By now it should be obvious that despite the speed at which I sometimes made breakthroughs, science never was that easy.

Working on the Folly was off to a slow start. Unfortunately, Vandermeer had been unable to arrange chimpanzee sperm and ova, though he assured me that this was just a matter of the time frame and that he would deliver them as soon as he could.

That made us concentrate on other mammals first. Which, naturally, we did not have at hand either. Well, except rats. Rats we had in raw numbers, in the Fortress as well as with Enki.

The rest simply took time to clone. Add in that the BOU had one glaring flaw, at least in this endeavor.

The eggheads from Nowhere were used to fertilize gametes under the microscope. Nothing wrong with that, basically, but we quickly noticed that the nano-bots were not optically neutral. No, under the microscope, they made the picture… unstable is I think the best word. To make it short, for two and a half days we were completely puzzled why the tried and tested method of injecting a sperm into an ovum suddenly refused to work any longer.

And another couple of days to find a solution to the problem. At first, I hoped that the BOU could be used to make it work, but while the resolution of the BOU was insane, it was not quite what one would call real-time. It had also difficulties locating the needle. In the end, I threw tech at the problem, as I had so often. I designed a small GRT specifically for lab work.

After that… well it was time to build up a database. Slowly. We would need thousands of specimens to find out what was common in all of them compared to what was unusual.

That all in itself would take over a month to do. Mostly because it took around half an hour to artificially fertilize an egg, irrelevant of the species.

And this was a use case where bots, any bots, were not fine-controlled enough to do it.

Still, the next Tuesday rolled around, and with it the premiere appearance of the telepresence bot. Everybody understood that I right then and there preferred to remain in the fortress and work on the Folly, instead of dressing for a day in the office, putting on any warpaint, and then spending 20 to 30 minutes just commuting. Not to mention all the little chitchat that usually happened before and after those meetings.

And thus, I was present through the matrix.

One admittedly minor kink in the procedure was that the android butler placed a cup of coffee in front of me regardless. We would have to work on its programming in that regard. Some other time.

The meeting was mostly a touch-up on the ongoing business. The revelation of the NADA was decided for Monday, November 5th, followed over the course of the week with all the other new goodies we had to offer.

In that regard, our rate of production had exploded. Kenneth and James had not stopped building empty plants, warehouses, and processing facilities, just because we had no immediate need for them.

No, we all knew that we would need most if not all of them before Enki was even a year old, so why stop now when we had a bit of a lull?

That meant when we decided to use bots and NADAs to make those bots, it had taken them only a couple of days to have the production facilities for the bots up and running. Yes, the first NADAs they used were of the old design, heck, old… just to get them up and running within two days, but then they filled whatever buildings they had prepared with big NADAs.

For now to make the bots, though the same NADAs would be later repurposed for other tasks. That of course meant that we had way more bots available than we needed and the two of them had decided to put the surplus to work on putting up new buildings.

Which they then proceeded to fill with NADAs. Right now, Enkis production capabilities were growing exponentially, though that would not remain. Right now, we were considering if we did not need even more land. Yes, we had not even 30 of the 225 blocks built on yet, but the way we were growing it was at least worth thinking about it.

In the end, the consensus was that we would hit a wall in demand sometime before we hit the wall of our lacking facilities.

And if that happened, who said we had to concentrate all of our eggs in this one, admittedly defensible basket?

Otherwise, the redesign of the NADA to the modular system was fully underway and we now could set up a new NADA within around four hours. And I meant the 625m³ NADAs here. The test of the new cyberware was well underway but had naturally no results yet, and the rats with the reflex booster were by now showing signs of neural degradation.

Hippocrates was in the opinion of Jessi ready for release, but we decided to wait until we started selling the new auto-surgeon.

The new emergency medical device was also being tested, again without any results yet.

Naveen was complaining profusely about Major Burke, who seemed to believe that anybody who declined to buy Vandermeer anti-ship weapons was a lost cause.

He completely ignored the areas where we did ask for help, like infantry weapons, crew-served weapons, radar software, and such things, and instead pestered Naveen and his crew that we needed to buy Vandermeer heavy weapons.

The bad thing here was that he downright blocked us from buying the weapons we actually needed. He did not believe we needed them when we did not buy the heavies.

In that, Michael agreed to talk to Vandermeer about Burke. This was getting out of hand. The good news though was that the ‘point-defense’ grav gun was nearly ready for testing, and the full-sized grav gun had a firing rate of 16 rpm.

To bring that into perspective, the big railguns with a 15kg slug that had less than 1/800th of the force per shot had on average a firing rate of three to four rpm. Those grav guns were in one word, deadly.

