11 - The Core of the Problem
“Have you actually taken the time to examine the ship in your possession?” Veskari asked as Maya, Tender, and Bell entered the bridge of Shen’s ship.
Maya paused. “I know that tone. Mother used to use it a lot. I did something wrong.”
“I’m asking this as nicely as I can, but did you even try to figure out how to use this ship?” Veskari asked again.
Maya cast a glance at Bell who shrugged and Tender was silent.
“Uh… I was pretty busy. Saving mankind and all that.”
Veskari gave a sigh, which was impressive seeing as he had no lungs and was a golden orb that had been plugged into the ship. His voice came out of hidden speakers about the bridge.
Maya looked around the bridge of Shen’s ship, she really needed to come up with a better name than that. It wasn’t as if the thought never occurred to her, but it was still Shen’s ship, it wasn’t hers. It was his. The vessel had been the place of many horrors and if there were such things as ghosts, this place would be ground zero.
Maya rubbed her head with her metal cast. She had only seven hours left in her regrow, but she was already tiring of the metal block. She could feel her hand itching underneath it and Nan stated it would only get worse. How much worse? She didn’t know, but it would get real bad. More joyous things to look forward to.
“Give it to me straight, Vesky. Don’t sugarcoat it for me. I’m a big girl wearing my big girl pants.”
“You are severely under utilizing this ships systems and even the cores in your possession.”
“Hmmm… not bad,” Maya said.
“Your inefficiency in the use of this ship borders on criminal mismanagement.”
“That hurts.” Maya flinched. “Food, shelter, saving mankind, fending off rogue AIs, and trying to learn all this system tech stuff from only a couple of knowledge cubes and manuals is time consuming. I didn’t get a user manual on how to run the ship at optimal levels.”
“I begin to understand that,” Veskari said.
“So what’s wrong?”
“In short, everything. The ship’s core is only running at a quarter of its power, the weapons systems and defense systems haven’t been activated even after the rogue AI attack, there are numerous maintenance issues that are beginning to become serious threats, and for the three mana cores, you are seriously hampering their collection of ambient mana.”
“Keep explaining, please.”
“You know what ambient mana is?”
“Of course. Magic space particles that get chomped on by everyone in the multiverse.”
Veskari sighed. “From the readings I’ve taken and what I remember of the multiverse at large, this dimensional plane has about one tenth of the ambient mana that exists in the rest of the multiverse.”
“Yeah, everyone’s been saying the mana’s on the low side here,” Maya said.
“There is very low mana in this whole plane and you have three Category V mana cores within less than a kilometer from one another.”
“Keep your cores close; keep your cores safe.”
“You realize mana cores condense ambient mana, right?”
“That’s what people have said, yes.”
“I think she’s trying to lead you to an answer, boss,” Tender said.
“I get that. I’m just not getting what she’s trying to say.”
Veskari sighed again. “With the low ambient mana and three C5 cores in one area, they are actively competing against one another to recharge themselves. You say that it takes five standard days to recharge the cores, if they were correctly placed and not competing against one another, you could cut down that time to less than two standard days.”
Maya chewed on the information and turned to Bell and Tender. “Did you guys know this?”
“I just woke up,” Bell said.
“I do not have information on mana cores at my disposal,” Tender replied.
“But you both know about cores and such, right? Not from actual studying of them, but from general osmosis of knowledge kind of stuff.”
“I just woke up.”
“I do not-“
“Yeah,” Maya frowned. She turned to face Veskari’s core and rubbed her head. “Well, setting out a core all by it’s lonesome is not going to happen,” she said. “We might as well batter them up and deep fry them because all the damned rogue AIs are gonna show up hankering for a slice of that core.”
“I understand that, I’m just stating the facts as I see them.”
“Right. Can we shut down two of the cores and let one do it’s recharge thing?” Maya asked.
“Shutting down a core is a difficult process, it will still be absorbing ambient mana at a lesser rate, but then it will have to undergo a restarting sequence that could take an entire standard day.”
“Right, gotta keep that boiler hot,” Maya tapped her hand on her cast. “Well, shit. Maybe we can just hop around the plane with the cores dangling out there.”
“That would not be advisable,” Veskari stated.
