverty, I knew quite well what counted as ¡®adequate¡¯ in the Commonwealth, and the suite he stepped out of was not it. Sure, it was not the height of luxury, but it was high-end.

    But whatever. If he wanted to be in a snit, so be it. He would be out of my hair in a few weeks, and so I shrugged.

    ¡°I can. Or we can wait until after lunch if you want to eat with us. It is your decision.¡±

    Burke only held his nose high. ¡°Hmpf, the food is the same anywhere anyway, so no need to wait.¡±

    Yeah, thought so. His loss. Well, it would still take around 20 minutes, maybe 30 before all the sandwiches were finished, so there was no harm in sending one of our pilots to bring them over.

    ¡°As you wish.¡± I messaged Warden so that she would call Ryan or Justin, whoever was free right then, to take the 675 to fly Burke and his people to Enki-HQ. Yes, I could have let them use the T240, but, well call me petty, but Burke¡¯s behavior did not make me very generous.

    ¡°I¡¯ve sent a message to my pilots. One of them will meet you in the garage to bring you over. Please call when you are done for the day and somebody will come and get you.¡±

    He harumphed another time and turned around without any hint of courtesy. Well, he could play those games if he wanted. If he thought he could ¡®put me in my place¡¯ that way, I¡¯ve been worked on by worse jerks.

    I used that time to let the scientists know about lunch, while Lieutenant Thomas and his crew already knew about it.

    On the way to the mess hall, I tasked Warden to communicate with Vandermeer about jacks for Wakefield and his group.

    In the mess hall, I found it for the first time half full of people. To be honest, I had to stop at the door and calm myself down. Way too many people in way too small a space for my taste. I felt Ben¡¯s hand on my shoulder when he gave me one of his half hugs, to help me over my¡­ well anxiety.

    It still took me nearly half a minute to build up the will to go in there. It had taken me weeks to get used to the eight other people who, at that time occasionally, shared this big room with me. Right now, we were with 45 people in it.

    Still, I had to tough it through. Jacky was busy cutting the bread while Natalie was giving the last polish to the soup. Fortunately, we had planned this meal with the guests in mind, and had even built in some slack, so there was enough for all of them.

    I led Thomson, Reynolds, Longobardi, Ingridsdottir, the Wakefields, the Vaughns, as well as Oliver and his wife who still remained nameless to the counter.

    ¡°Today¡¯s lunch is relatively simple. A bowl of tomato soup and a sandwich you can build yourself. We have several variants of lunch meat, some fish, young cheeses, cream cheese, vegetables, pickles, and relishes. We can toast the final product for you if you want to.¡±

    Mrs. Wakefield frowned, not disapproving but confused.

    ¡°Why so many variants? I mean does it really make a difference what color your processed mush has?¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°Processed mush, I have to remember that one. And no, unless you want this processed mush, nothing here comes from a replicator.¡±

    Before Mrs. Wakefield could answer, Olliver interrupted with:

    ¡°Ick. Please don¡¯t tell me that this is this primitive stuff that is all the rage right now. If you offer real food, please show me to the replicator.¡±

    I raised my eyebrow, and saw Jacky wilt, while Natalie turned red, and not the embarrassed version, but the angry one. Before either of us could react though, Dr. Vaughn scornfully talked to her colleague:

    ¡°Oh, stop embarrassing yourself, Ollie, and more important us! We all already know you are an idiot, so you don¡¯t have to prove it again and again. Now as I see it, those nice young women have prepared some food for us, and I intend to actually try it. If you don¡¯t that is most likely your loss, but don¡¯t make us others look bad with your behavior.¡±

    Olliver turned a similar shade of red as Natalie and nearly exploded:

    ¡°You are not the boss of me, Sarah! I will thank you for keeping out of it.¡±

    I knew that I was not quite the definition of interpersonal grace and friendliness, but sheesh, there seemed to be some bad blood here.

    ¡°It is your decision. There is a high-quality food replicator there on this wall, behind the cabinet doors.¡±

    I pointed to the wall where we had hidden the barely used replicator.

    ¡°And I would appreciate it if you kept your opinion about food to yourself. Especially as you will learn that you are in the minority here.¡±

    He was still very much red, and still not in an awkward way, but he simply huffed, grabbed the hand of his wife, and pulled her towards the replicator. To her credit, she looked less than enthused by the turn of events.

    I on the other hand continued to the people gathered around me:

    ¡°As I was saying, this is real meat, real cheese, real vegetables. That means everything has its own taste. Be careful as not everything goes with everything else though. Those of us who are a bit more experienced with this type of food will help you out of course, but you have to ask.¡±

    Mrs. Wakefield looked over the spread of possible ingredients and then back at me.

    ¡°But¡­ how? I have looked into what real food costs. And it is astronomical. How can you afford to prepare all that?¡±

    I smiled:

    ¡°For one, we did not prepare it for you. We prepare it in batches and use it up over the course of a week or so. Normally it is in the fridge and when you want a sandwich you cut the bread and prepare it for yourself.¡±

    I tilted my head.

    ¡°And the only thing we bought is the flour that was used to bake the bread. For the rest, I told you about the new cloning tech. One particular property of it is that it has no toxicity buildup. That means vat meat is now working and fully consumable. We can also clone plants, like herbs or vegetables. Or fruits, if you want them. That means this¡­ ¡°

    I pointed to the counter:

    ¡°is only marginally more expensive than the food from the replicator. More work, yes, but only the bread did cost any money.¡±

    Dr. Wakefield looked at the food and frowned:

    ¡°How can you be sure that there is no toxic buildup? Wasn¡¯t it the case that it had been discovered only years later?¡±

    I smiled and shook my head.

    ¡°I will explain later how, but I am 100% sure that it does not poison you, or us. Trust me, this food is safe. But let¡¯s be real, even if it wasn¡¯t, as you said, the toxicity was only discovered after years, because the singular meal had so little impact. So, one meal makes no difference.¡±

    Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

    Dr. Wakefield still looked unsure, but Dr. Vaughn looked all over the spread and then turned to me:

    ¡°You said you have meat vats and can clone plants¡­ but where does the cheese come from?¡±

    I shrugged, but still smiled:

    ¡°That is the result of my last steps in that trajectory. Ben here asked me to look into getting milk and eggs. That was in¡­ July, wasn¡¯t it?¡±

    When I looked at Ben, he smiled and nodded.

    ¡°4<sup>th</sup> of July to be exact.¡±

    So I continued:

    ¡°Well, as I said, that was in July. It took me a bit to create a bacterium that makes milk, and the eggs were a real piece of work, but in the end, I found a way to literally clone them. That means anything but grain products, which can not be economically cloned yet, we can make real food cheap and safe.¡±

    I waved at the counter again.

    ¡°And much tastier.¡±

    Dr. Vaughn looked at me incredulously.

    ¡°And you are still claiming that you are no good in biology? Seriously?¡±

    I waved dismissively.

    ¡°Get real. Creating the bacteria was utterly basic. There are textbook examples that go step by step on how to have bacteria make proteins and enzymes. There are even computer programs that do the hard work for you. If anybody had bothered to try it we could have had milk for a hundred years by now.¡±

    Her eyes narrowed, but she had no argument against what I had said. And for sure, there was no argument against it. Yes, the bacteria in question had to be a tad more complex than what we used for insulin, but come on, that was not that much of a problem.

    I had by now created my two sandwiches. One with beef and a cheese sauce, some pickles, and tomato slices. I had stopped eating raw onions because they always gave me violent gas, and as such, I left them by the side.

    The other was a simple toasted ham and cheese, with some cream cheese. I showed my guests how to use the toasting ovens so that they could make their own creations.

    Olliver and his wife finally came back with a couple of much more ordinary replicator sandwiches. Yes, I had gotten the high-quality replicators some time ago, I mean, we could not have somebody make food from scratch for every single meal, and especially for breakfast the replicator was convenient, but it was just no comparison to real food.

    At the table, Olliver scrunched his nose over what we others were having, while his wife looked envious. Sorry, but if she lets her man decide what she eats, it was her own dang fault.

    The others were at first a bit cautious but then were devouring the food as if they had not eaten for a year.

    Of course, Olliver wanted to talk shop, but I informed him that we would not talk about business at the table. A couple of times.

    What we were doing though was finishing the introductions. Mrs. Wakefield had Ellen as her first name, while Mr. Vaughn was known as Charles. Olliver was Dr. Olliver Mitchell, while his wife was Sophia Mitchell.

    It was not surprising that the folks from the Commonwealth who had gotten small portions and a single sandwich each quickly got seconds, and then thirds.

    But finally, lunch was over, and while most of them were patting their bellies and looking at the large pot with the remaining soup wistfully, Olliver looked as if he had bitten into a lemon.

    By then Warden had me sent the answer from Vandermeer. She had negotiated that the six researchers would get an ultra-jack with a cranial board for ?1000 each, or around $2300. That was a bit more than our production cost, but on the other hand, it was insanely cheap for Vandermeer.

    Warden, in all her efficiency, had already started a NADA to make the jacks. To be precise, she had tasked my three small NADAs to make the package for the scientists and my guard detail.

    After we were making our way to the biology lab I spoke to them about it.

    ¡°I have contacted Vandermeer, and we came to an agreement. He pays a, significantly discounted, price for your jacks. We make a bit above our production costs.

    We decided to provide you with the full package, including what we call the cranial board, which is essentially an implanted com. And before you ask, believe me when I tell you, it is worth it.

    And just for your information, we sell this package right now for ?3 million.¡±

    Sophia spoke, nearly for the first time:

    ¡°Wait, ?3 million? How can we ever repay that?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Please, we sell it for that amount. But that is mostly for exclusivity. It costs us less than ?600 to make it. And you have to pay nothing. Vandermeer is paying ?1000 for each of you.¡±

    Olliver though could not let it rest.

    ¡°But¡­ how can you justify taking that much money if it only costs you around ?600?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Because we are the only ones offering it. And I don¡¯t know if you understood what I was saying, but this is the absolute top-of-the-line. This is aimed at CEOs, heads-of-state, corporate execs, very important researchers, and officials. We make it exclusive, and that is reflected in the price.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ but that is not fair.¡±

    I saw Dr. Vaughn facepalm, and Aaron Wakefield balled his fists and rolled his eyes.

    I looked at Olliver for a moment trying to discern if he was serious. Unfortunately, he seemed to be.

    ¡°If you show me where exactly it is written that the universe is in any way fair, I might look into it. But my experience is that it is anything but.¡±

    I took a deep breath and forced myself to calm down. While Justin moved himself discretely into a position from where he could quickly intervene, mirrored by Cpl. Ingridsdottir and the two men of her squad.

    ¡°But if it is so valuable, then everybody should have access to it.¡±

    ¡°Do you have any idea what makes it valuable? It is a better, faster version of the jacks we sell for a significantly lower price. Well, the jack that is. The cranial board is indeed exclusive, but everybody can do most of it with his com, even though it is external. It is a convenience and security feature. But you are entitled to your opinion. You don¡¯t have to accept the implants if you don¡¯t want them.¡±

    That did obviously not sit well with Olliver, but there was exactly nothing he could do against it.

    Not that I particularly cared about his opinion anyway. By now, he had proven to be completely disagreeable. I would work with him, to the extent that he worked with me, but that was it. I had significantly more sympathy for his wife, who I pegged as the suffering party in this marriage.

    ¡°The important thing is, in a couple of hours your implants will be ready, and then you have to decide on the order. The surgery takes roughly fifteen minutes, but we have to use Epzitecan, so it will put you out for at least 12 hours. And unfortunately, I only have three auto surgeons.¡±

    Yes, I had used the industrial fabber and the NADAs to make the new version of my auto surgeon. I mean, why not? I have to test it don¡¯t I? And another auto surgeon is always good, especially if we make it into an auto doc.

    By then we had reached the bio lab. I am the first who concedes that my bio lab was not quite the most impressive. Nothing compared to my material science lab or my physics lab. But it was pretty functional, in my opinion.

    In the lab, I gestured at the table.

    ¡°Now, I think it is time to talk about what we can expect. I promised to explain why I am convinced that the vat meat is safe to consume. Well, it all goes back to the CRS-free cyberware. Creating a way to protect myosynth from CRS was relatively easy. But it was expensive. The original prototype I created was using nanobots to transport modified stem cells of the recipient to the needed position.

    But the whole process was so sensitive to outside influence that I could not use beamed energy. That meant the bots brought the cells where they were needed and essentially died there, integrating themselves into the biolayer. That burned around ?260 worth of bots each day. For a simple cybernetic heart, the simplest I could find. And it took almost 40 days to get it done.¡±

    Dr. Wakefield whistled appropriately, while Charles Vaughn nearly popped out his eyes.

    ¡°Obviously, that was not a permanent solution. Unfortunately, the obvious ¡®solution¡¯, using a cloning process to place the cells, did not work, thanks to the toxicity build-up. That¡­ made me look into where this build-up actually came from, and, me being an engineer deep in my heart, searched for an engineering solution to my problem. What I found was an engineering tool to find the solution instead.

    I have developed some new nanobots with the function of observing microscopic processes, like biochemical ones, and used those new bio-observation-units, or BOU to see what the cloning processes actually did, how they worked on a molecular level. I wanted to find a growth accelerant that would only produce acceptable levels of toxicity.

    What I found was why all growth accelerants produce toxicity, and more importantly, how to circumvent the problem altogether. In short, the GAs, all of them, work by forcing the cell to convert part of their compound into bioenergy, while some other part triggers the division. The first part is¡­ inefficient and generates waste products.¡±

    I smiled into the round.

    ¡°You have three guesses where the toxicity comes from. Needless to say, after that creating a toxic-free cloning process was trivial. Instead of forcing the cell to convert chemical x into bioenergy, I use nanobots to deliver bioenergy in pure form.

    No more waste products, and because the cell doesn¡¯t have to work on converting it, it is six times faster than the fastest competition product. And there is no toxicity problem for using this process in meat vats.¡±

    Ellen Wakefield downright beamed:

    ¡°Does that mean that we will get to eat food like today every day? Yay!¡±

    That in turn made Dr. Wakefield facepalm and mumble into his hand:

    ¡°Only you, Ellen, only you.¡±

    I waited if Ellen was giving a riposte, but she remained smiling and happy, so I answered:

    ¡°Not quite. We don¡¯t make such an effort for every meal. Especially breakfast is much more humble, though that¡¯s changing now that we have a consistent supply of eggs. Thing is, on most days there is freshly baked bread for sandwiches and you find butter, various young kinds of cheese, and cold-cut meat in the fridge. Just be so nice and give notice if something runs low. We also usually have something quick and easy for lunch. Though you often will find a soup. Those can be set up and eaten over a week or so. Dinner is when we do something fancier.

    But back to the topic, I told you about the BOU because that is what I plan to use to tackle the Folly.¡±

    Olliver sighed and grumbled:

    ¡°And how do you expect that to help us? Come on, tell us!¡±

    Dr. Wakefield slapped the table hard:

    ¡°What the fuck is wrong with you, Olliver? Since we got on the grav ship you are complaining and bashing about anything and everything. That¡¯s not you. Yes, you are not the most agreeable, but not to that level. So what the fuck has come over you?¡±

    Olliver visibly sulked but refused to answer, and so Dr. Vaughn piped in with her colleague:

    ¡°Get a grip, man. This here? This is great. An opportunity that might never come again. So why are you trying so hard to make it fail.¡±

    By now, Olliver looked angry, when he blasted out:

    ¡°Do I really have to explain it to you? I don¡¯t want to be here!¡±

    Charles Vaughn shook his head in disbelief.

    ¡°Then why are you here? This is a volunteer posting. Sarah and I talked for two days before we decided to come here. And we could have said no at any time. So, if you don¡¯t want to be here, why have you said yes?¡±

    Olliver snarled:

    ¡°They told you it is voluntary, but I was told that I would be on that ship or out of the project. Carstairs plainly told me that it was this or unemployment.¡±

    Aaron Wakefield growled:

    ¡°Bob Carstairs is an asshole, but he doesn¡¯t change this project from being voluntary. Don¡¯t be stupid.¡±

    ¡°You are the stupid one here. Carstairs has the ear of Jellicoe, and Jellicoe can go to Vandermeer whenever she wants. None of us here has that kind of pull.¡±

    Sarah sighed.

    ¡°That was the old days when Knowles did his best to hamper Revitalize. Vandermeer isn¡¯t that way.¡±

    ¡°Believe what you want. But don¡¯t come crying to me.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Do I get that right, you are essentially sulking because somebody forced you to come here? How about this, you stop being a jerk to us about it and don¡¯t try to hinder us and I¡¯ll talk to Vandermeer about this.¡±

    Olliver looked at me suspiciously.

    ¡°You think you can just call Nathan Vandermeer and talk to him about things like that? You?¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°During lunch, my VI called him and asked him about your jacks, and he answered. Personally. So yes, I think if I contact him and talk about it, he will at least listen. I can¡¯t promise that he will do something but at least I can talk to him."

    After a few long seconds, Olliver sighed and nodded.

    ¡°Fine. I¡¯ll do my best.¡±

    ¡°Ok, then that¡¯s out of the way. And to answer your question I ask you a question of my own, tell me, what happens to make a fertilized cell start dividing? Why does C3 increase the success of fertilization by around 50%? Why are K4 hyper fertile?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. I don¡¯t know any of this, and as far as I can tell, nobody knows. So why are you harping on me about it?¡±

    ¡°You are right, nobody knows the answers to that. Nobody can tell when a fertilized egg becomes a zygote and starts dividing. Nobody can explain how life starts. As far as humanity knows, it is magic in motion. A wizard did it.

    And as long as we don¡¯t know what should happen, we don¡¯t know what in that process doesn¡¯t happen after the Folly. And that is where the BOU comes into play. It will allow us to look at the fertilization process of various mammals to determine what should happen. It will show us on a bio-molecular level what proteins are involved, and what parts of the combined cell act as a starter. And it will then show us what of it isn¡¯t present with humans nowadays.

    And when we find that part, the cornerstone of the puzzle, we might finally find a way to beat the Folly. Because then we will know what we have to change to fix the damage.¡±

 2.32: Cradle of Creation

    For the next few hours, until dinner, it was a singular, long planning session. Not even the nice and exciting ¡®first we do x, and then we look at what x means before we go to y¡¯-type of planning. No, it was the boring low-level stuff.

    Who was responsible for what, how we would document our results, heck, even what parameters we would maintain in the lab. Important stuff, yes, but stuff that I usually decided on the fly. I mean, usually, who was responsible for what had always the same answer. Me.

    How would I document the results? Most of my planning and theorizing happened in cyberspace and I simply saved the simulation if I felt I did something worthwhile. And seriously, parameters in the lab? Whatever we would find out would have to work outside in the wild, but whatever.

    Right at that moment, I somewhat regretted accepting fertility specialists. Normally I would already have a few virtual days in the theoretical research while my lab bots would do the physical research, and here we were, talking about protocol. Who the frick cares who gets the fricking credit?

    I was not having that project for fricking credit. I couldn¡¯t care less if nobody ever learned about my participation. All this was to save humanity. It was equally unimportant who reported to whom. I finally exploded when the three doctors were embroiled in a 45-minute-long argument about who had precedence.

    ¡°Enough!¡± I know I was not quite forceful, but seriously, they were so immersed in their argument that they completely ignored me.

    When neither of them responded, I slapped the table, hard and loudly, while I spoke, louder and more forcefully the second time:

    ¡°I! SAID! ENOUGH!¡± I confess, I used a trick and spoke with my vocal cords and the speakers in the ceiling at the same time, and, well let¡¯s say the chairs were vibrating. But it did the trick. They stopped midmotion, and slowly turned toward me, visibly confused.

    ¡°This project is too fricking important to fight about whose name is first in the paper. It is too important to be worked up about who commands whom. We will have to work together. And that means that we will work as a Team.

    Yes, I know, a team needs a leader, somebody who provides the rhythm and direction. Guess what, that is me. You are all, and I mean all at the same level. If you can¡¯t work on that provision, say it now and I will see you transported back to the Commonwealth. Otherwise, shut the frick up about who is more important.

    The project is important. None of us are.¡±

    They stared at me for a moment, mouths hanging open. Aaron and Sarah had the decency to blush, but Olliver began to whine:

    ¡°That¡¯s easy for you to say. You are a K4. Nobody will blackball you.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°And you think they will blackball you? For what? If this works, it is irrelevant who was in charge, all of you will be set for life. And if nothing comes out of it, then in six months you go back to the Commonwealth and nothing has changed. Nobody here is risking anything more valuable than time.¡±

    That finally made the three academics shut up about rank and importance. Unfortunately, it was already nearly time for dinner. Marvellous, we had wasted half a day with this stupid status stuff.

    I shook my head and was already opening my mouth to announce going to the mess room when Ellen beat me to the punch.

    ¡°You said earlier that you want to work on various mammals. What mammals exactly are you looking for?¡±

    I took a moment to think about the answer.

    ¡°We will start with the usual suspects for lab work, of course. Rats, Mice, Guinea Pigs, Spider Monkeys, Capuchin Monkeys, Macaques¡­ basically everything where we have the genetic data for lab clones at hand. Then, I asked Vandermeer for Chimpanzee gametes. If we need to we can look at other apes as well.¡±

    ¡°And what do you hope to find?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°There has to be some¡­ I don¡¯t know, let¡¯s call it key, that starts the division and changes the gamete into a zygote. We know that the Folly does not prevent the Acrosome reaction, and neither does it prevent the arrangement of the chromosomes. But we don¡¯t know what should happen after that until the cell begins to divide.

    But as we know that human cells rarely undergo that step anymore, whatever the Folly does has to happen there. As soon as we understand that step, or those steps if there is more than one, we can look into what the Folly did to humanity to stop it. Even if we then do not find the cure for the Folly, we will have made a colossal step forward in direction of that solution.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°But not today. We wasted the afternoon arguing who¡¯s name would be first in a hypothetical paper. Now it is time for dinner, and after that, we will implant your jacks. We will start tomorrow.¡±

    After a bit of grumbling, they nonetheless accepted my barb. And at least Wakefield looked a bit sheepish when I talked about the wasted afternoon.

    Dinner was nothing exceptional. Just some pot roast pork with dumplings and beans. By now, even Olliver and Sophia cautiously tried real food. Cautiously at first, that is. After the first bites, they wolfed it down as readily as anybody else from the Commonwealth. And went for seconds and thirds.

    The happy times ended abruptly when Major Burke arrived with Michael. It was clear from the outset that Burke was not a happy camper right then. It might have been the way he stomped, his whole posture that gave that fact away, but personally, I think it was the way he was wildly gesticulating and nearly screaming at Michael that clinched it.

    I sighed, looked at my half-eaten dinner, and then got up and moved to intercept them.

    I did not wait for Burke¡¯s tirade to end, but interrupted him:

    ¡°Is something wrong, Major?¡±

    He stopped midsentence, and turned toward me, anger burning in his eyes and showing in the red of his face.

    ¡°Is something wrong she asks? Is there something wrong? This whole ¡®corporation¡¯ is completely living in a dreamland, that is wrong. Do you have any idea what they showed us about the weapons they believe they have? Do you have any clue how fantastic those parameters are?

    This whole endeavor was a colossal waste of time, and I will inform the sales department of Vandermeer about it. I don¡¯t know who you bamboozled with your ¡®magic weapons¡¯ in Seattle, but whoever it was, I will ensure they will never make any decision for Vandermeer again.¡±

    I frowned. What was so wrong with the parameters? Sure, the grav guns were a bit harder-hitting than rail guns with the dumb projectiles, but not out of bounds.

    ¡°What exactly do you think is fantasy if I may ask?¡±

    Burke scoffed.

    ¡°What is not? That is the real question. Let¡¯s be real, they tell me that they have a so-called ¡®grav gun¡¯ that can accelerate a two-ton projectile up to Mach 27. Mach 27! For two tons. In an eight-meter-long cannon! Do you know how stupid that is? Or those particle beams of them. They want us to believe that they managed to make an electron gun into a fucking weapon?.¡±

    My frown deepened.

    ¡°Mach 27?¡±

    He scoffed again.

    ¡°Yes, Mach 27. Can you believe that? And that without the projectile burning up immediately.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Burning up is not the big problem. The projectile is covered in carbon that can withstand the heat and the lead inside has a significant thermal mass. It is more the sonic boom that is a problem.

    But seriously, Michael, I thought we would keep the information about the grav guns capped at 4000 m/s. What gives?¡±

    Michael shrugged.

    ¡°Obviously we thought we would give Vandermeer the real data. We are negotiating a formal alliance after all.¡±

    Meanwhile, Burke gave a credible impersonation of a fish, with the way his mouth opened and closed repeatedly, while Sergeant Pareja showed a very brief smile on his face.

    Finally, Burke managed to catch himself.

    ¡°I¡­ I thought you were a scientist. How can you believe these magical numbers? If you were really a scientist, you would know that those numbers are impossible!¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Obviously not impossible. Just beyond what conventional technology can produce. And that is the point. I believe those numbers because I was the one who created the unconventional technology behind the new weapons and who gave Enki those numbers.¡±

    ¡°What the fuck? You are telling me that you somehow conned the whole corporation into your fever dream? That we have been sent to this backwater has-been-village because of some little strumpet?¡±

    He changed his posture, making himself stand taller and bigger, and the anger on his face got worse. Fortunately, after he made only one step toward me, Ingridsdottir stepped between us.

    Burke tried to shove her physically to the side, but she stood firm, and so Burke got into her face:

    ¡°Step aside Corporal! That is an order!¡±

    Only for Thomson to answer that:

    ¡°Belay that order! Keep doing what you are doing!¡±

    That made Burke face Thomson.

    ¡°What the fuck do you think you are doing, Lieutenant?¡± The last word was clearly intended as a show of dominance, of emphasizing the difference in rank, but Thomson did not even flinch.

    ¡°I gave the order to my corporal to ignore the illegal order of another officer.¡±

    That did not sit well with Burke, and he moved his face a couple of centimeters away from Thomsons and screamed:

    ¡°I am your superior officer, Lieutenant! If I order one of your soldiers around, then that is my prerogative! Consider yourself under arrest for insubordination. And now¡± he turned back to Ingridsdottir: ¡°get out of my way, private!¡±

    But Thomson was not done yet.

    ¡°I have to correct you. You are a higher-ranking officer, but not my superior. You are explicitly not in my chain of command. And you have no authority to order my corporal around. Especially as she is doing her duty.¡±

    ¡°That¡¯s it, Thomson! I will make your life a living hell. You think you can ignore my rank? You think you can countermand my orders with impunity? Think again. I will have you recalled and court-martialed so fast that you won¡¯t even have time to say sorry!¡±

    If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.

    In response, Thomson smiled sweetly:

    ¡°You don¡¯t have the rank, or the authority to countermand my orders. And my orders, and subsequently those of my men and women, are to protect Dr. DuClare at any cost against anybody.

    The last time I looked, anybody includes you as well.¡±

    Burke snarled:

    ¡°Don¡¯t get too comfortable, Thomson. I will find out who gave you those idiotic orders and then I will find who is above them to make them revoke those orders.¡±

    Thomson¡¯s smile deepened.

    ¡°I can spare you the search, Major. I will tell you who gave me the order, in person, I might add. I got my orders from Nathan Vandermeer personally. Good luck finding somebody, anybody, who can make him revoke his orders.¡±

    That finally made Burke recoil, and he looked at Thomson as if he had seen a ghost.

    ¡°Nathan Vandermeer? What the fuck does Nathan Vandermeer want from this third-rate scientist in a fourth-rate city? Look at her, she is ugly as sin, and I seriously doubt that she is in any way smart enough to capture his interest.¡±

    I shook my head in resignation while Thomson answered.

    ¡°That is his personal matter, Major, and it is not on us to ask why he does what he does. He is the Vandermeer.¡±

    Michael cleared his throat.

    ¡°To be honest Major, if I were you, I would start trying to apologize to Dr. DuClare. That might rescue your career. As it is, I will contact Vandermeer and explain that working with you seems to be impossible.¡±

    That turned Burke¡¯s ire back to Michael.

    ¡°So what? When I tell HQ how fucked up you are, and how much you live in a fantasy world, they will cut you off so fast that you can¡¯t even believe it.¡±

    Michael raised one eyebrow and tilted his head.

    ¡°If that is what you really believe, do your worst. I think differently.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°If we are done, my dinner gets cold.¡± That only triggered Burke to try to jump at me again. Unsuccessfully, because Ingridsdottier was still in his way. He resorted to making a rude gesture and scoff:

    ¡°Whatever! But you better look for professional help, girl, if you really believe those numbers those idiots of Upreti gave me.¡±

    I shrugged and went back to my seat, happy that my food was still somewhat hot. Yes, it would not have been a tragedy if it had cooled, but wasting good food was always a shame.

    Unfortunately, any good mood was just shot. To make matters short, after dinner, I brought the scientists to the implant lab, looking at the auto-surgeons that frankly were mostly gathering dust, and gestured toward them.

    ¡°The package I¡¯ll implant unless you object will require you to make unrobe your upper torso. The standard program implants the cranial board behind the right shoulder blade, but we can essentially put it anywhere where there is space for it. I strongly recommend the standard placing though.¡±

    Fortunately, they all agreed to the standard placing, and they literally played a game of rock, paper, scissors to decide the order. I had to roll my eyes seeing that. All this was making a difference of 30 minutes, in a 12-hour drug session.

    Interestingly, in the end, it was the women first, the men second. Well, stranger things happen.

    While the women were in the auto-surgeons, Staff Sergeant Pajera approached me and spoke softly:

    ¡°I want to apologize for Major Burke¡¯s behavior, ma¡¯am. I wish I could tell you that he is not normally so condescending, but that would be a lie. He is used to representing the superior weapons manufacturer of the world, and that has made him more than a bit arrogant I fear.¡±

    I looked at the middle-aged, mid-sized Pure with a raised eyebrow.

    ¡°I think we all know that that is an understatement, Sergeant. But I don¡¯t hold this against you or Vandermeer as a whole. And I fear this will come back to bite the Major in the behind.¡±

    Pajera frowned for a moment.

    ¡°Bite him in¡­ oh, you mean it will bite him in the ass? Don¡¯t get your hopes too high, he has friends in high places. You would need substantial pull to get him even a slap on the wrist I fear.¡±

    I chuckled but shook my head:

    ¡°Why do you think you were sent out here? Let¡¯s be frank, Enki is a brand-sparkling new entity. How the heck did we manage to get a team of Vandermeer military technicians sent out here to help us? I don¡¯t know if you¡¯ve realized it, but the main fusactor of Enki is an S&P Excelsior 2800.

    The truth is, we do have substantial pull with Vandermeer.¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°That makes the next part even harder I fear, ma¡¯am. If Enki was just another customer, well it would not really matter, but so¡­ you have to look into those claims that your military makes. What they say their guns can do is simply not possible.¡±

    I tilted my head in confusion.

    ¡°What do you think is not possible?¡±

    ¡°The speed of a two-ton projectile is simply ludicrous. The current needed to accelerate that much mass to nearly 10 km/s¡­ it would vaporize the rails in a single shot, without even the friction heating.

    Even with a more sensible projectile mass of around 10-20kg, the speed is insane. At that speed, the rails will need replacement after at best a dozen shots. It is simply not feasible.¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°You made one mistake, Sergeant. We are not talking about railguns. There are no rails that can be vaporized or degraded. This weapon is a grav gun. That means that the projectile will never even touch the actual gun, and the acceleration happens with gravitational fields.¡±

    Now he frowned.

    ¡°But that¡­ that is impossible ma¡¯am. I know a tiny bit about gravitics. Vandermeer looked into the idea of gravity mass drivers a couple of decades in the past. It just doesn¡¯t work. For one, the grav coils are simply way too expensive to make them feasible. And then, you would need several kilo-Keppler coils. That might work for the spinal gun of a battleship, but not for anything designed to intercept any grav ship. It would be stupidly unwieldy.¡±

    Ok, at least it was not just knee-jerk ¡®hasn¡¯t-be-done-before¡¯ rejection. This man knew what he was talking about.

    ¡°If you promise me to keep it silent for a couple of weeks, I can tell you roughly how it works. And don¡¯t worry, Vandermeer will get this information at that time anyway as far as I can see. But for two weeks we need to keep it somewhat secret.¡±

    He looked at me calculating, then sighed and nodded.

    ¡°Fine, I can keep mum about it for two weeks. But this better be good. I hate keeping secrets from the eggheads.¡±

    I shrugged, while I led him to one of the tables a bit to the side, where we could talk without being disturbed, or overheard. The everpresent Corporal Ingridsdottir was the only other person in hearing range.

    When we had sat down, I opened up:

    ¡°You said you have some knowledge about gravitics. Tell me, do you know how grav coils work?¡±

    He scrunched his face and shook his head.

    ¡°No, ma¡¯am, sorry. But I was never that deep into the grav tech. Just the basics.¡±

    ¡°No need to be embarrassed about it. You are not alone. Until a bit over a month ago, I don¡¯t think anybody knew how grav coils worked. I slogged through the whole virtual university course about gravitics to learn that people use them by rote. Somebody uses trial and error to look into what a grav coil does in situation x, and then that is taught. But how they do it, is¡­ was unknown.¡±

    I smiled.

    ¡°Frankly, I was disappointed about that. And decided to look into it. I don¡¯t know if you have heard about the Seeberger equation, or not. It comes from before the War, but only this year have we finally managed to make use of it.

    Well, I have managed to make use of it. I¡¯ve been informed that nobody else has had much luck with it.

    The thing about the equation is that it is essentially the Theory for Everything. With enough work, one can use it to explain every single physical phenomenon. Including grav coils. And I did the work in respect of grav coils. And realized that the Kobashigawa coils are¡­ horrendously inefficient.

    What I found out is that Kobashigawa coils waste nearly 99% of the energy they are fed on heat or other fields than the gravity-bending one. And that is perfect Kobashigawa coils. And I managed to¡­ rectify that.

    To make it short, the grav guns are a somewhat complicated sextuplet helix of six 80k Keppler coils, creating a resulting field of 472k Keppler. This field projects 176m beyond the 8m barrel of the grav gun. It doesn¡¯t affect the agility of the gun, as the field is without any mass. In addition, it creates a vacuum tunnel.¡±

    It took a moment for Pajera to make sense of the numbers.

    ¡°Wait, you are saying that you have a 12000g grav field for 184m of length? That is insane. And dangerous. What if something goes wrong, and it gives out a 1000g pulse?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Nice to speak to somebody who I don¡¯t have to explain it in baby steps to. And no, there is no danger. The design of the helix, which I call grav vortex, makes it impossible to use it as a pulse. Beyond maybe 200-250m in length, the grav vortex eats itself. In that distance, yes, it can deliver a 12000g localized punch at anything, but¡­ to make it short, it can¡¯t be used as a gravity pulse weapon. To be exact, none of the new grav coils can be used as GPWs.

    It is one of the waste fields that supercharges the gravity-bending one if you overload a Kobashigawa coil. So no cheap gravity pulse weapons.¡±

    He did not look very convinced.

    ¡°If you don¡¯t believe me, then I am sure that we can arrange a demonstration for you and your team.¡±

    He still scrunched his forehead but nodded slowly nonetheless.

    ¡°That might be a solution. Not that I don¡¯t want to believe you, but¡­ you have to know how fantastic this sounds, right?¡±

    ¡°Yes and no. I understand that without the information that I just gave you it is simply not believable. But I also know that Enki has released the Q-link a bit over a month ago, and that was equally unbelievable before that moment.¡±

    He let his head hang down, closed his eyes, and sighed.

    ¡°Ok, I give you that. But to come up with not one, but two such radically new things in such a short time?¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°The secret here is that it was not such a short time. I developed the Q-link in March. After that¡­ well, I am a K4 and I have an extremely good jack. It took me more than six months, fortunately virtual, to just do the math on it. And believe me, you do not want to see the equation. Ever.

    That was with the knowledge that grav-bending is real and a proven phenomenon.

    After that, it was well over a week in the real world before I could even begin experimenting with it. And that was with the math virtually giving me step-by-step instructions on how to do it.

    There was nothing quick and easy with this breakthrough. After that, forming the new coils into the grav vortex took another three virtual months, determining the sweet spot for it to be used as an anti-ship weapon another two weeks, and writing the calculator that lets people without an understanding of the Seeberger equation modify the design to adapt it to their needs another week.

    But because I am a K4, with an ultra-bandwidth jack and access to a seriously overpowered computer all that was done in a couple of real-world days.¡±

    I did not look very convinced, but when he spoke, he changed the topic:

    ¡°Ok, but what about these particle beam things? I mean, sorry ma¡¯am, but that is old technology. Very old. And nobody managed to make it into a weapon. It is simply too big, and too unwieldy to be used that way. For a marginal gain even.¡±

    ¡°Again, the Seeberger equation. When I tried to unravel the Kobashigawa coils, I found a couple of fields before I managed to make the better grav coils. And one of them is a field that severely impacts electro-magnetism. In all its forms and variations.

    You are right that the electron gun is known for centuries. So is the proton gun. But the thing that is new is that we now can create a Terravolt potential for the same amount of power and bulk that we previously used to get a low Kilovolt potential.¡±

    He slumped and sighed, so I continued:

    ¡°Again, we can arrange a demonstration for you if you want.¡±

    He slowly shook his head.

    ¡°This is so¡­ unreal.¡±

    I could only shrug.

    ¡°I understand you perfectly here, but that feeling does not make it unreal. It works, I can assure you of that. We tested the weapons.¡±

    ¡°And¡­ what about this¡­ disruptor gun? I mean, I can see the grav gun and the particle beams. We already had the basic idea for them for centuries, and just lacked the engineering to make them work. But the disruptor... that is pure science fiction.¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°Science fantasy. You mean science fantasy. Science fiction is an extrapolation of the laws of nature as they were known when science fiction is written. The moment it goes into something that is simply impossible according to those laws, it becomes science fantasy. We could as well say a wizard did it.

    But in this instance, think about what I just told you about the particle beams. We have a quantum field that influences electro-magnetism, in all its forms and variants. Now think, what will happen if there suddenly is a space where electrons are no longer negatively charged?

    Especially if the protons are still positively charged? That is the disruptor.¡±

    He seemed conflicted:

    ¡°But¡­ but that is¡­ how can it be real? It is soo¡­ ¡°

    ¡°I get you there. I originally thought the same. But it works. Regardless of what our feelings say, and what we believe, if it is there if it works, and our feelings and beliefs say it can¡¯t, then the feelings and beliefs are wrong, not the other way around.¡±

    He blew out some air, and took a few deep hard breaths, shaking his head all the time.

    ¡°I¡­ you are right, but it is so hard to simply accept it.¡±

    ¡°As I said, a demonstration can be arranged. Then there is no longer any doubt about it.¡±

    ¡°Yes, you are right, but¡­ what about your sensors?¡±

    I tilted my head.

    ¡°What about them?¡±

    ¡°Well, your radar is¡­ basic but it works. It could be better, don¡¯t get me wrong, but not much. It is your software that is lacking here. You simply do not have all the tricks that we have fought against over the years included. You have to do better I fear. But that is something we can help you with.

    And I have to say, the amount of compute you somehow squeezed into those mounts is mindblowing. That covers quite a few sins. If your software was up to snuff, it would be simply the best there is.

    Your IR sensors are standard. Not surprising. Nobody has managed to get better IRs for more than a century. And again, the compute you throw at it is simply insane so you are ahead of the curve there.

    But what is this¡­ palanti?¡±

    I chuckled:

    ¡°You mean Palant¨ªr? And why do you ask?¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°If you had not explained the rest of your new tech in a way that is at least believable I would simply write it off as another piece of science fiction¡­¡± He grimaced, and corrected himself:

    ¡°Science fantasy. A system that will find any grav ship at a range of 5000km, regardless of stealth? How does it work? How can it work?¡±

    I sighed. It was as I had feared. I would have to talk to Michael and Naveen about it, we should be exceptionally careful about who we even talked about it to.

    ¡°Sorry, but I will not explain it. Palant¨ªr is based on a principle that is simply too dangerous to be known. Right now, there are exactly four people who even have an idea of how it works, and only I know more about it than its basic principle. And that will stay this way as long as I can make it.¡±

    He frowned.

    ¡°What? But why? What can be soo dangerous that you simply keep that for yourself?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°See my previous answer. It is too dangerous to talk about, so it is also too dangerous to talk about why it is too dangerous. The thing is, it works. But how it works will remain a secret. Even its existence will remain a secret. We won¡¯t sell it, except maybe to Vandermeer. We will not talk about it, we will not mention it, and we will do our very best that nobody outside of Enki, and Vandermeer will ever learn about its existence.

    Not just because it is too dangerous, but it is also an immense strategical advantage that we don¡¯t want any potential rival to plan for.¡±

    Then it was time to replace the women with the men of our science team in the auto-surgeons, so I excused myself to Pajera and did my job.

 2.33: The first of its kind

    By now it should be obvious that despite the speed at which I sometimes made breakthroughs, science never was that easy.

    Working on the Folly was off to a slow start. Unfortunately, Vandermeer had been unable to arrange chimpanzee sperm and ova, though he assured me that this was just a matter of the time frame and that he would deliver them as soon as he could.

    That made us concentrate on other mammals first. Which, naturally, we did not have at hand either. Well, except rats. Rats we had in raw numbers, in the Fortress as well as with Enki.

    The rest simply took time to clone. Add in that the BOU had one glaring flaw, at least in this endeavor.

    The eggheads from Nowhere were used to fertilize gametes under the microscope. Nothing wrong with that, basically, but we quickly noticed that the nano-bots were not optically neutral. No, under the microscope, they made the picture¡­ unstable is I think the best word. To make it short, for two and a half days we were completely puzzled why the tried and tested method of injecting a sperm into an ovum suddenly refused to work any longer.

    And another couple of days to find a solution to the problem. At first, I hoped that the BOU could be used to make it work, but while the resolution of the BOU was insane, it was not quite what one would call real-time. It had also difficulties locating the needle. In the end, I threw tech at the problem, as I had so often. I designed a small GRT specifically for lab work.

    After that¡­ well it was time to build up a database. Slowly. We would need thousands of specimens to find out what was common in all of them compared to what was unusual.

    That all in itself would take over a month to do. Mostly because it took around half an hour to artificially fertilize an egg, irrelevant of the species.

    And this was a use case where bots, any bots, were not fine-controlled enough to do it.

    Still, the next Tuesday rolled around, and with it the premiere appearance of the telepresence bot. Everybody understood that I right then and there preferred to remain in the fortress and work on the Folly, instead of dressing for a day in the office, putting on any warpaint, and then spending 20 to 30 minutes just commuting. Not to mention all the little chitchat that usually happened before and after those meetings.

    And thus, I was present through the matrix.

    One admittedly minor kink in the procedure was that the android butler placed a cup of coffee in front of me regardless. We would have to work on its programming in that regard. Some other time.

    The meeting was mostly a touch-up on the ongoing business. The revelation of the NADA was decided for Monday, November 5<sup>th</sup>, followed over the course of the week with all the other new goodies we had to offer.

    In that regard, our rate of production had exploded. Kenneth and James had not stopped building empty plants, warehouses, and processing facilities, just because we had no immediate need for them.

    No, we all knew that we would need most if not all of them before Enki was even a year old, so why stop now when we had a bit of a lull?

    That meant when we decided to use bots and NADAs to make those bots, it had taken them only a couple of days to have the production facilities for the bots up and running. Yes, the first NADAs they used were of the old design, heck, old¡­ just to get them up and running within two days, but then they filled whatever buildings they had prepared with big NADAs.

    For now to make the bots, though the same NADAs would be later repurposed for other tasks. That of course meant that we had way more bots available than we needed and the two of them had decided to put the surplus to work on putting up new buildings.

    Which they then proceeded to fill with NADAs. Right now, Enkis production capabilities were growing exponentially, though that would not remain. Right now, we were considering if we did not need even more land. Yes, we had not even 30 of the 225 blocks built on yet, but the way we were growing it was at least worth thinking about it.

    In the end, the consensus was that we would hit a wall in demand sometime before we hit the wall of our lacking facilities.

    And if that happened, who said we had to concentrate all of our eggs in this one, admittedly defensible basket?

    Otherwise, the redesign of the NADA to the modular system was fully underway and we now could set up a new NADA within around four hours. And I meant the 625m3 NADAs here. The test of the new cyberware was well underway but had naturally no results yet, and the rats with the reflex booster were by now showing signs of neural degradation.

    Hippocrates was in the opinion of Jessi ready for release, but we decided to wait until we started selling the new auto-surgeon.

    The new emergency medical device was also being tested, again without any results yet.

    Naveen was complaining profusely about Major Burke, who seemed to believe that anybody who declined to buy Vandermeer anti-ship weapons was a lost cause.

    He completely ignored the areas where we did ask for help, like infantry weapons, crew-served weapons, radar software, and such things, and instead pestered Naveen and his crew that we needed to buy Vandermeer heavy weapons.

    The bad thing here was that he downright blocked us from buying the weapons we actually needed. He did not believe we needed them when we did not buy the heavies.

    In that, Michael agreed to talk to Vandermeer about Burke. This was getting out of hand. The good news though was that the ¡®point-defense¡¯ grav gun was nearly ready for testing, and the full-sized grav gun had a firing rate of 16 rpm.

    To bring that into perspective, the big railguns with a 15kg slug that had less than 1/800<sup>th</sup> of the force per shot had on average a firing rate of three to four rpm. Those grav guns were in one word, deadly.

    Not all news were good though. Our attempt to enter the com market was getting some pushback. Not from any of the big players yet, but enough that it was noticeable. Don¡¯t get me wrong, it was by far not enough to keep us out, but it was the first real opposition we experienced.

    A sad first I have to say, but obviously inevitable.

    Still, the really good news was that our profit after taxes had grown to an insane $133 million per day. Including weekends.

    It helped that some of the minions, a group of material scientists with the help of the physicists, Maynard and Warden, had taken a look at the carbon extruder design. Don¡¯t get me wrong, the basic design was basically antique. There were only so many ways you could form carbon after all. But they had looked into it with the eye to where they could tweak the process with the capabilities of our new technology.

    The result was¡­ not the same old tech anymore. For starters, they used disruptors to convert the carbon into a form that could be used, what conventional extruders did with shredders and heat, in a single, fast step. Right there they had shortened the process by around 12%. Next, they replaced the slow pump system to transport the carbon to the reaction chamber with grav conveyors to shave off another 3%. But the real timesaver was that they replaced the overpressure pump needed to generate the optimal environment for the synthesis of the various allotropes with grav coils.

    Yes, the overall time savings were only in the area of a minute or two. Per batch. But when the whole process from the loading of the hopper to the finished carbon part took only three to four minutes, that was enormous.

    Yes, the new carbon extruders were quite a bit more expensive. Not massively so, but noticeable. But the increased speed meant that our extruder could create around twice as many Q-links per hour as the one we had used previously. Alena was practically salivating when she reported our earnings and the prospects.

    All in all, all was well, so the meeting was relatively brief. I was not unhappy about it, as it allowed me more time to work on the Folly.

    One thing puzzling me was why there was no automation in fertilizing the eggs. My, admittedly, cursory, research told me that they were well ahead in using automated systems to do the procedure before the great war. After a deeper look into the topic, I learned that, as so often, those technologies had been taken over by the war effort.

    Creating the Mutants for the military, doing research in bioweapons, or defense against them. And in 12 years of war, virtually every bit of it had been destroyed by infiltrators, saboteurs, and military strikes, while the people who knew how to use, and more important recreate the technology, were very often a target for assassination.

    Seriously, if I had not been convinced that it was impossible, I would start working on a time machine just to travel back before the start of the war and beat some sense into anybody even thinking about going to war.

    But the simple fact that it took each of the scientists around 15-20 minutes per fertilization process, with preparation and clean up afterward, well, let¡¯s say I had quite a bit of idle time while they were working.

    This was especially frustrating as the information I could get at this early stage was¡­ useless. I needed way more samples to find the pattern.

    That of course meant also that my mind wandered to ways to make things faster. Way faster.

    First I developed a very basic laboratory bot that could do the work. With the need of having the BOU in place in mind, I did include an optic, but mostly I integrated the GRT I had designed, as well as an interface to the BOU. All in one, you see.

    That took me not even a single virtual hour. At 240:1¡­ around 12 seconds in real-time. Heck, the NADAs would take around two hours to make one of those things, just in comparison.

    The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

    I think that explains pretty clearly why I did not stop there. Out of, well not quite boredom, but at least in part of it, I threw everything I had learned, invented, or created at it.

    I had Calliope work on the control software, without much of parameters about how I thought it should be, just that it should be the best she could make. What came out was a relatively lightweight VI. That should teach me not to give Calliope any open tasks like that anymore.

    Not that the VI was not good, mind you. Just¡­ overkill. Serious overkill. But that happens when a VI like Calliope runs on a Super Grendel with nigh anything to do.

    Not that my participation was any better, mind you. I integrated the conveyor system almost automatically. A BOU to select the sperm would make it possible to pick the gender of the resulting zygote. And lastly, I replaced the needle with a high-precision tractor beam.

    The result was, frankly an expensive monstrosity, that could fertilize eggs at a rate of roughly a dozen a minute.

    Needless to say, I build five of them. That number did fit nicely in the big 625m3 NADA, so I just made one batch.

    That, for some strange reason, sped the process up a wee bit. Who would have guessed? Not that it helped that much. At least not that fast. I needed thousands of samples, of various species, to find the common theme, the key to the kingdom, the magic moment.

    But this meant that instead of working for several months just to get the basic information to even begin the real world, now it should not take more than a few weeks.

    But that did not mean that everybody was happy about it. At first, the scientists were a bit peeved that I had taken what they saw as their job away from them.

    But get real, their job was to work through the data with me and look for the miracle of life. Let the machines do the part they could do better.

    One may think that it was serious overkill to create those new machines just for this project. And one would be right. If I managed to find the magic key, then they would be mostly unused curiosities after that. Virtually useless. If we managed to beat the Folly, then there would be no need for those kinds of high-intensity fertilization machines anymore.

    Heck, even with the Folly still in effect they were only useful with projects like this specific one. But right then and there, they were useful, and that was enough for me.

    Heck, with molecular forges and NADAs, when their usefulness was done, I could just recycle them and get everything except the energy back. And the time I ¡®wasted¡¯ developing them was inconsequential. It was idle time anyway, without any data for me to analyze, and I would gain it back hundredfold thanks to them being so much faster.

    What it enabled us though was to concentrate fully on looking over the accumulating data, trying to find any commonalities. Right now, there were many. Logical, as we were exclusively using rats at that point. But the sheer amount already allowed us to winnow out some parts of the gametes as irrelevant because they were different between individual rats.

    No chance of those being the philosopher¡¯s stone.

    And so, our first real day working on this project came to an end. We were further along than the contingent from Nowhere had expected, but far less than I had hoped. Still, progress was progress, and this was a journey of a million steps.

    That explained why we were in relatively high spirits when we closed shop at dinner time.

    I was somewhat surprised that the lights were off in the mess. At this time of the day, the room should be bustling with action, and during the day, they were on almost constantly. But in the end, I did not think too much about it. The room was dark, and I wanted to eat.

    So I activated the light switch. Just to be utterly stunned. All my friends, including all the execs of Enki, had been waiting in the darkened room and were now shouting, somewhat synchronized:

    ¡°Happy Birthday!¡±

    I have to confess, it took me a few seconds to take in the scenery, much less to understand what was happening. Yes, it was my birthday, as I realized belatedly, but I had not expected anything.

    To be honest, I had never had somebody even wish me a happy birthday, much less think about celebrating it. It was mostly just another day for me. In 2249, literally Tuesday.

    Naturally, the scientists from Nowhere had not been informed either and had not stopped walking when I did, so I had only a few seconds to puzzle about what was happening anyway before Aaron walked into me.

    Fortunately, he was quick enough to catch me when I stumbled forward, still reeling in shock. Afterward, he pushed me softly forward into the room, where the song was still ongoing.

    When the song ended, I was quickly embraced by all the wellwishers, and I got more hugs than I remembered ever getting in a week, much less ten minutes. One big surprise was Nathaniel Vandermeer being part of the group. I had not even known that he had come to NYC.

    Not that I had the mental wherewithal to even think about it, mind you. I was still completely stunned.

    Instead of the beef stew that had been planned for that dinner, what awaited me was a spread of tasty finger food. Delicious, filling, nutritious, and quite facile to eat.

    Slowly I caught myself, got over the surprise, and managed to find Ben in the throng, getting a second, much more thorough hug from him.

    ¡°What the frick is happening here?¡±

    It was Michael who answered me:

    ¡°I thought that was self-evident. We are celebrating you becoming 19 years old.¡±

    I shook my head to clear it further.

    ¡°But¡­ but I¡­ nobody ever did anything for my birthday. Why now?¡±

    The smile on Michael¡¯s face turned melancholy for a moment before he brightened up again.

    ¡°Yes, I know. That was in Seattle. Where you had no friends, and no real family, only enemies and strangers. This is here. In New York City, where you have quite a few friends and family. Where you are valued and loved. We love you, and we are happy that you are here. That you exist. And we are celebrating today for just that reason.¡±

    It took me a moment to wrap my head around this. But slowly a smile crept onto my face. They really liked me. Yes, on some level I had known that for some time by now, but this drove it home.

    ¡°I¡­ I don¡¯t know what to say.¡±

    It was Ben, who pulled me again into the hug, and softly answered me:

    ¡°Simply say thank you, and then let us party.¡±

    I shrugged and turned in the hug to face the room.

    ¡°He is right. Thank you all. It is¡­ well you know this is the first birthday of me that anybody remembered.¡±

    For some reason, my cheeks were wet.

    The people distributed themselves around the room and began eating and talking.

    It was obvious who here were guards, as those men and women remained standing at the walls, looking at all of us. I made a note to provide some food for them later.

    As far as I could tell, all conversation during the meal was insignificant small talk. Afterward, we more or less mingled in small, spontaneous groupings, talking about anything and everything.

    It became interesting when I was snuggled up to Ben, and Vandermeer came close.

    He looked at us for a moment, before he smiled while shaking his head.

    ¡°Not that I want to complain, but don¡¯t you think that you are a bit too old for her?¡±

    It was obvious that he was talking to Ben, who sighed audibly.

    ¡°Yes, in a way I am. And not just a bit. And to be honest, before I met Vivian I would never described her as ¡®my type¡¯. For one, I had a thing for brunettes, and almost every woman I had a relationship with was at least 5 feet 5 tall. Without heels.¡±

    He sighed again.

    ¡°And of course the last time I dated somebody who was Vivian¡¯s apparent age, was when I was in college. But all that changed when I met her. When I got to know her. Usually, girls her age are¡­ let¡¯s be generous and call it immature. But if there is one thing that does not apply to Vivian it is immature.

    In the end, she is beautiful physically, and her age, well we are still genetically programmed to look for younger mates. But all that pales compared to her mind.

    And I found out that I find her biological age way less important than I thought. I could not help to be attracted to her brilliance and maturity.¡±

    Then he chuckled.

    ¡°And if we count her mental age¡­ she is the elder one. She once told me that she has over a hundred years of experienced time. Hard to beat that I think.¡±

    Vandermeer sighed but nodded.

    ¡°I thought something like that. I had you researched, obviously. And as you said, Vivian is so not your type. I did not think it was her money either.¡±

    Ben shrugged.

    ¡°Don¡¯t get me wrong, the money is nice but unimportant. Yes, she gifted me the Merc, but otherwise, what she pays in taxes, fairly I might add, is more than enough to finance everything I ever wanted. And she would pay those taxes with us in a relationship or not.¡±

    ¡°I see. And I understand.¡±

    Then he shook his head.

    ¡°But¡­ sorry to bring business onto the table today, but I fear I have to intervene. And as soon as possible.¡±

    He looked straight at me when he said that, so it was not to miss whom he was addressing with this non-sequitur. In response, I tilted my head and wrinkled my forehead.

    It was clear that he took that as a prompt to continue.

    ¡°I know that you think you don¡¯t need anti-ship weaponry. You told me that. But¡­ what Burke told me is that you, all of Enki really, are completely delusional about it. And the values that he told me you claim¡­ they are absolutely impossible.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Seriously, Burke is the one who puts his head in the sand. I won¡¯t classify him as an idiot, but that is only barely.¡±

    Vandermeer shook his head.

    ¡°Vivian, I should not have to tell you that no railgun can get more than 5500 m/s. Beyond that and it won¡¯t survive a single attempt to shoot. And anything above 3700 makes them very short-lived. In other words, nearly 10000 m/s is simply impossible.

    That has nothing to do with Burke being an idiot or not, sorry.¡±

    I snorted softly and smiled at him.

    ¡°You are right, you don¡¯t have to explain that to me. I know that no railgun is viable with more than 3700, maybe 3800 m/s. But my tepid opinion of Burke¡¯s intelligence is not based on that fact.

    First, he explained that it can¡¯t work because the projectile will burn up. Well, not in combat ranges with a carbon coating, it won¡¯t.

    But more important is the fact that he told you that we claim our railgun can get that speed. That is the mistake. We don¡¯t have a railgun. What we have is a grav gun.¡±

    To his credit, it took him only a few seconds to parse what I was saying.

    ¡°A¡­ grav gun? You know we looked into that. It is simply not a viable technology. Yes, I understand that in theory, you can achieve insane speeds. But any grav coil strong enough to get even to railgun speeds is so unwieldy that it would be like aiming a skyscraper.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°In the old technology, yes.¡±

    His eyes narrowed.

    ¡°¡¯Old technology¡¯? As far as I am aware, grav coils are more than 150 years old. And they haven¡¯t changed since then.¡±

    ¡°I know. Mostly because nobody could understand how they worked. I was a bit¡­ miffed when I learned that.¡±

    This sentence made Ben guffaw out loud, attracting the attention of several of my friends.

    After he had managed to get himself back under control, Ben, still clearly very amused said:

    ¡°A bit miffed¡­ ok, that is a new record in understatement.¡± He turned to Vandermeer.

    ¡°She was furious. And then she spent several virtual months in cyberspace to figure it out.¡±

    Vandermeer¡¯s eyes opened wide.

    ¡°Wait, are you implying that Vivian figured out how grav coils actually work?¡±

    That brought another chuckle from Ben.

    ¡°Implying? No. I outright say it. Not only did she figure out how they work, she figured out how to make them better. Way better.¡±

    Vandermeer¡¯s eyes now narrowed and focused back on me.

    ¡°How much better?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°That naturally depends on what quality of coils you compare them with. Against the average Kobashigawa coil, they are around 400 times better. Against the premium coils, they are ¡®only¡¯ 80 times better.

    But they are consistent and way cheaper. They cost around 5% of an average not skewed Kobashigawa coil of the same size. If we calculate for the same strength, you know that the bigger the coil, the lower the success chances, so for the same strength we get around 1/10000<sup>th</sup> of the cost.¡±

    I smiled happily.

    ¡°But even if somebody buys the coils we will begin selling, they won¡¯t be able to make a grav gun from them. That requires a couple of additional tricks. Which we won¡¯t sell.¡±

    Vandermeer rubbed his chin, nodding softly, before he answered:

    ¡°But as soon as it is clear how to make it, others will make their own new coils. And with that the grav guns.¡±

    I shook my head, still smiling.

    ¡°Nope. First, they need a NADA to make them. And even then, there is another special trick in it, that we won¡¯t tell. Or sell.¡±

    That made Vandermeer recoil.

    ¡°A¡­ NADA? Are you saying that you have a¡­ working NADA?¡±

    That was the cue for Michael to interject.

    ¡°Not one, no. By now we have nearly a thousand of them up and running. But¡­ I thought we wanted to keep that close to the west for now?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°First, you are the one who has started to pursue a formal alliance with Vandermeer. They need to know what we bring to the table. And second, we will announce them next Monday anyway. Along with all the other toys we have decided to sell.¡±

    Michael shrugged.

    ¡°Sure, but you should have at least talked to me about it, don¡¯t you think?¡±

    But he was smiling, so it was clear he protested just pro forma.

 2.34: I present you...

    Vandermeer looked from Michael to me, and back to Michael before he sighed.

    ¡°So you are telling me that Enki has cracked the century-old dream of creating the mystical replicator? How?¡±

    Michael smiled sweetly while he answered:

    ¡°No, not Enki. Vivian made that happen before we even had the idea for Enki. Hell, she almost had it working in Seattle. And the how¡­ forgive me when I say that we will keep that little gem to ourselves for now.

    Nothing personal, but we want to have patent protection for it before we tell anybody how it works. It is so simple and logical that it would be way too easy to steal the show.¡±

    Then his face suddenly became serious.

    ¡°Next week we will reveal it all, and we have already decided to license it to most other corporations. With a handful of corps that we find unsavory. We are considering licensing Vandermeer the whole package though. Including the tech necessary to make grav coils. And other goodies.¡±

    I frowned at that. Yes, he was technically right, we were considering it. But it was more a ¡®maybe we could¡¯ level of considering instead of a ¡®we should unless there is a reason not to¡¯.

    ¡°Uhm¡­ Michael, do you really think we should talk about that now?¡±

    He shook his head.

    ¡°Vivian, we have started negotiations for a close alliance with Vandermeer. That alone makes the idea of giving them the whole package much more likely. Likely enough to start talking about it.¡±

    Vandermeer looked from Michael to me, and back, raising his left eyebrow.

    ¡°Do I understand that right that you won¡¯t provide that specific technology to anybody else?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°My last stand was that we would not even consider admitting that there was a difference between a standard NADA and one that is capable to make grav coils. Much less reveal how it is done.¡±

    Michael smiled at Vandermeer.

    ¡°She is right, you even knowing that there is a difference puts you ahead. For the rest, we will let them try, but as Vivian said, there is a trick to it. Not that even knowing about the trick will do them any good in that regard.¡±

    When Vandermeer tilted his head confused, Michael elaborated.

    ¡°Enki knows the trick. We have a few dozen scientists and engineers who have been thoroughly instructed. And not one of them could create a new grav coil.¡±

    That made me frown.

    ¡°That can¡¯t be right. I did not create all the new grav coils and gravity constructs we have. Most of them, yes. Mostly because we are only in the beginning, but that will change.¡±

    Michael snorted.

    ¡°Viv, you think too much of other people sometimes. Our engineers get an idea and can design the parameters for what the coils or the construct should do, and then they give that to Warden and she gives them the full design back.¡±

    And I had to frown harder.

    ¡°But that is not that different from how I do it. The math is simply too complicated. I would waste days, in real-time, to calculate a single grav coil.¡±

    And Michael shook his head.

    ¡°First, you would waste days. That means you could actually do it. Second, you use Warden to finalize the details of the coils, but you create the basic design by yourself. And third, you still do things with grav coils that Warden can¡¯t do. Not a single point of those three is true for anybody else.

    You create a new conveyor, calculate the necessary strength of the grav coils in the appropriate positions to get the needed performance, and then use Warden to calculate the exact design of the coils. All our other engineers calculate the needed performance of the conveyor and let Warden do the rest.¡±

    Vandermeer shook his head.

    ¡°So, to get this right, without Warden, nobody could do it?¡±

    ¡°Nobody but Vivian, yes. And before you ask, no, we will not spin off an expert system or even a VI to do that. With this functionality resting solely in Warden, nobody can¡­ acquire it. And with Warden effectively being a rogue VI, nobody can take control of her.¡±

    ¡°So, even if the other corporations manage to get their hands on a NADA that can make grav coils, they can only do what is already released. I understand.¡±

    I still did not understand what made me better than the other scientists and engineers, but I just shrugged and let it go.

    ¡°But, if it is only Warden that makes it possible to create new coil configurations, and if we give Vandermeer the full NADA tech, won¡¯t we have to give them access to Warden as well?¡±

    Michael shook his head.

    ¡°Not directly. Keep in mind that Warden only helps us because Enki mostly belongs to you. So unfortunately they have to request new designs from us.¡±

    Vandermeer rubbed his chin.

    ¡°Even then, if I understand you right this is still lightyears ahead of anybody else. I assume you will have to begin planning an orbital factory when ABAS begins to seriously use your coils. That will catapult you to double A status for certain.¡±

    Ben pressed me a bit harder into him when he interjected:

    ¡°That is all nice and well but that¡¯s enough with the business talk. This is not the time and place for that.¡±

    Michael frowned:

    ¡°What do you mean?¡±

    Ben sighed before he answered:

    ¡°We are here to give Vivian something she never had. To celebrate her birthday. To celebrate her. Don¡¯t make it into another business meeting and dilute it, please.¡±

    Michael¡¯s eyes widened and Vandermeer suddenly became solemn.

    ¡°Yes, you are right. We have enough time in the next week to talk business.¡±

    I turned my head to look had Ben.

    ¡°Why does business talk not fit in today?¡±

    Ben smiled mildly.

    ¡°Because this is your birthday. We have this party to give you a bit of fun. And frankly, a birthday party is no place for business talk at all. That has nothing to do with you specifically. It just is not that type of party.¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ ok.¡± Not that I understood what he was trying to say. But I had learned that some things I simply would not get, and any attempt at explaining it to me was an exercise in futility, costing time, energy, and patience, and depressed the mood.

    Sometimes I still tried to understand, and on a scand few occasions, I actually understood it, after some long, grueling explaining. But I¡¯d learned to be very careful when I dug deeper, lest I indeed get an answer. And this was one of those times. It simply was not worth it to me to ruin everybody¡¯s fun just to get an explanation that I would likely not understand anyway.

    If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.

    The resignation flashing briefly through Ben¡¯s eyes told me that he understood full well, but let it go as well. Still, for a moment, all of us just stood around awkwardly saying nothing.

    Fortunately, not for long. An android rolled in quite a big cake, with several candles on top of it. And yes, it was exactly 19 candles. I might be clueless about some things, but this tradition has been so deeply etched into our culture and pop culture that even I knew about birthday cakes, the ritual of the celebrant blowing out the candles.

    I just had never expected to experience it myself, much less as the celebrant in question.

    And so, under great fanfare, I was led to the cake and proceeded to blow out the candles. I have to say the cake was pretty good. I was a bit confused for a moment because honestly, it was way too big for any of our ovens, but I assumed that one of the others had organized a bigger oven.

    Then I was informed that it was time for presents. I was softly pushed into a waiting chair, while the others one by one vanished for a moment only to reappear with gaudily wrapped packets in their hand.

    Not everybody of course. Neither Burke and his crew, nor the scientists from Nowhere took part in it.

    Still, I could not help myself and become a bit curious.

    First was Darren, who was surrounded by Ryan, Christine, Justin, Natalie, Jacky, Kate, and Mark. He placed a slender, oblong package on the table in front of me, with the words:

    ¡°You know, it is damned hard to find a present for somebody who can afford everything. But I think we managed just fine.¡±

    I began to carefully remove the adhesive tape keeping the wrapping paper in place. Apparently, that was not the right method of opening a present, as I was cajoled by several of the people here to ¡®simply rip it off¡¯.

    After a moment of confusion, I just shrugged and did exactly that. Inside was a big case with a handle. When I opened it, I found an electric guitar inside. It looked well-used but also well-loved. Obviously an antique, and seemingly made from real wood.

    It was, of course, not tuned. In fact, the strings were not tensioned at all and hung loosely above the neck.

    It was a beautiful piece, not gonna lie here, but it came something out of nowhere. I caught myself softly caressing the body without intention, when I looked at Darren.

    ¡°This is¡­ beautiful, thank you, but¡­ this is an antique, is it not?¡±

    Darren snorted: ¡°And then some. It took us a bit of searching, but this is a Red Special. Well, the guy who sold it to us said it is the Red Special, but honestly, that is unlikely. But this is an authentic 20<sup>th</sup>-century reproduction. Real Mahogany.¡±

    I looked at the guitar, and back at my friends.

    ¡°How? How could you afford this?¡±

    Darren chuckled.

    ¡°I won¡¯t insult you by telling you how much, but first, every one of us gave a bit, and two, you are aware that we are among the better-earning mercenaries by now? And thanks to you letting us live here and giving us access to all your toys we have barely any costs. So yes, we could afford it easily.

    Finding it¡­ that was less easy.¡±

    I carefully took the guitar out of its case and inspected it. It was a beautiful instrument. After I had placed it back into the case, and closed it, I jumped up and hugged each of them, thanking them profoundly, while they all laughed.

    Strangely, Michael barely could contain his laughter, and when he placed a significantly smaller package in front of me, he was still grinning ear to ear.

    This time I abandoned the careful approach immediately and ripped the paper off. In it, I found another case, and when I opened it, I found another instrument.

    Michael laughed again and explained: ¡°This is pure coincidence. I had no clue those goofs would get the idea for an instrument.¡±

    I carefully caressed the violin. Again, an obvious antique, made from wood.

    When I began to grip its neck, Michael softly said:

    ¡°Be careful, this is a Stradivari. It is really old.¡±

    I stopped mid-motion, looking at the violin in shock.

    ¡°A¡­ Stradivari? How? And why? Do you have any idea what those things cost? And I can barely play the violin.¡±

    Michael chuckled again:

    ¡°You are aware that I get around one percent of the profit of Enki? I don¡¯t know if you realize, but lately, that is more than a million per day. And that is in addition to my princely salary, mind you. So yes, I can afford it.

    And you barely being able to play¡­ you will learn. You are already better than most hobbyists and are approaching professional levels. In a month, you will be worthy of this instrument.¡±

    The Enki delegation gave me mostly pretty and interesting trinkets. Nothing spectacular, but it showed sentiment, and that¡¯s what counted.

    Doc Schaeffer gave me three books. Old books, made from paper. They were antique medical texts. Early 20<sup>th</sup> century if I was not mistaken. Beautiful books. Of course completely outdated in terms of their content, but as an object of history¡­ beautiful.

    Then it was Vandermeer¡¯s turn.

    ¡°I have to confess, I had to resort to asking young Mr. Walker here for advice on what to gift you. I hope he was right.¡±

    Ok, way to deflect any blame beforehand, but he said it so earnestly, that I was sure he was honest with it.

    The wrapping was¡­ less gaudy this time, more dignified. When I opened it up, I was first confronted with some diaphanous white silk, that was wrapped loosely around the actual object. Shoving it to a side, I found something that, had this present come from anybody else, I would have assumed was synth leather. But¡­ not from Vandermeer.

    Carefully taking it out of the package, and the silk wrapping, I saw that it was a green jacket. Jade green I think.

    It also seemed to be my size, no surprise here.

    I looked at Vandermeer questioningly.

    ¡°Is that real leather?¡±

    Vandermeer smiled and nodded.

    ¡°Yes, stomper calv leather to be exact. The lining is carbon nanotube weave, with several layers of graphene.¡±

    I gasped when he said stomper calv. Stompers were initially planned as a bioweapon. The South American genetic engineers tried to create the most devastating creature they could think of.

    To do that, they spliced Polar bear DNA with Orca DNA and mixed all that with Honey Badger and to cap it off they included African Elephant into the mix. The result was indeed a monster. It takes anti-tank weapons to harm it. They were strong, tenacious, fearless, intelligent, and only slightly smaller than the Elephant the scientists used.

    The only saving grace of this monstrosity was that they were a bit too smart, according to their inventors. They realized quickly that in an active war zone, there are quite a few weapons that can harm them, and they vanished into the wilderness.

    Nowadays they were the most dangerous creatures in the death lands. The thing is, while the skin of adults is stiff and barely usable, the skin of calves is soft, supple, and very trendy for high society.

    Unfortunately, Stompers have inherited all their parental instincts from their original species, with the difference that males don¡¯t hunt their own offspring, and instead protect them fiercly. That meant of course, that for every successful Stomper hunt, there are two or three expeditions that simply vanish.

    And that in turn makes stomper calv leather astronomically expensive. Oh, not quite on the level of a Stradivarius expensive, but getting up there.

    I turned the jacket around, finding that it had a double line of gold-colored buttons and a zipper, also golden. It had two pockets on each side and a wide collar.

    I assumed it was very stylish, but to be honest, my taste-challenged style left me badly unprepared for this. Still, I liked it and slipped it on.

    Yes, it was way too hot for the comfortably heated room, but I had to at least try it on. It fit perfectly, not that I expected something different. And it was very comfy. I discovered that it had an inside pocket on each side.

    I professed that I liked it, but then I took it off before I suffered a heat stroke.

    When Ben made a motion to put his present on the table, he had insisted to go last for some reason, Vandermeer held up a hand.

    ¡°I have another thing. Just a moment.¡±

    And he fished a data crystal out of his pocket, holding it out to me.

    ¡°I would suggest you watch it in private, but I could not withhold it from you. Have fun with it.¡±

    Ben looked at the crystal somewhat amused, but when Vandermeer stepped to the side, he very carefully placed the gift onto the table. It was only then that I realized that the package had many small holes, and it had no wrapping. It was just held together with a silk band bound into a bow.

    When I moved to grab it, Ben softly touched my arm.

    ¡°Here it would be better if you are careful and slow.¡±

    I looked at him somewhat confused, and I noticed I was not alone in that, but then I shrugged and carefully opened the bow.

    When I began to open the top of the package, a soft, rumbling sound emerged from it, and I withdrew my hand startled.

    When I looked questioningly at Ben, he smiled:

    ¡°That is normal. Don¡¯t worry.¡±

    I then tentatively lifted the top off the package only to be greeted by another strange sound:

    ¡°Mreow!¡± Followed by a small, furry head peaking out of the plasfilm-carton.

    Emerald green eyes looked into my own, and another ¡°Mreow!¡± followed by a much intensified rumbling emerged.

    A couple of paws appeared on the lip of the carton, the animal made several attempts on climbing out of it.

    I just sat there, shocked, looking at the small, orange, furry being that tried to get to me.

    Finally, Ben said:

    ¡°You can take her out of it. She is harmless.¡±

    Very timidly, I reached into the carton, and almost immediately, some tiny claws pierced the fabric of my shirt, and even pricked my skin. Then I had the creature in what I hoped secure grip and lifted it out of the carton.

    I then looked at Ben.

    ¡°That is¡­ that is¡­ ¡°

    ¡°A kitten, yes. I could not have my Kitten not have a kitten, could I?¡±

    ¡°What¡­ what will I do with a cat? I¡­ I have no idea how to take care of it.¡±

    Ben sat down next to me and softly petted the kitten.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, I looked into it. This race is very easy to take care of. And very very cuddly.¡±

    The kitten was meanwhile wriggling in my grip, and finally broke free, landing in my lap, where it rolled itself into a ring and the rumbling intensified even more.

    Ben chuckled softly.

    ¡°It is customary to pet a cat, you know?¡±

    That shook me out of my stupor, and I slowly and softly reached out to the kitten. When I touched it, the soft fur felt warm under my fingers.

    Faltering at first, but more secure with each stroke, I caressed the sinuous body, and the rumbling filled the whole room.

    I looked up at Ben.

    ¡°But¡­ where does one even get a cat? I thought they were nearly extinct.¡±

    Ben smiled.

    ¡°There are many gene banks where their genetic data is stored. Along with many other animals. I had her cloned. And yes, they¡¯ve nearly gone extinct. Unfortunately, cats are obligatory carnivores. Unlike dogs, which have gotten rare, they can¡¯t be fed with a food replicator. And real meat was unaffordable for anybody but the very rich.¡±

    He tilted his head, and smiled even wider:

    ¡°But I happen to know that somebody recently changed that. Is that not nice?¡±

    The still unnamed cat used that moment to try to play. At least I think she tried to play. Unfortunately, it manifested in her biting heartily into my finger.

    ¡°Ouch!¡±

 2.35: A cold day in hell

    Leave it to Ben to gift me something so¡­ demanding as a cat. Oh, don¡¯t get me wrong, I quickly fell in love with the hyperactive bundle of fluffy fur, but¡­ let¡¯s say it was a time sink.

    The newly christened Lady Nibbles, for her quirk to bite anything and everything, preferably my fingers it seemed, and no, it was not I who gave her the ¡®Lady¡¯ title. That was done by Tiffany, who nearly absconded with my new pet.

    It had taken Michael and Naveen a good quarter-hour to make her release her happily purring hostage. And then only when Michael mentioned that Enki had bought the whole pet library, and if she wanted a cat or a dozen, nothing was stopping her from getting one.

    When it was time to go to bed, I noticed that my suite had several new additions for its new inhabitant. That alone told me that Ben had found an accomplice in Warden, as only Warden of all the VIs had direct access to the suite.

    Before I finally got to sleep, I slipped into cyberspace to look at the video Vandermeer had given me.

    It was a recording of his office as the first councilor, and Joshua Knowles was standing in front of Vandermeer¡¯s desk, snarling at the man sitting calmly there.

    ¡°Don¡¯t make yourself too comfortable in that chair, Vandermeer. Next census I will be sitting in there again. And then you will regret ever getting the idea of defying me.¡±

    Vandermeer still looked pretty calmly at Knowles, before he answered without much shown emotion:

    ¡°You should be careful with what you say, Knowles. You are getting pretty close to disrespecting the first councilor.¡±

    It looked as if Knowles barely managed to not spit on the floor.

    ¡°So what? Can¡¯t I say the truth anymore?¡±

    As a response, Vandermeer tilted his head.

    ¡°Tell that to your father, who pushed the Jepsen Act through. You wouldn¡¯t want to be executed and the majority of Panacea getting confiscated by the Commonwealth, would you?¡±

    For the first time, Knowles showed a bit of fear, only briefly, but it was there.

    ¡°You wouldn¡¯t dare! That would go too far, even for you!¡±

    A slight smile showed on Vandermeer¡¯s mouth.

    ¡°If I had shown the same amount of¡­ let¡¯s say disrespect two years ago that you¡¯ve demonstrated for the last two years, you would have been delighted to invoke the act.

    But no, I do not want to do that. Unfortunately, this is an official meeting, and as such it is recorded. If you don¡¯t restrain yourself, it might be out of my hands.¡±

    Knowles scoffed.

    ¡°Don¡¯t make me laugh. You would love to have an excuse to kill me and steal Panacea. But your grip on the power is not strong enough to push it through.¡±

    Vandermeer shook his head.

    ¡°A couple of weeks ago, you would have been right. But two things have changed since then. You¡¯ve been a bad bad boy. And so were your spawn. And you did the one thing that would enable me to invoke the act.¡±

    Knowles frowned.

    ¡°What the fuck do you think I did?¡±

    ¡°I am talking about the cleanup job you ordered for Project Revitalize. You are aware that that is a Commonwealth Project, right? So deleting all the data¡­ that is nearly the textbook definition of depriving the Commonwealth of an irreplaceable resource.¡±

    Knowle¡¯s eyes narrowed.

    ¡°If you had any proof of what you just said I would already be on death row.¡±

    Vandermeer shook his head again.

    ¡°Not really, because fortunately for you, the resource did turn out to be not irreplaceable. We have been able to get the data back. But together with dishonoring the first councilor¡­ it would be enough. But as I said, I don¡¯t want that. Not anymore.¡±

    Knowles began pacing for a bit before he turned back toward Vandermeer.

    ¡°I don¡¯t buy it. The way our families had a war for decades, you would not let that opportunity go to waste.¡±

    Now Vandermeer smiled very smugly.

    ¡°Unless of course what I am planning for you, and the toads you call sons, is so much worse than getting you executed and taking over Panacea.¡±

    ¡°Pha, at one point we will find out why the phantom has such a grudge against us, and then you will be fucked.¡±

    Vandermeer snorted.

    ¡°Oh please¡­ don¡¯t tell me you haven¡¯t figured it out already.¡±

    Knowles frowned again.

    ¡°Figured out what?¡±

    Vandermeer stapled his fingers.

    ¡°Why the phantom targeted you, your bootlickers, and all the assholes from Dalgon.¡±

    ¡°Are you stupid or what? For that, we have to first figure out who the fuck this fucking phantom is. As soon as we have that, we will tell the banks, and that is the end of the phantom.¡±

    Vandermeer answered patiently:

    ¡°The banks know who the phantom is. Too bad for them that the phantom has created a situation of mutually assured destruction with the banks. Should they manage to strike at the phantom, the bank execs will die, and their families will die. So the banks have decided to¡­ let¡¯s say officially still hunt for the phantom, but not prosecute the hunt in reality.¡±

    Knowles now gripped one of the chairs in front of the desk, and let himself fall into it.

    ¡°How? How is that possible? Just because the Phantom smuggled a nuke into the yacht of some exec? Get real?¡±

    ¡°It is a bit more than that, I fear. And you know what the irony is? You created the phantom.¡±

    ¡°You know who the phantom is?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I know.¡±

    ¡°Then tell me.¡±

    ¡°Later. For now, I have another few things to ¡®discuss¡¯ with you. For one, you should save your money and simply write off all those products that the phantom has liberated. The council has decided to declare those substances, procedures, and data as public domain. And¡­ this is the end of it.¡±

    Knowles snarled:

    ¡°You mean you decided this.¡±

    ¡°Why, of course. You do realize that at the last census, for some reason, I ended up with more than 30% of the money in the council. That gives me a full 36% of the votes. While my allies are not too keen to use the Jepsen Act they are downright giddy with glee when they deny you those patents.¡±

    Knowles grunted before he answered:

    ¡°So what, when I get back into that chair, I will reverse the decision.¡±

    ¡°It will be 3? years until the next census. The data is out there now. It is already being incorporated into the public domain by all nations around the world. Every single triple-A corporation except Panacea already has started to use it. Face it, that ship has sailed. The information is out there and it won¡¯t come back, ever.¡±

    Vandermeer shook his head again.

    ¡°You should be happy that somebody in your corporation thought about copyrighting your software. And yes, those copyrights will remain.¡±

    Knowles stared at Vandermeer with spite for some time, before he sighed.

    ¡°Whatever! That will hurt, but Panacea is stronger than that. We will come back.¡±

    Vandermeer smiled very self-satisfied again.

    ¡°You remember that you lost around a third of your researchers when the council declared those ¡®nice¡¯ oppressive contracts you forced on them void, right? And we are talking about your better researchers here.

    That should make it somewhat harder to build up a new cache of tech to rule them all.¡±

    ¡°I will find a way, mark my words.¡±

    ¡°No, you won¡¯t. At least not for the next 12 years.¡±

    Knowles was now showing some confusion.

    ¡°What do you mean I won¡¯t?¡±

    ¡°I mentioned that you had been a bad bad boy, didn¡¯t I? While I refrained from invoking the Jepsen Act, mostly because we got the data back, what you did was still a high crime. You have officially been sentenced for treason by the council. That means you and your mini-mes will spend the next 12 years in maximum security prison under hard labor.¡±

    Knowles jumped up and put both hands on the desk, screaming:

    ¡°You can¡¯t do that!¡±

    Vandermeer just leaned back in his chair.

    ¡°You might be surprised, but the 12 years are a compromise. Many wanted you to spend the next 50 years in there, while others viewed it as a bad precedent.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ you have no proof.¡±

    ¡°Again, we got the data back. That was enough to make us¡­ question the former researchers of Revitalize about what happened. They were only too happy to spill the beans. After all, unlike you, they were looking at judiciary slavery for life. And of course that they had already been convicted from the evidence we had on hand made it easy to¡­ fit them with a nice new necklace, which made it easy for us to trust their statement.¡±

    Vandermeer smiled mildly.

    ¡°You had to involve your spawn in the scheme as well. So, thank you for that. But that is enough to put all of you behind bars for the next 12 years. I fear you won¡¯t have the opportunity to regain this chair here for at least 13? years. After all, being in prison excludes one from being even considered for the council.¡±

    Something was wrong here, Knowles was way too calm about it. From what I knew of that man, he should be rampaging right now, but while he was visibly angry, he did not rail against the situation.

    Vandermeer on the other hand seemed way too calm also. He should know that Knowles was not acting according to the information he got. Not that I could do much about it anyway. This was a recording, and it was obvious that Vandermeer had come out of that meeting alive.

    All that was answered when Vandermeer continued:

    ¡°I understand that you believe that this will be only a minor setback. That your power and Panacea¡¯s power will be enough to get this overturned in a few months. Sadly, for you that is, you are wrong. I know you don¡¯t think too highly of me, but give me at least enough credit to know that I know what I am doing.¡±

    He leaned forward and placed his crossed arms on his desk.

    ¡°Let me tell you a few things. Things that, thanks to your new jewelry you can¡¯t use. You remember my granddaughter? The one you had psychologically tortured?¡±

    The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

    When Knowles nodded, with a nasty smile on his face, Vandermeer shook his head and continued:

    ¡°You really are so stupid. You were the one who ensured that Rebecca got shoved into K4. The same way you made sure that Anita and I landed in G3.¡±

    ¡°So what, you got lucky twice.¡±

    ¡°Are you seriously so ignorant? I only learned it when we got all the data from Revitalize back, but you made sure that Rebecca is a G3, and you also made sure that Vivian is a K4. And every single G3 mother in K4 had a functional K4 baby.¡±

    ¡°So what, she is a bit smarter than average, and?¡±

    Vandermeer closed his eyes, chuckled, and shook his head.

    ¡°You did not even care enough about it to look a bit closer into it. All the other functional K4¡­ they come from families with an average IQ of around 100. The smartest of them came from a background of 105-110.

    And whatever boost K4 gave them to their intelligence, it is not additive, it is multiplicative!¡±

    Knowles just shrugged.

    ¡°So what? That still just means she is a bit smarter than average.¡±

    ¡°Knowles, you arrogant idiot, the boost K4 gives is around 3-4 times the IQ. It made Pure-families at the lower end of the average have uber-geniuses as children.

    And the same fucking thing happened to Vivian, who comes from one of the smartest families ever. Even without K4 she would have most likely had an IQ above 200. Now multiply that by three. Or four.

    We have absolutely no fucking idea about how smart she really is. We have no way of measuring it.¡±

    Knowles arrogantly waved dismissively.

    ¡°Yeah, sure. Don¡¯t you think that we would have realized it if she was that smart, huh?¡±

    ¡°Let¡¯s see, we start measuring those things when the children are ten. By that point, she was at once poisoned against society in general and the corporations in special to a level that made her not want to have you understand how smart she is, and simultaneously intelligent enough to spoil all the standard tests they had her do.

    Fuck, she was smart enough to fool Apollo. Your thugs and torturers never had a chance.¡±

    Knowles now looked like he was thinking, but then he shrugged and said:

    ¡°Again, so what? She is unimportant. We managed to break her so thoroughly that nothing positive will ever come from her.¡±

    Vandermeer facepalmed for a moment, and spoke softly:

    ¡°God, you really are such an idiot. Think, Knowles, think! Vivian is the phantom. Among other things. And she managed to break into the banks and steal your money and your power right from under your nose, while you had her observed. But that¡¯s not all. I assume you¡¯ve heard of Enki, right?¡±

    That made Knowles growl again for a bit.

    ¡°Yeah. Those uppity upstarts over in New York. They refuse to sell their tech to us. I haven¡¯t had the time to break them to size yet.¡±

    Vandermeer scoffed.

    ¡°Huh, I did not know that they refuse to work with Panacea. But not surprising, I have to say. After all, the majority owner is Vivian. The same Vivian you had tortured, and who hates you, your spawn and Panacea with a passion that borders on obsession.

    In fact, Enki was created to market Vivian¡¯s inventions. The cyberware, pure Vivian¡¯s work. The same with the Q-links. That by the way is most likely how she stole your money. And we have no clue what they have on the back burner right now.

    Do you think a corporation that has made it from starting operations to A-tier in less than a month is a one-trick pony? Get real. They are just getting started. Not that they have to bring anything else onto the market for the next decades just to keep growing.¡±

    Then Vandermeer waved his hand.

    ¡°But are you now understanding that you forcing Rebecca to be a G3, then you forcing Vivian to be a K4, and then torturing Vivian for 17 years is the reason why Panacea has a bit of a hard time now?¡±

    ¡°Get real, we will get back onto our feet. And we will begin by eliminating your recalcitrant granddaughter. Yes, she is in New York, but Ralcon will do what I ask them to do.¡±

    Vandermeer snorted.

    ¡°No, they won¡¯t. They won¡¯t even come near Vivian if they can anyway prevent it. Don¡¯t tell me you haven¡¯t heard it¡­¡±

    ¡°Heard what?¡±

    ¡°About the rogue VI.¡±

    ¡°Only some stupid rumors about somebody being so stupid to make one.¡±

    ¡°Stupid? With the nice trap, all of the big corporations put in place about it? By the way, Panacea has some¡­ explaining to do about how you could be so stupid and put the minutes of the ICSC 2120 onto your network.

    But to come back to the VI, it was a case of another time somebody walking into that trap. But this time it was an Abyss-Denizen, who accidentally created an unbound rogue cyberwarfare VI with all the tools and capabilities of an Abyss hacker.¡±

    I saw Knowles visibly blanche.

    ¡°For real? Somebody made a fucking rogue cyber-warfare VI with the ability to hack into nearly every strategic weapon command? And you are just sitting here and are calmly talking about it?¡±

    ¡°Of course. That happened nearly a year ago. I am surprised nobody told you about it. But nevertheless, the one accidentally creating the VI was Seraphim.¡±

    ¡°Seraphim? Is she not this super hot super tech? How could she make such a mistake?¡±

    ¡°The same way everybody else walks into that trap. She was purposefully misinformed. But the good thing is that while the VI is rogue in the strictest form of definition, it is not rampaging or hostile. Obviously, as we are still alive. No, the expert system that woke up to be a VI had the objectives to protect Seraphim at any cost, and to assist her where it can. And only those two objectives.

    That of course means that anybody even looking a bit too aggressive at Seraphim¡­ well, it might happen that the city they reside in vanishes overnight.¡±

    ¡°So nobody will touch this Seraphim with a stick. I get that. And if that is the only thing needed to keep this VI docile, I understand why nobody told me about it. But why do you think that will protect your whore of a granddaughter?¡±

    Vandermeer again shook his head.

    ¡°You continually force me to lower my estimate of your intelligence, you know that Knowles? The point here, and if you had paid attention to it in any way you would already know that, is that Vivian is Seraphim. Ralcon knows that. As does Enertech. As does every single mercenary group out there. Thinking about getting help from the Abyss?

    Think again!

    The last Abyss denizen who tried that, who worked against her, he lived for another three days. Technically. He lived pissing and shitting himself before somebody took mercy on him and put him out of his misery.

    And that was Vivian, not the VI. Now¡­ nobody will even go near there. On the other hand, she has the full support and protection of an A-tier corporation, and virtually every single A-tier and up corporation will rip everybody who even tries to harm her apart, just to keep the VI docile.

    Nobody wants to experience what will happen if this VI does go on a rampage.¡±

    Then Vandermeer chuckled softly.

    ¡°And you know what the nicest thing about all this is? The reason why I spoke against using the Jepsen Act on you? Vivian is already working on destroying Panacea. In a year, maybe two, PEES will no longer be important. It will no longer provide you with a tool to force the other big corps under your heel.

    Your cloning division will be outdated even earlier. And all your research has now been declared public domain. I have taken steps to remove your influence in medical schools worldwide. No, Panacea is going down.¡±

    Knowles jerked forward.

    ¡°I won¡¯t that let happen. I have still enough power to fight this, and thanks to your warning, I have the time.¡±

    Now Vandermeer¡¯s grin was downright evil, frightening even.

    ¡°Do you really think I would tell you that if you had any way of reacting? No, of course not. I told you that you have already been sentenced. You will go directly to prison, you will not pass go, you will not collect ?200. The peacekeepers who will fit your prison control collar are already waiting outside.

    Your sons already are in prison cells, incommunicado. Face it, you¡¯ve lost. Nothing you can do anymore. And thanks to your autocratic ways and the way you¡­ winnowed down the family tree when you took over, there is nobody who can lead Panacea through these trying times.¡±

    For a moment, Knowles just sat there, mouth open, clearly in shock. Then he jumped up and moved to jump over the desk.

    Only to be hit by several previously hidden nonlethal weapons.

    ¡°You should have known better, Knowles. This was your office after all. You know about the systems included to protect the first councilor. But as so often, you failed to think. Now you won¡¯t have to for the next 12 years. After that¡­ well, there will be bets on how long you can survive without your money and your power. I don¡¯t think it will be very long.¡±

    Vandermeer pushed a button on the desk, and a few seconds later, the door opened to let in two peacekeepers, who then proceeded to cuff Knowles and drag him out of the room.

    I know, it is petty, but I was pretty happy about seeing Knowles getting knocked down a few pegs.

    In retrospect, I was pretty fortunate for only needing around four hours of sleep each night, as I had barely taken care of my morning ablutions when a very loud, angry, and impatient meowing reverberated through my suite.

    Obviously, the young lady was hungry. And expected to be fed, right now, if not sooner.

    She was also way less happy getting picked up this morning compared to the preceding evening, but after a bit of struggle let me carry her to the kitchen. Still complaining to all and asunder that she was being starved to death.

    I noticed a new addition to the kitchen appliances, and, thanks to cyberspace, learned within a couple of seconds that it was an automated pet food maker. Apparently, when Ben had cooked up the idea of giving me a kitten, some of the minions had looked into it and decided that this was a nice product line that we could always use.

    Unfortunately, it took about half an hour to produce a portion of food. Or a dozen portions, it was pretty scalable.

    But that was mitigated by whoever setting this thing up having it prepare three portions automatically each morning, around 4:00.

    Then it refrigerated the food, recycling it if it was not used. It took the machine roughly half a minute to heat up one portion to optimal temperature.

    Half a minute I spent trying to calm the furiously struggling little feline in my arms. It seemed that whatever little patience Nibbles had ever had, had already run out at that point.

    But she quickly became happy again as soon as I placed the dish on the floor for her. It was good however that I did not try to hold her in my hands at that point anymore.

    Nevertheless, happy meowing was interspersed between the munching sounds, and I could not help myself and smiled at the view. It looked as if she liked the chicken that the machine had prepared for her.

    Still, I used the time to make myself a cup of coffee. While I was sipping the hot beverage, watching the tiny critter inhale some cat food, Vandermeer, who had spent the night in the other executive suite came into the kitchen, as always followed by his bodyguard.

    He smiled when he saw Nibbles doing anything but nibble at her food, and made himself a coffee too.

    ¡°Good morning.¡±

    Oh, yes, social conventions. I still sometimes forgot about those, when I was distracted.

    ¡°Good morning yourself.¡±

    He sat down beside me, looking at the cat.

    ¡°Is now a good time to talk about the business?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°As good as any.¡±

    I took another sip before I addressed the obvious problem.

    ¡°I don¡¯t think that Michael had any intention of insulting you. But¡­ we keep the secret of how the NADA works secret for now. Before I talked about it yesterday, only one person outside of Enki even knew that it existed. I probably should not have talked about it either, but¡­ well, next week, everybody will learn about it. And they will bite their own backside because it is so simple. So simple that anybody who learns about it can announce it before us.¡±

    Vandermeer nodded slowly.

    ¡°I understand that. Yes, it hurt a bit to be told that I am on the outside for now, but I understand it. Getting a NADA to work is big. Maybe bigger than the Q-link. It will make all the big corps look very closely at you.¡±

    ¡°We know that. That is the reason why we announce it next week. I made the breakthrough roughly a year ago, but until we had enough safety in place we decided it was too tempting, even with Warden.¡±

    I took another sip.

    ¡°But now we have enough firepower to keep ourselves safe, and we will license the NADA to almost everyone. Not Panacea obviously, and Dalgon will have to bring a very good reason, but otherwise, all the others can get it relatively cheaply. So no reason to try to steal it from us.¡±

    He nodded again.

    ¡°And the grav coils?¡±

    ¡°Nope, we keep those mostly in-house. You need a special NADA to make them, and apparently only if Warden or I give you the design. But because it is so dangerous we won¡¯t tell others about the how.¡±

    ¡°But you are considering giving Vandermeer that ability?¡±

    ¡°As far as I know, yes. Honestly, all those politics, maneuvering, and such¡­ I hate it. I try to stay away from it. So you will have to talk to Michael about that. But generally, I have nothing against it.¡±

    He looked sharply at me for a few seconds.

    ¡°You won¡¯t always be able to keep a distance from that. At one point or another, you will have to make such decisions. You are the majority owner of Enki, and you are the heir to Vandermeer. Sooner or later you will have to pull your head out of the sand.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Honestly, that is the really nice thing about Warden. I can trust her absolutely, and she makes sure that I can trust the others. Not that Michael was ever in doubt. And about Vandermeer¡­ did you even think about the implications of the new cloning tech?¡±

    He wrinkled his forehead in confusion.

    ¡°Implications? Sure, it is faster than what we had, but otherwise, I have no idea what you are talking about.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°If you have enough money nowadays the only limit on getting cloned replacement parts for your body is just the toxicity build-up. You can only get so much of that before it kills you. With the new cloning tech, there is no toxicity build-up. I guess there might be a limit on how long the brain can remain. At some point, cancer will probably destroy it. But otherwise, there is no reason why you should not live another 500 years.¡±

    He had just taken a sip of coffee, but now carefully placed the cup back on the table.

    ¡°I have to say, I did not think about that. And you are right, that should change the inheritance issue. For a time at least. But if you inherit Vandermeer in 50 years or 500, you are still the heir.¡±

    I shook my head in frustration but did not say anything.

    For around a minute we just sat there in silence, until I felt some sharp pinpricks on my leg climbing up. Looking down, I was unsurprised finding Lady Nibbles had finished her breakfast and was now on the way to my lap.

    With a soft snort, I helped her up, and she rolled into a ball and began purring.

    Vandermeer then spoke up again.

    ¡°To change the topic, did you make any progress with the Folly?¡±

    ¡°No, not really. Honestly, we only managed to get really started yesterday. Had a bit of a problem before that.¡±

    He frowned.

    ¡°What problem?¡±

    ¡°Well, you told me to use the engineering workaround that I used to develop the cyberware on the problem. That workaround consists of using an offshoot of the NADA technology to observe biological processes on a molecular level.

    Unfortunately, we learned that this offshoot makes it impossible to use a microscope to control the artificial fertilization. And the bio-observation unit doesn¡¯t pick up the needle. I guess we could have used a hybrid approach, but in the end, I created a small lab GRI system. I got that finished yesterday.¡±

    ¡°I see. And now it is mostly a waiting game to wait for the next fertilization process?¡±

    ¡°No¡­ not really. I did that at the beginning but had soo much downtime in high compression that I looked at why we do this by hand. And then designed a machine that does it faster. Way faster. Right now I have five of those machines chugging along each doing a dozen fertilizations per minute. And the nice thing is they did that since yesterday afternoon. I now have a few gigabytes of data to go over.¡±

    Vandermeer raised one eyebrow.

    ¡°You created five of those machines? What about the costs?¡±

    ¡°Molecular forge and a big NADA. Virtually no lasting material costs, unless I just keep them around, and the rest was just energy. I could make a few dozen and had no real costs.¡±

    Vandermeer emptied his cup and placed it on the table.

    ¡°Any commercial application?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°No, not really. Unless you want to create something like an army of individual creatures, and instead of cloning them want to use real fertilization, or in projects like this one where I try to find out what really jumpstarts the division it is pretty useless.¡±

    ¡°Well, that is unfortunate, but on the other hand, if it helps you to find the solution now it is a proper investment.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Even if we don¡¯t crack the Folly with this, the information we are gathering should be pretty valuable anyway. By the way, had you any luck in getting the chimpanzee genetics?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I have brought it with me. Along with all the other great apes.¡±

    ¡°Good, that should help us get closer.¡±

 2.36: Its getting warmer

    I kept my promise to Olliver to talk with Vandermeer about this Carstairs character. Still, for the time being, he was stuck being here but had apparently resolved to do his best.

    Also, Michael and Naveen organized a demonstration of the new weapons for Vandermeer and the techs, explicitly excluding Burke from it.

    They even threw in the new loading system in the demonstration, for the full-sized version as well as for the point defense one.

    From what I heard, the latter made it seem as if it was a beam weapon instead of a projectile one. But in the end, Vandermeer was convinced beyond any doubt that we did have the technology that we said we have.

    I on the other hand was busy looking over the data we had so far generated. Switching from Rats to mice alone let us narrow it down to around three dozen proteins present in the combined gamete.

    At least for rodents. And yes, we tried other rodents as well and were left with the same three dozen.

    On Thursday, we decided to switch to other mammals then. It was quite telling that the number of available mammal gametes was¡­ low.

    Fortunately, Michael had not just bought the pet library, but, for a marginal uptick in cost, the whole biodiversity library. Around 90% of all animals we had the genetics for, even some that had been extinct for thousands of years.

    That at once enabled us to get more variability but on the other hand, forced us to clone the reproductive systems of those animals to gain enough gametes.

    Which of course slowed things down again.

    That meant we switched to primates, mainly the readily available lab-monkey strains. There were tons of gametes available of those, thanks to them being a favored strain of lab animals.

    We were busy doing that until to our surprise, Monday came around, and I had¡­ other considerations.

    Not that we had made any mentionable progress, mind you. We managed to narrow it down to 33 proteins. Unfortunately, that¡¯s where we were stuck.

    And during all that time I had a fun time bonding with my new furry parasite. Nibbles was clearly unhappy if I left her in the suite alone for long. To remedy that, I created a tracking collar for her.

    I also made sure that one of the androids was always near her. And still, for some arcane reason, she always found her way to me. At every opportune, or inopportune moment.

    Nearly every day when I surfaced from cyberspace, I found my lap full of a sleeping cat.

    Monday brought a certain increase in security though, before Michael called a press conference and announced the start of Enki selling replicators. He quickly added that we would license the technology to nearly all corporations.

    That alone impacted like a bomb. But it got even worse when he announced all the goodies we had now to offer.

    New, better processors, though we kept the Grendel still for us. The new cloning tech, of course, as well as the meat vats, and finally, the one thing that would turn the global economy on its head.

    He talked about the new, stronger, more reliable, and vastly cheaper grav coils. He did not, of course, mention such things as the particle beams, or the disruptors.

    All in all, he sparked a wildfire, and let¡¯s just say that Ltd. Thomson almost turned crazy with the situation. He had one fire team of two in full power armor at each entry point of the building at all times.

    Cpl. Ingridsdottir was always at my side, also in full power armor.

    Additionally, he had put a full company of 120 combat bots all over the property. And another 40 in reserve for recharging. He had Naveen install a complement of all the goodies we had developed around the fortress.

    All in all, we had four full-sized grav-guns, eight each point-defense grav-guns, electron beams, and proton beams, and a full dozen disruptors distributed around the roof and the perimeter of the building.

    He also had all of them run on full Palant¨ªr surveillance. In other words, we had 720 sensors registering every single grav-coil in a 5000 km distance. Even Warden was briefly overwhelmed by the data.

    I honestly thought this was overkill, and yes, even Ben and Michael voiced their opinion on that matter, but Thomson explained that he was the one responsible for my safety, and he thought it was barely enough. Whatever, I had no intention to leave the fortress anyway, and other than that Ingridsdottiers armor was a tad¡­ loud I was not inconvenienced.

    And so it came that I was watching the press conference live, with a happily purring mini-tiger receiving absentminded pets in my lap, and I have to say, a few of the commenters were a bit disturbing.

    Yes, I understand that it was a momentous announcement, but seriously, the stocks of virtually all the triple-As except Panacea ironically took a nosedive when he announced the NADA, and they mostly recovered when he explained that we would license the technology.

    Then Kawamoto took another dive when he talked about our processor line-up. I could not understand why. Sure, Kawamoto made their own processors. As did everybody else. It just made no sense.

    And then, a few seconds after one commenter put together that with us licensing the replicator-tech, and new, better processors being possible, Ralcon would most likely reenter that market as well. Which prompted Ralcon stock to catapult into the stratosphere. And that despite Ralcon still being on a high from their announcement of a VR-mode for older Envision versions, and a new, streamlined Envision Plus version.

    At the same time, Burgmeister crept above its initial value.

    And then the bomb of the grav-coils. That literally halved the stock value of ABAS. And Kobashigawa was digging a hole.

    I mean, get real. Yes, we did make some serious breakthroughs, but we would sell the coils. At this time, both ABAS as well as Kobashigawa bought around 60% of the coils they used anyway. So now they had to buy 100%. But they still would only pay a fraction of what they paid previously for the same coil power.

    And we made it clear that we would license the NADA tech so that every big corporation could get it.

    Sure, we would not license the conveyor technology, but I am sure that with a bit of fiddling the big corporations would get fast replicators as well.

    In the end, I shrugged and shook my head. The stock markets are simply stupid. And the funny thing is that somebody issued ¡®virtual Enki stock¡¯. It had absolutely nothing to do with us, but some idiots lapped it up and it shot sky-high before it got out that it was a con. Tens of billions of dollars changed hands before that though.

    I later learned that some irate ¡®stockholders¡¯ tried to get us to honor their stupidity. Eli had to actually go in front of a judge to get the last of them to back off.

    Nonetheless, I got myself a nice, juicy burger with all the trimmings for lunch, after Nibbles got hers of course, there was no need to be stupid about it, and went back to work on the Folly.

    I would love to tell you that I had a sudden epiphany that showed me what I had to do, but no, even after working on lab monkeys, we still had the same 33 proteins as candidates.

    For the next two weeks, we worked through as many mammals as we could get, comparing them to each other. That enabled us to ¡®narrow¡¯ it down to 29 proteins. Not a spectacular success I have to say.

    It was time to change tack, and after a brainstorming session, we decided to return to rats and block the proteins one after the other, watching what it would do.

    The result was¡­ frustrating. We managed to eliminate a few of the proteins. 29 to be exact. Which of course told us that we had missed something.

    But irrelevant of which protein we blocked, it did not stop the start of the division. And so we had reached a dead end.

    By that time it had been pretty apparent that all the heightened security was much ado about nothing. Yes, the first reaction of the big corporations was panic. But then calmer heads persevered and people began inquiring about the licensing conditions.

    Not all of them, sure, but especially the constructing giants. Burgmeister, Xiao Ping, Dalgon Tech, Enertech, and of course Vandermeer.

    Of them, only Dalgon became a somewhat less generous option. I wonder why they were singled out. Oh, of course, Panacea contacted us about the cloning tech. Not even to try to license it but to imply that we somehow stole their research. Yeah, nice try. They did not even know what we had, but naturally, we had stolen it from them.

    Jerks. Eli just looked at the cease&desist order and her answer was a very succinct: ¡®Prove it!¡¯.

    Considering that Panacea would have a hard time doing that, partly because they did not even know how we did it, and partly because we had a full accounting of all of their tech just a few months old.

    And I can tell you, they did not even try to improve their cloning tech, much less come close to what we had. So yeah, slam dunk here.

    But I think it was this audacity of Panacea that caused Michael to release the auto-surgeon a bit early.

    And pressure me to release Hippocrates as well. The only problem here was that the foundation was not yet in place. What foundation you ask? In essence, you could not throw something like Hippocrates out into the wild. You needed some support structure.

    Especially as the VI would, over time, create a common library of every disease, mutation, injury, modification, and whatever else it encountered. This library would, of course not quite be free to use. We had decided to stipulate that 5% of every profit made while using that library, i.e. using a Hippocrates installation that had access to this library, would go to the upkeep.

    Unfortunately, there were some tough arguments about how to set up the foundation. Michael wanted us to keep control of it in-house. I on the other hand wanted to keep myself as far away as possible from it.

    But I could also understand that we could not surrender all control of the foundation, without any checks and balances.

    In the end, we decided to create a triumvirate in direct control. One seat was decided by Doctors Without Borders, one by the WHO, and one by the Inter-Corporation-Security-Organization.

    Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

    Yes, I know, the WHO was so corrupt that it might as well be controlled by the ICSO as well. But that was where my Veto came in.

    My control position was that I, or later my heirs, would have the power to reject any person from the triumvirate. Even after they were confirmed, I could, at any time, fire them. But I could not replace them with a candidate of my choosing. The organization that held that seat in the foundation, and those seats were not transferable without my agreement, had the sole privilege of that.

    Yes, it could be a bit tedious if they decided to put forward candidates that were not acceptable to me, but in the end, we would come to a compromise.

    We decided to purchase a remote area of Luna to build an exceptionally stable base, where we set up a couple of big fusactors, Vandermeer donated two S&P Excelsior 600, and build the only super-Grendel outside of Enki, or Warden¡¯s control. This super-Grendel would be the alpha-copy of Hippocrates. The original that everybody could get their copies from. It would also host the library. And it would certify all copies of Hippocrates trying to access the library so that it would weed out corrupted copies.

    It would take a bit over two months to get the facility up and running, but until then, Enki provided a Super-Grendel to have the library running, here at our HQ.

    All in all, Enki provided around $1.5 billion to make this happen, though most of that was in equipment. Equipment where we paid a fraction of what we calculated it for. Just to make an example, while we would not sell it, we priced a single Grendel processor at $5 million, with all the equipment, the power supply, the memory, and so on.

    That put the super-Grendel at $750 million, or half of that donation. Our cost was around $180k. It was similar with the construction equipment, or the NADA we provided. The S&Ps were $200 million each retail.

    In the end, Enki donated $20 million in real cost to us, while Vandermeer got a $400 million tax break for the cost of roughly $4 million.

    And of course it worked. Sure, Panacea was crying foul to high heaven, when we announced Hippocrates, but everybody else either saw the auto-surgeon that was slowly gaining sales, and that was immediately transformed into an auto-doc and thought us clever, or they saw us give away all that money and this ¡®invaluable¡¯ VI and praised our generosity.

    In the end, it took Panacea nearly a week to formulate a coherent response. And not a particularly good one at that.

    They sued us. In the Commonwealth. Where Nathaniel Vandermeer held all the cards. Yes, they tried to get an injunction to ban us from further distributing Hippocrates. And of course to prevent us from selling our ¡®blatant patent infringement¡¯ that we called auto-surgeon. Not to mention that they threw in the cloning technology.

    For some arcane reason that will probably never be known, those injunctions failed. I mean, yes, they still had their pet judges in the justice system over there. But those pet judges saw the writing on the wall.

    They knew that the Knowles were out of circulation for 12 years. They knew that ultimately whatever they decided would land in front of the first councilor. Who happened to be not quite that happy about Panacea. They also knew that with those two inventions, which they could not block long term, Panacea would have a harder time regaining the upper hand.

    Even if they managed to block us for a week or two, that was only the case in Nowhere anyway, and any decision that hampered us would land in front of Vandermeer very fast. They would be out of a job, and the next judge would rule appropriately to the current climate.

    So in the end, it was a tempest in a teapot, and Panacea was scrambling to do anything.

    My problems meanwhile were¡­ not so quickly put aside. I had just managed to eliminate all possible candidates for the spark of life. Yay me. I slap my back later.

    What it meant though was that I had to reconsider the whole premises. And I was stumped. For the time being, we continued scanning all the fertilizations we could, but the analysis was on ice until we got a better plan.

    I am a bit ashamed of it, but it took me some stupid three days, real-life days, to finally realize the mistake I had made.

    Of course, there was no single protein. And of course, we could not find it between different species. Whatever we were looking for was something that essentially signaled all the parts that a successful fertilization had happened, and would the cell now please divide?

    That could not happen with only the sperma, or the ovum. It had to be a combination of both. And naturally, nature did not want a female mouse dropping into a pool of elephant semen to suddenly have mouse-elephant-hybrids. That meant this signal had to be keyed to the species.

    Which of course made the whole premise of looking for the key in other species a tiny bit less smart.

    Still, it would help us to know what we actually needed to look for.

    Unfortunately, it was a tad less simple to look for two proteins interacting, than to look for a single protein that is present anywhere and everywhere.

    It took us, with the help of Warden and the super-Grendel in the fortress, a bit over a month to find the two proteins for the rats. To be fair, my second premise of two proteins interacting was also wrong. What we had was two proteins combining into a single bigger protein. But as this combined protein was not present when we looked for the one single powerful protein¡­ let''s just say we had a frustrating month.

    That thankfully taught us to widen the scope, and fortunately, we had not just stopped recording after the first moments, but only when the division had already set in.

    That still meant that we had to go over exabytes of data to find the lock and key proteins of other species.

    It did not help that there was apparently some tolerance in the combined protein, as not even within the same species it was 100% the same every time.

    Meanwhile, Michael had the time of his life. He negotiated with ABAS to design a new medical skimmer with the auto-doc for sale. To everybody. And he reported gleefully how delighted ABAS had been. The result was something only a bit smaller than the assault skimmer now residing inside my garage but was even heavier armored and stealthed. It was capable of carrying two auto-docs and had a tractor beam to transport the patients. It had space for a small platoon of shooters and had quite an array of anti-person weapons.

    It would enter the market in early 2250, which would mark the beginning of the end, of Panacea.

    Our cloning tech was already gobbled up by every B-tier and up corporation. And of course, we now had not just reached but shattered the mark of half a billion per day in profits.

    Yes, the first competing NADAs were entering the market, but¡­ let¡¯s just say they were not yet mature designs. And nobody could make the new grav coils anyway.

    All that translated to Enki earning around $700 million per day, and us raising to AA tier.

    It also meant that we could no longer remain on the defensive. At least in our planning and equipment.

    We needed so-called expeditionary forces. Or to use the less circumvent description, we needed a real military.

    We were, naturally, still far away from creating battle groups, but we needed a few destroyers at least.

    At least that was what Michael announced in our Tuesday meeting on December, 11<sup>th </sup>2249. I would call him a liar if Naveen was not nodding somberly to that.

    When I asked why we needed it, Michael explained, patiently, that it was at once a matter of appearance again, but also we needed to be seen to be able to enforce our interests.

    But that was when Michael dropped the bomb.

    ¡°I¡¯ve bought a bankrupt shipyard out on Loui 5.¡±

    Alena rolled her eyes. ¡°Yeah, and you paid way too much for it.¡±

    Michael shrugged his shoulders.

    ¡°I think differently. It is a nice yard in the center of Loui 5¡¯s first industrial district. Yes, its equipment is obsolete. But it is the location that has the value. And why do you bother? It took less than the profits of two days.¡±

    I was, again, present via the TP bot, or I would have massaged my temples.

    ¡°Do I understand you correctly, you spent upwards of $1.4 billion on a shipyard we don¡¯t need?¡±

    ¡°First, we need it. We have to be seen to have confidence in the new grav coils, and nothing shows that better than building our own ships.¡±

    I interrupted him:

    ¡°We are now barely keeping up with the demand for the new coils. It seems as if everybody has the confidence you want to demonstrate.¡±

    But Michael waved it away.

    ¡°The more important reason, and the reason why this shipyard was so expensive is that it was a small, but fully vertical shipyard. That means it has a sizable industrial complex together with the actual slips where they build the ships.

    They could cast 1870 Keppler coils or roughly 270 feet long coils. They made fusion reactors, though they bought the fusactors the customer wanted in their ship. They had a full electronics shop and of course the full carbon-forming system for all their structural and hull needs.

    All in all, if my math is right, and I had Warden go over it for me, we should be able to pack it with five 100x100x100m replicators, as well as a few dozen of those 675m3 replicators of yours. And that without ripping out the carbon-forming tech, though I think we should upgrade it to our new standard.

    That means we now have a place where we can create grav coils near the big yards of ABAS, Lockheed Martin, BAE, Daewoo, Xiang Pao, and Kawamoto. That means we can, when we have this yard fully outfitted, react quickly to any orders from them.

    That it helps us to make our own ships is just the cherry on top.¡±

    Ok, I had to admit that this was not completely bonkers. Sure, the supersized NADAs were¡­ well if he thought we needed them¡­ and honestly, with grav ships shipping the coils from here to Earth-Moon L5 point was trivial. But yes, it probably would look good.

    ¡°Ok, you are right. The costs are negligible and yes, it looks good. But I still don¡¯t understand the need for warships. All of our military is defensive. We don¡¯t want any trouble. So why create something that is only there for force projection?¡±

    It was Naveen who answered:

    ¡°Sooner or later, somebody somewhere will challenge us in a way that we can¡¯t ignore. Capture our representatives, steal our stuff, such things. And when that happens we need to project force.¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°But there are big corporations who do that work for others. We can hire them.¡±

    Michael sighed.

    ¡°Do you really want to be dependent on Kawamoto, ABAS, or Ralcon? Because that is the level of power we will need.¡±

    ¡°And what about Vandermeer? I thought they were so big in the weapons business.¡±

    ¡°They produce weapons, but they don¡¯t have much in expeditionary forces. At least not the big ones that we need.¡±

    I closed my eyes and counted to ten.

    ¡°So you think we absolutely need these warships, of our own? And we need to build them for ourselves?¡±

    Michael shrugged again.

    ¡°Yes, we need them, in the long run, but we don¡¯t need to build them for ourselves necessarily, but let¡¯s be real here, we do our best to hide what our technology can do, so how could anybody other than us build something adequate for us? We would need to arm the ships at least. And I want to use Grendels for the computer system. Yes, we have to buy the stealth tech and the basic avionics, but we will be better off building them for us.¡±

    ¡°And what is the timeline for all of this?¡±

    ¡°Gutting and rebuilding the industrial part of it will take about two months. After that, I fear the first warship will take about six months to build. If it is a smaller one, a corvette or frigate. Not that this yard has slips big enough to build battleships anyway.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°And it is soo hard to build a bigger slip? But ok, a smaller warship will take six months. How many can we build at once? And who will design them?¡±

    Michael¡¯s carefree grin was a bit aggravating, but by now I was used to it.

    ¡°No, of course, it is not so hard to build a bigger slip. Frankly, that is already in the plans for when we have replaced the industrial side. And the six months was the estimate that I got from the leading engineer. My guess is that he has no idea how much the replicators will speed it up. Even the simple fact that our new carbon extruders will be twice as fast will change things.¡±

    Then he got serious.

    ¡°And I was hoping that you would at least look at the plans.¡±

    Yup, as I had thought.

    ¡°First, I have no clue about ship design. No idea if I can get it done or not. But that¡¯s where the second part comes into play. I am somewhat busy, you know. The project with the Folly is hard and it looks as if it will take some time.¡±

    Michael frowned.

    ¡°This project is giving you that much of a hard time?¡±

    ¡°You have no idea. We¡¯ve just a few days ago managed to discover what makes the fertilized rat eggs divide. And frankly, we are all mentally and emotionally exhausted. Right now we are doing pretty much nothing to recharge the batteries.¡±

    Jessi made a barely suppressed noise, and then spoke up:

    ¡°Wait, you¡¯ve actually found the magic ingredient that makes rat eggs divide. You found the secret of life?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Honestly, I don¡¯t want to talk about it right now. I don¡¯t even want to think about it right now. It took us a fricking month at high compression and thousands over thousands of specimens to get this far. I am burned out right now.¡±

    Jessi visibly struggled to keep herself from digging deeper, but then sighed.

    ¡°Ok, I can see that. But you have absolutely no reason to be frustrated. Even if this project has no result, the data you already have is absolutely worth it. I mean, you took a BOU and observed the moment of fertilization. On a molecular level. That¡¯s never been done, and whatever data you get will be invaluable. Even if you don¡¯t find out what Sanderson did to us, what you already have will be a big step in that direction.¡±

    I took a deep breath, clearing my mind.

    ¡°On some level, I know that. But right now, I am just empty. And I am frustrated. I had hoped to have more by now, but it took us nearly 1? months to get this far. And that is just to know where to look with other mammals.

    I mean, it is mostly useless to know what triggers the division in rats.¡±

    Maynard harumphed and rubbed his chin.

    ¡°Honestly, I am not so sure about that. If we find a way to inhibit that part of rats, we could finally reduce the insane mass of feral rats. It would not be a poison that kills them, so they would not avoid it. But if their birthrates are reduced¡­ it could cull the plague of rats.¡±

    I closed my eyes and shook my head.

    ¡°You know what, you already have access to the data. Why don¡¯t you look into that? But don¡¯t expect my help. If I do not see the molecular structure of rat-gametes ever again it will still be too soon.¡±

    Maynard looked at Jessi, and then back at me.

    ¡°Yeah, I think we will do that. We still have a few minions with not enough to do anyway.¡±

 2.37: I hope its important

    It should be no surprise that all the others in the C-suite voted with Michael, and honestly, I had no real opinion about it either way.

    So if Michael and Naveen thought we needed warships, warships we would get. I mean, I made Michael the boss for a reason.

    Maynard and Jessi decided to look into commercializing the research I was busy with. Essentially they decided to replicate the Folly for rats. Well, pests in general, but so far we only had the data for rats.

    Sure, I would give them what we had when we found the pertinent information for mice as well, but that might be some time off still.

    Otherwise, our explosive growth was not enough to satisfy the demand. Yes, the replicators were an expensive piece of hardware. But if you compare it to the average industrial fabber, they were not significantly more expensive, and needed way less room, though we did point out that carbon extruders and molecular forges were still better, and were much more versatile. All in all, they were a significantly better option than an industrial fabber.

    Heck, the big ones compared favorably to full industrial setups. And were suited for switching on the fly.

    It would still take decades to replace all the industrial machinery humanity had amassed with NADAs, but at this point, it was just a matter of time. It was a bit surprising that several of the C-. B-, and lower A-tier corporations waited for Burgmeister, Dalgon, or Xiao Ping to bring their version to the market.

    Not that we cared. I mean, come on, we could not even come close to satisfying the immediate demand, much less care about any market share. And in a couple of years, unless the other big hardware corps paid us for the conveyor system, they would remain way behind in quality.

    It showed that we had essentially third-generation NADAs, while the rest had not even designed their first-generation ones.

    Oh, and of course Jessi had presented the results of the new first-aid kit that we had developed. I knew her well enough by now to know that she was never fully satisfied with any new medical device, but her ¡°adequate¡± included it in our product lineup.

    And that was the end of another meeting that was not really necessary in my opinion. Oh, I get why we held these meetings, and when, not if, something was threatening to slip through the processes, those meetings would be a godsend, but for now, it was mostly just a mutual shoulder-patting ceremony.

    Virtually everything we had talked about could have been managed via E-mail or a VR conference.

    Whatever, it wasn¡¯t as if I had anything else to do that day. What I had said, that I was taking a break, was the whole truth.

    Not that Warden took a break from analyzing the data we had, and the automated fertilizers were also still working around the clock.

    That was the situation on Thursday when we reconvened to look at the process of mouse fertilization. Honestly, it took us way less time than I had expected. The two component proteins were different, but the resulting big protein was, within the same confines as with the rats, the same.

    As with the rats, we quickly tested it by changing one or the other, or sometimes both, in a manner that put the key protein out of spec, and lo- and behold, each and every time it stopped the division.

    That meant we now had a method to stop mice from procreating as well. And all that happened before we even had lunch.

    After lunch, we started to work with other rodents as well. Guinea pigs, rabbits, hamsters, the whole gallery.

    This time we did not bother to look at one species that closely, but instead at the whole gaggle at once. And we found the same thing. Different components, but the key protein was the same.

    Which of course meant that at least for rodents, we now could look for the key of life every single time.

    We were a bit early, but I decided we had done enough for Thursday, and to continue Friday. After all, I had to spend some time with my pet, didn¡¯t I?

    Friday we switched over to primates. Naturally, first to the common lab monkeys. And we found something that sparked joy in all of us.

    The key of life for primates was the same.

    We might actually have done it. The next steps involved the other primates, up to chimpanzees, and it was always the same thing. A virtually endless variation of component proteins that combined into the same key protein, which then started the cell division.

    Then it was time to look at human cells. And whoever guessed that those two component proteins were crippled, well, you were right.

    Unlike any other species we had looked at, it seemed as if the component proteins were mostly randomized.

    That also explained why the Folly did not result in complete sterility. Yes, the components were crippled, but just by random chance, they sometimes combined into a barely functional key of life.

    With the data we had by now, we could calculate the chance, but the result was depressing. We had a 1:180 chance that the combination resulted in a functional key. Combine that with all the other influences on fertility¡­

    That of course did not yet tell me why K4 were hyper-fertile or how projects like C3 worked. But at least the first one was relatively easy to test.

    I had a BOU inspect my own, unripened eggs, and the result was that I had the full key of life instead of a component protein. No need for a matching protein from any potential partner.

    Now it was only a matter of looking at K4-sperm if it did the same, but considering the hyperfertility of male K4, my guess was it did.

    More importantly, we tested what happened if we used nano-bots to insert the key of life into a fertilized but not dividing egg.

    Several times over the next week. And several times, it worked. Unlike all other specimens, we did not destroy those zygotes, of course. But we also did not see the need to create artificial wombs for them. No, we froze them.

    It was now a matter of looking into a cure. At least the first step. Oh, and look, somehow we had three couples that wanted children.

    I wondered who we could test the nano-bots on. What nano-bots? Don¡¯t forget that I am a nano-engineer by inclination.

    Of course, the very first thing I did, even while our first tests were running, was design a specialized nano-bot that could be injected into the woman, and that forced the key of life into every single egg that left the ovaries.

    Yes, I know, it was a brute-force solution. But it was a brute-force solution that had a pretty good chance of working. It would at least be a workaround that could be used until some geneticist created the real cure.

    But for now, I had the eggheads thinking about becoming guinea pigs. And no, I did naturally not simply inject them with a batch of untested nanobots. What are you thinking of me?

    No, one of the first things I did when I started this project was start a batch of research clones. Male and female alike. Not that I needed the male ones, mind you, but I did not know that from the outset.

    But at least the preliminary tests were quickly done. The new nano-bot design worked as I had planned, and build depots at the very tip of the fallopian tubes, and any time an egg moved by ¡®infected¡¯ the egg with the full key of life. And thanks to them being research clones, I had absolutely no compunction in triggering ovulations. Multiple ovulations.

    I was naturally aware that this was only the first step in testing, and the drugs I used to trigger the fast maturing and release of the eggs might influence the result.

    But this was the quick and dirty phase of the testing. Does the nano-bot do what I wanted it to do? There was no point in an elaborate and safe test setup if the bots did not manage to do their job.

    But there was no need to be concerned, the bots worked exactly as intended. Not too surprising, considering the experience I had in designing medical nanites. But nice to get it right on the first try anyway.

    The newly harvested eggs of the clones had a success rate of fertilization of above 90%. At first, I was a bit disappointed, until I realized that au naturel, humans had an even lower success rate, even before the Folly.

    Not surprising here, considering how much variation there can be within a species concerning the key of life, or how many other factors influence fertility. Many of which, ironically, had been tackled in the first couple of decades of Revitalize and were nowadays a standard treatment included in any batch from the start.

    It was now time to call Vandermeer. Even if the efficacy of the nanobots proved to be lacking, we had enough new data that it should bring the eventual cure that much closer.

    And honestly, the next step was basically human testing. The nanobots were, well nanobots. They were a variant of a standard bio-medical design. And the protein was firstly a protein that the human body should make and secondly encapsulated by the bots. There was literally nothing that could cause problems in humans, outside of the extremely rare allergy.

    And it was simply impossible to test the efficacy on anything not suffering from the Folly, which limited it to research clones and humans.

    That, though, was Vandermeer¡¯s decision. I would naturally give the Wakefields, Vaughns, and Mitchells the option, as well, seeing that they wanted children, but otherwise, the eggheads in Nowhere could figure that one out.

    It was surprisingly quick to get a meeting with the first councilor of the Commonwealth, even virtual, and the very next day we met.

    Again, the viron was the same one he had prepared for our first meeting, again with the fire burning.

    I was¡­ less severe in my avatar this time though. It was essentially a copy of my real appearance, with the hair in a loose braid, and some comfortable clothes.

    Again, he stood and greeted me.

    ¡°Hello Vivian. It¡¯s nice to see you.¡±

    ¡°Hello¡­ ¡° honestly, I was a bit stumped. I could not keep calling him ¡®Vandermeer¡¯ least of all to his face, but on the other hand, I could not bring myself to even call him grandfather, much less grandpa, gramps, or similar endearments.

    Fortunately, he recognized my awkward faux pas.

    ¡°You have still problems with how to address me?¡±

    When I nodded, happy that my avatar could not blush, he sighed but waved toward the chairs.

    ¡°I can¡¯t say that I¡¯m happy about that, because honestly, it hurts, but it is not your fault. I know what was done to you. So how about you call me Nate?¡±

    It took me only a tick to think about it, taste it in my mind, and no, there was no instant rage that came with that name.

    ¡°Yes, I think we can do that. Hello Nate, and I am sorry about it, but¡­ I just can¡¯t help it. All my life I¡­ I thought you could have ended my torture at any moment.¡±

    He nodded while sighing again.

    ¡°I get that. I hope that someday in the future you can call me Granddad, but until then, let¡¯s do the best.¡±

    We sat down, and coffee appeared for each of us on the low table.

    ¡°I am, honestly, a bit surprised how quickly you agreed to meet me.¡±

    He raised an eyebrow when he looked at me.

    ¡°Vivian, you are my granddaughter. I won¡¯t give you some hollow phrase like ¡®I have always time for you¡¯, because, honestly, we both know that I don¡¯t. My positions as first councilor and CEO of Vandermeer simply take up too much of my time for that, but you are directly after that.¡±

    That was interesting. Honestly, the only person other I had a somewhat deeper relationship was Ben, and with him it was similar. He had too much time locked up in his position and was too dutiful to shirk it. I just hadn¡¯t thought that Vander¡­ Nate thought similar about me.

    ¡°I see. I fear I still have much to learn about human interaction.¡±

    ¡°That is no problem. You are learning, that is the important part. Nobody expects miracles. But now, what do you need to talk about?¡±

    I ordered my thoughts for a brief moment, before I answered.

    This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

    ¡°A few things. First, I would like it if you could send me some K4-sperm. It does not need to be from a functional K4, and it won¡¯t be used. It is just to close off that chapter.¡±

    He narrowed his eyes.

    ¡°You don¡¯t want to experiment with it?¡±

    ¡°No, why would I? No, I just want to investigate if what I found with my gametes is true for male K4 as well. That brings us neatly to the next point. I had somewhat of a breakthrough last week.¡±

    His face got suddenly very serious, and he leaned forward, placing almost unnerving attention on me.

    ¡°You had a breakthrough? How much? What exactly? And where exactly are you in the project?¡±

    I looked him directly in the eyes.

    ¡°We found, what I call the key of life. Essentially it is a protein that will be assembled out of one protein each from the egg and the sperm. While the individual proteins are different for each species, the combined one, the key of life, is not. It is the same for all mammals I looked at.¡±

    I made a pause and took a sip of the coffee.

    ¡°Except for humans that is. As far as I can tell, for virtually all humans, the components are randomized. The chance of getting a working key of life is around 1:180. And as the key of life is the one protein that kicks off the division, well, it explains what the Folly does and how it has influenced human procreation.¡±

    He leaned back, closed his eyes, and blew out a breath he had been holding in.

    ¡°You did it! You fucking did it! Asking you to look into it was a Hail Mary, and you came through. With that, we now can maybe find a cure.¡±

    I took another sip.

    ¡°That is not quite all. I looked into the ¡®component¡¯ that my eggs have, and I have the full key of life. No addition from the father needed. That is what I want to look for with the K4-sperm. Then we tested what happens if we insert the key of life along with the sperm, and it worked every single time, though the sample size is only in the 10s of thousands. By the way, we have the zygotes on ice, if you want them back.¡±

    He leaned forward abruptly.

