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 Palantír 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.
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, 11th 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 1½ 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.”
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 Palantír 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.
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, 11th 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 1½ 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.”
