CH1 - Bootstrap

— — —

"He says close your eyes

Sometimes it helps

And then I get... a scary thought...

That he's here... means he's never lost..." - Russian Roulette

— — —

Throughout my body were solarchives. The name was flashy, but there was nothing special about the hardware. Nodes of carbon, silicon, and some rare elements, sheathed in organometallics. What made them solarchives was the function. They contained any blueprint my ANI and AGI mesh crawlers had ever been able to find, as well as anything I had ever been asked to source, crack, or deliver.

Blueprints and information sufficient, in this time, to remake the world.

Yet, right now, most of it was useless.

What I had was a single portable fabber. It was powered by an ultra-high-capacity momentum battery cell, trickle-charged by nuclear RTG and designed to automatically tap wireless electrical grids, of which this city had none. Once I exhausted the momentum battery, I would be forced to physically tap local power sources… except the local power grid was weak. The power was there, mind, but an industrial-scale fabber would use… a lot. Far more than anyone could quietly steal.

Power was not the only issue. My portable fabber traded complexity and speed for generalism, master of nothing, passable at most. It could not create the more sophisticated technologies. Despite that, it was enough to bootstrap to a properly functional industrial base. But to do that, I would need materials.

All modern fabbers, from the portable to the largest of industrial cornucopia machines, could recycle objects into feedstock. But there were limits to this. If you didn't have something to sacrifice with the elements you needed, you were screwed. If you did, it would still be slow. Dismantling and sorting matter in a generalist fabber took nearly as long as fabrication, and if the elements you needed were only a small fraction of the objects… you were going to be waiting a long time.

There were also things they just couldn't do, like isotope sorting. Not because it was physically impossible, but it would be so impractical in a portable fabber that even my most paranoid blueprint archives didn't hold a driver for it.

Small work was slow work. If you wanted speed, you wanted things on a bigger scale. Hab recycling plants or mining operations had specialized machinery for macro-scale element processing, isotopic sorting, and the packaging of feedstock. Those were designs I did have.

But, again, I only had a small fabber. In theory, I could build the feedstock processors using disassembled garbage, but the time cost of breaking it down for machinery so big would be huge. Proper feedstock didn't exist here, but there were suppliers for 'pure' materials.

To get anything done fast, I needed power, and I needed materials.

I needed money.

Sia, progress on money?

[Cryptocurrency does not exist: a note has been added to the timeline divergence file. Two criminal forums have been located. FAF neural password algorithms were seeded with publically accessible information, and were able to guess the access codes for a money payment account. The balance was used to purchase the access codes for a larger number of compromised accounts. Captcha-solving, mturk tasks, and other micro-jobs suitable for narrow artificial intelligence generate only minor revenue. More time is required to make this money useable at local retailers. Network knowledge is insufficient for more direct manipulation.]

Unfortunate, but given thought it wasn't a surprise. Scion had just barely arrived before the modern internet. Tinkers and Thinkers appeared shortly after. As a result, the entire internet architecture was different. With the presence of parahumans making assumptions about computational power unreliable, the public-private key cryptography commonly used pre-mesh didn't even get off the ground.

I considered duplicating paper money for a moment, before dismissing it. Easy on the small scale, but I needed more, and there would be checks. Algorithms to make non sequential, aged bills with whatever security tricks kept valid for a divergent, obsolete currency were not something already in my database. I could create one, but that would take time. Time I'd rather not spend.

What about selling modern technology?

[The legal definition of tinkertech, in essence, is "any object or material created by a parahuman or with the assistance of a parahuman or parahuman power, which has not been shown to be able to be consistently replicated without parahuman involvement." The burden is on the defendant to prove that a parahuman involved in any manufacturing process was not critical to said process. Materials produced by a parahuman power or by a tinkertech object are considered tinkertech for the purposes of pricing regulations.]

This isn't tinkertech.

[The probability is overwhelming that local experts will declare it tinkertech. Modern technology incorporates software and hardware modules generated by AGIs, ANIs, and neural brute-force evolutionary solvers. These sections are foreign to human intuition, often contain dead logic, and other issues that make them fundamentally alien to local design practice. At the same time, these sections are reminiscent of what tinkertech schematics have been published online. Most importantly, these restrictions were created to protect the existing power blocks. Political pressures work against any verdict that would be harmful to their control of the market.]

What are the restrictions.

[Tinkertech is subjected to a 24% tax. It must be 22% more expensive than any good it might replace before the tax is applied. This restriction is wide enough that in practice, tinkertech and most raw materials produced by tinkertech cannot be legally sold at prices anyone would pay. This is before considering the issue of tinkertech requiring a tinker for maintenance.]