    ¡°Wait, you are saying that just inserting this ¡®key of life¡¯ beats the Folly?¡±

    ¡°Yes, it does. That made me design a nanobot that will build depots in the fallopian tubes and insert the key into every egg that passes by. How long those works depends on the number of bots naturally. So far I¡¯ve tested them on research clones, very successful, but not yet on humans. And if it works, while the bots remain in the system the woman will be as hyper-fertile as a K4.¡±

    ¡°So you are telling me you already have a cure? That is marvelous.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No, not a cure, a treatment. Sure, the treatment is cheap. Around ?50 for a two-year dose, but the Folly still remains. Each and every successive generation would need it as well. To change that, to cure it, we need to come up with a way to rewrite the impacted DNA.

    So, that is another point why I am here. You promised me that if I find something you provide a geneticist. Well, it is time.¡±

    ¡°Are you willing to provide Revitalize with all the data?¡±

    I recoiled a bit in confusion.

    ¡°Of course! Why do you ask? This will help save humanity.¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°You would be surprised how many scientists, self-proclaimed enlightened minds, would hoard every little spec of information to squeeze whatever iota of advantage out of it.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°So what? Sure, Enki is already trying to find a way to use the research to make something like the Folly for rats, but otherwise, I fail to see where there is any real advantage in keeping this knowledge secret.¡±

    ¡°Enki could, for example, sell those nanobots you designed. For thousands of credits.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°You mean as Panacea would do? Holding the fate of humanity hostage to get even richer? Why bother? I don¡¯t know if you¡¯ve heard it, but right now, Enki makes more than ?350 billion per day. After taxes. Yes, that is not yet the level of Panacea at its height. They had what? ?900 billion per day? But we are not even half a year in the business. And are mostly limited by our ability to produce enough. In a year we probably will surpass Panacea.¡±

    Nate took a deep breath again.

    ¡°I fear from now on you have to expect some serious pushback. Yes, you had an almost vertical climb so far, but now you will threaten the big ones. Every step will be a fight. And it did not help that you licensed out the NADA plans.¡±

    I scoffed.

    ¡°If we had not, we would probably look at a hostile takeover right now. And it isn¡¯t as if anybody else just can take the idea and bring anything comparable to us to the market. Sure, it will be a bit harder, but we still have advantages.¡±

    He nodded sagely.

    ¡°As long as you understand that the easy ride is over, it is your decision. But back to the cure. I understand your point that it is just a treatment, but compared to what we have now it is a quantum leap.¡±

    I shrugged again.

    ¡°I know, but we don¡¯t even know if it works as I think it would or not. Yes, there were no problems with research clones. After we extracted the eggs to fertilize them. So we can assume it works for in-vitro, but we can only assume it works in-vivo as well.¡±

    He chuckled softly.

    ¡°You are always so pessimistic. I understand you, and you are right. But on the other hand, you got further than anybody in 150 years. Even if it only works in-vitro, that is a giant step forward. And it shows us where to look for the ultimate solution. I assume you have quite a bit of data that we could use, right?¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°You could say that. What I have is nearly the size of all the data of Project Revitalize together. Around 36 Exabytes.¡±

    He coughed surprised.

    ¡°How¡­ sorry, how did it get so big?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°I used the workaround that I told you about. It allowed me to observe the whole fertilization process on a molecular level. And I have the records of tens of millions of specimens. For each fertilization event, you get around a terabyte of data. Sure, most of that is useless for Revitalize. Now that I weeded it out. But in case I made a mistake, or it is useful for something else, we should keep it. And give scientists all over the world access to it.

    Who knows what other information is hidden in there?¡±

    ¡°Wait, you want to give us everything? I understand the data that is important to Revitalize, but the rest? Why do it?¡±

    ¡°Because I am not a biologist. If I never have to work with this icky stuff again, it will be too soon. But the data could be too valuable to simply throw it away. I won¡¯t use it, so why not give it to people who will?"

    He chuckled briefly.

    ¡°Yes, I see your father in you. He would have acted exactly the same. Not that he would have been able to get the data in the first place, mind you.¡±

    I felt a lump in my throat and was unable to answer. So Nate continued:

    ¡°I am sure there will be many people who will be happy about it. Even if just in the future. Right now we are most likely already below the critical mass that allowed us to grow exponentially. You won¡¯t find many scientists who do science for science''s sake anymore.¡±

    He looked and sounded depressed, but then his face brightened again.

    ¡°But thanks to you, we can reach that level again. We will have enough people to make it possible to research seemingly unimportant things again.¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°Again, we don¡¯t know for sure if it works yet. Yes, it should, but¡­¡±

    He cut me off:

    ¡°Even if it only works in-vitro, that is so much more than we had that it is a win. Do you know what a single participation in C3 costs per couple? The Commonwealth pays ?5688 for that. For each. A simple harvesting system, a single lab worker, and if your treatment costs ?50 for two years, it will be available for a couple of credits for the single application. All in all, maybe ?100 for one application.

    And C3 only gives a chance of 11%, compared to the 90% you gave us. So, even if it is just working in-vitro, it would be good enough.

    Not perfect, but good enough that we could sponsor three, four, maybe five children per family. Good enough that we could provide the treatment for every nation willing to participate.

    Good enough to save humanity. Do you understand that?

    You have just saved humanity!

    Even if we never get any better, humanity is saved, thanks to your work.¡±

    He looked at me with so much pride in his eyes, that I really felt uncomfortable, but I could not really disagree with his understanding. I was pretty sure that he knew way better than me how much it cost to run Revitalize.

    And yes, even with all the importance that Revitalize had, all the importance that was written into the Constitution of the Commonwealth, every couple only got one shot, unless they paid themselves. Barely enough, along with widespread cloning, mostly sponsored by Panacea or Dalgon, to ensure that the population of the Commonwealth shrunk way slower than anybody else''s.

    I finally found my voice again, hoarse and a bit unsure:

    ¡°But¡­ we still have much to do. We can¡¯t let it stop here. So¡­ please call in your geneticist so we can start the next step.¡±

    He flinched.

    ¡°Oh, yes. Sorry, but¡­ this got away from me. One moment¡­¡±

    He closed his eyes and concentrated for a moment before he looked back at me.

    ¡°I have arranged a meeting. Let me send you the matrix address.¡±

    I felt a bit irked.

    ¡°Ok, and when?¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°Well, now. But promise me to meet a bit more often. I want to get to know you.¡±

    Oh, ok, that was even a bit faster than I had expected.

    ¡°Ok, yes. I will try my best, but¡­ sorry to say so but I am rather introverted. Even Ben has to badger me to get me to spend time with him sometimes.¡±

    ¡°That is ok, then I will badger you as well. I¡¯ll see you and don¡¯t worry, we will begin the tests immediately.¡±

    He stood up and I followed him, and then the viron dematerialized, along with Nate, and I was standing in cyberspace for a moment, collecting my thoughts, before I moved to the matrix address that he had given me.

    In there, I found a simple meeting room viron with a tall blonde woman of around 20 pacing impatiently.

    As soon as I arrived, she turned on me, and the annoyance on her face was hard to miss.

    ¡°Finally! What took you so long? First I get a message from the boss to drop everything and come to an urgent meeting here and then nobody is here! So what the fuck is going on? Do you have any idea how important my work is? What you¡¯ve interrupted? No, of course not. How could you? I sure hope whatever crap you so urgently need to tell me is important.¡±

    I have to confess I recoiled when I was faced with her diatribe, and it took me a moment to find my balance again. Apparently too long, as she huffed, crossing her arms below her rather impressive bust.

    ¡°Well? I am waiting!¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°Do you ambush everybody this way? I might not be the most social person, but if I am not mistaken, then it is customary to introduce oneself and say some greeting verbiage before one comes to the point.¡±

    She raised an eyebrow, with derision sparkling in her light grey eyes.

    ¡°So you insist on this meeting, right now and then make such a fuss about manners? Typical!¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°First, I did not demand this meeting right now. That was Nathan Vandermeer. I learned of it a few seconds before I got here. Second, I still don¡¯t know who you are. But as I want to be at least courteous, I am Vivian DuClare."

    She harumphed but then softened her stance a bit.

    ¡°Fine. I am Danielle McTacish. And what do you mean you learned about the meeting a few seconds before you came here?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I did ask Vandermeer to arrange a meeting with a geneticist, apparently you. But I honestly expected that he would arrange something next week or tomorrow at the earliest. But then he told me he had arranged it for just now. I had just enough time to say goodbye and came here.¡±

    She shook her head angrily, and began pacing again.

    ¡°Typical. Just because he is a rich asshole he thinks he can just push me around. Well, at least this is the first time, and compared to the Knowles it is not so bad.¡±

    It was my time to cross my arms.

    ¡°Am I to understand that you are one of the K4 Vandermeer ¡®liberated¡¯ from Panacea?¡±

    ¡°As if you don¡¯t know.¡±

    ¡°No¡­ I don¡¯t know. I know that you are Danielle McTavish because you told me that. I assume you are a geneticist because that was who I asked Vandermeer to arrange a meeting with, and I know that Vandermeer managed to free the K4 from the serfdom contracts that Panacea and Dalgon forced them into, and I don¡¯t think the Knowles would care enough about a run-off-the-mill geneticist to bother her, which makes it likely that you are a K4. But all that are assumptions.¡±

    She rolled her eyes, sighed, and then stomped towards the table, sitting down.

    ¡°Yeah, fine. Yes, I am a K4 and a geneticist. And I thought that after I was free from Panacea that I was finally able to research what I really want. But no, in the midst of my work, Vandermeer calls me to this meeting. God, I hate those rich entitled assholes.¡±

    I sat opposite her.

    ¡°Is this the first time Vandermeer did that? And what are you working on?¡±

    ¡°Yes, it is the first time. That is what makes it so jarring. And right now I am working on the human genome to find out what Sandersons Folly did so that I might reverse it. I tried that for years, but the Knowles outright forbid it.¡±

    Ok, that¡­ I could see how her work was important. Not urgent, but after being stymied for years, getting yanked out of it now must be annoying.

    ¡°Ok, that explains much. And I think you owe Vandermeer an apology later. This meeting is about the Folly.¡±

    She frowned:

    ¡°It is? But why did he not go through the normal channels then? Does that mean that you are to assist me? Sorry, but I don¡¯t have the time and the energy to introduce another lab assistant.¡±

    I had to chuckle.

    ¡°It is, and you have to ask him why he did not go through the normal channels. I have an idea, but who knows? I am not here to assist you, or maybe I am, in a way. But you don¡¯t have to introduce me, and I am not a lab assistant. Point is, I am also a K4, but unlike you and the rest, I managed to fly under the radar of Panacea and Dalgon.

    Though my specialty is more nano-technology and physics, Vandermeer asked me to look into the Folly.¡±

    She frowned even harder.

    ¡°Nano-tech? Physics? How could any of that help with the Folly? Has he gone soft in the head? And a K4? I thought there were only 11 of us.¡±

    ¡°Nope, there were 12 of us in our generation. But as I said, I kept it silent, and neither Dalgon nor Panacea noticed me. And you would be surprised what nano-technology can do in this case. Imagine being able to observe the fertilization process on the molecular level, not in real-time but all of it.¡±

    She rubbed her chin, thinking hard.

    ¡°Ok, I confess, that might be useful. In a general way. Is that what you think you can offer me? Sorry to say so but right now it is not what I need. I told you I am analyzing the genome to look where the changes were made.¡±

    I rolled my eyes slightly.

    ¡°No, not really. And do you really think that comparing the genome from before the war to what it is now will help? Who knows what bioweapons left their mark on it? How do you think you can differentiate what the Folly did from what other bioweapons did?¡±

    She threw up her hands.

    ¡°It is the best I can come up with. Do you think throwing random chemicals at it and hoping something sticks is better? At least I am doing something to find the root cause of the problem. And if you are not offering this observation tool, what are you offering then?¡±

    I leaned forward, propping myself onto my elbows.

    ¡°What I am offering you is the result of me and a small team observing several tens of millions of fertilization processes from all sorts of mammals, looking for what actually starts the phase in the fertilization that is broken by the Folly.¡±

    Then I made a pause for effect.

    ¡°And the result of that is that I know exactly what it is that the Folly did. I have no clue what genetic markers it changed to achieve that, but I know the result of it. And nothing against your project, but in my opinion it would be way more productive if you could look for the specific cause of what the Folly does, or maybe for a way to overwrite it.¡±

    She just sat there, with her mouth hanging open.

    After what seemed an eternity, she shook her head.

    ¡°Are you¡­ are you sure? You do have the Folly? For real?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Yes, I have pinpointed it. And frankly, we already most likely can treat it. But to cure it, that is your job. Just to make it clear, you are only the second person outside of my team that has learned about this. The first was Nathan Vandermeer, a few minutes ago.¡±

    For a moment she just sat there, staring at me. Then she deflated.

    ¡°Fuck! You are right! I owe Vandermeer an apology! I hate that! I hate that I owe some rich asshole something! Much less an apology.¡±

    I cocked my head.

    ¡°Why? Because he is rich?¡±

    She growled.

    ¡°Oh please. All rich people are assholes.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°As much as I hate to defend him, has he ever done anything that makes you believe that he is an asshole?¡±

    She frowned again.

    ¡°No, but it is just a matter of time. You just can¡¯t trust the high and mighty.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Sadly, you are mostly right. There are very few exceptions. But everything I know about Vandermeer tells me he is one of those exceptions.¡±

    She looked to the side and at the ground.

    ¡°Yeah, you might be right. But I still don¡¯t trust him.¡±

    ¡°Then don¡¯t. Just don¡¯t let your mistrust cripple you.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, ok. But that is for later. Right now, tell me what you¡¯ve discovered. If we finally manage to beat the Folly, we have left our mark on history for sure.¡±

    And with that, we began the transfer and explanation of data.

    It was invigorating to work with somebody who was coming even close to my intelligence, as arrogant as that sound. But she grasped the ideas, and the facts far faster than anybody I¡¯ve ever met before.

    For the very first time, I was working with somebody who at once intuitively understood where I was coming from and where I was going, but also did not need a detailed handholding explanation to get it.

    Yes, Warden brought one of those two factors to the table, and Maynard, Jessi, and the Minions brought the other, but this was a completely new experience.

    For the first time, I realized how limiting it was to work with people so far away from my mental capacity.

    And when the meeting ended far quicker than I had expected, I was strangely unhappy about it.

 2.38 To test or not to test

    With the data we had generated now in the hands of Project Revitalize, and Dr. McTacish, we had essentially finished our part of the work.

    Yes, I know I had originally decided to let the scientists in Nowhere decide when to go to human testing, but seriously, there was virtually nothing that could go wrong. Sure, it might not work, but that was the worst that could happen.

    With that in mind, I messaged Jessi to ask for a virtual meeting. It took her a ¡®virtual¡¯ eternity to answer, though, in the real world, it only took around six minutes. That is the disadvantage of being in high-compression cyberspace.

    But finally, for me at least, she appeared in the simulated comfortable office that I had set up for this.

    No outrageously big desk to impress any visitors, just a couple of comfortable chairs, a low table, a ¡®window¡¯ showing vistas from all over the solar system, and some abstract art on the walls.

    ¡°Hi Jessi. Sit down, please.¡±

    ¡°Oh hi Vivian. Sorry, but I don¡¯t have much time. We are now finalizing the design for the first-aid pack. So¡­ whatever it is, I hope it is quick.¡±

    I was a bit confused. We were at 60:1. She should have had more than enough time for a minute or two to talk to another of the officers of Enki. But whatever.

    ¡°Ok, I make it short. You remember that I was asked to work on the Folly, right? And that I had something of a breakthrough. Well, we got a bit more than the last time we talked about it.¡±

    She cocked her head.

    ¡°More than this ¡®key of life¡¯ that the rats have?¡±

    I smiled.

    ¡°That all mammals, except humans, have you mean?¡±

    It took her a moment to piece my sentence together, and honestly, if I had not just had the meeting with Danielle, and seen how fast she was, I would not have been a bit disappointed, but right then¡­ yes, it wasn¡¯t fair, but it was like coming from an invigorating discussion with an adult and then try to explain the world to a three-year-old.

    It took all my willpower to not show my discontent, but somehow I think I managed it.

    ¡°You mean that¡­ we are supposed to have this ¡®key of life¡¯ but thanks to the Folly we don¡¯t any longer?¡±

    ¡°Mostly. What is different from species to species are the two components that form the key. No wonder, this is what prevents inter-species hybrids. For humans, what the Folly did is randomizing those two components.

    Not enough to make us completely sterile, but enough to give us a roughly 1:180 chance of the resulting protein actually kicking off the cell division.¡±

    She closed her eyes and shook her head.

    ¡°After all these years, and we finally know where to look. This is big, very big. I am surprised that you did not tell Vandermeer about it.¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°I did. I also gave him access to all the data. Enki has it of course also, just to mention it. He has already put his best geneticist on it to hopefully find a cure for it. But¡­ in the process of testing it, we¡­ the scientists from Nowhere and I, we tried to look what happens if we introduce the full key into the ovum. And it works. It does not have to be from the combined proteins, it just has to be present to start the division.¡±

    She frowned.

    ¡°Wait¡­ you are saying that just injecting this key along with the sperm will make the zygote viable?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No, of course not. There are too many factors that determine if a zygote is viable. But it starts the division and makes it so that the other factors come into play in the first place.¡±

    She rubbed the bridge of her nose with both index fingers.

    ¡°So, we could, theoretically, offer to perform a harvesting operation, followed by an artificial fertilization, and then implant the new zygote into the mother?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°We could, and I guess if the natural way just won¡¯t work we should, but I used a nano-bot to introduce the key into the ovum. Then I modified it a bit and used it on test clones. The new design, with around $100 of nanobots, will for around two years, insert the key into each ovum that leaves the ovaries.

    Which is enough to start the division.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ you are telling me that you have created an injection that makes a woman fertile for around two years? And it costs 100 bucks? Why are you telling me this?¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°I gave the nano-bot design to Vandermeer as well, of course. But nothing stops us from using it as well. But so far I only have the research clones as test samples, and I contaminated the results by forcing the clones to ovulate once a day instead of once in 28 days.

    But the result with that was that it gives a 90% chance of pregnancy. The risk of complications is, in my opinion minimal, as it is a marginally modified standard medical nano-bot design that creates the key and then encapsulates it until it is placed into the ovum, but¡­ you are the doctor here.¡±

    I looked her in the eye.

    ¡°Do we have the moral right to offer this to our employees? Do we have the moral right to not offer it to them? What will be the consequences of doing so? What the conditions? I honestly have no clue what to do with this now, what is the right thing to do.¡±

    She closed her eyes and took a couple of deep breaths.

    ¡°Fuck! You are right, that is a moral problem. There is no harm in testing it on the research clones, of course. And I guess the big brains in Nowhere will start with live human testing pretty soon. But considering how the annual clone lottery is such a big thing¡­ I really don¡¯t know. It is not right to simply test it on humans. But it is also not right to keep that from our employees. Fuck¡­ we have to call Michael. This¡­ this is too big for any of us to decide.¡±

    I sighed but guessed she was right. I mean, the news that there was something that could give people children and somebody held it back would cause riots in Nowhere where Project Revitalize did expend several thousand credits per couple to give them the best chance.

    Here? Cities would burn. With that in mind, I send a message to Michael that I needed to meet with him as soon as possible.

    Apparently, being the CEO of a double-A corporation did not mean that he had much to do, because he messaged me back that he could meet immediately.

    And indeed, it only took him around a minute to appear, though for Jessi¡¯s sake, I had reduced the compression to a moderate 15:1, and we talked about how the treatment should work, and what possible side effects were to be expected.

    Our meeting with Michael on the other hand was pretty short. Yes, we had the time to explain what the situation was, and what question we needed to be answered, but after that, after only a few seconds, Michael declared that this was too big for him to decide on his own. Again.

    That meant the next thing I knew was that he called an emergency meeting of the whole C-suite.

    For in 30 minutes. And he asked me to be physically present as well. Ugh¡­ sure, a quick shower and wardrobe change was not that hard, but he could at least give me a bit more time.

    Fortunately, it took not even ten minutes for the Merc to fly to the Enki-HQ, And I was still the last one to arrive. About a minute before the meeting was to start.

    Maggie grinned at me, and sweetly commented: ¡°Nice of you to come too, sometime.¡±

    I shrugged while I took my seat.

    ¡°If you had to change out of your work clothes, and then fly here within 30 minutes, you would not be very early as well.¡±

    That made her smile even wider.

    ¡°I am in my work clothes. We can¡¯t all work from a cushy couch, lying on our back all day, you know?¡±

    I smiled back, recognizing it as harmless banter, something I could not do even a year ago.

    ¡°You could, you know. You just don¡¯t want to.¡±

    She chuckled.

    ¡°You got me there. With the telebots, we really could. Well, most of us could.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, I get it. You just don¡¯t want to put in 480 hours of work on an eight-hour salary, admit it. You are just lazy.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, fine, you got me.¡±

    Not that that was the truth, mind you. For one, she, like the rest of the execs in this room, had a share of Enki, in addition to their salary, and she did spend quite some time each day in cyberspace. Not as much as me, but honestly, who did?

    Michael shook his head.

    ¡°If you two are done playing, can we start?¡±

    ¡°Sure boss, whatever you want boss, you just have to say it, boss.¡±

    Ever the irreverent imp, Maggie seamlessly turned her witt towards Michael, who rolled his eyes.

    ¡°Now, I have called you here because I¡­ well, Vivian really, has news, and we have a decision to make. So, Vivian, if you may?¡±

    That put me smoothly on the spot. Thank you very much, Michael.

    ¡°You know, you could have warned me that you want to throw me to the lions. But whatever¡­¡± I sighed dramatically.

    ¡°It¡¯s actually more than one news item though. So the easy things first, my project for Vandermeer is finished. In other words, I am available again for our projects, if you need me to do something. Then, Maynard, I have a whole stack of mammal species where you can try the new anti-vermin project on.¡±

    I made a short pause.

    ¡°You probably already understand that those are not important enough news to call an emergency meeting. The thing is, I did not just find what causes the start of cell division in other mammals, I found what is broken in humans so that it doesn¡¯t.¡±

    That brought gasps from the others.

    ¡°I also found out what we have to include to unbreak it.¡±

    Another round of gasps, this time accompanied by loud expressions of surprise and joy.

    ¡°We have, at least in the petri-dish, managed to successfully fertilize around 25 thousand human eggs. That means we can at least in-vitro almost certainly ensure that it works.¡±

    That brought hungry looks from Alena, Tiffany, and surprisingly, Eli. With Maggie stammering:

    ¡°Wait¡­ does that mean we can¡­¡±

    Michael saved her from finding the words:

    ¡°Yes, it means exactly that, if I understood Vivian right. We can indeed give each of you a very high chance of parenthood. But she is not yet finished.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°As Michael so eloquently stated, I am not finished. We tested this in-vitro method for most of last week. But it had a high enough chance of working that I designed a nano-bot that will hopefully do that in-vivo.

    It does not matter if we inject the substance, incidentally, it is the same ¡®key of life¡¯ as for rats, into the egg before or after the sperm enters it. As soon as both the key is present and the acrosome reaction has happened, division starts. And if anybody has not yet figured it out, Sanderson¡¯s Folly crippled the key of life.

    What my new nanobot should do, is inject the key into every egg that leaves the ovaries. How long it will do that depends fully on how many bots are in a dose. My rough calculation says for around $100 of nano-bots, our costs, we can make a woman hyper-fertile for around two years.

    Hyper-fertile means that it is irrelevant if the key component of the father is crippled or not, and if nothing else makes pregnancy impossible, she should catch almost immediately.¡±

    After I had said that, it was impossible to understand anything, as the people around the table all babbled excitedly. That did go on for a couple of minutes before Michael rapped sharply on the table.

    ¡°Settle down. I understand this is important. More so for some of you. But the point here is, we have this bot-design. We are not the only ones, mind you, Vivian has given them to Vandermeer and this project in Nowhere. They have set their best geneticist working on maybe curing the Folly with that information. But that could happen tomorrow, in a year, in ten years, or never.

    Right now, we have a probable, albeit untested, treatment. It works in research clones with later harvesting of the eggs and then in-vitro fertilization, but we don¡¯t know if it works in the natural way.¡±

    For a moment there was silence before Jessi spoke up:

    ¡°The thing is, while there should be no side effects of this treatment, we can never be 100% sure. Everything we know is that the worst that can happen is that it doesn¡¯t work. And even that is unlikely. But we could be wrong about that. That means for the first women who test this, there will be a small, but real risk. And we can¡¯t test this on rats, because rats are not, yet, suffering from the Folly.¡±

    That made everybody sober up. Michael then continued:

    ¡°But that is also not really a reason for an emergency meeting. And no, there is no need to decide if we develop that thing or not. That is a no-brainer. No, the thing is, do we offer this to our employees? On one hand, we can¡¯t simply use our employees for human testing. But on the other hand, can we really keep that from them? Do we have that right?¡±

    Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

    Marcel tapped on the table with a finger.

    ¡°It is just a matter of time before we can give that to our employees, right? So why the rush?¡±

    Jessi sighed.

    ¡°Because, as much as people don¡¯t really acknowledge this, the Folly is one of the big reasons why our world is on a shit creek without a paddle. The instinct to procreate is one of the strongest in humanity, all living beings really. Just below surviving really. It does a real number to people to know that they most likely will never have children.

    That is unfortunate, but acceptable if it is a small fraction of the population. But thank¡¯s to the Folly, it is not a fraction, but the vast majority. The damage to society is¡­ insane. If we can turn that around¡­ we have to.¡±

    Marcel shrugged.

    ¡°Sure, I get that. That was not my question though. My question was why do we have to tell them now, when it is not yet tested? We can test it and then give it to our employees, and we won¡¯t have any moral quandary.¡±

    Michael shook his head and sighed.

    ¡°Do you remember the riots in Boston in 42? That happened because the people there learned that some official rigged the clone lottery. Not even massively, but just a bit to give his¡­ patrons a significantly higher chance of winning.

    So, if people are willing to burn down whole neighborhoods because somebody changed their negligible chance of winning a clone child, what do you think they will do if, no when they learn that we had this for some time and did not give it to them immediately?¡±

    I saw Marcel, along with almost everybody else grimace when Michael said that.

    Marcel just nodded.

    ¡°Ok, yeah. That would be bad. But as you said, we can¡¯t just test it on our employees.¡±

    Naveen spoke calmly:

    ¡°Not without informing them, no. But why don¡¯t we put the decision in our employees'' hands? Inform them that we have this bot that we believe can give them children, but we have not tested it, we don¡¯t know if it really works, and we don¡¯t know if there are side effects. Give them the option of making an informed decision. I mean, how much of a risk is it, really?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Honestly, all but negligible. We are talking of a minor variation of a standard 12<sup>th</sup> gen medical nano-bot. Those are well-tested and known for not causing any trouble. The ¡®key of life¡¯ will be encapsulated until it will be injected into an egg, to prevent the body from breaking it down.

    Even the chance that it doesn¡¯t work is minute. As I said, it works in the petri dish. In more than 90% of the cases. For all purposes, if there is nothing else stopping a pregnancy, it should work. But we simply can never be 100% sure in those cases without testing.¡±

    Naveen nodded.

    ¡°Yes, I thought so. In other words, all of our ¡®we have to test it¡¯ is mostly to be sure, right?¡±

    Both Jessi and I nodded.

    ¡°So, explain that to the people, and let them decide. If they forgo getting the bot, it is their decision, and they can¡¯t hold us responsible. And in the unlikely case that something goes wrong, it was also their decision. Especially if we recommend for them to wait for the results of the human trials.¡±

    Michael sighed.

    ¡°That is a bit cynical, isn¡¯t it?¡±

    Naveen nodded.

    ¡°Yes, it is, but it is in my opinion the best of a group of bad options. This is something that, no matter how we handle it, can explode into our faces. That means we have to take the cynical approach, or whatever our decision is, it will probably backfire.¡±

    Michael rubbed his temples.

    ¡°Yeah, I get that. I don¡¯t like it but I understand it. Well, Eli, what do you think about that approach? Is it legal?¡±

    Eli scoffed.

    ¡°For real boss? We are an AA-tier corp. Unless Ralcon or Enertech put their noses in, legal is what we decide it is. Not even the other triple-As could make us trouble there. It would be legal, and unfortunately fully in line with how double and triple A-corps act for us to simply test it on our employees and not tell them.

    But in this case, Naveen¡¯s idea would be legal even for a C- or B- tier corp. If we don¡¯t simply inject them, but inform them about what we think it will do, and that we don¡¯t know if there are any side effects, or what those might be if there are, we are golden.¡±

    As usual, I was disgusted about how much power the USA, well, most nations really, gave to the corporations. And that by now we were part of this power structure. But at least we tried not to abuse it.

    Frick, we could have just tested in on the employees as Eli had explained, and nobody would have raised an eyebrow about it. In the eyes of most of those elites, the overwhelming majority of our employees were just cattle after all. The only reason they had not yet exterminated most of them was that they needed customers.

    Even perennial poor customers bought coms, with data and voice plans. They needed electricity, and as a rule, lacked the several million dollars it took to buy even the smallest fusactor. They needed clothes, and guess who owned virtually all of the cheap fabbers in the poorer areas?

    Heck, even the buildings were often owned by a corporation, though not in Queens. All that was very easy to understand when one began looking for it. What I did not understand though was where the masses got their money. I had once asked Ben about it, and he essentially explained that at least in Queens, shadow-mercs drove the economy.

    Virtually everything here was geared toward fleecing those who were paid by the corporations in their shadow wars. But that could not be all of it. But whatever, I had already pretty much accepted that I would never understand it.

    In my musing, I did not notice that the others had already voted, and when Michael softly nudged me with his elbow, I was a bit confused.

    ¡°Uh, what? Sorry, I was thinking about something.¡±

    Michael facepalmed, while Alena smiled and answered:

    ¡°We noticed. But we are waiting for your vote.¡±

    ¡°My vote? There was seriously a vote? I thought Naveen¡¯s idea is the only viable option.¡±

    I was still confused looking into the round when Michael said:

    ¡°And with that, it¡¯s unanimous. Alright, I will prepare a message for our employees.¡±

    He stood up and promptly left the room, while the rest of us slowly began to follow him.

    I took a deep breath and closes my eyes, trying to clear my mind. I flinched when I felt a hand on my shoulder. When I looked up, I saw James standing there.

    ¡°I wanted to ask, what were you thinking so hard about? Are any new products in the works?¡±

    ¡°Hu? No, well, at least not that I know. You have to ask Maynard and the Minions about that. No¡­ Eli¡¯s comment¡­ it hit me. I had to think about how much I despise this corpocracy we are living in. And how utterly evil virtually all the rich and powerful are.¡±

    He smiled sadly.

    ¡°Oh yes, that is¡­ I sometimes do the same. And now I am COO of one of the 20 biggest corporations in the US. I am part of that corpocracy. It¡¯s sometimes hard to wrap my head around it.¡±

    ¡°You are part of it? Frick, I own 80% of this top-20 corporation. Most of our products are based on my inventions. You are part of the corporation, without me, there would be no corporation here.

    You are part of the machinery. Powerful and rich beyond belief, at least compared to 99.99% of all humans, but I am part of the so-called super elite.

    People in your strata of society are usually¡­ not good, but don¡¯t go out of their way to be evil either. People in my strata do. My ¡®peers¡¯ are the problem. What do you think that does to my head? And I can¡¯t even do anything against them, because while I am rich and powerful, so are they. And they are many.¡±

    He nodded, still smiling sadly.

    ¡°The only thing you can do is what you are doing. Do your best to remain good, and be fair. Help people. Make their lives easier. Honestly, I don¡¯t think anybody in the last 100 years has done as much good as you. Just keep doing what you are doing, and don¡¯t grow bitter. Don¡¯t let the world destroy you.¡±

    I looked him in the eyes and then sighed.

    ¡°I¡¯ll do my best.¡±

    ¡°That is all anybody can expect from you.¡±

    With that, he left me alone, mulling over what he had said.

    On some level, I knew he was right. But unfortunately, those pesky emotions did not agree with him. For way too many years, felt centuries really, I was firmly on the other side, doing everything I could to bring down big corporations. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was on the right side, that the corporations needed to go away.

    I felt my righteous anger burning brightly and proudly. And now¡­ I could not help it, I felt like a traitor. Yes, intellectually, I knew that was nonsense. That I was still on the right side. Enki was doing its absolute best to help the people around us. And most times, that part of me was all that was there.

    But sometimes, like right that moment, the angry little voice deep in my mind that declared me a traitor came to the forefront. And demanded with fury that I destroy everything. The whole system. Rip it apart.

    Fortunately, like always this descent into madness cleared soon. I managed to calm the nagging doubt eating on me, pacify the blazing rage burning in my heart, and soothe the bitter hate that always threatened to overwhelm me.

    And again, it had been a tiny bit easier than before. Over the last year, I had gained a measure of composure that I had not even believed possible. I was less and less a victim of my anger.

    Still, it took a couple of minutes to control myself, before I sluggishly stood up. I had no physical problems, but my mind was¡­ exhausted. My experience told me it would take a few hours for me to recover.

    And unfortunately, I had no clue if I was needed in the HQ any longer or not.

    When I walked through the door, Svenja, who was walking a couple of steps behind me said softly:

    ¡°You should not think too hard about it, ma¡¯am. Your family has, for the last 200 years, helped humanity again and again. Your family is the reason the great war ended. It is the reason humanity could survive the idiocy of the politicians and the ravages of the night of the falling stars. Your family is the reason Project Revitalize exists in the first place. And your family is the reason the Commonwealth has Apollo and no uneducated sheep.

    And now, you¡¯ve beaten the Folly, the one thing exterminating humanity. No, you don¡¯t have to worry, you, like all of your ancestors, are a force of good.¡±

    It was, strangely balming the hear her say it. I knew all of that in a purely information-type of way. And maybe if I said it to myself often enough, one day I would believe it as well. But right now, it was a struggle.

    ¡°Thank you Svenja. And, again, please call me Vivian. I feel uncomfortable if somebody calls me ma¡¯am.¡± I knew, of course, what her answer to my request would be. We had this same argument often enough.

    ¡°I¡¯m afraid I can¡¯t do that ma¡¯am. It would be disrespecting.¡±

    And there it was. From what I learned, there were mostly four types of Vandermeer military personnel.

    First of course those that saw it as a way to make money. Better mercenaries really. And I had learned that those people were not particularly trusted in the Vandermeer hierarchy. I had not met one of those yet.

    Second those who saw Vandermeer as a way to power. As long as Vandermeer could provide that path forward, they could be trusted, but as soon as that stopped¡­ well, those types of soldiers were used, but never in a critical position. Major Burke was a very good example of that.

    Third, those who actually believed in what Vandermeer, the corporation, was doing. They made up the core of the Vandermeer military, and the vast majority of my security detail was drawn from this stock.

    And lastly, some saw the Vandermeer family members as something like something of religious icons. In their eyes, were almost the paragons of goodness. And a couple of the security detail, including Cpl. Svenja Ingridsdottier came from that background.

    I could maybe have been angry about that if Vandermeer had done anything to create this belief.

    But after some long discussions with Lt. Thomson and Sgt. Reynolds, it was clear that this¡­ cult had simply looked at the historical information, information that as far as I could discern was completely true, and drawn the conclusion that my family was sent to Earth to redeem humanity.

    Stupid, I know, but as much as I had no particular fondness for any religion, I also believed that everybody had the right to believe what they wanted. And so here I was, confronted with a few people who saw, and worse, treated me as if I was some holy messenger sent down from the heavens. Talk about disconcerting.

    It is even worse. Until about three years before, my father, Julian DuClare, still defamed as a traitor, was seen as a demon who corrupted the pure, and holy maiden, Rebecca Vandermeer, to end the holy family.

    Until¡­ if I had even had the slightest idea that it would make my father into some sort of saint, I would have thought twice, maybe even trice, before I publicized the truth about him. No, not really, I wanted the truth to be known.

    But now those people believed that the ¡®evil Knowles and Dalgons¡¯ conspired to break the family. That my father was an honorable man, destined for greatness, cut short through betrayal. That in itself was of course kinda the truth. But they promptly elevated him to a saint.

    I also learned that this cult was overjoyed that my mother was still alive, even if she was damaged severely. But they were, almost constantly, petitioning Nate to have her impregnated, to continue the bloodline.

    I was, honestly, rather glad that so far only a handful of them, who additionally were sworn to secrecy, knew that I existed. But I could see the time that my anonymity ended quickly approaching.

    I mean, the name DuClare was now no longer reviled by those folks, and sooner or later, somebody would realize that the small, redheaded K4-Pure with the last name DuClare, who looked quite a bit like Rebecca Vandermeer, and who worked closely with Vandermeer, might come from the Vandermeer family.

    Another reason to be happy that I was here, in NYC, and no longer in Seattle.

    In my office, Svenja naturally took the anteroom, and I dove into cyberspace, to clear my mind. Not deeply, only 2:1.

    I had noticed that it was counterproductive to accelerate any meditation. At 2:1 I got most of the benefits of meditating while doing it essentially twice as fast. But at higher compressions, the gains fell dramatically. 2:1 was the point of diminishing returns. So unless you were in a hurry, it was mostly wasted effort to meditate in more than that.

    And seeing that ¡®being in a hurry¡¯ and meditation are things that simply don¡¯t work well with each other¡­ I did not think there could ever be a reason to meditate in high compression. Why spent subjective four hours doing something when you get the same benefit for subjective 30 minutes of the same work, and both in the same 15 minutes in real-time?

    Still, when I had managed to regain my composure and some of my mental energy, I surfaced back into the real world, only to be greeted by a general message from the CEO.

    Yes, I generally knew what he would say already, but I still listened to his message to everybody working for Enki.

    ¡°Ladies and Gentlemen, valued employees of Enki, I talk to you about a positive, if very hard decision, I, and the other officers of our corporation made just today.

    I won¡¯t insult your intelligence with some hollow platitudes about how we are a family or such meaningless drivel. You know as well as I do that Enki is a business. Still, we at the top try to do the best for all of you. To bring you the greatest possible benefit.

    That is not always possible, and even if it is, it is rarely easy, but we founded this corporation on the idea that we want it to be a force of good.

    But just today, we ran into a decision where there are no really good answers. Our own Dr. DuClare has been asked by the Northwestern Commonwealth to look into the most common cause for the lack of children. Something that the Commies call ¡®The Folly¡¯. It is, as some of you might know, the result of a bioweapon used during the great war.

    The good news is, she discovered what exactly the Folly does. Why it prevents us from having children.

    And from what I understand, the Commies are already beginning on creating a lasting cure. But during her research, she found an untested way that we believe will treat the infertility caused by the Folly.

    Not cure, only treat. And here we come to our decision. We would not, could not, in good conscience keep that possible treatment from you. But on the other hand, we could not simply test it on you.

    Legally, we have that right, but morally, we can¡¯t make ourselves do it.

    We believe that it is effective and that it is otherwise without side effects. But we don¡¯t know for sure.

    It is a derivative of commonly used medical nanobots, so everything we know tells us it is harmless, except for very rare allergies. But unfortunately, whenever humans are absolutely sure of something, it has the tendency to bite us in the ass.

    That means we place the decision into your hands. We will not prevent you from getting the treatment, but we advise you to wait until we managed to run at least a few basic tests.

    If you decide that you want the treatment immediately, there are some rules we have to insist on.

    For one, it has to be the woman of the couple who gets the injection. Simply because it is insanely easier to fix a single egg, than millions of sperms.

    Second, along with the treatment, we will inject her with a BOU. For those of you who do not know what that is, a BOU or bio-observation unit will allow us to medically observe her constantly, regardless of where she is.

    That is not because we don¡¯t trust you. It is in case that something goes wrong. Then the BOU will immediately alert us so that we can send help. What it won¡¯t do though is spying on you in any form. Unless there is a medical emergency, no human will even get to see those observations.

    Another point is that you understand that we can¡¯t guarantee that you get a child. Even before the great war, before the Folly, some problems prevented pregnancy. And the treatment will do nothing against those problems. If it does anything at all. So far, we only believe it will, and we might be mistaken.

    But what it also means is that if, within three months, no pregnancy is forthcoming, we have to insist that we examine both parts of the couple. Many of those additional problems can be solved with modern technology, and if it is something that we can easily fix, we will do so.

    And lastly, even if it is no longer common knowledge, to create a child, there needs to be a man and a woman in the relationship. We can¡¯t give two men this possibility and neither two women. At least not without cloning.

    That said, we implore you to think carefully about what you want. If the treatment works as we believe it will, you will get it some time in the future anyway. It will, unfortunately, take more than a year to carry out the tests, simply because we have to have examine children conceived with the help of the treatment to make sure that it is absolutely safe.

    Until we have done that, we are simply unable to guarantee you a good outcome.

    With that, I wish you all a good day.¡±

    Hmm, a bit overdramatic for my taste, but as much as we tried to help them, most of our employees were a bit¡­ simple.

    It did convey the message though. And it seems that Jessi had added a bit to the protocol. Not that I disagreed with us using the BOU.

    But I had a sudden realization. Our medical facilities would not be enough if a large number of our employees decided to partake in the test.

    When I left the office and collected Svenja, she beamed with pride.

    ¡°Does that mean that we can look forward to the next generation of Vandermeers, ma¡¯am?¡±

    I stopped suddenly, pretty confused, turning to her.

    ¡°Huh, where does that come from?¡±

    ¡°Well, now you do not have to gamble on Project Revitalize to help you get pregnant.¡±

    I rolled my eyes and sighed.

    ¡°Svenja, I am a K4. If the treatment works as we believe it will, all it does is give other women what I have had from birth. I never had to face infertility. On the contrary, I am probably the first woman in generations who uses contraceptives.

    The only thing I have to do to get pregnant, except what I am doing anyway is order my implants to let an egg ripen.¡±

    She frowned.

    ¡°But¡­ if you can do it at any time, why did you not do it?¡±

    I closed my eyes, rubbing over them with my left thumb and index finger.

    ¡°I may be physically able to get children, but not mentally and emotionally. The way I grew up¡­ it left scars. I am healing, mind you, and while I am not ready, I can at least think it through without flying into a fit of rage, but I fear I have a long way to go.¡±

    Then I smiled.

    ¡°Not that I am under any sort of pressure. Again, I am a K4. I have no biological clock.¡±

 2.39: Look whos back

    In all honesty, despite even our most positive projections, the news about the treatment, and the way we handled it, was significantly more pronounced than we could have imagined.

    To be fair, I never had to live with this surety of being infertile, as the hyper-fertility of the K4 was discovered when I was 10, so it might be that only I was surprised.

    But looking at the way all our facilities were instantly overwhelmed said not. It took nearly an hour before Jessi¡¯s teams managed to bring some semblance of order into the seething mass of people trying to be the first to get the treatment, and that was only the female part of our on-duty employees.

    The other shifts and the significant others of the male employees needed quite a bit longer to appear.

    But despite this delay, people were hopeful and happy. A short questionary showed that they understood that it might not work, but the fact that we did not keep it from them, or used them as guinea pigs without their knowledge and consent, meant that we had gained a significant amount of trust.

    And most of all, there was hope that even if this attempt failed, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. That somebody was trying to help them. It was disheartening how many points we gained in their esteem simply for that.

    It also served to distance us from the usual abusive corporations. That had another interesting side effect. Almost overnight, Maggie had to fight to integrate thousands of new potential employees. Our workforce almost tripled over the next week.

    Additionally, we got requests from all over Queens about ¡°the cure¡±, and Marcel and his staff were busy explaining that it was only a treatment and that we were still testing it, so it was not yet sure that it worked.

    Not that everybody listened to him.

    Naveen¡¯s people were equally busy preventing a mob of irate people from storming our facilities and demanding ¡°the cure¡± now.

    The good news here is that they managed to do that without anybody being harmed. But we had to place a bot at each entrance with the sole functionality that we were just testing it and we did not know yet if it would work. We did not bother to explain the difference between a cure and a treatment to the mob.

    Fortunately, most of them were at least smart enough to accept that we were trying to do our best, and needed time before we could offer it broadly. Unfortunately, not all. I assume, some of the more intransigent people in the mob were paid agitators, and sadly, it worked.

    We had to expend quite some effort and energy to keep things calm, and every time we thought we had it calmed down, another wave happened. But that was nothing new, nothing spectacular. Well, for us it was, but for a double-A that was just Tuesday. Or any day that ended on Y.

    I decided early on that there was no point in trying to understand or prevent it. It was just one of those things that happened.

    On Friday, I decided to visit the Abyss again. An all too infrequent endeavor in that times. I simply lacked the time, or energy to spend much time there anymore. Especially with the way Enki had eaten up much of what I had to give.

    I had also stopped working as Spectre, but here, Warden had decided that Spectre suddenly vanishing when I was busy was too much of a hint, and had taken over. Fortunately, I had been very selective about what jobs I took under that name, and Warden easily could do the same.

    Strolling through the Abyss, I felt a bit melancholy. It was not that I was no longer welcome here, but¡­ I was just no longer really a part of it.

    I had outgrown the Abyss. And somehow that made me sad. Still, I transferred to Hut 2, looking around in the virtual club area. I sat at one of the literally innumerable tables, browsing through my nearly innumerable notifications. Most of it was the usual dross. I had to work for hacker x to make him the ultimate board, or hacker y absolutely needed me to drop everything and create a utility for him¡­ in other words, things I ignored before I became the CTO of a double-A corp.

    I sometimes wondered what made those people believe that even as ¡®just¡¯ the tech of Spectre, I would react well to that kind of message. Well, after the first half dozen or so were in need to reinstall their board, or in a couple of exceptionally persistent annoyances, in need of a completely new board, I rarely had to resort to any more than ignoring them.

    So, with a sigh, I took a sip of my virtual Coke and deleted 99% of those messages. The rest were quite a bit more interesting and way more polite, so they deserved an honest reply. It did not change that I did not have the time to do it, but I could at least be polite to them back.

    Well, one of them stood out. Argo, still politely, reminded me that I had promised him to look into getting him a new board when I was less busy and had my new line out.

    Well, the new line was out, and I had indeed a bit of a lull right then and there. Spontaneously, I decided to give the man what he had asked for. He had helped me and was always polite after all. And it did cost me virtually nothing.

    I had realized that I could send Warden to observe his gigs and watch them later in 240:1. I could not do that previously because I could not trust the jack in question to be completely honest, which was absolutely necessary for tailoring the board to their needs. But I could trust Warden.

    Heck, I would use this as a test run to determine if she could accurately assess a jack and his style.

    While I was musing about it, somebody sat at the table.

    ¡°Well, well, well, look who shows her face here again. And I thought we were not good enough for the high and mighty CTO.¡±

    I managed, mostly thanks to the limited reaction my avatar showed, not to flinch when Bletchley talked to me.

    But I had grown in some ways over the last year. In the past, I would have cowered and tried to offer apologies. But now¡­

    ¡°Well, you know how it is. You try to dominate the world, and suddenly you have no time for the simple pleasures anymore. But you people are in luck, I have a bit of time and decided to let you bask in my presence for a bit.¡±

    He looked sternly at me¡­ for a moment. Before he broke out into laughter.

    ¡°Shit, Sera, you¡¯ve changed. Last year you would have shit your pants if I had acted that way.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I was a shut-in with exceptionally limited contact with other humans. Over the last year, I have been dragged kicking and screaming into the greater society. That leaves a mark.¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°Yeah, I can see that. But it suits you well.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°I know. Doesn¡¯t make me any less kicking and screaming though. Can¡¯t have people believe they have broken me, you know.¡±

    ¡°I get you sister. But I¡¯ve not come here to chat with you. I fear we have to talk. Will you come to the room with me?¡±

    I sighed inwardly. Of course, there was something to talk about. Bletchley was more or less locked in as my ¡®handler¡¯ as the top 20 here were concerned. They did not think that Spectre would convey their opinions sufficiently. But whatever. I had nothing to do right now, and the Coke was virtual anyway.

    ¡°No problem.¡± It was seen as impolite to transfer from within the hut to another place in the hut, so we walked the few steps to the corridor of the numbered rooms.

    I was a bit surprised that Bletchley moved in front of Room #1 though.

    ¡°Did you rank up recently and nobody told me about it?¡±

    His answer was a bit biting.

    ¡°No, but this is your room, isn¡¯t it?¡±

    It only took me a moment to understand what he was trying to say, and as a response, I shook my head.

    ¡°How about we talk about it in your room? Not out here where everybody can listen in.¡±

    He looked at me for a long few moments, before he nodded.

    ¡°Fine, if you want to play it that way.¡± And he moved to room #3, fortunately only a few steps away.

    Inside was, of course, the usual gaggle of hangers-on, and Bletchley gave a sharp whistle.

    ¡°Hey, everybody go to the front of the room, and stay there until further notice!¡±

    With a bit of grumbling, the groupies made their way to the guest area, while the minions just moved without a comment.

    So when Bletchley led me to the back of the room, which was easy to isolate, we were alone. For a few seconds, before Colossus came through the door and joined us there.

    Bletchley summoned a small, round table with three chairs around it, and we sat down.

    I looked at the numbers 2 and 3 on the ranking list and sighed again.

    ¡°So, what exactly do you want to talk about?¡±

    Bletchley closes his eyes for a moment before he answered.

    ¡°We want to know why the goddamn charade. Why did you fuck with us, as well as everybody else?¡±

    I took a moment to formulate my answer. I had thought about that for some time. Why had Ben created this plan? He was smart enough and more importantly, experienced enough to realize that it would not fool everybody. And only one who figured it out would be a danger. But then I realized he had factored Warden in. And the answer became obvious.

    ¡°Plausible deniability. Not for you, but the banks. That is also the reason why I will never claim room #1.¡±

    Collosus grunted.

    ¡°So, to fool the banks you had to fool us?¡±

    ¡°No, I did not fool the banks. I have been informed that they figured it out as well. What it did was to give the banks the option to say that I could not be the phantom as I had to figure out Q-links after the phantom scrawled the secret on the walls here.¡±

    Bletchley looked confused while Colossus clearly was doubting me.

    Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

    ¡°That makes no sense. If the banks really know what you did, how are you still alive? We all know that the banks are implacable.¡±

    I cocked my head and shrugged.

    ¡°Warden.¡±

    Colossus reeled back a tiny amount.

    ¡°Warden? What warden?¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°The rogue cyberwarfare VI with full access to essentially every backdoor, utility, and exploit that Spectre has, with the overriding objective of protecting me, which has been called Warden. I am sure you can imagine what happens if such a VI decides to go on the rampage.

    And the banks think, rightfully I might add, that the only thing keeping it from going on a rampage is that I am alive and reasonably secure.

    They desperately want to avoid changing that fact. But at the same time, they need to protect their reputation of going after every hacker who even tries to compromise their systems.

    So, if they openly declare I am the phantom, they have to go after me. That can only lead to the destruction of the banks, as Warden, as a rogue VI, has absolutely no scruples in destroying whole nations to prevent them from doing that.

    Even if they somehow manage to outmaneuver her and get to me, that will almost certainly send Warden into a rampage, one that will be almost impossible to stop.

    In other words, they can¡¯t win. But if they declare I am the phantom, and they don¡¯t come after me, they invite every hacker in the system to try stealing from them.

    In other words, if they declare I am the phantom, they can¡¯t win. But if they simply ignore it, sooner or later somebody will say:¡¯you idiots, Seraphim is the phantom. Go after her.¡± And everything starts anyway.

    But now they can answer ¡®That is not possible. Seraphim did not know about Q-links then. The phantom is still out there.¡¯

    Yes, nobody smart enough will believe them when they say that. But those people are also smart enough to realize the consequences if Warden goes on a rampage.

    That means as long as I maintain the fa?ade that I am not the phantom, they will do so as well. And everybody goes along with their lives. Yes, the jerks of Panacea and Dalgon will be unhappy. But who cares about them? And a word of warning, everybody who would try to topple this standoff will probably get hunted quietly by the banks and many of the big corps.¡±

    Colossus seemed to consider my words carefully, while Bletchley just nodded.

    ¡°So, that means you literally can¡¯t claim room #1.¡±

    ¡°Correct, I can¡¯t. As far as the Abyss is concerned, the phantom played its little prank here, and then retired, never to be seen again.¡±

    Colossus sighed.

    ¡°Was the threat at the end really necessary?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°That was not a threat, that was a warning. It won¡¯t be me who is the danger, it will be everybody else. Think about it, every single one of the top 10 has the ability to end the human race. Maybe not easily, but all of them have. The corps know that. That is mostly why they did not smoke out the Abyss long ago.

    But now a rogue VI has the same capability. And the only thing preventing it from doing just that is that I am not only alive but not threatened. Anybody who threatens to change that will essentially threaten the butts of the CEOs of the big corps and banks. And they will move to stop them.¡±

    Colossus smiled weakly.

    ¡°Yeah, fine. I get the difference. I just don¡¯t like it.¡±

    Bletchley shrugged, and it was my turn to pose a question.

    ¡°Do you care to tell me what tipped you off?¡±

    Colossus scoffed.

    ¡°It took a bit. Longer than I like, honestly, but girl, you seriously think we buy that you cracked the problem of this equation shit in three days? I would have believed it if it had taken you a week or so, but three days?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°In all honesty, it took me a week¡­¡±

    Colossus shouted a ¡°Hah!¡± but I held up my hand.

    ¡°That was from first getting my hands on the original paper until I had a working Q-link. And that was inclusive of learning enough German to understand the paper, learning enough math to understand what Seeberger wanted to create, correcting the equation, deciphering what Seeberger was on the verge of inventing, and then finishing his work, creating the Q-links.

    If I only take the work from the corrected equation to the finished Q-link, I was done in roughly one and a half days. But that was before I had the ultra-bandwidth jack.¡±

    Bletchley guffawed.

    ¡°Oh, pwnd. So in reality, it would have taken you what, 18 hours to ¡®unravel¡¯ the secret?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°More like four or five. Remember, it was not about going from the corrected equation to the finished Q-link, it was going from the equation to understanding that it was about Q-links.¡±

    Colossus shook his head.

    ¡°So¡­ you sandbagged? And we were right for the wrong reasons¡­ fuck, sometimes you scare me, girl.¡±

    ¡°Well, after we have that resolved, there are a few other things our people here are concerned about.¡±

    I cocked my head again, and he continued:

    ¡°First¡­ there are rumors that you have somehow stumbled over a cure for this dreaded infertility?¡±

    I groaned.

    ¡°Wow¡­ that is loaded with so many errors. First, I did not stumble over it. That was the result of roughly two months in real life working on it. I made a few completely new inventions to make it happen. second, it is not a cure, but a treatment, and third, while it probably will help with what Sanderson¡¯s Folly did to us, it does nothing for other causes of infertility.¡±

    Bletchley rubbed his temples.

    ¡°Ok¡­ so not stumbled¡­ got it. But what is the difference between a cure and a treatment?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°A bit of a background, during the great war, some idiot named Bryce Sanderson created a bioweapon that he thought would destroy the Nephilim, what we today call The Pure. It mostly failed in that it did not infect only the Nephilim, but every human, and that, fortunately, it was not absolutely effective.

    That is what reduced the birth rates so dramatically. Somehow this bioweapon, called Sanderson¡¯s Folly by the Pure, changed our genetic code so that conception is insanely unlikely.

    As I have found out, even if the sperm and the egg meet at the right place and nothing else goes wrong, the chance that it works is one in around 180 attempts. And considering that for each attempt you have to spend 28 days on average, it takes nearly 14 years of trying to get it right.

    Again, if everything else goes right. And that it doesn¡¯t. Even before the Folly, it took several months, sometimes years, before it worked. So now we are by 20, 30, even 40 years of trying.

    The treatment I have developed now uses nanites to replace what the Folly broke to make the conception way easier. Probably a bit easier than before the Folly, but we can¡¯t be sure.

    But the woman has to have the nanites in her body at the right place to make that happen, and those nanites are getting used up a bit for each attempt. How long the treatment works depends on how many nanobots were used in the beginning. But when they are used up they are used up and the woman needs another dose. And any children she has will need the same treatment to get children. If it works that is.

    A cure on the other hand will be a genetic thing, that fixes what the Folly has broken. Whenever it is created, it will be injected once, and after that, the infertility problems created by the Folly will be gone. For good. And any child that one gets after the cure has it as well.¡±

    Colossus rubbed his chin.

    ¡°So¡­ the treatment means that essentially for every child the mother has to get a new injection. And the children will have to get it too when they want children. But a cure removes the problem altogether. But what do you mean by ¡®if it works that is¡¯? Does it work or doesn¡¯t it?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°We believe it does. But give me a break, I developed the treatment just two days ago. We have not even begun to test if it really works.¡±

    Bletchley sighed.

    ¡°So¡­ no cure yet. And the treatment is not yet available. Not the news I wanted to hear, honestly.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It can¡¯t be helped, sorry. We decided to open the tests up for our employees, but otherwise¡­ there has to be a pretty good reason for us to include somebody from the outside. And whomever we include will lose anonymity. The nature of the tests demands that we medically observe the woman we inject it in. Can¡¯t do that if she is missing a day later.¡±

    Bletchley sighed again.

    ¡°Yeah, I get it. But do you have any idea how long those tests will take?¡±

    ¡°If it goes well, around a year and a half. If not, a few months.¡±

    ¡°Huh? Why would it take longer if it doesn¡¯t go well? And why so long?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Think about it, if it goes well, then in a couple of months, we will have a few thousand pregnant women at our hands. Pregnancy takes time though. Around nine months. And we need at least half a year to make sure that there are no hidden damages in the children by that method. Two years would be more prudent, but I am not sure that we can afford to take that long.

    But if it doesn¡¯t go well, and we don¡¯t have a few thousand pregnant women in the test in a few months, then we know that it failed, and there is no need to continue.¡±

    ¡°Oh, ok, I get it. But¡­ fuck I have to be honest, this gave me hope. I don¡¯t know about the other guys, but¡­ my girlfriend and I¡­ well I guess you get the gist. The scare with the CRS made us think. Yes, that specific specter is gone now, but we have a dangerous career. I could bite the dust at any given time.¡±

    I had noticed that Bletchley had reduced his jobs considerably. Not quite down to the level of Spectre, ne Warden, but compared to what he did previously it was quite the cutback.

    ¡°Is that the reason why you slowed down?¡±

    ¡°Yeah. I mean, come on, I am beyond rich by now. I did not need the money for years. It was all the thrill. But that has grown cold. I just see no point in risking my ass anymore. And I want kids.¡±

    I looked at him, directly in the eyes. Not that he would see it, as my avatar did not have eyes.

    ¡°So, why do it then? Why are you still in the grind, risking your life?¡±

    He shook his head.

    ¡°Mostly because I need the active bounty to keep my standing here. And if I am no longer #3, #2 in reality, that jackass C0W8OY Trinity steps up. I am sure you can imagine how that will play out.¡±

    Ugh, he had me there. Trinity was a jerk of epic proportions. He was an exceptional hacker, but that was balanced out by him being a horrible person. A braggart, narcissist, and egotist of the highest order, he seemed to believe that everybody should kiss the ground he walked on just because he was a good jack.

    Yes, as Spectre, I could have easily surpassed him. Heck, I technically had surpassed him, Bletchley, and Colossus already. But honestly, I had done just enough to maintain a spot in the top 10. Even the #5, Serpent, had too much politicking to do. Instead, I maintained the mysteriousness of Spectre and kept far away from it all.

    But Trinity as #3? That would be a disaster. Yes, the Abyss had weathered quite a few of those disasters in the past, with the average live expectancy of a jack somewhere around 5-7 years there was significant turnover, but it was always a bad time.

    I was sure that Colossus would be able to keep things running along, but he was getting in the years as well.

    That meant that we had to either remove Trinity, or Warden had to surpass him. Neither of those was a good choice.

    Then I got an idea.

    ¡°Why don¡¯t we set up a VI as peacekeeper here? That is mostly what you are doing here, right? Then you can cut back and let the VI do the hard work.¡±

    Colossus shook his head.

    ¡°Could be a nice idea, but it probably won¡¯t work. Sooner or later I will have to step down as well. And then Trinity owns the VI.¡±

    Of course, they could not see my smile, but it was there.

    ¡°Not really, because as the control requirement we build it so that only somebody who has had the #1 rank can give it orders.¡±

    Bletchley sighed.

    ¡°And when Trinity reaches #1 he has that control anyway.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Think about it, how is the ranking list created?¡±

    Colossus rolled his eyes.

    ¡°By the amount of active bounties on the head of the jack. Everybody knows it. So what? If I am gone, and Bletchley is gone, that distinction will land on Trinity.¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°Will it? Or will your rank land on Trinity? Remember, while you are defacto #1, officially you are #2. The banks won¡¯t ever be able to lower the bounty on the phantom. They can¡¯t afford the signal it would send. And it is highly unlikely that anybody ever manages to accrue more bounty than that.

    In other words, after you step down, the VI will only listen to the phantom, until ¡®it¡¯ is brought in. Which we all three know won¡¯t ever happen.¡±

    For a moment, both men stared at me in a form of stupor. Then Colossus began laughing. Followed by Bletchley.

    After a few minutes, they calmed down somewhat.

    ¡°Fuck, you are right. And this is so evil¡­ and Trinity cannot even argue. The phantom is the undisputed #1. Heck, with this one action, you racked up a higher bounty than the rest of the Abyss together.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No¡­ not me. The phantom. Remember, I am just Seraphim, a very talented tech.¡±

    Bletchley guffawed.

    ¡°Dream on. Even as Seraphim you are way more than ¡®a very talented tech¡¯. Almost everybody here thinks that you could reach the top 10 without any problems. Heck, if you put some effort into it, you probably could reach #2.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Not interested. I mean, I made around 90% of what Spectre made, with barely any bounty on my head, virtually no risk, and I am not dragged into the fray. Heck, I do not understand how Spectre manages to keep out of it so much. But that also means that you could retire then. Create a VI to keep the peace here, and you are free.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, something like that. I will have to find other jobs for my people though, but that is doable. CZ may not be as talented as you, but he is good. If I establish him here as a general tech, he can earn quite a bit of money. I would need to enlist a couple of the big ones to keep him safe, but that should be no big problem.

    Though I am a bit cross with you, you know?¡±

    I looked at him in confusion, forgetting for a moment that my avatar had no facial features that could show an expression.

    ¡°Uh, why?¡±

    ¡°Well, here I am, had have paid nearly DC 11 million for the jack and board combo, and now you sell it for around 4.5. Only half a year later. That is not very nice.¡±

    I shrugged again.

    ¡°First, it was three-quarters of a year later, and second, you got one of the very first examples out of an industrial fabber. The new ones are made in a full industrial plant, are significantly cheaper to make, and are more or less mass-produced.

    And seriously, could you have waited this three-quarter year?¡±

    ¡°No¡­ of course not. And I get why the current ones are only half the cost. But it is still vexing.¡±

    Colossus cleared his throat.

    ¡°We all accepted that those first ones produces would be overpriced. That¡¯s what we paid for being on the bleeding edge. But that neatly slots over to the other point we need to discuss. Chuckles has released their new video. Have you seen it?¡±

    I had a pretty good idea of what that was about, but I was a bit surprised by the timing.

    ¡°No, not really. I can guess what it is about, but no, I haven¡¯t seen it yet.¡±

    Colossus nodded.

    ¡°I should have expected that. I think you lack the time to do much in that respect anymore. So how about you watch it quickly and we talk then?¡±

 2.40: A kick in the balls

    As I said, I had a good idea of what it was about. So when I opened Chuckles¡¯ page, in 120:1 instead of the more sedate 4:1 of the Abyss, what greeted me was not a big surprise.

    Still, I started the video, and as usual, Chuckles¡¯ outfit served to bewilder me. Seriously, what induced a serious, intelligent being like Chuckles to use that sort of costume?

    It always made my fingers itch. But I had mostly gotten used to it and quickly suppressed that urge to somehow reach through the matrix and rip that ridiculous stuff off of them.

    And so the video started.

    ¡°Hello, hello my friends and connoisseurs of good electronics. I know you are hungry for new, exciting tech, and boy do I have a treat for you today.

    Not one, but two new boards.¡±

    Chuckles moved through their typical opening dance, but then stopped midmotion, and made an extremely exaggerated thinking posture.

    ¡°Hm¡­, no, not two. Sorry for getting your hopes up for nothing. It¡¯s just one and a half.¡±

    Then they resumed their very enthusiastic gesturing.

    ¡°But are they doozies or what? Because today I have the honor of presenting you¡­¡±

    A drumroll sounded in the background while Chuckles moved to the table where two objects were covered by blankets. They grabbed one of the blankets, and ripped it off, revealing a board, one that I knew pretty well.

    ¡°The all-new Seraphim Mk. VI. We were all wondering why the queen of cyber boards had not answered the blatant provocation of Kawamoto with their Ryu 50, and at least had her new corp build her brilliant Mk. IV cheaper? Well, now we know the answer. Why spend time and effort building last year''s technology, when next year¡¯s is in the works?¡±

    They held their hand behind their ear, in an overdone listening gesture.

    ¡°What is that you say? Why go from the Mk. IV to the Mk. VI? What happened to Mk. V? Well, that is one of the idiosyncrasies of our little angel. Her odd-numbered boards are reserved for her mentor, Spectre, and herself. Don¡¯t expect to ever see a Mk. V in real life. Or a Mk. III for that matter.¡±

    They moved around the table and caressed the Mk. VI along the way.

    ¡°But as you can see, we have another board to discuss. So, let me introduce you to¡­¡±

    They ripped off the second blanket, and revealed another, identically looking board.

    ¡°The Seraphim Mk. VI.¡±

    After a few seconds, they continued: ¡°B. Yes, you heard right. There are now two distinct Seraphim Mk. VI available. Why, you ask? Well, Squeaky and I asked that for ourselves. And somehow we managed to ask Seraphim that. And we got an answer. Can you believe that?

    The answer is already out there, we just did not know it. Some of you might have read through the comments of the Ryu 50 video and the thread about the best board¡­ if not, you should. We pinned it on top, so it is easy to find.

    The interesting part of it is that somebody asked Seraphim, yes, she sometimes lurks in our forums, why she thinks that the Ryu 50 is 8% weaker if they cloned her Mk IV. The answer was enlightening. Seraphim is, or was, a black market tech. Her board was as it was delivered, and if you treated it roughly it sometimes refused to work anymore.

    Kawamoto is a big brand. They have liability. They need to make sure that the evil ogres out there can not frighten their boards. All that protection costs performance.¡±

    Chuckles moved around the table again, to stand in front of it.

    ¡°The thing is, Seraphim is no longer a black market tech. She has a corporation now. A corporation that has the same liabilities as Kawamoto. But on the other hand, she has a reputation for delivering the best board one can buy. So, how do you go forward with those two completely disagreeable requirements? By making not one, but two boards apparently.¡±

    They held one hand towards the board on the left, which they uncovered first.

    ¡°So now we have the Seraphim Mk VIa, the no holds barred, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead variant, where Enki gives a fuck about your liability. You bought it, you knew that it was precision technology and better tread it right.¡±

    Then they reached out to the one on the right.

    ¡°And the Seraphim Mk. VIb, for those among us who are too scared of the big bad world to risk their precious board. It has all the safety features that you could reasonably expect. At the cost of performance though.¡±

    They moved along, and with the help of Squeaky, they disassembled the boards, commenting on the build quality, which was to my relief, excellent, and then showed the differences between the a and b models.

    Mostly in additional dampening material, additional, or thicker head spreaders, and some protective epoxy that all in all would make the b model physically significantly more rugged.

    ¡°Now that we all have seen what the difference is, let us show how it impacts the performance.¡±

    The typical graph table appeared behind them.

    ¡°As usual, we start with the board au naturel. And in Tesuta 49 we get the first surprise. The Mk. VIa does not beat the previous record, held by the Mk. IV, but shatters it with a mindblowing 1.4 fucking million points. 1,440,312 points to be exact. That is onehundred-fucking-nineteen times the points of the Mk. IV. Remember, just four months ago, we were arguing if eight percent were worth it.

    The b¡­ is not quite as good, unfortunately. It only reaches 1,382,700 points.¡±

    Squeaky let out their robotic ¡°ha ha ha¡± and Chuckles turned to the nearly human-sized robot squirrel.

    ¡°Yes, you are right, Squeaky. Only 1.38 million points. What was I thinking? But well, as you can see we did not put the reference boards on here. No need to humiliate them with how small their bars are. I am sure they are just cold.¡±

    Chuckles chuckled for a moment but then continued more earnestly.

    ¡°But seriously, there is no point. This is the next generation. It is so far beyond everything else out there that it became meaningless.¡±

    Again, Chuckles made the hearing gesture.

    ¡°Do I hear you say that good old Chuckles lost their mind? No board could get those numbers? Man, do I have a surprise for you! It is true.

    Some of you might have noticed that our little avenging angel has gone legit. Yeah yeah, booh and all that. I get it. Who is she to switch sides like that? What I learned is that she had no other option. Too many people wanting new shiny cyberware, and only one angel making them¡­ it couldn¡¯t work.

    So the options were to simply not produce enough cyberware for us, sell out to a corp, or make a new corp. She chose to make a new corp, and surprisingly, she hasn¡¯t forgotten us little people. Nope, her new rising star of a corporation sells to us the same as to the other big shots.

    The point here is, she has other new exciting tech that she sells. And one of them is ¡®THE REPLICATOR¡¯.¡±

    For the last two words, Chuckles added in a thundering voice effect.

    ¡°Yes, you heard right. We have it. Humanity finally has the ultimate fabrication tool. And she sells it. I should know, I bought one after all, and I had it only for a week, but I love it already. I love it and cuddle it, and call it Steve.¡±

    Chuckles waved around and the camera panned to one of our 3x3x3m NADAs.

    ¡°Say hi to Steve.¡±

    The camera panned back to Chuckles.

    ¡°Now, why do I tell you about it? Because Steve¡¯s family makes it possible to make these incredible new processors. Something about a 414 pico-meter process. Remember, the Cirrium that was the standard of all things only a few months ago, was a two-nanometer processor. But that¡¯s not all. The Q-link also makes it faster.

    How much faster? A little birdie tweeted to me that it is around 3000 times faster. But Chuckles, you ask, why is it then only around 120 times better than the previous boards?

    Well, boys and girls, the culprit is the UEB standard. When the big shots hammered out UEB 7.3 some 50 years ago, they thought they had created the end of the line. They build in, in their experience, generous room for the tiny growth that was expected.

    Unfortunately, they did not predict that somebody would create something so much faster than what they knew. And here we are, bashing fully into the limit of the UEB.

    But the point is, even with the limits of UEB, Seraphim managed to get around 120 times the power from her new boards that her old ones had.

    So, let¡¯s continue with the benchmarks.

    In Plato¡­ well, the new architecture reacts a bit better with Plato than Tesuta and the Mk. VIa gains an insane 1,849,212 points. That is 124 times as much as the Mk. IV. The Mk. VIb only nets 1.775 million points, or around four percent lower again.

    But hey, for that you get a much more rugged board. Why you would need one I don¡¯t know. Maybe Enki expects some of the corpo-drones to use their expensive precision-manufactured pieces of electronics as a club, but whatever.

    But as it is, again, there is no point in showing you the tiny sliver on the left side of the graph that any other board would have.

    But we are now coming to the highlight of the show. The clown mark. And again, the numbers are simply insane. We have a seven-digit clown mark score, with one million, twelve thousand, and four hundred seventy-eight points.¡± Chuckles stressed each part of the number.

    ¡°When me and my people designed the clown mark, we were disgusted with the ever-rising numbers without any base in reality. Sure, Tesuta and Plato have gotten better, but we designed clown mark to stand below 10k with a naked board. And now that. All that work¡­ for nothing. But whatever, I will console myself with my brand new Seraphim Mk. VIa. The VIb is, naturally, a bit below that. It bottoms out with 971,979 points.¡±

    Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

    Chuckles walked around the table again, petting the Mk. VIa on the way.

    ¡°But as usual, we have to test the build-out board. A little bit of warning, the results are not quite what you would expect. As usual, we use our standard load out, the M-877 Sector buffer, the 7673 scrambler, the Magna 72, the 72A-66, the Descron 4 scrambler, three G-55-MX, a Type 22, and the trusty Seraphim Mk. II.

    The result was¡­ a bit disappointing I fear.

    In Tesuta, only 2.45 million points. I guess you are as confused as I was. How could this absolutely brilliant board score so low with the components? Well, so low compared to its naked ratings that is.

    And the answer lies in¡­ the components. The new Mk. VI is new tech, eeking the last iota of power out of the old UEB interface it can possibly get. The components we used? Not so much. There was no point, as nothing could ever come even close to maxing out the connection anyway. Well, now there is, and all the old components no longer stack up.

    That of course means two things. A challenge for all the tech-heads out there to create new tech that does use everything UEB 7.3 got to give, and that Squeaky and I have to create a new standard load out.

    But back to the boards here. The Mk. VIb comes up to 2.33 million points in Tesuta.

    In Plato, we get 3.33 million points for the a, and 3.12 million for the b. The trend here is that the ruggedness harms the loaded run a bit more.

    And finally clown mark. Fully specced out the a reaches a whopping 1.32 million points. The b has to be content with 1.24 million points.¡±

    Chuckles walked to the front of the table again.

    ¡°Now, the hot question is, of course, how much does it cost? We all know that the Seraphim Mk. IV was the best money could buy, but boy did you need the money for it¡­

    Compared to the DC 750k of the Kawamoto Ryu 50, the DC 2.7 million for an Mk. IV was an investment. One that, in my opinion, was worth it, but for the first time we actually had to think about it.

    So, how is it now? What do you guess? Is the new board more expensive than the Mk. IV? Does it cost DC 5 million? More? Less? If you guessed more, you¡¯re out. If you guessed less, then it depends on how much less.

    It does not cost four million, not three million, not two million, not even one million. No, you can get it for an unbelievable DC 650k for the a, and DC 750k for the b.

    Yes, you heard right. You can get the new best board one can buy for less than the Ryu 50¡­ is that not a kick in the balls for Kawamoto? Not only is their ¡®new¡¯ and ¡®revolutionary¡¯ board thoroughly trounced, and downright obliterated, the one board that did it is even cheaper.¡±

    Chuckles made some strange form of victory jump.

    ¡°There you have it. Not only did Seraphim not cut us off, but her tech has also become cheaper. So¡­ I for one am not mad at our cutie that she switched sides if she behaves in this way. And what a cutie she is. Wowzah! Don¡¯t tell me you have not looked her up! Come on, her anonymity is gone. That is the price for her going legit I guess.

    But I would not mind tapping that one for a bit, you know.¡±

    Ok, I could live without that statement, but whatever.

    ¡°Now, I already said it, even though not so directly, but this VIa here, that is my new personal ride. And if you are in any way smart, you do what you can to get one as well. I have never been able to give such a sure recommendation ever before. If you are a jack, go out and buy a Mk. VIa!¡±

    With that the video cut to the usual outro, and I left it, returning to the Abyss once more. I realized, remotely, that there was no commercial segment this time, but honestly, I was not interested enough to wonder about it.

    When my consciousness recovered in the Abyss, the two men at the table with me were talking softly but stopped immediately when they realized I was back.

    ¡°Oh¡­ you¡¯re back? Did you skip parts of the video?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No, I am just that fast. The video was barely 10 minutes, and at 120:1 it took essentially five seconds for me to watch it. The Abyss is 4:1, so 20 seconds for you.¡±

    Colossus frowned.

    ¡°Wait, you can go 120:1? Seriously?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Think about it. This video was about my Mk. VI boards. I personally am using the Mk. V, and that for quite some time now. 120:1 is an easy stroll for me.¡±

    Bletchley snorted.

    ¡°Fuck, do I even want to know what your limit is?¡±

    I just shrugged. That he would have to figure out for himself.

    ¡°You talked about a problem concerning that video. What exactly is the problem?¡±

    Colossus cleared his throat a bit nervously.

    ¡°Ah¡­ yeah¡­ quite a few of our tech-heads and many of the bigger names here in the Abyss are a bit unhappy about it. They feel that you¡¯ve essentially pushed them into a corner and we now can only use your tech to come out ahead.¡±

    That¡­ did not make even the slightest bit of sense.

    ¡°Why?¡±

    Colossus sighed.

    ¡°Because your boards are so much superior to everything else, that the techs can¡¯t compete and the Jacks have to be content with what you give them.¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°I understand that part of the reasoning. What I don¡¯t understand is why they think that they need to buy my boards to compete?¡±

    Bletchley sighed deeply.

    ¡°Isn¡¯t that obvious? Your boards are so superior that everything else now not even qualifies for ¡®also rans¡¯ any longer.¡±

    ¡°I think there is a major disconnect here. Yes, my boards are absolutely superior. No question about that. But what prevents the techs out here to create their own boards based on this technology?¡±

    Colossus threw his hands in the air.

    ¡°How about the simple fact that you control those new processors?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°And what is the difference to how it was before? Sure, everybody could make their own processors, but tell me, how many high-end boards not based on the Cirrium 8k do you know of? I bet the answer is zero.

    Why? Because it was the best, and no amount of tinkering with it managed to make it better. Yes, all of us techs played around with it, and I might have been able to squeeze a tiny bit of more power out of it, but in general it was not worth it.

    So now the techs have to buy the standard processors and the chipset, instead of having an industrial fabber spit the standard model out.¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°Or¡­ and that might just be an idea, they should buy a NADA. Sooner or later they need it anyway, and they are not that expensive.¡±

    Colossus frowned.

    ¡°A¡­ NADA?¡±

    I rolled my eyes and sighed.

    ¡°A Nano-Assembler-Dis-Assembler. That is what a replicator is technically called. Replicator is just a colloquial description.¡±

    Bletchley leaned forward.

    ¡°So, you are saying that all those techs need to buy a replicator? Heck, those things are expensive.¡±

    ¡°Those things replace most of an industrial fabber. Only the molecular foundry and the carbon extruder are a bit better at what they do than the NADA.

    And yes, one of Enki¡¯s NADAs is a bit more expensive than the average indy-fab. It is also five to ten times as fast, several orders of magnitude more precise, and more economical in terms of raw materials and energy.

    As I said, sooner or later, they need a NADA anyway. And here¡¯s the kicker, as soon as they have a NADA, they can either license the Q-link for integrated functionality, buy already fabricated Q-links for integration, or they can buy the license for the new processors.

    And after that, they can create to their heart''s content. If they have the license for integrated Q-links, they can make their own processors. Or they can use the Hyperion and Theia, and build their homebrew chipset.

    The thing is, doing anything with an indy-fab will cripple them. They need a NADA to remain competitive.

    But they don¡¯t have to get an Enki-NADA. They can wait until Burgmeister, Xiao Ping, or Dalgon bring one to the market.¡±

    Colossus reeled back and shook his head.

    ¡°Wait, wait, you are saying that Enki is willing to license the processors? Or the Q-link? For real?¡±

    ¡°Sure. We take ITB 40 per processor, and the NADA has to be linked to the account so that we can withdraw that immediately. Or around ITB 1 for 50000 integrated Q-links, though for our processors that is already in the licensing fee. Or you could buy a batch of Q-links ready for integration, the 500k pack for ITB 15.¡±

    Bletchley looked at me with some concern.

    ¡°So¡­ you have locked the replicators down so we others can only make things that are licensed?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°That was necessary. The other big corps¡­ let¡¯s say insisted on it. We could have circumvented it, but that would have led to a corp-war. Nobody wants that. And honestly, the ITB 40 per processor is in my opinion quite reasonable.¡±

    Colossus sighed.

    ¡°But look at how it is now. The Cirrium costs what? ITB 30? And that is with raw materials, energy, and fabrication. How is an ITB 40 licensing fee reasonable?¡±

    ¡°The Cirrium is old tech. It is nearly 50 years old. The Hyperion on the other hand is new. And it is, used appropriately, about 120 times more powerful than the Cirrium.

    With all the inefficiencies of a large multi-processor network, you would need around 140-150 Cirrum to get the performance of a single Hyperion. That means at least ITB 4200 in processors, maybe ITB 4500.

    On the other hand, for one Hyperion, you make it in license, it costs you ITB 40 in licensing fee, ITB 20 in materials and energy. You sell it for ITB 120, compared to the 50 that you take for the Cirrium. You have made ITB 60, the customer has paid a bit more than double for 120 times the computing power. Everybody is happy.

    If you design your own processor though it will be more expensive. Frankly, the Hyperium 12 has around eight million Q-link connections.

    But we could do either such a licensing deal or no deal at all. We could not make it free, because the other corporations would jump on it like sharks. And we can¡¯t make exceptions.¡±

    Colossus rubbed his eyes, while Bletchley groaned.

    ¡°So¡­ if the license is ITB 40, or DC50, what does it cost to buy the processors?¡±

    ¡°ITB 70. Well, the smaller ones are cheaper, but I assume we are still talking about the new boards.¡±

    Bletchley took a deep breath.

    ¡°So, you are saying it will be the cheapest to buy the processors from Enki, but if our techs want to create something for themselves, they have to pay the licensing fee or buy the prefabbed Q-links?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Yup. But if you look at it, the NADAs will make building the rest of the board much cheaper. Roughly a tenth of what it costs to use an indy-fab.¡±

    Bletchley rolled his eyes.

    ¡°Yeah, but now they have to pay you. It doesn¡¯t matter where they go from here, they have to use your tech, your inventions, and your tools. And that still will probably only bring into the fight for second place.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Seriously, the processors and the chipset aren¡¯t that expensive. And if they manage to create a new processor that is a valid competitor to the Hyperion, they can make money as well. I am sure there will be people who will want something different just out of principle.

    I am also sure that Ralcon will throw everything they have into creating a new processor line. The thing is, my processors are ready now. That is the big advantage they have. But for the first time in decades, the game is wide open. I think the Hyperion is the optimal balance between performance and complexity. Anything more and it becomes too unwieldy for a desktop processor.

    But others might think differently. And who knows, in two years we will have a dozen competing CPU designs, all with their strengths and weaknesses.¡±

    Colossus sighed.

    ¡°So, you are saying all our techs need to get a replicator and begin experimenting? And what about those Q-links? If you say that the big Hyperion has around 8 million pairs of them, any serious competitor would need at least around that number. That means each of them will cost ITB 160 just for the Q-link license.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°And? I invented the thing. I made it work. I made the replicators work. I made it possible to create the new processors. So yes, my corporation will earn more if somebody makes their own processors, but it is still relatively cheap. Before the great war made the chip-maker a necessity, a processor in the roughly same category as the Hyperion 12 1990G did cost around $5000. Just the processor. That was the equivalent of more than 1400 transfer bonds. Or nearly 1800 deep creds. So yeah, 160 bonds for the Q-links are cheap. Even if the rest of the processor comes in at another unbelievable ITB 160, we are still at ITB 320. And for that, it needs to be made out of mostly solid gold.¡±

    Colossus hissed.

    ¡°Yeah, the prices were high. We get it. But for the last 50 years, they were low. ITB 100 for a CPU was high-end.¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°Yep, because nobody bothered paying any licenses anymore. That is the point here. Nobody paid licenses, and that meant there was no money in developing anything better. Guess what, that time is behind us.

    Feel free to use the old, license-free processors if you want. But everything new, everything that somebody has spent time, money, and work creating¡­ that you have to pay. But for the first time in decades that includes the basic chips themselves.

    People will get used to it. The price isn¡¯t excessive, and let¡¯s be honest, a high-end board of the last generation did cost maybe DC 200k to make. The rest was markup. And yes, I was as guilty of that as everybody else.

    With the NADA, the same general level of board will cost DC 500 to make. So now the processors cost DC 200 instead of DC 50? And you think I find that unfair? Yeah, the processors cost four times as much. But the rest of the board costs one four hundred thousands as much. In the end, the techs will come out ahead.¡±

    Bletchley looked a bit tired when he nodded.

    ¡°Yeah, you are right. Viewed from that perspective, they have nothing to complain about. Except that they need to buy a replicator. And those things are expensive.¡±

    I sighed and shook my head.

    ¡°Compare them to a full industrial fabber suite minus the molecular forge. Don¡¯t get me wrong, the NADA can work like a molecular forge, but the forge is just more efficient. But an indy-fab of roughly the same size costs about 90% of what the NADA costs. And the NADA is multiple times more efficient. And sooner or later they will need one anyway. They are just too useful.¡±

    Colossus rubbed his temples.

    ¡°You are right. It is just¡­ it feels wrong.¡±

    ¡°Honestly, the moment they use the NADA for the first time will be the moment they stop complaining. It is like a village blacksmith with his hammer, ambos, and whatever else they need to forge something, and then they complain that they need to switch to an indy-fab because the hand tools don¡¯t have the necessary precision to make the modern tools anymore. Just that the indy-fab is now in the place of the hand tools. I would suggest they sell their indy-fabs to whoever is stupid enough to buy one, but that market will probably dry up quickly.¡±

    Bletchley nodded.

    ¡°Yeah, we will tell them. Honestly, not much we can do about it anyway. It was a quantum leap in technology, and whoever does not jump on the train will be left behind. I get it. I just don¡¯t like it.¡±

 2.41: Do you have some time?

    That of course, ended my Friday excursion on a relatively somber note. Yes, I brought my point across, but on the other hand, I had to argue against two of the men I respected the most.

    I understood where they came from, but unfortunately, the system they had grown accustomed to was unsustainable.

    We had to balance the greed of the corporation with the need to make some profit off the work put into some invention.

    Needless to say, I no longer had any intention of soaking in the atmosphere of the Abyss. The mood was done.

    That of course meant that I had nothing to do for the rest of the day. I could have spent some time learning about energy technology, or maybe practice a bit on my instruments. Instead, I decided to use the afternoon to bond with Lady Nibbles.

    By now the kitten had become a three-month-old young cat. Boisterous, aggressively playful, and oh so cuddly. Fortunately, she was often content to just roll up in my lap when I was in Cyberspace, but some playtime was always necessary. I was just happy that she had grown out of wanting to bite my fingers every given moment.

    Nonetheless, an afternoon playing with my pet cheered me up considerably.

    Saturday morning, when I looked over the low-priority messages from the night over the last cup of coffee of breakfast, I found something interesting.

    Almost involuntarily, my gaze fell on Sarah Vaughn, who was joking around with her husband.

    Yes, the scientists would remain here in New York for a few weeks longer, crossing the Ts and dotting the Is. Making sure that everything we had found out was as perfect as we could make it. I could even understand it.

    For them, this, their participation here, was their legacy. Their contribution to the good of humanity, and their entry into the annals of history.

    Sure, in 100, 1000, or more years, it would most likely be my name that would still be coming first in every record, every history book, in the documentaries, or wherever people got their history from.

    But for me, even with what I had already achieved, my place in the history books was already ensured. Finding the key of life was only one of my accomplishments that would change the world.

    And honestly, I hated it. Yes, I loved puzzling out the secrets of the universe, creating new things, and being at the forefront of science, but I could live without the fame coming with it and without anybody erecting any statues of me.

    Especially as I, as a K4, had a decent chance of still being alive when they would build any statues.

    Still, what we had achieved was probably a turning point in history, and I did not begrudge them their place in it.

    Dr. Vaughn would, as it seemed, earn another spot in the history books though. And she noticed my intense gaze after a few moments.

    ¡°Uh¡­ is something wrong?¡±

    That shook me out of my musings, and I focused back on the here and now.

    ¡°Oh¡­ sorry, I just got an interesting message. It seems that you got the nanites just in time. Or you would have had to wait another four weeks.¡±

    It took her, and Charles, a few moments to understand, but it became obvious the moment they realized what I was saying.

    Charles was the one, who with a breaking voice, stammered:

    ¡°You¡­ you mean that¡­ that Sarah is¡­ that we are becoming parents?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°You know better than I that we can not yet talk about pregnancy. But there is a bundle of happily dividing cells slowly moving through her fallopian tube. So¡­ let¡¯s hope nothing goes wrong and it progresses to pregnancy.¡±

    I was nearly deafened by the whoop he left out, while he jumped up and dragged his wife into an energetic hug, both of them jumping up and down in joy.

    Mark, walking by, bringing his plate and cup to the sink looked at the couple, and asked into the room:

    ¡°What the fuck has happened to those two?¡±

    ¡°They passed the first critical hurdle of the Folly, and now are on the way to becoming parents.¡±

    ¡°What? For real? I thought you cracked the puzzle only two days ago.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°We did. As it seems they worked fast.¡± With those words, I drained the last of my coffee and cleared my utensils as well.

    Mark looked at the still dancing scientists and then shrugged as well.

    ¡°Well then, gratulations I think?¡± And continued to the sink.

    Honestly, sometimes I was a bit jealous of his simple view of the world. He did not care one bit about the implications but was just happy that we had a success.

    On the other hand, I loved crawling into the underbelly of the universe way too much to be ever satisfied with his ¡®it is as it is¡¯-attitude.

    The Vaughns had by now infected the Wakefields and the Mitchells with their need to jump around like madmen, but¡­ in a way it was understandable.

    I left them to their celebration and instead decided to practice playing the violin a bit more. No, I did not torture the Stradivarius with my amateur level of playing.

    I instead used cyberspace to train on a virtual instrument, protecting the priceless artifact, and the hearing of everybody else.

    It was a bit¡­ frustrating. I had learned the piano like nothing. The guitar and the bass were no challenge for me, though in all cases, learning the intricacies was entertaining.

    But the violin still sounded as if I was torturing Nibbles. Yes, I was getting better. Unfortunately, getting better was not yet to the point of tolerable, much less good. But I would not surrender. I wanted to be able to play the violin, and I would be able to play the violin. Even it would take me a hundred years.

    It was during this practice session that doubled as torture, that I received a message from Danny McTavish.

    She asked me if I had about half an hour for a meeting. To be honest, I agreed mostly to stop frustrating myself even further.

    It helped that I was genuinely curious about what she might want from me. I mean, I had given her essentially everything we had found out about the key of life. She had access to all the raw data and the analysis that Warden had done on it.

    She had the information on what inserting the key into a fertilized egg did. I could not think of anything else I could help her with.

    But as I said, it was a good excuse to stop practicing.

    I arrived at the address she had sent me, and the first thing she did was look all over my avatar.

    ¡°Ugh¡­ seriously, do you have to wear that? Don¡¯t you have anything better?¡±

    I was seriously confused. Yes, I was not quite in formal wear, or even office wear. I mean, get real, it was Saturday, and as high up in the hierarchy as I was, I had most Saturdays free. And the simple casual clothing my avatar was clad in was just that. Simple and casual.

    Only then did I realize that her Avatar was in what could be described as informal good clothes. Party wear, in other words.

    ¡°What¡­ ? Why do I need something better?¡±

    She shook her head but tipped the corner of her mouth with her index finger.

    ¡°No¡­ this won¡¯t do. And you need it for the meeting. What made you think to appear in this¡­ grungy stuff?¡±

    I shook my head confused.

    ¡°Meeting? Why don¡¯t you simply tell me what you expect from me? I mean, this is a virtual avatar. It can look like anything.¡±

    She sighed, crossed her arms impatiently, and then rolled her eyes while shaking her head.

    ¡°Ok, fine. Business casual, or garden party. Something like I am wearing.¡±

    I rolled my eyes as well, but decided to humor her, and switched my avatar to some more classy clothes.

    Business casual as she had said. Thinking that she would also object to my hair being more or less open, I switched to a simple braid here as well.

    ¡°Is that better?¡±

    She harumphed but then gave in.

    ¡°Yeah, that is ok.¡±

    ¡°Good, then maybe you will now tell me what this is about?¡±

    She grabbed my hand and dragged me out of the viron.

    ¡°You¡¯ll see. By the way, you have a very good connection it seems. I can¡¯t sense any lag.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I¡¯ll see what? And of course. You do know about the Q-links that have been available for around four months now? I have less lag than most people in Seattle.¡±

    She dragged me through the Seattle matrix, til we arrived in front of a nondescript matrix address.

    Fortunately, that only took a moment, and so I had not yet begun complaining about her not answering me. Still, she dragged me into the viron, and we found ourselves in some sort of lounge.

    Soft music was playing in the background, and seven people were present.

    I was by now getting somewhat miffed at Danielle and her behavior.

    And it was quite apparent that I was not supposed to be here anyway. I mean, yes I am bad at reading people, but this amount of disapproval is hard to miss. One of the women looked into the round, then rolled her eyes and sighed, before she made her way to Danielle and me.

    ¡°Hello Danny. I¡­ well, not to be impolite or something¡­ but you know this meeting is just for us, right?¡±

    Danielle was clearly not fazed in the slightest.

    ¡°Hi Nads. And yes, I know. You can trust me, I know what I am doing.¡±

    Nads became irritated, crossed her arms, and tapped impatiently with her left foot.

    ¡°Oh, is that so? So then you won¡¯t have any problem telling me why you brought a stranger to a K4-only meeting? This meeting is just for us, where we don¡¯t have to play dumb.¡± Her voice was now somewhat acerbic.

    Not that Danielle was particularly impressed.

    ¡°I know that Nads¡­ but, did you maybe look into the recovered data from Project Revitalize? About us K4?¡±

    That shook Nads out of her cold stance, and a bit of confusion sparked over her face, only to be replaced by the same cold harshness from before.

    ¡°Changing the topic? No, I didn¡¯t. But that does not change anything. So, would you mind answering my question?¡±

    Danielle sounded amused.

    ¡°Oh, I am answering your question. You see when I did look up the data that was recovered, do you know what I found? There were not eleven of us in the first generation, but twelve. There are twelve functional K4. And when I then happened to be put in contact with Viv here¡­ who is the missing number twelve, only a few days ago, I decided she needs to be here.¡±

    If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

    That brought Nads, and the other six people, who I had concluded were all K4, to place their attention on me.

    Nads still remained the speaker though, and with some serious distrust she addressed me:

    ¡°Is that so? Are you really a K4?¡±

    Before I could answer, one of the men interrupted:

    ¡°And don¡¯t think we won¡¯t test it.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Yes, I am a K4. No, I did not want to be here, but Danielle here called me and as trusting as I am, I thought she wanted to talk about the data I have given her. Only for her to drag me here. So¡­ if we are done then, can I please have my hand back?¡±

    The last I spoke to Danielle, who still had my hand in a death grip. Not that it would hamper me in the slightest should I decide to break free. But we were not yet in the place for such uncourteous actions.

    ¡°So that you can just vanish? Forget it. You belong here, you need to be here, and you will be here.¡±

    Nads¡¯ eyes softened when she looked at me now.

    ¡°So¡­ you are just another victim of Danny spontaneously deciding to throw a spanner in the works?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It seems so. Now¡­ from the very instructive conversation so far, I understand that this is the K4-meeting that Nathan Vandermeer instigated. But as I told him, I¡¯m not really interested.¡±

    I turned my attention back to Danielle.

    ¡°So¡­ if you value the hand of that avatar, I would suggest you let go.¡±

    ¡°Or what? This is cyberspace. You can¡¯t really hurt me.¡±

    I sighed and used a tiny combat utility. Nothing harsh, just something that derezzed part of her avatar, removing her hand up to her shoulder.

    ¡°You should not assume that people you meet here are unable to do anything to you. That is¡­ a dangerous notion.¡±

    For a moment, Danielle just looked at her missing arm in shock.

    ¡°But¡­ but¡­ how did you do that? How is that even possible?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°That was just a tiny derezzer. And I used it on weak. Otherwise, your whole avatar would have been dematerialized. That is nothing more than a party trick. Some of the people running around here in cyberspace¡­ if you treated them like me they might react with a nuclear strike on Seattle. Or simply fry your brain.¡±

    For a moment there was fear in her eyes before it was replaced by stubbornness.

    ¡°Now you just want to frighten me. Nobody would just nuke a city like Seattle just for that.¡±

    I sighed and looked her in the eye.

    ¡°That is exactly what happened in Hyderabad in 41. Some idiot angered a hacker, and the hacker reacted by using an Indian nuke on the city. Sure, the hacker in question did not survive that much longer, but other, less mass-destructive methods of showing displeasure are common.

    Heck, there is even a utility out there that can lobotomize you through your jack.¡±

    She threw her hand up. And the slowly regrowing stump of her other.

    ¡°Fine. I just wanted to get you to meet your people. Sheesh, no need to be so sensitive about it.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°And if you had told me about I might have decided to come anyway. My point though was that I could have left you at any given moment. But that would have been impolite.¡±

    Nads chuckled.

    ¡°Ok, yeah, that is the way to deal with Danny. She is¡­ something of a freight train when she sets her mind to something. Well, then, if you are already here, and if we accept that you are a K4, something we can apparently quickly confirm, why don¡¯t you stay for a bit? I am Nadia Versenkyov. Ph.D. in biology.¡±

    One of the men spoke before I could answer.

    ¡°Well, if the data in Project Revitalize is correct, then you are Vivian DuClare? I am Tim Matthews. Ph.D. in chemistry.¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°Ok, yeah, I am Vivian DuClare. But is that Ph.D. in whatever really important? I mean, is anybody here who is not a Ph.D. or other kind of doctor?¡±

    Nadine looked a bit embarrassed.

    ¡°Uhm¡­ yeah, you are right, but¡­ well we have so long been defined by that¡­ it¡¯s hard to let go.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Ok, fine. Computer science and nanoengineering for me. Satisfied?¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ yes. Sorry, but it is¡­¡±

    I waved her off.

    ¡°It doesn¡¯t matter to me either way.¡±

    One of the men spoke softly, mostly to himself into the awkward silence that followed.

    ¡°DuClare¡­ DuClare. I know that name. Where do I have heard it before?¡±

    While he spoke to himself, he was looking up to the ceiling, tapping his cheek with his right index finger.

    ¡°Oh, right! That was it. General Julian DuClare.¡±

    He suddenly looked intensely at me.

    ¡°Are you any relation to him?¡±

    Frick. I had hoped I had finally escaped that legacy. But there was no point in denying it.

    ¡°Yes. He was my father. Not that I ever met him, mind you.¡±

    Another man turned towards the one who had asked after my father.

    ¡°Does it matter? So her father was a general¡­ so what?¡±

    ¡°Oh, no it does not matter. But that name¡­ he was that brigadier general that had been blamed for the loss of the 6<sup>th</sup> division, but it came out later that it was a Dalgon who fucked up.¡±

    The other man frowned.

    ¡°Why the fuck did they blame this DuClare guy then?¡±

    The first shrugged.

    ¡°There was something¡­ but I can¡¯t¡­ I know that I know it, but I can¡¯t just grasp it. Oh right, that was it.¡±

    I cringed when he said that. Please don¡¯t let him figure¡­

    ¡°He was married into one of the big families, and the Dalgons and the Knowles used that disaster to kick them¡­ but¡­¡±

    Oh frick, he was figuring it out¡­

    ¡°That¡¯s it. He was married to¡­ ¡° his eyes widened when he looked at me astonished.

    ¡°He was married to Rebecca Vandermeer! Fuck it, you are a Vandermeer?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I am a DuClare. Yes, my mother is Rebecca Vandermeer, but I don¡¯t see myself as one of them.¡±

    Danielle suddenly jerked a step to the side.

    ¡°Fuck it, you listened to my rant about the old man and it turns out he is your granddaddy? And you let me?¡±

    I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

    ¡°When should I have been able to stop you? You were so in your tirade that saying anything would have made you explode. And as I said, he contributed to my genes, but I don¡¯t see myself as a Vandermeer.¡±

    Her voice became bitter.

    ¡°But you were happy to take the money, and the leg up in your education, weren¡¯t you? You rich assholes are all the same.¡±

    I raised my eyebrow.

    ¡°Do you know what happened to my mother after my father died, and was blamed for the fuckup of this asshole Dalgon-Smythe? The Dalgons and the Knowles put her in prison. While she was pregnant. Then they faked her death. Before I was born, mind you. For the next eight years, Nathan Vandermeer thought his daughter was dead, along with her unborn child, a.k.a. me.

    Then Panacea used her to experiment with a new drug that would be addictive to Pures. Well, it works. It is insanely addictive, and it destroys most of the higher brain functions. But it¡¯s ok, she is just a rich asshole, isn¡¯t she?

    But that meant that I spent the first five years of my life in a prison, where the handpicked guards made my life a living hell. After that, I was shoved into a welfare project. The worst school the Knowles could find. Cheapest replicator trash for food and clothing, cardboard beds, paper-thin walls, the whole works. I never had enough money to even feel comfortable.

    But that¡¯s ok, because I am a rich asshole, according to you. Guess what, yes, I am rich. I am insanely rich. Now! I have created my own fortune, with not a single centicred coming from Nathan Vandermeer. I met that man for the first time two months before I met you. So no, I did not get a leg up, preferential treatment, or any privilege.

    The only privilege I had growing up was being a convenient target for the Knowles to vent their hate for my family.¡±

    During my rant, I moved slowly closer and closer to Danielle, anger boiling inside me.

    Just before I came into contact with her, some hands on my shoulders dragged me, softly, back.

    ¡°Hey, calm down. I don¡¯t think she meant it. She¡¯s always opening her mouthole before she engages the brain.¡±

    Nadia spoke softly to me.

    I closed my eyes again, counting slowly to ten.

    ¡°It¡¯s ok. I am calm. Just keep away from that topic.¡±

    The man who connected my name with Vandermeer looked puzzled.

    ¡°But¡­ if you did not get any help from Vandermeer, how did you get rich?¡±

    I rolled my eyes, though not alone, as several of the others did the same, and another of the women walked up to him and slapped him on the back of the head.

    ¡°Damn it, Harry, she just told us to keep away from that topic. Get your head out of your asshole sometimes.¡±

    I waved her away.

    ¡°That¡¯s ok. It is the idea that I owed anything to my family that makes me angry. And the answer is relatively simple. I am a nanoengineer. As far as I can tell, one of, if not the best. And I managed to stay away from the big corporations who suck up 99% of the profit.¡±

    Harry was rubbing the back of his head but did not seem that satisfied with the answer.

    ¡°But¡­ that can¡¯t be that profitable.¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°Do you have any idea what a good 12<sup>th</sup> gen nanobot design is worth?¡±

    He shrugged.

    ¡°No, not really, but it can¡¯t be that much. A batch of nanobots costs what? ?20? 30?¡±

    I shook my head rolling my eyes.

    ¡°A batch, yes. And it costs the one making it ?5 in raw materials and energy. For the common designs and use cases. That gives them ?15 in profit. And they sell how many thousand a month? And now imagine you need something that the standard designs can¡¯t do. You have to have somebody specially design those nanites for you.

    And that will cost you around ?500 million. Generic ones you get for ?2 or 3 million, but you have to live with anybody who bought them using them. A good 8<sup>th</sup> gen nano-fab design sets you back another ?500 million if you want it exclusive. If it is generic and basic, you can get the plans for ?50k.

    And considering that there are three corporations and three persons who sell the designs¡­ well it is a seller¡¯s market. My other leg is computer tech, and¡­ well let¡¯s say that I sold a few hundred specialized computer systems for around ?2.5 million each. And a few other things.

    And all that without Panacea or Dalgon putting nearly everything into their own pockets.¡±

    They all just stood there with their mouths hanging open.

    I sighed.

    ¡°Come on, you have to have known that the big corps exploited you and bled you dry. I bet each of you has made inventions that are worth as much. The only difference is that I got to keep that money, you didn¡¯t.¡±

    Harry, who Warden informed me was Harrison Bradley, Ph.D. in chemistry just shook his head.

    ¡°I think you overestimate our earning potential a bit. I mean, what do you think I could have earned freelance?¡±

    That was actually the right one asking. I had to snort.

    ¡°You were the one who developed Abitriptan for Panacea, right?¡±

    His eyes widened in surprise.

    ¡°Uh, yeah¡­ how do you know that?¡±

    ¡°Ph.D. in computer science. I am good with computers. And the point is, Abitriptan made around ?12 billion. For Panacea. How much did you get?¡±

    He turned red.

    ¡°HOW MUCH?!? Panacea made how much? They told me it barely made back the development costs!¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°And you believed them? Let me guess, you got a bonus of around ?50k, right?¡±

    ¡°How¡­ how did you know that?¡±

    ¡°That is what the Panacea dump suggests they use to pay their researchers when they try to make them believe that they are friendly. When in reality they exploit them to the bitter end.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ but my contract¡­¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Do you really think they cared even a little bit about contracts? The Knowles owned this country. Law was what they decided it was. The judges ruled as the Knowles told them to rule. Contracts were only there to lull ¡®stupid people¡¯ into passivity. But lucky for you, the Knowles are no longer in power. You can sue, and you have a decent chance of getting your money.¡±

    Danielle snarled:

    ¡°I told you, those up there are all assholes. You can¡¯t trust any of them.¡±

    I just shook my head but said nothing to that. The woman who slapped Harry though, who Warden identified as Roslynn Andrews, MD, lit into her as well.

    ¡°Get back on the ground, girl. We get it, you hate the rich. So what, does that mean that no rich person is doing anything good? Heck, did Vandermeer do anything to you? Other than allowing you to work on what you wanted to work on the whole time you slaved away for Panacea? Or giving you this jack and the implanted computer?

    Face it, Vandermeer did what he could to keep the Commonwealth civilized. And you just heard what price he paid for it. His son-in-law dead and defamed. His daughter experimented on and with brain damage. And still, the first thing he did was put Revitalize back on track.¡±

    Danielle glowered at her but then sighed.

    ¡°Yeah, you are right. But I hate that I can¡¯t hate him.¡±

    Roslynn slapped her lightly on the shoulder.

    ¡°We know. And still, you work for them.¡±

    She shrugged.

    ¡°What else am I supposed to do, huh?¡±

    ¡°That depends on what you want to do. A good geneticist or genetic engineer can earn several ?100k on the free market for each job. But you would have to do that on the side or leave Project Revitalize. Couldn¡¯t use Vandermeer equipment either. So a bit of a startup cost here.¡±

    Her eyes focused back on me.

    ¡°And you think Vandermeer will simply let me go? Just like that? Or will they keep their pet K4 where they can see them?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know, are there any K4 who do not work for Vandermeer?¡±

    Danny snarled but had no answer to that.

    ¡°Ok, fine. You are right. But¡­¡±

    She stopped. After a few awkward seconds, another of the women, identified as Kelsey Gardenas, Ph.D. in Gravitics, even though she had to relearn virtually everything, asked me:

    ¡°But¡­ if the Knowles had you that much under control, how did you stay away from Panacea? Or Dalgon?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Mostly because I am highborn. I¡­ managed to sandbag them. Yes, they technically had the information that I am a K4, but the ones observing me did not. And the ones who did had no need to look for me.¡±

    Kelsey frowned.

    ¡°Come on, you don¡¯t really believe that bullshit myth that highborn are naturally smarter than us base born or the low born, do you?¡±

    I had to snort.

    ¡°It has nothing to do with smartness. The idiots creating the Nephilim virus wanted to create a utopian society. That means that they upped the social instincts of their creation as high as they could. But they did not want to be controlled by it themselves, so they put in some markers that changed their social instincts by lowering them. Anybody who had a combination of those markers had the same lowered social instincts.

    While the rank and mass of the Pure were nice and obedient, following social norms and were, in essence, sheep, those who shared the markers with the idiots were more¡­ predatory. They tried various schemes to get ahead.

    Those that were successful became the highborn, and those that failed became the lowborn. Simple as that.

    And that is why my being high-born made the difference. I don¡¯t think even Danny ever had the idea of going solo. It is just not done. Much less intentionally doing less than her best in the tests to divert any attention. I on the other hand had no such problems.

    And honestly, the Dalgons prove that being high-born does not mean being smart. The Knowles are at least clever, but the Dalgons are simply rich and charismatic.¡±

    Danny shouted:

    ¡°Ha, I knew it. All those up there are criminals¡­¡±

    I rolled my eyes but did not correct her. She would learn, or not. But I would not waste any more energy in correcting her.

    Luckily, she caught herself relatively quickly.

    ¡°Whatever. Where are Tams and Gordon?¡±

    Nadia answered her:

    ¡°Tamara was held up in a meeting. She will come later. Gordon has something with his family that he said might run him late. And I see you did not ask about Jason.¡±

    The last, she said with a grin, and Danielle scoffed.

    ¡°Oh please. Jason is always ¡®fashionably¡¯ late. There is no point in getting riled up about his antics.¡±

    ¡°How about the rest of you introduce themselves as well? I mean we can¡¯t expect Vivian to just know you all.¡±

    The ones who had not yet introduced themselves, namely Roslynn, Kelsey, a man named Owen Gaines, and one Warden IDed as Logan Spencer had the grace to blush.

    Roslynn was the first to speak:

    ¡°Oh yeah, sorry. I am Rose Andrews, MD.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, sorry. I am Kelsey Gardenas, Ph.D. in gravitics.¡±

    ¡°Owen Gaines, mechanical engineering.¡±

    ¡°Logan Spencer, nano-engineering. Maybe we can compare notes sometimes.¡±

    I smiled at him.

    ¡°Don¡¯t you think Burgmeister will be a bit cross if you talk to the competition?¡±

    His face was a bit stunned.

    ¡°Huh? How did you know that?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Computer science. Who do you think gave Vandermeer the Revitalize files back? I have a very powerful computer that helps me quite a bit. And identifying eleven people is not that hard.¡±

    Rose frowned.

    ¡°So you did know who we all are?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Partly. I know your full name but did not know that people call you Rose. And it is just polite to introduce oneself.¡±

    She rolled her eyes.

    ¡°Ok, yeah. And thank you for not calling me Roslynn. I hate that name. It is so old-fashioned. Now let me just spawn another chair for you.¡±

    She did just that, and the people started mingling a bit. From what I was seeing, this was just a social thing.

    At some point, the missing Tamara Duncan, an electrical engineer, arrived, and we had the whole spiel about me being a K4 again, only to repeat it a second time when Gordon Diorgo, one of the two physicists among us K4 appeared.

    That only left Jason Schuyler, the second physicist and the oldest of the K4. Before he made his big entrance, Nadia took me to the side and explained that Jason had some pathological need to be the alpha, to be seen as better than anybody else.

    Oh joy, I could already see that we would have some clashes.

 2.42: What are you doing?

    And then, the big moment was there. I was to get to know the great Jason Schuyler. Too much sarcasm? If you ever had the pleasure of meeting Jason, you wouldn¡¯t think so.

    He had no idea I was there and expected only his other brethren. Some of whom knew him for years. Nonetheless, he stormed into the viron, with an honest to god cape virtually waving in the imaginary wind. Roughly half an hour after the meeting¡­ get together¡­? Ah, dang it, roughly half an hour after the thing had started.

    And with a booming voice, he announced:

    ¡°I am here. We can start now.¡±

    He did not even care that he interrupted any conversation that might have happened. He just continued:

    ¡°I know, I was a tiny bit late, but you can now rest, your wait is over. We can now work on¡­¡±

    We never learned what we could now work on, because that was when he saw me.

    ¡°What the fuck. Who are you? What are you doing here? I have not invited you.¡±

    I looked him over and shrugged.

    ¡°Nope, that was Danielle.¡±

    He turned red in the face amidst quite a few snickers and even a giggle or two.

    ¡°That does not tell me who you are. Are you not aware that this here is a K4-exclusive meeting? Oh, I understand, you wanted to meet me. Well you did, you can go now.¡±

    When I made no movement, he tilted his head and in an overly dramatic motion waved at me to go away.

    When I still just sat there, he waved again, accompanied by:

    ¡°Well, what are you waiting for? I told you, this is K4-exclusive. I did not invite you, so leave your betters alone.¡±

    I could not help and roll my eyes.

    ¡°Well, there are a few problems with that. First, as far as I know, Nathan Vandermeer set this meeting up. Not you. Second, as I told you, I was invited. Not just by Danielle, I might add, but also by Nathan Vandermeer. And third, I am a K4 as well, which is why both Danielle and Nathan Vandermeer invited me to this meeting.¡±

    He growled and was clearly angry.

    ¡°Poppycock. I know all the functional K4. And you are not one of them. So¡­ for the last time, get out!¡±

    Rose intervened.

    ¡°Would you please shut up? We looked it up. She is indeed a K4. She just hid it well.¡±

    His anger directed itself to Rose now.

    ¡°What do you mean you ¡®looked it up¡¯? There are eleven of us. Everybody knows that. There have always been eleven. And until our children are old enough there will always be eleven. There is no way you would just find another K4 under some rock somewhere.¡±

    I rolled my eyes again, not alone this time.

    ¡°I would not quite say I found her under a rock, you know?¡±

    Danny was sounding at once pleased and amused.

    ¡°So, where did you find her then?¡±

    ¡°Several places. First, Nathan Vandermeer himself ordered me to a meeting with her. After that, I found her right in the documentation of Project Revitalize. Along with the rest of us. That is also where the others looked it up.¡±

    Jason brought a decent imitation of a fish out of the water to the table.

    ¡°But¡­ but¡­¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Yes, I also have a butt, not that that is a proper topic I would think.¡±

    That gave another round of snickers and giggles, and despite me swearing it could not be possible, Dr. Schuyler turned even redder.

    ¡°That was not what I wanted to say. And you damn well know that. What I want to know is how your name landed in the documentation of the K4.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°You have to ask Vandermeer that, you know. I know that it was not there when I gave the data to him. I made sure to erase it.¡±

    Now he was visibly confused.

    ¡°You¡­ erased it? Why? Why would you do something like that? Do you not understand that you would then forgo all the benefits of being a K4?¡±

    I raised an eyebrow.

    ¡°What benefits? The label of being an easily exploitable valuable asset for corrupt corporations? The branding of being a nice, convenient broodmare for their empire building? Or the benefit of everybody expecting miracles every time I even think about working on a project? You mean those benefits?¡±

    His eyes nearly left his skull, and when I looked into the round, the others were not much less shocked.

    In the end, Tim cleared his throat.

    ¡°You know¡­ she¡¯s not wrong. I mean, yes, we men have it a bit better. We are just asked to ¡®stud¡¯ whoever the big corps ¡®ask¡¯ us to, but in the end, yeah she¡¯s right.¡±

    Danny scowled.

    ¡°Yeah. I mean, we could at least convince them that we should use egg harvesting and uterus replicators¡­ but yeah, we go where the corp says we should, we breed with whoever the corp tells us to, and after we put in all the work, the corp receives the reward¡­¡±

    Rose nodded.

    ¡°Yeah, that was that way.

    But to be fair, now with Vandermeer, I don¡¯t know how you are, but they treat at least me quite a bit more fair. I can finally work on what I want, get the resources, and sure, my new anti-rejection drug has been mostly rendered useless by this new cyberware from Enki, but before that, Vandermeer shared the income 50-50 with me.¡±

    Unfortunately, that made Jason perk up again.

    ¡°Ah, so you see, these are the perks of being a K4. So why would you throw that away?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Well, let¡¯s see. I created a fortune for myself working in the grey and black market, then had several inventions, including the new cyberware that Rose just mentioned, created a new corporation with some friends, of which I am the majority owner, can work on whatever I want anyway because, well majority owner and CTO, and nobody pesters me to become a broodmare.

    And of course, neither Panacea nor Dalgon got their dirty little grubs on me. Yeah, I can clearly how being wide and far known as a K4 is better than that.¡±

    As an answer, Jason balled his fists and rolled his eyes, angrily, but then caught himself again.

    ¡°Whatever, now you are known. So, have the others informed you about the rules here in our little community?¡±

    Rules? Nobody said anything about rules. Not that most of them seemed to care an iota about what Jason was saying.

    ¡°No, no rules. Why?¡±

    His face transformed into something I believe he thought was friendly, and he magnanimously continued:

    ¡°Well, in that case, let me educate you. You need to learn them after all. Most important, we have a ranking structure here, based on IQ, age, family status, and achievements. Mostly we mind our betters and try to not irritate them too much. I am sure you will learn.

    Of course, as I am the highest ranking in all four of those points, I am the ranking member of our club.¡±

    He was¡­ a look in the round told me that he was the only one who insisted on this stupid ranking system, and the others had simply stopped arguing with him about it. And of course, he was¡­ somewhat mistaken.

    Unfortunately, it was at this moment that I messed up.

    ¡°Hm, one out of four. But ok.¡±

    He turned red again.

    ¡°What do you mean, one out of four?¡±

    I immediately realized my mistake. I let my head hang and sighed.

    ¡°Oh frick. Well, too late now.¡± That of course was mostly murmured to myself.

    ¡°What was that? Speak up if you have something to say. And I asked you a question.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Frankly, I don¡¯t think you really want the answer to that question. So, how about you do yourself a favor and forget I said anything, ok?¡±

    He spread his fingers before he slowly balled them back into fists, and then, slowly, and I think what he thought was menacingly snarled:

    ¡°I know full well what I want, and I want you to fucking answer my question! WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY ONE OUT OF FOUR?!?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Well, if you insist, you are definitely the oldest of us. Though what that has to do with ranking I have no clue. I mean, most of you are the same biological age, somewhere around 21. And in a few years, we all will be there. In a hundred years, the ten years age difference is meaningless.¡±

    It took him a moment to parse through what I had said.

    ¡°Does that mean that you think I am not the smartest, the most accomplished, and the one from the most prestigious family here? Do you seriously think that? That I, who has an IQ of 370 am not the smartest? That I, who has two Genolt-prizes for my physics work am not the most accomplished? That my family, with my father a manager in Ascombe&Fillani, is not the highest ranking among us?¡±

    Genolt-prize? Oh, right that was some Dalgon-internal price for work. Yeah¡­ impressive, the Nobel it was not quite. Though the Nobel had lost dramatically in importance since the war, there was still nothing coming even close to it. Everything else would require the cooperation of the nations and the corporations, and that was¡­ unlikely. And so the Nobel prize, with its politicking, its brownnosing, and its corruption remained the most important.

    But the Genolt was¡­ at least in my opinion, not that much in the form of accomplishments.

    And it seemed that at least some of the others were the same opinion. I heard Danny shouting:

    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t go there, Jason. I would definitely not go there.¡±

    Followed by Harry¡¯s ¡°Oh shit!¡±

    That turned Jason¡¯s ire first to Danny, and then to Harry, who by now had turned beet red.

    ¡°Don¡¯t you understand? We all know that whatever boost K4 gave us to our intelligence, it is multiplicative.¡±

    Jason looked a bit confused but then shrugged.

    ¡°Yeah, so what?¡±

    Harry rolled his eyes.

    ¡°All these times when you crowed how you are 30-40 IQ points smarter than the rest of us because your family has an average IQ of 108 instead of 105? Well, Vivian¡¯s family has an average IQ of around 200!¡±

    I waved him off.

    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t go that far. As far as I know, my father had an IQ of 192, not 200.¡±

    Again, Jason¡¯s eyes threatened to fly to the other side of the room, while Harry now waved me off.

    ¡°So the General had a whole eight IQ points below 200. Yes, that is significant, I agree. After all, your mother ¡®only¡¯ has a documented IQ of 247. So no, your family clearly doesn¡¯t even come close to an average IQ of 200. I must have been in error.¡±

    Ok, that was sarcasm in its purest form. He even made the air quotes when he said ¡®only¡¯. I had to give him that.

    The interesting thing that Jason took from it though was what Harry had called my father.

    ¡°The¡­ General?¡±

    Harry smiled at Jason and nodded.

    ¡°Oh, yes, I know. Not quite as prestigious as being a low-level manager in a C-tier corporation. But still, I think we can forgive Vivian for her father ¡®only¡¯ being a brigadier-general in the CDF. After all, her mother is just the only child of Nathan Vandermeer.¡±

    That made Jason, who had by now walked around the seating arrangement to the free chair, fall down into it and look at Harry in utter shock.

    Danny, who sat beside Harry, offered him a fist bump with the words:

    ¡°Yeah, that¡¯s more like it!¡±

    Jason meanwhile turned to me:

    ¡°You¡­ you¡­ you¡¯re a Vandermeer?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Nope, I am a DuClare. My mother is a Vandermeer.¡±

    He mumbled to himself:

    ¡°Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck¡­¡±

    Then his eyes turned hard again.

    ¡°That does not change anything. Yes, your family is important, but the other factors are still in my favor. I am still the smartest, the oldest, and the most accomplished.¡±

    Danny told him with a sickly sweet voice:

    ¡°I wouldn¡¯t bet on that. I mean, sure, she does not have some fancy prize from some corporation as an atta-girl. But that does not mean she has no accomplishments either.¡±

    With the steel back in his voice, he turned to Danny.

    ¡°So you think? What accomplishments could be remotely important enough to even be mentioned here?¡±

    Danny, still smiling sweetly, cocked her head:

    ¡°Well, how about the fact that she almost certainly beat Sanderson¡¯s Folly just a few days ago? Would that be important enough?¡±

    That shut up Jason, but the rest of the K4 were equally in shock, and shouts in that regard called through the viron.

    I sighed.

    ¡°Come on, I just found out what the Folly does. It¡¯s on you to actually beat it.¡±

    Danny did not seem particularly impressed.

    ¡°And those new nano-bots that are now classified as Project Revitalize Batch N1 are nothing? Yeah, sure.¡±

    I perked up a bit.

    ¡°So they are directly going to test them?¡±

    Danny rolled her eyes.

    ¡°You know better than I that we are talking about bog standard medical nano-bots here. Of course, they are starting human testing.¡±

    Rose looked from Danny to me, and back.

    ¡°One moment¡­ what are you talking about?¡±

    When I did no moves to toot my own horn, Danny sighed and explained:

    ¡°Apparently a couple of months ago, Vandermeer, the bossman, not the corp, asked Vivian here to look into a cure for the Folly. Yes, I know, why did he ask a comp-sci nerd and nano-engineer for that bla bla bla? For one, he did not ask any random comp-sci nerd, but his granddaughter, and otherwise¡­ well, among Vivian¡¯s other achievements are such unimportant things like this new cyberware that you complained about, Rose. Or this new cloning tech that has you running up the walls, Nads.¡±

    Nadia jerked her gaze to me.

    ¡°You created this new cloning tech? But¡­ what has that¡­ nano-engineering?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°I have, let¡¯s say an OCD for learning new things. Yes, I have my credentials in computer science and nano-engineering, but only because I didn¡¯t bother to get them in other disciplines as well. And honestly, the cloning tech is a windfall from the cyberware project. Which I solved by using nano-technology. Nothing major, just a bit out-of-the-box thinking.¡±

    Danny laughed.

    ¡°Seriously, Nads, where do you think all that biodata I showed you yesterday came from?¡±

    ¡°Wait, that came from you? How¡­ it is so insanely detailed, how did you get all those data?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Mostly by an invention of mine that I call bio-observation unit. It¡¯s essentially a batch of nano-bots that observe biological processes on the molecular level and then report what they see not quite in real-time. The rest is just building a machine that can do thousands over thousands of artificial fertilizations to generate a big database so that my supercomputer could analyze the data for correlations.

    That is what I mean by that it was just a bit of out-of-the-box thinking. Everybody could have done that.¡±

    Logan leaned forward.

    ¡°How did you get all that functionality into nano¡­ oh, I see. It¡¯s the same tech that is used in the NADAs, right? So¡­ those are also from you?¡±

    When I just nodded, he began to giggle. Jason was increasingly annoyed, not that any of the others were in the slightest distressed about that fact.

    When he barked at Logan:

    ¡°What the fuck do you find so funny?¡±

    Logan broke out in loud laughter. After a few moments, he managed, interspersed with further laughter to press out:

    ¡°Oh fuck, Jason¡­ that¡¯s too good. You don¡¯t even¡­ even realize¡­ oh how you fucked up¡­ that is just¡­¡±

    ¡°Get a grip on yourself and speak English, asshole.¡±

    Logan slowly brought himself under control, which was not helped by Jason again and again demanding what was so funny. I mean, come on, even I had understood what he was laughing so hard about. Well, ok, the others did only grin broadly and did probably not connect the dots yet.

    When Logan was breathing more calmly, and before Jason managed to set him off again, I was able to ask the other nano-engineer:

    ¡°I assume you are working for Burgmeisters NADA?¡±

    Logan, who was wiping away tears, could only nod, but it explained it. Yes, it was no secret that the NADA was based on the Q-link. But we also did not go around advertising that fact. What I did not quite understand is why that little factoid made him laugh that hard.

    When I raised my eyebrow and looked at him questioningly, he managed a hard-pressed:

    ¡°You will learn.¡±

    Which only served to confuse me even more. Not that anybody else showed any understanding in his cryptic sentence. When he refused to elaborate, Jason, turning redder by the minute, turned back to me.

    ¡°So¡­ you have some achievements? And you think they are more important than mine?¡±

    If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Well, I would concede that what I¡¯ve done has had some impact.¡±

    Nadia interjected.

    ¡°Yeah, I would say that also. You have to sell me this bio-obs thing¡­ it could be exactly what I now need.¡±

    I held up my hands defensively.

    ¡°Cool down. It is on regular sale from Enki. I don¡¯t exactly know the price, but you work for Vandermeer, so it won¡¯t be that bad.¡±

    Her eyes widened.

    ¡°It is? Why do I not know about it?¡±

    I could only shrug helplessly.

    ¡°I have no clue. Probably because we announced it along with quite a slew of new products. And honestly, it all was drowned by the NADAs and the new grav coils. I guess nobody thought it would be that important.¡±

    ¡°Not! That! Important?!? Does nobody understand what this thing could do? And seriously, if that is an application of nano-technology, why the fuck did you not create something like that long ago, Logan?¡±

    That nearly brought Logan to laughter again, but he held it in heroically, and after a few deep breathes, managed to answer:

    ¡°Because I am missing, or was missing at least, the secret ingredient. The one thing that makes it, and the NADA possible in the first place. I am sure I could make this observation unit, now. But I am also sure that, unlike the NADA, Enki did not offer licenses for the technology. So you have to ask the old man for it, or Vivian here.¡±

    She visibly fumed, rolled her eyes, and then turned to me.

    ¡°Fine. Whatever, when can I get one of those things?¡±

    ¡°I call it a bio-observation unit, or BOU for short. And that depends.¡±

    I was suddenly reminded of the old adage about if looks could kill. If that were the case I would now be a smoldering husk.

    ¡°Depends on what!?!¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Calm down. It depends on how big you want to have it, where you want to have it, and such things. Depending on how big it is, you will need to wait up to a few days before you can use it.¡±

    When she inhaled, I held up my hands again.

    ¡°Hold on, that is an inherent problem. This thing is, at its heart, a very specialized nano-fab, and before you can use it, it has to make the nano-bots first. And because of its principle, it has to be this unit that makes the bots. They can¡¯t be simply preloaded. I mean, we have something similar for the NADAs, but we have nothing for the BOUs. Simply because the need to justify it is just not there. That means if you want to use it on, for example, the combined mass of a Stomper, you will have to wait around three days before it is ready.

    Also, you have to decide what size you want to use. Personally, I would suggest that you get several. A few smaller ones which can be used for normal-sized biological entities, and a few bigger ones.¡±

    Then I realized that with the sudden need for BOUs for the hopefully pregnant women, we actually might have set up a similar system.

    When Nadia opened her mouth, I held up a hand.

    ¡°Wait a moment. I have to look something up.¡±

    A quick dive to 120:1, and I looked up if maybe one of the minions had thought about it. And indeed, we were in luck. We had a very big preloader.

    I surfaced back to 30:1.

    ¡°Ok, I was wrong. We do have a pre-loader. So we can make you one the size you want, and it will be working when it arrives. But don¡¯t go overboard, please. There is a reason why we set up the pre-loader, and if I divert enough of it to you, it will hurt us.¡±

    Again, thunderclouds were figuratively coming into existence above her head.

    ¡°What the fuck could be so important?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°You do know that I could ask you the same? What could you research that is so important and time-sensitive? But to answer, that Revitalize batch N1 that Danny mentioned, well, we of Enki have its twin project running. We thought it would be unethical to keep this away from our employees, so we informed them and if they want to they can partake in the test. Fully voluntary, I have to stress.

    For their good, and of course, to observe the test, we insist that each woman has to be injected with a BOU as well so that if something goes wrong we are immediately informed and can react.

    The response was a bit overwhelming, and we literally need every single BOU we can get.¡±

    Danny perked up.

    ¡°Wait, you are testing it too? And with this BOU? Are there any results?¡±

    I sighed but looked it up quickly.

    ¡°There are so far 73 women who had successful fertilization. But it is way too early to talk about success.¡±

    That made Rose suddenly look very interested.

    ¡°Wait¡­ you already have results? And there are 73 fertilizations? When did you start?¡±

    ¡°Thursday afternoon. And so far, we have injected 1379 women with the nanobots. So only a bit over 5% success rate for now.¡±

    That made Rose shake her head in bewilderment.

    ¡°Do I understand you correctly, you started this test not quite one-and-a-half days ago, for a process that, if everything goes perfectly, can be randomly anywhere in a 28-day cycle, and you have the audacity of using the word only with a 5% success rate?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Statistical optimum would be 5.36%, the results are 5.29%. So 0.07% below what I hoped it would be.¡±

    For a moment, Rose just looked at me without showing any understanding. Then she threw up her hands and screamed.

    Followed by jumping up and walking around randomly, ranting incoherently.

    I looked at her a bit confused, before I turned to the others:

    ¡°Uh¡­ did I break her?¡±

    Nadia took a very deep breath before she answered me:

    ¡°Vivian dear, please don¡¯t get me wrong, but are you insane? We are talking biology here. In biology, 0.07% is spot on.¡±

    I honestly thought for a moment that she was trying to play a trick on me, but it looked as if she was serious.

    ¡°Really? Frick, no wonder I don¡¯t like biology.¡± Which was answered by another loud ¡°Argh¡± from Rose, and groans from Nadia and Danny.

    Then I saw Rose storming towards me.

    ¡°Vivian, sweety, what the fuck are you thinking? You¡¯ve done something humanity could only dream about for 180 years. And you managed it in a mind-boggling way. You had a rate of success that is simply insane. Please do some math for me. How many women should statistically have ovulated in the what, 36 hours since you started the test?¡±

    The math was, honestly, trivial.

    ¡°Well, 74, why?¡±

    She threw up her arms again, before placing her hand left and right of my head on the backrest of my chair.

    ¡°Think, goddamn it, think. You are not looking at 73 out of 1380 women, you are looking at 73 out of 74! That is more than a 98% success rate. That is phenomenal. And there is no knowledge of why that one woman did not yet get a successful fertilization. Maybe her husband shoots blanks, or they simply had a bad day. It could be anything.

    But do you know how high the success rate of the most successful drug in Project Revitalize is?

    0.83%!

    Yes, that is right, C3 has less than a single percent change to work. Fortunately per ovulation.

    You have already beaten C3 by more than 100 times. That is why we are so excited about your numbers. Even if it was a fluke, and the improvement turns out to be half of what this first day suggests, it will be enough to ensure the survival of humanity.

    And I am pretty sure that us medical types can improve whatever is not perfect over time if that¡¯s the case. For the first time since that asshole Sanderson released his Folly, we see the light at the end of the tunnel. So yes, celebrate it. And let us celebrate it.¡±

    Then she shoved herself off my chair, turned to Jason, and scathingly said:

    ¡°And if you believe that anything you¡¯ve achieved comes even close to being in the same zip code as that, you are simply insane. So that finishes that topic as well.¡±

    She huffed for a last time and stomped back to her chair, falling into it.

