The key element to both products was not the end product, or even how they were made. It was the environment, the people, and how the entire area had been treated.

This was a universe with a highly restricted presence of Good, entirely by the designs of the Warp. Chaos rent and twisted at the laws of man and reality, so naturally the opposing forces went to Law and its uncompromising rigidity to oppose it, further factionalizing mortal life. But its Evil, corruptive side had no true counter.

Except for what I was making here.

It took time, love, and tenderness, but that’s what soulclaws as hard as adamant are for. The circuitry had to be in the patterns of Law, by Mekker fiat, which was fine. But I’d also overlaid in the patterns of Good, and furthermore, only Good people were allowed to work on the Gold boards, while the less protective Green boards employed the rest of them.

Good people, making Good-patterned items, in a Good Place on Good machinery. Without all four things together, they couldn’t be made. Exploiting Alignment vulnerabilities for fun and profit... who said Good people can’t make money?

Producing the base tech at TL 7 was way cheaper than doing it at TL 10, because I didn’t require Energized materials. The planet was full of the required elements, so getting supplies wasn’t hard at all.

I had been very careful when starting this branch of tech, and purchased the rights to it, not buying a license. The tech was old and worthless, and I got it for a veritable song. It also meant that any advances I made on it belonged to me... as long as I filed the appropriate paperwork.

The Mekkers would soon be getting news of the unexpected resilience of vakker tech against corruption, and of the Gold tech in particular. They would unleash their logic engines upon the problem, and find themselves able to get most of the same performance of the Green vakker tech... and they’d have to pay me a nice licensing fee to sell it. The basic supplies I needed were commodities, so they couldn’t wrench me from that side, and the production tech needed was primitive, by their standards... I could make everything I needed off a moderate-sized TL 10 Printer, which I already possessed.

I had already insulated myself through the law, and if they tried something like health inspectors, I was going to put a camera on the guy and follow him wherever he went looking for stuff.

Now, my only exposure was them advancing the tech to higher levels on me, taking the tech tree away from me. It was the single major impetus that had forced me to use my sealed Mark Karma to advance Rantha to Ten, as I couldn’t let them do that. If I did, I’d be at the mercy of the Mechanists, just like the rest of the Empire, and they’d strangle the tech tree to death to safeguard their monopoly on the semiconductor side of things.

Advancing up the Weird Science/Chaos Physics level of a tech tree is an endless loop of building diagnostic equipment to find out what laws you can fiddle with, getting the numbers, building the equipment to take advantage of the laws, building new diagnostic equipment to the next level, higher-tuned and more flexible, repeat and advance, repeat and advance.

Happily for me, the diagnostic and testing equipment already existed, I just had to use it in a completely new direction. Getting access to prior research wasn’t actually that hard, since it was esoteric foundational knowledge akin to buying a physics textbook, albeit only for people of Seven to Ten in Level. Since it was only principles, numbers, and applications, without the tech behind it, and way, way lower than the TL 15+ stuff that almost nobody alive understood, it wasn’t hoarded very closely. It almost restricted itself, since the people it was useful to were so minute. Most folk wanted the tech, not the info behind how and why it worked.

I’d already grabbed the Ranks in the technology, and knew how to make them, subject to aesthetics. I also had the Ranks in Math and Physics, so I knew how to get the numbers, and could understand the laws and principles behind them once I had them.

Buying those numbers saved me a lot of testing time, and let me start filing patents on vakker tech.

The advantage of working with a Visual File is how perfectly interactive it is with yourself. I could design with far greater speed and precision than working on any kind of actual computer, and simply download the results.

And just in case there were diagnostics on the computer, it wouldn’t reveal that I was thinking with a 44+ Intellect, either.

Yeah, I was still a Melee Prime, and I didn’t regret it. But like Mom-me, I was a double Primary Class in Expert, which was Int-based, and in a tech world, pure raw intellectual ability is valuable like nowhere else.

The Secondary Classes I had been lifting were Alchemist, Runesmith, Vizard, Null Wizard, Archer, and Scout, all Int or Dex-based, and reflecting that across the Sustained divide. Null Wizard also gave me Nog access, and I had slowly bought up my base Intellect and Dexterity to 18.

Skill points, Skill Ranks. This was a tech universe, not a magic universe. Science built from the floor to the ceiling for everyone, not just an individual. Sure, I had to fight, and there was no doubt I would be fighting on some catastrophic, horrific levels. It just hadn’t started yet.

So I had to think fast, and I had to think powerfully.

My physical dexterity and mental dexterity were advancing in lockstep, keeping me able to keep up physically with how fast I could think.

I had twelve thoughtstreams going now. Eight of them were focused on managing resources, building up my technology base, or making money.

I’d long ago made myself a new Band, simply because of the connective power and bandwidth I’d needed to do what I did. My brains needed places to play, and the Boole was that place.

The Quanta, however, was not a place for others to play in, as it was my playground. I made it that way by inventing my own programming language before it.

