Naturally, Ben was right again, as so often. The moment I left cyberspace I felt buried by a wave of exhaustion.

I somehow managed to stumble into my bed, still fully clothed, and was out like a light.

That of course led to me being hungry as a wolf as soon as I woke up. I was indeed so hungry that I did not even take the time to make myself some real food and instead resorted to the food replicator to get some nourishment.

A couple of sandwiches later, and let me tell you how glad I was that I had taken the care to upgrade to the high-quality system that Ben had suggested, I was at least able to focus on what Warden had wrought while I was sleeping.

The new gizmo worked on the first try without any sort of difficulty.

And if you believe that, I have some nice farmland on Pluto to sell you. Get real, of course it did not work. Those things never do. It took me nearly two dozen attempts to get the Q-links working, and another 100 or so to get them reliable.

And that was with 3d structures made out of simple carbon with most of the step-by-step instructions in Seeberger’s paper.

This new endeavor was a tiny bit more complicated. There were, of course, quite a few sticky points, but only two of them were important.

The first was that Warden informed me that she could only approximate a suitable form for the 4d field. Courtesy of that, we now had eight different forms to pour the melted alloy into. Hopefully at least one of them would work.

This brings me to the second little snag. I learned why grav-coils are so insanely expensive. They make an average of five coils to get one working one. And working one is a broad term here. It ranges from “yes, it can make you a few grams lighter” to “this can lift a battleship”.

Unfortunately, we did not have any idea how many parts we would have to cast. It could be one, as unlikely as that was, it could be 10, 100, or we would never find a working part. I was hoping that it was not the last one, heck, I was hoping that we could get it done in the first dozen or so. But it was just a matter of luck at this time.

I was aware that I should have bought a bigger smelter, but I only needed one working 4d-creator out of it. After that, I would have the ability to make optimized gadgets out of way more suited materials without much loss.

But I needed to bootstrap my capabilities to do so first. So now I spent two days waiting four hours for two minutes of work and then testing and discarding the useless pile of scrap to recycling.

And the worst of it, it was completely wasted. After the eighth piece of refused scrap, Mark, of all people, asked me why I always waited four hours before swearing.

I took a few seconds to calm myself down before I forced a smile and answered him:

“It takes four hours to melt the metal for one of the attempts. And each attempt is a gamble if it works or not.”

Mark just shrugged. “And you have to use this little thing here? Just to melt the metal? Can’t your indy-fabs do the same?”

“No, the indy-fabs are basically all specialized fabrication stuff. Metal-forming, milling, electronic fabrication, carbon extrusion, and so on… usually take the basic materials and form them into the specific parts.”

He looked a bit confused.

“Yeah, that is true, but I thought you had those molar forgeries to make the basic materials. Are they not part of the indy-fabs?”

I sighed and shook my head.

“The molecular forges use specific rapidly changing gravity fields to separate, or combine, the raw materials.”

He frowned but looked at the newly filled smelter.

“Huh? I thought it would melt the stuff first.”

“No, they are based on gravity to… dang, you are right, they use gravity on the molten materials to work on them. They are big smelters. Well, another $55 thousand wasted.”

I jumped up from the chair where I had checked the results of the last try from and gave the very surprised-looking Mark a hug.

I distantly heard him say:

“What the fuck was that?” just before I reached the molecular foundries. I would need to keep one of them at producing carbon sand for the forms, at least part of the time, but that was something that the smaller Micronite Creator could do, while I used the bigger Weyland to melt the alloy.

It could not be that easy, of course. That was not something that could be laid at the feet of Burgmeister, Micronite, or Thurgood. Simply put, with the molecular forges, smelting metals was almost extinct. Basically, the only things being cast in significant numbers at that time were the grav-coils. For almost everything else, carbon extruders were the faster, cheaper, and easier solution. Not to mention better.

Structural steel? A thing of the past. Duralluminium? Gone to the ash heap of history. Cast steel? Brittle, expensive, and heavy, compared to making the same part out of carbon. Sure, we still used plastic and injection molding. At slightly lower temperatures.

