PROGENITOR: WORM (A Wormquest AU)

"...lets put her on the maybe pile for now?" you say, biting your lip, slightly, while Andi looks up from his pile of papers. "This seems like a lot, and we definitely don't wanna fuck it up, right? You don't see Cam releasing products willy nilly without making sure they're absolutely perfectly in line with her diabolical vision, right?" you ask, nodding.

"Don't let Rachel let you hear diabolical," Andi says, then shakes herself. "But. No. You're right. We have time. Syntergenes do take a while to make." Her lips quirk up slightly. "And we can make sure that our design is airtight."

"That's the spirit," you say, punching her shoulder gently. "Now, can you do the deep space telescopy before the teens blow up the Yiggy and get us back in time for breakfast."

Andi gave you a thin smile.

New York City
New York
June 9th
1970


You were thinking of exactly what you had said, last month as you sat on the couch next to Rachel, who was eating from her big bowl of popcorn with clear relish. Your arms crossed over your chest and your lips pursed hard.

"Well," you say, quietly, as the talking heads started to snipe back at one another about what this could all mean. "Stan's going to be happy."

"Stan's still over the moon about Moldovia, he's made it into a three parter," Rachel said, her voice dry.

"It was a battle that last five minutes, he..." You shake your head. Not important.

What was important...was that the Indochinese Economic Gestalt Institute for Technology - the IEGIT, for short, or the Nguyet Cam Front For Laundering My Ideas if you preferred a more cynical perspective - had just released, in five languages, a news media report that everyone, everyone, was going absolutely apeshit over. The IEG had laid it out in words in plain, unaccented English so simple that even some racist hick from the backwater of America could have followed it.

You?

You followed it just a bit further.

Innovative Thinkers at the center of the IEGIT have worked with dark energy capable metahumans to experiment with a new form of fusion technology, allowing for the generation of clean energy. Initial results were promising, but developments in the new Đoàn Kết Helium-3 processing facility lead to an unexpected breakthrough that has been dubbed the L2 Engine. The L2 Engine produces immense thrust via attaining an incredibly high specific impulse. In lay-terms, the engine is powerful enough that a very small amount of fuel allows you to travel extremely quickly for a very long time! What is more, the specially Dark Energy enriched Helium-3, known as Helium-DE, that has been produced by the crew of the Đoàn Kết interacts with the L2 Engine to, almost immediately upon leaving the thruster, shunt itself out of our universe, rendering itself entirely safe for use near even fragile structures.

All of this was provided with images of an L2 Engine being used in Earth atmosphere. The engine should have been acting like a high powered particle beam, immolating everything in miles around it as it blazed out of the back. Instead, it just produced an eerie blue glow that kept the rocket aloft. Other camera footage - shot from outside of a space vehicle, by some metahuman - showed a bricklike spacecraft roaring through space with two of the L2 engines strapped to the back, with data scrolling along the side indicating speeds and G-forces.

"Is 5Gs fast?" Rachel had muttered.

"Yeah," you had whispered. You thought of the last part of the press release while crossing your arms over your chest.

The L2 engine is relatively inexpensive and simple to build and requires only a moderate amount of Helium-DE every month. For the price of a moderately expensive house, you can have access to an L2 Engine, which will be provided and sold by the IEG Ministry of International Commerce, pending agreements with the governments of the world who wish access to the technology.

"I really didn't see ProgHarm selling people stuff," Rachel said, sounding more annoyed by that then anything else. The talking heads were actually making that exact point. You picked up your remote and turned off the TV, then started to stand and pace around before Rachel. She watched you and kept eating popcorn, which made you feel kind of like you were the new amusement for her.

"They're using capitalism against itself - capitalism loves buying new stuff. And they just invented a perfectly safe, semi-weaponized fusion engine that makes a matter/antimatter rocket look like its playing tiddly winks - that thing was pulling 5Gs and it wasn't even fucking trying!" You threw up your hands. "That thing can go fast enough to turn anyone on the ship into strawberry jam, and the thrust plume ceases to exist the instant it has imparted thrust to the vehicle!" You scowl. "And I even know how they did it."

Rachel arched an eyebrow at you.