“Yeah, no shit.” Maya sighed. “Let me think on this. We need the two cores to open the threshold. It’s a weird thing, we’re not actually drawing mana when the threshold is opened, but the mana cores still need to be there. Once the dimensional bridge is built and the cage is active, then it begins drawing mana. The more mana we got on hand, the longer we can keep the bridge open and connected. We need more cores.”
“We have Big Snake’s core,” Tender said. “It is a small one, comparable to the pub core.”
Maya smirked, just a few weeks ago it was the pub mana core that had been the only thing keeping them alive. Now they were swimming in cores, but those same cores were emptying the pool of ambient mana they were wading in.
“What about the mana batteries powering the stasis pod?” Bell asked. “I have seen their like, very expensive and long lasting. They can be recharged, yes?”
“Of course. Nan has removed the stasis pod from the battery power source and has connected it to the ship’s core. A much stable energy source,” Veskari stated. “To recharge a single one of those batteries will require the collected mana of one and a half of these C5 cores.”
“Really?” Maya was amazed. “There’s six of those bad boys, so you’re saying they’ll suck up nine full mana cores?”
“Yes.”
Maya sighed and tried to think. It was interrupted.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but Yositari is ready to be removed from the statsis gel,” Nan’s voice came through the comms.
Maya grinned.”Oh, man. I wanna see this.”
***
“So a full core isn’t drawing on ambient mana?” Maya asked as the trio walked into the medical room.
“It still draws in ambient mana, but at a very reduced rate. Mana cores always draw in mana, regardless if they are at capacity or shut down. Yet if one core is fully charged, the ambient mana available for other cores increases,” Veskari responded.
“We can do a half charge on these batteries, right?”
“Yes, but doing so will eventually corrupt the battery.”
“Of course.”
Nan was in her holographic form and standing over Yosi’s pod. There were an array of machinery and devices stacked around the pod. Even with her Evaluation Skill she couldn’t identify more than half of them.
“Yositari will not awaken once she is removed,” Nan began. “Consciousness will be a slow process, her body has slight damage, but long term stasis also comes with its own set of problems. Especially if one has been under for over twenty thousand standard years.” Nan moved around the pod and began manipulating tools to remove the transparent covering of the pod. A series of mechanical arms dropped down from the ceiling, a brief memory came to Maya as she had seen similar arms in the Hanganathorie.
Maya and Bell took a seat on a bed and watched, while Tender stood by the door, seemingly staring off into space. She couldn’t see Veskari, but she could almost feel a palpable presence in the room, watching everything and waiting with bated breath.
“Ease up, Vesky. Nan’s the best, plus she’s from your neck of the woods. She’s got this,” Maya said.
“I do not question the AI Nanaseto’s abilities, I only worry about complications,” Veskari responded.
There was a soft pop and one of the machine arms hanging down from the ceiling removed the glass plate from the tube. A smell like disinfectant filled the room as the small dinosaur looking creature was exposed. Maya peered at the figure with interest, seeing that its body was encased in the gel like substance.
From the quick manual download she found on the stasis pod, Maya knew that the gel’s main component was the blood of some kind of space whale. Dangerous to obtain, but also highly sought after for its wide range of usage.
“Are these space whales being hunted to extinction?” Maya asked.
It was Veskari who answered. “There are multiple types of creatures that produce the specialty ingredients to create stasis gel,” he said.
“It’s not about the animal itself,” Bell said. “It’s about the mana trace that makes up the creature. It’s the reason that on any world one can find the ingredients to make healing potions and other alchemical items, the plant or creatures involved in creating those items doesn’t matter, only their mana trace.”
“Ah.” Maya said. “So there could be space whales like this in my universe?”
“From what I understand,” Veskari began, “it is difficult for pre-Integrated life to evolve in the vacuum of space. Therefore newly integrated worlds tend to not have the diversity of space faring lifeforms as older established Integrated universes.”
“So no space whales?” Maya frowned.
“Doubtful. Although that does mean your universe is currently a much safer place to travel around in, older Integrated universes tend to be… rich in life,” Veskari stated.
“They’re a bloody nuisance,” Zono’s voice suddenly butted in.
“Hey, I thought you were busy fixing yourself?”
“I got the message that the little Tari was getting pulled out of her tube,” Zono said. “But let me tell you, space creatures are a nightmare. Whole fleets get wiped out by them, whole wars had to grind to a halt because some migratory creatures were passing through a star system. Not to mention that the damage they can cause to a living world too.”