Not all news were good though. Our attempt to enter the com market was getting some pushback. Not from any of the big players yet, but enough that it was noticeable. Don’t get me wrong, it was by far not enough to keep us out, but it was the first real opposition we experienced.

A sad first I have to say, but obviously inevitable.

Still, the really good news was that our profit after taxes had grown to an insane $133 million per day. Including weekends.

It helped that some of the minions, a group of material scientists with the help of the physicists, Maynard and Warden, had taken a look at the carbon extruder design. Don’t get me wrong, the basic design was basically antique. There were only so many ways you could form carbon after all. But they had looked into it with the eye to where they could tweak the process with the capabilities of our new technology.

The result was… not the same old tech anymore. For starters, they used disruptors to convert the carbon into a form that could be used, what conventional extruders did with shredders and heat, in a single, fast step. Right there they had shortened the process by around 12%. Next, they replaced the slow pump system to transport the carbon to the reaction chamber with grav conveyors to shave off another 3%. But the real timesaver was that they replaced the overpressure pump needed to generate the optimal environment for the synthesis of the various allotropes with grav coils.

Yes, the overall time savings were only in the area of a minute or two. Per batch. But when the whole process from the loading of the hopper to the finished carbon part took only three to four minutes, that was enormous.

Yes, the new carbon extruders were quite a bit more expensive. Not massively so, but noticeable. But the increased speed meant that our extruder could create around twice as many Q-links per hour as the one we had used previously. Alena was practically salivating when she reported our earnings and the prospects.

All in all, all was well, so the meeting was relatively brief. I was not unhappy about it, as it allowed me more time to work on the Folly.

One thing puzzling me was why there was no automation in fertilizing the eggs. My, admittedly, cursory, research told me that they were well ahead in using automated systems to do the procedure before the great war. After a deeper look into the topic, I learned that, as so often, those technologies had been taken over by the war effort.

Creating the Mutants for the military, doing research in bioweapons, or defense against them. And in 12 years of war, virtually every bit of it had been destroyed by infiltrators, saboteurs, and military strikes, while the people who knew how to use, and more important recreate the technology, were very often a target for assassination.

Seriously, if I had not been convinced that it was impossible, I would start working on a time machine just to travel back before the start of the war and beat some sense into anybody even thinking about going to war.

But the simple fact that it took each of the scientists around 15-20 minutes per fertilization process, with preparation and clean up afterward, well, let’s say I had quite a bit of idle time while they were working.

This was especially frustrating as the information I could get at this early stage was… useless. I needed way more samples to find the pattern.

That of course meant also that my mind wandered to ways to make things faster. Way faster.

First I developed a very basic laboratory bot that could do the work. With the need of having the BOU in place in mind, I did include an optic, but mostly I integrated the GRT I had designed, as well as an interface to the BOU. All in one, you see.

That took me not even a single virtual hour. At 240:1… around 12 seconds in real-time. Heck, the NADAs would take around two hours to make one of those things, just in comparison.

I think that explains pretty clearly why I did not stop there. Out of, well not quite boredom, but at least in part of it, I threw everything I had learned, invented, or created at it.

I had Calliope work on the control software, without much of parameters about how I thought it should be, just that it should be the best she could make. What came out was a relatively lightweight VI. That should teach me not to give Calliope any open tasks like that anymore.

Not that the VI was not good, mind you. Just… overkill. Serious overkill. But that happens when a VI like Calliope runs on a Super Grendel with nigh anything to do.

Not that my participation was any better, mind you. I integrated the conveyor system almost automatically. A BOU to select the sperm would make it possible to pick the gender of the resulting zygote. And lastly, I replaced the needle with a high-precision tractor beam.

The result was, frankly an expensive monstrosity, that could fertilize eggs at a rate of roughly a dozen a minute.

Needless to say, I build five of them. That number did fit nicely in the big 625m³ NADA, so I just made one batch.

That, for some strange reason, sped the process up a wee bit. Who would have guessed? Not that it helped that much. At least not that fast. I needed thousands of samples, of various species, to find the common theme, the key to the kingdom, the magic moment.

But this meant that instead of working for several months just to get the basic information to even begin the real world, now it should not take more than a few weeks.

But that did not mean that everybody was happy about it. At first, the scientists were a bit peeved that I had taken what they saw as their job away from them.

But get real, their job was to work through the data with me and look for the miracle of life. Let the machines do the part they could do better.

One may think that it was serious overkill to create those new machines just for this project. And one would be right. If I managed to find the magic key, then they would be mostly unused curiosities after that. Virtually useless. If we managed to beat the Folly, then there would be no need for those kinds of high-intensity fertilization machines anymore.

Heck, even with the Folly still in effect they were only useful with projects like this specific one. But right then and there, they were useful, and that was enough for me.

