“Tell me a story, Father?”

Jim Raynor chuckled and set down the controls for the nanoforge, sweeping his son off the ground and holding him upside down under one arm. “An hour early? You tired or something?” he asked, tickling the one year old. Jonny was entirely too serious for his age.

“No, but you were remembering one just now!” Little Jonny protested. “It looked fun, but was all jumbled and out of order!”

The colonial marshal held back a grimace, and turned his son upright. He loved the boy, but the kid never ceased reminding him of the trouble of raising a telepath. Again, he offered thanks to his old friend Corporal Hickson for teaching him how to hide within his own mind. Spider-holes, Cole called it. It had been a technique for surviving Kel-morian corporate torturers, but since Jonny had been born, he’d been finding a use for it in resisting telepathy as well.

He’d used the technique to hide his… less pleasant memories from his son.

The event he’d been reminiscing over however was his unit's efforts to prototype the Reaper assault armor during the Guild Wars. They had been known as the Thunderstrike Third Division, callsign: Heaven's Devils. Those were fun days. Before Turaxis. Before the Confederacy sold his unit out to the Kel’Morians and they became mercenaries, bandits and pirates.

He’d been remembering his time as a test pilot for the Thunderstrike platform because he was printing replacement parts for the house's jump jets. Lydia was a brilliant miner and foreman, but she had no head for mechanics, while he was always tinkering in his free time.

A thought struck him and he looked down at the boy in his lap. “Say, Jonny, you’ve been really zipping along with those learning holograms. Think you’re up for helping daddy put together a full flow vespine chamber? We can mix lessons with a story. This one’s about the time your papa flew through the skies with a rocket pack!”

“Does that mean I get to use the nano-forge, Father?” Jonny asked, innocently.

James ruffled the boys hair and laughed. “One step at a time, kid. Show me you can understand basic mechanics first. Now, what you do is...”

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Much to his irritation, Jonny, or Tony as he preferred, didn’t get to use the nano-forge during that story-time. Despite reading the instructions out of James' head, he wasn’t able to complete the effort without help, some bits were just missing, and he hadn’t been an engineer either as magical girl Tanya or salaryman Hedeki. It shouldn’t have irritated him; he was only a year old, but the very existence of the nanoforge bothered him. The implications of its existence for manufacturing and the economy at large were enormous. The implications of his parents having one they could casually operate in their home even more so.

It would shift the entire economy away from the need for cities for a start. Without the need for factories and machined parts there was notably less need to concentrate skilled labor. Supply chains became immensely easier to manage when shipping blocks of raw elements refined at the mine would be sufficient for any level of manufacturing. The economy would shift heavily in favor of the service industry, as manufacturing would become a game of intellectual property rights management rather than real estate, equipment and worker population placement. Maintaining a mechanized war effort would become possible via pillage or the control of mining nodes; without the need to protect a large number of factories filled with specialized difficult to replace equipment. Building and hiding research bases moreso, if all of the delicate secretive materials could be easily synthesized from base components and assembled and modified on the fly at the site.

One thing Tony didn’t see though was bio-printers. Did they simply not exist? Or could his parents not afford them? He knew from father stories that farming had resurfaced as a major industrial concern for humanity alongside terraforming new worlds, having entire worlds dedicated to the subject, so it seemed unlikely food was something handled by nano-technology outside the possibility of military rations or expensive high level equipment. Something costly enough that waiting 9 months for a dirt-farmer was considered the more viable option.

John vaguely remembered a science fiction symposium he’s attended about how people would likely end up preferring hand crafted items and foodstuffs in a future dominated by automation and nanotechnology in his first life as Hideki, but back then he had been far more interested in military history and economic theory as entertainment, not syfy, fantasy or the combination thereof. Society looked down on those who lost themselves to fantasy, while business and the military were respectable and profitable endeavors.

A foolish oversight in hindsight; but honestly, who could have predicted this life trajectory? Magical world war two? Being catapulted into the distant future beyond earth? These were not reasonable expectations for a person to have! At least in his second life his military history fettish had benefited her.

