章 11: Chapter 11: Digesting a Meal Before Eating Again Is Highly Recommended

I woke up again. I wasn't sure of the exact date of my travels -- I hadn't been keeping a proper log -- but it was into the 7th year since I first slipped from my home reality. A home I had never had any luck actually finding. Oh, I could get close but nothing I really remembered as being relevant to my life was there. And the longer it took the worse that problem would be.

These were the thoughts that struck me as I surveyed the colony/habitat that the Hosts of Starhaven had carved out of the ice and rock of Ganymede thus far. I had to say -- for less than a year of actual time elapsed, the work they'd accomplished was fairly impressive. Granted, they had a number of advantages that threw off my expectations compared to my "mundane" upbringing. I was still sort of miscalabrated in my expectations. Tunnel boring back growing up was a process that took years to cross miles. Here, there were Hosts running laser drills to lay down precisely calibrated alchemical transmutation circles, while other Hosts activated those circles and restructured matter itself into conveniently portable chunks of raw elements in handy containers, while other Hosts attached antigravity clamps or just loaded them into self-moving trams. Carving out space was done to the tune of hundreds of cubic decameters per hour. The structural supports were printed and grown in place; power was abundant and cheap and easily deployed.

I was beginning to see more signs of inorganic surveillance equipment -- my Hosts had elected, wisely I felt, not to use our biotech base to run the OFCUT analogues for detecting magical activity and provide low level ambient suppression of intrusions by extra-dimensional beings. It would definitely not stop anything determined to get in, but it would make unintentionally drawing the attention of such entities far more difficult. It would also provide warning of brute-force intrusions -- though only within the city itself, and only in the case of heavy-handed rifts or dimensional tears being opened. More subtle methods, or simply opening one elsewhere and making the rest of the way in conventional space? I had nothing for that. Not yet. Well, not beyond the concealed Skrill Cannon CIWS systems and emplaced particle beam cannons. Against anything native to this universe they'd put up a good fight; against some of the things I was sure could make their way to this universe, they were essentially a joke.

I noticed there was even an array of kilometer-long Mass Effect based Matter Acceleration Cannons. That confused me briefly before I clued in -- they were using them for heavy duty Banishment Round deployment, in case something especially big and extradimensionally nasty arrive. Nothing says "Your invitation to the Christmas Party is cordially rescinded" like ten kilograms of banishment round impacting at relativistic speeds. I was a touch confused where the eezo for this was coming from before I recalled that I'd previously worked out that eezo could be synthesized using alchemy, as long as something provided the dark energy and neutron concentrations necessary. I checked and … yeah. They were using a Dho-Na summoning circle to concentrate the base materials as part of the alchemical design. Well, that was … okay. It was somewhat less dangerous than I thought due to the warding and auditing policies they'd implemented too. Well okay then.

My voice started out mild but grew into a growl as I spoke. "Hey, Smiley. What exactly are the research projects that Starhaven is currently engaged in, and why do I see some Laundry 'verse assisted tech beyond warding and detection in use on Starhaven proper?"

Smiley's emoji didn't flicker a bit. "Good morning. To answer sir's question: lacking proper intrasystem craft that could avoid the detection of the humanity of this era, we took the initiative to perform a few carefully selected tests in a subsurface installation some five thousand kilomters away from Starhaven to ensure the stability of the designs, and then moved them somewhat closer for logistical purposes once they had been certified not to 'thin the walls' as it were. If sir will note; we also have extra warded sensor equipment for observing for spatial and subspace anomalies in the area of the synthesizing installations. This on top of the automated banishment round heavy guns targeting the area."

Eh. I wasn't thrilled about it, but if I were to go ahead with building such a thing, I'd use similar precautions I guessed. I knew I'd tasked the Thinktanks with deriving a method of synthesizing eezo, so I couldn't really be upset that they had actually succeeded if in a way I wouldn't have wanted. Once we had a proper deep space presence, though, I'd have to have the synthesis process moved to extrastellar space. I was not thrilled with the idea of inviting things we couldn't fully detect and couldn't accurately predict into my home.

I sighed. "I suppose I should just get used to the notion that this is more the home of you Hosts than it really is mine, eh? No point in not having you be unthinking minions but instead have free will if I'm going to object every time you use it to do something I wouldn't."

Smiley's emoji turned to that even-happier one he'd used before. "As sir says."

I let my body go on sort of autopilot refreshing myself from the cold sleep interval -- damn but I always woke up starving from the cold sleep -- and let my mind drift through the datanet my Hosts had constructed. There were entire facilities that didn't make much sense in the context of a Host-based civilization. Hospitals were one thing; but why an obstetrics ward? Children's schools made sense in the warped context of Host children Acting the role, but we had more than twenty times the capacity that was necessary for that. And seriously. Habitation areas that were open-air domes with townhouses, lawns, and white picket fences? "Come to Ganymede. Enjoy the crippling radiation! Live the luxurious nineteen forties aesthetic in deep subsurface bunkers! Try the food!"

