The Effervescence, a peer to peer matter transfer technology, its origins lost in the mists of time, shrouded by religious taboo and ritual.
The Woven Oath, a deal with the Effervescence and a slavery mankind has unknowingly sold itself into.
CHAPTER 1
“Ahrg! Oh come on I don’t have the fibers for this!”
A growl of rage echoed around a dusty room filled with dusty shelves stacked high with dusty tomes as I closed the thin pages of the book he had been searching through. Out of some long forgotten reflex I put my finger into my mouth, sucking on the nonexistent wound. Taking my finger back out, I studied it though I knew there would be nothing there.
“Everything ok in there? You didn’t drop one of them did you? You do know how old those books are, right?” A kind yet stern voice called out.
My frown deepened as I dragged my hands through my tousled ginger mop.
“Yes, I am well aware that these books have survived hundreds of gigaknots and that it would be a travesty for me to drop one and it shatter into a million tiny pieces. I know. It was just a paper cut, the Oath closed it before any blood got on the pages, don’t worry”
The voice from outside changed from stern to parent like “Running a little low on funds are we? I keep telling you to fill your sheath with cords that are sure bets, there’s no point in chasing the little fish when the big fish will eventually eat them up.”
“Wise words I'm sure.” There were a hundred other responses I wanted to give at that moment but none of them would be appropriate for a subordinate to yell at his boss from another room.
“Did you find what you were looking for? I don’t like you breathing in there too much, the humidity will increase the rate of degradation.”
“And not hermetically sealing the room, filtering the air or putting each book into its own vacuum sealed case helps with that?”
“Well, you know, I like to have the real experience when it comes to these ancient things. I want to read them like they are meant to be read.”
In truth, he was being far too short with the kind old man. The Professor meant well. I knew that I was just frustrated with the needless waste of fibers. Hell, if it wasn’t for the Professor managing to keep interest in our research we would all be out of a job and likely food for the Oath. I didn’t think I would make it as a Ruster. Images of myself in garish outfits and missing several teeth swam through my mind before I shuddered and delicately placed the book back. Checking over the room a final time for anything Imay have left out of place, Thomas would surely notice if he did, I exited the ancient, hand crafted, wooden door and closed it behind him.
Transported back into the present day decor I took in the lab and its shabby appearance. It wasn’t exactly what one would expect of a Post-DDA lab studying the Effervescence in the turn 2560. You would think the building researching the technology itself would be tricked out with the latest and greatest in EfferTech but alas, the university had shunned them to a disused old building left over from before they had the budget for the newer printed structures.
I stepped over the floor tile that, when stood on, compressed a wire and shorted the lighting circuit. What kind of a building had lighting circuits nowadays anyway? Reflexively, he checked his sheath.
He had Two hundred and ten fibers, mostly in Whisp and Second Layer. Ow two hundred and eight now. Second Layer had been on a downward trend for a while. Recently, it felt like they were losing value every few knots, not exactly sustainable.
“I thought you had a big game in the next few megaknots. Bastion can get pretty rough. If you even need a hand with some extra fibers you know I need you around.”
I looked into the gray eyes of Professor Thomas Goddard, the lead of his research lab. Almost the perfect archetype for a professor, Thomas’ wild white hair and spectacles gave him a grandfather look that matched his caring and gentle personality to a tee.
“Don’t worry about me Professor, I have more than you think. I may just have to hitch a few things to make sure I keep up with any big hits tomorrow.” The professor gave me a knowing smile but didn’t push the matter further.
I walked back towards the accelerator ring, no wiser after his dive into the “library” but still hopeful for the third attempt at the resend and reprint protocol they had devised.We had enough data for the Moneron conference in two megaknots but it would be really great if we could get something new before they presented it on stage.
