I quickly got a reply from the Shadowbroker, but sadly, it was pretty much as I expected. He cautioned me of directly involving myself, saying that showing myself would only serve their narrative. He suggested gathering information and he would see them reach the right places, it was what he was doing but he doubted that it would have any effect. Skylar had been a target long before I ever arrived at the scene, as he stood in the way of their influence. Adding to that, was that, while he was willing to bend a few rules to save lives, he was a straight-shooter, mostly concerned with doing the right things. He knew that there was a political game that he sometimes had to play, but, for example, when it came to the donating influence of my father, Skylar had rarely done more than what was polite and left the schmoozing to his deputies whenever he could get away with.

I debated contacting Voltic but I had a strong feeling that it would backfire and only drag her into the mud, but I sent a message to Sandra, using my old Cat moniker, just general smalltalk with an allusion to current events and the investigation into Skylar, maybe something would come of it.

I had quite a bit of information gathered on the Greene-Family, it had been pretty much a hobby of mine for almost a year now, gathering information and trying to prove beyond any reasonable and unreasonable doubt that my allegations were correct. Once again, I gathered information, mainly what I had been able to find about their involvement with the Heroes League into a report, demonstrating quite clearly that there was a large incentive for the Greene-Family and their media-contacts to push the investigation and sent it off to the Shadowbroker. Hopefully he could do something useful with the information, it would not be beneficial to me, if Skylar was sacked. I doubted I could change the outcome, but it was one of those things you just had to try. And, if it failed, I highly doubted that the Greene-Family could hate me more than they already did.

But at the end of the day, I just considered the business with the Greene-family a side-distraction. In the great scheme of things, they were a locally constrained problem and if I was successful with my goal to become a full Guild-member, I could just consider the New Brunsburg area a loss, hell, I could consider the entire country lost and focus on different areas of the globe.

Depending on the exact nature of the Guild’s rules considering their members involvement in local politics, I could simply pick one of the more impoverished areas of the world and set up shop there, I might have to built some specialised artificial intelligences, far less sophisticated than Galatea, to handle security but I was reasonably sure that the combination of unlimited energy due to my fusion-generator and quite a bit of fire-power would be enough to establish myself. And if I managed to create an artificial intelligence specialised for physical security work, I had no doubt that I would be able to build combat robots to act as the arms for that intelligence. I would need to make sure that I kept tighter control on such a being, much tighter than the liberal stance I had taken with Galatea, but it was easily possible. If, that is, I managed to recreate the miracle I had performed when I had crafted Galatea.

All that, however, was for a potential future, for now, I was working on a computer the size of a desktop-PC but with the power of a serious supercomputer-cluster. And I was making headway, the usage of the crystal-substrate that I used for my energy-crystals allowed me to make my integrated circuits smaller than anything I had ever heard of before, the circuits were literally grown within the crystals on a molecular level. Trying to get them smaller might be possible, with different substances but I was quickly approaching what was physically possible.

As an offshoot of the super-personal-computer, I had managed to make a microcontroller, roughly one hundred times smaller than the previous smallest computer. It was lacking quite a bit when it came to computing power, memory or pretty much everything else, but it was tiny and able to execute simple programs. There were a couple of other problems, the biggest probably that each processor was only about twice the size of a grain of dust, making seeing them a challenge and keeping track of them nearly impossible. Manipulating them by hand was another challenge, so I simply made them already in place, not even trying to manipulate them.

But, tiny microprocessors and an artificial intelligence that was able to use them to their fullest extent combined to produce a computer with the size of a normal desktop-system but the computing power normally only found in massive super-computers. The best part of it was, that it looked just like a normal computer.

That had been one of my biggest worries, I was reasonably sure that there were no surveillance cameras within my workshop, only in the hallway outside, but I was not willing to take a risk on that, so everything I was working on in my workshop looked just like normal electrical parts and machines, making detection even less likely.

Simply said, there were only two ways I would be detected, one was due to seriously bad luck, a human operator looking at exactly the wrong time and realising that there was something fishy or some sort of automated system. But, unless they had a system on Galatea’s level, their automated systems had to check against known parameters, for example, if I started to draw serious amounts of power, that would cause a red flag, or if possible radiation-detectors went off.

But, working with ordinary looking electric parts and machines, that was unlikely to cause concern and they had no way to know that my normal-sized microchip had actually almost a hundred times the circuitry embedded within it.

To allow the computer to run at peak performance at times, without the higher energy draw needed for operating and cooling the system, I had built a second computer-shell, this one only containing energy-crystals that served as a battery to power the real computer if I needed serious work done. I even got myself permission from the building-admin to permanently run computers within my workshop, giving a partially true explanation for the amount of power I was drawing. It cost extra, but that was just the price of doing business.

But, just because I had a way to compute on a microscopic level, did not mean that I had a way to power or operate the microbots I wanted to create. Especially for more complex operations, they either needed more computing power or some way to outsource most of the computing somewhere else, leaving only the smallest part of computing for them.

As I was, once again, hammering my brain against the wall I was still stopped by, Galatea reminded me that I had promised Nisha and Mina to meet with them for dinner and a night out. There were worse things to do on a Saturday evening, so I had asked Galatea to alert me an hour before the appointed time, giving me enough time to have a shower.

Back at the dorm, Tanisha was in our room, once again listening to loud music, while appearing to study.

As I was grabbing clothes out of my closet, she looked up and paused her music.

“Hey, roomie, how’s it going?” she asked, her voice bored.

“Hello Tanisha, for once, I have time to go out with a couple of friends. I might have bitten off more than I thought when I chose the double-major, you know?” I answered, explaining the change in my normal routine and once again reinforcing the answer I had given her every time she had asked me if I wanted to go party with her. That answer being, ‘No, I need to study.’

“Whooohooow, you are going out? Miss Super-Serious-Super-Student takes time out of her studying to have fun? Dayum, I need to mark the calendar, that might just be a sign of the end-times.”

“I think you might exaggerate, just a little bit.”

“Girl, I don’t think you took a break since we started, not a single day. But hey, good for you. Say, do you need the room tonight? If you want, I can look for somewhere else to sleep, just in case you want to bring someone back, get some booty, you know?”

There was a stab in my heart, as memories of Sophia flooded back. I had tried not to think about her, ever since Galatea had put her foot down when it came to checking in on her. Well, Galatea had called it stalking and forbidden me from doing so, until I was willing to directly contact Sophia, but I never had the courage to do so.

“No, no need for that. But thank you.” I answered, my voice tight, and I quickly vanished into the bathroom with the clothes for the evening. Not that I was really dressing up, a pair of tight black leather pants, a dark, almost blood, red blouse and my bracelets, which I almost never took off. To finish things off, and because it was getting cold outside, I added a light, black leather jacket to the look and I was ready for whatever the two of them had planned.