Macronomicon
patreon
Chapter 274: Astronomical Protection
🕑 Added 2024-04-30 15:34:42 +0000 UTCGretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.exe
Another enormous segment of the factory went up in the amount of time it took Perry to blink.
Now another.
Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.exe
While Perry worked, he mulled over his priorities.
So, our primary goal is: Keep family alive.
Secondary goal: Survive.
Tertiary goal: Save the world from Solaris, who seems to have gone off the deep end.
It didn’t take someone with 2000 IQ (that wasn’t a thing) to figure out that once Perry had stamped out the mimic epidemic, his value to Solaris dwindled, and that might put him on the chopping block.
The answer was not to drag his feet on fixing the mimic problem. That was not an option. If portions of the Anchors had been turned, there was no reason his family was off the table. Honestly, he wanted to revisit the idea of sending them on vacation to Manitia for a couple months now that things had gotten…a little out of control.
Except it was too late for that. Solaris was holding them hostage against Perry’s good behavior, and sending them away would trigger an instakill.
He’d tried.
The probability dodge had gotten about halfway through explaining that he wanted to evac them before it’d blinked out.
So how do you defeat someone who moves at the speed of light? Nothing I can make has that kind of speed.
Not to mention, Solaris is effectively a walking nuclear weapon. If he can move from place to place with his clothes on, that implies that he’s able to impart his ability onto a small amount of matter and take that with him when he moves.
So, in theory, Solaris could take a baseball and accelerate it to the speed of light. That would…
Perry did the math in his head while he checked all the factories.
No more city. wow.
I’m not sure my Mark Nine could handle those forces. Perry did the math.
Nope.
Again, Perry was working with multipliers in the thousands, and while that made for some ungodly sturdy materials, the speed of light was a real bitch.
…Can I modify photons? Perry thought, glancing down at the glowing ring on his finger. His wedding ring had been made from a laser he’d struck Gorm with, whose reality-warping effects had congealed the beam into a liquid. He’d then used his Spendthrift perk to make it more structurally stable so it could be formed into rings.
Obviously there’s some wiggle room there.
Perry still had some feathers, but there was no way to guarantee similar results. He’d been shooting straight into Gorm’s chest, which had thousands of overlapping strands of reality-warping feathers, and there was no way to know what had done it except to exhaustively brute-force combinations.
That implied time Perry didn’t have.
What about my crystal?
Paradox had experimented with trapping light before, specifically to contain Gor’s Disintegration in a stable form.
I had…a fractal mirror box, and a crystal. The crystal turned out to be the more viable of the two options, but I’m wondering…
The fractal mirror box was created when I was level 4, with 23 Attunement, and I was able to make a box that could capture light for 2 seconds with chrome paint and evaporating crystals.
…What could I do now?
Perry checked his stats for the first time in quite a while.
Paradox Zauberer (Perry Z.)
Class: Potent Thaumaturge
Level 18
HP: 13
Body: 135
Stability: 136
Nerve: 135
Attunement: 135
Free Points: 0
XP to next level: 26210
Oh, look at that, about halfway to the next level. He’d been gradually accruing XP over the last…Nearly a year.
Finally slowing down on the whole leveling thing. Level 19 is going to be crazy. Level 20 is probably going to break Spacetime.
Okay, let’s see here. 135 Attunement is…725.36X
23 Attunement was 3.07X
725.36/3.07= 236.27
Okay, my Attunement is effectively two hundred and thirty-six times stronger than when I was level 4. If I repeated the process I did last time exactly, I could make a box that traps light for…(236X2)/60= seven minutes and fifty-two seconds.
Perry paused. That…was long enough to do something with.
Now how do we trap Solaris in it without him seeing it?
And keep in mind, it might be able to trap light, but if he throws a penny at me, I’m still going to die. He needs to charge in head-first, rather than cautiously test my defenses.
Except that’s exactly what he’s going to do. He’s the most powerful man on the planet, and yet he’s cautious as hell. The trap needs to be invisible, and I need to figure out a way to make myself more tolerant of things moving at C. long enough o convince him it’s not a trap anyway.
Such a trap couldn’t be invisible, could it? Because it interacts with light by its very nature. It would make a tearing effect as it freezes a small area’s visible light and then carries it with it. A bit like screen-tear on a computer.
