Alpha poked the drone with a manipulator probe as it rested in the TAWP’s maintenance bay. Bays like this were intended to service larger, more expensive drones, but he didn’t have many other options. The [Wasps] were cheap and disposable, after all. The drone twitched, and a small light pulse flowed down the lines carved directly into its chassis.
That itself was an anomaly. [Wasp] drones were made nearly entirely of nanites, barring a light metallic skeleton. Any damage to the drone could be repaired near instantly. The drone would break down into its composite nanites only after the internal framework was destroyed beyond repair.
So how had the old codger done it? Regardless of how often he ran extensive diagnostic reports, they all came back as “nothing wrong.” It was as if nanites couldn’t recognize the changes to the drone, as if the lines had always been a part of it. The nanites couldn’t tell the difference even when the drone was compared to standard [Wasps].
How?
Why?!
The entire thing was grinding on his sanity.
At least from a programming standpoint.
The software was giving him all kinds of issues, but the hardware was coming along far better. He’d yet to identify the energy stored in the strange gem embedded in the drone’s head, but how the energy circulated was easy enough to observe. In fact, the unknown energy was observable in several spectrums, and even seemed to change depending on where it was being directed. It flowed through the grooves as easily as water through pipes or electricity through circuits. Alpha suspected that was exactly what they were, but more testing would have to be done.
The Third Federation’s own hardware and software had long evolved past simple yes/no binary code, but would any of that transfer over? The secret would likely lie in the unknown energy source, which only brought him back to the question of what exactly was it?
More importantly, was he willing to risk experimenting with an entirely new, potentially dangerous energy source without the slightest idea what he was doing?
…. Of course he was!
The first thing he tried to do was to isolate the energy from the system. This proved… more difficult than Alpha had originally suspected. While in the gem, the energy was totally non-reactive; even the soft glow the gem gave off was nothing more than common light to Alpha’s equipment.
The gem seemed designed to be replaceable and could easily be removed and reattached to the drone with some small manipulation of its component nanites. It was even carved with a little spiraling groove that slotted seamlessly into the design.
But once it was removed, all energy flow stopped completely, and Alpha was left with what appeared to be just a pretty rock. Observing the energy as it exited the stone was pointless, as any break in the connecting seal would render the entire thing inert.
Trying to siphon off the energy as it flowed through the grooves was just as frustrating. Carving any new grooves into the system caused that section of grooves to shut down. The energy would just stop flowing through that area, bypassing it entirely through several node points. Alpha made some headway thanks to that, however. By selectively cutting off different sections, he could map several key sections of the groove network. The various sections’ purpose was anyone’s guess, but it was progress.
Studying the gem itself yielded some interesting results as well. Close examination and some micro-samples revealed the “gem” to be, in reality, some form of organic crystal. One of his Sub-AIs dinged an entry in his logs, and Alpha pulled up the record. The crystal was a nearly identical match in structure and composition to the strange crystals he had pulled out of a few penguins’ hearts.
Interesting.
Alpha pulled one of the sample crystals he’d collected from the TAWP’s storage and compared the two. Other than the drone’s gem being meticulously cut and polished, the two gems were identical in size, roughly half the drone’s “head,” and similar in color, though far richer and deeper. Though from what little Alpha knew of lapidary, the stone that the cut gem came from had likely been several times larger. The theory was further supported by a large number of cracks and inclusions in the raw crystal. But the real question was, did it contain the same type of energy itself? Or was it merely a container?
It was hard to tell, as the raw crystal was as inert as the cut stone when disconnected from the groove network. With that in mind, there was a simple way of testing it.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
And it just so happened to be a specialty of Alpha’s, copying other people’s work and pretending like it was his own!
— — —
“Huzzah! It works!”
Maliit raised her ink-stained hands into the air and cheered.
Malaki lowered the book he’d been reading and peered over its edge toward his wife.
“Back in the land of the living, I see. Good. What’s for din — ?”
The small red welt on his forehead doubled in size as the sound of another empty inkwell contacting his skull cut off his words.
Malaki rubbed his head and glared at the ink-stained woman on the other side of the room.
Grumbling, he asked.
“Fine! Fine! What did you do?”
Maliit grinned from ear to ear and raised a single finger. A small light bloomed at its tip. Malaki waved his hand, unimpressed.
“Nothing special. Any youngin’ with a bit of talent could do that.”
Maliit’s grin widened even further. The light on top of her finger blinked out.
