IDGM4 - 13 - Saturn Numbers (Patreon)

The first step to creating core material was the creation of conductive gel. The first step to creating conductive gel was leveling up mana channelers to shape the mana base components. The first step to creating mana base components was processing the right materials to a high degree of purity. Specifically five different naturally occurring Tier 1 minerals found on all planets in the Multiverse at Large.

The minerals were found easily enough among the trash piles.

“Two steps forward and one step back,” Maya muttered as she flopped into a chair.

“Well, at least it’s still forward movement,” Emilia replied. The mage rubbed at her eyes and yawned loudly.

“We can make the core material,” Maya said. “But scaling it up into actual mass production, we’re boned.”

“Do we need mass production?” Emilia asked. “I mean we’re only servicing the rogue AIs.”

“Gross, don’t say servicing rogue AIs,” Maya said and Emilia groaned. “If you’re going to do something, do it big. That’s what I’ve always said, starting yesterday. If we want more materials from the rogue AIs, then we’re gonna need to up the amount we’re shifting toward them. Right now we can cover the legit trade deal, but the black market, nope.”

“Is that even wise?” Emilia asked.

“Of course it is. You think the Big Brained Rogue AIs are gonna let us officially get away with high-grade components. No way. But the glue that holds societies together is the black market.”

“That’s so dumb. Why would rogue AIs have a black market, it’s not like they need things. They’re robots.”

“They do need things,” Maya replied. “They need power. Mana cores, specifically. You heard them, the Big Brains hold sway on who gets the power, who gets to Tier up into their little club. Look at any society and you’ll always find those who are downtrodden. Ain’t no utopia even among the robots.”

“So you’re trying to foment rebellion?” Emilia asked.

“Oh, heck no. I’m trying to get my hands on high grade components. You think giving the fighting class of rogue AIs some core material is going to make them go Spartacus on their buddies? They want to raise in Tiers and the dudes up top are making it hard for them. Therefore they find a different method to do so, one that isn’t taking too much away from their society. The amount of high grade components will not bankrupt them, it will not dramatically shift the power dynamics of this region. A few hundred kilos of high grade material falling off the back of a Big Spider’s back won’t be noticed all that much.”

“You seem pretty sure of this.”

“Anything with a brain is greedy,” Maya said.

“Spoken like a true merchant,” Emilia replied sarcastically.

“Oh, it’s not a condemnation, it’s just an observation. Everyone has their own wants and needs. They have that threshold they’re willing to cross if it means they gain something.”

“I wouldn’t sell out my species for a little bit of power.”

“No, you wouldn’t. But you’d sell out your species if it meant your family would be taken care of, if it meant you’d gain a voice in decision making, and for a bit of automony.

“Plus it isn’t like high-grade components are top secret and all that. Everyone knows it exists, its just getting your hands on it or creating it is the difficult part. The rogue AIs have the manufacturing capability, they’re just stingy.”

“To think that not long ago I was stressing about covering living costs when I got to Harvard,” Emilia said. “Now, I’m selling drugs to robots.”

“We’re selling quality of life improvements,” Maya said.

Emilia rolled her eyes.

“It’s all for a good cause. The cause of getting back home,” Maya replied.

“What will happen when we leave, then?” Emilia asked. “These Fighters who are counting on improving their lot with illegal core material, what are we going to do about them?”

Maya shrugged. “We leave and they can sort it out. We’re not going to make a huge dent in the way things are being handled here. We’re just going to sell enough core material to build a Cage and vamoose out of here.”

“You just said they were fighting for a better life,” Emilia said. “You’ll give them a hand, then take it away when they aren’t needed anymore.”

“Seriously, Emilia?” Maya said. “Just how much empathy do you got in there?”

Emilia shrugged. “I just feel we should help where we can. Not fuck up everything and leave. That’s how it was done in the old world.”

“We’re in an apocalypse with our own species on the verge of extinction. We’re trapped in the RSH surrounded by hostiles. We’re a group of mismatched assholes who don’t really like one another. I’ll give the rogue AIs as much core material as we can while we’re here. Maybe that’ll keep a few thousand Tarvana from being tossed in a blender and their mana channels extracted. Hopefully. Most likely it’ll just be business as usual.

“The rogue AIs fighting the Tarvana, the Tarvana fighting the rogue AIs. We’re a blip here and when we leave, it’ll be like we never existed. But for now, yeah, we’ll do what we can. I didn’t just throw us into chaos and restructured everything on a whim. This is our best chance of getting home and helping out the Tarvana.”

