After the big reveal of Seeberger’s equation and what it meant, I would have thought that it ushered in a new golden age for humanity. At some time I will learn to curb my unfounded faith in humanity.

Yes, the news made a big splash, and everybody and their neighbor began looking into it. Especially the banks began a rigorous security check for the little plugs I had smuggled in for project Hermes, and they even found some of them.

I had to erase my entries into their maintenance and janitorial services and was not able to retrieve all of the plugs. Not that it did them any good. Literally the first thing I did after redecorating room 1 of hut 2 was ordering Warden to dismantle the separate cluster that I had used for Hermes.

I had her run every single part through the molecular forge, including every single cable and even the screws. Then I had her distribute the materials all over the solar system. This was the advantage of using a VI. Any human would have argued and protested over the waste of resources.

After all, what I was throwing away would have served most Abyss-dwellers as primary cluster just fine. And to be honest, to this day I am not sure that I was not a tad paranoid. It probably would have been enough to simply break the Q-links but I decided to not take no risks here.

I knew, that at least theoretically, it was possible to get the position of one endpoint from the other. Sure, it was… a technical challenge. It would take something the size of the cluster to have any chance at all to get the position of one of the atoms.

But we are talking about the banks. The only reason no bank had an AAA status was that the banks excluded themselves from the ranking. They definitely had the resources to do it. Sure, they lacked the knowledge of how to do it, for now, but that was, in my estimation, just a matter of time.

Of course my estimation of how long it would take changed over the next few months. On one hand, I was ecstatic that my advantage would keep for a bit longer, on the other hand, what the freck were the well-paid scientists doing? Even in July, five months after I had practically pushed their collective noses into it, not a single one managed to even understand the equation.

Yes, it took me two months, thankfully virtual, but keep in mind that I only had the equation with the typo. In these two months, I not only understood the equation enough to realize that there was an error in it, but I frecking corrected it, understood it, and managed to create the first Q-links.

Ok, I had no insight into the labs of the triple-A corps, but I looked at all the major universities and the governmental labs. Nothing. Heck, there were online discussion groups trying to decypher the equation. I lurked in most of them, and they did not even come close.

Michael had, meanwhile, managed to buy a 15x15 block area of Queens directly adjacent to Ben’s territory. After some deliberation, and seeing the price one of those blocks was going for, we decided to increase the size by more than 100%. His estimate of the price for one of the blocks was nearly twice what it turned out in reality.

Sure, it got that way when Ben began weighing in in the negotiations, but the main factor was that we were taking off such a big block in one swoop, and promised taxes in near future. Ben managed to convince the city that it was better to get rid of as much of the ruined real estate at once.

It would take another two months before the S&P Excelsior 2.8 was up and running, but we had managed to get enough Westinghouse fusactors installed to serve for the first couple of years, I think.

I had insisted to convert one of the blocks into a park. It was astonishing how expensive it was to get fertile soil delivered. It cost nearly as much as the 225 blocks altogether. But I decided a bit of beauty was necessary.

It did not hurt that the park was placed directly opposite the future company HQ, an empty block for now.

That was not the only empty block at this time. Michael had wasted no time in clearing the ruins, even though the process was still ongoing.

So far we had the first elements of the material refinery, the secondary power production, and a couple of storage buildings up.

More importantly, the first production facility for neural cyberware was nearly finished.

Yes, we planned a production facility for muscular cyberware but decided early on that this was a much lower priority. Yes, the new application process worked perfectly, but unlike the nano-filter for Neuronect, the biosheathing process has to be tailored to the end-user.

I have already replaced all the cyberware of Ben and his allies, as well as most of his men. And he had his ‘beloved’ Kolvar Excelsior back, well, a new one. In general, he was as happy as can be, which in turn lifted my own mood considerably.

I had, meanwhile become somewhat proficient with my music, and now branched out into other instruments. Well, guitars at least, and e-bass.

I had even bought a full suite of instruments. High-end naturally. It was impressive how much being able to form my feelings and my moods into sound helped my mental problems.

That I had caused a devastating blow to Panacea did not hamper me either. All in all, I was in a considerably better mood than even half a year earlier.

