[X] Energy blade (1d)
What would you say to Alchemist if you were to quit now? You didn't even fail properly to justify it, and you're still on track with the schedule. Failing during trials like it happened with Scarecrow is one thing, but you doubt Alchemist is going to be forgiving if you just abandon her request half-way without a good reason. So, energy blade then. You slap your cheeks and smile at Gager.
"Thank you, I know what to do now!"
Her face betrays a fleeting hint of surprise.
"You are welcome. I'm glad you recovered so fast. So, what's you plan?"
"Patent infringement!"— you wink at your confused friend— "Or asking your permission to copy your energy blade tech. Pretty please with a cherry on top?"
Gager shakes her head, smiling.
"You have my permission and my support. It's quite late, but I'd gladly answer any questions you may have about it."
"That's my bestie for you! It's decided, you're spending the night in my room. Let's go!"
You grab her hand and pull her along, quashing objections before they arise. It's so nice to have a friend over, you can get used to it once more.
With all the insights Gager shared with you overnight, you don't waste any time in the morning. The energy blade has no substance, so of course it's never going to get stuck. Will it cut though? Oh yes, but not like the knife. Surprisingly, no material removal is involved either. The energy blade is basically a shaped array of particles that don't need holes to penetrate matter, somewhat like X-rays. The array disrupts atomic bonds of the material it passes through, leaving scattering fine dust in its wake.
There's some extra piece of information you were not going to get from reading the schematics in a million years, if not for Gager telling you: depending on the material, cutting triggers micro-fission reaction, resulting in emissions of short-lived, but extremely destructive bursts of energy. It's amazing how all the flying sparks and red-hot halves you observed were not caused by the blade's temperature, but were a mere byproduct of matter annihilation.
And there is also the bigger picture. Once again you encountered an almost impossibly advanced piece of craftsmanship, but this time, unlike Judge's force field generator, it was created to solves something so trivial. It's like an all-knowing being is making fun of the world, or a god is disguising their miracles as science. Who were those mysterious inventors, really? Are they still out there? What are they working on now? Will you ever be able to reach their level?
You enter the workshop and refocus on the task ahead, locking up all those questions without answers in the back of your mind. You may not fully understand the nature of the particles that compose the blade, or how the blade is shaped, but...
Breakthrough points requirement (1): True
You understand enough to control its shape. Which is going to be really important to your work. You bring up all relevant schematics and start designing a set of emitters specifically for Alchemist's gunblades. And it's not just copying Gager's solution: you need a tank-killer, so running around one poking holes in it might not be what Alchemist wants. It's better to give her a tool that aligns with her style and capabilities, something she can use to cut a tank in two with one swing, just like she dismantles opposing infantry. So, the blade will need to be at least four meters long, which is about a tank's width. Five meters to have some room for maneuvering.
Of course, maintaining such length all the time is impractical and hardly possible, considering power consumption and rapid circuits degradation. Instead some kind of burst mode with a strict time limit looks just about right. You analyze Alchemist's attack moves, noting the speed of her swings in various scenarios, then feed the data to an anti-tank combat simulation. The results say 0.3 seconds would be the longest time required to complete a cut. The circuits will hold without issues. What about power requirements? You multiply this by the calculated power draw of a 5-meter blade and... Wow.
You compare this to the Gager's weapon power draw, scaling your calculations to her blade size. The numbers don't make sense. The power supply should run in a matter of minutes, yet it never does. It doesn't make any sense.
Breakthrough points requirement (2): True
Or does it? You notice something that almost escaped your scrutiny: the power circuits are bidirectional. You dive deeper and soon get to the bottom of this. Whatever the blade is, it seems like the particles can act as reverse carriers, routing some energy from the fission reaction back to to the circuits. Actually, intense visual effects occur only when the power supply is fully charged and can't accept any more juice. This means as long as the blade is being put to work, it's essentially self-sustained.
You sigh. This is yet another layer of nearly-impossible tech, a solution to extract energy directly from nuclear fission reaction without all the steamy-turbiny infrastructure of a regular power plant. The current efficiency is too low to be directly used as a new generation of those, but the potential is undeniable. Maybe you'll return to it later, right now what matters is that you can give Alchemist an ultimate blade she asked for.
The day goes by in the blink of an eye. It was morning just now, but it's dark outside already. Your internal clocks don't show any irregularities, you were just too engrossed in the work. The assembled prototype is on a bench in front of you, its activation tests passed and all internal components nominal. You decide not to push yourself any more than this for today, so you queue the mirror pair of it and clock out.
Now, before you go spend some quality time with Gager, you drop a message to Alchemist asking if she's available tomorrow morning for acceptance testing, or if you should just ship the new weapons. That's when you're alerted from one of your web crawlers. It's a mean of communication that's encrypted just as much as it is inconspicuous, based on encoding encrypted information within image compression artifacts. Take a picture, compress it lossily with the modified encoder providing whatever payload, and upload it to a social media. Anyone can see it, no one can suspect anything.
But you digress. The crawler that detected your signature encoding technique is the one that monitors P90's feed, the solution you offered to stay in touch. You didn't expect it to be used, honestly, but seems like it was worth the effort.
The picture itself is nothing out of the ordinary, no visibly different from hundreds before it. You run the decoder on it to extract the encrypted payload, then decrypt it with your key.
"You told the truth. I know about the upcoming war game too. Can you get me in touch with your boss? We'd like to negotiate."
There's also a link to a news site. The article is about a certain man who used a Griffin T-Doll to commit suicide, apparently by ordering her to cut off his genitals, then kill him, and finally destroy her own core. It briefly touches the issue of the victim gaining control over the T-Doll, then goes on about psychological health of the modern society and how there should be software guardrails to prevent the usage of Dolls as suicide assistants. You smirk. Seems like P90 didn't waste time using your jailbreak, and managed to cover her tracks well so far.
Now, what do you do about her request? It's not a problem technically, but doing so will be admitting your involvement in the side-project that took two full work days from your tight schedule. You don't know if whatever she has to offer can be enough to justify your decisions in Agent's eyes.
[] Agree
[] Do not agree
