“That makes sense. How about weirder stuff, like C60 fullerenes?”
I nodded, “I don’t know?”
“How about stuff like nanotubes and nanofibers? I mean, if you can produce those in long chains, places like DuPont would hire you for millions. Why haven’t you tried that?”
I looked at her with my jaw dropped, letting the door swing closed. The sheer, blindingly obvious simplicity of it hit me like a freight train. Millions. Not from villainy, not from scraping by on Vilnet gigs, but from… a real job. A career. The concept was so alien it might as well have been spoken in Kaiju. I’d been so focused on what I couldn’t do, on the limitations, that I’d never looked at the one thing I could do that no one else on earth could replicate at scale.
She was smiling at me oddly and tilted her head, waiting for my reply.
“Because.” I said, slowly, the words feeling thick and stupid in my mouth, “I am an idiot. A spectacular, world-class, gold-medal-winning idiot. I never really thought about it. I also don’t really know how to do that.” My entire life’s plan, my grift, my villainous fa?ade, suddenly seemed like the pathetic flailings of a child who’d never once considered just using the door instead of trying to chew through the wall.
“Can I make a suggestion?”
I nodded slowly, my mind blown from the possibilities, my future rewriting itself in front of my eyes.
She smiled a little, “When you re-assess, show them what you can do with merging and strengthening materials, and maybe the surface healing. Don’t tell them how you do it, just tell them you think it into existence like most alphas do. Between your material dependency and low energy levels, I am still pretty sure they will rank you as at least a class five support. Otherwise, they are likely to throw you in a black site lab forever. You’d spend your days making unbreakable paperclips for spies.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“I will be more than happy to be your referral, which means technically they would have to get through me to get to you, and I am NOT a support. Right now, I am class four, but after training, I know I have at least class five potential, and pissing off a class five alpha is generally frowned upon.” She said it with a casual confidence that was both terrifying and deeply attractive.
“How do you know all this?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper. This was not the slightly na?ve girl from the roof. This was a strategist.
She smiled a little, “My mom is a functional replicator.”
Whoah. Okay, remember how I said widgeteer stuff expires eventually? Well, replicators create expendable devices, but they can be used to build OTHER stuff that isn’t expendable. If widgeteer drones can build a building, the building isn’t going to fall down when the drones expire. Just like a cell replicator can cast a spell or create a device that can regenerate, and the regenerated limb doesn’t just stop working when the alpha runs out of energy.
Functional replicators were a whole different story. They weren’t as smart or as insane as double-reinforced super-geniuses, but they were replicators that were damned close. They could create REAL technology that could be reverse-engineered before it expired, or even just use small bits of widgeteer tech to enable much more powerful true technology, like batteries or golem brains that make drones smarter or have far more power than they should have. They were the bridge between magic and science, and the government loved them almost as much as it feared them.
As a functional replicator, Mindy’s mom probably had a perfect idea of how black research sites worked, and might have even spent some time in one. She’d have given her daughter the talk: how to spot a fed, how to avoid getting disappeared, how to leverage your power without becoming an asset. It was the talk my parents never could have given me.
“Right. You win. Let’s kick this pig.” I said, as I held open the glass doors for her into the BSA facility… exactly the place where you are likely to be locked down as a national security asset. The air inside smelled of antiseptic and quiet desperation.
But weirdly, she was starting to become the first person I trusted in years, since Christine proved that trust was a huge mistake. And that, more than any government facility, was the most terrifying thing of all.