Heck, with molecular forges and NADAs, when their usefulness was done, I could just recycle them and get everything except the energy back. And the time I ‘wasted’ developing them was inconsequential. It was idle time anyway, without any data for me to analyze, and I would gain it back hundredfold thanks to them being so much faster.

What it enabled us though was to concentrate fully on looking over the accumulating data, trying to find any commonalities. Right now, there were many. Logical, as we were exclusively using rats at that point. But the sheer amount already allowed us to winnow out some parts of the gametes as irrelevant because they were different between individual rats.

No chance of those being the philosopher’s stone.

And so, our first real day working on this project came to an end. We were further along than the contingent from Nowhere had expected, but far less than I had hoped. Still, progress was progress, and this was a journey of a million steps.

That explained why we were in relatively high spirits when we closed shop at dinner time.

I was somewhat surprised that the lights were off in the mess. At this time of the day, the room should be bustling with action, and during the day, they were on almost constantly. But in the end, I did not think too much about it. The room was dark, and I wanted to eat.

So I activated the light switch. Just to be utterly stunned. All my friends, including all the execs of Enki, had been waiting in the darkened room and were now shouting, somewhat synchronized:

“Happy Birthday!”

I have to confess, it took me a few seconds to take in the scenery, much less to understand what was happening. Yes, it was my birthday, as I realized belatedly, but I had not expected anything.

To be honest, I had never had somebody even wish me a happy birthday, much less think about celebrating it. It was mostly just another day for me. In 2249, literally Tuesday.

Naturally, the scientists from Nowhere had not been informed either and had not stopped walking when I did, so I had only a few seconds to puzzle about what was happening anyway before Aaron walked into me.

Fortunately, he was quick enough to catch me when I stumbled forward, still reeling in shock. Afterward, he pushed me softly forward into the room, where the song was still ongoing.

When the song ended, I was quickly embraced by all the wellwishers, and I got more hugs than I remembered ever getting in a week, much less ten minutes. One big surprise was Nathaniel Vandermeer being part of the group. I had not even known that he had come to NYC.

Not that I had the mental wherewithal to even think about it, mind you. I was still completely stunned.

Instead of the beef stew that had been planned for that dinner, what awaited me was a spread of tasty finger food. Delicious, filling, nutritious, and quite facile to eat.

Slowly I caught myself, got over the surprise, and managed to find Ben in the throng, getting a second, much more thorough hug from him.

“What the frick is happening here?”

It was Michael who answered me:

“I thought that was self-evident. We are celebrating you becoming 19 years old.”

I shook my head to clear it further.

“But… but I… nobody ever did anything for my birthday. Why now?”

The smile on Michael’s face turned melancholy for a moment before he brightened up again.

“Yes, I know. That was in Seattle. Where you had no friends, and no real family, only enemies and strangers. This is here. In New York City, where you have quite a few friends and family. Where you are valued and loved. We love you, and we are happy that you are here. That you exist. And we are celebrating today for just that reason.”

It took me a moment to wrap my head around this. But slowly a smile crept onto my face. They really liked me. Yes, on some level I had known that for some time by now, but this drove it home.

“I… I don’t know what to say.”

It was Ben, who pulled me again into the hug, and softly answered me:

“Simply say thank you, and then let us party.”

I shrugged and turned in the hug to face the room.

“He is right. Thank you all. It is… well you know this is the first birthday of me that anybody remembered.”

For some reason, my cheeks were wet.

The people distributed themselves around the room and began eating and talking.

It was obvious who here were guards, as those men and women remained standing at the walls, looking at all of us. I made a note to provide some food for them later.

As far as I could tell, all conversation during the meal was insignificant small talk. Afterward, we more or less mingled in small, spontaneous groupings, talking about anything and everything.

It became interesting when I was snuggled up to Ben, and Vandermeer came close.

He looked at us for a moment, before he smiled while shaking his head.

“Not that I want to complain, but don’t you think that you are a bit too old for her?”

It was obvious that he was talking to Ben, who sighed audibly.

“Yes, in a way I am. And not just a bit. And to be honest, before I met Vivian I would never described her as ‘my type’. For one, I had a thing for brunettes, and almost every woman I had a relationship with was at least 5 feet 5 tall. Without heels.”

He sighed again.

“And of course the last time I dated somebody who was Vivian’s apparent age, was when I was in college. But all that changed when I met her. When I got to know her. Usually, girls her age are… let’s be generous and call it immature. But if there is one thing that does not apply to Vivian it is immature.

In the end, she is beautiful physically, and her age, well we are still genetically programmed to look for younger mates. But all that pales compared to her mind.

And I found out that I find her biological age way less important than I thought. I could not help to be attracted to her brilliance and maturity.”

