The Mk. 1 Armor was a fairly rousing success. It wasn't perfect, there were plenty of casualties and even some fatalities. The armor itself held up beyond expectations, but that doesn’t mean the person inside it was invincible. There were plenty of blast injuries, brain injuries, and even a fair number of dislocations. Sure, the armor was proof against bullets, but an IED going off under someone's feet did plenty of damage even without getting torn up by shrapnel. Generally, over-pressurization damage and concussions caused the most casualties, though fire and heat were a concern too. I remember one nasty incident involving a Molotov cocktail during some urban action somewhere.

One team of marines even got overrun and pinned down. I don't mean pinned the way soldiers in a firefight usually say pinned, I mean that a handful of terrorists literally sat on top of them and held them down until they surrendered. They were rescued pretty quickly, but the whole incident got caught on film and I'm not sure if those four guys ever recovered their dignity.

The Mk. 2 did better, and we got that into the military's hands less than a year after the first live combat trials with the Mk. 1. The joints were redesigned - mobility was even more limited, but someone wearing it couldn't be forced by a blast to move beyond what a body could naturally handle, and the mobility limits reduced brain and pressurization wave injuries a lot. The suit was also augmented by Plasma Copper heatsinks. Not a perfect protection against heat and flame, but it would usually give a soldier a chance to get out of the kitchen.

2 years after that the Mk. 3 was released. The Mk. 3 was basically the pinnacle of our designs. By then Hansen had figured out how to create a transparent material using a titanium alloy (Plasma Glass) that was seemingly as impervious as the Plasma Steel. With that and a few space-age fabrics, we were able to make the armor airtight. And the soldiers' faces were completely visible, barring some glare.

Blast injuries and TBIs from getting thrown around remained the most common casualties, but even those generally required a rather large explosive in close proximity to a soldier. A hand grenade at someone's feet wouldn’t do much but rattle a person inside. Even a blast that threw them against a wall was usually survivable without more than some bruising.

At the same time, the Pentagon had been quite liberal with armoring vehicles. We didn't have any military vehicles in production yet, but there were quite a few tanks, Humvees, choppers, and other transports that had been given Plasma Steel plating. I hear that having a few hundred pounds of high explosive flip your truck end over end is quite exciting. Sure it counted as a mission kill, but the occupants wouldn't be any more injured than they would get in a normal car accident. Not fun, but better than having the bottom of your vehicle torn open and filled with shrapnel.

And we got paid, of course. By procurement officers who were thrilled to pay us. We sold our armor cost for about the same as the best conventional armors. Soldiers loved it because it was a fraction of the weight of their old gear. The logistics guys loved that they didn’t have to replace anything but linings, no matter what happened to the suit. So even the bean counters who didn't really care about lives saved got to see a reduction in fueling, shipping, and maintenance costs. Silver linings, right?

We also released a 'civilian' line between the release of the Mk. 2 and Mk. 3. Vests with strike plates that could be worn somewhat comfortably under clothing; full clamshell-style cuirasses that strapped on over clothing; a variety of helmets; and more. The conquistador look came back in for cops and security guards, and it wasn't uncommon to see some guards wearing full suits - bank guards, armored car guards, and bodyguards especially.

There was another incident, similar to Corporal Lopez's story, involving a swat team moving into a militia-type compound in Northern Idaho. The group had been long suspected of all sorts of criminal activity, ranging from human trafficking to drug dealing with all the violent crime that goes hand in hand with that sort of stuff, all covered up with the usual patina of Constitutional nutjobbery. The authorities had held their suspicions for quite a while, but they never quite did anything that would make another Branch David worthwhile.

But armor makes for bravery. Eighteen SWAT team members walked into the compound early one morning, armed with tasers, clubs, and tear gas. A perimeter had been set up, but they deliberately moved without speed, without taking cover. They literally walked through gunfire from tower to nest to doorway, subduing the militiamen one by one. No casualties at all among the state police; two deaths among the militiamen, both caused by friendly fire. Lots of other injuries on the criminals though, chemical burns, bruising, and a few broken bones.

There was a renaissance in tactics going on. Soldiers spent less and less time on target practice, but spent hours on hand-to-hand drills and began experimenting with old-fashioned melee weapons. SWAT teams learned Roman legionnaire tactics and bayonet drills. Sure, snipers still got trained, but every year they got less useful.

It was inevitable, I think, given how much armor we were selling. Most soldiers and cops kept on top of theirs, but some pieces always made their way to less savory types. Never as much as you'd assume. The need for a good fit was pretty limiting. When we sold suits, we had to get pretty specific measurements, otherwise, a wearer would start dealing with armor blunt trauma. The armor worked by spreading out the force of a bullet over large portions of someone's body, and a bad fit would just refocus that force to a few small bits. So even stolen gear wasn't a huge problem.