Whatever. I had to admit that the habdomes did have a homey feel to them. I had a sinking feeling when I realized that there were plans for over a thousand such domes, each with a capacity for five hundred families each. That feeling sunk further when I saw that most of the Hosts weren't even occupying these domes, but instead residing in barracks-spaces. Four beds to a room, with ten rooms per cafeteria and storage area, and that made a single barrack. Querying the datanet gave me, at least, a decent answer as to why the Hosts were packing themselves like sardines, proverbially: they mostly used virtualscapes for personal relaxation activities, and as such mostly viewed their habitation concerns as a place to store their "work bodies" when not on the clock. I could actually see the sense in that, but I did worry that they viewed meatspace as mostly a burden rather than their home. Like so many other things, though, I realized I largely had to simply let it go. They at least appreciated the fact that their physical home was the seat in which their virtual experiences were housed, so there was that.

I continued to dig through daily report logs of the various Synod members. They were still using that numerical naming convention for themselves, and I really didn't know how I felt about that. But at this point it was clearly their choice to continue doing so, and I would just have to suck it up, as it were. I found a few incident reports -- mutations in attempted chimerical experiments of bioalchemy for cortical stacks and Eco Tech neural implants resulting in their becoming digital white noise generators; a test of a mass effect core being installed in a Precursor-tech skycar resulting in an explosion as the static from the core jumped into the car's capacitance gel in a way that defied our understanding of the nature of electrical charge buildup but gave interesting results from the continuous scans that had been running at the time… an incident with radiation killing off an entire half-kilometer area of the structural biohull of the research facility where the Hosts were attempting to construct a replicator using less exotic materials than the design specified, since they were so hard to come by…

It was impressive that none of these things were considered, by the Hosts, to be incidents that required awakening me. Even more impressive that there were no "real deaths" amongst the Hosts in any of the experiments thus far run. And at this point a good twenty percent of all Host activity was spent on reproducing the various technologies we had schematics and instructions for but using the materials, methods, and power sources of alternate derivations. It was… exhaustively thorough, actually, and I could see the underlying reasoning behind it even if it wasn't really all that "sexy".

As things stood right now one of the biggest challenges I was going to face over time was the integration of disparate techbases into one another. Take for example the weapons technologies I had access to. While I knew that there were particle weapons in the Mass Effect universe already -- the Protheans used them (and still did in Collector form) -- but I had seen what happened in the experiments to utilize eezo tech to increase the punch of the particle weapons designs I'd obtained from the Conastoga. Short form: a very expensive form of grenade. Now, granted, this might be made easier if I had access to a proper Prothean particle weapon design, but even with my scrying ability I had zero confidence in avoiding tipping off the Collectors of my existence -- and that was "bad end" territory for now.

There were other, similar, issues that exposed themselves in these experiments. For example -- eezo-based pseudogravity worked along very different properties than the artificial gravity generated by the gravplates I could construct. While they didn't exactly interfere with each other, if I were to try to use a conventional eezo FTL system with a ship that had gravity plating, the plating would need to be reduced in power in a way its standard design didn't really have in mind. Not even a difficult thing to tweak, but something that could kill you if you just turned it all on and hoped for the best.

As the Thinktanks discovered more of these integration quirks, they were able to improve the virtual space labs to better emulate all of these phenomena at once. And that in turn was feeding back to potential areas of improvement. I could see that one area that was being focused on was the effects of eezo when integrated with Host living plastic. Oddly, they didn't seem especially concerned with replicating biotic abilities, but rather seemed to believe that microgram nodules of eezo might improve their reflex speeds. It showed some signs of progress, even.

I turned to Smiley, who was standing there with his CRT head and his default emoji. "You guys have really been digging away at things. I'm impressed. Don't think I didn't notice how you've also been optimizing the data for storage density and retrieval speed by cyberbrain firmware. I appreciate your efforts at transparency."

Smiley's head tilted and turned into a question mark. "I will convey Sir's gratitude to the Synod -- but If I might ask, why are you saying this to me directly rather than calling them to assemble in virtual and thanking them directly?"

I smiled gently. "Oh… think of it as a sort of human foible. We feel that things done in meatspace are … more emotionally relevant."

The question mark faded to a blank screen for a second, before reverting to his default view. "I see. Well, then. Perhaps I should arrange for the Synod to meet with Sir in person when you next awaken?"

I paused for a moment. "That's… hmm. That's not a half-bad idea. Yeah. Please allow enough time before the meeting for me to review report entries and such before I have to hold court, though."

Smiley presented a somehow sly emoji. "'Hold court', Sir? You're warming up to the role."

I just sighed.

