"It's just a number."
-Anonymous Poster, 2222, Parallel's Message Board
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The next time I opened my eyes – if it could be even considered that – I was back on my tycoon. Centrum bustled with life. Though it felt wrong to call rough machinery life. Most of the air was blockaded by smoke, whether it was provoked by my machines or the planet itself.
There was something beautiful in being able to see the unbridled rage of nature without any possibility of danger. Then conquering it.
The tycoon AI announced the changes since my last login, but they weren't many. I already knew that there wouldn't be much if not any difference.
Hmm, we have a solid mining operation already set, so I think we should expand.
"Where to?" The AI asked for clarification.
Mainly to where the resources are. We need silicon and a lot of it. Glass, semiconductors, alloys… Other metals would be good, like gold or aluminum, but we can wait for those. Focus on silicon.
"Understood," It took a few minutes, but the AI updated my local map with points of interest. Some of them were too far for my liking.
Why have you highlighted these two points of interest? They are like 10 kilometers away from the mother base.
"There are plentiful deposits of a lot of minerals and metals that may be of interest, the most abundant are quartz and sulfur."
Ooh, sulfur. I had forgotten about it. That must be important for some chemical processes, though that's a bit toward the future. The thing about science and technology is that we have found a way to use every single element in the periodic table for something. If not to consume the element directly, then for a catalyst or some sort of reactive for a chemical reaction. Though I wasn't versed enough to talk about that. Anything that fell into chemistry I was going to piggyback on the AI's accumulated knowledge from other tycoons.
Then let's get those deposits. Considering the limestone rover is already free, let's send it to get that silicon. The faster we can get computers running – no matter how primitive – the better. Semiconductor-based computing had the advantage of being simple to recreate and manufacture with the right machinery. And it was stable, unlike quantum computing, which meant that machines would continue to work regardless of whether they were on a boiling planet or the coldness of space.
"Understood. Sending mining drone." The green dot signalizing the mining rover left the limestone deposit on the map and marched into uncharted territory.
Continuing with other matters, we have a lot of stockpiles. A few tons of steel, treated limestone, a bit of salt, and much copper. We need to use it all up on conveyors. I want everything connected with conveyor belts.
"Understood," It was getting a bit repetitive hearing the AI say that word, but I didn't shut it down. I needed a bit of feedback, if I didn't get that 'understood' I could only assume that the AI hadn't heard me.
I revised every machine at my disposal. I had started barely a few days ago and it was already getting overwhelming. One thing I did notice was the energy consumption. The new smelters were sucking a lot of energy from the grid.
Have a rover get more salt, I want two more thermal power plants. If we are going to expand, we will need a lot of energy, and the number one cause of failure in tycoons is lacking energy reserves.
Most people didn't have the background to sustain a tycoon, and even if you could technically leave everything up to artificial intelligence, they weren't perfect. Even high-level virtual intelligences weren't perfect. Nothing tended to be perfected, so it was moronic to expect perfection from an untrained person.
And even then, if your tycoon failed, it wasn't the end. At the very minimum, there were two people per tycoon, so you could get rescued with auxiliary batteries, and if somehow both people had failed, you had infinite neighbors that could salvage your tycoon. Most stellar systems had a neighboring system at around 10 light-years, which was barely a few hours in FTL travel, if not less.
"Understood." The AI added.
The tycoon was doing fairly well with energy right now, but the colony ships' batteries were anywhere near full, and it would take them a few days at this rate, which meant that if I increased the energy consumption, I would run out of energy in another few days.
Energy was imperative to civilization, whether it was food or fossil fuels, you needed energy to move things.
The current plan is to… I looked again at the checklist I had done in the previous session. Fuck the wool! Are the smelters producing wool? I anxiously asked the AI.
"The smelter is currently producing mineral wool as a byproduct of the smelting process." The AI calmly announced.
Alright, good, good. It was hard to keep everything in my mind. I had many ideas, and time flew like light. Too fast and invisible. I could be hours connected to the Project Tycoon and they felt like minutes sometimes. Are we using that wool though?
"Negative. The mineral wool is only being stockpiled at the moment."
We gotta get a crafter running then. I want the cables insulated at once.
"Understood."
It didn't seem like much, but reducing energy loss from heat and points of failure would mean the tycoon's dwindling reserves would last a bit more. And we already had the materials, so it wasn't like I was losing much time and manpower with the operation.
Going back to before I remembered the whole wool thing, the current plant was to get those wires insulated, expand the conveyor belt network, expand the energy production, and add more mining outposts – static ones if possible as the rovers were too valuable.
To summarize: expand, expand, EXPAND.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
The true essence of a tycoon, expand without anything else mattering but the profits. However, in my case, it would take a bit before I could have any profit at all, at least a month, not that I cared. In that month I would apparently become a millionaire, something that I still struggled to believe.
Time passed in a fast-forward.
I kept track of the hours, but everything became blurry, tasks blending into each other. I liked to micromanage too much, meaning my mind was constantly stimulated.
The rover I had sent to mine quartz had already arrived and was already operating. One thing the AI forgot to mention was that the deposit was fairly underground meaning the rover had to bore as there weren't any cave entrances. Prospect technology had reached far, too far some may say as I had no idea how the AI managed to detect these deposits. Frequency and vibration? I speculated that it had to do something with sound, but I couldn't be sure.
I had all the foundations of the tycoon set down now. Resource extraction, transportation, and energy production. Stress slowly disappeared from my body. The tycoon was a long-term investment and something that would take years to develop into something noteworthy. I was aware that I still had another colony ship that I could use for Gelida or Saxis, but until I was capable of manufacturing spaceships, I didn't want to use it. Having two independent and unconnected colonies will not boost my productivity in any manner. But once I could transport resources between the planets, even if it was only charged batteries, then I could expand outwards.