“The Sword of the Universe is on a constant campaign to eliminate the larger instances of space faring creatures, to keep the Union’s trade routes open,” Tender stated from the door. “I hear it is a intensive process, but also provides the Sword of the Universe with experience points needed for them to grow.”
Maya chewed on the information and watched intently as Nan began to clear away the gel with her mechanical arms. They moved with efficient dexterity about the body, chipping away at the harden gel and at the same time not touching her body.
“At this stage,” Nan said, “the body is very fragile. The gel has hardened and caused some molecular changes to the skin exposed to the gel. It can tear, rip, or shred easily. Therefore patience and care is required to remove it.”
“Can the gel be used again?” Maya asked.
“Perhaps in the unused stasis pods, but this gel has been active for too long now. Within another thousand standard years, it would have degraded until it could not keep the SIL in suspended animation.”
Everyone remained quiet and watched after that. The room held an expectant breath as they watched Nan chip away at the gel. Small flakes fell to the deck where another arm immediately sucked them up. As half of the body was freed, another machine rose down from the ceiling and clamped down over Yosi’s face. Lights began blinking and Nan allowed them access to the holographic monitor that she could see.
Maya grimaced at the detailed image of a series of microscopic tubes tunneling into Yosi’s lungs, heart, and other organs. This process had required some Tier 2 tech and Maya watched with sick fascination as organs were rebuilt on the fly. After a long moment the heart gave a jerk and stuttered, a moment later it began beating.
Yosi’s body then jerked to life, the small alien’s back arched and it’s inverted legs kicked out, the eyes opened up and wide multicolored eyes frantically rolled around.
“She is not awake,” Nan stated calmly. “This is a body’s normal reaction.”
Maya felt sick as she watched Yosi thrash and shudder on the table. The little creature gave out a shrill screech through the mask covering her face. Bell looked horrified and after a moment he left the room.
“Let him process,” Nan stated as Maya got up to follow him. “Your intervention will only hinder.”
Maya frowned, but sat back down. Nan did know best.
What followed was another half hour of Yosi jerking, shuddering, and occasionally letting out strangled cries of pain. It looked horrible, but Nan stated Yosi wasn’t really feeling anything. Her brain was still ‘asleep’ and would need some repairs for her to gain full functionality.
Maya sighed, feeling slightly sick. “Tell me when she’s out of the gel,” she said. “I need… I need to do something.”
“Return in five hours to get your cast removed.” Nan said as she was in the process of peeling off dead skin on Yosi. “I should be done in another hour.”
“Right,” Maya said and hurriedly left the room. Tender followed. Even Zono had left, mumbling about needing to do his own repairs.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
***
“So this black goo is like your blood, right?” Maya asked as she tried to take her mind off what she had seen by tearing chunks out of Big Snake. It was different when it wasn’t a flesh and blood creature, she told herself.
“Blood is not the correct term, it is a conductive gel that enables mana to be used in areas of high need. It passively collects ambient mana, but at a very slow rate.”
Maya paused with those words. “But its made by all rogue AIs, right?”
“From what little information I have on rogue AIs that exist in the multiverse, they do not have this ‘black goo’. I believe it is an evolutionary adaptation to the low ambient mana of this plane. The ‘black goo’ helps in harnessing ambient mana, it also allows the rogue AI to ‘inject’ its stored mana into needed areas, weapons, motors, etc.”
“But it’s made by rogue AIs?”
“Yes.”
“Can we make it?”
“I do not know. The ‘black goo’ I have been using in my forms comes from the collected remains of our defeated foes,” Tender held up a bucket that was filled with black goo.
Maya looked at the bucket and looked at Tender. She suddenly realized she hadn’t been paying all that much attention to things when she had helped rebuild his body after the battle with Shen. She had been mostly following his orders on where to put what and what to do, the fight having weighed heavily on her mind at the time.
“We have the rogue AI manufacturing module,” Maya said. The manufacturing module had been the possession of either the Peacock Turtle AI or the Rat AI, it had been found in the engineering section of the ship and had been used to make components and craft items needed by the rogue AIs. “Can we make more of this black goo?”
“It is a combination of mana stones and various other ingredients,” Tender said. “I believe the rogue AIs have been crushing up mana batteries, mixing them with other things, and creating this black goo.”