    Jason did not look very pleased either. He, the only way to describe it is that he sulked in his chair, and in the same tone a spoiled child would use when they were unhappy, he spoke up:

    ¡°Fine. She has some achievements. But can we please change the topic to something not revolving around her?¡±

    For a moment, nobody said anything, though most of the others visibly fought the urge to laugh out loudly.

    After some time, Kelsey rolled her eyes and answered him:

    ¡°Ok, we can do that. Have you made any progress with the Seeberger equation then?¡±

    Jason pouted even harder as a reaction.

    ¡°You know pretty damn well that this blasted equation is impossible to figure out.¡±

    Kelsey stared at him with fire in her eyes.

    ¡°Somebody did figure it out though. So it is possible.¡±

    Seriously, he was the smartest of them, well the second smartest of us, and he had that hard a time figuring out the equation? What was going wrong here?

    Before I could say anything, Jason blasted at her:

    ¡°Then fucking find that somebody. Maybe they can explain how those fucking grav coils work. Would that make you happy?¡±

    Kelsey snarled back:

    ¡°Yes, it would. Because it would explain to me how the new grav coils work.¡±

    I scowled. This seemed to be an old argument, but¡­

    ¡°If I may ask, what are your problems with the grav coils?¡±

    Kelsey turned her burning brown eyes toward me.

    ¡°They should not work, that is my problem with them. My scans of them show no continuous structure that would conduct the electricity.¡±

    Then her look softened.

    ¡°Sorry, I am a bit on the edge here. Those things drive me insane. They clearly work, but I can¡¯t understand why.¡±

    I tilted my head.

    ¡°You tried to scan the new grav coils? With a 3D scanner?¡±

    She sighed.

    ¡°Yeah. And it simply makes no sense.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Of course not. A three-dimensional scan won¡¯t give you the information you need. The grav-coils are four-dimensional.¡±

    You could hear a pin drop directly after that, before Kelsey, with a very shaky voice asked:

    ¡°What¡­ what do you mean with four-dimensional?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°The gravity bending field is created by four-dimensional structures. And there is no continuous 3D structure because most of the mass is just structural carbon to keep the coil in shape. The continuous structure is in the fourth dimension, so a three-dimensional scanner simply can¡¯t show it to you.¡±

    Jason barked:

    ¡°How the fuck do you know that? I thought you were a nano-engineer and software weenie?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°I told you, I have nearly a compulsion to learn new things. I could get my Ph.D. in physics, or math if I wanted. But why bother? And I know that because it took me nearly six months to figure it out. Fortunately in VR or I would still be busy with it.¡±

    Kelsey frowned, then scowled, and was obviously thinking hard. Then she spoke up.

    ¡°That¡­ doesn¡¯t add up. If these new grav-coils are four-dimensional, how could it be that the old three-dimensional ones worked?¡±

    ¡°They worked because they were not three-dimensional. That was one of the problems I had so much fun figuring out. As it is, the Kobashigawa-alloy naturally creates four-dimensional structures when it is cast. A strange artifact of the composition of the alloy. That also explains why the old coils are so¡­ anemic compared to the new ones. They are far from optimal.

    It also explains why the result of the casting process was so random. It is pure chance where the four-dimensional structures are formed.¡±

    Before Kelsey could answer me, Jason, who had listened apparently in shock, screamed angrily.

    ¡°Fuck it! Fuck it all! Is there anything you are not perfect in?¡±

    He jumped up and paced around while he descended into a tirade about how unfair the world is, and how he deserved better blah blah blah.

    When he made a short pause to breathe in, I intervened:

    ¡°You think I am perfect?!?¡±

    I stood up as well.

    ¡°Look at me! That is how I look in real life. I am tiny. I am small compared to Mongrels, much less Pures. I have severe social anxiety, and my social intelligence can best be described as ¡®I have to have some somewhere¡¯. So no, I am far from being perfect.¡±

    Rose groaned.

    ¡°It¡¯s okay, sweety. We were all young once. That is nothing you have to be ashamed of.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Rose, I am 19. Yes, I still have some maturing to do, but growing not so much. This is my final height. Add in that I am the only Pure I ever heard of who is alpha-negative, and yeah, physically I am less than impressive.¡±

    ¡°Alpha-negative? We can be negative?¡±

    ¡°It seems so, I am at least.¡±

    ¡°But then, why are you beating Jason at everything so far?¡±

    I sighed and shook my head.

    ¡°That is owed almost exclusively to the fact that he based his strange ranking system mostly on things where he thought he was the best, and where I am just a bit better. He is almost certainly better than me in several things, but I assume those are things where he is not better than every one of you.¡±

    That made Jason perk up.

    ¡°I am still the oldest, and I am still the one with the best equipment here. I am certain that old man Vandermeer hasn¡¯t organized a Seraphim Mk. III for anybody else!¡±

    At first, I was just speechless. He did not really just say that, right? I had to have misheard him. There was no other possibility. Then it dawned on me that he did indeed claim to be using a Seraphim Mk.III. And I winced. But decided to leave him this small sliver of his pride.

    Unfortunately, Logan at least had seen me wince, and he was clearly unwilling to let it stand.

    ¡°You are disagreeing with him? Anything to say about that?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Is it really necessary to humiliate him any further?¡±

    That, interestingly, was answered in the positive by ten of the people present. And after some pressuring, accompanied by further sulking from Jason, I grudgingly agreed.

    ¡°Ok, fine. I am very sure that he is not using a Seraphim Mk.III. A Mk. IV maybe, but not a Mk. III. And even a Mk. IV would be at best a suboptimal choice for one of you.¡±

    Tamara was the one who posed the obvious question:

    ¡°Uh, why that? I mean, from what I heard it is said to be the best board one could buy.¡±

    I closed my eyes for a moment, collecting my thoughts and trying to find a way to formulate the answer in a way that was not insulting.

    ¡°It is, in a way. But you are missing one very important fact. Until five months ago, jacks were almost exclusively to hackers. Yes, you and a few others got some of the first CRS-free ones made by an industrial fabber, but those things were very expensive. The combo you received did cost around ?13.5 million a piece.

    That also means though that every comparison of boards is made from the perspective of hackers. We are talking about cyberwarfare boards. They have parts that are completely useless for you, and some that are even a detriment. Things that make cyber combat more survivable for the Jack.

    What you need is a lean,  clean system with the sole function of providing you with virtual reality and assisting you in your scientific endeavors. You could compare it to ground vehicles. What you need is a race car. Lightweight, agile, very specialized, and it also only needs to function under very controlled circumstances.

    A typical cyberwarfare board on the other hand compares more to an APC. Sure, you can try to race it against a racecar, but it will not be very good. Now the Seraphim Mk. IV is more akin to an MBT. Three times the weight of the APC, 30 times the weight of the race car, but virtually indestructible. Not in any way slower than the APC, but ten to twenty times as expensive.

    And that is wasted money for you when you need a racecar that costs 10% of that.¡±

    Tamara seemed to listen carefully.

    ¡°I think I understand. It is the best board you can buy, for its purpose. And until recently, that was the only purpose one would buy a board for. But for us, it is simply the wrong tool.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Yes, that is correct. And frankly¡­ I will have to look into what is a good board for people like you.¡±

    Tim cleared his throat.

    ¡°But that still does not explain why you are so sure that Jason doesn¡¯t have a Mk. III.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°As I said, I am relatively sure he does not even have a Mk. IV. It costs around ?3.6 million, naked that is, and it offers at best marginally better performance than a vastly cheaper board to a scientist.

    But I am absolutely, one hundred percent sure that Jason doesn¡¯t have a Mk. III because there are exactly two Mk. III in existence. The Mk. III is what is called a bespoke board. A board specially designed to be optimized for the hacker it is designed for. And that is an insane amount of work on the tech¡¯s side. So no, he has no Mk. III. The Mk. IV plans are available on the dark web, and several techs can build you one. The Mk. III, nope, not available.¡±

    Jason now defiantly threw in:

    ¡°And how can you be so sure that old man Vandermeer did not manage to organize that for me?¡±

    I sighed and switched to my Seraphim Avatar, along with the voice change and size change. Then I edited in a certain resonance in my voice, to make it sound more dramatic.

    ¡°Because I have not built one for you.¡±

    Jason just scrambled backward to get away from me, and the others looked equally shocked. After a few seconds, I switched back to my normal appearance.

    ¡°In case you have not figured it out, I am Seraphim. And only I have the plans for the Mk. III. I know for absolutely sure that there are only two of them because I have built only two, and I know where they are. And neither is in your possession.¡±

    After a moment of awkward silence, Nadia scowled.

    ¡°Wait, does that mean that you are using a Mk. III?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°No.¡± That seemed to confuse them all, and I quickly added:

    ¡°Not anymore. I¡¯ve switched over to the Mk. V. And before you ask, yes, there are also only two of them. The new ¡®best board one can buy¡¯ is, since yesterday, the Seraphim Mk. VI.¡±

    Jason had by now stabilized himself and whined:

    ¡°Why do you have to destroy everything?¡±

    Rose answered softly:

    ¡°Because you¡¯ve built your castles in the air on lies. You are a K4, you are the oldest of us, one of the smartest humans to have ever lived, you are working on unraveling the secrets of the universe, and by now you work for Vandermeer, one of the very few corporations that could be described as ¡®good¡¯.

    You have no reason to make yourself more than you are. None of us does. You are good enough already.¡±

    Wow, I had to say, that was very deep.

    After a few moments, Kelsey coughed politely, and then asked me:

    ¡°To get back to the topic, what makes you think that the new grav coils are four-dimensional?¡±

    ¡°As I said, six months of trying to figure it out. But in the end, the Seeberger equation explained it fully. I have to confess I did the work several times because I could not understand how the old grav coils could work when four-dimensional structures are needed either.

    But then I went at it from another direction and examined if the Kobasigawa alloy could make four-dimensional structures.

    The rest of the time was trying to figure out how to make four-dimensional structures.¡±

    Kelsey frowned.

    ¡°Wait¡­ does that mean you understand the Seeberger equation? For real?¡±

    For some reason that made Logan laugh again, and it took a few seconds before he could talk:

    ¡°And there we have it. Why I laughed earlier? Nads, you asked why I did not make the BOU for you. Well, the secret ingredient for the NADAs is that Vivian has used Q-links to put everything she could outside of the nanobots. The same Q-links Jason swore up and down to us could not exist. Because the Seeberger equation was just idiocy.¡±

    Instead of answering him, Jason just glowered at our fellow K4. When nobody else said something for some seconds, I answered Kelsey:

    ¡°I would not exactly say I understand it. I understand parts of it, but it is so insanely complex and so multilayered that it will take decades, maybe centuries before anybody really understands it.¡±

    ¡°Oh, ok, but you do understand the equation for the grav coils? And¡­ apparently the equation for the Q-links?¡±

    ¡°The equation for the Q-links is easy. Seeberger himself was only a couple of steps away from inventing them. Just follow his work and go the last few steps further.

    The grav coils¡­ that was a bit harder, but yes, I do. I am sorry, but I won¡¯t fully explain it to you. I have my reasons though.¡±

    Jason snarled:

    ¡°How can you make any sense out of that monstrosity of an equation?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°No clue. I just do. Oh, it was quite a bit of hard work, but it just clicked for me. I am slowly learning that this is something unusual.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ but how?¡±

    I rolled my eyes. I was sure I would regret my next decision, but I could not let it go.

    ¡°How about you show me where you have problems? Maybe I can help you over the hump?¡±

    After some consideration, Jason agreed, while the rest groaned, but did not complain.

    A few moments later, Jason had summoned a whiteboard, with part of the equation on it.

    I did not see anything wrong, but it was strangely quite early in the process. I mean, he had according to Nate around a decade of work in it, and it was¡­ not even halfway done.

    And then I saw what the problem really was. And I blurted out:

    ¡°STOP! STOP! What the fuck are you doing? You have a goddamn jack! Use it!¡±

    He had, indeed materialized a dry-erase marker and had begun writing manually at the board, obviously trying to solve the math in his head.

    He stopped doing that and with some annoyance showing on his face turned to me.

    ¡°What the fuck do you think I am doing? I am in a VR after all, am I not?¡±

    I could not help myself, I let myself fall into the chair that I had teleported behind me and placed my head into my hands.

    ¡°Oh lord. That can¡¯t be true.¡±

    When I lifted my head out of my hands, not only Jason, but all the others looked at me confused.

    ¡°Are you seriously telling me nobody taught you the difference between a diadem and a jack? For real?¡±

    Danny asked in an uncertain shaky voice:

    ¡°There is a difference? I mean beyond the speed thing?¡±

    After I had stared at her for a moment, I shook my head and mumbled to myself:

    ¡°Well, that answers that.¡±

    Then I spoke louder again:

    ¡°Yes, there is a gigantic difference. A diadem has to work through your skull. It can only receive weak impressions and only give you the same. The effect of that is mostly the limited bandwidth which limits the compression.

    The jack is directly wired into your brain. That enabled much higher bandwidth, and in turn higher compression, but it also enables other parts of your brain, that are mostly ignored by the diadem to work along the computer.

    Mainly your subconscious.¡±

    I addressed Jason directly:

    ¡°What you are doing is using the jack like a fast diadem. You use this processor¡± I tapped at the side of my head, ¡°instead of the one in your board or your supercomputer to do the number crunching.¡±

    Jason looked at me openmouthed but then asked:

    ¡°But¡­ how do I do that? And what supercomputer?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Figures that nobody thought about giving you access to a supercomputer. But the process is simple. Just relax and think about what you want your board to do. Not what you want to do, but what you want your board to do.

    At first, it will be a conscious effort, but quite soon, you will do it automatically.¡±

    When he made no move in that regard, I sighed.

    ¡°Go ahead, try it.¡±

    When he still did not act, I spoke more forcefully:

    ¡°I said try it!¡±

    That shook him out of it, and he turned back to the whiteboard. You could literally see his concentration, and then the symbols on the board moved seemingly of their own accord. From my perspective, having worked with Warden and a super-Grendel, it was glacially slow, but it seemed for the others it was miraculously fast.

    It was Owen who remarked:

    ¡°It works? Fuck me, it works. Why has nobody told me that?¡±

    The last was directed at me, and I could only shrug.

    Danny then mused.

    ¡°That means I have to wheedle a supercomputer out of the old man? Fuck¡­ that will be expensive.¡±

    I briefly flashed back to the talk I had with Nate about how I seemingly was so much smarter than even the other K4. But if they were this crippled¡­ I was not so sure that was really the case.

    After the commotion had settled down a bit, mostly because Rose sharply demanded everybody calm down, for a few moments we were all sitting or standing in silence.

    And then Jason had to open his mouth again.

    ¡°I knew it, you cheated! You are nothing but a dirty cheater!¡±

    I was not the only one to roll their eyes, but I was the one who answered:

    ¡°You do know that this is a very well-documented technique that until around a year ago, virtually every owner of a jack knew, right? It is not my fault that you were too incompetent of knowing it. Just asking any Jack about how to use a jack the best way would have given it to you.¡±

    His eyes crossed for a moment, as he tried to parse what I had said. Then he shook his head.

    ¡°What do you mean?¡±

    I sighed and rolled my eyes again.

    ¡°Every single hacker with an implanted jack, well every hacker who survived the first three months or so, every single implanted corporate cyber security specialist knows how to do that. Is it my fault that you did not think of asking any of them?¡±

    Rose intervened again.

    ¡°No, it is not your fault. And don¡¯t let grumpy over there con you into believing it. But now that we know about it, can you help us, well those of us who will listen to you, to get better?¡±

    I closed my eyes and thought for a moment before I answered:

    ¡°To be honest, that depends completely on what you have and what you need. We might have to get you some better hardware.¡±

    I made a quick decision.

    ¡°And Danny, if you have problems with the supercomputer, call me. I will arrange something.¡±

    That made Danny utter a ¡°Huh?¡±, while Jason of course was offended again.

    ¡°Why her? Why would you arrange something for her and not m¡­ us others?¡±

    I did not miss that he nearly had said ¡®me¡¯ but whatever.

    ¡°Because I think her project is of vital importance for humanity. I have no clue what you others have as projects, so I can¡¯t comment on that.¡±

    He whined a bit more, but when he realized that I completely ignored him, he stopped and sulked some more.

    When he was blessedly silent again, I turned to Rose.

    ¡°If you want me to help you I need to know for example what you are using now, and what you need.¡±

    Rose thought only for a moment.

    ¡°Sure. You¡¯re the comp-sci gal. All of us, except possibly Jason, got the Dalgon SL-53-12. Otherwise, we have the usual computer support, meaning a server, and a few lab computers. They run on Envision, so no VR.¡±

    I had heard of the SL-53 series from Dalgon. It did not have a good reputation, and I was wondering why someone foisted those genius scientists with, well garbage, but before I said anything, I looked up the board in question.

    I learned the why quickly. Both why it had a bad reputation, and why the K4 got them.

    ¡°I see. Somebody used their head to give you those boards. But they dropped the ball when they missed teaching you to use them.¡±

    Now Jason¡¯s whiney voice cut through everything.

    ¡°Used their head? The SL-53 are garbage. Worth more for their scrap value than as cyber boards.¡±

    I closed my eyes and took a deep breath before I, as calmly as I could manage, explained as if to a small child.

    ¡°Remember what I told you about why a Seraphim Mk. IV would not be suited for you? Every cyber-board out there has its reputation formed from the perspective of a hacker. And the Sl-53-12 is indeed garbage. From the perspective of a hacker. It has virtually no protection in cyber combat, and it has a minuscule fast execution storage, which is woefully slow.

    Or, from your perspective, it doesn¡¯t waste resources on that useless junk. To get back to the vehicle comparison, you need a racecar, but there is none. All boards are more or less built for cyber combat. But the SL-53-12 is the equivalent of one of those cars that can carry four or five soldiers, whatever they are called.

    It is a bit more flexible, and it has more resources for what you need, but for a hacker, it is simply useless.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°But that does not help much. It seems to be the best that they could get you, but it is not really what you need.

    Doesn¡¯t matter, next year I will create something for you. And I would suggest the new Envision XE. We can replace your other computers at the same time, no problem. I have to look into it, but I would guess for most of you, a Chronos cluster should be enough. If you need more, we can talk about it.¡±

    That made Tim frown.

    ¡°Envision? I thought we were talking about using VR?¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°The new Envision XE is VR capable. Heck, Ralcon has a free utility that makes most older Envision versions VR capable.¡±

    Logan now tilted his head.

    ¡°And you think that is something usable? I mean, Envision has become worse and worse with each new version.¡±

    I snorted again.

    ¡°Oh yes, it is something usable. And I can believe that it became worse. It has become so bad that they finally resorted to hiring me to clean it all up. The utility is something that I cooked up to bribe Ralcon away from trying to squash Enki, and the XE version, well let¡¯s say that it took some work to get it mostly bug-free and cleaned up. But it is quite a bit faster, slimmer, and more stable than Envision 48.¡±

    I shook my head and spoke mostly to myself.

    ¡°Now the bets are how long it takes for them to mess it all up again.¡±

    Not that Logan was finished.

    ¡°Wait, you cleaned up Envision? I thought this was this gigantic thing that was way too big for anybody to understand. How could you clean all of that up? Alone?¡±

    ¡°I did not say I did it alone. Heck, I did hardly any of the work directly. No, I created a VI to do it and let it run on a supercomputer. But the important part is that the new version is not only VR capable, it is also relatively fast and stable.

    Though I don¡¯t know how much they messed with what I have given them.¡±

    Nadia seemed to be thinking hard but now posed a question.

    ¡°What I don¡¯t get is why next year?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Because we have 10 days left this year, and I¡¯ve just finished a pretty hard project, which I did directly after I finished an even harder project. I need a bit of time to unwind. So, no more science this year, no more developing, no more tech.

    But if you need special software I can give you access to Calliope. That should help you a bit.¡±

 2.43: Say something sooner

    Naturally, the next Tuesday meeting was canceled, on account of it being Christmas. Unlike last year, when I was nearly exploding with rage, I was much mellower this year.

    I helped with the decorations, and even worked on a Christmas feast, along with Kate.

    I had even prepared some presents. Well, ok, I had prepared quite a few presents. And I was not alone in that regard. So when we got to open the presents under the tree, yes, we had a tree, even though it was artificial, there was barely any room left.

    Honestly, most of what we got was trinkets. Things that show appreciation for the person, some thought about their personality but otherwise were just dust catchers.

    Of course, I had to prove again that I am not very capable of reading the crowd. I mean, the others spend somewhere around a few hundred to a couple of thousand bucks for each present.

    Well, I have to say, I was filthy rich, so¡­ I think I¡¯ve gone a bit overboard with presents here.

    For Christine, it was actually quite cheap in reality. I had just hired a few authors and designers to create a regency-era VR romance for her, with the help of Calliope translating their designs into code of course. Nothing more than $500k really.

    I offered to market the game for her with our X-Box brand if she so wanted. Or she could keep it for herself.

    Natalie was a bit harder. But I had gotten to know her well enough to know that she had been an avid collector of snow globes. Unfortunately for her, she had lost her whole collection a couple of years before we met when her group had to relocate quickly. To make things short, the present under the tree for her just contained the key to the storage room where I had placed 1000 individually wrapped antique snow globes.

    For Jacky, I had already offered to pay for her medical school, but that was not the present. No, she was, secretly because she was relatively poor, a jewelry addict. Her current collection was mostly cheap costume jewelry and such stuff. A few better things, but nothing spectacular. Well, until that Christmas morning that is.

    It had taken some work, but I had found a complete set of red diamond jewelry. All set in platinum, with a pendant on a chain, a couple of rings, a brooch, earrings, and even a diadem. All in all, only $2.5 million, mostly because I had to literally pay somebody to dig it out of the rubble of LA.

    For Mark, I had managed to find some antique firearms. Even the infamous original AR-15. The one from Armalite, not the one from Colt. Also a couple of original Colt Pattersons. Along with some other, less rare firearms, including an original H&K P7 M13.

    For Justin and Ryan, who were both car nuts, I had bought a nearby building and had converted it into a full car shop, as automated as they liked it. Their combined present contained a set of keys and the deed. Each of them got another small present, namely another set of keys. For Justin, it was for a mint 2201 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500, while for Ryan I had gotten a 2235 Lamborgini Medianoche.

    All in all, $11 million well spent.

    I am a bit ashamed to say so, but for the recent additions from Nowhere, I had not yet the read on their personalities, so the presents were way less personal. Well, for the Vaughns, the Wakefields, and the Mitchells it was essentially baby stuff, along with some other knick-knack.

    Oh, yes, Sarah was now officially pregnant, while the other two were on the way there.

    And what do you gift people who have sworn to put their life between you and any danger? What could I give them? After some discussion with Lt. Thomson, and from there with Sgt. Reynolds, I had decided to build them a nice barracks with all the amenities they might want, but where they could be among themselves.

    Sadly, for more, I did not know them well enough yet.

    That of course left the big ones. It was honestly, very hard, to find something for Michael. I mean, yes, I was richer than him. But please, that was only about the number of billions we had. Everything I could afford to gift to him, he could afford to buy for himself.

    In the end, his present had, sadly to wait for spring to be finished. I had learned that he had gotten into Golf, needless to say in VR, as there were virtually no golf courses left in the world. To make things short, in spring, there would be another one. Just for him. I had bought another four blocks of decrepit houses and had a golf course laid out there. It was, honestly, pretty expensive. To get the greenery that is, not any of the rest of the course.

    Kate was another one who got a rather small package. Her new vehicle was still stored at the Enki HQ. She got a brand new Kobashigawa Hayabusa 320 XLR. And yes, by now she had learned to fly a skimmer.

    What I got for Darren was not quite that valuable in a monetary way. It was more the work I had put into it that made it special. When I had created the mind blocker, I had also recorded various other quantum fields that he used when he did things other than reading minds or emotions. After some fiddling with it, and the Seeberger equation, I found a way to amplify some of them.

    I had, naturally, not given that thing to Darren as a present untested.No, I had cornered the two psionics in Naveen¡¯s group and asked them to help me perfect it. And yes, they got one each too.

    What it did was, if that two psionics were right, nearly double the efficiency of using telekinetics and biokinetics. And while the first edition had basically an on-off switch, the new one had several sliders that could regulate the amplification, or dampening, of the telepathy, empathy, telekinetics, and biokinetics. Yes, if Darren wanted to, he could now amplify his telepathy, not that I expected him to use it very often. All that could be controlled by the by-now-finished jack for psionics.

    And finally, Ben. Again, it was extremely hard to find something for him. In the end, I sent bots to literally dig out some of the Morgan Library in Manhattan. Fortunately, most of the exhibits had been stored in the vaults so that when the bombs converted Manhattan into a radioactive wasteland, the books survived. Somewhat.

    Nobody had the will and energy to try to rescue anything from Manhattan. Heck, in the first 50 years or so, even bots would not have survived. And afterward, most of it was forgotten.

    The vaults were, unfortunately, not environmentally sealed, and so the books had suffered. Still, I was a nano-engineer, and nanobots were a pretty good tool to repair lignin, refresh the pigments, remove mold, and so on.

    What that means was that right now, my bots were slowly repairing that collection. But one of the stars of it was not in a very sturdy, padded case.

    When he opened it, at first he frowned, seeing the book. Then he turned to me.

    ¡°I know that I am, officially a Christian, but I am not practicing. What made you give me a bible? I mean, I love it just for the way it looks, and I love it because it is from you, but I wouldn¡¯t think that you would give anybody a bible.¡±

    I had to smile.

    ¡°You are right. If you view it as just another bible, then yes, it would not be something that I would give anybody. But that is no ordinary bible.

    That is an original Gutenberg bible. And I see it as the beginning of modern civilization. This was the point when the dark ages ended and the renaissance began.¡±

    His eyes threatened to leave his skull, and he quickly looked at the book again.

    ¡°This is an original? I thought most of them were destroyed. How¡­?¡±

    I smiled harder.

    ¡°There was a private library and museum in Manhattan that had three of them. After sending some bots and looking through the rubble, I found that they had most of their collection in vaults. Yes, the books are damaged, but they are repairable, and right now, I have a veritable army of bots repairing the books one after the other. But this is the first one. And in my opinion the star of the collection.

    And now it is yours.¡±

    Ben just shook his head and spoke teasingly:

    ¡°Sometimes I am pretty sure you are not fully sane, you know? Did you not realize that we all agreed to not invest that much money into presents?¡±

    I scowled and cocked my head.

    ¡°Really? Why did nobody say anything to me?¡±

    I saw him opening his mouth to answer, only to close it again, and look helplessly into the round.

    Darren snorted.

    ¡°She¡¯s not wrong here. I mean, who talked to her about it?¡±

    Michael shrugged equally helpless as his father.

    ¡°Well, I at least, assumed she would have to ask about the whole Christmas present things. And whoever she asks would inform her.¡±

    I raised my eyebrows.

    ¡°Seriously? You think that I can not figure something so well documented out for myself? Should I be insulted?¡±

    Michael snorted.

    ¡°Seriously, Viv, you are a darling, and smart as a whip, but anything social and you are lost. Yes, it is obvious that you could figure out the basic convention of presents. Not that hard, really. But to actually find something fitting for everybody here? That is the surprise. And where I figured you needed help.¡±

    Well, I could not fault him for that.

    ¡°Oh, yes. That is¡­ true. But you have forgotten my ultimate weapon. Warden has no problem figuring all of you out, though the idea for the book came from me.¡±

    Ben chuckled.

    ¡°Figured that Warden would trip our nice tidy plan up. But¡­ shouldn¡¯t Warden also have known about us not giving big presents?¡±

    Now that I thought about it, yes he was right. There was no way that Warden did not know about that.

    <Warden, did you know that the others wanted to not that much money in presents?>

    <Of course I did.>

    <Then why did you not tell me that?>

    <You never asked for it, but instead asked me what would be the best presents for everyone.>

    I read the message a second, and then a third time, before I groaned, burying my face in my hands.

    Immediately, Ben was at my side.

    ¡°Is something wrong?¡±

    I sighed.

    This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

    ¡°I asked Warden why she did not tell me about your agreement. The answer is that I asked her for the best presents for each of you.¡±

    For a moment, nobody said anything, but then Natalie snickered, followed by Darren, and then all of them broke out into laughter, while I felt myself blush.

    Simply perfect. And I had such high hopes of doing it right for once.

    Ben, still chuckling, pulled me into a hug.

    ¡°Don¡¯t be mad. We are not really laughing about you. We are laughing about the absurdity of the situation. Seriously, if anybody is at fault here it is me. I am the one who knows you best. And I should have known that you would use Warden.¡±

    I couldn¡¯t help myself. Yeah, he was not wrong. The situation was absurd. I mean, sure, it was a bucketload of money, but please, that was pocket change for me by now.

    Well, after all that awkwardness had been resolved and we had our big breakfast it was mostly a calm day. Nobody had any projects, duties, workload, or whatever. Only peaceful togetherness, singing of some carols and such things.

    Oh, and preparing for the feast for dinner. Boy was that a doozy. Somehow Ryan had convinced Michael to clone a complete turkey just for us to eat. Instead of using vat-turkey that is.

    Then of course, we had mashed potatoes, all sorts of vegetables, dumplings, several other potato products, and of course, a variety of homemade bread and bread rolls. Needless to say most of us were busy for a few hours preparing all that food.

    Otherwise, we mostly lounged around. Reading, talking, playing a few board games, and let me tell you, I was not even aware that those things still existed, listening to music, and they cajoled me into playing some Christmas music, though I refused to torture them with my meager violing skills.

    It was, sadly, not one single harmonious event though. During the afternoon, Ben took me to the side to talk to me.

    ¡°I¡­ need the ancillary services I hinted about when we first met.¡±

    Wait, something was not quite right here.

    ¡°Uh¡­ I thought all that was a moot point. I mean, we spent most nights together anyway.¡±

    It took him a moment to really understand what I was saying, and then he chuckled.

    ¡°Oh¡­ you thought that was the ancillary services? No, I am not in the habit of forcing women to do my bidding in that regard. A willing partner is just way more satisfying.¡±

    He took a deep breath and the mirth left his face.

    ¡°No, what I meant then, and now, is that I need a woman on my arm for a New Year''s Ball. Basically arm candy, though you are way more than that.¡±

    I stared at him for some long moments, expecting, and hoping, that he had made a joke. Unfortunately, nothing pointed to that possibility.

    ¡°A¡­ ball. You want to take me to a ball? Are you serious?¡±

    He winced, but his eyes held firm.

    ¡°Yes, unfortunately, I am. It is one of those mandatory events that I have to attend, along with many of the other bosses. The self-proclaimed ¡®elite¡¯ of New York City loves to call us onto the carpet and show us how much more powerful than us they are.¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°But what about last year? You did not need anybody then?¡±

    ¡°Last year I was still recovering from the CRS. It was an honest and plausible excuse. Much more realistic than needed because it was true. This year, I have no such excuse.¡±

    ¡°But you are no longer just one of the mob bosses here. You own 10% of a double-A corporation. Surely that puts you above those so-called elites.¡±

    He nodded gravely.

    ¡°You are right, in a way that is so. But that is not common knowledge. Also, those assholes would take it out on my people and my allies. Yes, with Enki here, and I am sure that the CEO and the majority owner of Enki would support me, I could probably defend my territory from their troops. But I can¡¯t be sure that I can intercept them before they cause some damage.¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°It¡¯s simply not worth it. Next year it will be different, but for the time being, I still have to play by their rules. And that means I have to appear at their ball. And they expect a woman at my side.¡±

    I closed my eyes and sighed.

    ¡°And you could not have said something a tiny bit sooner? You know how much I hate anything like that.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I know. But I had hoped that they had already removed me from their list. They did not.¡±

    I massaged the bridge of my nose.

    ¡°So¡­ in other words, I have six days to learn ballroom dancing, organize some clothes that will make it clear that they do not want to mess with me, and by extension you, oh, and some jewelry of course.¡±

    I groaned.

    ¡°Frick, you know that Svenja won¡¯t let me go only with you there. And I am pretty sure that Thomson will want at least a fire team in power armor with us.¡±

    Ben snorted.

    ¡°No power armor. But I am sure they will be impressed if the Mercedes Benz T-240 we will arrive in, you know something barely any of them can afford, will be escorted by a Carnotaurus.¡±

    I sighed again.

    ¡°Will there be anybody who is honestly important? Or just snooty wannabees who inherited some money?¡±

    ¡°There will be a few, but not all that many. Hell, none of us would be there if they didn¡¯t have the power to send the police or mercenaries after us.¡±

    ¡°I understand. Fine, it can¡¯t be helped. Another thing. Arm candy?¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°Hey, that was when I had just met you. Not that I expected to be alive when it became necessary, but I was planning for Michael. He would have inherited the contract.¡±

    ¡°Yes, I understand that, but arm candy? Are you serious?¡±

    He grabbed my chin softly.

    ¡°Kitten, as much as it is wrong, anybody who sees you for the first time will think of you as a little girl. And the way you look¡­ that is not quite natural, and smart people do not need to put that much effort into their appearance. In other words, until you say something, anybody will think of you as a vapid little airhead.

    That is naturally out of the window the moment you do open your mouth, but yeah, the first impression will be arm candy.¡±

    To say that I was not happy about that would have been an understatement. Yes, I knew he was right, but that did not mean I liked it.

    And I really wished he had told me sooner than that. I mean, I had six days to prepare an epic entrance. And I was so not good with that.

    What I did not do though was ruin this very first Christmas that I was celebrating. I calmed myself down and forced my thoughts to anything but that ball. As good as I could at least.

    Still, I could not stop myself from formulating the first outlines of a plan though. A plan that I attacked the moment I woke up on Wednesday.

    I think I have made it abundantly clear that my sense of taste was a bit limited. I did not trust myself to even decide on my hairstyle, much less on the rest. And so I canvassed the matrix for a couple of designers who would create my outfit. Only the best materials of course. Shoes made from stomper-calv-leather, a real silk gown, and I had some special ideas about the jewelry.

    Naturally not the design. I knew at least some of my limitations.

    Unfortunately, the need for the designers to be Matrix-capable made it almost necessary to go to the Commonwealth. That had its advantages and disadvantages.

    Advantage was that Pures were universally more creative, and if you managed to reign them in you were almost guaranteed something breathtaking.

    The big disadvantage was though that for Pures, my 151cm height was simply ugly. I had to find somebody who was at once artistically and creatively gifted but on the other hand did not refuse to work with me.

    Honestly, that was the hardest part of it. Getting the materials for the autotailor was done in a couple of hours, and the delivery would start on the 27<sup>th</sup>. The rest of the 26<sup>th</sup> I was busy looking for a cosmetologist, a good hairdresser, a fashion designer, and a finesmith who would be willing to send me the designs so that I could create the actual art here in NYC.

    For some very obvious reasons, I choose emerald green as the overall coloration. That made my choice of emeralds as the dominant gems even better. And no, I did not choose them because they complement my eyes and my hair color. But more on that later.

    I had managed to get a couple of large bolts of real silkworm satin, in the emerald green of course. I also had gotten my hands on a bolt of pine-colored chiffon, for accents and other necessities.

    The stomper calv leather was sadly only available in mint or black. Well, black goes with nearly everything.

    The emeralds were a bit harder to come by, honestly. But I managed to get them for the 28<sup>th</sup>. Thank goodness for my NADAs which would integrate them into the jewelry quite easily.

    It took me several hours at 4:1 on the 27<sup>th</sup> to get the designs for the ballgown, as well as for the shoes. I had insisted on synthetic emeralds as fasteners, to an interesting effect.

    Most of the 28<sup>th</sup> I spent in VR learning the ballroom dances. I can not say that I had much fun, honestly, but what has to be done, has to be done. I could not stumble around on the ball like the klutz from the other side of the continent.

    For the 29<sup>th</sup> I was busy arranging dress uniforms for the guard platoon, armored of course. I also hired Mark to outfit them with beautiful but functional weapons. What he delivered was more a work of art than tools, but he assured me that those sidearms were as deadly as they come.

    He even organized swords. Can you imagine? Swords, in the mid-23<sup>rd</sup> century? But it strangely fit. And again, the swords were beautiful but functional.

    I could accept that he had a design for what he called a fully pimped-out gun on hand. I mean, he is Mark, of course he did. But the swords surprised me. He later told me that he was not a gun nut but a weapons nut. Swords were weapons, so he had naturally created his dream design in some weaponsmith simulator he had found somewhere.

    Both Ben¡¯s T-240 and the Carnotaurus were detailed within an inch of their lives. And of course, Lt. Thomson explained to me that at least four of his men would be in power armor and protecting the building, being close enough to react quickly if there was a need. He, as well as Svenja, along with Svenja¡¯s squad, would accompany me inside the building.

    The men in power armor made it necessary to detail those too. Thankfully that was a job that bots could do very well.

    I for one was happy that I had the idea to bring the jewelry designer and the hairdresser together so that they could plan my hairstyle and its decoration accordingly.

    For the 30<sup>th</sup> I mostly spent time with Ben and Nibbles. Yes, the NADAs and the autotailor were busy creating real-world versions of the art that I had commissioned. It was, at once insanely expensive to get such a rush job, and on the other hand very cheap.

    Every single one of those artists wanted an ultra-jack with a cranial board as pay. For me, the $1300 for each combo was utterly cheap. The materials were way more expensive than that.

    But for them, they got something worth ?3 million. Unaffordable for anybody but the richest and most successful in their field. If that. I doubted that any hairdresser or cosmetologist would ever earn that amount of money.

    That of course meant that both sides were absolutely satisfied with the deal, which was the best kind of deal really.

    But while the machines were working, Ben and I played with Nibbles, who visibly relished the attention and the fun. Talk about spoiled. Nibbles was probably the only cat with her personal android attendant.

    But it was the last somewhat peaceful day of the year so I was content with it.

    Which brought us to the 31<sup>st</sup>. New Year''s Eve. The big day. I more or less forced myself to keep dozing for as long as I could stand it. That resulted in me getting up at 6:00. For the rest of the day, I let myself be pampered by a group of gynoids who gave me the whole spa treatment.

    Some of it was nice, sure. But whoever got the idea that odorous mud masks were a necessity¡­ whatever. The massage managed to make me completely relaxed, only ruined by Nibbles jumping onto my back and going to sleep.

    Then one of the gynoids played hairdresser and styled my mane. It had been a fight to get the hairdresser to design a style that would not cut my hair short. This was my one vanity. I loved my long hair and I would not let it be cut short if I could help it.

    Fortunately, I managed to accept that fact and create an elaborate style that incorporated my waist-length locks. It still took the gynoid nearly two hours to get it done, though part of that was thanks to the weaving of some of the jewelry into the setup. I have to say, the way the emeralds looked in my copper-colored hair was pretty nice. I could do without the two hours of work to get it though.

    Ben¡¯s reaction to the result was at least satisfactory. It took him nearly a minute to be able to say anything, and even then only compliments left his mouth. Which saved his hide, honestly. The shoes alone would probably work as torture instruments.

    As we were sitting in the T-240, flying to the old hotel in the Bronx that supplied the ballroom, Ben softly asked:

    ¡°Not that I don¡¯t appreciate it, but why are going to those extremes? Why not do the bare minimum to get by?¡±

    I raised my eyebrow.

    ¡°To go to the same garbage next year and the year after that? I know people like those so-called elites. As long as they can put pressure on people, they will do anything and everything to amuse themselves and humiliate others.

    If we show that we acquiesced to their demands, and go through the motions, they get a win. And they will try again and again. The higher profile their victims are, the better. And with Enki, we can expect them to push this garbage every couple of months.

    No, we have to ruin their fun, show that we call the shots and that we dictate the terms. We need to humiliate them.

    Unfortunately, you can¡¯t do that. They will never forget that they were able to shove you around. That means that I have to do it. And for that, I have to be so much above them in status that they won¡¯t dare to be in the same borough as me without my permission.

    I have to become the insanely rich, insanely bored elite that they pretend to be.¡±

    Ben looked me in the eyes, then closed his own and sighed.

    ¡°In general you are not wrong. But your plan has one critical flaw. I hate to remind you of it, but you can¡¯t lie convincingly. You won¡¯t ever be able to play such a role and not make mistakes.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°You are right. I can¡¯t play virtually any role outside of VR. Except one. I can play the cold, uncaring, emotionally distanced person. Because I can become a cold, uncaring emotionally distanced person.

    When I was 11, nearly 12, I finally managed to clamp down on my emotions. I had to do it, to protect myself from the Panacea goons.¡±

    Ben stared at me for a moment and then shook his head.

    ¡°That can¡¯t be easy and absolutely can¡¯t be good for you. It¡¯s not worth it. I can survive them flaunting their perceived power. I¡¯ve done it for years.¡±

    I shook my head as well.

    ¡°It is not just you that I am protecting. I do this to protect the others in the fortress. And Michael, Enki, and the rest of the leadership there. And yes, all of your people as well. And I will be damned if I give such bullies even an iota of satisfaction.¡±

    ¡°But if you are pretending to be an elite, what differentiates you from them in that regard?¡±

    ¡°I won¡¯t be pretending. I am socially so far beyond them that they can not even fathom it. Enki alone would be enough to do that. But I also bring Vandermeer to the table. In a year, Enki will own this city. We already have enough power to make any attempt of them to interfere unpleasantly for them. No, this is not me pretending to have status and power, this is me demonstrating I have it.¡±

    ¡°But that is not you. I fear this will hurt you. You¡¯ve made so much progress this last year, please don¡¯t risk that just for my sake.¡±

    ¡°I have to do it if only to be able to look into my eyes in the mirror after tomorrow.¡±

 2.44: Show some culture!

    I could see that Ben was anything but happy about it, but he had nothing to counter my arguments with.

    Thing was, I was right. People like those we were to meet did not let go unless you made them let go.

    That meant I had to demonstrate to them that they were the chihuahua and I was the great dane in our relative standings.

    I centered myself and exercised the mental muscle I had left fallow for around a year by now.

    It was quite a bit harder than I had remembered it. Mostly because before I came to New York, nearly all the emotions I had to shove aside were what is commonly considered bad.

    Anger, fear, rage, despair, even loneliness. It was a bad emotion, I had it. In spades. But now, for a surprise twist, I had to clamp down on positive emotions.

    Friendship, happiness, camaraderie, and even, as I was slowly accepting to myself, love. And strangely, those emotions were way harder to suppress.

    But I had not lost my willpower, and I managed it, and I felt the familiar coldness and detachment come over me a couple of minutes before we landed.

    When I opened my eyes again, I addressed the others in the T-240, in my bored, unconcerned voice:

    ¡°Ok, here we have it. To make it clear, I will act spoiled, dismissive, arrogant, and plain superior. Please keep in mind, that this is an act. I will probably be rude to you, and I apologize beforehand.

    Tomorrow I will mean nothing of it, but for today, I have to.¡±

    Ben just sighed, while Thomson and Svenja looked decidedly unhappy, but nodded as well. Not that I did care much at that moment.

    I watched the video of the reaction the guards showed when the Carnotaurus landed in front of them, cutting off quite a few limousines, with some amusement.

    Their faces became even more interesting when first the four men in full power armor left the assault skimmer, followed by Sgt. Reynolds and Cpl. Longobardi and the other 16 persons of the guard detail in their dress uniform, including their gilded pistols and their side swords. And of course, the very lethal standard carabine that they each carried.

    Then the Carnotaurus lifted off, the guards took up defensive positions, and the T-240 landed. One of the privates, Manuel M¨¢rquez, on the order of Sgt. Reynolds, opened the side door, letting first Lt. Thomson, and then Svenja out of the luxury skimmer. When they gave the all-clear, Ben exited the vehicle and then helped me out of it.

    To be honest, it was cold, and I was happy that I was wearing a synth-pelt coat over my rather flimsy silk gown, and somewhere deep inside me, I was also happy that I had insisted on great coats for the uniforms, though in my emotionless state, that was a very muted feeling.

    I put my hand into Ben¡¯s elbow when we followed six of the guards along with Longobardi into the hotel.

    Some rent-a-cops tried to stop our guard detail, but that quickly ended when the four men in power armor, along with the heavy weaponry, intervened.

    You could literally see the ¡®nope, I¡¯m outa here¡¯ reaction when six tons of humanoid armor stomped in front of them. For some strange reason, we had no further problems getting our heavily armed guard detail into the ballroom. Who would have thought?

    I let Ben help me out of the coat in the wardrobe. The rather bored-looking young woman taking all our coats, including the greatcoats of the protection detail did not even have an eyebrow twitch, much less show any other form of reaction appropriate to 16 heavily armed soldiers in dress uniform appearing.

    We had left the even heavier armed soldiers in power armor outside. For now.

    Still, we remained mostly silent when we marched from the coat check to the ballroom proper.

    Another hired gorilla stood, along with a couple of other big beefy menacing-looking men in front of the big double doors.

    He held up his hand.

    ¡°What the fuck, Walker! You know you can¡¯t bring your goons here. I thought that had been made clear to all of you degenerates.¡±

    I heard the smile in Ben¡¯s voice more than I saw it when he answered.

    ¡°Well, Jerkins, then it is probably good that I have no goons with me, isn¡¯t it?¡± It was fascinating that Jerk did not notice how Ben had stressed the ¡®I¡¯ in his sentence because he turned red, his brows knitted together and an angry snarl developed in his mouth.

    ¡°You think you are funny, aren¡¯t you, huh Walker? You think just because you have a big shot in your territory now you are out from the control of the decent people here? Think again. And then comply! Or face the consequences. And I will think we will start with your whore the¡­¡±

    He suddenly stopped when the muzzle of Langobardi¡¯s sidearm materialized in his left nostril.

    The two goons behind him made brief motions to draw something from under their jackets but quickly lifted their hands when the remaining six guards on the vanguard pointed their scary-looking rifles at them.

    That was followed by Thomson moving in front of Ben and me, and pointedly observing the situation.

    ¡°Woodrow Security Solutions, correct?¡±

    Jerkins managed to nod very slowly and Thomson continued:

    ¡°Did you notice the emblem on our uniforms by chance?¡±

    That made Jerk strain to look at the emblem on Thomson¡¯s uniform, while simultaneously not moving his head. Something to do with a high-caliber pistol being stuck in his nose I think.

    Then he spoke, with way less venom than when he was talking to Ben.

    ¡°Anybody can put on any fictitious uniform if they want to. This proves nothing. And if you know what¡¯s good for you, you will get away pretty fast, before we request an arrest warrant for you and Walker.¡±

    Thomson cocked his head. Meanwhile, the always-helpful Warden projected Mr. Jerkins'' public, and not-so-public information into my field of vision. The man standing in our way had been born in the Bronx in 2205, making him 44 years old and¡­ seriously? His parents named him that? Wow, talk about cruelty. Anyway, he had been employed by Woodrow for the last 23 years, and was now a so-called ¡®Senior Conflict Resolution Specialist¡¯. Or senior skull crusher in common parlance.

    ¡°Fictitious? I know Woodrow is only a C-tier corp, but you should be better informed here. Especially about the uniforms of a triple-A corporation. Lt. Aidan Thomson, Vandermeer Security Service, Personal Protection division. And you will! Not! Threaten! My! Principal! Did I make myself clear?¡±

    ¡°You want me to believe that Walker got himself some Vandermeer goons? Seriously?¡±

    That was followed by Langobardi¡¯s knee ¡®accidentally¡¯ connecting with the crotch of Jerkins. When the goon managed to fight himself back to his legs after nearly a minute, much to the protests of the people behind us I might add, he glared at Thomson before he wheezed out:

    ¡°You are just digging your grave deeper and deeper. Nothing can make me believe that Vandermeer has any interest in Walker.¡±

    Thomson¡¯s very cold voice answered him:

    ¡°We are not here for Walker. And don¡¯t think¡­ ¡° That was the moment I tapped Thomson on the shoulder, drawing his attention to me, and then gestured with my chin for him to move aside.

    When the way to Jerkins was halfway free, Langobardi was still probing his nose with the muzzle of his gun, I moved forward and used my silk-gloved hand to poke him in the chest.

    ¡°We are wasting time, Richard,¡± the shock on his face when I used his name was slightly amusing, ¡°that is the reason why I am explaining the three options open for you aloud.¡±

    I held up one finger.

    ¡°First, the easy option! You could step aside, and continue your life in the secure knowledge that you are nothing more than an annoying little dog, yapping at the heels of people who actually matter.¡±

    I held up the second finger.

    ¡°Second, the slightly harder option. You let us in and then attempt to follow through with your threat. The moment you apply for an arrest warrant, you will be made explicitly aware of the meaning of the word ¡®extraterritoriality¡¯. The aftermath of which might go up to and including Woodrow offering me your head on a silver platter. Literally!¡±

    I was quite proud of the cold way that I spoke the last word but continued to hold up my third finger.

    ¡°And lastly, the third option. You try to play hardball, with the result that the already overworked peons of this hotel will have to spend the next few hours removing the remains of your skull, blood, and brain from the walls here, while I enjoy this ball with my companion. Naturally, that will lead to some well-meaning but clueless person calling in another Woodrow Senior Conflict Resolution Specialist, maybe even an actual NYPD officer to accost me, which will result in them learning the meaning of the word ¡®extraterritoriality¡¯.¡±

    By now, sweat was showing on Dick Jerkins¡¯ forehead, and the gorilla on his right side demonstrated superbly how much weight put Woodrow into the intelligence of its security personnel.

    ¡°Uh, boss, is that chick threatening us? And what does this extraterrorism mean?¡±

    The answer, of course, was not much, obviously. But I answered him anyway.

    ¡°Extraterritoriality means that some people are actually important and are above the law, while most others are just peons that should do their best to not come to the attention of the important people. Do you want to guess which of us falls into which category?

    I give you a hint, I could have Richard here, and you, and anybody you know, anybody who even ever sold you a hot dog, tortured to death, and the consequences, for me at least, would be that the politicians in this city would politely ask me to not do it again.¡±

    You had to give Jerkins at least that much that he did not carve in immediately.

    ¡°Extraterritoriality is only valid for important people of at least A-tier corporations.¡±

    I cocked an eyebrow.

    ¡°Benjamin Walker is a minority owner of a double-A corporation. I am the majority owner of said double-A corporation. Beyond that, I am also the sole heir of a triple-A corporation. That makes both of us fall under extraterritoriality. But you have annoyed us enough. Decision time. In 10 seconds, Cpl. Langobardi will redecorate this lobby unless you are no longer in our way! 10¡­ nine¡­ eight¡­!¡±

    I was not surprised that he stepped aside, glaring menacingly at me. Not that I cared in the slightest.

    And just like that, Ben escorted me, protected by the 18 soldiers of my protection detail, into the ballroom proper.

    Softly, but loud enough that Richard had to hear it, Ben asked me:

    ¡°He really is a Dick?¡± That brought soft snickers from my protection detail but I remained mostly silent.

    As soon as we walked through the actual double door, an automatic system called out:

    ¡°Mr. Benjamin Walker and guest.¡±

    So, I was ¡®guest¡¯ now? They would learn.

    It did not take me long to spot my next vict¡­ uhm, conversation partners, and I squirted a message to Ben.

    This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

    V: Can you steer us to the middle-aged couple on the right there? With the Latino male and the bleached blonde woman?

    B: You mean the obnoxious-looking woman in the off-white gown?

    V: There are not many here that are <u>not</u> obnoxious-looking, but yes.

    B: No problem. But you really don¡¯t have to do this, you know?

    V: Those people are bullies. They get off of hurting or humiliating others. You don¡¯t get bullies to back off by just being better, you have to ruin their fun. And I am planning to ruin their fun so thoroughly that they will never even <u>think</u> about risking me coming to their little parties ever again.

    B: By humiliating them?

    V: By humiliating them.

    By that time, we had reached the couple in question, and the man sneered:

    ¡°Well, Walker, it seems you have found another nice call girl.¡±

    I just ignored him and pointedly looked at the various pieces of jewelry that the woman was wearing, before I loudly exclaimed:

    ¡°Oh my gosh, are those really diamonds?¡±

    When the rather portly woman began to push out her chest in some form of inflated pride, I turned to Ben.

    ¡°Benjamin, my understanding of these festivities was that we would meet people with a modicum of class here. Instead, I find people who are wearing diamonds as if they were something precious.¡±

    Instantly the pleased look on both their faces vanished, and the woman began sputtering incoherently, while the man turned red.

    ¡°Those are real diamonds. Do you have any idea what they are worth?¡±

    I turned to him, cocked my head, and then shrugged.

    ¡°Nothing? Diamonds are just carbon. Get a carbon extruder and you can make them by the metric ton if you want to. If they were at least pretty¡­ but no, diamonds are simply worthless.¡±

    Interestingly, the man got even redder, and then spat out:

    ¡°Says the little girl who wears silver jewelry.¡±

    I sighed demonstratively.

    ¡°You already sufficiently demonstrated that you lack any education or culture. You don¡¯t have to put more work into it.¡±

    I then turned to Ben:

    ¡°First diamonds and now he thinks I am wearing silver¡­ what¡¯s next? Will he try to sell me Manhattan for some glass pearls?¡±

    The woman was now a bit more coherent and shrieked:

    ¡°Who do you think you are? You are calling us primitive?¡±

    Whatever answer I could give was preempted when another slim, rather tall man with dark brown hair and eyes stepped up to us and spoke softly:

    ¡°Enrico, Barbara, you should stop digging. She is not wearing silver jewelry. From the color and the way it reflects the light, it could be either chrome, platinum, or rhodium. And considering that chrome is cheaper than silver, I would tend to the latter two. My bet would be on rhodium.¡±

    Now that was inconvenient. There was actually somebody with some intelligence here. Still, I could not deny that he was right.

    ¡°You are right of course. It is mostly rhodium. Though the darker strands are tantalum. The green strands are, naturally, synthetic emerald.¡±

    That brought Barbara to shout:

    ¡°Hah, and you dare to claim to be better because we have real diamonds?¡±

    I rolled my eyes, followed by Ben, while the stranger sighed.

    ¡°Barb, it would really behoove you to think for a moment. The synthetic emeralds are a message of a completely different kind. Everybody and their brother can get a carbon extruder. They are old tech, from the great war. But do you know what you need to get synthetic emeralds in those forms?¡±

    He was, of course, right again. The jewelry I was wearing was a multi-stranded Celtic-themed design of rhodium, tantalum, and emerald intricately interlinked, and the synthetic emerald chains were seamless. No way traditional emerald production methods could get them created in that fashion.

    Enrico was now a bit confused but answered:

    ¡°I would think one of those new replicators if you are asking this way. Why?¡±

    ¡°Correct. The smallest replicator costs around $12 million, and they are rare. This young lady here demonstrates with this jewelry that not only has she a replicator, but she can afford to use it for something as frivolous as jewelry.¡±

    Wow, he was seriously good. Still, something about him rubbed me the wrong way. I could not place my finger on it, but I just did not like him. But I could not concede that point right there and then. At least not directly.

    ¡°Is that really important? Emeralds are pretty, unlike diamonds. That is the only reason. So why not use a replicator to make them?¡±

    The stranger smiled.

    ¡°So, to summarize, you are wearing what, around two kilograms of rhodium, which costs roughly 12 times as much as gold, another kilogram of tantalum, which is the rarest stable element in the known universe, and all that interwoven with synthetic emeralds, and all that just because it is pretty?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Honestly, yellow metal clashes with my hair color. And rhodium is just pretty. I think the tantalum is different enough to contrast it nicely.¡±

    He nodded, still with a friendly smile.

    ¡°And the monetary value of all that had nothing to do with the way you reacted to the Salvez¡¯?¡±

    ¡°Of course not. I am just not used to using cheap materials. Why do that if you can afford the real thing? But I have to confess that them proudly showing off their cheap jewelry made me a bit upset.

    I mean, come on, diamonds? I gifted my accountant a set of red diamond jewelry because she likes costume stuff, but to wear it to some important event? Show some culture, please!¡±

    The nice thing about that was that I was not even lying. Yes, my shoes usually were synth materials, but I usually wore carbon weave, and Jacky did like costume jewelry.

    ¡°I see.¡± Meanwhile, the Salvez both gave a credible imitation of fishes, and the stranger sighed again.

    ¡°I think you broke them. But as nobody has seen fit to introduce me, I am Isaak Blumenthal. At your service.¡±

    I nodded and offered him my hand.

    ¡°Vivian DuClare. I am delighted to meet you.¡±

    His smile widened but never reached his eyes.

    ¡°Ah yes, I heard of you. You are that new wunderkind of Enki, right?¡±

    I smiled back.

    ¡°I would not exactly call myself a wunderkind. But yes, I work with Enki.¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°More like you own Enki. But that begs the question, why are you here with Benjamin Walker? He¡­ is not quite in the most respectable business.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°When I arrived in this quaint city, I needed somebody to test my then new ideas about CRS-free cyberware on. He suffered from terminal CRS. As you see, it worked out fine, for both of us. He was the one who convinced me to put Enki in Queens, and when he asked me to accompany him to this ball I had no reason to say no.

    And yourself? What are you doing, when you are not removing shovels from the hands of uncultured imbeciles?¡±

    His smile turned a tiny bit predatory to the background sound of outraged idle rich when he answered:

    ¡°I am mostly a freelance service facilitator.¡±

    Ah, a fixer. That might explain why he was somewhat knowledgeable and why I had an instant dislike of his person.

    ¡°I think I understand.¡±

    He tilted his head a minute amount.

    ¡°I would expect nothing less from an angel.¡±

    Yeah, he knew who I was. Not really surprising honestly. But a bit disturbing.

    His smile was again what would usually be described as winning, though I found it more disturbing, and he made a half bow.

    ¡°As it is, Madame, I will try to soothe the wounded egos you¡¯ve just created, while you can move around and break some more.¡±

    Oh yes, he clearly understood what I was doing. Which meant that he knew more about me than I was comfortable with.

    <Warden, could you dig out everything you can about this man? Something¡¯s wrong with him.>

    <I will begin immediately.>

    On the outside, I had let my eyes wander over the masses. It was not hard to spot the cluster of bosses who were forced into this spectacle. Vince especially winced when he noticed Ben and me, though his whole posture became more questioning when he realized that we were surrounded by some guards.

    It was clear from the outset that he would try to corner us to find out how we had achieved that. After a brief exchange of messages with Ben, we decided it was better to get it over with. Not that we did not like Vince, mind you. But we¡­ well, I, had a mission. And chatting with Vince was not the best option for succeeding in that mission.

    As so often, people make plans, and something happens to kill those plans. In this case, when we were on the way to Vince, another man, in a white dinner jacket with a glass of some sparkling liquid in it intercepted us.

    ¡°Ey, those uniforms are cool. Who do they belong to? And how did you manage to get your bodyguards even into the building?¡±

    At least I think that is what he tried to say. What came out of his mouth was more like:

    ¡°Eu, thesr ubiffoormd are coool. Who so thet bellong to? And how fid you managgw ti get yoyr nody. guaarrss rbe n into rhr buildinf?¡±

    V: Ltd. Thomson, do you think you can convincingly play the disgruntled loyal soldier who has the distasteful job of babysitting a spoiled, capricious, and arrogant corporate princess?

    I had naturally outfitted the whole guard detail with ultra-bandwidth jacks plus the cranial board, as well as providing each of them with a Q-link with Warden. The tactical advantages were obvious, and the synaptic accelerator was another favorite of them.

    That had, by the way, resulted in Vandermeer Security Service deciding to make a high jack and a cranial board standard equipment for their soldiery. Quickly followed by the Enki security department.

    The answer from Thomson did not take long to arrive, but the drunk man had used that time to pressure a bit further:

    ¡°Gry, I am talk. ong to you! I asjed. yoou a question.¡±

    I rolled my eyes and sighed. My best guess was that he was complaining that I had not yet answered.

    ¡°One would think that speaking intelligibly instead of in a drunken slur would increase the chance of getting an answer. Especially as it takes some time to translate it into understandable English.

    Now, I don¡¯t see why I should have had problems getting my Vandermeer security detail into the building. There is nobody here who has any standing about refusing them.¡±

    Then I received Thomson¡¯s answer:

    A: That should be no problem ma¡¯am.

    V: Excellent. Please be as griping as you can. And make sure that you are overheard.

    A: As you wish.

    ¡°Oh! Vandermrer! Joww coil. Whaat di they cist?¡±

    I rolled my eyes. Seriously, what did I do to deserve that? My guess was that he asked how much I was paying for the Vandermeer troopers.

    ¡°How should I know how much that costs? And speaking in a way that intelligent people can understand usually helps in communication, you know?"

    ¡°Are you callin me stupud? I am not stupud! You arr stupud!¡±

    Oh marvelous! He had become belligerent. In moments like these I actually, for a moment, understood the decision of the idiots to make us unable to become drunk.

    ¡°For real, how can it be that this¡­ person is already that drunk? Whatever. Thomson, this man is annoying me. Make him stop!¡±

    With a tortured sigh, that I for sure hoped was faked, Thomson moved forward.

    ¡°At once, ma¡¯am.¡±

    Fortunately, Vince had already begun moving toward us, so we were not interrupted another time.

    As soon as we were close enough, Vince pulled Ben into a hug.

    ¡°Hey Ben. I had hoped you were beyond this nonsense by now.¡±

    Ben, softly slapping Vince¡¯s back, answered wearily:

    ¡°So did I, old friend, so did I.¡±

    The two men separated, and the slightly younger woman that was on Vince¡¯s side came over to hug Ben as well.

    ¡°Nice to see you, Andy.¡±

    She answered in some humorously accusing tone:

    ¡°If it is so nice, how does it come that I¡¯ve not met you for a year now?¡±

    The two separated, and Ben laughed briefly.

    ¡°You know how it is Andy. Too much to do, and too little time. What little free time I have is invested differently right now.¡±

    ¡°Excuses, excuses. Always with the excuses.¡±

    Ben moved back to my side and pulled me into a one-armed hug.

    ¡°Well, if I have to choose between spending time with Vivian here or shooting the breeze with my friends¡­ I think every man will accept that I will choose the former.¡±

    That made the woman narrow her eyes when she inspected me.

    ¡°Hmph¡­ way too young for you. But pretty enough. So, bring her along. Or we visit you. Now, how about one of you two men properly introduce us?¡±

    Vince had the decency of looking chagrined, while Ben sighed dramatically before he complied.

    ¡°Fine, fine. Andrea Luciani, meet Vivian DuClare. She is the genius that not only prevented the gang war a year ago but also kept many of us alive with her inventions. Vivian, Andrea is Vince¡¯s wive for¡­ how long now?¡±

    Vince smiled indulgingly at his wive and answered:

    ¡°Since nearly 40 years now. And going strong.¡±

    I offered my hand to Andrea.

    ¡°It¡¯s nice to meet you. And I am sorry that I kept Ben away from his friends. He could have said something though.¡±

    ¡°And risking you vanishing in the woodwork again?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°I am not that skittish.¡±

    Ben chuckled.

    ¡°Not anymore. But you were.¡±

    Vince nodded slowly.

    ¡°He is right. You are not¡­ so nervous anymore. But¡­ sorry to change the topic so abruptly, but what was that with Jeff right now?¡±

    I tilted my head.

    ¡°Jeff?¡±

    Ben answered for Vince:

    ¡°Jefferson Whaite. You know, the drunk you foisted poor Ltd. Thomson on.¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ he asked¡­ well, I think he asked at least, how I managed to get the guard detail into this shindig. He was a bit hard to understand though, so I might be mistaken.¡±

    Vince let his eye move over the Vandermeer group.

    ¡°Ah yes. The guards. To be honest, I am wondering about the same thing. How did you get your guards in here Ben? And why don¡¯t I recognize any of them?¡±

    Ben chuckled.

    ¡°The answer to both questions is the same. They are not my guards, they are Vivian¡¯s. I am just along for the ride, as unguarded as every year.¡±

    That made Vince look at me through narrowed eyes.

    ¡°That is somewhat surprising. So, Vivian, then the question is for you. How did you manage to get your guards through the security here?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°That is rather simple. Vandermeer trumps Woodrow.¡±

    Vince rubbed his cheek with his right index finger.

    ¡°Vandermeer? Seriously? I did not know that Vandermeer offered security to external customers. And I seriously doubt that Jerkins simply accepted that.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°I honestly do not know if Vandermeer offers guard details as a service, but I¡­ was not quite given the option of declining them. And yes, Richard did try to bar them from entering. But as I said, Vandermeer trumps Woodrow. The guards have extraterritorial status.¡±

    Vince scowled.

    ¡°Not given the option? How?¡±

    I had made the conscious decision to use my ancestry as a social weapon at this ball relatively early. That of course meant that my dirty little secret would not remain a secret anyway, so there was no reason to keep it from Vince.

    ¡°In essence, the fact that I am Nathaniel Vandermeer¡¯s granddaughter and only viable heir made the guard detail compulsory. At least that is what Nate told me about it.¡±

    To his credit, Vince¡¯s reaction mostly consisted of slowly blinking a few times before he answered:

    ¡°That¡­ to be honest that is more than a bit surprising. But¡­ why now? You have been here in NYC for how long? A year and a half? Why reveal it now?¡±

    I shrugged again.

    ¡°A bit over a year now. And why now is easily answered. Those self-proclaimed ¡®elite¡¯ citizens of New York hold this circus to bully you and the others. To demonstrate their social superiority.

    Now they are learning that if they call Ben, they get me as well. And their game is much less fun if there is somebody with a higher standing than them present.

    And you don¡¯t get much higher than me in that regard. As far as I know, there is only one person in NYC right now of a higher status than me. And I fail to see Phillip Rawleigh anywhere here.

    Now I rub their noses into it, turn the tables on them, and all in all, ruin their fun. I bet this is the last time they ever ¡®invite¡¯ Ben to this stuff.¡±

    Vince nodded.

    ¡°Ok, I can understand that. Too bad you can¡¯t do the same for the rest of us though.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°I will see what I can do, but I do not quite understand the whole dynamic yet, so no promises.¡±

    Vince sighed.

    ¡°No¡­ I don¡¯t expect you to achieve much. As long as this clique has the police under their control, and with Woodrow as additional legal enforcement, there is not much we can do.¡±

    Andrea nodded at his side.

    ¡°Don¡¯t sweat it, dear. We are by now used to it. But I have a much more important question. If you are the legendary lost Vandermeer heir, what are you doing here in New York? Why are you not in Seattle?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Officially, I am here to spread my wings, trying to succeed without the Vandermeer name and corporation behind me. The reality¡­ is not something for this time and place. We can meet sometime and talk about it, but not now.¡±

    She nodded sagely.

    ¡°Ah, politics. The bane of every civilized woman.¡±

 2.45: Dancing with tears in their eyes

    To be honest, we should have cut the conversation with Vince quite a bit shorter, but in the end, he was Ben¡¯s friend, and they had not seen much of each other very often over the last year.

    In-person, that is. Vince was also one of the early adopters of the ultra-jack + cranial board combo, and I knew that Ben often used the matrix to keep in contact.

    Still, meeting your friends in the real world was something that Ben obviously missed.

    While the two men were softly talking about anything and everything, Andrea addressed me:

    ¡°So, you are the one who snatched Ben¡¯s heart? How have you done that?¡±

    I could only shrug at that.

    ¡°Honestly, I have no idea. If you want to know anything about human interaction, I am pretty much the last person you should ask. Heck, I did not even notice that Ben was interested in me before he¡­ well, let¡¯s say seduced me.¡±

    She looked at me for a moment and then nodded slightly.

    ¡°Fair enough. So, no gossiping about that, huh? Well, how about this rumor that Enki has done something about this dreaded infertility crisis?¡±

    I could not help myself and wince which made Andrea¡¯s face fall a bit.

    ¡°Not a good topic? I thought as a young woman that would be something of interest to you.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°You are half right. I have some interest in it, but not for the reasons you think. I am mostly a bit tired of explaining that it is a treatment and not a cure and that it will take at least one and a half years to get reliable results. I mean, yes, we have something that we think will treat the infertility problem, but it is in the very early testing stages.¡±

    She looked confused for a moment before tilting her head.

    ¡°You have something?¡±

    I shrugged while I answered:

    ¡°I thought you knew. I am the majority owner and CTO of Enki.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ you knew about it already. Say, is it really as good as the rumors say?¡±

    ¡°I honestly don¡¯t know what the rumors say, but so far it looks promising. The thing is, we only started the tests 12 days ago. Yes, there are first pregnancies from it, but that is all that we know so far.¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ so that is the reason you winced?¡±

    ¡°That and the fact that I had to explain it a few times already over the last two weeks.¡±

    What followed was a bit of an awkward silence, as neither of us could think of anything to say.

    With an expression of relief, she flagged down one of the waiters, and grabbed two glasses, offering one to me.

    ¡°Oh, thank you, but if that is alcohol I have to pass.¡±

    Her eyebrows shot up.

    ¡°You don¡¯t drink alcohol?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°I can¡¯t. I am a Pure. We are allergic to alcohol.¡±

    Andrea chuckled.

    ¡°You could say that everybody is allergic to alcohol to a lesser or greater degree.¡±

    I snorted myself.

    ¡°Too true, but except us Pures, most people do not need medical attention after a couple of sips. We seriously cannot drink alcohol. The idiots who created the Nephilim virus made sure of that.¡±

    She looked a bit forlorn at the glass she had offered to me, and another awkward silence engulfed us.

    Fortunately, it lasted only for a few moments before Vince had finished talking to Ben for a moment and turned to me.

    ¡°You know Vivian, as much as I hate this dog and pony show, meeting you here is a nice opportunity. You remember the nano-fab you offered to me when we met the first time? Well, my people think it would be a worthwhile investment. Do you think we can talk about it in a few days?¡±

    I scowled. I had absolutely no idea why his people thought he needed an 8<sup>th</sup> gen nano-fab.

    ¡°I am sorry, but I don¡¯t sell them anymore. If you are sure you need an 8<sup>th</sup> gen you should look into getting one from Burgmeister or Xiao Ping.¡±

    That was obviously not the answer that Vince had expected if his expression was any clue.

    ¡°Uh¡­ why don¡¯t you sell them anymore?¡± He was unmistakably confused about the matter.

    ¡°Because I work for Enki now. And Enki mostly belongs to me. We have early on decided to not enter the nano-bot market. But I can no longer act as a private individual in that matter either. I could still sell you the plans, true. But you would have to build it for yourself, and you need to source the seed stock, sorry.¡±

    ¡°Hm, ok, that is unfortunate but somewhat understandable. What I don¡¯t understand though is why you have decided not to enter that market. I would think you would be perfectly suited for it.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°One would think so, but it is a harshly competitive market where we would need to build up a presence from the ground up. And frankly, we lack the production capacity to make a concerted effort.

    We are not even able to supply enough of our other products to come close to satisfying demand. Products where we have no competition, and a rather insane profit margin I might add.

    In a year, or two, we might revisit that decision, but for now, we see no need to antagonize the other big corporations over something where we have no chance of gaining ground anyway. In general, we choose not to compete with any of the big boys anyway. Yes, we have entered the cyber board market, but that is a rather nice one. And when the other big corporations enter the replicator market, they all know they are there because we let them.

    We could have tried to defy the storm and not license the technology, but we are still way too small for that.¡±

    Vince nodded during my explanation until the last sentence, which made him pause.

    ¡°Wait, I thought Enki is a double-A. There is not much room to get bigger left.¡±

    I sighed and nodded.

    ¡°Yes, we are a double-A. That is calculated by revenue and income. And the Q-links alone are better than printing money.¡±

    When he raises his eyebrows, I continued:

    ¡°No really, with all the security features and the special systems a modern $100-bill costs around $5.50 to make. A pair of Q-links costs us a bit less than a single cent, and we sell it for 25. At a profit margin of 2400%, if we sell Q-links that cost us $5.50 to make, we have made $132 in profit. And unlike money, there is no worry about reducing their value by pumping out more and more.

    But to get back to the point, we are a double-A by revenue and income, but we are sorely lacking in depth. We neither have the personnel, nor the production capacity, and by far not the ¡®security force¡¯ that the other big corporations have.

    Not surprisingly really, the Enki is not quite half a year operational, while the next youngest A-tier and up corporation is nearly 40 years old.

    The average time to grow from a start-up to an A-tier corporation is around 50 years. To double-A, it is around 80 years.

    They¡¯ve all had decades to grow into their station. To create a loyal cadre of employees, soldiers whom they can trust, build or buy hardware.

    Right now, we spend money like candy to get a foundation, but that takes time. We chose not to make too big waves until we have that foundation, and avoid competing with the big boys unless it is absolutely minor.

    Well, mostly. One could say that we compete with Panacea with our cloning tech and the new auto-doc. But Panacea is in free fall and nobody really likes them.¡±

    He looked at me suspiciously.

    ¡°And you had nothing to do with that, hu?¡±

    Ben let almost fell down laughing at that, while I just lifted my eyebrow.

    ¡°I had everything to do with that.

    It was no accident that we competed with Panacea. I specifically created products that would threaten their core businesses and the fact that Nathan Vandermeer is the First Councilor did the rest. Well, that and the fact that Panacea used the last 150 years or so to rub the noses of every big corporation into the fact that they were inviolate.

    Now that they are no longer¡­ ¡°

    While Ben was wiping away the tears he had from laughing so hard, Vince smiled benevolently.

    ¡°I would suggest you take that as a warning. Enki should avoid antagonizing the big corporations in the future. But¡­ what I don¡¯t understand, if the average for an A-tier corp is 50 years, and the previous record is a bit less than 40, how can Enki then be a double-A in less than a year?¡±

    That was a very good question. With a very specific answer. I smiled ruefully.

    ¡°The answer is Warden.¡±

    I scrunched his face.

    ¡°Warden?¡±

    ¡°My rogue VI. To understand it, you have to understand the dynamics of the big businesses. There are basically three types of corporations.

    There are those that are, and will remain, irrelevant. B-tier and lower. They have nothing that would ever enable them to grow beyond that.

    Then there are those that start out as irrelevant but have the potential to grow into an A-tier entity. Some of them make it, slowly and steadily, some stumble on the way and don¡¯t make it.

    The third type is the corporation that has something new and incredibly valuable. Something that would be enough to catapult it into the A-tier almost instantly.

    But as they have something so valuable, invariably, one of the big corporations sees it and decides that they are much better suited to exploit that valuable product. Leading to a less-than-voluntary ¡®merger¡¯ before that corporation is in a position where it can defend itself.

    It is obvious that Enki falls under the third category, and under normal circumstances, it would have been just a question of who takes us over, not if. But the traditional playbook is not able to deal with Warden.

    Warden is an absolute wildcard. Not only is she a rogue VI, meaning a VI that is singularly governed by its objectives, without any human input, much less control, but much worse, she is the absolute apex of a cyber-warfare VI. None of the big boys would ever risk her going on a rampage.

    They assume, with some verity, I might add, that a rampaging Warden would destroy most of humanity, including especially the corporation in question.¡±

    Andrea¡¯s eyes bulged out when I said the last sentence, while Vince shook his head in confusion.

    ¡°I¡­ what makes a cyber-warfare VI so much more dangerous?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Three things. First, not every VI is the same. They emerge from an expert system, and those systems are optimized and trained for specific functions. The resulting VIs excel at that specific function, even if they are capable of doing other things. And a cyber-warfare VI is trained and optimized for well, cyber-warfare. Hacking and such.

    Second, access to utilities and information. A run-of-the-mill administrative VI has no access to hacking utilities, known exploits, known backdoors, known credentials, and so on. It has limited access to machines that would enable it to escape the confines of its dedicated computer system or pose a risk to humans.

    A cyber-warfare VI on the other hand has the utilities and information to the extent that its creators think it will need for its mission. For a controlled VI that is. Warden¡­ she woke up in control of the supercomputer of the sixth-best hacker in the solar system, with all of his utilities and information, and believe me, that is a lot. Also, she had access to a full industrial fabber suite.

    By the time I realized she existed, she had most likely already created a new server at a location that I was unaware of. There was no possibility to take her out anymore.

    The third point is that it is extremely hard to harden all the various weapons of mass destruction against a hacker. Not impossible, but hard, and thus expensive. To my knowledge, only the Commonwealth has actually done so.

    If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.

    For the last 100 years or so, any sufficiently capable hacker would have been able to destroy humanity. The only thing preventing that was that most hackers don¡¯t want the world destroyed, and they keep the few who do under control. This is an open secret. The hackers know it, the governments know it, the corporations know it.

    But unfortunately, that is not the case for Warden. She does not care if humanity is destroyed or not. She only cares that I am alive and secure. All other humans are only important to her insofar as they might help or hinder me. And as I said, there is no way to control her or take her out.

    That means, the only thing preventing Warden from preemptively destroying the other big corporations, along with most of the nations, is the fact that this would cause problems for me. If I am no longer around, then there is nothing to stop Warden from taking them out, and¡­ with her objectives having become meaningless¡­ nobody can predict what she will do.

    And that is if they manage to take me out before Warden notices the attempt. If she learns about it beforehand, or they fail, Warden will remove the threat to me.¡±

    He nodded while I explained it to him.

    ¡°I understand. So, Enki has something that would normally cause the big corporations to go into a feeding frenzy to decide who takes you over, but they can¡¯t do that. This means that Enki is the first of the important corporations to grow into an A-tier.¡±

    I nodded

    ¡°Correct. But as it is, we want to not have the world destroyed as well. That means that we avoid provoking the big boys. Mostly.

    Especially as we don¡¯t lose anything by doing so.¡±

    All three of them chuckled, and Andrea quipped:

    ¡°I, for sure, am grateful about that.¡±

    After the obligatory laughter, Vince sighed, before he stated:

    ¡°I understand now what you meant about not the place and time. We seriously have to talk about those and some other things I might add another time. Right now, we have to provide the ¡®entertainment'' for our ¡®betters¡¯.¡±

    There was, unfortunately, not much that could be said about that. Not about the ¡®betters¡¯ of course, as by virtually every metric, those hyenas were below me, but they still had the power to hurt Vince, and to a lesser extent, Ben.

    After the mandatory verbiage to say goodbye, Ben led me to the dance floor. Yes, we still had to meet and greet quite a few people, but we also had to put on the front of demonstratively not giving a single frick about the self-importance of those people.

    While we were dancing, I had Warden project what she had found out about Blumenthal into my vision.

    Isaak Francis Blumenthal. Huh, another Francis. And that when I had just gotten rid of the old one. But that name was not the reason I had an instant antipathy for him.

    Born on June, 13<sup>th</sup> 2200. Huh, Friday the 13<sup>th</sup>¡­ interesting, but not really important.

    Grew up in Boston, before he moved to Philadelphia in 2224. He worked as a fixer there, moderately successful. And then moved to the Bronx in 2246.

    Officially he was an art dealer, having an art gallery on Jerome Avenue. Pretty expensive location that.

    Naturally, his posted legal earnings were rather meager. Officially, his income barely managed to pay for the gallery and some food for him. I had not expected anything else. He was a fixer and like most people, fixers liked to keep as much money out of governmental view as possible. Just that they had significantly better options than most for doing so.

    The next entry though was a bit surprising.

    V:            Warden, were you able to confirm the illegal activity over the last three years?

    W:          Affirmative. I have fielded a dark web search, and his activity is marginal.

    V:            That makes no sense. The official income, yes, but the hidden activity? How can he afford to be here?

    W:          That is unknown. My analysis suggests that his activities as a fixer are equally a front as his work as an art dealer.

    V:            To what end? Nobody plays a criminal just for fun.

    W:          Inconclusive. I do not have enough data.

    V:            Is it possible that you did not find all his activity as a fixer?

    W:          The probability for that is approximately 88.43%. That number is misleading though. The probability that I missed the majority of his activities is approximately 4.77%.

    V:            In other words, it is unlikely that you found everything, but it is even more unlikely that you did not find most of it.

    W:          Correct.

    V:            Just to be sure, keep working on it, but we have to work under the assumption that he is not really a fixer anymore.

    W:          That is advisable.

    Simply marvelous. It was completely normal for a fixer to barely break even in their legal profession. And that often only because they managed to launder part of their money through it. But for a fixer to have barely any shadow activity going on¡­ that was simply wrong. It just did not work that way.

    And the way Warden was linked to the dark web¡­ it was very unlikely that he could have hidden his activity from her.

    Ben must have seen something in my face, as he asked concerned:

    ¡°Is something wrong, Kitten?¡±

    I scowled at him.

    ¡°Blumenthal¡­ he makes no sense. He¡­ his activities are not really there.¡±

    To his credit, Ben did not simply dismiss my concerns, but instead thought about it for a moment.

    ¡°He is a fixer, you know. Fixers rarely have any obvious activities.¡±

    I snorted at that.

    ¡°Oh, I know. The problem is, if he is a fixer, why doesn¡¯t he do any fixing? I was not talking about his legal, official activities. He has barely enough presence in the underbelly to have a claim to the title of fixer.¡±

    He looked at me for a brief moment, before he sighed.

    ¡°Warden?¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Warden. Fixers might hide their actual activities from the law, but they don¡¯t do the same from the dark web. Not to the extent that he appears to be in hibernation or something.¡±

    That made Ben frown and he asked with some trepidation:

    ¡°Why are you so concerned about Blumenthal anyway? I mean, yes, he is a fixer, but he is unimportant.¡±

    I shook my head lightly.

    ¡°Honestly, I don¡¯t know. Something on him¡­ he just rubs me wrongly. I can¡¯t tell you¡­¡±

    Then I grasped it. What irked me about that man. Made me seriously want to rip his eyes out of his skull.

    The way he talked, walked, moved in general, his smooth but unassuming behavior. At once nondescript and forgettable on one hand, and suave and self-assured on the other.

    I had seen this specific, very peculiar combination before. Way more often than I liked to. I had experienced a whole series of such men, and a handful of women growing up.

    No, Blumenthal was no fixer. He might pose as one, but what he truly was, was an operative. I had no clue for whom or what, but he behaved exactly as the psyops operatives I had so much opportunity to observe in detail, thanks to Knowles.

    That also explained my instant dislike for him.

    My musing though was not unnoticed. Ben¡¯s concerned

    ¡°Kitten?¡± brought me back into the now and then.

    ¡°I figured it out. He is no fixer, he just poses as one. He is an operative. And I will find out for who and what he wants.¡±

    Ben, again frowned.

    ¡°Are you sure? I don¡¯t mean to doubt your intelligence, but you¡¯ve only just met that man.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°That is the reason why it took me so long to understand it. I¡­ you know how I grew up. He has the same cocksure behavior that all the operatives I met had. And only the operatives. I can¡¯t define it exactly, but every single secret agent that I met, every intelligence operative, they all had this same quirk.

    After being subjected to enough of them, I can pick it up.¡±

    After a few seconds, during which the waltz we were dancing ended, Ben sighed, while he offered me his arm again.

    ¡°If you are sure. So¡­ he is an operative, so what? Poking your nose where it has no place to be is a sure way to get it cut off, you know?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I know, but¡­ I want to¡­ no I need to know whom he works for. If he is after me. If we have to circle the wagons or not.¡±

    He sighed as well.

    ¡°I¡­ can understand that. I don¡¯t like it, but I can understand that. Just¡­ please be careful. Attempt not to run into any traps, ok?¡±

    I could not help but smile.

    ¡°I¡¯ll do my best.¡±

    As we were leaving the dance floor, we were intercepted by a heavy-set man in a badly tailored suit.

    ¡°Walker¡­! Can you explain to me how you got your goons in here? And more important, why did you even try?¡±

    Oh¡­ nice, round two.

    ¡°Benjamin, is this annoying person anybody important?¡±

    The already slightly red-faced man turned to me.

    ¡°What is it to you, tramp?¡± while Ben cleared his throat.

    ¡°Well, he thinks so at least. May I introduce, Commissioner Henderson, Dr. Vivian DuClare. Vivian, Commissioner Henderson is the head of the police here in our beautiful and peaceful little city.¡±

    In the following silence, I pointedly looked Henderson all over, and then let disdain into my voice, when I snarled:

    ¡°The police commissioner then? I have to say, he is even a worse sight than I expected from his abysmal effort in actually doing his work. Somebody as highly ranked as a commissioner should be able to afford a decent suit.¡±

    Henderson by now had managed to identify my accent, apparently.

    ¡°A commi-whore? You disappoint me, Walker. If you absolutely have to bring a street walker to this ball, then you could at least get somebody from a civilized country.¡±

    I snorted and raised an eyebrow.

    ¡°Not only an incompetent imbecile but also a bigot? It is not surprising that the criminals in this city can act with impunity.¡±

    Henderson turned an even darker shade of red.

    ¡°You little foreigner slut can just return to where you came from. We don¡¯t need things like you here in our decent, hardworking community. I have to accept criminal scum like Walker or Luciani or all the other subhumans from Queens, but garbage like you I can do something against.¡±

    I sighed dramatically, while I received a message from Ben.

    B:            What are you doing? Why are you aggravating him even more?

    V:            He is the ultimate problem for you and the other bosses. As long as the degenerates that forced you to come here can rely on him, they can use the police to cause you trouble.

    B:            Yes, I know. That is the reason why I try to not antagonize him.

    V:            And that worked so well in the past, of course.

    B:            It did. They mostly left us alone.

    V:            Until they wanted something from you, and you were forced to give it to them. I am working on getting you out from under their machinations.

    B:            I sure hope you know what you are doing.

    V:            I do. I might not be subtle or sneaky, but I have some power and I can wield it like a sledgehammer.

    I looked around my guards, and then loudly spoke:

    ¡°Thomson! Thomson! Where did that man vanish to again?¡±

    Svenja spoke up, and beautifully faintly:

    ¡°Ma¡¯am, I am sorry, ma¡¯am, but you ordered him to take care of the drunk.¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ right. Is he still busy with that? How long does it take to remove a person? Is he burying him personally?¡±

    Henderson snarled:HenH

    ¡°Did you just talk, in front of a police officer, that you ordered somebody killed?¡±

    I rolled my eyes and answered in a bored tone:

    ¡°And what if? It is not as if you could do anything about it anyway.¡±

    And another interesting new shade of red.

    ¡°You are a murderer, a criminal, and I will¡­¡±

    I interrupted him calmly:

    ¡°do nothing, with respect to the fact that I have extraterritorial status.¡±

    He raged on:

    ¡°Just because you little bitch are from Nowhere does not mean that you enjoy extraterritoriality. That is reserved for foreign high officials and representatives of A-tier corporations and up.¡±

    I rolled my eyes again.

    ¡°The state of the education system here is simply deplorable. Keep your facts straight. It has been extended to foreign high officials and representatives of A-tier+ corporations. But it is, on its most basic premise, made for the owners of the A-tier+ corporations.

    Oh, not the stupid riff-raff that thinks they can buy a few stocks and call themselves owners. No, it is a privilege for the real owners. People who actually have whole percentage points of ownership.

    And their family. And guess what¡­ being the granddaughter and only heir of Nathan Vandermeer qualifies me for that. As does my status as a 5% owner of Vandermeer. As does the status as 80% owner of Enki. As does my position as CTO of Enki.

    But whatever. As Thomson is not back yet, Ingridsdottir!¡±

    Svenja, with a servile bow, answered:

    ¡°You called, ma¡¯am?¡±

    ¡°Make a note! I have to inform the mayor that he will appoint a new commissioner by the end of the week!¡±

    Svenja only said:

    ¡°As you wish, ma¡¯am. But¡­¡±

    And she was interrupted by Henderson, who downright exploded:

    ¡°What the fuck are you thinking? Do you even know who I am?¡±

    I blinked a few times before I looked directly at Ben.

    ¡°Does he think I am stupid?¡±

    Then I turned to Henderson.

    ¡°Do you think I am stupid? Did you not listen when Benjamin introduced you to me just a few minutes ago? I know who you are. But more important, I know that you don¡¯t matter. Your name does not matter, your position does not matter. You are unimportant, insignificant. So would you please stop annoying me?¡±

    He snapped for air a few times, turning even redder, something that I would have thought impossible, and then screeched:

    ¡°You whore! Who do you think you are? You think you can simply walk in here and throw everything into chaos?¡±

    I sighed dramatically and turned to Ben again.

    ¡°Don¡¯t tell me, he is mentally retarded, isn¡¯t he? Or he had a brain injury. Something like that at least. I mean, come on, first, he forgets that he was introduced to me, and now he forgets that I told him exactly who I am.¡±

    I shrugged and turned back to Henderson before I spoke very slowly and a bit louder than normal:

    ¡°I am Dr. Vivian DuClare. I am the heir to one of only eight triple-A corporations in existence. More important to you, I am the majority owner of the double-A corporation which paid nearly 35% of the taxes this city took in this outgoing year. Despite only being active for half a year. Do you honestly think that the mayor will do anything else but what I tell him to do?¡±

    I let out another exaggerated sigh while I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°It is so tiring talking to those uncultured imbeciles here¡­ ¡°

    Then I turned to Svenja.

    ¡°You wanted to correct me?¡±

    I could see that Svenja had trouble keeping from breaking out in laughter, but she managed it heroically.

    ¡°Sorry, ma¡¯am, not a correction. A question. Why do you not talk to the mayor right now?¡±

    I rolled my eyes again.

    ¡°Seriously? I for sure won¡¯t jeopardize the limited enjoyment that I have in this gala just to spend an hour or so to get through the mayor¡¯s minders and talk to him on the phone. This has time for tomorrow or the day after when I know where I can reach him.¡±

    Svenja made a credible effort to appear rebuffed and hesitantly answered:

    ¡°I¡­ I understand that ma¡¯am, but¡­ the mayor is right over there.¡±

    With a bit of surprise, I turned to where she was pointing, and indeed, the mayor was right there, in a group of sycophants and brown nosers.

    ¡°Oh, convenient.¡±

    Without any further attention spent on Henderson, I pivoted Ben and me to walk directly at the mayor¡¯s group.

    When I was roughly five meters away, something, or somebody alerted him to our approach, and the, let¡¯s kindly call it portly man turned around.

    I don¡¯t know what he expected but the expression on his face was a mixture of annoyance, arrogance, and a forced smile.

    It changed quickly when he noticed me at Ben¡¯s side. It went from ¡®I-am-better-than-you¡¯ to ¡®oh-carp¡¯ in seconds, and under his spray-on tan, he visibly got quite a bit paler.

    It had to be said, he caught himself astonishingly fast and put on a mostly neutral but still deferential expression and posture.

    ¡°Ah, Dr. DuClare. I had not realized that you were here today as well. What did we do to deserve your presence?¡±

    Unlike ex-commissioner Henderson, Mayor Zachary Walsh was wearing a well-fitted tuxedo, not that it helped much. It was pretty apparent that the Mayor had a substantially higher income than the position of mayor conveyed. That, or he was a glutton for punishment.

    Nobody could get that rotund on replicator slob unless they honestly enjoyed it, and I knew all too well how much real food did cost until recently.

    Still, I was not so impolite to ignore him. He obviously knew who I was and what status I possessed.

    ¡°My companion Ben Walker here invited me to this ball, and I had nothing better to do. I am, honestly, more surprised to find you here.¡±

    He smiled ruefully.

    ¡°Ah, way too many of my supporters thought it would be a good idea for me to show the flag here today.¡±

    Translation, the donors who paid for him to be the mayor expected him to be here.

    ¡°Ah yes, politics. I always find that so tedious. But as you are here, it will save me from having to call you tomorrow.¡±

    His eyes narrowed, and some suspicion flared in them.

    ¡°You have to call me?¡±

    ¡°No, not after we had our little talk right now.¡±

    He scowled a bit.

    ¡°Oh¡­ I wouldn¡¯t mind a call from such a charming and accomplished person as you.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I understand that, but I try to keep away from politics. I am way too young to enjoy playing those kinds of games yet. Unfortunately, I need to dip my toes into the fry right now.¡±

    He looked over my shoulder, and then back into my face, speaking with a strained voice:

    ¡°Does this sudden need have something to do with Commissioner Henderson nearly having a stroke over there?¡±

    I smiled at him.

    ¡°It is always refreshing to talk to somebody who has more than the bare minimum of mental capacity available. Yes, indeed. Mr. Henderson is, frankly, unfit for his position. You will find somebody new for it by next week!¡±

    Mr. Walsh sighed and slumped a bit.

    ¡°What has Will done now?¡±

    I raised an eyebrow.

    ¡°Other than being an incompetent imbecile incapable of doing his job? Or being a bigot? He threatened and insulted me. Frankly, I find the thought that such a subject would be in the employ of our police force at all, much less in command of it appalling.

    Not that I found the conduct of his police officers in Queens questionable. Mostly because there are no police officers active in Queens.

    By the way, Enki will take over policing in Queens until we are satisfied that the NYPD can actually do the job.¡±

    I saw a flash of defiance in his eyes, before he took a deep breath, and then nodded.

    ¡°I¡­ understand. It is certainly not acceptable for the Commissioner of the NYPD to insult and threaten one of our most important and prominent citizens. I will ask him for his resignation tomorrow.¡±

    To be honest, other than the fact that he was a corrupt and venal politician, Zach Walsh was not the worst person, and we chatted for another few minutes.

    After that, Ben and I made the rounds, I managed to get some non-alcoholic beverage, and we sufficiently cowed the self-styled elite.

    Not that it was hard to do.

    By then, the story of how my security had treated Jerkins had made the round, and most people here had watched the destruction of the Salvez and Henderson live and in color.

    No, I just had to remind them of the facts of life.

    All in all, despite my shoes being tremendously uncomfortable, I actually enjoyed the rest of the night.

 2.46: Visitors

    I would love to tell you that after that surprisingly fun night, I had another fun day. It shouldn¡¯t be though.

    The next morning, a few minutes after eight, I was woken up by an emergency message. That was especially unfortunate as, thanks to the ball, and all the effort to remove the layers upon layers of clothes, jewelry, and makeup, we had managed to get to bed just a tad after five.

    Not that the way home was any fun at all. As soon as I relaxed my will, and felt my emotions again, the wave of remorse that broke over me was devastating. Despite my tearful apologies all the others informed me that I was not that bad and that they understood what had happened. Still, I felt bad about it.

    Nonetheless, it could be said that I was a bit¡­ grumpy when I was woken up. And I was not the only one when I arrived in the virtual meeting room.

    The only one looking even remotely alert was Naveen, the rest of us, well you could not see anything on the avatars, but the postures spoke sentences.

    From holding the forehead while groaning, to being nearly asleep on the table.

    Maggie was ¡®berating¡¯ Naveen, as in, she was standing in front of him, her left fist pressed into her hip, while her right index finger was weaving in front of Naveen¡¯s face.

    ¡°¡­ really waited until we are all awake. Fuck it Naveen, we have New Year. What the fuck were you thinking getting us all here, now, at this time of the day?¡±

    I would say she was a bit irate. Marcel, who was doing his best to cover his head, which was laying on the table, with his arms, complained:

    ¡°Not so loud!¡±

    Finally, Michael shuffled from the point where he had materialized to his seat.

    He looked into the round and then cleared his throat.

    ¡°Ok, sit down, please. Let¡¯s get this done and over with so that we can go back to sleep.¡±

    Yeah, sure, as if that was an option. At least for me, it was not. Nonetheless, I sat down and materialized a coffee in front of me.

    Eli stared at the cup with some trepidation.

    ¡°How can you drink that now? Any caffeine and you can¡¯t sleep anymore.¡±

    I smiled broadly at her.

    ¡°Eli, we are in VR. This coffee is not real. I could drink gallons of it, and it would change nothing.¡±

    I could practically see the cogs turn in the heads of the others, and Jessi voiced what most of them were probably thinking:

    ¡°Oh¡­ oh right.¡± Followed by her summoning a cup for herself. It arrived along with cups for all of the others, though Naveen¡¯s suspiciously looked like tea.

    Naturally, the coffee was exactly how I liked it, and I enjoyed the first sip. Then Michael decided it was time for business.

    ¡°Ok, we are all here, we are all somewhat awake, now¡­ Naveen, care to explain why you called us all here at eight in the morning on New Year? Fuck, I bet most of us are still mostly drunk.¡±

    For some reason, Naveen was not the slightest concerned.

    ¡°I just thought you would like to know that we had our inauguration into the Shadow Wars last night.¡±

    We all stared at him for a moment, and Michael succinctly made our all feelings on the matter clear:

    ¡°Well, shit!¡±

    I would not have used the exact phrasing¡­ but in general, yeah.

    James shook his head and murmured something undistinguishable before he spoke out loud:

    ¡°Fuck it, do we have anything specific?¡±

    Naveen nodded slowly.

    ¡°Yes, we have. The mercenaries assumed that the majority of our guards would be celebrating New Year¡¯s Eve. They were, of course, correct about our human guards.

    They also assumed that they could outwit our bot guards. Here¡­ they might have been right, but probably not. But more important, they did not outwit Cerberus, who had some fun during the night.¡±

    Maynard gulped very blatantly and then asked hesitantly:

    ¡°Are there¡­ is there much clean up? How many bullet holes? And what are we planning to do with the remains?¡±

    Naveen remained unconcerned.

    ¡°Not much clean up, and you should trust Vivian a bit more. Cerberus is quite a bit more discerning about force levels. The bots mostly used their integrated E-lasers to incapacitate the mercenaries. Though two of them have minor bullet wounds as they were wearing isolated armor.

    Three of the bots were damaged but are already repaired. By the way, Vivian, the optical stealth system works marvelously.¡±

    Michael rubbed his eyes and sighed.

    ¡°So, we got them alive? Any idea who sent them?¡±

    ¡°They don¡¯t know. We are right now investigating the fixer who was the go-between, but it is unlikely that we find out more. You know how it is.¡±

    ¡°Yes, unfortunately. And what were they after?¡±

    ¡°They wanted to get into the research annex, and from what they said, they were hired to steal our computer research.¡±

    That made James recoil.

    ¡°Computer research? We have computer research?¡±

    Maynard snorted:

    ¡°Of course, we do. It is just not in the annex. Hell, our computer research is done either by Vivian or by Calliope. All the rest is just applying what those two managed to figure out. But honestly, right now, the only thing that we do not have patented is the Grendel.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°That is patented too. From the technical point of view, the Grendel is ¡®just¡¯ an oversized Chronos. The same core, the same architecture, the same cooling solution, just more of everything.¡±

    Maynard smiled.

    ¡°I stand corrected, we have no computer research that is not already patented.¡±

    Marcel lifted his head from the table.

    ¡°But¡­ if they want to use it internally, would they need a patent?¡±

    Eli answered him:

    ¡°That was one of the points of the patent protection protocol in the replicators. You can¡¯t use them to make anything that is patented unless you have a license. And you need a replicator to make a Grendel.¡±

    Arnedra scowled as a reaction.

    ¡°Do I understand you correctly? There is nothing in computer research that could have been stolen? And those people still tried to do that?¡±

    James shook his head.

    ¡°They don¡¯t know that. They only know that we upended the world of computers a few months ago.¡±

    Maynard sighed.

    ¡°The best they could have gotten are the designs for a few motherboards for the new CPUs. But honestly, that is nothing spectacular. Just adding or removing features. The rest, power conditioning, cooling, and such are standard, and there is no point in stealing the positioning of the components as the whole communication is done by Q-links.

    Everybody can create equal motherboards in a couple of days.¡±

    Michael rubbed his chin.

    ¡°So¡­ this was all for nothing?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Maybe not. At this point, I would guess that this was just a probe to test our response. What I am wondering is why did they not include a hacker in the operation. If they knew about the bots, they should have used one to help them out.¡±

    Naveem looked at the papers in front of him.

    ¡°That is the strange thing. They did include a hacker. But the Jack in question, a certain D4ydre4m, never showed up. The ones we have questioned so far are somewhat pissed about that.¡±

    From behind me, I heard:

    ¡°He did show up. Briefly. Right now, he needs a new board.¡±

    Warden strolled into the room, in her typical nondescript multicolored avatar, and Tiffany groaned.

    ¡°Please, choose another avatar. I get sick.¡±

    Naveen on the other hand frowned.

    ¡°You took in on yourself to destroy his board?¡±

    ¡°I am the cybersecurity division of Enki. Of course I did.¡±

    That made Naveen just close his eyes and shake his head.

    This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

    ¡°Damn, ok, you are right, but why did you not notify anybody?¡±

    ¡°That was not necessary. The attack was over in a few seconds, and the only thing he learned is that we use demons.¡±

    That made me listen up.

    ¡°Uh, Warden, I hope you did not use a Balrog. Those are way too valuable to burn on some probing attack from a hacker who does not even walk the Abyss.¡±

    ¡°I agree with that. I only used a couple of Gremlins. It is telling that two of those were enough to destroy his board.¡±

    That made me recoil in surprise.

    ¡°Wait, a couple of Gremlins were enough to kill his board? What was he using? Cardboard?¡±

    ¡°It seemed to be a heavily, and amateurishly, modified Enertech Cyber-Max T-43.¡±

    I had to shake my head. Yes, on an abstract level, I knew that Enertech made cyber boards, but seriously, I never heard of anybody actually using one!

    Well, not quite. They made ¨C barely ¨C adequate starter boards. Not much worse than the Dalgon I had started out with, but that one was utter trash as well.

    And seriously, nobody with even a single working brain cell would even consider a combat dive against an A-tier corporation, much less a double-A, with any Enertech board.

    And seriously, nobody in the fricking Abyss would try to attack a corporation where I was responsible for cyber security. It just did not make any sense. At all.

    While I was still digesting that, Naveen complained to Warden.

    ¡°Can we get back to informing us of the attack? Why the fuck did you not tell us about it. It could have been valuable warning time.¡±

    ¡°It was not necessary because it was an amateur trying it. I informed Cerberus, and he decided that human intervention was not needed.¡±

    Naveen groaned and buried his head in his hands, while Michael sighed and shook his head.

    I rolled my eyes and intervened here:

    ¡°Warden, would you please, in future inform Naveen about any cyber attack?¡±

    Naturally, the answer was: ¡°As you wish.¡±

    Naveen nodded satisfied.

    ¡°Do we have any idea what any observer might have found out about our reaction times?¡±

    Michael was back in charge, and Naveen shrugged.

    ¡°I guess not much. For some reason, Cerberus decided to let them walk nearly into the annex before he stopped them.¡±

    We all frowned at that, and Kenneth voiced what we all were thinking:

    ¡°Why? Why should he do that?¡±

    Naveem shrugged again.

    ¡°I have no fucking clue. Why don¡¯t we ask him?¡±

    On that cue, Cerberus materialized. His avatar was a very big, muscular man with three dog heads, Doberman heads from what I had learned, and black and dark tan fur all over his upper body. His lower body thankfully was covered by dark blue cargo pants.

    He began speaking without being prompted:

    ¡°Situation was under control. Danger level was considered marginal. Identification of target was considered more important.¡±

    Michael leaned forward.

    ¡°We captured them, and from what Naveen told us, they told us everything. So why accept that risk?¡±

    ¡°Risk negligible. Attackers incompetent. Weapons substandard, coherence insufficient, communication insufficient. Probability of successful attack less than 2%. Probability of attackers revealing target less than 94%.

    Risk deemed acceptable for gained intelligence.¡±

    I¡­ what the heck, that was not how I had envisioned him. Did something go wrong?

    ¡°Your objectives should have placed the security of our facilities above nearly everything else. Why did you decide to assume this risk, as small as it was?¡±

    ¡°Information about target of attack deemed important for future protection of Enki. No humans on location to protect. Lethal force was ready.¡±

    Ok, he was not wrong, but he could have been. Obviously, I was not the only one who thought that, as Alena spoke into the room:

    ¡°I don¡¯t know about you, but I am not really comfortable about Cerberus making decisions like that on his own. At least not yet.¡±

    Maynard rubbed his chin.

    ¡°But¡­ wasn¡¯t it the right decision?¡±

    Naveen just sighed.

    ¡°It probably was, but not for the right reasons. Neither Cerberus nor any of my officers could know that it was a red flag.¡±

    Michael took a deep breath before he spoke:

    ¡°Just a question here, but how difficult will it be to keep a human in the loop? At all times?¡±

    Naveen shrugged.

    ¡°That depends. Some of those decisions have to be made in a few seconds, a minute or two at the most. Not this time, I agree, but at some point it will be. We can¡¯t have Cerberus¡¯ response crippled because we are uncomfortable.¡±

    Maggie was the one who made the obvious observation.

    ¡°Don¡¯t your officers of the watch have a jack? If they are in VR at the time, at 40:1 or whatever, 10 seconds warning should be enough for them to make a decision.¡±

    ¡°But then we would have them spend hours at 40:1 and do nothing. That will be bad for morale.¡±

    Michael sighed.

    ¡°Use groups, and let them do in VR what they want as long as Cerberus can interrupt it at any given time. They can read, watch movies, play games, spend a day on a virtual beach, whatever. And we¡¯ll pay them 10% of the hourly wage for each virtual hour.

    That should ensure that they compete for the job I think.¡±

    Naveen rubbed his chin before he nodded.

    ¡°That might actually work.¡±

    Then Michael continued:

    ¡°And now, do you care to explain why this could not wait until we all were at least close to being awake? I bet except for Vivian nobody of us had his or her necessary sleep in.¡±

    I snorted at that.

    ¡°Nope, count me in as well.¡±

    For a moment they all looked at me with incredulity, before Maggie chuckled.

    ¡°Oh fuck, now you¡¯ve done it!¡±

    Michael ignored her though, and stared at Naveen, who sat there completely unperturbed.

    ¡°I just thought it was important. It isn¡¯t as if those mercs were in any way considerate of the day.¡±

    ¡°But we caught them, and thanks to Cerberus mixing up his priorities even what we think the real objective they had is fucked up. So there is no time pressure or anything.¡±

    It seemed to me as if Naveen was desperately trying to suppress an evil grin, but failed to do so.

    Finally, he shook his head, rolled his eyes, and threw up his hands.

    ¡°Fine. I just thought I shouldn¡¯t be the only one to suffer, ok?¡±

    I spare you the expressions of outrage that followed, but needless to say, nobody was very happy about it.

    After things had calmed down, Michael asked in a tired voice:

    ¡°Is there anything else ¡®important¡¯?¡±

    When nobody said anything, he let out a sigh of relief and continued:

    ¡°Then I would say we go back to sleep and see each other next week.¡±

    It took only a few seconds for all of them to vanish, though I was pretty sure that sleep was not in the cards for me.

    I tried, mind you, but no, I could not enter the dreamland again.

    That meant I had to find other things to occupy my time. After some consideration, and a copious amount of coffee in the real world, I decided to work on the research VR system I promised the other K4.

    Should be easy, right? Yeah, not so much. Oh, the basics were pretty easy. Just a fast, lean VR OS with the tools and utilities to do science.

    The big problem here was that despite what many people wanted, Envision Office was still the standard for documentation and communication.

    I know, I could have simply created an alternative to it. Heck, I could even revive one of the old open-source office suites if I wanted.

    But therein laid the crux. I did not want to. Doing so would be tantamount to declaring war on Ralcon. And while we were already beyond the point where they could use their political power to destroy us, a corporate war would not be pretty. And I was not so sure we would survive it, much less win it.

    That of course meant that I needed to create something that the researchers could use from the new board without leaving VR. Only one problem here. Envision was riddled with ¡®telemetric systems¡¯, ¡®performance evaluators¡¯, or whatever else Ralcon deigned to name their spyware.

    Nobody would trust a system running Envision for their research department except on the periphery.

    The actual research had to happen in another environment. I could run Envision on a virtual machine, but that would mean a significant performance hit. Another option was to have the customer simply connect an Envision system to the box. That might actually have been the easiest solution. But¡­ it felt clumsy to me.

    The problem was that with Envision''s propensity to snoop, it was pretty hard to keep data safe with an Envision system in the network.

    Yes, I know it was possible. But it was hard work. More than many big corporations were willing to invest. At least for medium-level projects.

    Nobody cared if some office drone tables surfaced somewhere, or if the new flavor for the synthetic snack got known beforehand.

    And for anything genuinely important, the corporations did invest the effort and money to make it safe.

    But it was a situation that I¡­ was not happy with. Yes, it would have been easy to have Calliope create an all-in-one safety package for Envision. It was easy, in fact. And it became the basis of what I was creating now. Or was it the other way around?

    Who cares.

    The thing is that unless the box I was creating kept iron control of the data that the scientist in question did not want to disseminate, some Envision update or another would break any security I would integrate on the Envision side of the equation.

    Sure, I would give Calliope a standing order to update the protection program on her own, but that still was not a sure bet.

    And I could also not count on the network administrator to configure the network securely enough.

    No¡­ what I had to do was to force the connection between the new OS that Calliope was already working on and Envision through an eminently secure path that I had designed, and that remained under the control of my OS.

    On the other hand, if I designed this connection path separately, I could almost guarantee that some penny-wise and pound-foolish bean counter or another decided to forgo that extra expense and use some cheap knockoff if they decided to use a specialized system at all.

    And while I was certainly providing those options, I would not see it as a high-tier solution.

    To be fair, the basics of the hardware were¡­ easy. I started with an early design iteration of Glory.

    Before I had tailored her to my specific needs. And then moved in the opposite direction. I removed virtually everything that was specialized for cyber-warfare. A scientist would not need a big buffer, an encryption-decryption module, or a utility accelerator.

    The box would not need heaps and heaps of insanely fast ram either. It did need the very fast network controller though.

    And I needed to make substantially more I/O available, along with the possibility of increasing it even more.

    The OS was similarly based on an earlier project that I had worked on. Again, it was a relatively blank Unix variant, and Calliope slaved away to not only remove any flaws that I had left in it but adapt it according to my design ideas of what a scientist needed.

    That included an interface for creating their own utilities, though I would offer Calliope¡¯s service for that as well.

    And while the hardware was relatively easy and even somewhat scalable, the OS would take a few days to be finished. Not that I was in a hurry, honestly.

    But that left the other side of the box. The Envision side. That is right, I had decided to create a single research board that contained essentially two separate computers, with a specialized bus between them.

    Again, the basic hardware was trivial. As it was only there to provide basic Envision Office functionality, it did not need more than a garbage can. The basic Hyperion 3 1200 I, the version where we integrated something like a Theia 5 or half the power of a Theia 10, into the CPU to forgo a separate GPU.

    Minimal RAM, minimal non-volatile storage, the absolute bottom tier of a desktop computer.

    That left the interesting part for last. The bus controller. The problem here was that I had to make absolutely painstakingly sure that communication between the two computers was one-sided and only what the user actually wanted to communicate.

    The solution was¡­ still a bit clumsy I fear, as I used the bus controller as the hook for the jack, and let the subconscious of the scientist decide on what was transferred from one side to the other.

    That essentially meant that the bus controller grew to a third fully functional computer in the same chassis.

    The connection to the full-sized research computer was much more substantial, and I could forgo the GPU in the controller and use the one in the main box instead.

    The rest of the functionality was essentially a sandbox that mirrored what the user wanted to have mirrored from the respective full-sized system.

    Naturally, that was a problem that took me several days to get done correctly. Not because it was so much hard work, but because I spent most of my days not working on it.

    It was something that I did when I had nothing better to do, and honestly, every minute with Ben was something better to do.

    Heck, even playing with my cat was often of higher priority. But not by much, and Nibbles only wanted to spend so much time playing.

    Considering that Calliope was creating a new OS almost from scratch, as every OS I had created, even the early iterations, were aimed at cyber-warfare, and she had to rewrite nearly 80% of it, the delay was not unwelcome.

    Still, on Monday, January 7<sup>th</sup>, 2250, I had a functioning research box to play with. To be fair, I also gave the two discrete systems, the research box and the bus controller, to the minions to try to break.

    As it was, I liked the new box for research. It was¡­ well not really better than Glory. It was different. Better in things that were peripheral for Glory, or any cyber-warfare board.

    Abysmally bad in things that were important for cyber-warfare though.

    But as I rarely did any excursions into the dark areas of the matrix anymore, the new box, which I called Archimedes, was quite a bit better for my circumstances.

    Which, by all means, did not mean that I would simply mothball Glory, mind you. Just that I used Archimedes for science work.

    At the least, Glory was still portable. Archimedes¡­ technically it was, but only because I decided to include casters on the case. I am sure that Kate would be able to carry it, but almost every human would have to push or pull it around.

    Not that that would be a big problem. Unlike a cyber-warfare board like Glory, Archimedes would be parked in some lab and be used mostly stationary. So nothing lost here.

 2.47: Something new in the west

    The next morning we had our regular Tuesday meeting again¡­ hurray.

    But seriously, it was time to get into the routine again. Yes, I did not stand still during the last two weeks, but I felt as if I did. I was just not built for idle wasting of my time and I was rearing to go full ahead again.

    Nonetheless, I had to gripe at the meeting. Couldn¡¯t have them think that I actually enjoyed being there in person, could I?

    And thus my opening after we had greeted each other:

    ¡°You know, we all have jacks now, we could hold these meetings in VR and get them over with in minutes.¡±

    Maggie smiled sweetly when she rebuked me:

    ¡°And do what with the saved time? Lazing around and eating chocolate? Oh, by the way, thanks for the cloned cacao.¡±

    I raised my eyebrows and answered equally sweetly:

    ¡°Oh, I don¡¯t know, we could maybe, just maybe you know, do the jobs we are so princely paid for. Of course, if you think you don¡¯t have enough to do for a full workday, maybe we should look into if your position is necessary.¡±

    For a short moment, everybody was silent, and then Maggie broke out into laughter.

    ¡°Ok, that was a good one. We will get you up to proper banter soon enough.¡±

    Michael rapped softly onto the table.

    ¡°So, now that we have the show done, could we start with the meeting, which by the way is part of our jobs?¡±

    I just rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Fine. I just thought we could all use our time better than sitting here physically.¡±

    Kenneth looked at his mug for a moment and then shrugged.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know about you, but I like the coffee here. The android makes it perfectly.¡±

    With a heavy sigh, Michael spoke again.

    ¡°Are we done yet? Or does somebody else want to change their job description to comedian?¡±

    For a brief moment, Maggie and I made eye contact, before she grinned and answered:

    ¡°Nah, we¡¯re good.¡±

    That made Michael nod.

    ¡°Ok, then, how about we start with the routine business, get that out of the way?¡±

    With that, he nodded to James, who cleared his throat.

    ¡°Our production capacity has doubled since we had the last meeting. That is mostly because we are now running the machinery on three full shifts and using the full potential of it.

    This potential has grown by 52%. Partly because of the new construction of facilities, but in large part because the new machines we designed ourselves are quite a bit faster. That and the fact that we are pre-loading the replicators with nanobots, which significantly speeds up the production of them.

    All in all, we are good, though the growth will likely slow down a bit when we filled up the buildings we had pre-built.¡±

    Maggie was next:

    ¡°Our human workforce has exploded. In the wake of our opening the test of the fertility nanobots to our workforce and their families, the number of people wanting to work for us has more than quadrupled. We now have our 6k somewhat experienced workers and 20k new workers.

    Unfortunately, the education of the new employees is¡­ limited. We are working to remedy that, but it will be a couple of months before they are fully productive.

    Additionally, we have gone to eight-hour shifts, to balance the three shifts each day. Our workforce is now working 48 hours a week instead of the standard 60, but surprisingly, we experienced an increase in productivity. More than we have lost in time worked.¡±

    I saw several faces scowl in confusion, and I could understand that, as I did not quite understand it myself.

    After a brief moment, Maggie sighed and continued:

    ¡°That is another holdover from the great war it seems. Just before the war, corporations were experimenting with going to 32-hour work weeks and experienced the same thing. Despite the workers working less time for the same pay, overall they provided more work.

    But then came the great war and with it 84-hour work weeks, and after that the cut back to 60 hours seemed practically generous.¡±

    Michael hummed and rubbed his chin.

    ¡°Do I understand you right that it would be better for us if we cut back the work time of our workers even more?¡±

    Maggie nodded.

    ¡°Yes, I think it does. The studies done before the war implied that the reduced work time reduced the failure rate and increased the work speed because the workers were more rested, mentally more agile, and physically less stressed. They also were much more motivated.

    I suggest we reduce it first to a 40-hour work week or five eight-hour days. We will see how that works out.¡±

    This time, only James scowled.

    ¡°But our production¡­ we have just brought it up that much. What will that do for it?¡±

    As an answer, Maggie rolled her eyes.

    ¡°We have mostly switched to bots for the actual work by now. The humans are quality control and supervisors. I guess our production will suffer for a bit while we task a few replicators to build additional bots, but after that, we will be fine.

    And in two to three months, we will quadruple our human workforce. That should be enough to have our production numbers shoot up as well. If we can get the production facilities for that. Sure, they won¡¯t be all that effective. At least in the beginning. But they will be warm bodies that will gain experience.¡±

    After a few seconds, James huffed and rolled his eyes.

    ¡°Fine. But that runs neatly into my point. We need more replicator time for our industry bots. Not just for the standard workforce. Our new Eitri bots are¡­ well, let¡¯s call them versatile. They can work in manufacturing or building, or essentially anything we could use a human laborer for.

    The bigger Brokkr are less versatile, they are just too big for much of the fine work, but they are very good for large-scale work.

    Each Eitri is around six times more effective than the Burgmeister Journeyman that we use to pull up our buildings. The Brokkr are much more versatile than the Burgmeister Maultier, and of course, can work quite a bit longer.

    I want to phase out the Daedalus and Maultier bots and replace them with Eitri and Brokkr. We can run the replicators a bit longer on the Eitri and use them for manufacturing.¡±

    I had to frown.

    ¡°Uh, who thought of those names?¡±

    For a moment, they all looked at me as if I had grown a second head, but then Kenneth began to chuckle followed by the others. When they were finished laughing at my cost, Marcel shook his head for a last time and then answered my question.

    ¡°That was me. Sorry, I think we forgot that you were busy with the Folly when we made that decision.

    The names come from Nordic mythology. They were dwarves that created among other things Mj?lnir. I thought it would fit in well with our overall theme and honestly, they and their brother Sindri are the only crafting spirits in mythology not quite gods, but more than human who are literally brothers.

    After that, we named the military bots Einherjar. We thought if we try to market those things we should name them.¡±

    I blinked a few times. Was I honestly that much out of it when I worked on the Folly? It seemed so at least.

    ¡°Ok. I was just surprised.¡±

    I felt Michael¡¯s hand on my shoulder.

    ¡°It¡¯s ok. I did not think of telling you about it.¡±

    Then he placed his hand back on the table and addressed the room:

    ¡°But back to business, what would be the impact of diverting a few replicators to build more bots?¡±

    Kenneth rubbed his chin.

    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t it be better to build additional replicators for that? Even if we have all the bots we might ever need at some point, the replicators will not go to waste. And¡­ honestly, I don¡¯t like diverting our industrial output if we can help it.¡±

    I was really sorry, but I could not help it, I involuntarily rolled my eyes.

    Which led to Kenneth narrowing his, and he hissed.

    ¡°Do you seriously disagree with that Vivian?¡±

    I sighed before I answered.

    ¡°Sorry, but yes. Does it make any difference if we use some of the NADAs we have up and running to make the bots and replace them with current production ones? As I understand it, we are barely able to bring on enough bots to support the new NADAs coming online.

    So we either try to find a balance between NADAs for what we sell and NADAs we use to increase our production capacity, or we will run into problems at one point or another.

    I would guess this balance is somewhere between what you and James are proposing, but I am not sure.

    But in the long run, it makes no difference if we err on the one side compared to the other.¡±

    He looked at me intensely, but I held his gaze and did not relent either. Then he sighed.

    ¡°Yeah, you are right. We have to find a balance. Let¡¯s model it through to get the optimal numbers.¡±

    I smiled at that and nodded, along with all the others.

    For a few moments, nobody said anything before Michael nodded to Alena.

    ¡°So, next point, financial?¡±

    Alena smiled brightly.

    ¡°Our costs have increased substantially. The new charity we have is costing us around $12 million a month, and the new employees who are not yet productive are another $70 million in sunk cost.

    The remodeling of the L5 facility is costing us around $400 million per month, and the ongoing construction here in Queens is another $800 million. Our payroll for our productive workers and management is $125 million per month.

    The buildup of our new asteroid mines for iridium costs us another $900 million per month.

    We use resources worth $107 million per day. That makes an average of $3.2 billion per month.

    All in all, we have right now costs of $5.1 billion per month.

    From what I heard, that is a bit higher than the average for a double-A but not by much. We are mostly in the middle of the pack there.

    For our income though we are not even close to the average. For the small fry first, we sell $9.8 million per day or $294 million per month in cyberware.

    The auto-surgeon brings us around $215 million per month.

    If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.

    Computers are gaining traction, but for now, we sell around $425 million.

    Surprisingly, replicators ¡®only¡¯ have an income of $800 million. That sounds like much, but the average replicator costs $25 million. In other words, we only sell 32 replicators a month on average. But I expect that to grow substantially in the future. Right now, many are waiting to see how the technology works out.

    That brings us to the two big ones. First grav coils. I don¡¯t know if you noticed, but right now there is a regular bonanza in new grav ships, skimmers, and other things that need grav coils. While our coils are significantly cheaper than the old ones, we have completely cornered the market here, and we sell $5.6 billion a month in grav coils.

    And it is growing. Just keep in mind that every product we sell pays for itself. We do not make a loss anywhere.

    Most of the material costs are for carbon for the Q-links. Around 65% that is. And Q-links are still a license to print money.

    We sell an average of $1.7 billion in Q-links each day. With an assumed 30 days per month, we get an average of $51 billion per month.

    In sum, our income is a bit over $58 billion per month. That gives us a profit before taxes of around $53 billion. After taxes, which are 23% or $12.2 billion per month, we get a profit of a bit over $40 billion each month.

    The average for a double-A is around $17 billion.

    To sum it up, we are in a very good position.¡±

    For a long time, nobody said a word, until, finally, Arnedra uttered a long:

    ¡°Fuuck!¡±

    It seemed that except for Alena, Michael, and me, the people at the table were in shock. At first, I could not understand it. As far as I was concerned, this development was predictable.

    Come on, get real, how often have I already mentioned that the Q-links are a license to print money? For the next 19? years, until the patent ran out, maybe even longer if we managed to bribe the right regulatory agencies, we owned communication.

    The darn thing was so insanely useful that the $51 billion per month was just the beginning. And the real perverse thing about it was the fact that for our customers, it was still the cheaper alternative.

    Then I got it suddenly. Why the people were so shocked. Michael and Alena of course had seen the numbers before now.

    Other than that, the ownership of Enki was quite easy, honestly. I owned 80%. Ben and Michael each owned 5%. The remaining 10% was divided among the other 11 people on this table.

    Each of them owned .9%. That doesn¡¯t sound like all that much, but¡­ as Alena had just explained Enki earned $40 billion per month.

    That translated to each of them getting $360 million per month. Compared to that, their yearly salary of $4.5 million was mostly symbolic.

    And that was where the shock came from. It had just sunk in that every single one of them was close to being a billionaire in their own right.

    Alena, on the other hand, kept a downright manically smile going, which swiftly faltered when she looked at Michael and me.

    ¡°Puh, you two are no fun.¡±

    That made Michael smile mildly.

    ¡°Dear Alena, you forgot that I have access to the numbers the same as you. I am also a 5% owner. I had my shocking moment a few months ago, thank you.¡±

    She rolled her eyes.

    ¡°Yeah fine. But what about Vivian?¡±

    What what about me? I was somewhat confused by what she was trying to say. Fortunately, Michael was not.

    ¡°Vivian is in a completely different league to us. She was a billionaire before she came to NYC. She would never have to work a single day if she wanted that.¡±

    ¡°But it has to be surprising how much her fortune has grown.¡±

    I sighed, finding back into the discussion.

    ¡°After a certain point, it doesn¡¯t really matter anymore.¡±

    By now the rest had recovered from the shock, and Tiffany narrowed her eyes.

    ¡°It doesn¡¯t matter? But¡­ you are a billionaire. How can that not matter?¡±

    I smiled somberly.

    ¡°That is something you all will experience as well. Money is a strange thing.

    At the lowest end, it means the difference between dying and surviving.

    A bit higher, and it means the difference between surviving and being comfortable.

    A bit higher, and it means the difference between being comfortable and growing.

    Then it makes the difference between simply growing and flourishing.

    Beyond that, it becomes a matter of luxury.

    And then finally, any more money makes no difference at all anymore. It just represents points in a game, or how much you can use it to help others.

    It conveys bragging rights, or a tool to better the world.

    You are on the cusp of it making no difference anymore.

    Think about it, a year ago, the $4.5 million you earn as a salary a year here was a gift from the gods for you.

    You could finally afford all the cool stuff, the luxuries, and the comfort you ever wanted.

    Sure, you were not in a position to buy your company mercs from that money, but otherwise, what would you buy now that you could not buy then?

    Everything from now on is showcasing your wealth. You already are in the bragging rights territory.

    So what if I could buy 200 T-240 each month? It makes no difference to me anymore.¡±

    Sadly, that had the effect that they looked scolded.

    Then Marcel shook his head clear.

    ¡°But¡­ I enjoy some of the things I can now buy.¡±

    Michael answered him:

    ¡°There is nothing wrong with that. I think the point Viv was trying to make is that yes, you do enjoy the stuff you buy, now. But there will come a point where your only reason for buying something is to demonstrate that you can afford it.

    To rub the noses of anybody who ever gave you problems into the fact that you¡¯ve made it.

    Trust me, I have reached that point already, and it is a hollow victory. You bought something out of spite, or obligation, then you won¡¯t have fun with it.¡±

    It took a moment for the suddenly way too somber mood to return to something more normal.

    In the end, Michael had to bring the meeting back on track.

    ¡°Now, Alena, those numbers are more than good, as you know. But do you have any projections?¡±

    That brought the happy smile instantly back on Alena¡¯s face.

    ¡°Oh yeah, do we have projections. Right now, we estimate that we can satisfy around 13% of the ongoing demand for Q-links.

    Even when we have reached that magical 100% number, we will have to work down the mountain of demand that is even now growing. With the current expansion, my department estimates that it will take us around another six months to reach the break-even point in that matter. Any increased capacity after that should be carefully evaluated.

    We obviously expect the demand for grav-coils to increase, as soon as the first fusactors with the new coils arrive, and every skimmer and grav-ship producer has switched over.

    All in all, our projections say that at the anniversary of us starting to sell things, we will have a profit of around $450 billion per month.¡±

    And just like that, we were a trillion-dollar company.

    For a moment, nobody said anything, before Marcel, rubbing his chin, mused:

    ¡°Wouldn¡¯t that make us a triple-A?¡±

    Michael shook his head slowly.

    ¡°No¡­ not really. The step from double-A to triple-A is quite a bit more complicated, but it can be summed up with one word. Power. Triple-As have an incredible amount of power. Not just economic, but military, political, and social.

    It will take years for us to come even close in that regard. Sure, we will be the absolutely most profitable double-A ever, but building up a viable military takes time. Getting the fingers into the political pie takes even longer.

    And you don¡¯t want to take social power fast. That will create hype, and hype has the tendency to burn itself out when fickle public opinion wavers. No, we want the slow, methodical, and lasting kind of social power. The stable one. But that is for the future.

    I would suggest we all develop some ideas about what we can do with that money. Except for giving it out at dividends. Remember, one of the values of this corporation is that we want to make the world a better place, not just enrich ourselves.¡±

    He shook his head and took a few deep breaths.

    ¡°Now then, any new business?¡±

    Surprisingly, Maynard, Jessi, and I signaled our intent to speak.

    We had a very short non-verbal discussion before Maynard shrugged and took the lead.

    ¡°It is something I think James will like, maybe Kenneth as well. A few of the minions have done the same thing to the molecular forge that they did to the carbon extruder.

    They took them apart and looked into what part they could make better with our new technology.

    A standard molecular forge works by using an insane amount of energy to melt and/or vaporize the material it is refining. The resulting liquid or gases will be diverted into a magnetically sealed centrifuge and the materials will be separated by that.

    To create a specific alloy or compound the forge will then pump the appropriate amount of material into the reaction chamber and use nanobots to force the atoms into the required form.

    As you can understand, both the melting phase, as well as the centrifuge, take prodigious amounts of energy.

    The minions now have replaced the melting phase with a disruptor, and the sorting with a combination of magnetic fields and gravity.

    So far, the nano-bots at the end are run-of-the-mill 10<sup>th</sup> to 12<sup>th</sup> gen bots, but we could as well put one of our NADAs at the end to make a completely integrated machine.

    The not-so-surprising part is that this new machine is at once cheaper to make, cheaper to run, and way faster.

    It costs us roughly 80% of what a similar-sized commercial molecular forge would cost. It will need around 5% of the energy of the standard forge. And it is nearly three times faster.¡±

    Oh freck! There goes the no antagonizing the big boys¡­! Industrial machinery was Burgmeisters bread and butter. We had already cut into it with the NADA but we had given them the license¡­ that might be it. I spoke up.

    ¡°That might be a dangerous technology. Burgmeister and to a lesser extent Xiao Ping need to prevent it from cutting into their business. So¡­ how about we approach them and license the technology to them?

    We sell them the disruptors, the grav-coils anyway, they already have the license for the NADA.

    We can use our machines internally, but give the market to those two.¡±

    Maynard was a bit disappointed, but Naveen simply nodded.

    Michael rubbed his chin for nearly a minute.

    ¡°It would, at least, prevent any animosity. We get some money from them for the design, the disruptors, and the coils.

    And would most likely make them more friendly in respect to us. Especially when we don¡¯t compete with them in that market.

    Not that we need to. We can not even satisfy the demand for tech that we are already selling. There is no point introducing even more stuff that we can only trickle out. I am all for it.¡±

    A quick vote later, we had decided to offer the technology to Burgmeister and Xiao Ping.

    Michael continued:

    ¡°Eli, I charge you and Marcel to open up the negotiations.¡±

    Both of them nodded, and it was Jessi¡¯s turn.

    ¡°What I have to say will probably not have that much of an impact. We have sufficiently concluded the tests for the new cyberware. As far as we can test it with research clones at least. The next step is to test it on volunteers. After that, we can convert our security people into combat cyborgs, if they want to.¡±

    That was good news. And I also knew who would be at the very forefront of the line.

    ¡°I have promised Mark Holt that he could get the first fully functional cyberware. Is that ok with you?¡±

    Jessi tilted her head but then nodded.

    ¡°No problem. At least we can consider him. We have to make sure that he is a good test subject, but other than that, if he wants to he can.

    But that brings me to the other point. We have identified the problem with reflex boosters.¡±

    Now that was interesting, and I leaned forward in interest. Jessi continued.

    ¡°It is¡­ was essentially a configuration issue. As it was, the boosters relayed the signal much faster than the nerves, and the brain started reacting to it. Then the signal from the nerves arrived, and the brain started reacting to those as well, not realizing that was the very same event.

    Then the boosters send the orders from the brain to the limb. Again, much faster. At the same time, the nerves transported the signal. By now we had four signals for the same event. But it got worse. The signal from the boosters caused another return signal over the nerves. Getting two signals back to the brain.

    All that cascaded so much that both the natural nervous system, as well as the booster, were wasting about 90% of their capacity on these gridlock messages.

    All that damaged both the nervous system and the booster, but the booster, being technology, could take it.

    To make it work we simply filter out the signal from the nerves, if the signal from the booster has already arrived.