…Troublesome. I could understand the motivation behind it, but…

Sia, I need a fixer. Please start a search on law firms that deal with parahuman affairs. Sort them by how good they are at making problems go away, especially when they win cases the letter of the law suggests should have been lost.

[Initiating query. Available network access points are severely limited. This search will take a long time.]

That was fine. I had other ideas.

— — —

The fact that tinkertech was regulated only mattered on a large scale. The legislation was driven by proto-hypercorps. There were circumstances where the wheels of bureaucracy moved quickly, but defending the power of commercial giants from street corner peddlers was not one of them. No one was going to stop me unless and until someone that mattered complained, whether that was a government analyst or a clothing manufacturer.

So long as I kept things small and quick, I had room to wiggle in.

A quick stop by a mall, and I had photogrammetry scans of local power plugs and sockets, along with common data cables. I pulled up blueprints for some common, trivial devices and adjusted or added those plugs and sockets, along with kludging up software patches for the local standards. Since the details were available online, this didn't take long.

Heading towards the local flea market, I hit a few dumpsters, feeding broken electronics and other debris to my portable fabber. Slow, yes, but I had the time.

Several hours later, I traded a wireless power transmitter and receivers for a table at the flea market. Whether it was their utility or the sheer novelty of buying them from a "real live cape", it didn't take long to sell everything I had printed. I actually ended up purchasing items from other tables just to dump them in the fabricator.

I had limited myself to small and cheap things. Harmless items that wouldn't take long to fabricate or use obvious nanomachinery. High-efficiency solar panels, power transmitters, high-capacity battery cells, things like that.

By the time the sky darkened, I had over a thousand dollars. Between my body's clean metabolism and the self-cleaning nature of my bodysuit, it wasn't worth spending money on a room somewhere. I went back to the forest and climbed a tree, before triggering sleep.

— — —

"Oh wow, is this really just eighty?"

"Yes," I said after a brief glance. The teenager tugged his now-gloved hand loose from the table. "This really lets you climb walls?"

"Yes," I said again.

"I don't know, how do I know this really works…"

"You don't. But you do know all the other things on the table work. If you aren't comfortable with that, you can leave it for someone else to buy."

The boy looked conflicted, before he pulled out a money clip, peeling off four twenties. "If this doesn't work I'm coming back."

"That's fine."

As he walked away, I leaned back in my chair. Business had picked up, to the point that I had trouble keeping the table stocked. Frankly, I was surprised the PRT or Protectorate still hadn't showed up to piss in my parade— I had no doubt they were keeping an eye on me.

I already had a thread in the Brockton Bay section of Parahumans Online that had over twenty pages. Commenters seemed certain I would be visited by a gang or the Protectorate.

To be honest, I thought the only reason it hadn't happened yet was that I was sleeping in the woods; approaching me at my stall didn't give a gang any room to force anything. Not without creating a very public scene. As for the Protectorate… I wasn't sure.

All I needed was a few more days and I would shut this down. I had already collected over five thousand dollars— like I said, business had picked up. I was preparing stock in crates in advance, and it was never enough.

Part of it was that my stuff had more down-to-earth utility than most tinkertech. I had created a rubbery, flexible battery thinner than most phones. It would stick to the back of a device, with a plug on a stubby putty-like cord. It held ten times the charge of the battery in these smartphones, so slapping one on something let even the most intensive user forget about charging for weeks. That was my most popular item, now.

"Henry Svanta."

My head snapped up. I had not given my name to anyone.

A nondescript man in a suit stood at my stall, eyes hidden behind tinted glasses. He extended a hand out to me, an open flip phone held between his fingers.

"You have a phone call."

I slowly took the phone, hitting it with a burst of terahertz radiation. Not a bomb. I put it to my ear.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Henry. I've been watching your progress since you first appeared. You're quite the capable Tinker."

"I wouldn't go so far as all that," I said carefully. "I'm just a little skilled. Enough to get by."

"I think not." The voice was serious. "I think you are exactly what I need."

"I'm always happy to discuss business," I hedged, "Mr…"

There was a prolonged pause.

"Coil."

Sia?

[Coil is the leader of a secretive faction in Brockton Bay. Goals, resources, and membership are unknown, save that he makes use of paramilitary-type soldiers armed with laser rifles.]

"What exactly are you looking for, Coil?"

"Ranged weapons, armor, vehicles, medical machinery— I know you can do much, much more than you have. I'd like to help you do it."

I froze. First my name, now this.

