Digital Galaxies

Rather than confront the terrifying and alluring sparks that were flying between us, Cerri and I decided to get back to work. It took… well, an hour or two before either of us could scrape together enough coherency to actually get anything done… but hey, we tried.

The exosuits that Cerri had found earlier proved to be exactly what we were looking for. Designed with long ranged EVA in mind, they had powerful plasma thrusters that we could appropriate for Bundit’s use.

We ran into teething problems when it came to getting the alien tech to work with my human-built mech, but Turshie came to the rescue with a manual. Well, I say manual, but really it was like the whole design blueprint for the things. We’d be able to make more of them for ourselves eventually.

What finally slammed us back into our heads was when I made an idle comment to Cerri while I abused some gimbal joints.

“Imagine if we had these things out in reality,” I said, pointing to the little thrusters that she was currently disembowelling.

A clattering noise caused me to jerk my head up. She sat there at the worktable, staring at me with her mouth hanging open like I’d just stripped naked.

“Say that again.” She demanded.

Okay… what was going on here? “Um… it would be cool if we had these little plasma thrusters back in reality? Because the ones we have are big and shitty and dirty?”

In a rush, she grabbed at her tablet and frantically opened the blueprints to the plasma thrusters we were looking on. She was staring at them with so much intensity that I thought she might burn a hole in the poor slate of glass.

“Aalliiaa,” she said slowly, still looking at her tablet. “Come here?”

“Um, okay?”

I did as she asked, standing up from the work desk and wandering over to hers. We were using the smaller machine shop that was situated below the main engine room, because we didn’t want to explode anything and damage the strange alien reactor.

"Look at this and tell me what you see," she told me, pulling up the overall diagram for the little thruster.

It was just a blueprint, complicated but I could still make out all the components and stuff. Give me all the right tools and I could make this thing up from scratch.

“I don’t see anything weird,” I said after a minute of inspecting the plans. “What should I be seeing?”

“That’s just it,” she said excitedly. “DG didn’t have the tech or the scientific theory far enough to simulate this kind of thing. It hadn’t been invented yet. You should see hand-wavium on the plans somewhere, some place where you put some sort of magic material that makes the whole thing work. But it’s not there.”

“Wait… why isn’t it there?” I gasped, grabbing the tablet completely out of her hands. I flicked away and onto the blueprints for the big engines we used to have on the old Turshen. Sure enough, there it was, right in the middle. A component simply labelled engine components.

“Want to know my theory?” she asked, eyes all bright and shining.

I was almost breathless when I nodded. “Yes?!”

“Whatever happened to the DG simulation, it’s changed… perfected,” she explained with a quiet, animated intensity. “This design was generated after the jump from our servers. It’s the real deal. In fact, I think it’s safe to say this could be replicated back out in the real world. Not just that, but if my hypothesis is true, it tells us that the simulation is still a simulation.”

“Wait, how?” I asked while I looked around for a chair. We’d been sitting far enough apart to keep ourselves from getting distracted, but now things were getting way too interesting to have this conversation from such a distance.

While I grabbed my chair, she continued to ramble excitedly. “Well, because if it weren’t a simulation, that design you just pulled up would be real too. It’s still functioning on the rules that DG was created with. We’d have heard if all the engines in the game suddenly stopped working. Players would be burning down the game in anger. They aren’t though, so that means that the old rules still apply.”

“I’m guessing that DG didn’t actually simulate the whole galaxy then?” I asked with a grin. “Cos your friends claimed otherwise.”

“Of course not!” she grinned. “Well, no that’s not true. It simulated the big stuff, the stars burning and spinning, planets orbiting. It did that, but nothing as granular as the design for those thrusters. That would have been generated on demand.”

“Wow, okay so… all this alien tech we have around us… it’s real?” I breathed, staring around in wonder. “At least, in a certain sense.”

“Anything and everything that’s discovered outside of the human sphere, it will be replicable back in the real world, yeah,” she said, wiggling excitedly in her chair. “Human tech in the game is all designed using the hand-wavium.”

“This is so cool!” I said, smiling into her bright, gorgeous eyes.

“I can’t wait to tell the others,” she said, bouncing out of her chair and heading for the door.