What was reasonable for his current outlook however, were the career tracks of Miner, Farmer, Colonial administration and once more diving into military service. It was entirely possible, probable even, that there were more to be discovered, but Tony had not gotten that far. He was only 1 and a half, for all that he had completed the sixth grade interactive learning holograms.

Farmer… was not something he wanted to do. Even with fathers stories of piloting a mech and doing maintenance on lines of robot arms, that handled most of the dirty drudgery, Tony was not enthused. Unless there was something he was missing, there was little upward mobility in farming, even in a syfy setting, and though better looked upon than in either previous life, farmers were not a position of prestige here either.

Being a Miner like his mother… it held possibilities. The Morian’s reportedly built, and lost, large corporate concerns around prospecting and the idea of climbing such a corporate concern (or building one with his own hands) appealed to him… But there was also father’s warning and mothers’ regular diatribes to consider. The Confederacy and Combine did not respect the claims of mining companies, and engaging in one was almost as likely to involve him in war as joining the military.

Speaking of the military… no. Just no. It was a highly tempting path, both in prestige and juicy rear echelon positions, but Tony had learned his lesson as Tanya. The military was something to be avoided. It didn’t matter how talented he had ended up being in the pursuit, if Being X and Entity O did not force his hand somehow, he would not engage. It simply wasn’t worth the aggravation. Between his luck and the entities game, he was more or less guaranteed to get caught up in a major conflict immediately upon graduating boot camp.

If that happened, he hoped that; at least, he’d be able to pass puberty before ending up on the front line this time around.

That left colonial administration and the unknown. Colonial administration was something Tony felt he could integrate into fairly easily, and if he chose a posting on the other side of the sector from Morian or Umojian space, the chance of becoming embroiled in conflict was minimal to nonexistent. There was of course the possibility of encountering intelligent alien life, which could as easily be used as the new game pieces for the entities who had made his existence their sport, but after nearly 300 years of rapid expansion across this arm of the galaxy, nothing more intelligent than a dog had been encountered by any of the three human factions. He felt it his best bet.

The manifold or lone unknown option wasn’t something he could consider until he gained more information though; and that information, like the nano-forge, were locked behind his scholastic progress. After all, in a society where nano-technology, artificial intelligence, civilian Gundam’s and warp capable space travel were real, the question of which jobs remained and which were rendered obsolete wasn’t easily determined.

Limbering up as much as his underdeveloped body was able, Tony spun up one of his simpler mental and physical enhancement formulas and got to work.

The interactive learning holograms were a series of action arcade and action adventure games built around engaging small children. They were disgustingly cute in the early stages, but Tony felt it difficult to discount their effectiveness. The games were cleverly designed to encourage their players to engage in calisthenic exercises and answer questions quickly for rewards, complete with character progress bars that tracked the subjects performance and a tiered set of rewards designed to keep the dopamine flowing and addict participants to the act of learning.

Tony was sure Hideki’s classmates would have loved it. He was merely thankful that the guiding intelligence, the Multimedia Network Virtual Reality Adjutant; MNRVA, had adjusted to his intelligence and learning style as he worked rather than persisting with the baby treatment.

What he really wanted though was a MINT device. The Memetic Interface Neural Tutor was a machine he’d seen in his fathers memories of Boot Camp, which was used by the confederate Marine Corp to rapidly train skills and jobs into recruits in the manner of the american movie The Matrix.

I know Kung Fu.

There was something related to the device, though, that terrified father. Tony had been unable to access that memory so far. It made sense, he supposed, that father would do anything not to think of something that deeply associated with fear, it was only human to judiciously avoid such things. But he had to admit, it made him think slightly less of his new parent. At the same time, the mystery of the situation only made him all the more curious.

Knowledge was power after all.

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Lydia Elizabeth Raynor worried about her son. Jonny was such an odd baby, nothing like she’d learned to expect by playing with her friends' children over the years. But then, none of her friends' children were telepaths before they even left the womb. Still, she was proud of her little man. At a year and a half he was already dancing to music, doing school programs meant for children more than six times his age, ever so polite and oh so curious!

He’d wanted to come to work with her for months, but she’d held back due to the warnings and worries of her husband, James, and friend, Magistrate Myles Hammond. Jonny was no mere empath as she was, but a powerful telepath, and the more people who knew, the faster it would get back to Tarsonis and the Ghost program.

