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Arc 2, Chapter 9 ( Activation: Innovation )
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I stood over the product of five continuous days' worth of work by the Twelve, Sam, myself, and a good two dozen members of the Stray Patrol pressed into duty as rough laborers. Eighty thousand dollars' worth of raw materials, equipment, and so on -- shipped at expense, or on credit. Five full-size datacenter racks, each completely populated. And every last component within them completely unique -- graphene circuits and genetic data-storage arrays capable of performing
exaflops of computation and storing zettabytes of data in random-access array. The product of the integration of near every bit of publicly available information on computer theory, as extended by what my own experiments had thus far taught me. The heat put off by the circuitry involved here could flash-boil a fifty pound block of ice in a second, if it could but be directed to do so.
There are governments in the world that would declare war to possess this kind of hardware. The problem of powering this stuff however, had put me closer to the territory of things governments would commit
war crimes to possess.
The next challenge of course was
powering all of this. Even doing the work my/our selves, retrofitting an abandoned facility to handle three-phase power by simply utilizing 50A connectors was one thing; but actually getting hookups? It turned out to actually be easier to build a generator to provide the power needed than to get connected to the city mains. Especially since the nearest lines had been stolen for their copper content years ago. Besides; not drawing off of the city grid would give a better ability to mask the degree and timing of peak operations. So I exploited the mechanosynthetic properties of the CVI to construct a small gas turbine from various allotropes of carbon. A rough calculation of its actual power generation showed that the man-sized device was capable of producing power in the megawatt range. But of course, accomplishing that requires fuel... and that's where the risk of death-by-black-op comes into play.
I'd also proven the general consensus of the physics community with regards to the potential metastability of molecular-degenerate hydrogen. Once compressed with a couple hundred gigapascals of pressure, hydrogen gas turns into a solid metal... and remains that way once the pressure is taken off. (A miracle of actually
understanding what the physics of hardlight potentially permits.) More importantly, said degenerate hydrogen is a superconductor. At room temperature and above. And
this stuff could be mass produced. In fact, it had taken more effort to come up with a doping scheme that wouldn't meaningfully impede the production process and have a plausible role to play in the mechanisms (even if that plausibility was quite literally hand-waved as pure Tinker physics-fuckery) than it had to actually set up a production line for extruding said metallic hydrogen. So ... superconducting motors to convert the kinetic energy
nearly perfectly into electrical energy; superconducting coils to act as large-scale capacitors; and produce more degenerate hydrogen (in powder-form) to act as reactant fuel for the turbine. Mind you; this is not a free lunch scenario; the turbine's output wasn't gaseous hydrogen but steam. Burning the powdered metallic hydrogen causes it to revert from its metastable state into gas ... somewhat explosively. That however can't produce more energy than was invested in compressing it in the first place; but the gaseous state would be highly unstable as it would not yet have stabilized out of a nearly plasma state. So it would tend to react with the thing that
everything reacts with in the atmosphere; oxygen. It's a one-way cycle without other inputs to extract hydrogen from said water molecules ... but there's plenty of free molecular hydrogen in the atmosphere if you're willing to be patient about gathering it. Or speed up that process with something like wind turbines or solar paneling or waste-heat reclamation.
I was using all of those, of course. But that wasn't what was troubling me as I looked out from the scaffolding on the side of the no-longer-abandoned warehouse and purveyed my works. It was that metallic hydrogen.
It was too easy to make.
I called Sam -- largely becoming my primary confidant within the group of thirteen that I now directly employed -- and asked him to sit on the metallic grating next to me, our feet dangling off into the open air. He must've anticipated this somehow, because I hadn't even needed to finish my request before he set down the wrench he was working on re-truing the bolts holding that turbine to the concrete flooring to prevent vibrations from seeping in and started making his way over (showing off no less; he didn't bother using his feet as he made his way up the ladder, and simply hauled himself up.) "Yeah, Magister? What's going on? You've got that worried face again.
Again, mind you."