I ran my hand over the curves and intricate wiring of the accelerator, knowing every screw and solder as if it were my own body. The team had build this beauty from scratch, some of it custom printed but most of it cobbled together from various old AstraMagna blueprints. We should really get a full blueprint scan of it before something breaks, just in case they ever have the fibers to print another one. The blue glow from the electronics and the gentle hum of the magnets put me back into gear, my heart rate slowing and my breathing becoming regular, now ready to run through the complicated procedure for the third time.
“You ready?” A soft voice spoke from my right, Julia, the ever present peace in the sea of stress that was my life.
“He better be ready, I ain’t doing this a fourth time.” A smile split George’s face and I turned to face him in response.
“Well, if you didn’t get so distracted every time a blond walked past the window then maybe you would call out the right timings.”
“I don’t know why The Professor even lets you take part, doesn’t Coach tell him about your terrible reaction speeds?”
Julia sighed. “Will you two cut it out! This really is the last chance we get before Moreron, can you please both focus!” Her face softened. “We’ve done this twice already, I’m sure the experience we all got from the last two rounds will allow us to see the bindings of our labors.”
The team moved into position with Julia taking hold of the energy level display screen. George would need to request the veritable cocktail of materials that would be required at each stage of the collapse and so began checking them off on the custom spreadsheet we had made. Julia positioned herself to have a clear view of the three particle cannons positioned around the ring as well as the magnetically contained collapse in the middle. The entire process took around three hundred knots and required no less than thirty different requisitions costing a whopping two hundred fibers, thankfully the cost of each run came out of the lab’s budget.
Each delivery had to be timed perfectly and the blueprint required for each placement could change at any moment. This was where Julia came in. The placement of each set of atoms needed to be precise, creating a rip in space no bigger than the tip of a needle wasn’t simple and until completion, very unstable. In essence, her job was to monitor the makeup of the collapse, ensuring the magnetic field held the collapse perfectly in the middle of the ring and also diverting our limited power to where it was most needed.
We still don’t know how the Effervescence technology creates micro bridges from Storage to wherever in real space but we do know that they last for only a fraction of a knot so we hoped stability wasn’t too much of a problem. The closest science had come to understanding the transfer was when the Moneron group made the link between the FTL drive composition and its negative mass output. Collapsing a structure made out of negative mass and linking it to an identical collapse of normal matter was one of the theorized methods for bridging two points in space.
This was the third time we had performed the resend and reprint protocol, technically the 4th but our first attempt fizzled out before we could atomise the energy cell we had printed for the experiment. After nearly ten turnings, the lab was a well oiled machine so I didn't bother with a pep talk.
"Ready?" I received two nods and two focused looks back. "Ok, 3, 2,1, go. George, start with lead all the way to 20%. Julia, make sure most of the power goes to the inserters but send 10% to the ring just to get it primed.” My two lab mates nodded and set to work. The particles began to enter the inserters as George performed transaction after transaction, layering blueprints on top of eachother. If we were going to make any money out of this research, our custom blueprints were likely to be one of the main sources. We had to go through an alternate supplier, we didn’t even bother asking AstraMagna, they would never supply our research with as much as a toilet blueprint.
George performed the initial transactions, adding the lead to the particle inserters ready to be ionized. I checked the magnetic containment, looking to Julia to make sure the power levels were correct and signaled George to continue.
"Ok George, go with the platinum and bismuth next, leave the protons till last and then activate the inserters. Julia, get ready for the switch, we usually get an extra spike during the transfer so be ready for it. You know what happens if we miss that step." She knew. The collapse would fizzle out, maybe drag some nearby atoms with it and we would waste two hundred fibers worth of materials.
George ran through the next transactions in a matter of dekaknots, priming the particle inserters with the necessary materials to begin the acceleration and then collision. I checked the composition and compared it to our simulations, altering the percentages of each element as we went. Finally George completed all the transactions and with a nod to Julia, flipped the switch to insert the particles into the acceleration ring. Julia fiddled with some settings, moving the demand from the inserters to the powerful magnets around our custom rig. I called out the final steps of the collapse.
“This is collapse four, Lead, Platinum, Bismuth and ignition protons. 20% lead.” I looked and got the nod from Julia and George. “Firing the accelerator.”