“It’s like rogue AI alchemy?” Maya grinned.
“I suppose.”
“Does the black goo have to be pumped, connected to a power source or anything? Or can it just hang out and collect mana.”
“Ah, I see what you are getting at,” Tender said. “In essence the ‘black goo’ is like a mana battery, but one that can collect mana at the same time as storing it. It is not a mana core, although it may seem like it, for it is not actively pulling in ambient mana; it is just absorbing what it comes in contact with in a passive manner. Very inefficient and very slow.”
“But if we get mana stones and figure out how these things are being made, we can create more of this black goo, right?”
“I would think so.”
Maya rubbed her cast and smiled. “Tell me, Tender. Are there places in the multiverse that have higher than normal ambient mana?”
Tender paused as he thought. “Of course, mana is not distributed evenly across the multiverse. Especially newly Integrated worlds, especially Point of Contact worlds.”
Maya grinned even more. “What’s the general level of mana in a Point of Contact world?”
“I do not know, especially this early into Integration. I would imagine that it would be very high.”
Maya rubbed her cast again. “I got an idea,” she said.
“I believe I see where you are going,” Tender replied.
She rubbed her cast again, grimacing. “Aw, shit. I think the Itch is starting,” she said. She suddenly gasped in pain as her left hand felt like it caught on fire. It wasn’t an itch, it was a searing burning sensation that traveled up her arm.
“Holy shit, that hurts!”
***
“Once, long ago a wise woman, living in a dark cave, hinted that I would gain fortune and salvation by defeating the dreaded Peacock Turtle,” Maya said as she, Tender, and Bell sat before a campfire.
They were in the virtual world, Maya had been driven to near insanity with the fire in her arms and had begged Nan to shove her into the VR system to escape it. It had worked, Maya wasn’t trying to tear off the cast to get to her hand and Bell and Tender had joined her to listen to her plans. They were in a copy of a campsite that Maya had visited during her teenage years. She wasn’t one for camping, but this tale required the right setting.
“You’re talking about Nanaseto, correct?” Tender surmised.
“Yes the demonic Nan, carver of flesh, healer of wounds, breaker of hearts,” Maya said.
“I doubt she’s broken any hearts,” Bell responded.
“The way is dangerous,” Maya continued, “it is dark and it is filled with terrible monsters seeking your destruction, she told me. The dreaded Peacock Turtle lives in a poisoned land, it basks in the glow of mystical fire that injures all who approach it, yet it takes power from that fire.”
“The unshielded mana core,” Tender said.
“I know,” Bell muttered.
“Then she said something about ‘gens’ and I completely forgot about it after that.” Maya said.
“Veskari was totally awesome about putting down units of mana measurements for me. Anyway, this is what I learned. In the beginning, there is essence mana, the existence destroying force that the System goes out and fights in an endless battle that has spanned billions of years. The System then takes that essence mana and breaks it down into essence, the units that make up the multiverse, and mana, the units that powers everything in the multiverse. Of the two, mana is the one everyone has connection with, as it is what changes a SIL. Now essence is something that only higher Tiered SIL get to play with, as it’s the building blocks of the multiverse.
“The broken down mana becomes ambient mana or in Veskari’s words, protomana, from which is derived the ambient mana unit of measurement, promoa. This is just raw energy floating in the wind. Now, the background, ambient, levels of promoa are about the same everywhere, in the multiverse it’s about 500 promoa per cubic meter. Mana cores generally deplete the ambient mana in an area fairly quickly, but mana abhors a vacuum and therefore it tries to maintain a balance everywhere.
“Now we come to the mana cores. A C5. mana core, like the Hangy’s core, is a middle of the road sized mana core. That type of core is designed to pull in about 1,000,000 promoa a minute within a 10,000 cubic meter area. Within the core the promoa (p) gets made into generic mana, gens (g), the kind of mana machines use. Since it’s machine mana, it’s considered ‘lesser’ than the mana produced by biological entities. The conversion rate from promoa to gens is about 1000p to 1g. So a C5 core is sucking in about 100p per cubic meter, across 10,000 cubic meters, every minute. Which is turned into 1,000g a minute. That’s a lot, right? Wrong!