I shook my head and grimaced, pointing at the 50-gallon drum we'd converted into a gravity feeder for the turbine. "That stuff, Sam. The deeper I dig into what I can now do ... the things I can
make, the scarier some of the implications get. I know you wouldn't have the background for this but I am mass-producing a fucking room-temperature superconductor now, Sam, and it doesn't even strictly speaking require Tinkering to do. Just pressure. Immense amounts of pressure but
just pressure. The kinds of stresses that conventional materials could withstand if you used the right ones, no less."
"Okay ... so ... what's up?"
"It's ordinary, well-understood, physics -- that's what, Sam. Any asshole with the ability to generate hardlight fields could make this stuff. And it would revolutionize the planet. All that paranoia I've had about how Tinkers who try to actually uplift the world getting shot down, my man?
It's worse than I'd thought!" My voice was raising up higher. "All it would've taken is ONE materials physicist given Narwhal or even Shielder's powers -- let alone any Tinker with even a hint of talent in making forcefields -- and this stuff should've been saturating the world's power demands! ONE!!"
Sam blinked at me, is the best I could say -- I don't know if it was what I was saying or the reason I was so upset that was the cause of the confusion plastered on his face, but in either case it only exascerbated my reaction. "FUCK! Sam, don't you get it? For the better part of THIRTY YEARS we've been on the cusp of a global power revolution! So. Why. Hasn't. It. Happened.!? All it would take is
one Tinker so motivated to put this stuff out there and the world would already know. Just one, man. Even
Sphere had his moment before he became Mannequin damnit!"
This left my erstwhile-living companion nonplussed as he sat in thought. I could see his thought processes occurring -- literally; I was visualizing his CVI's activity feed via an overlay 3D rendering I'd been tinkering (pun intended) with. Something about watching the processes occur was incredibly soothing to me.
I continued my soliloquy to his silent audience. "So the thing is, Sam -- I could change the world overnight. I could activate the full replicative abilities of the lower-tier CVIs that APS's clients have purchased, and have each churn out hardlight seed-generators like the one we now have. Just one seed would be necessary to be able to churn out tons' worth of degenerate hydrogen wiring over the course of a decade or so; that seed-generator can probably churn out a new seed every minute or so without problems. More if I could figure out a better way to transfer the seeds, and provide the power demands. Half a million hardlight-field cores each year per generator. Let's say that they break down without attention after a year. Say that something manages to kill me then, and my shadow-selves lose their abilities at the same time. Say I never get another client that entire time. That's
ten million hardlight seeds, my friend. More than. All of which create machinery that can if not be
fully maintained by non-Tinkers, can at least be operated by them and have non-Tinkertech components that could be maintained. And we
know that the full model of the CVI requires no Tinker input to replicate... hell, it doesn't even require human attention at all -- only the correct signals and environment." I pause, collecting my breath for a moment.
"I could make every last human being on the planet bullet-proof. Let people literally share their memories with one another. Make that a permanent trait of the
species. Even if I died tomorrow I could do that. I could make electricity so cheap that people would
laugh at the idea that anyone might charge for it. And I can't have been the only one with abilities like this. The things I've done, they're so trivial. So simple. So what's the deal? Why am
I different? Or am I?"
Finally Sam clued in on what had me so terrified. "Ziz. You... fuck you're talking about
the Simurgh."
I shake my head with a grimace. "She first showed up eight years ago. What about the other three decades since parahumans first started showing up? No ... she's part of it. But not all of it. And that's the real enemy, Sam. The real limiter. There's no way I can win, against whatever that or they or it is. None. So ... I have to stay hidden. Can't do everything I
could do. But in the meantime? In the meantime ... I can at least fight some of it. Just because you can't win doesn't mean you have to surrender, or that there's no point in trying at all."
Sam's eyes shifted down to the Twelve -- or, rather, the four active members of the Twelve below. Abruptly his tone and stance shifted. "Did I tell you, James? The guys -- they've decided upon a name for their little group. Was trying to think of a way to bring it up with you. They're the Dogswatch."