Weapons and armor, sure. Vehicles could be a guess. But there was no reason for him to even think I could make medical technology. I knew about the stigma attached to biotinkers.

This was exactly the kind of disadvantageous situation I'd been trying to avoid.

...But it was too late for that, it seemed. And where there was risk, there was opportunity.

"...You are very well informed," I said.

"Naturally," he replied. His tone oozed confidence.

"In order to produce the sort of things you are interested in, I am going to need specialized equipment. I will need…" I crunched some numbers, "Sixty thousand in cash, up front."

"I can easily provide you with a lab—"

"I think not," I interrupted. "I won't have my machines on another's property."

"You have no identity," Coil stated.

I frowned. "That is not something you need concern yourself with."

There was another oddly long pause.

"We shall see," he said finally. "Thirty thousand should be more than enough."

"Fifty five more like— and that would make things difficult. I require specialized materials—"

"I can supply you with whatever you need," he interrupted.

"Oh?" I said. I couldn't help an edge of irritation in my voice. "Literal tons of coal, pure metals, and rare elements? Hundreds of gallons of diesel? I would still need money, besides."

"Done," he said. "I will provide all the materials you have stated. As for money… thirty thousand is the most I will offer."

I balked. It was absurd. Too convenient, too good to be true.

But if it was true, it was an offer I couldn't refuse.

"...Very well. I will text you account inform—"

"There is no need. I already have it."

I scowled. This man was far too pleased with himself.

We'd see how long that lasted.

— — —

The moment I decided to accept the offer, Sia acted. She had long since crawled all accessible real estate listings, made phone calls and conducted email correspondences. All the information she gathered had been collated and indexed within one of my solarchives. It was, therefore, only a matter of minutes to find what I needed.

It was an old meat packing plant, in the worst part of the city. It sat there for years after local industry collapsed. It changed hands silently a few times, but had spent most of that time as just another in a long list of properties that had been repossessed.

A ruined brick box, containing nothing but trash and debris, in the shittiest part of town.

It was perfect.

As agreed, Coil would provide me with materials. He gave me the number for one of his men, who arranged for materials to be delivered. The first day it was just a pallet of common metals, recycled electronics, and a barrel of diesel. The following deliveries expanded. Despite my skepticism, I received all the promised coal, metals, and even the rare elements.

I had most of what I needed to get set up, but even though it wouldn't take months, it would definitely still take time.

Unfortunately, even if I did have the blueprints, I could not leap from a portable fabricator to the latest industrial design. Blueprints were less schematic and more program. Countless pathways allowed for more flexibility, but at the end of the day, a industrial fab was the kind of thing that didn't need to be easily constructed by just any fab. My situation was not normal. I would have to build successively more advanced fabricators in order to leap my way to the top.

Still, most technologies would be available to me within a few days. For the rest… a little waiting was a small price to pay.

As soon as I started printing off the parts for a crude "some assembly required" desktop cornucopia machine, someone pounded on the door.

I couldn't help feeling frustrated. Throwing a tarp over my worktable, I picked up my plasma rifle. Moving to the door, I yanked it open, letting the blond girl thumping it stumble inward. I raised an eyebrow at her, and she scowled.

Even with that expression, she was cute. Dirty blonde hair tied back, just a dash of freckles on her nose. Striking green eyes.

Naturally, my first thought was that she was trouble.

"Hey, name's Tattletale. Boss told me to come tell you some things you need to know," she said.

The scowl was already gone, replaced with a smug grin.

"Yes," I said, "you do remind me of him now that I think about it."

And the scowl was back. I couldn't help an amused smile.

"Funny guy, huh. Well, Coil wanted me to see what you were doing with all his money."

"I have no doubt you already know. I have received materials, and he has not delivered a dollar. I am working on the tools and machines I will need to make the technology he wants."

She hummed, looking around. "Yeah, and I'm sure the materials didn't cost him anything, right?" She started toward the tarp but stopped when I raised the rifle slightly.

"Come on, let me see!"

"No."

"Coil won't be happy," she said blandly, but made no further effort to investigate the tarp. She squinted at me. "You really like doing that stone face thing, don't you Mr. 'Case 53'." She made finger quotes as she said the last bit. "You've got the mutations, but. Not mutations. Alterations? Biotinkering… Coil said you could do medical stuff—"

"I'm getting the impression you don't want me as a friend," I interrupted. Her smile disappeared.

"Okayyyy. You're a serious guy. I get it. Don't take this personally— all Coil's idea. I'm here because he said so."

Something felt off about this conversation. "What is it Coil told you to tell me, exactly?"