“Someone say Fleshy?” Chu said as he entered the room. He was followed by Sostanio and Anisa.

“What’s up?” Maya asked, eyeing the trio.

“News, good or bad, you decide,” Chu said, settling down in a seat across from her.

“Always bad news first,” Maya said.

“No, I mean we have some news. We don’t know if its good or bad. So you need to decide.”

“Alright, now you got my interest.”

“My mere presence didn’t already do that?” Chu asked, shocked.

“Get on with it.”

Chu opened a window and it displayed the gloomy RSH plains.

“Okay, this goes in the no news category,” Maya replied.

“Hold up, the good part is starting. We just have to wait through the preview trailers,” Chu said.

The video sped up, showing rogue AIs marching across the land. The angle changed and it showed Tarvana marching to meet them head on. Maya watched with interest as the two armies stood facing one another. She could see the leader of rouge army, another massive spider looking being, not HN4528Z, but someone of similar rank and size.

“We got a good analyze on the Fleshies,” Chu said. “They’re all pretty damn low rank, nothing over ten besides these turds here.” Chu gestured to a portion of the video and it zoomed in on scores of massively muscular Tarvana.

The cannon fodder were skinny, ill equipped, and sickly looking. The big Tarvana were well equipped and healthy looking. Like the Death Brigade she had faced.

“So they’re not the DB Fleshies?” Maya asked.

“No, this is regular Flesh Army Fleshies,” Chu said.

“When did this happen?” Emilia asked.

“Yesterday, the scouts we had out there have finally returned. They recorded the entire battle,” Sostanio replied. “We still have scouts out there keeping tabs on the results.”

“No spoilers,” Maya said as she watched the battle commence.

The Big Spider II stood back as hordes of smaller rogue AIs surged forward. The Big Tarvana were held in reserves as the cannon fodder battled against the rogue cannon fodder.

Maya frowned as she opened another screen and zoomed in on one of the rogue AIs. They were skeletal looking creatures, barely held together by bolts, with exposed black goo tubes swinging in the air, and easily destroyed. What kind of fight was this? Two trash armies battling one another?

“What the heck is going on?” Maya asked.

“We thought the same damn thing,” Chu said. “What kind of shit fight is this. They’re not even trying all that hard, but watch. It gets weirder.”

As the fight continued, Maya saw large armored creatures walking forward. They were covered in tentacles, nearly a copy of the omni-miner, but instead of a cargo area there was a literal cage on its back. Maya’s frown deepened as the tentacles began snatching up Tarvana, tossing them into the cages.

“They’re capturing Tarvana?” Maya asked.

“Keep watching.”

The Big Tarvana finally began moving forward. They carried massive bladed weapons and began cutting through the hordes of crappy rogue AIs. Black goo and robot parts began raining across the plains, as the Big Tarvana were far stronger than the foes they faced. Incredibly, the Big Tarvana completely ignored the walking cage backed rogue AIs. Those massive creatures also ignored the BTs, instead focusing on capturing the cannon fodder.

The video sped up, showing the BTs mopping up the rogue AIs and the cage backs waddling away with their prize. The land was littered with the dead and the destroyed as both armies retreated.

“What the hell was that?” Maya asked.

“A trade,” Anisa said.

“They didn’t teach me that in Merchant School,” Maya replied.

“A trade of power,” Anisa clarified. “The rogue AIs gained Tarvana to turn into their cores and the Tarvana got to level their soldiers.”

“Each side sacrifices some so that they can both grow in power,” Sostanio added.

“That’s…” Maya shook her head. “That’s utterly crazy.”

“Symbiosis,” Emilia said.

“No, it’s worst than that,” Maya said. “Whiteclaw, Bad Blood’s predecessor, said that high leveled Tarvana were sacrificed to the Mother. The old biddy takes the shards to level up.”

“I’ll interject with something about Saturn eating his babies so I can sound smart,” Chu said.

“It seems awfully complicated,” Emilia said. “Just to level up?”

“Indeed, should not the Tarvana just fight themselves? They are SIL and they can channel mana, would not it be best to have two groups fight and thereby level?” Sostanio asked.

“Figure it’s more palatable to die at rogue AI hands than your buddy’s blade,” Chu said. “At least you can justify it better in that manner.”

“You can gain decent levels by defeating rogue AIs,” Maya said. “All my levels are from rogue AIs that decided I was easy meat. The Rogue Nation are masters at manufacturing, they can easily replace the black goo and the bodies they throw at the Tarvana. Did you see that none of them carried mana batteries? They were short lived battle bots that barely qualified as rogue AIs.”