"Well, okay, I don't know how they got the preposterous thrust, but...the shunting out of the universe thing?" you ask. "That's a delayed effect bit of matter manipulation fuckery. That Helium-3 mining station is just a big tent over some poor ProgHarm meta who is turning helium-3 into helium-DE. Or it's hiding the gadget that does it." You frown. "Okay, it's not exactly HIDING it, but...you know what I mean!"

"Yes, honey," Rachel says. "Why is this all a problem?"

You rubbed your temple. "Oh, there's three hundred and fifty billion tons of gold alone in the asteroid belt. Similar amounts of tungsten. Nickle. Cobalt. Lithium? Uranium? Who knows, they might even find fucking monopoles out there. There's centuries of mineral wealth that no one owns and no one lives on, and the main reason we've never tapped it is because you can't find anything out there that you can't find down here, cheaper, and safer. Except Cam!" You threw your hands up. "Just fucking changed that!"

"And this is...bad," Rachel says, frowning.

"She just invented the only car in a world of horses, and she owns the gasoline," you say.

Rachel frowns.

"...okay, that could be bad," Rachel says. "We should get to the Yiggy, yeah?"

"Well, that's neat!"

Andi's voice echoed through the workshop as you and Rachel walked inside to find that, rather than needing to get together a plan to steal a top secret Vietnamese fusion engine, you found that there was a huge crate in the corner of the Yiggy's workshop, and the complicated guts of a massive L2 engine was laid out, with Tessa walking around on the pieces, taking notes of what was what and where it had gone, while Andi and Beta both examined a kind of complicated bundle of coils. Lisa, who was sitting on Beta's head in her fox form, looked incredibly bored.

"And how do the components-" Beta started.

"For the last time," Lisa said. "They're ALL hexagonal!"

"Oooooooooh!" Beta whispered.

"Kill me," Lisa said as you walked over to the two hyperbrains.

"What are you doing and how did we get this and what is Lisa doing?" you asked, in a quick string, your brow furrowing.

"Uh, we're examining the engine, Cam sent it to me, and Lisa's got better sensing equipment than anything in the workshop, and this engine has components that are...fiendishly complicated, we're going to have a hard time reproducing them with American factory standards to IEG standards," Andi said, sticking her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, thinking. "I think we can hit 0.5, maybe 1G if we use the Boeing labs, but there's no way we're going to hit the exponent thrusts that the VC engines are going to get..."

"I'm hearing a new corporation in the works!" Lisa said, perking up.

You shook your head, while Tori came flying into the room, her body glowing with her energies.

"Is it real!?" she asked, excitedly. "AHHH!"

"Yes, it's real..."

"IT'S A TORCHSHIP!" Tori squealed, kicking her feet excitedly. "BEOWULF SCHAFER, here we COME!"

"We could make it transparent!" Andi said.

"What are they talking about?" Rachel asked.

"You don't want to know," you say, quietly.

"No idea, huh?" Rachel mutters. You elbow her.

"This doesn't give us the stars," Beta said, quickly. "It's not FTL! So, they're not beating the Yiggy. It just...gives everyone who buys one a planet. And, uh, the media release wasn't lying. The construction is genius, but, now that we know how to do it, the components aren't that much more complicated than what we use to make automobiles. The real trick is the fuel."

"Remass," Tori said, absently.

"No, it's fuel," Beta said. "You buy a slug of HDE and it goes into the engine, then triggers a perfectly stable fusion reaction that can be throttled up or down. The more you throttle it up, the faster and hotter it burns. The wildest thing is it can go subfusion in temperature, but retains the reaction -the HDE temporarily slides out of spacetime until you need it again."

"Whoa," Tori whispered, her eyes shining. "I want one. I want a space car."

You frowned. "And what if you stuck one these to the back of a nuclear bomb?" you asked Andi.

"You get a torpedo," she says. "Perfect for midrange capital ship targets, assuming they don't have point defense lasers."

"MMMHMMM," you say, frowning. "Has the White House reached out to us?"

"Reached out to us, hell, the Secretary of Defense is in the guest room with Marsha," Andi said, jerking her thumb over her shoulder.

---
Buzzy's been UPSTAGED!? Before she was even BUILT!? Cam, you bitch. What is the S9's public facing reaction to this. ...Andi, Tori, and Beta are all nerding out over this, the nerds. Deep in your heart of hearts, you are also nerding out about this, but the world comes first before geeking out over getting a fusion torchship.
[ ] Write in