“You see because of weird mana magic laws, the more promoa that are on hand within the core, the more the of the ambient mana it is able to absorb. That means the base level of 100p a minute gets cranked up to 500p a minute, meaning the core will be sucking in 5,000,000p a minute producing 5,000g a minute. That’s 9,000,000g a standard day!
“This is not very interesting,” Bell said, looking bored.
“I also find it uninteresting,” Tender added.
“Your message said that you had obtained a breakthrough that could allow us to use the dimensional cage near infinitely. Yet, you’re telling us things we already know,” Bell added.
“Ease up there, pal. I’m covering my bases and recording this for posterity’s sake,” Maya turned ninety degrees from where she sat and spoke. “This is for you at home watching,” she said to empty air.
“What are you doing?” Bell asked.
“Breaking the fourth wall,” Maya replied.
“I do not understand,” Tender said.
“One day you will understand all, Tender. Just have patience.” Maya cleared her throat and turned back to the two. “Now we get to this dimensional plane and it’s weird lack of mana. From the scans Vesky ran, we’re looking at about 50p a cubic meter on average, not the multiverse standard of 500p. This makes the plane a mana desert.
“So, a weird thing happens when you have a full core and it’s pulling in the max amount of promoa from the air, if the mana isn’t drawn out the generic mana begins cannibalizing itself, the gens get torn back down to promoa, but then an even weirder thing happens. Instead of turning 1g into 1000p, it makes a tiny bit more promoa than it used to create the gen. No one knows where that extra promoa comes from, but it is created. It’s not essence mana because there is no essence mana here and the cores are still working like they should be.”
“I had not considered that,” Tender said. “All I understood was that the cores were working as they should be.”
“Well, Vesky is paying off dividends already with all his knowledge,”Maya said. “That extra promoa is being created by every one of the nine million gens being produced. They’re being torn back down and with every tear down, it’s producing a free 1 percent increase.
“Now as exponential increases go, this is scary. That original 1000p will be doubled within seventy tear downs and rebuilds. Then after another seventy cycles, it’ll double again. And again. And again. Until its producing so much generic mana that the sheer condensed mana will create an unstable mana vortex that will destroy everything in a hundred kilometer radius, then all that generic mana will shower out like some horrid poison. Making life a serious hell for any low tiered suckers caught in its wake.
“But that rarely happens, mostly due to the fact that the core will blow before it reaches that critical event. There’s more math behind it, but the big deal is that a C5 core can create up to ten times what it says on the box. Instead of a simple 9Mg a day, it’ll be producing 90Mg a day. That’s how these cores are able to power a big ole space ship.
“The common multiverse consensus is to run a core at eighty percent of capacity, any higher and you’re looking at the risk of boomy-boom-booms. This is where mana batteries come into play, they pull the generic mana off the top and store it, allowing the core to run at eighty percent. “
“Why are you telling us all of this?” Bell asked.
“Because I’m getting to the good part. Mana batteries are a safety valve and that means somewhere on the Hangy is a giant ass mana battery.”
“Ah,” Tender said.
“I’m not talking about those heavy ass emergency batteries, I’m talking about one that can store all the energy created by a C5 core. That’s a lot of battery there.”
“Would it not have been corrupted by mana?” Bell asked. “As what occurred to the emergency mana batteries.”
“These big ole batteries are meant to be the real power source behind the ship’s function. Once they’re fully charged, they’re supposed to power everything. Mana cores are just supposed to be used to collect mana, not store it.”
Everyone was quiet as they digested that bit of information.
“Then that would mean…”
“Yup. We were totally using the cores wrong. Veskari was correct in saying that it was bordering on criminal mismanagement. We have been draining the entire core every time we opened a threshold, to the point where it had to start all the way back from effectively zero.”
“Meaning that it’s been relying on only ambient mana to recharge itself.”
“Yeah, apparently there needs to be a ‘critical mass’ that allows the core to tear down the gens and gain that little boost. Just as the cores were reaching that point, we pull the plug and drain the whole thing to get back to Earth. We should have been letting the cores run hot and then pulling the excess into mana batteries, which then we would use to power the cage. We have just been doing what Shen did and that guy was a total moron when it came to engineering.”
“That’s all well and good, but why the big explanation?” Bell asked.
Maya grinned. “I have a plan.” She looked to Tender.
“She has a plan,” Tender said in a ‘spooky’ voice.