“So this is why this war’s been going on for so long,” Anisa said. “They trade one another to grow in power. But the Mother gains from all this suffering and strife. She is the one who benefits from all the blood spilled.”

“Looks that way,” Chu said. “So what you’re verdict? Good or bad?”

“Definitely bad,” Anisa said.

“Good,” Sostanio said. “They kill one another, no reason not to let them continue.”

“Bad,” Emilia said.

Maya watched the video and rapped her knuckles on the table. She opened another window and scanned it, a spreadsheet of information that flowed faster than the others could make sense of it.

“It’s potential profit,” Maya grinned.

“Profit?” Chu sighed. “That wasn’t one of the choices.”

“Uh, good then,” Maya said “it might resolve one of our issues. Resource extraction and purification.”

“Explain,” Sostanio said.

“Yeah, we jacked up Physical types ain’t got five brains to figure out what you’re saying half the time,” Chu remarked.

“Power is the key to everything,” Maya said. “The rogue AIs need mana cores and the Tarvana need experience mana.”

“Technically it’s their mama that needs the XP,” Chu said.

“Same difference. What mama wants, their entire nation wants.”

“That includes controlling you and your Cage,” Anisa said.

“Old news. That’s two months ago stuff, keep up with the times.”

“Plus we did a bit of genocide on them,” Chu added. “People don’t usually forget that kind of thing.”

“Again, old news. The Tarvana aren’t us or like most SIL. Death is just a way of life for most of them.”

“Then why do anything for them that might benefit them?” Sostanio asked. “If they are going to die, then why help at all.”

“Because we’re moral and upstanding SIL,” Maya said. “We’ll do what we can so they aren’t harvested by the thousands like we just saw. If we can make a dent in those numbers, then we still did some good. But now we can also make a dent in the other numbers, the Saturn eating her babies numbers.”

“Saturn’s a dude,” Chu remarked to Sastanio.

Emilia sighed and looked at the others. “Tell us, then.”

Maya grinned and opened a screen showing a blueprint. “Mana strippers.”

“How does that reduce Saturn numbers?” Chu asked. “Won’t that just pump the air full of more ambient mana?”

Maya shifted the blueprint before them and turned it into a three dimensional hologram. “This,” she said, “is the design for the first mana stripper we built. The one we had been using for a while, but after it was suggested that we mana strip everyone to gain more mana to run the Cage-“

“Someone call my name?” Chu grinned.

“Anyway, Tender and I and Scotty went through several dozen other designs to try and strip mana in a more efficient way. We managed to come up with several designs that would be able to strip your mana and pump you full of mana right back up, the result being you’ll never get the stripper hangover again.”

“Been there, done that,” Chu remarked.

“But the one we’re focused on here is this,” Maya brought up a design that was half finished. “It was to be an enclosed mana stripper and mana generator. Not just simple condensed mana, but also experience shards and all that good stuff. The purified mana that’s needed to make those shards.”

There was silence at the table as they all looked at one another.

“You’re telling me you can turn ambient mana into experience shards?” Sostanio asked.

“In the Cage, yeah.” Maya replied. “Technically the mana aura is ‘thicker’ than usual ambient mana, so it’s far easier to control and shape.”

The woman stared at her for a long moment. “Do you realize how that could completely upturn everything?” she demanded.

“You’ll need to push through thousands to get any real results,” Maya replied.

“That does not matter. The experience shards underground is massive in the Sword Union. Do you know how many near Tiered individuals there are. Whole planets have been devastated when a level 99 is desperate to reach those last few billion points before they die. Asoltolia was one such person. Look at what she did.”

Maya paused as she looked down at the half finished diagram.

“Well, they’ll need tesseracts, refined black goo, and a good dimensional mage,” Maya replied. “We couldn’t build it because my Dimensional Awareness was too low and we didn’t have access to higher grade system tech components. Now, we’ve got some mid-grade, Tier 2 to work with. That’ll help a lot in creating this.”

“So that’s how you were paying for your mercenaries?” Emilia asked. “Your were condensing all of our own mana into experience shards?”

“Basically, every time anyone uses mana in the Cage, it becomes purified mana, which gets stuck within the Cage. As the Cage exists in a bubble within Void Space, that mana has nowhere to go. If we collapse the bubble and return the Cage to the Hangy, the collected purified mana would have just dispersed into nothingness.”