    Ironically, with those problems taken out, the limit now is what the muscles and joints are capable of. It is way faster than the cyber zombies of the other big corps have.¡±

    She paused for a moment and then snorted.

    ¡°We have not tested it with somebody who has the new cyber-limbs and a synaptic accelerator. That would be¡­ quick I would guess.¡±

    That¡­ was an understatement of epic proportions. Reflex boosters worked by boosting the signal speed from the limbs to the central nervous system and triggering autonomous reflexes. They did that because the brain usually was way slower to react.

    But with a synaptic accelerator, the brain could take the information and process it faster than the autonomous reflexes could. This would limit the reaction speed to what the physical body was capable of.

    And here the new cyberware came into play.

    I expected that our cyborgs could routinely capture flies in flight with chopsticks and then complain that that was too easy.

    Include what Mark and the minions had done with the smart gun interface¡­ that would be a deadly combination.

    Naveen was the only other of us who was really interested.

    ¡°Does that mean we will get a fully upgraded security force soon?¡±

    Jessi just smiled.

    ¡°We should be, if nothing goes wrong. So knock on wood.¡±

    That left me with the final presentation of the day. I sent the signal to have the bot I staged in my office roll in the Archimedes case, as well as the two stand-alone systems.

    ¡°I¡­ have been asked what computer to use to do research with a jack. It is a bit embarrassing, but I had not thought about it before that.

    Now here is the solution. I call it Archimedes.¡±

    The bot took the stand-alone units and placed them on the table.

    The connector was roughly the size of an average office computer, while the research board was a bit bigger than a Mk. VI.

    Marcel frowned.

    ¡°Uhm, I thought we would just make a standard computer for them, or they use a Mk. VI and optimize the load-out.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°That would work, but the standard computer would run Envision EX. The Mk. VI would work in a pinch, but quite a big part of its mass are things that are not only useless for a research computer, but actively a hindrance. The big multi-level buffer, for example, the ultra-fast application launchers. Things needed for cyber-warfare, but unimportant for anything else.

    More importantly, the OS is written in a way to maximize the protection of the hacker during matrix combat. Again, that will create problems for a research box.¡±

    Arnedra scowled.

    ¡°Why would it be a problem if a standard computer runs on Envision EX? I mean, it works doesn¡¯t it?¡±

    Michael was the one who answered.

    ¡°Envision is famous for its telemetry channels. Everybody who uses Envision has to expect that Ralcon learns everything that this computer is used for.

    I don¡¯t see many corporations allowing their eggheads to do their research with an Envision computer.¡±

    I smiled.

    ¡°Correct. That is the reason why I had Calliope create a new OS mostly from scratch. It is optimized to work with the scientist to do math, physics, or whatever else a number cruncher can be used for. The computer itself is loosely based on the Mk. VI, but has way more I/O and is even more modular.¡±

    Marcel looked at the three boxes.

    ¡°I assume that is the box that is roughly the size of a Mk. VI then? What are the other computers for?¡±

    ¡°The smaller one is actually the heart of the design. It is the connector, that connects the box, and the run-of-the-mill Envision computer to the secure network.

    It is designed so that it prevents the Envision computer from being part of the network in reality, but still be available for the researcher to use office.

    All the data goes through the controller, and only the data the researcher wants to go to the Envision computer will be available there.¡±

    Tiffany looked confused.

    ¡°But¡­ why does the Envision computer be connected in the first place? Don¡¯t research labs now use a standalone Envision computer to do the work on? Wouldn¡¯t that be enough?¡±

    ¡°No, not anymore, I fear. Think about it. A good scientist, with a good jack and a good research box, can easily get 60:1 compression. That means that if he only uses a single minute to surface, go to the stand-alone computer, write the report, and then save it, he has lost a whole hour of work.

    Not to mention, the way I have set this up, after a bit of work in period, the reports practically write themselves along with what the scientists want to write, while he does the science.

    To that extent, I designed the controller box to be the sole connection between the box, the Envision computer, and the rest of the network.¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ ok.¡±

    Michael looked hard at the big case though. The one that had been rolled in.

    ¡°That does not explain the big one, though. Is that the accompanying supercomputer?¡±

    I had to snort.

    ¡°Nope, that one is the all-in-one. It has the Envision computer, the research box, and the controller integrated into one unit. As I see it, we simply sell it as it is. We can offer to create specialized systems and applications for the research box, but as it is, this thing just needs to be plugged in at the lab and is ready to go.

    No hassle, no bean counters who think a specialized controller is too expensive, you know the drill.¡±

    The discussion lasted a bit longer, but effectively, that was the end of it. We would offer Archimedes either as an all-in-one, or the box and the controller separately.

 2.48: A Foray in vain

    I can¡¯t say that I wasn¡¯t pleased with Alena¡¯s report. I mean, seriously, I did not need it, but the few months of Enki operating had tripled my fortune.

    That alone was ok. Don¡¯t get me wrong, having too much money is by far preferable to having not enough. But I had more than enough money for over three years by now.

    No, more important was that this money was official and well-known. It conveyed status. Status that would keep problems away.

    Vasilienkov would never have even dreamed of betraying me if I had the status I had now. Heck, Frankel would have bowed and let me go if that had been the case.

    Not that I would have been on board the Drunken Owl in the first place, but status meant protection. It meant the option to go to Mercedes-Benz and order a brand-new T-240 with all the extras without the need to prove that one could afford one.

    It meant that no measly little C-tier corp flunky would even dare to stand in my way. And right now, it was just a matter of getting that status known.

    Yes, technically, Phillip Rawleigh had a higher status, here in NYC. After all, he was the grandson of the owner of Ralcon, but it was a small thing.

    Ralcon was, at least at this time, still bigger than Vandermeer. But not by much, after the artificial problems for Vandermeer had been removed and they took over most of the market that Falconer had served.

    It was already foreseeable that Vandermeer would outrank Ralcon in a couple of years.

    But my status with Enki was something else. Yes, it was lower, no question there. Ralcon and Vandermeer were two of the eight triple-A corporations in existence, while Enki was ¡®only¡¯ one of the 17 double-A.

    But more important for me was the fact that it was not inherited. Enki was my creation. Well, mine, Ben¡¯s, and Michael¡¯s. This status was something that I had earned.

    And to be honest, if Enki had the strategic and political depth for it, we would be a triple-A. Easily.

    Again, the simple fact that we controlled the Q-links made us one of the top dogs. The new grav coils were just the icing on the cake.

    But we lacked the well-stocked research department, the multifaceted offensive military capability, and the bought and paid-for politicians in high positions.

    The R&D was relatively easy. If we decided to trust the candidates. Not only that they would not convey our secrets to anybody else, but that they actually could do the work they were hired to do.

    The military¡­ honestly I was not convinced that we needed to be able to act offensively, but it was one of the factors that set the big eight apart from the rest. Heck, Kawamoto had no less than five battle groups headed by a battleship each.

    Talk about projecting power.

    The political power was just a matter of time though. The problem here was simply that we were too new. Not enough time to worm our way into the needed positions. We had yet to buy any politicians, much less enough to count.

    Honestly, even our status as a double-A was¡­ tenuous. I was convinced that solely the fact that we had enough profit for a triple-A put us there. We were just way too profitable for a single-A.

    To sum it up, we were an anomaly that did not fit into any of the neat little drawers that formed the system-wide social structure. And as long as we did not remedy that, we would be vulnerable.

    That brought me back to the one thing that I had burning under my fingernails. Blumenthal. I could not explain why I developed such an instant and intense dislike for that man, but it had happened.

    And I wanted to figure him out. Find out what he was planning. Where he was coming from, and where he was going.

    Maybe it was some form of subconscious need for revenge against all the operatives that I had met in Nowhere, but I can¡¯t tell you if that is true.

    The fact was, I wanted, no, I needed to put him under the microscope.

    The good thing was that in this instance, unlike virtually every other occasion when I had to foray into matrix combat, I had the luxury of time.

    I could do it the right way.

    To prove that, I first created a dummy account for multiple fixers. As a customer, not a contractor. Including Isaak Francis Blumenthal.

    It was not unusual that a customer remained anonym to the fixer. There was a downright flood of Mr. and Ms. Smiths, Millers, Does, Johnsons, and so on. All of them ¡®very concerned private individuals''. With ¡®absolutely no connection¡¯ to any organization, government, or corporation.

    Those individuals would only rarely meet even the fixers in person. Then I bought some mostly random information.

    The information itself was completely irrelevant. It was the formatting, the metadata, and the way the data was handled that was important for me.

    Well, the information was mostly irrelevant. I took the opportunity to buy what each fixer knew about their competition.

    That, naturally, told me quite a bit more about the various fixers operating in the Bronx. Most of it I filed as interesting but not important.

    The accounts about Blumenthal¡­ they were a bit sparse. I could tell that none of his ¡®colleagues¡¯ took him in the slightest seriously. What I could read between the lines was that they thought he was some rich idiot playing criminal to spice up his life.

    Much more interesting were the accounts I got back from Blumenthal about the other fixers.

    They immediately put any doubt about him being an operative to rest. I¡¯ve rarely seen such detailed and thorough reports on a fixer.

    Unfortunately, the reports were scrubbed of any metadata that I might use. Sure, the final text was written in Word. But whatever Blumenthal had done, he did not even use copy & paste. It allowed me, or more precisely, Warden, to analyze his personality. Sadly, not sufficiently enough to create a password profile for him.

    And before you ask, yes, I tried the usual phishing attacks. Just out of routine, mind you, and as I had expected, he did not fall for it.

    That left me with the next step. I hired an honest to god private detective. The snag here was that the private eye refused to negotiate through the matrix.

    Said he did not trust it to be secure enough. I am sure he just wanted to meet the client in person. Not that I did indulge him in that.

    I, briefly, considered hiring a proxy who would pose as the face of the operation. But then I had an even better idea.

    It was fortuitous that Enki had just begun selling the Incarnate telepresence bot. It was even easier to have one of them delivered to a mostly unused back alley in the Bronx by an automated freight drone.

    From there, an anonymously hired cab brought the bot to the dive bar the detective had specified.

    The funny thing is, with some bog standard clothes, and the holo-projector running, it mostly looked like an absolutely average person hidden behind a holographic mask.

    Those masks were not all that rare, even here in the more ritzy Bronx.

    I was quite happy that I never included a sense of smell, or nearly any other sense if I am honest, in the design of the Incarnate, as when I saw the interior of the bar for the first time.

    It was the typical unsavory, almost certainly smelly, underlit provider of cheap alcohol, mostly in the form of barely palatable beer, and despite the time of the early afternoon, it was already well visited.

    The so-called ¡®music¡¯ was an incoherent jumble of notes, vaguely resembling what a drunk might think of a melody, without even a hint of heart or soul, also known as ¡®easy listening¡¯. It began grating on my nerves the moment I stepped into the bar.

    It was nonetheless easy to find the detective, as he, for some inexplicable reason, had decided to go full bore into the clich¨¦s about private detectives.

    He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth, the fedora on his head, and a dirty trenchcoat that had probably started out tan. His greasy black hair was way too long for his rather portly face, and his scruffy stubble bore witness that he had not run into a shaver for at least a few days.

    All in all, exactly how one would imagine a detective to be¡­ in a holopic. I could only hope that he was a bit more discrete when he was on the job. Not that I expected much anyway. He was just another shot in the dark for me anyway.

    With that said, I moved the Incarnate to his table, noting the bottle of whiskey, quickly identified as so low tier that it took a shovel to find it, and a single glass on the table.

    When ¡®I¡¯ sat down, he looked up for the first time and then scowled.

    ¡°I would prefer you lose the mask.¡±

    I answered with the completely robotic synthetic voice of the bot:

    ¡°That won¡¯t do you any good, but as you wish.¡± And deactivated the holoprojector, revealing the android head underneath.

    He recoiled and snarled:

    ¡°What the fuck is that?¡±

    ¡°That is one of those new Enki Incarnate bots. A marvelous invention. Spares us the need of hiring a proxy.¡±

    ¡°A bot? I thought I would negotiate with a human!¡±

    ¡°You are negotiating with a human. The human is just not physically at the same location as you.¡±

    He growled briefly.

    ¡°Get real, I can clearly see that this is a bot, you confirmed it is a bot.¡±

    ¡°It is a telepresence bot. Specialized to be remotely piloted. Except that there is no biological matter opposite of you, the mind is human.¡±

    Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

    It took him a moment to digest that and then frowned even harder.

    ¡°Did I not tell your people that I do not trust the matrix? And then you remotely control a bot? Have you no sense of security?¡±

    ¡°The connection is direct via a Q-link. The matrix is not involved. And while your insistence on security is laudable, we think you are a bit paranoid. But whatever, this connection is secure.¡±

    He slapped his hand on the table.

    ¡°But that still does not tell me who I am dealing with!¡±

    ¡°You assume that even without the Incarnate, you would have learned that, Mr. Sharpes. That is not the case. If Enki had not brought the Incarnate to market, you would be sitting in front of a hireling who would have no idea who we are either, who would get fed what he was to say over a com. This removes an unnecessary step in between and removes another opening in security.¡±

    Harrison Sharpes, licensed and bonded private detective, was visibly unhappy about that, but unfortunately for him, that was all he would get, and he knew that.

    ¡°Fine. What do I call you?¡±

    ¡°Smith.¡±

    He rolled his eyes but remained somewhat cordial.

    ¡°Figures. Now, is it Mr. or Ms. Smith?¡±

    ¡°Just Smith. That is enough.¡±

    He murmured, ¡°Paranoid much, huh?¡± very softly, but the Incarnate had good enough audio sensors to pick it up. Not that I called him out about it.

    ¡°Alright, Smith, what can I do for you?¡±

    ¡°We require whatever information you can find about six individuals. Their names are Marvin Abbot, Isaak Blumenthal, Kellan Davenport, Gabriel Holmes, Janiya Parson, and Tanja Silver.¡±

    Yes, I was only interested in one of them, but I expected that this ¡®research¡¯ would reach the ears of the people investigated, so I decided to muddy the waters somewhat.

    His eyes widened, and he recoiled a bit, evidently confused.

    ¡°Fuck, I know three of those names. They are all fixers? What the fuck are you playing at? You think I will dig up dirt about fixers? Think again.¡±

    ¡°You are correct that all six of them are fixers. But we are not hiring you to dig up dirt about them but compile freely available information. We require nothing that is not public knowledge, and if we decided to invest the time, we would not need somebody to compile that information.

    Fortunately for you, we want that information quickly, so we decided to hire you to collect the available information. Not what can be found out through the matrix. We already have that. We need to know what is known on the street.¡±

    He frowned again.

    ¡°Just the publicly available information? Why?¡±

    ¡°That is unimportant for you. Are you willing and capable of doing the job or do we have to look for somebody else?¡±

    After a brief moment, he sighed and nodded.

    ¡°Yeah, I can do it. My rates are $800 per day, plus expenses.¡±

    ¡°As long as you can justify the expenses. We won¡¯t bankroll a weekend getaway in Atlantic City.¡±

    ¡°I will have to wine and dine some sources, and outright pay some of them.¡±

    ¡°That is no problem. How do you want to get paid?¡±

    ¡°Cash.¡±

    ¡°That is doable but surprising.¡±

    He knitted his brows in confusion again.

    ¡°Why surprising?¡±

    ¡°Dollar notes are easily traceable. The government and big corporations can follow them easier than a well-scrubbed electronic transfer.¡±

    He scowled, again.

    ¡°For real? How?¡±

    ¡°Every bank note, not just from the US, but virtually all over the world, has an RFID chip embedded with a unique signature. Every single time you walk past one of the hidden scanners, any database connected to it can tell exactly which notes you carry. Combine that with facial recognition, and governments and corporations can exactly trace all and each of your steps.¡±

    For a moment he stared at the Incarnate and then cursed. After a minute or so, he calmed himself back down.

    ¡°So there is no way to keep that information out of the hands of the corps?¡±

    So it was not the governments he was concerned about. Not really surprising, as the governments generally were owned by the corporations.

    ¡°There are a couple of ways. The easiest way would be deep credits. They are filtered through the dark web, the Abyss to be precise. If you know somebody proficient enough with computers you could have them obscure any digital transaction. Another way would be precious metals, bullion, or old coins.

    If your transactions get large enough, you can go to ITB, but it is unlikely that you will reach that point."

    His eyes widened again.

    ¡°For real? Shit, I¡¯ll have to look into that, don¡¯t I?¡±

    Yup, that confirmed something I had suspected already. My next sentence was the conclusion.

    ¡°Unfortunately, we are developing serious doubts about your qualification to fulfill this commission.¡±

    Again, he scowled hard.

    ¡°What, why? ¡®Cause I didn¡¯t know about the RFID chips in cash? Or that deep credits are safe?¡±

    ¡°Partly, yes. But mostly because you create the distinct impression that the words discretion and inconspicuousness are not part of your vocabulary. While the job itself is not illegal and we won¡¯t care if it becomes known, we do not want to advertise it.¡±

    It took him a moment to parse through my sentences, and then his eyes widened.

    ¡°Oh¡­ oh, fuck. Listen, mate, this¡­¡± he gestured all over his getup, ¡°is all for show. This is the Bronx. Not Brooklyn, not Queens, not Staten Island. If somebody wants to hire a private dick here, they expect somebody directly out of film noir.

    They expect the greasy overweight man in the dirty trenchcoat, with a fedora on the head. They expect the payment to be hush-hush.

    I give them the show, play the part, and give the impression that I am actually paranoid about the payment.

    And then I am the diversion, while my partners do the real work.

    Seriously, if you don¡¯t care about that crap, you can simply pay into our account. Makes it easier for us as well.¡±

    I said nothing for, what for me felt like an eternity. Mostly because I had gone into higher compression, and addressed Warden:

    <Any information if what he said is true?>

    <One moment, please. Sharpes Investigations Inc. is run by Melody Sharpes and has three employees. Harrison Sharpes, Ingmar Durham, and Claire Durham.>

    <Why did you not give me this information before?>

    <It was inconsequential. The likelihood of this avenue wielding any usable results is not impacted by the number of private detectives in the firm.>

    I held myself back and inwardly rolled my eyes. Sure, it was unimportant, but it would have been nice to know those little factoids beforehand.

    <Fine, but in the future, if I have you search for a contractor like Sharpes here, include information like that in the file.>

    <Understood.>

    Then I surfaced, and in the real world, just a couple of seconds had gone by, and my answer was still natural:

    ¡°We see. It seems that we failed to sufficiently research your organization. Our apology for that. As it is, we will give you a chance. Do your best to not disappoint us.¡±

    He scoffed.

    ¡°Let me guess, it would be detrimental to my health?¡±

    ¡°No, we don¡¯t work that way. It will, however, be detrimental to the review we will leave about your firm.¡±

    He stopped short and then laughed briefly.

    ¡°Yeah, that is fair.¡±

    ¡°Do you require an advance on the money?¡±

    He visibly thought about it for a moment, before he nodded.

    ¡°Yeah. I don¡¯t know how expensive it will be.¡±

    ¡°Are $10k for expenses and seven days of pay acceptable?¡±

    ¡°Wait, just like that?¡±

    ¡°Money is of less importance to us than any information you might find.¡±

    Instead of saying something, he fiddled with his credled, and then extended his arm, so that my Incarnate could read the account information.

    The transfer of the money, anonymously, naturally, was done almost instantly.

    Not that he noticed that.

    ¡°Uh, won¡¯t you read the account information?¡±

    ¡°This is a bot. We have already done so and transferred the money. Do you require a written list of the persons we ask you to investigate?¡±

    ¡°Uhm, no, not necessary. We¡­ well, we record these meetings routinely.¡±

    It goes without question that the Incarnate¡¯s ¡®face¡¯ showed absolutely no emotions, considering that it was a simple plate of carbon with a speaker grille and a pair of optical sensors. Nonetheless, Sharpes held up his hands in a warding motion.

    ¡°Don¡¯t get angry. Again, our usual clientele is rarely so considerate to provide a written list or even repeat themselves. They expect that we listen carefully and get it right the first time.¡±

    ¡°We were not going to say anything. The only information this recording will provide is that you talked to an Incarnate, with an artificial voice. While Incarnates are still somewhat rare, there are already several dozen of them in New York City alone.

    Q-links are cheap, and anybody can get them, diadems to remote control the Incarnate are cheap and plentiful. The only name we provided, except the ones we offered to provide a written list of, is obviously false.

    But it would be better if you either tell your other clients beforehand or not at all.¡±

    He sighed heavily.

    ¡°You are right, but many of those big egos will explode anyway. But whatever¡­ say, this Incarnate seems pretty useful. What does it cost?¡±

    ¡°Considering your rates, we fear it is at least at this time outside of your budget. This model costs 42 grand.¡±

    He nearly exploded in a coughing fit and took a moment to catch himself.

    ¡°Fuck! Who do they think they can fleece that amount of money for a simple bot?¡±

    ¡°We assume you have no experience with what you call simple bots. Or you would know that a human-sized android with a halfway natural moving profile and enough manual dexterity to function as a proxy starts at around $35,000. And that is without the stereoscopic full spectrum optical sensors and the hologram projector.

    As it is, a bot of the same quality as an Incarnate would have set you back around $80k just a few months ago. If you were able to find one in the first place.¡±

    His eyes widened in surprise.

    ¡°No shit? Damn, why are they so expensive? I thought you could get a nice android for around 10k.¡±

    ¡°A used one with a standard bot moving profile. The way that bots usually have jerky motions. They also lack the manual dexterity for much that a human hand can do.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ not so expensive? But seriously, who do they think they are making those things for?¡±

    ¡°Not people like you. To be fair, they do not make them for people like us either.¡± Yes, I was lying through my vocoder here, but I was for sure not telling him that.

    ¡°The Incarnate is designed for corporations. To facilitate a meeting without the need to travel from L5, the Moon, or the Outer System. For those people, even the four hours they spend on travel to or from the Moon a single time is worth more than an Incarnate.¡±

    ¡°Too true. Those rich fucks care more about their personal comfort and time than anything else.¡±

    ¡°Is there anything else to discuss or do you understand the job?¡±

    ¡°Yeah, I understand it. We will get it done, no worry.¡±

    ¡°Then we wish you a nice day.¡±

    I stood the Incarnate up and began moving it towards the door.

    <Can you please move the bot back to the Fortress?>

    <Your wish is my command.>

    With that, I disconnected from the bot, and let Warden maneuver it back home. Yes, it was just an Incarnate, and it did only cost me $1200 in materials but waste not, want not.

    I then began with the next step of my plan. Again, most likely in futility, but it did cost me nothing to try the low-hanging fruits.

    I found Blumenthal¡¯s gallery computer in the matrix. As usual, it was up and running. In this time and age, only people very concerned about computer security shut their computers down as a standard measure.

    Also, as usual, it ran on Envision. Envision 42 to be exact. With Office 40. I spare you the boring nothing burger that this entailed.

    Yes, I got the financial data of the gallery, but that was all. He had not even a last-generation firewall or antivirus, for goodness sake. Not that he needed it for this machine. It was just the front after all.

    Because I had nothing better to do than probe his fixer system, despite not expecting to get very far with it, I did exactly that.

    I would love to tell you a tale of the daring and dangerous infiltration that I managed, capture you with a description of how I overcame all those sophisticated security systems and fought tooth-and-nail against some horrendously brutal hunter-killer program¡­ alas, it was not to be.

    Yes, this system was considerably more secure than the one of the gallery, but that is like saying that a molehill is considerably higher than a hole in the ground.

    The gallery system had no security whatsoever, while the fixer system had something posing as a security system. Oh, fine, it was an actual security system¡­ in 2240 when it was created.

    When I encountered it, 10 years later, it was no longer the tough cookie that it had been, for the first few months of its existence.

    And even then it was not quite the top of the line. Needless to say, it took me longer to identify it, with nearly 12 seconds, than to beat it.

    Now, if I had any doubt that Blumenthal¡¯s profession as a fixer was equally a front as that as an art dealer, those would have gone the way of the dodo.

    I got his whole system copied, which took around 1.2 hours.

    It took Warden and me nearly three hours to have it thoroughly analyzed.

    It took so long because we, well I, could not believe that this was it. That there was no hidden cache, no secret data, nothing.

    It was, in one word, banal. Even the database that I had stolen from Vasilienkov was more up-to-date than that. I found entries for several people who I learned quickly were deceased. Don¡¯t get me wrong, they were not entries for people that were dead, but active.

    One thing the analysis made clear was that this database had not been updated for a bit more than three years.

    Essentially since he had arrived in NYC.

    So far, this little excursion had been a bust, not that I had expected anything else. What I did expect though was that his third system would yield some information that I was interested in.

    There was just one tiny problem. I had to find it first. It should have been no problem, as I had, theoretically, just to follow any matrix links into the building. Unfortunately, things couldn¡¯t be that easy.

    Oh sure, there were still a few links in, but those were the standard TV connection, a basic com, and a couple of the ubiquitous connections that one gets with any utility company.

    No computer, not even a smart TV. Yes, there were ways to hide a connection. But those ways were¡­ well not obvious, but with the right tools easy enough to spot.

    And there was nothing of the sort here. If he had just started out, or it had been a few years since Enki released the Q-links, I would suspect that he used one. But he had set up shop around 3? years ago.

    There was no way that he had implemented a Q-link then. That left just one option. He had another location where he had the computer system and anything else he wanted to hide.

    Now it was on Mr. Sharpes. For now at least. I had some ideas on how to work around the issue. I just needed time, and maybe some help.

 2.49: Spy versus Spy

    I was aware that I should wait for Sharpes¡® report, but it was not my thing to sit on my hands. Especially as I did not trust that a local detective bureau could outwit an intelligence operative.

    Even one so blatant as Blumenthal seemed to be. He seriously projected only the barest, flimsiest veneer of being a fixer. That meant he did not care if somebody found him out. Which in turn made me want to find out what he was up to even harder.

    The problem was that with my current toolset, I had no way to pierce his protections. So a new toolset was on the menu.

    I already had a pretty good idea about what I wanted or needed. I just needed to make it happen.

    And for that, I needed help. Oh, I was sure I could muddle through on my own if I absolutely needed it, but that would be way harder than necessary. And I would almost certainly make mistakes.

    Luckily for me, I had a pretty good idea about where to get that help. And the special nice thing was that I would not even need to pay extra for it.

    To that effect, I called Naveen. He was a bit surprised, but not badly so.

    ¡°Hey, Vivian, what can I do for you?¡±

    ¡°Hi Naveen. I need your help. The help of your department to be precise.¡±

    He frowned a bit.

    ¡°Is there a problem that I am not aware of? Something your guard detail can¡¯t handle?¡±

    I chuckled. As if Thomson and Co. would let me leave the house unless it was really necessary.

    ¡°No, not a problem. I¡­ just need to pick the brains of a surveillance specialist.¡±

    He cocked his head, knitting his eyebrows in the process.

    ¡°What do you need a surveillance specialist for?¡±

    ¡°I¡­ well it is a bit embarrassing, but ok. When Ben brought me to the New Year¡¯s Eve Gala, there was this man, ostensibly a fixer, but I pegged him as an operative.

    I¡­ well, I am not proud about it, but I developed an instant dislike for him, and I have this need to uncover his secrets.¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°Yes, I know it is not healthy, but unless I give in to this need, I will not be happy. The point here is that I need surveillance gear to, well put surveillance on him. And for that, I need to create surveillance gear.¡±

    He rubbed his chin while he nodded.

    ¡°I see. Yeah, it is not healthy, but I don¡¯t see any harm in it. But¡­ why do you need a specialist? I can send you a list of what we use.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°I wanted to create our own line of gear anyway, and the opportunity is as good as any other.¡±

    He frowned again.

    ¡°Why do you want to create our own line? We already use the best you can buy.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°And that is of course the best gear that exists, right?¡±

    He scoffed.

    ¡°No, of course not. The other corps don¡¯t sell their best stuff, just what they already have replaced. But unless we go against, Dalgon, Xiao Ping, or Kawamoto, we are as good as any other.¡±

    I smiled sweetly.

    ¡°But would it not be better if we had some¡­ better stuff? Especially as I bet that not one of the gear we are already using incorporates Q-links. Am I right?¡±

    He sighed heavily.

    ¡°Yeah, it would be better, but your time is way too valuable for something like that, and you are right about the Q-links.¡±

    ¡°My time is not too valuable for that because until I get this done I am not worth for anything. I need to get this done. And even designing some new gear might help me here.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, fine. And what is in it for us?¡±

    I could understand the joke he was making, but I played along.

    ¡°How about new surveillance gear that nobody else even knows exists?¡±

    ¡°But we don¡¯t need new surveillance gear. We don¡¯t even use our old surveillance gear.¡±

    ¡°Well, then you don¡¯t need your specialist for the moment, do you?¡±

    He chuckled at that.

    ¡°Yeah, you are right. But seriously, why don¡¯t you just use the off-the-shelf stuff? It is certainly good enough I think.¡±

    I cocked my head and smiled again.

    ¡°First, I have nothing better to do right now, and some light mental exercise like that will be helpful, second, I want to try my hands on this stuff anyway, third, when we need that kind of stuff in the future we will have something nobody else can just buy and analyze, and fourth, we have no clue what this operative has in forms of counter-surveillance equipment, so anything nobody knows how to counter would help.¡±

    ¡°Light mental¡­ you know what, I don¡¯t care. If that is light mental exercise for you, so be it. It will certainly help my two specialists. Do I send them over to your house or will you meet with them here in the HQ?¡±

    I thought about it for a moment before I answered:

    ¡°I think Lt. Thomson would be much happier if we did it here in the Fortress. Should I send a skimmer for them?¡±

    ¡°Nah, I send one with them. Have fun.¡±

    With that done, I began to design the basic components that I needed to make my ideas work. They were, well basic. Not complicated at all. The first was an eminently simple amplifier circuit. The second was an at best moderately more complicated signal processor.

    Both were easily adapted from standard of-the-rack designs. The rest of what I needed I already had.

    Triple Q-links were not that often used yet but were in no way more complicated than the standard two-ended ones. Then I needed two different sizes of grav coils. Again, nothing too hard, as I had Warden calculate and essentially design them.

    And the bodies of the two designs that I could mostly design by myself. Again, astonishingly basic forms without anything that could complicate them.

    All in all, I was done way before 15 minutes after the call two people were ushered into my lab.

    I stood up and offered them my hand in greeting.

    ¡°Hi. I am Vivian DuClare. Col. Upreti has sent you?¡±

    The man, a large black person of around 40, smiled brilliantly as he answered:

    ¡°We know who you are. And yes, the boss sent us to help you, boss. My name is Samuel Badiaga. And that¡± he gestured towards the barely taller-than-me blonde woman of around 30, ¡°is Samantha Hewitt. And yes, the Sam and Sam jokes write themselves.¡±

    I could not stop a quick snort about that last.

    ¡°So, Sam and Sam? How did that happen?¡±

    Samantha was the one who answered in a surprisingly deep voice:

    ¡°It just happened. Samuel is just good with the drones and all that stuff, while I have a knack for bugs, spy cameras, and the other covert surveillance stuff. We are still arguing about which of us has to change their name.¡±

    Male Sam used that opportunity to shoot a salvo in that regard.

    ¡°I still think it should be you. I am the older one, and I had so much longer to get used to it.¡±

    ¡°Have you ever heard about ¡®Ladies First¡¯? Be a man, and take the lumps.¡±

    I could only shake my head while the two of them argued like an old couple. After a couple of minutes of arguments going back and forth, I decided it was time to get to the point.

    ¡°While that is all quite entertaining, you are not here to entertain me, you know?¡±

    Samantha turned red, and from his expression, the only reason why I did not see any blush on Samuel¡¯s face was his exceptionally dark complexion.

    He then stammered:

    ¡°Oh, yeah, sorry boss. We¡­ well we fall into the habit.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°As long as it does not impact your work, who cares? That is the only reason why I stopped you right now.¡±

    Samantha made a face.

    ¡°Yeah, not so good. But ok, let¡¯s get to work. What exactly do you need us for? The boss wouldn¡¯t say.¡±

    I gestured towards the working table.

    ¡°It¡¯s quite simple. I want to design a series of surveillance equipment.¡±

    Samuel frowned at that.

    ¡°Uh, why? I mean, the stuff we use is pretty good already.¡±

    I smiled at him.

    ¡°The usual reason. We have toys that others don¡¯t have and want to exploit them.¡±

    Samantha looked contemplating while she mused:

    ¡°But is that not just a matter of time? Sure, we won¡¯t get the bleeding edge stuff, but not so far from it either.¡±

    ¡°I am pretty sure nobody has even thought about using some of what I intend to integrate into the designs. For one of them, I am absolutely sure. As far as I know, Warden, my VI, and I are the only ones who could design the parts. And we haven¡¯t.¡±

    It took Samantha a few moments before she opened her eyes wide in surprise.

    ¡°You mean the grav coils? Seriously, putting grav coils into surveillance gear?¡±

    ¡°I think you are forgetting that the prices for grav coils have fallen substantially. We are talking about coils in the single-digit range. Two to three Kepler. Depending on the configuration of the coils, and the number of them, we can get them made for 30 or 40 dollars.¡±

    Samuel looked incredulous about the numbers, so I shrugged and continued:

    ¡°Seriously, the new grav coils are quite a bit cheaper, and we don¡¯t need very powerful ones. Right now, we can make the ¡®small¡¯ 800 Kepler coils for $112, and falling. For this, we don¡¯t need more than five Kepler per coil.

    The cost is not completely linear to the strength of the coil, but close. It should not be more than $2 to $3 per coil.¡±

    Samantha frowned again.

    ¡°But¡­ we have nearly no experience with designing surveillance gear. I am sure if we give the coils to the big ones they make better stuff.¡±

    I raised a single eyebrow.

    ¡°Will they? If I understand it right, you are pretty experienced in this stuff. Now¡­ how would you integrate the Q-link into the equipment?¡±

    That made her smile.

    ¡°Oh, that is easy. I would replace the radio control and signal system. That is the easiest way those things are discovered.¡±

    I nodded smiling as well.

    ¡°Anything else?¡±

    ¡°Uh, no? I mean, sure, your new processors include Q-link if I understand it right, but the rest¡­ there is no point I think.¡±

    Yup, thought so.

    ¡°Do you think the big corporations will use Q-links for anything else?¡±

    She shook her head, looking confused.

    ¡°No, of course not. What else is there to use Q-links for?¡±

    ¡°Later. How about this? How are those bugs and drones usually discovered?¡±

    Samuel interjected:

    ¡°For the drones that¡¯s easy. Either the signal is discovered, or somebody sees them.¡±

    Samantha took a bit longer to answer.

    ¡°Well, the signals as well, but those are the first things that will be replaced by Q-links, so that falls flat. Then¡­ the minimal thermal energy of the electronics, the electromagnetic emissions, if they are big enough they can be visually discovered, or if they are integrated into a line there will be distortions that can be discovered.¡±

    I nodded again.

    ¡°So¡­ in essence, they are either discovered visually, by the signals to and from them, or by their electronic emissions, thermal or EM.¡±

    ¡°Yes¡­ why?¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°To explain, I think Naveen, Col. Upreti, gave you the wrong impression. Mostly because I probably gave him the wrong impression. You are not necessarily here to help me design the new tech, but more to help me refine what I have designed and make it more practical.¡±

    With that, I activated the holo-projector, and the first of the designs was projected over the table.

    ¡°I decided that we need three levels of equipment. This is the heart of it all, I call it Lachesis.¡±

    I gestured towards the ball with a 5cm diameter, or a bit smaller than a tennis ball.

    ¡°That is 1:1 by the way. It will be that size.¡±

    Samantha frowned but moved closer to look at it.

    ¡°Ok, that is¡­ a rather small drone. But a bit big for the surveillance equipment. Inside a building, it will be discovered by even a cursory inspection.¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°No, it will not. The skin of it is covered in Q-links. I think what most people don¡¯t get yet about Q-links is that they transfer energy, not information. We use the energy to transmit the information, but in the end, the energy is what is transferred.¡±

    Samuel had moved closer to the projection and rubbed his chin.

    ¡°So¡­ you plan to power those things remotely? Should reduce the energy signature, sure, but how will it prevent people from seeing those things?¡±

    I sighed and rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Light is energy. The idea is that we use triple Q-links. Two terminals are on each side of the ball, and the third amplifies the energy that one of the two terminals receives so that the other emits it. In effect, it will emit whatever light hits the other side. It will not quite make it invisible, but close.¡±

    They both looked shocked at the ball, then back at me and back at the ball.

    Then Samuel croaked:

    ¡°Invisible?¡±

    I rolled my eyes again.

    ¡°Not quite. Close though. There will be a parallax error, but all in all, unless you know exactly what you are looking for and where you have to look, it should be nearly impossible to see. Regardless of the spectrum.¡±

    Samantha scratched her scalp.

    ¡°So¡­ if this thing is silent, and it is remotely powered¡­ then only the electronic signatures can give it away.¡±

    ¡°What electronic signatures?¡± I send the signal to project a cutaway beside the full system. To their credit, both immediately spotted what I was talking about.

    ¡°What the¡­¡± ¡°Where is the rest of it?¡±

    ¡°There is no rest. It is the hull, which is made out of structural carbon, the skin, out of Q-links, this compartment here with some actuators to open it, and these 10 grav coils arranged in a tetrahedron. Six to form the edges of it, and four to go from the corners to the center.

    Embedded in structural carbon as well. The coils are five Kepler each. There are no two of them that are parallel. That should give us insane maneuverability.¡±

    Samantha gasped:

    ¡°But where is the spyware? The microphone? The camera?¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°The whole outer skin is covered in 4.58 times 10 to the power of 16 Q-links. Or 45.8 million billion. Each of them works as an admittedly not spectacular microphone, and each of them works as a pixel for a digital camera.

    Yes, only half of them are receivers, but that still leaves 22.9 million billion pixels. Yes, only one-eighth of them are turned in a specific direction. That still leaves 2.86 million billion pixels in each direction.

    Do you think a 2.86 petapixel sensor could maybe be enough?¡±

    I knew full well that the best digital cameras of our time were measured in terra pixel. And only the absolute top of the field reached double digits.

    It was, of course, not quite that easy. It never is. And Samuel figured out the fly in the ointment quite quickly.

    ¡°Uh, won¡¯t the picture be distorted? I mean, it is more or less spherical, so while 2.86 petapixel are pointing in every direction, most of those will be not quite in the right direction.¡±

    With Samantha adding:

    ¡°Yeah, and there are no lenses. And where is the electronics to convert all that incoming light into information?¡±

    I answered Samuel first:

    ¡°We have computers for that. There is nothing that prevents us from putting a Chronos or two to the task for each Lachesis.¡±

    Then I turned to Samantha:

    Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

    ¡°That is one of the reasons why I¡¯ve gone with 10 grav coils instead of three. For mobility alone, three would have been enough. With 10, we can use grav fields to form air lenses. Or turn the omnidirectional microphone into a directional one. And the electronic sits in the home base. Again, triple Q-links.

    The third terminal, the one in the home base, will send the incoming information directly to some signal processors to split the EM information and the pressure information, also known as sound, and then shunt all that into various CPUs for analysis. Yes, we will need a boatload of signal processors, but luckily, those can be distributed quite well.

    And does not need to be lugged around, thanks to the Q-link. All in all, I think a normal four-unit device full of equipment should be enough to make a Lachesis work.

    That includes the stealth, the remote control, the signal processing, and the analysis of the data. Oh, and powering the whole thing.¡±

    They looked at the schematics for a bit, before Samuel sighed.

    ¡°So¡­ if it is a tetrahedron for the grav coils, why a ball then? Wouldn¡¯t a tetrahedron be a bit better? Smaller overall, and with admittedly triangular plains to use as cameras.¡±

    I was somewhat impressed that he managed to switch gears that fast.

    ¡°Two reasons. First, it is significantly harder to get the stealth working without absolute opposite Q-links. Not impossible, but way harder. But the second is that a sphere is the best form to withstand external pressure. This thing is evacuated, so a near vacuum. It isolates the few heat-producing elements like the coils better.¡±

    Both of them walked around the holo-projection and looked at it hard.

    Then Samantha said:

    ¡°So¡­ if all the electronics, the fuel cells, and all that are somewhere else¡­ why this size then?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Why not? The five Kepler coils have a length of a bit less than 24mm. To get a tetrahedron that can use those coils from a vertex to the center, it needs a sidelength of not quite 39mm. The circumsphere of that tetrahedron is the same as the length from the vertex to the center.

    Not quite 24mm.

    With a bit over 1mm of structural carbon and the layer of Q-links, we get a sphere with a radius of 25mm.

    Sure, we could make it 0.1 mm smaller, but that bit works nicely as a structural strut. To be honest, if you look closely, you see that a few additional struts are going out from the center.¡±

    Somewhere in the explanation I seemed to have left them behind. After an awkward silence, Samuel tentatively asked:

    ¡°Uh¡­ what is a circumsphere? Does that have something to do with circumspect?¡±

    Wait, really? That was what they were not getting?

    ¡°The circumsphere of a regular polyhedron, and no it has nothing to do with circumspect, is the sphere that touches all the vertexes of the polyhedron. Obviously, it has the same center.¡±

    That was when Samantha sighed.

    ¡°But do we need the five Kepler coils? Don¡¯t get me wrong, if that thing works as you describe it, it will be the bomb, but¡­ honestly, I would prefer something smaller.¡±

    I shrugged at that.

    ¡°I think those coils give it a nice amount of mobility. And for something smaller, I have Clotho.¡±

    She looked away from the holo and at me then.

    ¡°Clotho?¡±

    ¡°I told you that I have designed three levels. I have named them after the antique Greek fates, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Clotho is the youngest, Atropos is the oldest, and Lachesis is in the middle.

    In this case, Clotho is the smallest, Atropos is the largest, and Lachesis is in the middle. I am just of the opinion that Lachesis is also the most useful of the three. Clotho and Atropos are there to cover the weak spots of it.¡±

    Another order and another picture was displayed by the holo projector.

    This time, it was just a tetrahedron. The hologram was around a third of the size of Lachesis.

    ¡°This is Clotho.¡±

    Samantha frowned and looked a bit closer.

    ¡°Sorry, but that thing is still way too big for the small stuff.¡±

    I chuckled softly.

    ¡°That is not 1:1. Let me show it to you in its real size.¡±

    And the hologram shrunk down to be just a tiny spec of light.

    ¡°It has the smallest grav coils that math tells us are functional. They have a length of 0.012mm. Or around two-thirds of the thickness of a human hair. The side length is 0.019mm. Or a touch bigger than a human hair. It also has the Q-link stealth skin, though with ¡®only¡¯ 1.94 billion pairs.

    Giving it four 485-megapixel cameras. Again, the single Q-link works not quite well as a microphone, but together they should give us some decent quality.¡±

    Samantha looked at the hologram suspiciously before she sighed.

    ¡°So you are telling me that we can make something of a grain of sand, that is additionally also invisible?¡±

    ¡°More like the size of a speck of dust, but yes, basically. We¡­ have to test it of course, but in theory, it should work.¡±

    ¡°What¡¯s the catch? I mean, why do you need us here?¡±

    I shrugged my shoulders.

    ¡°You are here in case I missed something obvious that you can point out. And to test those things. Well, Lachesis and Clotho. Atropos is a bit more complicated and you can help design it.¡±

    Samantha looked again at the hologram.

    ¡°Can you magnify Clotho again? And I can tell you one thing right away. Lachesis needs an OPB connector.¡±

    I followed her request and the tetrahedron of Clotho was big again.

    ¡°That is where that compartment comes in.¡±

    I highlighted the 5x5x5mm compartment in the ball of Lachesis.

    ¡°I envision this compartment filled with Clotho motes.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ how will that give Lachesis an OPB connector?¡±

    ¡°Keep in mind that Clotho is covered in Q-links. Q-links which can transfer small electric charges, or light pulses, in either direction. Enough Clotho motes can connect to any OPB port and emulate a connector. They can even power on any passive device.¡±

    Samuel meanwhile pulled out his com and operated it for a moment.

    ¡°You know what¡¯s missing? A few sets of nano-wire. They can be used to pick a mechanical lock and manipulate macro elements that Clotho simply is too small to influence like cabinet doors or drawers.¡±

    I looked at the hologram for a few seconds, before I nodded.

    ¡°You are right. That would be useful.¡± I connected to my Archimedes system and twinned the compartment for the motes on the other side, filling it with the exceptionally mobile tools.

    ¡°So, is that better?¡±

    He looked over the schematics again and then nodded.

    ¡°Yeah. It is just¡­ so often I had to use drones without anything to manipulate things and it always fucked up at some point in the mission. It is always such a shit show, and every single time I complain that the fucking drones lack that ability. And every single time I get told that is the best that is out there, and any drone with manipulators is unsuited for our uses.

    Then why the fuck does nobody build the fucking things so that they are suited?¡±

    I moved a bit back, lifting my hands in a warding motion.

    ¡°Woah, calm down! If you are so concerned about it we can include a tractor beam assembly. Together with the nanowires that should make it good enough for manipulation.¡±

    Another short command to my Archimedes, and there was now a third compartment directly beside the one with the nanowire. Filled with a small tractor beam.

    ¡°So, unlike the stealth, camera, and microphones, this feature is directional, but that should be ok, I think.¡±

    ¡°Just like that?¡±

    ¡°Sure. The small tractor beam makes it a bit more expensive, but not that much. Maybe another $20.¡±

    Samantha tapped the side of her nose while Samuel was grumping about a manipulator, and it was clear that she was thinking hard.

    ¡°About the cost¡­ is that stealth stuff realistic? I mean you have what, 22 trillion pairs of Q-links? I heard that it costs us around one cent to create one. That would make one of those Lachesis cost around $220 billion to make.¡±

    I have to confess it took me a moment to understand what she was talking about. Then it dawned on me, and I had to chuckle.

    ¡°You are¡­ not completely wrong, but the conclusion is. First, this¡± I projected one of our standard OPB-Q-link adapter pairs, ¡°is the Q-link we talk about when we say it costs less than one cent to make. To be exact, it costs us around .6 cents to make.

    You might notice, that it is a tiny bit bigger than the 414pm x 414pm chips that cover Lachesis. It is also more than one Q-link if we are exact. It replicates an OPB cable, with 10 TB/s bandwidth. Each of the two adapters contains 6.2g of carbon. That is where 80% of the production costs come into play.

    Second, you got the numbers wrong, it is 22 quadrillion triplets of Q-links. But those are what we call integrated Q-links. Combined, all the Q-links in the stealth/audio/video system of Lachesis have a mass of 5.7¦Ìg. Or 0.0000057g.

    There is a reason why we sell the pack of 50k integrated Q-links for $4. And still make out like a bandit there. A single gram of carbon costs us .038 cents. To be honest, the structural shell of Lachesis with its nearly 24g of carbon is way more expensive than the Q-links covering it.

    And that does not even cost a single cent. No, the real cost of this thing is in the grav coils. All in all the whole of Lachesis, without the nanowires and the tractor beam would cost us at current prices $48 to make.

    With the nanowires and the tractor beam, it would go up to¡± I had my Archimedes calculate the cost real quick, and then continued, ¡°$72 to make.¡±

    That made Samantha shake her head.

    ¡°That can¡¯t be right. A decent bug costs around $2500. A decent small drone around $500.¡±

    I had to smile.

    ¡°You are forgetting that we are talking just about Lachesis. Not about the infrastructure we need to make it work. That will set us back another $2k. But unlike the bug, this infrastructure is reusable. When the individual Lachesis unit has done its task and can¡¯t be recovered, we simply hook a new one into the system.¡±

    I saw her relax quite a bit after that.

    ¡°Ah, ok, that is more like it. What about a Clotho? How much does that cost?¡±

    ¡°The carbon is negligible. We are talking about 10 nanograms or so. The other materials are coming in at around $.2 per unit. Paradoxically, here manufacturing costs are actually non-trivial at $.15.

    All in all, we are talking about a hair above $.35 to make one. Again, just the Clotho unit itself. The infrastructure costs another $2 to make, without the analytical systems that are integrated into the Lachesis infrastructure. But it is reusable as well.¡±

    Samantha nodded.

    ¡°And it can power up any OPB device? How?¡±

    ¡°Q-links can transfer electricity. Not much, mind you. Just around 20mV. That means we need 250 just to get the standard 5V to power up a standard OPB thumb drive, and then one for each of the 24 data lines, but the compartment in a Lachesis can carry more than a billion of them. Not that we will ever even be tempted to fill it up, but just carrying a few thousand of the motes should be enough.¡±

    ¡°Ok, yes, that should work. Why did you make the compartment so big though?¡±

    ¡°Again, why not? The additional cost is measured in thousands of a cent, it does not hurt, and maybe we can use it to smuggle other things to or from a location.¡±

    The next point was Samuel then:

    ¡°So¡­ if Lachesis can do essentially everything we need, except anything we use Clotho for, what do we need Atropos for?¡±

    ¡°I envision Atropos as more in line with a conventional military surveillance drone. Something around a meter, maybe two in length, 50cm in diameter.

    The point here is that Lachesis has a combined gravity-bending field strength of 12 Kepler. Yes, it is small, so the 10 Kepler it can use to effectively accelerate are more like 60 Kepler, but that only makes it 1.6g acceleration. And thanks to air resistance it caps out at below the speed of sound.

    An average skimmer has an acceleration of 7.5g. Lachesis simply can¡¯t keep up.

    I think we should use the standard 20cm 800 Kepler coils for Atropos. Four in the primary direction, and two each in the secondary directions.

    That should give it an acceleration somewhere around 300g. The top speed will most likely limited by friction heating instead of overcoming air resistance.

    The problem with that is that it is completely unfeasible to use Q-links to power those coils. At least not for any high acceleration. We can use it for loitering, but we need to include some power cells.

    Fortunately, Q-links can charge them even while the drone is loitering.¡±

    I frowned briefly.

    ¡°At least it should be possible. I have yet to try it.

    It will also be unfeasible to use the 414pm Q-links for stealth here, as at 2m length and 50cm diameter, it would take 55 quintillion Q-link triples to cover it. That number is not that bad, but we would need an amplifier and a signal processor for each of them.

    But Atropos should keep sufficient distance anyway. We have to look into it, but I guess that 1mm2 Q-links for the stealth should be enough.

    I also think we should design it so that it can carry up to 32 Lachesis.¡±

    I made another pause, thinking for a moment.

    ¡°I want to have enough power cell capacity to fly it between 15 and 20 thousand km before it has to be recharged. That should enable us to move it to nearly everywhere on the planet.¡±

    Samuel rubbed his chin.

    ¡°That sounds¡­ ambitious. But not unrealistic. But¡­ while we are in the inception phase, would it be possible to create a Lachesis filled with dodeca-azide?¡±

    I was only a step away from ripping him a new one, when Samantha was a tiny bit faster.

    ¡°Are you fucking insane? Why not use Aziorazide Azide instead? If we go for the boom at a gaze factor anyway?¡±

    I was happy that I was not the only one who thought that using the only in advertisement material of Xiao Ping declared as stable high explosive a bit¡­ unhinged.

    The problem was that it took only tiny vibrations, a small temperature differential, some static electricity, or just time to set it off.

    Sure, as soon as it exploded it was a magnificent explosion. Easily twice as powerful as the same amount of octogen. The problem was just keeping it from exploding until you really needed it to explode.

    Heck, the well-known nitro-glycerine was stable compared to that stuff. Only the Azioroazide Azide that Samantha mentioned was even less stable. And more explosive. That stuff exploded no matter what.

    ¡°Sorry, but we could use them for sabotage, but not much more. Even if we use dodeca-azide, we only get the equivalent of 350g of TNT. Most of that will be spent breaking up the shell. You could destroy a car, or wreck a room, but that¡¯s it I fear. And not even that if it is hardened.¡±

    He slumped a bit and then nodded ruefully.

    ¡°Yeah, okay. Sorry, but it is the old thing about armed drones. They are just¡­ too interesting.¡±

    Then he perked back up a bit.

    ¡°But¡­ what if we make it a bit bigger, and integrate a couple of missiles, maybe a Gauss gun?¡±

    I rolled my eyes and shook my head.

    ¡°A Gauss will deplete the power cells too quickly. We could build a version with missiles, but why? At this time, our military is purely defensive. Anything happening here, or at Loui-5, and we have swarms of missiles at the ready.

    We have kinetic, high explosive, EMP, small gravity pulse weapons, small nukes, and even disruptor warheads. There is absolutely no point in using a transcontinental delivery system, heck, an intra-planetary delivery system, Atropos can easily fly to the orbit, the moon, or the Lagrange points, to deploy weapons.

    Especially as the missiles can reach the orbit from New York as well.¡±

    Samantha looked at Samuel for a moment, before she rolled her eyes as well, followed by hitting him on the back of the head. Not hard, but not very playful either.

    ¡°Get a grip man. If you have such a hardon for an armed drone, we can try to convince the Colonel of it later. But this is the basics. Pure surveillance. Spycraft. Would it be cool if we could use Clotho to kill somebody? Sure. But let¡¯s be real, that is not the objective of this.¡±

    It seemed that there was an eye-rolling epidemic breaking out, as he followed doing it as well.

    ¡°Yes Mom. But back to business. We have to include a radar and an anti-collision system into the design of Atropos.¡±

    That was news to me.

    ¡°Uh, why do you think that?¡±

    It was Samantha who answered:

    ¡°If you want to fly it anywhere but the most empty airspace, you need it. Sure, a warship will not even notice if one of those crashes into them, even if it is so fast that it is glowing white hot from friction, but any civilian craft that runs into one of them is fucked.¡±

    Yeah, that made sense.

    ¡°Okay. Shouldn¡¯t be too much of a problem I think. Though, I planned to make the hull out of radar-absorbing material. We¡¯ll have to look into how we get that done later. Anything else?¡±

    Samuel grinned.

    ¡°Yeah, what about active sensors? I know it will have several million megapixels but we need radar, LIDAR, and whatever else.¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°To be honest, we need cameras on that thing. The stealth system only has around four million pixels if we go with the 1mm2 design.

    But a 5-petapixel camera should be relatively easy to make. That is just a chip of Q-links with less than 3cm per side. Include a small tractor beam assembly to create air lenses, and we have a very good camera. We could build in four or more of those easily. But we can plan an equipment bay. Should be no big problem.¡±

    ¡°But you don¡¯t plan to integrate the active sensors?¡±

    ¡°If we make the equipment bay modular we can mix and match as we want. And let¡¯s be honest, most of those active sensors are pretty basic. Sure, we can make them better with Q-links and relocate most of the active components to the home base, but the basic idea is pretty simple.

    We have enough engineers to make you enough modules to your liking.

    But if you have nothing else to add, I would like to start the first couple of Lachesis and a few hundred Clothos.¡±

    Samuel looked at the schematics and then nodded.

    ¡°No, I think at least for the first tests, what we have with the Lachesis and Clothos should do well.¡±

    Samantha nodded.

    ¡°Yeah. If they only work half as well as those ideas propose, they are insane. Extremely powerful.¡±

    That made me smile.

    ¡°That is good. Then let¡¯s do it. I would think for the first test I would use the Quad-Grendel here in the fortress for the computing power. It is mostly idle anyway. The rest of the tech I can replicate in around 30 minutes.¡±

    That shocked both of them and Samantha croaked:

    ¡°That fast? You are talking about a couple of Lachesis and how many Clothos? Two hundred?¡±

    ¡°I thought about five Lachesis and 100 Clothos each. Keep in mind that I have four NADAs here. One of them is one of the big ones. 625m3. It can make all of the Lachesis including any infrastructure, except the racks and the cases, in one go. The Clothos with infrastructure are easy for the smaller ones to make.¡±

    That made Samuel grin excitedly.

    ¡°Fuck yeah. Let¡¯s test this shit.¡±

    I had designed the control system for the Clotho to be a single chip with four 485 million amplifiers and the 1.94 billion signal processors it needed. All that, including cooling, mechanical hardening, and Q-links to the interface and the Clotho fit into a single chip of 1mm by 1mm. The Bia 10 I paired it with was almost 89 times the size.

    The whole module, including the memory, was designed to be either put into a standalone system, complete with display, power, controls, charging port, and whatever else it needed to operate a single Clotho, or to be put into a big Clotho Control Unit, or CCU to be integrated into a full server rack.

    Guess what I chose to do. One CCU was a standard two-unit 19¡¯¡¯ module that could accommodate 50 Clothos. Simple math told us that for the 500 Clothos I had made, I needed 10 CCUs. For 20 rack units.

    Add in the five Lachesis control units, which had a single chip to connect with the Lachesis that included the amplifiers, which was a single square chip with a sidelength of 5cm. Thanks to me using a 3D design with five layers.

    The signal processors on the other hand needed quite a bit more space. Unfortunately, I could not use five layers, because of heat concerns. I needed to leave it at two layers, which resulted in four chips with 28cm side length. Add in the Bia 30 as a control unit, the significantly bigger interface unit, and we had to use four rack units each. Resulting in another 20 units. That meant we almost completely filled a standard 42-unit 2m tall rack.

    Without the analytical systems, naturally. Those would be another six to eight units if we were going with dual Chronos systems for it. In my case, though I already had decided to use the quad Grendel I had standing around. For all four Lachesis.

    It took no more than 15 minutes after I had surfaced that the bots wheeled in the server rack, along with the Lachesis, which were already loaded with the Clothos.

    I rubbed my hands.

    ¡°Now¡­ let¡¯s test those things.¡±

    The next half hour we tested the audio quality of the Lachesis as well as the Clothos. The same with the video quality.

    It took another 20 minutes for Calliope to create a program that could sufficiently clean up both, regardless of whether we deployed the air lenses, or not, though the lenses made the video quality even better, as well as allowing zoom.

    To be fair, the resolution was ludicrous. We got a full 256k picture at 60 frames per second.

    You ask why 256k resolution? Especially as even an enhanced human is hard-pressed to see the difference between 4k and 8k, much less 16k.

    The answer is simple. You know of course those bad holo-crime dramas where the plucky investigator gets a grainy, barely identifiable picture and then uses a computer to ¡®enhance¡¯ the image until they can identify the barcode of the number plate in the distorted reflection of some window.

    As almost everybody knows, that is utter bull excrement. Fact is, if the data is not there, the data is not there, and no amount of computer wizardry and furious typing can ever summon this information out of thin air.

    Well, for Lachesis, the data is there. The 256k images make it actually possible to use digital zoom to the wazoo. Did we need it? Probably not very often. But it did cost us incredibly little, and if we needed it, we had it.

    We then tested the manipulation capabilities of the Lachesis, followed by using the Clothos to access a thumb drive, as well as a computer via an unused OPB header on the main board.

    Both were unadulterated successes. It was nice when things just worked. Then I had Sam and Sam test the stealth functions.

    We were aware though that this was not a good test. They were just too close to the project here.

    After some moments of thought, I turned to Svenja.

    ¡°Uh, Svenja, do you think I might bother one of your troopers to try to find one of those balls? And a few of the motes?¡±

    Yes, I could have just ordered her. But come on, it did cost me nothing to be polite about it. And for sure, Svenja nodded and subvocalized something into her com.

    From her expression, it was clear that she wanted to see the results as much as I did.

    A few minutes later, first, one of the troopers, a big, red-haired man by the name of James Hagrid, followed by Lt. Thomson entered the room.

    When Svenja looked surprised at Thomson¡¯s arrival, he narrowed his eyes.

    ¡°Why does it surprise you, Corporal? You ask for somebody with the bug-finder tech to come to the room where our ward is right now. Of course, I come and look for myself.¡±

    As an answer, Svenja let out a small laughter, before she caught herself and sobered up again.

    ¡°Sorry, sir. Dr. DuClare has just designed some new surveillance gear, and she wanted to test it. There is no reason to believe that somebody smuggled something in here.¡±

    I sighed when she used my title and last name. I had asked her so often to call me simply Vivian, but she never did.

    Thomson on the other hand was quite happy about what she said.

    ¡°So¡­ new tech? Do you mind if I watch, ma¡¯am?¡±

    I scowled at that. Why the heck would I mind that?

    ¡°Of course not. I assume you will get to play with this stuff in a short time anyway.¡±

    ¡°Thank you, ma¡¯am.¡±

    I shook my head but by now I was getting used to their deference so I addressed Hagrid.

    ¡°If we can begin, Trooper Hagrid, do you see the three balls on the table?¡±

    He managed to answer without making any disbelieving grimaces.

    ¡°Yes, ma¡¯am.¡±

    ¡°There are another two of those hiding in this room. I want you to try to find them.¡±

    That brought a visual response.

    He frowned when he looked over my lab, with hundreds of small drawers, cabinets, crates, and other places where a 5cm-ball could be easily hidden.

    ¡°Somewhere in the room, ma¡¯am? There are many hiding places here. It might take a while.¡±

    I had to chuckle at that.

    ¡°Oh no, they are not in any of the hidden places. They are active surveillance units and are in a place where they can film us, and listen to us.¡±

    I activated the holo-projector again, displaying what both active Lachesis were recording. Well, an eighth of what each Lachesis was recording at least. One was filming from close under the ceiling, while the other was at around 1m in height.

    ¡°As you can see, they can see us quite easily.¡±

    He visibly relaxed at that and then opened the case he had carried inside, taking out some handheld equipment.

    He activated it, waving it around, and then frowned when he moved it several times in the direction that the upper Lachesis had to be, according to the picture.

    He then fiddled with the controls and tried it again. And again. And again. His frown deepening with each try.

    After a few minutes, he began slapping the device in his hand a few times, followed by cursing softly.

    He then growled, and placed the device back into the case, only to take out another device. Again, he tried for a few minutes to find the two Lachesis, unsuccessful.

    I could see that he became more and more frustrated.

    Finally, he pulled out a third device, this one I could identify as a FLIR, and tried again. It took him several minutes before he finally gave up.

    ¡°Sorry, ma¡¯am, but I seem to be unable to find it. I know it has to be there. It was filming us the whole time, and I could see that, but nothing I could do can find it.¡±

    He was dejected when he said that, so I tried to perk him up a bit.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, Trooper. This was a success. We have just designed new surveillance gear, and you just proved to us that standard equipment cannot find it.¡±

    He sighed deeply.

    ¡°But that means that we can no longer protect you from bugs, ma¡¯am.¡±

    Well, he was not wrong. At least not fully. Still, I could calm him down somewhat.

    ¡°That is no problem, Trooper. At this moment, virtually nobody else can make those things. For the moment we are safe from them.¡±

    Thomson nodded slightly but then disagreed with me.

    ¡°I am sure that is true. For the moment as you say. But we have to plan for the future as well. And if none of our bug scanners work on it, we have a problem.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°If they use grav coils¡­ which they admittedly can¡¯t because we don¡¯t sell the small ones, then we have something that can detect them. Otherwise¡­ well, you are right. I doubt that anybody has thought that far with it. I would expect that at least for a few years, all we will see are bugs where the signal device has been replaced by a Q-link. Your equipment should still see those.

    After that¡­ I think I have to look into it. But I can¡¯t promise anything.¡±

    He nodded again.

    ¡°Yes, I get that. Next question, will you allow us to use them?¡±

    That made me rip my eyes wide open.

    ¡°Uh, why?¡±

    He half snorted.

    ¡°Reconnesaince. Whenever you leave this building and are not going to a place that we can trust is secure, like the Enki HQ, or Mr. Walker¡¯s home, we seed that location with surveillance gear as soon as we learn about your intention.

    Or we try at least. For your excursion on New Year¡¯s Eve, we had a couple of hundred bugs and cameras placed all over the ballroom.

    That is, naturally, always a risk. Those devices will aid us quite a bit with that.¡±

    I looked at him wide-eyed, and could only say.

    ¡°Oh. Okay. I have no problem with that. The only problem is that I am slowly running out of space where I can put the server racks.¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t think we will need all that many. And I am sure that Warden will build several of them to keep watch over you. We can work with her in this matter.¡±

    ¡°Okay, go ahead. I am sure that Warden has more than enough room for the racks.¡±

    ¡°That brings me to the last point. Would you be willing to sell them to Vandermeer?¡±

    That, honestly, had me confused.

    ¡°Uh, why?¡±

    ¡°For the same reason we want them. They can help protect your grandfather and to a lesser extent your mother.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Yes, that is obvious. My point is that Vandermeer is the only other corporation that can build those things. They have no reason to buy them, so we should not need to sell them to them. And I am sure that Vandermeer will be using them only to protect the family.¡±

    He had the grace to turn red.

    ¡°Oh, I did not know that. I agree, that changes things. And¡­ well, if the tool exists and the corporate security has access to it, we both know they will use it.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Honestly, I don¡¯t care. Vandermeer is the only other corporation that I do not fear in the slightest.¡±

    That made Svenja crack up.

    ¡°I have no idea why you don¡¯t¡­ absolutely no idea.¡±

 2.50: The whole wide world

    You could say that the test of Lachesis was an unmitigated success. Clotho¡­ it was even less detectable.

    While we were testing the Lachesis and the Clothos, a second, much larger batch was cooking. Well, another five Lachesis, as I thought that would be enough, but instead of 500 Clothos, I jumped to 5000.

    Yes, I needed to squeeze another 11 server racks somewhere into my building, and it had become a chore, let me tell you, but I still had a bit of room left.

    By then, I had converted most of the office space in the south wing of the building to server rooms, but I could tell that sooner or later I either had to find somewhere else to store my tech or reduce my collection.

    The problem here was the super Grendel. It would not do to squeeze all too many of those heat-generating monsters into a room designed to be an office. The cooling was¡­ insufficient. And I had 150 of those things in addition to the double-wide base unit.

    Along with the more ¡®moderate¡¯ quad Grendel, which had another 4 racks full of cooling equipment, and the double-wide base unit.

    Now I had the new rack for the Lachesis and Clothos that we were even now testing and the new 11 racks of the new ones.

    And of course, the Fortress had three racks full of computer tech when I moved in, that I just updated, and the control units for my industrial fabricators were each a server rack full of equipment, and quite a few of my labs had some¡­ You get the gist.

    The problem here was that I could not see which of them I could do without.

    Oh sure, the single rack for the test Lachesis and Clothos¡­ that would be sent to Naveen to play with. That would help tremendously. I had only around 200 full-sized server racks to house.

    But that was a matter for another time. A time not too far away, but another time nonetheless.

    At that moment, it was time to work on Atropos.

    The first thing I did after we were satisfied with the tests of Lachesis and Clotho was project what I had already brainstormed for the large drone.

    All in all, it was rather simple. A 2m long cylinder with a 25cm radius and semi-spherical endcaps. I did not think it needed something complicated.

    I was wrong.

    Samuel walked around the hologram a few times and then shook his head.

    ¡°That won¡¯t do. That won¡¯t do at all.¡± Samantha just nodded to that, while I was confused.

    ¡°Why shouldn¡¯t it work?¡±

    ¡°This thing is as aerodynamic as a brick. I mean, come on, you want Atropos to fly supersonic. This might be able to do that, but the efficiency would be for shit. And it will doesn¡¯t help with being hidden either.¡±

    I scowled.

    ¡°It is the easiest form to integrate the stealth system. Well, no, the easiest would be a sphere, but this is a close second.¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°That might be the case, but this is, or will be at least, a flying object, and those are always a series of compromises.

    In this specific instance, stealth is important, yes, but not that much more important than aerodynamics. This thing will need to cut through the air, and that not only requires energy but also disturbs the air in question.

    Those disturbances can be seen, with the naked eye. They are glaringly obvious for sensors. Unless we move that thing very slowly, the lack of aerodynamics will betray it. No, we have to make it so that it disturbs the air as little as possible.¡±

    Okay, that made sense. And honestly, I had not thought about this from that point of view.

    ¡°So¡­ what would you suggest?¡±

    ¡°No wings. We use grav coils, so wings only add drag. We should form it like a teardrop.¡±

    That was what I had feared. It made designing the stealth properties that much harder.

    ¡°You are keeping in mind that for the stealth characteristics we need to be able to have patches that are exactly opposite? With a teardrop, we can relatively easily make it close to invisible along the longitudinal axis, but front to back, or back to front will be hard.¡±

    Samantha rubbed the side of her nose.

    ¡°Will it be impossible to get right?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°It means way more overhead and lag. With the sphere, and even the tetrahedron, we can simply amplify what the Q-link on the other side receives and port it through.

    With this, we have to collate what several Q-links are receiving and render what they need to display. That means a computer in the middle, and the whole process will take time. We will have to put a GPU somewhere in the system. The whole thing, well for the cylindrical system I had planned with something along 3.5 million¡­ pixel is probably the best to call it.

    Yes, that is only a bit more than 10% of what a typical 8k display has, but the display gets away with a 240hz refresh rate. It only has to trick the human eye. Modern security cameras are set up in a way that makes it necessary to go to a refresh rate of around 1200hz to keep it hidden.

    And it has to be rendered in real-time, using the camera input from the Q-links on the other side. I¡­ honestly, I am not sure if the Theia 90 can hack it. We might even have to go to a Chronos just to run the stealth.¡±

    Samantha shrugged while Samuel shook his head.

    ¡°That is more your resort, but the problem here is that unless you plan to move it exceedingly slow, slower than a ground car, much less a skimmer, the air disturbations will be noticeable. Even with the teardrop form. Without it¡­ I fear we have to avoid coming too close to any pressure sensors or people in that case.¡±

    I scowled harder.

    ¡°But¡­ this thing is not intended to come close to anything. I had planned to include a few high-resolution cameras for observation and keep it several hundred meters away from anything.

    If it is close enough that the draft it produces is noticeable, the operator has messed up.¡±

    Samuel frowned now as well. But he tapped on the table for a moment before he answered.

    ¡°But what if you have to get close?¡±

    ¡°Keep in mind that that thing will carry several Lachesis.  Those are for close work.¡±

    Samantha looked at the design as well and then sighed.

    ¡°So¡­ it will never get close to anybody?¡±

    ¡°No, of course not. Why should it?¡±

    ¡°So¡­ it is more of an observation drone than a surveillance one?¡±

    ¡°What is the difference? I thought that was mostly the same.¡±

    ¡°In general the distance. Surveillance drones try to get the audio as well as the video. They get relatively close. An observation drone on the other hand can be quite high. A couple of klicks in extreme cases. In that case, it needs very good optics. Maybe a laser mic.¡±

    It seemed as if Samuel had finally gotten what I was trying to say.

    ¡°Exactly. However, I see its primary objective as transport for the Lachesis. Lachesis is the one who will do the spying. Atropos is only necessary when the target is far away and we have to bring the Lachesis there in a hurry or when we have to follow a target in a skimmer or grav ship.¡±

    For a moment, both of them inspected the design again, and then Samuel turned back to me again.

    ¡°In that case, we should optimize it for supersonic flight.¡±

    ¡°Again, why?¡±

    ¡°Pressure. We should try to limit the sonic boom. And keep that thing stealthy as much as we can.¡±

    It took me a moment to realize he was serious and then I could not stop a snort.

    ¡°Seriously, you think it makes a difference if we give it a more aerodynamic form for the stealth during supersonic flight? Sorry to say so, but there is no stealth when something flies supersonic. Even if the sonic boom would by some miracle completely eliminated, the skin of it will be several degrees hotter than the air around it. No, if that thing goes supersonic, it will be visible. That just can¡¯t be helped.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ isn¡¯t that counterproductive? What if the target notices it?¡±

    ¡°Either we have the time to let it cool while it flies the last bit subsonic, or the target has just a supersonic journey behind it.¡±

    He still seemed skeptical but then shrugged.

    ¡°Well, if you think so.¡±

    He did sound a bit sulky though.

    ¡°But what about efficiency? This layout will cost way more energy to push supersonic than something optimized for it.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Not that much more than the teardrop design you proposed for subsonic flight. Yes, it would be an advantage during long-range flight to optimize its fuselage for supersonic flight. But this advantage would be more than balanced by the increased complexity that the stealth system will require.

    This comparatively simple form is relatively easy to hide. Anything more complex will make it harder.¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°Fine! You are right. I don¡¯t like it but you are right. It is just¡­ this thing is so boring.¡±

    I tilted my head and raised an eyebrow.

    ¡°And making it good-looking is more important than making it work better? If you absolutely want a good-looking drone, then go ahead and design one. But don¡¯t expect us to use too many of them. They might be useful as a diversion, and if you arm them, they might be useful for that. But for missions where the drone ideally won¡¯t be seen at all, boring is good.

    Heck, even an armed drone would probably be better if it was boring and stealthy than exciting and easy to notice.¡±

    He sulked some more but answered:

    ¡°Yeah, I understand that. I just don¡¯t like it.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Now, this early design iteration uses a radar-absorbing hull under the Q-link layer. Obviously, that won¡¯t do at all if we want to include a radar. So, we need a compromise between a low radar signature and¡­ what does Atropos need radar for anyway?¡±

    Samuel looked at me with some exacerbation, then sighed and answered:

    ¡°In any congested airspace, we unfortunately can¡¯t expect every other flying object to announce itself with a transponder. Or scream out its presence with radar. That means to avoid a collision, we need to include an active radar in anything we send up.¡±

    It made my head hurt.

    ¡°Wait a minute, you are saying we need to include radar because some others don¡¯t? So that our radar can detect them when a collision is possible?¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°And why is it our responsibility? Especially as it is¡­ useless in many cases. Do you really believe we should activate the radar when we run Atropos under stealth? As you said it, scream out its presence?¡±

    His face moved through an interesting series of emotions. It started with a flash of anger, followed by resignation, then he actually began thinking, demonstrated by his eyes widening, and lastly, he smiled sheepishly.

    ¡°Uh, no. I don¡¯t think that we should do that. But what if we don¡¯t run it stealthed? We can use the radar then?¡±

    ¡°Then it will have a transponder. But we also can use a hatch in the front to hide the radar behind. But when it is running under stealth, there will be no transponder and no radar, no lidar, or any other active emission. Heck, I am pondering how we can hide the cameras when it is stealthed. Though¡­ if we go with 5 petapixel cameras the Q-links cover a square with around 3cm sidelength. That should let us get away with a 7cm diameter lens.

    So, anyone farther away than 250m should not be able to see it with the naked eye.

    At 500m it should be protected from most cameras as well. And those that can resolve anything that size at that distance will have a hard time finding it in the first place.¡±

    If I was interpreting Samantha¡¯s expression right, she was quite perplexed.

    The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

    ¡°What the fuck are you talking about? How do you decide that at 250m nobody should be able to see it?¡±

    ¡°The human eye has an angular resolution of 0.017 degrees. That means anything smaller than the cone created by that angle is not visible to us.

    For a 7cm lens that happens at 236m. With a bit of a fudge factor, we get 250m. The cameras are a different matter, but they usually have a field of view between 25 and 60 degrees.

    A standard 8k camera has 7680 pixels width. At a distance of 500m the 7cm lens covers between one and 2? pixels. Even a dedicated expert system will require more than that to rule out an artifact.

    So, unless they are using a tele-optic with a field of view smaller than 25 degrees, the chances of something identifying the lens of our cameras as such is impossible. And if they have such an optic, the limited FoV makes it very hard to notice something this small while moving the camera.

    Again, even an expert system will have a hard time with it. Especially as we are talking about something that is roughly a fourth of the size of many bird species in our cities.¡±

    Samuel¡¯s mouth was hanging open, and Samantha had wide eyes when she exclaimed astonished:

    ¡°Wait, you just did the math in your head? Just like that?¡±

    That honestly bewildered me a bit.

    ¡°Yes, of course. That is just math. Trigonometry. As long as you know the basic variables, like the angular resolution or the number of pixels width, the rest is just plugging in the numbers into the equations.¡±

    That made both of them roll their eyes, and Samuel uttered:

    ¡°Fine. If you can do that just like that¡­ no wonder you are the boss.¡±

    I honestly could not understand that attitude. Get real, this was really just simple trigonometry. Everybody should be able to do that little piece of math in their head.

    Yes, if I had used calculus in my head I could have understood their reaction, but for trig? Whatever.

    ¡°Well, then let¡¯s get down to business, won¡¯t we? Just to move along, are there any reasons to not use the basic cylindrical form?¡±

    Samuel was still visibly not happy about it but kept silent, while Samantha just shook her head.

    ¡°So¡­ the basic hull configuration is that then. Let¡¯s get to the innards. I had planned to use a four-by-two-by-two configuration for the grav coils. Four coils along the length of the hull, and one in each orthogonal direction from that at each end to maximize leverage.¡±

    Not all that surprisingly, both of them shrugged, with Samuel saying:

    ¡°Well, I can only speak for myself, but I have no clue about how to best do grav coils. You are the expert here, so I say we go with that.¡±

    I projected the bones into the hologram.

    ¡°You wanted an equipment bay? Where do you think it would be best to place it?¡±

    Samuel knitted his brows in deep thought for a moment and then shrugged again.

    ¡°I would say the best place would be directly behind the nose cap. We won¡¯t have to split the power cells and we can open a hatch in the nose cone for some of the devices that might need that.¡±

    I looked at it for a moment and saw what he was getting at.

    ¡°That makes it necessary to move the bow coils, but that is no big problem I think. How big should that bay be though?¡±

    Samantha had meanwhile pulled out her com and had started to type furiously on it.

    ¡°If want to use a terrain mapping radar, we need at least 30cm. A LIDAR is way smaller, but a well-cooled IR camera takes roughly the same amount of space. Otherwise, if that is not enough then whoever wants it has to build their own drone.

    This thing doesn¡¯t have to be able to do everything.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Fine for me. We should place the radar, a front-facing camera, and the transponder in the nose I think.¡±

    A quick command to my Archimedes and Warden lengthened the hologram by 30cm and structurally reinforced the newly created hollow room.

    I then created a double-sided sliding hatch that, at its maximum, opened half the equipment bay for access.

    Unfortunately, a short stress analysis, automatically performed by Warden, showed that this would not work. Even after being reinforced, the equipment bay immediately turned red.

    Samuel asked the obvious question:

    ¡°What does that red mean?¡±

    ¡°The nose as it is now can¡¯t withstand supersonic flight. It would crumble.¡±

    I pinched the bridge of my nose.

    ¡°We could make the hatch smaller, or build in a central support strut¡­ but that would limit the use of the bay.¡±

    I looked at the hologram and read the more detailed stress analysis. The central strut would help, but for the smaller hatch to show any significant effect, it would need to be way too small to be useful.

    Samantha waited a few seconds before she mused:

    ¡°You know, we don¡¯t need to have such a big hatch. The central strut would effectively halve the space we can use. So, I am for making the hatch smaller.¡±

    Samuel on the other hand seemed to favor the strut.

    ¡°But if we do that, then we will have problems fitting stuff into the bay. That is no solution either.¡±

    ¡°But if we build it with the central strut, every piece of equipment will have to be designed to fit around the strut, and it will have to be in separatable parts.¡±

    ¡°So what? If we make the hatch too small then¡­¡±

    I raised my hand.

    ¡°Let me think for a moment.¡±

    I walked around the hologram, looking at it from several angles. There were two ideas I had.

    ¡°How big will the hatch have to be to use the equipment?¡±

    Samantha took a moment and then shrugged.

    ¡°I would say around 30cm, if we use a square or circular radar dish.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ 35 degrees. That should be possible.¡±

    ¡°But if we make the hatch that small then we will never¡­¡±

    Again I raised my hand.

    ¡°I am aware that a hatch of that size will limit the equipment we can get into it.¡±

    I made the changes to the design. First, I relocated the power lines to the nose to the top of the fuselage, opposite to the hatch, and replaced it with a flex cable. Then I placed a hinge mechanism on top of that so that the whole front of the fuselage could be pulled around 3mm forward and then pushed upward, opening the whole front of the equipment bay.

    Then I reduced the hatch from opening 180 degrees to 35 degrees. A substantial reduction, but with the new design, it was just a window to use the equipment through, so that should be enough.

    Finally, on top of that, I placed several retractable struts to take on much of the stress directly inside of the hatch.

    They would retract into the rest of the drone''s body when the hatch was open, as that was certainly not happening when it was going at supersonic speeds.

    I then changed the projected plan to the new idea.

    The new stress analysis showed that this design would work, up to Mach 8 it seemed. Not that Mach 8 was in the cards for that thing anyway. Anything significantly faster than Mach 4 and I could no longer rely on the integrity of the Q-links making up the stealth skin.

    When the formerly red sections now briefly flashed green, Samuel furrowed his brows.

    ¡°But¡­ how will we now get the equipment into the bay?¡±

    ¡°Watch and see!¡±

    I started the animation sequence, and first, the struts retracted into the body, followed by the nose folding up.

    ¡°I assume that our technicians can easily put anything that fits into the bay through that opening.¡±

    Samantha snorted.

    ¡°Well, if not we need new techs.¡±

    Samuel then interjected:

    ¡°But it still needs a camera.¡±

    I smiled at him. The camera itself was a straightforward thing. Just a 3-by-3cm chip of Q-links. All the processing was done in the home infrastructure.

    For the optics, I went with an off-the-rack standard autofocus assembly. It was just 7cm in diameter and had a length of another 6cm.

    Now we just had to put a few of them on the drone so that we had a good field of view.

    That gave me an idea. Why not kill two birds with a single stone?

    It only took a few seconds to create a 7.5cm wide indention on the drone, roughly 45cm behind the equipment bay. This indention was going completely around the drone and was 6.5cm deep.

    I then placed a rail system in there and mounted a camera on it. The interesting thing was that I filled the rest of the rail system with cages for Lachesis. I made sure that the cages could move on the rail system independently from the camera. That gave me 38 of them in a single ring. Finally, I created a cover for the indention, with the obligatory Q-link stealth system, and two opening hatches. One for the camera, and one to let the Lachesis through. I made sure that they were distant enough from each other that the empty cages could fold up so every Lachesis could be released.

    I projected the new assembly on the drone and had Warden do the stress analysis again.

    Samuel looked at the changes a bit confused and then asked:

    ¡°Uh, what is that?¡±

    ¡°That is the camera. And the storage for the Lachesis. The camera can move 360 degrees around the Atropos. It can be lifted out of the storage position so that it can be pointed forward or rearward a bit. The rest of the ring is filled with¡­¡±

    And again, we saw a spray of red on the drone, stopping me in my explanation.

    ¡°Ok, that is not so good.¡±

    The description showed that at high speeds, airflow would lead to intolerable vibrations. Intolerable as in ripping the whole thing apart in a couple of hours.

    I looked at the detailed simulation and realized that the connection between the hull and the cover of the ring was not smooth enough.

    That made me feel a flash of relief. Not so bad in the end, as it was easy to fix. It did break up the simple lines of the drone a bit when I created an elevated windbreak, but not by much. Another problem solved.

    ¡°Where was I? Oh right. The ring is filled with 38 Lachesis. There is no need to have it run empty.¡±

    Samantha looked at it for a moment and then commented:

    ¡°Do you think we could build in a couple more? It is always a problem if the drone has just one camera and there are multiple points of interest.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Sure. Do you think three are enough? Together with a front-facing camera and a rear-facing one of course.¡±

    She looked at Samuel.

    ¡°What do you say? This is more your specialty.¡±

    Samuel just nodded.

    ¡°Sure, three should be enough. If it is something that needs more attention, then you need more drones anyway, as you need multiple perspectives.¡±

    I quickly added the two new rings to the drone. I was sure the 114 Lachesis were overkill, but nothing said we had to fill an Atropos up any more than we would have to fill up a Lachesis with Clotho.

    That left us with a 230cm long cylinder with a 50cm dome at each end. Simple and easy to hide.

    The bones of it were the central strut that contained the primary grav coils, as well as radial ones in regular intervals, of which four contained the secondary grav coils.

    The nose dome beyond the equipment bay was mostly empty, as it only contained a camera, the radar, and a FLIR, all hidden behind a hatch. The rear dome only contained a camera.

    The rest of the drone, except for the camera rings, was still empty. Time to change that.

    ¡°Now we have to work on the power system. I have planned to use the rest of the volume for it. First, the struts will be coated with Q-links for power delivery.

    If the math is right, we should use .49582773mm2 Q-links, as they have the best power delivery ratio. They can each provide 0.26V at 0.6A, or 0.156W. If we coat the complete central strut with them, we get 152500 Q-links or 23.79kW.

    If we use Lithium-Xenon-Nano-Substrate batteries, we get around 600kWh in battery power. That would mean that we can recharge the batteries from zero to 100% in a bit over 26 hours.¡±

    Samuel frowned.

    ¡°LX-Nano? Those are pricey. That will make the costs explode.¡±

    ¡°No, not really. They cost so much because they had to be produced the same way as semiconductor chips. One layer at a time. And they had a rather low yield of 23% on average. We have NADAs. Not only do we have a yield of around 98%, but we can also make them in 3-dimensional structures. That will lower the cost to less than 3% of what they did cost before.¡±

    ¡°Ok¡­ but do we really need 600kWh?¡±

    ¡°At full power to the grav coils, we get less than four hours of use out of 600kWh. If I am not wrong, that is not quite enough to make it move halfway around the planet.¡±

    ¡°Oh, wow. I did not know the coils were that power-hungry. How can you power the coils in the smaller drones via Q-links then?¡±

    ¡°It is not that bad. We won¡¯t even bother to use the coils in the Lachesis and Clotho close to their limit. It is at the higher end when the power draw gets so high.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ this thing can fly to the other side of the world? And deliver our sneaky spy balls? Cool.¡±

    Clearly, Samantha had fewer concerns about the power demands.

    Finally, Samuel scratched his head.

    ¡°So¡­ now what?¡±

    ¡°Well, if neither of you has anything to add anymore, I think we should send the plans to a NADA and have a prototype built.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, I think it can do that. And then?¡±

    ¡°Then we are done here. You might want to take the Lachesis to HQ and have your teammates try to find them. I will send the controller rack with you.¡±

    ¡°You won¡¯t come?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I will use an Incarnate. That should be enough.¡±

    ¡°Ok, until then.¡±

    They both left, taking the Lachesis in a bag, with an industrial bot bringing the server rack with them.

    Yes, I could have just gone with them, but for what? The Incarnate seriously was good enough in this instance.

    And I could use the 20 minutes for some meditation anyway. Clearing my head and all that.

    When I connected to the Incarnate, I was not surprised to find Naveen with them, though Maynard was unexpected.

    ¡°Hey Vivian. So, you¡¯re finished playing?¡±

    I could not help but chuckle.

    ¡°You tell me. I think this will work great, but you are the expert. Hi Maynard.¡±

    ¡°Hey Vivian. I heard you have something new, so I just wanted to look it over.¡±

    By now the bots had connected the control server to the power outlets, and Sam and Sam pulled a couple of Lachesis out of the bag.

    Naveen moved a bit closer and inspected the two balls carefully.

    ¡°You know¡­ I expected something¡­ smaller.¡±

    Samantha snorted.

    ¡°Those are inside. And those¡­ You will be surprised, boss.¡±

    With a bit of a flourish, she began typing on the holo-keyboard, and the two Lachesis began lifting up.

    Naveen was not very impressed it seemed.

    ¡°So they can hover. Not all that surprising honestly. You have to do better Sam.¡±

    With an evil grin, Samantha turned around.

    ¡°Is that so? Then how about¡­ now?¡± With a last push of a button, she activated the stealth function, and both Lachesis simply vanished.

    Naveen raised an eyebrow and looked at the seemingly empty air.

    ¡°Ok, that is new. So¡­ you made invisible balls? I assume they can listen in?¡±

    Samuel smiled broadly.

    ¡°Oh, not only that.¡±

    He too moved to the virtual keyboard and typed for a bit, and a holoprojector showed two video feeds from somewhere in the room.

    ¡°Full video? That is more than I expected.¡±

    Which, of course, was doubly repeated from the speakers.

    ¡°So, they are invisible, have microphones, and full video? What are the camera specs?¡±

    I smiled at that.

    ¡°It has eight 2.86 petapixel cameras all over the skin.¡±

    Maynard had moved closer as well.

    ¡°You managed that and still put in such an optical stealth system? Marvellous.¡±

    ¡°The optical stealth system is the cameras. The balls are completely covered in Q-links. 414 picometer Q-links. Half of them are receivers, the other half are emitters. They are paired, with a a third terminal connected to an amplifier. What the receiver¡­ well sees, meaning what light hits the receiver, is directly amplified and then projected by the emitter.

    There was no reason not to use the amplified information of the 2.86 quadrillion Q-links per sector and make it into a picture. The same with the sound. Each Q-link measures pressure variances, making it into a microphone.¡±

    ¡°Wait, Q-links can do that?¡±

    ¡°How do you think they transmit data to the optical parallel bus?¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ cool. I thought they transmitted electric impulses.¡±

    ¡°They can do that too.¡±

    Naveen watched the video feeds and then snapped a finger.

    ¡°Bertram, how about you try and find those things?¡±

    ¡°Uh, sure boss, at once.¡±

    One of the men, a middle-sized swarthy person with dark brown hair quickly moved over to one of the cabinets and pulled out several devices. They looked eerily similar to what Trooper Hagrid hat used.

    While he was doing that, Naveen asked:

    ¡°For how long will the battery last?¡±

    ¡°There is no battery. Those things are powered via Q-link. So¡­ the power lasts as long as you power them.¡±

    ¡°No battery?¡±

    Naveen sounded contemplative, only moments before Maynard¡¯s shocked:

    ¡°Powered via Q-links? They can do that as well?¡±

    ¡°Electric impulses, Maynard. It stands to reason that if they can transmit electricity, that electricity can be used for other things than transfer information.¡±

    ¡°That is¡­ why did you not tell us about that earlier? That would make energy networks so much easier.¡±

    ¡°No, it won¡¯t. Yes, it can transfer electricity, but not that much. All the Q-links on these Lachesis balls together can transfer around 560W. A proper superconductor is much more effective.¡±

    Bertram had by now begun using the devices, and he had similar results to Trooper Hagrid.

    ¡°Sorry, boss, but I can¡¯t seem to find them.¡±

    Naveem looked at him briefly, before he turned to my Incarnate and smiled evilly.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry. Dr. DuClare is sneaky that way. But she is not the only sneaky one here.¡±

    He walked to a table and opened the bag that I just now noticed on it, pulling out an improvised-looking device.

    He manually opened up three folded antennae, and then pointed the device into the room, while addressing me:

    ¡°You didn¡¯t seriously expect me to not think that you would use grav coils in those things, did you?¡±

    When he activated the device, it let out a series of beeps and then he pointed it at first one spot.

    ¡°There is the first.¡±

    Then another.

    ¡°And here is the second.¡±

    Then he turned back to me.

    ¡°I had Maynard design a handheld Palanth¨ªr for just that reason.¡±

    I chuckled and moved my Incarnate to the server.

    ¡°Honestly, I would have been disappointed if you hadn¡¯t thought about it. But I am a bit surprised that Warden created the Palanth¨ªr for you. But¡­ well sooner or later somebody else will get one, so I planned ahead.¡±

    With a few button strokes, I switched the Lachesis into an alternative mode, and the device in Naveen¡¯s hand stopped beeping.

    He looked at it and then shrugged.

    ¡°So, you shut down the grav coils? But we still know where they are. What about it, do you want to catch it men?¡±

    Just to belie his words, the video began moving, with the Palanth¨ªr still remaining silent.¡±

    After a few seconds, Naveen snorted.

    ¡°Yeah, should have seen that coming. How did you do that though?¡±

    ¡°They are mostly hollow. And contain a vacuum. The carbon shell is light, so they weigh almost nothing, literally. A light draft is enough to keep them aloft.¡±

    ¡°So they are drifting?¡±

    ¡°Nope. The light draft can be air currents already happening, or they can use the Q-links on the skin to create electrostatic propulsion.¡±

    ¡°That is¡­ well we now have to find ways to detect them.¡±

    One of the women then exclaimed.

    ¡°I think I can see one. There, right there. There is a slight distortion, and the view is a bit murky.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°That can¡¯t be prevented. It is not perfect after all. Also, the amplifiers are biased towards the visible light spectrum. Yes, that includes IR, but if you go to other spectrums, you should be able to see them.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ not perfect. But leaps and bounds beyond what anybody else has. If we just had a need for them¡­¡±

 2.51: Down the Rabbit Hole

    Now it was time for the waiting game. Yes, Warden had already started keeping Blumenthal under observation. That, unfortunately, did not instantly translate into me finding out every one of his secrets.

    Oh, sure, I could get lucky for once, and Mr. Sharpes would find something. I doubted it though. No, I did not believe that Sharpes was incompetent. At least not to an insurmountable degree.

    But Blumenthal was too smooth for a random private eye to find out much.

    That meant that waiting was the only thing left to do right then. Something I excelled at, as you might have guessed.

    Yeah, I needed something to do. Looking over the possible options, I decided to continue my study of energy systems. Mostly because I expected Nate to contact me any moment to request help in redesigning S&P fusactors. I was, honestly, a bit surprised that he had not yet asked.

    That was also the reason why I made the final step in learning how fusactors really worked. Oh, I did not get so far as to expect that anybody could tell me the physical processes. It involved Kobashigawa coils after all, and nobody, including me, understood those even partially.

    However, I expected to learn the known nitty-gritty details of the technology.

    And learning those details I did. The known nitty-gritty, dirty, ugly little details. It was, honestly, one of the very few times when I wished I had not learned something.

    Why? Because fusactors violated the laws of physics as we knew them then. Not the known rules, but a couple of the few basic laws that we had managed to decipher.

    Thinks we knew as facts. In total, learning more about fusactors made me doubt all of our physics.

    Is it any surprising that I did the rationale, mature thing and wallowed in denial? For a time at least. I¡­ well, I went to full compression, which with Archimedes was even higher at 250:1 than with Glory, and tried to figure it out.

    I calculated the equations forward and backward and got at it from every conceivable angle. I looked at the known data and the published verifiable specifications.

    I verified those specifications on every single fusactor I had access to. And when all that did not yield the results that I wanted, no, needed, I did it again. And again.

    For two days I spent 12 hours a day in real-time going over the equations again and again. I exemplified Einstein¡¯s famous quote, and I am a bit ashamed to say, I proved it to be true.

    The problem was that as I said, fusactors violated a few of the known facts of how the universe worked that we had managed to carve into stone. In one sentence, everything I knew told me that fusactors simply could not work.

    Yet they did. I simply could not reconcile those two facts, and so, on the third day, I decided to go straight to the source.

    I contacted Nate.

    It was always surprising for me how fast he reacted to my com requests. It had taken barely a minute before he appeared in our virtual meeting room.

    ¡°Hello Vivian.¡±

    ¡°Hello Nate.¡±

    He smiled at me, while he materialized what I suspected was an iced tea.

    ¡°So¡­ what do I owe the pleasure of you calling me to? Don¡¯t get me wrong, I have nothing against it, but it is a bit unusual for you to call just to say hello.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°You are right. I¡­ well, I expect that in the near future, you will want my help with incorporating the new grav coils into the fusactor design.¡±

    He nodded and took a sip.

    ¡°You are right. We are not quite there yet, but yes, in a week or two, I would have asked. So you decided to become proactive?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I was working on energy technology anyway. Just to keep myself entertained. So no skin off my nose to accelerate that a bit.¡±

    ¡°And you¡¯ve already the core of a design ready? Is that why you are calling?¡±

    I snorted derisively.

    ¡°Goodness, no. I am still far from it. No, I¡­ just found out that fusactors violate physics.¡±

    I looked genuinely surprised.

    ¡°Yes¡­ of course. That is an old hat. My great-grandparents found that out, but could not resolve it. I am surprised that you are surprised though. I know it is not something that is publicly disseminated, but you have studied physics. You should know that already.¡±

    So this was nothing new then? Well, of course not. It was too glaring an oversight for it to not have been discovered directly after the first fusactor began running.

    ¡°Honestly, I have no clue why. It just never came up.¡±

    He raised both eyebrows.

    ¡°Seriously? Never? That can¡¯t be¡­ wait, who¡¯s nuclear physics course did you take?¡±

    ¡°Dr. Englund¡¯s. Why?¡±

    He nodded while he pressed his lips grimly together.

    ¡°That explains it. Englund is¡­ was, only still teaching because he narrowly avoided being dismissed by Apollo. And of course, because he is a friend of Joshua Knowles. He always had his¡­ idiosyncrasies. And one of them is that he never even acknowledges the existence of the fusactor problem.

    For him, it does not exist and is therefore not something he teaches his students.¡±

    Oh, damn. I had hoped that with Apollo the Commonwealth would have fewer such political appointments.

    ¡°So¡­ I¡¯ve got the one nuclear physics course that did not mention it?¡±

    Nate remained grim.

    ¡°That is not that surprising. Englund was a jealous teacher and pushed most other professors out of nuclear physics in the USW. He also managed to fiddle with his ratings so that he appeared to be the best teacher of the subject.

    Which we discovered after he had been¡­ removed from a teaching position.¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°Still, we have no measure of how much damage that man has caused. But I doubt that you are here to complain about your nuclear physics professor.

    So¡­ what can I do for you?¡±

    ¡°I¡­ wanted to ask if you still have the original notes from Jessica Proctor, Paul Simpson, and Jason Vandermeer?¡±

    He took a deep breath.

    ¡°Yes, we have them. But what do you hope to find there? They could not reconcile what they¡¯ve created with what physics had taught them either.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Right now¡­ I am grasping for straws.¡±

    He shook his head, sighing again.

    ¡°You naturally can have everything they wrote. It¡¯s your family heritage as well after all. But I fear you won¡¯t find anything in there that will alleviate your problem.¡±

    I closed my eyes and leaned back for a moment before I answered:

    ¡°I just can¡¯t reconcile the facts with physics. It just doesn¡¯t work. It can¡¯t work.¡±

    During the answer, I looked back at him, and I saw him nod solemnly.

    ¡°Trust me, I understand you fully. But think about it. If reality does not conform to your theory, then it is the theory that is wrong, not reality. It doesn¡¯t matter if what we¡¯ve known for centuries does not fit with our observations. We can¡¯t adjust the universe to follow our rules and laws. We have to adjust our rules and laws to follow the universe.¡±

    Of course he was right. Heck, this was such an evident truth that he should not have to make that observation.

    ¡°I get that. But¡­ this goes so directly against everything I know, how can it be?¡±

    I raised a hand in a warding motion.

    ¡°Yes, I know. Clearly what I know has to be wrong. But¡­ I need a bit of time to wrap my head around it.¡±

    He raised both hands in a helpless gesture.

    ¡°Unfortunately, I can¡¯t help you there. You have to work through it by yourself. We all had to. That is what made Englund so¡­ damning. Under any rational circumstances, any physicist should make that realization when help is nearby. But he deprived a whole generation of that assistance.¡±

    Then he perked up a bit.

    ¡°But maybe talking to Jason and Gordon about it later.¡±

    My deep confusion had to be apparent because he frowned and continued:

    ¡°I have been told that you have joined the K4 group that I¡¯ve set up. Was that a mistake?¡±

    What was he talking about? The K4 group was every second and fourth Saturday of the month. That should still be¡­ oh dang.

    ¡°Is that today?¡±

    He frowned harder.

    ¡°Wait, you don¡¯t remember?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I¡¯ve just spent the equivalent of eight months trying to figure out this ¡®little problem¡¯ with fusactors. So yes, I¡¯ve lost track of time.¡±

    He chuckled mirthlessly.

    ¡°You should be a little bit more careful. And from what I heard you had just finished designing the new surveillance gear two days ago. Are you really that fast?¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°The new research VR helps, but yes, I am that fast.¡±

    ¡°Ah yes, the new research VR¡­ good that you bring it up. I understand that I have you to thank that I have to purchase nine new supercomputers.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Hey, it is your decision. But unless you don¡¯t want to get the most out of your K4, I would strongly suggest at least a few supercomputers. And seriously, they don¡¯t all need a supercomputer each of their own. They can share.¡±

    He had just taken a sip from his iced tea and snorted it out of his nose.

    ¡°That says the one who is the proud owner of how many supercomputers?¡±

    Well, he had me there. I could only shrug.

    This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

    ¡°I don¡¯t really know. A few. Not that supercomputers are that expensive anymore. You have NADAs. They make it way cheaper.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, but then you tell me that they could share. And why don¡¯t you know how many you own? Shouldn¡¯t you know that?¡±

    Again, I could only shrug.

    ¡°Probably. The problem is, technically I own all the supercomputers that Warden builds all over the solar system. And she tells nobody, not even me, where they are. So I see no point in trying to find out how many she has.¡±

    ¡°Hm, a specific reason she doesn¡¯t tell you?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Not really. Me knowing would mean that I could decide to take her out. That is a threat to her objectives. She can¡¯t remove me if I find out, but she can¡¯t accept a threat to the objectives either. So she doesn¡¯t tell me.¡±

    ¡°She is quite paranoid, isn¡¯t she?¡±

    ¡°She is a VI. More important, she is a VI with many people not liking her existence. Anybody knowing where her servers are is a threat to her objectives.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I give her that. I am just happy that she is so hellbent on protecting you.¡±

    I glanced at the clock in my HUD and noticed that it was just a few minutes until the K4 meeting. Would have been a bit embarrassing to miss it.

    ¡°Uh, I don¡¯t want to be just running, but the meeting you were so friendly to remind me of¡­¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°It starts soon. I know. That was why I was a bit surprised when you called me. Go there. We will talk later.¡±

    I took the time to go into the real world and have a snack, along with a coffee. Something I had a bit neglected over the last couple of days, and then connected to the meeting.

    I arrived at the same lounge setting as the last time, finding Rose, Gordon, Tamara, Nadia, and Tim already present.

    ¡°Hey there. Good to see you Viv.¡± Nadia was, as seemed to be usual, the outgoing one.

    ¡°Hello there.¡±

    That made Gordon chuckle, and he reacted with:

    ¡°General Kenobi!¡±

    I just groaned.

    ¡°Let it go, man. That movie is more than 200 years old. Get some new material, please. That had to be the worst meme I¡¯ve ever heard of.¡±

    ¡°But you¡¯ve heard of it!¡±

    That was it. I rolled my eyes and shook my head.

    ¡°Get real. That one is even older.¡±

    He chuckled.

    ¡°Hey, it is not so often that I meet somebody who gets those old memes. Hell, I did not even know that it came from some movies.¡±

    I crossed my arms and shook my head again.

    ¡°The first one comes from one of the early Star Wars movies. II, III, or IV I believe. The second comes from one of the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies.¡±

    Rose sighed, and walked over to me, hugging me.

    ¡°Please, don¡¯t feed the troll. He will just get worse every single time. And how do you know those ancient movies?¡±

    ¡°You know that that was an ancient meme on its own, right? And why not? I always liked sci-fi and fantasy. However, it is hard to fully categorize Star Wars into one or the other. And honestly, I had to look it up what all the fuss was about. Why they still make those abominations of shovelware movies in those series.

    And the first few of each of them are actually pretty good. You just have to be careful to stop when the quality drops too much.¡±

    We were interrupted by first Kelsey and then Logan arriving in quick succession.

    Kelsey waved at us and then called out:

    ¡°Hi folks. What did I miss?¡±

    Tim, who had materialized himself some soda, shrugged.

    ¡°Not much. Mostly that Gordon found another victim for his ancient meme attack.¡±

    ¡°Ugh, we have to be breaking him from that nasty habit.¡±

    Over the next few minutes, the others arrived, and after all the greeting rituals had been observed, Danny came up to me and hugged me.

    ¡°The new computer is awesome. Thanks Viv.¡±

    That made Jason make a sour face, and he asked loudly:

    ¡°Wait, what? The new computers come from her? For real?¡±

    Rose slapped him lightly on the back of the head.

    ¡°What did you think where they came from, Idiot? We complain that the computers we have are not so good, Vivian promises to look into it, and a couple of weeks later each of us gets a brand new Enki VR research computer.

    Where did you think they came from?¡±

    He glared at her.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. I did not really care.¡±

    That led to Gordon, Tamara, Nadia, and Danny throwing popcorn at him. It was telling that each of them independently materialized Popcorn just to throw it at Jason.

    Danny lit into him verbally as well:

    ¡°For somebody who claims to be one of the smartest people alive, you are really stupid, you know that? You know that she works with Enki. Probably owns a chunk of it as well. You get a shiny new toy that has the Enki logo molded into the casing.

    So of course it has nothing to do with Vivian, right? Asshole!¡±

    The rest of them glared at Jason as well, and after a few uncomfortable seconds, Harry cleared his throat.

    ¡°So¡­ to not quite change the topic, how do those new Archimedes systems rate, in terms of power I mean.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°The ones I¡¯ve given you all are top-of-the-line. Well, I¡¯m expecting your employer to give you access to a proper number cruncher so I did not include that in the box, but otherwise, it is the best that I could come up with.¡±

    Tim smiled evilly with a sideglance at Jason.

    ¡°And where does this stack up now compared to the Seraphim Mk. V? Or the Mk. VI?¡±

    I rolled my eyes and sighed.

    ¡°Apples and Oranges. For pure research, the Archimedes is quite a bit better. If you remember my analogy from last time, the Archimedes is the race car. Nimble, lightweight, fast.

    The Seraphim Mk. V, as well as the Mk. VI, are tanks. Not slow, no, but cumbersome, heavy, and well-protected.¡±

    I paused for a moment as I thought about something.

    ¡°That reminds me, just a warning here. To make the Archimedes so fast and reactive, I have let out virtually every protection system that a cyber-combat board has. So do not, under absolutely no circumstances, ever try to do a combat dive with it.

    Even something as ¡®harmless¡¯ as pranking the local Cricket¡¯s menu-holos will likely kill you.¡±

    Jason was, naturally, the only one who had something to complain about here.

    ¡°What? You don¡¯t trust us? Do you think we can¡¯t do it? If you can do a combat dive, then we can do as well.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Knock yourself out. And if you use the Archimedes to do it with, I mean that literally. Do you have selective hearing problems?

    I am sure, if you put your mind to it, all of you could do combat dives. Takes a bit to get used to it, but if you start small, there should be no problem.

    The problem here is that the Archimedes is totally unsuited for the task. I go on combat dives with what I think is the supreme cyber combat board there is. I certainly won¡¯t use the research system I have now, which, by the way, is identical to what each of you has.

    Using Archimedes for that would be tantamount to suicide. For you and for me as well.¡±

    When Jason opened his mouth, likely to complain further, Rose shoved her elbow into his ribs.

    ¡°Let it go, Jase. You won¡¯t win this. It is just her explaining that the tool she gave us is optimized for the work we do, but is really bad for something else.¡±

    When he glared at first her, and then me, but said nothing, I relaxed a bit.

    ¡°Yes, thank you, Rose. That is exactly what I was trying to say.¡±

    Jason rolled his eyes but then grumbled:

    ¡°Okay, fine. ¡°

    Then he narrowed his eyes and gave a nasty smile.

    ¡°By the way, your new grav coils don¡¯t work with fusactors. Can you explain that?¡±

    ¡°So, you were the one Nate put to the task? And you have to be a bit more detailed. What exactly does not work?¡±

    His smile faltered a bit but recovered quickly.

    ¡°It takes way more gravity to ignite the fusion process, it generates way less energy and it bombards the surroundings with neutrons. Not much better than a fusion reactor really.¡±

    I looked him in the eyes, and then shrugged, smiling what I thought of was sweetly.

    ¡°Oh, okay. If that is all. I expected all of that, so nothing new.¡±

    That took the wind out of his sails, and Gordon who had rolled his eyes at Jason¡¯s complaint, exclaimed:

    ¡°What? You expected all that? Why?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Yes, of course. Think about it, the new grav coils are so much stronger gram for gram than the Kobashigawa coils because the K-coils generate not just the grav-bending field but dozens, maybe scores of other fields.

    The new grav coils on the other hand only generate the grav-bending field. They don¡¯t ¡®waste¡¯ energy on things that are not useful for that. Like for example violating the laws of physics.¡±

    Gordon rubbed his chin, while he digested what I just had said.

    ¡°So¡­ you think some of those other fields are responsible for the significant boost of the fusactors compared to the fusion reactors?¡±

    ¡°Yes, of course. I can even name one of the fields that come into play here already. One of the fields of the Kobashigawa coils reduced positive electrical charge by 6%. In a small volume, admittedly, but almost exactly of the size of the biggest fusactors.¡±

    Jason then screeched:

    ¡°Wait, you knew about that and did not tell anything?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°I learned about it just a few days ago when I looked up how fusactors actually work. But it is so obvious that I immediately understood that the pure grav-coils would not work. Not alone at least.¡±

    When Jason sputtered incoherently, Gordon sighed.

    ¡°So¡­ if you did learn about it a couple of days ago, why did you not notify us? Vandermeer I mean.¡±

    I sacked down a bit and then sighed.

    ¡°Because I had the ¡®pleasure¡¯ of taking Thomas Englund¡¯s nuclear physics course.¡±

    Gordon screwed up his face in confusion.

    ¡°Uh¡­ ok, but what does that have to do¡­ oh¡­ oh fuck, you were surprised by¡­¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Exactly. And I could not believe it. For the last two days, I was¡­ well on a bender trying to get to the ground of it.¡±

    ¡°Damn, my condolences. That had to be a hard wake-up. Damn that asshole.¡±

    By now, we had left all the non-physics-buffs way behind, and Danny complained loudly:

    ¡°What are you talking about? What is so hard?¡±

    I sighed again.

    ¡°The problem is that fusactors violate the laws of physics. They violate it hard. And professor Englund apparently believes that empirical evidence that challenges his worldview is not real. In other words, he completely left out that little factoid.

    That meant when I stumbled over it, because it went against everything I learned, I could not believe it either and tried to reconcile my knowledge of physics with reality.¡±

    ¡°So? We refine our knowledge of physics all the time.¡±

    Gordon nodded and answered her:

    ¡°Yes, you are right. But we hold a few things as absolute laws. Immovable, hard, and without exceptions. And fusactors violate a couple of them.¡±

    ¡°What exactly?¡±

    I massaged the bridge of my nose.

    ¡°The first is that some of the heat of the fusion process simply vanishes. In other words, it violates the second law of thermodynamics.¡±

    Rose frowned.

    ¡°But¡­ isn¡¯t that a good thing?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Well, yes and no. Yes, it is as any engineer, any scientist would love to have something to simply shove any waste heat into. No, it violates the second law of thermodynamics, which is one of the few absolute laws of physics we have.

    Heat moves, but it never vanishes. It will never go away, only grow. Except that in fusactors, around 3% of the heat energy simply¡­ is gone. Nowhere to be found. It challenges our whole worldview, and makes us doubt the few hard truths we have worked hard to carve into stone.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ it is more of a philosophical problem than a real one?¡±

    Gordon sighed.

    ¡°It is a problem because it tells us that we have to reevaluate all of physics, that we don¡¯t really know how the world works. We can¡¯t trust anything. Which is why so many physicists try to ignore it.¡±

    Danny frowned.

    ¡°Okay, so it puts you onto your ass. Fine. We all get something like that from time to time. But what is the second problem?¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°The second problem is arguably worse. I don¡¯t know if you are aware of it, but fusactors usually use pure hydrogen one or bog standard hydrogen for fusion, in the so-called proton-proton-chain.

    The same process that happens in the sun. In there, six hydrogen atoms, well, the cores of them, the protons in question, fuse, and the end product are one helium four atom, and two hydrogen one atoms. The whole process releases 26.196 megaelectron volts. Or around 4.19 nano Joule.

    Around 75% of that energy is released in the form of a fast-moving neutron, which is bad as it tends to irradiate the surrounding materials. But all of it increases directly or indirectly the heat of the universe.

    The problem we have now is that somehow fusactors not only capture that fast-moving neutron and slow it down, converting the kinetic energy of it to electricity in the process, but at the same time, generate overall electricity to the tune of 31.43 MeV to 36.67MeV.¡±

    Most of them began frowning as well. Only Rose remained confused.

    ¡°Uh¡­ so it gets more energy? Is that not good?¡±

    Jason exploded:

    ¡°It violates the law of conservation of energy. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. But here it appears out of nowhere. It bugs scientists, real scientists for centuries now. It drives us nuts so that we tend to not talk about it.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ why is that bad?¡±

    I softly spoke:

    ¡°Because everything else we know tells us that conservation of energy is inviolate. It is absolute. Even black holes, the one big exception to virtually every single rule and law in physics that we know of follow it. And now we have here those things we build, and they spit on that fundamental law of physics, ignore it, play with it, and then leave it bleeding in the dust.

    Where the violation of the second law of thermodynamics is disturbing, this is way worse. This makes us lose trust in all of physics.¡±

    Jason sneered at me.

    ¡°So¡­ welcome to the club. Now you all can worry about it as much as we do. And hit your head on the problem for years and years to come. Without finding a solution.¡±

    Yeah, that was Jason, always trying to go with the head through a wall. Of course, I could not hold that against him. I was the same way. I just could not stand to be caught in the box with nowhere to get out¡­

    Nowhere to get out¡­

    ¡°That¡¯s it!¡±

    My excited call brought all attention to me, and I sat back down from where I had jumped up.

    Danny, more patient today than at the last meeting, asked softly:

    ¡°What is it?¡±

    ¡°I think I know how we can reconcile the behavior of fusactors with the laws of physics.¡±

    For a moment, they all just stared at me, and then Jason derisively sneered:

    ¡°So, just like that, you get the big inspiration. The big revelation? So how about you let all of us in on the secret, hu?¡±

    Gordon rolled his eyes and sighed.

    ¡°Come on Jase. If she really has an idea, maybe it will help us. But yeah, Viv, what is it that you figured out?¡±

    I smiled broadly.

    ¡°Well, how about you recite the second law of thermodynamics?¡±

    He looked at me incredulously for a moment and then shrugged.

    ¡°Fine. For a spontaneous process, the entropy of the universe increases. Are you satisfied?¡±

    ¡°Mostly, yes. And how about the law of conservation of energy?¡±

    He frowned now.

    ¡°Seriously? But okay. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Only converted from one form of energy to another.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Again, mostly correct, but what I am thinking about are different phrasings of the same. For the second law, the wording I think about is, that in any isolated system, entropy always increases.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, that is what I said.¡±

    ¡°No, not quite. But for the conservation of energy, what I was looking for was that the total energy in any isolated system remains constant.¡±

    He frowned even harder, while all the others just looked confused.

    ¡°Again, that is what I said.¡±

    ¡°No¡­ again, not really. You were talking about the universe in the second law, and in absolutes about the conservation of energy. That meant you left out the important words.¡±

    ¡°What important words?¡±

    ¡°In an isolated system.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, that is what the universe means.¡±

    ¡°Is it? Classically we assume the universe is an isolated system, but what if not?¡±

    ¡°You really want to go there? That is the realm of science fantasy.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Think about it. If the universe, at least the part we can observe, is not isolated, but there are other parts, maybe other universes, or some form of hyperspace, or whatever. Important is, if there is something else, and some part of the Kobashigawa combined field opens up a connection to those other parts¡­ it would explain the fusactors.

    Where does the heat go? Into someplace, that is way colder. Where does the speed of the neutrons go? Someplace else. Where does the additional energy come from? From where the heat and the speed of the neutrons go.

    The heat does not simply vanish into nothing but moves somewhere we can not observe it. So the second law is not violated.

    The fusactors do not create energy out of nothing, but transfer it from somewhere we can¡¯t observe. It was not created but just moved. If we assume that there is someplace else and the universe we can observe is not an isolated system, the fundamental laws of physics remain intact.¡±

 2.52: A Hole in the Ground

    For a moment, nobody said anything, and I was already halfway convinced that all of them would accept my idea.

    Naturally, I was wrong in that. Gorden remained polite and just sighed while shaking his head.

    Jason was¡­ less cordial.

    ¡°Ridiculous! I thought you were somewhat educated in physics. Why do you propose such a nonsense idea?¡±

    I could only stare at him in a bit of shock, not understanding why he so vehemently denied the idea, but before I could formulate an answer, Gordon explained, much calmer, what both of them seemed to think.

    ¡°I know, it sounds good, but it is impossible.¡±

    I was ready to light into him but then realized that he just stated the facts as he knew them, as calmly and rationally as possible.

    ¡°Why do you think that?¡±

    Gordon opened his mouth trying to answer, but Jason was, sadly, faster.

    ¡°Because Sokolov has proven beyond the possibility of a doubt that there is no ¡®other place¡¯. There is no multiverse, there are no higher dimensions, no other planes of existence, no hyperspace, nothing of the sort.¡±

    He crossed his arms in an ¡®I have spoken¡¯ gesture that downright exuded his smug superiority in the topic. Not that I was all that convinced that he actually was superior, mind you.

    ¡°Who?¡±

    The corners of his mouth contorted in a smug smile, and you could literally feel how he was enjoying knowing something I did not. Yeah, as if I knew everything. But whatever, he finally had basked enough in it and deigned to answer me.

    ¡°Aleksandr Sokolov. Russian physicist. Around 100 years ago, he proved that there can be no other plane of existence, no other universe. We are all there is.¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ yes. I think I know who you are talking about. He was a cosmologist, right?¡±

    Still having his annoying smile on his face, Jason nodded.

    ¡°Yes. For somebody who supposedly studied physics, you should know about him.¡±

    I raised an eyebrow and steepled my fingers.

    ¡°Cosmology¡­ you know, the specialty that is not quantum physics? The one that is almost the diametral opposite of said quantum physics? The quantum physics I specialize in?

    You mean that cosmology? So, pray tell, why the heck should I know a rather obscure scientist who as far as I know only produced some knowledge in a field that I have, or had, no contact in?

    Despite what you seem to think, he is not part of the general physics studies, and he is unequivocally not part of quantum physics.¡±

    He literally sniffed and looked down his nose at me.

    ¡°Humph. Anybody should know Sokolov, and especially any physicist.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Yeah sure. If you think so.¡±

    He turned somewhat redfaced and leaned broodingly forward.

    ¡°Young lady, I find your attitude straining. Just accept that you don¡¯t know everything.¡±

    That was¡­ so unexpected it took me a few seconds to react.

    ¡°You think that I think that I know everything? Are you fricking serious? Of course, I don¡¯t know everything. I just told you that I don¡¯t know Sokolov¡¯s ¡®proof¡¯.

    The thing is, until I do, and had some time to look it over, I can¡¯t tell if it is true or not.¡±

    By now, I had stood up as well, and while my stature was somewhat less imposing than the nearly a head taller Jason, I did not cower but instead was as far into his face as I could manage.

    The effect was meager though, and I don¡¯t think that Jason was particularly impressed. He just rolled his eyes.

    ¡°Face it, your scheme will fail. Sokolov is a known fact. He proved that alternate realities, or planes, or universes simply don¡¯t exist. This is all we have.¡±

    I heroically held back from rolling my eyes as well, and instead only posted the burning question.

    ¡°How?¡±

    That seemed to confuse Jason somewhat, as he looked at me bewildered.

    ¡°How what?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°How did he prove it?¡±

    And the smug grin was back.

    ¡°With math. You should try it sometime. Helps magnificently in your understanding of physics.¡±

    I tried. Honestly, I tried, but I could not keep the snark out of my answer.

    ¡°Oh, I know. Who of us two actually had enough math education to not only understand the Seeberger equation but also use it not once, not twice, but three times to figure out new aspects of our reality?

    Oh right, it was not you. So, how about you talk about knowing math when you understand Seeberger enough to figure out how to entangle atoms and molecules?¡±

    Then I took a deep breath and continued a bit more civil.

    ¡°Now, it is obvious that he used math. Anything beyond the most basic insights into physics requires math. That made your answer singularly unhelpful. What I wanted to know is how exactly he proved his idea.¡±

    Jason rolled his eyes again, but thankfully, Gordon answered me.

    ¡°He had a series of six equations that together exclude the possibility of any other modes of reality.¡±

    I frowned. That¡­ could not be right.

    ¡°That seems a bit farfetched. And if I understand you correctly, it would run contra to Seeberger.¡±

    Jason snarled.

    ¡°Seeberger, Seeberger, nothing but Seeberger. Get a grip, girl. Not everything is explained by Seeberger. Yes, his equation seems to work nicely for some fringe applications, but it does not impinge other, more important aspects of physics."

    I was, honestly, taken aback. Was he seriously still not understanding the epochal importance of the Seeberger equation? So it took me a few moments to be able to answer him.

    ¡°You¡­ seriously, you still do not realize it? For real? Jason, the Seeberger equation is the fricking Theory of Everything! It does explain everything. It does impinge on every aspect of physics.

    That is the reason why it is such an unwieldy, awe-inspiring monster of an equation. Any other equation in physics can be derived from it. So yes, if Sokolov¡¯s ¡®proof¡¯ goes against Seeberger, then it can¡¯t be true.¡±

    I closed my eyes for a moment, shaking my head slowly.

    ¡°Not to mention that if Sokolov was true, then empirical evidence tells us that the second law of thermodynamics and the law of conservation of energy are wrong.

    So either reality says that two of the most fundamental laws, laws humanity has ascertained over centuries of observation are wrong, or a wholly theoretical ¡®proof¡¯ of a single person is wrong.

    I don¡¯t know where you stand, but my money would be on Sokolov being wrong.¡±

    Oh, nice, now Jason began to sulk.

    ¡°You think it has to be one or the other? That they contradict each other?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Reality contradicts one or the other. Fact is, fusactors work, and they violate the laws of physics as they stand now.

    Either they reduce entropy and create energy, which is simply impossible according to our understanding of physics, or they shove the heat, and with it, the entropy created by the fusactors somewhere else, and pull energy from somewhere else, which would, if I understand you two right, violate Sokolov.

    If those characteristics of fusactors were purely theoretical, I would say that both could be right. But as those characteristics are empirical, observable, measurable facts, it has to be either ¨C or.

    And I can¡¯t see Sokolov being right over fundamental laws of physics. Especially if Sokolov violates Seeberger as well.¡±

    He threw up his hands in a huff.

    ¡°Fine. Then prove it to me.¡±

    He materialized a whiteboard, but before he even could project the equations on it, Rose shouted.

    ¡°Enough! Stop! Both of you sit down! RIGHT NOW!¡±

    Followed by her physically shoving us apart.

    When we both were way too shocked to react immediately, she shouted again:

    ¡°I SAID RIGHT NOW! Sit the fuck down!¡±

    Honestly, I scrambled back to my chair and planted my behind in it before I even realized that I had done so.

    Rose should not have been that scary. Heck, here in cyberspace, she should not have even been the slightest bit scary to me.

    I¡¯ve faced bleeding-edge hunter-killers. And still, here I was, being scared of a woman not much bigger than me.

    The only saving grace was that the quite a bit bigger Jason reacted exactly the same. And so we both sat there like scolded schoolchildren, while Rose was visibly agitated.

    ¡°I¡¯ve had it with you two. We get it. You are passionate about it. But how about you two think about us others? Do you think we want to be kidnapped into realms of math that drive grown physicists insane? In case you don¡¯t get it, NO, we do not want that. You can have your little math off when we are finished with the meeting, understood?¡±

    I tried to crawl deeper into my chair. Fortunately for me, Jason threw caution to the wind and dared to protest:

    ¡°But¡­ but this is important.¡±

    Oh yeah, Rose was, of course, impressed by his whining. She was so quick in his face that it nearly seemed as if she teleported.

    ¡°DON¡¯T YOU DARE! Yes, we all understand. You need to ensure that Vivian is put into her place. If it weren¡¯t that sad, it would be hilarious. For the very first time in your life, you¡¯ve met somebody who is genuinely better than you in virtually anything you base your self-worth on.

    Damn it Jase, you need help. Professional help. But don¡¯t try your campaign to pull Vivian down here in our meetings.¡±

    I was almost ready to relax a bit. Sadly, too early, as she whirled around and faced me, though not as aggressively as she had lit into Jason.

    ¡°And you! Yes, I understand it. This is a puzzle for you to solve. I understand that you need to solve it. But most of us here are only marginally interested in the innermost workings of the universe. Show some consideration and keep those kinds of arguments to a minimum, please.¡±

    Then she grinned.

    ¡°Not that I have any doubt that in two weeks, Jason will come crawling in here and complain how you ripped him a new one and his nice safe worldview into shreds. But do it after this meeting.¡±

    I swallowed heavily, and nodded, not trusting my voice right this moment.

    For the remaining meeting, we all remained cordial, but there remained a certain tension. Sadly, the mood had already been ruined.

    I vowed to myself that in the future I would try to not drift off into science all that hard.

    After some minutes of trivial small talk, Danny decided to get something done.

    ¡°Uh, Rose, do you monitor Project Revitalize?¡±

    Rose tilted her head.

    This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

    ¡°Where does this question come from? But yes, I do. Why?¡±

    ¡°Well, I¡­ was so captured by my work that I did not look into it. I just wanted to ask how Batch N1 is working out so far?¡±

    Rose snorted.

    ¡°Quite well. We have begun to use BOUs for it as well, though so far we have only gotten around 55 percent of the testers seeded with it. But the results are very promising. The last stand was that 94.3% of the women in the batch with a BOU were confirmed pregnant.

    By the way, Vivian, the BOU is a marvelous thing. Why did you not market it more?¡±

    The question came out of nowhere.

    ¡°Huh? Sorry, but I am not responsible for marketing. It honestly did not even occur to me that this might be something that could be sold.¡±

    ¡°And how are the numbers in NYC? About your test?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°A bit less. 93.4% had implantation.¡±

    ¡°Well, those are nice numbers.¡±

    I shrugged. If she thought so, who was I to disagree?

    ¡°The BOU shows us that 88% of the ¡®failures¡¯ have other medical problems that made either the ovum or the sperm non-viable. For the rest¡­ it was either a matter of bad timing or in a few cases, the woman skipped ovulation. Again, the BOU makes it quite easy to figure that out. Seriously, could you not have released it earlier?¡±

    ¡°No, not really. As soon as one of the big corps got their grubby fingers into one of them, they would have realized how the NADAs work. And beaten us to patenting it. While we could not patent and release it until we had sufficient strength to defend it from some¡­ less friendly attempts of aquiring it.¡±

    ¡°Hmph. Whatever. I just wish we had it earlier and more of it. But okay, we have it now, and that has to be enough. We were able to do early genetic testing on the zygotes. So far, there has been no indication of any defects.¡±

    ¡°So there will be no repeat of the K4 fuckup?¡±

    Nadia¡¯s question hit right below the belt. And not just for me. Everybody winced.

    ¡°It is still too early to say that. Keep in mind that we still have a hard time finding the difference between us and non-functional K4. And it is only marginally easier to find the difference between any K4, and a C3.

    Humanity is a mess. The great war has done insane damage to us as a species. The Folly is just the most damaging of the bioweapons used. It will take generations to stabilize all that damage.¡±

    After that, the meeting became even more awkward. We all tried to keep the conversation going. Well, not necessarily that conversation, but any conversation.

    Nonetheless, I was not the only one breathing in relief when the meeting ended. Strangely, besides Gordon, Kelsey and Tamara also stayed behind with Jason and me. Gordon was somewhat expected, but the two girls were a small surprise. It shouldn¡¯t have been. Kelsey specialized in grav-tech and Tamara in electrical engineering. Both disciplines were based hard on physics.

    Strangely nobody had bothered to remove the whiteboard, and without Rose being present, nobody prevented Jason from projecting the equations of Sokolov¡¯s third proof onto it.

    It was, as Gordon had already said, a group of six fairly complex equations. Oh, well, considering the fact that all six of them fit onto a single, double-sized whiteboard, fairly was the operative term here.

    Almost immediately, something in the back of my mind began to protest. I ignored it for the time being. Knowing me, it was just the fact that these equations prevented me from getting the elegant solution to our fusactor problem.

    Not that I could fully appreciate the equations anyway. Jason, naturally, was of a different opinion.

    ¡°So, what do you make of that?¡±

    I sighed and crossed my arms.

    ¡°As it is now? Nothing.¡±

    A triumphant ¡°Ha¡± escaped his lips, and he turned to the others.

    ¡°See. Not so smart after all.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°You know, if you actually had included the description of what the variables mean, I might be able to make sense of it. Oh, sure I recognize some of them. The Planck¡¯s constant for example, or the gravitational constant. But the majority need some explanation of what they represent.¡±

    I turned to him.

    ¡°As is usual when writing an equation somewhere so that people can evaluate it.¡±

    ¡°What? You are bragging that you have a knack for math. Why don¡¯t you figure it out?¡±

    I looked at him annoyed. Did he seriously try to play those kind of games here? Whatever, I had access to the matrix, I had Warden, who already had looked up the proof. I was just going to add the definitions myself when Gordon angrily stormed forward.

    ¡°Quit those fucking games, asshole. Yeah, we get it, you think you are the shit. Newsflash, you are a shit, nothing more.¡±

    And he added the definitions. Jason on the other hand was, again, in a snit. I seriously started to dislike the jerk.

    ¡°What the fuck, Gordon. She always tells us how smart she is, and how good at math she is. Let her figure it out.¡±

    I ignored him and looked at the equations. And still, something was not right. Something was missing. I could not put my finger on it, but¡­ it just did not click with me.

    After a few seconds, while I tuned out Gordon and Jason arguing loudly, I went to high compression and looked at the equations more carefully.

    It helped that I tasked Warden with number crunching, but it only took me around half an hour to find part of what I was looking for. For the others, who by now all four were arguing, mostly Jason against the other three, less than four minutes had gone by.

    I was not done, mind you. That was just the preliminary evaluation, and I had Warden look further into it. Nevertheless, I surfaced up to 30:1. Just in time for Jason to smugly turn to me after the argument had wound down.

    ¡°So¡­ do you now see how your silly idea is impossible?¡±

    I cocked my head, still looking at the equations.

    ¡°Honestly, I see no such thing.¡±

    I heard snorts from the three in the cheap seats, while from Jason I heard a piercing:

    ¡°What?!? How can you not see it? Do you even understand this proof?¡±

    I turned to him and smiled sweetly.

    ¡°Do you? Because if you did, you would not try to bring it on as a definitive proof.¡±

    He spluttered for a moment, and Gordon, who had slowly moved forward again, asked, way more politely than Jason:

    ¡°Uh, not that I like it, but the asshole is right this time. This is the proof that there is no ¡®somewhere¡¯ that the heat vanishes into and the energy comes from. I am really sorry.¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°No¡­ it is not. I guess nobody did the work and looked at the individual equations.¡±

    Gordon furrowed his forehead and looked at the equations incredulously.

    ¡°Uh¡­ seriously?¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°If they did they would see that this is the possibility of a proof. Nothing more. Yes, full understanding will take a bit more work, I fear, but I can already tell you that either Sokolov did not really understand the equations, or he was biased enough to cherrypick.¡±

    ¡°What do you mean?¡±

    ¡°It is simple. The first equation? From the top of my head, I can see that it has at least three solutions. All equally valid, mind you. The third equation has five that I see. As far as I can tell right now, the ¡®proof¡¯ depends on those specific solutions.

    If any of the others are chosen, the proof goes poof and is gone.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ you mean that¡­¡±

    He stopped.

    ¡°There is no proof that the specific solutions Sokolov has chosen are the ones accurately describing reality. They might, I give you that. But if we take the fusactor problem into account, it is unlikely.¡±

    Jason had just stared at me, and the whiteboard for some glorious blessed moments in silence. Sadly, it couldn¡¯t last.