In an instant, a whole host of things occurred to me and I grabbed her arm to keep her here. “Cerri, wait!”

“What?”

“We can’t tell anyone, not yet,” I said sadly, hating to rain on her parade. Cerri was all about the science, about discovery and learning without any other motivation than the simple joy of it. It made me love her just that much more, knowing what a good person she was. Unfortunately, not everyone was the same.

“Cerri, sit down?” I asked gently, pointing to the chair. “We need to be smart. If this tech gets into the wrong hands… everything the Exodus group is trying to achieve could go up in flames.”

“Oh,” she mumbled, slumping into her seat again. “Bugger.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Digital Exodus is secure, right?”

“Yes, extremely,” she nodded. “You’re technically a part of it now. We registered you, at least.”

“Okay, so we can probably tell the higher-ups what we’ve just figured out, but I want to take this one step further,” I mused, thinking on my feet. “We have a lot of advantages here if we do this right. I think we should patent this design, for starters.”

“But won’t that announce to the world that we’ve just come up with a crazy new thruster design?” she frowned, pulling the tablet out of my hands again to look at it.

“Nope, and you can thank blind capitalist greed for that,” I said with a triumphant smile. “The patent registry of the UN is one hundred percent automated. Not even AI are used in it, and they probably never will, now that we know they can become people. It’s all private, only the name of the patent and the number. Any new patent that gets submitted is scanned against the database to determine if it’s too similar to one that is already registered.”

“So we could claim ownership of this…” Cerri mused. “That seems a little greedy.”

“Only if we profit off it,” I shrugged. “The idea is to claim it before anyone else figures it out, that way we can protect it from use by other private parties. Then we can give it to the Exodus at a more leisurely pace. Obviously if the UN gets wind of this, they’ll just seize it, but there’s not really a whole lot we can do about that.”

That had her nodding along with a thoughtful expression. “Okay. Yeah, and we can just tell everyone that we want to snap up all the alien tech for sale back in human space, within the game.”

“Right, but then we actually patent it all for the Exodus,” I agreed.

As I spoke, I realised that my tail had found hers again and the two of them had gently wrapped themselves around each other. It was like they had minds of their own, I swear.

Cerri’s enthusiasm had been dampened, but she sprung back to life when another idea struck her. “Oh my god, Alia! We get to design EVA power armour for the guys! Power armour and some shuttles! We’ll need to retrofit one of the cargo bays to be a small hanger, and then… this is exciting.”

“Oh, for exploration?” I gasped, also excited now. That sounded like so much fun.

“Yes!” she laughed, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. “Back to work?”

“Definitely.”

****

It took us another day to get all the thrusters hooked up to bundit and working properly. Then the next day, after a few quick test flights, I was ready to go out in search of the Fab.

The new thrusters were attached to a sort of extra brace thing that was in turn hooked up to Bundit. I had a little button to release the whole harness if something went wrong and I needed to yeet the rig in a hurry. I hoped it didn’t come to that, but you never knew with this kind of jury-rigging.

“Okay,” Cerri said from the other side of the airlock door. “Round-trip, this should only take you about twelve hours, but we’ve packed you enough food for two days. Are you sure you’ll be okay in that cramped little mech for that long?”

“Are you kidding me?” I laughed. “It’s practically going to be a holiday by my standards.”

She let out an exasperated little chuckle. “You really are like a small animal. Always cramming yourself into little holes that the rest of us would find claustrophobic.”

I almost choked on air when she said it, and I froze, expecting her to complete the joke. She didn’t, though. Instead, it appeared she didn’t get the innuendo. Goodness gracious, she really was a terrible succubus. Maybe I’d get to help her learn… some day.

Shaking my head to clear it of dirty thoughts, I just smiled and said, “See you soon, Cerri. Well, apart from being connected to you by the network the whole time.”

“Plus helping to design these new exo-suits so we can print them when you get the fab here,” she said wryly. “It won’t really feel like you’re gone anyway.”

Neither of us mentioned that we wouldn’t be able to snuggle up to each other while we did our design work, but it was sort of implied at this point.

“Yeah,” I agreed, wishing bundit was big enough to fit her in it too. “OKay, I’m going to head out. Wish me luck!”