That in essence meant that nobody even thought about the need to have a molecular forge work as a smelter.

Fortunately, the whole process was relatively easy to work around and only required a software fix. And now I could divert the still molten alloy to one of the evacuation ports, instead of to the base-forming cooler, that provided me with such things as sheet steel, pipes, or whatever.

Yes, I had to line the port with carbon ceramics to protect it from the heat, but that was a trivial modification. But in exchange for half an hour of work, I now could produce molten Kobashigawa alloy at an insane rate. Where I previously had to wait four hours for the material for each try to melt, I now had to wait six minutes for the carbon extruders to finish with the form.

Needless to say, my experiments accelerated significantly, and not even a day later I was successful. Yes, it took something like 200 tries, but I mostly was busy testing the results, sending the useless ones back to be melted down again.

The final result of all that work was barely able to allow controlled placement of atoms by the one NADA I installed it in. And it was slow. But it worked and allowed me to have a second, much more precise, efficient, and faster 4d-creator in my hands a couple of days later.

Which made it possible for me to create my very first grav-coil. I have to confess, I ignored the palladium-silver alloy that Kobashigawa had used. The math said it should be unsuited for the application.

Instead, I moved directly to what the math said was the optimal configuration. An iridium-vanadium alloy, placed into a carbon matrix to keep it structurally stable. I kept it small, with only a length of 20cm and a diameter of 1cm. A traditional grav-coil of that size would at best give me two or three Kepler.

I had, naturally no real clue of how strong the coil I had created would really be. It honestly, depended not only on how efficient the coil was, compared to the traditional ones but also on how much of the energy not wasted into heat was also wasted into not gravity bending fields. I hoped to get at least 100 Kepler out of it.

Nonetheless, when I had the new coil in my hands, early Tuesday, I immediately began to set up a test bench.

Nothing too complicated for this first test.

Just a small carbon weight on a thin CNT strap and a simple scale to measure the strength.

I had an argument with Warden about the way I had set up the experiment. She insisted that I place the coil in a way that no person was directly behind it from the perspective of the weight.

Talk about a VI being stubborn. I tried to explain to her that the risk was negligible and that this coil should be no more than 200 Kepler in strength. In other words, good enough to replace the ones in most skimmers, but not quite at the level to be dangerous. Even a small grav-ship had several coils of 500 Kepler or even more.

I was in the last stages of the preparations when Michael came into the physics lab.

“Hey, have you forgotten our meeting the second time in a row?”

I absentmindedly greeted him.

“Oh, hi Michael. Is it time for the meeting already?” I kept my attention on the setup of the cameras while I said that.

“I take that as a yes then. And yes, it is time already. So, care to tell me why you are here instead of in cyberspace or the meeting room?”

“Huh? Did I not tell you about my breakthrough with grav-coils?”

He sounded tired when he answered: “No, somehow that must have slipped your mind. Care to explain it to me?”

The last of the connections were put in place by the bots, and I began moving behind the clear shield on the other side of the lab.

“The short version, grav-coils work by putting specific electric energy patterns through a four-dimensional structure. Obviously, nobody was ever able to create a four-dimensional structure, so how does it come that the grav-coils we have work? It is the Kobashigawa alloy, that naturally forms 4d-structures when it crystallizes from a molten state.”

I rapped softly against the clear carbon-composite shield to test if it was solidly anchored, and then fired up the computers and the cameras.

“The first breakthrough was that I could mathematically describe how the Kobashigawa coils could bend gravity, the second was to be able to calculate how to get a better grav-coil, the third was to calculate how a 4d-structure had to be formed to enable 4d-construction by a NADA, and lastly making a barely functional part that allowed me just that.

What you see on the table over there is the result.”

I gestured through the shield to the coil bolted to one of the tables.

“Wait, over there? That is what, 50 feet away?”

“A bit over 49. Or 15m, as I see it.”

He leaned forward and looked closer at the testing setup.

“Isn’t that a bit far away? Why the distance and this shield?”

I sighed.

“Because Warden is a ninny. She insists that I am as far away as possible.”

It was at this moment that Warden’s voice came from the loudspeaker in the console.

