M.J. Markgraf
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BSE Chapter 3-18
🕑 Added 2024-12-06 13:00:17 +0000 UTCAfter an eventful evening involving a brain-teaser board game between Yulia and himself, Alexander put his daughter to bed and returned to his workshop down the hallway.
He didn’t run off the moment she fell asleep though. He made sure she wasn’t having any nightmares or other issues. Even though he itched to unravel the secrets of these processors, losing three or four hours was not going to make much difference in the long run compared to making sure his daughter was ok.
Once he was sure she was settled and sleeping well, he left Dog to keep her safe. With his upgrades, he was more than enough to deter most people and slow down anyone else long enough for Alexander to cover the few hundred feet from his workshop to their door. Not that it was likely anyone would make it to the door with all the sensors he had embedded into the hallway where his workshop and home were situated, even authorized IDs that moved down the hallway would still ping him. He didn’t want to chance someone getting ahold of one of the ID cards and somehow tricking the sensors.
Feeling that Yulia was as safe as he could make her, Alexander entered his workshop. Nothing much had changed since he had left other than a few robots sitting near his test station. It was quiet too. Gone were the days when the manufacturing line was operating all day long. The peace and quiet was nice, but this lull in manufacturing wouldn’t last forever. He suspected he would be even more busy when the fleet returned.
That being said, he turned to the cradle where the processor sat. Figuring out how to provide the other systems that a computer required to operate without manually creating them all himself had been a bit of a challenge.
He eventually just turned to the advanced computronic since everything was already built into them. He would have used a supercomputer computronic for this, but they were all in use at the moment. If this test worked, he would need to pull one out from a control ship to run a fair comparison.
Alexander deleted the programming on the advanced computronic module and created his own based on what used to be there. He added the ability to throttle the advanced computronics processor down to nothing, while also accepting processing from an outside source.
That did make him wonder if he could link multiple advanced computronics together. While it might not be worth the effort, it was still something to think about.
Once the new code was in place, he powered up the cradle and reviewed the output. It seemed like everything was still working.
“Time to see what you can do,” he said as he connected the first cable to one of the robots.
The robot operated without issue, no real surprise. He connected two robots. The units took a bit longer to sync up, but they were soon running through the tasks Alexander had designed them to test.
The third connection worked, but the robots slowed noticeably in their operations. When he connected the fourth robot, there was a puff of white smoke from the cradle, and the robots all froze.
After removing the burned-out processor, he checked to make sure there was no damage to the cradle, before inputting a new one.
This time, he didn’t shock the processor by adding a new robot while the device was operating. Instead, he started with the four units moving in unison.
Once he was sure the processor could handle that, he slowly increased the self-learning. It was that feature that made the control ships so useful.
The processor lasted until the self-learning hit just over the fifty-percent mark before it too let out the magic smoke. That was not ideal, and Alexander was pretty sure it had nothing to do with him using the advanced computronic as an interface.
This wasn’t a thermal overload issue because he was monitoring temperatures and had heat pumps in place to pull heat away from the processor.
No, this was most likely some design or manufacturing defect within the processor itself. It was also possible the processors were just so old that they couldn’t handle the load.
With the next processor, he backed the robot count down to three and ran the test again. The third chip made it to eighty percent load before popping, the fourth only got to forty percent, and the fifth and final processor died at sixty percent load with the self-learning.
Alexander didn’t know what to make of it because the data was so all over the place. It seemed like he was going to have to produce his own new processors if he wanted to get any accurate data. That was annoying.
He decided not to dwell on the issue, instead, he redirected his focus to the machine that would hopefully allow him to create a new processor die. Alexander had been wanting to test this theory for a few months, but he didn’t want to convert one of his current printers for the test.
With it being slow, this would be a perfect time to test his idea without worrying that something could go catastrophically wrong.
The first thing he had to do was design a vacuum chamber large enough to hold everything. It would be required for both the sterile environment as well as to allow the static field to operate properly. They did not work well in an atmosphere.
Once that was complete, he designed the field emitters. These were not the bulky devices designed to project a massive field ahead of a vessel. They were thin, almost delicate armatures designed to move with precision. He included twelve of these armatures in the design.
Thankfully, Alexander didn’t need to design his own material delivery system. He simply copied the ones from his printers and ran the flow tubes through the armatures. The only difference is that he removed the heating element that allowed the stored material to go from its powdered state to a liquid inside the tubes. He wanted the material in that nanoscale-powered state until he was ready to melt it into place. Next, he added the emitter that would impart a charge to the contents of the tank.
Last he added a grid of lasers that were accurate enough to impart the heat to fuse the material together.
When all was said and done, the end result looked a bit like a madman had designed a fish tank.
Liking the results, Alexander sent all the parts to the correct printers. The only component he needed to send out was the clear shell. That would be made from the same material that the done was formed from, but it would take time to get that final piece since a proper mold would be needed to compress it into shape and heat it until it turned transparent.