It was not all a bed of roses of course. I was still miffed about revealing the existence of the Q-links, and I was still being pestered about explaining Seeberger’s equation. Not that anyone I talked to about it showed even the barest hints of understanding it.

Add in that the profits from the sale of cyberware had tapered off quite substantially, and you get a bit of a downer.

Don’t get me wrong, it was still more than a billion DC each month, but at the beginning of the craze, I made that each day. Yes, of course, I did not need it, but it was quite the ego-boost to experience how people value what I had created.

And yes, I understand that the tapering had nothing to do with the quality of my inventions but after seeing those numbers coming in, it is a bit of a letdown.

Still, I was now worth roughly $50 billion. And Ben had earned more than enough to begin modernizing his territory.

He was sufficiently impressed when I got my T-240 though. He joked that he would have to borrow it a few times. Well, half-joked that is. I could tell that he was not really envious, but he had the desire to show up in the luxury skimmer for meetings with his colleagues.

We bantered a bit back and forth about payment and how he could make it worth my effort.

He was even more impressed when I gave him his T-240. Yes, with all the tribute I was paying, he would have been able to afford one for himself, but he was more concerned with building up his territory.

It took me some time to convince him to even accept the dang thing. I was aware of how he reveled in the luxury of mine, so I had to assume that it was a pride thing. But in the end, after some conversations that treated to become heated, I finally managed to get him to take possession.

In other news, Doc Schaeffer was still very happy with the new auto-surgeon and has bought another three. After a bit of waiting, I incorporated the decision tree that I had liberated from Panacea. I was not the only one of course. After I had put it on the dark web, it had become the defacto standard in short order.

Panacea was still crying about it, and suing corporations left and right, but they were unable to stem the tide. Still, the version of the auto-surgeon I sold had the generally available decision tree, and I made a ‘hacked’ version of the firmware that included the Panacea tree and placed that on the dark web as well.

I then seeded some bulleting boards with the locations of the firmware. And lo and behold, when Panacea got around to suing Enki, we defeated the suit in record time by simply pointing out that we did not provide the stolen decision tree, and were not responsible for somebody ‘stealing’ our firmware and providing it for free in the dark web. The fact that the firmware became the base of many other black auto surgeon updates in the future underlined our innocence.

After all, it cut into our profit as well. In a bout of irony, we later, as in a year later, managed to take Panacea to the cleaners because they incorporated our firmware into their newest auto surgeon, but both events were still a bit in the future.

I had another project coming to a, well… acceptable outcome. Hunter proved to be an adequate Jack. By far not outstanding, and I could not see him ever reaching the Abyss on his own accords, but he was good enough to begin working.

He told me that he now understood why I had refused him a Seraphim Mk. IV. And he was wrong. He still did not fully get it. He only saw that his style, his modus operandi was still evolving and that an Mk. IV would have been wasted money, but he still could not understand how dangerous it was to get into diving with the best tech from the get-go. He would learn. Or not, but it was out of my hands.

By now, he had gotten a Dalgon Sigma board. Nothing spectacular, but a nice mid-level board. Of course, it was tuned a bit, but it suited his style pretty well.

He still asked me about getting an Mk. IV at every possible opportunity, but I managed to turn him out. He was by far not in a position yet to warrant the effort from me.

But ‘mentoring’ him had a surprisingly positive effect. Warden proved exceptionally proficient in keeping him alive, out of trouble, but still letting him make his own mistakes. In short, it was essentially the smoothest mentorship I’ve ever heard of, despite Hunter, who was now operating as Atrax, not being the most impressive of all candidates.

When I told the top people in the Abyss about it, we got the idea of creating a VI with the sole purpose of shepherding new Jacks into the business. Unlike the medical VI that I was still working on, this was relatively easy to achieve.

It would be interesting to observe how this VI, named Athena, would influence our community in the future. But the early impressions are pretty good.

Sure, Athena lacked the arsenal that Warden had access to, but she was sufficiently armed to protect fledgling Jacks into their first steps. And of course, everybody is pretty happy about not having to invest months to play guardian angel to a new hacker anymore.