"Oh, yeah," she said. "You've got the Protectorate in a tizzy. They were quietly freaking about your little tinkertech yard sales, but politics kept them from stomping all over your party the first few days after you showed up— risk of bad PR, bullying the poor new Case 53, etc. Red tape, yadda yadda. Plus you weren't acting like a lost puppy, being a clever go-getter problem-solving tinker instead— bigger chance of the ugly PR, and you getting a hate-on for them instead of seeing them as the great heroes."

"Then, boom, you disappeared to here. They haven't figured out where you went, but it doesn't even matter. They could make a scene about the unregulated tinkertech sales, but if they forced in your house and nosed around? If it got out, that could put other non-villain tinkers on edge. Messy for them… oh, and that leads into the other thing. The unwritten rules."

"Unwritten rules?" I dutifully parroted. It was quite clear the girl liked the sound of her own voice, and the sooner I indulged her the sooner she would go away.

"Yeah. Think of it as a game… yeah, no, that's not your style. Okay… A lot of capes, they're like walking weapons if they go all out. If capes unmask capes, invade their house, shit like that? They just made it so they have nothing to lose, it's all fucked, right. So the villain has no reason to hold back anymore. They unmask their enemies, or kill them, or their families— maybe by accident even, busting in their houses or something.

So there's like two or three villains to every hero. All things being equal— since triggers don't care about heroism, right?— that means if everybody went all out, you get a lot of dead capes and the heroes lose. Nobody wants that fight— it isn't worth it, everybody wants nice stuff and toppling the government fucks it all up. But that's the numbers. If it happened, the heroes would lose. If everyone goes hardcore, everybody loses.

So yeah, unwritten rules. Concessions. So any villain that isn't balls-to-the-walls crazy has a reason to keep things cool, keep the damage down. They have a way out. The ones that play nice, they won't even be unmasked if they get caught. If they break out of jail, all their stuff is fine. So they got a reason to not start blasting the shit out of everything when cornered."

I frowned. I could sort of see the argument. Enough to not dismiss it out of hand, at least.

The government didn't have the monopoly on force, so it couldn't operate on the tacit assumption that it would win a war to the knife. More importantly, even if they did win, the collateral would be horrific. The enemy would never be defeated, because there were always new parahumans, and— apparently— the statistical fact was more would be villains than heroes. The weakened scarcity economy of this world was too fragile to absorb more than a certain amount of collateral damage.

Of course, the technology in my solarchives could make for a very different paradigm. It must. Some measure of panopticon surveillance is necessary when you have nanofabrication. Otherwise, all it took was some kid having one bad day, and then the hab was being eaten by disassemblers.

As I absorbed the concept, the girl smiled. "Yeah. So, unwritten rules. Obviously no hard-and-fast list, but respect secret identities, don't unmask capes or fuck with their families. Don't fuck up meetings under truce, don't kill if you can help it, don't attack people with no stakes in shit, random civilians or whatever. Don't mind control or rape or… yeah, you get the idea."

"Quite," I said. "Very well then, you've told me. Anything else?"

"Come on, you don't want to hang out?" She sat down in my chair— my only chair— and pouted at me.

"No."

"Fine," she said blithely. "Can't say I didn't try, right?"

She got up and walked toward the door. She looked back. "I'll be back by in a week— no, a few days? Tomorrow, to see the finished thing." With that, she exited the building.

Annoying.

But I would put up with these annoying people if it got me back to proper, civilized quality of life.

Then? The ball would be in my court.

— — —

There was no roaring engine, or even a hum, but as the desktop-level cornucopia machine silently came online, I felt relief. It couldn't make everything, but it could make a lot of things I needed, things the portable fabber could not. Truly quality feedstock was still an issue, but the deliveries were a passable substitute for now.

The first run was two more portable fabbers. I buried one outside the city. The other was covered in cement, and dumped off a pier.

Having done that, the stress of being one attack or accident from disaster faded even more. I could focus on other things.

The fabber was assembling an automech, and I took photogrammetric scans of the building and assigned material categories. Terahertz scans were quickly composited over the data by the design suite. Outside was marked ignore, rooms were sketched out… ugly bricks to be walled over and support frames to be replaced outright. Once I was done, Sia piped the schematic into a suite of design programs and rapidly filled the fabber queue. More automechs, paneling, structural framework, data spimes, canisters of repair sprays, tanks of liquid polymer... If I had to deal with feeding the fabber for all that, it would take forever— but I didn't. The moment the automech completed, Sia took control of it, and it began dragging more materials into the fab.

