It took me nearly a week to get over the incident to the point where I could work again. The first day I simply could make myself even get up from bed. The day after, my hunger drove me out, but I could not say what I ate. It got progressively better but whenever I closed my eyes I saw the exploding cars.

Did I stop this stupid gang war? Yes, at least this part of it. Was it necessary to do it myself? I still think so, regardless of the pain. And it was equally necessary for me to watch it. Watching the carnage I sowed. The destruction, the death. I absolutely had to pay a price for intentionally killing people. I had too much power for it to be any different.

Not physical power, but digital. I already had backdoors into a great many militaries in the world, even a few megacorps. It would be way too easy for me to task an orbital KEW to take out whole city blocks or launch a few nukes. Only the NWC had physical lockouts on their WMDs, even after Hyderabad. All the others tried their best to ignore the situation.

Sure, it was not exactly child’s play to get to the point where you could use these weapons, but there were still more than 100 humans who were capable of doing it. The only thing preventing some of them from actually doing it was that the top of our community rigorously exterminated the ones seriously trying to.

To make it short, for most of 6 days the only things I did were eat, sleep, and brood. The few times I tried to work on something I made a righteous hash out of it, giving up in disgust.

The others tried to help me get through it, and at some level, I was thankful for their care but I simply could not make myself show any appreciation for their effort. That was the underlying problem. I could not make myself do anything at all.

Hunger brought me to eat, my nose brought me to the shower, I slept if I was tired, but the rest of the time I brooded. I wept a few times, not sure if it was about Kursalin and his men, or self-pity. Maybe a combination of both.

My cast was finally off, and the new nano fab was up and running, without anything to do for now, and the shells of the others were ready for seeding.

The new processor was halfway done, and I had to run the simulation on the auto-surgeon. I had to inspect the new heart for Mr. Walker, even though it was almost certain that there were no problems.

Regardless though what I had to do, I simply could not do it. I had neither the energy nor the strength and most certainly not the will to do anything.

I am sure I would have freed myself out of this funk at some time, after all, I did it before, but in the end, it was Darren who broke me out of it.

On the afternoon of Saturday, he simply barged into my room and placed his hands on my temples.

Then a warmth flooded through my head and my mood cleared instantly. I was dumbfounded nonetheless by his behavior.

“Enough. Yes, you killed the Ivan and his thugs. Newsflash, they came here to kill you. Maybe Doc Schaeffer and our other guests too if they knew they were here, but they came specifically to kill you.

And I understand why you had to do it yourself, and I even get why you had to watch it. And I applaud you for that. But you have moped enough. You were left without a choice in this matter. So yes, grieve about your lost innocence, but be proud about your resolve to do the right thing.”

I blinked a few times, and then looked directly at him.

“What did you do?”

His sigh was pretty sad.

“Biokinetics again. You were trapped in a vicious circle between your brain chemistry and your depression.

Your mood changed your chemistry, making your mood even darker, worsening your chemistry.

The result was that you had a serious deficit of some hormones that make people happy. I just jump-started the release of those hormones, and essentially made you artificially happy enough to overcome your funk.”

I slowly shook my head.

“That… that does not sound too healthy.”

He sat on the bed beside me.

“Of course not, but it is healthier than rotting away here. You will still have to work out your problems, I have only given you a jump start. So please do us all a favor and look for help.”

I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths.

“Any idea how I should do that?”

“I don’t know. Learn yoga, meditate, search for a shrink, or take up a hobby. Anything but bury yourself in your grief.”

I nodded at that but did not answer, thinking about what I could do. Sure, I could dive into work, but in the long run, it would leave me in a bad state.

A hobby… I could look into some real ingredients here. I loved to cook after all, and even more to eat real food. The other things, I would not trust a shrink, not ever again.

I had enough counseling growing up to last me forever. Yoga or meditation, I could look into that.

I vaguely was aware that he stood up and left the room, but I was already in the process of looking up possibilities.

I was not sure how long the boost Darren had given me would last, but I was sure to use it as much as I could.