The shift in conversational topic jarred me out of my thoughts. "The Dog who now?"
"Dogswatch. The least enjoyable watch of the day -- and the watch at the end of the day. It's not like we haven't noticed the way you're feeling, kid; hell... the guys all know that you single-handledly picked them up out of the Drain and gave them purpose again. And yeah... we've all noticed some personality changes from how we used to be but who fucking-well cares? We're better off this way. Me most of all. So what I'm saying here is, kid -- you wanna go off and do the suicidal last stand thing, well, you won't do it alone. Whatever it is, we're in. One hundred percent. So spill the fucking beans, kid. What plans have you got in that head of yours?"
"I can't. Not yet."
"I'd say we've earned a measure or two of trus-"
"It's not you, Sam. The
air has eyes." Speaking of eyes, his now were locked on me with the shape of confusion written in them. "Ziz is the most famous for it but there are others. And there are still others that can look in the other direction. No. I won't say it. I won't even
think it. No plans. No planning. No great grandiose agendas. All we can do is help in small ways, Sam. Anything more and that ... entity ... would strike me/us down in the bat of an eye.
Something wants this world slowly turning to shit, Sam, and whatever it is has managed for the better part of thirty years to do so despite Thinkers and Tinkers and Trumps who could have turned the global economy upside down. The Endbringers are just another manifestation of that pattern." I stood up brusquely and jumped down from the second-floor grate-style flooring and landed softly on my feet. Sam followed, of course, suit. I strode purposefully over to a machine that was the current focus of nearly all of the computational hardware, and every last ounce of my inventive spirit available to it. Said machine was something I hadn't explained to anyone -- hell, I didn't even fully let
myself understand it. The knowledge for its parts were carefully compartmentalized amongst the various shadow-selves of my and the Twelve's CVI's... coordinated in segment by the newly-built mainframe. To be entirely honest I didn't even properly know what I was doing right now -- it seemed the right thing to do and that was that. More like absent-mindedly scratching my nose than anything with a specific plan.
The machine was sleek-looking, with its smooth custom-molded plastic (appearing) exterior. It was twice as tall as I was; half-again that in width. There were synthetic-diamond portholes allowing a view to the interior, where purplish beams of light were focused on a central point. On its exterior, a hand-crank attached to a visible rack-and-pinion setup showed the physical interrupt in an otherwise-complete power conduit. By turning the crank, the pinion-gear would push or pull the gear-toothed "rack" in or out of place, completing or breaking the circult.
"But speaking of small ways, Sam on to more pleasant topics -- I've been meaning to discuss with you the idea of overhauling the cybervirus in your system with something less dependant on glucose inputs. Since we have the molecular-degenerate hydrogen now, it should be possible to use magnetic-inductance to transfer electrical energy to the CVI in your system on a system-holistic basis rather than spot treatments." My hand started turning the crank.
"Oh yeah? What would that gain me?"
"Well, for one ... assuming it works out, it means more vigorous activity levels from the cybervirus which in turn should mean a greater rate of handoff to the supplemental systems we're replacing your articulating musculature with. And with the current results from Bobbietwo's neural cybervirus clusters ... well --"
"More time to kick it on this ball of dirt you're saying? You still haven't... wait, 'Bobbietwo'? Really?"