The ring-shaped accelerator began its low pitch wheering, quickly rising in pitch as the particles were accelerated faster and faster as the incredibly powerful electromagnets guided the ionized particles. The inside of the ring was a near total vacuum so the particles whizzing round and round made no noise themselves.
The wheering reached a crescendo to then be replaced by a single loud bang as all the magnets turned on in unison to fire the particles at each other in the center of the machine. I had been listening to the pitch of the magnets and knew my cue. At the exact moment the magnetic wheering reached its peak I activated the atomiser placed just above the charged energy cell I had printed for the experiment. I timed it to perfection and the cell atomized within a single knot of the inserters firing. The cell disappeared and a bright flash radiated from the center of the ring. Within the same knot the lab lights dimmed then went out, plunging us into almost complete blackness.
The emergency lighting came on a few dekaknots later and Julia looked at me with a mockingly disapproving look. “I told you you shouldn't do a collapse by yourself.” I smiled broadly. In truth, a few burnt out relays would likely have been the worst outcome, maybe the collapse would have evaporated too early and we would have lost the experiment.
“Um, checking the hitch logs it looks like we didn’t make it into the main EfferStorage this time either.” Julia piped up, breaking the moment.
Checking my sheath I could see that one and a half fibers had been deducted from my sheath earlier when I had first printed the energy cell but no fibers had been credited since resubmitting the cell. Energy cell mats were in high demand and it should have only taken a few knots for the material to be requisitioned by someone else. My sheath had submitted the material, via the dematerialised energy cell, but my sheath had not been credited again meaning noone had requested the material, most likely because it wasn’t available in main storage for them to request. We all waited for another thirty dekaknots but I eventually tore my eyes away from my sheath, trying to ignore the increasing amount of red, and looked at my team and shook my head. The smile slowly fell from George’s face, Julia remained as impassive as usual and even Thomas, who had come over to observe the final results, looked disappointed.
With a technology that can form any construct at any point in space, subject to the required materials and energy being present, how can one shortcut the cost of getting objects into space?
The Effervescence technology provided a foundation upon which man could push up to the limits of human creativity. We still had no material strong enough to construct a space elevator, but with the right blueprint, maybe we wouldn’t have to. The issue with a space elevator is that it requires a static cable or track to be hung down from orbit and be secured to the surface of a planet. No material could make it more than half the distance before it broke under its own weight. A visionary—in his day, many called him insane—by the name of Biseck decided that the best way to solve any problem was to turn any perceived weakness into an advantage. No material could hold its own weight and would fall back down to the surface of the planet. He acquiesced to these terms and designed a method of transportation with this as a feature rather than a bug.
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Though it sounds backward and ill-conceived, the key to the success of Biseck’s invention was a genius of engineering that has yet to be topped. The three control nodes, more complicated than most fusion reactor plants, guided his invention, turning the act of falling into humanity’s liberation. The name “Mag Drop'' is derived from its method of action. A cylindrical capsule ringed with sets of repeating magnets is raised several hundred feet into the air via a slowly accelerating rail launch system (at around 1.5 m/s2 acceleration. This “initial launch” is only slightly uncomfortable. At about two hundred meters up, the capsule is traveling at a lazy twenty-five meters per second. After being released by the magnetic launcher, the first magnetic ring blueprint is activated and a sixty-meter-wide ring materializes in midair above the capsule. The ring appears to hover in place for a dekaknot and then drops. The three controlling nodes constantly monitor the location and velocity of the capsule as it rises with two nodes housed planetside and the third attached to a space station locked in geostationary orbit above the spaceport. Triangulating the position and velocity of the capsule, the nodes activate a blueprint that requests the materialization of the massive magnetic ring above the rising capsule. The materialized ring instantly begins to fall toward the surface of the planet, and as the ring falls, the capsule rises, the magnetic attraction between itself and the inverse rings on the capsule increasing as the distance decreases. The two sets of opposing magnets pull toward each other, pulling the capsule upward and the magnetic ring downward. The magnets on the top side of the ring are reversed so that once it drops and passes over the capsule, a second push is given after the initial pull.