How could I apply it to an area without needing the light-trapping surface to be present?
Perry’s furiously working mind thought back to his earlier days establishing his brand of super-heroism in Franklin City.
Dregor’s Binding. Yes. Shadowcat Umbilical cord and Prox Semen combine to create a voodoo-like effect.
With a certain amount of tweaking, I could create a doll of my armor, which I could then coat with the light-trap. Or build one around it…effectively making an invisible light-trap by using the transitive properties of Dragor’s binding to clamp down on light around the suit at a moment’s notice. I don’t need a voodoo doll of my armor laying around to get used against me, I just have to harness the properties of Dregor’s binding to make invisible (but real) effects.
Yes. That could work. Perry began mentally designing the prototype as he continued surveying the production lines. He was currently producing hundreds of thousands of mimic tests per minute. It might not be enough.
Then I need to make myself resistant to kinetic forces strong enough to spark nuclear fusion. Good luck with that.
Or wait…maybe I don’t have to be strong enough to survive the most Solaris can throw at me. Maybe I only have to be strong enough to outlast Earth itself. He’s probably always holding to not destroy the city/planet he’s living in. That might be within the realm of possibility of what I’m capable of. The Mark 9 is already close.
Except…what if he doesn’t hold back? What if he throws a building at me at the speed of light, and the surface of the Earth gets glassed?
Dregor’s Binding might come in clutch there, too.
What if I could add hundred of tons of protective material without actually adding hundreds of tons? Ablative plating strong enough to absorb things moving at c.
For anyone else, it might’ve been a pipe dream, but Perry had options.
Also. I need to break into Lightshow’s personal lab to see if she ever considered how she might fight Solaris if it ever came down to it. She was among the few who could pose a credible threat to him.
It just never occurred to her, and Solaris was wise enough to let it lie.
Perry also needed to put out feelers and see who had survived Solaris’s purge. Who had a modicum of power and might be able to support Perry in taking the unbalanced super down?
Gramma’s probably still alive. Solaris never figured out a way to kill her earlier, so why would he now, with his mental faculties diminished? Tyrannus is probably still alive. He’s not an anchor and Solaris is content letting him handle his side of the continent.
Mom and dad…
Perry blinked tears out of his eyes.
According to Solaris they’d managed to get away, but they were Kill-On-Sight for the ruler of Franklin City.
Not to mention, if Perry were Solaris, he wouldn’t tell Perry he’d killed them. He would say they got away. Just to keep Perry calm long enough to get the test out of him.
Perry was now suddenly faced with the harrowing possibility of having to work with his grandmother.
And dead parents.
The primary problem with trying to establish contact with other supers and try to form a team, was that Solaris was constantly watching him. Everyone of note, really. Even now, Solaris was flickering in and out of his secluded lab out in the middle of the ocean, so fast that Perry couldn’t perceive it with his physical senses.
His dimensional senses, however, had picked up on the grating hum of Solaris’s presence whipping through ever since he’d stepped back into the lab. Solaris had found it the instant he’d first opened the portal to go home.
How do you betray someone watching your every move?
Answer: Very carefully.
Perry had been deliberately making the struts of the ocean-bound factories bigger than they had to be. He could’ve made them toothpicks in comparison to the rest of the building and they would’ve been fine against the ocean waves and undersea megafauna, but instead he made them fifteen feet in diameter of solid concrete like an ordinary ocean lair might have.
He was also running a full complement of 32 Probability Dodges, using all but four of them to test the limits of Solaris’s surveillance.
They were dropping like flies.
His first success was when one of his probabilities managed to sneak his light-trapping armor prototype vat into one of the struts.
The strut in question had been blocked from view in the scrying orb by his elbow and thumb, and Solaris (for that fraction of a second, anyway) had taken a liking to observing from a specific corner of the room.
He just barely missed it.
Perry stifled a sigh of relief and added that Probability to the control group, enacting no further changes to preserve it for an hour.
At the end of that hour, heart hammering in his chest, Perry took a risk. This is it. After this, I’m committing myself to opposing Solaris, because if he finds a suit of armor specifically designed to fight him, or if he did catch it, but just decided to wait and see what I do with it…I’m as good as dead.
Perry wanted to take a deep, steadying breath, but Solaris was watching him. Solaris was everywhere.
