After the whole disappointment with Sophia, I threw myself into my work with abandon. My gut feeling told me that it was either Clark’s fault by directly interfering or my family name that scared her off. Not that I could truly fault her for that, a company as large as KingCorps has some nasty scandals and rumors attached to it. Knowing my father, a lot of them were true and probably the nastiest off all. But I was not my father, and would never be.

But the single-minded focus with which I worked paid off. Whenever I had more than a few minutes, I was on a device, planning with Galatea and drawing up new things. The first thing I wanted to do was fleshing out the exo-frame I was using into a full armour. Something that I could use and go out to start spreading my name, my ‘brand’ so to speak. I needed to make big enough waves that the Guild approached me, I could not approach them or I would be in a weaker negotiating-position and I needed all the advantages I could get. Even for an organisation as powerful as the Guild, crossing my father was not done lightly.

I had contemplated the easy way out a few times, ‘killing’ myself and living in hiding but it was problematic, I had no doubt my father would leave no stone unturned if I vanished without an iron-clad death. In addition, if I ever got caught I might get a slap on the wrist by the law but my father would not just slap my wrist. He would make sure that my cage was secure, that I would never get a breath of air that he didn’t approved of. No, if I ever had to take that step, it would be after I tried every other possible way. For now, I had options. I would not burn those without desperate need. I had survived in my cage for sixteen years, I would survive a little longer.

But back to the armour I wanted to build. I had an idea for a ceramic-metal compound, hard, relatively light, energy-absorbent and resistant. All in all, a great thing for armour-scales, bonded onto a different metal to absorb and diffuse impacts. There was no use in having an armour that didn’t break when hit hard enough if it transferred the energy into me and the impact killed me. But I had a few ideas that would help with impact-diffusion, mostly a metal-sublayer followed by a gel-cushion.

The next two weeks were spent in an effort to get the needed raw materials, some of them were hard to get and I had to use both a covertly organised van and my exo-frame to move them. Some metals were damned hard to get, let alone move. But after I had enough raw materials, I wanted to start with the serious work. Casting, forging and annealing.

Sadly, it was not to be. Winter had come and Jailer Barbie was convinced that I would be lost without her. She spent every day in the mansion, making sure that I was not stepping out of line, no doubt on orders of my father. I made nice with her as best as I could but there was no way to get away for any long amount of time. Certainly not for a whole weekend, something I would need to get the compound produced and used, once it hardened for the first time, it would be close to impossible to further work with it. Similarly, the various armour-parts would have to be done in a single setting and there was just no time.

I would have to exercise patience and the only virtue I had any true adherence to was not patience. Diligence, I could do. The other six? Only by outside-force. In a way, my father was to me, what ‘God’ was to catholics, a vengeful being, forcing them to adhere by its strict guidelines or face eternal damnation. But I would break free, I would spread my wings and fly. He could burn the land and boil the sea, but he could not take the sky from me.

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But I digress, once again.

During the winter, progress on my project slowed down to a crawl. There was one weekend that I managed to get away and forge the metal layer of the armour and install a few of the servo-motors to power it. While I could simply use muscle-strength to move it in an unpowered mode, for non-combat situations and such, there was no way I could fight like that. It would make me a slow-moving, weak turtle. No, I would have to make it a true power-armour, moved by servos and guided by my movement. I had already designed the impact absorbing gel-layer to serve as a sensor-mesh as well, allowing me to move the armour similarly to a skin around me. It would require a dedicated processor and probably help from Galatea but I was certain it would work.

But other problems still loomed.

By now, I had managed to tap into one of the large main-water conduits, bringing water from the surrounding areas to supply the city, allowing me to drain off small amounts of water. Well, small compared to the total flow. I could use it to take the occasional shower or even drink it, after I ran it through filters, but it was not enough to prepare large amounts of deuterium, limiting me by limiting my energy generation. But Galatea had a solution for that, she had managed what I had not, she had created a continuous flow-heavy water separator. We just had to install it into the conduit, without triggering any warning flags and we could get all the heavy water we wanted. In the end, we decided that we could not put it truly into the conduit but we could give the conduit a second flow by installing it on the outside. Water-pressure would do the rest, forcing a steady flow into our conduit without a large impact on the water flow and pressure downstream. Hopefully.

Once more, Galatea proved that she was my greatest creation and I could never hope to create something greater. I felt like a proud parent after I installed her invention and opened the conduit so water could flow into her separator. It worked, and it worked like a charm.

Unless someone was running some strange monitoring of the heavy-water levels within our drinking water, nobody would notice anything. There might be a small hiccup but as long as there was no repetition or any hint of foul play, they would most likely just let it go. And even if they investigated, I had tapped the conduit almost fifteen meters below ground, unless they used some serious equipment, they had no chance to find me. Well, maybe if they knew about the old bunker. But I doubted that anything had survived Galatea’s purge, she was good with things like that.

Another problem that I had yet to solve was related to power as well. After I had finished the specs for my base-armour, there was no way I could power it with any technology I knew of. My fusion-reactor was far too large and I had no idea how to make it smaller. Also, the fusion-reactor had a few problems with portability, it needed a steady environment. There was no way I could use the current design in anything smaller than a bus. It needed highly calibrated shock-absorbers, controlled temperature and even controlled pressure. There was no way to build it into a combat-armour. And using normal battery-technology was more a joke, I could power the armour if I strapped on a large backpack filled with batteries. Well, at least I could power it for a minute or so. And not a minute of combat, with all servos running at full power, a minute of non-combat, just running the sensors, the processor and Galatea.

Yes, the suit would run an instance of Galatea, not the main-instance but one of them. As an AI, she could run multiple instances of herself but she disliked it, she said it made her feel strange, knowing that she had just, in effect, cloned herself. I accepted her feelings on that matter and would run both instances in a synchronized mode but I wanted to have her with me if we ever got separated from the surrounding network. There without her, the armour was a heavy, cumbersome piece of metal. With her, it was a marvel of ingenuity.

Well, it would be, if I was able to overcome the power-problem...