The giant magnetic ring continues to fall to Earth and is captured by even larger electromagnets before it impacts the ground. The kinetic energy gained by the ring as it falls is recaptured by the electromagnets on the ground and fed back i. Likewise, as the magnetic ring passes over the capsule, a large amount of electrical current is generated and stored in the giant capacitors aboard the transport device. This stored energy is used by ion thrusters in the final stages of assent to enable the fine movements required for docking. The three nodes monitor the capsule’s velocity, acceleration, and precise location, spawning new magnetic rings at the required locations and with perfect spacing to maintain a constant, comfortable acceleration toward the orbiting space station.
*****
Thomas and the rest of the team were waiting by our departure gate, nervously checking the time and searching around for me. They all turned as I came into view, trying to look as calm as if I had planned on turning up at this time all along.
“James! You made it! I really do hate it when we cut things close like this” Thomas had his travel hat on and would be a jittering wreck until we reached our destination. FTL Thomas was back in full force. We assumed it was the stresses of faster than light travel which stretched his nerves so thinly. Another ancient Pre-DDA book I had once read had a strange comment about it not mattering how fast the body travels, the soul travels at the speed of some oddly large and exotic pack animal. I’ve no idea what the quote actually meant but the imagery seemed to describe FTL Thomas perfectly.
George and Julia both gave me knowing looks. We had all had a late night but I had spent an extra fifty kiloknots at home, pouring over the data we had collected in our latest experiment. As a result, I had slept in and almost missed our ascension in the Mag Drop. George moved to greet me, a tired look also gracing his eyes.
“You really aren't doing much to keep FTL Thomas under check these days”. He chuckled.
“Good morning to you too man, though now I'm wondering if the lack of beauty sleep is whats progressing your rapidly graying hair?”
“Hey, not looking to sparky yourself for a barely thirty year old. Julia reminded me that you still owed me that mountain bike blueprint if we failed the third resend”
“I told you, once we settle on Moneron. I’m just secretly hoping I get jumped by a Ruster gang and they take it before I can give it back to you”.
“If you two have had quite enough fun we really should be going. The next drop is in less than ten kiloknots and if we miss it, that's it we miss our FTL connection to Moneron.” George and I stopped our bickering and smiled, turning to Thomas like the whole argument was a show we had put on just for him. Thomas let out a long suffering sigh and turned to set off towards Mag gate ten.
We boarded the capsule perfectly on time, both George and I giving Thomas a look as if to say ‘see, nothing to worry about.’ He simply frowned at us with a fatherly look of disapproval.
The launcher slowly accelerated us the first two hundred meters before the Mag Drop engaged and the giant rings began to fall over us, pulling and pushing us up into the stratosphere. I sent off some final messages through the EfferBubble with instructions to my cleaner not to move any of the papers strewn around my desk. What looks to some like a disorganized mess is in fact a highly structured collection of research notes and papers. I tell you, if one piece of paper moved I would know.
As we rose higher and higher I took the opportunity to survey the city as a whole and inspect the various elements of it from the sky. The city grew and expanded out from Hub 5, a giant 2d triangle exactly one hundred meters high and two hundred meters wide dominating the horizon. Leading up to the triangle, the Hub 5 Effervescence submission portal, was a complicated mess of spaghettified conveyor belts. The day was still early but I could already see a hive of activity around the rapidly moving belts. Trucks and drones bringing in refined and unrefined material from quarries and workers unloading the shipments onto the conveyors which transported the vast array of matter towards the triangular portal. Every time I rode the Mag Drop I watched all the moving parts with fascination, like one giant disconnected yet organized hive. The Hub deposit mechanism activates in the last five meters. The matter, submitted to the Hub like some kind of ritual sacrifice, is first atomised, broken down into a cloud of singular atoms, the cloud is then pulled through an extremely high powered energy beam of some kind. We have not yet been allowed to study the atomiser or energy beam projector, there are only sixteen Hubs in all the galaxy after all, plus the two broken ones, no one wants to risk us breaking something and potentially destroying an entire planet's economy.