I'd decided to try something a little different this time with my wake/sleep cycle. Rather than just being awake for one day, I stayed active for a full week, tasking an individual host or team of hosts to assist me with some task or another. The biggest concerns I had were in utilizing the occult software utilities that we'd redesigned in a way guaranteed not to cause me to get my face eaten off -- a compromise to that effect was in the form of a dataslate that was hefty enough to run the utilities and interface with my cyberbrain firmware, but not too large to prevent me from wearing it like a pendant. As a "backup" against future mental intrusions or geases or other "psychic whammies" I was given a platinum and iridium diadem with eezo-dust plasmonic circuitry, to operate as a dedicated platform for running wards. I felt this to be excessive given the wards in question barely qualified as grade 4 (on a scale where grade 8 made you bulletproof and grade 1 could be overcome by basic glamours but at least give you warning you were getting a head wedgie), but at least it made up for that by being ridiculously durable in terms of the capability of that grade 4 ward compared to the expectations of a similar device made using silicon and electronic circuits.

Oh, yeah. FTL computing in ASICs. That was a useful advance. Prohibitively -- ruinously -- expensive to anyone who couldn't synthesize pure eezo on demand, and merely ludicrously expensive in terms of the Starhaven economy (manhours and resource allocation being the biggest constraints, as there was little else to budget), but it was still seeing distribution here and there. Like in the targeting arrays for the defensive systems of the city and of the Heartseed.

I was basically being taken back to school, as it were, for those seven days. But it was a schooling designed by theoretical experts in the integration of complex data and with access to virtual physics classrooms to allow near infinite hands-on repetition training. I would download cyberbrain models of the necessary skills to perform various underlying tasks, and cyberbrain-optimized datadumps of various bits of information, and then go through physically processing the information via various means. Everything from field medicine and deep memorization of the anatomy of known species (sophonts to animals to plants) enough to use chimerical bioalchemy to merge them in new and novel ways, or to simply perform as medical surgery; to close combat exercises relying on my Fahrkan neural implant's ability to provide me with a "battle reflex mode", to field stripping a full scale model of the Conastoga and the Prothean frigates followed by reassembling them.

Granted, I spent little more than two or three hours on any given task, and often was overseeing or directing Hosts rather than manually executing the tasks myself, but the point was that I was, in fact, learning these things. And at an absurdly effective speed -- after all, I was merely integrating information I already had access to, rather than beating the information itself into my synapses. It also helped that I wasn't really trying to achieve expertise in any of the tasks I set myself; just basic competence and enough awareness of the rest to hold a conversation intelligibly if pressed on the matter.

A leader should know enough about his follower's jobs and lives that he at least appreciated what they did for him in general, after all. And I now had some of the biggest cheats there were to achieving that standard. Even though I now had almost a hundred thousand followers.

One of the tasks that I spent more time on than the rest was of mastering Dho-Na programming. Even though I was running it on a separated device from myself, I still felt that the hazards that it possibly represented deserved a deeper understanding than the rest of my learning methods required. To that end, I'd had one of the eldritch labs that had been used to do the theoretical work necessary for synthesizing eezo repurposed into a destructive test bed for the very same model of dataslate -- and diadem -- that I was now carrying on my person. I wanted to get a good sense of what kinds of failure modes a given bit of physical damage could cause, or a given bug in the code and whether it might be detectable by automated scanning.

The results of this process were… well. Disturbing is a good word for it. At one point -- on day 3 -- I actually managed to summon Feeders, which made quick work of the scanning equipment present and would have gone further if the warding systems present hadn't delayed them long enough for the incineration system to reduce everything in the lab to elemental gases. We switched to another lab and marked the entire kilometer radius area around that lab for removal into deep space and nuclear reduction.

This, mind you, was on top of similar work being done by Thinktank hosts and feeding me back their experimental results. Turing-Theoretic Dho-Na programming -- AKA eldritch necromancy -- was not a forgiving endeavor to the practitioner. And some people do this in their own heads. No wonder the Laundry Earth was on a one way track to annihilation.

Still, between the cutouts and a few hundred participants, I began to get a feel for safe methods for at least what I considered the core mechanisms I was really worried about: geases, glamours, and summoning/intrusion -- and how to ward against them. Enough, at least, that I'd had my diadem revised such that only myself and my followers could actually see it; a basically "nothing to see here" glamour. It even worked through recorded media. Applying the same to my Skrill was just as basic an exercise, but I still insisted on the chip that executed the glamour be isolated from the Skrill it was implanted in with a silicone capsule. I wasn't willing to risk my automail sockets with the same. Sure, in theory, nothing could go wrong. But there was an old saying about theory and practice: "In theory, theory and practice are always the same. In practice, they never are.". I could remove the diadem, and tear out the invisibility chip from the Skrill. No such love could be had by my automail sockets.

I wound up extending my first seven days of study to a full fortnight before I'd decided I'd caught up enough to not be completely behind my Hosts when I next awoke.