Perry collapsed the probabilities down to the one that had successfully hidden the prototype.
A fraction of a second passed, and Perry didn’t die.
Paradox’s Probability Dodge.exe (32)
Perry branched out again into another 32 possibilities.
One hurdle passed.
Now I need to create a material that can withstand other materials moving at c.
Dregor’s Binding might actually be able to help with that, too.
The voodoo-like magic allowed properties to transition between a simulacrum and the real world, with much stronger expression than something like magnetism.
Perry momentarily though of dad’s armor, which was (possibly) held together by magnetism, which forced every millimeter of the armor to maintain it’s position, affording excellent protection from kinetic force, essentially buttressing the material with magnetic force.
Lenz’s law, perhaps?
If Perry created a phantom area around himself that induced a current based on objects moving through it, then the object’s force would create a magnetic force that would oppose itself, and in effect, slow itself down. The faster it moved, the more it would slow itself down.
He could effectively translate kinetic force into electricity.
There’s just one issue. The induced current will have energy on par with a nuclear bomb. Where will THAT energy go?
Wait…I’m a Battery Tinker, too.
Perry reviewed his relevant perks.
Super-Capacitor: Storage devices you create have increased capacity, efficiency, charge and discharge rates.
Atypical Battery: You may create devices that store and release on command any kind of intangible force without changing its form, such as heat, cold, motivation, light, maternal disapproval, magnetism, chemical potential, kinetic energy and more.
I think it’s time I really lean into the Battery Tinker portion of my Class. Perry thought. Could Perry make a portable battery powerful enough to store a nuclear blast?
Let’s do the math.
Spendthrift multiplier for reactions (in this case, energy storage) = 725 (Base attunement)
In his testing, Perry had found that the base multiplier for the super-capacitor Perk was 100X, multiplying it by his Attunement gave him 72500.
Multiplying those two together gave him…
52,562,500X
So, if I create a single AA battery, it can store…
Perry translated into Joules.
One AA battery has 10 kilojoules, so multiply that by fifty two million…
About half a Terajoule.
1 Megaton nuclear bomb equals approximately four thousand Terajoules.
That’s not an apples to apples, comparison, though. He’ll be throwing things at light speed. Let’s figure out how many joules are in…say, a penny thrown at the speed of light.
Thanks Einstein, Perry thought, plugging the weight of a penny into E=mc^2.
A moment later…
Fuck you, Einstein, you bitch!
224 terajoules in a penny!? Are you kidding me!?
Perry needed to effectively strap five hundred AA batteries to his suit to absorb Solaris lazily flinging a penny at him at the speed of light.
I mean, sure, it’s amazing I even have that option, but it’s not gonna cut it. I need more powerful batteries. By a few orders of magnitude.
All this math was done using a storebought AA battery as the basis. If I design and create a battery that is vastly more powerful before applying my perks…then we might be on to something…
Perry got to work.
Outwardly, he continued supervising the production of mimic testing serum at a relatively sedate pace.
Internally, he was furiously designing a solution to The Solaris Problem.
Comments
Bookwyrm
Looks like Macronomicon took classes in fighter, it now he can’t count to 274 (;
Bookwyrm
Agreed, for Solaris his reaction speed it also at C so just about anything Perry does Solaris will see
Thomas
The assumptions for e=mc^2 to be true are: This applies only to sub atomic particles, there is no relative motion between the point of observation and the sub atomic particle this is being applied to. For any two sub atomic particles to have no relative motion towards each other is a nearly statistically impossible, and would only occur for the smallest amount of time before there would be relative motion between those particles. I doubt that in our solar system there is ever any 2 sub atomic particles that meet the assumption of no relative motion at any given moment of time. Although with the amount of sub atomic particles in the universe it is a near statistical certainty that there is at least one pair of sub atomic particles that have no relative motion towards each other at any given moment. But the equation is a good loose approximation for figuring out the energy of a system within an order of magnitude. It just drives me nuts when people act like it is the end all be all of calculating energy of a system since it is so inaccurate.