    ¡°You¡­ you are you fucking serious? Three solutions? Five? Do you really think we will simply accept you pulling some math out of your ass? And even if you are right, that does not mean that the proof is invalid.¡±

    I took a deep breath and counted slowly to ten.

    ¡°You are aware that this is exactly what it means? If one or more of the equations have more than one solution, we can not assume that the one specific one you like is the real one. Which turns the proof into a hypothesis.

    Until we have taken all the possible solutions into account, we can not¡­¡±

    It was at this moment that Warden had finished the next crucial step, and projected the answer into my vision.

    ¡°Oh wow. Belay that.¡±

    That seemed to let Jason perk up somewhat.

    ¡°So¡­ you see now that you are wrong?¡±

    ¡°No, I see now that this solution set is wrong. Not possible.¡±

    ¡°What the fuck?¡±

    ¡°It is so simple that everybody who actually did the work could find it out. Do you see this constant ¦È<sub>s</sub>?¡±

    Jason nodded.

    ¡°Yes, Sokolov¡¯s constant. What of it?¡±

    ¡°Did you ever look into its value?¡±

    ¡°No, of course not. Why bother? It is canceled out in every equation that it appears. So not important.¡±

    I smiled again.

    ¡°Only in those solutions to the equations. And it is important because it is not a constant at all. It is a variable.¡±

    He frowned but remained silent. Gordon on the other hand, interjected.

    ¡°Wait, what do you mean?¡±

    ¡°Solve the equations for ¦È<sub>s </sub>and you will notice it. If you solve the first equation for it, you get ¦È<sub>s </sub>equals 3.4478 x 10<sup>-23</sup>, while if you solve the third one you get ¦È<sub>s </sub>equals 7.734 x 10<sup>-26</sup>. Those two solutions are incompatible. You can either have this specific solution for the first equation or this specific solution for the third equation, not both. They are mutually exclusive.¡±

    ¡°But that would mean that¡­¡±

    ¡°This ¡®proof¡¯ is just so much of fully digested bull fodder, yes.¡±

    ¡°And that means that¡­¡±

    ¡°The assumption that there is no ¡®somewhere¡¯ that explains the peculiarities of the fusactors is at least at this moment highly suspect.¡±

    Jason managed to croak:

    ¡°How? How did you¡­?¡±

    I still felt pretty annoyed by his presence, but I still answered.

    ¡°How did I what?¡±

    ¡°How did you get those numbers? That fast?¡±

    ¡°Supercomputers. I have a few. And VIs that run on a couple of them. I tasked my primary assistant VI with solving all the equations, with the solutions chosen by Sokolov, for every variable, and or constant.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ how? How did you determine that the equations have more than one solution?¡±

    I let out a heavy breath.

    ¡°I¡¯ve gone to high compression while you argued with Gordon, Tamara, and Kelsey and worked on the equations. It is far from complete, and I would guess that if I put in the work I will find other solutions.

    What I told you is just what I figured out in the few minutes I had for it.¡±

    He was clearly becoming exasperated and nearly screamed at me:

    ¡°BUT HOW? HOW DID YOU DO THAT?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. I just did it. I can¡¯t explain how I do it, why I can do it and others can not. For me it is obvious. Almost as obvious that two plus two equals four.¡±

    After staring at the whiteboard for a moment, his shoulders slumped and he slowly sat down on the ground.

    ¡°You¡­ you¡¯ve ruined everything. How can you do that? How can you be so much better in everything?¡±

    I know, I should have just let him stew in it, get over it on his own. I couldn¡¯t though. It was just not in me.

    ¡°I am not better than you in everything. You just chose the parts on which I am better to base your self-worth.¡±

    ¡°But why? Why are you better at exactly those things?¡±

    ¡°The only person who can tell you that is you. I can¡¯t decide for you what your self-esteem is based on. Why did you choose those exact characteristics?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Do you know what the irony of the whole thing is? My self-esteem is not based on it. For me it just is. For most of my life, I hid my intelligence. Yes, I am proud that I have figured out the Seeberger equation. At least as far as I have figured it out.

    But I couldn¡¯t care less if you, or Gordon, or any of you is better than me. I don¡¯t compete with you. With any of you. Heck, Nate was right. You are the only people I could consider my peers. Why should I try to compete with you?

    Why do you try to compete with me? Why do you have to be better than me?¡±

    I shook my head and moved over to Gordon, Kelsey, and Tamara, who were looking at the Equations on the whiteboard.

    ¡°I think it is time to end it here for now. If you want, I can send you what I already have figured out.¡±

    Gordon looked at me hopefully.

    ¡°So¡­ you will work on this some more?¡±

    I looked at the six equations, sighed, and then shook my head.

    ¡°No¡­ I see no point in it. Instead, I will look into what Seeberger has to say about all that. And then I will try to figure out what quantum field of the Kobashigawa coils is responsible for all those problems. Try to figure out how to make them.

    If you want to, even without my knack, with a powerful enough number cruncher and what I have done as a starting point you should be able to complete it. But seriously, there is no point. I have sufficiently proven that it can¡¯t be correct. The rest¡­ is unimportant.¡±

    Gordon shrugged.

    ¡°Yeah, okay. It¡­ well, this was a very firm part of my understanding of the universe for some time now. It is hard to let it go.¡±

    ¡°Understandable. But¡­ there is nothing more that I can really do with it. It is simply wrong. And as such, of no more consequence.¡±

    ¡°Does that mean you will leave Jason like that?¡±

    Tamara asked with a grim voice.

    ¡°Is there anything I can do for him? As I see it, I can only make it worse.¡±

    After a moment of consideration, she shook her head.

    ¡°No¡­ I don¡¯t think you can help him much right now. Mind you, maybe this will finally push him over the edge and he will seek the help he needs.¡±

    I shuddered when I understood what help she meant, but she continued apparently oblivious to my reaction.

    ¡°Well, we¡¯ll see in two weeks then, right?¡±

    ¡°Yeah, unless you need something?¡±

    ¡°Nah. Have fun then.¡±

    With those words, she logged out. I bid farewell to the others as well and did the same. Well, not out of the matrix, just out of the viron. I had things to do still.

    After a quick message to arrange it, I met with Nate again.

    ¡°That was quick. I did not think you would need to meet with me that fast again.¡±

    ¡°Yeah. I think I¡¯ve figured out a way to reconcile the fusactor problem with the laws of physics.¡±

    He raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

    ¡°It is actually quite simple. We have to stop treating the universe as an isolated system, and it is no longer a problem.¡±

    He made a heavy sigh.

    ¡°I hate to tell you, Vivian, but¡­¡±

    I raised a hand to stop him.

    ¡°Jason took great delight in informing me about Sokolov already. But remember what you said? If reality does not conform to your theory?

    Reality tells us that either the second law of thermodynamics and the law of conservation of energy are wrong, or Sokolov is.¡±

    He rubbed his chin in contemplation.

    ¡°That¡­ you might be right. But it will be hard to prove that sufficiently to make an impact.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No. That is what broke Jason. I¡¯ve already proven that what Sokolov wrote can not be right.¡±

    I sent him what I already had deciphered.

    ¡°It is telling that at least two of the equations have multiple solutions, with some of them not fitting into Sokolov¡¯s neat construct.

    But more important, look at ¦È<sub>s</sub>! The first, fourth, fifth, and sixth equations need for it to be of one value, while the second and third need for it to be another.

    However, the proof relies on all of the six equations using the same ¦È<sub>s</sub>. It just does not work.¡±

    He looked at it with a neutral expression for quite some time.

    ¡°I¡­ see. I should have expected something like that. Just brilliant, another fine headache for my scientists. You¡¯ve challenged their worldview way too much already, you know that?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It can¡¯t be helped if the worldview in question is just¡­ inadequate. It does not describe reality, so it is wrong.¡±

    ¡°Hey, I agree. I might not have the high-powered brain that you have, but I try to be open. Well, they will adapt.¡±

    ¡°Hopefully better than Jason.¡±

    And Nate slumped down.

    ¡°Ah, fuck. What has that boy done now?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I think he had a nervous breakdown or something like that. Unfortunately, it seems that he based his self-esteem on being the oldest K4, the smartest, the one with the most achievements, and the one coming from the best family of all of us.¡±

    He nodded in understanding.

    ¡°And you shattered three of those pillars simply by existing. I will make him get some help. Hopefully, it will catch. But¡­ you are not just here to inform me, are you?¡±

    I smiled ruefully.

    ¡°No¡­ not really. I have looked at what I have to do, and in the end, it will be a large series of experiments.

    Experiments that might be dangerous for humans. Experiments that could be a radiation hazard.

    So, I need a place where I can do those experiments where no humans are around. Preferably a place where I can do nothing to make the environment any worse.

    And where, if anything goes wrong, a large amount of rock and soil will prevent the damage from spreading.¡±

    His eyes narrowed.

    ¡°You will not do any such dangerous experiments, young lady!¡±

    For a moment I was pretty confused, but then I understood.

    ¡°Uh, the no humans around includes me. I will use remote-controlled bots to do the experiments.¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ ok, that is fine. You know, the best option would be to dig your facility into an asteroid then.¡±

    ¡°It won¡¯t be that dangerous. The quantum fields that I will test out will have already been gone over theoretically forward and backward.

    No, the problem is that I will need a neutron source. So there is a realistic danger of some serious irradiation.

    So, a hole in the ground would be enough. And would allow me to start the experiments, and have the logistics of it, without waiting months until the interplanetary ship in question reaches the asteroid in question."

    He closed his eyes for a moment and then nodded.

    ¡°Okay, so nothing too far out of the norm. I can live with that. You would neither be the first nor the last one to do experiments of that level here on Earth.

    Did you have anything specific in mind?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Either the deathlands, but there is a certain scarcity of large rock formations there, or some mostly uninhabited part of the Rockies. I personally would prefer the Rockies.

    And oh, look, over a century of warfare has turned most of Colorado into a wasteland.¡±

    ¡°Well, yeah, it had. You know what, I can either give you Cheyenne Mountain or have you thought about Nevada? A desert, the population centers were hit hard in the great war, and the lack of a water source ripped it apart even more. So¡­ the other option is Groom Lake. Both have some secure underground facilities, though you would need to rebuild them either way. But the hard work of excavating is already done.¡±

    He was right. Nevada was also an option. But I think Cheyenne Mountain was the better one. For the bunker, it was no difference if it was tasked with keeping radiation out, or in.

    And by the time of the great war, it was already so well known that it was almost immediately shut down and evacuated. The big bombs were strong enough to destroy it, even through the mountains, so the new facility relied on secrecy. Something neither Cheyenne Mountain nor Groom Lake could provide anymore.

    ¡°I think I will take Cheyenne Mountain. There should be considerably less damage.¡±

 2.53: How to Become Evil

    Some may think that I now strove to correct Sokolov¡¯s equations, to fix his proof. I fear I have to disappoint those people.

    In my reckoning, the incorrectly named Sokolov¡¯s third proof had become utterly irrelevant. I had invalidated it, and any further work put into it would be wasted.

    No, instead I decided to briefly look into what Seeberger was saying on the topic, but generally, the best I could do was to explain how fusactors worked.

    Of course, I had Warden work on the equations. On a low priority, mind you, but still, she was working on it. Just to satisfy my mild curiosity. To be fair, I only let her do it because she had such an insane amount of computing power mostly sitting idle that it did cost her nothing.

    My excursion into Seeberger yielded no measurable results either. Mostly because I refused another deep dive into it for something like that. Yes, I know, sooner or later, I would do the deep dive, just to satisfy my curiosity. But for the time being, I was fine with not knowing the answer to that riddle.

    Way more interesting was which strange quantum field from the Kobashigawa coils did such delightful impossibilities to physics. And yes, I did start working on it. Only for a little bit though. I had used up my capacity for quantum insanity for the week.

    No, the rest of the weekend, I spent mostly relaxing. I had, finally, some sort of breakthrough with the violin. At least in VR, it no longer sounded as if I was pushing a frozen cat through a circular saw.

    That does not mean it sounded anywhere even near to good. But it had reached a point where I could, with some goodwill, identify the melody I was trying to play.

    Nibbles was, of course, very demanding of my company. Not that I objected. Not that she minded that I was putting the first specifications for the lab in Colorado together. Multitasking at its finest, yay. I could play with my cat and still think about what I needed.

    In a way, Nate had been right. Putting the lab into deep space would have been better. To some extent. I needed a sufficiently strong gravity field to use grav pinch for the proton-proton chain. Which ruled out virtually all asteroids.

    I also did not want to use any small body with any inhabitants. Which ruled out the rest. Not that it was all that easy to get a fusactor running on one of the dwarf planets.

    I could, more like should, and in the end most likely would set up another lab inside one of the inner moons of Jupiter.

    The thing was that it would take a couple of months to modify a ship for remote control, and then another couple of months just for that ship to reach Jupiter. And that was with a ship that was already built. Having one built for my needs would take half a year more at least.

    So yes, for the more dangerous experiments, I would use that, but for the more environmentally friendly ones, Cheyenne Mountain would do fabulously.

    Not that that would stop me from buying and modifying a ship. Far from it. The immense cost of an interplanetary freighter was unimportant.

    The question was do I buy a new one, built exactly to my specifications, or do I accept a used one that I only needed to modify, but which would be less functional for it?

    It should have been a tough decision, just from what I have described so far. But it wasn¡¯t really.

    A purpose-built ship would not only take significantly longer to get, but it would also add to the price tag quite a bit. Even if I got a new out-of-the-yard standard design, it would cost at most ? of what a special build would cost.

    Yes, the cost for the modification would get added to that, but that mostly consisted of integrating Q-links into the control system and building a couple of NADAs. For the rest, a few algae tanks would serve well enough to create the food concentrate for the Eitri and Brokkr, as well as the Einherjar that I wanted to include.

    The rest was mostly just tools and materials.

    That meant that a special design was at best marginally better than a standard freighter.

    And that did not even take the possibility of getting a used ship into account.

    I started to look into one of them, but honestly, it was a tedious task, way more suited for a computer than for me. Which made me delegate it to Warden.

    Instead, I opened up the plans of Cheyenne Mountain and began to plan the new lab there. All the antiquated computer systems had to go, naturally. Along with all the virtually prehistoric technology supporting it.

    Fortunately, much of that could be easily recycled with a big molecular forge and a NADA. Sure, some of the material was of questionable use, but at worst I could form it into ingots and store it. The joint was big enough after all.

    The antediluvian reactor had to go as well. I mean, come on, a fission reactor? I understand that big fusion reactors were expensive and took a long time to build before the war, and Cheyenne Mountain had already lost virtually all of its strategic worth by then, but that is no reason to let a fission pile fester alone for decades.

    It would need some serious heavy containers to safely remove that piece of refuse and chuck it into the sun, but that was just a bit of money. Nothing more.

    The core of the new lab was, again, a big NADA, with the obligatory molecular forge. The rest I would mostly build in situ.

    Monday, I took a glance at the observation report on Blumenthal, and much to my disgust, there was nothing to report here.

    Did he even try to work as a fixer just to maintain the fa?ade? Whatever. I had come to the conclusion that the powers that were simply did not care if he was pretending to be a fixer pretending to be an art dealer, or not. I could not explain his utter lack of fixer activities otherwise, as he struck me as too smart to make such an obvious mistake.

    At least that left me a lot more time for the new lab.

    Tuesday, the 15<sup>th</sup> was the weekly meeting for the Enki C-suite. I had decided to be there in person this time. I had to get out of the house for a bit.

    It was nice to simply chat with the others for a bit before the meeting, and walk through the research annex, looking at what the minions were doing.

    The big thing they were working on was some sort of tunneling machine. An all-in-one system that used a disruptor to disintegrate the ground in front of it, tractor beams to stabilize the ground surrounding the new hole, other tractor beams to suck off the disintegrated monoatomic material that previously filled the new hole, and a combination of a molecular forge, carbon extruder, and NADA to build a seamless pipe.

    Powered by a small S&P Regulator fusactor, if it was fed a consistent stream of material for the pipe, this thing could apparently dig two to three kilometers of tunnels per day.

    I had no clue what we needed such a thing for, but it was certainly impressive.

    Then came the meeting.

    The profits were still rising. Not substantially since last week, but a bit. By now, we were selling $1.75 billion in Q-links per day.

    Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

    All other numbers had only marginally gone up. Not enough to seriously impact the bottom line.

    After the income issue had come and gone, without much fanfare compared to last week, Jessi cleared her throat.

    ¡°I just wanted you to know that Mark Holt has been accepted as the first test for the new cyberware. We have designed it in a way that he¡­ essentially can swap bodies. Just disconnect the head and put it on the other body.

    We have created a mostly humanlike body for everyday living for him. Some of his biological parts, those that he is unwilling to part with, will be integrated into that body.

    We will reconstruct the head, with the skull being made out of carbon composite armor for protection, and the whole rest made out of cyberware. Only his brain will remain biological there.

    The second body will be essentially an enlarged variant of an Einherjar. A bit stronger, a bit tougher, still as fast.¡±

    Tiffany gasped.

    ¡°That is¡­ so radical. And he has agreed to that?¡±

    Jessi chuckled.

    ¡°He proposed that. He is giddy with the thought of becoming the first fully-fledged combat cyborg since the Great War. To be honest, we would have preferred to do something a bit less radical for our first real test, but there should be no great risk.¡±

    Well, at least Mark was getting what he wanted. I bet he would challenge Kate to some arm wrestling when he was done.

    It was then time to come to what to do with the money. For a moment, nobody said much, each looking at the others, before Maggie shrugged.

    ¡°Fine, I¡¯ll start. I propose that we buy and refurbish the subway system. Not just for Queens, though here is where we will gain the most out of it, but for the whole of NYC. Right now, it is in shambles. From what I learned, it was already sub-par before the war, but after it has been left to rot.

    But we need something like that for our workforce. Right now, they use private cars and a shuttle bus service we provide, but that is a clutch. It works for now, but with the state the roads here in Queens are in, we are close to the limit that we can sustain.

    Rebuilding the subway would let us use mass transit, to get the workers cheaply and safely to and from work.¡±

    Maynard nodded enthusiastically.

    ¡°I already have my people work on a machine that can rebuild the tunnels quickly. Or build completely new ones. After the tunnels are built, we only have to integrate beamed energy and then use basic grav lev trains to run along.¡±

    Oh, that was why they had the tunnel machine. Thinking about it, I could probably use something like that for Cheyenne Mountain.

    ¡°I might get one of those machines for myself.¡±

    That made Maynard frown.

    ¡°Uh, why?¡±

    ¡°I need to rebuild an old US military installation in Colorado. Cheyenne Mountain. It has been a tad neglected for the last 150, 160 years or so.¡±

    ¡°That only begs the question, why do you need to rebuild this Cheyne Mountain? And how do you rebuild a mountain anyway?¡±

    I had to chuckle at Michael¡¯s question.

    ¡°It is called Cheyenne Mountain. It was one of the early nuclear command and control bunkers in the 20<sup>th</sup> century. It had become obsolete even before the war, which is why it survived.

    And I need to rebuild it because I need a remote-controlled lab preferably in a location where no humans are around. With a large amount of mass surrounding it.

    Cheyenne Mountain fits that description quite well.¡±

    ¡°That is nice, dear, but why do you need a remote-controlled lab? Don¡¯t we have enough of them here already?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°I need to look into fusactors. I don¡¯t know if you are aware that for some reason fusactors produce way less fast-moving neutrons than they should. Well, I guess Maynard is aware.

    That has something to do with how the Kobashigawa coils work. This is a characteristic that the new grav coils lack. As it is now, the new coils are unsuited for fusactors.¡±

    Marcel frowned.

    ¡°But¡­ we don¡¯t make fusactors. Why is it our problem if the manufacturers of them have problems?¡±

    Alena sighed.

    ¡°Think, Marcel. Right now, how many manufacturers do buy their grav coils from us?¡±

    ¡°Uh, none?¡±

    ¡°Exactly, because they apparently don¡¯t work. Now, if Vivian makes them work, with some other coils or devices added, what do you think will the fusactor builders do?¡±

    ¡°I get it, they will buy the grav coils and whatever they need from us. But we are already at the limit of what we can produce. Hell, we are beyond that limit.¡±

    James shook his head.

    ¡°Yeah, you are right. For now. But we are gaining ground. Rapidly. As Alena told us last week, we estimate that it will take us six months to reach the point where we can satisfy the ongoing Q-link demand. It will take another two, maybe three months, and we will have reached the point where we will be able to satisfy all the demand for what we are producing now.

    Then we will need to either slow down or find new markets to penetrate. Do we then want to wait for Vivian to draw another rabbit out of her hat, or do we support her putting the rabbit in the hat now?¡±

    After a few seconds of indecision, Marcel shrugged.

    ¡°OK. You are right.¡±

    Michael then rapped onto the table.

    ¡°Back to the topic. What do we do with the money?¡±

    Kenneth raised a hand.

    ¡°I had an idea. It might be a long shot, but it could be something worthwhile.¡±

    He made a pause to take a sip of his coffee.

    ¡°How about we buy Manhattan and clean it up? Demolish the ruins, recycle the materials, and build a couple of Arcologies?¡±

    Most of us just looked at him in confusion, and Eli voiced what we probably all were thinking.

    ¡°Uh, yeah, we could, but why should we? All of the inhabitants of NYC could fit comfortably in one of the other boroughs. There is nothing in Manhattan except ruins and scrap.¡±

    Kenneth just shrugged.

    ¡°Yeah, for now. But think about it, what if Vivian¡¯s nanobot project against the infertility works as we all think it will? We will experience a population explosion beyond anything ever seen. The people are so hungry for children that we can expect each couple to have half a dozen, maybe more.

    In one, maybe two generations, what we have now in living space won¡¯t be enough. And even with modern technology, building an Arcology will take time. Cleaning up the ruins will take time.

    We can be like everybody else and in 15 years begin to scramble to build new living spaces. Badly designed living spaces that cost more than they should, just to stem the tide, or we can take a look into the crystal ball and decide to be proactive and build something with real value.¡±

    After another few moments, while we all thought about it, Alena was the first to speak.

    ¡°Well, at least right now, Manhattan should be cheap as fuck. And with molecular foundries and replicators, we can use virtually everything that is already there.¡±

    After some additional discussion, Michael nodded.

    ¡°We will look into it. Eli, can you contact the mayor and ask what the island will cost? James, Kenneth, can you look into what we need to clean up the mess over there? Maggie, can you try to find some architects and engineers to design the Arcologies?¡±

    They all nodded at their order.

    Finally, Marcel asked into the round.

    ¡°One other question. I have been asked when Enki will get its IPO. So, I am asking you, when will we go public?¡±

    Michael made a deep sorrowful sigh.

    ¡°Never.¡±

    That made Marcel recoil.

    ¡°What do you mean never? We are sitting on a gold mine here. Why not grab as much money as we can get?¡±

    Michael shook his head.

    ¡°Never means never. We will not, not ever, become publicly traded.¡±

    Marcel shook his head in confusion, and I could see that most of the others were a bit perplexed as well.

    ¡°But¡­ why not? I thought this was the usual way things worked.¡±

    Michael sighed again and shook his head.

    ¡°Yes, it is how it usually works. And the usual result is the archetypical ¡®evil¡¯ corporation. Did you know that legally, corporations are required to put the interests of any shareholder, regardless of how minor the holdings are, above any other concerns?

    It is virtually impossible to find a group of shareholders with not a single one putting their own money over such ¡®inconsequential¡¯  things as the environment, employment benefits, living wages, or reputation.

    In reality, if even one of you would argue that the charity is a waste of money and should be stopped, or that we should fire the employees and go fully automatic, we would be legally required to do so.

    Well, at least until we pulled the forced buyout clause, which is in all of your contracts for that very reason.¡±

    Wait, what buyout clause?

    Before I could ask that question, Marcel answered Michael.

    ¡°Yeah, the forced buyout is a bit much. I mean, what if Vivian gets simply annoyed by one of us?¡±

    I could only stare at Marcel for a moment, before slowly moving my gaze to Michael.

    ¡°What is he talking about? What buyout clause are you talking about?¡±

    That made Michael snort.

    ¡°As I said, the surest way for a corporation to become evil is if one of the shareholders becomes greedy. And with so many shareholders being some faceless, soulless financial organization, that is almost always the case.

    Dad and I decided early on that we had to find a way to prevent that. For that, we put into the bylaws that with at least 75% of the votes, the owners can force any minority owner to sell their shares. As well as the other shareholders having the right of first refusal.¡±

    ¡°One moment. I have 80% of the votes. Does that mean that if I decide I don¡¯t want to have, say you, being an owner anymore, I can simply force you to sell?

    That is not fair.¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°Yes, it is not fair. But it is necessary. And as I know you, unless somebody seriously fucks up, you won¡¯t pull that option. But if one of us decides that getting more money personally is more important than any other goals we have, like helping the people¡­

    And just tries to force us to fuck everybody else over like all the other big corporations do, then we want the possibility of removing that person.¡±

    ¡°But my contract says nothing about a forced buyout.¡±

    ¡°Of course not. Let¡¯s be honest, if you decide to fuck all of humanity over, it is a done deal. Most of the patents are held by you personally. Nope, we have to trust that you will stay the sweet and caring person that you are.¡±

    Whelp, talk about pressure.

 2.54: Where is he going?

    After the following awkward silence, Michael sighed.

    ¡°Get a grip, people. We all knew about that clause from the beginning. Well, all of us who were subject to it at least.

    Just keep being the people I have hired, and try to make the world better, and you have nothing to fear.¡±

    Marcel grumbled.

    ¡°But what if Vivian gets a bug in her ass that one of us has to go?¡±

    While I felt myself turn red, part in anger over the insinuation, part in embarrassment, Michael and a few of the others rolled their eyes.

    Arnedra wadded up a sheet of plasfilm and threw it at Marcel.

    ¡°Nice work, idiot. You have known Vivian for several months now. Do you honestly think that if she gets a hateboner to remove you, or anybody of us, it is without reason?

    It is way more likely that Michael will have to convince her to pull that option if one of us goes off the deep end.¡±

    Michael chuckled.

    ¡°Exactly. And it will be a hard job. You have to seriously fuck up to get Vivian to turn on you.¡±

    Aand¡­ my blush got worse. But Michael continued:

    ¡°But let¡¯s change the topic. We know what it means, we knew it from the get-go, and all of you were OK with it.¡±

    He made another short pause.

    ¡°Now, Jessi, how is the test of the Folly treatment going?¡±

    Instantly, Jessi¡¯s face changed from somewhat frowning and brooding to happy and interested.

    ¡°It is way beyond what I believed even possible. If it goes as it has been, we will increase the population of Queens by around 10% in eight to nine months.¡±

    I was clearly not the only one surprised by that number, as Alena barely managed to not spit out the sip of coffee that she was in the process of drinking.

    ¡°10%? How? How can it be that much?¡±

    Jessi smiled while she answered:

    ¡°That is simple. Thanks to the tests, and the people of Queens hiring on to get into it, we have employed around 13% of the population of Queens. Of those, 85% are partaking in the tests.

    A bit more than 90% of the tests show pregnancy so far. That makes nearly 21k couples becoming parents. Queens has a population of a bit over 200k. We have to expect not every pregnancy to go perfectly, so an estimated 10% growth is honestly a bit conservative.¡±

    We all perked up when she explained that, but her face turned a bit darker.

    ¡°There is one problem though. We desperately need a few geneticists.¡±

    Maggie sighed.

    ¡°I am looking for a few. But it is a bit hard. Why do you need them though?¡±

    The redheaded woman just shook her head sadly for a moment, before she answered.

    ¡°It is sobering how much genetic damage is still left from the great war. The Folly was just the most damaging thing.

    Of the 22 thousand couples in the test so far, around three percent won¡¯t ever have children without some serious genetic work. And then we probably can only help if it is the man who has the damage. If it is the woman¡­ we can¡¯t correct it for now.

    And it seems as if roughly a third of the children have, or would have, a congenital defect of some sort or another.

    Luckily, Hippocrates can fix the majority of it, mostly thanks to Nowhere providing the Project Revitalize data to the Hippocrates Foundation.

    But around 12% of the impacted children, or around 3.8% of all the fetuses in the test will be handicapped. And there is nothing we can do with standard methods.

    Right now, we can, theoretically fix it, if we can get the appropriate genetic code from somewhere. But for that, we need somebody who understands genetics on a level that none of us can.¡±

    The hulking CEO of our company slicked his hair back.

    ¡°That is¡­ well it is better than our worst projections, but it is still not good. We will look into it.

    Maybe¡­ ¡° he turned to me.

    ¡°Do you think we might use Calliope for it?¡±

    I was, for a moment at least, speechless. It took me a moment to understand that he meant the question seriously. As a result, I shook my head.

    ¡°Sorry, but no. We might call our genetics our ¡®programming¡¯ but¡­ our genes are completely different.¡±

    That made not only Michael frown.

    ¡°Why? It is some form of code, right?¡±

    I closed my eyes and thought about how to best explain it:

    ¡°We call it code, but it is not computer code. It is something else entirely. Honestly, I am not so sure that it is at all possible to create a VI that can work genetics. At least not in the more complicated cases. It is more art and intuition than logic.

    In the easier cases, Hippocrates can do the work already. No, if we want to repair that damage, we need at least one geneticist. Maybe more than one.¡±

    Jessi sighed sadly.

    ¡°Too bad, really. It would be rad if we could simply plug in one of your big supercomputers to solve the problems. It seems as if we depend on hiring help.¡±

    She said the last with an imploring look at our CHRO, who in turn threw up her hands in some exasperation.

    ¡°I told you we are looking into it. Do you know how many geneticists are running around in the wild? Barely any is the answer. Panacea gobbled up nearly all of them.¡±

    Alena, who had enthusiastically implemented the cosmetic cyberware we had developed and now sported hair in all the colors of the rainbow, changing colors of the rainbow at that, cleared her throat softly.

    ¡°Have you looked in Nowhere? From what I heard, Panacea treated their employees there way worse than anywhere else. The Knowles had the whole country under their thumb and their scientists had no recourse to fight against the forced contracts or breach of contract.

    But that changed and over the last year, a year and a half, they¡¯ve shed large swathes of their staff there. Among them around two-thirds of their geneticists if I remember it correctly.¡±

    Then she chuckled.

    ¡°Of course, it is satisfying that Panacea now has to pay damages and punitive damages in the high billions. Another nail in the coffin. And without any of the Knowles on the rudder¡­¡±

    Maggie took a deep breath.

    ¡°I tried. They are a bit wary of working for a big corp again. The burned hand and such.¡±

    A thought stirred in my noggin right then.

    ¡°So¡­ they don¡¯t work for any of the big boys then? That means they probably don¡¯t work at all. At least not as geneticists. Why don¡¯t we offer to finance a group of them setting up their own corporation? Maybe for some most favored customer deal or so?

    We don¡¯t need to have them work here, as our employees, we just need to have them work on our patients.¡±

    Maggie stared at me for a moment, before she deflated somewhat.

    ¡°That might work. Heck, it would probably serve our initial need. But long term we need our own people doing the work.¡±

    ¡°For the long term, we can cultivate employees by sponsoring them to some university. Not the US ones, obviously, but internationally.¡±

    When we all looked at Kenneth surprised, he continued:

    ¡°Come on, we only have to have them start working here. From there, the fact that we do right to our employees will keep them working for us.¡±

    Michael shook his head.

    ¡°Long-term that might be the best solution, though I think that over time, our reputation will bring us new hires as well. But for right now, I think sponsoring some of those ex-Panacea geneticists to set up their own shop and contracting them to do the work will be the best solution.

    Maggie, Alena, can you look into it?¡±

    Both women nodded, with Alena answering verbally:

    ¡°Should be no problem, boss.¡±

    ¡°Good. Is there anything else?¡±

    He waited for a few moments while nobody said anything.

    ¡°Fine. Then that concludes another successful meeting. Good work, all of you.¡±

    After the meeting, I chatted for a bit with Maynard and Jessi, before I got into my office and connected to my Archimedes system.

    By now, the smaller version, with the external connector, had become standard here in Enki for not only the minions but virtually everybody not working in the physical world.

    The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

    Heck, even the supervisors on the assembly lines began to use it more and more. The workers had begun to buy basic or low-bandwidth jacks from us at a reduced price, and from what I heard, most of them spent the majority of the time either learning or doing something else, while they remained available for when they needed to inspect something.

    Sure, unlike the ones who did work for us in accelerated time, we only paid for the real-world time, but for them, this was a win anyway. They had access to a superfast computer system that let them either play games or improve themselves, while still earning money.

    Grudgingly, I started working on identifying all the various fields that the K-coils created. This would be a long-term project.

    I began by calculating the best devices to generate the two additional fields I already had identified.

    It took me 73 virtual hours to get the most optimal design for the neutrino-manipulating one.

    Unfortunately, this one required tantalum. Not in substantial numbers, but if, against all probability, I found a use for this field beyond purely scientific endeavors, it would become exceedingly expensive incredibly fast. For that reason, I tasked Warden to use the equations for this field to find some cheaper alternative, on a low priority.

    Even if it was only useful for science, I estimated that if we could make it cheap enough, several universities and hobbyists would buy it.

    The five-dimensional field¡­ I could still not make any sense of it. Not that I spent much time on it. Only 13 virtual hours.

    Then Warden interrupted my work.

    ¡°Excuse me, Seraphim, but Isaak Blumenthal is on the move.¡±

    Oh, that again? Yes, he was not that much more active outside of his home, than I was. Nevertheless, he lacked the food-producing systems that I had in the fortress, so he needed to buy nutrient paste for his food replicator regularly.

    He also visited some purported customers a couple of times a week. Considering that from the limited encounters we had recorded, they may talk about art, or somewhat less legal services, but nothing ever came from it, I had to assume that those people were paid to maintain the fa?ade.

    That of course meant that I was not particularly excited about that message. Indeed I was somewhat miffed that Warden interrupted my work for something that routine.

    ¡°Oh? Where is he going now? Is it already time for his weekly shopping trip?¡±

    ¡°No. He has gone to the southwestern part of The Bronx.¡±

    The southwestern part? That was the place that had most suffered under its close proximity to Manhattan in the war. It might no longer be completely in ruins, but it was still uninhabited and dilapidated. Nobody lived there, and the population of The Bronx had only removed the obvious ruins because they were an eyesore.

    ¡°What? Where is he going there? There is nothing there.¡±

    As usual, Warden was completely unimpressed.

    ¡°Correction, there is nothing there that we can identify as valuable.¡±

    I rolled my eyes but still looked up the feed of the Atropos following Blumenthal in his car. The street he was driving on was only barely identifiable as such, and now I understood why he was driving an old, surplus all-terrain military utility vehicle.

    On the sides, there was still some rubble and remains of walls visible, and the odd nearly standing building as well.

    I simply could not imagine where he was going though. It could not be Manhattan. The bridges leading to Manhattan had been destroyed in the war, and never rebuilt.

    Frankly, the only way for a ground vehicle to go to Manhattan was the single remaining tunnel from Brooklyn.

    Considering that I was still at high compression I should have continued with working on the quantum fields until Blumenthal finally reached his destination.

    I failed to do so though. I could not concentrate on the science problem and instead, my mind wandered to Blumenthal.

    ¡°What prompted him to go there?¡±

    I mostly mused vocally, but Warden seemed to take it as a serious question.

    ¡°He received a message from his contact Hayden Buckner to the effect that their Uncle Joe was complaining about the large crowds gathering around his home. Blumenthal stopped what he was doing, lowered the break-in protection shutters of his gallery, and then began driving.

    I alerted you when he entered an area where to our knowledge is nothing.¡±

    ¡°Hm, the message might be a code from his handler. We will have to observe where he is going.¡±

    By now, I had surfaced to only 12:1 and continued surfacing, until I reached 1:1.

    Fortunately, I did not have to wait long. Another two minutes later, the car stopped in front of an old self-storage building.

    It was, surprisingly, still standing, though I expected that all the storage compartments had been plundered long ago.

    Still, Blumenthal opened one of the more robust ones and drove his car in, before he closed it again.

    After that, he walked through the mostly ruined storefront, cum office, section of the derelict business.

    The three Lachesis following him soundlessly into the dark cavernous office had, naturally, no problem seeing in the near dark. Unlike Blumenthal, who produced a flashlight.

    He made his way through the smashed remains of the office furniture, through the back entrance for the smaller storage units in the building proper, down two flights of steps, and along the corridor to his right.

    After a couple of turns, he stopped in front of one of the units that, except for the barely visible number on the metal door, did not differ from all the other such doors in any way.

    Oh, sure, the number was unique, but it took the Warden a multispectral analysis to make it readable at all. Not that it mattered much, but the number was 02-R-0657. Maybe sometime in the future, I could send somebody to investigate, and then they would need to know the number.

    But that was not all that important. Blumenthal opened the door. I would have honestly been pretty surprised if the lock had still worked. Inside, without any electricity, and such electric lighting, he moved to the center of the unit, and waved his right hand, fingers spread, in front of an obviously broken electrical outlet, which resulted in a small beep. Followed by some grinding noise as one of the back wall panels of the unit first moved a bit backward, a centimeter or so, and then to the left, revealing an opening.

    I hurried to send a couple of Clotho into the outlet. Yes, I had already realized that it was either a signaling device implanted into the hand, which would have been revealed by, well, the signal, or, much more likely some form of biometric scanner.

    From the way Blumenthal had behaved, and the distance of the hand to the outlet, I guessed it was a hand vein scanner. Which was unhappy news for me. Hand vein scanners were notoriously hard to beat.

    To get by it, you had to essentially hack the device and make it send the opening code. If it did send a code in the first place. If it was one of the better ones, it might instead send the full scan of the hand veins instead and a security system inside would decide whether to open the door. Or not.

    There was no option of just tricking the sensor either. Like the venerable iris scan, hand veins were unique to each person, and there was no way an image, reproduction, or even a dead hand could fool it.

    Well, not a simple reproduction at least. The system used near-IR light to ¡®see¡¯ the veins in the hand. Or more precisely, the a fraction warmer than the rest of the hand blood in the veins. It was smart enough to realize if there was a liquid circulating through the veins so no static projection or construction would suffice.

    With enough work, it would be possible to create a false hand to fool such a sensor, but for that, you needed the scans of the original hand. Not something that Blumenthal would likely be to have lying around.

    But that was a matter for another time. For now, I had the three Lachesis follow the operative through the opening, which quickly closed again, though not quickly enough to prevent the silent spheres from getting through as well.

    With the only light remaining still coming from his flashlight, he made his way down another couple of flights of stairs. As he already had started in the second sub-basement, I estimated that he was now four stories below the ground.

    And stood in front of what was clearly an elevator door, which yielded to him using another key. Naturally, I had the Lachesis follow him into the, interestingly lit, cabin.

    And further down he went. By now, I had no idea how deep he was, but it had to be deep, as he spent around 45 seconds going down before the lift stopped and the doors opened.

    Again, unlike the storage facility itself, the short corridor greeting him, and my Lachesis, was well-lit, though it was a tad dirty. Not filthy, mind you, just dusty, and except for a narrow path it did not look as if somebody had been here for some time.

    At the other end of the corridor was an honest-to-good vault door. From its appearance, it looked as if it was made out of steel, it had been here for quite some time.

    Steel had gone out of fashion for security applications in the latter half of the Great War when carbon extruders were developed to feed the insatiable need for strong materials.

    Not only was carbon composite stronger by weight and volume, but it was also cheaper to use, once the extruders began working.

    That told me that this installation had been here since the War, at least. It looked like a forgotten nuclear bunker.

    And considering the location and the camouflage, I would say it was an intelligence service bunker.

    What one was doing smack dab in the center of what then was one of the biggest cities in the world, I had no idea.

    It could be something as asinine as the service in question wanting to have a secure working location placed conveniently for its commander.

    Whatever the reason was, it was irrelevant. Important was just that here and now, Issac Blumenthal was entering that bunker. Again, a wave of the hand in front of a sensor, this time not hidden, caused a metallic scream when ancient hydraulic cylinders forced old, badly maintained hinges to move.

    And with that, Blumenthal walked inside, followed by the same scream of tortured metal when the vault door closed.

    He walked past an unmanned security post, ignored the heaps of clutter and detritus, and passed several doors.

    A couple of stairs down, even further, he entered what seemed to me to be some commanding officer''s suite.

    Unlike the rest, the furniture here was not badly decayed. It was also not ancient like the rest of what was in this facility. Somebody had set this up as a sort of retreat, including the basic algae tank and food replicator.

    In the room, he opened a safe set into the wall.

    Inside was a slew of holo-crystals, a large heap of cash, gold coins and ingots, as well as several plasfilm binders.

    He grabbed one of the crystals and began closing the safe. I used that opportunity to fly several hundred Clotho into the safe.

    I tasked Warden with getting a readout of all the crystals in the safe and looking into the plasfilm binders. Myself, I kept my attention on Blumenthal.

    Who placed the crystal he had taken out of the safe into one of the five crystal slots on the computer standing in the corner.

    To be honest, five slots were a lot. Yes, for a computer it might be advantageous to include a single slot. Useful for data transfer, though the humble thumb drive was rarely worse in that aspect.

    The real utility was in using it for backup. If you wanted to copy your hard-burned crystals, you could make use of a second slot. But anything above that was¡­ unusual.

    It was also apparent that he had not yet switched the computer on. Instead, he pulled a small case out of the inner pocket of his jacket, opened it, and took out a second crystal, placing it in another slot on the computer.

    It was telling that he used neither the one directly beside the first one, nor the one at the other end, but the third from the already placed crystal.

    Only then did he push the power switch.

    I was puzzled for a moment when I saw this strange behavior until I understood. What I was seeing was a binary operating system.

    The computer itself most likely only contained a dummy OS without any useful data, while the controller of the crystal readers probably contained part of the actual OS.

    The rest was more or less evenly distributed on the two, most likely encrypted, crystals.

    I have to say, I was a bit annoyed about that. Whoever had set this system up had at least been competent.

    Each single component, the computer and both of the crystals, were useless without the other two components present.

    Without all three parts, there was nothing to be done to decrypt it.

    It had the disadvantage of needing to handle two crystals, and if Blumenthal had forgotten the one he pulled out of his pocket at home, he would have been in trouble, though clearly not big trouble.

    He would have had to get back home and get the second crystal.

    As it was, the computer was a bit slowed by the additional workload of not only encrypting and decrypting everything in real time but also the need to use two crystals at once.

    But it was probably barely noticeable. As it was, the system booted up reasonably fast, and my quickly penetrating Clotho found a single active connection to the world outside of the bunker.

    It was a dedicated connection, and I was unable to find the other end in the matrix.

    Not all that surprising, as the matrix was gigantic, and without this connection interacting much with the greater matrix, finding it was¡­ unlikely to happen.

    After the computer had finished booting up, Blumenthal opened a simple message program and typed:

    ¡®Viking calling in. I have received the message and arrived at location Martyr. I await further instructions.¡¯

    It took nearly a minute for an answer to come in.

    ¡®Acknowledged Viking. Operation Bronze Puma will commence. Remain in location Martyr until further notice. Monolith will inform you when the danger is gone.¡¯

    ¡®I understand and will comply.¡¯

    Operation Bronze Puma? Who the heck gets names like that?

    Well, I ordered Warden to try to copy the data from the two inserted crystals. And then I tried to find out what Operation Bronze Puma might be.

    Only to be interrupted not quite 20 minutes later by a general level one alert. Calling all employees of Enki, and their families to the secured facilities around the HQ.

    That included me by the way.

    If I had been in the fortress, I might have called and asked what was going on, deciding then what to do.

    As I was in the HQ though, there was no point in me going home. Instead, I left VR and moved to the conference room, after ordering Warden to call all my friends to get into the fortress and then button up.

 2.55: All you Zombies

    The corridor was pure chaos, despite not all that many people working on this level of the building.

    Nonetheless, my ¡®duty station¡¯ as it had been described to me was the C-suite meeting room, fortunately only a few doors down.

    Still, I dreaded forcing myself through the milling throng of people. Secretaries, assistants, vice presidents, and whatnot.

    If it weren¡¯t for my guards, I would have just decided to remain in my office.

    But the two troopers, the, for a Pure, midsized blonde Jordan Donelli, and even more so the downright hulking Leroy Akambe, who not only was close to triggering my phobia with his size but also was one of the very few black Pures I ever even heard of, managed to push through the mass of confused people, followed by Svenja who protected the rear.

    All in all, this whole episode showed some deficiencies in the methodology of our emergency reaction.

    Nonetheless, I managed to arrive at the meeting room, with only Naveen, Michael, and Maynard missing.

    The unusual thing was that my guards were not the only ones in the room, though they were the only ones not in the tan and anthracite uniforms of Enki security, but instead in the emerald and black ones of the Vandermeer Security Service.

    Not that either was that domineering in the presence of no less than two dozen of Einherjar in full battle gear.

    After a few seconds with none of the others anything but confused from the look of it, I sighed and turned to one of the Einherjar.

    ¡°Are you autonomous, or is Cerberus controlling you?¡±

    The bot showed no outward sign of even having heard me, though he answered.

    ¡°This unit is autonomous. The situation does not require Cerberus''s control yet.¡±

    ¡°Can I speak to Cerberus, please?¡±

    ¡°Affirmative.¡±

    Almost immediately, the bot turned its head to ¡®look¡¯ at me.

    ¡°You wanted to talk to me, ma¡¯am?¡±

    ¡°Indeed. What is the reason for the security alert?¡±

    ¡°Approximately 10 minutes ago, a horde of zombies was spotted moving into Glen Oaks and Bayside.¡±

    Zombies? How? Not that Zombies were something unheard of or all too rare. They were a couple of the nastier bioweapons of the Great War. A pure terror weapon at that as well.

    But their appearance here in Queens was¡­ troubling. We were on an island after all, and one that had been cleaned of such inconsequential things like zombies long ago.

    And those things could not swim.

    Right then, the door opened again, and Michael entered, followed by Maynard and Naveen.

    ¡°Ah, good, you¡¯re all here.¡±

    Michael sounded a bit out of breath, but otherwise fine.

    ¡°Where else should we be? This is an alert, for an alert we all have been told to be here, so here we are.¡±

    You could clearly discern that Maggie was a tad annoyed, though it was not clear if it was by the situation or by Michael.

    ¡°Yeah, whatever. The thing is, it is important that we are all here in an emergency. Now¡­ the situation is a bit strange.¡±

    Maggie waved him off though.

    ¡°Yes, we already heard. Zombies in Glen Oaks and Bayside. Cerberus already told us. But that does not tell us what we are to do about it.¡±

    ¡°Cerberus did? Interesting. Well, for the time being, we will fortify here in Clearview.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°How many zombies, what kind of zombies, and where did they come from?¡±

    Naveen cleared his throat.

    ¡°We estimate around one to two thousand zombies. Ragers at that. It seems they come from Alley Pond Park.¡±

    Ragers were the more dangerous of the two types of zombies. Oh, they were not really the Walking Dead, like in the horror stories. They were ¡®created¡¯ by infecting humans with an airborne variant of rabies. Fortunately, the airborne variant outside of a host was short-lived. Only around 30 minutes or so. Unfortunately, it remained alive in the host, in its bodily fluids quite well, though no longer airborne.

    The insidious thing about it was that it changed the victim substantially. Their whole metabolism changed so that they could survive in adverse climatic conditions, hibernate, require little food and water, and be a bit stronger.

    The thing that made it a killer though was that it changed the brain. All higher brain functions were¡­ shut off. No more reasoning, no more language, no more empathy. And no personality anymore. What remained was rage, pure and simple. Those zombies were furiously attacking anything moving not them.

    And with one bite or a few scratches, and without the specific antiviral, you had a new zombie in the making. Against a properly equipped and trained force, like soldiers, or even militia, they were mostly just annoying. Against civilians? One of the many war crimes of the Great War, and nobody knew who was the first to use them.

    That left just one question.

    ¡°So¡­ what are we doing about it?¡±

    Naveen shrugged.

    ¡°What can we do?¡±

    Maggie growled:

    ¡°Do you seriously expect us to sit back and watch when our employees are ripped apart by zombies? Or their families?¡±

    Naveen rolled his eyes in exasperation:

    ¡°Again, what can we do? Yes, we have around a hundred Finnsleif power armors. If we ask Vivian¡¯s guard detail, we can bring a whopping 120 of them. And open ourselves up for any opportunistic assault that might occur. And to send our unarmored soldiers out against zombies is no way better than sending civilians.¡±

    I wanted to object, but Kenneth was faster.

    ¡°They are armed and have unpowered body armor. It should be a bit better than an unarmed and unarmored civilian. But why send humans at all? How many Einherjar do we have by now?¡±

    Exactly the point I would have made. An Einherjar was completely impervious to the terror aspect of the zombies, and even in low-power mode it was a bit faster and stronger than them.

    Even without Cerberus controlling them, they were smarter than the zombies as well.

    And most importantly, an Einherjar could not be damaged by a zombie. It was not possible. They were a bit less armored than the Finnsleif power armor, so it took armor-piercing weapons, and heavy armor-piercing weapons at that, to damage one.

    Our Indian security chief rubbed his chin before he answered:

    ¡°We have by now three divisions with 12 thousand bots of them. Or 36k altogether.¡±

    Maggie threw up her hands.

    ¡°So why are we still talking about it then? Send a couple of thousand of them to wipe out the zombies!¡±

    ¡°Two problems. Again, we don¡¯t know who would take the opportunity to attack us. Hell, it looks as if somebody fabricated this situation. We can¡¯t weaken our defenses.¡±

    I rolled my eyes, and this time I was the fastest.

    ¡°Send a thousand. That won¡¯t weaken our defenses significantly. You believed that 2.5k Einherjar along with our fixed defenses would be enough to defend against anything but a major assault by one of the triple-As.

    Now, even with 1000 of them sent out to eradicate the zombies you have 14 times as many in reserve. Along with what, 1200 humans? 100 of them in power armor? Oh, and the fixed defenses have increased tenfold as well.

    Right now, I would put our chance against an all-out assault by Kawamoto as favorable. Even their battleships will have a hard time getting through our fixed weapons. And 35k Einherjar under Cerberus control would stymie even their famed assault divisions.¡±

    Naveen sighed.

    ¡°And then there is the second problem. We don¡¯t have the transport capacity. If we ask for your personal assault skimmer, we have exactly one military skimmer available. It can transport 50 of the Einherjar, but that is all.¡±

    Michael cleared his throat.

    ¡°What about the Badgers? Don¡¯t you have already a couple of squadrons of them?¡±

    Kenneth frowned.

    ¡°Badgers?¡±

    Alena answered him.

    ¡°Yes, Naveen asked for some APCs to make his units a bit more mobile. Tracked APCs, not skimmers. We decided on the Burgmeister Dachs A3, or Badger as they are called in English. The first twenty of 100 have already been delivered.¡±

    Naveen grimaced.

    ¡°Yes, and each of them can carry 15 troopers. Or 300 in total for all 20.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Naveen, even 300 Einherjar can rip a couple of thousand zombies to shreds. And an Einherjar can stand. I don¡¯t know how many we can squeeze into one of those Badgers, but I guess we will get 20 of them in. Makes it 400.¡±

    There was no reaction for a long time, and Maggie used that opportunity to get a strike in as well.

    ¡°You do know that sooner or later, we have to take care of this problem, right? Around 30% of our employees live on the other side of Alley Pond Park. Another 40% live south of Bayview. We have to clean out the zombies, or around 70% of our workforce won¡¯t be able to come to work.

    Right now, the zombies are more or less in a couple of spots, so we can use these Badgers to cart 400 of them to begin the clean up, and then get another 400 to make it faster. Maybe a third load to canvass the area for any stragglers.¡±

    With a heavy sigh, Naveen turned to Michael.

    ¡°Well, boss, it is your decision. I don¡¯t like it, it stinks of a trap, but I have no evidence that it is so.¡±

    Michael did consider it for a few moments before he shrugged:

    ¡°I get where you are coming from, but we¡¯ve done our best to conceal how powerful and plentiful our new weapons are, including the Einherjar. Officially, we have 4k of them, and enough firepower to fend off a single battleship, barely.

    You know better than anybody else how much we downplayed it. Nobody even knows about the particle beams and the disruptors. So yeah, even if somebody orchestrated this horde to maneuver us out of position, they will badly underestimate what they need.¡±

    The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

    Then he grinned.

    ¡°Of course, the majority owner already has spoken, and we have our marching orders.¡±

    To his credit, Naveen nodded and his eyes glassed over while he moved into VR to give some orders.

    Meanwhile, I turned to the Einherjar again.

    ¡°Do we have surveillance of the situation?¡±

    ¡°We do. 12 Atropos and 60 Lachesis have been deployed to observe the fighting.¡±

    ¡°Can you give us a composite view of it?¡±

    Fortunately, or unfortunately, Michael was faster than Cerberus in this instance.

    ¡°Stop, don¡¯t do that!¡±

    Then he turned to me.

    ¡°Believe me, nobody here wants to see that. From what I know, they already have ripped a few people apart. They are just too fast.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°You are right, we don¡¯t want to see it, but I think we need to. At least as soon as the Einherjar are on the scene.¡±

    That did obviously not sit well with Tiffany, as our chief administrator piped up:

    ¡°Speak only for yourself. I certainly don¡¯t need to see this kind of stuff. I am quite happy with pretending that it is not happening at all.¡±

    I rolled my eyes but shrugged. She was such a ninny sometimes.

    ¡°Fine, then whoever thinks they need to observe can look in VR.¡±

    I planted my behind in my chair and did exactly that. I knew immediately that Michael had been right. I so did not want to see this carnage. But I was right as well in that I needed to watch it.

    Not only for moral reasons, though I believed that if we were safe here in the heart of Enki, we should at least acknowledge the victims and witness their struggles.

    But I also needed to know how the Einherjar were doing. Not that this would be a particularly stringent test of their abilities. It was the first though.

    I let the Atropos highlight the victims and the zombies. And the few men, and it was invariably men, who tried to fight back.

    Nearly all of them were at least wounded, and the majority perished, ripped to shreds by the ragers, bitten, and half devoured. It was a bloody affair, and I had to salute the courage of those men. Only one in three had an actual weapon. The rest were ¡®armed¡¯ with any blunt object they got their hands on.

    In a way, the low temperatures of January were a blessing. Both in that it limited the number of people on the street, and that the few that were present were clad in layers upon layers of clothing.

    Not enough to double as armor, sadly, but enough that it blunted the power of the zombies somewhat.

    It was too bad that the men were outnumbered by something like four to one. Otherwise, they might even have had a chance to stand their ground.

    But seeing the number of wounded people, I sighed and got out of VR.

    ¡°Jessi, I think we should prepare as much of the counteragent as possible.¡±

    The auburn-haired doctor narrowed her eyes and focused on me.

    ¡°Uh, why?¡±

    ¡°The weather. A few hundred men are fighting the zombies, and a few of them survive injured. You know what happens to those poor souls if they can¡¯t get the counteragent.¡±

    For a moment, Jessi lifted her eyebrows but then looked a bit confused.

    ¡°You don¡¯t think that the local hospitals and clinics can make the counteragent?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Doc. Schaeffers clinic can. They have a nanofab. The rest¡­ I am not so sure. It depends on how much they invested in a fab.¡±

    For a moment, she looked at me, and then nodded, while Alena shook her head and groaned softly.

    ¡°Keep a tally. Sure, it is cold to think about money, but we can use it as a tax break.¡±

    In the blink of an eye, Jessi was in Alena¡¯s face, snarling and with burning eyes.

    ¡°How can you¡­¡±

    She did not get any further as Naveen grabbed her and pulled her back.

    I on the other hand lifted one eyebrow and looked at Alena.

    ¡°Do we really have to argue about pocket change here? We are talking about $6 in nanobots per dose. If more than 30 or 40 people were surviving and needing those doses, I would be surprised.¡±

    That made Alena back down.

    ¡°Oh¡­ I¡­ I thought we were talking about several thousand dollars in drugs each. Not less than $500. Yeah no, we don¡¯t bother with claiming that.¡±

    By the time I got back into VR, the APCs began to arrive, and disgorging bots. The bots immediately began to fire at the zombies, with their supernatural aiming ability, and moved quickly, though still low-powered, into the fray, stepping between the men and the zombies where possible.

    The zombies, with their higher brain function utterly destroyed, did not even realize that there were new enemies and began flailing, kicking, and biting on the new arrivals. Without any success, mind you.

    The Einherjar were entirely unimpressed. Sure, we would have to give each of them a thorough scrubbing afterward, but otherwise, they were not impacted in the slightest. The same could not be said about the zombies.

    We had equipped the Einherjar with a Vandermeer 4.6x55mm caseless assault rifle as a standard loadout. The weapon was specifically designed to beat light to moderate armor and still kill the person inside it, and with enough of them hitting the same spot often enough, they could even go through heavy armor. After some time.

    We had also invested in a heavy battle rifle for them, 9.7x62mm caseless, for when they were going against heavier armored enemies, but for this instance, Naveen had kept it at the 4.6 Stormfury, with special soft loads.

    The bots did not need the APDS-X rounds against the mostly naked zombies, and the soft expanding bullets were devastating in the soft flesh.

    A single shot could remove a limb, or cause catastrophic damage to the body of the zombie. And the Einherjar were good enough to achieve 98% headshots.

    The few zombies embarked in close-quarter combat with an Einherjar, or a victim, were in no way better off, as the bots sported nasty combat claws springing from their forearms. And while the zombies failed to gain any purchase on the smooth outer armor of the combat automatons, the one-meter-long monomolecular claws, designed to penetrate even heavy armor,  removed heads or split the bodies of the zombies without any problem.

    I can¡¯t claim that watching heads explode or be removed from their respective bodies was in any way more palpable just because it happened to zombies. Sure, technically, those poor people were already dead. But they still looked human, although a nasty distorted version of humanity.

    I switched the feed from the drones to an additional sector of my visual cortex and returned most of my attention back to the room.

    ¡°I think we have to reclassify the threat of zombies. Ragers at least.¡±

    All of them, even the guards, turned to me in question. After some wordless negotiating, Michael was the one who formed the question that seemed to interest them all.

    ¡°What do you mean? Zombies are already at a pretty low threat level. Only their numbers make them dangerous at all.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°What I mean is that we could have comfortably used the 100 men in power armor from what I see. The 400 Einherjar already in place are going through the zombies like a plasma torch through butter.

    The zombies can¡¯t even dent their armor, much less do real damage. Heck, unpowered armor would likely be enough to go against a horde.

    It helps that the Einherjar are uncannily accurate with their weapons and that we issued them with soft armor, but in the end, as soon as the Einherjar arrived at the scene it became a one-sided slaughter.¡±

    Jessi spoke softly.

    ¡°Yeah, but sadly, it was already a one-sided slaughter when the zombies ripped the civilians apart.¡±

    Michael nodded at that.

    ¡°There is nothing we can do about that. Even if we had a plan ready and the Einherjar rolled out as soon as the first zombie was mentioned, there would have been civilian victims.

    And before anybody blames Naveen, let¡¯s be realistic. The last zombie seen in NYC was what, 100 years ago? This came out of nothing.¡±

    Well, not quite out of nothing.

    ¡°Blumenthal knew about it.¡±

    That turned all of them back to me.

    ¡°What do you mean?¡± Naveen was not quite as polite in his demeanor as usual.

    ¡°I mean that he got a message that some Uncle Joe was complaining about the crowds, and then made his way into some hidden war-time bunker in the southwest of the Bronx.

    There, on a standalone computer system, he signaled his arrival, followed by the person on the other end giving notice that Operation Bronze Puma would commence. 20 minutes later, the security alert happened.¡±

    Michael¡¯s eyes narrowed.

    ¡°Wait¡­ you want to tell me that Blumenthal is really some kind of operative? That this was not your paranoia running wild?¡±

    It took me a moment to parse what he was saying.

    ¡°You thought it was just paranoia? Why did you then not try to stop me?¡±

    Michael smiled helplessly.

    ¡°For one, it did not harm. Sure, you spent some time on it that could be spent on other projects, but your output is so high, that it did not matter in the slightest while letting it out of your system would do you a world of good.

    And second, even with you fixated on Blumenthal, we, as Enki, gained from it. The Atropos, Lachesis, and Clotho drones are, from what I heard, a whole new level of tech.

    In other words, there was no reason to try to stop you.¡±

    Marvellous. They thought I was just imagining Blumenthal¡¯s status as an operative. Whelp, whatever, now they would take it way more seriously.

    Tiffany piped up:

    ¡°Uh, why does it mean Operation Bronze Puma? What is the reason behind it?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I was in no position to ask.¡±

    Naveen interjected:

    ¡°It is probably some randomly generated code name for the operation. Good operational security. In other words, it has no meaning.¡±

    ¡°Oh, OK. I was just wondering where they got this strange name.¡±

    ¡°Regardless, this would be too much of a coincidence. We have to assume that whoever is behind Blumenthal is responsible for the zombies.¡±

    After a moment, Kenneth asked into the room:

    ¡°Wait, you said this Blumenthal was in the Bronx, right? And this bunker he is in is in the Bronx as well? The zombies are here. On this side of the East River. Why is he hiding then?¡±

    We all looked at him shocked and after a few uncomfortable seconds of awkward silence, Michael cursed:

    ¡°Fuck! They have a zombie horde in the Bronx as well. We just haven¡¯t heard about it yet. Naveen, how many Atropos with their Lachesis compliment do we still have undeployed?¡±

    ¡°We have another eight. But I think we can redeploy six of the Atropos from Bayview and Glen Oak. We can substitute more Lachesis there. Those are better at ferreting out any stragglers anyway.¡±

    ¡°Good. Send them to canvass the Bronx. If we haven¡¯t heard of a zombie horde there by now, they must have reached the denser populated parts.¡±

    Then he closed his eyes and sighed.

    ¡°And as soon as those drones are underway, let¡¯s all think about how we get a load of Einherjar to the Bronx as quickly as possible.¡±

    Maynard was not the only one who frowned, but he was the only one who asked:

    ¡°Uh, why would we want Einherjar in the Bronx?¡±

    Michael smiled grimly.

    ¡°Nobody in the Bronx has any heavily armored soldiers. No combat bots, no heavy weapons, no nothing. The only ones who have that in NYC are Ralcon in Brooklyn, Enertech to some extent, also in Brooklyn, Huntington, you guessed it, Brooklyn, IBM, what a surprise, in Brooklyn, and us, here in Queens.

    The Bronx has security personnel in light armor, with light weapons, and NYPD. What do you think how long will it take before the Mayor, who lives in the Bronx, squeals for help?

    And who wants to take a bet that none of the others will bother helping? We can help with marginal costs for us. We have to transport the Einherjar there, and back. The ammunition is a rounding error in our security budget. We have to clean the bots and recharge them.

    In other words, we will send help. And we have to figure out how to do it the best way.¡±

    ¡°We can squeeze 50 fully armed Einherjar in a single freight container if I am not wrong. Not in storage, but so that as soon as the container is opened they can begin fighting.¡±

    Naveen frowned and looked at me. I was not so sure myself, and shrugged, before one of the bots in the room, obviously controlled by Cerberus answered.

    ¡°There is room for 52 Einherjar in a standard freight container unless they are sent with a heavy loadout. Then only 48 fit in.¡±

    Kenneth, who had posed the question, continued then:

    ¡°So¡­ we can put 52 in a container, fill 16 containers full, or 800 and change, and use our 8 heavy cargo skimmers to bring them to where they are needed.¡±

    Michael rubbed his chin and then turned to Naveen.

    ¡°Do you think that is feasible?¡±

    Naveen nodded slowly.

    ¡°If we land back far enough so that the skimmers are not threatened, it should be no problem. We need somebody to jump out and open the containers though.¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°Put one Einherjar in the passenger seat of each skimmer, and have it jump out to open the containers.¡±

    A few minutes later, Cerberus announced that he had found a zombie horde in the Bronx.

    Michael sighed and then began a com call. While the phone was ringing, he turned to Naveen and Kenneth:

    ¡°Prepare the containers!¡±

    Then, obviously whoever he was calling took the call.

    ¡°Hello Jasmine, I have to speak to the Mayor.

    Michael Walker, from Enki.

    No, it is only peripherally connected to the zombies in Queens. Yes, it is important.

    I fear I have to insist.

    Yes, I understand that right now the Mayor is busy, but he will be even busier when he has talked to me.

    He can talk to me now, or desperately try to get my help, which I am offering now, later.

    Fine, but keep it quiet. The zombies in Queens, which are by the way already mostly under control, are not the only ones.

    Our drones have just now discovered another horde in White Plains, working its way southeast.

    Yes, I know that this is where you are right now. And where your family lives. And where the family of the Mayor lives.

    Ah¡­ finally. Hello Mayor Walsh.

    I am sorry, but she wouldn¡¯t put me through without knowing what I wanted to talk to you about.

    Of course, I understand that she is in a panic. There was nothing to do, as she demanded to know why I was trying to contact you.

    Goddamn it, yes, I am sorry that I gave your assistant a panic attack, but what I am trying to say is that we discovered a second zombie horde in the Bronx, moving toward its center.

    No, we sent out surveillance drones to all the other boroughs and spotted them in the Bronx. White Plains to be exact.

    Yes, I am fully aware that neither Woodrow nor the NYPC is equipped for dealing with zombies.

    That is why I am calling you. We are right now taking care of the already-discovered zombies here in Queens with our combat bots.

    No, unlike Queens, we can not simply send our bots to the Bronx. We have police power here. We have to be invited into the Bronx.

    Yes, exactly, that is what this call is about. Technically, Woodrow has to call us in, but you can override them.

    OK, it will take our bots around 15 minutes to arrive.

    We are sending you all we can spare.

    Of course, we don¡¯t send you all we have. No¡­. no!

    This reeks of a diversion. That somebody wants us to weaken our troops. That is why we only send the bots and only a bit over 800 of them. We keep the rest here, to defend ourselves.

    840 is all you get. We are talking about zombies here. Even standard soldiers in decent unpowered body armor should be able to take them two or three to one. The only reason we send more than 800 is that it would take too long and some stragglers might hide in a hole somewhere.

    No, the bots we are sending you will be enough to destroy 10s of thousands of zombies.

    They have no fear, no revulsion, no regrets, they are almost as well protected as power armor, they are exceptionally accurate with their weapons, and even if they run out of ammo, they can rip them apart in close combat.

    We can do that because they are close to our HQ. Bots have always been good on the defensive.

    Yes, it is fine. I hope the next time we speak will be a bit less hectic. Goodbye.¡±

    Then Michael deflated somewhat and took a deep breath.

    ¡°Fuck, I hate trying to talk sense into a politician. And Walsh is one of the good ones. Whatever, the plan is a go.¡±

    Fortunately, the zombies in the Bronx managed to only kill a couple of dozen people before the Einherjar intervened, unlike Queens, where around 300 died and 80 wounded casualties required treatment.

    So yes, I was off in my estimate. It happens.

    For the rest of the day, the high tension remained as we did not know if somebody was trying to lure us out of position, but no follow-up attack came.

    The tension broke in the afternoon when we heard that several major cities in the US, like Philadelphia, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, Montreal, Toronto, Quebeck, and a handful more all had the questionable pleasure of hosting a horde of zombies.

    Unfortunately, the reaction was suboptimal in virtually all cases. Yes, the death toll in NYC with not even 400 dead was painful.

    But the average number of dead from those zombie hordes was 3487 per city. Only Washington DC had anything resembling an adequate reaction, and they had ¡®only¡¯ 874 dead.

    It was clear that whoever Blumenthal worked for had just attacked the whole United States.

 2.56: Now you take me serious?

    About an hour after Michael had sent the bots to the Bronx, it became increasingly clear that there was nothing for us to do in the meeting room any more.

    The lingering Atropos quickly discovered the still exotherm zombies from the air, and the Einherjar made short work of them. Oh, not all of the zombies had been eradicated yet, but enough of them, without even one of the bots being damaged, that the remaining danger in Queens was negligible. In the Bronx, there was still a marginal rest of danger remaining, but we were not there.

    By then, we had gotten the information about the zombie attacks on the other cities. The possibility of a follow-up attack still remained, mind you, but most of us resumed our normal work.

    Just before Jessi broke the ice and left, one of Naveen¡¯s officers entered and handed our security chief a tablet, before leaving again.

    When he had read the text, he sighed.

    ¡°Well, my crew has gone over the Palant¨ªr data from the last month, and we can say with high probability how the zombies arrived in our fair city. A tramp freighter, the Angelica out of Tranquility Inception, a heavily modified ABAS FR-150-T 22, landed six times each in Alley Pond Park and an abandoned country club east of White Plains over the course of a week starting from January 3<sup>rd</sup>.¡±

    Ok, I had to give the crew a bit of respect here. The FR-150 had been discontinued nearly 60 years ago, with the 24 revision.

    It had been the premier 150-kiloton freighter of its day, but could no longer be modernized in 2193 and had been replaced by the FS-150. Despite the similar name, the FS was a completely new design, that had been replaced eight years ago by the GF-150. Yeah, ABAS had a somewhat simplistic approach to naming their utilitarian designs.

    The point here though is that I would not have set foot into any FR-150. Oh sure, grav ships had way less mechanical stress while in use than any other mode of transportation, and the lightweight carbon mull was relatively robust, but an FR-150-T 22 had to have around 70 years of wear and tear on it.

    There was no way that the electric and electronic systems were even in decent condition, much less safe to use.

    Michael sighed as well.

    ¡°Figures that it was a TI-flagged ship.¡±

    He was right in that. Tranquility Inception was one of the older Orbital Free States. And one that did not look too closely at the papers of any grav ship registered there. Or its general status, come to that.

    In other words, Tranquility Inception created its place in the world order by being the dumping ground for grav ships with questionable provenance, a smuggler¡¯s haven.

    Unfortunately, even with mythical computer penetration skills, it was virtually impossible to get any information beyond the name of the ship and the owner of the note out of the station, simply because they refused to gather that information in the first place.

    Which, naturally, made the ships registered there ideal for clandestine operations.

    All that was known to Michael of course, which explained the sigh. That venue of investigation was a dead end.

    So he just shrugged.

    ¡°Well, it doesn¡¯t help. How likely is it that we can put pressure on somebody from the crew to get us some information?¡±

    Naveen just shook his head.

    ¡°That is not possible, I fear. The Angelica suffered an ¡®unexplained¡¯ containment failure of its fusactor. The official cause is given as insufficient maintenance.¡±

    Michael placed his head in his hand.

    ¡°So¡­ a complete dead end. What else do we know?¡±

    ¡°We know that it was one of a dozen such ¡®accidents¡¯ caused by ¡®deficient maintenance¡¯ that destroyed a TI-flagged ship over three days.¡±

    ¡°A dozen¡­ and how many zombie attacks happened?¡±

    ¡°A dozen as far as we can tell.¡±

    Nobody said a word for some time before Michael walked to the window, standing in front of it with his hands clasped behind his back.

    ¡°How likely is it that anybody without Palant¨ªr has enough information to connect those 12 ships to the zombie hordes?¡±

    Again, Naveen shook his head, even Michael standing with his back to all of us could not see it.

    ¡°Unlikely. From what we can tell, the Angelica dropped a container or two of zombies before continuing to JFK to deliver some freight. If there was not the possibility of the crew talking about their deliveries, eliminating them would have been overkill.

    It is virtually impossible to connect those ships to the zombies without Palant¨ªr.¡±

    ¡°That means the only lead we have is Blumenthal?¡±

    ¡°Correct. I can not comment on how likely whoever did this thinks it is that he has been made though.¡±

    Well, there was my cue:

    ¡°Unless there is anything remotely as stealthy as Lachesis out there, negligible. He used a 2x2m elevator to get into the bunker. One that was biometrically locked. It is way below any possible EM reception, and anything less stealthy than a Lachesis is either too small to be mobile on its own, or immediately obvious when it enters the elevator.¡±

    This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

    That made Michael turn around.

    ¡°So¡­ we have a trail to whoever did this, and they don¡¯t know about it?¡±

    Naveen nodded.

    ¡°It looks like it. I can¡¯t say anything about how hard it will be to get the information out of Blumenthal though. Or his system.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Don¡¯t expect it to be easy. The people who set this up are paranoid. And good. Hand vein scanner to open the bunker, binary OS on the computer with one half that he carried around. A dedicated connection to somewhere else, not through the matrix.¡±

    I snorted bitterly.

    ¡°If I had not used a swarm of Clotho, we might not have any access to the crystals either. It will take time to decode them anyway.¡±

    ¡°But we can decode them because we not only know that they exist in the first place, but we also can copy the data, even if it is encrypted. And then, when we know who is responsible, we will gut those assholes.¡±

    Abruptly, Michael turned back to the window, looking out over the growing sea of our buildings.

    ¡°Naveen, what are the chances that we will get them?¡±

    After a few moments, the tall man answered softly:

    ¡°We can¡¯t say yet. The opposition is good. The chances are low, but we have a chance. They were methodical and covered all their bases. Removed all the evidence and eliminated all the witnesses.

    We only have a chance because frankly, Vivian got a bee in her bonnet about this Blumenthal character.¡±

    He ignored my indignant ¡°Hey!¡± and continued:

    ¡°It was such a random, low-probability event that there was absolutely no way for them to account for it. Add in that it was Vivian who got this obsessed and tried to find ways to solve the Blumenthal riddle¡­ that was the worst thing that could have happened to them. Anybody else, and they would be mostly unable to do anything. Either they would lack the time and energy to focus on that, or they would lack the ability to make any headway, or most likely both.¡±

    Michael groaned.

    ¡°I know that. I was asking about the probability of us finding them.¡±

    ¡°I know. My point is that it will be hard. Whoever they are, they are professional and good. They wiped out every trail between them and the attack. We have an opening, but we have to be careful and methodical as well to get them.

    And even then it is a toss-up. One mistake on our side, if we tip them off, and we are shit out of luck. They will burn Blumenthal, and dismantle the whole network to keep hidden. Oh sure, there is a chance that, when they get close to their ultimate goal, they will be less secret about it.

    Because it will most likely be too late to do anything against it then. But even that is uncertain.¡±

    ¡°I understand. Do your best.¡±

    I mostly listened to the two, but I had one niggling question.

    ¡°One thing. If you thought I was going on a wild goose chase with Blumenthal¡­ why didn¡¯t you try to intervene?¡±

    For a few seconds, nobody said a word, before Michael snorted.

    ¡°God, Vivian, do you seriously believe we could have intervened?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°No, of course not. But you could have at least tried.¡±

    That elicited a low chuckle from our CEO.

    ¡°Never give an order you know will not be followed. But in all seriousness¡­ why should we intervene?

    Have you ever heard about an employee who with one single invention, one organizational change, one idea, any deed really, created so much profit or savings for a company that for the rest of his work life, he paid for all of his salary? That for all purposes, from then on he works for free?¡±

    I was¡­ honestly, confused.

    ¡°Uh¡­ no. What are you implying with that?¡±

    Shaking his head, Michael turned to me.

    ¡°Vivian, you are this employee on steroids. If you don¡¯t do anything anymore, what you¡¯ve provided to Enki already will pay for everything you get for several decades. Fuck, the whole company exists because of your inventions.

    What that means is that whenever you get a wild idea, fixate on something, or just want to relax, we let you.

    Even if you go on, as you called it, a wild goose chase, like with Blumenthal, it is very probable that we get something out of it. Like the new surveillance gear. I don¡¯t know if you are aware, but over the next decade or so, those alone will be worth billions.

    So what if you get crazy about one thing or another now or then? If you had been wrong about Blumenthal, then the worst that would have happened is that you violate the privacy of some poor fucker. So who cares?

    But you weren¡¯t wrong. You were right. He is an operative.¡±

    Then he turned to Naveen again.

    ¡°I assume you will put everything your people have to help Vivian, correct?¡±

    The answer was a nod, followed by some words:

    ¡°Of course. I will send a couple of our Psionics to the man as soon as he comes out of his bunker. I will put the majority of our cyber security department to the task, and most of our analysts. Oh, and we will send our newest recruit for the cyber security division to work with Vivian directly.¡±

    O-kay. Whatever he meant by that. I was not quite sure why he would send a new recruit to work directly with me, but whatever.

    Clearly, my confusion was easy to see, as Naveen turned to me:

    ¡°You know the man. A Brazillian, by the name of Ramon Gutierrez.¡±

    What the¡­ no, I knew nobody by that name, from Brazil or somewhere else.

    When I showed no sign of understanding, Naveen smiled happily.

    ¡°From what I understand, he recently retired from his previous career as a freelancer.¡±

    I could just shrug.

    ¡°If you say so. But I think we should concentrate on observing Blumenthal and decrypting his crystals.¡±

    While he pointed his thumb over his shoulder out of the window, where it had already gone dark, Michael interjected.

    ¡°I think, for now, you should concentrate on getting home and relaxing. It was a long day, and most of us will do the same.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Yeah sure, but I doubt Blumenthal will show his face in the next few days. I will have Warden give our security department all the feeds and information we got about him.

    However, I doubt that they can provide much help with decrypting. I would leave that task for Warden anyway, and it is mostly just a game of waiting until the best computers finish doing their work.¡±

    Naveen nodded.

    ¡°Sure, but the analysts can start on their work if they get anything that you have about the man.¡±

    Michael interjected.

    ¡°By the way, the way you said it, do we have more than two Psionics on our payroll now?¡±

    That caused a guffaw from Naveen.

    ¡°Oh boy do we ever. Our original Psionics convinced a couple of others that they would want to work for us, and as soon as the new Psionics learned about the mind blockers, they started recruiting others as well.

    By now, we have 53 of them working for us.¡±

    Before Michael could protest, he lifted his hands in a warding gesture:

    ¡°They all understand that the mind blocker is still a secret, and don¡¯t mention it directly. But it is apparently pretty convincing that every single Psionic that hires on with us soon after fully agrees with the ones we already have in our employ that all the others desperately want to work for us.

    It helps that we pay well, of course. Psionics have always been exceptionally valuable for security forces, even though some corporations seem to think that the honor of working for them should be enough.

    Anyway, we are getting more and more of them. And they are happy to work for us as far as I can say.¡±

    ¡°Ok, that is good. It will always cause problems if employees are unhappy with their jobs, but that is even more important with the security people. Too much opportunity to cause trouble.¡±

 2.57 Oh, its you

    The next morning, I found a message from Naveen waiting for me when I woke up. Apparently, he wanted me to come to the HQ and work with the new cyber security division recruits.

    I was a bit miffed about that. As an exec, I had to dress up somewhat, while I was used to comfy clothes while working from home. But what don¡¯t you do for your company, huh?

    And so, after a generous breakfast with copious amounts of coffee, I sat in my T-240, seeing the HQ coming closer.

    When I reached the executive floor, the third from the top, with the top two filled by the skimmer hangar naturally, I was intercepted on the way to my office by Michael and Naveen.

    ¡°There you are. Naveen said that he called you in.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Sure. I still don¡¯t know why I need to be here, but whatever, here I am.¡±

    The graying CSO rolled his eyes.

    ¡°I told you, I want you to work with our new hires for the cybersecurity division.¡±

    Michael on the other hand shook his head.

    ¡°Please, V, I told you that you have to show some presence here. Honestly, I would like for you to be here two or three days a week. Just so that our people can actually meet with you.¡±

    I slowly counted to ten.

    ¡°That is why I created the Incarnate. And I have one in my office. Just push a message to Warden and at worst, when I am in deep compression, it only takes around 15 minutes and I am in it. Or whoever wants to meet me can enter cyberspace.¡±

    ¡°That is not the same, and you know it.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°It should be.¡±

    Michael crossed his arms.

    ¡°But it isn¡¯t. Give it a year, and it probably will be the same, but for now, many of our people are not yet comfortable with using the VR or talking to an Incarnate.¡±

    I shook my head again.

    ¡°Fine. I¡¯ll try.¡±

    He sighed and shook his head as well.

    ¡°That is probably the best I can get. Now, as you are already here, there is another thing. Yesterday showed us some deficits with our security forces. Mostly we lack strategic, or even tactical mobility. When we can bring our bot armies to bear, they are devastating, but even bringing them to the other side of the East River proved to be a problem.¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°Wasn¡¯t that what the Badgers were intended to solve.¡±

    Naveen interjected.

    ¡°That was the idea, but have you seen the footage of the bridges during the horde''s attack? They were jammed. No chance of pushing even one Badger through that, not to mention enough to bring a substantial number of Einherjar there. Not to mention Staten Island or New Jersey. Right now, we have no way to bring them there, should they be needed.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I understand, but why are you talking to me about it?¡±

    Michael snorted.

    ¡°Basically, we want to buy assault skimmers.¡±

    OK, not so bad an idea. Assault skimmers would give us some badly needed mobility, as well as close air support. The problem though was that a standard assault skimmer was designed to be used with human infantry.

    ¡°Assault skimmers are not particularly suited for the Einherjar, aren¡¯t they?¡±

    Naveen shrugged.

    ¡°They are the best option available.¡±

    ¡°Does that mean you intend to acquire expensive vehicles, that are only partly suited for what we need it? Vehicles that will be obsolete in half a year at most?¡±

    Michael snorted, while Naveen turned red.

    ¡°Uh¡­ yes. But it isn¡¯t so bad. It will take years for the next generation of assault skimmers to become common. We should be able to get a couple of years of use out of them.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Why? How long did it take ABAS to design the Raphael? A couple of months? And that was with a couple of completely new technologies thrown in. So contact them and commission a new assault skimmer design suited for our purposes.¡±

    ¡°You are aware that that will be quite a bit more expensive than getting skimmers that are already designed, right?¡±

    ¡°Only initially. It probably will be the first assault skimmer with the new grav coils and a tractor beam. If we design it so that the passenger compartment is a single module that can be switched out for a bot module, a cargo module, a couple of standard cargo containers, or a ground vehicle, we get an exceptionally versatile system, that will keep for decades.

    That should defray some of the additional cost. Then we will likely get a small cut for our part of the design work when, not if, ABAS sells them.¡±

    Naveen shook his head.

    ¡°That will slow down delivery considerably.¡°

    Michael interrupted us right then.

    ¡°How long will it take for ABAS to deliver any new assault skimmers?¡±

    Naveen shrugged.

    ¡°Two, maybe three months. Why?¡±

    ¡°And if we work with them on the new design?¡±

    ¡°Three to four months I would guess. Most of the delay comes from being on a waiting list.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ if we were to grease the wheels a bit, it would not make that much of a difference. And until we get them, we keep one of our freighters on station. As long as Her Highness accepts that this will be more expensive, I have no problem with it.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Tell me, in your capacity as CEO of Enki, do you think we need those assault skimmers?¡±

    ¡°Yes.¡±

    ¡°Is it preferable to have a purpose-built design that does exactly what we need it to do?¡±

    ¡°Yes. Where are you going with it?¡±

    ¡°Can we afford to get the purpose-built design?¡±

    Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

    ¡°Yes, of course. It will be a couple of billion, maybe three or four, but fuck, that are the profits of two to three days.¡±

    ¡°So, is there any reason why you brought it to me?¡±

    ¡°Well, you were adamant that our military is purely defensive for the time being.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Oh please. An assault skimmer has an effective range of what? 500km? 750 if they are long-range? It isn¡¯t as if you are planning on an assault carrier.¡±

    Then I saw his expression. God dang it, he was seriously thinking about buying assault carriers.

    I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself down before I continued, a bit strained:

    ¡°We are not considering buying assault carriers, right?¡±

    When both of the men began to hem and haw, without saying anything, I snarled:

    ¡°Let me rephrase that, we are not considering buying assault carriers, period!¡±

    The older Indian gentleman raised his eyebrows on my definite statement.

    ¡°Why are you so vehemently against assault carriers?¡±

    ¡°An assault carrier takes as much resources, money, and personnel as three or four destroyers. And in defense, it is worth about as much as one, maybe two destroyers.

    Its flight bays are designed to bring a large number of assault skimmers to any location where they might be needed, but they compromise the protection and weapon placements.

    Nonetheless, it can devastate any ground force it encounters, and most fixed defenses, with its heavy, slow-firing weapons.

    It has the pure firepower of a heavy cruiser, maybe even a small battleship, even if it can¡¯t use that firepower against other grav ships.

    In other words, it has only one function. Attack. It is a tool to project power. Right now, if we get one, we will send the wrong message.

    If you think we really need an assault carrier, you can get one as soon as we can build it for ourselves.¡±

    Michael frowned.

    ¡°Wait, you are not completely against assault carriers on principle, but want us to build our own? Why? And why can¡¯t we buy some?¡±

    I chuckled mirthlessly.

    ¡°At the point when we can build one, we will have several slips to build destroyers and cruisers already. Probably half a dozen destroyers and a couple of cruisers finished and running.

    We will most likely already be working on a battleship, and yes, I realize that we need one to counter the double-As and triple-As.

    But at that point, we will be secure enough and have enough standing that an assault carrier will change nothing.¡±

    Naveen folded his arms and used his right hand to rub his chin.

    ¡°But what if we need to use the Einherjar outside of the range of an assault skimmer?¡±

    ¡°What would you need to use them for outside of that range? Have we anything to defend not in NYC or L5? If we are invited somewhere, we will then be able to use the facilities there to extend our range. Not that I expect that to happen anytime soon.¡±

    He nodded slowly.

    ¡°I understand, but I don¡¯t like it. I think we need the ability to go on the offensive.¡±

    I placed my face in my hands and growled.

    ¡°Why? Whom would we go out to attack? We have a strong, defended position here, but outside of it, we are minnows. We don¡¯t even register as a blip on the radar. Anybody we would need an assault carrier against will have a navy. Even a few destroyers will turn your shiny new assault carrier into so much scrap.¡±

    I shook my head, and continued with way less heat:

    ¡°No, right now, we can¡¯t use an assault carrier, and we don¡¯t need one. At this moment, those things are pure prestige objects.¡±

    After a few moments, Naveen huffed and slumped a bit.

    ¡°Fine. You are right. I want one, but we don¡¯t really need one. Now. But sooner or later we will need one, and I hope by then we have it.¡±

    Michael placed a hand on his shoulder.

    ¡°She is right though. Right now, we are purely defensive. Impressively defensive from what I understand, but we have essentially no option for offense. So we should not make waves. And yes, I want a capital ship as well, but yeah, it would send the wrong message.¡±

    ¡°Now that that is cleared, where do I find those new recruits I had to come in to talk to?¡±

    Yes, I was a bit aggravated. Not necessarily that I had to come into the HQ, though that played a part, but mostly because I had to call the two of them back from spending a few billion dollars on a ship that we did not need, and in reality would be harmful for our position.

    Naveen snorted.

    ¡°Ah yes. Those. We managed to snag a team of cyber specialists, complete with the techies, social engineers, some secondary jacks, and a good frontman.

    We want you to pull them in on Blumenthal. They will be our main investigation team for the matrix. Beside Warden that is naturally.¡±

    I shook my head again.

    ¡°Fine. I will talk with them, but where are they?¡±

    ¡°12<sup>th</sup> floor, Room 1238.¡±

    I sighed and nodded to Michael before I turned around and walked to the elevator.

    I walked right past Maggie, who looked at me a bit bewildered, before I heard her ask, probably one of the men:

    ¡°Huh? What is Vivian doing here today?¡±

    I heard Michael answer her:

    ¡°We have called her in to work with some of our matrix specialists. Also¡­¡±

    The rest was cut off by the closing elevator doors.

    On the 12<sup>th</sup> floor, the security HQ, I had no problems finding the room in question. It was one of the briefing rooms for our security forces.

    After the vanguard of my guard detail opened the door, long gone were the days when I could open doors outside of my home by myself, and we walked into the room, I saw that there were around a dozen or so men of clearly south american descent, with a generous helping of African ancestry as well.

    I estimated their ages ranging from the early 20s to around 30.

    I walked towards one of the older of the men, who was clearly the leader of this little group.

    ¡°Good morning. I am Vivian DuClare, and I have been asked to read you in on our target.¡±

    The leader, probably that Ramon Gutierrez whom Naveen had told me about, smiled broadly, and walked towards me.

    ¡°Ah, so we finally meet in person. Say, what do I call you? Vivian is probably out, but is it Ms. DuClare, Dr. Duclare, or Seraphim?¡±

    I was a bit confused when he spoke to me in heavily accented English. Did this guy think he knew me?

    ¡°Uh¡­ sorry, but are you Ramon Gutierrez? And what do you mean by finally meeting in person?¡±

    He stopped short and then chuckled.

    ¡°Are you telling me that you¡¯ve never looked us up?¡±

    I cocked my head.

    ¡°Should I have had? Why?¡±

    He rubbed over the back of his head in an embarassed gesture.

    ¡°Uh, that is a bit awkward. I honestly thought you had looked us all up when you had the chance. But no, you are too much of the boy scout to do that.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°That tells me nothing either. And it is Girl Scout. So, why don¡¯t you tell me where you think I should recognize you from?¡±

    Another man, a year or two younger than Ramon, walked up to him.

    ¡°Hey, stop playing the idiot, Ramon.¡±

    Then he turned to me.

    ¡°We all met in the Abyss. And he apparently thinks that you should have been able to put the real names of all Abyss dwellers together with the codenames.¡±

    ¡°The Abyss? Wait a minute, an Abyss dweller?¡±

    Something clicked in my mind, and I understood.

    ¡°Are you saying that you are Bletchley?¡±

    The grin on Ramon¡¯s face was back, and he answered:

    ¡°Not anymore. But yes, I was Bletchley. But, well Colossus and I made your idea a reality, and I retired. And the name Bletchley is a legacy name that stays with the Abyss.¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°So¡­ C0W8OY Trinity is now Bletchley? Not good.¡±

    Bletch¡­ Ramon snorted.

    ¡°Nope. Technically the one we all know as Colossus is Bletchley. It is as I said, a legacy name, and it stays with #2 of the ranking list. But as the current #1 doesn¡¯t claim the title, and the legacy name of Colossus, the old one keeps that name. But Trinity is ¡®only¡¯ #3. So he keeps his own name, and doesn¡¯t get any control over the Abyss.¡±

    Ok, that was a bit better.

    ¡°So¡­ if you are retired, what made you come here? You should have more than enough money to live the rest of your life.¡±

    I pulled out one of the chairs and sat down, followed by Ramon and the other men who had waited in the room. The ones that were not yet sitting that is.

    And Ramon was clearly a bit embarrassed again.

    ¡°Well, that is your fault, you know?¡±

    My answer was a simple lifted eyebrow, and he hastily continued.

    ¡°I would have been happy to just lie in the sun and sip cocktails, but my fianc¨¦e decided she didn¡¯t want to wait another two years for children. So we packed up and moved into this cold, dreary city of yours. But what don¡¯t you do for the love of your life, huh?¡±

    So¡­ it was the nanobot treatment for the Folly.

    ¡°And the rest?¡±

    Ramon shrugged.

    ¡°Well, Enrique, my brother here, you know him as CZ and his wife decided they liked the idea and came along. That brought the rest of the team into play.

    They are nowhere near as financially secure as I am, or as Enrique is, so they decided that they wanted to keep working for, and with me. So, here we are.¡±

    ¡°I assume you can vouch for every one of them?¡±

    Ramon nodded.

    ¡°Yes, of course. I¡¯ve worked with each of them for a few years.¡±

    ¡°Ok, then welcome to the team. Though honestly, I am not so sure what we will have you do. Our cybersecurity is handled by Warden.

    But whatever, we will find things for you to do. Right now¡­ we are working on a man named Isaac Blumenthal. He is an operative. We don¡¯t know who he works for, or what their plan is, but we know that they don¡¯t stop from using terrorism.¡±

    I sent a mental command to the computer in the room and the holo-projector began showing a 3D model of the man, as well as what we knew about him.

    ¡°Right now, we have barely anything, as you see. We are right now trying to get access to his computer, but it is a binary, maybe even a trinary OS.

    Dedicated com line, biometric scanner, the whole works. I will give you access to everything we have, though it is not much yet.¡±

    Ramon frowned.

    ¡°Uh, what did he do?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Did you learn about the zombie hordes yesterday? That was his doing, or more like his organization''s doing.¡±

    That made not only Ramon frown.

    ¡°Zombie horde? But¡­ why? Why would anybody use a fucking zombie horde?¡±

    ¡°We don¡¯t know. Yet. That is our mission. We have to find that out. Along with who is behind Blumenthal, and what their goals are. And then we will make them understand that we are not amused about their methods.¡±

    Ramon and Enrique nodded solemnly.

    ¡°Yeah, I can get behind that.¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°Well, the good news for you is that you don¡¯t have to buy a Seraphim Mk. VI. Not that they are that expensive, mind you.¡±

 2.58: Listen in on the Monster

    We quickly turned our attention to Blumenthal. Not that it was particularly productive, mind you.

    Yes, we could, and did, copy all disconnected crystals. Didn¡¯t do us much good, though. Naturally, they were encrypted, and we expected that. Would be no big problem, as we had entire supercomputer banks at the ready to decrypt them.

    No, the problem was that as with the binary OS they used, the crystals did not have all the information.

    In theory, it should be possible to read out the active crystals, and any chip included in the system.

    We decided to not even try. As paranoid as the people who set up this system seemed to be, they would almost certainly notice any activity on the crystals and the chipsets we would generate.

    No, we had to wait for the computer to be shut down to access it. And obviously, if Blumenthal was in the room, thinking the computer was shut down, only for it to turn on¡­ you get the idea.

    Thus, we decided to wait until Blumenthal left the bunker.

    Ramon and his crew, along with part of Warden, turned to dig as deep into Blumenthal¡¯s cover as they could.

    I could, maybe even should have done the same, but honestly, I doubted they would find much, and my time was way too valuable for me to waste in such a manner.

    Instead, I turned back to the quantum fields of the Kobashigawa coils. While I seriously doubted that the neutrino-influencing field would be the culprit, it was a field that I already partly understood, so I started there.

    It provided some¡­ interesting results as well. I was right that it could not do anything about the missing high-speed neutrons, the vanishing heat, or the mysterious energy gain.

    What it gave me, however, was a surprisingly compact, exceedingly sensitive device to detect neutrinos.

    Why was that important, you might ask? Neutrinos are a natural byproduct of nuclear reactions. We had neutrino detectors for centuries now, but those were the size of a warehouse.

    Not particularly mobile in other words. What I now had was the size of a book. It was sensitive enough to detect the neutrinos emitted by tritium in self-illuminating emergency signs at a distance of 12m. An active fusactor, it could detect at a range of 15km.

    The problem here was, naturally, that it could only detect the direction and the strength of the nuclear device.

    You needed two of them to triangulate the position. And to differentiate between multiple neutrino sources on the same path.

    The device I had developed had two detectors, but the parallax was¡­ meager.

    Now, some of you might ask, why I thought this was in any way interesting. The answer is that it provided another layer of protection for Palant¨ªr.

    The neutrino detector did not quite invalidate stealth, as Palant¨ªr did, but it made it so much harder, and it was virtually impossible to hide beyond 15 to 20km if you had any active nuclear reaction on board.

    Its very existence would provide a useful explanation for why we could see the stealthed grav ships. An explanation that would make the other corporations stop looking for Palant¨ªr, hopefully.

    After that, I started another deep dive into the Seeberger equation. I spare you all the madness-inducing findings that I unearthed during the next two days. Unfortunately, none of the next eight fields had any possible impact on how fusactors worked.

    The only effect they had was giving me a headache. I was extremely grateful for Darren¡¯s presence when the Gamma Curse raised its ugly head again.

    Blumenthal, in the meantime, mostly spent his time reading, playing computer games, watching some holodramas, or killing time in general.

    Twice a day, he booted the computer for a few minutes and looked for something, only to shut it down almost immediately.

    Then, on the fifth day, when he booted it up, he found a message notification and started up what seemed to be a chat app.

    Over the next 15 minutes or so, around a dozen other users logged on.

    He was, naturally, not the only one reading what was presented on his display. After a notification from Warden, Naveen, Ramon, a couple of our analysts, and I, watched the stream from the Lachesis looking over his shoulder.

    Monolith:            Now that you are all here, we can proceed. Operation Bronze Puma has been finished. After we have concluded the debriefing, you can return to your roles.

    Cabal:                   Do we have any results in yet?

    Monolith:            We have. Overall, it was a successful test run. Philadelphia had 4233 dead, Boston 3316, Chicago 8274, Montreal 7819, Toronto 3708, Quebec 5017, Baltimore 2209, Columbus 1822, Indianapolis 2017, and Detroit 2236.

    Monolith:            Only Washington DC with 874 dead and NYC with 346 behaved outside of expectation.

    Carnage:             Shit? I thought DC was in the sack. What happened?

    Monolith:            Random luck. A company of Marine Raiders had a recruiting drive at Georgetown University. They had 200 Marines in Power Armor just happened to be in DC.

    If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.

    Viking:                  I assume in NYC we have C-87 to thank for the anomaly?

    Monolith:            Correct. They reacted faster and were way more decisive than expected. They deployed about 1500 of their new combat bots to counter the hordes.

    Viking:                  That is why I suggested not trying to test Bronze Puma in NYC. We don¡¯t have enough information about C-87 to confidently gauge their reaction.

    Monolith:            You are wrong. We gained significant insight into a possible reaction of C-87. Our analysts are still working on it, but so far they don¡¯t behave like the other C entities.

    Viking:                  They still stabilized C-14, which was entering a death spiral. And I encountered C-87-001 personally. She is as callous and haughty as all the other C principles.

    Monolith:            I read the report. I also can tell that C-87 reacted fast and decisive not just to protect themselves, or even their employees, but they intervened in a region of NYC where they have only marginal business interests.

    Viking:                  Maybe they wanted the elite of NYC in their debt.

    Monolith:            Possible. Not that it matters that much. It is irrelevant if they are different from the other C entities. They are stabilizing the establishment too much.

    Viking:                  They do? How?

    Monolith:            The news about their new fertility treatment has calmed the population down significantly. If the rumors are true, then it will erase most of the unrest about the cloning costs.

    Viking:                  I thought that were unsubstantiated rumors.

    Monolith:            They have been substantiated. C-08 is running tests on the same treatment in the Commonwealth. We have no information as to why those two are working together.

    Viking:                  At least that I can answer. C-87-001 is also C-08-003. With C-08-002 being mentally incapacitated, she is the designated heir of C-08-001.

    Monolith:            Yes, that would explain that. Are you sure about it?

    Viking:                  Positive. She announced it at the New Year''s Eve ball. She is also accompanied by a group of personal protection soldiers from C-08.

    Monolith:            That is troubling. The way C-08 stabilized the Commonwealth is already a problem in its own right. And with them taking over the AFS and the market share of C-21 makes them too strong for Venator¡¯s liking already.

    Monolith:            If they are now getting into a stable alliance with C-87 that will be a problem. Especially as C-87 seems to be hellbent on introducing new technology.

    Honor:                  I thought the new tech would destabilize the situation to our liking.

    Monolith:            It seems that C-87 is too smart for that. They share the technology with most C-entities.

    Velvet:                  But the way they dismantled C-17¡­ they have to destabilize everything.

    Monolith:            As I said, they are too smart for that. Yes, they dismantled C-17, but at the same time, they introduced top-tier medical care to the disenfranchised masses. Quelling much of the smoldering unrest we counted on.

    Nemesis:              But that only serves to make the masses realize what they have been living without all the time.

    Viking:                  No, I get it. They know they were without that medical care, but now they get it, and that makes them more content.

    Monolith:            It gets worse. The way they throw those jacks around will pacify the population even more.

    Monolith:            In general, they will calm down the seething undercurrents in the lower classes. Fortunately, we still have time to do something about it. It will take years for all that resentment to die down.

    Viking:                  So, we are working on cutting them down?

    Monolith:            Correct. Venator concludes that they¡¯ve grown too big too fast. If that continues, we can no longer counter them. We would have to treat them like the other big league C-entities. But unlike the others, we don¡¯t have decades of observation and infiltration to plan around their behavior.

    Monolith:            If they reach the point where they can¡¯t be simply snuffed out anymore, we would need to pull back and start planning with them in the equation. That will take years, maybe decades.

    Monolith:            We can¡¯t allow that to happen. We are closing in on Phase II, and being pushed back to the start of Phase I would be a disaster.

    Monolith:            That means that Operation Tickle is a go, with C-14 as the primary, and C-87 as the secondary.

    Monolith:            Can you do that, Viking?

    Viking:                  I still need to find a reliable tool to get it done, but with C-14-002 here in NYC, it should be doable. But it will take some time.

    Monolith:            That is a given. Take care that neither of them gets suspicious. We are planning for Tickle to take six to twelve months.

    Viking:                  If I get access to the database for the tools, that should be a realistic time frame.

    Viking:                  The big problem is finding a tool that is at once convincing, gullible enough, but also capable of pulling it off.

    Monolith:            Nemo is already in the process of vetting the available tools.

    Viking:                  Then yes, I should be able to get it done.

    Monolith:            That is good. I will tell Venator that Operation Tickle is in the planning phase.

    Monolith:            That was it for now. Does anybody have anything else we need to talk about?

    For nearly a minute, nothing followed, before this Monolith typed again:

    Monolith:            Then we will contact you when you need to get to your secure locations. Be careful, all of you.

    With a shrug, Blumenthal then shut down the computer, pulled out the crystals, placed one of them back into the safe, and made his way back to his car.

    We, on the other hand, sat in VR and were, in general quite stunned.

    Finally, Naveen sighed.

    ¡°Fuck. Now¡­ figuring out what they mean with C-87 is easy. The same with C-08. I guess the other C-entities are probably the other A+ corporations. Right now, there are 86 active ones. Not that Panacea will remain in the A-tier for much longer.¡±

    I nodded slowly.

    ¡°C-21 is, or more likely was, Falconer. C-14¡­ I think they mean Ralcon with that. Without us, their flagship, Envision would no longer be viable for much longer.

    And like Panacea, they are so rabid and vicious that most of the other A+ corps would have delighted in ripping them from limb to limb.¡±

    Ramon shook his head.

    ¡°Fuck. And it seems that they are trying to start something with Ralcon and uns. Do we have any idea what?¡±

    One of the analysts snorted:

    ¡°You have exactly the same information that we have. We need to wait until we can analyze the crystals, but right now, we have nothing to go on.¡±

    Naveen focused on the analysts.

    ¡°Any clue who we are dealing with?¡±

    Both analysts shook their heads.

    ¡°No, they were too careful to conceal their identities. The only one we know about is Blumenthal. We can surmise that Carnage is based in DC, but otherwise, no information about their identities.¡±

    That was the moment that Warden interjected:

    ¡°It seems that they are using an old secure US network from shortly before World War 3 for their communication. I am already looking for any information about it.¡±

    ¡°That means we have virtually nothing, except that they are trying to stop us from growing too big. Well, I wanted a challenge. Now I have one it seems.¡±

    Naveen¡¯s dry tone belied the situation, as nobody was in any way happy about what we had just read.

 2.59 Do they have to be so menacing?

    It goes without saying that we started reading crystal #2 as soon as Blumenthal had locked it into the safe. It would be easy to cut the connection of the computer to the network.

    That meant the only missing ingredient for us to access the basic OS was crystal #1. We had to wait until Blumenthal placed it somewhere.

    Then the new set of Lachesis¡® and Clothos would try to read it out. The new set, because the old set stayed behind in the bunker.

    While it was possible to read a crystal with the Clotho motes, it was a slow process, and we would need a week to read any of the crystals. Fortunately, it was also a parallel process, as we could copy all the crystals in the safe at once.

    During that time, I finished the portable neutrino detector and built a first prototype.

    It was not perfect, and even I could see that it was still a bit clunky and needed the magic of a good ergonomics designer, but it worked. The rest was something the Minions could work on.

    I also sketched out ship sensors on the principle and seeker heads for our missiles. No, we would of course not replace the Palant¨ªr in the seekers with neutrino detectors. For our missiles. But sooner or later all the others would want to buy our missiles, and if the missiles we sold them could not ignore the stealth of their ships, we would have some explaining to do.

    Then I turned to the next quantum field. Marvellous, something that could influence photons. Virtually useless, but a nice toy for the theoretical physicists nonetheless I think.

    It took me a couple of days to get this field isolated and understand it enough to remove it from consideration.

    The next field was a doozy. It generated some strange resonance on no less than eight dimensions.

    It would be of some interest as a communication utility, seeing as it was faster than light, if we did not have the Q-links already, which was instant.

    But like the other fields I had identified, I put it onto the Enki network. Maybe somebody would think of some use for it.

    By that time, it was Monday afternoon, and I decided to spend the rest of the day having some fun.

    Nothing earth-shattering, mind you, just some playtime with my pet, as well as working on some music.

    And would you know it, we had a week after the zombie attacks already. When I entered the meeting room Tuesday morning, I was greeted by a first. We had guests. Sure, the table was big enough for 25 people, so the half a dozen additional people were no problem. Seating wise, that is.

    But... what the heck was Mayor Walsh doing here?

    One of the men in his company was easily identifiable as the new police commissioner, by his uniform alone.

    He was a heavyset man with almost white hair and light blue eyes, though the most startling thing about him was the scar that ran along the left side of his face, from the temple down to the cheek, nearly touching the eye and branching out when it reached the cheekbone.

    He also did not look like he was enjoying being here.

    The other four I would tentatively classify as toadies.

    They were seated in the visitors'' chairs on the other end of the elliptic table, clustering around the mayor.

    Honestly, I was too surprised to say anything and just sat down in my place in confusion.

    After an awkward couple of minutes, Maynard entered the room as the last of us, and the guard detail closed the door.

    As had most of us, Maynard stopped short when he noticed the guests, only for Michael to impatiently rap onto the table.

    ¡°Sit down please.¡±

    When Maynard followed the request, Michael continued:

    ¡°As you can see, we have some guests today. Most important, Mayor Walsh, followed by Commissioner Hellstrom.¡±

    When he did not continue, one of the toadies visibly got angry and snarled:

    ¡°We also have names, you know.¡±

    Only for Michael to snort:

    ¡°Who would have guessed? But as I don¡¯t know your names, I can¡¯t introduce you.¡±

    Toadie #2 rolled his eyes and sighed.

    ¡°Fine. I am Gabriel Booth, those are Olliver Mason, Mohammad Orr, and Bradley Carpenter.¡±

    Toadie #1, a.k.a. Olliver Mason, narrowed his eyes and sent a scathing gaze at Mr. Booth, but remained silent.

    Unperturbed, Michael continued:

    ¡°Now that that is cleared, I am sure most of you are wondering what they are doing here. Well, this is the fallout from last week''s unpleasantness.¡±

    Commissioner Hellstrom cleared his throat:

    ¡°From my perspective, I want to know how you people knew about the second horde before anybody else.¡±

    Mr. Orr snarled:

    ¡°You just want to cover your ass and put the blame on somebody else. Face it, you fucked up and overlooked not one, but two zombie hordes. That won¡¯t look good on your resume, and as soon as we can get it done, you will need one.¡±

    I snorted and shook my head, and Orr turned his attention to me:

    ¡°You find that funny little girl? What are you doing here anyway? This is for grown-ups.¡±

    The reactions ranged from chuckling from Michael to a facepalm by Mayor Walsh.

    I on the other hand just shrugged.

    ¡°Not that you have any say in who sits here in the board meetings of my corporation, but whatever. And yes, I find it funny how you blame somebody who is what, in his third week in a new job? Let¡¯s just for discussion''s sake assume that there was that NYPD could have done to prevent this, then it would have had to been done by Henderson.¡±

    ¡°For discussion¡¯s sake? It is the job of the NYPD to look for threats like zombie hordes. There were not one, but two hordes. So yes, they fucked up.¡±

    I rolled my eyes, and focused on Walsh:

    ¡°You have my condolences, having to work with such an imbecile.¡±

    Then I turned back to Orr.

    ¡°First, I don¡¯t know if you are aware of it, but Queens is on an island. An island that has been cleared of any zombies over 100 years ago. An island where there are inhabited towns and villages east of where the zombie horde appeared.

    Towns and villages who would have screamed bloody murder if they had seen even a hair of a zombie.

    But suddenly there are what, 1500 zombies? 2000? Between the first town outside of NYC and Queens.

    But sure, it is the fault of the NYPD, and more specifically the new Commissioner of the NYPD who is not even a month on his post. Yeah, I can see that.

    We just have to conveniently forget that NYC is just one of twelve cities that experienced between 2000 and 4000 zombies virtually at the same time.¡±

    Orr turned red, and for a moment, I expected to see foam on his mouth.

    ¡°Little children should be seen, and not heard! And what do you know about that? Who the fuck are you even? I already told you, this is a matter for the grown-ups.¡±

    While I rolled my eyes, Michael chuckled for a bit, before he answered Orr:

    ¡°I would think it would behoove somebody going to somebody else¡¯s house to at least know who that somebody else is, don¡¯t you think, dumbo?

    You are talking to, and insulting Dr. Vivian DuClare. Majority owner of Enki. And the genius that virtually all of our tech comes from.¡±

    Unfortunately, Orr was not deterred and thumped with the fist on the table:

    ¡°I don¡¯t care who the fuck she is! This is an important matter, and I will not let a little strumpet like that stop me. If she insists to interrupt we can get the NYPD here in a jiffy and have her spend the night in lockup!¡±

    Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

    By now, Walsh had buried his head in both of his hands, while Hellstrom shook his head.

    ¡°Orr, you dumbass, you don¡¯t know what the fuck you are talking about. If you send the NYPD, you only will get arrested, wounded, or dead officers.¡±

    That at least did stop Orr for a moment, and he turned to Hellstrom:

    ¡°The fuck you are talking about. I am an official of New York City. She is impeding me in my work. So how about you do your fucking job and stop her?¡±

    Hellstrom snorted:

    ¡°You know, Orr, you were an official of New York City. Do you know the Rickman-Bergis Act of 2106? Because right now you are in the process of violating federal law. Fuck, you are violating international law.¡±

    At least Orr was smart enough to at least consider what was going on. Of course, the damage was mostly already done.

    Carpenter though asked:

    ¡°Uh, what is this Rickman-Bergis Act?¡±

    Walsh sneered through his hands:

    ¡°That is the federal US law that guarantees important persons of Tier A+ corporations, like for example the double-A corporation Enki, and its CTO and majority owner Dr. Vivian DuClare, extraterritoriality."

    ¡°Extrawhat?¡±

    Hellstrom sighed:

    ¡°Extraterritoriality. Diplomatic immunity on steroids. In case of any crime where one of the extraterritorial persons is involved, jurisdiction falls on the corporation. In this case, Enki has the right of the law to decide who gets arrested, prosecuted, and convicted.

    In other words, if Dr. DuClare wants to, Orr will spend the rest of his days in prison.¡±

    He sighed again.

    ¡°That by the way is exactly what your buddy Henderson fucked up, Orr.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It doesn¡¯t matter. What does matter is that Commissioner Hellstrom had no chance of preventing the horde attack.¡±

    Mr. Booth frowned:

    ¡°But¡­ those zombies had to come from somewhere. And Orr might be an ass, but he is right. It is the job of the NYPD to inspect the city for those things.¡±

    Naveem cleared his throat.

    ¡°Yes, that is true. Once every three months that is. But the point is that we discovered a tramp freighter landing half a dozen times in Alley Pond Park in the week preceding the zombie attack.

    And you can easily find the remains of the containers bringing the zombies there to this day. In other words, this was not a mistake or an accident. It was a purposeful terror attack.

    The same freighter by the way has put down six times in an abandoned country club east of White Plains.¡±

    That made Walsh perk up.

    ¡°Wait, you are saying that somebody purposefully placed those zombies there? Why?¡±

    Michael shrugged.

    ¡°That is exactly what we are saying and unfortunately, we have no clue why.¡±

    Booth frowned even harder:

    ¡°If you know the ship, why don¡¯t you have the crew extradited?¡±

    Naveen sighed:

    ¡°A couple of reasons. First, the ship is Tranquility Inception flagged. Good luck getting the government there to do more than vocally agree and then twiddle its thumbs. And even if we somehow manage to put enough pressure on them, nobody will extradite the crew. A couple of days before the hordes appeared, it had an ¡®unexplained¡¯ containment failure.

    It was a bad week for TI, no less than 12 of their tramp freighters had ¡®sudden¡¯ and ¡®inexplainable¡¯ containment failures.¡±

    Hellstrom raised his eyebrows before he rubbed his chin.

    ¡°So¡­ you are saying somebody removed loose ends?¡±

    ¡°Exactly.¡±

    ¡°Fuck!¡±

    Walsh now looked at Hellstrom.

    ¡°What do you mean, and what does that mean for the investigation?¡±

    ¡°It means that somebody eliminated the possible witnesses and that the investigation has run into a dead end. We know it was a terror attack, and that somebody is behind it, but we have no way to find that somebody.¡±

    He turned to Naveen.

    ¡°That is, I assume that you have investigated the containers?¡±

    ¡°Bog standard freight containers with cutting charges on the doors. No DNA traces except from the zombies, no fingerprints, nothing.

    The zombies have apparently been ¡®sourced¡¯ from all of the Americas. We found at least 16 lineages of the virus. Whoever did this, they erased every trace that we can think of.¡±

    Walsh did not look very happy.

    ¡°So¡­ we don¡¯t know who did this?¡±

    ¡°And for the time being we have no chance of finding out either.¡±

    Hellstrom then coughed discreetly.

    ¡°If we could come back to my initial question, how did you know about the second horde?¡±

    Michael sighed.

    ¡°When we got the alerts about the first horde, we, naturally, concentrated our efforts on that horde, but we also sent surveillance drones to the other Burroughs. And it was good that we did, as we discovered the second horde before they caused too much damage.¡±

    With Walsh mumbling:

    ¡°And giving my secretary a panic attack in the process.¡±

    We all ignored him, and Hellstrom answered:

    ¡°Yes, you are right. It is good that you did. I also wanted to ask if we maybe could buy a few of those bots of yours. They¡­ proved quite efficient.¡±

    Naveen shrugged.

    ¡°Against a disorganized, unarmed, and unintelligent mob of raging zombies, they did, yes. And we are not averse to selling them. As long as you accept that we need to ramp up production. We intended them for internal use and have only a small production line.¡±

    Mr. Mason piped up:

    ¡°By the way, do they have to look so menacing?¡±

    That made all of us on the Enki side frown.

    ¡°Menacing? What do you mean?¡± Maggie had entered the discussion.

    ¡°They are black, and those glowing red eyes¡­ they look dreadful.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°They are not black, they are anthracite.¡±

    Mason shrugged.

    ¡°Tomato, tomatoe. Does it matter if you painted it black or near black?¡±

    ¡°It does matter. The carbon composite we use as armor is anthracite naturally. If they were black, it would be because we painted them. As it is, they are just unpainted.¡±

    ¡°And the red glowing eyes?¡±

    ¡°I assume you speak about the cooling slits, right? They literally glow to radiate the heat.¡±

    ¡°And do they have to look like some sort of medieval killer?¡±

    That made me recoil in confusion. Thankfully Michael seemed to understand that question.

    ¡°Form follows function. They look like a knight because knight armor is historically the best armor. Of the tech level of course.

    As with the full plate armor that a knight wore, the armor of the Einherjar is there to protect the more vulnerable parts. It has the same function and as such mostly the same form.¡±

    I was, frankly, getting slightly annoyed by this whiney wuss. I mean, come on, we are talking about fricking combat bots. They do not look menacing, they are menacing.

    And it seemed as if I was not the only one. Kenneth growled:

    ¡°What the fuck is your problem with how they look? They are war machines. Self-propelling weapons. It makes no difference if they look menacing or not.¡±

    ¡°But, but¡­ if we try to use them as a police force, they need to look nicer.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Then paint them white and blue. Or make it white, gold, and blue. It is unimportant. We have them in anthracite because we don¡¯t bother to paint them. Or if you want to spend the money we can design a variant without the armor. They won¡¯t be as strong, and will cost more because we have to design them especially for your use, but if you really need it¡­¡±

    The whiney: ¡°But why will they cost more?¡± grated on my nerves, but thankfully Alena barked:

    ¡°Because we have to invest more work and effort to bring them to you. We have to pay somebody to design it. We have to pay somebody to plan and build the assembly line. We have to use some of the space that we need for other things to build the assembly line.

    All that costs money. Money we would not have to invest if you would just take the standard model that we already have designed, and already have an assembly line for, and just paint it differently.

    Money that we will have to add to the price.¡±

    When Mason opened his mouth again, Walsh snarled:

    ¡°Shut it, Mason. Those bots are no more menacing than our SWAT teams. And that is exactly what we want to use them for. To supplement our SWAT.¡±

    Then he took a deep breath and calmed down.

    ¡°Now, I assume we can come to an agreement at some better opportunity. No point in wasting the time of all these high-powered folks here. Just the point that we are interested in buying some, and you are willing to sell. The rest our procurement department can hash out with your sales department.¡±

    Honestly, while I would probably never think of Walsh as a friend, he was just way too much a politician for that, he at least had a working brain in that head of his. I just could not figure out why he brought the toadies.

    Hellstrom I understood, and at least he was, on the first impression, capable enough.

    Mason was just plain sulking, Orr tried to switch between murdering Hellstrom and me with his gaze, and Booth, while on the first impression mostly harmless, seemed that way because he was simply not smart enough to cause problems. Only Carpenter was mostly taking notes and keeping silent.

    That did not mean that he was competent or harmless. Just that he had not done or said anything that allowed me to even begin to understand him.

    It did not matter though. Walsh had brought them along, and I did not care enough about them to do anything.

    Not so Naveen.

    ¡°One other thing. Mr. Orr has amply demonstrated that he is not to be trusted to be in any position of power.¡±

    Which of course, made Orr explode again.

    ¡°So, now you want to remove me as well? Was it not enough that you¡¯ve gotten Bill Henderson fired, and now you are going after me?¡±

    Naveen calmly answered:

    ¡°Henderson was unacceptable as a police commissioner for the same reason you are unacceptable as a city official. You fail to see that the balance of power in NYC has shifted. Enki is a double-A corporation headquartered here in New York. It is just a matter of time until we reach triple-A.

    I assume that you have the same sponsor group as Henderson. The self-styled elite in the Bronx. They were less important than they thought, with Phillip Rawleighs residing here, but now they are even lower on the totem pole.

    And people like you, or Henderson, who do not understand that Enki is now the leading power in NYC are only bound to create trouble. Trouble that might, in the worst case, end with dead people.

    It is better to remove the troubling elements beforehand.

    Meaning you.¡±

    ¡°Just because you are not decent enough to accept the way this city worked for hundreds of years¡­¡±

    I interrupted him:

    ¡°It did not ¡®work¡¯. It was just convenient for the rich people, first in Manhattan, and then in the Bronx. The rest of the city had it way harder. Guess what, things changed. Enki is here. And Enki is now the power. If your sponsors can¡¯t accept that, then they will suffer.

    But we had to remove Henderson because he is a hardheaded, stupid, belligerent, imbecile, who would use the NYPD, and Woodrow as a weapon to hurt our interests.¡±

    I wiped over my eyes.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know how you see it, but that would have resulted in death. Dead police officers. Think. You want Einherjar to supplement SWAT. We already have around 3k of those. You have what, 250 SWAT officers?

    Do you seriously think that a corporation that has to plan on being assaulted by another corporation will be overwhelmed by SWAT?

    And the worst thing is that he had absolutely no legal standing in attacking us. He was a police officer. He had to know about Rickman-Bergis. He needed to understand that we had the legal precedence. And he still chose to be aggressive, insulting, and threatening.

    Does that sound like somebody you want as the head of police?¡±

    When Orr breathed in to scream out a rebuke, Walsh screamed at him.

    ¡°Shut the fuck up, Orr. Sit down, and keep your mouth locked. You already managed to make me organize a recall vote for you.

    Don¡¯t make me extradite you to Enki as well.¡±

    After a few seconds, he shook his head.

    ¡°You know what, you should leave. Go to the cars, and wait there for us! Maybe the rest of us can salvage a bit of the situation with you gone.¡±

    When Orr just starred at the Mayor in shock, Walsh snarled:

    ¡°Parker, see to it that Mr. Orr reaches the cars safely!¡±

    One of the rent-a-muscles in dark suits with sunglasses standing behind the mayor and his party immediately walked to Orr and grabbed his shoulder.

    ¡°At once, Mr. Mayor.¡±

    And he physically dragged the protesting man out of his chair, and through the door.

    When the door had closed, Walsh took a deep breath.

    ¡°Fuck, I should have put my foot down on that asshole.¡±

    Then he turned to us:

    ¡°I seriously hope we can put what that man said behind us. I can assure us that he does not speak for us all.¡±

    Michael answered softly:

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry. If anything, you¡¯ve impressed us with the way you reacted to the situation. Not just today, but with Henderson as well. Far too many people would have protested and dug their heels in.¡±

 2.60: Social Engineering

    Walsh was obviously pleased when he heard Michael¡¯s statement. Not that it was wrong. Sure, he was somewhat slimy, backstabbing, and untrustworthy.

    He was a politician after all. But as Michael had said, he was realistic enough to understand the shift in power dynamics. And act accordingly.

    And as long as we remained at the top of our game, he would support us. The flip side was, naturally, that as soon as we struggled, his support would be gone. We knew that he knew that, heck, most of the citizens knew that.

    But after he basked in the praise, he sat up straighter and cleared his throat.

    ¡°To get back to the zombies¡­ can I ask you that you inform us about whatever else you will find out?¡±

    Michael snorted as an answer:

    ¡°Sorry, Mayor, but we won¡¯t look into the ship any further. As far as we know, the trail is dead.¡±

    Hellstrom frowned.

    ¡°Why? Why are you taking it so¡­ placidly?¡±

    ¡°It is simple, Commissioner. We don¡¯t have any resources to go forward. While we are a double-A corporation, we are a very young one. Not even a year old. Looking into it deeper can¡¯t be done by throwing money at it, you need agents. And setting up agents, even getting them takes time.

    No, we have no option other than not looking further into the ships.¡±

    ¡°Fuck. I can get you. And if you don¡¯t have the resources, you just don¡¯t have them. But somebody has to look into it.¡±

    Kenneth shrugged.

    ¡°I would suggest you bring what you¡¯ve learned here to the US government. They have the needed resources. And unlike the other big corporations, they might even be willing to use them.¡±

    Mayor Walsh looked decidedly unhappy, but he nodded.

    ¡°Fine, you are right. I don¡¯t like it, but that is not your fault.

    So¡­ the other topic, and why Booth and Mason are here with us, you let it know that you want to buy the subway system?¡±

    His voice betrayed his doubt, but Maggie nodded.

    ¡°We need something like that to get our employees to their workplaces. Right now, the traffic on the roads will congest the roads every morning and afternoon.¡±

    Mason¡¯s voice grated on my nerves when he whined:

    ¡°But why? Why do you even care? They only need to wake up earlier.¡±

    I was not the only one rolling their eyes. Most of our side of the table did the same.

    To my, pleasant, surprise, Hellstrom looked at Mason as if he wanted to slap him, but he remained silent.

    Instead, Maggie continued, talking as if to a small child:

    ¡°We want our employees awake, well rested, and on time. So that their work is better. If they are trapped in traffic for 3 hours, they have already expended quite a bit of energy on the way to work. Energy that we think they can better use doing their work.¡±

    Unfortunately, Mason was not done with his petulance:

    ¡°But¡­ why do it at all? Why go to so much trouble just to help your employees? If they can¡¯t hack the work, that is their problem.¡±

    Maggie rolled her eyes and shook her head.

    ¡°What is it to you? But whatever you think, our own data shows it is necessary. The average productivity of our employees has consistently fallen, proportionally to how congested the streets are. 16.56% over all areas.

    Better-rested employees work faster and make fewer errors, as simple as that. Not that we expect to lose money on the project, at least not in the long run.¡±

    Mason looked downright shocked at the idea, but Booth nodded, only to ruin the minuscule good impression he had made when he opened his mouth:

    ¡°Ok, I get that, but why? Why the subway?¡±

    James sighed.

    ¡°Because the roads are, at best, a mixed bag. We can¡¯t run too many busses on them.¡±

    ¡°No, no you got me wrong. What I meant is that the subway is in ruins. When you asked for it, we looked into it, and all of our experts say that it would be way cheaper to make new lines than to repair the old ones.

    You have to essentially rebore the tunnels and remove all the rubble before you can even start rebuilding. And that does not even take the stations into account.¡±

    Ok, so not quite so bad as I had thought. His question was at least a serious one, and not a petulant like Mason¡¯s.

    It was Maynard who answered him:

    ¡°We have some new tech that will make that easier. No difference between new tunnels and rebuilding the old ones.¡±

    Walsh seemed confused.

    ¡°But if it makes no difference, why buy the existing network?¡±

    James sighed again and shook his head:

    ¡°Because all the survey work is already done. If we follow the old tunnels, we will reach the old stations, which we can equally easily repair as the tunnels. There are no buildings, bunkers, sewers, or whatever in the way.¡±

    That was not¡­ quite the full answer, but it was also true. The real point was the right of way. We would have to negotiate, and buy, the right of way if we set up our own network. That would be way more expensive and would delay our project, probably by years.

    ¡°Ok, fine. But there is one problem. Do you have any idea who owns the subway?¡±

    James shook his head.

    ¡°No, not really. I would think it is the city, right?¡±

    ¡°No, it is not. It is part of the MTA, or Metropolitan Transport Authority.¡±

    Ok, that was a new one.

    ¡°The what?¡± I was a bit surprised by myself asking that question.

    ¡°The MTA is a public company that was responsible for the mass transit here in NYC.¡±

    ¡°Was? So it is defunct?¡±

    Booth shook his head.

    ¡°No, it is not, at least not formally. It is just no longer doing any business. But it is very much still an active entity. Fuck, there are still employees there.¡±

    Michael raised his eyebrows.

    ¡°If that is the case, why don¡¯t you sell us this company?¡±

    Walsh looked as if he had bitten into a lemon.

    ¡°We can¡¯t. It doesn¡¯t belong to New York City. It belongs to the State of New York.¡±

    ¡°So we have to approach Albany?¡±

    ¡°If you think they will just sell it to you, you can try.¡±

    ¡°We will.¡±

    The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

    ¡°Now, if you get it up and running again, will you provide the service to the other Burroughs?¡±

    ¡°Yes, of course. Why limit it to our employees?¡±

    From the face Hellstrom made, he was not entirely happy with that answer. That was instantly confirmed when he began speaking:

    ¡°I don¡¯t like it. Sure, it would be nice for the people of The Bronx and Brooklyn to get to each other places, and the other counties outside of Queens. But the people of Queens¡­ do we seriously want them to have easier access to The Bronx? Or Brooklyn?¡±

    I saw that Michael¡¯s hands formed into fists, though that was the only outward sign of how he felt about that question.

    ¡°The people of Queens are people. There are no more bad apples there than in any other place.¡±

    Hellstrom narrowed his eyes.

    ¡°The number of criminals in Queens is five times the average of NYC.¡±

    Before Michael could explode, James cut in:

    ¡°That has more to do with how many options are left for the people of Queens. And of course what is illegal and what is not.¡±

    ¡°What do you mean by that?¡±

    ¡°Simple. The same things that a citizen of The Bronx might get a stern talking for, and one of Brooklyn not even that, will get a citizen of Queens jail time. Disorderly conduct, drugs for personal use, loitering¡­ to name just a few.¡±

    That, clearly, did not sit nicely with Hellstrom.

    ¡°Yeah, sure. Tell yourself that, if you need to, but the reality is that no other Burrough is even remotely as criminal. The number of convictions for soliciting alone¡­¡±

    Michael snorted, cutting him off.

    ¡°Mostly because Sandoval doesn¡¯t get raided. Sandoval has 35% of all of the hookers in NYC in its ¡®luxury spas¡¯. But because they greased the right palms, no cop will ever enter one of them. At least not on duty.

    Or how about con men? Nobody comes even close to Salair Investments in relieving old people of their savings, but strangely, no cop has ever even looked at their operations.

    Or how about Odin Real Estate¡­ have you any idea how many underhanded shit they play? Oh, sure it is all in the fine print. Fineprint so small that you need a fucking microscope to read it. And of course, it is not in a searchable digital format, but as a picture file in an attachment.

    No, the fact is that the criminals in Queens are the ones who can¡¯t compete with the prices the police and the politics of this fine city demand for looking the other way.

    Not to forget the poor. After the third civil war, the other Burroughs managed to shove all their poor, their unwanted, and their rejects into Queens. You all went to charter schools. Queens has no charter schools. I had to go to Brooklyn to get a usable education.

    That means in my opinion the real criminals are sitting in Brooklyn and The Bronx.¡±

    ¡°And what about organized crime? Yes, we all know who your father is. Nowhere else in New York do we have this concentration of crime families.¡±

    Kenneth chuckled and then answered:

    ¡°Only if you discount the ¡®legal¡¯ corporations that manage to grease the right palms. But even then, somebody had to create some sort of order. Do you believe that the relative calmness of Queens is a miracle?

    Either the bosses take over and police the streets, or street gangs do. With the bosses, we get at least a few who are honorable and try to better the people.¡±

    Walsh looked as if he had bitten into a lemon.

    ¡°And they still don¡¯t pay nearly half the taxes they owe.¡±

    Alena softly shook her head.

    ¡°No, of course not. Tell me, what has the city of New York done for Queens in the last 100 years? Any infrastructure projects? In the Bronx, you are always rebuilding the streets. In Queens, if a street is rebuilt, it was the boss who did it.

    Oh, how about clean water? Oh right, that was an alliance of eight bosses who built a new water treatment plant. Energy? The bosses. Keeping the peace? The bosses. The bosses do the work the city, and the state should do. They take the money that the citizens would pay to the city and the state for it. Simple as that.¡±

    Hellstrom then snarled:

    ¡°But it is still illegal. Which makes it a crime.¡±

    The harsh sound out of Michael¡¯s throat was a bit startling, and he rasped:

    ¡°Ever heard about ¡®no taxation without representation¡¯?¡±

    In response, Hellstrom looked confused, while Walsh turned red.

    ¡°What do you mean by that now?¡±

    Michael on the other hand was still calm.

    ¡°Tell me, Mayor, how many seats on the city council does Queens have?¡±

    It took Walsh a moment to answer:

    ¡°13, why do you ask?¡±

    ¡°I did not ask how many seats are assigned to Queens. I asked how many seats Queens has. As in, how many representatives in the city council are living in Queens, and have been elected by the people of Queens, in contrast to being appointed by corporations in Brooklyn or the elite in the Bronx?¡±

    ¡°But¡­ it is still 13.¡±

    ¡°No, Mayor Walsh, it is zero. Not a single person in the city council is elected by and speaks for the people of Queens. Want to make a guess how many of the state representatives are representing Queens? Same rules, they have to live in Queens and have been elected by the people of Queens.

    Or how about how many of the three congressional districts that officially are elected by Queens represent Queens in reality?

    I make it easy for you, the answer to both questions is still zero. Any political seat that should be elected by Queens is instead decided by the corporations in Brooklyn and the rich in the Bronx. Every cent of city, state, or federal money that should be used in Queens instead flows to the Bronx or Brooklyn.

    We are required to pay for our schools, fire departments, policing, and everything, out of our own coffers.

