M.J. Markgraf
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BSE Chapter 3-17
🕑 Added 2024-12-05 13:00:10 +0000 UTCAs Alexander watched the last shuttle leave the planet and head for Eden’s Might, he couldn’t help thinking there was more he could have done.
It was an irrational thought because Alexander had been working nonstop to make this mission possible as soon as possible. Delaying it was really the only way he could improve their chances and he had already delayed it once to allow Eden’s Might to be completed. That turned out to be rather fortuitous since Captain Krieger showed up in time because of that delay.
Alexander felt better about having the much more experienced captain leading the mission, but time would tell if he made the correct choice or not.
Soon the shuttle docked and he watched through the video feed as the three frigates formed a wedge formation with the Talon trailing behind, flanked by the Hawks’ two gunships. The mercenary company had not been able to free up their additional frigates for this operation, but they would arrive in Unokane before the fleet returned.
“Eden’s End Traffic Control, this is Eden’s Might, we are ready to depart.”
Alexander pressed the button to respond. “Captain Krieger, you are clear to depart. Good luck, and safe travels, EETC out.”
The ships accelerated away from the planet and towards the galactic north, where they would jump as soon as they could safely do so. The three systems Alexander narrowed the search to, all existed in the galactic north. A journey of maybe twenty light-years from their current location. That wasn’t much in the grand scheme of the universe, but when you considered STO space only spanned about forty light-years, and human-occupied space only expanded that by another fifteen light-years give or take, that was a significant journey.
“Lucas, alert me when they jump.”
“Can do, Alex, but where are you off to in such a hurry?”
“I have a puzzle to solve.”
The young man just grinned sardonically and shook his head.
As Alexander made his way to Atrium D, he reached out to his robots and carts mentally, or so he tried. Ever since his experience on Dalton’s ship, Alexander had been trying to figure out what he did to forge that remote connection.
His body wasn’t being forthcoming with answers though. With a sigh, he tried recreating the events that led up to that experience. Trying to will himself to connect to the tablet didn’t work either. It seemed he might need a direct digital connection before he could continue.
The tablet wouldn’t work, because he would need to take the entire thing apart just to get at the processor, and then it still wouldn’t work because it wouldn’t have any power. Alexander could provide the power, but that seemed like a less-than-ideal solution to his problem.
He entered the atrium and looked around. With the prison, and holding area for the people who decided not to take his job offer, the open space had shrunk by over half. He saw a few of the latter watching him from the upper living balconies but he ignored them. They would be going home soon enough.
Unfortunately, Alexander didn’t have any other area large enough to lay out all the parts he pulled off of Krieger’s ship. He was far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to tell what he was doing though. There was also no need to worry about children wandering in anymore. The playground had been moved to Atrium C a few weeks back after work had been completed there.
The central atrium was also nearly complete, but it appeared that Yi Na did not need his entire work crew to complete the last sections which is why the man had reassigned them to finish C.
There were talks about putting a playground in each atrium, but Alexander wasn’t sure that would work for A, at least until the population spread out. Since adding playgrounds wasn’t something that needed governmental review, he left that decision up to the new council. With no small surprise, Damien, Gabriella, Sheila, and Nancy all stepped down from their positions.
Whoever was on the new council, just got a simple councilman or woman title and they would have to send their requests to him once a month to approve, deny, or follow up for more information. Alexander limited them to ten requests a month, which meant they needed to pick and choose to decide which ones were the most important.
As for the previous four councilors, they reported directly to Alexander now, but in more of a director role instead of the political one they held before. It was a change Alexander would have made eventually as he further expanded Blue Star Enterprises on Eden’s End, but he wished it hadn’t come about in the way it did.
He planned on adding a few more director roles in the near future but he realized he was getting off track. Any reminder of that incident seemed to do that to him.
Alexander focused and walked over to a nearby terminal. Using credits or contributions, anyone could call up one of the automated carts. Not many people took advantage of that option, but it was there if they wanted to. Hopefully, when the train was up and running, it would be more popular. It would also be free.
With deft motions, Alexander removed the cover on the terminal and directly connected to it. He could have connected through the data chip slot, but he wasn’t sure that would give him the access he needed. If this idea worked, he could test that later.
The terminal interface flashed to life in his mind space. Instead of navigating the menus, Alexander pushed his mind through the connection. Almost immediately he ran into Lucas’ intrusion defenses. He was almost immediately tossed right back out and his mind swam.
Alexander assumed the defenses would be about as strong as what was aboard Dawn, but this was a whole lot stronger.
A moment later, his radio buzzed to life.
“Alex, are you doing something weird on the network?” Lucas asked, sounding slightly annoyed, but also slightly curious.
“Sorry about that,” he responded after his mind settled. “I was testing something. I should have warned you beforehand.”
There was a long pause before the young man replied. “Did your test work?”
Alexander chuckled slightly. “No, in fact, your network security tossed me out on my butt. Why is it so much more effective than the one I encountered on Dawn?”
He could almost hear the smirk in the man’s voice. “I improved it, but it's mostly just the program's access to so much processing power. I imagine if you tried what you did when Dawn was in full working order, your experience would have been much different.”
Alexander grunted at that. “Any hints at how to bypass it?”
The man laughed over the radio. “No, it wouldn’t be a very good intrusion defense if I gave you hints on how to get around it. You’ll just need to figure it out on your own. Oh, before I go, I was just about to call you and let you know the fleet just jumped. No signs of any issues so far.”