Bookwyrm
I think this really puts into perspective just how powerful Perry has really become.
lewdlegume
I wrote that post during a break in a hurry, so here are some corrections, implications, and further concerns with a thing that makes things light speed-like. First, I should clarify that E^2=(pc)^2+(mc^2)^2 is generally very relevant (it's the total energy of a system, after all), it's just the rest mass portion ((mc^2)^2) becomes significantly less relevant the closer you are to the speed of light, since momentum is defined relativistically (and copper is a horrendous candidate for fission reactions - to release any meaningful amount of energy you'd have to input an inconceivably large amount of it in the first place). Next, when I mentioned "An enemy that can [throw] things at light speed'", I spoke inaccurately. You can't move anything with rest mass at light speed. Massless particles (or more precisely, "particles" with no rest mass) like photons, can go at light speed because they're always moving at the speed of light (though kind of not really a la gluon, but that's an incredibly dense topic that's not super relevant which we'll save for another day), so we can conveniently (lol) wave away invariant mass in the "we reach infinite energy" contexts since those particles are never not moving, and thereby have no rest mass. You can't (in italics, underlined, and bolded) move an object with rest mass at the speed of light, since it takes exponentially and infinitely more energy to linearly increase speed, the closer you are to the speed of light, and nothing has infinite energy. It's worth noting, as an enthusiastic comment pointed out above mine, that in our real, existing universe we seem to have perceived objects with an ostensibly infinite energy density - black holes. And yes! It is, indeed, true in some sense that one could say that as a massive object approached the speed of light its "mass" increases (the actual nature of WTF even is mass? remains a lecture for another day), and one might expect the formation of a supermassive, dare I say infinitely dense, gravitational body, in the contexts of relativistic physics. Voila! You're now tasked with inventing a unified theory of quantum gravity for your book! This exact problem is one which sits in the tension between quantum mechanics and general relativity, and is as of yet unresolved. There's some of the "exotic physics" I mentioned in my original post. We really just don't in particular know what happens in ultra-high energy systems, and trying to move things too close to the speed of light tends to make those quite readily. A black hole would probably form though. Anyways, infeasibility of moving objects at light speed aside (unless, of course, you have a grand unified theory of quantum gravity lying around), the more feasible physics-based option is that Solaris turns all the energy into light. This actually outputs very reasonable numbers that are certainly workable. The main problem with turning things into high-energy light is that the main mode of photon-matter interaction in extremely high energy systems is creation of antimatter via pair production. This causes a lot of pretty high-energy matter-antimatter interaction, but that's generally not that bad, releasing likely significantly less energy than double that of the again-applicable mc^2. The main problem being, of course, that Solaris moving, or generally trying to move anything, would be completely impractical, but that's probably nothing a bit of Tide-based handwaving couldn't fix. Also, I have many things to say about Mass Driver and Chemestro but they didn't have equations attached to them so I'll refrain from commenting.
Endmor
tftc you've missed a letter here "long enough o convince him it’s not a trap anyway"
Apotheosis
Seeing Solaris like this really puts into perspective how batshit professor replica was in his/her prime, I wonder how they're doing now
Hayden Leech
I fucking love what this whole chain of events would look like from a continuous perspective. Perry is basically freely weaving through fate to straight up decide what happens. Learning what to do and what not to do by literally peering into fate. It’s a good trick. From a Solaris POV it just looks like Perry did it in one shot. All this sleight of hand/planning/experimentation… and the response is just the immediate reaction to being threatened.
Daemion
This might be interesting to you, although I have the feeling you know it already: https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/ There's more like that, for example "What if you exploded a nuclear bomb (say, the Tsar Bomba) at the bottom of the Marianas Trench?" or "If a meteor made out of diamond and 100 feet in diameter was traveling at the speed of light and hit the earth, what would happen to it?” or "If I shot an infinitely strong laser beam into the sky at a random point, how much damage would it do?". It's a good source for mad scientist ideas. ;)
Extra16
Imagine not being able to deal with someone who can move at the speed of light. Git gud paradox.
Macronomicon
somebody get me a physicist on call!
Macronomicon
In case he misses, I guess? always good to have a plan B
sb3n
Just use the trusty handwaveium Tide XD
Macronomicon
I...don't know if i can grok that, lol.
