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° 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°, 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?
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 5th-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.”
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° 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°, 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?
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 5th-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.”