From what is understood about the Effervescence and the Hub deposit system, the high energy beam must tags any atomised material that passes through it at a subatomic level. Each atom is logged and its data stored in the Effervescence ledger. When a requisition is put in, the ledger is consulted and the required materials delivered. The new location of each atom will be adjusted on the ledger and the fees for the entire process deducted from the sheath making the transaction. The cost of requisitioning materials is variable. The energy required to deliver over any given distance is known but the availability of any particular atom type can vary over time. Common atoms like silicon and aluminum are consistently cheap, however, less common elements with higher mining costs like palladium vary in value to megaknot to megaknot. Many complain that access to the Hub system is a universal right but that the majority of the material deposits are done by large conglomerates. A citizen's right to access the Effervescence and transact with it in any way is written into law on the rope itself, be it through resource deposit, energy production, material requisition or construction of digital assets atop its highly complex computing network. The Galactic Government is formed by delegates from the very entities who interact most with the Effervescence and it is in their interest to keep as many people linked to the technological life blood as possible. Being in the top five shows you provide a service the population wants and as a result a significant influence over the Effervescence and Hub network. Anyone can submit resources to the Hub but only Trentor Mining has the billions of fibers required to capture and mine the asteroids floating around the Hub 5 solar system.
I had never submitted any resources myself but we studied all aspects of the Effervescence in the lab. I knew in my bones that, once our research took off, we would become a major contributing entity to the network, able to influence how fibers were distributed and services were rendered all throughout the galaxy.
As we ascended, more and more of the city came into view. The industrial center spans out from the Hub and the retail districts branch off from various industrial sections. This branching gave the city a board game look with each section branching off from the center having its own style and aesthetic. The zones were even given colors and the overhead provided by the capsule windows overlaid these colors on the appropriate zones. The lab was located in Blue zone which generally contained more academic or R&D focused industries. Red zones generally contained more public oriented retail, Yellow were energy production, Green zones focused on the organic, food, clothing etc, Orange held all of the entertainment focused businesses and was one of the largest, Purple zone was Larimer’s computational district, yes an entire district was dedicated just to computational work though it was not as big as you may imagine.
A distance from the main city a final zone was highlighted, the Gray zones. I tried to ignore these parts of the city whenever I came up in the Mag Drop but my mind always inevitably drifted there. The Gray zones held those who had been locked off from civilized society. Deemed unworthy or too much of a risk to allow integration with the rest of the EfferBubble. These people eked out a living on the outskirts of major cities. Repeat criminals, or those deemed hostile to the top contributing companies, had their Effervescence sheaths tagged and warnings sent out to anyone when interacting with Gray zone occupants through any of the major companies services. They couldn’t be barred from using the Effervescence technology itself, this is fundamentally impossible, but no sheath was forced to transact with another. If your sheath got flagged then you and anyone regularly interacting with your sheath was likely to be put on a black list. So scared of also ending up on the blacklist, companies and other members of the public refused to transact in any way with such individuals. Though they could use the base Effervescence technology, Gray zone people were effectively locked out of using any of the technology that had been built on top of it. Each planet's Hub could designate transactions it prioritized but could also refuse to perform any transaction from black listed sheaths. Many people inhabiting the Gray zones had done such heinous crimes that entire planets refused to validate their transactions. Unfortunately, free planets like Moneron refused to censor any transactions and so, often, Grey zone dwellers and Rusters got their prints eventually. I didn’t like the idea that I could accidentally perform a hitch with one of these sheaths, putting my own sheath on a temporary blacklist for an entire turn. It was a threat that every parent used to bring their children into line. “Grow up to be a good little boy or girl or you’ll end up blacklisted and they’ll kick you out of the EfferBubble. You don’t want to have to live in a Gray zone do you?” I never wanted to end up in a Gray zone, the folk that lived there were terrifying. They were so different from other regular citizens. They behaved in ways that made no sense and had even developed their own distinct accent, a lilting but gruff style of speech that was at times quite hard to understand. Sometimes they leaked into other zones but were easy to spot due to their dirty and holey clothes as well as their general disdain for anyone around them. l tried to ignore the disturbing fact that the Gray Zones grew more and more every time I came up here, I thought most of them ended up eaten by the Oath, how were there more of them every turn? I couldn’t care less that these people were cut off. They endangered us all and interacting with a Ruster could ruin my hopes of ever building a successful company of my own and paying off a huge chunk of my Oath in advance.