WickedlyDesigned
Quick question: why plan for stopping Solaris at light speed? Sucker punch him instead. Paradox has access to dickbag poison, and a lot of testing done with it. Get a version that's the opposite of the mimic test, enhancing its disruptive effect, create a cage with it, and use Gretchen's idillic manifestation to drop it around Solaris in a social situation, like the handover of the tests. Or if Gretchen's is too slow, then try to project the effect with Dregor's binding, effectively creating a zone where powers don't work/go haywire.
lewdlegume
For what it's worth, E=mc^2 only holds true for objects with relativistic energy m, which means you can't use the rest mass of a penny since, y'know, it'd be hurdling at the speed of light. Mostly physicists use E^2=(pc)^2+(mc^2)^2, where m in this case is rest mass and p is momentum. Practically this wouldn't make tooooo much of a difference, but it's an inaccuracy basic enough that it does challenge Perry's intelligence. But also, the mass-energy conversion isn't what you really care about here! Most of that energy won't matter - almost none of it is released, given copper's proximity to iron. More relevant is the nuclear blast generated by the fission the penny causes, but even that's contingent on the real concern here - what does it actually mean for the penny to be travelling at the speed of light? Because every percent closer you get to the speed of light, relativistic kinetic energy fucking triples. As in like, 0.99c to 0.9999c is a tenfold increase in kinetic energy. At 0.9c we're talking in hundreds of terajoules. At 0.99c we're talking a petajoule of energy. I could suspend disbelief up until now, but since you've introduced equations you're grating against values that, after a certain line, enter into the bounds of exotic planck-scale physics. An enemy that can "[throw] things at light speed" can exceedingly casually blow up the entire universe, or worse. The only real way to make these values reasonable is if Solaris converts all the energy from things into photons of equivalent energy and information, in which case - yes, you'd get values similar to what you've listed here, but you'd also have to contend with the fact that Solaris is significantly larger than a penny, and doesn't level the country every time he touches a thing. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding the power though.
Dane Billman
Very cool chapter. Also fun to note that the original quest to kill Solaris, if I’m remember correctly would give Perry 30,000 XP, so right at the tipping point for a level up!
Nathan Quitugua
Nvm, answered my own question. Its in the beginning of this chaper
Nathan Quitugua
Its easy, we kill the batman. But in all honesty, Solaris just flickering between all these people is impressive. I dont recall but did Perry attempt to make a probability dodge that went to Manita? I figure Solaris can't transcend dimensional realms like Perry can with a portal so if Perry can make it through alive, he should be able to theoretically have all the time in the world to fix the problem, unless the millisecond he does it, all his family dies in a heartbeat.
Apotheosis
Light speed is truly bullshit
Rotary
Maybe he’ll peace out after the mimics are dealt with? If he’s that tired, handing the hat to Dr. or Tyranus sounds viable once things settle.
Andrew
Thank you!
guipe
Here's the Gemini pro answer if you want it: https://poe.com/s/WW5Mln9wZhyJu0MvxHet
guipe
Yea the speed of light is scary. I mean technically the energy stored in mass actually going at the speed of light is infinite. Since it take exponentially more energy to accelerate the closer to the speed of light you are. AKA, the energy requiered to go from 0% the speed of light to 99% the speed of light is LOWER then the energy required to go from 99% to 99.9%. Now why is that? Its because your mass increase as you get closer to the speed of light. Meaning, that the penny you just threw at the speed of light is now a Black hole of infinite size. The good news is that you won't die because only small black hole kill you by spaghettification. The bad news is: BLACK HOLE...
Macronomicon
thank, got it.
mhaj58
I’m wondering about Solaris? Hasn’t he thought about dying before the mimic tried to assimilate him? He’s old and tired, but now spite and paranoia are driving him to crazy levels of fear and anxiety. I wonder what his life was like before, when he was dealing pot and had a family.
Domy
Considering that a major concern of future space exploration is the idea of planet cracking with a chunk of iron going at 1% of the speed of C, a penny at the speed of C sounds terrifying.
LeoClashes
Looks like chap # mislabeled. TFTC I wonder how much energy the city uses annually? Funny to imagine Perry making a super battery, Solaris flinging a rock at it and powering the city for the next century.
PlasmaticPi
Yes it is. So glad I don't have to do the math for something like this.
Kevin Neely
Indeed
Josh Turple
274 not 273?
xyphion
Second? :(
Macronomicon
The speed of light is Fuckin' scary, you guys.