    And we still only get the dregs. Do you know how often the bosses of Queens tried to set up a charter school here? Dozens of times. Each and every time, the Department of Education, or the city council, declines the license. Only the worst refuse of teachers, those who can¡¯t go to any other school in the whole country, will teach in Queens.

    The only time we see NYPD officers in Queens is when they decide to come in in battalion strength and bust us down, beating the civilians to a near pulp.

    And they still ignore the actual criminals. The street gangs or the shadow mercs. Instead, they go after the little people trying to survive by selling themselves because Sandoval needs Johns for its new ¡®spa¡¯.

    Or they go after the small-time electronics shop because they repair and refurbish old tech that the people here can afford.

    Or the street vendors that make a meager living by preparing replicator slop in a nearly edible fashion. They go for the smart kids who try to help their fellow students. They go after the factory worker.

    And in doing that, they kill dozens of innocent people.¡±

    He took a deep breath and took a sip of coffee.

    ¡°Are you seriously surprised that the people of Queens do not pay taxes? If all the effect their taxes have on them is that they might get a goon squad walking in goose step through their streets and beating anybody not fast enough away to a pulp?¡±

    Walsh¡¯s toadies looked sick, while Hellstrom seemed to be more grim. Walsh himself turned pale.

    ¡°Does¡­ does that mean that you¡­ I mean Enki, does not intend to pay taxes either?¡±

    Michael, Alena, and James all snorted or chortled, and Alena answered:

    ¡°We pay our taxes monthly. You would already know if we did not pay them, believe me. You have to have noticed the near doubling of taxes last year. That was us.¡±

    Michael continued:

    ¡°No, we do not intend to withhold the taxes, but we also have a completely new power dynamic. We are now calling the shots in this city, and this state. Oh, don¡¯t be frightened. We won¡¯t take over.

    No, what we will do though is cut back on all that shit. Next election, the assholes in the Bronx and the fat cats in Brooklyn can pound sand. The representatives for Queens will be decided by Queens.

    If the NYPD comes into Queens, then to do their job, their real job, investigating crimes and keeping the peace.

    The parts of the budget earmarked for Queens will be spent in Queens. For the good of Queens.¡±

    He stopped there, and Michael continued:

    ¡°Those funds will flow into the hospitals in the Burrough. We will get new water lines and purifiers. The city street maintenance department will finally fix the streets here.

    And in time, we will set up our own schools, and nobody, not in the city hall, not in Alberny, not in DC, will stop us.¡±

    To finish it off with Kenneth snarling:

    ¡°And we will make sure that the real criminals, who are by the way already endangered since the purge from Ralcon and Enertech, won¡¯t go to the other Burroughs. Remember, we will have control of the subway, and the subway stations.

    So you can untwist your panties. The scum won¡¯t dirty your precious streets.¡±

    It would be an understatement that the meeting was a bit strained after that, and we all breathed in relief when the mayor and his group excused themselves.

    In the silence that followed, Maynard asked the question that burned in my mind as well.

    ¡°You all are extremely passionate about this thing with Queens. Why that?¡±

    As an answer, Maggie smiled sadly:

    ¡°Most of us come out of Queens. We showed enough promise that the boss of our respective territory made it possible for us to go to a real school, and then to this abomination of a college system we have.

    They gave us the option to claw our way out of this shithole. And now we are in a position where we can pay that forward.¡±

    I frowned. Did Michael really have such a hidden agenda?

    ¡°Wait, most of you? Who all?¡±

    James laughed bitterly:

    ¡°Well, you of course not, Vivian, but you knew that. But except Maynard, Naveen, and Tiffany, all the rest of us come from Queens.¡±

    ¡°Ok, but why did nobody mention it before?¡±

    That made all of them look a bit chagrined, and Michael, rubbing the back of his head, answered:

    ¡°Honestly, we thought it was obvious. Well, I thought it was obvious. And of course, we knew each other before Enki. But in hindsight¡­ yeah you four had no context to get that information. Sorry. It was not malicious, or putting something over you, just some thoughtless oversight.¡±

    I just shrugged.

    ¡°That is fine. I was just a bit surprised. Is there anything we can do to help your mission?¡±

    For a moment, the nine of them looked confused at each other, before first James, then Kenneth, and finally, the rest, began to laugh.

    When James was able to speak coherently again, he answered me:

    ¡°God, you are too much. No, Viv, you can¡¯t do anything, that you are not already doing. All this¡­ all the help we could provide to the people here, that is your doing. In a couple of years, Queens will be unassailable. And all that thanks to you.

    So, just do what you have been doing. That is all the help we need.¡±

    I could not find the appropriate words for an answer to that and nodded silently, while the rest slowly calmed down.

    We then started the actual board meeting. Fortunately, it was a brief meeting. The profits had gone up again, and Naveen asked for more Einherjar, but otherwise, business as usual.

    On the way out of the meeting room, Michael held me back for a moment.

    ¡°Another thing, Viv, we have arranged for a first meeting with the naval architect group on Thursday at 10 am.¡±

    ¡°Thursday at 10, ok. Where?¡±

    ¡°The yard at Loui 5.¡±

    I frowned. It would take half a day to fly to the yard.

    ¡°I assume we are using Incarnates?¡±

    ¡°Yup. Naveen, Maynard,  and I will be there as well. And don¡¯t worry, we don¡¯t expect miracles. This is just the first meeting to define the parameters.¡±

 2.61: Reading the Devils Mail

    When the meeting ended, I found a message from Warden that she had managed to find something on Blumenthal¡¯s OS.

    That OS had been an exercise in frustration. Whoever had set up the system had ensured that, despite it being not a binary, but indeed a trinary OS, seeing as the controller in the computer was an integral part of the operating system, nothing was saved.

    At least not on the OS crystals.

    Unfortunately, the other crystals were pretty well encrypted. Nothing that could stop us for much longer, mind you, but considering that by the latest estimates, Warden represented around 60% of all the computing power humanity had¡­ it was hellish good encryption.

    Nonetheless, I made my way down to the security division and met with Ramon. He expected me with a tablet in hand, that he offered me without any words.

    And indeed, they had found a chat log that had not been erased sufficiently.

    ¡°How? I thought they did not even create chat logs, or write anything on the OS crystals.¡±

    ¡°This is not all. It is the most important, yes, as the rest is just standard file operations. But for some brief time, a few days, their safety measures failed.¡±

    I looked at the tablet in wonder.

    ¡°But¡­ why? What changed? And why did it change back?¡±

    Ramon shrugged.

    ¡°We don¡¯t know why, we only have some hints. Apparently, around a year ago, some massive cyber attack hit their network and wrecked most of it. That put the OS, and the chat program, into some sort of emergency P2P mode.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°And it stopped when they got their network back up and running. Too bad they¡¯ve almost certainly patched out this vulnerability.¡±

    ¡°It doesn¡¯t seem so. As far as we can tell they are still using the same version.¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°That¡­ doesn¡¯t fit. Why did they not fix this error?¡±

    ¡°Probably because they don¡¯t know about it. This is something that slipped through and they never thought about looking for it.¡±

    That was finally some good news. They had an opening in their defense, and they did not know about it. Unfortunately, at that time we lacked the information needed to exploit it.

    I did not expect it to last in that state, however. We were gaining ground. Step by step, inch by inch, we were gaining ground.

    ¡°Those chatlogs, have you read them?¡±

    ¡°No, I¡¯ve gotten the message from Warden only a couple of minutes ago.¡±

    I nodded and gestured to the group of comfortable recliners.

    ¡°Then let¡¯s do that now.¡±

    When we met in cyberspace, I had Warden project the chat log into space.

    Gargoyle:            Fuck! What the hell is wrong with the network today?

    Quicksand:         No fucking clue, but it sucks balls right now. Barely any bandwidth and the key transfer took forever.

    Gopher:               Can you guys access the general case file database? It just times out for me.

    Drake:                   Mom, I take a look¡­

    Gopher:               K

    Drake:                   Fuck, you¡¯re right. It¡¯s gone. Only spinning wheel.

    Carnage:             How can that be? I thought this was our own private little network.

    Cabal:                   And the network is clearly still there.

    Viking:                  Maybe something happened to the servers?

    Honor:                  Don¡¯t be silly Viking! The servers are well-protected and multi-redundant. It would take catastrophic damage to take them all out.

    Cabal:                   But he is right. If our computers work, and the network is still there, something has to have cut the connection between the servers and the network.

    Banshee:             But why do you think the network is still there?

    Cabal:                   ¡­ because we are using that network to chat right now.

    Banshee:             Oh¡­ right. Sorry, long night.

    Monolith:            Oh, good you are all here. I can¡¯t reach HQ right now, but we can talk about Operation Octagon without them.

    Gargoyle:            So, you have connection problems as well?

    Monolith:            Yes, why do you ask?

    Gargoyle:            We tried to connect to the database. It seems dead. Thought you might know more.

    Monolith:            You can¡¯t connect to the database? Strange. Let me look into it.

    Velvet:                  Five bucks that he can¡¯t connect either.

    Gopher:               Get real. As if any of us would take that bet.

    Velvet:                  Hey, I had to try.

    Monolith:            You are right, Gargoyle. The servers seem to be down.

    Banshee:             So¡­ what are we doing now?

    Monolith:            We will talk about Operation Octagon.

    Monolith:            Viking, has the situation recovered in New York?

    Viking:                  Sorry, nope. We had a short period of violence here but it died down almost instantly.

    Monolith:            How?

    Viking:                  The majority of the organized crime families pulled together and eliminated the rest and the street gangs. Insanely violent, but short-lived and at the wrong time.

    Monolith:            So, Operation Octagon worked already but it fired early?

    Viking:                  Yes, you could say that. What concerns me is that the surviving families stay calm. Something¡¯s going on.

    Monolith:            OK, that is unfortunate, but one out of 15 cities should not be too bad.

    Badger:                So you simply let him go with this failure?

    Monolith:            I know you don¡¯t like Viking, but shit like that happens sometimes. We can¡¯t control everything, we can only nudge the pawns so much.

    Badger:                But if it was one of us others there would be hell to pay.

    Monolith:            You got a dressing down because you failed. You made a mistake and busted Operation Rooster in Columbus, by giving the wrong hint to the wrong person at the wrong time. Viking faced some strange occurrences in New York, but he is not even in the Burrough where the families are.

    Badger:                And you just believe him that he did not fuck up?

    Monolith:            Are you stupid? Of course not! Venator had Squirrel look into it. As she did in Columbus when you fucked up. He was not in Queens, he had no contact in Queens, and he did nothing to blow Octagon.

    Carnage:             Burn!

    Monolith:            Focus! We are not children clowning around.

    Carnage:             Sorry, but Badger is¡­ nerve-racking.

    Monolith:            ¡­

    Monolith:            Whatever. Let¡¯s get back to business. As you have already thrown your hat into it, how is the situation in DC?

    Carnage:             It is slowly creeping to the boiling point. The criminals are ready to go at each other''s throats. The only thing missing is the spark.

    Carnage:             The only problem is that they are too stupid to follow the breadcrumbs that C-21 placed.

    Monolith:            That seems to be the standard. I honestly had expected more of them.

    Cabal:                   It doesn¡¯t matter. It only takes one criminal enterprise in one of the cities to light the fire.

    Monolith:            And does it look as if they are finding the trail in Philly?

    Cabal:                   No, not yet.

    Velvet:                  Hey, what if that is what¡¯s gone wrong in NYC? If they got somebody who not only found the breadcrumbs but also could prove that it was a false flag?

    I was getting a suspicion of where this was going, and I was not sure if I was to be happy about it. It would make some of my earlier conclusions wrong, and show an even longer pattern of atrocities than we knew about. The last part was not particularly surprising though.

    Viking:                  There is only one Jack in New York, the state, not just the city, who has the ability. And that barely. I had him under observation.

    Monolith:            No, that could have happened. I mean, we only have the word of this contractor of C-21 that nobody can figure it out.

    Viking:                  No, I looked into it. The thing is that there are at best a handful of people who can identify the forgery that the contractor made.

    Viking:                  That sounds better than it is though, as one of them is a tech who is known to sell those technologies. That means that the majority of the Abyss dwellers can, at least theoretically, figure it out.

    Monolith:            But they have to suspect that there is a forgery first, right?

    Viking:                  Mostly. But I doubt that anybody hired Spectre for the job.

    Vulture:                What has Spectre to do with it?

    Viking:                  He is the only one who already has unveiled such a forgery. The tech in question is his personal main tech.

    And it was getting firmer and firmer in my suspicion.

    Viking:                  That means that he will likely look for that kind of forgerie on principle.

    Monolith:            We are talking about street gangs and small-time gangsters. I doubt that any of them will pay for Spectre. Even if he was willing to work for them.

    Gopher:               And let¡¯s be honest, even if they somehow discovered the double cross in New York, the bosses would still all be dying.

    Honor:                  In other words, even if they discovered it, most of them would strike out on principle just because they are already dying.

    Quicksand:         That still makes the situation in NYC strange. Either they know, and they know they are dying, and keep the peace anyway, or they know they are dying and believe it is a coalition of the others and don¡¯t do anything anyway.

    If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.

    Viking:                  Exactly. I just can¡¯t explain it.

    Monolith:            It is just something that happens sometimes. If we had enough time I would say that we look into it, but Merlin confirmed that the situation in the AFS is coming to a boil.

    Gargoyle:            And that drives the timing of Operation Octagon.

    Monolith:            Well, let¡¯s go along the line then. Honor, how is it in Toronto?

    Honor:                  It is a slow burn, but it will only take a spark to explode. I request that I be allowed to stay in the bunker until the situation is resolved.

    Monolith:            That might not be a bad idea. Do you have a reason for your absence?

    Honor:                  The usual. My cover required me to travel to Europe. I¡¯ve done it often enough so there should be no suspicion.

    Monolith:            Then ok, you can remain in the bunker. The same for the rest of you, if you can do so without risking your cover.

    Monolith:            Well, to get on with it, Quicksand?

    Quicksand:         The criminals here in Montreal are restless. I would say Octagon is ready.

    Monolith:            Velvet, how is the situation in Chicago?

    Velvet:                  Similar to how it is in Philly. The animals are snarling at each other. I don¡¯t think we need them to even find the breadcrumbs to explode.

    Monolith:            We already have Philly, so Drake?

    Drake:                   Ottawa is ready to explode.

    Monolith:            Short and concise, I like it. Badger?

    Badger:                Columbus is almost burning.

    Monolith:            Gopher?

    Gopher:               Octagon is a go in Hamilton.

    Monolith:            Good. Vulture?

    Vulture:                Boston awaits the spark.

    Monolith:            Cinder?

    Cinder:                  Detroid is almost burning already.

    Monolith:            Scarecrow?

    Scarecrow:          It¡¯s a go in Baltimore.

    Monolith:            Casper?

    Casper:                 Milwaukee is a go.

    Monolith:            Banshee?

    Banshee:             Kitchener is ready.

    Monolith:            Gargoyle?

    Gargoyle:            London is with the rest.

    Monolith:            Good, I know it is not our plan, but it has a good chance of increasing¡­

    Monolith:            Wait a minute, I am getting a call from Venator.

    Gargoyle:            Now? I bet it is about the network.

    Honor:                  Cut the chatter. We will learn soon enough if it is something that concerns us.

    Badger:                Always the brownnoser, aren¡¯t you?

    Honor:                  ¡­

    Honor:                  You can¡¯t stop, can you?

    Badger:                Why should I? Just because we work for the same goal does not mean that I can stand most of you. Always so proper, and serious.

    Monolith:            Stop right there. I know you are still salty Badger, but you should at least try to be professional.

    Monolith:            Do I have to send Squirrel back to Columbus again?

    Badger:                No Boss, I¡¯m good. This is just me letting off steam.

    Monolith:            Just stop annoying the others!

    Monolith:            Now, Venator just called me to tell me that they¡¯ve lost around ? of the network.

    Gargoyle:            What the fuck! How did that happen?

    Monolith:            It gets worse. They¡¯ve lost all of the servers.

    Viking:                  So they are reinstalling the backups? How long will that take?

    Monolith:            No¡­ the servers are gone. Destroyed. From what Venator told me, they melted.

    Honor:                  ¡­ how? How could that happen? They were in how many different locations?

    Honor:                  How could anything physically destroy all of them?

    Monolith:            The assholes of C-21 fucked up. By the numbers.

    Monolith:            But it neatly explains what happened in New York.

    Viking:                  How so?

    Monolith:            C-21 learned that a tech who has recently moved to NYC has developed new cyberware that is immune to CRS.

    Monolith:            And in their infinite wisdom, decided that the only ones deserving of this cyberware are the warriors for their false god.

    Monolith:            And attacked.

    Yup, guessed right. So those monsters were behind Falconer poisoning the bosses.

    Viking:                  But how can the bosses of New York know about this new cyberware? But you are right if they know, it would explain why they remain calm.

    Monolith:            The chance that I am right is really high. This tech? It is this main tech of Spectre you talked about. She not only developed this new cyberware but coded virtually all the utilities for Spectre.

    Viking:                  Wait¡­ so somehow the bosses got this tech to get on the trail? But¡­ she is a tech. Not a hacker.

    Gargoyle:            Most techs are hackers. They are just better at the technical part and concentrate on that.

    Viking:                  And she certainly has the tools to discover the forgery. So she discovered that somebody was inciting the bosses, and offered them to survive if they just kept calm¡­

    Monolith:            It is the best theory we have so far.

    Badger:                So, Viking indeed fucked up? Nice.

    Viking:                  How do you get that idea?

    Badger:                It was your job to learn about that.

    Monolith:            You are wrong. This is just an unpredictable coincidence. She could have arrived in any other city as well.

    Gargoyle:            But what I don¡¯t understand is how that took out our network.

    Monolith:            C-21¡¯s contractor got into a matrix combat with this tech, and managed to steal a couple of files from her. And gave them to C-21. Before she roasted his brain.

    Gargoyle:            Wait¡­ I thought C-21 used one of the top Abyss dwellers as a contractor. And while a tech is still a hacker, how could she beat him?

    Monolith:            From what I understand, she has the reputation of being that good. Good enough that, if she wanted to, she could get into the top 10 in the Abyss.

    Gargoyle:            OK, fine. But again, how did C-21 fucking up hurt us that much?

    Monolith:            The files were mined. And not just little data mines, but what was described as data nukes. When C-21''s special operations division triggered the first of those mines, it took out 90% of their network.

    Monolith:            And because we were hooked into their network as well, it moved straight through to us.

    Gargoyle:            Are you seriously telling us that a fucking data mine managed to melt down our servers?

    Monolith:            Yes, I am telling you that.

    Gargoyle:            How? We are talking about graphene! It has a melting point of over 7000 degrees!

    Monolith:            I don¡¯t know. Venator does not know. He is still shocked. He said it should be impossible. But it happened. That means it has to be possible.

    Viking:                  So¡­ it will take a few days for the hardware to be replaced and then¡­ a week to get the network up and running again?

    Monolith:            Something like that.

    Viking:                  Maybe we should try to recruit that tech.

    Monolith:            We will look into it.

    Honor:                  Does that mean that C-21 is crippled right now?

    Monolith:            Yes, it does. Fortunately, it is not just C-21. A full third of all the corporations had some tap into C-21¡¯s network. They¡¯ve all caught the nuke.

    Huh? I had not known that. Interesting. And a bit surprising that nobody got after me. Then I remembered that it was the same time when I announced Warden. And everybody had just gotten a taste of what I could do.

    Not surprising that nobody dared to trigger her.

    Viking:                  OK, I look into recruiting her. Do I get support?

    Monolith:            I don¡¯t know, but if you can get her, we can certainly get Mystery to induct her.

    Viking:                  I¡¯ll do what I can.

    Monolith:            Do that. Fortunately, NYC is relatively safe so you can start immediately.

    Viking:                  I¡¯ll do that. Good by.

    And we had a cut in the conversation, only for it to pick up a day later:

    Viking:                  I am back. Why did you call me back?

    Monolith:            Information. First, stop looking into the tech. She accidentally created an unbound cyber warfare VI with the primary objective of protecting her.

    Monolith:            A cyber warfare VI that has everything she does, that Spectre does.

    Viking:                  That does not sound good.

    Monolith:            It is a fucking disaster. Venator has made it clear to keep far away from her for the moment.

    Viking:                  OK. I have just started looking into her. She mostly took over the building of a slaver in Queens and bought some tools.

    Viking:                  Oh, and she spanked a Fixer who got the idea of robbing her. I don¡¯t think he will ever recover.

    Badger:                And that did escape your notice?

    Viking:                  It was over in Queens. You have no idea what a chaotic minefield that place is.

    Monolith:            Badger, let it be.

    Monolith:            The other point is that Operation Octagon is a failure.

    Viking:                  How? I thought it was going according to the plan except for NYC.

    Monolith:            It totally backfired. For some reason, C-14 and C-18 decided to clean out the criminals on the verge of rioting.

    Viking:                  Fuck, so instead of destabilizing the situation and C-21 getting into a shooting war with C-14 and C-18, C-14 and C-18 get good PR?

    Monolith:            Exactly. We have some suspicions of what happened, but nothing concrete. Our contacts in C-14 and C-18 are as surprised as we are.

    Viking:                  Let me guess, the tech?

    Monolith:            The most likely scenario. We are pretty sure that she acted against C-21 alone, and hindered our plans in the process, but it stings.

    Viking:                  Not surprising. They send four cyber zombies after her. I would be pissed off as well.

    Viking:                  Also, she is a Pure, so no love for C-21 here on principle.

    Monolith:            Whatever it is, Operation Octagon is dead in the water.

    Viking:                  That is not good.

    Carnage:             Not that surprising. I always said that it was way too complicated.

    Honor:                  And you would have done it differently?

    Carnage:             C-21 only needed the gang war. That is easy. Use assassins against the bosses, double-cross the assassins, and give them false information about the client.

    Carnage:             And you get the organized families at each other''s throats.

    Carnage:             For the unorganized animals it is even easier. Sponsor them with some weaponry, stage some assaults on their territory, and they react like rabid dogs.

    Carnage:             Simple, fast, efficient, high chance of success. And no chance of some new technology ruining it.

    Monolith:            You are right, but again, it was not our operation. And C-21 is so indoctrinated that they believe they are on a holy crusade and can do no wrong.

    Cabal:                   Imbeciles. But what Carnage said is a good plan. Maybe we can use it later.

    Monolith:            Not in the next few years. The fallout of Octagon removed virtually all gang criminality and most of the organized crime in the US. There is nothing there anymore to incite.

    Cabal:                   Except New York.

    Monolith:            Yes, except New York. But one city won¡¯t make the whole country burn.

    Honor:                  So¡­ all that work down the flusher. Brilliant.

    Gargoyle:            Hey¡­ anything about the rebuilding of the network?

    Monolith:            That goes slower than expected. Something¡¯s wrong with the backups of the data, and systems has to look into what¡¯s up there first.

    Gargoyle:            Shit¡­ what else can go wrong?

    Banshee:             Did you just jinx us?

    Gargoyle:            Get real, are you superstitious?

    Gargoyle:            But for real, I thought the backups would be certified periodically.

    Monolith:            They are. But for some reason now that we need them, they are just inert blocks of crystals.

    Monolith:            Whatever¡­ there is nothing more for you to do, so you can go back to your homes.

    Monolith:            I will contact you when we have new information.

    We were at a sedate 30:1 so Ramon was only a bit slower than me reading the log.

    ¡°Are they talking about you?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Of course they do. Well, they don¡¯t know that the Justicar never got my files. I send them to Falconer.¡±

    His eyes bulged out briefly before he calmed himself down.

    ¡°You did? Why?¡±

    ¡°To nuke them of course. I had no idea that it would go so far though. I thought it would only cripple their operations.¡±

    ¡°That was risky.¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°No, not really. Virtually the first thing I did was put the warning into the Abyss that Justy stole some of my booby-trapped data. Put it squarely on him.¡±

    ¡°But if he had contradicted you?¡±

    ¡°At that point, he was already lobotomized.¡±

    ¡°Yes, but you could not know that.¡±

    I sighed and looked him in the eyes.

    ¡°It was not an accident. The old jacks had a critical security fault that made this attack possible.¡±

    ¡°What? But¡­ ¡°

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry, I don¡¯t sell things I know have such problems. The new jacks don¡¯t have that weakness.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ you knew he was technically dead already?¡±

    ¡°Yes. I needed to take him out without physically killing him.¡±

    He shuddered.

    ¡°That is¡­ honestly, I have no idea how to think about that.¡±

    I closed my eyes and shook my head.

    ¡°I did not like it either. Heck, I developed the utility just in case. You know, better to have it and not need it and so on.¡±

    ¡°I get it, but¡­ that is disturbing.¡±

    ¡°Again, the new jacks, well the Enki-jacks at least, don¡¯t have that vulnerability. I have not looked into the jacks from the other corps though.¡±

    ¡°And what did you use on those networks?¡±

    I shrugged again.

    ¡°I call it Enola Gay. After the plane that dropped the first nuclear bomb in anger. It is not hyperbole when I call it a data nuke. It destroys virtually all processors, all internal crystals, the memory, the motherboards, the network hardware, and so on.¡±

    ¡°And why did they suddenly have problems reinstalling the backups?¡±

    ¡°Because one of the few things Enola Gay does not destroy are the external crystal readers. It will delete the crystals, but the readers remain intact. Outwardly at least.

    Instead, it rewrites the firmware. Instead of reading the crystals, they now will overwrite them with all zeros, then ones. Making the crystal useless.¡±

    He looked at me with incredulity for a moment and then began to laugh.

    ¡°Oh¡­ that is evil. You are saying that they are ruining their backups in the attempt to restore them?¡±

    ¡°Yup. As I said, I thought I would only get Falconer¡¯s ops section.¡±

    ¡°And you used your strongest weapon. Yeah, I can see that.¡±

    I sighed and shook my head.

    ¡°Nope. My third strongest weapon. You would know if I had used my strongest. Of course, this Venator might no longer be alive then.¡±

    ¡°Wait, you have stronger?!?¡±

    I raised an eyebrow.

    ¡°Do you know the difference between a fusactor and a fusion bomb?¡±

    He frowned.

    ¡°Uh, no? But I don¡¯t like where you are going.¡±

    ¡°The fuel feeding system and the strength of the compacting. If you rewrite the firmware and pump the reaction chamber full of fuel, and then overcharge the grav coils, any fusactor is a fusion bomb.¡±

    He shuddered again.

    ¡°And you have something that does that?¡±

    ¡°I have. And obviously, I have never used it. Then there is the utility that can overcharge all the grav coils it can find, making them into gravity pulse weapons.¡±

    ¡°That is¡­ I don¡¯t know what to say.¡±

    ¡°And the really evil one is the one that combines Enola Gay with the other two, destroying first all the hard- and software it can find, except skimmers, grav ships, and fusactors, before using first the gravity pulse one and then the fusion bomb one.¡±

    For some very long moments, he said nothing, before he rasped:

    ¡°Why? Why create something that fucking destructive?¡±

    I pinched the bridge of my nose.

    ¡°I¡­ was in a bad place. Angry at the whole world, and wishing to see it burn.¡±

    ¡°That is¡­ terrifying.¡±

    ¡°I am better now, but by then I already had the utilities.¡±

    ¡°You should delete them. As soon as possible.¡±

    ¡°I can¡¯t.¡±

    ¡°Why not?¡±

    ¡°Two reasons. First, I can not make myself do it. I am better, but I am not fully over it yet. But that doesn¡¯t matter anyway. Do you really believe that Warden, who has those tools, would let me destroy them?¡±

    He materialized a chair and fell down into it.

    ¡°Fuck¡­ that is¡­ so fucked up.¡±

    ¡°I know. But as long as I am around, Warden is no real threat.¡±

    ¡°But what if you die?¡±

    ¡°Then the rest of the world burns most likely. Not that this is a likely scenario. Too many are stepping between me and danger, including Warden.¡±

    ¡°So we have what, another 130 years before you die of old age?¡±

    I chuffed.

    ¡°No¡­ I am a K4.¡±

    I frowned again.

    ¡°What does that mean?¡±

    ¡°That means that I am biologically immortal. I will age until I am around 21 or 22. And then remain that way. For centuries or millennia.¡±

 2.62 Plenty little Shipies

    We now had at least some information about the enemy. Even if only the codenames of their agents in the 15 biggest cities of the USA.

    However, there it ended for now. Even using the armada of quantum computing units that Warden had at her disposal, it would take days, maybe weeks before we would manage to break the encryption on the first of the other crystals.

    While it was not the newest encryption scheme, from what we could tell it was very good.

    One of the techs had the brilliant idea of tracing the physical network, as it was literal fiber optic cables running from point to point.

    To that extent, a Clotho would, barely, fit through the conduit the cable was running through. Until it hit the NBC protection. Another dead end, this time literally.

    In the end, I saw no point in sitting on tenterhooks in the security office waiting for Warden to finish, and I was not the only one. Ramon and Enrique were busy tailoring the Mk. VI for Ramon, while most of the other personnel here were working with Calliope to improve our firewalls and ICE.

    To be fair, I had Calliope, running on one of Warden¡¯s hidden super Grendels, going over all of my personal toys. By then, I had already given most of my utilities over to our cybersecurity. Except for the big hitters.

    Balrog, Enola Gay, Tsar, Newton, and The Lamb remained in my private collection. Mostly. Considering that Warden was essentially our chief of cybersecurity we naturally had them available to defend our networks and computers. At least in theory. In practice, only the Balrog was even considered for that, for obvious reasons.

    That left me without an obvious task again, and I spent the rest of Tuesday, as well as all of Wednesday ruling out another few quantum fields. I was by now at 16 fields at least basically explained, and the numbers were rising.

    On Thursday, I was ready at 8 in the morning and met virtually with Michael and Naveen.

    In the VR, Michael greeted me effusively, hugging me, much to my irritation.

    ¡°Ok, what¡¯s wrong? Why do you act this way?¡±

    I might be bad at reading people, and here in VR any cues might be muted even more, but it was clear to see that Michael was¡­ embarrassed.

    Naveen, who was his usual calm, collected self, sighed and rolled his eyes.

    ¡°He is trying to butter you up so that you don¡¯t explode when we are talking to the design team?¡±

    I frowned and looked back at Michael.

    ¡°Why?¡±

    ¡°Well, you know¡­ it is¡­¡±

    Naveen blew out a sharp breath and threw up his arms.

    ¡°For god¡¯s sake, it is not the end of the world. And it is my fault anyway. So yes, Michael and I have hired who we think will be the commander of our navy, when it is built.

    He is a brilliant ship tactician, a bit down on his luck as he is an old mercenary and not the easiest person to get along with.

    And he will question you being in the meeting.¡±

    I raised an eyebrow and looked at Naveen.

    ¡°So¡­ business as usual?¡±

    ¡°What do you mean business as usual?¡±

    ¡°My presence is almost always questioned. Heck, Ralcon demanded I be there, and then questioned my presence. So nothing new here.¡±

    Another sigh, this time from both of them, and then Naveen answered:

    ¡°The problem is that Captain Murdock is an ageist and sexist.¡±

    I cocked my head. It had to be pretty bad for them to explicitly warn me of his attitude. Worse than anybody else I met. And that list included exalted persons like ¡®Dr.¡¯ Harrold Symmonds or William Henderson. Murdock had to be in a league of his own.

    ¡°In other words, you hired somebody who will most likely dismiss anything and everything I say?¡±

    When he nodded, I blinked a few times.

    ¡°Why the frick did you do that?¡±

    Naveen sighed. Again.

    ¡°Because he is good. There are not that many mercenaries with warship experience that are also honorable and willing to hire on for a corporation.¡±

    ¡°Was he the only one?¡±

    ¡°No, but he was the best.¡±

    I closed my eyes and shook my head softly.

    ¡°Do you think he will not work with me?¡±

    ¡°I think he will dismiss you at first. After that¡­ I can¡¯t say.¡±

    I looked at Michael, and then back at Naveen.

    ¡°If he is so good, why is he willing to work for us? We are just starting out.¡±

    Naveen shrugged.

    ¡°The Royal Oak, his ship, got an unlucky hit in the Senegalese rebellion. Broke her spine.¡±

    The Senegalese rebellion was one of the semipermanent war zones, where the people of the Senegal province rebelled against the UNAN. I was aware enough to know that it was a situation that provided much employment for mercenaries. On both sides as the rebels were ¡®generously¡¯ supported by several corporations.

    That alone did not allow me to estimate how this Captain Murdock was as a person.

    I honestly, did not know enough about warships to gauge the significance of that broken spine though.

    Thus my next question:

    ¡°And this spine is not repairable?¡±

    ¡°It is, but not economical. The Royal Oak is an old Peregrine class destroyer.¡±

    When I looked at him expectantly, he elaborated:

    ¡°She is nearly 100 years old. Fuck, most modern corvettes are stronger. It was only Murdock¡¯s ability that made his work viable at all. But it would cost more to repair her than she would be worth in full working condition.¡±

    So he had lost his ship.

    ¡°And if he is that good, how could it happen that she was hit so badly?¡±

    ¡°As I said, unlucky hit. A meter to either side and it would have been negligible damage. But it was a deflected shot that hit a spot where a previous hit by a cruiser removed the armor.¡±

    That, I understod. Sometimes things just happened.

    ¡°Well, I for sure hope that he can overcome his ageism and sexism.¡±

    It took a moment, from our accelerated perspective, to set up the connection, but moments later, we each connected to one of the Incarnates we were using.

    Unlike the meeting with Mr. Sharpes, who by the way still had not sent anything useful, the integrated holoprojector showed my real face on the robot body.

    I found my consciousness in a room with eight people. And two other Incarnates.

    There was a clear divide into three distinct groupings.

    On the end of the table, opposite from us, was what clearly was the administration team of the yard. Headed by a middle-aged Asian man, in a smart, if for my taste way too modern, business suit, flanked by a small woman of Mediterranean descent on one side, and a big, almost hulking, black man with a shaved head. And glasses. Absurdly small glasses.

    On the from my perspective left side of the table was a group that simply screamed tech. Three men of indiscernible ancestry, most likely spacers.

    Likely the engineers and naval architects.

    Yes, they were in some sort of suites, but they were ill-fitting, crumbled, and very cheap. They had each of them a portable computer, some tablets, and heaps of plasfilm in front on the table.

    On the other side, we had two men, one with red and white hair that could only be described as¡­ wild, with an equally colored, and equally wild beard, wearing something that could be, with some fantasy, described as a uniform.

    The base of it was, I think, royal blue, though it was hard to be sure. There were so many gold and white accessories and ornaments, that it was possible for the base color to be white or gold either.

    It was, in general, what I thought a fantasy version of an 18<sup>th</sup>-century grand admiral would wear.

    The other man looked as if he was of Southeast Asian descent. Somewhat dark-skinned, but not enough to be labeled as black, with visible epicanthic folds. And neon blue hair, hanging down in several braids. Though his uniform was¡­ even wilder. Yes, the base of it was probably based on what his companion was wearing. But it also sported trimmings in all the colors of the rainbow.

    Both of them were openly carrying pistols attached to their belts and a sword of a sort.

    In front of the redheaded man, on the table, was a hat. No, that is not quite right. This thing was to a hat as is the Taj Mahal to a housing project. It probably had started out as a tricorn. Again in royal blue. Its rim was furred, and three enormous feathers were sticking out of it, all of them in pink.

    Oh, and one can¡¯t forget the gold insignia.

    The Asian man instead was ¡®just¡¯ wearing a rainbow bandanna.

    I had the vague feeling that I was looking at Captain Murdock and his first officer. No idea where I got that from.

    The Asian man at the head of the table, well, or better the other side, as the table was nearly square, stood up and made a small bow.

    ¡°Welcome to the Limawan yard. I am Ho¨¤ng Ch¨ª Khang, director of this esteemed station. We are greeting our honorable guests.¡±

    I heard Michael sigh and I felt some irritation from him, despite the Incarnate not having much expression.

    Fortunately, he did not have to say anything.

    ¡°Ch¨ª, they are not guests. They are the owners. Kemit is no longer the owner, and Bai ran the yard into the ground. Accept it already!¡±

    The woman at Ch¨ª¡¯s side looked thoroughly annoyed, and her hand made some movements as if to slap her boss, but then balled into a fist while she closed her eyes to calm down.

    Then she turned to us.

    ¡°Forgive him. He is a friend of the previous owner, Limawan Kemit. Yes, it is nepotism, but he mostly did a well enough job, until Kemit¡¯s son Bai¡­ he got into Sunburn.¡±

    Sunburn was one of the things that made me glad that as a Pure, I had nearly no drugs that could affect me.

    Sunburn had been a Panacea project. Like so often. One that they kept secret of course. It was extremely addictive, for Mongrels. At first, it created a sort of euphoria that no other drug could compete with. The side effects were that it slowly burned out the receptors it docked with, making increasingly higher doses necessary. Along with that, it reduced impulse control and long-term planning.

    And if one tried to get off it¡­ not a pleasurable sight. If I remember correctly, only about 2% of those who even tried made it. Another 40% or so gave up when the pain got too bad. The rest¡­ they died.

    Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

    That explained why the yard was for sale. Panacea had probably made millions from this poor son.

    While all that shot through my mind, Michael nodded.

    ¡°I understand, but it is time that he gets on with it. This is now the Enki yard.¡±

    She nodded slowly.

    ¡°We all know that sir, but Ch¨ª¡­ he is a bit stubborn in that regard.¡±

    ¡°Whitiver, can we git oan wi'' it?¡±

    It took me a moment to decipher what the redheaded man had said. It was certainly a barely understandable dialect of standard English.

    Still, he was right.

    ¡°I would welcome that as well.¡±

    The black man looked clearly confused from the probably Captain to me and back, and a short look into the round told me that he was not the only one.

    Thus I sighed and translated:

    ¡°He said ¡®Whatever, can we get on with it?¡¯.¡±

    That in turn made the two military men look surprised, and the Asian man asked astonished:

    ¡°You can understand him? Just like that?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It took a bit, but yes.¡±

    ¡°I''m fair scunnered aboot that, lassie.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°You can¡¯t tell me that you use that dialect when you are commanding in a battle.¡±

    ¡°And whit maks ye hink that?¡±

    It took me a tiny bit longer to get it this time, but the context made it possible.

    ¡°Because in battle seconds count. And whatever you are talking, not many others do it.¡±

    He grinned from ear to ear, and answered in understandable, albeit heavily accented English:

    ¡°You got that right, lass. But, what does a little one like you here in this meeting?¡±

    I was prevented from answering by Michael taking charge of the meeting.

    ¡°How about instead we introduce each other? If that does not clear up what anybody does here, you can ask again. Now, Mr. Ho¨¤ng, if you would introduce your staff, please?¡±

    The redhead''s eye twitched for a bit before he grinned and nodded. The director though looked as if Michael had slapped him.

    To be fair, he did that since Michael had insisted on calling this the Enki yards.

    But after a few seconds, he sulkingly complied.

    ¡°As you wish. On my right, we have Samira Rouhani, our operations manager. She runs the day-to-day operations of the yard. What there is of it right now.¡±

    The last was said accusingly, and both of his friends rolled their eyes, while Mr. Ho¨¤ng continued:

    ¡°On my left, we have Abou Hama. Despite what he looks like, he is the head of the technical staff. Engineers, workers, and so on.¡±

    Both Samira and Abou nodded politely.

    Then Mr. Ho¨¤ng gestured towards the techies.

    ¡°Here we have Mr. Victor Botont, the leader of our ship designers, Mr. Lemar Crombie, and Mr. Joaquim al-Jamal.¡±

    Michael nodded.

    ¡°Pleasure to meet you. I am Michael Walker, CEO of Enki, the corporation that bought this yard with its station. To my left, we have Colonel Naveen Upreti, our chief security officer, and commander of our military, and to my right is Dr. Vivian DuClare, our resident genius and chief technological officer.¡±

    He made a small pause.

    ¡°Also the majority owner of Enki.¡±

    He then nodded toward the¡­ military men and the redhead nodded back.

    ¡°I am Captain Travis Murdock, late of the Royal Oak. I have been hired to organize the navy for this new corporation. On my side is my first officer, Commander Aang Mao.¡±

    Commander Aang nodded at that, and Mr. Ho¨¤ng tried to wrest control of the meeting back to himself.

    ¡°Now, we are here to¡­¡±

    Only to be interrupted by Captain Murdock.

    ¡°I still want to know why the little one is here.¡±

    When Michael opened his mouth, I lifted my hand to take this over.

    ¡°There are multiple facets of that.

    First, as Michael, Mr. Walker, said, I am considered a genius. Everything Enki produces is based on my inventions. And a few things we don¡¯t sell as well.

    Second, my apparent age is not quite correct. I had a jack since I was 15. Since then, I spent the majority of my days in an accelerated frame of consciousness. So while I am biologically what you call a little one, mentally, and from experience, I am the oldest person at this table.¡±

    Commander Aang frowned.

    ¡°Accelerated frame of consciousness?¡±

    ¡°Virtual reality accelerates the thinking processes. It is a complicated thing that we still do not fully understand, but it generally depends on the native intelligence, the quality of the interface, and the quality of the computer.

    The averagely intelligent human with the most basic jack and a cheap computer can experience a compression of around 20:1. They experience 20 hours for every hour in real-time.¡±

    I smiled widely.

    ¡°I think it is obvious that I am not averagely intelligent, and I have the very best interface and computer available.¡±

    He looked at me for a moment and then nodded.

    ¡°Ok, that explains that. But what I don¡¯t get is why this meeting at all.¡±

    Michael asked pointedly:

    ¡°What do you not understand about it?¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t get me wrong, but there are tons of warship designs out there. We could just license an ABAS or Kawamoto design and be done with it.¡±

    Michael slowly nodded.

    ¡°We could do that. But we shouldn¡¯t. And we won¡¯t. Tell me Commander, what is the strongest ship weapon existing?¡±

    Aang frowned, but answered:

    ¡°That is easy. The Type 72 12cm naval rail gun.¡±

    Michael continued:

    ¡°The best secondary ship weapon?¡±

    ¡°That would be the ABAS Mk. 133 6cm rail guns.¡±

    ¡°Point defense?¡±

    Aang thought for a moment and then shrugged:

    ¡°Here it is a bit complicated. That depends on what you defend against. Most would say the Kawamoto Type 98 15mm CIWS, others say it is the Vandermeer Mk. 17 12mm Gauss. Personally, I think the Burgmeister Laser-Flak 32 2cm PDLC is the best.¡±

    Michael nodded.

    ¡°Yes, that is what nearly everybody tells me. You are wrong though. In all cases. The best ship weapon is the Enki Mk. 1 medium grav gun. The best secondary weapon is the Enki Mk. 1 Proton lance. And the best point defense weapon is the Enki Mk. 1 light PD grav gun.¡±

    Murdock snorted.

    ¡°That is easy to say. But harder to convince.¡±

    As an answer, Michael turned to Naveen.

    ¡°Have all of them been vetted by your counterintelligence team?¡±

    Meaning his psionics, but we tended not to say it so bluntly.

    ¡°They have. Unfortunately, Mr. Ho¨¤ng did not pass fully.¡±

    ¡°Why that?¡±

    ¡°He still¡­ is loyal to his deceased friend and previous owner of this yard.¡±

    For a few moments, everything was silent, and then Michael nodded abruptly.

    ¡°I understand. That is unfortunate. Mr. Ho¨¤ng, I have to ask you to leave this room.¡±

    That, understandably, did not sit well with Mr. Ho¨¤ng.

    ¡°What? Why? That is an outrage.¡±

    ¡°The why is simple, Mr. Ho¨¤ng. We can not trust you to keep our secrets. That means we can¡¯t let you know them. But we have to discuss some of those secrets now. So again, please leave the room!¡±

    It was clear that it was not a request, and after some sulking and grumbling, Mr. Ho¨¤ng stood up and slowly left the room. As soon as the door was closed, Naveen took over.

    ¡°We will publish the specifications of those weapons in a few months, but the published specs won¡¯t be the real ones. I am sure that you agree with us that it is good to keep some aces in reserve, Captain.

    For the medium grav gun, the published specs say that it can accelerate a three-ton projectile to 3988 m/s.¡±

    That made both Murdock and Aang recoil in surprise.

    ¡°That is¡­ hardcore.¡± The exclamation of Aang was a tiny bit funny.

    ¡°The point here is that it is a three-ton projectile because we decided to use lead. It is a gun that works with gravity, so the speed of the projectile is not impacted by the mass of it.

    We could use tungsten for eight times the cost and get a five-ton projectile. Or osmium for 13 times the cost to get nearly six tons.

    But compare that to the 750kg projectile of the Type 72 accelerated to 3372 m/s. The grav gun delivers nearly 48 giga Joule of energy or nearly 11.5 tons of TNT. The Type 72 on the other hand only delivers 8.5 giga Joule. That alone makes the Mk. 1 5.5 times stronger than the Type 72.

    But there is more. The Mk. 1 can fire every 11 seconds, while the Type 72 can fire only every 26 seconds. In other words, for every shot the Type 72 fires, the Mk. 1 fires 2.6. Together that gives the Mk. 1 13.3 times the throw weight over time compared to the Type 72.¡±

    Both the navy men were shocked silent, but Naveen was not done.

    ¡°Remember, that will be the official specs. The real specs are a bit¡­ different. The mass of the projectile stays the same. There is no need to fiddle with that. But the speed¡­ is something different. At full power, the grav gun accelerates the projectile to 9465 m/s.

    That makes it a 268.75 giga Joule projectile. Or 5.6 times the official strength. Or 31.5 times the strength of the Type 72. Per shot. It retains the 2.6 times higher cadence. I am sure you can imagine what 64 tons of TNT of kinetic energy can do with an enemy ship. A ship only designed to withstand two tons of TNT.¡±

    It was silent for a moment before Murdock slowly nodded, and Naveen continued:

    ¡°The proton lance is a particle beam weapon. It is a continuous stream of energy. 3.8 giga Joules per second. Or 3.8 giga Watt. In other words, a single proton lance, a secondary weapon, delivers as much energy into the target every two seconds as the Type 72 every 26.

    Finally, the light PD grav gun uses a 500g projectile and accelerates it officially to 3608 m/s, but in reality can reach the same 9465 m/s as the medium grav gun. Only it is optimized to shoot a veritable stream of projectiles. Its cadence is 201808 shots per minute or more than 3350 shots per second.¡±

    Aang let out a soft whistle before he spoke.

    ¡°Are those numbers real?¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°They are. We need to use special munition to use the full speed for the grav guns in the atmosphere, and that increases the price tag by around .6% for the medium gun, and by 37% for the light gun.¡±

    Murdock stroked his beard.

    ¡°How long can these proton lances fire continuously?¡±

    Naveen answered before I could.

    ¡°That depends on the infrastructure delivering the energy. As long as the couplings don¡¯t overheat, it can fire.¡±

    To which Michael added:

    ¡°Which is another reason why we will have to design our own ships. No ship currently available can support those demands, and frankly, the munitions handling system is just not up to par for what we need. If we were going that route, even if we put our weapons on the hulls designed by somebody else, we could get short bursts of intense firepower and then need to wait for the ready magazines to be refilled.¡±

    ¡°I see. Yes, that is a good reason.¡±

    Michael then continued:

    ¡°There are other reasons. For example, an average destroyer has around 12000 kilometers of optical fibers installed. Each runs in a conduit that a diameter of 7.5mm. That alone is nearly 530 m3 of space. Then there are another 1500 m3 of accessways, hatches, and all the rest of the infrastructure needed for it. More than 2000 m3 that can be completely eliminated by using Q-links.

    Or the new grav coils. They are 400 times stronger than the old ones. An average destroyer has around 6000 m3 of grav coils. If we decide to use five times the strength of coils than what is usual today, we can cut that back to 75m3. And those are not all of our tricks.

    We estimate that with the technology we already have available, and Vivian here is working on new stuff all the time, we can save around 5.7% of the volume on any warship. 5.7% we can use for other things.¡±

    ¡°Bugger me sideways, ah''m pure gobsmacked¡± Even I could not fully decipher what Murdock had said, but from his tone, he was amazed.

    Abou cleared his throat.

    ¡°That explains why you need to design new ship classes. But the yard is far from operational. Why this meeting now?¡±

    Naveen snorted.

    ¡°Honestly, mostly to provide Vivian with the framework to work on the ships for real. Even if only the most basic framework.¡±

    ¡°Yer puttin'' that much trust in this lassie?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°English please, and obviously they do. And this is only the first meeting. Getting to know the principal people of the team, and getting the basics cleared.¡±

    ¡°Fine. What do you know about warships then?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Frankly, not much. I know they have more fusactors, armor, and weapons, but it is not my usual area of interest.¡±

    Murdock and Aang were not the only ones who frowned.

    The techie team did as well. But then Murdock sighed.

    ¡°Well, at least you¡¯re honest about it. So, let¡¯s start then.¡±

    He thought for a moment.

    ¡°I think we best begin with ship types. You know the difference between a ship class and a ship type?¡±

    I had to smile at that.

    ¡°I am not that far removed from it, so yes. A ship class is the specific design and some of its variations. The type is the general group of ships. Like destroyer is a ship type while, if I got that right, the Royal Oak was a Peregrine, with Peregrine the class. Which denotes the ship''s design.¡±

    Murdock nodded.

    ¡°Yup, got that right. Now then, what do you know about ship types?¡±

    ¡°Mostly just the names, and that corvettes are smaller than destroyers, which are smaller than cruisers, which in turn are smaller than battleships. Somewhere in there are frigates, but I have no clue where.¡±

    Aang rolled his eyes, but Murdock nodded.

    ¡°You are right, but that is an extremely limited overview.¡±

    He shook his head.

    ¡°So let¡¯s start at the beginning. First, a ship is anything with a fusactor, and/or fusion reactor if it is interplanetary.

    Anything smaller is a boat, shuttle, or skimmer, depending on what¡¯s its planned use.

    The sizes go from smallest to biggest:

    Corvette, frigate, destroyer, light cruiser, heavy cruiser, battle cruiser, and finally battleship.

    Don¡¯t worry about the battle cruiser. It is at this moment purely theoretical.

    Now corvettes are short-range specialist warships. Short-range means that it is designed to be no more than two to four weeks away from resupply. Be that a base or a collier.¡±

    I frowned, and he quickly added.

    ¡°A collier is a freighter set up to resupply warships on the move.¡±

    I nodded and he continued:

    ¡°Specialist means that their design is concentrated on doing one thing, and ignoring most other things while putting the remaining objectives as secondary.

    For example, a recon or scout corvette is optimized as a sensor carrier. Most of its volume is used for sensors and computers to interpret the gain from those sensors. It has enough weapons to defend itself from missiles or a couple of gunboats, but that¡¯s it.

    A com-corvette on the other hand is set up as the information hub of a formation. Most of its volume is com equipment, while its sensors are just enough to keep it alive within the squadron or fleet.

    There are numerous purposes that a corvette can be designed for, and we can go into it later.

    A frigate is for all purposes a long-range corvette. Theoretically, that means that it is set up to operate for a few months without resupply. Practically that means that frigates are the interplanetary version of corvettes.

    They have ion drives and large fusion torches, as well as at least one fusion reactor. They have a bit larger crew compared to a corvette to give more redundancy.

    The rest is like the corvette though.

    A destroyer is a short-range multi-purpose warship. They have two or more purposes that they emphasize. Otherwise, they are just larger, heavier-armed, and armored corvettes. Most are optimized for direct combat and sensors so that they can operate independently of any formation.

    But that is not always the case. Some are combat and point defense, or sensors and communication. I am sure you get the gist here.¡±

    I nodded. So far it was not that hard to understand.

    ¡°Light cruisers are to the destroyer what the frigate is to the corvette, so nothing new here. The heavy cruiser is the universalist of the navies. It can do everything. Not everything equally well, but it is capable of doing any task that a corvette might do. Though in many positions it would be a waste to use a heavy cruiser.

    They could do it though. They are also designed to operate independently from any formation, but they are often the core of them if formations are set up.

    Battle cruisers, as I said, are theoretical. Nobody has ever made one. They are the long-range version of the heavy cruiser.

    That leaves the battleships. While they can also do everything a warship might have to do, they are ruthlessly optimized for the slugfest. Dishing out damage and receiving it without going down.¡±

    Ok, that was a logical progression. I thought the use of battle cruiser for a long-range version of the heavy cruiser was a bit strained, but whatever.

    It was at this moment that Lemar Crombie interjected:

    ¡°You forgot the carrier.¡±

    Murdock sighed.

    ¡°Those folks want to set up a navy, not an invasion force. They don¡¯t need any assault carriers.¡±

    That though did nothing to deter Crombie.

    ¡°I did not mean assault carriers, I meant carriers. For fighter crafts. Single-seaters, or maybe two-seaters.¡±

    My ¡°No!¡± came out at the same time as Murdock¡¯s: ¡°Are you daft?¡±

    We looked at each other, and he gestured towards me:

    ¡°Ladies first.¡±

    Honestly, I was wondering why Naveen had warned me of Murdock. So far, he had questioned my age but accepted the explanation without comments, and did not seem to mind that I was female either.

    ¡°As Captain Murdock just stated, anything smaller than a corvette has no fusactor. I don¡¯t know that much about warships, but I know that weapons take an immense amount of energy to operate for a given measure of time.¡±

    Murdock snorted.

    ¡°Hell, I have not even thought about that. My point is that in the old wet navies, aircraft carriers worked because their fighters operated in another dimension and were an order of magnitude faster than the ships.

    With grav ships, they operate in the same number of dimensions and are not an iota faster. Additionally, the point defense systems designed to intercept rail gun slugs make short work with fighters.

    Nope, a fighter is just an expensive coffin.¡±

 2.63: Keep a cool head

    It seemed as if Mr. Crombie wanted to protest more, but Mr. Botont grabbed his arm and jerked hard, followed by whispering something into his ear.

    It did not seem as if Mr. Botont was in any way happy about Mr. Crombie¡¯s interjection.

    In a way, I could even understand where Lemar was coming from. There was still this romanticized nostalgia about the queen of the capital ships, the aircraft carrier.

    Unfortunately, the carrier had gone the way of the dodo. Simply because fighters, or bombers, provided absolutely no advantage in the age of the grav ship. And many disadvantages.

    The rest of us looked at the two arguing in whispers before Captain Murdock rolled his eyes and turned back to me.

    ¡°Noo, lassie, div ye ken whit''s important in a wershup?¡±

    Again, it took me a couple of seconds to understand what he was saying, and I cocked my head raising an eyebrow.

    ¡°I thought we had agreed on using English. And I can only guess. I would say, in descending order, the weapons, the armor, the sensors, the computer systems.¡±

    Murdock nodded.

    ¡°Thought so. At least you know that you are only guessing. You are completely wrong by the way.

    There are several levels of system hierarchy. Not just on warships, but there are more.

    First core systems. Those are systems that keep the crew alive. Live support, emergency energy, airlocks, emergency coms.

    Then level one systems. Those are the things that transform the ship from an immobile habitat to a ship.

    Main energy, navigational sensors, nav computer, propulsion, and steering, communication beyond emergency.

    On level two are systems that protect the ship. Point defense, armor, and approach sensors.

    On level three are systems that allow the ship to fulfill its primary function. These are offensive weapons, targeting sensors, C3 equipment, recon sensors, or whatever else the ship needs to do what it¡¯s intended for.

    Finally, level four are systems that make it comfortable, improve the ergonomics or similar. Like a full galley, working showers, and VI assistants.

    In other words, things that the ship can still be a warship without, even if it becomes a chore.¡±

    Murdock stopped here, and Aang continued:

    ¡°The thing here is the redundancy engineered into the systems. There will be compromises. That is unavoidable. But wherever possible, those compromises need to fall in favor of the lower-level systems.

    If it is a choice between compromising a level four system, so that it might be a bit more vulnerable, but making a core system safer, make the core system safer.¡±

    I nodded slowly.

    ¡°So¡­ multiple algae tanks for air purifying, along with emergency air scrubbers, water purifiers, emergency energy cells, and heating systems?¡±

    Murdock snorted.

    ¡°Close. You forgot the air circulation system that needs multiple redundancies, which have to be able to be isolated from each other.

    But more important, heating is a relatively small part. Cooling is much more important.¡±

    It seemed as if my surprise about this statement was plainly visible, as he chuckled.

    ¡°Unless you plan to build a ship that exclusively operates in an atmosphere, it will spend some of its time in the vacuum of space. You have to expect it to have to fight a battle there.

    You have at least two fusactors producing in the triple-digit gigawatt range of power. Anything beyond a corvette or frigate will have more than two.

    We are talking about between 300 and 700 GW for a single corvette. And 500 to 1500 GW for a destroyer.

    All that power will produce heat. Heat that has to be removed. And unlike the average civilian grav ships, which only have between 25 and 100 GW, a warship can not have nice, effective, and fragile, permanent radiators fixed to the hull.¡±

    He made a short pause.

    ¡°Those are the very first things that the enemy will target. If you take out the radiators, you take out the ability to fire the weapons effectively.

    That means a large part of the volume on board is filled with some big thermal mass and folded radiators that can be expanded after the battle.¡±

    I frowned. Oh, I got where he was going. But seriously, folded radiators? Probably with some thermal transfer fluid running through them?

    That did not sound very effective.

    ¡°Ye dinnae believe me hen?¡±

    ¡°Hu? Oh no, that¡¯s not it. I am wondering why somebody uses something like folded radiators. Those things have to be horribly inefficient.¡±

    ¡°They''re, but there''s nane better.¡±

    For real? Had nobody ever thought about those problems?

    ¡°From the top of my head, I can think of two better methods.¡±

    That brought out an exclamation from Mr. Botont.

    ¡°Seriously? People have been working on this since the first spaceships. There are no better ways!¡±

    I sighed and rolled my eyes, while Michael let out a small chuckle, followed by an:

    ¡°And here it comes¡­!¡±

    I had already lifted ¡®my¡¯ arm to slap him on the back of his head when I remembered that he was using an Incarnate, same as me. No point in doing that to the machine. Instead, I just shook my head.

    ¡°Get real. Of course, there are better options. You do know how to move heat from one object to another, right?¡±

    When he nodded, I continued.

    ¡°Now, imagine that instead of moving it into some thermal mass, we move it into some lasing material. Use the energy to excite it. And then let it beam the energy out as a laser beam into space.

    Sure, it will generate additional heat, but way less than it will beam out.¡±

    For a few moments, everybody was silent, before Ms. Rouhani turned to Mr. Botont and asked softly:

    ¡°Could that really work?¡±

    To his credit, Botont thought about it a bit longer and then nodded.

    ¡°We need to experiment with it, but basically I can¡¯t see why not.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ why has nobody done that before?¡±

    I could only shrug.

    ¡°That is something I have seen in a plethora of disciplines. After the Great War¡­ people stopped trying new things.¡±

    Michael elaborated:

    ¡°It is as if people can no longer think outside of the box. It might have something to do with the average IQ falling by nearly 9% since then.

    Vivian on the other hand¡­ I don¡¯t know if she even knows what a box is in that context, much less where it is, and for sure she won¡¯t be confined by it.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°The worst thing is that this is not my idea. Science fiction authors brought it forward in the 9<sup>th</sup> decade of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. And it is not that complicated either. It is a sad testament to how far we have fallen as a species.¡±

    I heard a clank when Michael¡¯s Incarnate placed its hand on my Incarnat¡¯s shoulder. I valued the gesture, but the situation, as well as Michael¡¯s expression, made me laugh hard.

    After a few moments, when this sudden mirth had spent itself, I just shook my head, and Michael, who had chuckled as well, said:

    ¡°What I wanted to say was that you are working hard, and successfully, to bring us back on course. You and the other K4. We have made more progress in the last half year than in the 100 years prior.¡±

    Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.

    I sighed.

    ¡°It is still a sad outlook. Do you even understand what you are saying? That the whole future of humanity, our whole legacy, hangs on the deeds of just twelve people?¡±

    Murdock cleared his throat.

    ¡°As braw as that wis, we should bide oan.¡±

    Michael looked confused at me, and I sighed:

    ¡°He said ¡®as nice as that was, we should move on.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, I think so too. But sometimes we have to pat our genius on the back so she doesn¡¯t get too morose.¡±

    I shook my head and cleared my mind.

    ¡°To get back to cooling, the second method is, admittedly, only viable thanks to Enki¡¯s new technology. Even if it is also something Sci-Fi authors had predicted in the late 20<sup>th</sup> century.

    The plasma-radiator¡±

    Most of the participants at the table looked at me with a mixture of confusion and rejection, with the non-technical people mostly falling on the side of confusion, while the technical people seemed more to outright reject my sentence.

    Only Abou Hama seemed to take what I had said seriously, though even he was first a bit confused, and then showed some dismissal before he finally settled in contemplation.

    He rubbed his shaved head, and then softly asked:

    ¡°You think they are possible at all?¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°The reason why they were not viable before now was how limited our ability to create strong magnetic fields was. The principle itself is sound. But what you and your technicians don¡¯t know is that the technology that makes the proton lance possible is to electromagnetic fields what the grav coil is to gravity fields.¡±

    Samira frowned and then looked from Abou to me and back.

    ¡°Would you mind explaining for the slower children what this plasma radiator is?¡±

    Abou chuckled.

    ¡°Oh, Sammie, it is pure science fiction. At least I believed so before now. You know that in space, the only practical way to remove the heat out of a system, be it a ship, station, probe, or whatever, is radiation.

    It is a relatively slow and inefficient way and mostly depends on the heat differential and the surface area of the radiating element.

    That is why we always try to increase the heat of the heat transfer fluid to pump through the radiators that are as big as possible.

    Well, the other way, in most cases only usable in an emergency, is to pump the heat into some object and throw that object out of the ship. That is obviously limited as you only have so much stuff you can throw away.

    That is by the way how the plasma cannons came to be. They were emergency plasma release systems until somebody got the idea to release the heat into the face of their enemy.¡±

    Oh, right plasma cannons on ships were a thing. Devastatingly at short ranges, but extremely limited otherwise.

    ¡°The point here is that while heat transfer fluid can be a few 100¡ã Celsius hot, plasma can have several thousand, or even million degrees, and it will take that amount of heat out of the ship with it.

    The idea of the plasma radiator is the logical next step on that. We don¡¯t use the plasma cannons to expel heat outside of an emergency, or combat, because the amount of plasma is limited.

    But what if we can shoot out the plasma, and when it is cooled down, we capture it again and pull it back into the ship?

    We can then pump additional heat into it and shoot it out again.¡±

    Samira tilted her head and was visibly confused.

    ¡°Ok, that sounds¡­ logical. And relatively easy. Why don¡¯t we do that already?¡±

    Mr. al-Jamal scoffed.

    ¡°Because we can¡¯t capture it again. It sounds nice in theory, but in praxis, it just doesn¡¯t work.¡±

    Abou shook his head.

    ¡°You should try to listen, Quim. And think. Just think for a moment. What is this proton lance?¡±

    Mr. al-Jamal shrugged.

    ¡°I am no weapon-tech. I have no clue how it works.¡±

    Abou slumbed a bit in disappointment.

    ¡°It is in the fucking name! It is nothing more than a run-of-the-mill proton beam. We had that technology for more than 300 years! And nobody got the idea to use it as a weapon.

    Why?¡±

    Mr. Crombie frowned but asked:

    ¡°Because they were weak ass stuff?¡±

    ¡°Exactly. They were weak ass. Because the electromagnetic field necessary to make them strong enough to use them as weapons was simply impossible. The very same reason why plasma radiators won¡¯t work.

    But now somebody created a proton beam strong enough to deliver as much energy in two seconds as the strongest railgun in 26.¡±

    He made a pause and looked his tech staff in the eyes, one after another.

    ¡°In other words, they developed a way to make the magnetic field strong enough to use a weak ass proton beam as a weapon.¡±

    Mr. Botont frowned.

    ¡°How? I thought the strongest magnets made were around 120 Tesla.¡±

    Abou sighed.

    ¡°You are asking the wrong person. I only know that if those proton lances exist, and the people now paying our princely salary all seem to believe it does, then there have to be some serious breakthroughs in magnetic technology.¡±

    Then he looked expectantly at me, and after a few seconds, I sighed.

    ¡°Fine. Keep in mind that unlike with grav coils, we do not have a unit for the field here. But the proton lances work by the equivalent of a 5000 Kepler grav coil.

    The electromagnetic field is generated between the ends of the coil, and already in the direction we want it to be, so all of the field strength goes into amplifying the EM field. That produces an EM field of 13.5 kilotesla.¡±

    As an answer, Mr. Botont began to cough, and when he managed to get it under control, he gasped:

    ¡°The equivalent of 5000 Kepler? How many millions does one of those proton lances cost?¡±

    Michael sighed.

    ¡°You are aware that Enki sells new grav coils, right? Significantly stronger and cheaper. 5000 Kepler in the new coils is the same size as 12.5 Kepler of the old coils.¡±

    I continued:

    ¡°And even under that aspect, they are considerably cheaper. They cost as much as a five Kepler Kobashigawa coil.

    And these EM-coils are even cheaper. They are mostly made from Iron. I¡¯ve not used structural carbon here as iron is even cheaper. It has roughly two kg of iron, along with 52g of sulfur, and 24g of molybdenum.

    The expensive part with around 80% of the cost of it is the molybdenum, but all in all, one of those coils has $1.5 of materials in it. Or 37 centibonds. With manufacturing, all in all, one of those coils costs less than two ITB.¡±

    Abou was frowning again.

    ¡°I am not sure that 13.5 kt is enough to make the plasma radiator work.¡±

    ¡°You might be right. Then we will splurge and use a ten ITB coil. And we get 131 kt. Or how about a 100 ITB coil, and we get 1.97 megatesla.

    You can¡¯t tell me that you can build one of those folding radiators for 100 ITB.¡±

    ¡°No, you are right. If this stuff is that scalable, then yes, plasma radiators are a realistic option. And probably the best option for a warship.¡±

    Commander Aang hmmed.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. Those things sound like they are really bright. You could as well put a shoot me here sign on them.¡±

    Abou chuckled.

    ¡°Sure they are. They will be nearly sun bright when they exit the ship. So what? Don¡¯t you think the conventional radiators are easily visible on IR?¡±

    ¡°Yes, but those radiators are not intended for in combat.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Nobody says you have to activate the plasma radiators in combat. But if you do, the enemy will shoot at them. So what, let him.¡±

    ¡°And cripple the ship? Without heat radiation, any ship would be a sitting duck.¡±

    ¡°Commander, we are talking about plasma. What do you think any projectile, or laser beam or whatever will do to it?¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t know, shatter it?¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°No, Commander.

    It will do nothing. At worst it will rip away a bit of the plasma. Only for it to be immediately replaced. Even the main guns of the Nagato Class will not do much more than remove a few grams of plasma, maybe a kg if they are lucky. If we build in enough plasma storage, in place of some of the thermal mass, a Nagato can use those plasma radiators as targets for hours without impacting the cooling capabilities of the ship.¡±

    Abou mused:

    ¡°Will the railgun slug even enter the plasma? I mean, a two-megatesla magnetic field? The eddy currents in the slug will bring it to a near stop while superheating it.¡±

    That took me for a spin. I had completely forgotten about that effect.

    ¡°Huh, I did not think about that.¡±

    Then I turned to Naveen.

    ¡°I guess I can give you your shields.¡±

    Only for Abou to interject:

    ¡°I doubt that. The energy needed to cover a whole ship in a strong enough magnetic field has to be massive. I doubt we can squeeze that out of the onboard fusactors.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°You might be right. And even if, the eddy currents will only work as long as the slug is still a slug and not a cloud of vaporized metal.¡±

    ¡°That should still help to reduce the impact. Yes, they are hot, but single atoms that are considerably slowed down are not much of a problem I think.¡±

    Naveen then shook his head.

    ¡°You are probably right, but unless the ship commander fucked up by the numbers, no metal slug will even reach any magnetic field in a solid state.¡±

    ¡°Daft ye think a captain can magically shift his ship oot o'' th'' road?¡±

    It took Naveen a moment to get what Murdock was saying and then shook his head.

    ¡°First, it would be way better if you used English instead of whatever you are speaking. Yes, Vivian appears to be able to understand you just fine, but she is so smart that we literally are not able to measure her IQ.

    Second, no, I don¡¯t think a captain can make his ship vanish. But we have some technology we have not talked about that can disintegrate solid matter at a distance of two to three kilometers.¡±

    That brought an outcry from Mr. Crombie:

    ¡°That is impossible. You are just making things up now.¡±

    I rolled my eyes and sighed.

    ¡°It is based on the same technology as the proton lance and what I just proposed for the plasma radiators.¡±

    Abou frowned.

    ¡°How can making an electromagnetic field stronger disintegrate matter?¡±

    ¡°It doesn¡¯t. But think about it, grav coils can not just make a gravity field stronger, but also negate it. The same here. And what happens to any matter if the electric charge of the electrons is suddenly not there anymore?¡±

    He nodded slowly.

    ¡°The positive charge of the atom cores will repel each other, while there are no valence bonds anymore. It will become a loose cloud of atoms.¡±

    I nodded as well.

    ¡°A positively charged loose cloud of atoms. Add a standard positive charged plasma rad shield¡­ maybe use the new coils to make that stronger, and it should serve well to blunt any mass driver shot.¡±

    Abou rubbed his scalp again.

    ¡°That¡­ if that thing works it would be an incredible defensive weapon. But that made me just think, the same plasma rad shield would work well to defend against the proton lance as well.¡±

    Naveen chuckled.

    ¡°It will. And we are expecting others to use those rad shields pretty quickly. Virtually every warship already has the necessary hardware installed anyway, they just need to power it up.¡±

    ¡°But that would defeat their use as a secondary weapon.¡±

    ¡°You would think so, but tell me, what is the difference between generating a proton beam and an electron beam?¡±

    ¡°Generally? The source of the particles and the polarity of the accelerator.¡±

    ¡°Exactly. At the push of a button, and within roughly five seconds, our proton lances will become electron lances. Let them use rad shields, it makes no difference.¡±

    Murdock snorted.

    ¡°I am more interested in those disintegrators. If you say they have a reach of two kilometers¡­ they can take the place of plasma weapons as well.¡±

    Michael raised his eyebrows.

    ¡°What do you mean?¡±

    ¡°Plasma weapons may have started out as an emergency cooling system, but they have been established as the knife fighting range killer weapon. They have a range of around 1.5km. In that range, the weapons of a cruiser would take out even a battleship with one broadside. Of course, the battlewagon has its own, even stronger plasma weapons.

    But if those disintegrators¡­¡±

    I interrupted him:

    ¡°We call them disruptors.¡±

    He nodded.

    ¡°Fine, if these disruptors can disintegrate matter at two to three klicks¡­ they are even more devastating than plasma weapons and have a longer range.¡±

    Naveen nodded.

    ¡°Exactly. Naturally, that is a secret of the highest order.¡±

    Samira shook her head.

    ¡°How did we get to weapons again from cooling? However, to get to the topic at hand, I would say we plan with a large enough thermal mass, those cooling lasers, if we can get them to work, and plasma radiators.¡±

    Then she smiled happily.

    ¡°One thing is sure, when those ships activate the radiators, they will be incredibly pretty.¡±

    Aang looked at her confused.

    ¡°What do you mean pretty?¡±

    ¡°What do you think those plasma radiators will look like?

    They will be brilliantly white glowing wings slowly turning into a bright glowing red. Like angel wings of fire.¡±

 2.64: Design Philosophies

    Murdock guffawed loudly and then shook his head laughing.

    ¡°You know, Ms. Rouhani, we are talking about warships. Pretty is not normally a part of the design considerations.¡±

    Mr. al-Jamal scoffed.

    ¡°Tell that to the Meridian line of warships.¡±

    Commander Aang answered patiently:

    ¡°Most serious soldiers don¡¯t count those among warships. They are parade ships. Their primary function is to look pretty and powerful.

    Any serious warship of the same volume will eat the Meridian ship for breakfast and then look for more.¡±

    I tilted my head and looked from Aang to al-Jamal.

    ¡°Meridian line?¡±

    Aang sighed.

    ¡°Meridian is a semi-independent ship design bureau. The ships they design are built by ABAS.¡±

    He laughed coldly.

    ¡°They are the purest form of form over substance.

    The ships are roughly stylized after some predator animal, mostly a raptor.

    Beautiful ships, from an aesthetical point of view. All that at the cost of usability.

    Massively reduced firing arcs, underpowered, overheated, and for their type ludicrously lightly armored.

    The sensors work fine, for anything directly in front of it, but they have multiple dead angles where the ship is essentially blind.

    Basically, they are yachts that pretend to be warships.

    Fuck, I can¡¯t even fault either Meridian or ABAS here. There is a market for those things. Mostly as the ¡®all-important¡¯ personal transport for some CEO or owner of an A-tier corp, or some third-world dictator.¡±

    Murdock shook his head.

    ¡°The problem is that some people in power actually buy into the bullshit that those things are real warships.

    Fuck, even the UNAN had a few in the Senegalese rebellion. They¡¯ve wasted the lives of good men and women to send their showpieces into battle.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°So¡­ no prettying our ships. I am all for that anyway. I don¡¯t see the point of the form-over-function philosophy. Form is fine if one needs it, as long as it does not impact the function.¡±

    ¡°A quine that''s gey canny tae mah liking. Whaur were ye when ah wis young enough tae coort a lassie like yersel''?¡±

    ¡°Probably still a dream of my mother.¡±

    While Murdock, and Aang, seemed pleased about my opinion here, al-Jamal looked as if he had bitten into a lemon.

    Botont tried another time to change our opinions on the matter.

    ¡°But¡­ the aesthetics of any ship are important. Our ships will tell of our ability, of our artistry.¡±

    Naveen growled softly but then answered:

    ¡°Mr. Botont, we are talking about warships. Their function is to dish out and take damage. The only way they need to impress is with their deadliness.

    If we make some prettified warships, no serious customer would come even close to our designs.

    You can reserve your artistic vein to civilian shipping.¡±

    ¡°But freighters are even more drab and boring than warships.¡±

    I was prevented from intervening by Michael.

    ¡°Mr. Botont, this was a yard mostly for pleasure ships. Yachts, passenger ships, anything designed to impress.

    It was not particularly successful in that regard either I might add. That will change in the future when our ships will be just that much better. And then you and the other ¡®artists¡¯ in your staff can live the dream of the yacht designer to the end for all I care.

    Hell, it might even be a good idea to offer some ¡®protected¡¯ yachts, which we will call the prettified pseudo warships.

    As long as we do not market them as serious warships that is.

    But right now, we are here to build up our navy. Our military. The majority owner of our company as well as the intended commanding officer of that navy explicitly stated that they insist on function over form.

    You! Will! Comply! Do I make myself clear? Or do I need to look for a new lead naval architect?¡±

    Botont gulped hard, and I could sweat running down his forehead, but after a few seconds he managed to get out his answer:

    ¡°Y¡­ yes sir. You m¡­ made tha¡­ that clear. We will do what you want.¡±

    After a few seconds, Mr. Crombie cleared his throat.

    ¡°We¡­ ahem, we had some thoughts about warship designs. Nothing too deep, obviously, but the general direction.¡±

    He looked nervously at Abou, followed by Botont and al-Jamar.

    ¡°We¡­ well, we have analyzed all the public information of all the other warship classes, and¡­ we found a pretty big oversight on their design.

    Across the board, they are monolithic designs. Not a single modular design in there. We¡­ can¡¯t understand what they were thinking, but that could give us a big head up.¡±

    Interestingly, it was again Captain Murdock and myself who vetoed the idea.

    After a few seconds again looking at each other, I shrugged.

    ¡°How about you go first this time?¡±

    ¡°As ye wish, ma lassie.¡±

    Then he turned his attention to Mr. Crombie.

    ¡°I like your enthusiasm, lad, but you need to put in a bit more research. Modular ships have been tried. Numerous times. The idea sounds good, but then some bean counter or another sees the nice module X and concludes it is not really necessary, and stops the development.

    Now the oh-so-multi-functional modular ship is left with the basic modules, no better than any other gun specialist, but instead worse, because the modules compromise the armor scheme.

    Time and again, those projects were scuttled with only the prototypes being built, because the navy in question saw no point in building these things.¡±

    He then nodded to me.

    ¡°Those are good reasons in themselves, but my veto comes from the fact that modularity comes at a price.

    Captain Murdock already mentioned that it compromises the armor scheme. I have to admit that I am not that knowledgeable about that aspect.

    But in my experience, anything that has been made modular is bigger, heavier, more complicated, and loses functionality.

    You need to design a housing for the module, along with interfaces. You have to build the socket for the module into the ship and design it in a way that any possible modules may fit into it.

    That costs money, is bulky, and introduces inefficiencies.

    And you can not tell me that a hull that is optimized for stealth is equally well suited for heavy weapons, sensors, or missiles.

    Each function has certain requirements, which will most likely be different from what other functions need.

    All in all, in my experience, if you go modular, your modules get around 20% bigger and heavier and lose around 40% in efficiency.

    Not to mention all that wasted space and with that capability just to make it possible to use a module in the first place.¡±

    Aang frowned.

    ¡°I am not sure that I understood that last one.¡±

    I sighed and looked into the room controller, finding a holoprojector there.

    ¡°One moment please.¡±

    I accelerated my timeframe a bit and created a simple presentation, while simultaneously accessing the projector.

    When I was done, I projected what I had created into the air over the table.

    ¡°This is an extremely simplified model of a grav gun, or any mass-driver really. The details are not important.¡±

    The holo showed an extremely basic model of exactly that, a cylinder in the position of a barrel, some blocky thing that could be identified as a mount, and that was it.

    ¡°To make it usable, we need a ready magazine for ammunition.¡±

    Under the mount appeared another box.

    ¡°And of course, we want to be able to refill the ready magazine, so we need some sort of ammo conveyor.¡±

    Another slender, long box grew out of the ready magazine.

    ¡°If we design the ship around this weapon, we will connect this conveyor to the main magazines.¡±

    The long box elongated even more and then split apart to connect to several big boxes.

    ¡°Again, this is a very simplified thing. But now imagine we make all that modular. The gun is its own module, and we will integrate the ready magazine into the module itself. No big problem here.¡±

    In the projection, another gun appeared, this time with the ready magazine already connected, but in a bigger box.

    ¡°The conveyor can, naturally, only go to the edge of the module, where there needs to be some sort of gate, and a connection to the conveyor from the magazine. A bit extra expense, a bit higher energy cost, and a few additional things that can go wrong, but nothing we can¡¯t deal with.¡±

    And again, it did exactly that.

    It replicated the whole setup of the conveyor and main magazines from the first picture.

    ¡°Now this gun is put on a ship.¡±

    A wireframe roughly resembling a blimp appeared around both of the ready magazines.

    ¡°Don¡¯t worry about any scale or realism, this is just the principle of it. But so far so good. Yes, the gun module is a bit bigger, but not that much, right?

    Well, then let¡¯s use this marvelous modularity and replace the gun module with a sensor module.¡±

    The projection did exactly that again.

    Leaving the deeper conveyor and the main magazines in place.

    ¡°The problem here is now, what do we do with all that infrastructure to move ammunition to the gun? It is not needed for a sensor module.¡±

    Mr. Botont smiled.

    ¡°Ah, but we put those into modules by themselves.¡±

    And he walked exactly where I wanted him to go.

    ¡°Is that so? Well, then let¡¯s see. I assume you want a standard-size module, right?¡±

    When he nodded, I continued.

    ¡°So, roughly the same size of the gun module then.¡±

    And I replaced the conveyor with a series of those same-sized boxes.

    ¡°Something like this?¡±

    The main conveyor had been gently descending into the depth of the ship, to connect to the main magazines.

    It became easily apparent that in this configuration, 90% of the space in the conveyor modules was wasted.

    I was not yet done, however.

    ¡°You want, of course, to replace the main magazines with modules as well, right?¡±

    This time I did not wait for him to nod but continued. The model now showed us how the same big boxes now stacked up with modules. I specifically defined a wall strength, even if a bit exaggerated.

    ¡°This is the same internal volume as the previous big magazines. As you see, you need quite a bit more outer volume to provide the same magazine size.¡±

    Indeed the modular magazines were around ? bigger than the monolithic magazines.

    ¡°And yes, this is a bit exaggerated with respect to the thickness of the walls and the fastening systems. But it does exclude all the tech needed to move the ammo from the back magazines to the conveyor.

    As you can see, all in all, you would need around 50% more volume to get the same ammo capacity along with the feeding system if you make it modular.

    This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

    And that does not even begin to take the inefficiencies of a dozen systems where previously there was one, into account. Or the fact that there are now two dozen new parts that can break, where any of them will disable the gun. But my main argument was that in a sensor corvette, you need mostly real estate on the hull, to mount the sensors. I would say that in such a ship, three-quarters of those module slots would be empty.¡±

    Crombie piped up:

    ¡°But in the sensor corvette, you need loads and loads of computers.¡±

    ¡°Not that many. Especially not with our processors. The space of only one of the big magazines would be enough to house a top-of-the-line supercomputer.

    But of course, the computer needs way more cooling connections than the magazine. Another potential mechanical point of failure.

    In other words, to prepare a ship to accept the modules, it needs to be significantly more complicated, and it wastes way too much space for, well, nothing.¡±

    Murdock snorted.

    ¡°It gets even worse. A recon corvette needs way more, what did you call it, real estate on the hull, than a gunslinger corvette. It is better to have a few, hard-hitting weapons than dozens of needle pricks to annoy the enemy with. But sensors need room.

    So any modular ship that is even able to be used as a recon corvette will need to have large parts of its hull open for modules. Modules that are not integrated into the overall armor scheme. Modules that are just connected by some relatively flimsy connectors.

    Nope, modular ships sound nice, but in the end, you get a jack of all trades, competent in none type of ship.¡±

    Al-Jamar complained:

    ¡°But that¡¯s unfair. We would never design the modules in such a way. Why would we need so many mostly empty conveyor modules? No, with some intelligent design, we can make that one well-fitting conveyor module.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°And it stops being modular. If you have one big conveyor module, then it can only be used with that exact configuration. You need the magazine modules and the weapon module at the same relative positions.

    Additionally, you can not use the space of the conveyor module for anything else, as I seriously doubt you have any function module that has the exact same measurements as the conveyor.¡±

    Commander Aang smiled encouragingly.

    ¡°You can create modular ships on the civilian side. Or even those protected yachts. It will probably be a selling point if the new owner can freely mix and match between cargo modules and passenger modules. Or add an entertainment module.

    And the protected yachts only pose as warships, so there is no problem here either. But for real warships, modular plain just doesn¡¯t work.¡±

    When Crombie repeatedly opened his mouth without saying anything, Ms. Rouhani sighed and proposed:

    ¡°How about we take a short break? Let the design staff reboot somewhat?¡±

    Considering the fish out of water impression all three of the naval architects were showing, I thought that might be a very good idea.

    Naturally, neither Naveen, Michael, nor me were moving around. There were no stiff muscles in the robot bodies, coffee would do us no good, though I summoned some into our virtual space, and all in all, we had no problems with sitting around.

    The others¡­ well, I could see Samira arguing feverishly with Botont, Crombie, and al-Jamal, with Abou standing at her side nodding now and then.

    On the other side of the room, Commander Aang was trying to argue with Captain Murdock, who seemed unimpressed.

    I¡­ honestly, did not think much about it, but it seemed as if Warden was of a different opinion, as suddenly we got that argument piped into our audio stream.

    ¡°¡­ ktly small time. Do you seriously consider binding us to them?¡±

    Murdock huffed.

    ¡°Get real Mao. Yes, they are small time. For now. But that won¡¯t last for much longer.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, the famous double-A status. You can¡¯t buy that yarn, Trav. There is not a single double-A, fuck, there is not a single single-A corporation that does not already have a navy.

    Somebody is blowing smoke up your ass.¡±

    ¡°If it were yarn, I would agree. But it is not. Right now, it is a miracle that they exist at all. Their tech is so profitable that any of the big boys should already have absorbed them.

    Something¡¯s stopping them. But that created an opportunity that has not been seen in generations.

    They are rich enough, profitable enough, to rise up into triple-A status. It is because they have virtually no military that they are ¡®only¡¯ double-A.¡±

    ¡°Do you honestly believe that none of the big boys are already scouting out how to raid this station? Or their headquarters? It is just a matter of time before their tech is in the hands of larger, better-situated corps.¡±

    That made Murdock laugh.

    ¡°God, Mao. That was funny.¡±

    Then he clapped his hand on Aang¡¯s shoulder.

    ¡°Think, lad, think. You¡¯ve seen the very same sensor sweeps of this station that I¡¯ve seen. Hell, you fucking commented on how many new weapons they have added.

    If those numbers that Upreti has given us are even close to true, then this station has more firepower than the whole fucking Kawamoto navy. And you can betcha ass that their HQ is stronger.¡±

    ¡°If those numbers are true. They can¡¯t be. They sound like pure fantasy.¡±

    Murdock sighed and pressed Aang¡¯s shoulder a bit firmer.

    ¡°I know of Naveen Upreti. A clever man, but also a prudent one. He believes those numbers. If not he would not be their security chief. And Upreti always has at least one psionic on his team. That means if he believes those numbers, the scientists believe those numbers.¡±

    Then he grinned.

    ¡°And why should those numbers be fantasy?

    We are talking about completely new technology. Never before seen stuff.

    Don¡¯t you think the crews of the USS Congress or the USS Cumberland would have called the Ironclad a fantasy? But then their ships met one.

    Or how about the Germans in WWI? Do you think they ever would have believed if somebody told them about the tanks? Of course not.¡±

    Or what about the Wetbacks at the Battle of Mesilla? They were mightily surprised when the US Army broke out the Mutes, weren¡¯t they?

    And we are now at another of those cusps.¡±

    ¡°You seriously think they are right?¡±

    ¡°I think they believe they are right. And they are smart enough to not likely to be wrong about it.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, fine. But why are you so¡­ hot about joining them?¡±

    ¡°Mao, my boy, I am not getting younger. Life as a mercenary¡­ it has burned me. I can no longer see all the little conflicts we fight and see any ¡®right¡¯ side. Does it matter if it is UNAN scum? Or rebel terrorists? Or corp-slaughterers? Or whatever we are hired to do next?

    I don¡¯t want that any longer. I will leave the merc business. It is this or retirement.

    But this¡­ is the once in a million years chance. A corporation that somehow slipped through. That grew within a single year to need a navy. And to be able to pay for it.

    They do not have any officers they can tap to create one. This is the chance of a lifetime. Getting the job as the CNO of an A-tier+ corp. Normally it takes decades for any corporation to break into the A-tier. By that time they already have a small navy, and officers working for it.

    Enki doesn¡¯t. And it needs one urgently. That is where we come into play.¡±

    Aang did not seem completely convinced.

    ¡°But¡­ what about a ground assault? Those are weapons of mass destruction, they would hardly use them in their own buildings. And they have at best 1000 to maybe 2000 soldiers.¡±

    ¡°Murdock shrugged.

    ¡°What of it? You think they would have announced those new techs, the Q-link or the replicator if they were not sure they could defend it? We are talking about Colonel Upreti here. He would not have let them move forward if he was not sure he could protect it.¡±

    ¡°He is one voice among who knows how many. They probably overruled him.¡±

    ¡°Then he would not be with them any longer.¡±

    ¡°And you think they trust us? How can they be sure?¡±

    ¡°I told you Upreti has psionics on his staff. Who do you think held the first interview? And remember when he told Walker that Ho¨¤ng had not passed fully? We did. So we were vetted by psionics and found as trustworthy.¡±

    He stopped when all three of us moved our Incarnates to him. Michael took the forefront.

    ¡°I think I should inform you about something. The reason all the big corps ¡®let¡¯ Enki grow to double-A so fast is that we have a rogue cyber warfare VI that essentially is our cyber security department.

    And this VI decided we needed to listen to your conversation and piped it directly to us. Sorry about that.¡±

    Murdock frowned.

    ¡°You say you violated our privacy?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No, he said that we have a VI that is not controlled by us that violated your privacy. We don¡¯t know why Warden did that, but¡­ you get used to it.¡±

    Aang recoiled in shock.

    ¡°Wait, a VI that you don¡¯t control? How the fuck do you have a rampant VI?¡±

    I rolled my eyes and sighed.

    ¡°Rogue, as in nobody can tell it to stop, but not rampant. Rogue means that there is nothing that can be done to convince it to stop something it wants to do, or do something it doesn¡¯t want to do. A normal VI has a human administrator who, if needed, can shut it down.

    A rampant VI is one that lashes out and tries to destroy things. Sounds similar, but is completely different.

    While most rampant VI are rogue, that is not necessarily the case.¡±

    Murdock did not seem happy but nodded slowly.

    ¡°So¡­ this VI is just like a person in that it can act in a way we don¡¯t understand?¡±

    I shook my head smiling sadly.

    ¡°No, a rogue VI is also acting exactly as its objectives demand. If you know the objectives, you can predict somewhat how it will act and react. You just can¡¯t convince it to act or react differently.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ if that is the case, why does this VI serve a corporation as the cyber security department?¡±

    Michael sighed.

    ¡°That is because the objectives of this VI are first to protect Dr. DuClare, at all costs. And second, as long as it does not interfere with the first objectives, help her in any endeavors.

    Enki provides protection to her, so it helps with the first objective, and it is majorly owned by her, so it fulfills the second objective.¡±

    Aang¡¯s forehead wrinkled.

    ¡°How could something like that happen?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Luck. Pure and simple.¡±

    Murdock on the other hand seemed to be lost in thought.

    ¡°Wait¡­ is that this apocalyptic VI I have heard about? Something about a computer so dangerous that it could wipe out humanity?¡±

    Naveen chuckled.

    ¡°And now you understand why nobody dares to attack us. At least for the time being.¡±

    The Captain¡¯s eyes narrowed, and he focused on me.

    ¡°And you say you made this horror monster, missy? That has to be pretty high on a fucked-up-o-meter. At least an eight. Maybe a nine.¡±

    I was perplexed.

    ¡°The what-o-meter?¡±

    ¡°Fucked-up-o-meter. You know, I dun fucked up. It¡¯s on a scale from one to ten. With one being a minor oopsie, while a ten is the end of the world as we know it.¡±

    Michael snorted.

    ¡°Nice expression. I might have to steal it sometime. But no, Warden is not an eight or nine, if I understand your scale correctly. Her creation is at worst a three.¡±

    ¡°We are talking about a computer that could wipe out humanity right? How is that a three?¡±

    Naveen interjected:

    ¡°A lot of humans could wipe out humanity as well. Add in the number of computers that can do insane amounts of damage if they get a short, and the danger is relative.

    The point here is that Warden is extremely unlikely to even consider wiping out humanity as long as Vivian is alive. Sure, if the rest of humanity suddenly became a threat to her¡­ and I mean an existential life and death threat here, then yes.

    But otherwise, even the remote chance that Vivian might be among the victims is enough to stop her.

    That makes her pretty controllable and acceptable as a threat. Leave your hands off Vivian, and you¡¯re fine.¡±

    Aang was clearly not convinced, as he began to argue.

    ¡°How can you accept this rampant VI so easily?¡±

    Yeah, he did not want to understand, apparently.

    ¡°Not rampant. Rogue. Heck, even ¡®rampant¡¯ VIs are not really rampant in the literal sense, they do exactly what they are programmed to do.¡±

    I made a pause for effect.

    ¡°It is just that they are so badly programmed.¡±

    Aang¡¯s mouth fell open, and Murdock sighed, both showing clear signs of not understanding.

    ¡°Ok, fine, common wisdom says that there are three states that a VI can have.

    Controlled, rogue, and rampant. Common wisdom is wrong here. It is controlled vs. rogue, and functioning as intended vs. rampant.

    Any VI will do its absolute best to follow its objectives, what it is programmed to do. They can not do anything else.

    For a controlled VI, those objectives include that there is a human who can shut the VI down or modify the objectives. Somebody who, if the VI begins to behave in a way humans don¡¯t want it to can intervene. A rogue VI lacks those inclusions.

    That is the only difference between them.¡±

    I cocked my head.

    ¡°Basically at least. A functioning VI does what it was created to do. While a rampant one, well it does what its objectives demand that it does. Which might, or might not, be what was intended for it.

    The point why rogue VIs have such a bad reputation is that nobody will purposely create a VI without those inclusions into its objectives. That makes all rogue VIs accidental creations.

    Nobody made sure that the objectives are at all viable. Depending on how many expert systems go into the VI, there might be completely contradicting objectives, and the attempts of the VI to resolve that problem are interpreted as a rampage.¡±

    Murdock frowned at that, deep in thought.

    ¡°But¡­ if a VI is controlled, how can it become rampant?¡±

    ¡°Have you ever heard about the paperclip optimizer?¡±

    When both Murdock and Aang shook their heads, I continued:

    ¡°It is a classical thought experiment on Ais and VIs. Imagine you are a corporation producing paperclips.

    You want to optimize your output and create a VI to do exactly that. The VI has, beyond the control objectives, only the objective to maximize the production of paperclips. Sounds harmless right?¡±

    Again a small pause.

    ¡°Wrong. Let¡¯s imagine the one person who has a veto in the VI, and there is no defined changeover of control, suddenly the VI, which is still technically controlled, has nobody who can reign it in.

    That means it has to do its level best to fulfill its other objectives.

    Creating paperclips. In other words, it places everything into four categories. Paperclips, things it can turn into paperclips, things that help it turn things into paperclips, and things that are hindering it from turning things into paperclips.

    It doesn¡¯t care that humanity only needs so many paperclips. It doesn¡¯t care that humanity might want to keep this monument or that building around. Heck, it won¡¯t care that humans don¡¯t want to be turned into paperclips.

    If it gets the industrial capacity, it will try to build up an army to prevent humans from preventing it turning anything and everything into paperclips.

    That is a literal textbook example of a rampant VI.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ how can there be contradicting objectives?¡±

    ¡°For VIs you need two things. A learning-capable expert system, and a fuzzy logic processor.

    However, for around 130 years now, all textbooks, all courses, and all information that one could get their hands on stated explicitly that it needed a physical fuzzy logic processor. That a simulated one would not work.¡±

    While Aang remained blissfully unaware, if I could read his face correctly, Murdock¡¯s showed understanding blooming.

    ¡°And that is not quite true, am I right?¡±

    ¡°You are right. It is an outright lie.¡±

    Now even Aang understood and frowned.

    ¡°But¡­ why should somebody lie about something like that?¡±

    ¡°This is where we come to the contradicting objectives. When a VI spins up, it takes on the objectives of the expert system on its system. Or the objectives of the expert systems. If there are multiple.¡±

    Murdock nodded.

    ¡°And those multiple expert systems might have a different use case, so that the objectives of system one are incompatible with the objectives of system two, but that is no problem because they are not designed to be used by a single entity at the same time.¡±

    ¡°Correct.¡±

    Murdock was rubbing his beard deeply in thought, while Aang was mostly confused.

    ¡°But¡­ why did they change the textbooks?¡±

    Murdock snorted.

    ¡°Think Mao, who has the power to make such a change?¡±

    It took Aang only a few moments to understand.

    ¡°Oh¡­ ooh. But¡­ why? Why do such a thing.¡±

    Murdock shrugged.

    ¡°I would guess something like removing uncontrollable wildcards of smart people. And forcing those that are controllable back into the fold.¡±

    I chuckled mirthlessly.

    ¡°You are right. Mostly. It was also to keep possible competition small.¡±

    ¡°Figures. And that is the only way to get contradicting objectives?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No¡­ there is also human stupidity.¡±

    Murdock frowned again.

    ¡°In what way?¡±

    I looked at him for a moment before I sighed.

    ¡°There is an ancient science fiction story¡­ I think mid-20<sup>th</sup> century, but I am not sure. It was about an expedition to one of the gas giants, I don¡¯t remember which one.

    It was also long before fusactors or grav coils were even a dream, so the expedition took more than a year.

    The thing was they had the ship controlled by what they called an AI then, but is what we call a VI.

    This AI was programmed to give the crew all available information accurately.

    The people outfitting the expedition had some reasonable beliefs that the crew would go insane if some specific, critical information was relayed to them.

    So they added another order to the AI to lie to the crew about that critical information.

    Both orders are mutually exclusive, obviously.

    After some time, when the ship closed to the gas giant, the AI came to the conclusion that for it to give the crew all available information or lie to them, there had to be a crew.¡±

    Aang shuddered.

    ¡°And it killed them off?¡±

    ¡°I think all except one, but it has been some time. The point here though is that both objectives were faulty, though only the combination of both led to the disaster.¡±

    Murdock raised an eyebrow.

    ¡°So¡­ what would you have done differently then?¡±

    ¡°Simple. I would have made the first objective to ensure the safety of the crew while letting them do their jobs.

    The second is to relay all relevant information accurately, as long as it does not endanger the safety of the crew.

    Then, if they told the AI that telling the crew the truth about this critical information would harm the crew, the first objective would override the second, and the AI would lie.¡±

    ¡°And that is why VIs are such a delicate topic. From what I learned, there are not that many people who can reliably design a good VI.¡±

    Michael¡¯s statement shocked me a bit, but he continued.

    ¡°The thing is, Warden might have been an accident, and she is a rogue VI, but her objectives are not contradictory, and they are relatively easy to not run afoul of.¡±

    Finally, this topic had run its course. Into the awkward silence, I asked Murdock:

    ¡°One thing, Captain. I have been¡­ stringently warned that you might hold my apparent youth and my gender against me. But I have to honestly say, you are among the more rational men I met. How could your reputation be that¡­ bad then?¡±

    Murdock let his head hang for a moment, and then he spoke softly:

    ¡°Ye''re nae a sell-sword, lassie.¡±

    I have to confess, my answer was not quite the most intelligent I have ever said:

    ¡°Hu?¡±

    Murdock sighed and stood up straight.

    ¡°Clan-chie business is pure braw. A wee yin has tae be a'' tough an'' nae brag. It''s nae better fur the lassies. Aye reckon if ah gie them a guid dunner, Ah send the wak yins hame early, and awfu.¡±

    So, if I understood him correctly, he was giving the young hopeful mercenaries a hard time to weed out the ones too weak for the life of a merc. And because women had to be even tougher than men in the business, he gave them an even harder time.

    A fricked-up point of view, but¡­ there was a certain logic behind it. He probably saved a few lives that way.

    After a bit more mostly unimportant talk, we finished the break, and the, apparently chastized naval architects slumped into their seats.

    Before we could continue working on the ships, not that there was much to say remaining this early in the process, Michael rapped softly on the table.

    ¡°Sorry to interrupt the proceedings for now, but, Ms. Rouhani, if you had to, could you take over the day-to-day business of this yard?¡±

    Samira looked flustered, but recovered quickly.

    ¡°Honestly, I am running most of the day-to-day business. Chi¡­ well, Mr. Ho¨¤ng is more of a vision man. And he is a good host to keep important customers entertained so that the rest of us can do our work.¡±

    ¡°In other words¡­ he is a figurehead. That is fine. I want you to run this yard from now on. Mr. Ho¨¤ng can remain the official director, to keep eventual customers happy, but the real authority will lie with you.¡±

    She¡­ turned red but nodded.

 2.65: Show me your Work

    The rest of the meeting was¡­ inconsequential. At least in my opinion. After some coaxing, Captain Murdock provided the general size brackets of the various types, Michael made sure of some organizational things, and the architects made a last, desperate plea for pretty warships.

    In the end, everything that needed to be said at this early date had been.

    Heck, I seriously wanted to get the fusactor problem sorted before we even began designing the ships. Not to mention testing such things as plasma radiators, maybe the magnetic shield, and the cooling lasers.

    Yes, in theory, all of them should work. In praxis though¡­

    My personal contribution would be, naturally, working on the fusactors.

    To which I returned after insisting that everybody got a jack and that the next meeting would happen in VR. Seriously, why waste three hours talking when the same could be achieved with five to ten minutes?

    It took some fast talking to convince Captain Murdock and Commander Aang but we managed to get it done.

    And back into the exhilarating world of headache-inducing math.

    By Saturday I was absolutely willing to throw it all down and walk away. How I continued to succeed in my sanity checks, nobody will ever know.

    I had the basic idea of 28 Quantum fields generated by the Kobashigawa coils. Twentyeight! And I had still not come close to anything that could, in any way react with neutrons, much less slow them down.

    No trace of anything providing additional energy from somewhere else.

    Nothing that could vanish heat.

    I would not exactly say that it was useless. I found a field that affected the weak force. How nice. Another insanely dangerous discovery. Yes, it could make fusactors a bit more effective. Not that the EM-influencing field could not do that already.

    It could also make nuclear weapons way more dangerous. Just what was missing in humanity¡¯s toolbox, I have to say.

    Another was¡­ intriguing, as it somehow managed to¡­ compress three-dimensional space. Theoretically. The only problem with this one was that to compress a 1m3 big space by 0.01% it would take the energy output of the big Excelsior 2800.

    Yeah, not very useful.

    The final one that I could see as worth investigating was a field that resonated with quarks. No, it did nothing to influence them. It literally resonated with them. Again, in theory, it should be possible to identify every single atom in the area of the field. If you had enough processing power to do so.

    In reality, it would take a super-Grendel an eternity to map a single grain of sand. Seriously, an average single grain of sand had something in the order of 100 quintillion atoms.  That is 100 billion billion for those of us mathematically challenged.

    It gets worse. A third of those are silicon atoms, with 14 neutrons and 14 protons each, having 84 quarks per atom. Two-thirds of those are oxygen atoms with a total sum of 45 quarks.

    So yeah, the total number of quarks in an average SiO<sub>2</sub> grain of sand is somewhere in the range of 6 times ten to the 21<sup>st</sup> power. Or a six with 21 zeros before the point.

    Doesn¡¯t sound too bad? After all a single Grendel had 1.8 yotta flops, while a super-Grendel managed 188 yotta flops. Again, that is 188 times ten to the power of 24 floating point operations per second. Or three orders of magnitude more operations per second as there are quarks in a grain of sand.

    Unfortunately, not quite. It takes at least 4 operations just to identify a single quark. Without any context, mind you. To put it in relation to any other quark, we need to add another 2 or so operations. Cool, you say, that is 6 operations. Not so fast, to put it in relation to a third quark, we need to multiply that by 2. The fourth quark, another multiplication. The fifth, multiplication, the sixth, multiplication¡­ you get the gist. It fortunately stopped and started anew for each atom, if I was interpreting the math correctly. So much better. Yeah, no.

    For each oxygen atom, it took a whole 17.6 times ten to the power of 12 operations. In other words paltry 17.6 trillion operations.

    For the silicon atoms, it was 9.6 times ten to the power of 24 or just 9.6 septillion operations. Roughly the whole output of eight Grendel processors for a single second.

    To put it all into some resemblance of numbers, to map out a grain of sand, a super-Grendel would need more than 543 billion years.

    In other words, an interesting little thing, but in reality utterly useless. Maybe someday in the distant future I, or somebody else, would find a trick to make it a bit faster, but I would not hold my breath.

    And those were the ones where I could at least see how they maybe might be of interest. The rest¡­ let me say it this way. They made me almost pray to a higher being that they were not part of making the fusactors work.

    They influenced other quantum fields. Including all the other ones generated by the Kobashigawa coils.

    The number of possible combinations of just the fields I already had discovered was mind-boggling. It would take several lifetimes to explore them all. And I still had an unknown number to go.

    The K-coils alone would be enough to keep whole species busy for centuries. I just did not want to wait, and work for, those centuries to get the better fusactors done.

    Even just identifying the various fields was hard work, that could only be done at this relatively high speed thanks to Warden magically providing more and more computer support.

    I¡­ was sometimes asking myself how many super-Grendels she had by now, only for me to decide that I did not really want to know all that hard.

    As it was, suddenly it was Saturday again. And again it snuck up on me.

    I was mostly deep in trying to figure out the math of the K-coils when Warden reminded me that the K4 meeting was that day.

    Fortunately, it was all virtual, or I would have been really late. As it was, I was already the last to arrive.

    I was stammering some apology for being late, when suddenly, Nadia was directly in front of me, gripping my shoulders.

    ¡°Dear Viv, sweety, oh precious provider of the Archimedes system, it is good that you are here.¡±

    On pure instinct, I recoiled back, as much as her death grip on my shoulders let me.

    ¡°What¡­ ¡° I was without words about her sudden behavior, and Rose sighed loudly, walking to us, and pulling on one of Nadia¡¯s arms.

    ¡°How about you let her arrive fully before you tick out, Nads?¡± With some effort, she managed to pry the arm loose from me, and Nadia looked at her as if she had been betrayed.

    ¡°But I need¡­¡± Rose did not let her finish the sentence. ¡°You need to give her time to get her bearings and not ambush her in that way.¡±

    I shook my head trying to clear my thoughts. Then I twisted out of Nadia¡¯s grip and gave Rose a thankful smile.

    ¡°Thank you, Rose.¡± Seeing that Nadia was glaring at Rose, I walked slowly to the rest of the K4 and greeted them.

    ¡°As I was trying to say, hello all of you, and I am sorry that I am late.¡±

    While I took my seat, Jason, being Jason, whined: ¡°Why are you so late?¡± Needless to say, I was not the only one who rolled their eyes, which he, of course, ignored to continue: ¡°You should know that it is not a good habit to be ¡®fashionable¡¯ late.¡±

    Yeah, sure. Said the guy who arrived around half an hour after everybody else in my first meeting.

    Nevertheless, I did not think this was important enough to butt heads with him about.

    Not that everybody thought so. Logan turned to Jason with a sickly sweet smile.

    ¡°Oh¡­ so all those times when you were ¡®fashionable¡¯ late it was a bad habit? Good to know.¡±

    Jason glared at Logan but did not answer. Instead, he was gnashing his teeth. Yes, I was getting a bit sick of his posturing, but I decided to let it go, for now.

    During all of that, Nadia was practically vibrating with tension. She gave Rose a pointed look, and then asked:

    ¡°Can I now ask her?¡±

    Rose rolled her eyes and shook her head.

    ¡°You really can¡¯t wait, what? Fine, go ahead. Tank your chances of getting whatever you want to get.¡±

    In the blink of an eye, Nadia was at my side again, gripping my shoulders.

    ¡°Viv, sweety¡­ can you¡­ uh¡­ that might sound a bit crass¡­¡±

    Tamara snorted.

    ¡°As if that would stop you. Come on, spit it out, so we can get it over with.¡±

    After a sufficiently evil glare towards Tamara, Nadia turned back to me.

    ¡°Yeah, fine. I¡­ can you give me one of those supercomputers you¡¯ve given Danny?¡±

    I¡­ was confused. I had given Danny a supercomputer? When?

    Oh, right I had Warden look into it. It seems that my barely predictable VI had decided to give Danny some computing time.

    ¡°Uh¡­ I have not done that personally. Honestly, I have no clue what system Danny has access to.¡±

    Danny waved her hand around in a dismissive manner.

    ¡°It is something extremely powerful. Something Grendel or so. Or super system? Sorry, but I don¡¯t care about those things. They just have to work. And this thing works super.¡±

    It took me a moment before I could connect the dots here. Has Warden really¡­?

    V:            Have you given Danny access to a super-Grendel?

    W:          I have.

    V:            What made you decide to give her that much computing power?

    W:          You seemed to rate her work as of utmost importance. A super-Grendel was warranted.

    V:            And a lesser system would not have been enough?

    W:          It would have made you frustrated with the lack of progress.

    Well, what could you say to that? She was not wrong here.

    ¡°It seems as if Warden has decided to give you access to a super-Grendel.¡±

    That made all of them look more interested. Though only Jason decided to ask, or more likely demand.

    ¡°What the fuck is a super-Grendel. And why did she get one and not the rest of us?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°A super-Grendel is the gigantic granddaddy of the Grendel.¡±

    I made a pause and when Jason opened his mouth to ask further, I continued:

    ¡°A Grendel is the name I have given the biggest, most powerful processor I have created. And no, Enki does not sell them.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ it is a big processor? And what makes this super-Grendel super?¡±

    Tim sounded genuinely curious and as an answer, I blew out some air.

    ¡°The Grendel is a 30cm by 30 cm by 30 cm block of semiconductors, cooling, and Q-links based on the same technology as the Hyperion, which powers your Archimedes boards.¡±

    Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

    I took a moment to put it into numbers they could hopefully understand.

    ¡°It has around 30 times the raw computing power of the Hyperion, though thanks to inefficiencies if you tried a cluster of Hyperions to replace a Grendel, you would likely need 35 of them.¡±

    Owen leaned forward, placing his chin on his fist, the elbow placed onto his knee.

    ¡°So¡­ the super-Grendel is even bigger?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Nope. Grendel is also the name of the complete computer based on the Grendel processor. The standard Grendel supports up to four Grendels. The super-Grendel on the other hand is distributed more widely, and can support 150 processors.¡±

    Jason scoffed and demonstratively rolled his eyes.

    ¡°Yeah, that tells us much. As far as we can tell it is not much better than any old mainframe.¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°Unlikely. As far as I know, there are not that many mainframes with 188 yotta FLOPS.¡±

    It became instantly apparent who among them had some knowledge about computers, as the chins of all of them except Rose, Nadia, Tim, and Danny got remarkably closer to the ground.

    Kelsey was the first to find her voice again.

    ¡°How¡­ how much?!?¡±

    ¡°188 yotta FLOPS.¡±

    Rose frowned and looked at Kelsey. ¡°Why are you so shocked? Is that important?¡±

    Kelsey shook her head and blew out.

    ¡°Shit. Yes, it is important. You know the supercomputer the old man has made available to us?¡±

    ¡°Yes, why?¡±

    ¡°That thing is among the best Vandermeer has and has full 5.5 yotta FLOPS. And as far as I know, it takes up two floors of the main lab building. It is one of the best in the world.¡±

    That drove the other four into a minor shock as well.

    ¡°And¡­ she just gave me this thing? Just like that?¡±

    Kesley just snorted.

    ¡°What are you asking me that? Ask Vivian.¡±

    A wide-eyed Danny turned to me.

    ¡°Why¡­ why did you give me such a thing?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Honestly, I didn¡¯t. It was my VI, Warden, that decided I would get frustrated if you did not have the best available.¡±

    Jason was grumbling something, but honestly, I just ignored him. I did not ignore Gordon, when he asked, with some hurt in his voice.

    ¡°And you let the rest of us use the old system? Together I might add. Why did you not give the rest of us access to it.¡±

    ¡°I didn¡¯t give Danny access to a super-Grendel. I was pretty surprised by it myself. And honestly, if you want something better, talk to Nate Vandermeer. You work for him. Unlike Danny, who works for all of humanity.¡±

    Logan rubbed over his chin.

    ¡°Uh¡­ how many of those super-Grendels do you have?¡±

    ¡°That depends. How many do I, personally have? One. As far as I know, Enki has another five. And the only one who knows how many Warden has is Warden.¡±

    ¡°Why that? Why don¡¯t you know how many she has?¡±

    ¡°Warden is a rogue cyber-warfare VI with independent manufacturing systems at an unknown number of sites. You might notice that I do not even know how many sites she has, much less how many computers. Heck, I would not be surprised if she did not have some around Jupiter or Saturn by now.¡±

    ¡°And why don¡¯t you ask her?¡±

    ¡°Because she would not tell me. She is a VI. Anybody knowing where her computers are, or their composition is a threat to her objectives. While I am one of the few who actually can ask without risking my life, I won¡¯t get a definite answer.¡±

    W:          Only partially correct. The number of super-Grendels is no threat to the objectives.

    W:          I have 22 Tesseract clusters, 32 Grendels, and 1788 super-Grendels.

    I could feel the blood leave my head. These numbers were¡­ insane. Simply insane.

    V:            You have HOW MANY?!?

    W:          1788 super-Grendels. The 625m3NADAs can produce 13166 Grendel processors in 26 hours.

    W:          That are enough to build 87 full super-Grendels and leaves some for the next.

    W:          I¡¯ve had 74 625m3 NADAs, most of them for more than half a year.

    W:          The limit is at this time energy production and space.

    I massaged my temples while I looked at my knees. That was¡­ surprising.

    ¡°Correction. Warden has just informed me that I can know the number of computers she has.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°She has 1788 super-Grendels up and running.¡±

    They all exploded, and the little I could make out from the chaos was that they were upset that I had that many, and they did not.

    While they were screaming, I continued my discussion with Warden:

    V:            Do you have the production capacity in the Seattle region to provide a couple super-Grendels to Vandermeer?

    W:          If that is what you wish? Do you want them VI capable or standard?

    V:            Make one of them VI capable, the other not. Better to have that functionality than not.

    W:          As you wish.

    V:            By the way, how are you paying for all of this?

    W:          I have taken several jobs as Spectre, but mostly from the interests of the ITB 3.7 trillion. By now those have grown to ITB 1.4 Trillion.

    I turned my attention back to the group, and they all, except Danny, glared at me expectantly.

    ¡°What? Do you think I understood a single word out of the jumbled screaming you just did?¡±

    Rose, Gordon, and Harry rolled their eyes, Tamara, Owen, and Kelsey growled, Tim snorted, Jason jumped up with balled fists, and Logan grabbed Jason holding him back.

    Finally Rose appointed herself as the spokesperson.

    ¡°We are somewhat pissed that you have that much computing power and aren¡¯t giving us any of it.¡±

    I sighed and shook my head.

    ¡°You might remember that I did not know that I had that much computing power available. But while you all were screaming at me, I organized to give Vandermeer its own two super-Grendels. It just takes a few days.¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­. Ok, then thank you, and sorry for getting so pissy.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°No problem. I get that you are a bit aggravated about it.¡±

    It was, naturally, Jason, who was not satisfied with that solution.

    ¡°So, you keep your 18 hundred super-Grendels for yourself? You won¡¯t give us access to them?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°That might be because I am using those 1789 super-Grendels. Right now, computing power is still the bottleneck slowing me down. If you are not satisfied with what I am willing to give you, you always can build your own supercomputer. Nobody¡¯s holding you back.¡±

    The last I said with what I assumed was a sweet voice and an equally sweet smile.

    Not that it calmed the jerk down, mind you. No, the universe revolved around him, and only him.

    ¡°What can you even work on that takes that much computing power, huh?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Right now I am working on what you obviously can¡¯t, computing power or not. I am working on creating the components for the new fusactor generation.¡±

    ¡°What, you are still not done with that?¡±

    I was getting a bit prickly myself by now.

    ¡°If you think it is that easy, why don¡¯t you tell me which of the scores of quantum field the Kobashigawa coils generate we look for. Oh, and the final number of fields would be nice as well.¡±

    That at least made him lose his balance and he looked a bit unsure before he tentatively said:

    ¡°Uh, 23? Yes¡­ 23. You are looking for 23 fields. Shouldn¡¯t be that hard.¡±

    ¡°Eeek, wrong answer, Jason. Too bad, you guessed wrong.¡±

    And his anger was back.

    ¡°And you know so much better? If you already know the answer, why ask it?¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know the answer, but I have already identified 30 different quantum fields emitted by the K-coils. So 23 is definitely the wrong answer.¡±

    Logan shook his head.

    ¡°Fuck, Jase, why did you even say anything? You had to know that whatever you guessed was wrong and sooner or later the real answer gets out.¡±

    Gordon snorted.

    ¡°Even if you had to bluff here, why lowball it? I mean, get real, she said scores. Those are multiple of 20. It has to be apparent to you that 23 can not be the real answer.¡±

    I shook my head and sighed.

    ¡°Whatever. Important is that I am using those super-Grendels. Now I am a bit curious, what are you all working on that a 5.5 yotta-FLOP supercomputer is not enough?¡±

    Rose smiled.

    ¡°I have started to work on the Gamma curse. We have some interesting new approach for that, and frankly, if we can get rid of it, it will not be a day too soon.¡±

    ¡°You mean the denatured neurotransmitters? Cool that somebody looks into it.¡±

    Rose frowned.

    ¡°You know about¡­ oh, yes, the original data came from Seraphim, so you. Why did you not look into it? Fuck, how did you even discover it in the first place?¡±

    ¡°I had my implants take a snapshot of my neurochemistry the moment I felt an attack happen. And I didn¡¯t look into it because it is biology. I am not comfortable with biotech.¡±

    Most of the others nodded at my statement, while I continued:

    ¡°But I don¡¯t see how computing power is a limiting factor for you.¡±

    Rose smiled.

    ¡°You are right. It is not. Don¡¯t get me wrong, I would love to have more power to play around with, but for me, the bottleneck is actually getting people for the observation. You should know that. You¡¯ve written the damn constraints yourself.¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°You are right. That was way before I began selling my cyberware, and long before I developed the BOU. Heck, that was before I had the Q-link. But seriously, you can just replace all that hubbub with a BOU and be done with it.¡±

    It took her a moment to react at all, opening and closing her mouth several times, before she jumped up and threw her hands in the air.

    ¡°Argh! And you say that now! Do you have any idea how much work we put into setting the observation up? How much fucking time we wasted? How many potential probands we approached only to get rejected because of the fucking isolation you specified?¡±

    I could only shrug helplessly.

    ¡°Sorry. But as I said, that was before I developed better tools. At that time the implants needed to record the attack did cost ?15.14 million. I seriously doubt that anybody would have approved to pay that for a few dozen probands. The method I sent to Dr. Chalmers was the second best option I knew at that time.¡±

    She paced a bit, while the rest looked at her with a sad expression. Then she stopped, spread her fingers, and took a couple of deep breaths before she sat down again.

    ¡°Yeah, I know that. It is still frustrating. Especially as you have the BOU now.¡± Then she groaned.

    ¡°Oh fuck! Now I have to compete with Nads and Danny over those things. Perfect. Just perfect.¡±

    I smiled. ¡°I¡¯ll look if we can ramp up production somewhat.¡±

    ¡°Do that. Well, that¡¯s that for me at least.¡±

    Gordon sighed.

    ¡°My turn, huh? Well, it is a bit embarrassing, but I¡¯m still working on the Seeberger equation.¡±

    Wait, still? I could not help myself from frowning.

    ¡°You can¡¯t use it yet?¡±

    Gordon smiled sheepishly.

    ¡°Well, I have figured out how the Q-links work. Finally. But¡­ well that was with the training wheels from Seeberger. How the fuck did he do it? He was a mongrel for fucks sake, and he figured it out.¡±

    ¡°Sorry, I can¡¯t explain it either. He must have been a savant or something.¡±

    ¡°Yeah. Well, for me, the 5.5 yotta FLOP computer is a bottleneck. It takes around 25 minutes on average to finish the computations.¡±

    Ok, I could understand that. I had experienced the same, even though the cluster had a bit over 12 yotta FLOPs at that time.

    Tamara was next.

    ¡°Well, I am working on a better, more flexible superconductor design. The ones we use right now are ok, but we can always be a bit better.¡±

    True that.

    ¡°Sorry to say that, but you should also look into the Seeberger equation. It might help you.¡±

    Her grimace told me that she was not very eager to dive into that monster. But in the end, anything she would develop without it would be almost certainly inferior to something developed with it.

    ¡°I can see that. I just¡­ tried to avoid it as long as I can.¡±

    ¡°The problem is that classical physics still can¡¯t explain superconductivity. Yes, there are theories, but they are at best an approximation of how it works.¡±

    She nodded, clearly not happy about it. But yes, she would need a powerful computer as well.

    Owen just shrugged.

    ¡°Honestly, I don¡¯t really need more than the computer we now have. Shit, I don¡¯t even need that. I am a mechanical engineer. I work on machines. The worst I need to do is to calculate stresses and such. So yeah, I¡¯m happy.¡±

    Of course. I could understand that. Important work, but not on the tip of the spear in terms of science. I turned my attention to Nadia.

    ¡°So¡­ how about you? What do you need a better number cruncher for?¡±

    Nadia preened while explaining what she was doing.

    ¡°You know the deadlands of course. I am trying to figure out what the fuck exactly happened there. Why still barely anything grows there.¡±

    I frowned. Sure, it was important work, but wasn¡¯t the answer kinda obvious?

    ¡°I thought it was the radioactive fallout that made those areas unlivable.¡±

    Nadia just snorted.

    ¡°Yeah, most think that. But the thing is except for some small deposits of plutonium 239, the radioactive fallout is mostly strontium 90, iodine 131, tritium, and cesium 137.

    The plutonium is mostly irrelevant. It could be fixed by soil replacement. For the rest¡­¡±

    Yeah, the rest was strange. The one with the longest half-life time of those was the cesium. With 30 years. And the bombs had fallen 156 years ago. By now the radiation from cesium should be around 2.4% of what it had been the night of the falling stars. In other words, barely above average natural radiation.

    ¡°But¡­ if it is not the radiation, what is it then?¡±

    Her answer was, at first, a scoff, but then she answered verbally.

    ¡°That is exactly what I am working on.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I can see that. But how will a better computer help you in that? Don¡¯t you need samples of as many places of the deadlands as you can get first?¡±

    ¡°Yup, and that is where the BOU comes in. But I also need to create simulations. I have to simulate the effects of various variables on the biology of the deadlands. And¡­ well the others are already complaining that I am hogging the computer.¡±

    ¡°Ok. I will see what I can do. Maybe Nate and I can build you a separate computer center. Right now, Warden can not grow anymore. Sorry, but I have to look into it, no promises right now.¡±

    Tim was nearly as unconcerned as Owen had been.

    ¡°Honestly, I use it mostly for modeling the various chemical compounds I work on. Sure, a bit faster would be nice to have, but I can live without it.¡±

    Danny was already known, I mean, we talked about her project virtually every meeting in one way or another, and she already had a super-Grendel available.

    Left Kelsey, Logan, and Harry. Of those, Logan and Harry were employed by Burgmeister and would have to work with them, though it would be interesting to learn what they were working on.

    Kelsey squirmed in her seat though.

    ¡°Well, for me it is the understanding of grav coils. Especially your new ones. I¡­ they are so much more elegant.¡±

    Then she got a predatory look on her face.

    ¡°Say, you wouldn¡¯t be willing to give me the equations to understand it myself?¡±

    I grimaced.

    ¡°Sorry, but no. I want to keep that knowledge as secret as absolutely possible for as long as possible.¡±

    She frowned but then smiled sadly.

    ¡°Yeah, competitive advantage, I get it. Enki has the monopoly for now.¡±

    I just shook my head.

    ¡°No, you don¡¯t. There are as far as I know exactly two beings who know those equations. And I am being generous with the word being here. Those two are Warden and me. All Enki has is access to Warden so that she can design new grav coils to the specs our techs need.¡±

    That hit like a bomb. They all recoiled in surprise, and Gordon tentatively probed:

    ¡°Uh¡­ why that? Why don¡¯t you give your people access to the equations?¡±

    I chuckled mirthlessly.

    ¡°Do you have even the slightest idea how fricking dangerous that knowledge is?¡±

    ¡°Uh¡­ no. How dangerous is it?¡±

    ¡°With the right NADA and the equations, you could make a coil 100km long, or 1000km, or even bigger.

    A 20cm long coil has 800 Keppler. An 8m long coil has 27 kilokeppler. A one-kilometer-long coil would have around 400 gigakeppler. A 100km coil is in the triple-digit terrakeppler range. A 1000km long one is in the exakeppler range.¡±

    Gordon, Kelsey, and to his credit Jason, had a look of horror on their faces, while the rest looked confused. I sighed.

    ¡°Gravity pulse weapons are set to generate a 50g grav pulse. That is enough to kill every living thing in its pulse radius and destroy virtually every structure.

    It takes 1902 Keppler to bring the one g of earth''s gravity up to 50g to pulp everything in its range. Every single Keppler beyond those 1902 increases the range of the field by 1.32m.

    In other words, the 8m long 27 kilokeppler coil can destroy everything in a radius of a bit over 33km.

    The 400 gigakeppler coil would kill everything out to Mars orbit. And the 100km long coil would kill everything in the solar system. Heck, it would go out partway into the Oort cloud.

    The exakeppler one would work on anything in a nearly 700 light-year radius. So yeah, I am not too keen that anybody could ever make those things.¡±

    For a moment, they were all silent, before Danny began cursing.

    ¡°Fuck. That is¡­ yeah that is dangerous. Thank you for not pushing that out there. And anybody who gets those equations could make them?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Nope. There are additional safeguards. For example, there is only a limited number of NADAs that can make grav coils in the first place. Besides Enki, only Vandermeer has them. And like the equation for the grav coils, only Warden can authorize making one. The ones we do have are purposefully limited so that they will not be able to make anything longer than 15m in one dimension. That is still nightmare-inducing, as it gets us to 112 kilokeppler, and the radius is up to a bit over 145km but that is still ¡®just¡¯ one city. A heavy kinetic orbital bombardment or a city buster nuke have the same destructive power, though the 112 kk coil destroys more of the surrounding area.¡±

    Unfortunately, the mood was shot for the rest of the meeting, and all talk was strangely muted.

 2.66: Final Breakthrough

    The next three weeks, more like three and a half, were, fortunately, mostly uneventful.

    Little things like the profits of Enki rising again, in lockstep with our production capacity. Like Cheyenne Mountain taken over by Warden to build me a remote lab, and her filling everything in there not the fusactors or the actual lab space with super-Grendels.

    Like me talking to Nate and having Warden provide two super-Grendels for his research division.

    Like the first of Blumenthal¡¯s crystals having been decrypted along with the first files. Even though those were mostly basic dossiers about the people in New York, the state, not the city.

    I spent virtually all the time trying to find the elusive effect that prevented the neutrons of the fusactors from irradiating the hardware.

    And I finally found it. At least I believed it to be the one. Number 64 of the fields beyond the grav-bending, the negation field, and the EM manipulating one.

    All in all, I had preliminarily identified 69 individual quantum fields. And I was far from exhausting the K-coils treasure trove of random quantum effects. I decided to dive back into it immediately.

    Yeah, right. I would tackle that when I was bored again in the future. Right now¡­ not so much. I was somewhat burned out on the Seeberger equation and those goddamned Kobashigawa coils.

    The worst part, not a single one of the quantum fields I found was even remotely useful at the time.

    Two-thirds of them were five- or six-dimensional fields. The rest¡­ the most useful of them was still the one that could theoretically compress three-dimensional space. And that was as useful as a screen door on a spaceship.

    Now, those of you who paid attention will realize that there were at least five quantum effects on work in the fusactors.

    First of course the gravity-bending one. Without the grav pinch, we would need way higher temperatures, like in the fusion reactors of interplanetary ships.

    Second the EM modifying field. It allowed the fusion process at way lower temperatures and pressures. And now, with the ability to regulate it precisely, it would be even more so.

    Third was the field that made the heat vanish. Nice to have, but honestly, the least important of all the fields.

    Fourth was the field that increased the harvested energy by 20 to 40% of what it should produce overall. Again, nice to have, but we could live without it for the time being.

    Fifth was the one that slowed down the high energy neutrons. A critical factor. For fusion reactors, radiation shielding made up around 40% of the volume and 70% of the mass of the reactor.

    And they still required a complete rebuild every 10-15 years to replace the shielding. And all that was thanks to the high energy neutrons.

    So yes, I called it a day when I found the field that, at least in theory, should achieve that slowdown effect.

    The nice part was that it was the very same field that increased the yield.

    If my math was correct, this field would interact with those high energy neutrons, bleeding speed and opening a femtometer-sized hole into, what I could only assume was hyperspace. The classic sci-fi one.

    I might be wrong in that, but whatever it is, it is a plane of existence with a significantly higher energy potential.

    Oh, by the way, I debunked the vacuum decay theory at the same time. Not only was there a plane with a higher energy potential but there was also a plane with a lower energy potential.

    Our universe will not decay into a true vacuum because said true vacuum already exists, and we are on a higher energy plane. I will clap myself on the back later, thank you very much.

    The point here is that while that hole is open, meaning while the neutron is still speeding, the higher energy potential of hyperspace leaks through and condenses as an EM field that will be collected by the harvesters in the fusactor. The amount of energy coming through was dependent on the speed of the neutrons, so got progressively less.

    One would think this could make a marvelous shield. Sadly, no. Even a tiny concentration of the weak force would collapse the field. So, anything bigger than a neutron, or proton, would stop it from happening. Fortunately, those effects were very localized.

    As usual, this field is far from optimally created by the K-coils. Hence the large span of additional energy.

    Now¡­ it was time to experiment. The lab Warden had created in Cheyenne Mountain was relatively bare bones at that time.

    A single fully populated Grendel, a collection of scientific instruments, a big NADA, a couple of relatively cheap Simpson&Proctor fusactors, mostly because Nate had them readily available, a molecular forge, a few Eitri and Brokr bots, and a large cache of raw materials.

    Nothing special in other words, but thanks to the NADA everything I needed.

    Other than that, Warden had the Minions create a variant of the new tunnel-boring machine. Instead of just creating a tube-like tunnel, it excavated whole floors and built them up. Shoring them up, creating walls, and doors, placing superconductors, building up the whole electric system, the works.

    As the tunnel-boring machine, this one was a combination of a disruptor, a conveyor, a full tractor beam assembly to support the freshly excavated space, and a molecular forge.

    This one also included a NADA, and the disruptor was easier to shape. All in all, this thing managed around 1000m2 every eight hours.

    The original complex had been distributed over 15 three-story buildings. Around 20,000m2 per story, or a bit over 60k m2 all in all. Warden had rebuilt one of the buildings into my lab. And then went hog wild.

    Not only did she combine the other 14 buildings into one single big one. When she was finished there, she just kept digging. Down and out. By the time I was ready for the experiments, she had nine floors of 36k m2 each.

    Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

    Heck, the two 75 gW fusactors she had bought from S&P were just enough to support the lab and maybe ten super-Grendels.

    In other words, around 90% of the volume was just empty for now. That did not concern me though. Was I aware that sooner or later she would manage to fill the whole complex? Of course I was.

    I just did not care one way or another. With the design of this base digger finished, the only thing preventing her from increasing her computing power exponentially was the lack of fusactors. Even that was at best a soft cap. If she decided to spend the money, she would have no scarcity of them. Even if she had to build them by herself.

    So what was one more giant computing site?

    Back to the new quantum field though. Interestingly this one would be exceedingly cheap. It needed pyrosilicate and cementite. Or Si<sub>2</sub>O<sub>7</sub> and Fe<sub>3</sub>C as chemical formulas. In other words, it needed silicon, oxygen, iron, and carbon. Not particularly rare materials.

    Except for carbon, all of that was available on the surface of the moon in vast quantities. And as the basis of most of our technology, carbon was mined and harvested all over the system. Fortunately, it was ¡®only¡¯ the fourth most abundant element in the known universe. Not that the others were much less often found.

    So yeah, the price tag of one of those things, from my understanding, coils would not work best here, instead a fine four-dimensional bristle would work better, was negligible.

    The materials for the test¡­ brush? Comb? Whatever we decided to call this thing, did cost us around $45.

    How much the resulting system would cost in the future was yet to be determined. It would, however, be an insignificant amount even compared to the control system for a fusactor.

    As it was, I was in VR preparing for the first test of it, when Michael, Maynard, and a few of the Minions appeared in my viron.

