Chapter 2: The Drudge of Adulthood and More Inventions

I was assigned the task of rationalizing our atmospheric control systems. First, I had to define my sample. I took apart the code running one of the mothballed air domains. I couldn't do anything bad to it if I screwed up--there wasn't any furniture, appliances, rugs or anything else that could be harmed by, say, a random shot of chlorine gas at 2000 degrees.

I found a few things that worried me, and brought them to the department head's attention. They were recognized as possible system failure modes should the right conditions come together. Those got fixed ship-wide. Next I put together a control cluster of 64 air domains and diagrammed out the event chains. What a mess! It had all been written by hand like a flippin' chess program. I regularized it into a logic tree with proper feedback loops that were proven to damp out cycles rather than allow them to oscillate into destructive, read lethal, conditions. I had other teams come in to attempt to test the thing to destruction, but nobody could. I did my final write-up and passed it up-stream.

I was tired. Tired of working, tired of everything. I got the OK to take a vacation in one of the wetlands. The caretakers had designed and built paths, benches, shelters and elevated pads to hold primitive buildings or tents up above the water-line. I signed up for a tent, pad and bug net where I relaxed for a couple weeks.

Eventually my upbringing made me edgy. I needed something to do. I recalled that I'd never completed my studies of EM field theory and examined the ship's drive equations. I thought that it was about time.

I took the courseware, then started analyzing real-world applications of it. Once I truly understood how our reactionless drive worked I continued my studies to see where the field equations went when I oscillated, exaggerated or zeroed certain variables. I began to see things that just didn't make sense. I decided to try it out in hardware to see what would happen. Certain safety protocols had to be addressed. I had an RPV test bed built with fast Q-bit controls and telemetry.

Q-bits are paired subatomic particles that can be read and written to by modifying their spin states. They're horribly expensive to produce along with the equipment to run them, but they operate simultaneously across vast distances.

Then, using our drive field generators as a starting point I built something different. I used superconducting wire because the circuit Q's I was seeing in the theory would be pushing a lot of power. By command of the captain I couldn't try anything closer than 0.1 A. U. from the ship. Well, that was okay with me. I would be working with power densities that man had not controlled before, only released. The first time I fired it up I got structural deformation in the test bed before it tore the mounts off of the generator. We had to send a mining boat out to tow it in. Once we got the thing into an air-filled bay and up to temperature my team went over it with micrometers to see what had happened. Somehow the test bed, sitting at zero thrust in space, was subjected to over 110 G. It was mankind's first gravity generator.

Of course we had to duplicate the experiment to validate what had happened. We got the same result, and on the third test we were able to vary the field strength. Then I went back to the theory to formalize it all.

The damned equations wouldn't cooperate. I had a set of terms that did what they damned well wanted to and no amount of coercion on my part would make them zero out. So, I worked to exaggerate them. Holy shit. The field locus separated from the generator. The higher the voltage I applied to it, the further away the locus propagated from the generator. Then I worked on tightening down the locus. I had an idea. If I could focus it enough and dump enough power into it, perhaps I could make the field smaller than its Swarzchild radius. That would by definition generate a black hole. First, though, I had to get it to propagate without any jitter. That meant rebuilding it larger, and with more stable materials that wouldn't generate eddy currents. That meant heavier superconductors. The thing got pretty expensive to make, but when I told the captain, who was also our CEO, what I was trying to do he authorized the expense. Again, it was all tested at a healthy distance from the ship. It took over a year and a half to get all the superconducting cable made and to wind an eight-meter coil in such a manner that it didn't develop hot spots and blow the superconductivity of the cable, thereby explosively vaporizing large segments of the coil. We went through a LOT of niobium. Engineering kept having to scrape down the walls to recover the plated-on metal. I ended up implementing a separate fusion reactor to power the damned thing.