4.6
o0O0o0O0o

Since we now had Thursday off school, and most villains tended to tread carefully the day of the endbringer truce, I got basically the whole day to myself. I decided to see if Amy wanted to come over to my house before Saturday to collaborate on the healing spray project. I still remembered her number from when she gave it to me the other day at lunch. She tried to be nonchalant about it by saying it was for whenever we were collaborating, but by her blush, the fact that she was literally giving me her number was not lost on her.

After two rings, she picked up. "Hey... Taylor?" She sounded dead tired.

Oh, shoot. Too late now, she had already picked up. "Hi Amy, I was gonna call about maybe getting together today. I forgot that you woke up in the middle of the night to go to an endbringer fight. Sorry about that. I'm so used to not needing sleep, sorry, didn't mean to rub it in. I'm making an ass of myself right now aren't I?"

I got a weary chuckle in response. "No it's fine. I-" She gave a jaw cracking yawn. "I was awake, I just couldn't get to sleep after I got back. Sorry I'm so out of it. You don't need sleep? That must be nice."

She sounded a little loopy, but not actually mad at me. I tried to continue without sticking my foot further down my throat. "Thanks, yeah. We can talk about it on Saturday if you want? I'm not sure how I would go about modifying someone else yet, but it would be a cool project to work on if we finish the medical spray thing."

Amy thought that over for a minute. "Hmm? Sure. I'll see you on Saturday. Well, you know, at school too, but on Saturday for real... I'm gonna try to sleep again. Thanks for calling I guess? It's nice that you thought of me even if I can't actually do anything today. Talk to you later."

"Talk to you tomorrow." I added, still feeling like a heel.

With that, she hung up.

Hmm. Now what.

I know, I could work with Chris on finding his specialty. I'm sure he was in his lab right now.

That decided, I suited up and started jogging to the PRT HQ. On the way I was thinking about Canberra.

It all comes back to time. I read the estimates, the death tole on the civilians was likely somewhere around fifty thousand people, with probably that many again that were incurably insane. That left a quarter of a million people that needed protecting and organizing. If I wanted numbers of creatures comparable to the numbers of police per capita, especially for a war-torn area, I would need anywhere from one to three thousand creatures. Ideally it would be at the higher end of the scale.

First problem: I didn't have time to grow creatures with stealth, even just basic stealth. The idea was a total non-starter.

Solution: Forgo stealth entirely, work in the open as a not quite human ally. My current idea was to use my most human template, not that that was saying much mind you, and modify it to look a lot more human. The templates were natural infiltrators and saboteurs. They even had a freaky injection system of what amounted to viral attack code in DNA form that I would be discarding. It would end up being about the size, weight, and shape of a human. Albeit one with four arms. Slightly bulbous, bald head and barbie doll lack of interesting bits to differentiate it from humans, but still human-ish.

Advantage: They could grow incredibly quickly. It would take hours for them to mature, maybe half a day all told. A single brand new base could easily pump out ten per day if it had enough raw material and energy supplied. Which brought me to my next problem.

Second problem: I didn't have time to grow creatures using sunlight. It would cripple my output. My normal method of gathering mass from atmospheric CO2 was too slow as well, so I needed materials.

Solution: Solve both materials and energy at the same time, fuel my growth with bio-matter instead of sunlight. I would be reversing my normal process, pumping out CO2 as I digested the bio-matter to generate energy. I estimated it would take about ten times as much mass going in as I would get out, but I wouldn't be limited by energy or materials any more, I would be limited by how fast I could build the bases with digestion pools.

Downside: It would be grisly, and nasty, but I needed the bio-matter. I would be fueling my growth on the corpses lying around in the open. I couldn't afford to be squeamish about it if I wanted to save lives.

Advantage: It would deal with most of the disease problem that would crop up if no one dealt with the bodies, at least this way they would be doing something useful instead.

Third problem: I didn't have time to grow a network in the area, at least not fast enough to make a difference. They were already putting more permanent fencing in place in a rough oval around Canberra. Forty kilometers across at the widest, twenty at the narrowest. That was more than six hundred square kilometers that I needed network in, and I only had one planter.

Solution: Fortuitously, as infiltrators and saboteurs, the templates I was looking at using had to operate without access to the network under usual conditions. Each of them acted as a booster for any local signal. It wouldn't help control other templates, but if you had a network of nothing but infiltrators, they could sustain a signal over quite a distance by themselves. I just needed to tweak their instincts and knowledge to be much more human. I would eventually have so many of them that it would start to seriously impact how I thought if they were non-human. So each one would be getting a slightly modified copy of my own original brain and mind, so even if they were separated from the network, they could interact with humans properly.

Advantage: Since they would be so close to human, even outside of the network, I could pass myself off as a monster cape who had the ability to create more of herself. That would neatly cover my reason for being there as well, people in a quarantine zone would understand better than anyone else what it meant to be too dangerous to be let out in to society, and self-replication fell firmly under that umbrella.

Now, there were a couple of potential issues with this plan. First and foremost would be that I needed people to trust the creepy bald hivemind monster. I'm pretty sure that they would, once they could see that I was helping, but if they didn't, I might just end up fighting a losing battle to help people that were trying to kill me.

The other main issue was that if it ever got out that I was doing this, it would be capital b, Bad. Immediate kill order for me, hooray. I doubt that they would care that it wasn't technically self-replication. So I would need to make sure that my cover story was a strong as possible. Unfortunately it also meant that I would need to be very subtle about using any bio-manipulation to help people out, unless I was absolutely sure that it couldn't come back to bite me. I know that the Simurgh containment zones technically didn't get monitored like that, but I would be trusting a lot to that fact.