So the first thing I did was dive into cyberspace and began researching the contacts Mr. Walker had given me.

I sadly found out that our refrigerators, unused for nearly 30 years, were non-functional. Not that I would really trust real food to nearly 4 decades-old appliances.

So new refrigerators and freezers were ordered, with express delivery for today. I then contacted the fixers here about a real food source, including spices.

With that done, I began to investigate possible methods to meditate. After a few virtual hours, I decided to buy several VR tutorials for yoga, meditation, and Tai Chi, and over the next subjective days try each. Finally, I settled on Tai Chi as the option best suited for me, and I learned the skill.

In real-time, I had spent 3 hours on this, but now it was time to try this in the real world. The beginning was a bit awkward, but I soon got the hang of it. During the exercise, I tried to get my tumultuous mind under control.

I knew without a doubt that I had done the right thing, but my feelings were much harder to convince. I was sure that I had made considerable headway when I finished an hour later, but I also knew that I was not yet out of trouble.

After a shower, I felt much better. I had to go over my to-do list another time.

The amount of changes were manageable.

Mia had finished the disassembling of the heart nearly two weeks ago. The bioreactor was chugging along.

The upgrades to the fortress were coming along.

The old Westons were removed and scrapped, and the installation of the other two Yaoshis was nearly done. I noticed my new laboratories were set up, and the industrial fabber was up and running.

Contacts and reputation had made large strides forward, with the big meeting. The only thing left here was to deliver.

The new slaves, except Frankel, were auctioned off, and we had an understanding with Sayomi, where she would try to live for at least a month before she resorted to suicide.

Now then I launched the design stress simulation of the new auto-surgeon, before starting a few batches of seed stock on the new nano fab. Idly I mused about how to maximize the output of a nano fab, and build the largest possible.

Mark had given me my new pistols, but I had simply ignored them, not having the strength of will to even look into it, so now I took them out, inspecting them. Mark had even provided an instruction manual for them. The message told me that he had tested both of them. He had also added the profile to the range VR.

I logged into the VR and trained with the two pistols for some time, getting continuously better, under the tutelage of the NPC here. I have to admit, that Mark was right. These two pistols were by far better than my PDP 22, not to mention how much better they felt in my hands.

If he was also right about the armor-piercing qualities of the ammunition, and I had no reason to doubt that, I was golden. As golden as I could be at least.

After I had spent two virtual days training with the guns, I looked up the results of the simulation and found no surprises. The design was overengineered to a ridiculous amount, but it would be the best auto-surgeon I had ever heard about.

Then I started to work on the redesign of the NADA. I had yet to test the disassembler part of it, and the nano-assembler function was disappointingly slow, but the basic principle was obviously working.

The problem was getting the materials fast enough to the point where they were needed.

It could be around 50 times faster if I could deliver the resources fast enough. I had the vague idea to use a faster nanobot design as a porter, but a fast simulation showed that I would gain at best an increase by a factor of three. Not enough for my ambition.

Not that I threw the design away. It could still be used. Instead, I moved up to the macrocosm. I designed a substrate-material mixer and combined that with a pump and a robotic spray head to deliver the solution to the right place.

I tried for several hours to balance the speed of the pump so that it brought the mix at an acceptable pace, without blasting the material and the nanobots all over the tank. All without noticeable success, so I redesigned the system with a reservoir at the spray head and a second, weaker pump there to deliver the mix.

My simulation showed that this system would be somewhere around 20-25 times faster. When I added the fast porters the increase became 30 times. Still not at its full potential but it would have to do. I knew that over the next months, maybe years, I would fiddle with the design of the delivery system, the design of the bots, and everything else. With the new system, if the simulations were right, I could build a Chimaera processor in half a day. And with a bit of redesign, I would be able to build a dozen of them at once.

Thanks to the industrial fabber I would not need to have the mechanical systems fabricated by somebody else, as I had to do with the original NADA I brought with me from Seattle.

Instead, I started a fabrication run. When the processor was done in three days I would have the auto-surgeon and the upgrades for the NADA ready.