Bell frowned.
“We have six awesome crafted mana batteries.. We have three C5 cores that can charge two of those bad boys up to full. There is some weird efficiency loss when changing raw gen mana into stored mana, but no biggie.
“Veskari said that the cores were competing for promoa because they were too close together. A C5 core needs a good 10,000 cubic meters of free space around it to work effectively. By having all these cores clustered together, we’ve been hampering them.”
“I think the reason Shen didn’t have any batteries or a set up to collect excess mana is because he didn’t open these thresholds that often. Well, he couldn’t but he was trying to brute force them open using the cores, which burned out the mana channels on all the poor people he captured. Veskari also found logs that showed he was just releasing mana when it got to dangerous levels.”
“What does this all mean?” Bell asked.
Maya grinned again. “Those mana batteries we found, they can hold 20Mg of mana. A fully operational C5 core will be producing 90Mg a day! Well, theoretically.”
“Theoretically?” Bell frowned again.
“Low mana in this dang place. We’re getting 50p a cubic foot, not 500p. So technically a fully operational C5 core would be making 9Mg a day in the RSH,” Maya said.
“RSH?” Bell asked.
“Rainbow Sky Hellscape.” Maya said.
“Right…”
“There’s also something weird about the dirt here. The ambient mana saturation is a lot lower in the dirt, so we’ve been kicking ourselves in the butt by burying the cores. Which is weird, because in the multiverse at large, ambient mana levels are pretty much standard everywhere, even inside of a star’s core. The only place it really changes are around Tier 2 point of contact worlds and naturally occurring mana saturated areas.
“With Tier 2 POC worlds, you’re looking at anywhere between ten to a hundred times the ambient mana in the place. It’s wild out there, but this far into Integration it hasn’t stabilized yet. This is where my awesome plan comes into play,” Maya grinned. “We’re gonna charge up those batteries, then we’re gonna build us a black goo mana net.”
Bell sighed. “What now?”
“There is an abundance of rogue AIs here, they all have this black goo inside of them that is a kind of combo mana battery and passive mana collector. These are attached to a condenser and thereby creating a workaround mana core. It’s a pretty ingenious adaptation by the rogue AIs. The black goo is not efficient nor is it powerful, but it’s free generic mana.”
Maya stood up and waved her hands, the scene changed from the campsite to her standing in an empty gray dirt void. Above them was a rough image of a net of cloth and metal that stretched for kilometers.
“I present to you, the Black Goo Mana Net!” Maya announced.
“I don’t get it,” Bell said.
“According to Nan, we can create durable tubes out of the duracloth. Whole miles of them. From what Tender and I discovered, the rogue AI black goo looks like liquid, feels like liquid, but it really isn’t a liquid. It doesn’t freeze, boil, or evaporate. It’s a mixture of mana stones and eleven herbs and spices.”
Maya waved her hands again and they were standing in the dark void of space, below them lazily spun Earth.
“My plan is to create a few miles of the black goo net and then attach it to a mana core. Then we fly up overtop of Earth and chuck that core out the front door.”
“So that you can take advantage of the higher ambient mana levels?” Bell asked.
“Righto, buddy. The thing with C5 cores is that they can only go up to 10k cubic meters, but if you attach a mana net, which is a thing, they can get up to 30k cubic meters to draw from, meaning they’re tripling the amount of ambient mana they’re pulling in. Therefore… instead of 90Mg, It’ll be 270Mg a friggin’ day! That’s 9Mg an hour! That’s what one of these cores produces in a day, in this place.”
Bell raised an eye ridge.
“This solves a lot of our problems. There’s no scary rogue AIs in space around Earth, there are currently no space whales in our universe, and the high concentration of mana in the area could be ten times what is considered normal. So, instead of 270Mg, it could be 2700Mg! Or even more! Actually it can’t be any more than 350Mg a day, otherwise the core will burn itself out and nasty boomy-boom-booms occur. So, we’re looking at maybe a 350Mg or nearly 12Mg an hour. That would mean one of the crafted batteries will be charged in less than 2 hours, or just a bit under 21 hours RSH time.”
Bell perked up at that.
“Looking at the data, we’re burning nearly 2Mg an hour to keep the cage operational. So if we toss both cores out there, that’ll free us of the fear of them being snapped up by rogue AIs and it will also charge up two whole crafted mana batteries every 21 hours. Which can then be used to power the cage.”