"I suck at naming things okay?" A click, a thump, and everything inside the factory started glowing with a low purplish light -- Cherenkov radiation from the flooding of tachyons the hardlight fields within the machine are directing to the newly-formed -- and, without power, incredibly short-lived -- tachyon-crystal forming the operative heart of the machine. Each of the beams of light corresponded to a different false image of what was now occurring within the formerly-abandoned factory. Not a foolproof technique against precognitive information-gathering but ... useful nonetheless -- and so painfully obvious; if you could capture photons into a semi-material nature, the same technique would be applicable to a large array of other such weakly-interacting non-baryonic ("energy") particles... including ones known to travel backwards in time (largely considered to be the primary physical means precognition operated, though never fully tested). The ancillary benefits of this device however were that once an area was flooded with destabilized tachyons, the formation of any other crystallized tachyon seeds would be almost impossible to detect within its area as a matter of information-theoretic principles; the damned things propagate
backwards in time from their formation so can only be contained by objects that do not experience time at all, but can somehow re-anchor those tachyons forming the crystal while propagating along the same Hawking arrow as the rest of the observable universe -- meaning they must simultaneously not experience time
and be affected by it. That in and of itself didn't do much -- but by flooding a region with holographic "soft" crystallized tachyons, you could create a paradoxical state something like a radar scrambler; any information carried by the normal flow of tachyons within the region would be lost... and thus, if new seeds were created within that region this could neither be measured directly nor indirectly. More, similar pieces of information started flooding my mind as I thought about the consequences of the existence of such a device as I was now realizing was fully constructed before me.
I blinked for a second as I realized the consequences of that 'flooding':
I had literally been deleting information from my own mind about this device until it was fully operational.
Looking over at Sam and the rest of the Twelve, I realized another piece of information to be true; the same tachyonic field which was scrambling pre- or post- cognitive intrusions into the factory's interior would mean jack and-or squat once the device was turned back off, unless we could do something to perpetuate its benefits. Such as embedding at least one hard-tachyonic seed within the cybervirus colonies within our brains thus giving us a way to back-propagate information signals a few seconds in time. In and of itself not that great an advantage ... but it would count as a form of precognition and
that in turn would be a major edge -- especially if used to provide an encrypted communications channel with either each other or this very facility.
The tachyonic holograph-emitter couldn't last forever; it was simply too power-hungry to work for long on anything short of nuclear fusion power systems such as ... no. I had to clamp that line of thought down
hard. My time here was very limited; even now the clockwork spring-coil on the rack-and-pinion device activating the holograph-emitter was ticking down the seconds until the emitter would be physically depowered. I had no idea if it would be able to be turned back on; some of the theoretical work my mainframes had churned out indicated that any physical area once so-flooded would be "contaminated" in a manner preventing their activating again. Only fifteen thousand of the simulated runs returned that result -- fifteen thousand out of some seven million simulations. The results were rather varied; I could only count on simulations without physical results up until I actually activated this thing.
Damnit. I was getting distracted again... almost as if something was trying to stop me from pulling this off. I didn't have time for this. I grimaced as I picked up my pace; forcing myself to execute the tasks that would successfully generate thirty-four new hard-tachyon seeds. One for each of myself, Sam, and the Twelve ... and one for each
especially lucky bodyguard for each of my current clients, who would soon be getting an upgra-
I shook my head again and got back to work even as the sunset's purples and reds faded into black in the factory's windows and skylights.
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Elsewhere, a well-to-do family -- a middle-aged father, frumpy with an office-worker's build; a rather fit and attractive equally middle-aged mother, with just the
hint of "treatments" showing in the stiffness of her eyebrows; a twelve-year-old and too-thin daughter who is clearly nursing a bit of a headache -- are sitting down to dinner under that self-same sunset. An earlier meal than is often the case, but the father had a rare incidence of having nothing holding him back from coming home -- perhaps somewhat more motivated than usual by whispered conversations with the mother about what must be troubling their daughter as indicated by the recent bouts of "illness" and "headaches" sending her home early from the best school in the area... private schools not being an option due to the image that would present. As they sit down, the mother asks an idle question of the daughter, intending to get her to engage with her parents. "You've been reading all of those statistics books recently, sweetie! So tell me this; what are the odds that your father will get the afternoon off like this again anytime soon?" The daughter's eyes narrow and then go wide.
The next sound is Dinah Alcott's unconscious face planting itself in the mashed potatoes and assorted greens on her plate. A trickle of blood can be seen coming out of her right -- lower -- nostril.