Lydia was conflicted on that point.

On one hand, as a loyal Confederate citizen, she felt it was her duty to aid the old families and her recruiter had been insistent that ghosts were one of the most important cogs in that machine. Loyal agents who used their extraordinary abilities to sniff out problems in the administration and report them back to their leaders. This kept the confederacy free of corruption, traitors, rebels and injustice! It wasn’t an invasion of privacy or murder, the criminals were convicted by their own thoughts and memories. They were their own judge and jury, the ghost simply carried out justice. It was a prestigious and honorable position.

On the other hand, little Jonny was only a babe, and loyalty or not, he deserved to enjoy his childhood. She deserved to enjoy his childhood. She’d felt enough minds before fleeing to this backwater-mud-ball of a planet to understand the effect children had on women's mental health. What concerned her more however, was whether or not being a ghost would be good for her baby. She couldn’t train him like he would need… but at the same time, he seemed to be doing well enough training himself. The Confederate recruiter who had talked to her in highschool spoke a great deal about how dangerous untrained telepaths could be… but Jonny was a powerful telepath and the worst that had happened was she could always feel his calm steady presence in the back of her head. It was soothing, more than invasive, she thought.

This awareness was what prompted her to bring him along to the command center today. He always got so focused and content when hearing her talk about the day's operations; it would bring both of them joy if he were there to see it personally.

As they drove though, she noticed Jonny seemed distracted by… everything and nothing. As they made their way into the latest mining compound, his normally calm demeanor faded into distractibility, ADD, agitation and then headaches. Frowning in worry, she quickly brought Jonny to the command deck of the mobile refinery and got everybody going. As the number of people nearby began to thin, the symptoms reversed order, but didn’t go away.

“Jonny, are you alright, baby?” Lydia asked worriedly, as she got done issuing orders to the SCV platforms. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Yes, mother.” Jonny replied, massaging his temples. “Being with you makes it easier.”

Lydia smiled worriedly at that. Such a cutie, and already a stoic like his daddy! “Well, I promised to show you what I do, what would you like to see first?”

Stolen story; please report.

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The problems began more or less the moment Tony left home. He hadn’t realized initially how spoiled he was having a mother with a mild magical presence or father who was resistant. They offered a focus for this damnable instinct to reach out and touch the minds of others bestowed upon him by Entity O. Living on the outskirts of camp, or perhaps behind neosteel walls may have helped as well, Tony wasn’t sure, but where previously he had only been aware of other minds when both his parents were off working, riding through camp in his mother’s jeep made them stand out starkly to the young mages sixth sense.

The first issue he noticed was the voices; peoples internal monologue. Not everybody had them, apparently, or maybe they were just blocked from his sight somehow, but for those who did, their thoughts broadcast themselves to the boy’s mind as though he were in the middle of a crowd. Less obvious, but still present were the emotional states of those within his range; a range which was frustratingly larger than his ability to listen in to personal thoughts, but blessedly easier to ignore. The hard part though, were flashes he caught of sensory feedback from those they passed closest to. Seeing through the bleary pained eyes of men and women with hangovers was almost worse than having them in his first life.

None of them seemed to have visual imaginations like mother and father did, thankfully, but Tony wasn’t sure he could count on that to remain constant. Maybe it was an uncommon trait, maybe it only came after becoming familiar with a subject's brain, or maybe he just needed to be close enough to reach out and touch them, he wasn’t sure, but for now he was thankful, because if everyone had visual imaginations that would have been too much to bear. As it was, he grit his teeth and held his mothers hand like a lifeline. Touching her seemed to help somewhat.

Whether she was taking visual cues or Tony himself was projecting his own thoughts of discomfort, he wasn’t sure, but he was thankful when he was rushed inside and through the elevator to the command deck. The other minds didn’t go away once he entered the room, but distance and dozens of layers of Neosteel between him and everyone else quieted the tumult enough for him to focus through it.