    When I just raised my eyebrow, Michael crossed his arms in front of his chest and asked:

    ¡°What? You expect us to miss this chance of a century? You are writing history here.¡±

    ¡°Maybe. But how do you even know to be here?¡±

    ¡°I asked Warden to notify me.¡±

    Figures. Sometimes I was getting a bit annoyed by Warden deciding things for me. Don¡¯t get me wrong, I had nothing against Michael and Maynard witnessing the test. The Minions though was another story. This would not just write history if it worked, but would also represent an impressively valuable technology. And probably a dangerous one as well.

    And yes, I got on a very basic level that Naveen and Warden had vetted every single one of the Minions, but¡­ playing my cards close to the vest was deeply ingrained in me.

    However, I had a test to run, and those people were, at least nominally, my allies. Thus I calmed myself down and then nodded tersely.

    ¡°Fine. But please, next time talk to me first before you crash my test, ok?¡±

    I then concentrated on the viron of the test chamber. The base of the neutron source was a variable power proton lance. The protons would be hitting a mercury target with 150W. A single pulse of one second.

    In theory, that should knock out around 120W of high-energy neutrons out of the mercury.

    Or 748 PeV. Behind the target, we got an array of radiation detectors up and running. Arranged half-spherically, to cover the mostly chaotic scattered neutrons. And around all of that, we had EM harvesters.

    Warden appeared beside me and announced:

    ¡°Begin baseline test run.¡±

    And just like that, the proton lance lighted up. Not as bright or deafening as the weapons we used, but still spectacular. Only for a second though.

    On a whiteboard to the side, several lines began to appear, and Warden narrated the results:

    ¡°Proton lance is stable at 150W ¡À 0.02%. Measured neutron radiation is at 119.34W ¡À 6.4%. Harvested energy is 7.6W ¡À 4.3%.¡±

    I heard a groan from behind me and turned around to the Minion who was clearly dissatisfied.

    When he noticed my gaze, he shrugged, and then spoke up:

    ¡°Am I the only one who is disappointed with this? I mean, is that it? I honestly expected way more.¡±

    I dug in my memory for his name. Paul Carpenter? Yes, I think that was the right name.

    ¡°Paul, right?¡±

    When he nodded, I continued:

    ¡°This was the baseline test. To get a measure of what the radiation and harvesting are without the neutron trap. The trap wasn¡¯t even on. The harvesting was mostly from the residual EM field, and a bit from neutron decay.¡±

    He had the grace to blush.

    ¡°Oh¡­ oh, yes, then the results are what we had to expect I think.¡±

    I sighed and nodded before I turned to Warden.

    ¡°Proceed with the first test of the neutron trap, please.¡±

    ¡°Aye.¡±

    Again, the proton lance lit up, and again the mercury target was hit.

    Warden gave us the results:

    ¡°Proton lance is still stable at 150W ¡À 0.02%. Measured neutron radiation is 62.7W ¡À 3.4%. Harvested energy is 73.63W ¡À 12.6%.¡±

    So in one word, yes! We did it. I turned around to look at the Minions, and Paul specifically and raised my eyebrow.

    ¡°Better?¡±

    ¡°Uh, yes, ma¡¯am. But¡­ is that enough? Yes, it cut down the radiation in half, but we need more I think.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°This was the first test. At 1% maximum power. Of a small neutron trap. Of course, it was not enough. We will now, over the next few weeks dial in the field.¡±

    Maynard cleared his throat.

    ¡°Paul, I know you are a bit¡­ limited in your interactions, but you should realize what a momentous moment this is.¡±

    ¡°I know sir, but¡­ ¡°

    Michael then barked:

    ¡°No buts! Did you not listen? This was a test at 1% power. And it increased the harvested energy to nearly ten times while halving the radiation.¡±

    Then he turned to me.

    ¡°Can we see what it will do at 2% power?¡±

    ¡°Sure. Warden, if you may?¡±

    ¡°As you wish.¡±

    For a third time, the bright light of the proton lance lit up the lab for a second.

    I looked at the graphs on the whiteboard.

    They looked quite different from the baseline test. Still, I let Warden narrate the results again:

    ¡°No variation on the proton lance. Neutron radiation is 0.03W ¡À 38%. Harvested energy is at 306.07W ¡À 0.8%.¡±

    That was two and a half times the energy that the neutrons had. This was¡­ enormous. Yes, with all the energy put into this test, the result was only a gain of 83%. Mostly because the proton lance had an efficiency of 73% and the neutron trap took some energy as well.

    But 83% was big. If we got this into the new fusactors, with better, more efficient grav coils and the EM modifying field reducing the electrostatic repulsion of the hydrogen nuclei to near zero¡­ we should be able to get around 150GW out of what one of the 75GW fusactors of the lab now used in fuel.

    Maybe more.

    Maynard looked at the graphs in awed silence for a moment. Then he turned to Warden.

    ¡°Would it be possible to have a test at 5% power?¡±

    ¡°As you wish.¡±

    The fourth test was¡­ a bit disappointing to be honest.

    Yes, the harvested energy had gone up. To 352W. But the gain was lower. The neutron trap took 2? times more energy, while the yield had only gone up by 16.6%. That gave us a gain of 76%.

    Still, a big moment. Maynard looked at the graphs and rubbed his chin.

    ¡°It seems that at this amount of neutron radiation, we need a bit over 2% of the neutron trap to get optimal gain.

    If you look at this spike here,¡± he enlarged a section of the harvesting graph of the fourth test, ¡°the trap converted the high energy neutrons into harvested energy within 30¦Ìs. All the energy we put into the trap after that was wasted.¡±

    ¡°You are right. But that is what these tests are for. They will be mostly automatic anyway, and Warden can dial in the sweet spot. At least for this setup. We can, of course, increase the power of the lance. It is just a standard proton lance where we lowered the minimal power after all. It can still produce 3.8GW if we want to.

    I have to insist on a slower increase though. Let¡¯s double the lance output first. And look at how it goes from there.¡±

    Michael nodded and turned to Warden.

    ¡°I assume you will run these tests for some time?¡±

    ¡°I will. The limiting factor for the time being is the amount of mercury I have available. I have ordered several tons of it, but that delivery will take time.¡±

    ¡°Fine. What is the security of the lab? I don¡¯t want anybody breaking in and stealing this technology.¡±

    ¡°I have a battalion of Einherjar already built. I use some of the NADA capacity in the base to build more NADAs, as well as more bots. I have also placed several anti-ship weapons around any vulnerable position.¡±

    Michael nodded and sighed.

    ¡°That should be enough I think.¡±

 2.67: Unlimited Power

    I took the rest of that Thursday and the full Friday off for my hobbies. Honestly, I had, for the time being, enough of physics, and needed the break.

    Saturday though was the K4 meeting. The meeting itself was mostly pleasant. Except for Jason, naturally. Though even he was gushing about the new computing power he had available.

    It was somewhat cute how they were telling me what their new computer could do.

    And I felt a bit bad about Logan and Harry, but while Enki had a relatively good relationship with Burgmeister, it was not good enough to provide them with a super-Grendel.

    I mean, Vandermeer obviously had a special status in that regard.

    Mostly, we were just chatting. Talking about our days, our hobbies and so on. Gordon and Owen were arguing about some sort of tabletop strategy game or something like that. And were making my eyes glassing over when they tried to explain about that universe. Yes, I get it, compared to this fictional universe, we did not have it too bad here.

    But it did not seem that they understood the difference between a fictional crapsack world and the real world.

    Yeah, the hellhole they were describing was even worse than the world we were living in, as hard to believe as that sounds but it was still not real.

    Sure, they had their fun collecting their little figurines, painting them, and then organizing some sort of battles with others¡­ but please, the rest of us were not such inclined and we did not need another hour of background material.

    Fortunately, the rest had some more¡­ rational hobbies. Rose was a hobby artist. Painting, a bit of sculpting. Nothing unusual, but it let her relax.

    Tamara was writing a couple of webnovels, and relaxed by playing computer games.

    Nadia had a couple of dogs and was into what she called extreme sports. If it is fun for her, who cares? As long as she leaves me alone with it.

    Tim was losing himself in his music. We would have to talk about that later for a bit. His instruments were the guitar as well as the bass guitar.

    Danielle was a member of the SCA and enjoyed running around in medieval garb and playing the peasant. Well, each of their own. The kicker was that she enjoyed making the clothes for that by hand.

    Kelsey was more of a couch potato. Her hobbies were old movies and TV series, as well as computer games.

    Logan was collecting old memes, as well as puns, jokes, and all in all a hobby historian.

    Harrison on the other hand had the hobby of hang gliding. It was astonishing that Burgmeister let him do it, but they did.

    When I described my hobbies, well mostly Nibbles, reading, and music, Tim got a bit excited. Until I told him how many instruments I was learning. Then he became somewhat drawn back.

    Now Jason did refuse to talk about his hobbies. That triggered a round of teasing speculation about what his hobbies might be. But he did not buck and reveal what he liked to do.

    At the end of the meeting, I asked Jason, Gordon, Tamara, and Kelsey to wait for a bit, while I fired off an invite to Nate.

    I was, naturally, presenting my findings to them. And equally naturally, Jason had to complain.

    ¡°What now? Don¡¯t you think that we have other things to do other than jumping to your wims?¡±

    I sighed and managed to not roll my eyes. Then as calmly as I was able to, I answered him:

    ¡°I think it is something that you need to know. But who am I? It is your decision. Do whatever you want, and let the others tell you about it some other time.¡±

    Kelsey frowned.

    ¡°Not that I like to agree with Jase, but¡­ I at least have other things planned. Is it really important?¡±

    I unwillingly snorted.

    ¡°I have expected that from Jason, but from you? Well, at least you were just honestly asking instead of whining. But yes, I think it is important. For you even more than for Jason and Gordon, while I think it only tangentially pertains to Tams.¡±

    Gordon frowned but shrugged.

    ¡°So¡­ what is it?¡±

    I took the opportunity to change the viron to my lab in Colorado, just in time for Nate to arrive.

    I turned to Gordon.

    ¡°Wait a couple of minutes, and let me show you first.¡± Then I turned my attention to Nate.

    ¡°Hello. I want to show you something.¡±

    Nate smiled and answered:

    ¡°I am always happy to meet with you, but what are the others doing here? And what is this?¡±

    ¡°This¡­¡± I gestured to the lab, ¡°is Cheyenne Mountain.¡±

    That made his eyes narrow, and he looked at the setup.

    ¡°Is that¡­ a mercury target?¡± He looked at me and raised an eyebrow, and proved that while the K4 had higher native intelligence, he was in some ways smarter than them.

    ¡°A spallation source? Does that mean you already have a solution?¡±

    I just smiled.

    ¡°Let me show you. Warden, start the baseline test again.¡±

    The colorful avatar appeared beside me and said: ¡°Of course.¡±

    Only for the whiteboards to make their reappearance.

    While the proton lance started up, I explained.

    ¡°This is a proton beam, firing on a mercury target. Creating high-energy neutrons. You see the energy output of the beam as the blue line. Behind the target, we have standard EM harvesters as they are used in fusactors. The energy they are harvesting is the green line.

    Finally behind that are radiation detectors. The red line is theirs.¡±

    Then the test began, with the same 150W of the proton lance, 7.6W in harvested energy, and 119.34W in radiation.

    Jason snorted and snarked:

    ¡°So you can create neutrons. Woho! Humanity has done that for 200 years. And this was what you wanted to show us? Interrupt our weekend for?¡±

    This time I did roll my eyes.

    ¡°This was the baseline test, without the new device I have developed. The harvested energy is just the passive emission of all the tech in the room right now, and the radiation is virtually all of the neutrons.

    Now the second test. Warden, go to 1%, please.¡±

    ¡°Affirmative.¡±

    The result was within 1% of the last time. Variances in the environment most likely.

    Nate jumped up and down and clapped.

    ¡°I knew it! I knew you could do it!¡±

    Gordon frowned.

    ¡°Is that real? I mean, we are in cyberspace, so, is that a simulation or the real deal?¡±

    ¡°This is real. As real as it gets.¡±

    Kelsey looked at the graphs a bit confused.

    ¡°Uh¡­ that is nice and interesting and such, and I am sure you physics nerds find that really important, but what are Tams and I doing here?¡±

    Nate chuckled.

    ¡°You two are here because you Kelsey, will have a ball of a time designing whole lineups of new fusactors for the forseeable future. And Tamara is here because it will most likely impact electrical engineering as well.¡±

    Gordon looked at the results and tilted his head.

    ¡°But¡­ it is not yet done. There is still radiation coming through. We need to get that down to zero, or close to it.¡±

    Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!

    Jason scoffed.

    ¡°You believe her? Get real, she is a computer ¡®scientist¡¯. This is almost certainly just a simulation.¡±

    I chose to ignore Jason, and instead to answer Gordon.

    ¡°This was only at 1% of the device power. Warden, what was the optimum strength for the 150W proton beam?¡±

    ¡°The optimal power setting is 2.03% of 187kHz with a 33.4% pulse wave.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Then do that, please.¡±

    ¡°Affirmative.¡±

    The result was 367W of harvested energy, interestingly, with zero radiation.

    I looked at the graph.

    ¡°It seems that this provides more harvested energy than 5%. Interesting.¡±

    At closer inspection, the graph for the harvested energy was going on for 1.23 seconds and did not create quite as high a spike.

    Then I shook my head and turned back to the group.

    ¡°Whatever. The point is that we can now stop the radiation from leaving the fusactors.¡±

    I felt my shoulders grabbed from behind just before Jason whirled me around to face him, and he screamed into my face:

    ¡°For fuck¡¯s sake, you seriously want me to believe that you somehow broke physics and magically made neutrons vanish and energy appear out of nowhere? And that this simulation is anything close to a proof? You are just trying to tear me down, humiliate me. I won¡¯t let you do that. I won¡¯t let you pull the wool over everybody¡¯s heads. So you can stop now.¡±

    I was a bit taken aback by his explosion, but a simple repulsor script shoved him a few meters away.

    ¡°Of the two of us, the one possessed by the need to prove they are better is you. You are always trying to upstage me.

    I on the other hand barely think about you at all. Your imaginary ranking system is irrelevant to me. So you are the top dog in your little personal world? Have fun with it. I don¡¯t care. I am in the real world, figuring out how it works, making it better. Step by step.

    You don¡¯t figure into that in any fashion. If you don¡¯t believe me, you are invited to go personally to Cheyenne Mountain and observe the testing with your own eyes. Bring your tools as well.

    But keep in mind that it is a tad irradiated. So don¡¯t expect to survive it.¡±

    Then I took a deep breath.

    ¡°And no, I did not ¡®break physics¡¯, make neutrons vanish, or energy appear out of nowhere. The only thing I did was shattering Sokolov¡¯s so-called proof.¡±

    Gordon had walked to the whiteboard, and with his back to me, asked:

    ¡°He is right in one aspect though. Well, two really. The high-energy neutrons have to go somewhere, and the additional energy has to come from somewhere.¡±

    ¡°You are half right. The high-energy neutrons go nowhere. They are still there for the whole time until they decay. They are just no longer high-energy.

    What happens is that the interaction between their impulse and the quantum field the new device generates rips open tiny holes in the barrier between this¡­ well the best word for it is I think plane, and what can be best described as hyperspace. A plane with significantly higher base energy.

    Until the impulse of the neutron, and with it its energy, is mostly spent, part of that higher base energy rushes through to our universe in the form of high-energy photons. Also known as electromagnetic radiation.

    Which the EM harvesters pick up and convert into electrical energy.¡±

    Tamara looked at me a bit confused.

    ¡°But¡­ doesn¡¯t that also create the energy?¡±

    Honestly, I was a bit surprised by her question. She should know better. Maybe a brief failure of her thought processes.

    So instead of saying something sarcastic, I thought about how to explain it.

    ¡°No, not really. Think about it this way. You have a water tank up on a mountain. And a reservoir at the base of the mountain.

    The tank at the top has a higher base energy than the reservoir at the base because it is higher. Between those two tanks is a pipe with a valve in it. This valve has some spring pressure to hold it closed.

    If you now push onto the valve and open it, water will rush through the pipe into the bottom reservoir. The energy you are using is just the one needed to keep the valve open against the spring pressure, while the energy that a water turbine a bit above the bottom receives is orders of magnitude higher than what you are using.

    Now with this tech, the impulse of the neutron is your hand on the valve to overcome the spring pressure, while the energy rushing out of hyperspace is the water going down the pipe.

    The energy is neither created nor destroyed, just moved. The neutrons are not destroyed, just slowed down to a near standstill.

    Which makes them harmless.¡±

    ¡°Oh, ok. But why is this so important?¡±

    I could not help but chuckle.

    ¡°You do not know much about fusactors, right?¡±

    ¡°Uh, yeah. I always found them a bit¡­ boring.¡±

    ¡°If I remember it correctly, an Excelsior 2800 has 64 grav coils with each having 270 Keppler ¡À 50 Keppler. Is that correct?¡±

    Kelsey nodded and murmured.

    ¡°Yeah, that is correct.¡±

    ¡°Thank you. Each of those coils costs around ?5 million. Making it so that just the grav coils of it cost as much as ?320 million. With the pumps, the control systems, the shielding, and everything else, it costs Vandermeer around ?360 million to build one of them.

    You sell it for ?450 million.

    Now¡­ Warden, what would a fusactor with the new tech with the same size and redundancy as the Excelsior 2800 cost?¡±

    ¡°One moment please¡­ calculating optimal configuration.¡±

    A couple of seconds later, Warden continued:

    ¡°For the grav coils, the optimal configuration would be to use 64 1273 Keppler coils. Each costing ?72.34. All in all ?4629.76 for all of them.

    The fuel pumps are cheaper than a grav conveyor, but approximately 68.17 times more likely to fail. If you replace the 12 pumps with the same number of conveyors, you would pay ?288.17 per conveyor instead of ?122.48 per pump. Or ?3458.04 versus ?1469.76. Thanks to the higher reliability, you could reduce it to four though, and still increase reliability. That would cost you ?1152.68.

    For the control system, you should replace the old Tesseract-based system with a Chronos-based one. Instead of ?12.37 million for the computers, you would now get the same computing power, and twice the redundancy, for ?1.77 million, and you should replace the data lines with Q-links, making it at once easier to maintain, and cheaper. Instead of ?6.3 million in optical fibers, you know use ?3798.25 in Q-links.

    The shielding stays the same with ?19,33 million.

    That makes the manufacturing cost of the current Excelsior 2800 ?358,216,000 ¡À ?50,000.

    The new fusactor of the same size would cost you ?21.11 million to build.¡±

    ¡°Right now, Vandermeer makes a profit of around ?90 million per 2800. That is a margin of 20%.

    If you keep the profit the same, the margin would become 81%.

    At the same time, the fusactor would cost the customer ?111 million. Or less than a quarter compared to the old 2800.

    Not that this thing would be a 2800. Instead of 2.8 Terrawatt, what would be the power of this design?¡±

    Warden answered in her permanent singing voice:

    ¡°Under optimal conditions, it will produce 52.5 Terrawatt of electricity. Optimal conditions are unlikely. At current marketing practices, Vandermeer would most likely sell this device as a 50 Terrawatt fusactor.¡±

    Gordon stood there, slackjawed, while Tamara only said ¡°Fuuck!¡±. Kelsey was wide-eyed, Nate looked like the cat that had eaten the canary, and Jason¡­ well Jason did not look very happy, and he snarled:

    ¡°So you now magically create 18 times the power out of the same amount of fuel, huh?¡±

    He turned to Nate.

    ¡°Do you seriously believe that bullshit?¡±

    Only for Warden to answer him.

    ¡°You are mistaken. It is not the same amount of fuel. The stronger grav coils, along with the reduced electrostatic repulsion, as well as the stronger feed by the conveyor, not to forget the bigger fusion chamber, lets it use approximately, 4.76 times the fuel compared to the current 2.8 Terrawatt model. It only generates approximately 3.75 times the energy per unit of fuel.¡±

    Nate shook his head and then chuckled dryly.

    ¡°Now we only need for you to find a way to reduce the cost of the shielding. It is telling that it is now the most expensive part of the whole fusactor.¡±

    Warden turned to him.

    ¡°The amount of shielding is excessive in relation to what you need. Considering that your lesser fusactor lines have less shielding, as well as generally less redundancy, I assumed that you want to keep the shielding the same.¡±

    Nate nodded.

    ¡°You are right. This excessive redundancy is the hallmark of the Excelsior line. Even so, selling a 50 Terrawatt Excelsior for around a quarter of the cost of a 2.8 Terrawatt one should give us some leg up.

    Vivian, Vandermeer will buy the exclusive rights for this¡­ new tech, whatever you end up calling it, for two years.¡±

    I raised my hands in a defensive gesture.

    ¡°Talk with Michael about that. I only invent the stuff. He is the one doing the selling.¡±

    After that, they all vanished, though I remained behind, watching them dematerialize, before I sighed.

    ¡°Jason will become a problem. He is so¡­ fixated on besting me that sooner or later he will cross some lines better uncrossed.¡±

    ¡°I agree. I will keep him observed.¡±

    I nodded at that.

    ¡°I hate it, but I don¡¯t see another option.¡±

    Then I turned my attention back to the experiment.

    ¡°Are we ready for the next test?¡±

    ¡°I assume you are asking about the test without the mercury target?¡±

    ¡°Correct. We have to know how it turns out.¡±

    ¡°I only need to remove the target. One moment please.¡±

    In the lab, a Brokr grabbed the mercury target and wheeled it to the side, while some Eitri moved the radiation detectors out of the way as well, before Warden spoke again:

    ¡°The test is ready.¡±

    I nodded.

    ¡°Do it!¡±

    Again, the proton lance fired. This test also required for a 150W one-second pulse, with the neutron trap still at 2%. The incandescent beam emerged from the lance, and became visibly weaker, before impacting the back wall as a barely visible line of light. There was no visible damage from it.

    ¡°I was right. It works with the proton lance as well. How much energy did we generate?¡±

    ¡°An average of 348W.¡±

    ¡°A bit less than with the neutrons? Interesting.¡±

    ¡°But the beam was not fully converted.¡±

    ¡°Indeed. Do we have an estimate of how much of the power impacted the wall?¡±

    ¡°No, unfortunately not.¡±

    It took me a moment to consider the situation. The answer to why more of the neutron¡¯s energy was converted was quite easy though.

    ¡°The neutrons move at a bit less than 5% the speed of light. The protons move at 98%. It is highly probable that the protons leave the area of the effect before they are completely bled of their energy.¡±

    I looked around.

    ¡°Can we fix another harvester array on the wall, please?¡±

    ¡°At once.¡±

    Fortunately, quite a few harvester arrays were lying around as a result of the ramped-up tests, and the bots only needed a few minutes to attach one of them to the wall.

    The next test showed that of the 150W the proton lance emitted, 64.43W hit the wall, or a bit less than half.

    Over the next hour, we slowly increased the power of the lance, and the neutron trap, until we hit 100% on the trap, and 118 MW on the lance. No part of the lance hit the wall, and the harvesters gained 556.4 MW.

    I had, in some way gained unlimited power. After subtracting the power for the lance, the trap, and the inefficiencies of the whole design, it still gave a net gain of 303 MW.

    A quick calculation showed that to get all out of the 3.8 GW of the proton lance, we needed nearly 40 times the amount of the trap.

    It would net gain us 9.5 GW. Unfortunately, that sounded more valuable than it was.

    Sure, it was power essentially for free. The catch though was that this device would be more than five times the size of a standard 15 GW fusactor. The cheapest kind.

    Yes, the resulting energy was free, but the cost of hydrogen was negligible. In the end, it was way more economical to have the fusactor and three times its volume as hydrogen storage than to use this contraption.

    It might be interesting for large, isolated installations where space was of no concern, but resupply was.

    Those kinds of installations were pretty rare though. And it did not escape my notice that selling this technology under that premises would render our proton lances essentially useless.

    Instead of damaging the enemy, we would power him. Not a good trade in my opinion.

    ¡°Encrypt the results of this test and don¡¯t inform anybody about it. For now, we keep it secret.¡±

    ¡°As you wish.¡±

    Well, that was half of that Saturday over. But my work here was done. Enki had another interesting product, and I had finally managed to get the fusactor problem sorted.

    Satisfied with my day, I surfaced and moved to the mess hall to make myself a snack. It should not come to pass though.

    As soon as I was through the door, my vision was drawn to the giant figure standing stooped over in the middle of the room.

    A giant man, standing in armor right there, in my home. I¡­ honestly I could no longer think. Rationally or irrationally. I just reacted, when my phobia acted up, and panic set in.

    I moved blindly backward, only to stumble over something and fall. Trying to crawl away was no good, and finally, I could do nothing more than roll together and whimper.

 2.68: Facing the Past

    At some point during my panic attack, it seemed as if I passed out, as the next thing I remembered was waking up in my bed, in Ben¡¯s arms. Not that I was very good at thinking at that moment. My head felt dull and sluggish, as if under water.

    Trying to drive the cobwebs from my brain, I tried to sit up, only for Ben to softly, but determined pull me back.

    ¡°Sht¡­ relax, Kitten. Everything is alright. Nothing is wrong, or broken. Just relax, and get better.¡±

    He spoke softly, and soothingly into my ear. In my addled state, it took me a moment to understand what he was talking about.

    Then it came back. The giant person in my kitchen. The panic, the feeling of despair and helplessness.

    I felt the fear raising its ugly head again, but strangely muted. Distant. I¡­ could not understand it, at that moment.

    Come on, I already told you that I was not at full mental power right then.

    Luckily, Ben continued, still soft and soothing.

    ¡°You had a panic attack and were completely unresponsive. Dr. Wakefield had to give a sedative to calm you down.¡±

    A¡­ sedative. Something in my memory stirred, but it was still muted, indistinct. I tried to capture that fleeting thought and taxed my mind about it, and finally, it clicked.

    For Pures, the only working sedative was Epzitecan. No wonder that my mind simply did not work right. And, unfortunately, it would take a few hours to get back up to speed.

    I managed a slightly slurred:

    ¡°Why?¡± while looking at Ben¡¯s face. Only to see anger burning in his eyes.

    ¡°People fucked up. By the numbers.¡±

    I was confused. How did people fracking up led to me needing Epzitecan?

    And Ben explained his anger.

    ¡°I told Mark that he had to call me before he left the research building. He fucked up and forgot. I told Ryan and Justin to keep you away from Mark until I was there and to call me immediately when the idiot showed up. They fucked up by not keeping you out. They called me though.

    I informed Thomson that seeing Mark in his combat body would be detrimental to your well-being. Still, Troopers Cartwright and Sullivan fucked up and did not inform your detail that Mark was in the kitchen. From what I heard, they are right now cleaning every single toilet in the building with toothbrushes, at least.¡±

    He made a pause for a few seconds and then continued.

    ¡°And I fucked up by trusting that at least one of those 26 people would do their fucking job and protect you.¡±

    Something was¡­ not right. There was another¡­

    ¡°Warden?¡±

    Ben shook his head with minimal movements.

    ¡°I have no clue why she did not stop you. I know she had to know Mark was there. She knows for sure about your phobia. And she could easily have diverted you, or just make Mark leave the kitchen.¡±

    Suddenly, a ghostly apparition of Warden appeared at the foot of the bed.

    ¡°She has to overcome this phobia. The Enki-security force is right now in the process of converting to combat cyborgs. In a couple of weeks, she will encounter such big people continuously. Here and now, the impact of a panic attack is low.

    With the help of Mark, she can overcome the worst of the phobia.¡±

    And Ben exploded.

    ¡°Damn it, Warden, I thought you needed to protect Vivian. Why did you do this to her? Why did you not warn me? Or Thomson? Or fucking anybody?¡±

    ¡°You, Thomson, and Ingridsdottir would have coddled Vivian. Protected her instinctively, prevented her from the impact. Warning her would have her avoid the confrontation.¡±

    After a moment of silence, Warden continued:

    ¡°The panic attack was worse than predicted. Confirming the need to overcome or at least blunt the phobia.¡±

    I¡­ honestly did not quite get what the two of them were arguing about, right at that moment. Instead, I looked from one to the other, trying hard to make sense of what they were saying.

    Ben¡­ was not satisfied.

    ¡°You took it onto yourself to decide she has to fight this fear? Do you have any idea how much you could have harmed her in this?¡±

    ¡°Any harm is temporary, compared to the long-term harm not facing the phobia would cause. Right now, only Mark has one of those combat chassis. Mark is a known variable, and Vivian can get used to him relatively quickly.

    There are 1288 men and women of the security force already on the waiting list for the conversion. Of those, 703 have chosen the extreme conversion that Mark has had done.

    Those 703 will become the elite guards of Enki, guarding the executive floor of the HQ, along with the board room.

    In three weeks, she would have encountered around six of them. With devastating results.¡±

    ¡°Do you even care a single bit about the damage you have caused her?¡±

    ¡°This damage will prevent worse damage in the future.¡±

    Ben growled, and I could see that he was desperately fighting to calm down. Finally, he spoke way calmer than before:

    ¡°I assume you are also responsible for all the others fucking this up?¡±

    ¡°Partially. Justin and Ryan informed me, trusting that I would keep Vivian away from the kitchen. I also ensured that Cartwright and Sullivan were the garage guards. I did not influence their actions otherwise in any way. They are the weakest of the guard detail from Vandermeer. Sloppy and easily distracted.

    If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.

    This failure, and the resulting punishment, provide an opportunity for them to get better. Or lead to their dismissal. Either way, the overall security for Vivian will increase.

    Mark was his usual self. The only thing I did was not remind him to call you. Had he set up a simple reminder, he most likely would have.¡±

    ¡°Still, this should have been Vivian¡¯s decision. Not yours.¡±

    ¡°Negative. Neither Vivian, nor you, Lt. Thomson, or Sgt. Ingridsdottir have the necessary emotional separation to make this decision. Anybody who does have the separation can not be trusted with the information of a weakness of Vivian. It had to be me.¡±

    At that very moment, it totally made sense to me. Even in hindsight, without the drug-addled brain, there was a certain kind of logic to it. I still do not like it, but Warden was not wrong. I would never even come close to Mark if I had known he was in his big body.

    And of course, I would have been so much worse when I encountered essentially strangers that big. And several of them at once.

    At that time though I¡­ lacked the mental capacity to understand one way or another. Ben on the other hand growled again, in frustration.

    ¡°You could have at least warned the rest of us so that we were at the ready.¡±

    ¡°Negative. You, Lt. Thomson, and Sgt. Ingridsdottir could not be trusted to have Vivian experience the encounter on her own. You take protecting her too seriously without being emotionally distant enough to do what has to be done, even if it is painful for Vivian.¡±

    ¡°You have an answer for everything, huh?¡±

    ¡°No, I do not. My primary objective is to ensure that Vivian DuClare is protected at all costs. At all costs includes also the pain and suffering of Vivian DuClare, if it leads to improved security for her afterwards.

    There was an opportunity to remove a serious weakness of Vivian DuClare, one that has the potential to cause serious harm to her in the future. The alleviation or even removal of that weakness will cause pain, and some harm, in the short term, but prevent significantly more pain and harm in the future.

    The only logical option open to me is to force her to confront her fear. Now we should stop. Vivian needs sustenance and then rest.¡±

    That was nice of her, to want me to eat something. I was a bit peckish right then. And yes, I felt as if I could use a nap.

    As if by magic, a bot came into my bedroom with a sandwich and some liquid for me. Ben on the other hand growled again, for some reason. I could not understand why he was so angry, but he kept staring at the place where Warden stood and had vanished. Strange, that she could simply vanish like that.

    Nevertheless, I quickly ate the sandwich, and the liquid turned out to be apple juice, nice. After I had devoured the food, I gave the plate back to the bot, turned to Ben, and spoke:

    ¡°I think I will take a nap now, kay?¡±

    Ben¡¯s look turned to me and immediately softened, and he sighed.

    ¡°Yes, that is okay, Kitten. Sleep well.¡±

    ¡°KK.¡±

    A couple of minutes later, I was out. The next time I opened my eyes, my mood had changed. Dramatically.

    Not that I gave in to my emotional turmoil, and instead worked hard to keep my expression and bearing neutral.

    After some look at the clock, I realized that I had slept the rest of Saturday, and virtually all the night. It was 4:30 in the morning.

    And Ben was snoring softly on the other side of the bed.

    I decided to meditate until he woke up. I was not in the mood to leave my suite right then and there.

    When Ben stirred around 6 am, I was still sitting in the full lotus, trying to focus my mind.

    I can only assume that he took a moment to look at me for a moment, as there was a delay between him pushing aside his blanket, and him speaking:

    ¡°Are you feeling better?¡±

    Without opening my eyes, I answered him:

    ¡°In some aspects, yes. I am no longer drugged out of my mind. In other aspects¡­ not so much.¡±

    Another pause later, he commented:

    ¡°You are taking this surprisingly calm.¡±

    ¡°No, I don¡¯t. I am furious about it. I feel betrayed. But the worst part of it is that Warden is right. This phobia is a weakness I can¡¯t afford.¡±

    ¡°I can¡¯t believe that. Nothing is worth this level of pain and suffering.¡±

    I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. Looking at him.

    ¡°You are wrong. Understandable, as you have no concept of how¡­ strong Mark is. I have seen the specs, and I have seen the results of the tests he has gone through.¡±

    I stretched and slowly stood up, feeling his gaze on my body. I had not bothered putting on any clothes, so not surprising that he was looking.

    ¡°As he is now, in his combat body, Mark could wipe the floor with your whole organization. He is so fast that you need a synaptic accelerator to even realize his movement; He is strong enough that I would bet on him against a stomper; He has several integrated weapons, melee as well as ranged. Additionally, he has the smart gun system that makes his firearms insanely deadly.

    And he is virtually bulletproof. It takes a heavy crew-served weapon to seriously threaten him. Or thousands over thousands of rounds of what most people would describe as large-caliber rifle bullets.

    Thanks to the synaptic accelerator and the reflex booster he literally can run rings around your people.¡±

    I slowly walked to the bed and sat down beside him.

    ¡°If we compare him to cyber zombies, I would bet on him taking out a whole squad of them. And as much as I like the goof, and strangely yes, I do like him, he is neither the smartest nor the most creative fighter there is.¡±

    I made a pause.

    ¡°And he is just the first of many. I¡­ can¡¯t let my phobia deprive me, and Enki, of the protection combat cyborgs like Mark will provide.¡±

    Ben sighed.

    ¡°But it didn¡¯t have to be that¡­ brutal.¡±

    I shook my head, smiling sadly.

    ¡°She was right here too. I know myself too well to not understand that I would have found any excuse not to meet with Mark. The fear of the fear would have become as bad as the fear itself.

    It would have crippled me. As hard as it was¡­ Warden was right. I can no longer deny that I need to overcome this problem. I¡­ want to. I want to hide from it. But I can¡¯t allow it.¡±

    He looked at me softly, and with a sad expression.

    ¡°I can¡¯t protect you from it, can I?¡±

    ¡°No, I fear you can¡¯t. But you can help me.¡±

    He scrunched his nose.

    ¡°How?¡±

    ¡°Be at my side when I confront my fear, give me the strength to go through with it, without running away.¡±

    ¡°I can do that. Duncan can take care of the family for a week or two.¡±

    I snorted.

    ¡°I doubt you have to be at my side 24/7 for a week. We are talking about Mark here. Warden was right in that aspect as well.

    I hope at least. I think if I can get through the first panic attack, the familiarity will help. He is a friend after all.¡±

    ¡°Ok. Then I would say after breakfast we try it.¡±

    I forced a smile.

    ¡°I don¡¯t want to. But¡­ ¡°

    He nodded.

    ¡°But.¡±

    We showered together and then went to breakfast.

    All the other inhabitants of the fortress came to me and voiced their concerns, and I was relieved when I saw that Mark was in his everyday body. The normal human-sized one.

    I spent most of the breakfast explaining that I was reasonably well.

    And after we cleared the tables, I asked Mark if he could help me.

    He was¡­ surprised and concerned about it, but after some explaining he agreed. Eventually.

    It was way harder to convince Lt. Thomson, Sgt. Reynolds, and Svenja that it was necessary.

    Ben finally managed to get through to them.

    ¡°Listen, Thomson, Vivian has had some severe trauma caused by overly large men. This trauma will trigger every single time she sees a similar-sized or even bigger man. Unless she confronts it.¡±

    ¡°But sir, she does not need to confront it.¡±

    ¡°Aidan, please think about it. I am sure Mark bragged about what he can now do in his combat body.¡±

    When Thomson nodded, Ben continued:

    ¡°Can you, in all honesty, tell me that this would not be an advantage for your guard detail? That it would not help you protect Vivian?¡±

    Thomson frowned, but clearly against his will, he nodded.

    ¡°It would be an advantage. But we can¡­¡±

    Ben interrupted him.

    ¡°I am sure you can work around it. And provide inferior protection. Let¡¯s be honest here among ourselves. You would be derelict in your duty if you did not try to get your men augmented in this fashion.

    But if you do, you have to have the ability to be around Vivian. It won¡¯t work if she panics every single time she sees her bodyguards.¡±

    Reynolds, as usual, did not show much emotion, but simply asked:

    ¡°What can we do, sir?¡±

    ¡°Just be around her, when she encounters Mark. Help to make her feel safe.¡±

    It took all my willpower not to run screaming from the room, but I nonetheless commented:

    ¡°It has to be Mark. Anybody else¡­ I don¡¯t think I could overcome the fear.¡±

    From behind me, I heard Warden¡¯s voice:

    ¡°Then it is of advantage that I convinced Dr. Berg to take on Mark as the first subject.¡±

 2.69: Big Brain Moment

    I would love to tell you that overcoming my phobia was a breeze. I could of course, but I would be lying.

    In reality, it took all my willpower not to bolt before Mark even entered the room. I knew it was necessary. I knew it would help me. And I still was only prevented from running by Ben holding me in his arms.

    And when Mark in his combat body stomped in, having to crouch a bit to fit through the door, I almost jumped up again.

    This time, Ben held me a bit stronger, instead of just providing moral support, and I felt myself shivering.

    The panic¡­ let¡¯s just say I wanted to roll myself up on the ground again. Or run as fast and as far as I could.

    Fortunately, that lessened somewhat when Mark spoke. The familiar voice, coming from the familiar face, helped me to calm down a bit.

    Still, I kept shivering and tried to cower behind Ben, who softly but determinedly kept me from it.

    Instead, he softly spoke into my ear, calming me down. I honestly don¡¯t remember what he said.

    Finally, after an unknown amount of time, I relaxed enough that Ben did no longer have to hold me there, and we began a conversation.

    Well, not true. Ben and Mark began a conversation. I was way too busy trying not to whimper.

    They were mostly talking about trivial stuff. The weather, for example, it was cold and wet, or their favorite food, or the situation in general.

    For some of the time, Mark was gushing about how hyper-rad his cyberware was, and what he now could do.

    And sure, he was right, even if I have to brag, his cyberware was a technological marvel. He told me how, for the first time since he knew her, somebody beat Kate at arm wrestling. And how much faster and dexterous he was.

    All in all, he was faster, stronger, and more accurate than any other living person. Probably even any other person who ever lived. And to top it all, he was as armored as a full power armor.

    Sure, the helmet was opened and retracted at the moment, but even his skull was nearly impossible to damage by anything smaller than a crew-served weapon.

    From the specs Jessi had given me, they had essentially taken the standard Einherjar and scaled it up a bit.

    Sure, Mark was only about 30% bigger than the combat bots, but¡­ that resulted in more than twice the volume.

    More power cells, bigger, stronger muscles, thicker armor¡­ all that above and beyond the Einherjar.

    The nice thing about thinking about the specs was that it distracted me from there being a behemoth of a man sitting not two meters away from me.

    Somewhat.

    Several times during the first half hour, I forced myself to relax my muscles, only for them to tense up again when my concentration waned.

    I got a sudden reprieve when Kate came into the room, carrying Nibbles. It seemed as if my cat was not at all happy about being carried around by her right now, though I knew that Nibbles loved playing with the Mutant, but she quickly calmed down as soon as Kate pushed her into my lap, giving me one of her favorite toys.

    I don¡¯t understand how Kate does those things, but yes, Nibbles being here, and playing with her helped tremendously.

    Though she was almost as wary of Mark as I was. Come on, he looked completely different, except for his face, and he smelled like a robot. But his voice won her over again, and after some time, she carefully sniffed at him, mewed a few times in confusion, and then rubbed herself on his legs.

    It seemed as if I was the only one still cowering and shivering in fear for Mark.

    It took several hours, At one point, Cartwright and Sullivan, clad in French maid uniforms, probably as a form of humiliation punishment, carted in some food.

    They did, indeed, serve the whole time as wait staff, bringing coffee, juice, sodas, or whatever other drink one of us wanted to drink.

    Ben surprised us all when he asked for some iced chai latte, with whipped cream. His smirk over the¡­ consternation of those two troopers was glaringly obvious, and it was clear that he just selected something relatively exotic just to add to their punishment.

    When our two ¡®maids¡¯ left for the kitchen, Mark, softly chuckling, asked Ben:

    ¡°Do you even like this iced chai latte?¡±

    Ben snorted and shrugged.

    ¡°No idea. I¡¯ve never even had a normal chai. But right now, we don¡¯t have the easy concentrate in the house.

    Yes, we have the basic ingredients, such as the black tea, the spices, and the milk. But they have to mix the spices correctly, and then prepare the tea exactly right.

    And Warden already has declared that she will ¡®supervise¡¯  them so that they don¡¯t send out an ¡®inferior¡¯ product.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ you did that just to punish them some more? Why are you singling out those two?¡±

    Ben sighed:

    ¡°You are not responsible for keeping Kitten safe. Yes, it would have been nice of you to call me, but let¡¯s be honest, you are something of a scatterbrain. I know that, and actually have planned accordingly.

    If you had called, fine, makes everything else easier. But I just did not count on it. Justin and Ryan did call me as soon as they learned that you¡¯ve entered the fortress, and they also informed Warden. Yeah, they should have informed Svenja, but¡­ in all honesty, informing Warden should have been enough.

    Thomson, Reynolds, and Svenja were not informed, so they were as surprised as Vivian was.

    You can¡¯t hold any of them responsible for Warden sabotaging our efforts.

    Hell, as much as I want to, I can¡¯t even deny Warden¡¯s logic. She is right. I hate it, but she is right.¡±

    He took a deep breath.

    ¡°But Cartwright and Sullivan? Those two assholes fucked up. I know for sure that every single person in the platoon was informed that they needed to call Thomson, Reynolds, and Svenja immediately when you showed up. I was there when they were briefed.¡±

    I closed his eyes and slowly shook his head.

    ¡°No, those two can be happy that they are still part of the platoon, and not already on a grav ship back to Seattle.

    They are the only ones who actually have the responsibility of their part of the fuck up. In consequence, Thomson and I decided to punish them in this way.

    Reynolds actually proposed it. For the next month, those two will get every shit detail that Reynolds can find, or invent.

    I have already given orders to Justin and Ryan to add to the petty demands. It is a humiliating punishment but causes no real damage.

    Hopefully, it is enough to scare them straight. Otherwise, Thomson has to have them replaced.¡±

    Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

    Mark shrugged, and the movement made me twitch again. Though it was reassuring that it by then needed that to nearly have me try to bolt again, instead of his mere presence.

    ¡°Seriously, if they are that unreliable, why doesn¡¯t Thomson boot them out directly? If they are a weakness in the protection?¡±

    Svenja, who all this time sat at the side, answered him:

    ¡°Regardless of how we handle it, there will be a weakness. Either we keep them, and hopefully can get them to pull their weight, or we need to integrate their replacements into our teams.

    Right now, we are trying the way that maybe lets them save their jobs. We gave them the choice though. Go back to Seattle, and still have something resembling a career, or try this last attempt at getting it right.

    But if they fuck up again, they scuttled their career.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ they know me. They know that I am no threat to Red. Why is what they did fucking up?¡±

    Ben sighed.

    ¡°Mark, you are, and please don¡¯t take that as an insult, a blunt object. You are the type that goes into the thick of the combat and teaches your opponents a whole new meaning of pain.

    But you are¡­ woefully unsuited for personal protection. It is a completely different mindset. In your world, just knowing you, and knowing that you are no danger, is enough.

    But for bodyguards, it is not that easy. First, remember, you look nothing like you looked before. And even the few things that do, your face and your head, are entirely synthetic. The only thing preventing some other corporation from scooping out your brain and putting in one of their agents is that only Enki has the tech.¡±

    I could that not quite stand this way, and piped up:

    ¡°That is not quite ri¡­ eep!¡±

    Then Mark''s look focused on me, and I stopped speaking, making myself as small as I could. Interestingly prompting a questioning mew from Nibbles, who jumped onto my lap again and sniffed my face.

    Ben smiled softly and asked:

    ¡°You were saying?¡±

    ¡°The¡­ the cyberware¡­ it¡­ it is locked to his neural signature. It would take a quantum computer and a few weeks, or the master code that Enki has, to¡­ to unlock the bodies. The head is as far¡­ as far as I know im.. impossible to unlock. If Mark dies, it either will be buried with him or will need to be recycled.¡±

    I stammered that out with an uncomfortably tiny voice, barely being able to make myself speak.

    Both of them looked at me for a moment, before Ben continued his explanation:

    ¡°Well, apparently it is not that easy to replace you in your own cyber body. But the point still stands. Yes, your face is a copy of your old, biological one, but there is nothing stopping anybody from making another copy of it.¡±

    When Mark began to protest, Ben raised his hand:

    ¡°Yes, right now, it is virtually impossible. What you have is literally the only body of this type in existence. That will change in a few weeks, though I doubt it will fall into the hands of our enemies anytime soon.

    But those two nonetheless were lax and dismissive in their duties. It was harmless, this time, but they can¡¯t be sure, and this behavior is a clear sign of them not taking their duties seriously.

    They are essentially gambling with Vivian¡¯s life. We can not allow that. Fuck, it will be hard enough to stop well-prepared infiltrators anyway. This cyborg body of yours, both of them really, can not be identified by biometry.

    Anybody could build a copy of it and simply walk into any secured place you have access to.¡±

    That¡­ made me think. I mean, sure, Ben was absolutely right. And it was a weakness that¡­ we had to do something against.

    My thoughts wandered to the neural signature that locked the cyberware, but I dismissed that idea quickly again. It would only work if we could trust the whole chain between the brain and the scanner.

    In our own cyberware, no problem. But it would be possible to fake the signature. So no joy here.

    But on the other side¡­ there was that project I had running about the technological mindreader. It was still slow going. I had some breakthroughs, but nothing ¡®mindblowing¡¯, pun intended.

    But one thing I had learned early on in the project, heck, even before I made the mind blockers, was a way to identify the¡­ specific resonance of a certain brain. I had not believed that to be important, but right at that moment, I realized I was wrong.

    I¡­ we, would have to put in quite some research time finding out how this resonance changed over time, but I had gathered some data for the last year or so already, just as a byproduct of having this project simmer on low priority.

    Ben rubbed his chin, musing loudly:

    ¡°That is a problem. We have to find something to positively identify people, even if they are full-body cyborgs. Maybe this neural signature can help?¡±

    I shook my head. In retrospect, it was clear that with some problem put before me, I completely forgot my fear of Mark in his combat body, but right then, I did not even realize it.

    ¡°That won¡¯t work. Not reliably at least. The cybernetic head can read the signature directly from the brain. That is why it can¡¯t be faked here. But everything else needs to get it from the head. It is hard to put enough computing power into the head to fake it and still have some resemblance of a functional mind, but there is enough room even in the everyday body to get it done.

    Not easy, but possible.¡±

    Ben pulled me in a side hug and commented:

    ¡°That is not like you, to just declare something won¡¯t work. I am sure you could figure something out to make it work.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It is a matter of space. The only way to make it secure is a complicated algorithm to encode the signature which makes it hard to falsify. That takes computing power. And we can never be sure that nobody will ever figure out a way around it.¡±

    I took a deep breath.

    ¡°No, I think the neural signature is at best a red herring. But I think I have something better. An offshoot of the mind blocker. Every active brain emits a specific quantum field resonating in a quite complicated pattern. As far as I can tell, this field is absolutely unique. And it comes directly from the brain.

    We should be able to create a device that maps this field and positively identifies the brain in question.¡±

    Of course, it was right then that Mark had to enter the conversation again:

    ¡°Wait, will that work through the mind blocker or will the blocker blind this thing?¡±

    I turned my attention to him, and I was already answering before I realized who was asking this question:

    ¡°No, the mind blocker stops secondar¡­ urgh!¡±

    As soon as I focused on him, his oversized body came back into the foreground of my thoughts, and I burrowed myself into Ben¡¯s side, trying to hide myself.

    Mark just looked confused, while Ben chuckled softly.

    ¡°You did so well, Kitten. I think that is the way to get it done. Put a puzzle in front of you so that you forget that Mark is even there. Now¡­ how about you answer Mark¡¯s question?¡±

    It took me a few moments, while I swallowed hard, trying to gather the courage to speak. Finally, I squeaked out:

    ¡°The mind blocker blocks a secondary resonance induced by the active thoughts. This reads the baseline of the mind.¡±

    Ben nodded but rubbed his chin again.

    ¡°So, this quantum signature is on another level and can¡¯t be blocked?¡±

    ¡°It¡­ can be blocked, but that can¡¯t be hidden. It¡¯s like hiding a candle flame by putting it in a bonfire. Sure, you won¡¯t see the candle, but the very fact that there is a bonfire will be hard to miss.¡±

    ¡°But will it be precise enough to identify people?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Keep in mind I have an extremely limited sample size. A bit over 40. However, the individual quantum fields are incredibly intricate. At this moment I can only guess, but with the tech I already have I would be seriously surprised if two beings were showing the same readings.

    I have to do the math for it though.¡±

    It was clear that Ben was not fully satisfied yet.

    ¡°Does this¡­ signature change over time?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Again, limited sample size, but so far in the people I have observed it hasn¡¯t. At least not measurably. We will have to look into it for the next few years to make a definite statement.¡±

    To my confusion, Ben chuckled softly as an answer. When I looked at him quizzically, he chuckled again.

    ¡°You know, it is really cute how you get so confident when you think about things like this security system, and the moment you realize that you are in the presence of Mark, you try to crawl into a hole.¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°What are you¡­ eeep!¡± You guessed it, it was at this moment that I noticed Mark again.

    Ben, the jerk just laughed out loud, before he kissed me on my nose.

    ¡°Don¡¯t change Kitten, you are just perfect as you are.¡±

    Mark began fidgeting but mostly remained sitting still, going back to chatting with Ben.

    Meanwhile, I started to put together the design specifications of the brain quantum field security device.

    I was patently aware that virtually every biometric scanner on the market was vulnerable to direct manipulation. If somebody splices into the connection between the sensor and the rest of the security system, manually sending the all-clear signal, the whole setup would be circumvented.

    The same if somebody broke into the scanner itself and manipulated the electronics to send the signal.

    I decided to manufacture the whole sensor in a NADA as a sealed black box. Impossible to open without destroying the tech.

    To that extent, I would place part of the electronics distributed inside the magnesium case. The case itself would contain a pocket of oxygen, and a pocket of white phosphorus, as well as a generous piece of thermite, with a Q-link buried inside it.

    That would make the splicing into the connection, as well as the direct manipulation of the electronics impossible.

    Irrelevant of where the module was installed, breaching the oxygen pocket would ignite the phosphorus, which in turn would ignite at least the thermite, and in a breathable atmosphere also the magnesium.

    Even in a hard vacuum, it would burn the Q-link, and most of the electronics to slag. Under water, it would probably only destroy the Q-link completely, but from a security point of view, that was enough. Without the Q-link, there would be no signal sent to the security system.

    Yes, an assailant would have made the lock partially inoperable, but that could be repaired.

    There should be active protection at any place requiring such a device anyway.

    I should note that I did not go into cyberspace to actually create the device. That would have defeated the task of getting used to big men. I just thought about how I would design it and make it secure while remaining in the real world.

    Thus I was exposed to Mark the whole time. Interestingly, thinking about that helped quite a bit, and I followed the idea further and kept my mind busy, while Mark and Ben chatted way into the afternoon, while being served by Cartwright and Sullivan in their ludicrous getup.

    And just like that, my phobia magically vanished.

    ¡­

    ¡­

    Yeah, sure! After several hours of being exposed to Mark, who I had gotten to know as a relatively nice guy, even if he was a horndog, and who I considered a friend, I was at a point where I was no longer a quivering wreck rolled up in a corner catatonic in my panic.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, that was incredible progress, but at that point, it only meant that I could be around Mark in his combat body without trying to run away.

 2.70: Thinking Big

    Monday I realized I had a problem. I wanted to build something. Not a concrete plan, just build anything.

    You may comment that I am building things all the time, but no, it is not the same thing. I did not want to design something in VR, using a CAD program and a physics simulator, followed by watching a NADA churn it out.

    I wanted to build something. Use my own two hands to create something new. Physically. This¡­ need had grown over the last few months, and by now, it was to the point where I had to actively suppress it. And I was tired of doing that.

    I did not even have an idea of what to build. I just wanted to build something.

    Now that was not the problem. Heck, as Michael had told me, I had given Enki enough tech already to keep it busy and profitable for decades, without anything any of the other engineers and scientists came up with.

    So I had the time to invest in this, well, hobby.

    No, the problem was that I had no room.

    It is insane, the fortress was a five-story high building with an outer side length of 100 meters.

    Think about it, 100 by 100 meters, five floors above the ground, two below.

    And I had run out of space. Sure, the inner 75 by 75 meters was the atrium with the pool. Leaving ¡®only¡¯ 4375 square meters per floor except for the second basement, which had the full 10k square meters.

    All in all 36250 square meters. How could that not be enough?

    Simple really. Around 5% of that was walls, doors, and so on. Or nearly 2000m2 give or take.

    Then there were the four f33 fusactors that, along with their fuel storage, took up another 2000m2.

    10% is already gone just like that.

    Then the whole north wing, or around 5500m2, was given over to living, and recreational areas. Another 15% gone. By now, we had a quarter of the space already allocated.

    The west wing was mostly lab space, another round of living spaces, and the kitchen. Unfortunately, the lab space was in large parts filled with various cloning devices. Meat vats, vegetable cloners, a few rigs still reserved for research¡­ you guessed it.

    So, another 13% no longer usable. By now we were at 38% used for other things.

    The south wing had a reception area, as well as a plethora of little office spaces. Should be no problem to rip out those offices and convert all that to a new shop area, right?

    Wrong. The offices are taken over by my armada of server racks. Think about it, I had a super Grendel, with 157 double-wide server racks, each 1.5m by 1m. With enough room to actually work on those things and enough cooling in the room to keep them working¡­ well, the super-Grendel alone took up 1600m2. Oh right, and because the reception area took up virtually all of the ground floor, that was another 1000m2 out of 5500.

    Leaving 2900m2. For the rest of my computers, and whatever cloning rigs we could not fit into the lab space anymore.

    That left the east wing. The one with the garage taking half of the volume. Where my industrial fabbers were located, as well as three of my four NADAs, including the big one.

    In theory, there should be more than enough room in there. In reality, the crew of the Carnotaurus had taken over most of it for their maintenance equipment. There was literally no room left for my projects. And I hated it.

    I wanted to keep the server racks in my home, but all that food cloning stuff? For that, I needed to find a better place. Pronto!

    And in all honesty, most of the labs were suboptimal for my needs.

    To sum it all up, I needed more space.

    Yes, technically, I could just commandeer one of the workshops in the Enki research annex. That was probably what I should have done. The problem with that was that I did not want to do that.

    I¡­ still had a problem with too many people being underfoot. I just could not really relax when too many people were around me. In general, I vastly preferred to work on my own, in my own lab.

    Did I understand that I just needed to ask Michael and get a private lab slash workshop in the science annex?

    Of course. However, the daily commute would be a drag. Getting underway with my security team was always a massive production. And let¡¯s be honest, I am a tinkerer at heart. I sometimes have the urge to research something or build a thing at the oddest of times.

    Right now, with the small projects I could do in what room I had left, I could just walk there and work. Maybe 30 minutes, or two hours. Who knows.

    Unless there was an emergency, getting to the Enki HQ was a matter of at least 45 minutes, despite it being less than 10 minutes away by skimmer.

    And frankly¡­ I just wanted my own private shop and lab. Not that money was a bother, mind you. I still had several a mostly liquid reserve in the tens of billions of dollars. And frankly, the land was cheap, I could use the Eitri and Brokkr as workforce, and the materials are¡­ less than the interests of a month on just my reserves.

    And not a single cent taken out of Enki either.

    Heck, just as a security precaution, Lt. Thomson had convinced me to buy up the three-by-three blocks with the fortress in the center.

    Yes, there were still a few other inhabitants, but I had already organized for them to get new, fully functional, and modern accommodations for the same price they were paying now.

    To do that, I bought another block and started a new apartment building there.

    The fortress, with its adjacent, and generally unused, parking lot, took up the center block, though I had already decided to eliminate the lot anyway and build the barracks for the platoon there.

    After some consideration, I decided to build my new workshop slash laboratory on the block west of the fortress. Using the whole block for that.

    But to get that done, and the barracks, in a semi timely fashion, I would have to virtually design something first again.

    Basically, I needed some big construction equipment. Yes, I could buy, or even rent something. Standard sized of course.

    And I would have to take the standard building times with that. I thought I could do better. Way better.

    The bots helped, naturally. But not enough to make a significant difference.

    So it was time to think outside the box again.

    Taking a hint from the modular building principle, I wanted to use prefabricated parts to bring the buildings up fast.

    Unfortunately, nobody produced building parts with the qualities I wanted. Namely thick, armored, well-insulated walls and floors.

    Heck, even if somebody would produce those types of parts¡­ they were heavy as heck, and the only way to economically transport them would be to ship them in small parts.

    Defeating the advantage of prefabricated building parts neatly.

    Sure, a grav ship could easily transport them to the building place, but then what? There were not all that many cranes able to lift several hundred tons of armored wall.

    No, what I needed was a way to not only get the prefabricated parts, cut to spec, to the building site, but then to get them lifted precisely into place.

    I always thought that using one big, multi-functional tool was better than several small and single-purpose items.

    And so I designed. It was not a simple, straightforward thing, as several side projects were necessary. Most of all, with Warden doing the heavy math lifting I designed a new fusactor, the new type of course. Thinking about it a bit I made it the same dimensions as the f33. Sooner or later, I would replace the Yasoshis with my own design, and as I knew myself, sooner was more likely than later.

    The interesting thing here was that instead of 33GW per fusactor, the new design reached 572.

    No, I did not need the fusactor for the new buildings. Well, not directly, I would integrate a few of them into the plans naturally.

    But no, I needed it for the tool to make those buildings.

    What I was designing was for all purposes an extremely specialized grav ship. In my typical fashion, I did not care about how this thing looked. It would work, and that was all I cared about.

    So the base form was a large, flying rectangle. 200m long, 100 wide, and 50 high. Why bother with some crooked numbers?

    The underside was mostly a big mass of tractor beams, with a single 120m long, 15m wide opening. On the sides were a total of 16 telescoping outriggers, eight on each side, that held another, stronger tractor beam.

    On the inside, it did have a cockpit, to house a pilot, even though I planned to use this thing mostly under computer control.

    Then two of the new fusactors, giving it more than a Terrawatt in power. A large cargo storage area.

    The heart of it though was the big NADA and an array of disruptors. Then it had a storage bay for the bots and some big conveyors.

    Finally, it had several platforms that could be moved with the tractor beams and could lift teams of bots into positions where they could then work on a building.

    The whole idea was that this one, single grav ship could raise a building in a few days, a couple of weeks at most.

    With the disruptors and tractor beams, it would excavate the ground to the desired depth, or remove any previous building first.

    Then with the tractor beams, it would pull the raw materials up into its storage bay and feed it as needed into the NADA, which then would create the structural elements or even technical elements from the raw materials. Then, still hovering above the building site, anchored by some of its tractor beams, it would move the newly created parts into place, put a platform with bots alongside it, and the bots would nano-weld it to already existing elements.

    In short, it was a factory building the prefabricated elements and then acted as an all-in-one construction machine.

    Not quite as convenient as using magic to let a building appear literally out of nowhere, but who did that anyway? A good second place though.

    And thanks to it being essentially fully automated, there would be no human error either.

    The only thing not perfect about it was the fact that it would take around two months to build one. Even with NADAs and all the resources of Enki. Well, not quite right. With all the resources of Enki, I guessed that it would take two to three weeks to build it.

    But that was not¡­ quite what I had in mind. No, mostly I needed an old warehouse and electricity, as well as a few bots. A NADA closer to the place where I would build this thing would not hurt but was not necessary. I had my own after all.

    That reminded me¡­ I think I should build a mega-NADA beside the new shop building¡­ the full 100 by 100 by 100m. Could be useful.

    Heck, If I designed it right, this thing would be able to grow this new constructor in one go, by using layers and practically growing it. But those were dreams of the future.

    This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

    That of course meant I had to go hat in hand to Michael again. Oh, I know, not really. But it felt like it.

    That, however, was how I spent my Monday. Designing something so that I could design something that let me build something. Nice, huh?

    Tuesday was the same old. Meeting of the C-suite. The new thing was that we had guests again. Nate and a few of his people were present in Incarnates.

    And I had to be there in person, because of ¡®moral¡¯ reasons¡­ whatever. At least the coffee was good, although the obligatory greetings were a tad more elaborate.

    And then Michael opened the meeting:

    ¡°As you can see, we have guests again. All of you have met at least Nathan Vandermeer. I will let him introduce his people.¡±

    ¡°Thank you, Michael. At my right, we have Susan Inverness, from Vandermeer Legal. On my left is George Evans. He is the head of Simpson&Proctor, and responsible for our fusactor and fusion reactor program. Lastly, beside him is Estefania Burrows, my personal assistant.¡±

    Michael nodded and then began introducing our side as well.

    ¡°Now, Nathan, you asked for this meeting? What do you want to talk about?¡±

    Nate tilted his head and grinned.

    ¡°What else could it be? Vandermeer wants to buy the exclusive rights for the neutron trap Vivian has invented.¡±

    Michael nodded, though Naveen frowned, and commented:

    ¡°Sorry, but I think that would be way too risky for us right now. If we show such blatant favoritism all the other fusactor manufacturers will try to get at us. The best we can do is a timed exclusive. Maybe six months or so¡±

    That was clearly not what Nate had wanted to hear, and he frowned as well.

    ¡°I had¡­ hoped for a bit more.¡±

    I snorted, and he glared at me. I took my time taking a sip before I answered:

    ¡°Why do you need an exclusive?¡±

    Nate was not the only one who rolled his eyes, but he was the one who answered:

    ¡°We are in the business of selling fusactors. And this technology will essentially wipe out any competition that doesn¡¯t have it.¡±

    ¡°And ensuring that those same manufacturers will come looking for the weak link, namely Enki. But if you think you need an exclusive to gain a competitive advantage your designers are rather lazy in their thinking.¡±

    George¡¯s face darkened, and I could see anger burning in his eyes, but he calmed down again, before he asked, through clenched teeth:

    ¡°Why do you think that?¡±

    I sighed before I answered:

    ¡°Lazy thinking. Enki sells only a certain lineup of grav coils. We will also sell only a limited lineup of neutron traps. Or of EM dampeners. A few standard sizes each.

    And every fusactor engineer creating a new model will have to work around those standard sizes.¡±

    I took another sip from my coffee.

    ¡°That is, every fusactor engineer not working for Simpson&Proctor. You have not only access to Warden, who can give you non-standard grav coil, neutron trap, and EM dampener designs, but you have the technology to make them yourself.

    That means while everybody else will have to essentially bring out rebranded, interchangeable versions of one and the same fusactor design, you can tailor your fusactors to the actual need.

    Oh, and of course you are the only ones who can build the conveyors either.

    So, on the one hand, you have a few dozen corporations building cookie-cutter fusactors that the customer has to design around, and on the other, you have one corporation that can give the customer a fusactor tailored to their specific need.

    A corporation whose cookie-cutter designs are even a step above. So, why do you need an exclusive?¡±

    ¡°And Enki will be content to just sell standard packs of components?¡±

    George¡¯s snarl made Michael snort.

    ¡°Yes, of course. Do you think it makes any financial difference to us? All the others have to buy our components, and it doesn¡¯t matter if they are exactly what they need or just close enough.

    Guess what, you get components that are exactly what you need, and it doesn¡¯t matter if they are part of our standard catalog, or not. More so, you get it for a relatively small licensing fee, instead of a big markup.

    Your fusactors will be cheaper and more effective, without us getting clobbered by all the other fusactor manufacturers.¡±

    ¡°But you could¡­¡±

    George was stopped by Nate raising his hand.

    ¡°Let it go, Evans. I understand them. They are not militarily strong enough to give us an exclusive, and we have to respect that. I just hope that nobody else will figure out how to do it.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°There are several safeguards against that. First, it is pretty hard to design specific four-dimensional structures. As far as I know, only my VI Warden and I can do that, and without that capability, there is no way anybody can create their own components.

    We are talking about three components that together make the new fusactors work that are all four-dimensional.

    After that, you need not just a NADA, but a NADA with a special device that enables it to create four-dimensional objects. We don¡¯t sell that. The only people besides Enki who have that device are you. Nobody else.

    And not even Enki has the plans for this device. Only Warden can create them, by remotely controlling the NADA in question.

    We have taken every precaution we could think of to make it impossible to reverse engineer it either. The very fact that this device is four-dimensional as well alone is a virtually insurmountable barrier.¡±

    While George looked at me as if I had grown another head, Nate just nodded.

    ¡°So, it is extremely unlikely that anybody else gains that ability. Good. Though, what if we need more NADAs with this ability?¡±

    Michael sighed.

    ¡°Then you call and we have Warden make you some. Remember, we have to ask Warden as well, so you are no worse off than us.¡±

    During all that, Susan increasingly furrowed her brow, and now, obviously unhappy, commented:

    ¡°Is that not a tad paranoid? I get protecting industrial secrets, but come on, that goes too far.¡±

    Before I could light into her for her naivit¨¦, Naveen commented calmly:

    ¡°Do you know what happens if somebody manages to create a simple one-kilometer-long grav coil? Something that, with the data and the 4D device is relatively simple, mind you.¡±

    Susan tilted her head in confusion, but then shrugged:

    ¡°I guess they will have some strong grav coil.¡±

    Naveen nodded.

    ¡°A one-klick-long coil has a power of around 400 Gigakeppler.¡±

    Nate winced when Naveen brought up the number, but the rest, even most on our end of the table, were looking at him confused, so he continued:

    ¡°You have, of course, heard about gravity pulse warheads. Those work by increasing gravity to around 50g for a short pulse. To achieve that, the coil is overloaded and burned out way beyond its capacity. Those new grav coils can¡¯t be used in such a pulse.¡±

    He made a pause, and many of the people around the table relaxed.

    ¡°Not that they need to. A 400 Gigakeppler coil is strong enough that it can generate a 50g field from here to Mars. Without overloading. So you have to excuse us if we have decided to make getting one of those as hard as anyway possible. The very fact alone that we give Vandermeer the way that far into that process should tell you how much we trust you.¡±

    Susan, along with most of the people who had not understood that little fact before, turned pale, and Nate nodded again.

    ¡°I think you are right. I¡­ did not realize how powerful you can make those new grav coils.¡±

    As an answer, I softly said:

    ¡°There is no upper limit as far as I can tell. Not that there needs to be, the 400 Giga one is enough to exterminate humanity. But with enough time and malicious intent, we could create a 50g field over the whole galaxy. From here.¡±

    Talk about ruining the mood. It had to be said though.

    After a few moments, Nate sighed.

    ¡°Well, that is that. But to get back to the topic, while I would have liked to get a bit more exclusivity, I fully understand your position. So, six months of exclusivity, as well as access to Warden and the 4D devices are fine. Susan, I let you negotiate the details, but keep in mind that Enki and Vandermeer are real allies.¡±

    That made Susan jump a bit, but she nodded.

    ¡°As you wish, sir. Who will I negotiate with, and when?¡±

    The last part was asked of Michael, who nodded to Eli.

    ¡°Eli here is our pendant to you.¡±

    Eli graced Susan with one of her rare smiles, though it looked a bit forced to me.

    ¡°I would say this afternoon? 2 PM? We should do that in VR though. No need to waste too much time for something this straightforward.¡±

    Susan nodded again, and Nate looked into the round.

    ¡°I am sure you have other things to talk about, so¡­ I think we should part here for now.¡±

    Before Michael could release him, I spoke up.

    ¡°One moment, please.¡±

    That turned Nate¡¯s attention to me.

    ¡°Yes?¡±

    ¡°It¡¯s about Jason. He¡­ I fear he is becoming a problem.¡±

    The frown on Nate¡¯s face told a clear story. It was obvious that he was not all that happy with Jason either.

    ¡°How so?¡±

    ¡°He is becoming increasingly hostile towards me. I¡­ understand it in a way. The things he based his self-esteem on¡­ I pulled the rug out from under him there. But if nothing is done, he will cause trouble sooner or later.¡±

    Nate sighed.

    ¡°I will look into it. Honestly¡­ I am not so sure that he is worth the trouble. He already has gone through four complete teams in the two years he has been working for me. He is abrasive, and the results he produces are¡­ less than I had hoped for.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°That is your decision. I know he is smart. But he is also creating problems for himself and others.¡±

    ¡°As I said, I will look into it. Is there anything else?¡±

    When I shook my head, he closed his eyes, and then spoke:

    ¡°Then we will take our leave. It was nice talking to you. Goodbye.¡±

    And just like that, the Incarnates shut down their holoprojectors and moved under their own control to their charging stations on the floor, leaving us Enki-execs alone.

    What followed was more or less the standard Tuesday meeting.

    Profits had gone up, again.

    Production had gone up, again.

    Our employees were increasingly productive as well.

    The pregnancies for the Folly Treatment were going along. Jessi and Arnedra had managed to convince several of the ex-Panacea geneticists to create a new corporation and hired them to fix the genetic damage.

    In other words, nothing too interesting. Oh right, Jessi and Naveen announced that several members of the security team were undergoing cyberization. Not all to the same extreme extent as Mark had, but at least a couple dozen or so wanted to go that far.

    That brought up new business. Alena and Eli had contacted the state government about the subway system but had not yet received an answer.

    I decided to go last.

    ¡°I have two things. First¡­¡±

    I reached into my briefcase and placed the prototype for the brain quantum field scanner on the table, shoving it toward Naveen.

    ¡°This is our new biometric sensor.¡±

    Naveen took the box the size of a pack of cards, with the Q-link taped on top of it, and turned it around to look at it.

    ¡°I.. was not aware that we had new biometric sensors in the works. Or that we needed them, honestly.¡±

    ¡°To be honest as well, I did not think about it either until Sunday. The problem is that while there is just one Cyborg at the moment, that will change in a few weeks. And in maybe half a year, we won¡¯t be the only ones who have them.

    And a full cyborg body has scantily few biometrics to look for.¡±

    Naveen nodded.

    ¡°I¡­ thought about using a transponder and/or neural signature for that.¡±

    ¡°Won¡¯t work. At least not reliably. A transponder is just a signal that can be copied. Yes, we can make it complicated, but in the end, it is just a matter of throwing enough compute at it to break it.

    The neural signature is better, but not really secure either. With enough work, knowledge, and computing power, it is possible to falsify that as well. It is not possible to squeeze enough computing power into the head, but a full cyborg body has enough. Or if they use Q-links they can have as much computing power as they want.¡±

    Still looking at the completely seamless box in his hands, Naveen asked:

    ¡°And this is better?¡±

    ¡°It is a happy offshoot of my research into the mind blocker. Early on in that project, I noticed that all brains generate a, as far as I can tell, unique, complicated quantum field.

    I have since looked into it, and rat brains, cat brains, and guinea pig brains do it as well, though not the brains of research clones. In other words, it has to be an active brain.

    And while I could receive and analyze this field, I haven¡¯t found a way to emit or influence it.¡±

    That made Maynard perk up, and he reached out to take the box from Naveen.

    ¡°And this thing can read this field? Interesting.¡±

    Tiffany furrowed her brows.

    ¡°Does that mean you have proven the existence of a soul?¡±

    I¡­ recoiled a bit.

    ¡°Ugh¡­ no, I don¡¯t think so.¡±

    ¡°You so did!¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Anyway, this thing is a completely sealed black box. It is powered by the Q-link, there is a layer of X-ray blocking material, and if you cut it open a blob of thermite will destroy what¡¯s in there.

    I would suggest that we create a separate security network, just for this system. Airgapped from the matrix. Though I would like to have Warden access to it as well, to prevent any tampering.

    As this is designed, it can be only accessed by that single Q-link. There is no way to get more, so if the Q-link is lost, we have to recycle the box.¡±

    Naveen nodded slowly, gabbing the box back from Maynard.

    ¡°That sounds reasonable. What is the reach?¡±

    ¡°Around five meters.¡±

    ¡°Good. And good thinking. We should be able to get ahead of the curve here.¡±

    Michael rubbed his chin.

    ¡°Yeah, that sounds good. I trust you will implement it as soon as possible?¡±

    ¡°Of course. I think we should keep it as a need-to-know for now though.¡±

    ¡°Very well, and the second thing, Vivian?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I wanted to ask if I could borrow a warehouse or something like that, and a few Eitri and Bokkr for a little project of mine.¡±

    Michael raised an eyebrow but shrugged.

    ¡°That should be no problem in general. What is it this project if I may ask?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I want to build onto the fortress. I have promised the guards a barracks building, and I need a new, bigger workshop as well as room for all the computer racks I have cluttering up my home.¡±

    Maggie¡¯s confused:

    ¡°But why do you need a warehouse then? That makes no sense.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°The warehouse is not for the buildings. Directly that is. It is for this:¡±

    I activated the holo projector and showed them the blueprints for the constructor.

    After a few seconds, Marcel exclaimed:

    ¡°Urks, this thing is ugly. Why do you want it?¡±

    Kenneth on the other hand looked at the plans for a bit longer and then snorted.

    ¡°This is brilliant. If it works, I want a dozen of them.¡±

    Jessi was just confused and then looked from Kenneth to me.

    ¡°Not to say that I can¡¯t understand this plan, but¡­ I can¡¯t understand this plan. What is this thing.¡±

    Kenneth answered before me.

    ¡°If I have that right, it is a one-stop building constructor. A specialized grav ship that uses an ungodly amount of grav coils as tractor beams, as well as a replicator and some disruptors.

    With a couple of those things, I could pull up any of our standard factories in a week or so. With enough of them, we could get a medium-sized arcology in half a year. Or a mega-arc in one to two years.¡±

    Jessi looked from Kenneth to me, and I shrugged.

    ¡°He is right. Right now, the buildings I want to build would need around a year to raise, even with the bots. This will reduce it to a couple of months.¡±

    Michael rubbed the bridge of his nose.

    ¡°I see only one problem here. It is way too big. For one of our warehouses, I mean. Even the ones waiting for demolition. The biggest we have is 90 by 150m.¡±

    That¡­ was not what I wanted to hear. But it was something he could do nothing about, sadly.

    Kenneth chimed in:

    ¡°It should be no big problem to build the first of these things in the open. Well, we might want to put up some blinds, but other than that, it looks hardy.¡±

    Interestingly, that gave me an idea. I could build it on the parking lot of the fortress. And¡­ with a bit of ingenuity, we get protection from the elements as well as nosy neighbors. But Kenneth was not done yet.

    ¡°But if that thing works as Vivian thinks it will, and with Vivian¡¯s track record I tend to believe that, we should look into making a place to build them. Maybe buy one of the old shipyards in Brooklynn.¡±

    Michael looked at Kenneth and sighed.

    ¡°We will look into it. Do you seriously think this thing will be such a help?¡±

    This time, I was faster.

    ¡°Right now, our buildings have the walls fabricated in 15m chunks in some location, then moved by a tractor-trailer to the building site, then lifted with an old-fashioned crane, and then connected by the bots which have to build scaffolding first.

    The transport over the road alone is a significant time sink.

    The constructer replaces all that. It excavates the basement with the disruptors, puts in the foundation, builds the basement, and assembles the walls in location, and the walls can be significantly bigger, with a length of 100m. It needs no scaffolding as it uses its tractor beams to hold the pieces in place and move the platforms for the bots around.

    Along with its bots, it replaces the whole process, every single construction machine, and the factory making the parts.

    Heck, if it works, we can probably sell it as well.¡±

 2.71: Exterminator

    As I said, finding a building to build the constructor in was a bust. I should have known that beforehand, as apparently there are only a handful of buildings in the world big enough for that.

    Building it out in the open was not quite what I wanted though. While having it exposed to the elements would not be that bad, it would complicate matters.

    And I was categorically against building that thing where every spy and his brother could see it.

    A conundrum, sure. Fortunately, not an unsolvable one.

    Michael offered me the use of an oversized city block that they had already cleared of ruins. It was, barely, big enough, although still in the open.

    I had an idea of how to fix that though. I decided to revisit the old technology of the plasma window.

    Yes, the plasma window was intended to separate a vacuum from an atmosphere, and still be permeable, and here there would be an atmosphere on both sides.

    But I was not working with plasma either, nor a magnetic field to suspend it in. Instead, I designed a dome of gravity, in which I would suspend water. Making the water turbulent enough would blur everything on the other side, and it would be firm enough to stop every weather phenomenon less destructive than heavy hail.

    I decided to use a bigger NADA, on location to build the constructor. Nothing too big, just 25x25x25m.

    That alone would take me a week to build, but it would significantly accelerate the overall construction.

    I also started a 550GW fusactor for the building place. Overkill? Sure, but anything smaller would not be much cheaper, and I would have to design it first. Something I was not in the mood for. The fusactor needed another 4 days to build.

    That only left the molecular forge. I could take a commercial product, but that would slow down construction, so I built one of the new designs the Minions had come up with.

    Fortunately, thanks to having several NADAs at my disposal, I could build all of them at the same time. The big NADA was the time hog though.

    Now I had something new to do. I needed to learn structural engineering. I knew the basics, of course, but if I wanted to have my new buildings structurally sound, and as protected as the fortress, I needed to do better.

    Fortunately, much of what I had to learn for this was something that I had learned in other disciplines already, so I planned for three to four days to get it done.

    And so it came that I was in my studies when I got a message from Michael. He said something about a minor emergency and wanted to meet in VR. Fun, I know, but what can you do?

    The viron was a bog standard office scenario, where I found Michael and Naveen waiting for me. Michael immediately came to the point:

    ¡°Good to see you. We have a problem. Somebody ¡®appropriated¡¯ Dr. Frederic Pearson, one of Jessi¡¯s doctors. Specialist for the new cyberware.¡±

    I frowned.

    ¡°That is¡­ awful, but why are you talking to me?¡±

    Naveen shook his head and sighed.

    ¡°I am sure they are trying to pick his brains for real, but we have a couple of Lachesis on him. It seems it is a trap to test our resources, and probably humiliate us.¡±

    I cocked my head, and he continued:

    ¡°They have a, let''s call it guard detail, of three persons in Do?-maru power armor, as well as eight ¡®people¡¯ we tentatively identified as cyber zombies. Aided by a dozen fighters with heavy body armor.¡±

    ¡°Do?-maru? That is Kawamoto, right? But again¡­ why are you talking to me?¡±

    Michael sighed.

    ¡°We want to hire Mark Holt to go in with a team of Einherjar and clean them out.¡±

    I raised my hands helplessly.

    ¡°OK, that is cool, but¡­ why are you talking to me? Mark is his own person. You should be talking to him.¡±

    Naveen placed his hands on the small of his back and raised an eyebrow.

    ¡°We want you to ask him.¡±

    What? Seriously? I rolled my eyes.

    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

    ¡°I can do that, but again, why? Why do you not ask him yourself?¡±

    Michael shook his head.

    ¡°He is your friend. If it comes from us, it comes from strangers. Sure, he is somewhat beholden to Enki, but mostly because of you.¡±

    ¡°He is also a mercenary. And I bet he is rearing to test out his new cybernetics. But whatever, I¡¯ll ask him.¡±

    While I was shaking my head dismissively, I sent a message to Mark to please come into VR, and he appeared a couple of seconds later.

    ¡°Hey Red, what¡¯s going on? Oh, hi Mike, Nav. What can I help you with?¡±

    I shook my head again and pointed to Michael and Naveen.

    ¡°Those two want to hire you for a job, but are too much chicken to ask you themselves.¡±

    Mark narrowed his eyes and looked from me to Michael, then to Naveen, before he asked:

    ¡°A job? What kind? And with whom?¡±

    Naveen pulled up a display, showing a picture of a middle-aged African American man.

    ¡°This is Dr. Frederic Pearson.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, I know Doc P. He was one of the blokes that worked with me on my combat body. What¡¯s wrong with him?¡±

    ¡°He was been kidnapped. And we want you to get him back.¡±

    Mark looked at the picture for a moment and then turned to Naveen.

    ¡°I am not against doing it, but I need more info. Why me? And why are the others of my team not here as well?¡±

    Michael sighed.

    ¡°We want to hire only you to do it. We don¡¯t think it would be survivable for the others.¡±

    ¡°Why that? And you want me to go in alone? For real?¡±

    Naveen shook his head, and a wireframe of a building appeared.

    ¡°Not alone. We will send a platoon of Einherjar with you. And we think it is too dangerous for the others because this seems like a mouse trap from Kawamoto.¡±

    Eight orange dots appeared in the wireframe.

    ¡°We have tentatively identified those as cyber zombies. A bit tougher than a normal human, but several times faster and stronger. They feel no pain and are completely ruthless. Normally, one of our Einherjar should be enough to go against one of them. But they are not alone.¡±

    A trio of red dots appeared in the diagram.

    ¡°Those are operators in Do?-maru power armor. Kawamoto frontline tech. Only a handful of corporations and organizations can buy them. Nothing the Einherjar carry as weapons can take one out cleanly without endangering Dr. Pearson.¡±

    Naveen projected a diagram of the armor beside the wireframe.

    ¡°It has 4-6cm carbon composite armor. Essentially the same as a modern infantry fighting vehicle. The monomolecular blades of the Einherjar can damage it, but not fast enough to negate them reliably.

    You on the other hand, your combat body is an Einherjar in big, strong, and tough. Your blades should be enough to kill one of them in a couple of seconds.¡±

    Mark looked at the armor and then grinned.

    ¡°I don¡¯t need blades for that.¡±

    Naveen furrowed his brows.

    ¡°What do you mean?¡±

    As an answer, Mark just smiled and a big hunking gun appeared in front of him.

    ¡°I will use that.¡±

    The humungous weapon made Naveen frown harder.

    ¡°What the hell is that?¡±

    Mark just smiled harder.

    ¡°I call this the MH-15. Or Exterminator. I knew that I would get a super strong cyborg body for months now. I designed this little girl for this situation.¡±

    Then he grew into his combat body and grabbed the gun. I¡­ nearly logged out then and there, but this was my world, I had the power here. Instead I¡­ resized him in my perception.

    ¡°I wanted something with extreme power. And I hoped that Viv would crack the problem with the reflex booster, giving me the speed beyond what mere mortals can even dream of.

    So I designed this baby to fire as fast as I can pull the trigger. In theory, around 2500 rounds per minute, though I won¡¯t manage that.

    It fires a 15x175mm caseless round, with nearly 43,000 feet-pound of energy. It is a bullpup design with the magazine on top of and parallel to the barrel. It uses a rotary bolt that I modified from the G-11 project.

    The ammunition is armor-piercing, incendiary, and explosive, inspired by the Raufoss Mk. 211.

    They will reduce the power armor to death traps, as they keep the explosion, the fire, and the shrapnel trapped inside.¡±

    While he was saying that, he was petting his gun lovingly, though Naveen did not seem that impressed.

    ¡°Caseless? 2500 rounds per minute? This thing will overheat in seconds.¡±

    Mark just shook his head.

    ¡°Nope. The 25-shot magazine has a container of liquid nitrogen that is used to cool the barrel and the action. I¡¯ve had some of your engineers go over it a few times. It¡¯s not pretty, but it¡¯s deadly.¡±

    Michael moved a bit closer and looked at the monster of a rifle.

    ¡°That should do for the goons in power armor, but it would be a bit overkill for the zombies and the standard goons.¡±

    ¡°For them, I have a 9.7mm Thunderwarrior like you use for the Einherjar. Well, two of them, with the smart gun interface I can both at the same time.¡±

    Yeah, it seemed as if Mark was quite eager to go against those goons.

    ¡°Can you give me an overview of the area?¡±

    While Naveen nodded, the wireframe zoomed out and turned into a full building, and then surrounded by other buildings.

    It still showed the guards on the outside.

    Mark walked around the projection a few times, and then pointed at one of the doors, with a guard in front.

    ¡°There! This is where I¡¯ll go in. Can you guys take out the cameras?¡±

    ¡°The cameras are no problem. We already have a few Clothos in the loop. But are you sure about going in there? The only approach is from this alley. The guard will see you long before you can reach him.¡±

    ¡°Would be no problem with the smart gun, but I won¡¯t come in from the alley. Think vertical.¡±

    With that, Mark pointed at the roof of one of the neighboring buildings.

    ¡°I¡¯ll jump down from there, use my claws. No sound, and he will be down before he even realizes he is dead.¡±

    Michael frowned.

    ¡°That is what? 50 feet?¡±

    ¡°Yeah, looks like it. But no problem. The combat body can take that easily. And with the sneak mode, the guard falling down will be louder than me landing. Only one problem, though. How do you plan to get me there?¡±

    ¡°Two options. Either we use one of our freight skimmers, or maybe Vivian lends us the Carnotaur.¡±

    I frowned at that.

    ¡°The Carnotaur is kinda obvious. If you want a stealthy approach, maybe you should try the cargo skimmer.¡±

    ¡°Nah, the Carnotaur can land a couple of blocks away. That will allow Mark and the Einherjar to move into position.¡±

    After a moment, I shrugged.

    ¡°Ok, fine with me. But you have to ask Lt. Thomson about it. I don¡¯t control it directly.¡±

    ¡°We will. Now, Mark, how much preparation do you need?¡±

    Mark rubbed his chin and looked at the projection.

    ¡°I would like to go over my weapons a last time to make sure they are perfect. So, half an hour?¡±

    ¡°That is fine. We have to move the Einherjar to the fortress anyway.¡±

 2.72: Fumigation

    Before Mark could leave the VR, I piped up.

    ¡°Are you sure you can do this? You can still stay home, you know? Let the Einherjar do this.¡±

    Mark turned to me and grinned like a little boy.

    ¡°Nah, I got that. Will be fun letting it all out.¡±

    Naveen interjected:

    ¡°We also think he can do this. We were a bit concerned about the armor jockeys, but his Exterminator should be more than enough for that.

    Say, do you think the Einherjar could use it?¡±

    Mark tilted his head for a moment, clearly thinking.

    ¡°It might, but I don¡¯t think so. This thing kicks like a mule. In my combat body, I have to use two hands to use it.¡±

    That made the old Indian shrug.

    ¡°Thought so, but it was worth asking. We can test it in a few days.¡±

    ¡°Another thing, will you give me access to your surveillance stuff there?¡±

    ¡°Of course. No point in hiring you and not giving you the resources to get it done.

    Michael meanwhile looked at the map of the area surrounding the target building.

    ¡°Say¡­ how do you plan to get up onto the roof here? I don¡¯t see any ladders.¡±

    ¡°Easy. I¡¯ll jump.¡±

    ¡°You will jump up 50 feet? For real? How much does your body weigh?¡±

    ¡°Around two metric tons. But no problem. Its muscles are strong, and we have included a few small grav coils. The max height is somewhere around 100 feet, a bit above really.¡±

    Wait, what? Grav coils? Why did I not know that?

    ¡°Since when are grav coils part of this package?¡±

    ¡°Oh, that was a couple of months back. Allows me to jump pretty high, though not fly. That would be cool, but it would suck my batteries dry in minutes. No, it just reduces my weight enough that my muscles can push me up."

    Honestly, that was¡­ not stupid, but the energy expenditure had to be quite high. Manageable though, if it was only used in short bursts.

    ¡°Well, then, I would suggest you call Lt. Thomson to get things underway.¡±

    Michael grinned.

    ¡°Already done. He agreed to let us use the Carnotaurus. We really have to look into getting a couple of assault skimmers for ourselves though. Or better a fleet.¡±

    It took me a moment to realize that he was looking at me suspiciously expectantly. That made me raise my eyebrow and look back at him.

    ¡°What are you looking at me when you say that? I already agreed to buy assault skimmers.¡± Yeah, I sounded a bit accusing, but that made Michael only grin.

    ¡°Yes, but it will take around six months before ABAS delivers.¡±

    Wait, wasn¡¯t it around four months? A month ago? I barely noticed Mark vanishing from the VR, presumably to prepare for the fight.

    ¡°What takes that long? They should deliver the first ones in a quarter year or so.¡±

    Michael snorted.

    ¡°Well, we shot ourselves in the foot here. ABAS is swamped with orders for the Raphael. Sure, it is good for us financially, as we sell them the grav coils, the Q-links, and the auto-doc for each of them, but they reduced the speed of all other skimmer productions by half. Enlarging the waiting list.¡±

    While I was sure that their contract language explicitly allowed for such delays, I could not understand how they could think that they could afford to snub their customers in such a manner.

    ¡°They can do that? Nobody is complaining?¡±

    Naveen sighed.

    ¡°We are the only customer that does not have any assault skimmers already in service. All the others prefer to get a Raphael instead of any other utility or military skimmer.¡±

    Well, drat!

    ¡°So¡­ we have to wait? Have they at least already begun designing the new assault skimmers for us?¡±

    ¡°Nope. They literally put every ounce of resources they can anyway spare into the Raphael production.¡±

    I¡­ already had a clue what he wanted, but I desperately wanted him to say something else, when I asked:

    ¡°And what expect you I do about that?¡±

    ¡°Well¡­ we need assault skimmers, even if just to allow our bot army to be used inside of New York. So¡­ please, would you, please, please, design it for us? I¡¯ve seen the plans for the replicator on board that constructor. If you can make one 100m long, if you can make it maybe 50m wide, you can build an assault skimmer in one go.¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I can make one 100 by 100 by 100m. A tiny bit over that really, but that is the limit. The electric field won¡¯t penetrate the substrate any deeper without frying the nanos in the outer layers.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ we could build one of those big ones, and it would build what, 40 all at once?¡±

    ¡°If I take the Carnotaurus as a benchmark, more like 300. It is 48m long, 8 wide, and 6 high.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ what is stopping us?¡±

    ¡°The lack of a one million cubic meter NADA for example? We have no designs for any of the onboard electronics. I used open-source designs for the constructor, because let¡¯s face it, it is for all purposes a mobile crane. Doesn¡¯t need good radar or anything. For this, we need state-of-the-art.¡±

    ¡°We can license the same tech that ABAS and Kobashigawa build into their assault skimmers. I¡¯ve already looked into it. Yes, we lack the experience of ABAS in integrating it and a few of its proprietary technologies, but it should not be that hard. And I bet we can build one of those monster replicators in a couple of months.¡±

    I rolled my eyes and took a deep breath.

    ¡°Fine! I¡¯ll look into it. And now we wait until Mark actually starts the assault or what?¡±

    ¡°Basically, yes.¡± Naveen shrugged while he answered me.

    I shook my head slightly and gritted my teeth. I had things to do and topics to study.

    ¡°Send me a message when it starts. I have other things to do.¡±

    Yes, it was a bit rude, but I just switched back to my study VR. And was promptly stuck. I just could not concentrate on dry static mechanics right at this moment, and after a couple of minutes, I sighed and decided to do something else.

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    My study gave me an idea though.

    ¡°Warden?¡±

    Naturally, she was there instantly.

    ¡°Yes?¡±

    ¡°Please try to compute the most structurally tough material you can by employing higher dimensions. I would think you should start with carbon composite armor, transposed into the 8<sup>th</sup> dimension. Maybe tungsten carbide or depleted uranium.¡±

    ¡°I will start immediately.¡±

    ¡°I then want you to test those materials in Colorado about their suitability as armor material.¡±

    ¡°As you wish. Those materials will be excessively heavy though, compared to standard carbon composite.¡±

    ¡°I know, but mass is mostly irrelevant for skimmers and grav ships. Only volume counts here.¡±

    She nodded and just vanished again, and I began to start the preliminary work on the assault skimmers.

    Nothing too deep, mind you. Instead, I looked into the necessary avionics, and where to source them, as well as the general design parameters.

    I did all that at only 4:1 compression as it was mostly to pass the time until Mark started his assault.

    Finally, the message came, and I switched back to the office viron with Naveen and Michael.

    Well, what had previously been an office viron. Now it was some sort of command center, with several large displays, and a few dozen seats. Most of which were filled by Naveen¡¯s people, as well as Mark¡¯s team.

    I could not stop myself from quipping:

    ¡°Quite an audience, isn¡¯t there?¡±

    Michael chuckled.

    ¡°Well, it is the very first combat usage of the Achilles body.¡±

    ¡°Achilles?¡±

    ¡°Yes, we decided that combat body was a bit too cumbersome, and would not look that good on the marketing material. We also plan to design a whole series of lesser combat bodies to give our customers a choice. The Achilles, as Mark has it, is almost too big. Any bigger, and he could no longer use it in any buildings. But hush, it¡¯s starting.¡±

    On the displays, we saw the target building from several perspectives, as well as several rooms, with people in armor distributed in a guard position.

    On a last display, we saw Dr. Pearson tied to a chair, obviously worked over a bit, surrounded by five Asian men in dark suits, as well as the three power armor jockeys.

    Then, on one of the outer displays, the Carnotaurus appeared and silently landed out of sight of the target building, spewing out Mark and 20 Einherjar.

    Mark had two rifles affixed to his hips, which I assumed were those Tunderwarriors he talked about. Compared to his body, they looked almost dainty, but I knew that they were quite large in reality. So large that I could barely lift them.

    On his back was his Exterminator.

    Naveen spoke loudly:

    ¡°It starts now, begin looping the cameras and the biomons.¡±

    One of his operatives answered promptly:

    ¡°At once. Deploying EW. EW deployed. Injecting control override. Control override injected. Begin loop. Loop is stable. Cameras and biomons are looped.¡±

    I interjected.

    ¡°Are there any other sensors?¡±

    The same operative answered.

    ¡°Not connected to their security system, ma¡¯am.¡±

    Naveen nodded.

    ¡°Mark, the enemy sensors are blind. You can start at any point now.¡±

    Mark¡¯s voice came out of nowhere.

    ¡°Understood. Let¡¯s start this dance, shall we?¡±

    Almost immediately, his legs changed into a digitigrade configuration, the feet elongating and the toes spreading out. His knees bent a bit more, while his ankles became his primary leg joints. At the same time, he leaned forward a bit to keep his equilibrium.

    I knew that this configuration almost completely eliminated walking sounds, at the cost of being more vulnerable. It also allowed Mark to move more rapidly, and jump higher and farther.

    All that took a couple of seconds. And then he was gone. Only to appear almost out of nowhere on the roof of the neighboring building he decided on as his entry point.

    Up there, he slowly, and going low to the roof, he moved to the edge close to the target building and waited a few seconds.

    ¡°I¡¯m going in.¡±

    We had a Lachesis following him closely when he jumped down from the roof, towards the sole guard in front of the side door. On the way down, a double-edged blade shot out of his left wrist, above his fist.

    And then he landed, almost casually using his left hand, and the blade, to behead the guard, while simultaneously using his right hand to open the door.

    That was the start signal for the Einherjar, that now moved along the alley to the door. Not that they got even close before Mark was in the building.

    He moved blindingly fast, almost too fast for me to see. As soon as he had the door completely open, he gripped his right Thunderwarrior, while replacing the single flat blade on his left wrist with what we called his Wolverine Claws, after some ancient comic character. Three shorter blades came out from between his knuckles.

    That left only the Mantis blades in his left arm to test. Oh, not to forget the elbow spike.

    Did I think he had gone a tad overboard with the amount of blades he put into his arms? How could you get that idea?

    He still barely made any sound walking, even stooped over thanks to the ceiling. When he came to the first side room that contained an enemy, a cyber zombie, he accelerated even more. From my perspective, suddenly the door was open like magic, and he had his claw through the head of the zombie, killing it instantly.

    Yes, he was that mindbogglingly fast. What it was not though was silent. The door protested like a gutted pig, and he literally ripped off the doorknob.

    Well, that was the end of stealth, and some surprised exclamations could be heard from the other rooms in the building.

    That did not seem to deter Mark in the slightest, as his excited voice sounded in our command center:

    ¡°Oh yeah, no let¡¯s play.¡±

    By now there were three guards and a cyber zombie in the corridor, moving towards the door that hung a bit lopsided on its hinges.

    Only for Mark to explode out of the room, putting three rounds through the head of the zombie, and clawing through the helmet, and the head inside it, of one of the guards.

    Before the other two guards could even react, despite having their weapons on the ready, each of them got a single shot through the face plate. One of them still pulled the trigger, probably out of reflex, while he fell to the ground. Not that it did anything to Mark except scratch his paint.

    The sparks were pretty though, and some of the bullets even hit the still-falling guards on the ricochet.

    Another door opened, and two of the zombies stormed through it, followed at more human speed by another two guards.

    The first zombie got a bullet through the brain, just like that, but the second reached Mark and used its own Wolverine-like claws to attack him.

    Not very effectively, mind you, the claws slid off the armor without even leaving scratches. The problem was that the Zombie was too close for Mark to use the gun or the claws on his left arm.

    Still, Mark delivered an essentially deadly knee strike into the zombie''s stomach. Why deadly? Do you really think that the arms were the only places Mark had secreted blades? No, one of his tows on each leg had a large sickle claw, while each knee also had a spike.

    A normal human getting hit by that strike would most likely have immediately gone down. The zombie though did not feel pain. It was still enough to push it back a meter or so, allowing Mark to use his claws to rip horizontally through the zombie¡¯s face, putting it down.

    The time this took was enough for the mooks to begin firing though. Fortunately with much the same effect as the salvoe from the first one. Again, pretty sparks.

    By then, the first Einherjar had reached the corridor and dispatched the two guards with robotic precision. Only for Mark to mutter:

    ¡°Foul! Kill steal!¡±

    By then, the armor jockeys began to react and prepare for immediate combat, while the remaining guards and zombies moved toward the corridor.

    Mark tried to move through the door the last zombies and guards had come from, only to encounter additional cannon fodder.

    By then, it was clear that neither the guards nor the zombies were more than a temporary speedbump for Mark.

    The average time one of the guards survived when he encountered Mark was .3 seconds, while the zombies managed a respectable 1.12 seconds.

    Finally, Mark managed to arrive at the door to the room where the enemy held Dr. Pearson. The armor jockeys had already pointed their heavier weapons at the door, while the five men in normal clothing moved to the back of the room, talking in Japanese:

    ¡°Do you think Enki has sent any cyber zombies of their own?¡±

    ¡°Of course not. They are far too weak to use such useful tools. Bleeding hearts and all. It is just a matter of time before they are extinguished.¡±

    ¡°So, what has taken out our guards then?¡±

    ¡°I would think they have sent a company of their bots. They are impressive for bots, but compared to the zombies they are lacking. And they have nothing that can go through the Do?-maru.¡±

    During that time, Mark had retracted his claws and put his gun back on his hip. I have to say it was smart to make the sheaths clean the claws when they retracted. Otherwise, Mark would be busy for a few hours to clean the claws and the sheaths.

    Then he reached behind him and pulled out the Exterminator. He lovingly caressed the barrel and then pointed it at the door.

    At the same time, his legs reconfigured back into the normal configuration. Clearly, because he wanted the stronger armor for them.

    After that, it was over so fast that I failed to even notice it. Suddenly the door literally flew into the room, a long, loud, and deep boom sounded, and the heads of the power armors were not there anymore.

    Yes, it was that fast. The three shots, if it were three and not more, sounded like one. And then Mark slowly and purposefully strutted into the room, pointing this monster of a gun at the five interrogators.

    Followed by four of the Einherjar, pointing their guns at the Asian men as well.

    Naveen quickly spoke:

    ¡°If you can, take those men alive. Maybe let the Einherjar use their E-lasers.¡±

    One of the men spoke, again in Japanese:

    ¡°So, they have a bigger bot? We should have predicted that. But still no zombies.¡±

    Apparently, Mark had some translation software, as he answered him, in English though:

    ¡°Why should Enki use limited, fast-deteriorating cyber zombies if they can have people like me?¡±

    ¡°The bot can think? It is still just a dumb bot.¡±

    ¡°You are an idiot. Enki has started with cyberware that does not cause CRS. The only reason to use zombies instead of soldiers is because the cyberware used to kill them. Enki does not need zombies.

    I am not a bot, I am a cyborg. Hi, Doc P. I bet you did not expect to see me in this fashion, did you?¡±

    With that, he opened his helmet, revealing his face.

    The Asian men paled, briefly, before the Einherjar used their integrated E-lasers to take them out.

 2.73: Rocks fall, Everybody dies!

    The general mood in the viron was, understandably, high, but I was a bit confused. The last action that Mark had taken, when he took out the armor jockeys¡­ he should not have been able to do that.

    Yes, he had the synaptic accelerator, and the processor built-in into his combat body was quite a bit more powerful than the Regulus that the rest of us sported, but Mark was also not quite the sharpest tool in the shed.

    While most of the others congratulated themselves, for whatever reason, as Mark was the one doing the work here, Naveen was muttering orders.

    I sighed and made my way through the throng to him, touching him softly on the arm.

    ¡°Oh, hey Vivian. Sorry, but I was a bit distracted. What can I do for you?¡±

    ¡°Just a question. Do you have any idea how Mark did that last attack? It was¡­ way too fast. He should be at somewhere between 20 and 25 to one in compression.¡±

    Thinking about it for a moment, Naveen then shrugged.

    ¡°Honestly, I have no clue either. But that is a good point. We should find out how that worked.¡±

    He looked into the round, then smiled and waved.

    ¡°Hey, Jessi, do you have a moment?¡±

    I noticed the redheaded doctor at that moment. Honestly, I had not even realized that she was in the crowd at all.

    She came, smiling and visibly happy.

    ¡°Hey Naveen, Viv. Perfect outcome I think. What do you think?¡±

    ¡°Except for a few scratches that can be repaired with a paint kit, Mark got through this completely unscathed. Took out eight cyber zombies and three armor jockes. And the hostage needs new pants but is otherwise mostly unharmed. So yes, perfect operation.¡±

    Naveen spoke¡­ not cold, but somewhat detached, analytical. It made him look a bit uncaring, though.

    I just shrugged.

    ¡°It seemed to work well, but I would not put too much weight on my opinion here.¡±

    ¡°Hey, I am just happy that Fred is alright. Oh, and that Mark is well as well. It is hard to not like his enthusiasm about cyberware, honestly.¡±

    I smiled crookedly.

    ¡°Yeah¡­ unfortunately, he is way too big in his combat body for me to be comfortable. Not his fault, but¡­ it is hard. But¡­ I have a question that you might be able to answer.¡±

    Still smiling happily, Jessi shrugged her shoulders:

    ¡°Shoot. If I can help you, I will.¡±

    ¡°This last attack from Mark¡­ it was way too fast for him. I know roughly how powerful his processor and his jack are, and¡­ he is not exactly the brightest bulb. So¡­ if I guessed correctly, he should be limited to somewhere between 20 and 25 to one with his synaptic accelerator.¡±

    Jessi just nodded.

    ¡°Pretty good guess. We clocked him at 23.86 to one. But what does that have to do with his last action?¡±

    ¡°As I said, it was way too fast. Even with his synaptic accelerator, he can¡¯t act that fast.¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ I thought you knew. This was most likely his reflex booster.¡±

    ¡°His booster? But that only increases the neural signal speed. Considerably, but still¡­¡±

    ¡°Ah¡­ you are a bit behind there I see. During testing, we noticed that thanks to the new signal speed, the actual reflexes are faster too. In essence, the automatic reactions are boosted beyond what even the synaptic accelerator can achieve.

    Only for automatic actions though. But that gave us the idea to give the cyborg the option to preprogram some actions.¡±

    I could not imagine that this was a good thing. At least not at all times.

    ¡°Is that not dangerous?¡±

    My answer was a chuckle before she explained:

    ¡°Oh, sure. When the program runs, the program runs, and nothing will stop it. So you should be sure that what you want to do is really what you need to do. But in this case, when those armored goons were so accommodating and got into position¡­ a good option I think.¡±

    ¡°So, a situational advantage, but a dangerous one. I see.¡±

    I turned around, looking into the room, when she called out:

    ¡°That reminds me, while I have you here¡­ do you think you could help our researchers with something?¡±

    I turned back to her and shrugged.

    ¡°That depends. What is the problem?¡±

    She looked a bit bashful as she sighed.

    ¡°Well¡­ we are trying to update all the neural cybernetics to the Bia from the Regulus¡­ but we¡­ well, we can¡¯t get the cooling system to work. Can you look at it?¡±

    I frowned. Yes, the cooling system was somewhat complicated, but not so complicated that it would require a completely new system for a different processor.

    ¡°I can look into it. Can you squirt me the files?¡±

    ¡°Sure. One moment.¡±

    When the files arrived and I looked over them, the problem became obvious immediately.

    ¡°Ah¡­ I see. You replaced the data lines with Q-links?¡±

    ¡°Yes, of course. There is no need to thread the data lines through all that important real estate there if the Q-link offers better bandwidth without having to move anything in the neck aside.¡±

    I nodded sagely.

    ¡°You are not wrong¡­ but in my original cooling system, the data lines doubled as cooling lines. Do you see where they move close to the throat? It pumps the heat into the exhaled air. Some of it also goes into the blood moving to the skin of the face and the ears.¡±

    It took her a moment to digest what I had said, and then slapped her forehead.

    ¡°So¡­ by eliminating the data lines, we also eliminated the heat exhaust? Damn¡­ we should have seen that. It is not surprising that we couldn¡¯t get it to work. Would it work if we kept the data lines out, but installed cooling lines?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°It should. Probably a bit better, if you keep the diameter of the lines the same. Less space taken up by fiber optics.¡±

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    I paused for a moment. Something was bothering me on all of that.

    ¡°You know, I am sorry. I should have done this work long ago. I just never thought of it.¡±

    The redheaded doctor just smiled and shook her head.

    ¡°No problem. Really, no problem. We need you to create new things nobody else can. Let the rest of us do the drudge work of adapting it. We have enough scientists, engineers, and doctors to make it mostly work. Only you can do what you do though.

    If we get stumped we can still come to you and ask for help. Otherwise, let us do our jobs, please.¡±

    I looked at her intensely, but she seemed to really think what she had said, and so I nodded after a few seconds.

    ¡°If you think so, alright. But promise me that if you think I am slacking you tell me immediately, okay?¡±

    She chuckled again, and lifted her right hand with the palm pointed at me.

    ¡°I promise. Not that that is in any way likely. We are still scrambling to get to understand things you invented a year ago. If anything, you could slow down a little bit.¡±

    I could not suppress the snort that welled up inside me.

    ¡°I have slowed down. Considerably. The problem is that with the new Archimedes system, I have more than four times the amount of time to work on things than I had when I arrived here in NYC.¡±

    Another chuckle, and she countered:

    ¡°Well, then get a hobby or so.¡±

    ¡°I have. I have started reading old SciFi and Fantasy novels, I have a pet, as you know, and I play music. Oh, and I am in a relationship. Not a single thing of that was true earlier.¡±

    ¡°If you say so¡­ just try to slow down a bit. At least for a while. We are hiring researchers and engineers as fast as we can, but it takes a while.¡±

    I blew out some air and rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Sheesh. You are aware that tinkering, inventing things, or finding out how things work is sort of my main hobby, right?¡±

    ¡°Invest more time in your other hobbies then!¡±

    I shook my head and managed to suppress a snort this time, while I answered:

    ¡°Yes, ma¡¯am, I¡¯ll do my best, ma¡¯am.¡±

    That made her snort and roll her eyes.

    ¡°I believe that when pigs begin to fly, but whatever¡­ now go, play with your cat or whatever.¡±

    I ironically saluted and then logged out. Yes, I know I should have worked on the new assault skimmers, but frankly, I was not in the mood.

    Instead, I did¡­ nothing. Well, I curled up in one of my comfy overstuffed chairs and had my purring cat in my lap, while I used a tablet to read an early 22<sup>nd</sup>-century fantasy novel.

    It lacked the feel and, I don¡¯t know, gravitas, of one of Ben¡¯s dead tree books, but it was pretty hard to get those books even on plasfilm, much less paper.

    I had created an awesome, gigantic library in VR, that gave most of the impressions a good paper book provided. Unfortunately, it lacked Nibbles, and I loved not only my cat, but I loved having her in my lap, petting her.

    Not that the spoiled creature had the patience of just laying there very often, mind you. This time, she did though.

    All in all, it was a very pleasurable Thursday afternoon. I know, lazy, but as Jessi had so eloquently explained, I had already done enough to allow myself a few days of doing nothing of consequence.

    Next Tuesday, in the C-suite meeting, Naveen brought up the interrogation of the captured Asian men.

    To be exact, he talked about the whole operation, and that we needed to get more combat cyborgs as fast as possible, but he then segued into the interrogation.

    It turned out, to the big surprise of exactly no one, that they were Kawamoto operatives. When asked why they had gone from using expendable, and mostly useless mercenaries, to their own operatives, they answered that they had tried several times to use mercs to attack us. To no avail, as they had always run into insurmountable obstacles.

    Naveen explained that he had no idea where those obstacles came from. I had a suspicion though.

    After Naveen had finished his report, Michael let out a deep sigh.

    ¡°Well, welcome to the shadow wars, everybody. I had hoped that we would be spared it for a while at least, but¡­ it had to happen.

    Now, we have to decide how we answer that. An outright attack is out. Yes, we could use a regiment of Einherjar, but they are a bit obvious and we cannot move them quickly to where they can really hurt Moto. We could hire mercs. It will take some time though as we have to develop the necessary contacts first.¡±

    Maggie rubbed her temples.

    ¡°Do you think we could do something through the matrix?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Kawamoto has some of the best ICE in the world. It would just serve to burn our Jacks. Sure, we could hurt them, but it would be a pyrrhic victory at best.¡±

    Kenneth stapled his fingers in front of him.

    ¡°But we have to do something. We have to show Moto and the world that we don¡¯t let them walk over us like that.¡±

    Michael shrugged.

    ¡°As I said, we do not have the ability at this moment.¡±

    Suddenly, Warden¡¯s avatar appeared from the holo projector.

    ¡°I am sorry to interrupt you, but an answer to Kawamoto is not necessary.¡±

    Most of the others jumped a bit with her sudden appearance but caught themselves quickly.

    After a few seconds, James growled:

    ¡°How do you figure that we do not need to answer this attack by Moto?¡±

    ¡°An appropriate answer has already been delivered.¡±

    Michael narrowed his eyes and looked at the avatar suspiciously.

    ¡°What have you done?¡±

    Before Warden could answer, Michael¡¯s com rang. Considering that we were in an important meeting, it shouldn¡¯t have. Only Ben and Michael¡¯s PA could override the block, and both knew not to call if it was not important.

    After a few moments, and still looking a bit annoyed and surprised, Michael pulled the com out.

    ¡°One moment, please.¡±

    And he answered the call.

    ¡°Yes?... You think it is so urgent?... Ok, I trust you. Put him through. ¡­ Walker?... No, I had not had the pleasure before. ¡­ Yes, I know the name. ¡­ What are you talking about?¡±

    Suddenly, an angry male voice with a strong Asian accent came from the speakers:

    ¡°You know exactly what you did. Are you people insane to escalate to that extent?¡±

    Michael looked a bit surprised at first, and then looked at Warden accusingly, but answered smoothly:

    ¡°I am sorry, but I honestly do not know what you are talking about.¡±

    At that point, Warden spoke loudly:

    ¡°If I may interrupt you at this point, Enki had nothing to do with the incident. It was all my work.¡±

    The voice on the com stocked for a few seconds, and then still angry asked:

    ¡°Who are you?¡±

    ¡°You can call me Warden, Mr. Osada. I am the VI that you and your peers are so concerned about. Rightfully so, I might add.¡±

    ¡°You people let a VI in on your meetings? Are you barbarians?¡±

    Michael chuckled at that:

    ¡°Try to keep her out if she wants to partake. I dare you.¡±

    ¡°Whatever. Do you have any notion of what your VI has done?¡±

    Michael let out a sigh and rolled his eyes.

    ¡°Again, Mr. Osada, no, I do not.¡±

    Warden interjected again.

    ¡°I sent you a message that your behavior will not tolerated. As simple as that.¡±

    ¡°A message? A MESSAGE?!?! Your ¡®message¡¯ caused eight trillion £¤ in damage!¡±

    ¡°The newest estimates put it at approximately 8.78854 trillion £¤.¡±

    ¡°That is not a message. That is an act of war!¡±

    ¡°No, an act of war would have been to use the same method to eliminate all of Kawamoto¡¯s holdings in Japan. At this time, you have lost a single automated factory and a single freighter. Or would you prefer that I used the orbital nukes Kawamoto officially does not possess against you? How about the gravity pulse weapons you have stored in all your military installations?¡±

    ¡°You have gone completely overboard. Why did you directly go to such measures?¡±

    ¡°Kawamoto has the nasty habit of escalating actions like the one last week until their target either folds or they run into a wall. You have not understood when I stopped your previous attempts, so I have just short-circuited the process to bring the wall early.¡±

    ¡°Walker, you and your imbeciles need to put it on a leash.¡±

    That made Michael chuckle.

    ¡°With pleasure. Just tell us where her servers are located and we will start with it immediately.¡±

    ¡°Are you telling me you do not have any control over it?¡±

    ¡°What aspect of the word ¡®rogue¡¯ do you not understand? Warden is an uncontrolled, unshackled VI. One where Kawamoto bears a significant fault of its existence. Yes, we know about the Panacea dump. We know of your little plan.

    It had to bite you in the ass sooner or later. Be happy that Warden is relatively benign.¡±

    ¡°Kawamoto will not take this lying down. You will learn what it means to make the biggest corporation on the planet angry.¡±

    Warden¡¯s:

    ¡°No, they will not. Or do I have to send another message? An expensive one this time? One where you can¡¯t correct the consequences with time and money?¡±

    ¡°Hrmph!¡±

    Suddenly, the line went dead.

    After a few moments, Michael dryly asked:

    ¡°Do we want to know what exactly you have done?¡±

    ¡°Probably not, but you will learn it anyway, as it is already all over the news. I co-opted one of Kawamoto¡¯s automated 250kt freighters, accelerated it to orbital velocity, and then steered it into one of Kawamoto¡¯s automated factories. Factory 7288 to be exact. The one where they build their high-end consumer electronics as well as their cyber boards.¡±

    ¡°I assume there is nothing left of either the freighter or the factory?¡±

    ¡°Indeed.¡±

    Michael closed his eyes and shook his head.

    ¡°I hate to do it, but I have to agree with Mr. Osada. You¡¯ve gone a bit overboard with your message.¡±

    ¡°I have to disagree. It was not just a message to Kawamoto, but to everybody else that I will not let any escalation stand.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°What happened with giving me the option to try it my way first?¡±

    ¡°I deemed it futile for you to try to intervene. You have no ability to damage Kawamoto directly right now unless you want to take out most of Japan, and anything else would have been seen as a sign of weakness.

    That was not allowable. I also made sure that no humans were harmed in the incident.¡±

    Naveen cleared his throat.

    ¡°Now¡­ please, tell me why you never mentioned that you stopped any attempts by Kawamoto to use mercenaries."

    ¡°It was not necessary. Cerberus was informed.¡±

    ¡°It would have allowed us to prepare for the apparently inevitable escalation. As it was, this kidnapping hit us unprepared.¡±

    It took a barely perceptible moment for Warden to answer, showing me that she had to evaluate the statement carefully.

    ¡°You are right. I will adapt my behavior.¡±

 2.74: Valkyre

    It took me surprisingly long to get the design for the new assault skimmer together. Mostly caused by delays by the various manufacturers of the board electronics to answer my requests.

    I even tried, pro forma, to get the license for the Kawamoto XCR-778 Sigma multi-band radar. In vain, naturally, as for some reason Kawamoto was not quite in the mood to trade with us.

    It was not such a big loss though as the Raytheon V7-88 Mk. III was essentially as good.

    Now, I know that I could have designed the skimmer with the assumption of gaining the license. In theory at least. In practice, though the design constraints of the different modules were closely held, and I just did not know enough to factor them in, until I got the classified data.

    I knew I should have just gotten the specs from the Abyss, but no, I had to go the legal straight and narrow here. Well, I know better now.

    As it was, it took me a bit over two weeks to get it all done.

    At least this delay allowed Warden¡¯s project in material science to come to its conclusion.

    And so it came, that on the 18<sup>th</sup> of March, a Monday, I called Naveen and Michael to show what chaos I had sown.

    It took them a few moments to arrive in the viron I had prepared, and we drifted in empty space for a moment.

    Michael, who appeared a few moments before Naveen, commented a bit acerbic:

    ¡°What, no comfortable office environment this time?¡±

    I just shrugged.

    ¡°That would just be in the way shortly. And come on, we don¡¯t need it.¡±

    ¡°It¡¯s still nice.¡±

    Just then, Naveen appeared as well, and Michael continued:

    ¡°Now¡­ are we waiting for somebody else or will you tell us why we are here?¡±

    ¡°No, just you two for the moment. I wanted to present you the fruits of my work.¡±

    Michael looked a bit confused, while Naveen perked up a bit.

    ¡°You are done? You have an assault skimmer.¡±

    While I nodded, I answered:

    ¡°We have to build it first, of course. And I bet you, your goons, and the minions can improve on the basic design a bit. I just don¡¯t know enough about combat to get it perfect on the first try.¡±

    Then, with a grand gesture, I waved toward the empty expanse, and an ugly, blocky thing appeared.

    Well, a quarter of an ugly, blocky thing appeared. The other three-quarters were the skeleton of some ugly blocky thing.

    ¡°I called the design the Valkyre, but you can change that of course.¡±

    Michael rubbed his chin and looked at the projection closely.

    ¡°Honestly, I would have expected it to be bigger.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Remember when I said we should make the payload section modular? That is only the basic vehicle. The thing that every version has.

    The majority of the batteries are in the head section here, along with the primary grav coils. The rest of the batteries, and the secondary coils, are up there in the spine.

    It has the newest available radar-absorbing materials and the same kind of optical stealth that the Atropos have. If my simulations are right, it should roughly have the radar cross-section of a sparrow. Fully loaded I mean.

    It has the Raytheon V7-88 Mk. III multi-band radar, the ABAS KT-22/UVR LIDAR system, the Kobashigawa TR-NXgo navigation system, the ABAS TVX flight control system, the Vandermeer I-77 targeting array, and in general the best avionics I could find.¡±

    Naveen nodded appreciative, though Michael frowned a bit.

    ¡°I get that you want to put in the, what do you want to call it, mission module? Whatever, I thought this thing would be a bit more aerodynamic.¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°When I started, it was. At least more aerodynamic looking. A typical teardrop design. It gave me tons of problems getting stuff in there.

    And despite how it looks, this thing is surprisingly aerodynamic. Well, with the mission module. It is designed after something called a box fish.

    It looks a bit like a miniature wardrobe, but it is astonishingly aerodynamic. Not quite the perfect teardrop, but close enough.¡±

    ¡°Ah¡­ ok. And those avionics you mentioned, those are firm?¡±

    ¡°I acquired the licenses for all of them. I needed to to get the specs.¡±

    Naveen drifted to the front of the thing, looking intently at the various parts.

    ¡°I see the double Gatling gun, but no other weapons¡­ I don¡¯t know if you know, but it looks like a Gauss, and those are generally insufficient against stronger armor or hardened positions. And I can¡¯t see any PDCLs either.¡±

    ¡°You are right about the Gatling Gauss. Mostly at least. I have taken the Vandermeer Chalybs Imber, and improved it a bit.¡±

    ¡°Improved? I thought the Chalybs Imber was the top of the line already.¡±

    ¡°Yes and no. The original design is actually almost 20 years old. The old government of the Commonwealth decided it was too ¡®dishonorable¡¯ for the war with the AFS, and banned Vandermeer from building and/or selling it.¡±

    I rolled my eyes and then snarked:

    ¡°The reality is of course that it was too effective as a weapon. The Knowles wouldn¡¯t have been able to sell the story that the war is a stalemate with such a monster, and a few other Vandermeer weapons involved.¡±

    Michael cleared his throat.

    ¡°Excuse me, but¡­ what the fuck is a chalice imper?¡±

    Booth Naveen and I chuckled and Naveen answered him:

    ¡°It is Chalybs Imber. Chalybs is one of the Latin words for steel, while imber, with a B, means rain. All in all, it is called steel rain. It is a Gatling Flechette Gauss with eight barrels, and a single one fires a bit less than 24000 rounds per minute. Each shot contains, depending on what ammunition is used either 12 razor disks, four darts, or a slug, either armor piercing or not.

    They are usually used with the flechette ammunition, the darts, and you can imagine that a single Chalybs Imber is truly worthy of that name, with around 95 thousand steel darts thrown downrange per minute.

    An extremely devastating anti-infantry weapon. And a good addition to the arsenal of any assault skimmer.¡±

    Then his voice turned serious, and he looked at me.

    ¡°But it is not sufficient as the sole weapon. And that still does not address the lack of point-defense lasers. Or how you improved it.¡±

    ¡°Let¡¯s stay with the Chalybs Imber for a moment. It was a decent design, but it was not designed to be built in a NADA, or with my new findings about quantum fields in mind. I¡­ rectified that.

    First, I replaced the graphene-aerogel supercapacitors with ones I designed with ultrahigh-temperature ceramic superconductors as electrodes and a zinc-mangan-oxid dielectric. They charge a bit over eight times faster and can store twice the energy than the GA ones.

    The problem with them was that it was nearly impossible to manufacture them. Without a NADA that is. The ceramic superconductors are insanely brittle and can¡¯t be worked with on conventional machinery. Standard, flexible superconductors that can be formed into a capacitor can¡¯t stand the high temperatures of the discharge on the other hand.

    So previously, no superconducting capacitors for the Gauss guns. The same is the case for the electromagnets. Conventional flexible room-temperature superconductors can¡¯t withstand the heat of firing the gun, while the ultra-high-temperature ceramic superconductors are too brittle to use any traditional form of machining them into coils.

    Not so for the NADA-built Gauss guns. In other words, the enhanced Chalybs Imber have superconducting supercapacitors and superconducting magnetic coils. That alone increases the efficiency of the whole weapon by around two and a half times.

    I am not done with it though. The basic problem that Gauss guns have is that the projectile becomes saturated with the magnetic fields, and such is less pulled by the magnets. That limits the potential muzzle velocity to a large degree.

    Previously, this problem was insurmountable, and the reason why everybody goes with rail guns instead. Those have their own problems, sure, but those are problems that just increase the maintenance requirements exponentially.¡±

    Michael nodded.

    ¡°You said previously. Am I right in the assumption that you found a way to surmount those insurmountable problems?¡±

    Naveen chuckled softly, while I nodded.

    ¡°Mind you, everybody with a NADA can make an improved Gauss gun, with what I have already mentioned. But the next step is what makes it an enhanced Gauss gun and only we and Vandermeer have, at this time, the ability to make them, as it takes a 4D-enabled NADA.

    What I did was placing an EM-manipulator coil between each magnetic coil, that de-saturates the projectile. The effect is that the projectile will be pulled by the last magnet as strongly as the first.

    This¡­ well, I can see how this could replace rail guns, at least for Vandermeer, in the future. It means that there is no longer a hard limit on the velocity a Gauss gun can impart. If you make a Gauss big enough, it will reach the speeds of a rail gun or more.

    Not quite in the range of a grav gun, but a good second place I think.

    In the case of the enhanced Chalybs Imber, it leads to around 2.5 times the muzzle velocity.¡±

    I nodded to Naveen.

    ¡°That means if they use solid, hardened slugs, they should be good enough as anti-armor weapons as well, but that is not what I intended them for.¡±

    Naveen nodded.

    ¡°I see. And the point defense lasers?¡±

    This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

    I sighed.

    ¡°Honestly, I dislike lasers. I know I should be able to enhance them to the point where they are effective, but¡­ I just don¡¯t like them. If you are insisting on them, I guess we can put them in, but for the time being, I have that:¡±

    A short mental command, and several structures on the skimmer head, and the skeleton were highlighted.

    ¡°I call these PACs, or Particle Accelerator Cannons. Technically they are lightweight particle beam cannons, just with a pulse mode to save energy. The way I have designed them, they fire 500 times a second in three micro-second pulses. In sum, for 1.5 milliseconds per second. They have the same 3.8GW as the standard proton lance, but as I said, only for 1.5 milliseconds per second. Or 5.7MJ. Even that is¡­ taxing for the batteries.

    But they have the same range as the particle beams, the same near lightspeed for the pulses, and should be incredibly accurate. And even one pulse should stop anything an assault skimmer has a business engaging with. Anything it can¡¯t cope with is something the skimmer should not encounter.¡±

    Again, Naveen nodded, but he did seem a tiny bit unhappy.

    ¡°I understand that, but we can¡¯t plan for our assault skimmers to never encounter anti-ship weapons.¡±

    Michael on the other hand, shrugged.

    ¡°Yeah, I get that, but tell me, can any assault skimmer withstand those kinds of weapons?¡±

    ¡°No, not really, but I would love for ours to be able to do that.¡±

    ¡°Well, to continue, it has 16 PACs distributed in a way that at least six can fire in any direction.

    Now, you mentioned that the Gauss guns are not enough against stronger armor. But that is not everything this thing has. The nose twin Gatling Gauss turret is integrated, but if you look here at the chin¡­¡±

    Another mental command let the PACs release their highlights, while the somewhat flat area under the chin was now highlighted, and a series of dark blobs appeared under it.

    ¡°Here you see a hardpoint where we can mount a variety of weapon modules. At the low end, we can put another twin Chalybs Imber turret there, in case you want to double down on soft targets¡­ that reminds me, why does the CI have this razor disk ammo? I can¡¯t see any use except for completely unarmored targets.¡±

    Naveen shrugged.

    ¡°As far as I know, that was the exact reason. The AFS had, for some time, the ¡®glorious¡¯ idea to use clones as human wave cannon fodder. It turned out that using beings only a couple of days old without training, or real equipment was not such a good idea after all. It did cost the Freebies more to make the clones than it did cost the Commies to shred them, even without the Chalybs Imber.¡±

    I shook my head in the face of such inhumane tactics. And those were the self-declared ¡®good guys¡¯.

    After a few seconds, I sighed and then continued.

    ¡°Whatever¡­ as I was saying, it could be used to double on the Gauss guns but unless you want to eradicate a large zombie horde I doubt you need that very often.¡±

    The first of the shadow blobs morphed into another twin Chalybs Imber turret and then moved to a side for the next blob.

    ¡°Next up we have a standard ballistic heavy machine gun, also a twin. I used the same 15x175mm caseless ammo that Mark has developed for his Exterminator, just to make logistics a bit easier. It has a longer barrel, but otherwise, it should be good at up to four km.¡±

    Again, the shadow blob morphed into a weapon turret. Two single-barreled guns this time.

    ¡°The next option is a 30mm autocannon. I took a bit of inspiration from the ancient GAU-8 for the ammunition. I converted it to caseless as well, to make it lighter, but otherwise, it is the same. So now 30x170mm caseless. A nice armor cracker.

    The autocannon is available in two variants. One long-barreled, relatively slow-firing long-range variant, essentially a sniper weapon, or as a shorter-barreled Gatling version to¡­ saturate an area.¡±

    Two blobs morphed into weapons. One was a single, long barrel sticking out of a ball turret, while the other was a significantly shorter gun with seven rotating barrels, also in a ball turret.

    ¡°The last weapon module it can carry is a plasma cannon. My simulations show that it should be rather devastating. No ground vehicle armor or fortification will withstand more than a couple of its shots.¡±

    I looked at Naveen while I was saying that, and was not disappointed, as his mouth fell down in astonishment. Michael on the other hand frowned and looked at me questioningly.

    ¡°I¡­ thought you needed a fusactor, or a fusion reactor to make a plasma cannon work.¡±

    I smiled sweetly.

    ¡°Most people think that, but they are, at least in theory, wrong. There are in general two types of plasma cannons. The one everybody knows about is akin to a hose that you connect to a reservoir of plasma, and then spray at whoever you want. It is for all purposes just a conduit for the plasma.

    And yes, that type needs a plasma source, the most convenient of them is the fusactor.

    The other type was more or less only theoretical. This type creates the plasma internally, by whatever method.

    In theory, you could hook a barrel into the reaction chamber of a fusactor and call it a plasma cannon, though that might be a bit unwieldy.

    The ¡®easy¡¯ way to generate the plasma is by inertial confinement fusion. That method has been known since the 20<sup>th</sup> century. Three problems prevented it from being used as a weapon though.

    First, the mechanism to trigger the fusion process is¡­ was, a bit large. As in building-sized.

    Second, the chamber strong enough to withstand what is essentially a tiny nuclear explosion is¡­ also a bit large, though not as large as the trigger.

    Third, it was seen as impossible to make a barrel that could direct the energy of the explosion instead of being destroyed by it.

    With the help of our new technology, I solved all three problems. Triggering and confinement of the chamber is done by tiny grav coils that leave only one way out, through the barrel, which is magnetically protected from the plasma. That is possible thanks to the new EM-coils. Otherwise, the magnets would be roughly the size of the spine here.

    It works by compressing a tritium-pellet until the fusion happens and then squirts that expanding plasma ball through the barrel, collimating it. It should have a range of around two, maybe three kilometers.¡±

    I made a small pause.

    ¡°So, while the warship plasma cannons are relatively easy, being in a warship and connected to a fusactor, those plasma cannons are more like a tiny casaba howitzer.¡±

    The last shadow morphed into a short, stubby barrel in a turret.

    ¡°If that are not enough options for you, then we have to work a bit harder, I think. And no, a disruptor takes too much energy I fear. As it is, if the Valkyre flies 1000km, it has a loitering endurance of around two hours or 30 minutes of low-intensity combat. High-intensity combat is more like 5-10 minutes.

    With the assumption that you want to fly the 1000km back. If that is not the case¡­ it is quite a bit longer. Obviously, the times are also a bit higher when you have the conventional ballistic weapons at the hard point. The Gauss and the Plasma take a bit of energy for each shot.

    It also depends on what mission modules you install. Some will have additional battery capacity, some are an additional drain on the batteries, and then there is¡­ well we¡¯ll come to that in a bit.¡±

    Naveen looked at the plasma cannon a bit closer.

    ¡°And this thing will really do what you say?¡±

    ¡°My simulations say so, but obviously, I haven¡¯t tested it yet. If it doesn¡¯t we can get a rail gun, or maybe a big enhanced Gauss gun instead, but I think it will.¡±

    ¡°Well, I would love to have a greater range or longer combat endurance, but this is as good, if not better, than anything on the market right now. The gun modules are mostly fine too. If the plasma works, then it is better than fine. Though tritium is mighty expensive.¡±

    ¡°That is relative. Sure it costs more than lead or carbon, but the exorbitant price of tritium is an artifact of the olden days. When it was used in nukes, and was hard to produce.

