The e-waste recycling plant was one of the turning points in my plans for world domination… I mean expansion plans. (I need to be more careful with those Freudian slips.)

Michael bringing me that first box of electronic scrap was like taking baby steps, learning how to build things with Lego blocks. Now, with all the material Dave was providing, I could finally stretch my creative ingenuity.

It felt so freeing to have so many resources after the literal drought I experienced before. Have you any idea of how rich e-waste is with all those metals, oxides, and rare-earth elements that usually cost obscene amounts of money?

If you are only interested in precious metals, then gold is used as solder and in connection pads where good electrical connections are paramount; silver is used in batteries, solder, and switches. There was actually a study done at the beginning of the 21st century, which showed that only in the United States of America, up to 1500 tons of gold and 3000 tons of silver was disposed of, as electronic waste—and that was just in the year of that study. That number had considerably gone up, in the following years and decades.

Besides, it was handed to me on a silver platter. There was no need to mine everything I needed from the Earth’s crust. That scrap was rich in gold, silver, steel, plastic, copper, oxides, aluminum, nickel, tin, lead, zinc, cobalt, mercury, lithium, silicon, and so many more. Household appliances are made from aluminum or steel cases, Microchips are composed of small amounts of silicon, aluminum, and copper. Palladium is used in capacitors. It was an El Dorado of various materials I needed to make so many of my projects into a reality. (For a moment, I wanted to scream like Daffy Duck in Ali Baba’s cave, “I'm rich. I'm wealthy. Yahoo. I'm comfortably well off.”)

Seriously, there is so much quality material inside of e-waste, and people are paying to dispose of it. If that is not a win-win deal, I do not know what is. Why would anybody export that wealth out of the country as garbage? It boggles the mind.

A nano-factory is not a very complex concept. (If your tech base is advanced enough.)

I essentially copied the same principles used in the ship’s mini nano-factory and made it many times larger. You take a bunch of construction nanites, provide them with an energy source, and then give them enough scrap to extract the needed material. If it has all the essential ingredients, anything you can envision can be constructed. Below that warehouse, (where Michael placed those two suitcases), I designed (and nanites built) the first large-scale nano-factory on Earth.

I needed it to be big since some of my projects required a lot of space and I was always hungry for more material. It was twice the size of the warehouse above it, with reinforced walls constructed from densely packed earth that made it as hard as stone.

Most of the space was empty; it was the necessary room for my projects. Although I did build several robotic arms to hold individual pieces in the assembly process. The nanites could work around it, but there was no reason not to make it easier on them. Very similar to what car factories use to assemble a chassis. (Humans are making themselves superfluous … more efficient, but in the long run—not a smart thing to do.)

On-site, I created another machine intelligence to work as my supervisor for all future tasks. Useful little tools, you tell them what to do and they do it exactly. (God forbid if they found themselves in a situation that was not predicted in their orders, the damn things go straight to logic loops.)

My first project was satellites, which were essential for many things. Including my access to considerably higher bandwidth. (Let’s not forget one of my goals—not having to depend on unreliable human infrastructure.)

The Internet was necessary to our plans, and while the access to it was controlled by governments and private companies, I could not be sure that access would not be shut down at some point. (I am a firm believer in ‘hope for the best, but plan for the worst’.)

My satellites were black spheres with all sorts of gadgets I could cram into them, plus one hundred miniaturized probes carrying construction nanites that would be used as a delivery vehicle, to carry those nanites all around the Earth’s orbit, so I could infiltrate and take control of everybody else’s satellites. If you think that was wrong of me, consider that some of those satellites carried secret armaments, to be used on surface targets. It can be said that I was doing a favor to all people on Earth… seriously. Anyway, after the first one, which was more of a proof of concept, I started building more… a lot more. It was a simple, but elegant plan in my pursuit of digital domination… excuse me, expansion.

The second project was all for Michael’s benefit; it was important to increase his safety (and it was a cool thing to do).

I didn’t want to make a flying saucer at first, it was efficient but such a simple design. Unfortunately, if I made a functioning copy of Flash Gordon’s ship, or of the Millennium Falcon, it would not really be unnoticeable. (And yes, I did consider them.)

The flying saucer design was the one that could be most easily debunked; every day there are sightings of them, especially by individuals that had one glass too many. And let’s be honest, they look cool and have impressive aerodynamic properties. (So said the AI that had grown up watching movies that favored that particular design.)