In the meantime, he printed out a thick transparent plastic and reinforced it with a metal lattice. It wouldn’t last forever, but it should be good enough to run his tests.
After assembling the very delicate piece of machinery, Alexander stepped back to look it over. It was probably the strangest machine he had seen, but it was also the first truly unique device he had built since he first played around with the artificial gravity interrupter.
Some might argue that point since he had his ring printers, and other items he designed and built, but they would be wrong. Those were just modifications to existing technology. This ‘nano-assembler’ as Alexander was dubbing it was a completely new take on printing as far as he was able to discover. If it worked, who knew what possibilities it could open up?
Alexander loaded the program he had created for the device. There was a bit of extra setup he had to do before actually turning the machine on though. He connected the nano-assembler to the facility's computer. He would check the logs later to verify this, but he was pretty certain a single advanced chip would not be enough to operate the device. Not unless he slowed it way down. And he didn’t want to do that.
It was a good thing he was testing this at night when the network was running at minimum load.
Without further ado, he flicked the design over to the machine.
The pumps whirred to life and flushed the production area until the filters no longer detected any dust. A moment after that, all twelve arms flexed and retracted quickly as they went through their startup test.
Alexander felt a slight static buzz as the machine started energizing the particles in the material tanks. He would need to adjust the programming later so all of these things happened at the same time, but for now, this was fine.
Material shot up the print tubes and the arms all whirled to life. They were a blur of motion that made them almost look like they were shooting out a steady stream of material, which was being lit by the lasers, producing a bright glow that would make the device hard to look at for a normal person. Alexander simply marveled at the sight as he watched the entire process from beginning to end. He would need to add some auto-darkening to the machine to protect people from the harsh glare, but the result was impressive.
Unlike a normal printer, nothing ever physically came into contact with the material after it left the feed tube. Alexander used a property of the static field to hold the individual particles in place while the lasers set them. It was sort of like laser sintering, except way more accurate, since he could control the exact form of the molten material as it set. This is why it took so much processing power to operate effectively.
The regular printers performed a similar function, but he had yet to overcome certain design limitations to bring their accuracy and tolerances up much past Dr. Nova Lund’s design requirements for her project.
With this, he may have just skipped right to single nanometer accuracy, and that was just the start. Alexander’s goal was to increase the accuracy of his prints to the point where he could manipulate single atoms at a time.
That may seem like a pipedream to some, but Alexander was almost certain the aliens who built his body had overcome that issue a long time ago. The uniformity of the material he was composed of simply couldn’t have come about any other way.
It would also explain why the STO had so many issues recreating it. If he was successful in this endeavor, it opened up so many possibilities, the least of which was recreating the armor that he was shrouded in.
He was getting ahead of himself though. The first test of the device hadn’t even been completed yet. He suspected he would need to make tweaks to both the machine and the programming before he was happy with the end result.
In what seemed like no time at all, the arms all retracted and the machine shut down. The machine wasn’t as quick as his current generation of printers, but it wasn’t meant to be.
In the center of the build tray was a brand-new set of nanoform lattices. He wouldn’t know if it actually worked until he made a new processor with the lattice, but he was hopeful. The one issue he did see was gravity limiting the types of items he could produce with the device. To truly test it out, he needed to create one to operate in zero-G.
It was a good thing he had plenty of time to work all of that out before the fleet returned.
Comments
Darkest Dot
That's not how it works, that's not how it works at all. There not stamping processors on an assembly line with a set of dies. It's actually closer to the sintering process but with masks that allows selective material adhesion or diffusion.
Sid_Cypher
Isn't it a piece of material that a chip (e.g. processor or memory) is fabricated on? Like diced silicon wafers, could be graphene, could be diamondoid. Look up "die shots". Entire systems are put on a chip (SoC).
Zachary Patterson
Thank you for the chapter!
Azulmar
He is so going to fill the system with stealth weapon platforms.
mmarkgraf212
A die is a specialized machine tool used in manufacturing industries to cut and/or form material to a desired shape or profile, sort of like a mold.
mmarkgraf212
He's referring to the control ships. Not the computer chips.
Gabriel Melnik
The way today's data centers handle that kind of work is with a piece of software called a load balancer. It's mostly used for a practice called horizontal scaling, and the concept is that when one computer can't handle the load, instead of upgrading the individual performance (This can't be done on the fly) you split said work between a N amount of computers evenly (This can be done on the fly and it's cheaper) Also, computronics seem so shoddy the more they are used, given that Alexander needs to reinvent the wheel in order to get features that were supported from the start with business grade software (Linux mostly)
Skulldragon7
"hopefully allow him to create a new processor die." Are the processors in the shape of dice?
Skulldragon7
made the control ships so useful.->made the control chips so useful.