And the changes weren’t limited to the United States. While we were doing surprisingly well keeping our methods secret, we were still selling products to pretty much any government that wanted them. We did have a few State Department consultants who would give us a greenlight on sales, and keep track of serial numbers, but pretty soon there were only a few odd states left out. We didn’t sell to a few of the really broken African states, or North Korea. Although North Korea never really came sniffing around, either. I think they just decided the whole thing was some sort of scam.

But conflict around the world was changing. Not that there had been any major state conflicts going on, just the low-grade guerrilla stuff that never goes away. But ambushes on convoys would just fizzle out. Clearing out caves, bases, and all those tight spaces that partisans love suddenly became safe and easy to clear out. Safe and easy enough that the big terrorist and criminal organizations around the world found themselves rapidly curtailed. Pundits started talking about a new golden age for world peace. Even drone bombing programs got scaled back - no smart bomb is as smart as boots on the ground, after all. Even marines are better at controlling collateral damage than a smart bomb. Even the Palestinians and Israelis looked like they were making nice.

I may have been naive.

But business was gangbusters. I think, I'm not going to bother looking up what gangbusters actually means, but I'm pretty sure I'm using the term correctly. We expended at an insane rate. Within five years of releasing the MK-1 armor we were accounting for almost a quarter of all manufacturing in the US, and nearly a tenth of worldwide manufacturing. We were literally bringing in money faster than we could spend it.

About half of our profits were invested in research. Which makes sense, given that Hansen owned nearly half of the company. He was now one of several PHDs we paid, along with a couple of hundred other researchers. All those physicists hammering away at Angat's breakthrough were excited to come and work for the one group that had managed to do something real with it. All we had to do was keep Hansen away from personnel decisions and we were fine. He delegated areas of research and reviewed everyone's findings, but Austin expanded his focuses and dealt with most of the coordination.

Austin didn't necessarily know the science, but he did know how to keep people motivated, how to find good workers, and how to make sure they had what they needed to get their work done. He also turned into something of a savant at managing egos and difficult personalities. It turns out that the Professor wasn't exactly abnormal among researching academics.

Meanwhile, the Beards managed the actual manufacturing, with some help from executive staff slowly brought in. They directly handled new mold designs, new parts manufacturing, and had a finger on all the supply chain management stuff. Every month it got easier to find people with talent and experience at the nuts and bolts of large-scale manufacturing.

That was because we were actually putting most of the other companies out of business. I didn’t realize how much of a problem that was with our business model – we pretty much never sold the same item twice to the same person. There's no such thing as a repeat customer when your product never breaks or wears out. All those hand tools we were selling a few years ago? Since then we had bought out a few tool companies, and the rest had gone under. Once you sell a plasma steel hammer, that’s one less hammer that will ever get purchased again. Once we got working electric motors built out of plasma steel we sold power tools, too. We bought out the companies with useful patents, but most everyone else went under. The most successful survivors were the ones who opted to buy parts from us directly – people like Boeing.

We did our best to mitigate the problems – we hired people from businesses that we shuttered as much as we could, paid them a lot more than we had to, and kept more employees than we needed.

As the issues got obvious, the five of us talked about this a lot. We were on a tiger – anything we made was going to outsell the rest of the market unless we overcharged by a huge margin. But once the market saturated, we were done. We kept our prices high – margins on some products were close to a thousand percent, even when counting our inflated personnel costs – but that just slowed down the problem. Even at the crazy margins a lot of our products ran fairly close to market levels, and people bought them.

But the truth was, there wasn't much we could do. Manufacturing was on its way out. If we didn't make plasma steel, someone else would. It was just too damn useful. Someone had to ride the wave, so it might as well be us. But I'd be lying if I didn't say it kept me up at night. The industrial revolution caused a huge amount of horror while it lifted people up, but you couldn't pin that any individuals in the history books, not really. This time though, it would be all too easy to pin this revolution on my friends and me.

All I could do was all I could do.

All those extra workers we had? Most of them were busy coming up with new products, new applications, and new ideas. A lot of those ideas were obvious. We were already building cars – at least the motors, chassis, and mechanical bits; the body and interior didn't change much. A solid Plasma Steel car was a bit too dangerous, the designers had to soften the inside and provide crumple zones for safety's sake. Tractors too, furniture, and so on. High tech factory equipment – robotic arms, drones, printers, and modular equipment that could be re-purposed towards all sorts of different products.

We even had about a thousand people who worked from home, whose only ‘job’ was to talk to our prototype AI and use it to operate a smart home whose components we sent them.