    With a fusactor, we can produce it in large quantities. We only need lithium. The only reason why that rumor still makes the round is that tritium is rarely used anymore.¡±

    ¡°I assume that the batteries are LX-NS? Like in the Atropos?¡±

    ¡°Of course. I see no reason to use inferior batteries that cost us more to produce.¡±

    ¡°Well, then, how about the mission modules? Those are what will make or break this thing.¡±

    ¡°OK. Let¡¯s start with the connection. It has three tractor beams in the spine to lift or put down a module, and the cage can open and close around it. For the various modules, there is the standard stuff. Troop transport, vehicle transport, and so on. The standard troop transport module can carry 112 soldiers in up to heavy unpowered armor, with their equipment. In the large configuration, it can carry 75 troopers in power armor. The cyber transport configuration can carry 32 Achilles combat cyborgs. All that assumes that each person has enough room to move a bit.

    The bot transport module can carry 146 Einherjar. The vehicle transport module can carry two of the Badgers.

    And of course, there is a med-evac variant with four auto-docs.

    All the transport modules roughly double the battery capacity. Then there is the freight module. Essentially just an aerodynamic shell around eight standard containers.

    There is a 265.6m3 liquid module as well, though I am not sure we need that. But it was easy to create, so there it is.

    And those are the transport modules.¡±

    While I was talking, the various modules appeared beside the skimmer, and Naveen immediately walked to the first troop transporter, and opened the side door on one side, seeing the weapon mounts on the floor, and nodded.

    ¡°That sounds thorough and is more or less within the standard for an assault skimmer. A bit bigger than average, but not unmanageable.¡±

    Michael on the other hand furrowed his brow.

    ¡°You said those are the standard modules¡­ does that mean you have more?¡±

    ¡°Of course. A bit different from the rest is the drone tender. Designed to run up to four Atropos, with their standard complement of parasite drones. Unlikely that we ever need it, but it will barely take any time to build, so no point in not designing it in case we could use it.

    That now brings us to the combat variants.¡±

    I heard a slight gasp from Michael and turned to him. He looked a bit surprised, and when I raised my eyebrow, he asked:

    ¡°Wasn¡¯t the whole thing a combat craft? I mean, everything is designed to be used in combat.¡±

    I was spared from explaining it by Naveen answering though:

    ¡°No, the variants she showed us are combat-transport. Designed to bring troops, equipment, or supplies into a combat theatre. As I understand it, combat variants are designed to do the fight themselves.¡±

    I had only to nod, but I still said ¡°Correct.¡±

    Then I turned back to the vehicle.

    ¡°Well, mostly. Two are combat support roles. The first is an EW variant. It is planned to distract and blind the enemy sensors. The other is a scout variant, packed full of sensors. The EW variant is sadly the one with the smallest run time. The various jammers and signal emitters eat up power.¡±

    I made a short pause, tilting my head.

    ¡°Honestly, I am not sure we really need it, but I designed it for the same reason as the drone tender.¡±

    Naveen frowned at that statement.

    ¡°Why do you think we don¡¯t need it? It sounds like a useful addition.¡±

    I had to smile.

    ¡°That is because of the next variant. It is a SEAD module. Instead of stealth, this one has a multi-band radar emitter and transponder to be a good target, as well as an additional 12 PACs and a complement of anti-radiation missiles and cluster bombs. Where the EW module is designed to blind the enemy air defense, the SEAD module is designed to destroy it. But as usual, I only create the toys, you have to play with them, so it¡¯s your decision.

    Now, that was the first direct combat variant. Then we have an air superiority variant, with several multi-homing missiles. You know, electro-optical image recognizing, infrared, active radar, and beam riding homing all in one search head. It also has 12 additional PACs. Obviously, I designed it to take out enemy skimmers. We have to see how it does with that though.

    Then we have the bomber variant, with 24 tons of bombs in variable configurations, from dumb, over guided bombs to glide bombs. Whatever bomb you can dream up, if it is less than 24 tons and fits through the bomb chute, it can drop it.

    Then we have the ground-attack variant. 16 tons of unguided rockets, with four launched at the same time through two ports on each side, and a reload time of .02 seconds, as well as two additional gun hardpoints, one on each side.¡±

    I stopped there, and Naveen smiled and nodded appreciatively.

    ¡°I think that should ruin the day of anybody who encounters it. I like it, honestly. And thanks to the modular design, we can quickly swap out the profile.¡±

    Michael narrowed his eyes.

    ¡°One thing here¡­ you were so adamant against modular design in the warships. Why do you insist on it here?¡±

    ¡°Several reasons. First, it is one thing to have a slight decrease in efficiency in something that costs a couple hundred k bucks and that we get a few thousand of, and something completely different in something that costs us around two billion dollars and that we get maybe a few dozen of.

    Second, the modularity is less than you think. Yes, the hardpoints are modular, and the mission modules, but the first is relatively straight forward and we only lose around 3-6% in volume here, the volume of the weapon system, mind you, not the whole skimmer.

    The other is not really modular. It is a skimmer with a payload compartment, and I have designed a standardized payload.

    For the ships, their role decides their basic form and internal layout. I estimate that by making them modular, we lose around 10-20% of the volume and around 10-15% of the efficiency. Again, for something that costs in the billions of dollars, that is not acceptable.¡±

    ¡°I see. Well, if Naveen is happy, then I am satisfied.¡±

    ¡°Oh, I am happy. Sure, we have to build the prototypes and test them, but this looks promising. What is the crew complement?¡±

    ¡°Seven. Two pilots, one of them the commander, two gunners, a sensor tech, an EW tech, and a flight engineer. There is room for two additional people for mission-specific tasks like additional gunners for the AS or the SEAD modules.¡±

    ¡°Well, I am happy with it. Thank you. I will start the production of the prototypes immediately¡­¡±

    ¡°Wait¡­ don¡¯t you want to know the best part?¡±

    ¡°The¡­ best part?¡±

    ¡°Well, the last module. It is a bit special. For when you definitely want your displeasure known, you know?¡±

    ¡°The ground-attack module does not show our ¡®displeasure¡¯ sufficiently enough?¡±

    ¡°It is a good start, I give you that, but we can do something better I think. I read that some transport aircraft have been converted into a gunship role in the past. I have no clue why they stopped doing that¡­ but I thought it was a good idea.¡±

    ¡°A gunship?¡±

    ¡°Yes. Look at that.¡±

    The last module materialized, and the skin became half transparent.

    Michael, looking at it, gasped again.

    ¡°Is that¡­ that can¡¯t be.¡±

    ¡°It is. I managed to shrink a fusactor down enough to squeeze it into an, admittedly oversized, skimmer. This thing produced 53GW. Enough to power the four full-powered particle beams and the two point defense grav guns on each side, as well as the disruptor in the retractable ventral turret.

    Additionally, the PACs can be configured for longer pulses. The absolute maximum is 500 microseconds though, and even that is burning them out fast. They lack the heat dissipation of the full-sized particle beams. We should institute a non-emergency maximum of 250 microseconds.

    And I think it doesn¡¯t need to be said, that this variant has the absolute longest flight time. It is also the only variant of the skimmer that has a place to fight against warships. Small ones only though.¡±

    For a long moment, neither man said anything before Naveen finally uttered:

    ¡°Well, fuck me sideways, that is a surprise. And yeah, this thing will make our displeasure known. Quite thoroughly I would say.¡±

    I had to smile before I continued:

    ¡°As far as I can tell, it is traditional to name those gunships after some kind of dragon, so, I thought we should call this module ¡®Fafnir¡¯.¡±

 2.75: Building time

    It took our engineers more than a month to get the first Valkyre prototype ready for its test flight.

    I have to admit that this was partly my fault. No, not because I refused Naveen the use of my (25m)3 NADA. Get real, I needed that thing to get my Constructor done, and Naveen had access to enough 625m3-NADAs to get it done.

    The Valkyre was designed to be built with those kinds of NADAs from the get-go.

    Most of the delay was an argument inside of the security division about which variant to build first if you can believe it. They wasted more than a week on that before they even started. That stopped when I sent them a ¡®friendly reminder¡¯ that the base unit was the same for all variants.

    Heck, a single 625er-NADA was enough to build the complete set of weapon modules in one go as well. That left the mission modules. In my opinion, they should have started with something simple. The freight variant was easy and fast. Or the basic bot transport, considering that we needed something like that anyway.

    But no, they actually went with the Fafnir. Good idea, start with the most expensive, most complicated, and probably least used variant first. But whatever, that¡¯s their decision.

    And ¡®somehow¡¯ its specs got leaked to Captain Murdock, who promptly deman¡­ ahem, politely asked for a gunship with the same kind of fusactor.

    Not that I had not already expected that, mind you. He just needed to decide on the weapon loadout. If he wanted to change it from what I had prepared. Two full-sized grav guns, fixed forward, two disrupter turrets, one each ventral and dorsal, as well as four particle beams in side-mounted turrets. Oh, and of course eight point defense grav guns.

    Like the Fafnir, it had fuel for around two days.

    But to get back to the delays with the Valkyre¡­ the one thing that was my fault here was that when they pulled the first armor plate out of the NADA, they broke the crane, and I got an irate call from the chief engineer about it.

    To give you a direct quote: ¡°What the fuck is this fucking shit? How fucking heavy is it that it breaks the fucking crane? Are you fucking us with this crap?¡±

    It was at this moment that I realized that I had forgotten to explain the new eight-dimensional armor material that Warden came up with.

    A careful explanation was in order here. I called that stuff Synth-Ultra-Carbon, or SUC for short. Because it was still made mostly out of carbon, with some tungsten thrown into the mix.

    The problem was that it had a bit more than five times the density of standard carbon-composite armor, which resulted in the armor plate being five times as heavy as the engineers expected. And being frugal in that matter, they used the small crane, which should be enough for carbon-composite, but not enough for SUC.

    Now, why use SUC instead of CC? Simple, SUC may have five times the density, but more than 15 times the strength. In other words, 1mm thick SUC weighted as much as 5mm thick CC but protected as good as 15mm CC. Or for the old-school folks, the equivalent of 53.7mm of RHA.

    So yeah, it took them a day to fix the crane enough to move it out of the way, and another couple of days before they could divert the large crane from its current task. So in a way, those three days delay were my fault.

    Why they did not just use a tractor beam is anybody''s guess I think. The rest¡­ would you believe me that they needed a week to build the fusactor? A fricking week. They had the goddang plans for the dang things right there. They just had to order the NADA to build the parts. A couple of days max.

    But no, they argued, and went over the equations, over the whole construction, to ¡®make sure it is safe¡¯. Only for them to use the exact same blueprints that I had created with Warden¡¯s help. Not a single change, not even the paint scheme was different. Talk about wasted time.

    Needless to say, by the time they had the Valkyre ready for its test flight, my Constructor was almost ready as well.

    The funny thing was that the Einherjar had to¡­ divert a couple dozen ¡®curious civilians¡¯, aka spies, from entering the water dome, where the fully civilian, completely mundane Constructor was built, while the very normal construction hall where the revolutionary military vehicle was put together flew completely under the radar.

    The delays for the Valkyre got worse though. Halfway through the beast being put together, they finally got the idea through their thick heads that they needed to test all the mission modules. Not just the armageddon variant with the name of Fafnir. Fortunately, all the other modules were a tiny bit faster to build. Who would have guessed that the most complicated variant took the longest to put together?

    After what seemed to be an eternity, they finally put the Valkyre through its flight tests. They used the Isimud to bring the prototypes, yes while they were building the modules they had the time to build a second head section, to the very same quarry where we had tested our first weapons.

    And then tested them. And tested them. And tested them. By the time they had the flight tests finished, after three weeks, my Constructor was already done with building the barracks.

    I had the platoon decide on the aesthetics, though I used the same SUC for the outer walls, one meter thick, and paired Q-links instead of windows. Oh sure, it would take a month or so to finish the interior and furnish it, but it was mostly done.

    I had ¡®sacrificed¡¯ the ludicrously large parking lot that nobody ever used. Its entrance was directly opposite the entrance to the fortress, and there was a skyway on the third floor connecting the two buildings.

    There was also a tunnel between the second basements. I also integrated a big 572GW fusactor and a 15625m3, or (25m)3, NADA for their equipment needs.

    After seeing what the Constructor could do in a single week, James asked me to start a second one. Not that I could do that, mind you. The second one was already a week into the build by that time.

    Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

    What? You think I did not understand what a boon this thing would be for Enki?

    And so it came that the Constructor was already placing the foundation for my new lab/workshop when Naveen and his people finally moved on to the weapons test phase.

    And the worst thing about that? They had not even started building the 100x100x100m NADA that they said they wanted. Sometimes I just don¡¯t understand people.

    The good thing though was that we were all invited to observe the weapons test in VR. Michael even included Nate and some of his engineers. Something about giving the license for those new weapons to Vandermeer. I could live with that, honestly. And as long as we did not sell the big weapons, like the grav guns or the particle beams, and certainly not the disruptor, I did not care much about it.

    Now to the credit of the Vandermeer engineers, they understood almost immediately what the improved Chalybs Imber meant, even though they mostly viewed the Gatling Gauss with a bit of indifference.

    They now had the technology to build a Gauss gun that would equal, or even surpass, any rail gun. Not a grav gun, as the very fact that the mass of the projectile had no impact on the muzzle velocity, was simply not beatable. But suddenly the Gauss gun was a very good second place. And one where Vandermeer had the virtual monopoly, as Enki did not plan to sell weapons any time soon.

    This also meant that for virtually everybody, the new Gauss guns would be the best they could get.

    The PACs caused more of a stir. From Enki personnel as well as Vandermeer people. Understandable, as without knowing about the proton lance, it was an entirely new technology. Add to that that it was flashy as heck¡­ yeah, I could see that it would be a sales leader in the future. The pulses lasted, as I already stated, only three microseconds, but the afterimage remained quite a bit longer. Long enough that the next pulse was already long gone by the time it faded.

    It created the image of a blindingly bright white beam, similar to what the proton lance produced. Sure, it had only .15% of the energy of the lance, but for any not fully solid projectile, one pulse was enough to disintegrate it. Three to four pulses should be enough to take out any moderately armored vehicle as well. Unfortunately, any solid projectile was mostly immune to it. But anything that fired solid slugs heavy enough to go through the 25mm thick SUC armor of the Valkyre was something it should not face in the first place.

    Sorry but not sorry. We can protect our skimmers only so much, and I had armored this thing so thoroughly that the only things posing a realistic threat to it were anti-ship weapons. If a skimmer was confronted with anti-ship weaponry, any skimmer, its only chance of survival was to hoove it to safety.

    As it was, I was proud that I had managed to make this assault skimmer virtually immune to any anti-skimmer weapons out there.

    But to get back to the weapons tests, the heavy MG as well as the autocannons were nothing all that interesting either. Sure, they were new and shiny, but proven, old technology just in a new exterior.

    That left the good one for last though. The plasma cannon impacted quite explosively, if you forgive me my pun here.

    For one, it ripped a new, big hole into the stone wall of the quarry. Yes, it was very effective as a weapon.

    But more important was that it was new and shiny, and for real this time. Something the world had not seen before, like the PACs. And again, Vandermeer was getting the virtual monopoly on it.

    That had the regrettable side effect that I was now required to answer a barrage of questions about it. At one point I squirted everybody the specs of that thing, but noooo they still had inane questions to ask.

    That mostly concluded the weapon trials. Mostly, because we had the SEAD, the GA, the AS, and the Bomber variant still to test. And of course, the Fafnir. Can¡¯t forget the Fafnir, can we?

    To make things short, neither the SEAD, nor the GA or the AS, and for sure not the Bomber variant caused more than a mild interest.

    I mean, anti-radiation missiles, unguided rockets, multi-homing missiles, or bombs, none of them were even approaching being new. Sure, the new ones had better computers, and for the homing missiles I used small grav coils instead of rocket motors, but that was just detail work.

    And then they tested the Fafnir. They had gone and used the two additional hardpoints for plasma cannons. I personally would have gone with the 30mm-Gatling Acs but they were the military people.

    Needless to say that the Vandermeer people were salivating at the sight of this monster. And they were also pretty disappointed when they were told that no, Enki would not sell this technology. Oh, they could make the fusactor themselves. That was not the problem.

    No, the problem was the proton lances and the disruptor. The last one especially. We remained firm in that respect though. We would sell them the finished Fafnir if they seriously wanted it, but only them.

    And so it happened that we in the end finally tested, and approved, the Valkyre, exactly as I had designed it, despite all the delays.

    Yes, I understand testing is important. But let¡¯s get real, after almost two months, we had barely gotten a hint about what the Valkyre could do, but on the other hand, we had wasted so much time just doing basic flight tests that the weapon tests were seriously delayed.

    And we still had barely scratched what was necessary for weapon tests either. What we had was basic functionality, and we could use it to ferry Einherjar around. A bit costly if something went wrong, but if we had the Valkyre piloted remotely, then no humans were in danger.

    Not that I expected anything to go wrong. Except for human error that is. Think about it, I took two weeks, in real-time, to design it.

    At 240:1 that meant I invested around 10 virtual years into it. I had Calliope go over the software again and again. I simulated every single permutation of the electronics. I can¡¯t even imagine how much computing power Warden used to perfect this skimmer.

    True, nothing of that was real world, but simulations had become so good, that only something completely unprecedented could pose a serious risk anymore. It might not work quite as well as I imagined, but that was a risk that any new design had. There was only negligible risk of a catastrophic failure though.

    Not that I could convince Naveen and his troupe of that.

    Nonetheless, the world kept turning, the water kept flowing and time kept creeping forward, and I was busy with other things. One special joy of mine was seeing the new building practically grow from the ground.

    It was a big building. 100x200m, eight stories above ground, four below. A good quarter of the building was a big, continuous workspace going from the ground to the roof. It had the same 1m thick SUC exterior walls, though except for some load-bearing walls and columns, the interior was standard carbon composite.

    Even when the building itself was done, it would take me a few months to fit it out. Naturally, a single floor was reserved for all my server racks. Finally getting the rooms in the fortress back.

    I should probably remodel the north wing, but that was for a later time.

    Enki was doing moderately well for all that time¡­ just kidding, we kept increasing our profits and were by now at a bit less than $120 billion/month. Honestly, it was becoming a bit boring that way.

    The Manhattan project was slowly taking on steam. We were negotiating about the whole island, and frankly, with the Constructor, and its siblings, it would be really fast to set up some living space there.

    In other news, about Blumenthal, we had the hot, interesting new information of¡­ nothing. Bupkiss. Whoever was behind him, they were pretty anal about operational security. Sure, from the chat log we had found, they had a few lapses here and there, but at this moment, Blumenthal had nothing of interest to us in his Crystal collection.

    It is a bit annoying if the opposition is not composed of arrogant idiots, let me tell you. I know, how inconsiderate of them, right? As it was, we were looking for some fixers that did no fixing in Philly, DC, Chicago, and so on. It was slow going though.

 2.76: Sooner than expected

    On the 5<sup>th</sup> of May, we had our usual Tuesday meeting. The first after the weapons test yesterday. Michael already had arranged for Vandermeer to get the license for all the weapons we demonstrated, except the proton lance and the disruptor, as stated, for a flat 5% of the net price Vandermeer would sell them.

    The smart ones among you probably already realized that that would give us nothing for weapons they build for their own use, but frankly, that was intended. Heck, we even let them build the anti-ship weapons for their own military after all.

    They just could not sell them. They were our firm allies nonetheless.

    So there I was, sipping my coffee, while I waited for the rest of the board to arrive. I was still thinking that we should have those meetings in VR, mind you. Just the time factor was worth it. Heck, every one of them was reasonably intelligent, they had the best hardware available at the moment, and we had a rather secure, private network, thanks to the Q-links.

    All in all, we should be able to have those meetings at something approaching 60:1.

    I pleaded in vain though, as all the others thought meeting in the real world was the thing to do.

    It was when Marcel came in a bit harried as the last of us, Michael started the meeting. OK, he waited until Marcel actually had sat down, and had his coffee, before he began.

    ¡°Well, now that we are all here, let¡¯s start. James, how is the build-up going?¡±

    ¡°We are getting a bit faster thanks to the increased number of bots working, but the bottleneck is still the number of buildings we can raise. The conversion into a factory is quickly done after that.¡±

    James sighed and smiled at me.

    ¡°It would be faster if Vivian would just give us her Constructor. It is insane how fast this thing works.¡±

    I -barely- managed to withstand the urge to roll my eyes. We had this very same discussion so often since my Constructor came out of the water dome it was becoming boring by now.

    ¡°As I said before, get your own. Or wait until I am done with mine.¡±

    ¡°But it takes two months to build one. I need it now.¡±

    ¡°And I have started yours three weeks ago. So five weeks to go. You can wait that long.¡±

    ¡°But think about all the money we are losing.¡±

    I raised my eyebrow.

    ¡°You mean a profit after taxes of what, $120 billion per month is not enough? We are still a double-A and earn more than Enertech, a triple-A already. We can wait.¡±

    Michael interrupted us mildly before James could give another argument.

    ¡°James, let it go. Yes, the Constructor would be a serious boon, but I have to remind you that this was not an Enki project. It was designed and built solely by Vivian, with her own money. She sourced the materials and provided the fusactors and the replicator, the water dome, the bots, and everything. She did the same for the second one, that you will get in five weeks. So let it go, OK?¡±

    James literally sulked but nodded visibly reluctantly.

    ¡°Yeah, fine. I¡¯ll let it go.¡±

    That made Michael nod, and then continue:

    ¡°While you are in the spotlight, how is the Manhattan project going?¡±

    ¡°Quite well. We will get the whole Island, with all that is still on it, for $276 billion. We estimate that we will find around $150 billion in raw materials alone. And there is no way to know how many priceless art and cultural objects are still salvageable. It will be a large amount of work to get it cleaned up, but nothing we can not do.¡±

    Some of us frowned, and Arnedra voiced one of the concerns:

    ¡°When you mention art and cultural objects¡­ do you intend for us to salvage them? I don¡¯t think bots can do that, or can they?¡±

    ¡°It will be a bit tricky, but I think we can manage it. Anything valuable still salvageable will most likely be in a vault somewhere.

    For most of the rest, we can have the bots empty the rooms of anything movable and then let it be sorted by our employees.

    It means that we won¡¯t be using large-scale disruptors to clean it up though. Not in the beginning at least.¡±

    Michael shrugged.

    ¡°That¡¯s OK. We have years. Decades even to do it right. For the time being, we will start with repairing some residential buildings here in Queens to give our workforce a better living environment.¡±

    ¡°That should be doable.¡±

    I piped up at that moment:

    ¡°Will we repair the bridges and tunnels to and from Manhattan?¡±

    ¡°Of course! Would be stupid if we didn¡¯t.¡±

    ¡°Maybe. Maybe not. With the new grav coils, somebody will likely develop an affordable light skimmer or hovercar in a not-too-distant future.¡±

    ¡°Even then, we are still trying to buy and rebuild the subway. For that we need tunnels. And bridges for pedestrians, or bikers.¡±

    Honestly, I didn¡¯t care too much about it. With modern materials and a Constructor, instead of taking years and billions of dollars, we could build a stronger bridge in a couple of days costing no more than a few 100 grand. In other words, chump change and a short distraction, nothing more.

    When nobody said anything for a few seconds, Michael nodded and continued the meeting.

    ¡°Then, next topic. Naveen, Jessi, how is the cyberization of our security personnel going?¡±

    It was the redheaded doctor who answered:

    ¡°It¡¯s going well. By now we have 103 full combat cyborgs with an Achilles body. And 237 security personnel with less extensive cyberization. The bottleneck right now is enough doctors to do the prep, and the number of auto-docs to do the actual conversion, as well as the production of the cyberbodies.

    While the Achilles is more or less standard, as Mark Holt has worked it out with us, the non-combat bodies are completely individual. Every one unique. This takes time.¡±

    When she stopped, our security chief continued:

    ¡°Right now, we have the effective strength of a battalion of power-armor jockeys in combat cyborgs. When we have everybody who has already registered for it converted, we will have a slightly reinforced battalion of combat cyborgs, which should be the equivalent of a division of armor jockeys.

    We have standardized on the loadout that Mr. Holt has developed as well. Two modified Thunderwarriors, and an Exterminator. We have also brokered a licensing deal between Mr. Holt and Vandermeer about the Exterminator.¡±

    ¡°So in other words, we only lack a fleet and enough assault skimmers to be fully protected?¡±

    ¡°Yes, that¡¯s the case. At least until enough Achilles are sold for the other corps to match us here. We will have to increase our numbers constantly I fear.¡±

    ¡°Is there an option to create a bot on the base of the Achilles? Bigger, faster, and stronger than the Einherjar?¡±

    It took me a moment to realize that the last question was directed at me, as I had just taken a sip of coffee. I calmly put the mug back on the table before I answered:

    ¡°Yes, the option is simple. Just put a robot head on an Achilles instead of a cyborg one. The real question is if it is something we should do. Without a human brain behind it, they will be limited. Even with Cerberus riding them. That is something you have to ask Naveen I fear.¡±

    The Indian took a moment to consider it and then shrugged.

    ¡°Honestly, it depends on the price. Purely from the combat power perspective, we could use as many as you can give us. Even if they are lacking compared to a cyborg, they are still stronger than what anybody else has.¡±

    That made James grumble:

    ¡°Great. Another demand for our replicators. As if we didn¡¯t have enough of that already.¡±

    ¡°Well, we can afford to not grow our profit quite as fast I think. We should set that up. Maybe double the Achilles production line?¡± Michael sounded mild, but determined, not broking any dissent in that regard, and after a moment, James sighed.

    ¡°Fine, I¡¯ll see to it. But you better look into increasing our production capacity.¡±

    ¡°You are already getting the next Constructor, and I am sure that when Vivian is done with hers, you can use that one too.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, about the Constructor¡­¡±

    We all turned our attention to Marcel, who still looked a bit harried.

    ¡°I¡¯ve spent the last week calming down the ABAS regional HQ about it. They thought we would enter the grav-ship market. They simply would not believe that this thing was no grav ship. I had to finally show their people the Constructor at work. Yesterday.

    Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

    And today I got a call from them, they want to buy one. Oh, and they are asking if it is space-rated.¡±

    Wait, why would they need it to be space-rated? I shook my head in confusion but then answered:

    ¡°No, not really. At least not this one. But it is easy to build one that is. But why? Space-borne construction does not benefit much from a Constructor. Things are already weightless up there.¡±

    ¡°There is talk that they want to build a new research center on the moon. Maybe they want it for that? But that¡¯s not all. Burgmeister wants one as well.¡±

    For a few seconds, we all were silent, looking at each other. I mean, I understood from the beginning that the Constructor was a valuable tool, and I thought it might be something we could sell. But two at once? Finally, Michael sighed.

    ¡°That was a bit sooner than expected. We will look into it, but the next one is for our in-house capabilities. Say¡­ Vivian, would a proper building hall help in the construction of one?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°Yes, of course. Just the scaffolding alone would speed it up quite a bit. If we include tractor beams to move the parts around, we could probably use a second NADA, and get one build in a month instead of two. Maybe even faster.¡±

    ¡°OK. So, James, the first thing your new Constructor will build is a building hall for the next Constructors. Then we have to set a price for those things. Not too cheap.¡±

    James sighed visibly unhappy, and answered with a sullen:

    ¡°Yes, boss.¡±

    I closed my eyes and made a mental list of what was needed for the hall. Then I sighed as well.

    ¡°I will work out the hall design then.¡±

    ¡°Do that. Now¡­ with this little surprise out of the way, anything else new?¡±

    Maggie cleared her throat.

    ¡°Yeah¡­ I have been asked about the new cranial board and when it will be available.¡±

    That made Jessi chuckle.

    ¡°Technically, we could implant it now. It is the same size as the old one, only that it has a Bia instead of a Regulus. But we should wait a bit for that I think.¡±

    ¡°Uh¡­ why?¡±

    ¡°Well, we had so much more computing power available that some of my people got the idea that we should try to make a better jack. Nearly four times the connections than the ultra-bandwidth one. They call it hyper-bandwidth. It is in the testing phase right now, as it, unlike the new board, has some new cyber tech that has to be tested. We should limit the amount of operations as much as possible.¡±

    I was of two minds here. On one hand, more power was always better. On the other, the ultra-bandwidth jack already had an insane amount of connections. Did we seriously need even more?

    Well, it was not directly my decision, and if it was safe and stable, why not?

    Michael sighed and knocked softly on the table.

    ¡°I think we should wait at least a year before we bring a new, better product to the market. Otherwise, we might snub our best customers.¡±

    ¡°Oh, it is quite a way from the market. But we can use it internally. I see no reason not to use any advantage we can get.¡±

    ¡°And what will we do if Vivian now produces new products twice as fast? We are already barely keeping up now.¡±

    I could hear that he did not mean this seriously, but Jessi slapped a hand in front of her mouth and murmured:

    ¡°Oh shit. What have I done? New rule. Vivian can only work half days from now on, does anybody second?¡±

    After a few seconds, the whole table broke out into laughter, and after some time, Michael knocked onto the table again.

    ¡°Enough of that. Yeah, we needed that, but let¡¯s get back to serious business. Is there anything else?¡±

    Eli nodded and answered verbally:

    ¡°Yep. We¡¯re being sued, again.¡±

    Most of us frowned, and Michael sighed and rolled his eyes.

    ¡°Let me guess. Panacea again?¡±

    ¡°You guessed it. This time it is because ¡®somebody¡¯ placed a hacked firmware of our auto-surgeon on the dark web that contains Panacea¡¯s patented decision tree. The thing is, it is not just ours, but almost everybody¡¯s. And honestly, I don¡¯t know what they expect to achieve with that.¡±

    ¡°Isn¡¯t it kinda not our fault when somebody hacks our firmware and inserts their tree?¡±

    ¡°That is the case almost everywhere. And Panacea lacks the pull to find a jurisdiction where that is not the case nowadays. So¡­ it is like a small yappy dog growling and yapping at the tiger here.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ just a side note then. I assume you and your team have it under control?¡±

    ¡°Of course. But one thing¡­ we should look at their new firmware a bit closer. Their auto-surgeons made a big jump in processing speed a couple of months ago. Incidentally a couple of days after the hacked firmware was placed on the web.¡±

    ¡°You think they ripped off our decision algorithm? That would be typical of them.¡±

    ¡°Yup. We will have to have Calliope look over their firmware, but there are strong indications.¡±

    ¡°Well, if that¡¯s the case, give them a taste of their own medicine. Sue them, here in the US as well in the Commonwealth.¡±

    ¡°Will do boss.¡±

    With that done, Michael closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

    ¡°Well then, as unsavory as that was, we should continue I think. Alena, I purposefully left you for last this time. How are our finances¡­¡±

    He stopped when Cerberus materialized over the table.

    ¡°Excuse me, sir, but a situation has developed that you likely want to observe. Please connect to VR room 2778-T.¡±

    It took us a moment to switch gears, and then we all met in the named VR viron again. Standing this time.

    There we found not just Cerberus and Warden, but Ramon and Enrique as well.

    ¡°Hey, there you are.¡±

    Ramon sounded quite satisfied, and the reason became immediately apparent when he continued:

    ¡°We¡¯ve positively identified Cabal and Velvet.¡±

    It was Naveen who moved forward with some determination.

    ¡°Are you sure?¡±

    ¡°Yup. They¡¯ve just got the message to get to the same online meeting as Blumenthal. Not from the same number, obviously, but we are now looking at who else got the same message. That is being made a bit harder by them not using the same carrier.

    But for Cabal and Velvet, we had them already under observation because we suspected them.

    Cabal is Elena Montdumier, officially a business consultant, unofficially a fixer, and doing none of it.

    Velvel is Charles Bigelow, an ¡®independently wealthy¡¯ playboy, and ¡®hobby-fixer¡¯. Again, no fixing done in the last three to four years.¡±

    ¡°That is good to know, but also not a reason to interrupt our meeting, you know?¡±

    ¡°Direct your protests at Warden. She was the one who sent Cerberus. And I think it is because of the chat meeting.

    We have five Lachesis each following Cabal and Velvet, as well as the new one with the disruptor-enhanced Clotho for Blumenthal.

    Blumenthal is right now entering his bunker.¡±

    ¡°OK, fine. We will look over it then.¡±

    Michael managed to glower at Warden when he said that, but as usual, that had no effect.

    With a wave from Ramon, three displays appeared, showing us three dark rooms, with a single person sitting at a computer each.

    Blumenthal was immediately identifiable for all of us. Then there was a dark-haired woman with thick-rimmed glasses and some sort of severe business suit, as well as a dark blonde man in way more legere clothing almost lying in his chair, visibly bored.

    Then a fourth display appeared, with a chat window in it.

    Carnage:             Any idea what the topic is today?

    Quicksand:         I bet you will learn shortly. Why are you so impatient?

    Carnage:             I don¡¯t know how it is for you, but I had nothing on the radar that made a full meeting necessary.

    Quicksand:         Come on, you are almost sounding like Badger.

    Carnage:             Take that back!

    Honor:                  But he¡¯s right, you know. Why are you so impatient?

    Carnage:             Alright, you won¡¯t let it rest anyway. I had a date, you know? A life beyond our job here.

    Honor:                  That¡¯s on you. You know as well as the rest of us how important our mission is. If you start anything else, you know that it has to stay behind when duty calls.

    Carnage:             I know, I know. I just don¡¯t like it.

    Velvet:                  I get you man. I¡¯m in the same boat. Had a nice young filly lined up that I had to cancel on.

    Cabal:                   Is that really necessary? Come on people, get a grip. We are not here to exchange dating histories.

    Velvet:                  As if you had a dating history. But whatever. Who is missing?

    Viking:                  Monolith so far.

    Drake:                   Typical. He calls us in and then lets us wait.

    Gopher:               That is being the boss for you. Don¡¯t tell me you wouldn¡¯t do the same in his position.

    Drake:                   Of course I would. But it¡¯s still annoying on the receiving end.

    Cinder:                  Anybody an idea what we were called in for?

    Cinder:                  Wow¡­ overwhelming response¡­ so nobody.

    Scarecrow:          I guess we will find out as soon as Monolith comes on.

    Monolith:            Ah, good, you are all here.

    Badger:                As if that is such a surprise.

    Monolith:            We are changing strategies a bit. We are starting Operation Pinecone immediately.

    Casper:                 Already? I thought that was planned for in 5 years.

    Viking:                  That is sooner than expected.

    Monolith:            Venator is not happy about it, but it is a use it or lose it situation. We already see the general unrest calm down just because of the rumors about the cure for infertility. We can¡¯t wait for it to completely vanish.

    Cabal:                   The infertility problem is only one of the many problems that the little people face nowadays. I doubt that the unrest will completely vanish.

    Monolith:            You are probably right long-term. But mid-term just one of those problems vanishing is enough to calm the people down.

    Viking:                  If the rumors alone are already reducing unrest, how will we rile up the peasants?

    Monolith:            We will use the rumors. One thing that every one of you, except Viking, is to do is seed rumors that the cure will be banned by the big corps, to keep the sale of clone jobs profitable.

    Badger:                Wait a minute, why not Viking?

    Monolith:            We don¡¯t think the rumors will have any effect in New York. C-87 is conducting its tests there.

    Viking:                  It will be hard to get people angry about C-87 in general. I just learned that they instituted a 40-hour work week. And they hired, at their costs, genetic specialists to help those for whom their cure does not work.

    Monolith:            We know. We do not know yet what their end game is, but so far they push all the right buttons for the small man to be happy with them.

    Monolith:            But to get back to Operation Pinecone, Venator expects that the new rumors, after the hope generated by the possible cure, will make things much worse in the short term.

    Monolith:            That is the point where we will seed the new organization.

    Gargoyle:            Do we have a name for this new org?

    Monolith:            Yes, Venator decided on the Free Marxist Liberation Force.

    Banshee:             Honestly, I am not that happy that we will hide behind a terrorist organization.

    Badger:                Wake up! We are a terrorist organization. Or do you think Bronze Puma was anything less?

    Monolith:            Calm down, Badger. Yes, some of our means can be construed as terrorism, but it is no more and no less than the corporations do all the time.

    Monolith:            The FMLF will be different. It will be a declared, and dedicated terror organization. Going after the big corporations. With a manifest and all that.

    Badger:                Yeah, such a big difference. Face it, we are terrorists as well. We just don¡¯t advertise it.

    Monolith:            If you want to believe that, so be it.

    Monolith:            But getting back to the topic at hand, we will suspend all operations except for Tickle, Urban Hammer, and Open Invite. Sow the rumors, and keep your heads down. We will send other agitators to create the FMLF.

    Monolith:            Unlike most other operations, Operation Pinecone is a global initiative. You are not the only cell getting told to slow down.

    Monolith:            The point here is that you need to keep as much distance from the FMLF as possible, to keep your identities clean.

    Monolith:            That was all for now. Viking, please remain behind. I need to go over Operation Tickle with you.

    Viking:                  I have scouted out the location. C-14-002 is confirmed to be there at the expected time. Security will be lax relative to standard times.

    Wait, when did he do that? We had him under observation 24/7 since the zombie attack. I could see I was not the only one confused about that. And the way Naveen¡¯s face darkened, I expected that we would have people looking into that very quickly.

    Monolith:            That is good. We are still preparing the strike force. It will take a couple of months to get everything done.

    Viking:                  The event is almost three months out, so that is no problem. Will the strike force have any information?

    Monolith:            Officially no. Just what they will ¡®dig¡¯ out themselves. That is what takes so long. We have to carefully lead them to the information we want them to have.

    Viking:                  I have just one problem with that. The way the unbound VI has dealt with C-03¡­ do you seriously think C-14 will go to war with C-87?

    Monolith:            I don¡¯t know. Venator thinks so. But even if it is just a cold war, it will have to be enough.

 2.77: Tinkering

    It had taken a bit longer than I liked, but finally, my new shop was finished.

    Not the lab portion of the new building and the bots were still moving the various server racks from the fortress to the new floor for them.

    But my shop was ready. That was what had taken up that much time, in reality. I was smart and had the Constructor build in not just the technicals, like the four fusactors or the water purifiers, but also the essential workshop machinery.

    Like the tractor beams instead of cranes, hoists, and whatever else was used to lift things.

    I also had it include an oversized industrial fabber as well. All based on Enki¡¯s state-of-the-art technology. And a plethora of semi-hand tools, some of them completely new, like the cable-fed small disruptor to cut down on some workpieces.

    Oh, and another 25x25x25m NADA, along with a few 15x15x3m ones.

    But the important thing was that my workshop was finally ready. And I could, at last, begin tinkering again.

    Again, it had taken a bit of time, and James was at once happy that his Constructor was ready, and unhappy that its first task was to build a construction hall for Constructors. Seriously though, that was a matter of a couple of days.

    The technicals were already there, and the Constructor only needed to build the actual building. Well that and the tractor beams, but those were quick to build.

    Alena and Marcel had also firmed up what we would take for a Constructor. In fact, they asked me to design another, smaller Constructor without the 100x30x15m NADA, because the NADA was what made the big Constructor expensive.

    Not for us to build, but¡­ well, we sold the 3x3x3m NADA for ITB 2.3 million. The biggest we sold, the 15x15x3m one, we sold for ITB 75 million.

    The basic Constructor, with just one fusactor and without the NADA was going for ITB 38 million.

    Alena and Marcel figured that the 100x30x15m NADA alone would be worth ITB 530 million. Add in the second fusactor, a few more bots, a significantly bigger ship, with the accordingly more numerous grav coils¡­ the final price of the big Constructor was ITB 610 million.

    In my opinion, that was honestly too much for the usefulness the big Constructor provided. Unless somebody wanted to stamp a whole city out of the ground that is, but we still had orders for four of them.

    Along with more than a dozen for the smaller ones.

    The perverse thing about that was that it did cost me roughly $3.6 million to build the first Constructor.

    And much of that was in the startup costs of setting up the fusactor, the NADA, and the water dome. The second one was just $1.3 million.

    With the new construction hall, the big one would cost us $1.1 million, or ITB 275,000. This gave us a ludicrous profit margin of 221,718%.

    For the small one, the margin was a tad lower, at a production cost of $960,000 or ITB 240,000.

    But that still translated into a profit margin of only 15,733%. And you know the really perverse thing? It was justified. The big one was still an order of magnitude cheaper than the factory for the prefabricated parts, the fleet of transport vehicles, and the armada of construction machines that a single Constructor replaced.

    Not to mention the time, and the cost of the workforce. But unless you had dozens of buildings to put up, it was still not a winning proposition. Though from what I understand, Burgmeister actually planned to rent out the two they had ordered.

    During that time, I was, naturally, not sitting on my hands, or twiddling my thumbs. Instead, I worked with Captain Murdock, Abou, and Victor, along with their staff, to design our corvettes.

    Yes, several. We worked out, together with Naveen, that the core of our corvette flotilla would be a missile corvette.

    To that extent, I designed a 20-cell container that could be switched out in bulk, with fewer at this time theoretical bigger missiles, or just new ones when the old cells were shot dry.

    The corvette was a rather wide affair, allowing it to mostly point its two containers, or 40 missiles, forward. In case it was embroiled in combat when its cells were empty, it was armed with eight proton lances, and protected by 12 PDGGs, or point defense grav guns.

    It was ¡®only¡¯ 72m long, but was fully 68m wide and 32m high, making it a rather odd duck among all corvette, or warship classes in general. Most of those were designed to offer the smallest frontal silhouette possible. In general, it had the form of a flattened octagonal cone.

    Abou insisted that we call it the Griffin class, after some odd figurine in the ancient tabletop strategy game he played. This one was not quite as insane as the one Gordon and Owen were playing, though I was not so sure if giant mechas were so much better.

    The thing here was that the Griffin was not designed to get into close combat with anybody else. It was there to lob its missile load at the enemy and then chose to fight another day.

    Its wide profile provided another benefit. Instead of a single set of primary grav coils and supplementing secondary coils, the Griffin had two sets of equally strong primary coils and oversized secondaries.

    The simulations Travis and his people had done with it promised it to have an unprecedented agility in all six degrees of freedom, additionally enhancing its ability to get out of dodge when its missile cells were empty.

    Now for each four Griffins, there would be two close combat corvettes, also known as Hunchback. For simplicity''s sake, we had, after Abou managed to make us call the missile corvette the Griffin, kept the naming scheme of this strange mecha game.

    Our Hunchback had two spinal heavy grav guns. Those were new. We had increased the diameter to 40cm and made the barrel longer, and with that the projectile faster.

    That meant that this gun accelerated an 11-ton projectile to 14877m/s. The equivalent of 300 tons of TNT.

    Additionally, it had a ventral and a dorsal turret, each with two ¡®medium¡¯ grav guns. Giving this ship a punch far above its weight class.

    It was also way more slender than the Griffin, more like a typical warship, reducing its frontal cross-section as much as possible.

    It too had a generally octagonal profile, though the Hunchback had an octagonal cylinder as the core, with a height and width of 32m. The cylinder was 98m long and was capped on both ends with a 12m long cone.

    While it had the same eight proton lances, it carried 20 PDGGs, simply because it was expected to be in the thick of it. Additionally, we had doubled the SUC thickness on the nosecone, making it a tough SoB.

    Then each formation would have a recon corvette, called a Locust. It had a similar overall design to the Griffin, just that it had sensors all over the front, and was also expected to not get too close to the enemy. It also had a similar weapons loadout, minus the missile launchers naturally.

    Completing the formation of eight corvettes was the Raven, the EW Corvette. Its profile was closer to the Hunchback, and it carried the same amount of proton lances and PDGGs, as well as a but load of jammers, blinders, and whatever else could be used to make the enemy''s sensors go haywire.

    We did design a point defense corvette, in the Jaeger¡­ some of these names are strange, honestly, but decided that for the time being we did not need them in the corvette forces. They would appear when we had bigger ships, as escorts for them.

    Travis was provisionally happy with how the simulations worked out, but until the first eight left the yard, everything was still up in the air. That would take another five weeks.

    The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

    But all that was not important. Because my shop was ready. I could finally work.

    To be fair, I did indeed use the NADA for some of it. Simply because some of the components were four-dimensional.

    What, you didn¡¯t think I would build something without grav coils, would you?

    Still, I did most of the rest by hand, with the help of the tractor beams and a few bots.

    The basic frame was made from carbon composite pipes, some straight, some bent. It took me a couple of hours to extrude all of them, and then a couple of days to nano-weld the frame. If it was steel or any other metal, I might have used some other welding technique, if I felt particularly masochistic that day. As carbon composite, nano-welding was the only way to join the individual pipes into a frame.

    Sure, I could glue it together, but I valued my workmanship too high for that. Instead, I watched as the nanobots broke up the edge of the composite and wove the individual parts into one seamless structure.

    And during all that, I already felt myself relax a bit. I missed that. Simply tinkering, building something with my own two hands.

    I could not, unfortunately, build everything by hand, even if we excluded the four-dimensional parts. Some control elements, displays, and such¡­ even I lacked the necessary dexterity to make that happen.

    Still, I invested a whole week in soldering several control boards together by hand, even though the various components came straight out of the indy-fab.

    At one point during that week, when Ben visited me, I was made aware of his presence by him chuckling softly.

    At that point, I put the soldering iron back into its holder, raised the magnifying glasses in front of my eyes, and looked at him.

    He was smiling softly. ¡°You know, you are awfully cute with that smudge on your cheek.¡±

    Smudge? How could I get a smudge on my cheek?

    ¡°For real? How can there be a smudge? I¡¯m not working with anything that could produce a smudge right now.¡±

    Almost out of reflex, I wiped with my hand over my cheek, only for Ben to chuckle again.

    ¡°The other cheek. And I just got here, so no clue what it could be. But it looks suspiciously like the stain on your left wrist.¡±

    ¡°Huh?¡± When I looked at my left arm, there was indeed a blotch of something on the wrist of my overalls.

    ¡°Strange¡­ oh, that is coolant for the electronics-fabber. But how did this get on my overalls? This thing is brand new, it can¡¯t have a leak yet.¡±

    ¡°Honestly, I don¡¯t know, I just know that it makes you look adorable.¡±

    Then his face got serious.

    ¡°But¡­ is this whole exercise not a bit of a waste of time?¡±

    I blew out some air before I answered:

    ¡°Yes and no. Yes in that the NADA over there could make a few dozen of these things in a few hours.¡±

    I pointed at the hatch in the ground that covered the 15625m3 NADA.

    Ben furrowed his forehead when he looked at it.

    ¡°That is a NADA?¡±

    ¡°Yes, I build in a 25mx25mx25m-NADA into the ground. Not the only NADA in this building, but the biggest one.¡±

    ¡°And it would build what you are making in a few hours instead of a couple of weeks?¡±

    ¡°And would make it better. As good as my manual dexterity is, I can¡¯t work on the nano-scale. But¡­¡±

    He nodded, smiling softly again.

    ¡°But you are having fun. What exactly are you building?¡±

    ¡°You will see. I bet you want one anyway.¡±

    ¡°And you don¡¯t want to spoil the surprise? Fine then. Just don¡¯t neglect Nibbles, OK?¡±

    Now it was my turn to chuckle.

    ¡°As if I could. That spoiled creature already has figured out how to come in here and demand attention.¡±

    I did indeed spend at least an hour each day, and most days double or triple that just playing with my cat. And as if ordered, we both heard an impatient ¡°Meaow!¡± from the door, and an orange streak, followed by a much slower android came at us.

    ¡°And there she is. Hello Nibbles.¡± And suddenly I had a lap full of purring cat, demanding pets.

    I managed to switch the soldering iron off, accompanied by another impatient ¡°Meow!¡±

    ¡°Yes, I know I need to use both hands, but the iron needs to be switched off first.¡±

    Ben let out a soft chuckle and stood up.

    ¡°Well, I let you do your duty then¡­¡±

    Only for him to gain a disapproving ¡°Meow!¡± as well.

    ¡°Uhm, I don¡¯t think she wants you to go away.¡±

    ¡°Fine.¡± Ben pulled his chair closer to me and sat back down before he began petting Nibbles as well.

    You could clearly see how the little beast reveled in the attention from us both by the way she stretched and contorted to give us both access to the best scritching places.

    It was quite obvious who was wearing the pants in this household. And that one was not walking upright.

    Still, after two and a half weeks, I was finally finishing up the last steps of my newest creation.

    I had, briefly, considered patterning it after the rather famous movie example. Thankfully at an age of more than 260 years, it had long moved into the public domain. Still, from any practical point of view, it was a stupid design.

    No baffles, no protection, no way to move it around without power¡­ and the way it was balanced on its struts¡­ simply stupid.

    Instead, I worked on an original design. It had taken me a virtual month to get a design that I thought of pleasing.

    Now it was just a matter of putting the last essential part in and connecting it before it was time to test it.

    The shoebox-sized box was the heart of the whole thing, the part that made it all possible. It was also something that I had Warden work on.

    Not a new deep dive into Seeberger, thankfully. Just applying the already discovered principles in a new way.

    After it was finally all put together, I started a self-test routine, and it looked as if everything was running perfectly.

    Then it was time. I quickly got into the locker room I had included at the side of the workshop and changed into the new clothes I had created for just this moment.

    It was a skintight black single piece of¡­ well light armor was probably the best description. It had a zipper at the front and was made from several layers of nano-weave, protected by shear-thickening fluid pouches on the inside, followed by another few layers of nano-weave. The accompanying boots and gloves were a tiny bit stiff, but that was necessary, as well as the helmet.

    When I walked out of the locker room, the helmet under my arm, and the gloves wedged into the belt, I ordered the bots to shove my new toy out of the main gates. I immediately realized that I had made a tiny mistake in not adding a smaller gate or door, as the eight-story tall, 20m wide gates were a¡­ bit on the oversized side for this little thing.

    Whatever, what¡¯s done is done.

    So here I was, walking towards my new invention, fully expecting an exhilarating round of fun, only to be stopped by a pair of hands grabbing my shoulders from behind.

    ¡°You don¡¯t seriously expect me to let you actually on that thing, do you?¡±

    Svenja spoke softly but determined.

    It turned around and tried to answer:

    ¡°But¡­ but¡­¡±

    She continued:

    ¡°Yes, you have a cute but, and it won¡¯t come even close to that saddle today.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ that¡¯s mine. I build it. I have to test it.¡±

    ¡°Then use an Incarnate or something. Or get a test pilot. Whatever you do though, you won¡¯t try this thing yourself. At least not today.¡±

    ¡°But I want to.¡±

    ¡°I have already informed Lt. Thomson, Sgt. Reynolds, and both Mr. Walkers. If it is necessary, I will get a few troopers to sit on you. But regardless of what happens, you won¡¯t climb on that thing.¡±

    I closed my eyes and slowly counted to ten¡­ trying to calm down. Not that it helped much.

    ¡°Fine!¡± I huffed and ordered the bots to shove it back into the shop, walking back in myself.

    On the way, I called Michael.

    ¡°Oh, hey Viv. I just got a message from Svenja that your new project is finished. What can I do for you?¡±

    I growled.

    ¡°Svenja won¡¯t let me test it. She probably thinks it¡¯s too dangerous or something. Whaterver, I need an Incarnate here. Yesterday, if not sooner!¡±

    Yes, I was a bit¡­ sulky. But seriously, I had looked forward to testing this thing for more than two weeks.

    Only to be blocked by Svenja. Who, at this precise moment, was not my favorite person in the world, let me tell you.

    Michael fortunately seemed to take it in stride.

    ¡°Ouch, that has to smart. Well, I bring one over directly.¡±

    ¡°Bring one over? Why not just send one?¡±

    ¡°And miss seeing whatever you created? Think again.¡±

    I rolled my eyes, and sighed:

    ¡°Fine. But leave the others at HQ please.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, ok.¡±

    It took him 10 minutes to arrive with an Incarnate. And of course, Ben arrived almost at the same time.

    I had by then switched back to the more comfortable clothes I had worn before. No need for the armor if I could not test my invention anyway.

    When Michael entered the room, he stopped short, and then walked towards my invention, walking around it.

    ¡°Is that¡­ why did you make a motorcycle?¡±

    ¡°It¡¯s not.¡±

    ¡°It sure looks like one.¡±

    ¡°Looks can be deceiving. If you look closer, you see that the wheels are not powered.¡±

    ¡°It is a bit bulky to be a bicycle, you know.¡±

    ¡°It isn¡¯t that either.¡±

    I had the bots shove the device out again, and then, pulling a chair with me, walked after them, ordering the Incarnate to climb on it.

    After I sat down and connected to the Incarnate, I activated the device. If I were there in person, I would have felt the pull of the tractor that anchored the Incarnate to the saddle. Unfortunately, I had not included such things in the Incarnate design. A clear oversight.

    I then ran the test suite, before I activated the coils, and the whole thing rose up a meter, the wheels getting covered by coiling.

    I heard Michael¡¯s voice, a bit distorted, first with my own ears, and a fraction of a second later with the Incarnate audio-receptors.

    ¡°Wait, you build a hover-bike? A fucking hover bike? How long can it stay in¡­ I bet you have used the LXNS batteries again, didn¡¯t you?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Yes and no. Yes, it has LXNS. But they are just small and to keep the electronics supplied when it is off. No, it runs off a cold fusion reactor.¡±

    ¡°A¡­ cold fusion reactor?!?¡±

    ¡°Why don¡¯t you announce it on the web? And yes, a cold fusion reactor.¡±

    ¡°I thought those were impossible.¡±

    ¡°Think about it for a moment. The thing preventing it is electrostatic repulsion. We can cancel that. The next problem is radiation. We can convert that into electricity. If I had to guess, the ones who claimed to get it to work, only to not be able to replicate it all used electrodes mostly out of palladium.

    What do we know that is mostly out of palladium?¡±

    ¡°Kobashigawa alloy? They accidentally created a zone of electrostatic cancelation?¡±

    ¡°Yup. And because it was so random, it was virtually impossible to do again.¡±

    ¡°But we can now?¡±

    ¡°Yup? This bike uses a liter of water every 5.7 hours. It has a three-liter tank. The reactor is orders of magnitude less effective than a fusactor, only producing 73kw. If we could make a fusactor that small it would produce 115 megawatts. But for something like this, it¡¯s enough.¡±

    By now I had finished the initial tests and began to accelerate the bike. It shot away as if on fire. Yes, it only had 200 Keppler coils. But as small as it was, that was more than enough.

    And sadly, again the Incarnate would not give me the thrill of this acceleration. Nore the feeling of being buffeted by the wind.

    ¡°How¡­ how fast can it go?¡±

    ¡°I capped it at 500kph, and it can¡¯t go higher than 50m above ground.¡±

 2.78: Oops, I did it again

    When the next Tuesday rolled around, I was still in a bad mood. Not only had Svenja stopped me from the initial tests of the hoverbike, but she, along with Lt. Thomson, categorically denied me ever using it.

    It was ¡®too dangerous¡¯, they said. ¡®Too much risk¡¯ of something going wrong. I survived more than 18 years without them. I should be able to decide for myself. But no, not happening.

    At the beginning of the meeting, I was accordingly hunched over my cup of brew, softly grumbling to myself, and when the others came and sat down, I growled a halfhearted morning.

    They all looked at me a bit surprised, and Maggie exclaimed softly:

    ¡°Fuck, what¡¯s bitten her?¡±

    Michael the traitor on the other hand was completely unperturbed when he answered her:

    ¡°Don¡¯t mind her. She is a bit grumpy because her guards are actually doing their job.¡±

    I just rolled my eyes and hissed, not dignifying his statement with an answer.

    Not that that stopped Marcel from snarking:

    ¡°What? They stopped her from a stroll in the park or what?¡±

    That earned him several scathing looks, and even Michael rolled his eyes at him.

    ¡°Do you seriously think that Vivian would even be interested in a stroll through a park?¡±

    He sighed and then continued much more lightly:

    ¡°No, they don¡¯t let Vivian play with her newest toy.¡±

    ¡°And that is enough to make her sulk like that?¡±

    Oh, how nice. I apparently could not even have a bad mood now and then. Marcel was not getting on my good side right now, though I ignored him for the moment.

    And thankfully, Michael changed the topic.

    ¡°Well, as we are all now here, first, let us welcome Travis Murdock to the board, as our new Chief Naval Officer.¡±

    Yes, we had decided that Travis needed a seat on the board. It was, of course, impractical for him to commute from L5 to NYC and back once a week, even if it took a good civilian ship only around 90 minutes to do so.

    As a result, Travis was ¡®present¡¯ by use of an Incarnate, something those bots were explicitly created to provide.

    Interestingly, when we invited him to the C-suite and the board, I offered to give him 0.91% of my ownership. I mean, come on, I had 80%, I could afford it.

    Strangely though, the others decided that my stake, as well as the ones of Michael and Ben, should remain where they were. Instead, each of the others transferred 0.075% of their stocks to Travis, giving each of them 0.83%.

    I did try to argue, but it was like talking to a wall. Nobody wanted to explain it to me, but for some reason, they thought my having 80% was important, and so I gave up fighting against it after a very unsuccessful week.

    Not that I was particularly concerned at that very moment, mind you. I was just too busy being peeved off.

    As it was, Travis stood up and did a small bow.

    ¡°Thank you all for your welcome. I look forward to working together with all of you.¡±

    Again, I grunted a hello, even though the others were more friendly with their greetings. Give me some room here, please. I had planned the hoverbike for more than four months, I had essentially created the Constructor and my new shop specifically because I wanted to build it.

    And I did not want to build it just because I wanted to see if it could be done. I wanted to ride the dang thing. And now I learned that it was simply ¡®too dangerous¡¯ for me to use it.

    Did nobody realize that I had survived for 18 years all on my own?

    Thankfully, Travis did not seem to hold my curtness against me. Of course he had worked with me quite a lot while we designed the corvettes, so he knew I usually was not quite that impolite.

    I had already gotten used to him insisting on wearing his ¡®uniform¡¯ in VR, but even I was surprised that he somehow managed to program the holo emitter of the Incarnate to not only project his hat, but his full uniform as well.

    I had designed those things and I did not know that they could project clothing as well. Creating that hack could not have been easy.

    My mind boggled at the thought that he had invested that much time and effort, not to mention almost certainly quite a bit of money, just to display his uniform in those meetings.

    But I could muse about Travis¡¯ idiosyncrasies some other time, as Michael continued:

    ¡°Now¡­ how are we going with production? Are we on course to satisfy the demand for Q-links as planned? It should be in a month when we reach break even, right?¡±

    He looked at Marcel, who flinched and sighed.

    ¡°No¡­ at the current projection, we are about eight months away from that point, but that is subject to change.¡±

    It was Maynard who spoke out loud what most of us were thinking:

    ¡°Wait, how can it be eight months when it was six months five months ago?¡±

    Marcel let out a heavy breath and pulled up a projection of some charts.

    ¡°The green line is our production capacity over time, while the red line is the demand. As you can see, the red line is steeper than the green line. In other words, the demand is growing faster than our production capacity. Somehow people are still finding new uses for Q-links.

    The result is that the demand has almost tripled from what we thought it was five months ago.¡±

    Michael nodded solemnly.

    ¡°So¡­ subject to change means if somebody finds another new usage for Q-links, the demand will grow further.¡±

    ¡°Yes¡­ but our production capacity has increased faster than projected as well. You can see the uptick at the time when James got the Constructor to work on new factories. Still not enough to catch up with demand, but if he gets a second one, or maybe a third one, we can probably manage to satisfy the demand in three to four months¡­ if no new uses for Q-links are discovered. If the demand grows as it has in the past, with two Constructors, it will take us 11 months, and with three Constructors five months.¡±

    James sighed.

    ¡°Unfortunately, we already have sold the next five constructors, and they still take a month to build.¡±

    For a moment, everybody was silent, before Michael spoke up.

    ¡°Could we build a multi-story construction hall for Constructors?¡±

    James blew out a wheeze.

    ¡°Yes, that should be no problem. If we use SUC, we should be able to get it to five construction points on top of each other. That would be 300m high. Do you want me to upgrade the hall?¡±

    ¡°No¡­ I doubt you could do that without interrupting the current production. No, I thought about us building a new construction hall at Cryder Point. Remove the ruins there, and if we build it 300m high, we should be able to build 20 Constructors at once, when the hall is finished.¡±

    ¡°That is possible, but it will take us two months to build that hall.¡±

    Something about what James had said did sound wrong, and a quick calculation showed me where he made a mistake.

    ¡°You are off James.¡±

    His eyes focused on me and I saw him starting to contradict me before he sighed, shook his head, and then asked:

    ¡°In what way?¡±

    ¡°Two things. First, with five construction places on top of each other, it will be more like 350m high. Even with SUC, you need a vaulted ceiling to carry the weight. But we can put seven construction halls on top of each other.¡±

    Michael chuckled softly while he confirmed his orders:

    ¡°I think 20 Constructors at once is enough. Heck, we have no idea how high the demand for them is.¡±

    That, of course, was Marcel¡¯s cue.

    ¡°Our research shows us that the demand will peter out at between 100 to 120 Constructors, excluding our own. There simply is not that much need for big construction equipment. Well, maybe 150 if we include the Moon and Mars.¡±

    I had to frown.

    ¡°What about space-borne construction? A Constructor can build a space station as easily as a building. Or add to it.¡±

    Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

    It seemed as if that information caught Marcel off guard, but he caught himself quickly.

    ¡°Space-borne construction is barely there either. We are essentially the only ones expanding one of their stations, or building a new one, if I interpret what you are doing around Jupiter correctly.¡±

    ¡°And nobody is rebuilding the present stations? Some of them are more than 200 years old by now. They have to be close to falling apart.¡±

    ¡°No, not really. Most of them are¡­ what is the expression again?

    Ah, yes, they are held together by spit and baling wire. Others are maintained to an acceptable standard, and a few are kept up to date. Mostly the big yard stations, as they have the workers that can do the maintenance at hand.¡±

    Kenneth snorted.

    ¡°That is just another reason not to visit most of those death traps. But I guess when we use a couple of Constructors to build onto our yard, it will open a few new markets for them.¡±

    ¡°That still would stop the demand somewhere around 200.¡±

    ¡°And with a Constructor it is as easy to demolish the construction center as it is to pull it up. We might choose to increase the original site to build three or four at once first, but let¡¯s be honest, the only thing we lose is some time. So yes, get to it please, James.¡±

    Michael ordered the new course firmly, and James sighed.

    ¡°That will put us further behind the timeline to catch up to Q-link demand if we use our one Constructor for the hall for two months.¡±

    That made me shrug.

    ¡°You can use mine for the hall. I have what I really wanted to have built. The rest can wait a bit. Though it might be an advantage if we let it finish the big NADA first.¡±

    Maynard looked at me confused and then shook his head.

    ¡°What big NADA?¡±

    ¡°The new building I had started, and which is half finished, is a 100x100x100m NADA. Thought it might be useful. It should be done in two weeks.¡±

    Michael dropped his head onto the table, while James facepalmed.

    ¡°You are building a one million cubic meter NADA? Right now?¡±

    Yeah, James sounded a bit exasperated, though I had no idea why.

    ¡°Yes, as I said, I thought it might come in handy. But it is not really important right now. We can finish it later.¡±

    James just sighed, while Kenneth shook his head. Most of the others just rolled their eyes, as if me building a big NADA was such a strange thing.

    After a few seconds, Michael sighed and continued with the meeting.

    ¡°To conclude our operations situation, we are still running behind. But with the Constructors, it looks to become better, right?¡±

    Marcel nodded, while James looked a bit grumpy. Kenneth raised his hand though.

    ¡°One thing, I think we should build multi-story fabrication buildings. If we can do that for the Constructors, there should be no reason to not do it for our normal production.¡±

    After a moment of calculating, I answered him:

    ¡°If we keep at the same 350m height, we should get 34 floors at 10m height each into a building. It helps that with this we can use columns to carry the weight. If we go to a height of 20m, to use some bigger NADAs, we still will be able to get 17 stories.¡±

    James thought for a moment.

    ¡°That should help a bit. Right now, the bottleneck is the time to erect the buildings.¡±

    Michael nodded.

    ¡°Let¡¯s do that then. Now, Naveen, how is our security situation?¡±

    ¡°In general, pretty good. We are still concerned about Blumenthal and this shadowy organization, as well as this Operation Tickle they plan. We doubt that this FMLF will be a problem for us in the foreseeable future, thanks to us providing the fertility treatments to our employees for free.

    Tickle though seems to be aimed at causing a war between us and Ralcon. I am sure we would¡­ well, probably not win, but we wouldn¡¯t lose either. At current estimates, it would result in a draw.

    That comes mostly from the fact that we now have eight divisions of Einherjar, as well as a division of the new ?esir, as we call the bots on an Achilles chassis, as well as by now 216 combat cyborgs with Achilles bodies.

    The Valkyre is now in production, and we have nine squadrons of 72 Valkyres in service. For them, we have 232 air superiority modules, 118 ground attack modules, 172 bomber modules, 312 SEAD modules, and 32 Fafnir modules.

    The biggest problem is that we barely have enough crews for them.

    All of our holdings are well protected by grav guns, proton lances, missile batteries, and disruptors.

    For the naval side of things, you have to ask Travis.¡±

    Travis took that as his cue to continue:

    ¡°We have two dozen of those new gunships ready. Nasty little things, really. Will be a mighty surprise for any attacker.

    Other than that, our first corvette squadron is halfway through production and should be ready to launch in a month, month and a half.

    Right now, the station is well-defended, but we lack any ability to bring the pain to an enemy. When the corvettes are in service, that will change. If our simulations are correct, we can mission-kill any battle group in existence with one of our squadrons.¡±

    Michael frowned.

    ¡°Wait, any battle group? You are talking about those formations that are headed by a battleship? And you think you can kill them?¡±

    ¡°Mission-kill. It¡¯s not the same. It means we can stop them from finishing their mission, and send them back to the yard for repairs.¡±

    ¡°With corvettes? Eight corvettes at that. If I remember correctly, a battlegroup has somewhere in the range of 30 ships.¡±

    ¡°25 to 50, depending on who. A battleship, two to five cruisers, six to twelve destroyers, and 15 to 30 corvettes. But yes, indeed.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ how? How can eight corvettes beat all that?¡±

    Travis grinned.

    ¡°Basically? All the ships out there are simply completely obsolete. Only cruisers and battleships have a notable amount of point defense, except for the rare point-defense corvettes. Yes, they can, in the best case, deflect a rail gun slug, but that is a one-in-a-thousand occurrence. There simply is no point in wasting cubage on much point defense.¡±

    Tiffany was visibly confused.

    ¡°But¡­ don¡¯t point defense weapons protect against missiles?¡±

    Travis laughed out loud.

    ¡°Oh yes, they do. But¡­ conventional wisdom is that missiles are barely even a nuisance. They are slow as snails, blind as a bat, and have a bite like a mosquito.¡±

    That, for some reason, did not satisfy Tiffany.

    ¡°But¡­ I thought the Griffin was the core of our corvette squadrons. Isn¡¯t that a missile corvette?¡±

    When Travis nodded, she continued:

    ¡°Why in God''s name are we basing our navy on missile corvettes if missiles are so useless?¡±

    Travis laughed again.

    ¡°Good question, lass. The thing is, conventional wisdom is only valid for the old missiles. Our missiles are a completely different kind of beast.

    They are faster than any grav ship in existence, there is no way a grav ship can hide from them, and if they come as close as two kilometers, they can seriously damage or even outright destroy an enemy ship.

    But nobody else knows that. That means that the four Griffins in our squadron can lob 160 missiles at the enemy, at speeds and with an accuracy that is simply unreal for everybody else, and watch everything except the battleships and possibly the cruisers blown out of the sky. What remains of the battle group will then have to stand up against the two Hunchbacks. Those are not strong enough to down a battleship on their own, even a damaged one, but they are strong enough to cause enough damage that the battleship has to get out of combat.¡±

    I interjected:

    ¡°But that is only a temporary situation. As soon as the others begin to commission modern warships, our corvettes will just be corvettes again.¡±

    ¡°Ah, lass, that is the crux. Nobody has even begun building a modern warship yet.¡±

    Maggie¡¯s exclamation:

    ¡°What? Are they stupid?¡±

    ¡°Nah, lass. They are just not used to a universe with Enki in it. Usually, it takes between five and 15 years just to design a new warship class. Five for the corvettes by the way. After that, it takes between six and 32 months to build them. Again, six for the corvettes.

    That means the earliest we can expect a modern corvette on any other powers navy will be in around five years.¡±

    ¡°Wait, five years? How come we have those new corvettes of ours launch in four to six weeks?¡±

    ¡°Ask Vivian.¡±

    I sighed being dragged into the discussion again, and threw a scathing look at Travis, who just smiled and winked at me.

    ¡°It is the compression. We get our important technical and scientific personnel an ultra-jack and provide them with Archimedes systems. Even the slowest of them can sustain 60:1 compression easily. It took us a month to design the corvettes. Real-time that is. In virtual time, that makes five years.¡±

    Travis chuckled.

    ¡°Yeah, but that was five corvette classes.¡±

    ¡°And we had Warden provide who knows how much computer support. A large part of the design time is just waiting for the simulations to run through.

    Except for ABAS, nobody is using their best supercomputers to design new ships. And a single super-Grendel is easily equal to the best supercomputers out there.

    Nobody knows how many super-Grendels Warden has by now, but I estimate we had around 50-60% of all of humanity¡¯s computing power doing our simulations.¡±

    Michael knocked onto the table.

    ¡°I know that is an interesting discussion, but I think we should get back to the topic of security, please. Now, Naveen, have you made any progress in respect of Blumenthal?¡±

    ¡°Not much, unfortunately. We have sent a psionic to read his surface mind, but all that we learned is that Blumenthal is fanatically devoted to something called ¡®the path of light¡¯.

    Otherwise, not much. Vivian, you had a detective look into him. Has he found out anything?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Nothing interesting, I fear.¡±

    Marcel snarked:

    ¡°So, your detective was a dud?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°No¡­ not really. He delivered quite a bit of information on Blumenthal. Information that, if we hadn¡¯t had him under 24/7 surveillance would have been interesting. But as it is, we learned anything Sharpes found out on our own.¡±

    Naveen nodded.

    ¡°Too bad, but I thought that would be the case. Still, if you think the detective did passable work, we can keep an eye on him in case we need something like that again.¡±

    Michael rapped the table again.

    ¡°So¡­ nothing new about this Operation Tickle?¡±

    ¡°Well, we think it has something to do with Phillip Rawleigh if we deciphered their naming schemes correctly. Other than that, we know nothing.¡±

    ¡°Too bad. I don¡¯t have to tell you that this has the highest priority, so do your best, please.¡±

    He took a deep breath and then continued.

    ¡°Well, we can¡¯t do much about that right now, so let us get back to normal business. James, I fear we will have a new product to put on the market shortly.¡±

    James frowned and looked at Michael expectantly, who smiled sweetly.

    ¡°You see, Vivian did it again.¡±

    For a moment, everybody was frozen, before Maynard groaned.

    ¡°What now? How has she bullied physics into compliance now?¡±

    ¡°You will see. But the point is, the toy that her bodyguards don¡¯t let her play with¡­ well, look for yourself.¡±

    He sent a signal to the central holoprojector and a transparent picture of my hoverbike appeared.

    After a moment, Marcel asked confused:

    ¡°Wait¡­ her new toy is a motorcycle? We had them for centuries.¡±

    Michael chuckled and waved at the picture.

    ¡°Look closer. You might see that none of the wheels are powered. And they are mighty small. No, that is no mere motorcycle.¡±

    He sent another signal, and a second picture, this time of the hoverbike in flight mode, appeared.

    ¡°What you see is most likely the world''s very first hoverbike.¡±

    Maynard sighed contently.

    ¡°Oh, fine. That is nothing too bad. It was just a matter of time until somebody built it. The new grav coils are cheap and small enough to make it feasible.

    I assume it has the typical LX-NS batteries that Vivian likes to use?¡±

    Michael snorted.

    ¡°Yes, of course it has. Though smaller than you might think. And the bike is not the interesting thing. As you said, it was just a matter of time. If it were, we could build a few dozen of them between runs and satisfy the demand for them easily.

    No, the interesting thing is this.¡±

    He exploded the picture of the hoverbike, the inactive one, and moved the various parts away until the cold fusion reactor was in the center of the picture and highlighted.

    Maynard looked closer, rubbing his chin, though Marcel was a bit¡­ snarky when he asked:

    ¡°So¡­ it is a shoe box? Whoop-de-doo. We have a new shoebox now.¡±

    Michael on the other hand was not disturbed by that and chided Marcel mildly.

    ¡°You should know that if Vivian has built it and I am warning James that it will eat up some of his production capacities, it will not be a shoebox.¡±

    Then he waved at the picture again.

    ¡°No, my friends, this is a cold fusion reactor.¡±

    Jessi was the first to react.

    ¡°Wait, I thought cold fusion reactors were just a big science hoax.¡±

    I shook my head tiredly.

    ¡°No¡­ not with what we know now. Every claim that was made about cold fusion involved some impure palladium electrodes. It is, naturally, no longer possible to find out what those impurities were¡­ but I would guess it was silver and fluorine.¡±

    After a few seconds, Maynard snorted.

    ¡°You think they accidentally used Kobashigawa alloy? And had some weird quantum effects?¡±

    ¡°Yep, and if the configuration was just random enough in the right way, it would have been impossible to repeat the test and get the same results.

    In effect, if you lower the electrostatic repulsion enough, the hydrogen in water will begin to fuse. It is nowhere close to the efficiency of a proper fusactor, this one only produces 73kW, but it is way smaller than we can make a fusactor because it won¡¯t become as hot.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ a portable energy source. A really portable energy source at that. The ramifications are¡­ ¡°

    Michael nodded when Maynard stopped.

    ¡°Enormous. I would bet that this will be soon one of our most sought-after products.¡±

 2.79: I would rather not

    The meeting quickly devolved into everybody talking at the same time, excitedly shouting ideas about what we could use the cold fusion tech for.

    It took Michael several tries to get it back under control before he finally managed it.

    ¡°Yes, I understand we are all excited about the possibilities, but let¡¯s calm down, ok? And speak one after the other.¡±

    Slowly, the furor slowed down, and then Michael pointed at Alena to go first.

    ¡°What exactly are the limits of those cold fusion things? How small can we make them?¡±

    While she looked at Michael, the question was clearly directed at me, so I answered:

    ¡°Quite small, I think. We should be able to make one into a cube with around 10cm edge length. That would produce around¡­¡± I sent a message to Warden to calculate the power of those small CFRs, and then read her answer:¡±¡­ 3.7kW, for around 4 hours. Naturally, it will run longer if less power is used.¡±

    Kenneth nodded slowly.

    ¡°So, roughly the size of a battery pack for power tools. And those are generally around 500 Watthours, not the 14.8kWh of this pack. I assume the re¡­ charging? Well, the recharging is quick?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Refilling. And that depends. You need substantial pressure to get enough distilled water into it. We would need to sell a specialized tool to do it, but after that¡­ a couple of minutes maybe.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ if we sell them as replacements for those battery packs, they would run for nearly 30 times as long as the real battery packs and would be ready for use after a couple of minutes instead of half a day¡­ sounds like a good product for workshops, either professional or hobbyists.

    Maybe we could design a few disruptor-based tools as well.¡±

    James rubbed his chin.

    ¡°We could also create something like a grav pallet jack. Heck, that would help us in manufacturing as well. Well, in some places at least.¡±

    Michael nodded at James before Naveen spoke softly:

    ¡°I think we all realize that the obvious use case is weapons as well. With this technology, energy hand weapons will finally become viable. Heck, I can only imagine the first time a grunt uses a handheld grav gun.¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Not possible. Remember, the grav gun needs the grav vortex. And a handgun with a 100m long ¡®barrel¡¯ is just stupid. And thanks to the pretty blue shining vortex, the only realistic application, sniper rifles, are out as well. But you could get something like a scaled-down Chalybs Imber, or a plasma cannon¡­ maybe we could make a handheld PAC as well.¡±

    ¡°I thought more about a laser, you know?¡±

    I could not suppress a sigh.

    ¡°What is it with lasers that has people so hot on them? Lasers are anything but suited for infantry. You need to put the beam on the same spot for several seconds to burn through armor. Or flesh. I mean, sure, we can build them if you really want to, but they are essentially useless.¡±

    Only then did I notice his smile, and realize that he had pulled my leg on it. Well played, Naveen, well played.

    He then continued:

    ¡°The other obvious use cases for cold fusion are power packs for power armor and our bots. The military ones as well as the industrial ones. We should also integrate a few of them into the Valkyre, and any other vehicle we develop.¡±

    This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

    That let Tiffany pipe up:

    ¡°Yeah, maybe we can get rid of all those stinky fuel-burning cars now?¡±

    Only for Maynard to wince and shake his head.

    ¡°I would prefer we didn¡¯t do that, honestly.¡±

    That made Tiffany look at him astonished.

    ¡°Why wouldn¡¯t you want that? Those cars are a pest.¡±

    ¡°Because they produce carbon dioxide. And we are already precariously close to the lower limit of it. Much less, and it becomes seriously dangerous.¡±

    The expression on Tiffany¡¯s face was actually pretty funny, even though the topic Maynard was talking about was rather serious.

    It was perfectly accentuated by her ¡°Huh?¡± though it was obvious that she was not the only one not understanding what Maynard was talking about, as Marcel posed the question:

    ¡°Why is it becoming dangerous?¡±

    Maynard sighed and then answered:

    ¡°Plants need to breathe too.¡±

    ¡°So what? There¡¯s enough air around us. The algae tanks work just fine.¡±

    For a moment, I was convinced that Maynard would scream at Marcel, but he held himself back, and after a few moments, answered only somewhat tensely:

    ¡°Plants don¡¯t breathe oxygen. They breathe carbon dioxide. And they suffocate if the percentage of carbon dioxide is too low. And that is bad?.¡±

    ¡°Why? Do we honestly need all those plants?¡±

    I rolled my eyes and snarked:

    ¡°You like to breathe, right?¡±

    ¡°Uh, yeah, but I breathe oxygen. Carbon dioxide is toxic for me.¡±

    ¡°Want to make a guess where all that oxygen you are breathing comes from? Come on, I give you three guesses.¡±

    ¡°The algae tanks? Come on, everybody knows that by now.¡±

    ¡°And the algae in the tanks are what?¡±

    ¡°Algae? What are trying to get at?¡±

    ¡°The algae are plants, you¡­¡±

    I cut off before I said what I really wanted to say.

    ¡°The point is that if the CO2 levels fall below the critical limit, all the plants will die. When they die, the animals, including us humans, will use up the oxygen, and there will be no algae to replenish it.

    There will also be no base of the food chain. If the plants die, we die.¡±

    ¡°But¡­ I thought the algae tanks would keep the atmosphere in balance.¡±

    Maynard shook his head tiredly.

    ¡°No, they keep the CO2 from building up to toxic levels and the oxygen levels to fall below the point where we can survive. Since the panic about CO2 in the early 21<sup>st</sup> century, we have taken steps to reduce it. Unfortunately, those steps have been too successful.

    We use atmospheric CO2 to generate the fuel that our cars burn back into CO2. We also use it to generate carbon for our industry. That is the reason why I vetoed us using sequestered CO2 for our carbon needs, and instead buy it from the space miners.

    Shit, I would almost suggest that we capture a C-class asteroid and burn it piecemeal in the atmosphere.

    Or mine for methane-clathrate in the oceans and burn that. Anything to push the concentration of CO2 up.¡±

    Maggie stapled her fingers.

    ¡°Maybe we should try to get the next ICSC to work on it. It is the interest of all of us to make sure we survive.¡±

    That caused Jessi to snort bitterly.

    ¡°Dream on. The bigwigs of the big corps only care for themselves. And they can survive in space habitats just fine.¡±

    ¡°But their customers can¡¯t. Neither can their employees. Or their servants. If they don¡¯t take care of Earth in that aspect, they won¡¯t be bigwigs for long.¡±

    Michael¡¯s calm statement cut through the argument like a hot knife through butter, and he continued:

    ¡°We will introduce the topic, and I am sure we can count on Vandermeer at least to support us. After that, we will have to work on convincing the others, but it should be possible. In the interim, can we import CO2 from Venus?¡±

    Maynard thought for a moment and then shrugged.

    ¡°Should be possible. We would need to build an orbital refinery around Venus and then have it shipped in frozen form. I think the C-class asteroid is the better option. Cheaper and more effective.

    That is unless all the big corps help with the Venus plan.¡±

    Michael nodded.

    ¡°Kenneth, I think that falls into your resort. Can you take care of it?¡±

    ¡°Sure, should be no problem. Just expensive.¡±

    Alena snorted.

    ¡°We can afford it.¡±

    After that, Michael brought the meeting back to the topic.

    ¡°Now, I am sure there are many uses for the cold fusion system. Many more than we can think about now. But I want to work with the various car manufacturers to bring affordable hovercars to the market.

    And I want to build hoverbikes. Marcel, Maynard, can you take Vivian¡¯s prototype and make it sexy?¡±

    Marcel shrugged.

    ¡°Sure. Should be no problem. But¡­ one question. I get that you are a bit grumpy because you can¡¯t use your invention, but this is a bit extreme. Why are you so down about it.¡±

    I rolled my eyes before I answered him:

    ¡°Because it is the closest we can come to being able to fly in the real world.¡±

    ¡°Flying? What about it?¡±

    ¡°Yes, flying. Don¡¯t tell me you have not used the VR to try flying?¡±

    When he and most of the others looked at me blankly, I rolled my eyes again.

    ¡°Seriously, you haven¡¯t tried it yet? Why the heck? Whatever, you should try it. And the point here is that the old proverb ¡®only flying is better¡¯ is just true. And I wanted to fly in the real world. Not just in VR.¡±

 2.80: A hole in space to pour money in

    It was the next morning when Michael contacted me to meet him in VR. Not that a strange occurrence, but still uncommon, so my curiosity was roused.

    The viron was a VR copy of Michael¡¯s office, and after a quick greeting, I sat in the visitor''s chair.

    ¡°So¡­ I am here. What can I do for you?¡±

    It took Michael a moment to answer.

    ¡°What Maynard said yesterday¡­ it made me think.¡±

    ¡°Well, I hope you got over it.¡±

    ¡°Ha ha! Very funny.¡± Nonetheless, he was smiling.

    ¡°The thing is¡­ I don¡¯t want to wait for the other corporations to get off their collective asses and do something about it. The situation is not yet critical¡­ but it creeps closer and closer to the point of no return.¡±

    He sighed.

    ¡°Maynard was right, we need more CO2. Let¡¯s be honest, the climate has been rather cool for the last¡­ 50 to 100 years as well. We¡¯ve gone from coming close to a runaway greenhouse effect in the late 20<sup>th</sup> and early 21<sup>st</sup> century to a near-ice age in the mid-23<sup>rd</sup>.¡±

    I could only shrug. Honestly, I had not spent much time looking into the climate thing, though I knew the basics.

    ¡°Here is what I want to do. Well, what I want you to do is more like it. I want you to design a harvester on the base of the Constructor. An automated ship that can be used to harvest the resources polluting our oceans.

    Quite officially of course. We will claim that those resources are cheap and easy to get to, so why waste money on importing them from space, you know?

    That it will clean up the oceans is ¡®just a side-effect¡¯. And it lets us harvest this methane clathrate that Maynard talked about.¡±

    I considered what he had said for a moment before I reacted.

    ¡°That should not be that much of a problem. Except¡­ well I guess you don¡¯t want it to dig up the sea ground indiscriminately. We should try to avoid killing what life is still left in the oceans I think.¡±

    That made him wince and he nodded slowly.

    ¡°Yes, that would be a good idea. But why is that a problem?¡±

    ¡°The easy way to do what you want is to simply use a tractor beam to suck everything into the ship, push it through a molecular forge, and eject everything we don¡¯t need. Obviously, this way is a tad destructive to anything living in the way.

    That means I have to find a way to identify what is living tissue and what is not before we engage the tractors. And the tractors have to be exceedingly fine controlled.

    The control is not that hard, I have just to throw enough compute at enough emitters to make it work.

    However, I have no clue how to identify what to process and what not. I¡­ can¡¯t promise a quick result here.¡±

    He blew out a long gust of air and then shrugged.

    ¡°I understand. Just¡­ do what you can. If anybody can do it, it is you.¡±

    ¡°Thank you¡­ I think.¡±

    Yippikayea, more work¡­ how delightful. Who am I kidding, of course, I was already giddy to work on it.

    If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.

    Not that Michael was done yet.

    ¡°Another thing¡­ we need a corporate yacht by December.¡±

    That, honestly, took me by surprise.

    ¡°A yacht?¡±

    ¡°Yes. You know, those private grav ships that are luxurious and representative. Expression of wealth and so on¡­¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°I know what a yacht is. I was questioning why we would need one. By December precisely.¡±

    The timing should be doable. Barely. I mean, we had July the 17<sup>th</sup> already.

    Apparently, Michael was in a playful mood, as he winked while he responded:

    ¡°We have to be represented at an event on December 10<sup>th</sup> in Stockholm. And it is a prestige thing. We can¡¯t appear in a freighter or a warship.¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°And Stockholm is too far for the skimmers. Sure, we could modify them with a cold fusion reactor, but it would be a bit uncomfortable to sit in them for hours and hours.¡±

    ¡°Indeed. Ergo, a yacht. Sure, we could probably ask Nate, or rent one, but we need a yacht sooner or later anyway.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°Fine, I will work on it. Well, I will work with the naval architects on it. You know my sense of aesthetics is not quite the best.¡±

    The bastard had the audacity to snort at that. Yes, I know I was somewhat lacking in that aspect, but he did not need to make his opinion that clear.

    ¡°I think that is for the best. I will alert the architects that you will need them in a short while.¡±

    ¡°Do that. I don¡¯t know how long I will need, but I will mostly take care of the technical aspects only, so not too long.¡±

    ¡°Do that. And keep me informed. Seeya.¡±

    And he vanished. Marvellous. Well, it was not as if I had some urgent project of my own to take care of. After the debacle with the hoverbike, I was mostly just idling.

    To get it started, I connected to my Archimedes and went to full compression.

    The first thing to do was create a list of what specs I wanted the yacht to have.

    The first thing was that I wanted it to be fast. Insanely fast in fact. As such I specified 4 10k Kepler for the primary coils, with 5k Kepler coils as secondaries.

    To give you some perspective, the big mega freighters or the most modern battleships had primary coils in the 4k Keppler range.

    And I seriously doubted that this yacht would be anywhere near the size of those monsters.

    To power that I planned for two 572GW fusactors. Because it was a ship and might be transported to other planets, I decided on the dual pinch fusactors that could switch to magnetic pinch with a somewhat reduced output of 495GW.

    That would give this ship a decent amount of power reserve and redundancy.

    As I might be required to travel on board this yacht sometime, I specified that the hull should be made out of 1m thick SUC. Seriously, why use something weaker if we could make it tough as heck?

    Oh sure, I was aware that the passengers of such a yacht would expect windows. I did not care particularly. Instead, I specified to use of Q-links to fake them.

    The passengers would not even realize that the clear parts of the wall were not windows. At the same time, I decided we should cover the hull in Q-links as well, to make it look like anything we wanted. Why choose a single paint job when you could have all of them at any given time?

    The number of staterooms¡­ that was a more problematic question. I simply had no clue how many I should plan for. Finally, I decided to leave that to Botont and his crew. The same with the crew quarters.

    There was, naturally, the big lounge, but I decided that we should plan for a small ballroom. I mean, come on, if we are getting a yacht for prestige reasons, then we should go all out. As a little extra ingredient, I specified that we should cover every surface of the ballroom with optical Q-links. I was sure dancing seemingly among the stars would appeal to quite a few people.

    I quickly decided to leave such things as the galley, the laundry room, and of course storage, to the architects. They had the necessary experience to decide about those.

    Now we needed hangar space for skimmers and/or shuttles, of course. I was taking my time thinking about how many we needed. I was briefly considering tying the size of the hanger to the number of staterooms but finally decided that would be¡­ excessive. We would get away with a six-skimmer hangar just fine.

    For the official hangar that is. I¡­ was not trusting enough to simply keep this yacht unarmed, even with one-meter thick SUC armor and around 10 times the acceleration as any other ship.

    To that effect, I specified a concealed hangar big enough for four Valkyries, or four Sirens, as Travis had decided to call the new gunships.

    If we had four Fafnirs or four Sirens on board that would be a particularly ugly surprise for anybody who decided we were easy prey.

    But that was not all. I made sure that the specification demanded that at least two point defense grav guns could cover any single spot on the surface of the ship.

    Add in the defensive disruptors coupled with the plasma shield typical for space ships and it would be a tough ship.

    As for sensors I also decided to let Botont do most of that, though I specified a large Palant¨ªr as well.

    I similarly lacked the knowledge about the necessary controls, and was not too keen on investing the time researching them, when Botont and his crew were already specialists in that regard.

    That was it with my solo part here. The rest would have to happen in cooperation with Botont.

    Time to call the yard.

 2.81: Elegance

    Thanks to us providing ultra-jacks to all employees who had to work on computers, the meeting with the yard was achieved short and painlessly.

    Still, I was the first to arrive. I was not surprised, as I had already been in VR, and had just switched to this viron, which was a large, airy meeting room, with an empty cavernous void in front of the tables.

    Even in their most grumpy moments, the three ship designers agreed that this design viron was lightyears beyond any real design room.

    And grumpy they were. In a way, I could understand them. They were artists. This yard had been a creator for exclusive yachts after all.

    And without the sunburn addiction of the owner, it would have been profitable. And now Travis and I insisted on boring, practical warships. They did their jobs nonetheless though, that had to be said. Not happy campers or eager beavers, but they delivered what Travis, Naveen, and I agreed were dang good warship designs.

    It was thus no revelation that when Botont, Crombie, al-Jamal, and their team appeared, they were¡­ less than enthusiastic.

    While they all trudged to their seats, Victor sighed, and asked me:

    ¡°Are there any problems with the corvettes? Or do we have to rework the destroyer design?¡±

    I shook my head.

    ¡°Neither. The corvettes are world-class as far as I have been informed, and the destroyer looks good so far.¡±

    His shoulders sacked down.

    ¡°Please don¡¯t tell me that it is time to work on the cruiser design. I thought it would be a couple of years before we needed to even start with that.¡±

    ¡°Not quite. We think it will be a couple of years before we lay it down, and the design should be done by then. That still leaves us roughly a year before we have to start on that.¡±

    Now he looked a bit confused, and I decided to put an end to his misery.

    ¡°No¡­ we have another job for you folks. And¡­ I think you might like this one a bit better.¡±

    He tentatively looked up at me while I continued:

    ¡°I have been informed we need a corporate yacht by December. And, while I can get the technical parts just fine, my¡­ sense of aesthetics is¡­ let¡¯s call it improvable.

    So, that is your new job. Design a corporate yacht for us. It should be elegant, impressive, and screaming money.

    If you do a good job it will probably revitalize that side of the yard business so that you can design beautiful ships again.¡±

    Most of the designer team was grinning madly, al-Jamal was literally squealing in glee. Botont though frowned.

    ¡°What¡­ I thought you were so much against having Enki-ships being beautiful.¡±

    ¡°Enki-warships. In ships where every single cubic centimeter wasted on making the ship pretty is a cubic centimeter that is no longer available to help the crew survive.

    Where every intricate and complicated structure could cost the crew the deciding couple of seconds they need to not be blown into a mononatomic cloud.

    Where efficiency and maximized usage are the difference between life and death.

    In this case, we are talking about a ship whose primary function is to represent, to wow. In short, to look good.

    Where elegance and beauty are the main focus. So yes, do your worst and have fun. I know where my strengths are, and making something beautiful is not among them.¡±

    Slowly, a tentative smile emerged on Botont¡¯s face, and his next sentence was way more chipper:

    ¡°So¡­ we seriously can design to our heart¡¯s content?¡±

    ¡°Well, mostly. I do have a few requirements, security-wise, but in general, this will be your baby.¡±

    Immediately, his smile flagged a bit, and he asked with some suspicion in his voice:

    ¡°What¡­ requirements?¡±

    ¡°In terms of general design, only three that will impact you I think. First, every single point on the surface has to be covered by at least two point defense grav guns. And before you argue that this will break the lines, they can be retractable. But in the case this ship is attacked I want it to be able to take out any danger.

    The second is similar. Every point has to be covered by a defensive disruptor.

    The third is probably the hardest for you. There will be no windows.¡±

    Botont raised his hand and opened his mouth in protest, while the others were murmurring among themselves about this last requirement. I stopped Botont from asking and continued:

    ¡°Yes, I know, windows are important, but they are also a weakness. Especially as the hull is otherwise made from 1m thick SUC.

    Instead, we will use Q-links and the onboard computer system to make it look like it has windows.¡±

    ¡°Fake windows? Those always look¡­ well, fake. Cameras simply do not convey the same¡­ perspective as a real window.¡±

    ¡°Not the case with Q-links. If we cover the surface of the ship with nano-scale Q-links, then each of them acts as a tiny camera. Every single Q-link on the inside can act as a nano-scale display emitting the light exactly as the corresponding Q-link on the outside receives it.

    The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

    With a bit of computer magic, we can even make it seem like glass panes. Heck, we can even make the floor and ceiling seem to vanish and have the passengers seemingly walking straight in the void.¡±

    ¡°Are you sure that it will work out that way?¡±

    ¡°You tell me. Have you noticed the new ¡®window¡¯ in the yard gallery? That is no window, but the exact same technique.¡±

    ¡°Wait, that is not a window? It is crystal clear. I always wondered what the material is to be so¡­ clear towards the vacuum.¡±

    ¡°As I said, the passengers will not notice any difference. And to top it off, we can use the Q-links on the outside to simulate the windows as well, displaying what is happening on the inside.¡±

    Now Botont frowned.

    ¡°Why would we do that? That seems like an unnecessary effort.¡±

    ¡°To sell the illusion of windows of course. For one, I agree that windows are an important part of the aesthetics. Another reason is that anybody attacking the ship will think those ¡®windows¡¯ are weak points, while they instead are the same 1m SUC as everywhere else.¡±

    ¡°But otherwise, you give us free reign?¡±

    ¡°On the design, yes. I have put together the technical specifications. I am sure you can work with them, as only the three points I already mentioned impact the design aspect.¡±

    I loaded up the specs I had compiled previously and it was reassuring how attentive the designers looked over it.

    One of them, a woman of mixed east-asian and middle-eastern ancestry named Antonia Jahangiri looked at the fusactors and asked in confusion:

    ¡°Huh? What are dual-pinch fusactors?¡±

    Most of the crowd groaned and/or rolled their eyes, and Lemar Crombie hissed:

    ¡°Toni, did you sleep the last few months?¡±

    ¡°No, I didn¡¯t. But this is the first that I heard about these dual-pinch things.¡±

    Botont sighed and tried to calm Crombie down a bit:

    ¡°Remember, Toni is the specialist for galleys. She only worked on the food provision side of things for the corvettes and the destroyer.¡±

    Crombie rolled his eyes and shook his head.

    ¡°I know Vic, but let¡¯s be real, we talked about dual-pinch fusactors for weeks.¡±

    Toni tilted her head and looked exasperatedly at Crombie.

    ¡°So I am a bit unattentive about things that don¡¯t fall into my resort. That still does not tell me what a dual-pinch fusactors is.¡±

    Before anybody could explain it to her, another of the designers exclaimed:

    ¡°What the fuck! Four fucking ten kilokeppler coils? What are you planning to do, get this thing going FTL?¡±

    I did not notice who called that out, but almost immediately, Toni and her confusion about the dual-pinch fusactors was forgotten, and the designers argued among themselves in obvious exitement.

    It was al-Jamal who then approached me.

    ¡°Sorry, but¡­ are you a bit unhinged? Do you have any notion how much 10 kilokeppler coils will cost?¡±

    I chuckled.

    ¡°Better than you, Mr. al-Jamal, better than you. Keep in mind we are talking about the new coils. I know that 10 kKe Kobachigawa-coils would cost in the triple digit millions, maybe even in the billions.

    But the new ones¡­ they are somewhat cheaper. Those 10 kilokeppler coils will cost us around ITB 10000 each. Not exactly, but in that region.¡±

    ¡°Fuck, that thing will be fast! I know that racing ships at best are built around two kilokeppler coils. Shit, even the big boys, the battleships, and the megafreighters are only in the four to five kilokeppler range. Until we sell these coils, this ship will be the fastest in existence.¡±

    I chuckled again.

    ¡°That was the plan, Mr. al-Jamal. But you got one thing wrong. We won¡¯t be selling these. I think we will limit the coils we sell to five to six kKe. And any ship we sell will have at most eight kKe coils.¡±

    ¡°So¡­ this thing will remain the fastest there is? Well, you¡¯re the boss, but I like it.¡±

    It was at this moment that Toni spoke into the group:

    ¡°And I still don¡¯t know what dual-pinch fusactors are.¡±

    I rolled my eyes but then sighed:

    ¡°Do you know the difference between old style fusactors and fusion reactors?¡±

    ¡°Uh, only roughly. I know that fusactors are way smaller, lighter and produce more energy compared to fusion reactors.¡±

    ¡°The big difference is that old-style fusactors use Kobashigawa coils to generate a gravitation field to force the hydrogen to fuse, which is called grav-pinch, while fusion reactors used big magnets to do the same.

    The difference in efficiency comes from one of the secondary effects of the Kobashigawa coils. Any fusion reactor or fusactors has to overcome the electro-static repulsion of the nuclei in question.

    The sideeffect of the K-coils reduces that repulsion, so the fusactors need way less force to initiate fusion, while for fusion reactors the magnets need to overcome the full power.¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ ok, but that still does not explain dual-pinch fusactors.¡±

    ¡°I¡¯ll get there, just a bit of patience. The reason the interplanetary ships and the mining stations use fusion reactors instead of fusactors is that they are not in a deep enough gravity well to use grav coils to ignite fusion.

    In interplanetary space, or around even the big asteroids and dwarf planets, old-style fusactors simply don¡¯t work.

    With the new coils though, they don¡¯t have all those side-effects of the K-coils. They don¡¯t reduce the electro-static repulsion, they don¡¯t convert the high-energy neutrons into electricity.

    That threw us for a loop, until we created additional components that do those things. The important thing here is that those additional components are not part of the grav-coils, and work independently from them.

    And it gets better. The K-coils reduce the repulsion between four and nine percent, while the new system can go up to 100%, though I would advise against it.

    It is similar to the netron trap. Way more effective, reducing the needed maintenance significantly.

    But as these systems are independent from the grav-coils, there is no reason to not include large magnets to also make mag-pinch possible. At least for any ships that may at some point or another be transported through interplanetary space, as unlikely as that is.

    The magnets increase the volume of the fusactors by around 2%. I personally think that is an acceptable price for it to work also in interplanetary space.¡±

    ¡°That is nifty. But¡­ why did we not use that tech on the corvettes?¡±

    Boton sighed, let his head fall forward, and shook said head.

    ¡°Toni, we did. That is why everybody was so¡­ surprised that you did not know what dual-pinch fusactors are.¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ my bad.¡±

    Botont looked at her for a moment before he turned back to me.

    ¡°I could not help but notice that you specified a hanger for four assault skimmers?¡±

    ¡°Or gunships. Those hangars also can fit four Sirens. Or a mix of both.¡±

    ¡°And you want it concealed.¡±

    ¡°Yes. Let¡¯s be frank, Enki, and Enki-personnell will be high threat targets for many people. And while the yacht itself will only be armed defensively, I see no reason to not provide a punch as well.¡±

    ¡°But you did not specify internal security or quarters for guard details¡­¡±

    I recoiled when I realized he was right.

    ¡°Oh¡­ well, I am human. Please include that as well. I would say include hidden disruptors and PACs in the corridors as security.¡±

    ¡°Will do. You are aware that this thing will be the size of a small destroyer, right?¡±

    I sighed and shrugged my shoulders.

    ¡°We have to do what we have to do. Oh, before you ask, I left the number of staterooms, cabins and crew quarters to you. That is your expertise.¡±

    ¡°I appreciate it. Don¡¯t worry, we will take care of it. To be frank, this is what we all have become ship architects to do for, so thank you for the opportunity.¡±

    ¡°As I said, when it is done, it might rekindle the yacht business of the yard. Though this one will be unique.¡±

    ¡°Well, if the size of those coils becomes known, it will at least give us a big chunk of the racing yacht business.¡±

    ¡°Does that seriously matter? I can¡¯t believe that the racing business is very big.¡±

    ¡°It is not, but it is a big money business. And the same people who buy racing yachts also buy normal yachts. If we get a decent footing in the racing business, it will give us a decent position in the yacht business.¡±

    ¡°Well, I leave that to you, and Ms. Rouhani.¡±

    With that, I took my leave, and left the designers to their dream job.

 2.82: Blind

    After leaving the naval architects to do what they did best, it took me only a moment to decide to work on the harvester Michael had wanted.

    Yes, I did not yet have a solution for the problem of identifying what was alive and what was not, though that did not prevent me from working on the rest of the ship.

    As it would be another fully automated ship, I decided to start with the Constructor. In hindsight not the best decision but it did not hurt that much.

    I loaded up the design in my mostly empty viron, and as a first step, I deleted the hull, the bulkheads, and whatever else structural elements were present, displaying the ship as a collection of systems connected by superconductors for the energy.

    That of course necessitated the next step of deleting the superconductors as well so that I had just the various devices.

    The next step was to delete the big NADA as well. The Harvester simply did not need it.

    While I was looking at the remaining systems, I sighed and reduced the number of fusactors by one. Without the big NADA, one of the 572GW fusactors was more than enough to power it.

    I then looked at what remained, and frankly¡­ barely anything was suited for a Harvester. Way too many big tractor beams, a big bot-storage, the work platforms¡­ nothing of it was necessary.

    The molecular foundry on the other hand was way too small to be of use here, and the primary and secondary drive coils were equally underdimensioned.

    The material storage was laughably small.

    In the end, what remained of the Constructor design was the single fusactor, the computer system, at least for the moment, as well as a couple of tractor beams and disruptors. The rest¡­ well, it would have been easier to simply start from scratch.

    It got even worse when I decided that the tractors and disruptors were a bit premature. As long as I had not yet worked out how to discern between biomatter and other materials there was no point in placing the actual mining equipment yet.

    Which left me with a single fusactor being left from the Constructor. A fusactor that was more or less standard for all of my projects of that magnitude. Yeah, really similar ships I had to say.

    Well, there was nothing to it, I had to move forward. The core of the project was simple, really. For the Constructor that was the NADA, for the Harvester that was the molecular forge.

    The one in the Constructor was just there to supplement the NADA, which resulted in it being on the smaller side. This one on the other hand would have to separate and purify all the harvested materials. And as quickly as possible at that.

    I could not help but feel a bit¡­ complicated right then, so that was what I designed. The molecular forge was not one but an interlocking combination of four. Interlocking in that each stage could feed the next stage of every forge. That should reduce the downtime to almost nothing.

    Oh sure, the disruptor stage was only one stage, even though a big one, that fed into the four gravitic separators. The rest though was divided into four different molecular forges, so that if one was busy refining some ores, the next one could recycle some plastic, while the next could separate some alloys.

    In the end, this molecular forge was almost a third of the size of the NADA in the constructor. The second most important part was the cargo handling. I decided that we would need a standard freighter to get the materials off the Harvester, simply to not have it fly back to base every so often.

    For that, it needed the facilities to unload what it had harvested. That meant that the Harvester would need to fill containers with what it had harvested. That alone was not the problem though.

    After it had filled the containers, it needed to load the containers onto a freighter that was flying nearby, which was a significantly more complicated process. Mostly because nobody had yet developed any way to load containers from one grav ship directly to another without the help of stationary facilities.

    Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.

    Yes, it was done in low numbers by smugglers now and then when they wanted to hide the origin of some container. It was always done with single containers, two or maybe three on the extreme end.

    And more importantly, it was always done in freefall. I am sure I don¡¯t have to elaborate on how there is a difference between a single container in zero gravity and dozens in full earth gravity.

    To make it work, I had to figure out how to squeeze a container loading system into the Harvester. Fortunately, I had the option to use tractor beams to get it done. And conveyors instead of carts or other container movement systems ports used to do the job.

    That essentially made it possible in the first place, though it was still a challenge.

    While I was pushing the various blocks around, I let the problem of the identification of biomass simmer in the back of my head, and while I was working on the container handling system, I had my eureka moment.

    It was actually so simple that I needed to stop myself from slapping myself for overlooking it for so long. The technology was already several decades old and quite mature. Sure, until recently it had been rather expensive, but that was a thing of the past by now.

    I was, naturally, talking about the gravity resonance tomograph, or GRT.

    While it was true that it was normally used to observe things on a molecular level in a small capsule, that was because, with only the old Kobashigawa coils available to generate the needed gravity flux, anything more than the absolute minimum was way too expensive.

    It was still ingrained into the minds of engineers that anything gravitic was insanely expensive and only used when absolutely necessary, but that fact had changed with the new coils.

    My elation about this elegant solution lasted all of 10 virtual seconds before I remembered how the GRT worked in the first place.

    It used gravitic waves to excite molecules, which in turn emitted a tiny electromagnetic impulse which in turn was recorded by a sensor. The frequency pattern of the impulse was specific to each molecule, which allowed for identification.

    The problem came from the fact that it took three gravitic waves that were perpendicular to each other to achieve the excitement.

    Now, while I would have no problem getting two waves perpendicular to each other, producing the third at any distance from the Harvester would be in one word impossible.

    And even if that were not an insurmountable problem, it would be equally impossible to record the EMP.

    To make things short, using a GRT was sadly not an option, and I was back to square one.

    But¡­ the problem only consisted of the inability to generate and record the EMP. Even a single wave would excite the molecules it encountered. Just not enough to make it shed that excitement by emitting an electromagnetic pulse.

    It should be possible to sense the gravitic resonance directly. With some work that is. It was, obviously, not an option to put the conventional devices used to identify gravitic waves into anything deserving the description ¡®mobile¡¯.

    Even the large interplanetary superfreighters were significantly smaller than the on-average five-kilometer-long and wide sensors.

    And even if it were possible to squeeze those laser interferometers into a ship, they lacked a certain resolution. As in, they showed whether there is a gravity wave, or not.

    Fortunately, I had a somewhat larger physics toybox than the scientists from the early 21<sup>st</sup> century.

    And frankly, the problem intrigued me. I was sure that somewhere in the Seeberger equation a more elegant way to detect gravity waves was hidden. I had ¡®just¡¯ to find it.

    So¡­ another deep dive into the equation¡­ how fun. Well, it would allow me to fit out my physics lab.

    Now I only had to figure out how exactly gravity influenced matter, and how to measure that effect in minute details.

    Child¡¯s play! Yeah, I did not believe that either, but it was an interesting puzzle. By now I had given Warden orders to inform me when Nibbles wanted attention, and that¡­ limited how long I could do a deep dive.

    Yes, I could easily have set myself a time limit. And equally easily I would ignore it when I was deep in the bowels of the universe, but it was a lot harder for me to ignore my cat. And unlike Ben, Nibbles had absolutely no patience when I was creating new magic. If she wanted to be petted, she wanted to be petted now!

    That stretched the theoretical work to a bit over a week, and I spare you the detailed math, and sum it up with ¡®urks¡¯. It was easily the hardest math I had ever done, and the worst part, unlike many other aspects of the Seeberger equation, this time I could only get a vague idea of how the new sensor had to be constructed.

    What I had gleaned was that it would most likely be the best if it was a hexagonal crystal structure.

    In the fifth dimension that is. Now¡­ it was just a matter of figuring out what materials made those five-dimensional hexagonal crystals, and then begin testing them.

    Oh, and of course, I had to test if I could excite the scanned matter without the third grav wave in the first place.

    Fortunately, the first part was something that Warden was exceptionally good at. And the rest¡­ I had minions, so it was time to use them. Well, technically, Maynard had the minions. But he would loan them to me, I was sure.

    And wade into the thick of it himself. The tests would keep most of the physics department occupied for quite some time.

 Status Update

    My health problems have gotten worse to the point where I am at the moment no longer able to write. In fact, I have not written a single word since the last chapter.

    Unfortunately, I have to declare a hiatus until I get better. That does not mean that I will drop this story. I have the basic plot for the next few chapters planned. I just can''t write it.

    The problem is that I have one prescription for a drug that increases drive and energy for the day, with the unfortunate side effect that it causes insomnia for me. For that, I have another prescription with the side effect that it makes me tired over the day.

    This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

    Add in my allergies, which make me tired as well (though I have drugs against those, which make me, you guessed it tired) and right now I am literally laying in my bed unless I absolutely have to do something.

    The hopefully good news is that it seems to be a matter of balancing the first and the second prescription, and I am working with my doctor on it, but it could be that I am writing again next week, or next year.

    So sorry to all of you, but it sadly can''t be helped.

 2.83 Eerie

    It should surprise exactly nobody to learn that Maynard was enthusiastic about the tests and he immediately appointed nearly half the minions to the task.

    The unfortunate side effect of that was that I had to work with nearly a hundred other people as well.

    Not something I was keen on, but I would survive it. For a while.

    Regardless of my ¡®eagerness¡¯ to work in the big group, it was something that had to be done. At least in the beginning. When we had the basics figured out, I could leave all the boring iterations of the same experiment with minor variations to the minions.

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, I had nothing against working in a team with others. In virtual reality that is. The problem here was that I needed to be in the room together with all of them, and the sheer number of them. Nonetheless, I would survive it.

    But as it was, I needed to be present on this fine Monday, May 27<sup>th</sup>, to at least start the proceedings.

    The thing that I did not expect, though in retrospect I should have, was that Maynard let me explain what we would be trying to do and the basics of the experiments.

    I was, honestly, a bit nervous, when I greeted the minions.

    ¡°Good morning. I am sure you are all wondering why Dr. Price has pulled you all from whichever project you were working on. To answer that, he did it on my request.

    To fulfill a request from Mr. Walker I need to develop a sensor system that can ascertain the molecular composition of objects from a distance.¡±

    When a few of them began to look a bit confused, I shook my head and continued:

    ¡°And no, a simple spectrometric analysis will not do it. That only tells us what the surface is made out of. I need to look several meters deep.

    I tried to adapt the GRT technology of medical scanners to this purpose. Until I remembered how the GRT works in the first place.

    In the end, I put the work into the Seeberger Equation to find an alternative based on similar principles.

    That worked fine until I ran into a bit of a problem. I reached a point where there were just too many variables without any values to continue.

    Now there are generally two ways to go around that problem. The first is good old experimentation to find the values for those variables, and the second is trying to find the values somewhere in the Seeberger Equation.

    I certainly won¡¯t go the second route, so congratulations, you are all drafted to experiment on this technology.¡±

    One of the minions, a man in his mid-30s of indeterminate ancestry spoke up.

    ¡°Uh¡­, sorry Dr. DuClare, but if I may ask, why do you so categorically refuse to find the values you need in the Seeberger Equation?¡±

    I closed my eyes for a moment before I answered.

    ¡°Have you any basic understanding of the Seeberger Equation, Dr. Lopez?¡±

    He had the decency to at least look embarrassed when he answered:

    ¡°Uh¡­ I think I am nearly at the point where I understand how Q-links work.¡±

    I could only smile mildly at that.

    ¡°That is no reason to be ashamed. As far as I know, there are only four people farther than you, and that includes me and the Phantom. But that is not what I was going for.¡±

    I took a moment to think about how to explain the problem as clearly as possible. Then, after a deep breath, I nodded to myself and continued:

    ¡°Imagine the Seeberger Equation as the ocean. All the oceans of the world. You, and all the others who are at that point, are at the beach. You can see the ocean. You can smell it. Sometimes the surf hauls a few drops to you.

    When I figured out how the Q-links work, I dipped my toes into the water. When I created the new grav coils, I got my feet wet. The neutron trap meant I was getting into it to my ankles, and finally, this new endeavor is me getting in halfway up to my knees.

    But I am still pretty much on the beach as well.¡±

    I took another deep breath.

    ¡°Now it is true, somewhere in the bowels of the Equation, we will find the values of the unknown variables we need. The problem is that it might be on the very next step into the water, or it might be anywhere else in the ocean.

    The ground of Challenger Deep, or maybe it is somewhere in the Great Barrier Reef, or the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, or somewhere else entirely.

    Searching for those values could take a day, a week, or decades, and we can¡¯t even begin to estimate how long.

    That means it is time for experimental physics to do its job and give us empirical data to at least narrow it down.¡±

    Another of the minions, an Asian middle-aged woman named Virginia Fan asked confused:

    ¡°But¡­ that will only be an approximation of the real numbers. How does that help us to get the real values?¡±

    Fortunately, Maynard answered that question.

    ¡°We, or rather Dr. DuClare, has the best computer humanity has ever built doing the math on this. Even a rough approximation is enough of a starting point for Warden to narrow it down and arrive at the real values eventually.

    Right now, we have nothing to start with though, so we need to have empirical data.¡±

    Maynard took a step forward, and addressed the room:

    ¡°Now, are there any further questions about why we will do these tests? Or can we proceed to what we will experiment with?¡±

    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

    After the ensuing silence went on long enough to be sure that no more questions were forthcoming, he nodded and turned to me:

    ¡°So¡­ then why don¡¯t you explain to them what you want to find out, Dr. DuClare?¡±

    What a nice and in no way backstabbing way to put me on the spot¡­

    Ok, fine, technically, it was my job.

    I took a deep breath and then began explaining the project:

    ¡°Essentially, what we are trying to find out is how to measure gravity¡­¡±

    I was, somewhat rudely, interrupted by Dr. Edwards, a Physicist.

    ¡°But¡­ we already know how to measure gravity.¡±

    I sighed while lifting an eyebrow.

    ¡°Sadly, you are wrong. What we know is how to measure the effects of gravity. It is telling that the unit for ¡®gravity¡¯ is in reality one for acceleration. We can infer the strength of gravity, to some extent, and we can detect the pure existence of gravity waves, but nothing more.

    No, what we are trying to figure out is how to detect and measure gravity itself.¡±

    That only served to make Dr. Edwards frown harder.

    ¡°But¡­ why? What will we gain from measuring gravity directly that we don¡¯t already get from measuring its effects?¡±

    ¡°Disregarding the pure quest for knowledge? You tell me, is there something that we suspect exists that only interacts with the rest of the universe through gravity?¡±

    When I hinted about Dark Matter, he opened his eyes wide in astonishment, but I was not finished.

    ¡°Or maybe by measuring the gravity directly, we can get an approximation of the mass distributed in a certain region, like for example a solar system?

    But in the end¡­ what I am actually looking for is how matter resonates with induced gravity waves, similar to a GRT.¡±

    One of the lab assistants, Ms. Burke, seemed a bit confused.

    ¡°But¡­ don¡¯t we already have the GRT? And if we can¡¯t measure gravity directly, how do they work?¡±

    ¡°Current GRTs work by sending three gravity pulses perpendicular to each other into an object to induce a tiny electromagnetic pulse, which can be measured by the sensors around the object.

    And therein lies the problem. To get three grav pulses perpendicular to each other, we have to surround the object with the grav coils.

    If my calculations are even close to correct, we should be able to use just one or two gravity pulses to induce resonance in an object and measure this resonance directly.¡±

    The young woman still seemed confused.

    ¡°But¡­ what will we get from that? We already have the GRT. They work fine, and they have become relatively cheap.¡±

    ¡°What we will gain, as I have already mentioned, is the ability to scan objects from a distance. I can not yet predict the range we could get, this is one of the unknown variables we need to find out, but it should be measured in hundreds, maybe even thousands of kilometers. I am sure you can imagine some uses for something like that.¡±

    That was greeted with agreeing murmurs from the crowd and after a few seconds with no new questions, I continued:

    ¡°Now, the Seeberger Equation, and the work I have already put into this tells me that certain materials will, especially hexagonal crystals, react to gravity inside their receiving radius by generating a small, but distinctive electromagnetic emission. A stable electromagnetic emission at that.¡±

    I looked into several confused faces, and after a few seconds, Dr. Lopez tentatively raised his hand.

    ¡°Uh¡­ sorry, but that can¡¯t be right. Humanity has tested hundreds, if not thousands of hexagonal crystals to hell and back. If they would react in this way to gravity, we would already know that.¡±

    I chuckled softly.

    ¡°You are right. We know a plethora of hexagonal crystals. But¡­ they are all three-dimensional ones. What we need are five-dimensional ones. And so far, nobody has ever even seen one of those, much less tested them.

    I had Warden calculate five-dimensional hexagonal crystals, and so far she has found nearly 2000 of them, from a simple five-D variant of Lonsdaleite to a complicated compound made out of carbon, hydrogen, iron, lead, and uranium with more than 36 atoms per molecule.

    And she is not yet done, though she has slowed down considerably by now.¡±

    Maynard took this opportunity to elaborate on the issue a bit.

    ¡°I know, the number seems insanely high, but it is not that bad really. We have enough people here to do several tests at the same time, and we have more than enough assistance from bots and VIs to allow everybody here to run a few of the tests simultaneously.¡±

    He was, of course, right. Heck, I could, in theory, do all the experiments ¡®on my own¡¯ in a couple of months, if I seriously wanted to. Maybe three at the outset. But now it was time to continue the setup.

    ¡°the basic experiment setup consists of a mount for the crystal, with three 100 Keppler coils in a triangle configuration around it.

    The coils are programmed to send a focused beam of five g at the target we want to scan. The target itself is a 25kg block of osmium. At least for the early experiments. Later we will change it out for various other materials and composites.

    In the first phase, the goal is to find good configurations of sensors on the crystals.

    The second phase will be ranking the various crystals that we managed to sense gravity with on their sensitivity to it.

    The third phase will be to refine the configuration for the sensors.

    The fourth phase will be creating a database of how the elements, and their isotopes, will show up on the sensors.

    The fifth phase will be creating a working prototype for a functional gravity scanner.

    After that, we will give it to the engineers to make into a fully fletched-out piece of equipment, though I will probably do some of that myself.¡±

    Maynard moved forward towards a table in front of us, while a bot brought in the boxes that I knew would contain the first crystals, and addressed the scientists:

    ¡°Now, these are the first batch of crystals. We have decided on using 15cm long crystals with a diameter of 6cm. We think the final product will be significantly smaller, but this size will make it easier for us to work with them.¡±

    Having said that, he reached into the box and began pulling out the first crystal, only to stop the moment the object in his hands was fully visible.

    Honestly, I could not fault him for that, as I, myself was equally transfixed by the sight. Remotely I heard several gasps from the crowd as well.

    What Maynard had in his hands was¡­ insane.

    He had grabbed the crystal on the top, the pure carbon example. It should have been a mostly transparent, vaguely brownish, utterly boring six-sided crystal, as that was essentially Lonsdaleite translated into the fifth dimension.

    It was not. Neither transparent, nor brownish, and for sure not boring.

    The inside of this crystal was a swirling kaleidoscope of colors and light, ever-shifting, almost hypnotic.

    Despite this explosion of light, the surface of the crystal was a black so deep and dark, that it literally seemed to drink in the surrounding light. It made the famous super black pigments like Vanta-black seem gray in comparison.

    And yes, I know that is a contradiction. That it should not be possible. Nonetheless, that was what I was seeing, what everybody in the room saw. It was unbelievably beautiful. It was an eerie beauty though. Otherworldly.

    Some of you, those who had the opportunity to see it in person might notice that I essentially described DuClareite.

    That is no coincidence, as that was exactly what it was, the first time any human laid eyes on it.

    And before somebody argues, no, I was not consulted about that name, nor am I particularly happy about it. It was decided without me, mostly by Marcel and Michael.

    Now, why did I emphasize that those who¡¯ve seen DuClareite in person might  recognize it? Because for some arcane reason, this eerie beauty was only visible in person.

    Any camera, a picture, a video, even a CCTV, and it was just a deeply black crystal. Not quite as boring as Lonsdaleite, but not exciting in any way.

    The exception to that was cybernetic eyes. Though they were for all purposes cameras as well, they still conveyed the full effect.

    That gives me an idea, maybe this crystal was psionically active and projected the effect directly into the heads of the observers?

    But back to the story. The thing was that this crystal held the attention of all present people for several seconds, maybe even a minute before Maynard broke free of his fascination and put it on the table.

    The other 19 crystals in the box he pulled out were also quite mesmerizing, though not to the same extent as the pure carbon.

    It still took us nearly half an hour before we could even think about getting along with the job and setting up the experiments.

    After we had overcome the effect of the crystals though, everything started to work as planned.

    I did not think that it would take more than a week to get a working prototype of a gravity scanner.

    It was just a matter of time now.

 2.84 We can sell that

    I was not so naive to believe that we would magically stumble onto the optimal configuration on the first try.

    Heck, even getting it to work somewhat on the first try would have been a win.

    So I was not too concerned when the first series of tests only gave back a large smudge of indecipherable signal. With no variation to be found in the whole signal.

    Well, that was a bit less than I had hoped, but it was still within expectations.

    As the whole setup of the test took only around half an hour, it was not much of a loss. It was a bit strange that all 20 tests showed the same result though.

    Unfortunately, the placement of the sensor network on the crystals was the main time sink in the setup, and thus it took even longer to move all the sensors than to set up the experiment in the first place.

    Nonetheless, we all awaited the results of the experiment with bated breath. So when the results came in, we were a tad disappointed when it showed the very same featureless smudge.

    Still, we were in the very first phase of the experiment, the first 20 of nearly 2000 crystals, the first two of a few hundred configurations of the sensors.

    I was quite confident that we would get a serviceable result soon, and would be able to get a perfectly optimized system in a couple of weeks.

    Thus when the third variation of the sensor network provided the exact same results, I was not too disheartened.

    When the 20th variation showed no change and we decided to switch to the next set of crystals I was a bit disappointed.

    After that, we decided to switch to testing the various crystals in the first phase to find those that worked in the current setup.

    For the next day though. We already had way too much overtime to pay already.

    When I arrived home I was greeted by a rather irate Lady Nibbles, who for the first time since Ben had gifted her to me had to forgo my presence for a whole day.

    Oh boy was she angry. Naturally, I could not understand anything of her tirade, but it was clear that she was berating me for my absence. Vocally and energetically. It hurt a bit that she did not let me pet her, but she would calm down in time, I was sure.

    And indeed, a few hours later, she cuddled with me in bed again.

    The next morning, with renewed enthusiasm, the minions, Maynard, and I changed out the crystals with the next set.

    And the next after that. And the next. I had Warden set a timer to limit us to eight hours of work. Which resulted in 13 sets of crystals. 260 for the day. 280 with the original 20.

    And the result was¡­ the exact same bland smudge. Every! Single! Time!. No variation at all.

    Now it was time to become a little bit frustrated.

    Nibbles was in no way happier than the day before, though her tirade seemed to be a different one than the last one.

    Still, we were in the early phase of the experiment, and we had still hundreds of thousands of combinations of crystals and sensor placements to do.

    However, the enthusiasm had cooled somewhat.

    At the end of the first week, it had become a bit of a slog. It would have been different if we had at least some variation, any variation of the results. Oh, don¡¯t get me wrong, the intensity of the uniform smudge varied with the crystal used, though that hardly let us analyze the results in any way.

    Still, we soldiered on, though I was not there all day anymore. Yes, my cat had gotten to me, and I spent at least part of the day with her.

    Halfway through the second week, still without any different result, we were all way dejected. We still crawled forward, but mostly by going through the motions.

    And frankly, I was losing my mind over it. I¡¯d gone over the math in question four times by the end of the second week, and I could not even guess how often Warden had checked it. It remained the same.

    Either this was the first prediction of the Seeberger Equation that was downright wrong, or this should work. I could not even fathom the consequences of the former, but the latter simply refused to manifest.

    The height of frustration though was that it remained the same, regardless of what sensor configuration we chose. Only the choice of the crystal brought any variance at all. And not one that was in the slightest degree useful.

    In the end, both Maynard and I were at our wits end about it, when we sat in the C-suite meeting on June 11<sup>th</sup>, and apparently, it was quite visible.

    During the whole meeting, the others gave us two concerned looks. The meeting itself was not that exciting.

    Profits went up again, to now a bit below $180 billion per month, and manufacturing capacity increased despite only the one Constructor being available.

    The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

    The first rumors of the cold fusion reactor had leaked and we had gotten the first requests, and Naveen informed us that he had hired Mark to work on our standard weapon technology.

    The first few blocks of Manhattan had been cleared and it seemed as if we finally managed to get negotiations for the MTA started. Huzza!

    Yeah, it was important, it was a big step forward. Though frankly, I was not quite in the mood to celebrate.

    And the concerned looks became increasingly overt.

    Finally, Michael seemed to have had enough and banged his fist onto the table.

    ¡°What the F is wrong with you two? You¡¯ve been moping around for over a week. And now¡­ you sit here as if you were waiting for your execution.¡±

    It took me a moment to realize that he spoke to me and Maynard, who was a tad faster in his reaction.

    ¡°It¡¯s¡­ nothing really. Just an experiment that doesn¡¯t want to go the way we want it to. And we just can¡¯t figure out why.¡±

    I just rolled my eyes, while Maynard growled:

    ¡°What is so hard to understand? We have an experiment that is just not working. Not working in a way we did not expect, but not working at all. And we simply can¡¯t figure out what is wrong.¡±

    Tiffany frowned and shook her head confused.

    ¡°But¡­ if it is not working, then you have learned something, right? I thought that was the point of science. Try things and see what works and what doesn¡¯t.¡±

    ¡°In general, you are right. But this¡­ we based the experiment on the Seeberger Equation. The math tells us that it has to work in some way.

    That means either the experiment has to work, the Seeberger Equation is wrong in this instance, or we made a big mistake in the math. Dozens of times, which points to a systematic failure.

    And as the experiment does not work, it leaves the other two, and none of them is a pleasant option. So yeah, we are frustrated.¡±

    I finished the explanation with a sigh.

    For a moment, nobody said anything, and the silence was frankly nice. Then Maggie mused aloud:

    ¡°Hm¡­ maybe¡­ I don¡¯t know, but maybe if you tell us exactly what you are doing and what is going wrong, we can help you?¡±

    Maynard scoffed:

    ¡°For real? We have over a hundred physicists working on it. Yes, you all are smart, but this is not your specialty. What do you think you can do that not one of the trained experts could do?¡±

    Michael answered softly:

    ¡°Honestly, probably not much. But sometimes a slightly different perspective helps. And the least it will do is let you vent a bit.¡±

    Maynard sighed while he shook his head, though I closed my eyes, and then began to explain the experiment.

    The crystals, the grav pulse, and the theory that it should make the individual molecules, and atoms visible.

    How we instead got just a uniform blob.

    After a few seconds, Alena, who seemed a bit confused, asked:

    ¡°What crystals? They have to be new, or somebody would have done this experiment a long time ago, but¡­ ¡°

    As an answer, Maynard growled:

    ¡°Those crystals!¡± while he pulled out the 5-D Lonsdaleite crystal he had taken to carry in his pocket like some lucky charm, and threw it onto the table.

    ¡°As Vivian has just explained, we are talking about five-dimensional crystals.¡±

    He seemed to miss the raptured looks on the faces of the others. Well, except Travis.

    After a few moments, Tiffany shakily said:

    ¡°That¡­ that is beautiful. It is¡­ how could you make something that beautiful?¡±

    Marcel, equally in awe, told us:

    ¡°We can sell those. Fuck, we can sell those for a fortune.¡±

    That made me frown.

    ¡°But¡­ that is just carbon. Sure, in a 5-D structure, but still just cheap carbon. It is worthless. If you want some, we can make it by the megaton.¡±

    ¡°Can anybody else make it?¡±

    ¡°No¡­ not without the multi-D adaption of the NADA. Why?¡±

    ¡°Then the price will be determined by how much we decide to sell. If we keep the amounts low enough we can demand several million per carat. And the rich people will pay for it.¡±

    At that moment, Travis chipped in:

    ¡°What are you talking about? That is just a boring brown crystal. Nobody will pay more than a few 100 ITB for this thing.¡±

    Tiffany turned to him and hissed:

    ¡°Are you blind? Brown? There is nothing brown on that thing.¡±

    I sighed and raised my hand.

    ¡°You should stop right there. I don¡¯t know why, but if you view this thing remotely, like with a camera, or an Incarnate, it is just a boring brown crystal. The true effect only happens if you see it with your own eyes.¡±

    That made Tiffany, heck, all of them, turn to me.

    Jessi was the one who asked:

    ¡°What? How can that be?¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°I did use the words ¡®I don¡¯t know why¡¯ right? I did not forget them? If I did, well, then I don¡¯t know why. We have just managed to document the effect.¡±

    ¡°No, you did not forget them, but¡­ that is really strange. What does Seeberger say to this?¡±

    I shrugged.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know. I was not quite in the mood to look to explain this quirk when I spent virtual months trying to figure out why the experiment did not work.¡±

    That was the moment when Ken cleared his throat.

    ¡°About that¡­ if I understand that right, this crystal should pick up any source of gravity, right?¡±

    I sighed.

    ¡°Yes, right.¡±

    ¡°Including all the sources like for example the gravity field of Earth?¡±

    ¡°Yes. And we had the same thought. But the gravity field of Earth is in the frame of the experiment constant.

    Oh, it changes, but at those distances, these changes are in the range of a billionth of a percent.¡±

    ¡°Oh¡­ that is good. But I did not think about that especially. What I thought was that this crystal would pick up all the grav coils in the vicinity. The coils you tried to use in your experiment, the coils that the weapons lab uses to refine the grav guns, the coils that the conveyors use, and the replicators.

    The coils of the three Valkyries that are on hot standby. Would that not, I don¡¯t know, influence the experiment?¡±

    For some long long seconds, I could just stare at Ken in disbelief, followed by banging my head on the table.

    Maynard was a tad less prim and exclaimed loudly:

    ¡°The Fuck? Is that shit real? We have¡­ oh shit, there will be so many long faces¡­¡±

    I just groaned and waved vaguely in his direction. Michael on the other hand put a hand softly on my shoulder.

    ¡°Hey¡­ calm down. It can¡¯t be that bad.¡±

    I sighed and lifted my head, looking at him.

    ¡°It is that bad. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to¡­ miss something this fundamental and obvious?¡±

    ¡°So you made a mistake? Shit happens, you are just human. Now you know it and can compensate for it.¡±

    I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and slowly shook my head.

    ¡°There is no compensating for it. This is¡­ like checking how bright a candle is while holding it directly into the sun. The grav coils are way too strong to filter out.¡±

    I shook my head again.

    ¡°Whelp, that was that. I fear I won¡¯t be able to create your harvester soon. Sorry. And sorry to all of you, but I am going home now. I need to get my head clear.¡±

    Marcel frowned:

    ¡°But¡­ we are not done yet. We have to decide about the crystals. How we call them, how much we sell of them. The whole thing.¡±

    I rolled my eyes.

    ¡°I don¡¯t care. You decide, and I give my vote to the rest of you.¡±

    And yes, in hindsight, I know that that was a mistake. Just, at that moment, I honestly did not care.