“But the two charged batteries will only produce 20 hrs of cage time,” Bell said.
“Well, according the newly organized and correlated data from Veskari, we only really need about 16Mg to open the threshold, any fewer gens and it’ll not form. We’ve been waiting for it to reach 40Mg before opening the gateway, which gave us twenty hours to play around in the multiverse.
“For the time being, we’ll be only doing short hops back to the multiverse. Less than eight hours, which will be about forty minutes MVT.”
“Multiverse time?” Tender asked.
“Got it in one, buddy. Using the minimum amount of time needed, we can hop into Earth space and collect the charged mana batteries. Reset them and start all over again. Then we build up a stockpile of all six of them, maybe also put together all the mana batteries we’ve been able to salvage, find the big one in Hangy and then we’ll have oodles of time back in the multiverse, enough that we don’t even have to close the gateway, we’ll just be collecting mana from the goo network. Perhaps if we build a big enough goo network, we won’t have to use cores anymore. It may be inefficient and slow, but the black goo doesn’t require mana channeling to create. Plus, y’know, space is huge.”
“How easy is it to create the black goo?” Bell asked.
“Just mana stones and some other ingredients. Tender ran an analyst on it to see what’s needed and it looks doable. Zono’s got all the stuff we’ll need packed away in his dimensional storage, all we need to do is… buy it. If we can create the black goo, we’ll be able to make a knock-off mana battery. No Tier 2 machinery or arcane knowledge needed. If it’s good enough for rogue AIs, it’s good enough for us.”
“Rogue AIs created the black goo?” Bell asked.
“Yup. But before you say ’Tis evil, this black goo’, it’s really not. It’s just black goo. Nothing roguish or evil about it.”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” Bell said.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“I have a question. If the C5 core needs 10,000 cubic meters of space and if the promoa concentration around Earth is ten times what normal ambient mana is, why would you need the black goo net?”
Maya paused. “Uh…”
“If the promoa concentration around Earth is say… 5000p a cubic meter, then that would mean the cores would be producing…. 90Mgs, which will actually be 900Mg a day. As a C5 core, it can only produce 350Mg a day. So why the black goo net?”
“You’re right, in Earth’s ambient mana saturation, it might not be needed. But in any other place, the black goo would be a major boon. It’s collecting and creating mana, but it’s also extending the range of the C5 core.
“We probably should just toss out the cores over Earth, but long term the black goo is a mana collection and storage device. From Tender’s analyst on it, it can store up to 40,000g per liter, with the tube size, we’ll be needing about a liter for every twenty square meters. So if we create a twenty thousand square meter net, it will be able to store up to 40Mg. That could also act as a stabilizer for the mana cores, drawing off what is needed or supplying extra gens to keep it running at peak efficiency. Plus, we’ll always need more power. We’re gonna be expanding our base of operations soon, once I get that Economic Module Token spent. ”
“So this is what you have been spending the last four hours doing?” Bell smiled.
“The VR is pretty cool these days, with my Tier upgrade, my lack of mana channels, it’s not so much headache, brain destroying craziness as it once was. I’m starting to like it in here. Plus the last forty hours of VR time has been spent figuring out how to manufacture the tubes we’re gonna need. We won’t need much, just a small dab of black goo per meter, but it’s still gonna be a lot if we’re looking at creating forty thousand square meters of netting.”
“Indeed.”
“That brings up another thing.”
“What’s that?” Bell asked.
“We’re gonna need to become Vampires, the creatures of the night, the terror of the Rogue AI! Until we can begin production on our own, of course.”
“You want to drain rogue AIs of the black goo?” Bell asked.
“Yup. You down for some exsanguination?”
“I am,” Tender said.
“That feels wrong, somehow,” Maya muttered. “But we still have some stuff to do. I’m putting going back to Earth on hold for a few days, we’ll charge up two batteries, move the cores so they aren’t hampering one another, begin production on the black goo tubes, patch up the parts of Zono he needs fixing, salvage the rogue AIs we have on hand to collect goo and parts, then, “ Maya sighed, “then we move the ship to the Hangy. That’s where the real fun begins.”
“That’s a lot of work,” Bell said.
Maya grinned. “Stay busy or… I don’t know… stay in bed?”