Over the next couple of days, I got introduced to the joys of fame. Karen had been the only one of the four of us who had a regular boyfriend, so when the rumour mill spread that one of the girls in our suite had been raped by her boyfriend, it was obvious who was the victim. When it was spread that he had been taken down by ‘the lesbian whore’ as the gossip put it most of the time, things were only slightly less obvious, I had never made a secret out of my sexual orientation and as soon as the rumors hit the gym, people put two and two together, getting Diana as a result. So, I was, depending on who you asked, either a lesbian seductress, stealing a guy’s girlfriend or I was the knightess in leather corset, riding to the rescue of the fair maiden. Personally, I drew one conclusion from the insane amount of inane gossip and that was, people here had too much free-time. Considering my own load of classes and homework, I had barely enough time for my extracurricular workshop-projects.

It took until lunch on wednesday that the unbidden fame intruded into my other social circle, when some girl I had never seen before pressed a letter onto me and scurried off. It might not have mattered but it happened right next to Mina who promptly snatched the letter before I could quite comprehend what had happened.

It was a poem, dedicated to the fierce amazon of the Curie-dorm. The sad part was, it wasn’t completely bad, only that it was about me and about as subtle as a battle-tank. There were multiple allusions to my name, some of them good, some of them just horrible.

Mina thought it was hilarious, that I was getting adoring poems and I had to explain what had happened to both, Nisha and her. Both asked me to tell Karen they were happy she was fine and were proud of me, for helping. Neither seemed particularly surprised that I had been able to stop a man without injury or apparent trouble, but then, both knew I was training daily. I was more embarrassed by their praise but simply accepted it.

When later that day, the Cluster-Newspage published an inaccurate piece of gossip, I briefly considered showing them my nasty side but at the end of the day, discretion prevailed. Well, mostly. Galatea and I did compile a rather nasty hit-piece on the reporter that had written the article, it was the same who had visited us after the event and somehow, it got into their ‘reader’s say’-collum. My, what a great newspage, they even published hit-pieces on their own staff. The hit-piece only contained publicly available data but I doubted anyone would take the time to comb through the amount of information Galatea had filtered to find the gems, like the unfortunate afro said reporter had sported during middle-school. We had spent multiple hours of super-computer runtime to dig up data so we were quite thorough.

When that reporter, started running when he randomly saw me in the streets made me feel quite a bit better and I considered justice served.

The next day, thursday, the first idiot appeared to harass me at the gym. I gave him extra points for getting up early, it was just after five a.m. after all and left him for Ray to deal with. He had forbidden me from using the sparring-ring to deal with such idiots, so it was on him to take care of them and I told him so. He just laughed, told me I had done a good job and to keep my eyes open. He took the idiot into the back and after a few minutes, the idiot reemerged, rather pale and refusing to look in my general direction. Afterwards, I was no longer harassed at the gym.

That night, Karen returned to her own bed a change I was thankful for. But I had learned something new. I was awakened by snoring. And I was kept awake by snoring. And Karen sounded like an engine in dire need of maintenance. I had no idea how Ru Shi managed to sleep through that but I was unable to.

On Friday, I learned something interesting about the local justice-system. They investigated but they had no prison to speak of, only deporting criminals either to their country of origin, or to the country of the criminal’s victim, if they were inclined to take them. The investigation was considered a slam-dunk, as the police-officers had been wearing small cameras and recorded him, ranting about the fact that the ‘whore had wanted to be raped’ and similar nonsense. They had packaged the forensic evidence, the confession and the statements from Karen and me into one report and sent him where he had been from, to face justice there. I was not sure I liked the system, especially in regards to events that were not considered a crime everywhere, but I was not in a position to change things. Yet.

But, with each day, the interest in the events waned and while I did not go back to relative obscurity, the general interest ceased. The rumor mills got new fodder and the gossip mongers needed new tidbits to enrich their boring existence.

I, on the other hand, was happily working with Galatea on increasing the amount of nanites. Both of us had stopped considering individual nanites, only thinking in millions of them now. For ease of access, we had stopped to make them in the evacuated vacuum-chamber and started to simply dump parts into the nano-swarm that was now living in the chest Galatea had designed. That way, Galatea could simply use the bots to construct more bots, increasing speed even further. But also the failure-rate, at their level, even some random radiation-spike could cause one of them to malfunction, forcing us to scrap it.

The chest also allowed me to test what they could actually do. Sure, just using them to scan things was trivial, they could easily link up with their filaments and transmit their own position and that of their filaments, giving a resolution that was normally only available to electron microscopes. But, I was able to do more than just look at things, I was able to manipulate things. One of my tests was to construct something from scratch, something relatively simple, an engraved piece of jewelry and I ran into a problem. It was slow. My first idea had been to place every particle in order, thinking of a 3D printer. But I should have done the math first, there was a reason Galatea and I had stopped to think of them in individual terms and thought of them collectively as the swarm and, when thinking of smaller samples, the size of the swarm rounding to the nearest million. Even a normal ring, made from a single material, sized for my finger, took a full night to assemble, particle by particle.

When Galatea reported the next morning, I could only smack myself at my stupidity and make a note to self that for future projects, each swarm would be subdivided as much as practical, all starting subassemblies.

A little over a week after the event with David, Nisha cornered me and asked about the supercomputer I had told her about.

“You said you need to cobble together an operating system. Do you have it yet?” she asked, her voice uncommonly solemn.

“Depends what you want to do. For some things, yes, for others we might need to write extra code. Why?” I asked, feeling her seriousness. She was not asking for something for classes or a passing interest, it was more.

“I have an algorithm that should allow me to optimise an idea I have, for a molten salt-reactor. If it works like I think it will, it might pave the future for my country. But it is extremely complex, my own computer just crashes if I try to solve it and if I ask anyone else, I might lose my work. You, on the other hand, I believe I can trust you. I hope, I can trust you.” her eyes were pleading in a way I had never seen on her before. She was trusting me with her dream, a dream we had often discussed but it seemed she believed to have it in reach. Seeing her like that, there was only one response I could give her.

“It might take my computer some time. How about you come by friday evening and we see what we can do with your work?” I asked and suddenly I was enveloped in a hug.

“Thank you. I swear, you will not regret this. If I can make this work, you will never have to worry again in your life.” her voice was thick with emotion.

“We, if we can make this work. And I believe in your work, so I believe we can make your dream a reality.”