By the time Tattletale invited herself back into my home, things looked very different.v Almost civilized, even.

"How's it going Hen— oh."

She jerked to a stop just inside the door.

Smooth, tinted carbon-plastic composite walls. A thin carpeted floor. It was a killbox, with still-empty sockets for turrets and other traps. The entrance hallway led to a sharp U-turn, hiding the rest of the facility from sight.

Not a smidge of dust, dirt, debris, or rust to be seen. Not even a stain.

"...You definitely need to work on my place." She gave me a sidelong look. "You can do more than colored walls and carpet? Yeah. I'm tempted to just move in here."

"What does Coil want now?"

"I'm hurt," Tattletale said, her tone mock-wounded. "You think I'm only here for him?"

I sighed. "As you say… come on then." I led her down the hall. It terminated in a large room, which currently only held a table and chairs. Against the wall was a refrigerator— a local model. I had better uses for fab time.

"Oh shit, is that a robot!?" Tattletale said. Open surprise was painted across her face. She was looking through an open door at an automech, currently feeding broken computer graphic cards into the desktop fabber.

"Guns, armor, biotinkering, robots… you're starting to scare me, Henry," she said lightly, but her body language suggested it wasn't just a joke. "Is there anything you can't do?"

"I can't make you go away, apparently," I replied, and she gave a weak laugh. She dropped into a chair.

"Okay… so let's get the boring stuff done with. Coil wants a hundred plasma rifles."

"Impossible," I said flatly. "My machines aren't good enough, and I don't have some materials I would need. Not to mention I have yet to see his promised money."

"Yeah, well, Coil doesn't see it that way." She sighed. "I'm supposed to sell you on it, but it's difficult to work with this hard a sell. He said the materials he is delivering is more than enough. It was weird. He seemed upset about something, but he didn't go into details."

I glanced at my rifle consideringly.

Yes, it was impossible.

A plasma rifle was a high-energy weapon. It used as much power in a few shots as the average home here used in a day. That didn't sound like much, but that was the usage of a grid-wired home over 24 hours, drawn in seconds from a man-portable battery. Massive, instant bursts of power.

That battery was the biggest problem. Chemical battery technology had been refined a lot since this time period, but at the end of the day, it just wasn't good enough for man-portable energy weapons. Nothing was, until you leaped across a gulf of complexity to something altogether different.

The highest-capacity rechargeable battery I knew of was the momentum battery. It used room temperature superconductors, composed of twisted bilayer graphene, gold, and electrum. The superconductors served to suspend countless nanoscopic flywheels, pinned by quantum locks on magnetic flux lines. The entire assembly floated within a frictionless gyroscope built on similar principles. The end result was orders of magnitude more energy storage than that provided by chemical batteries— the only hard limit was the tensile strength of the carbon nanotube flywheels. The downside was the level of detail. Nothing about them was on a macro scale, so for the fabber AI no shortcuts on print time were possible.

Technically, I could still make one. But if I did it today it'd be lucky to finish in a week, and the slightest print error would tank the storage capacity or even force me to restart the print from scratch. Meanwhile, I'd get nothing done. Only a fool would willingly spend their time making the flashiest gun when they needed to build an economic foundation.

But I doubted Coil wanted to hear that, so I'd simply have to lie.

"Even with the materials I've received, I couldn't make one of these. I'd need…" I pulled up a "low-budget" plasma rifle schematic, a fusion reactor, and a high-grade chemical battery design. "Yttrium, cerium, praseodymium… the whole range of rare earth elements really. Right now I only have the subset common to electronics and automobiles. Deuterium, tritium, hydrogen and argon are used in the fuel. There's also lithium, germanium, phosphorus, sulfur, and gold in the power cells… I'll just print a list for you. If he wants something like that, he'll have to provide all the materials. And I don't have the machines to make things like that in bulk. I need more time."

"...Great, thanks," she said, slumping back. "What's your plan anyway, with all this?" She waved her hand vaguely.

"Mmm," I said noncommittally. "Coil doesn't need my plans."

"What if I'm not asking for him?" Tattletale said. She hesitated. "Maybe you aren't the only one getting a bad deal."

I paused.

"I'll need to think about that."

"Yeah. Okay."

She sat there quietly for a while, watching the automechs drag materials in and parts out. I watched her. Sometimes, her brow would furrow, or her eyes widened slightly. I was not sure as to the cause.

She didn't say anything more. After a few hours, she sighed and stood up. She rubbed her temples and winced. "If anyone asks, I spent all these hours negotiating with you."

"Sure," I said, amused, and led her out.

— — —