September 6th, 2010
Annalise Lila Clarke, Lila to her diminishing circle of friends, eyed the device floating in the air above her desk. She used her left eye to magnify the image by two hundred percent, looking at the lower corner of the last of a series of contragravity motors. There was a small flaw in the lower edge of the motor. She returned her vision to normal and turned back to her keyboard. Her display showed a single line code amongst the other data flowing across the holographic screen. Lila thought for a moment, then advanced the screen to line 2,312,408, the exact line she needed. She altered three parameters, then paged to another line precisely and changed a single parameter there, instructing her expert virtual intelligence, SANDI, to compile and executed the program.
SANDI was one of the first things she programmed even before building her first crystal-quantum computer. The acronym, Super Advanced Neuron Derived Intelligence was a little pedantic, but it was a first try and Lila was a little attached to the name after almost two years of use.
SANDI dutifully compiled and executed the program as Lila turned her magnified eye back toward the offending motor. The lower edge of the motor smoothed to an acceptable level. The flaw wouldn't have affected the performance of the device, but she had standards that she would not compromise on. Not if her overall vision was to be achieved.
The world was dying. When parahumans first appeared, there was an atmosphere of hope, but by the time she had been born, that hope was already beginning to wane. More parahuman triggers became villains, rather than heroes each year. The PRT and Protectorate were slowly being overwhelmed like cops in 1920s Chicago. Endbringer attacks continued to occur at regular, predictable rates, destroying whole cities at a time, or worse whole regions, such as Kyushu or Newfoundland, which had been drowned beneath the waves.
Lila was a parahuman herself, as result of a car accident two years before. The accident had taken her father's life and caused her to trigger, but not in the typical way. Her brute ability, as the PRT called powers like hers, made sense. The overwhelming increase in her intellect and associated other abilities didn't. It was widely accepted that Tinker abilities didn't come with other abilities, other than maybe Thinker abilities or grab-bag powers were usually minor, but her brute ability was insane, giving her unlimited endurance, crazy-high durability, a godly degree of strength, and vastly increased speed. It also slowed her aging, so that now at sixteen, she still looked almost the same as she did at fourteen. Her hair and fingernails still grew the same, which was a pain until she invented a cutter capable of cutting them both; she later determined that her powers came with a sliding scale from zero to a hundred, making the device unnecessary. She kept her blond hair long, but tightly braided, since at its highest durability a stray strand could cut a person in half. She had lost her left eye in the same accident her father died, but she had replaced it three months later with an electronic one, though it had been obviously mechanical at the time; six months after she built a realistic cybernetic version that matched her natural blue eye. She still had a small scar in the corner of her left eye where the windshield wiper had scooped the eye out. Right now, she was wearing a white lab coat over jeans and a 'Bad Canary' t-shirt. Her feet were bare, like they usually were. Her strength and speed were hell on shoes.
LAPP, her second VI, was assigned to provide predictions on the long-term viability of humans living on earth. LAPP had only been running for a little over six months, and so far, its predictions were not good. Pulling everything possible from all data sources available showed that human would be extinct between eight and one hundred fifty years. The numbers fluctuated, which LAPP told her was likely due to influences that were not being accounted for in the data, but showed up in the observable effects. She had looked at the data herself, and only determined that she didn't know what she didn't know.
"SANDI, activate HLG and project engine," Lila said to the air. The HLG, or Hard-Light Generator, actually just projected another Hard-Light Generator, made out of hard light. The VI would then upload the control program, which in turn would allow the projected HLG to project the generator that would itself provide the power to keep the PHLG projecting the generator, perpetual power. If it worked as planned.
"PHLG is stable," the VI replied. "Uploading program."
There was a pause as the generator appeared attached to the PHLG.
"PHLG is stable, generator stable," SANDI told her.
Lila picked up a device from her desk. "Gravity Status?" she asked the VI.
"Ten percent negative gravity," replied SANDI.
Lila waived the device in her hand at the generator and found the same readings that SANDI just announced.
Lila picked up one of two cylinders on her desk and walked to the far side of the projection.
"Open matter port," she said as she held the cylinder up to the hard-light device.
"Matter port open," SANDI replied, and as Lila raised the cylinder into place, SANDI continued, "Locked."
Lila returned to the desk for the other cylinder, this one a little more ornate with a small gravity field generator attached to safely contain the antimatter, and ordered, "Open the antimatter port."
"Antimatter port open," came the reply, followed by a, "Locked," when Lila lifted the cylinder into place.
"Ok, SANDI, final checks," Lila said as a chime sounded letting her know there was someone at her door, which she ignored.
"All indicators 'Green'," SANDI continued, "Initiate?" A second chime sounded, which she ignored.