I am going to have to find some way to control this curse, Tony thought to himself sourly, or else my only careers will involve remote work or Isolation. It wasn’t such a bad thing on the surface, Tony was well aware his warped personality of lives 1 and 2 made him bad with people, but not being able to fake socializing meant that career progression was more or less crippled. The very ability that should have solved his interpersonal issues threatened to exacerbate them into an insurmountable hurdle.

Damn you, Entity O!

Mother seemed to be a touchstone of a sort. Holding her hand didn’t make the other other voices stop, per say, but it made them all feel more distant and washed out when he did. Like a room full of whispers rather than a cafeteria or relaxed social function. That would work well enough while Tony was still a small child, but once he hit his teens it would rapidly become socially unacceptable and for an adult it was simply taboo. A chain and a shame in one embarrassing package.

At least he had 10 years to solve the issue. That should be enough, right?

Focusing his mind on a strength enhancement formula, Tony felt his range contract somewhat and smiled. Walking over to one of the walls, he grabbed a crate of prepared replacement equipment and moved it over to the light table where his mother was working and clambered atop it. He could perhaps have flown, but he hadn’t revealed that ability to his parents yet. Doubtless it would raise distress, rather than admiration. That was what the horror films always said, after all.

He watched patiently as his mother set the daily order of battle. Watching it on the table and in her mind, he got a feel for how it was planned out, matching efficiency with the temperament of the workers and the size of the crystals. It reminded him somewhat of planning battles with the Salamander Division, though mother’s leadership involved far more micro-management. A reasonable standard if one could know the inner lives of their employees and how best to motivate them, though it felt to Tony that this would leave them less able to function without her, which was inefficient.

“Jonny, are you alright baby? I’m sorry about that...” Tony looked up at his mother and let her emotions wash over him. Worry, embarrassment, hope. Internal monologue paused as she flipped gears. They were here because he’d wanted to see her at work for more than a year and had just left him to his own thoughts for an hour. Tony hadn’t minded because it allowed him time to collect his thoughts and process the psychic load of his new talents, but she felt the need to apologize, it was only good relations to accept.

“Yes, mother” he replied, “it’s easier when I’m with you.” Relief flooded her and Tony knew he’d said the right thing. Now, to business.

“Well, I promised to show you what I do, what would you like to see first?” she asked, radiating excitement and pride. Such a cutie.

Tony winced slightly at hearing the thought, too used to it to object visibly. He was familiar with the utility and drawbacks of cuteness from his time as Tanya, and it was something he’d hoped to avoid by regaining his masculinity. Still… he was only two years old, if his own mother didn’t think he was cute that should be a warning flag on it’s own. Hoping to avoid the situation, he launched into his questions.

“How does the command table work?” He started with, “you didn’t give many orders but the holographic units largely followed the more complex plan I saw in your head. Is it a psionic amplifier? Or..?”

Lydia nodded and smiled down at him, focusing on a memory so he could see it. “The command table pairs with an augmented reality system that projects on the SCV’s cockpit. I select them and they get a video of my face, an audio feed and their own holographic map off to the right of their window. I can then use mnemonic gestures to set a destination and macro of preset orders which appear as beacons and pathing information or give verbal directions, which the adjutant translates into the same. Using the macro’s, however, is faster.”

There she paused, watching him expectantly. Tony smiled in appreciation. This was something they’d worked out over the last year, allowing him to indicate if he didn’t understand something, rather than having her baby him with every explanation. It let him revive the air of competence he had so carefully cultivated in his last two lives while still enjoying adults' willingness to humor his ‘childish curiosity’. “What are the macros?”

“Macros are a shorthand for more complex orders, so instead of rambling on for a whole minute telling my people what to do, I can say Holtzman plain this area and my people will understand a certain group of SCV’s are supposed to group up to cut down, catch and disassemble this extra large shaft before moving on to smaller more easily drilled crystals.” She explained, bringing up a hologram of grouping, pathing and work orders along with a holographic representation of how it should be done.

After that, she went on to describe a number of other macros, their purposes, how they improved safety and efficiency of the mining and when they needed to change based on the type of mineral being mined. Tony was familiar with the concept, having planned, ordered and drilled flight maneuvers of all sorts in his second life as Tanya, but it was fascinating to see how technology and futurism had changed how such a thing was done. It would certainly help with training, but unless the adjutant AI was capable of adaptation, it would likely raise casualties on the battlefield as units followed programmed patterns right into enemy fire rather than evading or displaying initiative.