“So you built something that could do that same thing, on a smaller scale and not connected to Void Space?” Anisa asked.

“We only designed it, like I said, we didn’t have the right materials or the time,” Maya said.

“And you want to give it to a Tier 3 or higher being who’s hell bent on killing you?” Chu asked.

“She’s not hell bent on killing me, she just wanted the Cage to do her own mischief. By now she must have figured out we can’t go back, so my value has diminished by a lot.”

“If this machine works, it seems like a massive boon for them and you’d be selling it for nearly nothing. We can extract the material needed for the core material and we can purify them into something that can be used,” Emilia stated. “You’re offering the Flesh Mother unlimited experience for something we can do ourselves, albeit with a lot of effort.”

“Right now we’re expending nearly fifty percent of our mana on purifying the necessary materials into base components. We’re going to eventually run out of mana, even with the cores and tesseracts. We can slow down our mana drain by making black goo netting, like we did for the space station and around the Hangy, but that would mean more manufacturing on our part. Between defense, training, and the steep learning curve, we’re already desperately low on hands to make things.”

“Am I correct in assuming this isn’t some perpetual motion engine?” Emilia asked.

“Say what?”

“That the mana it strips isn’t going to keep the machine running, that there’ll need to be an input of work mana to keep it running.”

“Oh, yeah,” Maya said. “A lot of friggin work mana. We’re talking more than we were able to generate in the Cage. We could get the other strippers working because I could control the Cage, but this one would need a massive amount of power to keep it running. It’s also not super efficient, there’ll be leakage and eventually breakage. It needs to create a small dimensional bubble to condense and shape the mana, which is a power hungry process.”

“People would still want it,” Sostanio said. “If it meant you could level up whole armies or get yourself a new Tier, the price in work mana cores would be negligible.”

“They’ll also need a dimensional mage to keep the bubble from popping or spilling out the purified mana before it can be processed.”

“You designed all of this before you even knew there were dimensional mages?” Chu asked. “You seeing into the future or something.”

“The math just works out that way,” Maya said. “The designs and what we wanted it to do, it required things we just didn’t have. We knew we needed higher grade components, we knew it would require a dimensional mage of some kind to keep the bubble from popping, and that it would need more power than we were capable of producing. It’s far, far, far, far easier to strip mana in an already created bubble in Void Space.”

“So this would tie up Big Mama’s extensive mana core production and generating?” Chu asked. “She would have to devote huge resources to keeping this thing running, so she could gain levels.”

“Yeah,” Maya replied.

“Would she?” Anisa asked. “Would she change the course of her entire nation to just gain more levels?”

“She’s already letting thousands of her people die so she can gain access to a few dozen high leveled Tarvana,” Emilia said. “Let’s just figure that there isn’t much she isn’t willing to do for more power.”

“It would probably force her to level more of her people,” Chu said. “Like you said, the higher your levels, the bigger your mana aura.”

“Well, we’re all speculating,” Emilia said. “Maya hasn’t built it and we don’t know if she can even build it. We’re already focusing on creating as much core material as possible and we have a shipment deadline to meet.”

“Are you questioning my engineering abilities?” Maya asked, shocked.

Emilia gave a shrug. “I guess you can try, as you can’t channel mana you can’t help in making the base components or even the core material.”

Maya frowned. “I feel like I’ve just been insulted.”

“Don’t worry, Maya,” Chu said. “The bosses and owners always get to sit on their asses while the minions slave away at menial jobs. You’ve also got the excuse of not having mana channels to fall back on.”

“What will the cost be to us?” Anisa asked. “What will it take away from our own production?”

“Not much,” Maya said. “I can get a lot of the material from the Overlord’s orb and once we get our hands on the mid-grade stuff, I can begin building it.”

“Won’t we need the mid-grade to create base components?” Anisa asked.

“No, not really, we could, but it wouldn’t really be a boost in production. The base component making process is already low tech as possible, it’s just we don’t have all the hands needed to do it. Using higher grade components won’t do much in increasing production.”

“Seems like a lot of work for too few gains,” Chu said. “You’d have to prove the tech works to the Fleshies, then you have to get them to a meeting, and most of all, you’d have to ensure you wouldn’t be killed by them.”

“But we would be saving an uncountable amount of Tarvana lives,” Anisa said.

“They’ve already shown that they cannot be trusted,” Sostanio said.

“Look who’s talking,” Chu muttered.

“It won’t hurt to try,” Maya said.

“Famous last words,” Chu replied.