It was in late May when I finished most of my medium-term projects, and had to look for something else to do, and I remembered that Ben had asked me to design his new computer network. That in turn reminded me that I needed to beef up the security of the fortress.

And so I looked into it, and I finally found out why barely anybody in the US knew about Beowulf clusters.

Somehow Ralcon had managed to get a US patent on the very concept of distributed computing. Don’t ask me how they managed that.

This technology was already more than a century old when Ralcon was created from the remains of Intel, AMD, and Microsoft after the computer industry hit the hard wall of 3-nanometer construction. Every other nation had laughed at this attempt and declared it prior arts.

But not the US of A. No siree, they decided that Ralcon had all the right to that technology. And they enforced it rigorously.

They forced the hardware builders to use a variant of their network controllers that prevented distributed computing.

Only they had the right to it. And they let themselves be paid princely for the privilege of using a Beowulf.

I was already not thinking very fondly about Ralcon because of the way they limited nano-bot use in the US, and now that.

Honestly, I was quite a bit irked with them, but I got an idea of how I could pee in their soup, without breaking the law. Of course, it all depended on selling NADA’s in the long run, but it was a way to neatly circumvent the artificial bottle-neck.

I called it Grendel. Essentially it was the mother of all processors. Or maybe the grandmother.

With the help of Q-links, the NADA, and everything I’ve learned while designing the Chimaera and the Hyperion, I poured into the Grendel.

Physically, it was a massive cube of Graphene, Peltier elements, heat pipes, and electrical connectors with a side length of a bit over 30cm, or 1 foot.

This thing had a mass of a hair over 70kg (or 155lb). It was almost twice as heavy as I was.

I managed to squeeze nearly 33 thousand full-sized cores into it. Considering that a high-end Tesseract worked with 512 cores, this one processor had the cores of 64 Tesseracts, which, with the fact that the average Beowulf cluster used between five and twelve Tesseracts, meant that I had way more than enough processor power in one processor than most university departments had in their whole computing pool.

I integrated nearly an exabyte of cache as well.

And that was before all the advantages of the 413 pm process and the Q-link architecture came into play.

Honestly, I would only need two or three of these things to replace my cluster flop for flop. The disadvantage was that it did take my NADA nearly two weeks to make a single one of these monsters.

And the real kicker? I designed the chipset of the motherboard to accept up to four of them.

In other words, with a single server, I now could build a supercomputer, without ever coming even close to distributed computing.

Not that the motherboard did not allow for that as well. The only challenge was designing a case that could actually support the weight of these things. Oh, and the cooling of the case. Yes, the integrated cooling was… substantial, but that only moved the heat out of the processor.

It would not matter if it melted the motherboard and the rest of the computer within a couple of minutes. I decided on using liquid nitrogen to transport the heat toward the separate cooling units.

It was almost comical. The computer itself was a single 11 RU double-wide module. The storage system added another four units. The cooling for it consisted of another four complete full-height server racks.

Was it impractical? Of course. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it was actually surprisingly efficient in terms of power usage and cooling. The same amount of computing would have taken up a couple of rooms if I had used traditional designs. Even if I had used the 413pm process and Q-links it would have taken three times as much volume, 1.5 times as much power, and would need twice the cooling.

But on the other hand, it would be much more modular, and more granular to a barely comprehensible extent. With the Grendel, you had essentially all or nothing. With a traditional design on the other hand you can start with a couple of processors and begin using the system, while you add processors as needed at a tempo you can sustain.

Needless to say, I immediately began to build a second, and then a third NADA. I was not surprised when Warden informed me that she began building a couple of those servers at each of her locations.

Heck, for laughs, I designed a version with fuzzy logic cores, just a tiny bit bigger.

When I was done with all of it, and proudly told Ben about what I had done, he stared at me for a moment as if I had grown another head before he sighed and shook his head.

Then he matter of factly told me, that his organization, criminal as it is, had absolutely no problem with using pirated technology, and I could as well have just used a more or less normal Beowulf.

Well, dang, all that work, for nothing? Ok, I now had a monster of a processor, but for what?

He better would be happy with the Grendel server I already had built for him, that was for sure.

So what if it was about 500 times more powerful than he needed? He had it now and that’s it.