Regardless of the potential issues, I think I had a plan. The template was designed already, that was increasingly easy with my increased brainpower. Now I just had to wait for the first base to be ready in Canberra in a couple of days. Mustn't let the cart get to far ahead of the course after all.

That done, I decided to look up what the internet thought of the Canberra fight last night.

From the look of it, I was the talk of the town. Someone in our little teleportation party had let slip that there was a cape called Invisible Man that was coming to his first Simurgh fight. Combined with Strider's comment that I was heavy, it was assumed that Invisible Man was a tinker that wore power armour and focused entirely on being non-detectable.

The loss of potentially Simurgh-proof Stranger tech was lamented, but Invisible Man was seen as a hero for sacrificing his life in order to destroy the Simurgh's device before it became active. There was even talk about the fact that some were pushing for the entire city to be covered in a dome instead of the more usual concrete wall, but were shut down over the expense to do so when the device had never even activated.

The reason everyone seemed so certain that Invisible Man had Simurgh-proof tech and that he died was that the Simurgh had never reacted like she did during that fight, searching blindly for an opponent. She had only cut off pursuit when she had held her 'brick-o-location' in place for a full minute after she had stopped attacking anything.

Meanwhile in Canberra, I had crawled out of the bus and in to an abandoned home. I gorged on all the food in the fridge, then crawled in to a bedroom at the back of the house to go in to torpor. I didn't need to sleep, and it would turn my camouflage off, but it would also considerably speed my healing. I was willing to forgo some time awake now in order to have more time mobile soon. As that body dreamed, I focused on it's connection to the planter.

The planter was focusing diligently on it's job, which right now mostly consisted of scrounging food to fuel the creation of base seeds. They were extremely energy intensive to make compared to network seeds, but I needed the bases more, right now. Even with repeated trips to the smashed supermarkets and other sources of easy calories, I could only manage to make three or four bases per day. By the time my commando could move again, the planter will have saturated the circle around it with a dozen or so bases.

As soon as I was mobile, it would be a lot more important to make bases as equally spread as possible within the quarantine zone, to prevent me from having to drag corpses too far to fuel them. With my first base being ready in three days, and my first creatures ready by the fourth day, I would soon be able to move out and start helping people.

I would be walking a fine line, but in addition to trying to keep riots from breaking out because of panicked or crazy people, I would try to convince people to help me drag corpses into the digestion pools. I'm not sure how I'll convince people other than by telling them that it will help with disease, but I'm sure I'll have enough tries at it that I'll eventually have a decent argument.

With bio-matter coming in as fast as I can add bases, I estimated that I would be able to have a force of several thousand infiltrators within about a month, which was lucky since that's also around when the corpses would stop being useful as fuel, decomposing too much on their own already. I would be right up against the edge of what's possible, but I think that I could expand fast enough to deal with most of the corpses in the city and build up a suitable force before the corpses started causing problems for people.

When I finally got to Chris' lab, he was hard at work seeing if he was a 'transitions' tinker.

He jumped when I spoke up. "Hey Chris. What are you working on?"

Not quite in full tinker fugue, he was still rather distracted as he answered me.

"Well when I wanted to check if I could cause transitions between different energy types for my pistols, I got some ideas. I wouldn't be able to do it directly though. Something about the idea is almost right though."

I was scratching my head. "So, you have 'interfaces' and 'transitions' that are close, but 'multifunctionality' doesn't work? Let's see here. You could transition between different interfaces or something. What would that do? An 'integration' tinker? Do you think you could integrate say, my armour, and one of Armsmaster's scanners?"

Chris sat down at his desk and started scribbling. "No, that's not right either. This is so frustrating. I can feel that we're right on the edge of it, but we can't figure it out."

I sat down as well. "What's left then? If it's not transitioning between interfaces, maybe it's making interfaces for transitions?"

Chris just laid his head down on the desk. "Isn't that basically the same thing? We'll just come up with something else to try."

Shaking my head, I didn't let the thought go. There was something about it. "No, because transitioning between different interfaces is integrating different systems, while making interfaces for transitions would be... swappable parts? Some standardized connection that has interchangeable pieces."

Chris was staring at me now. "What, like modularity? If I could build anything modular I would have already made a modular power system or something, there's no way I could have a specialty that broad."

"Didn't you say that's how you ended up building your pistols though? You built them as spare power for your hoverboard. How do they attach?"

He dragged his board over to him, then snapped the front end and pistol grip of his pistol off and slapped the body to the bottom of the board. "Like that, see?" He seemed to think about what he had just done.

Very slowly, he took the former body of the pistol off of the board then looked at the attachment point. "Modular power supply? Holy shit! I already built a modular power supply, I just never used it for anything other than firing lasers!"

He started looking around his workshop at unfinished projects in a new light. Reverently he walked up to a belt looking attachment for his power armour and slotted his power supply in to place. It started to hum quietly.

"Holy shit. Holy Shit! This is the shield generator that I could never finish, I could never figure out how to build it with a self contained power supply." He was jumping around the room now.

He rushed over and hugged me. "Thankyouthankyouthankyou!" He was already back to flitting around his workshop looking at old unfinished projects.

"Modularity! Hah! That's so broad it's ridiculous. I could build just about anything. I have so many ideas now." He was grinning ear to ear.

This was good.