Oh God, the Economy!
Chapter 1: The Economic impact is immeasurable.
I don't like Worm, I don't like the setting, I don't like the characters very much. Not in a sense that I don't understand the writing, I understand that most teenagers are irrational, and make short-sighted decisions. But I find the willingness to give up all moral principles the moment it strays from the path of least resistance, but one of many unnatural choices to enforce the author's view of the world. Though I dropped the work rapidly It dragged on for far too long on things I cared very little about. But that's beyond the here and now.
I know close to fuck all about Worm nor the people in it, beyond vague impressions from skimmed fanfiction. Right now I wish I paid far more attention because for one thing, I didn't know the moon getting blown up was in the cards. Seriously, a co-worker says that the moon exploded, I told him he was full of shit, so I took one step outside and look up. Wouldn't you know it Moon was fucked, glowing a pretty damn menacing red and all.
Have you ever seen a blacksmith hit an iron bar on TV and watched as all those sparks go flying off? The moon looks like that but times a million, all in slow motion. It's rather beautiful in a haunting way. How it looks doesn't matter really, all that matters is that I am fucked six ways to Sunday. But don't worry it's all priced in, the housing market crash is obviously a part of hedging the risk of imminent planetary devastation.
I'm taking this all a little too lightly, aren't I? Well to be perfectly honest, I was already running on fumes before shit hit the fan. Who the hell wants to be here on Earth Bet when they know damn well that this whole world is just one big slum. I don't have family here, I don't have my friends here, and frankly, I say good riddance let this place crash and burn not like I can do anything about it. But no this place is one big joke, one long and fucked up joke by a Canadian who vastly underestimates the nature of the indomitable human spirit, and it shows.
From what little I remember of the story, and vague notions from secondhand accounts Earth Bet has practically called it quits. Well, I don't see it, I don't see it one bit. This world needs to be smothered by a bullshit precognitive with zero understanding of the human philosophical condition, a mentally ill gold man picking the most fucked in the head people to give superpowers, and a trio of shit-tier kaiju who are power wanked by the author to maintain this shit hole. With all of that and more, this place is just barely falling apart. Bet may have a bloody nose, but I don't think that bell's going to ring anytime soon. Because at the end of the day, there are no limits to what man can endure, and people don't roll over quietly when the world goes down the drain.
Why am I so confident in human resilience? Because all around me I see people getting up and getting shit done even though it's gotten rough. Earth bet isn't just parahumans, and most of them are chosen because when the going got rough they broke, and even then some of them still bounced back. So how could I lie down and take it when I see the human spirit in action?
When I got to Earth Bet I didn't know where I was, or what I was doing here. But I did learn one thing quickly, is even in the face of a huge personal paradigm shift, life goes on. I struggled a bit, no support network, no identification, and no job. But I struggled it out and played my cards right, when I got spirited away to this world I found myself in Brockton Bay the center of the story, a bad city but still better than Baltimore. Only stupid people, or native Broktonites, stay there willingly. Using all my pocket money on a cheap bus ticket to head somewhere nice and out of the action.
I make it to Albany NY. There I partially BS'd at the Police Department, claiming I was heading home but my apartment wasn't there. Pretty quickly realizing power fuckery was afoot after showing him my iPhone, me and the officer came to the conclusion I was from a different earth. I was sent to a small PRT office where we told the same story.
PRT guy makes a call, and some kid in a noir costume looks at me and asks me to tell my story, and the kid says it checks out. PRT officer tells the officer that this was completely unnecessary and that we were wasting our time as they apparently have a system in place to handle this, dickhead.
The officer and I headed back to the station, he looked up the SOP for it, and I was asked my age and date of birth. Apparently, I'm not allowed to keep my old DOB because I would be six. Then I was told to head to the courthouse and get handed my new paperwork and 1000 dollars. Before you know it I have an apartment, work the night shift at a gas station, and according to the US government, I am now born in 1990.
Having no friends or family on Earth Bet might have been a blessing in disguise. At some point, I started getting Ideas, but I don't know when, as most of the time I just ignored them. After some time realized I may be technically inclined, but when I started thinking more about tungsten alloys than Rome something might be up. I concluded I must be some sort of retarded tinker, and had a sneaking suspicion that there might be more to this than I originally thought.
You see the shock factor for Earth Bet had worn off the moment I had to do paperwork to be a gas station attendant, I didn't pay much attention to the cape scene. A bunch of guys wearing costumes and talking shit on live television is fun, but realistically the effect it has on my life is nil. Albany isn't the largest city so we have at most two to three capes at any given time, and the two tend to be a ward by the name of Crow, the same kid I met at the PRT office too, and Rowan, a red-headed lady. The third cape tends to be some random trigger who gets shuffled out to NYC. So at the end of the day who particularly cares?