Pompously, Lila looked at the video pickup and clearly stated, "With the initiation of this generator, concerns about energy are a thing of the past. It is with great pride that I give the human race," a longer, more insistent chime sounded. Lila sighed, "Pause recording," then walked over to the door jerking it open, already knowing who it was.
"Mother," she said with exasperation, "you are interrupting an historic moment."
Her mother, Lilly Clarke, gave her a patient look, then tapped her watch. "Breakfast," she said simply.
"Mother, "she replied, beginning to feel a greater degree of impatience, "I am quite literally changing the world right now. I don't even get any nutrition from breakfast."
Her mother sighed, looking into her eyes as if trying to deduce what thoughts were going on in Lila's head. Her mother could no more understand her thoughts than an amoeba would be able to discern Lilly's.
"How high are you now?" her mother asked. The question had special meaning, since drugs no longer affected Lila.
"Mother," Lila replied, "I am solving all the human race's energy problems FOREVER!"
"How high?" came the question again.
"Fine," Lila said, "fifty percent." Lila was really running over ninety percent of her mental functions toward her current project, but any time she ran anything over seventy-five, her mother got this look on her face and started talking about psychotherapists.
"Then perhaps you could increase to one hundred and use the other fifty percent on interpersonal skills?" was her mother's reply.
"Fine" Lila, said making the adjustments in her head, then realized how she had been acting, said, "Wow, Mom, I am so sorry, I was trying to get this done before breakfast, so I could tell you about it. I can tell you about it anyway, just let me do safe shutdown."
"Lila," Lilly, said, "I don't mind you taking a little extra time before breakfast, I just hate it when you stop thinking about people as 'people'. You can finish, then come down to breakfast."
"Do you want to see it?" Lila asked. She knew that her mother wouldn't understand the engineering, nobody else would either, but at least she could share the initiation of the first generator."
"Sure," Lilly replied, "it might be nice to know what kind of project actually takes you an entire week to complete."
"Oh, this didn't take a week, Mom," Lila said. "I've had this planned since October, 2008. I just needed to build the tools to build the tools times ten to actually complete the project. Originally, I was building it to power the world. Now, with the coming apocalypse, it's to power space stations and star ships."
"Right, coming apocalypse," her mom said very matter-of-factly. She wasn't entirely as convinced as Lila that the world was doomed.
"Anyway," Lila said, motioning her into my room and holding my hands out toward the PHLG and the projected power generator.
"SANDI, strike that last comment from the recording," Lila said, then to her mother, "Well, this is it."
"I've seen your hard holograms…"
"Hard-Light Projections," I interrupted.
"Okay, I've seen your Hard-Light Projections before," Lilly said with a grin.
"So, the projector there," I pointed at the HLG on a shelf, "is actually projecting another HLG, or a PHLG. The PHLG is then projecting a gravity motor generator, like the one that is actually running the house right now."
"Are you working with antimatter again," her mother asked, to Lila's surprise.
"Right, the gravity generator runs on a matter-antimatter reaction," Lila replied before continuing, "and the small part below that is the dimensional tap. So, the PHLP creates the gravity generator and the dimensional tap. The gravity generator focuses the matter/antimatter reaction at the tip of the dimensional tap. The reaction opens a dimensional breach, which the tap keeps open and draws energy; then the tap feeds a little power to the PHLP, and keeps supplying power to project the tap. So that means the entire thing receives the power to keep the tap operating, from the tap, with plenty of energy, something like twenty-three megawatts left over to supply power," she concluded with a smile on her face.
"Hold on a second," Lilly said. Lila could see her working through everything she had said for almost a minute. "IT'S A PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE!" Lilly screeched excitedly.
"Very cool, mom," Lila replied, with a smile "I didn't know if you would figure that out."
It was easy for Lila to forget that her mother was fairly well-educated. She worked as an actuary for insurance, but her degree was in mathematics. She wasn't an actually a physicist, but she knew the basics.
"Well, since you do a lot of energy stuff, I've been reading about it," Lilly replied. "But, perpetual motion. That's impossible, isn't it?"
"Anyway," Lila said with a roll of her eyes, "without further ado, Mom, world," she looked at SANDI's camera pickup for that, "I present the very first 'Clarke Recursive Extradimensional Energy Converter'. SANDI, begin matter/antimatter reaction."
There was a burst of light as the gravity generator operated for the second it needed to insert the tap. Then the light faded and the generator looks the same as it had before.
Lila pointed her sensor at the device. "Yup, twenty-three point three recurring megawatts residual energy," she said after examining the readings. "I'll plug it into the house and deactivate the gravity generator after breakfast," she said. Just looking at the operational prototype, she had half a dozen ideas to make a more efficient and powerful generator. In five years, the entire human race would be running on C.R.E.E.C.s.