The assent took around two hundred Knots which was expected given the calm weather and clear skies. The Des Plates slowly engage during the assent, holding the occupants to their seats. Like the pressurizing of a long distance plane, the process was mostly unnoticeable unless you were looking for it. The Des plate was another in a long list of Effervescence successes. The name was taken from the ship the technology was discovered on. A long distance science mission in Post-DDA 2060 discovered an abandoned warship out past the Emer System. An ancient behemoth dated back to somewhere around 50 Pre-DDA. The ship, forebodingly named “The Desolation,” was towed back to Nakamecca, Hub 1, and had every millimeter scanned and blueprinted. Oddly, it was the ship's deck plates that provided the most valuable discovery. At this point the Galactic Government, then made up from the top seven galactic wide conglomerates, had installed Mag Drops on most of the major planets. However, a method for generating artificial gravity had still not been found, enter The Desolation. A detailed blueprint was taken of several intact deck plates and after a little restoration and reconstruction with the Effervescence, researchers were ecstatic to find the plates generated an artificial gravity field ten meters directly above them. A team based out of a lab near Hub 6 discovered that the ability to generate artificial gravity came from the interaction between two components listed under the Effervescence transaction numbers 13450 and 13451. All attempts at replicating and improving the technology have failed and the exact interactions between 13450 and 13451 that produce the artificial gravity effect is still unknown. For this reason all zero or near zero gravity vehicles are fitted with identical deck plates commonly referred to as Des Plates.
We walked through the main lobby of the station, as one was forced to do when exiting the Mag Drop. As I did every time, I stared up at the glass dome ceiling. This part of the station was packed with retail shops peddling the latest Effervescence gadgets and blueprints. I was a bit of a sucker for new and unusual blueprints and had prints for stuff I’d never use. I, of course, had the print for Des plates. I had absolutely no plans to use it and it cost me several months wages to purchase but it felt like owning a piece of history. I had prints for various power tools and gadgets; I liked the idea of building my own furniture from natural growing wood but hadn’t yet found the time… or the wood. I had prints for several gourmet meals reviewed highly by galaxy wide famous chefs as well as some more basic recipes I used for day to day consumption. I had prints for ten different variations of screw… you never knew when you may need a screw to hold a vital piece of lab equipment together. I hadn’t yet had occasion to use all ten varieties but when I did I would be ready.
“Now this looks like the perfect upgrade for you James! Ditch your brick and mortar house and take that camping trip around Larimer you’re always harping on about but never actually getting on with.”
George pointed to an advert on one of the pillars for a new hiking tent blueprint.
“Im tempted man, I really am.” I responded as my eyes raked the blueprint advert. “Just think of all that fresh air and open forest.”
Julia cocked her head on one side, a whimsical look overtaking her face. “I don’t know what I would do without the trees and the forest to take my mind off of work. Sometimes I get so lost in the minutia that I can't see the cord for the threads.”
“Maybe we should all go together, that way we can spend some time really nailing down our research goals for the next turn.” The Professor chimed in with a jovial smile.
“That defeats the entire point of a camping trip Thomas!” Julia was always more informal with the Professor, calling him by his first name.
“Fair enough, fair enough. I have a good feeling about this presentation on Moneron. After this, things are going to change and we won’t have to spend our days and our nights fabricating lab gear out of junk and disused blueprints.”