But suddenly It did matter, and I couldn't keep my head in the ground. All in all a daunting prospect. But I could operate under the radar, for a while, save up my pennies for a shitbox and repair with my overwhelming power. Then I'll be in business, and next thing you know I blow 1k on what amounts to a rusted-out DeLorean, who cares about low profile when this is an option, I can afford it thanks to Back to the Future never taking off like it did back home. It was a steal, but the guy wanted it gone and I was happy to take it off his hands.
Renting a truck, I towed it to an old abandoned steel mill. Ideally, I can use this place's derelict industrial equipment to my ends, after blowing the rest of my savings on the tool necessary to "refurbish" the DeLorean. In the vast jungle rusting buildings, overtaken by vegetation I set up a small area to my liking. With the various tools I had at my disposal, I set up a propane forge and worked tirelessly. After I was finished I was left with a fully function DeLorean, clean and sleek on the outside, but with many surprise features on the inside.
Though I think I may have gone overboard, the various doohickys are well hidden within the car If I had to open the frunk with company I may need to answer some questions. No way I wasn't gonna add some special features when I'm a tinker. However I did encounter a small issue, aren't tinkers supposed to have some kind of autopilot? It sure as hell didn't feel like autopilot, having to triple-check everything to make sure I wasn't messing anything up. Hell, I don't believe you could even classify my car as tinker tech. Hell the onboard computer uses my fork of Linux, mainly because I don't trust other tinkers edits of Linux, they look like malware.
So Back to where this all started. Moon went boom, bad times all around. But I know even with how meager my ability may be, I have to do something. Right now no one seems to be considering that there may be something more pressing than the state of the economy. Property prices certainly shouldn't be the main concern when the mother of all meteor showers is going to permanently screw Earth. We don't have time to be worrying, we need to be doing.
So what do I need to do to save the most lives in, the long term? The Moon partially exploding means a few things for Earth. Axial tilt is surely thrown off, tides a bit borked, and skies are gonna be raining fiery rocks from the stars above, followed by a great ice age the likes of which Earth has not seen since the Neo-proterozoic era. Then you have the usual suspects every three months. So the two main concerns, for now, are fiery sky rocks and the cold. The last endbringer attack was November 18th last year so I have about …. Ok so endbringer some time this month, I think, so Simurgh or Leviathan probably somewhere not here. I can work with that.
Asteroids and cold are the first and second threats respectively, so either underground or underwater, underground is the best option. The US has plenty of caves and abandoned mineshafts, so I gotta find one near here… shit out of luck, ok so how deep would I have to dig? Shit ok 10 miles to survive a dinosaur killer, well damn. Ok so If I want an elevator that can carry let us say four large shipping containers it needs to have a radius of twenty-nine feet. I need to move 140 million cubic feet. So I need to be able to do 384 thousand cubic feet per day every day to finish it in a year. Well nobody said it'd be easy but I'm starting to think I should've bought a truck.
I gather my pitifully small number of belongings and exit my apartment for what I intend to be the last time. It's a small one-room apartment on the second level of an old motel now apartment building. It's exactly what you're thinking, a bland beige rectangle that forms a slight L shape with a cracked asphalt parking lot in the front. I load my valuables into my car's frunk and double-check that all of my things are accounted for, old laptop, toiletries, clothes, etc. I make sure to keep my clothes away from the turret's feed mechanism, wouldn't want them to get caught. Closing the frunk with a dull thud, I hop into my car, and start it, with a deep rumbling uncharacteristic of my car's size, I drive off into the night.
Thinking through what I need to do soon, I need a steady supply of carbon. I can make practically everything I want if I can get a hold of a large quantity of coke (fuel) or maybe used tires, anything with high carbon content. I have all the metals I need for the first few steps of Industrialization and automation, but without Carbon or Silicon, I won't be able to make the computer parts necessary for efficient automation. Where to look? I guess charcoal or wood will work for now, long term I may want to switch over to coal proper.
A large rusted facility looms at the end of an unkept road, what once used to be a place bustling with activity is now long forgotten. I'm lucky I found this place, it's the ideal location for a tinker capable of working on a large scale. I pull into the warehouse that's acting as my temporary workshop, tucked in the corner lies an assortment of tools, scrap metal tables, a makeshift mechanical lathe, a furnace, etc. It doesn't look quite what I'd expect, but when was it about looks? I turn on the car engine turned makeshift generator and turn on the small lights dotted around the workstations.
