Chapter 26 In space with a junkyard ship

I had thrown everything I had at the new nano machines, and they survived it all. The metal that the new armor plates are made out of is just too good.

The only problem is everything I have is not anywhere close enough to the forces those nano machines need to survive if I want them to contain the power of fusion and actually be able to make power out of that.

Because of this, I’ve ordered one kilogram of both helium-3 and deuterium. There were more combinations of substances that could be used for fusion, but this combination was actually the cheapest and, in theory, should be more controllable.

It shouldn't take long for my order to arrive, but in the meanwhile, it was time to finish the chip that needed that revealing crystal.

As I looked at the revealing crystal now, it was once again clear. Carefully, I removed it from its socket on the small ring. The chip itself was already printed, so all I had to do was mount it in the correct location underneath an extremely good camera.

This is basically what the device back in the Adventurers' Association would have done if I had used it.

When everything was reading green, with a thought a port opened at the left back of my skull. This port could fit four chips of this size, two of the slots already filled. With a click, it socketed in and I started to run diagnostics on it once again. You could never be too careful with stuff that you connect to your brain.

Lola also went through the programming of the software we bought, but nothing was amiss with it. The crystal should already be changing, so it shouldn’t take too much longer before I have the chip up and running fully.

Before that happened, the fuel delivery had arrived.

Getting off the ship was now easy as the ramp was now lowered. A section of the floor opened up and inside that was the delivery. This was exactly how the armor plates had arrived, but that time Bob was the one that brought them out and delivered them to their current location.

Two of the drones flew over and brought them when I was halfway to the delivery location. Seems like they wanted to help me a bit.

“Thanks, guys,” I said to them which seemed to make them happy.

“Are you sure this is a good idea? If those nano machines can’t handle it, the ship could be destroyed. On another point, I’ve been running the numbers and simulations, and I don’t know if it's possible for us to be able to run a constant fusion core. We simply know too little of this technology to do it properly.”

“Don't worry, Lola. I’m pretty sure the nano machines can handle it, and I’m only going to use like a gram of fuel. Even the current nano machines in the power core should be enough to contain an amount so small, and it should burn up fast enough to not cause us too much problems.”

“As for not being able to run it continuously like the other fusion cores we know of, now in that you are absolutely correct. But I have other ideas on how we could work around that. First, let us test if this would even work.”

The power core nano machines accepted the new additions easily and let them move into the correct positions. Adding the fuel was a bit difficult, but nano machines were wonderful in the way that they could change shapes, so now there was a correct amount of fuel mixture in the correct position that was only 1.2 grams in weight.

We had the knowledge of how to start a fusion reaction that I had been able to get back on Earth. It basically took a lot of power and heat, but the current power core was easily capable of that, and we didn't have to resort to active fission, as I decided to wait longer so the power core can accumulate the correct amount of power necessary to start a fusion reaction.

The wait was a lengthy one, but finally the chip finished its setup, and I could finally see everything the revealing crystal now knew about me. In the Adventurers' Association, I would have gotten the same screen, but then they would have also known everything about me, and I didn’t want that.

On my AR, I could now pull up what would be described as a status page or a character sheet in any VR or even older video games. It was something that, for some reason, brought me extreme joy.

Name: Remi Graves

Age: 34

Species: Human variant (bio-cybernetic) Male

Bonds:

AI: Lola, Bob (100+)

Ship: Forward Horizon

Items: None

Enhancements: Bio-cybernetics, Bio-nano machines

Body: rank G

Mind: rank G

Core: rank G

Innate ability: Looting variant

Affinity:

Basic: rank G 1/3

Mind: rank G 1/3

Mechanist: rank G 1/3

Skills: None

That just looked awesome. Now every time I got stronger, got more bonds, or even more skills, everything would show up here, and it would show me whenever I got any improvement to my current status. I was basically at the very bottom, so I had a long way to go.

To my adventure card I added a couple of versions of my current status, especially the bonded AI parts, so that in the future it would be easier to confirm to others that all these AIs were actually bonded and that I was following galactic law.

The power core signaled its readiness, so I allowed it to activate. The power production jumped well above what we had been able to accomplish before.

The power core was heating up more than I expected, but it seemed it would be able to handle it. The graphs, however, continued to rise; fortunately, the fuel ran out and things started to stabilize.

We had to run the boot-up sequence for the main engine so we would have a power draw powerful enough for the power core not to overcharge, which would lead to quite a bad outcome.

The nano machines in the power core were already running diagnostics on the new ones, and Lola was running through all the data we gathered so next time we could do it better, as the fuel ran out way too fast.

The preliminary data seemed to indicate that the new nano machines were able to survive, even though about 4% of the old nano machines perished. That was because we simply didn't have enough of the new ones. None of us expected so much heat. The power output also seemed good enough even for this unoptimized try.

“Seems like we need a lot more of these nano machines?”

“Agreed. They seem to be able to survive a lot,” Lola answered.

It seemed like it was time to start printing a lot more of them. When I reached my workshop, I got a different kind of notification from the station itself.

When I pulled it up, a big smile came to my face. My reward had been deposited, that of 8.8 million mana credits. It wasn't an amount that would fix all my money problems, but it was an extremely good start.

It was really difficult getting large enough chunks of the armor plating cut with our current tools, but we managed so the nano machine printer could start operating at full capacity. We really needed better tools and some other base materials I was starting to run low on. Fortunately, that was an easy fix, and I spent about 1.5 million mana credits to purchase those base metals.

Easy come, easy go.

There was also a lot of stuff on the back of my ship that was taking up a lot of space that I technically no longer needed, especially some of the bulkier base metals that were cheap enough that bringing them along would actually be worse than just buying them whenever I needed. But of course, I would need to keep some just in case.

“Lola, start going over the cargo manifest and see what we can sell off. It's about time we had more space back here, and from what I understand, it's better to have more expensive materials that take up less space. Should be good to have currency to buy the stuff we need instead of just lugging everything around.”

“Acknowledged. I will get on it right away.”

I spent some time going through the different tools available for purchase, and currently, I had my eye on two of them. One of them was a cutter that worked on a similar principle as the 3D printer. What it basically did was pull away the molecules, making an extremely clean cut that wouldn't heat the surrounding material.

The second one was what was called a stitcher. It worked by weaving small strands of material through the two pieces you wanted to connect, creating an extremely solid bond.

You could then use a different kind of tool to heat it up, if it was possible to heat up that material, to make an even more solid bond. We already had such tools as we use them for cutting, but they could certainly be used only for heating.

Both of them were portable. I could hold them in my hands, and it seemed like they were standard tools for basically anyone who worked on ships. It also didn’t cost too much, the stitcher was 800K while the cutter was 100K. It was still quite pricey, but these were in the corporation shops. I bet that there were cheaper ones available if I shopped around a bit.

There was also a skill shop that I wanted to visit, and a few other ones, so I think it’s time for another trip into the station itself. Lola had gotten quite a good idea of what things cost in the corporation shops, so it was now time to get a better idea of what things might cost outside their influence.

Lola had also been able to confirm that, yes, every device, every software, everything you bought from the corporation would be filled up with software and tamper-proof locks to make sure that you couldn't copy what they had done.

Hopefully, the same wasn't true for smaller manufacturers because I wanted to know how these things worked, and not just buy new ones whenever they broke. I wanted to be able to fix stuff.