George clapped me on the back with his oversized hands. “Well count me in, we just have to make sure the pressure doesn’t get to James here so he doesn’t screw up the presentation.” I smiled and laughed though just the mention of the presentation raised my heart rate and dampened my palms. “Honestly though Professor, I think i'm ready to have a go at presenting some of our results, I'm far more handsome than James here and have at least twice the character.”
The Professor smiled and his eyes twinkled as they often did when he was amused. “Yes George, that is precisely why I have James lead in these conferences, communicating science is far less about ‘being handsome’ and much more about communicating the facts, cold and hard.” The conversation devolved into George and I debating which of us was the more attractive with many a plea to Julia to be the referee and name the victor.
We found our second departure gate where we would actually be boarding the shuttle that would fly us to Moneron. I loved coming to the docking gates just to marvel at the awesome simplicity of how they worked. From what we could tell, space travel had previously been a dangerous and expensive venture with only a few skilled and trained enough to undergo its stresses and dangers. With the Effervescence, a lot of the dangers had been bypassed. Docking ports were well known to be a weak point in any structure suspended in a vacuum and the company behind the design of the space port now used galaxy wide came up with a simple yet beautiful solution to this issue. The Effervescence bubbles structures into existence through the use of blueprints. Blueprints denote the precise location of every atom within a 3d structure. The trick to removing weak points on the space station was in the design of the initial blueprint. Most would have designed the spaceport and then designed shuttles and craft that could interface with the port in a reliable way. Not IntraGalactic (a bit of a standard name but their marketing was some of the finest around), they decided that the smart thing to do would be to create a single blueprint containing the space station and the spacecraft together forming one contiguous structure, fused together at the atomic level. When a craft wanted to detach, the blueprint would be shifted to the station without that specific craft atomically bonded. The craft would, in the same instant, switch over to its own, independent, blueprint. The transition would be seamless and the atoms holding the two machines together would be retrieved back into Effervescence storage. To avoid a mistiming of the blueprint switchover the spacecraft housed all of their passengers in an independent structure held inside the spacecraft itself. That way, if the space station blueprint switched before the spacecraft blueprint took over, the entire crew wouldn’t suddenly be left without any protection from the freezing nothingness around them. A miss timing had never happened as the transactions could be timed to execute in exactly the same knot, but the potential for asphyxiating in the vacuum of space isn't a fear people naturally overcome. When a ship came into dock the process was reversed with the initial blueprint activating again with the craft and station swapping to a singular, atomically bonded structure.
Our shuttle was already docked so all that was left was to wait for our departure time. I took the few minutes we had left to check my sheath for the blueprints I had with me.
Iron Screws (variations 10)
Hammar (1)
Drill (1)
Spanners (variations 6)
Food recipes (30 variations)
EfferShower Mark III (This was one of my most expensive blueprints to date but honestly, not only does it save a crazy amount of room in my apartment but if ever you’re on the road and wanted a quick shower to freshen up, the EfferShower is a life saver).
EfferHollo Movies (variations 200) (Ok… so I owned a lot of hollo movies. It was how I passed the time alone in my apartment).
Hardback Books (variations 15) (It seemed humanity never got tired of physical books. They were far less common nowadays but with the Effervescence you could purchase the blueprint for your favorite books and have them available at any time stored on your BubbleDrive, your own personal library).
Des Plate (1)
Mountain bike (1) (I really needed to get this back to George)
Papaya personal computer and accessories (1) (Papaya made the best personal work station blueprints bolts could buy).
Dumbbell Weights 15kg (2) (I bought this blueprint after I put on an alarming amount of weight during one of the colder winter seasons on Larimer… I still had not materialized them once).
Ventrax tailored suit (1) (I only owned one suit and it was a print. I could never hope to afford a real tailored suit with a researcher's salary. I was constantly reminding myself that we were lucky Thomas managed to get the funding to pay any of us at all.)