TL 7+ programming languages usually operated on atomic spin for enhanced memory loads and connectivity. It was no longer on or off, or even how much on or off, it was what direction of on or off. Quark-level imbalances were as good as binary at the right levels, and so the stuff hummed along on subatomic loads as freely as positive or negative charges.

Vakker languages added the whole mechanic of charge level and frequency to the code, i.e. what frequency and amplitude was the information stored at? The core information that was frequently accessed could be stored at the efficient low frequency, low amplitude levels, while lesser-used stuff could be increasingly spread out to the higher, stronger levels, gradually ramping up the load as need increased. As this all could be on top of atomic spin and vibrational levels, naturally the Quanta required a new programming language that would take these variables into account, one that could continue advancing up the scale as the TL increased.

That was why I wasn’t afraid of them downloading and sending off the schema for my stuff. They were going to pull up the files on their Boolean systems, and the files were just going to crash into unrecognizability. Because, yeah, I was using stuff running on Vakker tech to make Vakker tech.

A high-order cyberpath with an Int of 30+ might be able to take the leap to understand the language, if they understood the foundational code... which I’d reworked from the start to be not exactly compatible with Mekker Code, for the simple reason that Mekker Code didn’t do the job for Vakker tech. My dear Councilor here hoping for a tech freebie was going to get nothing.

This naturally was unacceptable to the Mechinists, too, who demanded access to the root code for security purposes. I supplied it promptly, and they were still at a loss... because all of their cyber implants ran on Mekker Code, and so couldn’t process the code I’d given them, rendering them incapable of understanding it. The higher orders tended to replace parts of their brain with tech, and thus were even less capable of processing it with the lack of meat to make the mental leap. It was a hilarious situation, where the lower-order borgs had the best chance of understanding it, because they relied the least on implants to do their thinking for them. But by the time they reached Seven, the minimum level needed to comprehend it, they had long made themselves incapable of doing so!

Ah, the wonders of excess brainpower. The code clearly was not corrupt, and wasn’t xenos, had no psychic signature to speak of... and they couldn’t understand it. At least, not without having to include Vakker tech into their own systems... which was unthinkable, of course. They could only stew and wonder at their own failures.

They did realize, along with a whole lot of others, that I was an innovative genius, the like of which rarely came along in a thousand years, and I could be equally dangerous and useful, disruptive and road-clearing. I had no doubt conversations were going on at high levels of the Mechanist Guilds on exactly what to do about me, since I was psi and obviously would not be joining them. Eliminate, or follow and see where I led them? Decisions, decisions...

------

The money from the sales of this newly secure and Warp-resistant technology, especially in weapon and defense systems, was driving my whole shebang forwards, although nobody really realized it, and I had so, so much scaling up to do.

That’s okay. Time, people... I had all these things to work with now.

And, of course, it wasn’t all that I was working on.

The Goldgreen Bank now existed, and all my Marked did business through it, as well as most of the inhabitants of Habberblok, and a whole lot of other people attracted to my business style. It avoided me needing to borrow money from Upspire and have the invisible threat of recall and seizure hanging over my head, or having to pay ‘high-risk’ interest rates.

Deposits meant cash to work with, loans leveraged against principle to make more money, and a foundation to get into the arena of high finance.

This kind of thing was naturally ridiculously competitive, and basically a contest of information vs. computing power and speed. Twelfth-sigma changes in trade numbers could means fortunes lost or run, given the scale of some of the trades going on. There was no shaving the accounts to make money, because everybody was watching the decimals trying to do just that, and it was a case of who knew what, who predicted what, and simple blind guessing as the information lords hoarded little chunks of what was coming, determined to make fortunes manipulating the market.

Juris watched this stuff, and would occasionally crack down on some wealthy idiot going overboard, but basically, they considered the markets a jungle where only the ready and the dumb went in to compete. They’d crack down on anything resembling a threat to production of vital industries, so most of the manipulators stayed away from them, preferring to prey on and play around with the smaller local companies who were most vulnerable to layers of bad and good news coming at them.

This was the birthplace of corporate and noble intrigue, as fortunes were made and lost by having early access to information, and it extended out into the stars and the galaxy and empire beyond. The truly big players could doom or raise planets with their bets, and the spillovers from failed contracts, signs of corruption, new innovations coming out, and the like could easily ripple through the entire galaxy.

What I was doing would indeed ripple throughout the galaxy, so I had to ramp things up and solidify my foundation. The market for what I was making was literally endless; I couldn’t even supply the Coronal Knights to the proper degree, and their demands were dwarfed by the Umbrans and the security-crazed Juris. Add in the corporations, and I was satisfying nothing and nobody yet, even in my local market.

To supply the galaxy’s demand for Vakker-tech, I was basically going to need at least an entire planet devoted solely to the production of micro-miniaturized vacuum tubes. Since that would be stupid by centralizing all production in one place and making it vulnerable, I was going to have to spread throughout the galaxy.

Mmm, Megacorp Rantha, opening for business...

But for now, I still had a zwilnik cockroach to destroy.