No… that wasn’t quite right. Malaki narrowed his eyes and focused on the point above her finger. He could see the air… waver slightly. The old man switched to [Spirit Sight], but he couldn’t quite make out what he was seeing even then. It looked like she was just channeling spirit energy into… nothing? No, not nothing; again, her spirit energy flexed, and now the “nothing” became a different “nothing”? That didn’t make any sense.
The old man stood, walked over, and waved his hand over his wife’s finger. It was… hot? An invisible flame? No, there was no fire-affinity at all. It simply… was heat. He’d heard of a heatless flame before… but flameless heat? How? Oh, sure, the uneducated might say that sunlight was a kind of flameless heat, but those in the know understood that even the heat of the Sister above and the faraway sun were just different aspects and manifestations of “Fire.”
That was why any aspiring Solar Mage or Cultivator had to start with learning the basics of fire before moving on to controlling the more complicated solar affinity. Even the boiling lakes far to the icy north could be attributed to the burning magma found deep below. So how was she producing “heat” without the smallest amount of fire-aligned spirit energy?
He asked her as much, too.
“How are you doing that?”
Maliit only smirked.
“You weren’t paying the slightest bit of attention, were you?”
Malaki only grumped and turned away, muttering something under his breath about rude juniors and nerdy old women. Then yelped as a small scorch mark appeared on the back of his head. Malaki smacked the spot, then whirled around to face the old crone. Maliit didn’t even bother pretending she wasn’t responsible. Malaki’s face flushed red, and he opened his mouth to yell, but another scorch mark appeared right over the still-swollen lump on his head.
Maliit broke into laughter as he rubbed the now lightly singed lump. She flexed her spirit energy a third time, but Malaki was ready for it this time. He threw up a small Spirit barrier in front of the invisible attack… only for a third scorch mark to appear on his chest. The old man went pale as Maliit’s grin turned predatory. Of course, a barrier meant to block a Spirit attack hadn’t worked… there was never any spirit energy, to begin with.
The patrolling Guardian, who would later respond to claims of someone “skinning a cat,” would later refuse to give a full report on the grounds of “concerns for his safety and wellbeing.”
— — —
“Huzzah! It works!”
Alpha raised his arms in victory!
He’d destroyed two dozen of the heart crystals trying to mimic the cut of the drone’s gem, with little success.
The raw crystals were surprisingly difficult to damage, but once he had, it had the nasty habit of crumbling to dust. It took a few tries before a careful examination of the cut stone showed it had never been truly cut at all. Instead, it appeared to have been fractured along some naturally occurring lines. Closer observation of the raw crystals revealed similar lines running throughout the crystal structure. Fracturing along these lines not only kept the crystal intact but somehow deepened the crystal’s color. The pieces broken off, meanwhile, were pale and colorless, as if all the color had been drained from them.
How that worked. Alpha didn’t have the faintest clue.
The next part had been the hardest, actually extracting the energy. Trying to carve the same spiral pattern into the gem no longer resulted in the crystal simply crumbling to dust. No, now the results were far more… explosive. That such a small crystal, only a few millimeters wide after fracturing, could explode with such force was impressive. Thankfully, the TAWP was equipped with more than one bay. It took Alpha a few hours to come up with a solution.
At first, he thought the spiral was there to transfer power, but why make it a spiral? Why cause so much damage to an already unstable crystal when other methods might work better? But what if the spiral was just there to increase the surface area in contact with the grooves instead? It wasn’t there to draw out power but collect as much of the energy already leaking as possible.
With that theory in mind, Alpha tried something different. Instead of cutting into the gem, Alpha carved the groove to fit the gem perfectly on a microscopic level.
The form-fitted gem was connected to an exact replica of a section of the line network Alpha’s experiments suggested acted as a reservoir for the energy before it was sent to other areas. Of course, scaled down to fit the much smaller gem. This section seemed to be responsible for actually “pulling” the energy out of the gem, though how it did so would have to be studied further.
And it worked! … kind of.
The energy in the gem reacted as expected, flowing through the gem and into the reservoir. However, it did so chaotically, leaping from the grooves at random intervals and sputtering at times. Still, it was progress.
Or it was until the entire array network started to warp and twist.
“Oh, No. That can’t be good…”
Using the drone launch platform in the bay, Alpha ejected the small piece of carved metal and embedded gem, no bigger than a few centimeters, into the air, several dozen meters. The near-meter-wide fireball that lit up the night sky sent several nearby people running and set the guards on edge.
It seemed Alpha still had some kinks to work out…