Alexander was grateful to hear there were no issues with the jump. He did his best to test every ship, but this was Eden’s Might’s first jump outside the system. All of the in-system test jumps went well, but there was always the possibility of something going wrong. That issue was lessened since he was simply reusing the same jump drive the ship had previously but he still preferred to ere on the side of caution.
“Thanks for the heads-up. Let me know if anything changes.”
“Will do,” Lucas responded before the radio went silent.
Lucas was right about the intrusion defense. Despite that, Alexander was still annoyed that he couldn’t test his idea at the moment. Replacing the panel on the terminal, he returned to his tablet and manually entered the commands to get the carts and bots to the atrium to lay out the parts.
It took nearly six hours to lay out every single part.
When he had initially removed the boxes from the ship, he hadn’t done much more than glance inside them to make sure they weren’t full of garbage. He was glad he decided to take the time to go through each box now. In one of the boxes, he found some data chips. When he fed them to the tablet, he found the build plans as well as a full breakdown of each and every part.
Alexander had recognized a few components from the boxes, but most of the items were new to him. He was sure he could reverse engineer the parts in time and even assemble the device without the plans, but this saved so much time and effort.
He also realized that some parts were missing. Specifically the dies for the processors.
That meant instead of a fully functional nanochip fabricator, he essentially had a useless collection of parts.
“I guess I couldn’t be that lucky,” he sighed.
Despite this setback, Alexander was still going to go forward with the assembly process. If the processors in the other boxes had come from this machine, he was sure he could create a die to make more.
Considering the design of the machine was intended for production in normal gravity, Alexander wasn’t expecting a whole lot out of the processors. They would be significantly better than the homegrown chips from the late twentieth century that he had been making, but he would need additional hardware to make them compatible with current systems. The boxed-up processors did not come bundled together with all the hardware like the current computers did.
He wondered why this fabricator relied on ground-based fabrication instead of zero-G. He knew zero-G manufacturing was a relatively new concept for humanity but he didn’t know exactly how new. Now that he had access to a Qcomm and the STO network he could find out. A quick search and some credits later, Alexander had his information. Having access to the net again sure made things much easier.
It turns out zero-G manufacturing was only patented fifty-seven years ago. Unified computronics, which is what they called the process of combining all the parts of a computer into one component, came out a few years after that.
If that was the case, the processor that this machine was designed to create was probably over fifty-seven years old. Looking at some of the parts he recognized, it might be even older than that. Age really wasn’t much of a concern, only processing speed. Once he did a side-by-side comparison test with the current generation, he would get a better idea of what he was dealing with.
He didn’t start the assembly right away, instead, he went home and spent some time with Yulia after she got home from school. His daughter didn’t stick around long since she wanted to go play with her friends, but that was perfectly ok with him.
Once she left, he went to his workshop where a space had been cleared for the nanochip fabricator. A steady stream of robots trundled in with parts as Alexander personally assembled the machine.
Occasionally he would stop and retrieve a part that had to be printed due to damage. A few hours later, he stood back and admired the device.
The self-contained cleanroom environment within the device would need to be flushed a few dozen times to ensure nothing got inside, but everything minus the processor die was ready to go.
He walked over to his holographic analyzer and looked at the rendering that it had made of the processor. The device wasn’t really designed to recreate such detailed parts, but it got Alexander about eighty percent there. The rest he quickly cleaned up based on best guesses from the other parts of the processor that he could see.
For anyone else, this process would have taken weeks if not months. With his ability to multitask and trace each run, Alexander managed to clean up the model within a few hours.
He wouldn’t be able to print it though as his printers were nowhere near accurate enough. Alexander had an idea of how to get around that issue, but it would take the use of another machine that he had yet to design.
Putting that on hold, Alexander took the processor out of the analyzer and popped it into a cradle that was very similar to the one he used when he originally tested the supercomputer’s ability to control robots.
There were no robots currently, Alexander just needed to know what sort of programming was on the processor.
He could have probably done this step by connecting to the processor directly, but he didn’t want to risk damaging the chip or the programming inside it.
Once the unit was powered up, a simple two-dimensional interface popped up on the holographic display. Blue Bell Logic Systems popped up in white letters before quickly vanishing as the processor ran a self-diagnostic.
So far everything was pretty standard. Then the checks started to come back as failed.
Once the self-diagnostic was completed, Alexander looked at the entire log. It seemed time had not been very kind to the outdated processor. Over eighty percent of the self-checks had come back as failed.
He pulled the processor and repeated the tests with the next one. After discarding twenty-three of the processors, he finally got one that was only forty percent degraded. After a further round of testing, he found one that was twenty percent degraded.
After going through the entire supply of stored processors, Alexander only had five that survived with less than ten percent degradation. That wasn’t a good sign for the longevity of these processors if he did get production up and running for them. He may need to try and tweak them a bit to see if he can find out what was causing this issue.
Alexander had hoped to finish the testing but it had taken far longer than he anticipated and he had run out of time. He sent a few items to the printers in his workshop before hurrying off to make supper for Yulia and see her off to bed. He would return to the problem after that.
Comments
Zachary Patterson
Thank you for the chapter!
Gabriel Melnik
C'mon a 60 year old CPU working at half it's speed isn't an unreliable product. If I found a Intel 4004 in a dusty box from the '70 I'd be happy it still works.