There were three rocky celestial bodies still left to be colonized – and it wasn't like I was done with Centrum – besides a gas giant and a star.
Contrary to popular belief, stars could be colonized, though it was true that it wasn't colonization as most thought. Building Dyson swarms or orbital habitats could be considered colonization. If I managed to establish interplanetary networks, then a Dyson swarm would be the most optimal energy production choice at my disposal as I could transport the energy with batteries.
When will they develop wormholes? It seems rather inefficient to have to transport energy manually.
"Do you want me to connect to the Quantum Entanglement Forum to search for an answer?" The AI butted in.
No, don't do that. I was just thinking aloud.
"Understood." A simple word and overused word, but I don't know what I would do without the feedback.
Wormhole technology had been elusive, the same could be said for organic faster-than-light transport methods. If you wanted to travel to another planet, it was just simpler to use a rental body as the connection would be instant and in real-time.
Wormholes had the theoretical advantage of making interstellar travel instantaneous, just like communications. Many centuries ago it could have been difficult to say that as there would have been needed to have a receiving end. One – once again, in theory – needed to have a destination point for the wormhole for the passage to be stable. But that was no longer an issue as a good quarter of the Milky Way had been colonized, if not more. Metrics were beyond me. Meaning that between any established tycoon anywhere in the galaxy it would be possible to transport resources instantly.
Now the boring and dream-shattering part.
Wormholes were tricky. No matter how many probes they threw into black holes, and they did so daily in the hopes that one could work, a singularity had yet to be recorded. Wormholes didn't require black holes to exist, but black holes possessed one by definition if relativity were to be trusted. Black holes had been a significant contribution to wormhole research, thing I knew because of a niche interest of mine, but even if natural wormholes existed, it was impossible to detect anything past the event horizon of a black hole that wasn't Hawking radiation.
Another part of the problem of wormholes was that they needed to have an equivalent input-output in kind of an opposite force way of Newtonian physics. I may be getting it wrong here but that could be solved by sending equal payloads from both orifices – ignoring how two opposite objects may travel across an impossible thin tube – but if they hadn't done so yet, it was because it wasn't that simple.
There was a reason why I kept myself to robotics and only dipped into quantum physics as that was needed for simultaneous massive communication.
I was a fool mumbling about fields of research that were centuries old, spanning even before the second millennium. It was hard tricking the universe into thinking that it had been folded in half by monkeys.
Crafter rovers worked fast as they mounted the cable insulation. The AI had to sadly take the electrical grid down for an hour to mount them, but not much progress was lost, most of the tycoon currently worked on independent drones at the moment and the only electricity they got was from recharged stations.
Can you remind me when I will be able to join the galactic game and the marketplace?
"There are multiple steps that need to be achieved before doing so." A step-to-step guide appeared in my vision. "First you need a spaceport. Normal tycoons tend to share one in order to save resources and time, but in your case, it falls in solely on your shoulders."
Well, there were bound to be some setbacks to managing a whole system by myself.
"I recommend placing the spaceport on Saxis. Its position is perfect for interplanetary gravitational catapults."
That's what I intended to do. But first I want a space station here on Centrum. Is it possible to reuse colony ships?
"Affirmative. Colony ships are reusable, though they will take more time to travel as their original vessel was launched via railgun into Centrum and it is no longer usable."
Wait. So you are saying that if we rebuild this vessel I can railgun the ships all across Tolaya with the QEC?
"Affirmative. That is indeed a possibility."
Interesting, interesting. I expected I would need space stations to get a spaceship network going, but I had forgotten about the QEC. It would normally be a shared resource, but it was fully under my control. Continue explaining the steps, please.
"Understood." A rectangle with written information shone slightly. "The next step would be to have an FTL shipyard. Conventional space travel will otherwise prove trade unfeasible."
Yeah, I'm well aware of that. What's the closest stellar neighbor?
"CT-21354, also known as Harvesta." The AI announced.
If the tycoons worked as I thought they did, then Mérida or Makoto should be placed there. Whilst it would be funny to send a ship directly to their assigned tycoon as soon as they started with it, it was simply impossible. Is it possible to ask who are my neighbors? The people managing the tycoons, I mean.
"Negative." Well, my dreams were shattered so fast that they even reached the stratosphere. "You can only access that information once you have established a marketplace outpost."
Begin there, damn it! You scared me for a moment.
"Apologies, I will be more direct next time." Now I felt bad.
What's the next step?
"Those are all the steps." The AI taciturnly answered.
Wait, really?
"Affirmative. Only a spaceport and FTL ships are needed to access the marketplace."
Isn't that too easy?
"At current production rates, it will take 212 years before this system produces a ship capable of faster-than-light travel."
The number was so stupidly high that I straight up couldn't believe it. Are the growth projections factored in? If not do so.
"Negative. Growth projections have not been factored in. Apologies, growth projections cannot be calculated with precision as there is not enough data to establish a projection based on the nature of your tycoon."
Okay, I guess that's because you are taking into account the whole stellar system. What about only Centrum? I will extrapolate the numbers myself from there.
"Taking into account the current growth of the Centrum tycoon, FTL ship manufacturing will be possible in around six months."
Hmm… Considering I had more planets to work with, therefore having an abundance of more resources, and also working at lower gravities with Saxis and Gelida, the time could be cut pessimistically at least by half. Three months to connect with the greater humanity whole felt like a good time. Alright, that's our long-term goal. If I ever do something that deviates from the goal or will slow the progress significantly, please remind me of it.
"Understood."
By the time I would be able to connect to the marketplace, I would be back in Jericho, and with any luck, I may be able to ask for some advice there. The tutorial was now over, now it was time to expand until my influence reached beyond the confines of the Tolaya red dwarf.