Then he chuckled.

“And if we count her mental age… she is the elder one. She once told me that she has over a hundred years of experienced time. Hard to beat that I think.”

Vandermeer sighed but nodded.

“I thought something like that. I had you researched, obviously. And as you said, Vivian is so not your type. I did not think it was her money either.”

Ben shrugged.

“Don’t get me wrong, the money is nice but unimportant. Yes, she gifted me the Merc, but otherwise, what she pays in taxes, fairly I might add, is more than enough to finance everything I ever wanted. And she would pay those taxes with us in a relationship or not.”

“I see. And I understand.”

Then he shook his head.

“But… sorry to bring business onto the table today, but I fear I have to intervene. And as soon as possible.”

He looked straight at me when he said that, so it was not to miss whom he was addressing with this non-sequitur. In response, I tilted my head and wrinkled my forehead.

It was clear that he took that as a prompt to continue.

“I know that you think you don’t need anti-ship weaponry. You told me that. But… what Burke told me is that you, all of Enki really, are completely delusional about it. And the values that he told me you claim… they are absolutely impossible.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Seriously, Burke is the one who puts his head in the sand. I won’t classify him as an idiot, but that is only barely.”

Vandermeer shook his head.

“Vivian, I should not have to tell you that no railgun can get more than 5500 m/s. Beyond that and it won’t survive a single attempt to shoot. And anything above 3700 makes them very short-lived. In other words, nearly 10000 m/s is simply impossible.

That has nothing to do with Burke being an idiot or not, sorry.”

I snorted softly and smiled at him.

“You are right, you don’t have to explain that to me. I know that no railgun is viable with more than 3700, maybe 3800 m/s. But my tepid opinion of Burke’s intelligence is not based on that fact.

First, he explained that it can’t work because the projectile will burn up. Well, not in combat ranges with a carbon coating, it won’t.

But more important is the fact that he told you that we claim our railgun can get that speed. That is the mistake. We don’t have a railgun. What we have is a grav gun.”

To his credit, it took him only a few seconds to parse what I was saying.

“A… grav gun? You know we looked into that. It is simply not a viable technology. Yes, I understand that in theory, you can achieve insane speeds. But any grav coil strong enough to get even to railgun speeds is so unwieldy that it would be like aiming a skyscraper.”

I sighed.

“In the old technology, yes.”

His eyes narrowed.

“’Old technology’? As far as I am aware, grav coils are more than 150 years old. And they haven’t changed since then.”

“I know. Mostly because nobody could understand how they worked. I was a bit… miffed when I learned that.”

This sentence made Ben guffaw out loud, attracting the attention of several of my friends.

After he had managed to get himself back under control, Ben, still clearly very amused said:

“A bit miffed… ok, that is a new record in understatement.” He turned to Vandermeer.

“She was furious. And then she spent several virtual months in cyberspace to figure it out.”

Vandermeer’s eyes opened wide.

“Wait, are you implying that Vivian figured out how grav coils actually work?”

That brought another chuckle from Ben.

“Implying? No. I outright say it. Not only did she figure out how they work, she figured out how to make them better. Way better.”

Vandermeer’s eyes now narrowed and focused back on me.

“How much better?”

I shrugged.

“That naturally depends on what quality of coils you compare them with. Against the average Kobashigawa coil, they are around 400 times better. Against the premium coils, they are ‘only’ 80 times better.

But they are consistent and way cheaper. They cost around 5% of an average not skewed Kobashigawa coil of the same size. If we calculate for the same strength, you know that the bigger the coil, the lower the success chances, so for the same strength we get around 1/10000th of the cost.”

I smiled happily.

“But even if somebody buys the coils we will begin selling, they won’t be able to make a grav gun from them. That requires a couple of additional tricks. Which we won’t sell.”

Vandermeer rubbed his chin, nodding softly, before he answered:

“But as soon as it is clear how to make it, others will make their own new coils. And with that the grav guns.”

I shook my head, still smiling.

“Nope. First, they need a NADA to make them. And even then, there is another special trick in it, that we won’t tell. Or sell.”

That made Vandermeer recoil.

“A… NADA? Are you saying that you have a… working NADA?”

That was the cue for Michael to interject.

“Not one, no. By now we have nearly a thousand of them up and running. But… I thought we wanted to keep that close to the west for now?”

I rolled my eyes.

“First, you are the one who has started to pursue a formal alliance with Vandermeer. They need to know what we bring to the table. And second, we will announce them next Monday anyway. Along with all the other toys we have decided to sell.”

Michael shrugged.

“Sure, but you should have at least talked to me about it, don’t you think?”

But he was smiling, so it was clear he protested just pro forma.