Of course, the question was, did a commander with such awareness of the theatre of operation even need subordinates with initiative? Not if they were sufficiently attentive to their area of command.

Those were questions for when he started his own company however. For now, he worked to commit the lecture to memory and identify the patterns. This went on for roughly two hours between his periodic questions and the holographic videos of the orders in action. The lesson ended with mother cuing a new set of orders and calling a snack break. Quietly bemoaning the prohibition on coffee, Tony dutifully drank his nutrient fortified orange juice and chocolate chip cookies.

When the snack was done, the questions continued. “Mother, you mentioned crystals had different compositions. Why do we even mine crystal in the first place? What does it provide?”

“Mineral crystals are… difficult to explain.” Mother replied, and Tony could feel the wince in her mind and emotions. “At their core, crystals are purified dirt. Remember your puzzle games? Dirt is the individual blocks. Rock is stacked blocks. Crystal is a solid cube of blocks without spaces and stacked in pretty repeating patterns.”

“I know what elements and structure are, mother.” Tony interjected, smiling. “But crystal forests are… weird. I’ve seen the map, we go back to forests you mined out before and they had grown back. But that doesn’t make any sense! What are they? Why do we mine them? What are they made from and how do they work?”

She reached down and ruffled his hair, smiling brightly. “You’re so smart, Jonny! I should’ve expected this with your athena scores. Alright then!” She reached over to the interface and brought up a file on his progress. “You’ve gotten… level two earth science. Well done. Alright; so, minerals. As best we can tell, minerals are… well, living silicon based organisms. We don’t know quite how they function, or if we do it’s not public knowledge, but crystals grow by actively stripping an area around them of rare metals and refine them into a highly concentrated structure. That’s what makes them special. It removes the need to process massive amounts of raw ore’s and allows us to get 99% pure conversion from crystal to useful resource ingots. Blue minerals like I mine here are primarily lower order metals from aluminum to zinc. There are also green, red, yellow and purple crystals, as well as vespene gas; each of them form around a different sort of mineral composition.”

“So, vespene is like a mineral that collects the noble gasses?” Tony asked, head cocked to the side. That would be particularly interesting, given the special characteristic of the noble gasses was how so little affected them.

“Nope!“ Mother chirped. “Vespine is formed from mostly chemicals. Propane, butane, methane, crude oil, acetylene, pure oxygen and hydrogen and various flammable mineral oils. It all coalesces around microscopic grains of dust from that 1% of minerals that remains unidentified. It can be refined or used directly in most modern engines. The mix seems to work remarkably well for creating high energy plasma. It’s somewhat unintuitive, but so was Neosteel once upon a time.”

Tony nodded slowly. It was unintuitive that using a mix of chemicals would burn better than a dedicated engine with dedicated fuel, but if it was like neosteel he was willing to admit ignorance. In normal modern metallurgy you chose the base metal based on the properties you wanted and used a 95% purity, with other elements kept at a minimum to provide slight alterations to the base property. Going over 5% other materials created weak metals that crumbled easily. Neosteel and similar alloys used equal mole measurements of 3 to 7 different elements to create a material called a quasicrystal. These metamaterials had significantly different properties to any of their base materials but were, generally speaking, an order of magnitude stronger than older alloys, and allowed for an exponentially higher variety of specialist materials.

A headache for any engineer or supply officer, to be certain, but undeniably useful for civilian and military products. Many materials existed that would fill a role which previously required complex technology to achieve. It’s discovery in the 22nd century of old earth was what had allowed for the creation of the warp drive, among other things.

It was a subject largely beyond Tony as well… but so long as he did not select a career path where he needed to know such things, he felt he would be fine just knowing the overarching theory.

“So, minerals and gas are… ” Tony hesitated before continuing “a magical material that transmutes useful materials out of the environment?” He asked. “That seems like it would be inconvenient for the global terraforming mission.”