I was investing a lot of cash in land. We were testing out automated farm equipment – our tractors and farm equipment run by heuristic AIs – one overseer with a bunch of unbreakable machinery could manage huge volumes of land. It made for some good photo ops though. Most of the land I'd bought was abandoned rust belt property. Empty subdivisions in Detroit and similar. A lot of it was initially bought for reclamation purposes – we were still managing to keep our techniques secret, and there was lots of old linoleum in those old houses. The glass, pipes, and other materials were used too. Technically the operation was at a loss but keeping Plasma Steel methods secret for another few years was worth it.

Plasma Products still ended up owning most of Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio. Cleaning it up and reverting it to farmland was good PR. We also ended up using it to test out or larger concepts.

It was one of those concepts that was causing problems for me now. We could make beams up to sixty feet long, shaped to interlock with other beams at varying angles and points. We could make opaque sheets in standard building sizes, and transparent Plasma Glass sheets sized the same as any glass available. The glass was relatively expensive, but overall we could build a building cheaper than traditional materials. The big bottleneck was labor – so we started a program to train crane operators. We even started using drone tech so the operators could work from home, or out of state, or wherever.

We built a ten-story apartment building in the middle of nowhere in a couple of days, just to test the concept. Only needed workers on site to supervise, and to handle a few tricky bits, like connecting the new building to existing infrastructure. That done, we built a skyscraper for our new corporate headquarters and donated buildings for subsidized housing in a few cities.

And the orders started coming in. Pretty much no one building anything larger than a single-family home wanted to build with anything but us, we had a brand and we had an outstanding bounty to pay a major reward for any Plasma Steel failure. There were some surprising objections. One of those objections was eating dinner with me. He was a kind of round sort of guy, a bureaucrat from California.

His suit was a little too small, which was probably why a sleeve hadn't gotten dipped in his sauce yet. He was talking about how pleasant the cool fall weather was, “I heard some leaves were changing already, I think I'll drive out to see it tomorrow before I go home.”

“It is pretty enough, Mr. Benson. I'll admit I don't really spend a lot of time sightseeing, myself. I'm glad you were willing to come up though.” I took a careful bite of my pasta. “I really do prefer face to face, and I've got to admit I didn't really understand what the permit problem was when the lawyers explained it to me. I’m hoping you can explain the issue to me.”

He took a largish hunk of garlic bread, answering around the mouthful, “I'm happy to. Everything's documented and above board, it’s not like we always have to go through the lawyers.” He swallowed, with the help of a sip from a glass of white wine. “But permits are just impossible without more data. We have very strict fire and earthquake codes, after all. We simply can't issue a permit without the data from your engineers about Plasma Steel tolerances.”

“Tolerances.” My voice was flat. This is what the attorneys had told me, but I still couldn't quite believe it.

“Yeah, before we can properly evaluate a new material for building, we need to know how much it flexes, how much it can hold, and so on. We also need to know how it holds the load in high heat. We can't have buildings collapse when they catch fire, after all.”

“You've seen our material, right? The reports about it?”

“Sure. This is great pasta, by the way.”

“Thanks.” I took another careful bite. “Um, so why are tolerances an issue? The Plasma Steel exceeds any other building material in any rating you'd care to examine. So far as I know, the army still hasn't managed to break any.”

“Well, until we know exactly where it breaks, we just can't approve it. The law is clear, after all.” Benson wasn't making eye contact with me. Apparently, the pasta was as attractive looking to him as it was tasty.

“But doesn’t the law just set a minimum standard? We’ve looked at California’s building codes, requiring an exact number seems well beyond the scope?

“Well, I didn't write the policy, I just follow it. Plasteel just isn't up to code yet.”

“Plasma Steel. And I still fail to see how it fails to meet code.” I ranted at him some. I'll spare you the verbatim recording, but I think I managed to simultaneously express how unhappy I was with California and how little I cared about their rejection. We were the largest manufacturing company in the world and had never spent more than a hundred fifty thousand dollars a year on marketing. Hell, even that marketing was more about recruiting than selling. We had subsidiary companies designing buildings around the country, and around the world. People were demanding our products, our buildings, our everything, at a rate that we could only barely supply. I made it clear to him (in an accurate prophecy) that if the California government blocked Plasma Steel buildings then the voters would make it abundantly clear when California became the most backward state in the Union.

If they had just been trying to protect their own industries, I’d have been sympathetic. It’s true, we were a threat to lumber, to mining, to import businesses, even to farming. Asking us to accommodate existing business would have made plenty of sense. Instead, they just tried to hold us up for cash and petty tyranny.

So I just had to double down. The CA legislature thought they could just tax Plasma Steel at exorbitant rates in exchange for permits. So I publicized all the negotiations and piddly little complaints they had and made it clear that I would sell nothing in their great state unless we were treated like any other material. I even quit selling our consumer products there.

I just made sure the websites all flashed a great big warning explaining why you couldn’t buy that invincible mixer for your wife.