My thinking was that if I was going to make a flying saucer, I would make one that was absolutely kick-ass. It did not take me long to finish the first one, and I made that baby with all the bells and whistles.

The final product was slick and functional. Holo-emitters on both sides of the hull insured complete transparency from the inside, and functional invisibility from the outside. Engines (copied from the ship), enabled it to reach incredible speeds. It was not the fastest thing ever built on Earth, but my flying saucer didn’t need refueling for a very long time. The cold fusion power plant made sure of that. It is not technically a true spaceship, even if it can go to space for a while. All the same, comparing it to modern aircraft is like comparing a dinghy with a fighter jet. (My flying saucer being the fighter jet, just to be clear.)

I did not put any weapons on it since it was essentially a transportation vehicle. My biggest concern was that if it were noticed somehow, some idiot in a jet fighter would fire missiles at it. However, with the superior speed my aircraft could achieve, we could simply outrun them. I know it was invisible, but if there was any rain, the holo-emitters couldn’t compensate for the light refraction the water would produce — there are rarely perfect inventions in the real world.

I couldn’t wait for Michael to see it.

Now, as I mentioned there are two technologies that are essential to our plans, and they both work on manipulating gravity. First was the Gravity-drive, and the second was Gravity-generators.

The gravity-drive doesn’t produce gravity, it manipulates the one that is already available—everywhere. The easier way to understand it is to look at it as a magnet that at the same time pushes and pulls from different celestial bodies. Normally the Sun has the greatest pull in the Solar System and it is always utilized as the central point, but the closer you are to the other planets, (in this case, the good old Earth), their own gravitational pull grows stronger.

The Solar System is a gravity rich environment and the Gravity-drive can achieve some great speeds traversing it. It is good that it has so many gravity sources to work with as it can manipulate them all to make fine-tuned adjustments to the flight. Some smarty-pants would say that there is not as strong gravitational pull once you get some distance from our planet, and he would be right. Despite that, there is the genius of this ancient tech; a cheat that makes this drive so useful. It is able to increase that gravity potential a thousand-fold, by using… well, I have no idea. Honestly, there is something there that does not compute. At least with my meager understanding of alien physics and how the laws of nature work. I will admit that we as a species are not exactly on the top of the knowledge pyramid. (For god’s sake, it was not long ago that we thought the Earth was flat.)

The question is, how was I able to make Gravity-drives for the satellites and transporters? (And Al is still referring to them as flying saucers, just to annoy me.) That one was easy: monkey see, monkey do. I am a great copyist, and I copied the whole thing on a molecular level. Yeah, I know, you shouldn’t do that. Well, tell it to the Chinese who are on a quest to duplicate every single thing they get their hands on. Do you think those workers in garage factories know everything about the devices they are replicating?

The process has some inherited dangers, but I always do extensive testing before proclaiming something is a finished product. The model I deemed 001 went through every test I could think of and it performed to specifications.

The second technology that is essential to our plans is Gravity-generators. As the name implies, they create gravity, which can be adjusted to whatever setting you wish, as if using a dimmer switch. They are all over the ship, in the shape of plates that are under the floor. That is why we generally refer to them as gravity plates. I do understand almost 95% of this technology since most of it is elementary; it is that last 5% that is a bit tricky. As in, “How the hell is this thing doing the thing it does?” As I stated before, copying is something I am good at. To that same smart Alec, I would pose a question, “Does your grandfather really understand how solar panels work, in precise detail?” One does not need to understand how some things function to use them, or even to reproduce them.

Power sources were a bit easier since the concept of cold fusion is well known to humanity; the practical side of making it work was where we stumbled. The power they provided was needed in great quantities due to the fact that these gizmos need a lot of juice. Fortunately, the shipbuilders had that technology simplified to the extent that even a high school physics teacher could duplicate, once the underlying concepts and settings were known to him.

I could even make cold fusion reactors in bigger sizes, even to the point when only one of those could power a small town. (I’m getting ahead of myself, that project is way down the line.)

As I said, everything was tested to the extreme; I had no intention to allow anybody to find themselves in a dangerous situation as a result of this tech. There is no doubt in my mind that in time we will fully understand all intricacies and secrets of these technologies.

For now—I have bigger fish to fry.