Mother laughed and flicked his nose, saying ‘boop’. “Magical is one way to say it!” She giggled. “The common conspiracy theory is that it’s proof of alien intelligences moving among us! However, most mineral and gas fields since their discovery haven’t been natural; we’ve planted them on purpose. Find an area rich in ores, and plant a crystal. Come back three months later you’ll have anywhere from a cluster of crystal shafts to a forest of them, depending on the spread and richness of the local resources!”

Then she shrugs. “It does have a negative effect on terraforming, but that’s why we do it only on mines rather than planting them everywhere and coming back decades later to cleansweep a planets crust. That strategy is used on asteroid fields and comets.”

For the next hour and a half until lunch they discussed mineral seeding. Ethics, strategies, detection, effectiveness, civilian vs government rights toward ceeding and mining and risk vs reward scenarios in mining. Lava worlds for instance. Recently formed or cataclysmically devastated worlds full of volcanic activity were the gold standard of crystal mining. There you could expect to get rich fields of all different colors of mineral, and have veins that burrowed deep into the crust, allowing them to regenerate mined out spires almost as fast as the SCV’s could collect them. The risk in mining these crystals, of course, was seismic activity making permanent structures a deathtrap, lava flows covering your field periodically and the militaries of the three great powers and 1000 pirate operations seeking to capture or bomb your facilities to deny them to others.

These planets, such as Char, New Fulsome, Redstone and others often doubled as prison worlds, working on the theory that occupying dangerous energetic antisocial types with high risk jobs would keep them focused and provide rehabilitation and job skills. And should a few million of them die, who cared? Tony cared. Either of his previous lives could have been sentenced to such a planet if his signaling failed, and so this was likely a risk he would face in the future. He and his mother were psychic, who was to say that there weren’t others with the talent? Another project to work on when developing his training regime.

After lunch, an apple, a ham sandwich and locally sourced milk; Mother took him on a tour of the facility. Tony had initially wondered why the Mobile Mining Facility needed so much loud machinery, what with nano-forges, so mother determined to show him.

“SCV’s bring in the crystals over there,” she pointed to a beltway where large chunks and whole smaller crystals were brought in and pulled up into the machinery. “Now, we could just dump it straight into the nanoforge and wait for the blue goo to melt everything down, but that’s actually inefficient, so first, it goes through a series of chompers.” She explained, pointing. “Do you know why?”

Tony thought about it for most of a minute. “To increase surface area?”

“Close!” She agreed happily. “If we wanted the best possible surface area, we’d continue to break things down until the crystals were sand and then pour it into the forge. Instead, we go for gravel, ranging from chips about the size of your finger to rocks about the size of your head. The chunk only needs to be small enough to have completely dissolved by the time it gets two thirds of the way down the tank. After that, the process is reversed, forming ingots which come out over there!” She pointed to another series of beltways that led to a series of familiar modern shipping containers.

“Some companies simply fill their containers with whatever they dig up as the forge craps it out, but we here at Diamondback don’t ship out a container until it’s entire full of pure elements.” She leaned down to whisper conspiratorially into his ear. “It makes selling easier, as the shipment can be sold in bulk without reloading, haggling, sorting or fraud claims.”

Tony resisted the urge to cringe at the thought. In two separate lives, he’s made his name on logistics, and such sloppiness had been a bane of both lives. It was almost painful that his mother took such pleasure in doing the bare minimum. It boded poorly for the rest of the society.

“Wanna get a souvenir?” His mother asked out of the blue. “The chompers use mechanical pressure and resonant frequencies to break down the crystal structure, but one of the common maintenance duties is to gather chips that fly out of the machinery and fall down the sides.”

Thinking it over, Tony decided it would be proper signaling to humor his mother, and so agreed enthusiastically. Ten minutes more of navigation, they’d arrived at the maintenance shed and greeted the local worker, Andy Kelerchec. Once mother had explained what they wanted, Andy went over to the most recent bin of chips and shards, that hadn’t yet been poured back into the system and pulled out several pieces with a good shape and no sharp edges.

“Here ya go, kid.” He said, offering the stones to him. “Which one strikes yer fancy?”

This close to the stones, the minerals seemed to vibrate and sing to him and Tony reached out slowly, taking a pear shaped shard.

The moment his fingers touched the gem, everything went white.