My mind is abuzz with possibilities, I start thinking through what can only be described as a Raspberry Pi knock-off. I pull a notebook from my workbench cubby and begin sketching the architecture. I slowly mark down diagrams for microprocessors, motherboards, storage systems, etc. Carefully labeling and marking down flaws in the initial sketches while taking into account how I will build them, and revising them till I find the schematics satisfactory. I pull out an admittedly poorly organized binder and rewrite the schematics into a neat form, and place them within the binder.
Now to begin, the first couple computers I will have to personally make. But well within my capability. The computers are nothing extraordinary in capability, I predict they can punch well above their weight class. The only thing I need is some charcoal or graphene, in a relatively small quantity, and due to the nature of carbon nanotubes. Then I need silicon for the wafers. Both of which will require some simple chemistry. I grab a shovel and an orange plastic bucket, get into my car, and speed off. Luckily the environment of Albany has plenty of rivers and streams, with exactly the right kind of sand I'm looking for. Silica sand also known as white sand is very common up and down the East Coast making this particularly easy for me to source silicon locally. I drive for a small amount of time before stumbling upon a small sandy creek.
Shovel and bucket in hand at the ass crack of dawn, on a cold January morning. The air is damp, as I shovel my sand into the bucket. I load it into my car and start heading towards town. I assume there may be people panicking, you know with the moon and all, and the first thing they'd buy would be charcoal. So I'll just have to buy large amounts of mechanical pencil lead.
Arriving at Walmart, I head inside. For an apocalyptic scenario like this, it's strange to see nobody seeming to understand the gravity of the situation. But I assume for a world that is regularly attacked by kaiju there may be some degree of indifference built up. Grabbing forty dollars worth of pencil lead, and rushing through the self-checkout I return to my base of operations.
Taking the graphite, and creating a small arc discharge chamber, I pump the chamber full of helium. Never know when you'll need an inert gas. Once the chamber is filled, I take a pair of wires and put the graphite in between. Periodically discharging the wires and creating a black substance that is carbon nanotubing.
The easy part was done I retrieved my sand and set up a small steel pot, putting the sand into the said pot, and using magnesium powder I light it and separate the silicon from the silica sand. Now the dumping the silicon powder into a chemical bath to encourage the rapid growth of a large silicon crystal. I finished and cut the large silicon crystal with my table wire saw into many small wafers. Once finished, I prepare to construct a makeshift dark room. Then using a couple of metal cleaning chemicals I create a special light-reactive chemical that will be used to bind the carbon nanotubes to the silicon wafer.
Now for the last step, I construct a highly precise laser. Using a set of electrically activated polarized lenses, with a mechanically programmed pattern through the use of time-consuming mechanical computers. I constructed my first microprocessor, using it. Followed by creating the rest of the computer parts using similar methods. Once it reaches afternoon I have a fully constructed computer. After setting up my custom Linux distribution through the DeLorean's onboard computer, I can move on to the next step, automating it.
But before I can get started, I hear my phone ringing. It's an old flip phone I got on the cheap. A gruff voice breaks through "Why aren't you on shift?" My boss Maury.
"Boss, the moon exploded" I respond stating the obvious reasoning.
"So?" Maury asks, genuinely taking me off guard.
"I'm not gonna waste my life working at a gas station while the world ends," I say.
"The world ain't ending, one of them capes is gonna sort it out. No reason to not come to work." Maury rebukes.
"Then I guess this is where I say I quit." I finish.
"You could've just said that in the first place kid, no need to be so damn melodramatic about it," grumbles Maury.
I hang up and think about it, the surety he had that someone else would sort the moon fiasco out, well, I frankly think is somewhat insane. But I guess that's the common view on this world, maybe this was intentionally done by government thinkers or something. Anywho I resume my work where I left off. Having most of the necessary equipment set up. It's rather simple to automate. With my access to copper and steel, mechanical arms are easy to make, along with the computer acting as a controller. It's incredibly easy to set up a rudimentary assembly line. Giving somewhat generous times between steps, the only chemical inputs are silica sand, graphite, and magnesium powder. With periodic exchanges of the binding chemical, and silicon crystal chemical. But those two chemicals only use a negligible amount in their reactions they can largely be left alone.
Though eventually, I will need to substitute the magnesium powder with something like coke(fuel), it will do for now. My pondering is interrupted by a roaring stomach. I realize that I have gone the full morning without eating. It seems Tinker Tech can wait for now.