“I deem the risk of damage to you unacceptable.”

“My goodness, Warden, that thing is a 20 cm-long coil. A traditional grav-coil of that size is doing exceptionally well if it can produce two to three Kepler. Even if this coil is 100 times stronger does not make this dangerous. Of course, we will start at one percent of power.”

“We don’t know if this new coil is 100 times stronger. In theory, it can be anywhere from 100 times to 10000 times stronger. And might I remind you that the same theory clearly states that the grav-coils that are now in use can’t work? I am not happy that you are doing this test in the same building as you are, but anything closer and the risk is unacceptable.”

I rolled my eyes.

“The risk is negligible. There is barely any risk at all.”

“The risk is completely avoidable and you would not lose anything if you just rented an old warehouse and remotely controlled the experiment. In that regard, any risk is unacceptable.”

I gave up, as I had earlier already. This was something I could not win at. Not that she was not right. Sure, it might have cost a bit of time, but in the end, there were no real consequences for me doing this test from a distance. Except that I wanted to know now, not in a couple of days.

When neither Warden nor I talked for a few moments, Michael intervened.

“I have a couple of questions here. First, what is Kepler?”

“Hu? I thought people knew about that. But alright.

A Kepler is the unit that humanity is using to measure the strength of the gravity bending field. A single Kepler is strong enough to bend gravity by 90° on everything in a 1.32m distance or less. Or it can modify the power of gravity by 2.63%, not cumulative. Two Kepler you can bend gravity by 180°, or by 90° over a distance of 2.64m, or modify the gravity field by 5.26%.

Our mercs each have six 103 Keppler coils, two in each orthogonal direction to the main axis of the skimmer. My ABAS 675 on the other hand has eight 122 Kepler coils, with four of them on the long axis.”

Michael nodded.

“Hm, I see. And what are those risks Warden has spoken about?”

“The risks are negligible. We are starting at 1% power. That means that if it is on the absolute extreme end of what Warden says, there will be at most 300 Kepler. As we won’t use more than 25Hz the radius will be less than 2m. The test object is a 1kg lump of carbon, fixed to the scales by a 1mm² braided carbon-nano-tube cable. This cable has a strength of nearly 130 kilo Newton. Or, in other words, for it to fail, there has to be more than 13 thousand g working on the lump. Or more than 13k Kepler. At 1% power, that would rate this 20cm coil at least at 1.3 Mega Kepler.”

“And that is impossible?”

“The strongest coils currently known to man rate around 12k Kepler. And those things are big. 208m long, 10m diameter. They are used for the interplanetary catapults. I think you understand why I think that such a small coil won’t be a threat.”

“Ok, if you say so. You are the scientist after all. But while I am here, what is your stance on releasing the replicators?”

“NADAs. And do you think it is the right time? We are still very vulnerable to strongarm tactics.”

He sighed.

“I know you are insisting on the name NADA, but let’s face it, a minute after we announce them, everybody will call them replicators. So why not jump on the bandwagon? We can use NADA as type designation. And I think if we do it right, now is the time. If we give one or two of the triple As a license of making and selling them, we are not the sole provider.”

“No, I think we should wait until we have some military.”

“Then how about you begin designing the military? We are in a unique situation where we can use cyborgs without killing them.”

I took a deep breath but then nodded.

“Fine, I’ll work on it as soon as we are done here.”

With that, I activated the test protocol. For a fraction of a second, everything seemed to work fine. The weight lifted up from the table and moved towards the coil. The numbers on the digital scale shot up.

Until they reverted to zero, followed by a loud bang from the laboratory. Where I once had a nice, clean and tidy physics lab, I now had a disaster zone.

The whole mounting contraption for the carbon weight was bent. The weight itself was gone, even though half of the nanotube cable was still there. The table, where the coil had been bolted down was in splinters distributed over the whole laboratory. Parts had even impacted the shield. The coil was nowhere to be seen.

The worst though was the wall behind the coil. It looked as if a giant had punched a hole into it.

I could only look at the devastation in shock before I began to laugh hysterically.

“Oopsie!”